The Russia House Read Online Free Page A

cannot expect it suddenly to rise up and save us,’ he read. A quote? A night thought? There was no way to tell. References to writers, Russian, Latin and European. Talk of Nietzsche, Kafka and people he’d never heard of, let alone read. More talk of war, this time in English: ‘The old declare it, the young fight it, but today the babies and old people fight it too.’ He turned another page and came on nothing but a round brown stain. He lifted the notebook to his nose and sniffed. Booze, he thought with contempt. Stinks like a brewery. No wonder he’s a mate of Barley Blair’s. A double page devoted to a series of hysterical proclamations.
    – OUR GREATEST PROGRESS IS IN THE FIELD OF BACKWARDNESS!
    – SOVIET PARALYSIS IS THE MOST PROGRESSIVE IN THE WORLD!
    – OUR BACKWARDNESS IS OUR GREATEST MILITARY SECRET!
    – IF WE DON’T KNOW OUR OWN INTENTIONS AND OUR OWN CAPACITIES, HOW CAN WE KNOW YOURS?
    – THE TRUE ENEMY IS OUR OWN INCOMPETENCE!
    And on the next page, a poem, painstakingly copied from Lord knew where:
He wires in and wires out.
And leaves the people still in doubt
Whether the snake that made the track,
Was going south or coming back.
    Scrambling to his feet, Landau strode angrily to the window which gave on to a glum courtyard full of uncollected rubbish.
    ‘A blooming word-artist, Harry. That’s what I thought he was. Some long-haired, drug-ridden, self-indulgent genius, and she’s gone and thrown herself away on him same as they all do.’
    She was lucky there was no Moscow telephone directory or he’d have rung her up and told her what she’d got.
    To stoke his anger, he took up the second book, licked his fingertip and whisked contemptuously through it page by page, which was how he came upon the drawings. Then everything went blank for him for a moment, like a flash of empty screen in the middle of a film, while he cursed himself for being an impetuous little Slav instead of a cool calm Englishman. Then he sat down on the bed again, but gently, as if there were someone resting in it, someone he had hurt with his premature condemnations.
    For if Landau despised what too often passed for literature, his pleasure in technical matters was unconfined. Even when he didn’t follow what he was looking at, he could relish a good page of mathematics all day long. And he knew at one glance, as he had known of the woman Katya, that what he was looking at here was quality. Not your ruled drawing, it was true. Light sketches but all the better for it. Drawn freehand without instruments by somebody who could think with a pencil. Tangents, parabolas, cones. And in between the drawings, businesslike descriptions that architects and engineers use, words like ‘aimpoint’ and ‘captive carry’ and ‘bias’ and gravity and trajectory – ‘some in your English, Harry, and some in your Russian.’
    Though Harry is not my real name.
    Yet when he began to compare the lettering of these beautifully-written words in the second book with the rambling jungle in the first, he discovered to his astonishment certain unmistakable similarities. So that he had the sensation of looking at a kind of schizophrenic’s diary with Dr. Jekyll writing one volume and Mr. Hyde the other.
    He looked in the third notebook, which was as orderly and purposeful as the second but arranged like a kind of mathematical log with dates and numbers and formulae and the word ‘error’ repeating itself frequently, often underlined or lifted with an exclamation mark. Then suddenly Landau stared, and continued staring, and could not remove his eyes from what he was reading. The cosy obscurity of the writer’s technical jargon had ended with a bang. So had his philosophical ramblings and classy annotated drawings. The words came off the page with a blazoned clarity.
    ‘The American strategists can sleep in peace. Their nightmares cannot be realised. The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British.