High Jinx Page 6

The students were very serious about their month in Russia, and the 12,000-ton Pushkin was well equipped with appropriate reading for inquisitive young scholars visiting the Soviet Union for the first time.

  Alistair’s roommate, Brian Scargill, was a third-year student, the president of the Socialist Society. He took his duties as, in effect, the student group leader very seriously. In consultation with Miss Corbett it was decided that there would be two seminars every day at sea, each lasting two hours. During the first of these Miss Corbett would give general lectures on Soviet life and the history of the Soviet Union. In the afternoon she would teach elementary Russian.

  The first day out, in the Channel, they ran into something of a gale. Attendance at the first seminar was accordingly sparse. But Miss Corbett made it without apparent difficulty, as did Fleetwood and two others, not including Scargill who, when late that afternoon he emerged from his stateroom, was volubly mortified that an ordinary storm would stand in the way of his instruction in the great socialist experiment being conducted in the Soviet Union.

  Alice Goodyear Corbett was a lithe, pretty, full-breasted, nimble-minded young woman, twenty-four years old. Her father was an American journalist who had been posted to Moscow just four months after the October Revolution, and now was recognised by the community of journalists there as the senior Western journalist in residence. Alice Goodyear Corbett (the convention had always been to use her full name, dating back to when, at age five, asked by a visiting Russian what her name was, she had answered, ‘Moye imya Alice Goodyear Corbett’) had attended schools in Moscow from kindergarten and, at first with her father and in due course with others, had travelled everywhere foreigners were permitted to go.

  Her early life was confused by the commotions that so absorbed her father professionally but affected her personally. There were the years in the early twenties when she was in secondary school and was treated erratically by her teachers, who had not yet been instructed on the proper attitude to exhibit to a young daughter of a representative of the imperialist press. The children, before they reached ideological puberty, accepted her—as a foreigner to be sure, but also as someone apparently as familiar as they were with the ways of Moscow. Alice Goodyear Corbett knew all about their holidays and their history, their museums and their toys. She went regularly to play with other girls, daughters of other Americans and of English and German journalists, but she found, after reaching her teens, that her relations with them tended to be more mechanical than those with her Russian friends. Given her choice, she elected to accept invitations to spend time with her Russian friends.

  But then, approaching college age in the late twenties, she discovered, after one incident in particular, that as a foreigner she was generically suspect. She had been excitedly invited to a birthday party by her oldest friend, Olga. The day before the party and after Alice Goodyear Corbett had saved two weeks’ allowance to buy a special birthday present, a Mickey Mouse watch, Olga said that her parents had called off the party. Alice Goodyear Corbett stared hard at Olga, who turned her head to one side and began to cry. She confessed that her parents had become afraid of foreigners coming to their home, Comrade Stalin having pronounced recently on the dangers of cosmopolitanism. Alice Goodyear Corbett had replied that she was not Jewish, so at least that particular charge could not apply to her, but Olga was simply confused, and cried some more. There were other such incidents.

  Alice Goodyear Corbett reacted by resolving in word and deed clearly to dispel any suspicion on the part of anyone who observed her that by virtue of her parents’ background she was hostile to what was becoming the country of her choice. She began to pay special attention during the long indoctrination courses, and consistently got the highest grades in the class, mastering the minutiae of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. In time she was being called upon to give demonstration answers to questions put to her in front of the whole class before visiting teachers from other parts of first Moscow, then other Russian cities. By the time she had graduated from secondary school she had achieved a minor eminence in the student world of Moscow: the perfectly trained Soviet protégée. Some indication of this reached her father (her mother had never managed to learn a word of Russian and simply ignored her daughter’s activities except as they involved domestic arrangements). Her father passed it off as the kind of thing precocious children tended to do—involve themselves in their own culture—and paid little attention to it. Besides, he was himself sympathetic with what the Soviet state was trying to do and not entirely decided whether, when time came to retire, he would go back to Virginia. Perhaps he might just stay on in Moscow.

