Dr Berlin (3 page)

‘Not if you aren’t Russian,’ Kate had replied, her optimism invented that moment in response to her father’s ignorance of a city she knew he had never visited, only imagined with his prejudiced eye. ‘Anyway, I won’t be away for long, just a few months, less than a year.’

Wasn’t anything bearable for a year, particularly if you were working with a musician as outstanding as Vinogradoff?

The argument had ground on during the spring and early summer, Kate sticking single-mindedly to her wish to go to Moscow. In the end her father had relented because he didn’t want to hinder the development of an ability he found so difficult to understand but of which secretly he was proud. It was unlikely, he maintained to her teachers when she was out of earshot, that his daughter would be good enough to become a concert performer, but if her heart was set upon it, then he didn’t want to be the one to oppose her. Better she find out the hard way that she wasn’t up to it.

‘If you don’t like Moscow,’ he said after telling her of his change of mind, ‘you can always pack it in and come home.’

Later, as they said goodbye at the airport, he had briefly held her hand and said: ‘I shall miss you, Kate. Take care of yourself.’

It was the closest he had come since her mother had died to expressing affection for her, and she had tears in her eyes as she boarded the aircraft.

*

Ten to three. Kate turns over restlessly, the sheet tangled and uncomfortable.

If the man I love is in Moscow, her night mind suddenly proposes, then I should follow my heart and stay here with him.

Her more rational self, caught unawares by this unexpected idea, takes time to regain control. She has promised her father she will return home. There is no escaping that obligation. Her visa will run out soon. To pretend she could have a life here is self-deception, if not madness. The authorities will never let her stay, however hard she pleads. There is no more stony heart than the bureaucrat acting under instructions that
allow no deviations from the rulebook, and in Moscow there are regiments of such heartless men and women. She dries her eyes on the corner of the sheet.

No, she must count herself lucky that in this year that is almost over she has discovered the love that will sustain her all her life. She will celebrate it in every note she plays, every concert she gives. She will dedicate every hour of practice to this man who is sleeping beside her. Every day her music will call to him across space and time and somehow – how? – he will hear her message. Even if she cannot speak to him or touch him, he will hear in the sound of her cello that she loves him still, loves him always. She will work tirelessly so that they can be together, even if only fleetingly for a day or two in some foreign city. Better a life of brief moments of intense happiness than to live without love.

In the darkness he reaches out and holds her. Her tears spill over onto his shoulder.

‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘Please don’t cry.’

The tumult in her mind means she is unable to hear a word.

*

Moscow, she imagines as the plane lumbers heavily out of Heathrow Airport on a rainswept September morning and sets its course east, will be a dark and hostile city. The thought fills her with anxiety. She has in her bag a guide to the city that she has not dared look at, an unopened Russian phrasebook and a potted explanation of Marxist-Leninism, whose first page she has found incomprehensible. What the rest is like she daren’t imagine. But she has brought them with her none the less. As the plane bumps its way through the last ragged edges of cloud and levels out, she stares at the brightest of blue skies, her preconceptions of the country she is heading for nourished by familiar images from films she has seen, books she has read, ideas she has accumulated from newspapers and the radio.

Will the buildings be ugly concrete boxes so huge that the Streets are always cast in shadow? Will there be signs of industrialisation everywhere, vast factories, chimneys belching smoke, the boom and roar of the thunderous march of Soviet heavy industry? Will she see on all the buildings brightly coloured posters illustrating happy, smiling workers milling steel or digging coal miles underground? Fulfilment in the Soviet Union is derived from finding one’s true identity through working for the great process of building a socialist state. What is good for the masses is good for the individual. She has learned that much, at least. Will the people walk by in the street, eyes averted, the women’s heads covered in faded scarves, their children pale and subdued, a population walking on tiptoe, under the vigilant eye of the KGB, who watch aggressively for signs of errant behaviour that betray the malign intentions of the enemies of the state?

