This Russian Invader Is Everywhere

CHAPTER 12: BY THE WAY OF THE SPIES Ingenuous boy, warned by experience, now The pebble's charms shall tempt thine eyes no more….. Amelia Opie, ‘Stanzas to Cynthio’ Only the fidgety sheep watched the perilous future king pick the pebbles for his sling….. Martin A Ramos, ‘Marigolds’ Years ago I used to work in a market garden, so whenever I see marigolds I tend to recognize them for what they are. People who work in the world of secret intelligence know what PUBLISHED CRYPTOGRAMS are. Once, during the final phase of the Cold War, the horticultural section of a Belfast newspaper carried an article which was written under the name of the accepted gardening correspondent. The said article can only have bemused honest growers of Virginian stock. It bore a strange headline . This Russian invader is everywhere Ordinary readers were meant to believe that the author was talking about the Russian vine, which he described as …..rejoicing in the delightful ‘tongue-roller’ of Polygonum Baldschuanicum (Repeat ten times to get the feel of it). In fact, the author was talking about a person who once displayed an interest in polygons by publishing an article on figurate numbers in a mathematical journal. The person was a member of a Brethren church, and was known to be interested in gardening. Brethren are sometimes described quaintly as ‘Plymouth Brethren’ (Polygonum Baldschuanicum = P B). At that time the person was performing many of his scholarly labours in the Russian field. Within a short period he published some work on Pushkin, was commissioned to write a major article for an encyclopedia of Russian literature, gave an evening lecture in the local university on Andrei Bely, translated a Russian booklet about a particular kind of engine, was elected as a member of the Irish Slavists' Association, and contributed to the annual journal of that association. The words RUSSIAN INVADER implied that the person was an aggressive agent of the Soviet Union, while the word EVERYWHERE implied that he had penetrated many different theatres of the home front. The person lived in Belfast. By day he worked in a large town called Ballymena, about thirty miles away. Every night the person went for a run along 190 the shore, close to the motorway and the railway lines. Why am I telling you these perfectly trivial facts? Well, the article began, Watch out, it could catch you unawares! The second paragraph ran as follows. And by the manner it is rampaging along the fence between the M2 motorway and the railway lines, I should reckon that in a matter of a year or two it will have reached the outskirts of Ballymena. It struck the Slavistical person as curious that one sentence relating to the Russian vine should happen to mention both the exact place where he went for his nightly run, and the town in which he worked. I forgot to say that the person's first two initials were D and Z. Being a scholarly kind of chap, the author of the article managed to include one difficult proper noun in his fourth paragraph, which began, It is called the Russian vine as it was found growing in Tadz hikistan in Southern Russia in 1883. (Tadzhikistan, whose name today is normally spelled Tajikistan , was not part of ‘Southern Russia’ in 1883, but Russianness has to be emphasized. What about ‘growing’? Well, people ‘grow’ at school. Tadzhikistan contains the initials DZ and the word HIT, plus AKA and the nickname of the vine-person’s old school.) Let’s move on! The author thought fit to mention the fence, the railway and the M2 once again. He seemed to have a thing about ‘the fence along the railway’. It is far too vigorous for the average small to medium-sized garden. As already implied , it has a tendency to swamp all in its path. It was well-chosen indeed as a cover for the fence along the railway at the Belfast end of the M2. Then he continued, On a garden scale it is best used where there is something quite substantial to cover up, to obscure, or to camouflage. Why use so many words? In a garden context, to ‘cover up’ is the same as to ‘obscure’, which is the same as to ‘camouflage’. ‘Obscure’ is an odd verb to use about a creeper, and ‘camouflage’ is really a soldier’s verb. Aside from those verbs, what is 'something quite substantial'? If the author means an oil-tank, or a garage wall, or a trellised area in which the household bins have their abode, why doesn’t he say so? ‘Something quite substantial’ sounds portentously vague in comparison with the careful precision of ‘cover up’, ‘obscure’, and ‘camouflage’. It’s a bit like saying, ‘something on a scale