Smiley’s People by John le Carré

Nobody in the room, said Toby, showed the least surprise at this sudden deification of a dead Russian deserter.

The priest, said Grigoriev, now proceeded to sketch the manner of the heroic agent Ostrakov’s life, at the same time initiating Grigoriev into the mysteries of secret work. In order to escape the vigilance of imperialist counter-intelligence, the priest explained, it was necessary to invent for an agent a legend or false biography which would make him acceptable to anti-Soviet elements. Ostrakov was therefore in appearance a Red Army defector who had ‘escaped’ into West Berlin, and thence to Paris, abandoning his wife and one daughter in Moscow. But in order to safeguard Ostrakov’s standing among the Paris émigrés, it was logically necessary that the wife should suffer for the traitorous actions of her husband.

‘For after all,’ said the priest, ‘if imperialist spies were to report that Ostrakova, the wife of a deserter and renegade, was living in good standing in Moscow – receiving her husband’s salary, for example, or occupying the same apartment – imagine the effect this would have upon the credibility of Ostrakov!’

Grigoriev said he could imagine this well. The priest, he explained in parenthesis, was in no sense authoritarian in his manner, but rather treated Grigoriev as an equal, doubtless out of respect for his academic qualifications.

‘Doubtless,’ Smiley said, and made a note.

Therefore, said the priest somewhat abruptly, Ostrakova and her daughter Alexandra, with the full agreement of her husband, were transferred to a far province and given a house to live in, and different names, and even – in their modest and selfless way – of necessity, their own legend also. Such, said the priest, was the painful reality of those who devoted themselves to special work. And consider, Grigoriev – he went on intently – consider the effect that such deprivation, and subterfuge, and even duplicity, might have upon a sensitive and perhaps already unbalanced daughter : an absent father whose very name had been eradicated from her life! A mother who, before being removed to safety, was obliged to endure the full brunt of public disgrace! Picture to yourself, the priest insisted – you, a father – the strains upon the young and delicate nature of a maturing girl!

Bowing to such forceful eloquence, Grigoriev was quick to say that as a father he could picture such strains easily and it occurred to Toby at that moment, and probably to everybody else as well, that Grigoriev was exactly what he claimed to be : a humane and decent man caught in the net of events beyond his understanding or control.

For the last several years, the priest continued in a voice heavy with regret, the girl Alexandra – or, as she used to call herself, Tatiana – had been, in the Soviet province where she lived, a wanton and a social outcast. Under the pressures of her situation she had performed a variety of criminal acts, including arson and theft in public places. She had sided with pseudo-intellectual criminals and the worst imaginable anti-social elements. She had given herself freely to men, often several in a day. At first, when she was arrested, it had been possible for the priest and his assistants to stay the normal processes of law. But gradually, for reasons of security, this protection had to be withdrawn, and Alexandra had more than once been confined to State psychiatric clinics that specialized in the treatment of congenital social malcontents – with the negative results which the priest had already described.

‘She has also on several occasions been detained in a common prison,’ said the priest in a low voice. And, according to Grigoriev, he summed up this sad story as follows : ‘You will readily appreciate, dear Grigoriev, as an academic, a father, as a man of the world, how tragically the ever-worsening news of his daughter’s misfortunes affected the usefulness of our heroic agent Ostrakov in his lonely exile in Paris.’

Yet again, Grigoriev had been impressed by the remarkable sense of feeling – he would call it even a sense of direct personal responsibility – that the priest, through his story, inspired.

His voice arid as ever, Smiley made another interruption.

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