C09 A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre

Author:John Le Carre
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Unknown
ISBN: 9781416594888
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2008-10-31T18:30:00+00:00

In the sudden quiet of her own office, in the very room where she had first received Ursula’s referred call from Melik imploring her to come and visit this Russian-speaking friend of his who desperately needed her help, she looked back on the weekend as if it comprised her entire life.

The pieces still refused to settle. Over two days and nights she had visited him five times. Or was it six? Or seven if you included taking him there? Again on the Saturday evening. Twice on Sunday. Again this morning at crack of dawn when I interrupted him praying. How many times did that make?

But ask her to account for the actual hours she had spent with him, arrange them in some kind of rational order—what they had talked about as they walked their separate tightropes, where they had laughed and where they had retreated to their separate corners—everything merged, and incidents started changing places with each other.

Was it for Saturday supper that they had cooked potato and onion soup together on her camping stove in the dark, like children at a campfire?

“Why do you not put on the lights, Annabel? Are you in Chechnya expecting an air raid? Is it illegal to show lights tonight? In that case, all Hamburg is illegal.”

“It’s better not to attract attention unnecessarily, that’s all.”

“Sometimes the dark attracts more attention than the light,” he observed after long reflection.

Nothing that was without its meaning for him; meanings from his world, not hers. Nothing that did not have the ring of hard-won profundity, arrived at in the face of despair.

Was it on the Sunday morning that she brought him Russian newspapers from the railway station kiosk—or afternoon? She remembered cycling to the station and spending a small fortune on Ogonyok, Novi Mir and Kommersant, and as an afterthought flowers from the station stall. Her first idea had been a begonia that he could tend. Then, given the plans she had for him, she decided it was better to buy cut flowers, but which? Did roses denote love to him? Heaven forbid. She compromised on tulips, only to find they didn’t fit into the box on the front of her bicycle so she ended up carrying them one-handed like an Olympic torch all the way down to the harbor front only to find that half the petals had blown off.

And when they sat with the length of the attic between them listening to Tchaikovsky, and he suddenly jumped up, switched off the tape recorder and returned to his place on the packing case beneath the arched window in order to recite a heroic Chechen poem to her about mountains, rivers, forests and the thwarted love of a noble Chechen hunter—arbitrarily translating patches into Russian when he felt like it or, as she suspected, when he knew their meaning, which was not always the case, and clutching his gold bracelet while he orated—well, was that last night or Saturday?

And when was it that he described, by way of

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