He stepped through the familiar triple doors, gave his bag and coat to the babushka behind the cloakroom counter, then showed his old reader's ticket to an armed guard in a glass booth.
He signed his name in the register and added the time. It was eleven minutes past ten. They had yet to get around to computerising the Lenin, which meant forty million titles were still on index cards. At the top of a wide flight of stone steps, beneath the vaulted ceiling, was a sea of wooden cabinets, and Kelso moved among them as he had done years ago, sliding open one drawer after another, riffling through the familiar titles. Radzinsky he would need, and the second volume of Volkogonov, and Khrushchev and Alliluyeva. The cards for these last two were marked with the Cyrillic symbol '~' which meant they had been held in the secret index until 1991. How many titles was he allowed? Five, wasn't it? Finally, he decided on Chuyev's series of interviews with the ancient Molotov. Then he took his request slips to the issuing desk and watched as they were fitted into a metal canister and fired down the pneumatic tube into the Lenin's lower depths.
'What's the wait today?'
The assistant shrugged. Who was she to say?
An hour?'
She shrugged again.
He thought: nothing changes.
He wandered back across the landing into Reading Room No. 3, and trod softly down the path of worn green carpet that led to his old seat. And nothing had changed here, either - not the rich brownness of the wood-panelled, galleried hail, nor the dry smell of it, nor its sacrilegious hush. At one end was a statue of Lenin reading a book, at the other an astrological clock. Maybe two hundred people were bent over their desks. Through the window to his left he could see the dome and spire of St Nicholas's. He might never have left; the past eighteen years might have been a dream.
He sat down and laid out his things and in that instant he was a student of twenty-six again, living in a single room in Corpus V of Moscow University; paying 260 roubles a month for a desk, a bed, a chair and a cupboard, taking meals in the basement canteen that was overrun by cockroaches, spending his days in the Lenin and his nights with a girlfriend - with Nadya, or Katya, or Margarita, or Irma. Irma. Now there was a woman. He ran his hand over the scratched surface of the desk and wondered what had become of Irma. Perhaps he should have stuck with her -serious, beautiful Irma, with her samizdat magazines and her basement meetings, making love to the accompaniment of a rattling Gestetner duplicator and afterwards vowing that they would be different, that they would change the world.
Irma. He wondered what she would make of the new Russia. The last he had heard she was a dental assistant in South Wales.
He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit.
His books arrived at the issuing stack just after eleven, or at any rate four of them did: they had fetched up volume one of Volkogonov rather than volume two and he had to send it back. Still, he had enough. He carried the books back to his desk and gradually he became absorbed in his task, reading, noting and cross-referencing the various eyewitness accounts of Stalin's death. He found, as usual, an aesthetic pleasure in the sheer detective work of research. Secondhand sources and speculation he discarded. He was only interested in those people who had actually been in the same room as the GenSec and had left behind a description he could match against Rapava's.
By his reckoning there were seven: the Politburo members, Khrushchev and Molotov; Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; two of Stalin's bodyguards, Rybin and Lozgachev; and two of his medical staff: the physician, Myasnikov, and the recuscitator, a woman named Chesnokova. The other eyewitnesses had either killed themselves (like the bodyguard,
He signed his name in the register and added the time. It was eleven minutes past ten. They had yet to get around to computerising the Lenin, which meant forty million titles were still on index cards. At the top of a wide flight of stone steps, beneath the vaulted ceiling, was a sea of wooden cabinets, and Kelso moved among them as he had done years ago, sliding open one drawer after another, riffling through the familiar titles. Radzinsky he would need, and the second volume of Volkogonov, and Khrushchev and Alliluyeva. The cards for these last two were marked with the Cyrillic symbol '~' which meant they had been held in the secret index until 1991. How many titles was he allowed? Five, wasn't it? Finally, he decided on Chuyev's series of interviews with the ancient Molotov. Then he took his request slips to the issuing desk and watched as they were fitted into a metal canister and fired down the pneumatic tube into the Lenin's lower depths.
'What's the wait today?'
The assistant shrugged. Who was she to say?
An hour?'
She shrugged again.
He thought: nothing changes.
He wandered back across the landing into Reading Room No. 3, and trod softly down the path of worn green carpet that led to his old seat. And nothing had changed here, either - not the rich brownness of the wood-panelled, galleried hail, nor the dry smell of it, nor its sacrilegious hush. At one end was a statue of Lenin reading a book, at the other an astrological clock. Maybe two hundred people were bent over their desks. Through the window to his left he could see the dome and spire of St Nicholas's. He might never have left; the past eighteen years might have been a dream.
He sat down and laid out his things and in that instant he was a student of twenty-six again, living in a single room in Corpus V of Moscow University; paying 260 roubles a month for a desk, a bed, a chair and a cupboard, taking meals in the basement canteen that was overrun by cockroaches, spending his days in the Lenin and his nights with a girlfriend - with Nadya, or Katya, or Margarita, or Irma. Irma. Now there was a woman. He ran his hand over the scratched surface of the desk and wondered what had become of Irma. Perhaps he should have stuck with her -serious, beautiful Irma, with her samizdat magazines and her basement meetings, making love to the accompaniment of a rattling Gestetner duplicator and afterwards vowing that they would be different, that they would change the world.
Irma. He wondered what she would make of the new Russia. The last he had heard she was a dental assistant in South Wales.
He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit.
His books arrived at the issuing stack just after eleven, or at any rate four of them did: they had fetched up volume one of Volkogonov rather than volume two and he had to send it back. Still, he had enough. He carried the books back to his desk and gradually he became absorbed in his task, reading, noting and cross-referencing the various eyewitness accounts of Stalin's death. He found, as usual, an aesthetic pleasure in the sheer detective work of research. Secondhand sources and speculation he discarded. He was only interested in those people who had actually been in the same room as the GenSec and had left behind a description he could match against Rapava's.
By his reckoning there were seven: the Politburo members, Khrushchev and Molotov; Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; two of Stalin's bodyguards, Rybin and Lozgachev; and two of his medical staff: the physician, Myasnikov, and the recuscitator, a woman named Chesnokova. The other eyewitnesses had either killed themselves (like the bodyguard,
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