Dr Berlin (36 page)

‘Well?’ It was all Berlin could find to say. He felt like a man about to receive a sentence for a crime of which he was innocent.

‘Do we accept your story? That is the big question that has been preoccupying us. Do we trust you as a bona fide messenger from the Marshal of the Red Army? The short answer, Dr Berlin, is no, we don’t. We believe that you are faithfully giving us the story you were told to give us. Our difficulty is, we don’t accept the motives of the man who sent you, therefore we don’t accept your story. That’s our difficulty in a nutshell, isn’t it, George? What you’ve told us doesn’t add up. We think it’s a nice try to make us lower our guard at a moment of great political tension but it’s not one we’re going to fall for.’

‘Nice try,’ George repeated. ‘That’s right.’

He found it impossible to sleep. It was not just the heat, though there was not a breath of wind and the humidity was high, it was a sense that something significant was about to happen, an event of such magnitude that he knew it would change his life for ever. He was afraid to tell anyone about his sudden premonition, certainly not Anton, who would have mocked him mercilessly in front of all his friends, especially Igor, and they would have joined his brother in laughing at him.

For a day or two his mother watched him closely as if he was sickening for something. She fussed over him more than usual, touching his forehead to see if he had a temperature. ‘You look flushed, Andrei. Are you all right?' She brushed his hair away from his forehead, and left a glass of water by his bed. Once, in the middle of the night, she crept into his room and for a few moments lay beside him. He pretended to be asleep.

For two days and nights nothing happened. He fell asleep at dawn and had to be woken by his mother, who worried about his pale appearance and the darkening shadows under his eyes.

‘It's the heat,' he told her. ‘It's so difficult to get to sleep.'

On the third night, he was sitting up in bed holding the glass against his cheek – even that was warm now – when he heard the sound of a car drawing up in the street below. Doors opened and slammed shut. Boots rang on the pavement. Voices came, though he couldn't make out what they were saying. He crept to the window and looked out. He counted
four men in dark suits before they disappeared into his building.

He went to the bedroom door, opened it quietly and listened. The flat was silent, The only sound he heard was that of his brother Anton snoring heavily in the other bed. Then he heard footsteps running up the stairs, fists hammering heavily on the front door of the apartment. Someone pressed the bell continuously. He heard his father's name called. The light went on in his parents' bedroom. His father came out, followed by his mother. How young she was, he thought, how delicate and vulnerable.

His father opened the door. The men – he was sure they were policemen – rushed in. They behaved as he expected them to. They told his father to get dressed. He was to come with them at once. Why? he heard his father ask. What for? But he got no reply, only the order to do as they said and quickly, they were in a hurry.

His mother was crying, clinging desperately to his father's arm. He saw his father push her away. It was not rejection but the gesture of a frightened man. One of the policemen would stay behind, they were told. In an hour or two they would come back to search the apartment. In the meantime, nothing was to be disturbed, nothing removed. The front door slammed. Andrei heard footsteps clattering quickly down the stone steps, and his mother crying in her room.

He crept back into bed, covering himself with a single sheet. Later, his mother came in and lay on the bed beside him, holding his hand against her, kissing his hair and crying softly but saying nothing.

All the time, in the bed opposite, Anton snored.

*

His father's trial lasted less than half an hour. Photographs were produced of the defaced sculptures. His father, white and unshaven, denied any desecration. Why would he damage his own work? What was the point? He was a sculptor, an artist.
He was privileged to create the likeness of the Great Leader and other heroes of the Soviet Union. They were the work of his own hands. It was madness to suggest that he would destroy what he had so painstakingly made. Repeatedly he said he was not the perpetrator of this terrible act.

If he had not defaced the statues of the Head of State, the prosecutor asked in a menacingly quiet voice, who did? The court waited. His father had no answer. He could only shake his head, sob and protest his innocence. Without evidence of these acts of desecration, brought to the notice of the authorities by a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, the judge said in his summing-up, this case would have gone undetected. He praised the writer of the anonymous letter that had revealed the depths of the crime against the Great Leader. Andrei felt his mother tighten her grip on his arm.

His father, trembling as he waited for his sentence, never once looked back at his wife and son.