  While a second-year student at the University of Moscow, Alice Goodyear Corbett had been called surreptitiously to the inner sanctum of the Party, located in the Student Union Building, and proudly informed that close observation by her teachers and others had persuaded officials to pay her the supreme honour of extending to her an invitation to join the Communist Party which, if she accepted, would mean that she shared an honour with only three per cent of the Soviet population. The principal condition attached to her membership was that on no account was she to divulge this development to anyone, especially not to her father or to her mother, because although they were known to be friendly to the great revolution, if it became known that their only child had become a member of the Party this would embarrass him with his employer, the United Press, perhaps even bringing about his recall to the United States and depriving the Soviet Union of a useful commentator.

  Alice accepted the honour with great enthusiasm. During her two trips home to Virginia during the preceding five years she had become practiced in defending Soviet policies. Much of what was alleged about Stalin’s Russia was, quite simply, a lie—for instance the charge that the defendants in the great purge trials were any less than flatly guilty, as charged, of treason. She was happy to think of herself as a consolidated member of an international movement, the great purposes of which would be to remove war and the causes of war and social and class antagonisms from the earth forever.

  Alice wrote poetry, and her poetry included paeans to the Soviet state and its leaders, though she had had on more than one occasion to face the metrical choice either of substituting the name of a new leader in place of the name that figured in her original lines but was now exposed as having been treasonable or, if she couldn’t find another leader with the requisite number of syllables to his name and ending with the same sound as the deposed leader (she was not able to find someone to substitute for Zinoviev), she would have to toss the poem away. But she had now the equivalent of a little book of poems, dedicated to Soviet leaders, to Soviet cities and villages, to Soviet schools, and to some of her Soviet teachers. One day, she dreamed, when her father’s professional interests would no longer be jeopardised, she would publish these poems. What pleased her most was that she had been able to compose them both in Russian and in English, taking here and there the necessary linguistic liberties.

  While doing postgraduate work in Russian history, she had been approached by her cell leader and told that Comrade Pleshkov of Intourist desired to see her. The meeting took place late that afternoon in what had been the groom’s cottage of a czarist prince, on Herzen Street.

  It was wildly exciting. The idea of it was that every summer until further notice she would escort a half-dozen or as many as a dozen British students, bringing them from England for a month’s tour of the Soviet Union. Mrs. Pleshkov explained that Soviet policy was to encourage a true knowledge of the country by intelligent young people from abroad, particularly those who had shown interest in communism. On top of her regular duties—to lecture to the students, to expedite their travel arrangements, to coordinate their programmes—she was to keep a sharp eye out for any student who inclined sufficiently toward the great communist experiment, of which Russia was the matrix, to qualify for possible recruitment.

  ‘Do you mean—actually to invite them to join the Party?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs
. Pleshkov said in her husky voice, taking a deep drag at her cigarette. ‘Yes—of course, you will in each case check first with me so that we can conduct appropriate investigations. But I have that authority, to extend membership. And we can hope that some of the young people will in due course show themselves willing to go further.’

  ‘What do you mean, Comrade?’

  ‘The imperialist world—as you know, Comrade Corbett—is always poised to do damage to the socialist revolution. We need help from within Great Britain from young people who are loyal to humanity, not to decadent imperialist regimes.’

  ‘You mean, spies?’—Alice Goodyear Corbett’s calm, matter-of-fact request for elucidation snowed that she was not in the least troubled by the nature of her proposed commission, let alone shocked by the idea.

  ‘You might call them that, yes. “Friends of the Soviet Union,” I would prefer to call them: foreign friends of international socialism. These young men and women will, when they graduate, branch out and take positions in the armed forces, in the foreign service, in the academies: it would be good to know that out fraternity is always growing, that everywhere—everywhere in the world—there are friends of the Soviet Union.’

