Dr Berlin (7 page)

‘Why are you arresting me? Where are you taking me?’ he asked repeatedly, as the car raced through the deserted city, the street lights dimly reflected in what remained of the snow. His captors gave him no answer. His mind refused to imagine what might happen to him. He was hustled into the Lubyanka, an officer on either side holding his arms in an iron grip, down in the elevator to the basement, along a corridor and finally into a cold, windowless room furnished only with a desk, a chair, a table and a lamp.

‘Why have you brought me here? I demand to know.’

He was bound to his chair with ropes that tore into the skin of his wrists and ankles and he quickly lost any feeling in his hands and feet. His interrogation began at once. He was accused of betraying the Soviet people by giving secrets to German spies. He denied the accusations, saying he had given away no secrets: he was a loyal Soviet citizen. They appeared uninterested in his defence. They held photographs in front of him and shouted the names of his colleagues who, they claimed, were traitors too, working for the enemy. Who else belonged to this secret organisation? Where did its meetings take place? Who was its leader?

There was no secret organisation, he told them, no meetings, no leader. His captors refused to believe him, calling him a fascist spy, and threatening that, unless he confessed his crimes, he would be taken out and shot.

He had given secrets to no one, he repeated, his voice betraying his desperation. He was an engineer, he worked in a laboratory, dedicated to the task of designing a missile that would transform the Soviet war effort. He went home at night to his wife and children so tired he could hardly think. He had no opportunity to betray secrets to anyone, and no reason either.

They ignored his denials – did they even hear the words he used? – and taunted him with what they would do to Elza and his children if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to know.

He broke down, sobbing, unable to exercise any control over himself now, repeating again and again that he had done nothing wrong. His accusers were mistaken. He was innocent of any charge against him. He was part of a team of engineers and designers, working on rockets whose power would help defeat the German invaders. He was not the man they were after. It must be a mistake. They should let him go. He had important work to complete.
They
must
let
him
go.

Their response was to strike him in the face and kick his legs, knocking over the chair so he lay helpless on the floor, where they kicked him again, telling him they’d do worse to his wife and daughter, but still he had told them nothing because he had nothing to tell. How do you confess to crimes you have not committed? Or blame men you know to be innocent?

Later on – is it minutes or hours, is it still night or has the day dawned? – at a nod from his interrogator, they untie him. For one hypnotic moment he imagines he is being released. He is unable to move because he has lost all feeling in his arms and legs. He is lifted from the chair and taken to the back of the room. They roll up his sleeves, remove his watch and force him to kneel before a table, palms down on the wooden
surface. They pull off his leather belt and lay it over his wrists. Then, with hammer and nails they secure the belt so that he cannot move his hands. Behind him, one man holds his head, another his shoulders. He cannot imagine what they are about to do.

While his interrogator continues to shout more questions to which he has no answers, another man systematically shatters first the ends of his fingers, then the joints, the knuckles and the bones in each hand, hammering them with a wooden mallet. With each question he cannot answer, another bone is broken. Radin experiences pain of an intensity of which he has never dreamed. Unconsciousness is the only relief from his suffering but every time he loses himself in merciful oblivion, they throw icy water over him. When he revives, the questioning and the hammering continue.

Give
us
the
answers
we
want,
they say,
and
you
will
save
your
hands.

For one brief moment in his ordeal his mind escapes from the pain, travelling outside his body, and he sees with great clarity what is happening to him. He is aware of the bleeding mess of his hands, the bloodstained table, the marks of blood on his forearms, his shirt, his face and neck, the twisted expressions of his torturers, who stand so close to him, and the overpowering stench of their bodies. He senses their anger against him, an anger whose origins he cannot comprehend; he hears them shout again and again that he and his colleagues are traitors who should die for their crimes against the state.

He sees a way out of his torture. Why not identify one of his colleagues as a traitor? Someone must have betrayed him without cause – why should he not do the same to another? For a moment he is attracted by this escape route. He will reveal that one of his fellow scientists has betrayed secrets to the Germans and that will be it – a lie but the pain will cease. They may even let him go. It is tempting, to end his terrible suffering.

