EXCERPT

PROLOGUE

Nobody who had ever had those black-flecked, green eyes scan him could ever forget them. As we came abreast of each other, they fixed on my face before he ran expert hands over my anorak and down my trousers to check I was not carrying a gun or a bomb. Another star sparkled on the blue epaulettes and collar tabs of his KGB uniform meaning he had become one of the leading guards who, with whistles and batons, were controlling and searching the long queue shuffling across Red Square towards the Lenin Mausoleum.
Did he recognize me from eight months before when Larissa and I had made this pilgrimage, like so may newlywed couples, to the Red Christ? I reassured myself by remembering that, on the previous occasion, I was wearing a beard, tinted dark like my hair. Anyway, if he had, what could he have done that his masters hadn’t already done? However, his glacier-green eyes betrayed no interest and a twitch of his peaked cap urged me onward.
Maybe on that last visit, he had paid more professional attention to the bouquet of lilies Larissa was carrying with other Saturday brides to place on the Unknown Soldier’s tomb as the double file wound alongside the Kremlin Wall. Had he put his hands under my jacket, he might have discovered the miniature automatic camera strapped round my body and covered with my wedding suit.
Now, I had nothing to hide but my curiosity. Not the morbid attraction of the crime scene for the criminal, but merely to check if Vladimir Ilych Lenin looked as he did the last time I had seen him in his glass sarcophagus. All the same, when I reflected on what we had done and what I had gone through for Lenin, I marveled at my own moral courage in coming here.
In this queue, we had a bit of everything - the new bourgeois in their felt or astrakhan hats, peasant women in headscarves, their men in mufflers, a few Georgians in traditional costume and a bunch of Young Pioneers, boys in red forage caps and girls in red foulards and white blouses.
Immediately in front of me and upwind I had a Kirghiz family, a man and two women with oblique, Asiatic eyes, dressed in sheepskin jackets, fur boots and fur hats. Never did I imagine the stink of the yaks, goats and sheep they Co-existed with could travel two thousand miles unabated.
Ahead, the queue halted abruptly as a KGB guard argued with a German holding a bulky leather wallet that had somehow escaped detection half a mile back. Unceremoniously, the guard wrenched it open then flourished a small camera. “You know this is forbidden,” he barked in Russian.

“Sorry,” said the German, shaking his head, having obviously forgotten that almost everything that was not compulsory in this Communist state was therefore forbidden. Herded with his blonde wife and daughter to the Spassky Tower guardhouse under the Kremlin Wall, he submitted to a thorough search; they left their wallets and handbags before sidling back into the queue.

“Silence, and keep your hands out of your pockets,” the guards ordered as we inched forward again.

Prom the Spassky Tower, one o’clock chimed. Two hours it had taken me to work through Red Square, round the Kremlin towers and behind the wall to emerge roughly where I had started; now we were climbing towards Saint Basil’s Cathedral with its ice-cream-cone architecture to turn right towards the red-granite and gray-felspar mausoleum with its Cyrillic letters, LENIN, glittering in the May sunlight.

Twenty yards from the building, the queue quickened its stride; people began blowing their noses and clearing their throats like a concert audience before curtain-up. Soon, I was going through the gate and mounting the steps. At the top, flanking the entrance, two guards stood immobile but for their eyes flicking over each person who entered. My distorted face shone back at me from a bayonet as I passed through the massive bronze doors and went down the crypt steps.

On my previous visit, we had moved more slowly. But then we had posted Raya and Anastas ten yards ahead, and the little Armenian with his thick, dark glasses and white stick was holding up the procession long enough for me to fire off my series of pictures.

At the same time, Larissa on my arm wearing her white bridal gown was noting everything about this quaint ritual; she was studying the crypt layout, the figure of Lenin in his crystal cage and taking stock of the guards who were hustling the crowd round the body and out. It all seemed eons ago.

In the wake of my Kirghiz family, I stepped quickly down the marble stairs, first left then right, to enter the funeral hall. Up another half-flight of steps to a parapet along the wall just above the holy of holies of Mother Russia. At the corners of the glass coffin stood four guards with fixed bayonets while another half-dozen watched the rapt crowd looking down on the figure in its aura of pink, penumbral light. They were watching for whichever madman might want to destroy what represented Lenin with a bomb, or even commit the sacrilege of photographing him.

For a moment or two I glanced at the worshipping faces, intent on that tiny, black-clad figure with angular features, reddish hair and beard and that Tartar cast to his closed eyes. On previous visits, I had sensed the religious awe in that incense-laden vault, but did not have time to notice how ritualistic, how theatrical the whole ceremony was. A hundred pairs of hypnotized eyes gazed at Lenin as though at some icon while the guards stared back at the crowd.

“Keep moving. Hands out of your pockets,” a guard whispered hoarsely as we scuffed along the back wall by Lenin’s feet, then towards the exit. “Er sieht wie Wachs aus,” hissed the blonde German woman to her husband. “No talking,” a guard snapped at her beckoning her onwards.

But she was right. Lenin did look waxy. His hands and face, all there was of him on show under that fluorescence, appeared dark yellow, jaundiced - though at ten feet it was difficult to tell if this were a mummy or a waxwork dummy. Yet, despite my own doubts, despite everything I have learned about Vladimir Ilych Lenin, every time I have gazed at that parchment face and those tiny hands lying on that black, silk cloth, I get the sort of feeling pilgrims must have before the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, or at Fatima.

I know that face like my own with its cropped ginger hair and the flare of its side nostrils, the outsize cranium; I could describe exactly how the right index finger is crooked; in fact, I don’t suppose Professor Boris Zbarsky or Professor Ferdinand Hochstetter, the doctors who embalmed Lenin, knew some of the details as well as I did. Shuffling round, I wondered what that curious, Eurasian head would have thought had it been aware of the trick we played on him.

Nothing seemed to have changed from the first time I had seen Lenin. Same guards. Same enormous crowd. Yet nothing was the same for me, since Larissa could not share it with me. We had shared so much; and even though she had never loved me as much as I loved her, nobody had ever loved me like her. Nobody.

“Move along, chelovek,” the senior guard whispered in my ear. But gently, perhaps mistaking my faraway expression for adoration of the Communist Christ, After rounding the coffin, we inched down some steps, up some more and out the back door leading to the path along the Kremlin Wall, lined with spruce trees. There, the queue scattered though guards still marshaled us and urged us forward. Several people loitered to peer over the iron railing at the graves of Stalin and other revolutionary figures buried beside the crenellated wall.

My mind was still back there, in the crypt. Wondering exactly what that was lying under the glass cage. Had she been here, Larissa might have enlightened me. Or maybe she finished up having to guess. And she was the one who thought up the whole crazy scheme.

But I’m away ahead of myself. I suppose I should really begin by telling you about Larissa and myself from the time we met.