Edge of Eternity (14 page)

‘Don’t look at it that way,’ said his father.

George bit back an irate retort. His family only wanted what was best for him, he knew. Trying to keep his voice neutral, he said: ‘Which way should I look at it?’

‘Your role in the civil rights movement won’t be as a front-line soldier, that’s all. Be a supporter. Send a cheque once a year to the NAACP.’ The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was the oldest and most conservative civil rights group: they had opposed Freedom Rides as being too provocative. ‘Just keep your head down. Let someone else go on the bus.’

‘There might be another way,’ said George.

‘What’s that?’

‘I could work for Martin Luther King.’

‘Has he offered you a job?’

‘I’ve received an approach.’

‘What would he pay you?’

‘Not much, I’m guessing.’

Lev said: ‘Don’t think you can turn down a perfectly good job then come to me for an allowance.’

‘Okay, Grandfather,’ said George, although that was exactly what he had been thinking. ‘But I believe I’ll take the job anyway.’

His mother joined the argument. ‘Oh, George, don’t,’ she said. She was going to say more, but the graduating students were called to line up for their degrees. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk more later.’

George left the family group and found his place in line. The ceremony began, and he shuffled forward. He recalled working at Fawcett Renshaw last summer. Mr Renshaw had thought himself heroically liberal for hiring a black law clerk. But George had been given work that was demeaningly easy even for an intern. He had been patient and looked for an opportunity, and one had come. He had done a piece of legal research that won a case for the firm, and they had offered him a job on graduation.

This kind of thing happened to him a lot. The world assumed that a student at Harvard must be intelligent and capable – unless he was black, in which case all bets were off. All his life George had had to prove that he was not an idiot. It made him resentful. If he ever had children, his hope was that they would grow up in a different world.

His turn came to go onstage. As he mounted the short flight of steps, he was astonished to hear hissing.

Hissing was a Harvard tradition, normally used against professors who lectured badly or were rude to students. George was so horrified that he paused on the steps and looked back. He caught the eye of Joseph Hugo. Hugo was not the only one – the hissing was too loud for that – but George felt sure that Hugo had orchestrated this.

George felt hated. He was too humiliated to mount the stage. He stood there, frozen, and the blood rushed to his face.

Then someone began clapping. Looking across the rows of seats, George saw a professor standing up. It was Merv West, one of the younger faculty. Others joined him in applauding, and they quickly drowned out the hissing. Several more people stood up. George imagined that even people who did not know him had guessed who he was by the plaster cast on his arm.

He found his courage again and walked on to the stage. A cheer went up as he was handed his certificate. He turned slowly to face the audience and acknowledged the applause with a modest bow of his head. Then he went off.

His heart was hammering as he joined the other students. Several men shook his hand silently. He was horrified by the hissing, and at the same time elated by the applause. He realized he was perspiring, and he wiped his face with a handkerchief. What an ordeal.

He watched the rest of the ceremony in a daze, glad to have time to recover. As the shock of the hissing wore off, he could see that it had been done by Hugo and a handful of right-wing lunatics, and the rest of liberal Harvard had honoured him. He should feel proud, he told himself.

The students rejoined their families for lunch. George’s mother hugged him. ‘They cheered you,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Greg said. ‘Though for a moment there it looked as if it was going to be something else.’

George spread his hands in a gesture of appeal. ‘How can I not be part of this struggle?’ he said. ‘I really want the job at Fawcett Renshaw, and I want to please the family that has supported me through all these years of education – but that’s not all. What if I have children?’

Marga put in: ‘That would be nice!’

‘But, Grandmother, my children will be coloured. What kind of world will they grow up in? Will they be second-class Americans?’

The conversation was interrupted by Merv West, who shook George’s hand and congratulated him on getting his degree. Professor West was a little under-dressed in a tweed suit and a button-down collar.

George said: ‘Thank you for starting the applause, Professor.’

‘Don’t thank me, you deserved it.’

George introduced his family. ‘We were just talking about my future.’

‘I hope you haven’t made any final decisions.’

George’s curiosity was piqued. What did that mean? ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘I’ve been talking to the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy – a Harvard graduate, as you know.’