Sheremetevo Airport, an ugly building rising up out of the dusk as the plane taxies towards it, confirms her fears. It is a cliché of communist architecture, just what she has been expecting. An army officer comes on board the plane to collect passports – she feels immediately nervous giving up, even for a short time, the only proof of her identity. The officer senses her reluctance and snatches her passport from her. His angry expression makes Kate feel she has already committed some crime by wishing to enter the country. Her anxiety mounts.

Once through customs, her instructions are to look for a man holding a placard with her name on it. Nervously she searches the jostling crowd in the arrivals hall. Why do they stare at her so? Not many names are being held up – the plane was half-empty – but not one of them is hers. Has she been forgotten? What will she do if she cannot find him? Eventually she spots a piratical figure with a black beard and moustache, a cigarette stuck to his lips. He carries a small card on which someone has spelled her name incorrectly. He looks hopefully
in her direction. Can she trust him? She has a sudden vision of being kidnapped, taken gagged and bound to an apartment in Moscow where she is drugged and forced to become the mistress of a bloated drunken communist official more than twice her age. For a moment she is paralysed, unable to move. She takes control of herself again and follows the pirate to the car. He neither smiles nor speaks English. She tries her elementary Russian but he chooses not to understand. It is growing dark, and the night air stings her cheeks with cold. Autumn in Moscow is already well advanced.

He drives her to the students’ hostel in Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. The streets are too dimly lit to see much. Moscow under the cover of night retains its mystery. The morning will reveal it in all its expected awfulness. She is met by a Czech girl, Pryska, with limited English who has been deputed to show her round. She goes to bed that night in a room she will share with another student, a singer from Volgorod called Natasha who has not yet arrived, with her suitcases unpacked, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe leaving, she hopes, enough space for her companion. She lies in an unfamiliar bed, exhausted by her fears but still sleepless, wondering why she agreed to come here. Her father was right. Why did she listen to the siren voices of her teachers? She hears the noise of other students talking late into the night. Someone plays a piano. She is disturbed by sudden laughter. She sleeps uneasily. The fearful city inhabits her dreams. She is miserable and alone; her passport lost, she is unable ever to return home. She has got what she wanted but she is not sure of the wisdom of her decision.

The following day she is collected by the same unsmiling driver, still smoking what looks like the same cigarette. She trusts him now and greets him with a smile that is not returned. The morning is clear, the light sharp and the cold has gone. Her journey takes her through tree-lined boulevards. The leaves are already on the turn. How many trees
there are, and parks: so much more green than she had expected, though she is surprised by the lack of flowers. Where are the brutal buildings, the huge posters, the dark streets deprived of sunlight, the smoking factories she expected? The Moscow that she sees is unexpectedly a nineteenth-century city: there are very few cars in its wide streets. Occasionally she sees a gigantic lorry rumbling its way along the enormous highways of the city, or a black official car racing down the central reservation. A number of buildings are topped by an illuminated star; on others a hammer and sickle have been carved out of stone or made in brick, or a red flag hangs limply in the warm air. In the middle distance she spots three tall chimneys, painted in thick red and white stripes, gushing white smoke. There are no other signs of Soviet industry close by.

Suddenly she passes the ancient citadel on its hill, the Kremlin with its dazzling golden domes, its flags and stars, surrounded by its blood-red wall of swallowtail battlements looking out over the Moscow River. In the months that follow she will come to know these buildings that as yet have no name: the Trinity Tower, the Palace of Congresses, the State Armoury, the Patriarch’s Palace, the Cathedral of the Assumption, and beyond, the Mausoleum in Red Square where Lenin and Stalin are buried. Her spirits rise. It is a magical vision, and she can imagine music being played inside these walls.

‘Kremlin,’ her driver says, pointing. It is the first word he has spoken to her. Still there is no smile.

Vinogradoff is as she remembered him, tall, grinning and dressed in a baggy black suit at least one size too big. He comes out to greet her on the steps of the Conservatoire. He holds out his arms and kisses her warmly on both cheeks.

‘Welcome,’ he says in English. ‘We are so pleased you are here. This is a great day for all of us.’