  Alice Goodyear Corbett said the prospect pleased her in every way. Among other things it appealed to the poet in her, the notion that, using her own informed intuition, she might discern which students especially to approach, which other students to let alone.

  The first of the Intourist Tours for the Cambridge University Socialist Society had yielded a harvest of two students whose fidelity, tested now for two years, had been established. Granted, there had been a slight problem with young Greenspan who had exuberantly volunteered to assassinate King George. But in Moscow it was judged, however tentatively, a satisfactory enterprise, and it was now established procedure that on their return to Cambridge, those students deemed worth cultivating would be put in touch with, and thereafter serve under the direction of, unit leaders. Both of them, after the first summer, had commended the recruiting instincts of Alice Goodyear Corbett; the second year, three of eleven student tourists accepted her discreetly proffered invitation.

  The experience, moreover, had done wonders for Alice Goodyear Corbett, whose self-confidence had blossomed and whose very appearance took on a special, arresting aspect: a handsome, passionate young woman, alight with enthusiasm, confident of her ability, shrewd in her insights.

  Alice Goodyear Corbett decided the very first night, when the Pushkin was rolling wildly in the cranky seas of the Channel and most of the ships’ passengers stayed in their staterooms in varied forms of queasiness and outright distress, that the young man from Trinity who had completed only his first year at Cambridge was the most attractive prospect for the Party of all the students she had mixed with, and before the evening was over they had engaged in sprightly conversation. She discovered that in his subtle, almost childish way (he was, after all, only just eighteen), the slim young man with no trace of a beard on his face, a light sprinkle of faded freckles reaching from his nose to his hair, so quick to grasp nuance, to expand and improvise on subjects only tangentially touched upon, so phenomenally knowledgeable on the subject—the communist enterprise—in which Alice Goodyear Corbett was an acknowledged expert, that notwithstanding his almost exaggerated youth, Alistair Fleetwood was really the senior presence in the group. She was at once perplexed, intrigued, and excited. It was almost midnight, and the bar was all but empty. She asked him if he would care for a nightcap, or would that overstrain his stomach? He answered that his stomach was perfectly fine, and ordered an orangeade. She touched her glass of vodka to his orangeade and said, ‘You will have a wonderful adventure during the next month, I promise you, Alistair.’

  ‘Oh, I am quite certain that is the case, Miss Corbett. You know, that is, after all, why I came. That, combined with the intelligent disgust anyone has, or should have, who knows England as I know England. But we need not go into that: the class system, the public school snobberies, the grinding poverty of the working poor. It is possible that I could teach you something about my country that you don’t know. But I am so pleased to be here under your guidance! I look forward especially to learning Russian from you.’

  They said good night, and even walked out on deck for brief exposure to the howling wind. Alistair Fleetwood insisted on escorting her to her cabin, on reaching which he bowed his head slightly, smiled, and said he would see her tomorrow at the seminar. ‘Or maybe even before that, if you are at breakfast.’ Alice Goodyear Corbett smiled, and on sliding into her bed was mildly astonished to find that that young man—that child! she insisted on putting it that way, in self-reproach—had actually … aroused her.

  One month later they were again aboard the Pushkin, having travelled two thousand miles within the Soviet Union. Mostly, of course, they had been in Moscow and Leningrad. The reactions of the young Cantabrigians, Alice Goodyear Corbett reflected, were not very different from the reactions of the first and second groups, the one last year and the one the summer before. Two or three were travelling, really, only for the sake of the adventure, their curiosity limited to what Alice Goodyear Corbett quickly grew to recognise as the ‘exciting’ historical sites: Lenin’s Tomb, the Kremlin, the house in Leningrad where Rasputin had been killed, the prison where Lenin’s brother had been held before he was hanged—that kind of thing. The enbalmed Lenin was to be expected: it came first with foreign visitors, even as with Soviet pilgrims. But beyond these obvious historical sites, ‘they are more interested in the guillotine that cut off Marie Antoinette’s head than in the French Revolution,’ as she said, compressing her criticism in one report to her supervisor. These students were visibly bored during the hours and hours and hours spent in factories and agricultural collectives where, by contrast, the ideologically motivated students took copious notes, cluck-clucking over what they were assured was the relative backwardness of comparable British and American enterprises.

