Dr Berlin (9 page)

The seriousness of Radin’s condition had been widely known for some months at the Institute but never discussed openly. When he’d first gone to hospital, there’d been whispers that his doctors had tried an experimental therapy because his life was so valuable. When he didn’t return to work as the doctors had predicted, it was assumed the treatment had failed. The Institute struggled on in an uneasy state of suspension, its progress mutating into inaction. Radin’s
continued absence and the accompanying silence about his condition unnerved those who worked for him. On the surface little changed. The sign on the door of his empty office still read ‘Chief Designer’ – he was referred to by name only behind his back and out of hearing, and then always as Viktor – the door between his office and that of his secretary remained open as if he was ready to call for dictation. On the few occasions that Valery had asked about Radin, she had reassured him that the Chief Designer would be returning tomorrow, the day after, soon. She had spoken to him on the telephone only a short time ago; he sounded cheerful, he was looking forward to coming back to work, he had asked for his papers to be brought to him. But he never appeared. Each day she bore her disappointment with a stoicism born of careful instruction.

Decisions waited for Radin’s return, budgets for his approval, schedules for his authorisation, changes to the design of an engine or a space capsule for his agreement. At the Institute in Moscow or at the Cosmodrome in Baikonur no one dared to step into the vacuum created by his absence and assume responsibility for his programme. The inactivity continued, unquestioned, unchallenged, its poison spreading a slow paralysis throughout the organisation. Without his galvanising presence, the machine that Radin had set up was beginning to run down. With Radin’s death, the Soviet space programme was leaderless.

What would happen now? Whispered speculation was rife. Who would they appoint in his place? What changes would be made? There were no obvious successors – certainly not Grinko, now Acting Director in Radin’s ‘continued absence’. He had made too many enemies: that was the problem. The Politburo had relied on one man for too long. They had never allowed themselves to assume that he was mortal. They had never insisted that he train successors, and now so much of what Radin had achieved was likely to be lost because of the government’s short-sightedness. Valery’s frustration and anger
took another turn. Did no one ever think ahead?

The official denial of what everyone knew to be true followed a familiar pattern – truth disguised as rumour, followed by a denial couched in some transparently false explanation because the truth was politically unacceptable. Did those who manufactured these statements no longer have any regard for the people they governed? Did they truly imagine that their fabrications were believed? A quick survey of his colleagues would show (if you could overcome the impossible task of getting them to reveal their thoughts) that they knew these statements had no foundation at all. But what could be done about it? The system might make a fool of itself, verifiable truth might be officially denied, but there’d be no complaint, no protest, no shared sense of outrage – hardly even a sly comment on its absurdity. A passive, mute acceptance would be the only reaction to events, characterised by an instinctive retreat from any possible conflict, in the interest of one’s own survival. Always keep your head down. Never show yourself above the parapet.

We are no longer a society, Valery thought. We are a collection of individuals looking out for ourselves. How great our rulers’ contempt must be for the people they have emasculated so successfully. How low we have sunk.

‘When he heard that Viktor had died,’ a colleague whispered to Valery as they went downstairs for lunch, ‘the First Secretary was so angry he ordered the Politburo to bring him back to life, which they did. Another Soviet first to celebrate. We can now raise the dead.’

‘Come and have tea,’ Stevens told Marion Blackwell on the telephone. ‘Any time after four. We can talk then.’

Geoffrey Stevens was a legend to the undergraduate population, a professor of nuclear physics who, a couple of
years after the war ended, had lost faith in the atomic bomb he had been helping to build. In an act of madness or courage, depending on your viewpoint, he had gone to Moscow to try to convince the Russians to outlaw nuclear weapons. He’d failed, of course. The Soviets had humiliated him, effectively ending his public career. On his return from Moscow, Stevens had resigned from all his government appointments. He had retreated to Cambridge, where he was ostracised by a number of senior members of the university, who condemned what he had done. Some of his most vocal opponents were in his own college. They had been outraged by his flight to Moscow, which they considered an act of treachery. His subsequent adoption of the anti-nuclear cause confirmed – as they saw it – the rightness of their verdict. If Stevens was hurt by the rejection of his colleagues, he never showed it. He remained an icon to those he taught and to many others who shared his convictions, and a formidable opponent to those who advocated the building and use of weapons of indiscriminate destruction.

