Never mind spending any time with Fidel Castro. But Philby did spend long hours, day after day, with Cuban officials who talked endlessly with him about the resources of the Communist world and about the inevitability, under Marxist direction, of victory.
Philby obliged his hosts most of the time, but now and again pressed his orthodoxy and gave rein to his crotchets. At Baradero he and Rufina were staying quite near the splendid Dupont Villa, open to tourists. Philby refused even to visit the grand palace, one more affront, a legacy of the period of capitalist exploitation. And when asked if he wished to see the house that Ernest Hemingway had lived in, his answer was that he had no interest in doing so. This did not involve a general boycott of Hemingway’s haunts, however, and certainly not of the famous bar, the Floridita, renowned for its special daiquiris. The Philbys and their escorts were each served a daiquiri. One drink was never enough for Kim Philby, but when he motioned for a second, he got from his bearded Cuban escort lurid tales of the demonic strategic impact of this particular mix of lime and rum. The Cuban positively forbade the Philbys a second drink, even as he ordered another for himself and his two aides.
The only consumer item not rationed, Rufina noticed, was ice cream. All else was scarce. But she and her husband were not in Cuba to promulgate a commercial five-year plan, and their contentment was abiding that this critical island was in the hands of a Communist ally.
They weren’t entirely sorry when, on the day they were supposed to depart, they were told that their sailing was postponed by two weeks because of a mix-up. The old familiar freighter had pulled away a day earlier than scheduled, which meant, for the Philbys, a fortnight more in Cuba, after which they were put aboard the Yanis Lentsmanis and set out for two weeks at sea, this time following a different route, Havana to Odessa.
There were the exciting moments and the sharp changes, from the tropical sun to the cold of early spring. When they entered the Bosporus there was snow, but it was dark, and they could only just make out the road and lights in the house windows, including the house where Philby had once lived and worked. He had never traveled there to verify it, but it had been reported to him that his old house now bore a plaque: “Kim Philby, outstanding intelligence officer, lived here 1941–48.”
CHAPTER 41
Dr. Vladimir Kirov was surprised by the nature of the call from Professor Lindbergh Titov. It wasn’t surprising to be hearing from his old friend and fellow member of the Union of Scientists and Scholars. What surprised him was that the call hadn’t been for the usual reason, which was, and had been for some years, to set a date for dinner and, often, on to the ballet. This time, Titov said he wanted a professional medical consultation. Kirov was in his early sixties, but had not slowed down as doctor and teacher.
“Of course, Linbek. I could give you an exact time to come in during the day. Or—you can come in any time after six. I stay in the office until just before eight.… Yes yes yes, we’ll go for dinner after. I suggest the Hercole. The headwaiter there recognizes my eminence, and will take good care of us.”
Comrade Lindbergh Vissarionovich Titov was just sixty. He was hairless, as he had been, at age twenty-one, when Kirov first met him at the medical school. After a brief exposure to Titov, Kirov speculated jocularly that the absence of hair suggested a furnace of intellectual activity, activity of such intensity that something had to give out—in this case, Titov’s body hair. But everybody quickly got used to it, and the thirty-five students in the medical-research department of the university medical school soon stopped paying any notice to the hair, or lack of it.
Yet Titov was self-conscious, and took every opportunity to put on his cap, or, in colder weather, his knitted woolen hat, striped in red and gold, which he took with him everywhere. “Everywhere” included the laboratory in which he worked under the tutelage of Nikolai Sokolov, the only living Russian Nobel laureate in science when Titov entered medical school. Nikolai Sokolov was seventy-eight. His widely hailed accomplishment in radiology—he was father of the Sokolovgram—had been done in his twenties.
Sokolov had slowed down, but no one would suggest he withdraw from the research division of the medical school, and he had no desire to do so. He merely intensified his longstanding resistance to regular student seminars. Rather than simply teach or conduct seminars, he liked to walk about the classrooms and laboratories, watching the students at work, listening to what they were saying, hearing about the problems they were addressing, the threads of exploration that engaged them. Then, year after year, he would single out one student for a close personal association. In the spring of 1950, he had shown interest in the hairless young man who asked penetrating questions and who spoke and laughed a lot when in company with his fellow students in the refectory, or at ease in the courtyard, with a smoke, wearing, usually, his red and gold hat.
In May, Professor Sokolov addressed a note to the young Titov. He asked him to come to his office at five the next afternoon.