‘I hope you told him that his handling of what happened in Alabama was a national disgrace.’

West smiled regretfully. ‘Not in those words, not quite. But he and I agreed that the administration’s response was inadequate.’

‘Very. I can’t imagine he . . .’ George tailed off as he was struck by a thought. ‘What does this have to do with decisions about my future?’

‘Bobby has decided to hire a young black lawyer to give the Attorney General’s team a Negro perspective on civil rights. And he asked me if there was anyone I could recommend.’

George was momentarily stunned. ‘Are you saying . . . ?’

West raised a warning hand. ‘I’m not offering you the job – only Bobby can do that. But I can get you an interview – if you want it.’

Jacky said: ‘George! A job with Bobby Kennedy! That would be fantastic.’

‘Mother, the Kennedys have let us down so badly.’

‘Then go to work for Bobby and change things!’

George hesitated. He looked at the eager faces around him: his mother, his father, his grandmother, his grandfather, and back to his mother again.

‘Maybe I will,’ he said at last.

8

Dimka Dvorkin was abashed to be a virgin at the age of twenty-two.

He had dated several girls while at university, but none of them had let him go all the way. Anyway, he was not sure he should. No one had actually told him that sex should be part of a long-term, loving relationship, but he sort of felt it anyway. He had never been in a frantic hurry to do it, the way some boys were. However, his lack of experience was now becoming an embarrassment.

His friend Valentin Lebedev was the opposite. Tall and confident, he had black hair and blue eyes and buckets of charm. By the end of their first year at Moscow University he had bedded most of the girl students in the politics department and one of the teachers.

Early on in their friendship, Dimka had said to him: ‘What do you do about, you know, avoiding pregnancy?’

‘That’s the girl’s problem, isn’t it?’ Valentin had said carelessly. ‘Worst comes to the worst, it’s not that difficult to get an abortion.’

Talking to others, Dimka found out that many Soviet boys took the same attitude. Men did not get pregnant, so it was not their problem. And abortion was available on demand during the first twelve weeks. But Dimka could not get comfortable with Valentin’s approach, perhaps because his sister was so scornful about it.

Sex was Valentin’s main interest, and studying took second place. With Dimka it had been the other way around – which was why Dimka was now an aide in the Kremlin and Valentin worked for the Moscow City Parks Department.

It was through his connections in Parks that Valentin had been able to arrange for the two of them to spend a week at the V. I. Lenin Holiday Camp for Young Communists in July 1961.

The camp was a bit military, with tents pitched in ruler-straight rows and a curfew at ten-thirty, but it had a swimming pool and a boating lake and loads of girls, and a week there was a privilege much sought after.

Dimka felt he deserved a holiday. The Vienna Summit had been a victory for the Soviet Union, and he shared the credit.

Vienna had actually begun badly for Khrushchev. Kennedy and his dazzling wife had entered Vienna in a fleet of limousines flying dozens of stars-and-stripes flags. When the two leaders met, television viewers all over the world saw that Kennedy was several inches taller, towering over Khrushchev, looking down his patrician nose at the bald top of Khrushchev’s head. Kennedy’s tailored jackets and skinny ties made Khrushchev look like a farmer in his Sunday suit. America had won a glamour contest that the Soviet Union had not even known it was entering.

But once the talks began, Khrushchev had dominated. When Kennedy tried to have an amiable discussion, as between two reasonable men, Khrushchev became loudly aggressive. Kennedy suggested it was not logical for the Soviet Union to encourage Communism in Third World countries then protest indignantly about American efforts to roll back Communism in the Soviet sphere. Khrushchev replied scornfully that the spread of Communism was a historic inevitability, and nothing that either leader did could stand in its way. Kennedy’s grasp of Marxist philosophy was weak, and he had not known what to say.

The strategy developed by Dimka and other advisors had triumphed. When Khrushchev returned to Moscow he ordered dozens of copies of the summit minutes to be distributed, not only to the Soviet bloc, but also to the leaders of countries as far away as Cambodia and Mexico. Since then Kennedy had been silent, not even responding to Khrushchev’s threat to take over West Berlin. And Dimka went on holiday.