that would have appealed to Fantômas, to Fu Manchu, and to Dr Mabuse’. The article concluded with a flash of good humour. Unlike many rampant growers the Russian vine is an attractive invader. But -- give it room and stand back quickly! ‘Stand back quickly' is an instruction which appears on fireworks. In Northern Ireland at that time it was not unknown for bombs to go off under people's cars. The third paragraph of the article had ended with an interesting sentence. And as it can grow 20 feet in a season, it is hard to miss. 191 Taken together with ‘stand back quickly’, the phrase ‘hard to miss’ may be construed as not altogether blithe and bonny. The vine-person was able to identify the article's author as someone who had been a bright senior in his old school while he himself was a junior. After cryptically naming himself in a passage at which we have already glanced, the author went on to say of the vine-person, When I was a young horticulturist it was a comparative variety. Nowadays one almost sees it at every turn. Most people who read that first sentence will think, 'Misprint. The author means a comparative RARITY.' But he doesn't. 'Young' is positive degree. 'Younger' is comparative degree. The sentence really means, When I was a YOUNG horticulturist ( = school student), the vine-person was a YOUNGER student at the same school. Look at the sentence which follows. Nowadays one almost sees it at every turn. 'ALMOST sees it at every turn'? Why not 'sees it at almost every turn'? If 'ALMOST sees it at every turn' sounds appallingly clumsy, its clumsiness has a purpose. ' Almost sees' indicates the word SEES minus its final letter (SEE). It also points to the letter which is ‘almost see’, the letter which is pronounced ‘see’: the letter cee , which (once understood for what it is) should be read along with the first letter of IT and the first letter of AT. [One obscure allusion needs to be explained. During the early 1980s, the vine-person published three ‘Turinese Letters’ in the Nietzschean manner about vile practices of the musical world. These articles aroused a great deal of anger at the time. EES is almost sees , I is almost it , and TURN is almost Turin . EES plus I plus TURN makes TURINESE.] You'll notice something similar if you go back to the sentence beginning, It was well-chosen indeed as . Look at the first letters of CHOSEN, INDEED, and AS. The infelicitous hyphen which links WELL and CHOSEN allows the word WELL to function as a kind of cloak. For its part the opening sentence ( Watch out, it could catch you unawares! ) contains the sort of equidistant letter spacing that you may have encountered in ‘Bible Code’ books. The fifth Elsie and her friends will have no problems here. Count backward from the C of CATCH, leave a six-letter gap, and you reach the I of IT. Count backward from the I of IT, leave a six-letter gap, and you reach the A of WATCH. The cryptogram is embraced in five words. It employs the first and fifth words, which rhyme visually (WATCH and CATCH), plus the third or central word (IT). A closer spacing is found in ‘something quite substantial ’. The second sentence of the article’s fourth paragraph began as follows. It was introduced to Kew Gardens by way of the St Petersburg Botanical Gardens…… Why ‘by way of’, and not simply ‘from’? The author has made some effort to follow ‘Kew Gardens’ with a word whose first letter is B. Let me canter quickly over a field of tedious detail. The 'Russian invader' article was one of many publications whose authors were at pains to rebuke the vine- person. What for? For being a Big Bad Boy: or in other words, for failing to join 192 the group of which they themselves were members. That roguish group was actually unsympathetic to honest Anglo-American simplicities. Now the visible sea of the modern Irish troubles, in which thousands of people lost their lives, was affected by global eddies and skerries whose existence was known to very few. While the vine-person was not employed as a member of any intelligence agency, different groups of people wanted him to work for them. The members of one such group persuaded themselves that he had agreed to do so. Once they realized that he was not prepared to work for them, they became afraid that he would share with others the knowledge of their activities which they believed him to have acquired. Displaying the double-minded deviousness of which only certain men are capable, they created and published a whole collection of cryptograms so as to attack the vine-person at two levels.

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