Titov allowed himself to speculate that, just possibly, the great Sokolov would select him as his special student. It was known that a fresh selection would be made after the incumbent protégé, the dreamy, longhaired Stepan, graduated and left Moscow to join the radiology department at the university in Leningrad. Such an association with Sokolov meant academic preferment, but, more important, meant intensive exposure to someone whose mind had dazzled scientists even in other fields. Titov was breathless at the thought that he might be picked, and so he was, after one hour’s conversation in the great man’s office.
Sokolov had opened by asking a question Titov had frequently heard. “Let me begin, Comrade Lindbergh Vissarionovich, by asking for an explanation for your extraordinary first name.”
Titov very nearly blushed, as he sat, like a boy, answering that question. “Comrade Nikolai Semyonovich, my father was an aviator. He was in the Soviet Air Force. An accident in a fighter plane, the Ant-4—the first all-metal plane with two engines—resulted in the amputation of one leg. We were very poor, but we did have a radio, and my father’s excitement in May of 1927 was—”
“You are going to tell me about Charles Augustus Lindbergh?”
Titov broke out in one of those ear-to-ear smiles that lighted entire rooms. “Yes, that is what happened. Now, although the English name isn’t that hard to pronounce in Russian, people find it outlandish, so I’ve simplified the pronunciation to Linbek.”
“Very well, comrade Linbek Vissarionovich. I note that your patronymic is the same as that of our … august leader.”
“Yes, comrade. My mother felt it might give a little protection against any suggestion that we were pro-American because of my first name if she gave me the same patronymic as Comrade Stalin’s. So she changed my father’s name to Vissarion.”
Sokolov paused. “That is a burden in life.”
Titov did not reply directly. He simply smiled again, and admitted that in his dreams—“in my happy dreams”—he was an aviator.
After nine months superintending Titov, Sokolov went to the office of the dean. He recommended that the student Titov, now given the title Medical Scientist, be made a Fellow and excused from any formal obligations in the graduate-studies program. “He is a very rare bird, comrade. A free, unfettered, curious, imaginative mind. He is as familiar with the isotopes and the positron as with members of his own family. Leave him free and unmolested, Comrade Anton Dmitrievich.”
It was so, and Titov’s freedom from constraints pleased him greatly, a manumission he hastened to tell Kirov about, his close friend, the classmate who had locked into urological studies. “Where is your research taking you, Linbek?”
“I am not certain. But I am certain that I must arrange to visit Hiroshima.”
Dr. Kirov now positioned his friend and patient over the special urological examining bench. Kirov’s gloved fingers reached deep into him.
“Oy. Oyyyyy!”
“It’s almost over.”
“You mean my life?”
Kirov chuckled. “I will need a culture, and some urine.”
Titov, dressing himself, asked, “What do you think it is, Volodya?”
“I think you have an enlarged prostate.”
“Does that mean I can’t have more children?” he laughed.
“You have a fine son.”
“Yes. But after he was born, Nina had two ectopic pregnancies in a row. I think you knew that. I don’t suppose anything you can do with my prostate could correct that!”
“Linbek, if the test is positive, then you will get treatment. There are basically two kinds. There is radiology, a specialty of yours, and surgery, a specialty of mine.”
“Let’s not talk about it at supper.”
“As you like. But don’t be tense about it. These things happen. Life goes on.”
“My prostate’s life would not go on, would it?”
“That can depend. On the precision of the radiological treatment. Or on what the surgeon discovered there.”
The two scientists had finished their meal—Caucasian spiced chicken and rice, cake and coffee—and had almost finished the second bottle of wine. “You know something, Volodya?” Titov addressed his companion. “I have in my laboratory, I am convinced, the concept and the constituent parts of a procedure that would immunize against radioactivity.”
Kirov was startled. “You mean, someone who was immunized would never have to fear X-ray treatment?”
“Correct. And if exposed to nuclear radiation—even at the level of Chernobyl—would have the means of neutralizing it.”
“Is the work you are doing widely known?”
“Not widely. Two of my assistants are of course aware of what I am doing. So is Dr. Shumberg, our old classmate.”
Kirov’s face tightened. He thought to bring up the matter of Ursina, but quickly changed his mind. He could not trust himself to contain his tears at the mention of Ursina. “That is exciting, what you tell me.”
