"Ian Watson - Stalin's Teardrops" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

Stalin's Teardrops




STALIN'S
TEARDROPS
Ian Watson
Part I: The Lie of the Land
"This is the era of clarity now, Valentin," Mirov reproved me. "I
don't necessarily like it, but I am no traitor. I have problems, you
have problems. We must adapt."
I chuckled and then said, "In this office we have always adapted,
haven't we?"
By "office" I referred to the whole cluster of studios which composed
the department of cartography. Ten in all, these were interconnected
by archways rather than doors so that my staff and I could pass freely
from one to the next across a continuous sweep of parquet flooring.
In recent years I had resisted the general tendency to subdivide
spacious rooms which, prior to the Revolution, had been the province
of a giant insurance company. For our drawing tables and extra-wide
filing cabinets we needed elbow-room. We needed as much daylight
as possible from our windows overlooking the courtyard deep below.
Hence our location here on the eighth floor; hence the absence of
steel bars at our windows, and ours alone. Grids of shadow must not
fall across our work.
On hot summer days when breezes blew in and out we needed to be
specially vigilant. (And of course we used much sealing wax every
evening when we locked up.) In winter, the standard lightingтАФthose
big white globes topped by shadesтАФwas perfectly adequate. Still,
their illumination could not rival pure daylight. We often left the
finalization of important maps until the summer months.
Mirov's comments about clarity seemed spurious in the
circumstances; though with a sinking heart I knew all too well what

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Stalin's Teardrops


he meant.
"We have lost touch with our own country," he said forlornly,
echoing a decision which had been handed down from on high.
"Of course we have," I agreed. "That was the whole idea, wasn't it?"
"This must change." He permitted himself a wry joke. "The lie of the
land must be corrected."
Mirov was a stout sixty-five-year-old with short grizzled hair
resembling the hachuring on a map of a steep round hillock. His nose
and cheeks were broken-veined from over-indulgence in the now-
forbidden spirit. I think he resented never having been attached to
one of the more glamorous branches of our secret police. Maybe he