On the first day, Dimka put on his new clothes, a checked short-sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts his mother had sewn from the trousers of a worn-out blue serge suit. ‘Are shorts like that fashionable in the West?’ Valentin said.

Dimka laughed. ‘Not as far as I know.’

While Valentin was shaving, Dimka went for supplies.

When he emerged he was pleased to see, right next door, a young woman lighting the small portable stove that was provided with each tent. She was a little older than Dimka, he guessed twenty-seven. She had thick red-brown hair cut in a bob, and an attractive scatter of freckles. She looked alarmingly fashionable in an orange blouse and a pair of tight black pants that ended just below the knee.

‘Hello!’ Dimka said with a smile. She looked up at him. He said: ‘Do you need a hand with that?’

She lit the gas with a match, then went inside her tent without speaking.

Well, I’m not going to lose my virginity with her, Dimka thought, and he walked on.

He bought eggs and bread in the store next to the communal bathroom block. When he got back there were two girls outside the next tent: the one he had spoken to, and a pretty blonde with a trim figure. The blonde wore the same style of black pants, but with a pink blouse. Valentin was talking to them, and they were laughing.

He introduced them to Dimka. The redhead was called Nina, and she made no reference to their earlier encounter, though she still seemed reserved. The blonde was Anna, and she was obviously the outgoing one, smiling and pushing her hair back with a graceful gesture.

Dimka and Valentin had brought with them one iron saucepan in which they planned to do all the cooking, and Dimka had filled it with water to boil the eggs; but the girls were better equipped, and Nina took the eggs from him to make blinis.

Things were looking up, Dimka thought.

Dimka studied Nina while they ate. Her narrow nose, small mouth and daintily protruding chin gave her a guarded look, as if she were perpetually weighing things up. But she was voluptuous and, when Dimka realized he might see her in a swimsuit, his throat went dry.

Valentin said: ‘Dimka and I are going to take a boat and row across to the other side of the lake.’ This was the first Dimka had heard of such a plan, but he said nothing. ‘Why don’t the four of us go together?’ Valentin went on. ‘We could take a picnic lunch.’

It could not possibly be that easy, Dimka thought. They had only just met!

The girls looked at one another for a telepathic moment, then Nina said briskly: ‘We’ll see. Let’s clear away.’ She began to pick up plates and cutlery.

That was disappointing, but perhaps not the end of the matter.

Dimka volunteered to carry the dirty dishes to the bathroom block.

‘Where did you get those shorts?’ Nina asked while they were walking.

‘My mother sewed them.’

She laughed. ‘Sweet.’

Dimka asked himself what his sister would have implied by calling a man sweet, and he decided it meant he was kind but not attractive.

A concrete blockhouse contained toilets, showers and large communal sinks. Dimka watched while Nina washed the dishes. He tried to think of things to say, but nothing came. If she had asked him about the crisis in Berlin, he could have talked all day. But he had no gift for the mildly amusing nonsense that Valentin produced in an effortless stream. Eventually, he managed: ‘Have you and Anna been friends long?’

‘We work together,’ she said. ‘We’re both administrators at the steel union headquarters in Moscow. I got divorced a year ago, and Anna was looking for someone to share her apartment, so now we live together.’

Divorced, Dimka thought; that meant she was sexually experienced. He felt intimidated. ‘What was your husband like?’

‘He’s a shit,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t like talking about him.’

‘Okay.’ Dimka searched desperately for something bland to say. ‘Anna seems a really nice person,’ he tried.

‘She’s well connected.’

That seemed an odd remark to make about your friend. ‘How so?’

‘Her father got us this holiday. He’s Moscow District Secretary of the union.’ Nina seemed proud of this.

Dimka carried the clean dishes back to the tents. When they arrived, Valentin said cheerily: ‘We’ve made sandwiches – ham and cheese.’ Anna looked at Nina and made a gesture of helplessness, as if to say that she had been unable to halt the Valentin steamroller; but it was clear to Dimka that she had not really wanted to. Nina shrugged, and so it was settled that they would picnic.