Face Me When You Walk Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

important people,’ agreed the writer. ‘But that’s like putting on a cloak to hide a hole in your trousers.’
    He sipped his drink.
    â€˜Do you know?’ resumed Nikolai. ‘At home they thought I was the village idiot.’
    Pamela laughed, knowing he meant her to. It wasn’t an act, she concluded. He did need a friend.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because I scribbled in books,’ he said. ‘The local party secretary, a man called Georgi Polenov, actually came to the house to complain. He said I was setting a bad example, refusing to work. If I were excluded from the co-operative, then others would want the same privileges.’
    Nikolai stopped, staring at her. ‘They wanted me to work in the fields,’ he remembered, disbelievingly. ‘I was supposed to drive a machine that packed wheat during the harvest. Every time I tried, I broke it.’
    It was difficult not to laugh again. Thank God, thought Pamela, for the napkin.
    â€˜I was lucky, meeting Polenov,’ said Nikolai. ‘He was a refined man, mourning the old era.’
    He poured brandy into her glass. It seemed pointless to object.
    â€˜The only way he could do it was through his pretension to literature,’ said Nikolai. ‘He would even, at times, refer to Dickens and Shakespeare as if he had read them, which I’m sure he hadn’t. But he had read Amalrik and Solzhenitsyn in samizdat … ’
    He stopped, like someone helping another across stepping-stones in an eager river.
    â€˜Do you know of samizdat , the underground method of printing and circulating prohibited material?’ he asked.
    Again Pamela stifled a laugh. For the first time in his life, she thought, he was talking confidently to someone.
    â€˜I had heard of it,’ she said. Then, allowing him the indulgence, she added, ‘But I was never quite sure what it meant.’
    He smiled, enjoying the role, like a child with the monologue in the school play.
    â€˜He sent my stuff to some friends he had cultivated among the Writers’ Union in Kiev. They were impressed and sent it here, to Moscow. Luckily for me, Comrade Ballenin read it.’
    Nikolai added more brandy to her glass, then to his.
    â€˜Oh God, how Kiev frightened me,’ he reflected. He looked directly at her. ‘Would you believe,’ he said, ‘my father had never been there. Never once in his whole life. It was like hell, something mothers frightened their children with. “If you are naughty, I’ll send you to Kiev.” We didn’t call it by its real name. It was always the “big place”, as if to mention its correct name would call down a curse.’
    Nikolai was talking hurriedly, spurred by memories. Sometimes Pamela, whose Russian was still imperfect, had difficulty in immediately understanding him. Alcohol was blurring some of the words. Did peasants really feel that about Kiev or Moscow, she wondered? Or was he romanticizing the whole thing? He began to laugh and she thought he was lapsing into complete drunkenness.
    â€˜I was absolutely terrified the first time I went there,’ he started again. ‘I had the address of Polcnov’s friend in the Writers’ Circle, but everything was so big and I couldn’t find it. I went around and around all those concrete buildings. Everyone was far too busy to help me. And then I wanted a toilet. I didn’t know how to find one. I was walking around, pigeon kneed. And finally I found a park; I was quite sure I would get arrested, but I couldn’t wait any longer. So I peed against a tree.’
    Pamela sniggered.
    â€˜It wasn’t funny,’ protested Nikolai. ‘I was so frightened of park-keepers or police that I still wet my trousers. I walked around for an hour until it dried. I chafed my legs red raw.’
    Remembering a nephew to whom it had happened in London, Pamela said, ‘Yes, it does.’
    The child had been six years old,