‘There you are,’ he said to Valentina, ‘the United States Department of Defence. Or War,’ he added.
Unsolicited statistics lit up in his brain like figures on a computer. ‘The world’s second largest building,’ he recited. ‘Did you know that they take 190,000 phone calls a day in there? And that they have 4,200 clocks and 685 water fountains?’
‘Really?’ The sarcasm was gentle. ‘And how many cups of coffee do they drink a day?’
‘Thirty thousand,’ Zhukov said promptly, grinning apologetically.
‘It’s strange to think they could be speaking to the Kremlin right now.’
Zhukov looked at his watch. 3 p.m. ‘They probably are. Every hour on the hour they test the teletype machines. The messages are very reassuring. I read, for instance, that one test message from the Americans on the hot line was a four-stanza poem by Robert Frost—“Desert Places”.’
‘And what did the Kremlin reply with?’
‘Excerpts in Russian from a Chekhov short story about birch trees. I understand twenty messages passed between Washington and Moscow during the Arab-Israeli war. They probably averted a world war on those teletypes.’
‘Who sent the first message?’
He patted her knee. ‘Premier Kosygin.’ He was pleased about that, too. ‘And the President keeps the messages in a green leather album as a memento.’ Statistics and trivia for ever accumulating in the filing cabinet of his brain; substitutes for the sonnets he once planned to deposit there.
He pointed the Volkswagen towards the ghetto. Losing himself a couple of times in the graceful geometry, driving along 15th in which a flourishing bookshop was separated from the White House by the protective bulk of the Treasury Department; finding 14th and following its route, its lament, to the Negro quarter.
In the Saturday afternoon quiet it was an abandoned place. A discarded screen set, a pool scummy with neglect. Tenements leaning, small shop windows rheumy. A few blacks strolling to nowhere; not a white face in sight.
Valentina said, ‘Can we get out and walk?’
Zhukov shook his head. ‘They advised me not to.’
‘We wouldn’t come to any harm.’
‘Why not? Because we’re Russians? Red Panthers? How would they know? You can’t explain after you’ve been knocked unconscious.’
‘I think it’s exaggerated. They don’t look very dangerous.’
Like many women she had the knack of converting discretion into cowardice. ‘The ambassador’s wife in New York thought the dangers of Central Park were exaggerated and she was mugged there.’
‘Mugged? You sound very American, Vladimir.’
‘I try to speak their language—it’s my job.’
They stopped at a red light, the stubby car vulnerable in the listlessly hostile street. An old Pontiac slid up beside them, the black driver grinning at them without friendliness. A snap-brimmed hat was tilted on the back of his head, one elbow rested outside the window with self-conscious nonchalance. But you couldn’t see his eyes; only your own reflection in the mirrors of his glasses. Chewing, grinning, he spat towards the Volkswagen as the lights changed and took off fast, tyres screaming, briefly victorious over white trash.
This flaking road, Zhukov thought, led to the deep south. There were still mounds of soiled snow on the sidewalk, but the disease of the place was tropical, leprosy, sleeping sickness, the wasting of cholera.
He turned into a residential street where pride was resurrected. Terraces of clean red brick and portals and verandas for summertime courting and grizzled remembering. And cars slumbering outside.
He drove on, rounded a block, returning to 14th.
Waiting for the lights to change, a girl of sixteen or so danced to the beat of distant rhythms. Dressed to kill in a black leather micro skirt with tassels swinging and a red breasty sweater; no coat on this cold and dead day. She may not have known she was dancing—as conscious of her rhythm as she was of her heartbeat. Words unwritten—‘I don’t give a damn, I don’t give a damn.’ Breasts bobbing, buttocks taut under black leather. Fingers flicking, orange baubles of ear-rings bouncing. She felt them staring; the rhythms froze, the smile, a snarl. She said something but they couldn’t hear. An obscenity, no doubt, in this hopeless place.
Valentina sat tensely. ‘It was like this,’ she said, ‘before the Revolution. Streets like this are deceptive. This is where it’s happening.’ She pointed behind shutters, behind walls. ‘And why not? Compare these streets with the streets of Bethesda, Georgetown, Alexandria.’
‘At least the Government is trying to do something about it.’
‘They. Trying? It’s not even their city, Vladimir. Where are those statistics of yours? How many Negroes and how many whites in Washington?’
‘Five hundred thousand Negroes,’ Zhukov admitted. ‘And 300,000 whites. Something like that. But they are trying, Valentina. Schools, housing, black mayors, black politicians. What more can they do?’
‘Get out of Vietnam and use the money to help their own people.’
For God’s sake, he wanted to cry out. Stop strangling yourself with politics. To hell with bloody politics. Wasn’t Russia doing the same as America? Grabbing millions of roubles for armaments and the race into space while her people stood in line for shabby overcoats, steel teeth, sprouting potatoes, shoes like polished cardboard. What’s more, if Russia had been faced with a crucial problem none of the black dissident meetings behind closed shutters would have been allowed. The rebels would have been chopping wood and sinking mines in the lost camps of Siberia. (He was surprised that he permitted such thoughts.)
He wanted to hurry away from the ghetto where all sympathy was spurned. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘you would like an apartment here among the blacks.’
She didn’t reply; his Valentina, companion for twenty years, mother of their only child, Natasha. Valentina—the soul of mother Russia, her wild song confined to a monotone by rules. So that she hardly recognized her own small hypocrisies any more.
‘Would you like that?’ he persisted. ‘Would you like an apartment here? You could do a lot of good work among these people.’ He rubbed her cheek lightly with the back of his hand.
‘Don’t be foolish, Vladimir. You know it would be impracticable.’ But she smiled at him and held his hand to her cheek for a moment. ‘How could a diplomat live in a Negro ghetto?’
Another red light stopped them. Vladimir noticed a group of black teenagers lounging in the doorway of a dead-eyed shop. Apprehension stirred. He peered to the left and right to see if he could jump the light. Indisputably with more cowardice than discretion. The spirit of Leningrad, Vladimir Zhukov! He wound down the window of the bug with bravado.
The young men were gathered on the opposite side of the intersection. One of them, hair combed out in black wings around his ears, held up a clenched fist. ‘Hello, whitey,’ he shouted. Too much to hope that they would recognize the diplomatic plates. Vladimir Zhukov, soldier and diplomat, called back, ‘Hallo there.’
‘Why,’ said the leader in a brown leather jacket, ‘this chalk wants to be friendly. A friendly whitey! Ain’t that something. What do you want, whitey—a nigger chick to screw?’
Zhukov implored the lights to change, but they remained steadfastly red.
‘Please drive on,’ Valentina urged him.
‘I thought you wanted to get out and walk. Meet the people.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Vladimir. Drive on before they attack us.’
Zhukov wound up the window. But he refused to drive on against