Dr Berlin (29 page)

‘The girl is a spy for the British,’ the man with the revolver said.

‘That’s absurd.’

‘We have evidence.’

‘If she was a spy,’ he said, ‘I would have told you by now.’ He hoped his self-disgust was evident. ‘I am expert at that. I steal the secrets of my friends and betray them to you. If the girl was a spy, I would already have betrayed her.’

‘Unless you had fallen in love with her.’

Silence. They were locked in the struggle now. This was the turning point. There could only be one winner.

‘Are you in love with her?’

What was he to say? ‘She’s a student.’

‘You don’t fall in love with students.’ Berlin shrugged. ‘You fuck them and throw them away, is that it?’

‘That’s right.’ The mockery in his voice would be lost on his interrogator.

‘And the English girl is no exception?’

‘Why should she be?’

His interrogator did not answer. He unscrewed the cap on his pen once more and wrote in his notebook. He kept his cigarette clamped in his mouth as he did so. His breathing was laboured.

‘You will return with her to Moscow tomorrow, after which you will not see her again.’

‘Do you know who your boyfriend is?’

‘He is a historian. He teaches at the university.’

‘Is that what he tells you?’ Her interrogator laughed. ‘Did you believe him?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘He is lying to you. Your lover is an informer, a man who betrays his friends, his neighbours, anyone, even his own family. You are sleeping with the lowest form of life. Do you know why he does that? I will tell you. He informs for money. Do you think a man with his tastes is able to live as he does on an academic’s salary?’ He brought his face close to hers. ‘Does that surprise you?’

‘I don’t believe you.’ The suggestion was absurd, ridiculous. She rejected it.

‘Ask him. See if he has the courage to tell you.’

‘Did they try to poison your mind about me?’ Berlin asked. ‘Did they tell you stories about me? If they did, you must let me answer their charges. You must hear the truth.’

‘No,’ Kate replied. ‘No, nothing like that.’

He could see she wasn’t going to tell him. There was only one possible explanation for her silence. It was the only way she could keep her illusions about him intact. They had told her about him. She knew what he was. He felt sickened and desperate.

*

All she remembered of the journey back to Moscow was that she was cold all the time. Her heart was empty. Her emotions were numbed. Her mind was incapable of rational thought. She was frightened and exhausted and full of foreboding. Again and again she heard the voice of her interrogator in her mind. She felt his foul breath on her, the acrid, musky smell of his body too near her.
What
if
all
he
had
said
about
Berlin
were
true?
She thought of his apartment, the way he lived. ‘Sometimes we bend the rules,’ he had said.

No, it was impossible. How could this man whom she had come to know so well be two people; how could he conceal his other nature from her? When you loved someone the barriers of camouflage and deception were stripped away. You faced each other as you were, didn’t you? She had given herself to him. Had he still concealed some part of himself from her? Was it possible to do that and still love someone? Or was it only possible if you were feigning love? Questions ricocheted around her mind, unanswered and threatening. How was she to find out? Did she want to find out?

‘Ask him.’ The man had laughed at her inability to reject the doubt that he had so deliberately lodged in her mind. ‘Get him to tell you.’

Every time she closed her eyes she saw her interrogator’s mocking face leaning over her, smelled his breath again, sensed all too clearly his moral emptiness. How could she ask such a terrible thing?
Is
it
true
you
inform
on
those
closest
to
you?
The question would tell Andrei that she doubted him. She doubted herself. Better to accept her interrogator’s challenge for what it was – a deliberate technique to destroy what she believed because that was all the harm he could do to her – and go on as if he had said nothing. Don’t let him control you. Resist him. Forget what he had told you. Don’t let him win.

Suddenly she felt an outsider again. In her mind she returned to those early weeks in Moscow when she had felt at odds with this alien city and its strange, disturbing culture. The confidence Berlin had given her was ebbing away. The trust that was so necessary to her – the ability to believe what he told her about himself – had been destroyed in the ninety minutes of her interrogation. That, she knew, was what they wanted. She was determined to ignore what they had told her. But try as she might, her doubts persisted, working their inevitable, intimidating power on what she wanted to believe.

The train roared through the ice-cold night. Berlin was attentive to her. She didn’t want to eat. He made her drink tea, laced with brandy, to keep up her strength. If she didn’t want to talk, he remained silent. When she shivered suddenly without warning, he covered her with the blanket from his bunk. As she dozed off, he was there watching her. When she awoke, he hadn’t moved. He was still there beside her, looking exhausted, not saying a word, holding her hand.