He applauds her suddenly and a few others join in. A young
student, a girl her own age, comes forward and presents her with a bouquet of flowers. Vinogradoff grins possessively, puts his arm through hers and leads her into the Conservatoire. She hears a singer practising her scales. Someone is playing a violin. This is familiar territory. She is back in a world she knows. She feels at home. Her Moscow adventure has begun.

Gerard Pountney, ex-Foreign Office lackey, ex-leader writer on a national daily, briefly ex-Moscow correspondent for the same newspaper, sits alone in front of the editing machine and watches his reincarnation on the monitor. His former lives have mercifully been jettisoned into a past that, with each day that passes, slips ever further into a memory that can be harmlessly suppressed. On the screen he sees a reinvented and revitalised version of himself, and he congratulates himself on his good fortune. He experiences a pleasing glow of satisfaction.

‘Behind me,’ his screen image is saying, ‘is the famous Brandenburg Gate that separates East from West in the divided city of Berlin. On one side is the Kurfürstendamm, a street of well-stocked shops, cafés full of people, cars, bicycles, a street teeming with life as we in the West know it. Plenty to buy, plenty to eat, plenty to do. Over there is the Unter den Linden, its buildings mostly empty, many still carrying the unrepaired scars of a war that ended more than fifteen years ago. Its streets have few shops or cafés, and fewer people. It presents a desolate spectacle. This is where East meets West, and it is not a happy encounter.’

The camera, travelling secretly in a car along the eastern sector of the city, records the empty streets, the uncared-for buildings blackened with age, fleetingly picks up huge and brightly painted posters with incongruous images of healthy young men and women striding towards the ‘radiant future’ of
socialism, their example exhorting the local population to a life of ever greater dedication and sacrifice. It is a forlorn message playing to an empty house.

‘Is this the socialist paradise that the posters proclaim? Is this the promised communist Utopia? Well, the citizens of the German Democratic Republic don’t think so. They give their verdict each day by crossing the border to the West in their thousands, never to return. We are witnessing a massive migration. On this evidence alone, capitalism and democracy are an irresistible combination.’

Pountney is walking down the Kurfürstendamm now, and the camera retreats in front of him. ‘Who are these people who are voting with their feet? They are drawn from the entire spectrum of East German society: scientists, teachers, doctors, labourers, engineers, economists, accountants, students, the very people on whom a modern economy depends. These men and women are the human resources East Germany can ill afford to lose. Between 1949 and today, nearly two million people have migrated west from the GDR. Nearly two hundred thousand have left in the last year alone. That is why the streets are empty, and why the national economy underperforms. The consequences of this stunning rejection of communism for the future of East Germany are grim.’

The camera sweeps past a line at the Marienfeld Camp in West Berlin, showing people of all ages, complete families in some cases, staring steadfastly into the lens, their patient expressions betraying none of their fears. They are in transit between one world and another. Their futures are blank sheets waiting to be filled with the hopes and dreams that drove them to gamble with their lives escaping from the GDR and which, for the present, they dare not allow themselves to revive. While they have no official identity, their lives are suspended. They are powerless to do anything but wait, the fate of refugees everywhere.

‘These people are typical of those who have fled. Young
and old alike, disillusioned by the communist experiment, unable to see a clear future for themselves or their families, all now seek a better life in the West.’

He is standing in front of the crowd, talking to the camera once more. ‘Imagine the agony of taking the decision to leave your roots and your possessions, in some cases elderly members of your family whom you may never see again, a decision based on the hope that what awaits you can surely be no worse than what you have left behind and will probably be much better. These people at this camp represent two million such decisions. For the courage of those decisions they must command our respect.’

The angle changes. The camera looks over Pountney’s shoulder at a panorama of Berlin.

‘If that is the personal story, what about the political? The people are demanding a better standard of living from their government. They will wait no longer. They want it now. That is precisely what East Germany’s command economy is unable to deliver. Unless the East German authorities can stop this exodus of people on whose skills their future must be based, the situation can only get worse.’