Our Game полностью

I have said that I have always been, and would continue to be, prepared to make sacrifices for my neighbours, compatriots, and friends. But when it came to saving barbarians from one another in countries no bigger than a letter on the map, I failed to see why I should throw myself into a burning house to rescue a dog I had never cared for in the first place.

I have said all this with brio, but my heart is in none of it, though I refuse to let this show. Perhaps it pleases me to be stuck out on a limb. Suddenly, to our shared surprise, Larry declares he is delighted with me.

"Bang on the nose, Timbo. Spoken from the gut. Congrats. Right, Emm?"

Emma is anything but right.

"You were appalling," she says in a low, vicious voice, straight into my face. "You were actually terminal." She means that to her great relief I have behaved badly enough to justify her transgressions.

And the same night, as she sets off up the great staircase to resume her typing: "You don't understand the first thing about involvement."

* * *

I had returned to "A People's Calvary." I was reading history and reading it too fast, and history was not my mood, even if the past explained the present. Academic arguments about the founding of the city of Vladikavkaz: did it rise on Ingush or Ossetian territory? References to the "distorted historical facts" being offered by apologists from the Ossetian camp. Talk of the bravery of the plains-dwelling Ingush of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they were forced to take up arms to defend their villages. Talk of the contested Prigorod region, the sacred Prigorodnyi raion, now the great bone of contention between Ossetians and Ingush. Talk of places that might indeed be only the size of a letter on the map, yet when their inhabitants rose up, the power of the entire Russian Empire was held to ransom. Talk of the hopes raised by the coming of Soviet Communism and how these hopes were dashed when the red tsars turned out to be just as terrible as their white predecessors....

Suddenly out of my temporary frustration came a burst of light, and I leapt once more excitedly to my feet.

* * *

Crammed against the stone wall stood the old school trunk I used as a filing box for my CC archive. From it I extracted a bunch of folders. One contained surveillance reports, a second, character notes, a third, microphone intercepts. Armed with the intercepts, I sped back to the trestle table and resumed my reading: except that this time the Calvary is CC's own, and in my memory I am listening to his modulated Russian voice—one might almost say civilised—as he and Larry sit in their bugged hotel room at Heathrow, drinking malt whisky out of tooth mugs.

There is always something a little magical to me about these meetings between Larry and CC. If Larry feels a kinship with CC, so do I. Do we not have Larry in common? Are we not both alternately delighted and alarmed by him, raised up, brought down, infuriated and enchanted? Are we not, both of us, dependent on him for our good standing with our masters? And am I not justified, as I read the transcripts or listen to the tapes, in taking a certain pride in my controlling interest?

Heathrow is one of Checheyev's favourite places. He can take rooms there by the half day, he can rotate hotels and fancy himself anonymous—though thanks to Larry the listeners are usually ahead of him At this particular meeting, according to Larry's later account of it, CC has pulled a bunch of faded photographs from his wallet:

"This is my family, Larry, this is my aul [translator's gratuitous note: village] as it was in my father's day, this is our house, which is still occupied by Ossetians, this is their washing, hanging on the clothesline that was put up by my father, here are my brothers and sisters, and here is the railroad that deported my people to Kazakhstan.... So many died on the journey that the Russians had to keep stopping the train to bury them in mass graves.... And here is the place where my father was shot."

After the photographs Checheyev takes his diplomatic pass from his pocket and waves it in Larry's face. The transcribers' English, as leaden as ever:

"You think I was born in 1946. That is not so. Nineteen forty-six is for my cover here, my other person. I was born in 1944, on Red Army Day, which is February twenty-third. That's a big national holiday in Russia. And I was born not in Tbilisi but in a freezing cattle truck headed for the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan.

"... Do you know what happened on 23 February 1944, when I was being born and everybody was having a nice national holiday, and Russian soldiers were dancing to order in our villages and making festive? I'll tell you. The entire In-gush and Chechen nations were declared criminal by edict of Josef Stalin and carted thousands of miles from their fertile Caucasian plains to be resettled in wastelands north of the Aral Sea...."