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Harry cliraffiti-covered tene from the lift door had a permanent look about it He walked slowly up the stairs to the eighth floor and went in search of aparthbors looked out from their doorways, suspicious of the sovernment official

His gentle knock on the door was answered so quickly shefor him Harry smiled down at an old woman with sad, tired eyes and a deeply lined face He could i separation froh they were about the sae, she looked twenty years older than him

“Good afternoon, Mr Clifton,” she said with no trace of an accent “Please couest down a narrow, uncarpeted corridor into the living roo above a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, was the sole adornment on otherwise blank walls

“Please sit down,” she said, gesturing toward one of the two chairs that were the only pieces of furniture in the roo journey to see allant efforts to have able ally”

Mrs Babakov talked about her husband as if he was late home fro a twenty-year prison sentence more than seven thousand miles away

“How did you first meet Anatoly?” he asked

“We both trained at Moscow’s Foreign Languages Institute I ended up teaching English at a local state school, while Anatoly moved into the Kre top of his year When ere first , that we must have been blessed, ere so lucky, and by ed overnight when Anatoly was chosen to translate the chairanda purposes in the West

“Then the chairman’s official interpreter fell ill, and Anatoly filled in A temporary appointment, they told him, and hoished it had been But he wanted to impress the country’s leader, and he must have done so, because he was quickly promoted to become Stalin’s principal interpreter You’d understand why, if you’d ever met him”

“Wrong tense,” said Harry “You mean I’ll understand hen I meet him”

She san,” she continued “He becah he was only an apparatchik, he began to witness things that e presented to the people, of a kind, benevolent favorite uncle, could not have been further from the truth Anatoly would tell me the most horrendous stories when he came back from work, but never in front of anyone else, even our closest friends If he had spoken out, his punishment would not have been demotion, he would simply have disappeared like so many thousands of others Yes, thousands, if they so much as raised an eyebrow in protest

“His only solace was in his writing, which he knew could never be published until after Stalin’s death, and probably not until after his own death But Anatoly wanted the world to know that Stalin was every bit as evil as Hitler The only difference being that he’d got aith it And then Stalin died

“Anatoly became impatient to let the world knohat he knew He should have waited longer, but when he found a publisher who shared his ideals, he couldn’t stop himself On the day of publication, even before Uncle Joe reached the shops, every copy was destroyed So great were the KGB’s fears of anyone discovering the truth that even the presses on which Anatoly’s words had been printed were smashed to pieces The next day he was arrested, and within a week he’d been tried and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor in the gulag for writing a book that no one had ever read If he’d been an Araphy of Roosevelt or Churchill, he would have been on every talk show, and his book would have been a best seller”

“But you ed to escape”

“Yes, Anatoly had seen as co A feeeks before publication, he sent ave me every ruble he had saved, and a proof copy of the book I et across the border into Poland, but not until I’d bribed a guard with s I arrived in America without a penny”

“And the book, did you bring it with you?”