The Beria Papers: The scandalous diaries of a Russian tyrant by Alan Williams

Author:Alan Williams [Williams, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2020-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

Tatana cut short her studies, and five days later we left on the car-ferry for Boulogne. We arrived at the little town of Le Crotoy in time for lunch, which Boris organized with his usual aggressive panache. The patronne of the Hotel de La Baie, Mme Mado Poncelet, was a massive bejewelled woman in a dyed blue wig and dark glasses, who was accompanied at every step by two morose Alsatians. She proved a formidable challenge even for Boris, but their gastronomic tastes coincided and the first meal at our new place of work was a success.

That afternoon Boris took the train to Paris, where he’d made arrangements to meet the old Georgian restaurateur and collect the typewriter. Tatana had settled herself on her balcony in the late sun and began reading the typescript.

We seemed to be the only foreigners in the town — a quiet jumble of houses gathered round the wooden fishing-jetty on the edge of the broad estuary of the Somme. Most of the other guests in the hotel were Parisians who had come down for the duck shooting on the mud-flats, or for a quiet weekend à deux. That evening a young man was sitting at the bar with his girlfriend, when Madame Mado, with her two Alsatians at her heels, passed them with a pat on the man’s shoulder, saying, ‘Ca va, l’amour?’ — and waddled on without waiting for a reply.

Providing her clients were contented and well-fed, she seemed totally disinterested in them. When we’d first arrived and filled in the registration fiches, she had shown no interest in Boris’ or Tatana’s passports — his giving his place of birth as Moscow; hers as Zugdidi, Georgia, U.S.S.R. However, I’d have been happier if we hadn’t had to fill them in at all: for somehow they seemed to constitute our first real act of complicity; and I wondered what happened to those fiches after they were sent to the local Préfecture. Over the summer they must amount to more than a million in France alone. Were they destroyed at the end of the season? Or did they moulder in some monstrous filing-system to be dug out months later and land on an Inspector’s desk?

At seven o’clock I went up to Tatana’s room. She was lying on the bed finishing the first typescript. The ashtray on the side table was full of dead cigarettes, the air hazy with tobacco smoke.

‘Would you get me a drink?’ she said. ‘A large Pernod with a lot of ice.’ When I came back with it, she laid the typescript aside, and I noticed with relief that she was in the middle of one of the Russian passages. I wondered how she was taking the rest.

‘I’m enjoying it very much,’ she said at last. ‘My only real criticism is that at times you make Beria almost amusing — a sort of jolly, sexy old blackguard who used his position simply to enjoy himself — drinking and wenching and occasionally shooting people — and proud of boasting about it afterwards.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.