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Page 55
ican who was looking for human perfection in those around him, and never finding it.
On impulse, Morgan had stopped at the Library of Congress to spend two hours with the poems of Anna Neville's namesake, Anna Akhmatova.
They surprised him. He had expected hard-rock Marxism. Instead, he learned that Akhmatova had lost a husband to the Stalin purges, and that she was understandably a most melancholy woman. She had been born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko.
According to the RCMP, the Red Vicar (George Mathis actually was an ordained Episcopalian minister) had met Akhmatova in the Soviet Union in 1949at the height of the cold war. His visit had been on behalf of the British Ban the Bomb Committee. The Stalinists had been less than pleased when he chose to associate himself with Akhmatova, who was considered "unreliable."
Score one for you, Vicar, Morgan thought.
The Canadians speculated that their relationship had been intimate, but Mathis had been in his early thirties and Akhmatova had been at least sixty in 1949, so the suggestion of a love affair was questionable.
Akhmatova had died, unrehabilitated, in 1966. She had not lived to see perestroika and glasnost, which was a pity, Morgan thought. But whatever else the Red Vicar had been, he had been no Stalinist. A quondam apologist for the old monster, yes. But there had been plenty of those in the West. Intellectuals found it difficult to let go of old illusions.
Morgan felt a certain sympathy for Mathis. He had found Akhmatova's biography moving and her poems haunting.
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This: the song of our last meeting . . .
I looked back at the dark house's frame;
In the bedroom the candles were burning
An indifferent, yellowed flame
.

 
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