*

When he saw his father again he did not recognise him. In five years he had become a shrunken old man. The stocky frame was gone. His arms and legs were like sticks now, and the lines of his skull showed through his prison-pale skin. He had lost his hair and his teeth and his eyes had a frightened look about them. He refused to speak of his experiences, except to say that they were too terrible to repeat. In her horror at what his time in prison had done to him, his mother hardly spoke to her husband. She could not bring herself to touch this diminished man, this husk who bore little resemblance to the artist who had been taken from her. His father seldom went out, preferring to remain within the narrow confines of the apartment.

He refused to return to his studio, and disowned all his sculpture. He asked Andrei's mother to remove the bust he had sculpted of her, and she hid it in a cupboard. He had no profession any more, he said, because he had no life. That had
been stolen from him by the injustice of the charges against him and the sentence he had been given by the court. The years in prison had killed his soul. He no longer shared his wife's bedroom, but slept on a low sofa in the living room of the small apartment. He drank and occasionally, in a drunken stupor, he would try to hit Andrei's mother. He no longer had any strength and she was able to push him away. She said nothing in his presence, living in a private world of her own silence. Andrei spent as much time as he could away from the apartment. His brother had already left home to train on submarines in Murmansk.

When he was home, his father hardly acknowledged Andrei's presence. On the few occasions that he did look at him, Andrei had the unmistakable feeling that he knew what he had done and that he would never forgive him.

‘Today the Soviet government detonated a one-hundred-megaton nuclear bomb in the atmosphere, breaking the treaty with the West to ban all such tests.’

Pountney is in Berlin. It is a cold autumn evening. He wears a dark overcoat. As he talks to the camera, people pass him on the pavement and cars with headlights blazing race down the street.

‘There can be little doubt that this was a deliberate act to increase international tension and put pressure on the West to give in to Soviet demands over Berlin.’

The camera moves past Pountney to a checkpoint where, under bright lights, American troops stand with automatic weapons at the ready. In the background, armoured personnel vehicles can be seen.

‘Today the city has gone about its business as usual. But the people are understandably nervous. The talk is of the likelihood of war, brought that much closer by the news of the Soviet nuclear test. American reinforcements, under the command of General Clay, have been arriving over the past two days. There are growing signs of battle readiness here. Have they brought nuclear warheads with them? That is the question most in need of an answer. Speculation is rife. There can be little doubt that this is a city preparing for war.’

‘What time is it?’ Kate asked.

‘Time to get up.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘Come here.’ He took both her hands and pulled her gently from the bed, enveloping her in his arms as he did so. ‘Remember this little room,’ he whispered. ‘Fix it in your mind. This is our room. Remember that we were happy here.’

*

Kate knocked on the door a second time, but still there was no answer. Could she have made a mistake? She put down her bag and looked at her diary. No, she was right. She was meant to be at his apartment at ten-thirty today, Thursday. She knocked again, this time louder. Silence. She waited. The door to the next apartment opened slightly. She saw an elderly face staring one-eyed at her.

‘I’ve come for my lesson with Mr Vinogradoff,’ Kate said in Russian. Why did she sound apologetic? ‘I wondered if you knew where he was.’

The door was closed and the lock turned. She waited. She could hear whispers. The door opened again.

‘Come in, please.’

The curtains had been pulled against the strong sunlight, and at first she found it hard to adjust her sight. The flat was smaller than Vinogradoff’s and decorated with a few heavy pieces of furniture, some photographs, though of whom she couldn’t make out, and thick carpets. The old woman was dressed in widow’s black and ancient slippers.

‘In here.’ Kate was led by the hand into another darkened room. She sensed rather than saw the presence of someone else.

‘Kate, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

Vinogradoff stood up. His suit was more crumpled than before and his expression was a mixture of depression and fear. She had never seen him like this.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I cannot tell you in my own words,’ he replied. ‘But I know you will not be satisfied until I have given you an explanation. Better that I take you there. What you see will speak for itself.’

‘Is it safe?’ the old woman asked.

‘What’s the difference between a moment of safety and a moment of risk?’ Vinogradoff said sharply. ‘There are no safe times any more. We live in permanent danger.’

He put his hands on the old woman’s shoulders and bent low to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘Thank you for sheltering me, Mrs Markova. I am grateful.’

She touched his cheek with her hand. Kate could see that there were tears in her eyes. Vinogradoff turned to Kate. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let me show you what they have done.’