Somewhere within him a voice that he recognises as his
own but he is unsure where it comes from tells him that if he lies, he will become an accomplice in their crime, a new link in an endless chain of lies and corruption. Once he goes down that path, if he is lucky enough to survive, he will have lost himself and become their creature. At that moment the life he has always dreamed of will be at an end. He knows that he has been born to build rockets that will reach the stars. Whatever else he does, he must resist the temptation to give in or he will never realise his destiny.
He
must
resist.

Then he slips into unconsciousness.

*

Two weeks later he arrived in Kolyma at the start of a five-year sentence for anti-Soviet activities. Blood seeped through the crude bandages someone had wrapped around his shattered hands. The bones were set by a prisoner who claimed he had been a medic in another life, but he did it badly and without any kind of anaesthetic, and again the pain was intense. Some bones mended, others didn’t, and the swellings reduced but never disappeared. His hands had been beaten permanently out of shape. They no longer had much feeling or mobility and little strength. He was the prisoner with two enlarged fleshy gloves that could hold little on their own. He was unable to work in the mine, dig trenches or cut trees. He saw the danger of his uselessness. To save his life, he suggested that they put a harness around him and use him as they would a horse or a donkey to pull carts or haul logs. For months, before they moved him from Kolyma, his life was little better than that of an animal.

Eight months later his case was re-investigated, his sentence cut to two years and, after the intercession of his professor, he was moved to a
sharaga,
an open prison where, with other scientists, also prisoners like himself, he worked on the designs of aeroplanes. For a time he was brought to Butirskaya prison in Moscow, where he was visited by Elza and his children, Olga and Kyrill. On these rare occasions, he felt he was
looking at his family through the wrong end of a telescope. Increasingly they were people he did not know, growing older without him, lives that hardly touched his own. When he was in their presence, he kept his hands out of sight, behind his back or in his pockets. Elza knew what had happened to him. His children, he told her, were too young to understand. He found it hard to resist the temptation to take them in his arms.

After the war, he never revealed what he had suffered. He made no complaints about the waste of human resources, nor of valuable research time while he was serving his sentence. Nor was he heard to question the authority that had so cruelly disabled him. When he was told about the great advances made by German rocket scientists in the time he had been away, as he called it, he was not surprised. He studied engineering journals, listened to reports of his fellow engineers who had been to see the V2 factory in Peenemunde, spent hours poring over the spoils with which they returned, and later more hours in conversation with German scientists who had been brought to Moscow to work on the development of Soviet rockets. He settled back into the work he had begun before the war, the task of designing spacecraft that would eventually take a man to the moon and beyond.

His disfigured hands provided long moments of anxiety for the authorities. Radin was now vulnerable because his disability made him an identifiable target for the enemies of the state. Members of the Space Administration Committee feared that he would become a magnet for American agents, that in a desperate effort to reduce the Soviet lead over US technology, they might kidnap or even kill him. Soviet doctors, they learned, could not disguise what had happened to him because they had no cure for the damage he had suffered. The man whose genius was now recognised had to be kept out of sight, the Committee instructed. In the interests of his own safety, they argued, he was to become invisible.

The executive action to remove the evidence of his
existence was carried out with clinical efficiency on instructions from the Kremlin. Radin was deprived of a home address, a telephone number and any official place of work. There was no longer any record that he had ever been born, that he married and had children or that he was divorced. His name could no longer be found on internal memoranda, on the circulation list of the minutes of meetings, even on the door of his office. There was no record of his conviction and sentence or of his incarceration. He was forbidden to travel abroad for conferences. His photograph was removed from all newspaper archives so it could never be reproduced. There was no reference to him in any edition of the
Soviet
Encyclopedia.
He was not allowed to appear at any public event, nor to receive public recognition for any of his exploits. When he was awarded the Order of Lenin, the medal was presented to him at a secret ceremony in his office, with only two of his senior staff present, and they were sworn to secrecy. In the Kremlin, in the state-owned military-industrial organisations that built spacecraft and missiles and at Baikonur, the secret cosmodrome where Radin’s energy and vision directed the space programme, he was known only as ‘the Chief Designer’.

If within the Soviet Union Viktor Radin had become invisible, in the West his reputation, based on his invisibility, outgrew even his considerable success.