She was grateful for his attention. Her terror at her ordeal had not yet worn off. Her sudden shaking was a physical response to what had happened, Berlin told her. It would pass in time. She wondered if the immediacy of her memories would ever fade. Would she silence the doubting voice in her mind? As the train neared Moscow, she knew the battle was lost – just as she knew that the questions to which she wanted answers lay beyond her power to ask. A terrible damage had been done, and she had been trapped, powerless, in its path.

*

She awoke from a troubled sleep. It was still pitch-black
outside. Berlin was where she had seen him last, sitting by her. She felt like an invalid, emotionally battered and physically weakened, emerging from a dark pit of dreadful dreams.

‘Andrei?’

‘Another couple of hours,’ he said. ‘Nearly there.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked. What she meant was:
What
’
s
going
to
happen
to
us?

‘We’ll talk later, when you’re better.’

‘Now, Andrei,’ she pleaded. ‘Talk to me now.’

He wouldn’t change his mind. He stroked her hair and told her to rest. She felt herself hypnotised by the touch of his hand and her eyes closed. Obediently, she slept. In her dreams she relived new versions of what had happened to her.

*

Berlin left the hostel in Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. He took the metro back to his apartment and on his return poured himself a large glass of whisky. He knew – and he was sure Kate did, though nothing had been said – that the events in Helsinki had brought the secret police into the relationship, and that was intolerable. They would not be left alone now. They would be stalked, harassed, spied on. Kate would lose her nerve or her musical talent would be damaged in the face of what was happening to her. He could think of no way to camouflage that. The police would make sure she was aware of their presence. That was part of the pressure they would exert on her.

Vinogradoff had been right to select her. She had a rare talent. No wonder he had praised her so highly when they had met at the concert at the Conservatoire. He could not put that at risk. Better to end it now before any further harm was done. It hurt him to say that he had seen how frightened Kate had been. He could not allow her to be put into that position again. Whatever the cost to him, he must protect her innocence.

He was surprised at how devastated he felt, how the
thought of losing this beautiful English girl left him gasping and weakened. How close she had come to winning his heart.

*

She watches him disappear into the night and only then does she break down and cry. Will she ever see him again? As she lies awake in bed, she knows in her heart that their relationship can have no future now. Ninety minutes of horror in Helsinki have destroyed it. Berlin has departed from her life for ever. She is heartbroken. What did she do wrong? Could she have stopped him leaving? Only when she dries her tears does she realise that she has done nothing wrong.

There is a mystery to Berlin that she cannot resolve, though in the days that follow she does her best to do so. She cannot pin down his identity nor, after what happened in Helsinki, can she trust him. To that extent, she accepts that her interrogators have won, but there is nothing she can do about it. Sometimes she thinks he is two people – the quiet, studious historian, and someone else, a man with secrets that lead him into a world she wants to know nothing about. Even after the weeks she has known him, she recognises that there is a side of Berlin that she has not penetrated. Whatever it is, he is skilful at protecting it. Helsinki gave her a brief glimpse of that other world, that world he seemed to know about. She hated it because it terrified her. Best, she knows, for her own sake, to keep away.

She dries her tears. She has much to thank him for. Not least, he has taught her how to dissemble.

Andrei kept his head down between the rows of seats in the cinema, drawn by the sounds he heard: a woman gasping, not in terror as he first thought, but rhythmically, pleasurably. There were small cries of satisfaction, and another sound, a man's voice, words uttered breathlessly, though he couldn't hear what was being said.

Somewhere deep inside him he knew what was going on but he was unable to put a name to it. He felt a strange kind of excitement that he was treading in forbidden territory – adult territory – that what he was about to discover were secrets that would change him for ever because they belonged to a world he had never entered. Part of him wanted to stay where he was, to see nothing, learn nothing, to retain his innocence. Sometimes, he knew, knowing nothing makes your life easier. Sometimes it is better not to know. But another part of him knew that he had to find out, that this was a door that one day he would have to go through – so why not now?

He crept along the aisle at the side of the auditorium, keeping as low as he could, even though it was pitch dark, a sense of mounting turmoil inside him as he did so. Every few paces he stood up cautiously but he could see nothing.