‘Marion.’ She took his outstretched hand. ‘Come in.’ He ushered her into the kitchen, where tea was laid. She saw one of Celia’s cakes on the table, dark with raisins and dried fruit.

‘I need your help, Geoffrey.’ Stevens had little capacity for small talk. It was best to get to the point quickly.

‘Shouldn’t you be asking someone else?’ He demurred out of habit, but she knew he was delighted to be approached for advice. She suspected he had the opportunity all too infrequently. ‘I’m hardly classed as respectable these days.’

‘I’m on the Blake-Thomas committee,’ she said, ignoring his objection. ‘We selected this year’s speaker months ago but very inconveniently he recently died on us. We’ve had to find a replacement. That’s what all the fuss has been about.’

When she’d come up with the idea of proposing the Russian historian Andrei Berlin, she told him, she had never imagined she would run into such fierce opposition. After some fearful wrangling, the issue had been decided by
Professor Eastman’s casting vote, which didn’t make her at all popular with her opponents on the committee.

‘In the end I won, after a split vote.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘The trouble is, I’ve been having sleepless nights ever since.’

‘If you’re asking me to support your candidate, Marion, I’m not sure your chairman would approve. Eastman and I haven’t spoken for over a decade.’

‘No, it’s nothing like that. I want you to tell me if what I’ve done is mad.’

‘Mad isn’t the epithet I’d choose,’ Stevens said. ‘Brave, yes. But then that’s what I’d expect of you.’

‘I don’t want flattery, Geoffrey. This is too important. I want to know what you really think.’

Stevens took out his pipe and began to fill it from a yellow oilcloth wallet. ‘Berlin’s reputation is growing. I’ve not read him but that’s what I hear from those who know about these things. One can only gain from trying to understand how one’s opponent’s mind works, however discomforting the process might be. Berlin would give the Blake-Thomas a good shake-up, which is just what it needs.’

‘I should stick to my guns and stop worrying?’

‘Do you have an alternative?’

‘Michael Scott keeps muttering about Professor Astruc.’

‘Astruc starts hares running and then drops out of the hunt – never finishes anything,’ Stevens said dismissively. ‘I’m surprised Michael doesn’t agree. He ought to know better.’

‘I began to think I was wrong and everyone else was right.’ She smiled at him. ‘I feel relieved. Thank you.’

Stevens laughed. ‘You don’t need me to bolster your convictions, Marion, though I’m flattered you think I could.’ He poured her some more tea. ‘Who else was against you? Not Peter Chadwick, surely?’

‘No, Peter’s an angel, backed me all the way.’

‘Who then?’

She hesitated. ‘Bill Gant.’

‘Poor old Bill. Doesn’t surprise me at all. When has he ever been
for
something? Such a shame. He was an able undergraduate – best historian of his year. Great things were expected of him but our high hopes never came to anything. Bill ran out of steam before he was thirty. The charitable explanation is that his career is a casualty of his wife’s illness. He’s never been able to concentrate on anything for long enough, he’s always had to have half an eye on her. How well do you know him?’

How well indeed? Here come the lies.

‘Our paths cross from time to time.’

‘Don’t worry if he’s against you. He’s a fading influence now. His opposition doesn’t count.’

‘I can deal with Bill,’ she said. ‘It’s Michael Scott I’m worried about. He took me aside afterwards and told me that in all the years of the Blake-Thomas, there’d never been a decision on a casting vote before. He made his disapproval quite plain. In his opinion I should have withdrawn before Eastman intervened. I’ve got to make Berlin’s visit a success or Michael isn’t going to let me forget it. This is a bad time for me to make an enemy of him. I’m up for a university lectureship.’