*

Why is he experiencing pain again now, when he has felt nothing in his hands for years? Why, when he closes his eyes, can he see the face of his interrogator and hear his harsh voice shouting at him? He can even smell the sour sweat on his body and his foul breath. Why is this event from so long ago suddenly so close?

At that moment he has the sense that his hands have been touched, that they are no longer burning. They feel as if they have been plunged into ice-cold water. The feeling of coolness and the strength have been restored. He looks at his
hands. They are again as they once were, white, with long fingers and well-manicured nails. A transformation has taken place. He has been healed. A calm descends on him as his memory drains into the distance. From somewhere in the room he hears a voice calling softly,
Viktor,
Viktor.

It sounds like his mother but it can’t be. He hasn’t seen her since she died years ago. How can she be here with him now? He turns towards the voice, and there she is, standing by his bed in her familiar grey apron, a thin, worn figure, her white hair in a bun, smiling at him.

Viktor,
Viktor,
she is saying. Her hands are outstretched in greeting. He knows that it is her touch that has healed him.

Mother,
Mother.
Is that smiling young man next to her his dear son, Kyrill?
Kyrill.
Is
that
you?

As he reaches towards the faces he loves his eyes close and he falls slowly and willingly into a soft and endlessly enclosing darkness.

It was film night. The decision had been taken three days before: they would not use the official cinema. The nights were far too hot to be shut up in a room without proper ventilation. They'd set up an open-air cinema. Rig up a screen. Bring chairs, rugs for the children. And the film? By popular demand,
Ivan's
Search.
What else?

For Andrei, the day passed too slowly. Seconds were like hours, minutes like days. He wanted to help with the preparations but was told he couldn't, he'd only get in the way. The fathers would build the cinema for a night, while the mothers sunbathed and swam. The children played on the beach, except for Andrei, who hung around, watching the construction of the makeshift cinema from a distance.

‘It won't be dark till much later,' his mother said. ‘You must eat now. You'll be hungry if you don't.'

‘Where's Father?' he asked.

‘He's coming soon.' He caught the bewilderment in his mother's expression. She had no idea where his father was. ‘I'll save him something for later.'

He ate reluctantly and tested the state's denial of religion by secretly praying for the sun to fall out of the sky and bring night sooner. His prayers were not answered. He was not sure whether to be pleased or sad. Would nothing make the time pass?

His elder brother Anton teased him. It was just a film, he said. Films were nothing but light projected onto a screen:
illusion, make-believe, stupid dreams. What was Andrei getting excited about?

Don't get angry, Andrei told himself. He wants you to lose your temper so he can demonstrate his superiority.

‘Leave him alone,' his mother said wearily.

Andrei caught his mother's eye and said nothing. She knew what he felt because she felt it too. Anton was talking nonsense. Films were real, adventures that sucked you into their stories so that you became the people you were watching. Anton spent too much time trying to attract girls to want to believe in anything but himself. He couldn't understand that intoxicating feeling of being another person living in another world – a world of dreams, but what dreams, what adventures. He could be a pilot flying his plane through a blizzard on a mercy mission to save a dying mother-to-be; or a soldier single-handedly defending his elderly parents' home against the enemy; or a young boy taking his sick father's place in the shift at the mine to earn money to keep the family alive. These were the adventures he watched on the screen, and these were the dreams he wanted in his own life. When the film was over, he relived them again and again in his mind until he became the heroes whose exploits he so admired.

He left the communal dining room to find the open-air cinema. It was still hot. He took the long route so as not to get there too soon. He walked along an endless corridor, passing door after door. He counted the numbers. Seventy-two. Seventy-four. Eighty-six. Eighty-eight. One hundred. How many people were staying here? He knew that in this vast building there were many more corridors like this, and that outside in this seaside resort there were many more accommodation buildings, say, four hundred rooms in each building. Families of four shared rooms. Perhaps sixteen hundred people at any one time were all here for a holiday. All, like his father, had been rewarded with a Black Sea trip for their efforts in building the Soviet state of which they were so proud.

He continued down some stairs, along another corridor,
past the entrance to the open-air swimming pool – deserted now, the water stilled and waiting for the morning, the slowly darkening sky reflected on the smooth surface of the water, the smell of chlorine making his eyes smart. On he went past the gym, also deserted, past the cinema, its door closed.

