Our Game

Rogov is the KGB head resident in Havana. It is my secret conviction that Rogov ordered the interrogation.

I ask the impossible question: What was it like? Larry affects to be surprised.

"After Winchester? A piece of cake. I'll settle for a Cuban prison over House Library any day. Hey, Timbo"—nudging my arm—"how about her? Cut out for you. Ugly and willing. No threat."

* * *

I had two guards, and they had no other life but me. They did everything together, whether it was night or day. Both had that tipping walk I had noticed in their comrades at the nightclub. Both spoke the gentle Russian of the south, but as a second language or perhaps by now a third, for they were first-year students in Muslim Studies at the Islamic University in Nazran, and their subjects were Arabic, the Koran, and the history of Islam. They declined to tell me their names, I supposed again on orders, but since they were also forbidden by their faith to lie, for those ten days they had no names at all.

They were Murids, they told me proudly, devoted to God and their spiritual masters, committed to a discreet and manly life in the search for sacred knowledge. Murids, they said, were the moral heart of the Ingush cause and of the military and political opposition to Russia. They were pledged to set an example of piety, honesty, bravery, and self-deprivation. The bigger and more studious—I have neither more than twenty—came from Ekazhevo, a large village on the outskirts of Nazran; his diminutive comrade was from Jairakh, high in the mountains close to the Georgian Military Highway at the southern extremity of the disputed Prigorod region, which they told me constituted half of traditional Ingushetia.

All this on the first day, while they stood shyly at the far end of my cell, dressed in bomber jackets and clutching machine pistols, watching me eat a breakfast of the same strong black tea I had found in Aitken May's waiting room, with a piece of precious lemon, and bread and cheese and hard-boiled eggs. Meals were from the start a ceremony. My Murids took turns to carry the tray, and great pride in their munificence. And since I quickly noticed that their own fare was less lavish—consisting, as they told me, of provisions they had brought from Nazran so that no dietary laws were breached—I made a show of eating mine with relish. By the second day, the cooks themselves started to appear: straight-eyed women in head scarves, who peered in at me from the cover of the doorway, the youngest the most modest, the older ones quizzing me with sparkling eyes.

Only once, through a misunderstanding, did I savour the less sociable side of our relationship. I was lying on my bed dreaming, and my dreams must have taken a violent turn, for when I opened my eyes and saw my two Murids staring down at me, one proudly bearing a cake of toilet soap and towels, the other my evening meal, I sprang up with a warlike shout, only to have my feet swept from under me and, as I started to struggle to my feet, the oily muzzle of a pistol pressed into my neck. Alone again, I heard their field telephone crackle and the sound of their quiet voices as they reported the event. They returned to watch me eat my meal, then removed the tray and chained me to my bed.

For my salvation I abandoned all resistance of body and mind. Supine and inert, I convinced myself that the greatest freedom in the world was to have no control over one's destiny.

Yet in the morning, when my guards released me, my wrists were bleeding and my ankles so swollen that we had to bathe them in cold water.

* * *

Magomed arrived with a bottle of vodka. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his round face under his skullcap was dark with stubble. What was saddening him? Or were his smiles always as sad as this? He poured the vodka but drank none himself. He enquired whether I was content. I replied, "Royally." He gave a distant smile and repeated: "Royally." We discussed in no particular sequence the writers Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Ford Madox Ford, and Bulgakov. He assured me that it was rare for him to engage in civilised conversation and asked whether such discussion was available to me in England.

"Only with Larry," I replied, hoping I might draw him.

But his reply was another sad smile, which neither acknowledged Larry's existence nor denied it. He asked how I was getting along with my Murids.

"They are polite?"

"Perfectly."

"They are the sons of martyrs." The sad smile again. "Perhaps they think you are the instrument of God's will.”

“Why should they think that?"

"There is a prophecy, widely believed in Sufist circles ever since the nineteenth century when the Imam Shamyl sent letters to your Queen Victoria, that the Russian Empire will one day collapse and the North Caucasus, including Ingushetia and Chechenia, will come under the rule of the British sovereign."

I received this information gravely, which was how he had imparted it.