  Jack Lively, a vigorous young man of twenty who played rugger at Cambridge, was a socialist, Alice Goodyear Corbett suspected, largely because his father was a prominent leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. Jack Lively made it clear from the moment he landed in Leningrad that he expected a little romantic diversion. Alice Goodyear Corbett told him that that kind of thing did not go on under socialism; to which Lively, who was reading anthropology at Trinity, said to Miss Corbett, a) that she couldn’t really be right about that, that what she called ‘that kind of thing’ happens everywhere on earth; and b) if in fact socialism has come up with a system in which ‘that kind of thing doesn’t happen,’ why, said Jack Lively, he would need to reconsider his commitment to socialism.

  Most of the group—the conversation took place in the little bus on the ride to Nagornski, so that they might witness with their own eyes the freedom of religion given by Stalin’s government to those ‘quaint old monks,’ as Alice Goodyear Corbett put it—sided with their guide. But later, in their hotel room, Brian Scargill confessed to Alistair Fleetwood that though he had sided with Miss Corbett, in fact he thought that probably Jack Lively was correct.

  What brought on the concrete problem was when, a few minutes late for breakfast the following morning, Jack Lively, sitting down between Scargill and Fleetwood, smiled lasciviously as he dug into his ham and cheese and said, ‘You know that blather old Corbett was giving us yesterday about how in Stalin’s Russia there are no you-know-whats?

  ‘Well,’ he smiled, ‘she was wrong. And this one’—his eyes closed sweetly to suggest satiety and then opened again, the eyes now of the accountant—‘was hardly dear unless you want to call a quid and a packet of Dunhills expensive. Say, do you think old Corbett would go along with the idea if I persuaded Tania—yes, “Tania”—to join us for the rest of the tour? I’m sure she’d be glad to. Besides,’ Jack Lively was enjoying himself hugely, ‘there is great advantage to be got from my suggestion, because as in the Soviet Union all things are owned in common, Tania
would, I am certain, be happy to oblige the rest of you. Though—’ he stopped dramatically, ‘perhaps not you, Fleetwood. She would probably take one look at you and figure you wouldn’t know what to do in bed, and she is not a licensed teacher.’

  Alistair Fleetwood, though he gave no signs of it, was heavily challenged by this dose of raillery and condescension from Jack Lively. On the one hand he was totally loyal to Alice Goodyear Corbett and felt honour-bound to believe everything she said about life under socialism. On the other hand, his scientific intelligence taught him that facts, among them those that had to do with (ineradicable? Was this defective loyalty to Marx-Lenin?) human appetites cannot be denied by ideological asseverations, and evidently Jack Lively had had a night out with a professional. He was, also, secretly amused and titillated by the fantasy of a travelling tart with the Cambridge Socialist Society Intourist trip through the Soviet Union. If such perquisites were advertised, he was sure there would be more volunteers for the next tour. But above all he was sensitive to the implication that he was not really old enough to be experienced, perhaps even too naïve to be conversant with basic biological formulae.

  But meanwhile he had to say something to Lively. So he shot back, ‘Oh really, Jack. So you found someone who breaks the rules. Whoever said there are any societies anywhere where some people don’t break the rules?’

  Lively was not going to leave it at that. ‘There are certainly a lot of people who break the rules in Russia, you can say that again. At the rate at which they are executing traitors, Fleet-wood, breaking the rule must be a very popular thing to do.’

  On this point Alistair became truly defensive. ‘Do you have the figures, Lively, on the number of Roundheads executed by Cavaliers? Or the number of heretics killed during the religious wars of the seventeenth century? When you get around to doing that research, come see me about the Moscow trials.’