He reached the door at the back of the auditorium that led to the projectionist's box. He opened the door quietly and froze. Had they heard him? Had he been found out? Nothing seemed to disturb whatever was going on. The small cries, the gasps, continued. With relief, he closed the door as quietly as he could and crept up the narrow staircase. It was still pitch
dark – he did not dare turn on any lights – and he stretched out his arms so that he could touch both the banisters and the wall. Like a blind man, he felt his way to the projection room and let himself in. He went to the window that looked out over the auditorium. It was no good. There was no light anywhere. All was blackness. There was no vision, only sound. The cries were getting faster, the rhythm picking up.

He never thought about his decision. He had no idea why he decided as he did, except that there was no other decision to make.
He
had
to
know
. He felt for the bank of switches on the control panel. How many hours had he spent up here, watching the projectionist practise his craft? He'd picked up what you did by watching, and then he'd relived it all in his mind as he lay sleepless on his bed during the hot nights. It wasn't hard to remember what was where, even in the dark. He had done this so many times in his imagination. He found the switch for the house lights and pulled it sharply towards him. The auditorium was suddenly bathed in a bright light.

He looked out through the porthole again. At first he could see no one, but he heard a cry of rage from the auditorium, followed by a woman's scream of horror at her discovery. Two people stood up in the central aisle, a man and a woman. Both were naked. The young woman clutched a shirt to her breast. The man was standing up, staring at the projectionist's box, his enormous thing bobbing out in front of him as he shielded his eyes from the glare of the lights.

Andrei Berlin found himself looking down at his own father.

The lock to his office had been changed. His key wouldn’t work. His name-card had been removed from its holder on the door. Perplexed, he looked through the frosted glass. The room had been emptied of anything that identified it with him. He went to the next office. That too was locked and empty, its name-card also removed. The same was true as he looked down the corridor. Empty, nameless rooms were locked in readiness for their next occupants. His whole department had been eliminated. He sat on a window ledge, clutching his briefcase, uncertain of what to do. How long he remained there, he didn’t know. If he was dreaming, he had no recollection of what he dreamed.

Then a voice said: ‘They did it overnight – cleared out the offices, took away boxes of papers, left nothing behind. I’ve seen them do it before.’ It was the janitor, an old man with a shaven head and few teeth.

In a fury Valery raced down the stairs to the second floor.

‘I demand to see Acting Director Grinko,’ he said to Radin’s secretary.

‘Acting Director Grinko is unavailable.’ She did not look up from her typing.

‘When will he be available?’

She stopped for a moment to consult her diary. ‘He is on leave for ten days, then he will be in Baikonur until the end of the month. After that he is fully occupied with budget
meetings with the head of the Space Commission. He may be able to see you in five weeks’ time, but I can guarantee nothing.’

‘I want the keys to my office.’

‘Acting Director Grinko has all the keys.’

‘And my papers? Where are my papers?’

‘I can release nothing without his authority, and he is unavailable.’

He wanted to shout at her but he knew it was pointless. This woman was not his enemy. He had been defeated by a crazy system that allowed a dead man to decide the future, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Did
no
one
understand
the
damage
they
were
doing
to
themselves?

He walked out into the street, dazed and disbelieving. His robotics team had been dissolved and their work impounded. They had worked for months to achieve nothing. No one had warned him, no one had bothered to say that this might happen. He was horrified, dismayed and depressed. How could such a thing happen?

About an hour later Ruth telephoned him at his flat. She had heard about his department’s closure. ‘How could Grinko do that?’ she asked.

‘With impunity,’ was his sharp reply.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Valery did not hold out much hope. The people his mother knew were getting older; they were being replaced by a generation that knew little or nothing of what she had done. He lay on his bed, unable to read, and waited. When the telephone call came, Ruth sounded disappointed.

‘I did what I could,’ she said grimly. ‘It isn’t enough. I don’t know what to say.’

‘Thank you for trying,’ he said.

‘What will you do?’

‘What can I do?’

‘All that work gone to waste. I can’t bear to think of it.’

He questioned himself continually. Had he been wrong to
push for a decision? Was it a tactical mistake to support his case for robot exploration so enthusiastically? Would it not have been better to work on quietly, and wait for the day when they might be summoned to show what they had achieved? That wasn’t how the future would be built. It was the policy of timidity. Ideas demanded boldness. He had tried to keep faith with what his team had produced, and he had failed.

