And that was how he saw himself: as a Wallach, or as a Romanian at the very least. And as a historian and patriot (while yet his patriotism was for a country whose name had long since faded on old maps) he knew that his homeland’s history had been long and very bloody. Trace Wallachia’s history and what does one find? – that it has been bartered, annexed, stolen, re-taken and stolen again, raked over and ravished and ruined – but that always it has sprung back into a being of its own. The country was a phoenix! Its very soil was alive, dark with blood, given strength by blood. Yes, the strength of the people had been in the land, and that of the land in its people. It was a land they could fight for, which by its nature could almost fight for itself. Any set of historical maps would show why this was so: in those old days, before the aeroplane and the tank – ringed about by mountains and marshes, with the Black Sea on the eastern flank, bog lands to the west and the Danube in the south – the region had been almost completely insular, safe as a fortress.
And so, through his pride in his heritage, Dragosani was first a Wallach (and possibly the only surviving Wallach in the world), second a Romanian, but hardly a Russian at all. What were they after all, Gregor Borowitz included, but the settled spume of wave after wave of invaders, sons of Huns and Goths, Slavs and Franks, Mongols and Turks? Of course there’d be the blood of those dogs in Boris Dragosani, too, but mostly he was a Wallach! He could only liken himself to the older man in the one respect that they had both been orphans of sorts; but even in that area the circumstances were very different. Borowitz had at least had parents of his own; as a baby he had known them, even though they were now long forgotten. But Dragosani … he had been a foundling. Found on a doorstep in a Romanian village, little more than a day old, and brought up and educated by a rich farmer and landowner; that had been his lot. And not a bad one overall.
‘Well, Boris,’ said Borowitz, drawing his protégé back from his musing, ‘and what do you think of that, eh?’
‘Of what?’
‘Huh!’ the older man snorted. ‘Look, I know this place is very restful, and that I’m a boring old fart at best, but for goodness’ sake don’t go to sleep on me! What do you think of the branch being free at last of the KGB?’
‘Is it really?’
‘Yes, really!’ Borowitz rubbed his blunt hands together in satisfaction until they almost rustled. ‘We’re purged, you might say. We were only obliged to suffer them in the first place because Andropov likes to have a finger in every pie. Well, this pie’s no longer to his taste. It has all worked out very well.’
‘How did you do it?’ (Dragosani knew the other was dying to tell him.)
Borowitz shrugged, almost as if to play down his own role in the affair – which in itself gave Dragosani to know that the exact opposite was the truth. ‘Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Should I say that I put my job on the line? That I put the branch itself on the line? I gambled, if you like – except that I knew I couldn’t lose.’
Then it wasn’t a gamble,’ said Dragosani. ‘What, exactly, did you do?’
Borowitz chuckled. ‘Boris, you know how I hate being exact. But yes, I’ll tell you. I went to see Brezhnev before the hearing – and I told him how things were going to be.’
‘Hah!’ it was Dragosani’s turn to snort. ‘You told him? You told Leonid Brezhnev, Party Leader, how things were going to be? What things?’
Borowitz smiled his wolfs smile. ‘Future things!’ he said. ‘Things which are not yet! I told him his political billing and cooing with Nixon would take him from strength to strength – but that he should prepare for Nixon’s fall three years from now, when it will be shown to the world that he is corrupt. I told him that when that is over he will be in a position of some advantage, dealing with a bumbler in the White House. I told him that in preparation for American hard-liners yet to come, next year he will sign an agreement permitting sputniks to photograph missile sites in the USA, and vice versa -that he should do it while he still had the chance and while America is ahead in the space race. Détente again, you see. He’s keen on it. He’s similarly keen that they shouldn’t get too far ahead in that race, and so I promised him a joint space venture, which will come in 1975. As for a whole crowd of Jews and dissidents who’ve been giving him problems, I told him we’d be rid of a great many of them – possibly as many as 125,000 – in the next three or four years!