Vol. 38 No. 1 1971 - page 57

PARTISAN REVIEW
57
It is of course not possible to do more than take the humblest
flights into speculation, while making do with those so frequent and
highly publicised spy dramas, for some reason or other so very near
to farce, that do leave obscurity for our attention.
It can't be possible that the high reaches of espionage can
have anything in common with, for instance, this small happening.
A communist living in a small town in England, who had been
openly and undramatically a communist for years, and for whom
the state of being a communist had become rather like the prac–
tice of an undemanding religion - this man looked out of his window
one fine summer afternoon to see standing in the street outside his
house a car of such foreignness and such opulence that he was em–
barrassed, and at once began to work out what excuses he could use
to his working-class neighbours whose cars, if any, would be dust
in comparison. Out of this monster of a car came two large smiling
Russians, carrying a teddy bear the size of a sofa, a bottle of vodka,
a long and very heavy roll, which later turned out to be a vast carpet
with the picture of the Kremlin on it, and a box of chocolates of
British make, with a pretty lady and a pretty dog.
Every window in the street already had heads packed behind
the curtains.
"Come in," said he, "but I don't think I have the pleasure of
knowing who...."
The roll of carpet was propped in the hall, the three children
sent off to play with the teddy bear in the kitchen, and the box of
chocolates set aside fOT the lady of the house, who was doing the
week's shopping in the High Street. The vodka was opened at once.
It turned out that it was
his
wife they wanted: they were in–
terested in him as a go-between. They wished him to ask
his
wife,
who was an employee of the town council, to get hold of the records
of the Council's meetings, and to pass these records on to them. Now,
this wasn't London, or even Edinburgh.
It
was a small unimportant
North of England town, in which it would be hard to imagine any–
thing ever happening that could be of interest to anyone outside it,
let alone the agents of a Foreign Power. But, said he, these records are
open, anyone could go and get copies - you, for instance - "Com–
rades, I shall be delighted to take you to the Town Hall myself."
No, what they had been instructed to do was to ask
his
wife
to procure them minutes and records, nothing less would do.
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