The flat had been devastated. The contents of drawers littered the floor, chairs and tables had been knocked over, crockery smashed, cushions and mattresses ripped open with knives, the carpet and even some floorboards had been torn up in a frenzied search. In one corner, propped up against the wall, lay the remains of a cello. Its strings had been torn from it and someone had kicked in the side. The bow had been snapped in two.

‘Who did this?’ Kate asked.

‘The KGB,’ he replied.

‘Why? What do they want?’

‘They fear witnesses to the truth,’ Vinogradoff said. ‘Because it can take so many forms, they must search everywhere for the smallest sign of its existence and then destroy it.’

‘What were they looking for?’ she whispered.

‘A few sheets of paper on which some notes were written.’

‘Your music?’ Vinogradoff nodded. ‘Did they find it?’

‘No.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

For a moment he seemed to struggle for words. ‘There is nothing to find. My score no longer exists. I have destroyed it.’

Destroyed – the lovely piece he had asked her to play. How could he do that to his own music? What could have driven him to such a desperate action?

‘Why?’ It was all she could say. ‘Why?’

‘They want to silence me. My music was disloyal.’ He laughed drily. ‘Take away my music and I am denied a voice. I am made safe. I would rather destroy what is mine than have others do it for me.’

‘How can music be disloyal?’ It was so ridiculous she wanted to laugh.

‘In this country,’ Vinogradoff said quietly, ‘art’s sole function is to proclaim the glorious virtues of the Soviet way.’

‘That is the greatest lie of all,’ she said.

The
radiant
future.
The promise that could never be delivered. She saw clearly then for the first time the scale of the deception practised on the people. You cannot play the music of Bach, Brahms, Dvořák, and then submit your own music to people with no understanding of art, who respond to barren instructions from those in command who in turn are as ignorant as those who carry out their orders. You cannot fix music to the mast of socialism, call it to account against tenets that have nothing to do with musical form and expect it to have any originality. Music comes from the heart, and what the heart says must be true. It was the human heart they feared.

‘Why are they afraid of what you have written?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Won’t my answer place you in danger too?’

‘I don’t care about that,’ she replied, not knowing if she meant it or not.

Vinogradoff thought for a moment. ‘Since it is over now, I see no reason why you should not know.’

He had composed an oratorio, he said, the setting to music of a long poem written over the years by unknown prisoners in the gulags, the secret system of concentration camps that Stalin had set up across the country in which to incarcerate anyone who opposed his way.

‘My father spent ten years in one of those terrible places. His only crime was to play the violin. When he was released, he recited that poem to me one night and I wrote it down. Weeks later he died. He had lost the ability to play his beloved violin and it broke his heart. I promised myself then that one day I would raise a memorial to him in the only way I knew how, through music I would write.’

He paused for a moment, overcome with emotion. ‘The existence of these camps is an open secret never officially acknowledged. You will find them listed on no maps, you will never read their names. Yet it is to this state within a state that the so-called enemies of socialism are sent. It is fear of these terrible penal colonies, where human life no longer has a value, that makes liars and cowards of us all. These forgotten cities in hell,’ he added, ‘embody all that is worst in our nature. They are vile, cruel places where men are reduced to a status below that of animals. They become slaves. Yet out of these camps of evil and degradation has come something unexpected and wonderful, words that redeem the daily humiliations and violations of the camp guards on their victims. Words of hope and trust in the future from those who cannot speak for themselves, that proclaim a vision of the world as it was and perhaps as it one day might be again. Words whose knowledge is a crime, whose repetition is an act of hostility towards the state. That is what I set to music.’

‘What would they have done if they had found the score?’ Kate asked.

‘I would not be here talking to you now.’

He would be in a cell somewhere, facing the prospect of a rigged trial, years in some distant, forgotten, undiscoverable prison like his father, where he would not be allowed his cello, where he would be made to do manual work that would ruin his hands so that when he was freed, old before his time from malnutrition and the terrible conditions in which he had lived, like his father he would never again be able to take up his profession.

‘You may think that destroying my music to spare my life is an act of moral cowardice. But I could not survive in one of those camps. My decision was that it was better to hope that one day I would be able to return to composing than suffer now as a martyr. I hope you will not think badly of me.’

‘How could I?’ she said. ‘What right have I to judge you?’

What she wanted to say was that she felt insulted and sullied by what he had told her, and outraged that the world would now never hear the beautiful music that, for a few moments one afternoon, it had been her pleasure to create.