What should he do? He remembered his mother’s account of her protest when she was involved, in the months after the end of the war, in the building of the first Soviet nuclear bomb. For weeks she and her fellow scientists refused to work on the project because they had discovered that no provision had been made to move the local population from the area of the test site. Their refusal had succeeded. The test area was cleared. The scientists returned to work. There was no retribution. This had astounded him. His mother had led the challenge to the authority of the state and got away with it. Had she had a protector? She denied it repeatedly and he was forced to accept her verdict without being convinced that she was telling him the truth.

Perhaps he should follow his mother’s example, and refuse to continue to work for the Space Commission until his robotics plans had been restored to him. The idea took root. He would protest at what had been done to him.

He stayed at home. He failed to turn up for work. No one came to get him. There were no angry telephone calls. His resistance was ignored. He felt as if he did not exist. Ruth came to see him but for the first time in years they quarrelled, she begging him to return to work, he refusing, quoting her story back at her.

‘It isn’t the same,? she said. ‘We had a position of strength. The Central Committee desperately wanted the bomb. We were the only people who could make it. We had a natural position of power you don’t have. That was what we decided to exploit.’

Valery refused to listen. The days passed in depression. He
ate only when he had to, didn’t shave, occasionally changed his clothes, smoked continually, drank in bouts, didn’t read the newspapers or listen to the radio and refused to see anyone, including Ruth. In his mind, as he lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, the idea of opposing, of standing up for what he believed and saying no, began to take shape.

*

He remembered how, when he was fifteen, Ruth had suddenly insisted that, whatever happened to either of them at school or at work, when they were with friends, whatever lies they told, whenever circumstances demanded that they distort the truth, at least at home there would be no lies, no evasions, no dissimulations. Only the truth, she made him promise – even if they had to whisper it to each other, huddled over the kitchen table with the radio on. His mother didn’t disguise from him the daily compromises she had made in order to bring him up as she wanted, ‘so that one day I could tell you the truth’.

Valery had been strengthened by her candour but he was made wary too, because knowing more made his life more difficult. For his own safety, he now had to conceal what he knew. To protect him, his mother taught him to create a ‘double nature’, a duality between the real and the apparent, a technique, she insisted, that sustained rather than impaired her sanity. If truth were to be a necessary secret in his life, then he too would have to develop a double nature, just as she had done. He became her willing pupil. Slowly and patiently he made himself into two people, one public, one private. On occasions, he suffered agonies keeping the two apart, but for her sake he did so. The more he learned about what his mother had survived and how she had done it, the more his admiration for her grew.

‘In this country,’ she told him, ‘belief is a private matter. It doesn’t join us to our neighbour, it separates us from him because we have been taught to distrust him. Conscience has
no public life because its advocacy can only lead to self-destruction. The time may come when once more it has a value, but that time is surely not now. Do we shore up this bankrupt regime by never protesting its decisions, never speaking out against its acts of immorality, its cruelties and follies? Those who do not understand the conditions of life in the Soviet Union will answer yes, and dismiss us as cowards. Ignore them. They know nothing. Somehow each of us must find our own way to live in this country. What matters is memory. We must never forget the crimes carried out in our name. Like cavemen, we must carve our experiences on dark walls, even if we have to wait a thousand years before the truth of our experience is known. If we cannot write the history of our times, then we must memorise what we know. We must hand down our memories to those who come after us. You cannot conceal truth for ever.
Until
that
day
,
nothing
must
be
forgotten
.’

He didn’t have her patience. His job had been removed by a man who was dead. Only one person, he was told, could change that policy. There was, he knew, no hope that the decision made against him could ever be reversed. It was wrong, absurd, dangerous. He was not prepared to accept it. In his mind he pushed aside his mother’s structures about duality. Those may have been the tactics for the past. The present demanded more direct action. He would stick out his protest. He would force the authorities to test his resolve.

*

Three weeks later he was persuaded by a friend to go to a student concert at the Conservatoire. He had grown a beard by then, and his hair was longer. He was thinner too because he had eaten so little. He heard Kate playing. As he listened, he found he had tears in his eyes. Was this the same girl he had rescued from the Lenin Library? She had a power, a maturity, a command of the music that touched him. He wanted to climb over the rows of chairs in front of him and take her in
his arms and kiss her. As he listened, his heart moved inside him and he fell in love.

When it was over he hung back, waiting for her to appear, wondering if she would speak to him.