‘You’d better make sure Berlin’s visit
is
a huge success, then Michael won’t dare raise a whisper against you.’ Stevens reached for a piece of paper and wrote a telephone number on it. ‘If you think you need more ammunition, talk to my son, Danny. He’s Berlin’s publisher. I’m sure he’ll be able to help you. The pair of you should be able to put paid to any thoughts of revenge Michael Scott may have.’

Kate watched the dawn creep into the room through the break in the curtains, its soft light flooding into the bedroom like an incoming tide, illuminating first the chair with the stuffing coming out of its arm, then a section of the wooden
floor (how uneven the floorboards were), the end of the bed and up the sheet that covered them, until finally it painted the face that she loved so much with its grey light. At that moment, she wanted to wake him with her kisses, hold him in her arms and tell him that she was his and that nothing could ever separate them.

Had she spoken, he would have opened his eyes at once and stared at her with that troubled look that hurt so much. The world is a prison, he would solemnly tell her, in which we are all trapped and from which there can be no escape, no happy ending. Her mind translated his words to mean we have no future together, only a number of days and nights together, and each day that number is reduced by one.

‘When you leave Moscow,’ he had told her once, ‘we will shed tears, we will make promises to each other as we say goodbye, but in our hearts we will know that when we part we will never meet again. From that moment on, we will be simply a memory to each other that over time will fade and die. That is how our love will end.’

She refused to believe him. If she left Moscow, she said, in the knowledge that she would never see him again, her life would end. She loved him with a certainty and a passion that meant there was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep him. He was hers and she would never let him go.

‘Such dreams are impossible,’ he had replied. You must not hope for a future that cannot be realised. We must live in the real world. Dreams are dangerous deceptions, creatures of darkness, which is why they vanish when you wake.’

She called that his Russian pessimism and dismissed it. He had smiled sadly and looked away, accepting what he saw as his fate,
their
fate, with a resignation that infuriated her. In moments like that, when he tried to rationalise their situation – he called it bringing her back to earth – she felt that he was as far away from her as he could be. Sometimes her pain was so intense that she wondered if he still loved her.

Somehow, in the weeks before her return home – a day she
refused even to imagine but which was coming closer with an unwelcome speed – she had to find the answers that would convince him that their parting would be temporary, not for ever.

What she found impossible to make him understand was her sense of her own determination. It was what had got her to Moscow when the obstacles seemed insurmountable. Now she would use it to save the man she loved. She
would
not let him go. They
would
spend their lives together. It might sound absurd – of course it sounded absurd – but in her heart she knew it was possible. What she didn’t yet know was how it could be done.

*

Six weeks after her arrival in Moscow, one of the students at the Conservatoire – a Bulgarian violinist whom she hardly knew – had insisted that Kate listen to a recording he had of a Russian composer she had never heard of. It was a cello sonata, and she was at once entranced by its playfulness and humour, so different from much of the contemporary Russian music she had heard. Where, she asked, could she learn more about Khutoryanski? The Conservatoire appeared to have neither a biography nor any of his music.

‘Try the Lenin Library,’ the Bulgarian told Kate. ‘It has thousands of scores. You’re bound to find Khutoryanski there.’

Two days later, she walked up the steps of the library and flashed her student card at the elderly woman guarding the entrance, to be rewarded as usual with the traditional angry Muscovite stare. Why were there so many cross people in this city? She could not get used to the Russian sullenness – or was it Soviet sullenness? The library was a crowded palace of culture, with marble halls and reading rooms of polished wood, and the inevitable photographs and busts of Lenin wherever you looked, in a permanent state of oration.

She submitted her request for the score of Khutoryanski’s
Third Cello Sonata to an unsmiling girl not much older than herself, who disappeared through a glass door into a catalogue room filled with pale wooden bureaux with endless drawers containing thousands of tightly packed library cards. Kate watched her search through two boxes, find nothing, then engage in conversation with an older woman who snatched the request from her, read it and shook her head.

‘We have no score of this name,’ the assistant told Kate a moment later.