‘Unless I had seen it with my own eyes,’ she said, looking round his devastated apartment, ‘it would be difficult to believe that this had happened.’

‘You have now seen us at our worst. You have met the evil that lives in the heart of this country. You now know the most awful truth of all, that to survive in this madhouse, we must all collaborate in the destruction of truth. I am no more courageous than my neighbour. I am ashamed to tell you that I have destroyed my manuscript to save myself, but it is true. If we are to live until tomorrow, we must all deceive ourselves every minute of the day. We have no strength to resist, only to survive. That is why we are a compromised people. The life we try to lead is not the truth, and so long as we live in these conditions it never will be. The truth is black and bitter and concealed. It is suppressed by those who control our lives because they fear that if we come too close to it, we will see
them exposed for what they are – cruel guardians of a worthless dogma.’

She was no longer listening to him. All she could hear was the lilting notes of the piece she had played: the sound of water racing over stones, the humming of insects, the rustle of the breeze through grass, the stillness of a summer afternoon. How could such beauty betray anyone?

‘Is that right?’ she asked, humming a bar or two.

‘Yes.’ He hummed the melodic line with her and developed it.

‘You see,’ she smiled. ‘Your music is not dead.’

‘You must explain that to me,’ he said.

‘You can remember the piece, can’t you?’

‘Every note. So long as I can breathe, it will be here, locked in my heart.’

‘Then sing it to me. Sing it to me now.’

He looked at her, with no understanding of what she was saying. She saw a poor, diminished, desolate man, standing among the ruins of his apartment, holding in his hand a broken cello bow and staring at her without knowing what she was saying.

‘I want you to sing your piece to me.’

For a moment he did nothing. Then out of the silence came the sound of his voice, and the first notes of the hymn to the unbreakable dignity of human life that he had composed.

‘Do you understand now?’ she said. ‘I will learn your music, the words and the notes. When I leave Moscow I will take your music with me. No one will know because no one can see into my head – not even an X-ray can find this. When I get home I will transcribe it, then I will get it played.’

‘You must not put my name to it,’ he said, suddenly terrified. ‘If you do that, they will arrest me, my wife and child. They will separate us and send us to different prisons.’

‘Then it will be music without a name, without a composer, an anonymous cry of truth from a distant country. No one will know who composed it, nor where nor when.
The mystery will remain until the day when you can identify yourself with what you have written.’

He reached across and, taking her hand, held it to his lips. She felt the warmth of his tears on her fingers.

‘If there is a God,’ he said quietly, ‘he must have sent you to me.’

Koliakov saw the headline on a newsagent’s stand as he came out of the tube. He bought an evening paper and read with incredulity that the Soviet government had exploded a nuclear device in the atmosphere. This was madness, he kept repeating to himself, sheer madness. If it was scare tactics to heighten the tension around Berlin, then the risk was out of all proportion to the gain. Use Soviet troops, as they’d been used in Budapest, fight if you have to, but reject weapons of mass, indiscriminate slaughter. What hope can there be if you make a poisonous, uninhabitable desert of the world you wish to conquer?

Was this act a consequence of Medvedev’s appointment? He could hear that shrill, coarse voice arguing that the Test Ban Treaty should be ignored, that the West must be frightened into a corner by a show of Soviet strength. He could imagine the smile that would touch the corners of his mouth as he saw his argument gaining ground. By the time Koliakov reached Victoria, he was certain that Medvedev was the author of this outrage.

Once more the image of an old man lying dead on the hard earth flashed before his eyes. He felt again the pain in his head, as if something was trying to melt his eyes. He rubbed his face frantically with both hands to get rid of it but without success. The only relief, he knew, was to be found in the darkness of his room.

He walked back to his lodgings in his usual manner,
doubling back on himself and setting traps for anyone who might be shadowing him. He warmed some soup on the gas burner in the fireplace and drank it while skimming the rest of the paper. Somewhere inside he read a short paragraph about the discovery of a woman’s body in a mews house in Knightsbridge. Police, it said, were pursuing their inquiries.

Then he broke open what he called his emergency supplies, a bottle of vodka he had brought with him from his flat. He drank while he considered his next move.

It took a long time to get through but Berlin hung on because he was desperate. He had got a handful of sixpences and shillings from the porter Wilkins. He had found the number from directory enquiries. He dialled, waited, inserted his coins.