‘Hello,’ Valery said. ‘You probably won’t remember me.’

She turned at the sound of his voice, and for a moment looked puzzled. Then she smiled at him. ‘You look different,’ she said.

‘Mascha! Come here!’

The dog was racing away through the undergrowth in pursuit of its prey, and took no notice of the command to return. Marshal Gerasimov looked surprised that his authority should be so easily ignored. In the distance Berlin saw two pigeons rise lazily into the morning air, wings flapping loudly. The tail of the dog was visible above the long grass.

‘Damn animal. No discipline at all.’

Berlin followed Gerasimov into the cemetery, presumably once the village burial ground, now long neglected. The gravestones appeared through the undergrowth like the heads of resting animals, the wall surrounding it collapsed in many places through want of repair.

‘At my age, a graveyard is a comforting place,’ Gerasimov said, ‘where I meet old friends.’

Why the old general had brought him to this place miles from Moscow was a mystery. Less than an hour before he had received a telephone message that Marshal Gerasimov wished to see him. A car had been sent. He sat beside the silent, chain-smoking general as they were driven out of the city and deep into the countryside. He was given no explanation for his presence.

‘You do not need to believe in any religion to know that after a life of struggle the dead have the right to rest in peace.’

Long grass, ground elder and ivy had overgrown many of the graves; time and the ravages of the Russian winter had damaged and dislodged tombstones and weathered the inscriptions, so that all too often they were unreadable. Occasionally Gerasimov used his stick to attack the undergrowth in his search for a particular grave.

‘We should honour those who dedicate their lives to the service of the state,’ he continued, ‘and not ignore them when they die.’

Was he thinking of his own funeral? Of the huge garlanded photograph of a younger version of himself that would be paraded like a banner before his open coffin, while a long line of whispering mourners followed him into the graveyard for his burial with full military honours?

‘Viktor was fiercely proud of his independence,’ Gerasimov said. ‘He always believed he was the author of his own survival. It wasn’t so, of course, but he was too valuable to be told the truth. It would have broken his heart. Even the Central Committee came to recognise that.’

The dog returned and leaped up at Gerasimov, who bent down to stroke her. ‘Too old to learn new tricks, aren’t you, Mascha? Like your master.’ He threw a stick for her and she ran off after it.

‘Viktor believed he owed nothing to anyone. He had no idea of the battles that in his absence were fought on his behalf, or he pretended to know nothing because it suited him. He had no favours to repay. Perhaps it is as well that not all of us follow the same creed.’

Did he detect regret in the old man’s voice? Did he too have secrets that he could never share, moments when his own life had been dependent on the support of others? Gerasimov had survived so many upheavals since the Revolution. What accommodations had he had to make along the way? What debts were still outstanding, waiting to be redeemed from those who in the past may have saved his life? Or was his power based on the fact that he had outlived them all?

The old general stopped in front of a gravestone and was silent for a moment. Berlin followed his gaze. The name
Yelena
Gerasimova
and the dates
1902–1954
were inscribed on a tilting granite slab.

‘Today is the anniversary of my wife’s death,’ he said suddenly. ‘It was her wish to be buried where she was born but the village is deserted now, and no one tends the graves. I do my best but it is not enough. Her life was cruelly cut short but she lived long enough to learn of the birth of her grandson. Now he is dead too. My son and I buried the boy next to his grandmother.’

He used his stick to push away the long grass from a newer gravestone nearby.
Nikolai
Gerasimov
,
aged
eight
, the freshly carved inscription read. If the old man felt any emotion, he kept it to himself. His dark grey face, eyes buried under enormous jutting eyebrows, stared down at the two graves. He was lost in his private thoughts.

‘Sometimes I can hardly remember what Yelena looked like. I can remember the boy as if I had seen him yesterday.’

He must be in his mid-seventies now, Berlin imagined. The deep furrows on his face told of an ingrained weariness, of battles with words as well as weapons, while the worn skin showed that the struggles of a long life were exacting their slow revenge on him. He might look exhausted, but Berlin was in no doubt about the strength of his belief in a creed that for him held the only true answer to the ills of the world. His conviction would remain unshaken until the day he died. He would never doubt the dogma, only those who had failed to live up to its high demands, a weakness to which he was implacably opposed. He saw himself surrounded by men and women who lacked his austere vision, who were too selfish, too weak or too undisciplined to accept the challenge to change the nature of society that he had so readily adopted as a young man.