Why did he go in? Was it to pay homage to the heroes whose thrilling exploits he dreamed of at night? Or did he hear hushed voices inside, curiosity making him creep into the darkness? Later, when he tried to remember, his memory played tricks and he couldn't be sure what had made him do it. Whatever his motive, he pushed open the door and slid in silently, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark before he moved. He was aware at once that someone else was in the cinema: he could hear a man's voice whispering, then a woman's. Why anyone would want to talk in the dark in an empty cinema when everyone knew that tonight the film would be shown out of doors escaped him. He crept into the auditorium, keeping low between the seats, and listened.

‘Please.' A man's voice, pleading.

‘We can't. We simply can't.' A woman's voice. A firm denial.

‘Why not?'

‘Someone will see.'

‘It'll be dark. They'll all be staring at the screen.'

Silence. A sound like kissing, then a sigh.

‘That's unfair. I said no, I meant it.'

‘No, you didn't.'

‘You're a pig.' Another silence. More kissing? This time he wasn't sure. ‘I won't do it. I won't come.'

‘You will. I'll be there, waiting. You won't be able to resist me.'

‘That's what I'm afraid of.'

Then, from outside, a whistle, the signal that they were ready to begin. Without thinking he ran for the door and the noise alerted the speakers. He didn't think they could identify him in the darkness, but it was always possible. He ducked
between the rows of seats to hide himself. Only at the last moment did he look back, and then only for an instant. As he opened the door, a shaft of light cut through the darkness. He saw two heads, close together, eyes staring – no time to identify them before they too ducked out of sight. Were they frightened of being seen, or was that his imagination? He ran for his life.

It was almost dark outside, the sky completely clear, the stars distant pinpricks of glistening light. Lanterns had been lit, and one or two people had torches. A sheet had been suspended between two trees to serve as a makeshift screen. The projector was rigged up on a table, its front resting on a pedestal of books so that it would throw its image high onto the screen. Benches and chairs had been brought out of the main building, with rugs spread on the ground at the front for the children.

It was cooler now. A breath of air was occasionally blown from the sea by the light evening breeze. The air smelled sweet. His mother, he saw, was already seated, keeping the chair next to her for his father. She waved at him and pointed to the rug. Anton was with his friends at the front, a group of boys noisily pretending to be uninterested in what was going on. Suddenly someone shouted, ‘Lights out, we're ready,' and one by one the lanterns were extinguished.

All was darkness and quiet. These was not a sound, even from Anton. Andrei rested his chin on his knees and looked up at the screen as a light began to flicker across it. He was momentarily disturbed by a child standing up in front of him and playing his torch on the audience before his mother reached forward to snatch the torch from him.

He had that familiar feeling of excitement in his stomach as the film began.
Ivan's
Search
for
His
Father,
the children around him murmured aloud. The sound rattled from an old loudspeaker that had been placed under the screen. Occasionally it played tricks with the words, making the dialogue hard to hear. Occasionally, too, the night breeze rippled the oblong
screen, making the images dance and distort, at which the children giggled, to be hushed by their parents. But none of that mattered. Andrei was transfixed by what he saw.

Into his view, there appear a wide prairie; trees, birch and oak; a river snaking its way through a field; a village going about its daily business, the men in hats and boots, smoking pipes, some on horseback, others in shirtsleeves, working in the fields harvesting, stacking sacks of corn in a barn. The women, scarves around their heads and wearing full skirts, nurse children or wash clothes. A boy about his own age, with huge eyes and cropped blond hair, Ivan, is in the fields with his friends helping with the harvest. There are shining faces, old and young alike; images of contentment, of time suspended, of life as he had read of it in story books at school.

Then the picture changes. Horses thunder across the plain, throwing up dust and stones, a posse of men with hard faces and guns in their saddles is riding somewhere. He sees again the village he has only just left but now the faces are full of fear as the peasants scatter, mothers clasp their babies, dragging their younger children by the hand as they try to escape the marauders. He sees burning brands being thrown into houses, men being shot in the street, women falling and being cut down where they lie, vainly protecting their children with their bodies. Ivan runs as his mother and brothers are trapped in their home. The barn alongside their house is set alight. Smoke forms a huge column in the sky, blacking out the sun. Night falls, the village burns. Flames fill the screen and his imagination. The village dies.