A Shadow of Myself. Mike Phillips
Tbilisi. Chechnya was to be Victor’s last mission, and he was sitting in front of Grozny in an armoured personnel carrier along with the other veterans when they were hit by a hail of armour-piercing grenades which the partisans had bought from a Russian conscript the previous week. Young Rodionov died instantly, and Victor found himself wandering in the wreckage of the armoured column, the only remaining member of the ‘bodyguard’.
Back in Moscow he lost no time in visiting the dacha. The treasure was stored in a cabin near the house, and working feverishly over the space of four nights he removed everything he found there. He piled them up in the attic of the old house in Uglich on the Volga, where his aged parents still lived. Over the next few years he sold the least valuable objects piece by piece. Eventually he ran into Valentin by accident, as they were both standing in a queue for changing currency in a booth at the end of Ulitsa Vavarka. They had first met in what seemed like another lifetime, during the week before the advance on Grozny, and they began talking, hesitantly at first, then with increasing passion and nostalgia. Victor talked about the explosion and the shock of waking up to find all his closest comrades dead or maimed. Valentin told about how they had taken Grozny, then scoured the countryside, alternately frozen with the cold and sweating with fear, nothing but kasha porridge and bread in their stomachs, wincing from the anticipated sting of snipers’ bullets, torn apart with anger at the pointlessness of it all.
By this time they were standing in front of a stall on the site of the old market place near Arbatskaya Metro, clinking their glasses together and toasting their chief tormentors. ‘Yeltsin – alkash. Grachev – doorak.’ These were their ironic salutes to the old boozer and the moron who had sent them to hell without the slightest idea of what they were doing.
A dam had burst. Valentin talked about his mother’s death and his imminent departure for Berlin, and Victor was struck by the idea that here was the perfect conduit, a comrade he could trust to do business for him in the West.
The following evening, they met again at the apartment in the block near Belorussia Station where Valentin’s mother had lived. Victor had brought the picture in the back of his van, covered with sheets of newspaper tied on with string, and, once upstairs, he propped it up against the wall on a chair and tore the paper off.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘isn’t it beautiful?’
When his cousin got to this part of the story George nodded his head, his imagination replaying the entire scene.
‘Yes,’ he muttered, almost as if he was talking to himself. ‘It’s beautiful.’
That was how it had begun.
On that first day George had asked the obvious question. Why bother with stealing cars?
‘It’s a cover,’ Valentin explained patiently. Victor could run a more or less legitimate business dealing in taxis, cars, and car parts. No one would ask questions about his money.
‘But they’re stolen cars,’ George protested.
Valentin shrugged.
‘Who cares?’
On the morning that Valentin stole the Jaguar they had been in business for nearly two years and there was still no sign of the supply of paintings drying up. The cars were no problem. Valentin had become an expert in choosing the right models – BMWs, Jaguars, Porsches, the occasional top-of-the-range Volkswagen. The streets seemed to flow with the rich, hot scent of their shining metal, sweetened by luxurious spicy touches of leather and rubber; and there was practically no risk apart from the actual moment of opening a door. When Valentin climbed into a motor in the morning he knew that by nightfall it would have travelled a distance of more than a thousand kilometres and across several borders. This was his only regret, he told George. Sometimes the pleasure he experienced when he sat in front of the wheel of a beautiful car was almost as good as sex, and when he drove it into one of the garages they used he would feel the insane desire to keep it, to remain wrapped in the clinging embrace of soft warm leather, if only for a little while longer.
‘Verrückt,’ George had muttered. ‘You’re crazy.’ But, at the same time, he reflected that it was just as well. Their zones of responsibility had divided themselves, as it seemed, quite naturally. George’s job was to sell the paintings. Valentin boosted the cars. Since their first experience with the dealer, Gunther, George had set out to inform himself about the art objects he was handling. He read catalogues and visited galleries, museums and auction rooms, checking the prices carefully, matching his estimates with them. He read about Feofan Grek, and Rublyov and Ushakov, and then leaving icons behind he read about the Wanderers group, the Peredvizhniki, Surikov and Repin, and then Mikhail Vrubel and Diaghilev. Before he had progressed very far, however, he had realised that Levitan, whose painting he had sold to Gunther for a few thousand marks, was a classic example of the nineteenth century Peredvizhniki. The landscapes were famous and highly valued, and he learnt also that there were collectors not far away who would have given him ten or twenty times the amount without a single question. ‘Idiot,’ he muttered to himself from time to time, as he turned the illustrated pages or sat at the back of an auction watching the bidding. ‘Idiot.’
It was a new world in which George immersed himself. At first his wife Radka was puzzled, then delighted at his new-found interest. When he resigned as manager of one of the rent-a-car firms at the airport, the job he’d held down for five years, she had almost panicked, convinced that he was about to return to his old ways. But he’d surprised her with the amount he earnt buying and selling antiques, as he called them. Later on, as the stream of money swelled into something like a flood she began to worry again. But, for a while, George’s happiness with his end of the bargain was complete. Valentin’s adventures didn’t tempt him at all. He had gone boosting with the Russian a couple of times and he hated it all, the rush of excitement as they approached the car, the sucking dread of a humiliating arrest, the stupid babbling euphoria of the escape. George was content to leave that side of the business to his cousin, and when Valentin ran off at the mouth about cars, as he usually did, he merely listened patiently, an ironic smile curling on his lips.
As Valentin swung right climbing up MaxBreuerallee towards the Bahnhof in Altona he was telling George that the Jaguar’s engine made the wrong sort of noise.
‘Like a tank, except it doesn’t smoke and stink of kerosene.’
‘You never drove a tank,’ George said automatically.
Valentin looked round at him, his expression suddenly clouded.
‘I’ve smelt plenty.’
It was a smell George also remembered with an uncomfortable clarity. Once upon a time it had been so familiar that he could go for days without noticing it. But there was still one occasion that he associated with the smell of kerosene and the grinding rumble of the armoured engines, and Valentin’s remark had made his mind leap to it, like turning the knob on a pair of binoculars and suddenly seeing a distant scene in sharp focus, as if close enough to touch.
He was in the army then, twenty years old, only a boy. His unit had been sent over the border on a mission of fraternal assistance against saboteurs and subversives. That’s what they’d been told in the political briefings anyway, but no one in the unit believed it. The invasion of 1968 was nearly ten years in the past, but the boys already knew that they would face scorn and pointing fingers rather than the open arms of a grateful population. The column had made a stop near Karlovy Vary, a long way short of Prague. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was shining brightly. They were in no hurry, the soldiers had been told, and when the little row of armoured vehicles parked by the side of the country road, some of them went off to piss in the meadow or sprawl under the shade of the trees.
George stood leaning against a tank, smoking a cigarette. He was thinking of his mother. She had clung to him, muttering endearments, her cheeks wet with tears: ‘Malcheek. Chelovechek. My little man.’ Then, after he had turned away, she gripped his elbow and brought her mouth close to his ear. ‘Trust no one.’
He was one of the first to see the girls. They looked German with their fair hair and long brown legs gleaming in the sun, but