December. James Steel

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СКАЧАТЬ whole scene was watched by the earth in utter silence; it lay flat and quiescent, overawed by the majesty of the spectacle unfolding above it. And he too lay on his back on the warm summer earth, spreading out his arms and drawing breath up from the land under him, startled by the beauty of being alive.

      To him, this landscape came together with the Russian character to form the Russian soul. It became for him the embodiment of great strength and yet, at the same time, great tenderness.

      In reading Life and Fate—Vasily Grossman’s epic of the Russian nation centred around the battle of Stalingrad—he experienced a moment of revelation: ‘The earth was vast, even the great forests had both a beginning and an end, but the earth just stretched on for ever. And grief was something equally vast, equally eternal.’

      He realised that the never-ending nature of the terrain was the same as the vastness of life, and this created both a sense of great freedom because it existed, but also of a great corresponding sadness because life will end and it will all be gone. He struggled to reconcile the tension between these forces.

      He wondered at the wisdom that he could learn from observing natural phenomena: the flight of birds, the slow graceful gestures of trees and the stately progress of clouds across the sky. He felt that all these things were words in the conversation that nature was having with him in his life.

      However, with such passionate experiences came the pain of unrequited love. He might love life but it did not feel the need to explain itself to him. He waited patiently, as a child waits on a parent to tell him how things work.

      But all he got was silence.

      He would go out onto the steppe and stare up angrily at the sky, but it just looked back at him with a gaze as empty and content as that of a Buddha and resolutely refused to answer his questions.

      Sergey felt this absence of communication as a physical force, pressing in on his skull. It was the same as when he swam down deep in the local swimming pool, where the silence was heavy, and he could look up and see the surface shimmering a long way above his head.

      He could feel the water pressing in on him from all sides; the walls of his head bulging in under it. He knew then that he had to swim desperately to the surface far above him to escape the pain. But the faster he swam the faster he ran out of breath and so the more desperately he kicked out. The feeling culminated in a fear of inactivity and created a terrified energy within him.

      From his early teens onwards, this found an outlet in two ways. Literature was his first love. He discovered that other great human minds had confronted and wrestled with the same issues that he did and had left traces of their battles behind them. So he hunted meaning in literature furiously, frantically ripping through books like a starving man looking for food between the pages, all the while marvelling at the power of writing to gather and pin meaning onto a piece of paper. When he came across insights he shivered and thought to himself: This is black bread—black bread for my soul.

      Books piled up in his room, all with significant passages underlined, pages folded and with thoughts that had spun off from the writing scribbled in the margins and on the blank pages at the back.

      The second outlet for his skills was on his mother’s market stall. She was a chelnoki, a market trader, who allowed people to survive both the incompetencies of the Soviet system and then the anarchy of its collapse in the 1990s. From her Sergey learned how to lie, to cheat and to bribe the police and other authorities that variously sought to regulate and profit from their activities. He started out by selling underwear off the back of a lorry, then graduated to buying second-hand Mercedes in West Germany, driving them back home through long days and nights, and then selling them on for a huge mark-up.

      From this he went on to buying companies. He understood accounts instinctively and loved the challenge of ripping through a balance sheet, diagnosing faults and then taking on the cold-blooded risks necessary to win in the bare-knuckle capitalism of the Yeltsin era. From humble beginnings his business empire gradually expanded from automotive parts, to mines, to food preparation, and then into more glamorous sectors like media.

      However, at times of inner crisis, like now, he had to turn back to literature to steady himself. He needed books as his touchstone.

      He pulled the greatest book ever written out of the Louis Vuitton briefcase at his feet: Life and Fate. His battered copy had been heavily annotated.

      He turned to the section where Sokolov and Madyarov were arguing about the true nature of what freedom meant in Russia. Sokolov was in full flood: ‘Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history—the banner of a true, human, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man.’

      The bearer of the banner of the dignity of the Russian man! That was what he was! That was what Russkaya dusha was all about!

      He could see himself with a grand banner unfurled over his head expressing his love for the people of Russia. The great image stuck in his head, revivifying him.

      He sat in his luxurious executive jet with the book in front of him, holding it and staring out of the window, lost in renewed dreams of glory as he swept on to meet President Krymov.

       Chapter Nine

      Sergey was ushered quietly into Krymov’s office in the Kremlin.

      Even though it was Saturday evening, the President was still hard at work. Being unable to let go was all part of his instability.

      He followed the classic dictator-kitsch style of having a huge office with his desk set at the far end of it to intimidate anyone who had to take the long walk towards him.

      Although, to be fair, this desk did have history. His particular office lay on the top floor of the Senate House, a triangular building around a central courtyard, along the eastern wall of the Kremlin, with Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square just over the great outer wall to the east of it.

      It had been the office of the Russian head of state since 1918 so the other occupants had included Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernyenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev.

      Now Krymov sat at his huge desk with a green-shaded lamp illuminating the wall of paperwork that he liked to hide behind. It was ten o’clock at night and he was hunched over the desk, pen in one hand, signing documents. He looked up and glowered at Sergey like an angry pig.

      Sergey walked nonchalantly across the deep pile carpet towards him, wearing his crumpled suit and tie, his hair askew and his diamond earring glinting in the low lights.

      Krymov wagged his finger at him threateningly.

      ‘Shaposhnikov, what’s this I hear about you meeting up with a man called Devereux in London?’

      Sergey froze halfway across the carpet.

      ‘You said he was a geologist you were flying out to Krasnokamensk but Gorsky has checked him out and tells me he is a well-known British mercenary. What’s going on?’ he barked. ‘If you don’t want to smell, then don’t touch shit!’

      Behind him stood Major Batyuk, the head of Echelon 25, Krymov’s élite bodyguard unit. A tall, balding man with a hardened face, СКАЧАТЬ