“Yes, it is very exciting, but I must go home now. I am at the laboratory at six.”
“I’ll give you your medical news on Tuesday.”
They exchanged a bear hug.
CHAPTER 42
At six-thirty, Titov arrived at the office of his doctor and friend, the red and gold hat tight over his head. On the phone, earlier in the day, Kirov had asked him to allow an hour or so. “I need to talk with you about another matter.”
“There is no other matter than my prostate.”
“I’ll see you at six-thirty, Linbek.”
The analysis had been done. The prostate was cancerous. “There is always the possibility of metastasis, and that is something to be watched. My recommendation is that you submit to twenty radiation sessions. I would be wasting the time of the principal student of radiology in Moscow—perhaps in the world—to instruct you in the matter of radiation treatments. What I have here for your radiologist is a very precise location to bear down on.”
“Volodya, can I have … normal relations with my wife?”
“You certainly can, some weeks’ time after the treatments. During the period of treatment you may not achieve satisfactory erections.”
“In that case I will have to keep Nina entertained with bulletins from my radiological institute. But Volodya, you had some other matter on your mind. What is it?”
Kirov had not been informed by Ursina on that Friday, two weeks earlier, about her scheduled ectopic operation later in the day. She hadn’t even told her old friend that she was pregnant—or that she had a lover, let alone an American lover. But in a telephone call from a public site (he assumed) the previous Monday, she had told him, excitedly and defiantly, about her encounter with the culture minister.
“What exactly did you have in that speech?”
“Not much you’d approve of, my dear friend.”
“Maybe you should let me read it.”
“I’ll do that, Volodya. In the next couple of days. I’m going to be … busy for a day or so.”
He loved Ursina Chadinov as he’d have loved his own daughter. He had taken Ursina under his wing when she was nineteen, at the behest of Dr. Roman Eskimov, his own, aging mentor, who was married to Ursina’s aunt. Kirov had provided academic counsel, social direction, and warm company. There had been the brief estrangement. Ursina had invited Kirov, even though twenty years her senior, as her date at the medical students’ end-of-second-year party. This party was, traditionally, unrestrained. The seventy students were tense from the ordeal of their examinations, anxious for a night’s uninhibited relaxation.
Ursina, lively with wine, her eyes radiant with excitement, motioned to Vladimir—who was wearing a white shirt and his very best gray suit, his decoration from Moscow University prominent on his lapel—to follow her. Ursina led him to one of the rooms provided by the hostelry. “Then, Volodya”—she had never before used the diminutive with him, her mentor and professor—“I can express myself on how much I love you and owe to you.”
Kirov followed her into the little room and accepted her hot embrace. But he grabbed her hand at a critical moment. “No further, dear Ursina. I am, in these matters—different.”
She gasped, and in mere seconds was entirely sober. Her eyes were tearful. “I’m sorry, Volodya. But I love you just as much as if—”
“As if I were normal.”
She bit that one off deftly. “If you were normal, Volodya, I wouldn’t feel the love for you that I do.”
The evening had ended on that conciliatory tone, but for some weeks, meeting each other in the corridors of the medical school, there hadn’t been the old, easy intimacy.
Gradually, this returned, and when Ursina became a full doctor of urology, she was everywhere thought of as the special protégée of the learned Dr. Kirov, whom she had now informed of her disgrace with the culture minister.
Seated behind his desk, as if still talking doctor to patient, Kirov said to Titov, “I am personally and professionally interested in Dr. Ursina Chadinov.”
“Isn’t she the professor who was to follow me as welcomer at the peace forum?”
“Yes. That’s she, and the talk she had prepared was the cause of her political trouble. A lovely woman, gifted practitioner, and assiduous researcher.”
“What’s her trouble?”
“She is dead. I learned only after her death that she was deeply in love with an American and had conceived a child, apparently very soon after they met. He flew back to Washington soon after she found out—”
“Oh, one of those. ‘I’ll send you a Christmas card, dear—’”
“No no no. He loved her totally and intended to come back to Moscow—to do what exactly, one doesn’t know. But Rufina Martins, who was Ursina’s roommate for years, right until she married, became involved. She returned from Kiev, where she had gone to tend to her sick brother. She loved Ursina deeply and is ablaze with fury and indignation over her death.”
“Death from what, goddammit it, Volodya?”
“Her pregnancy was ectopic.”
“So? My wife had two of those. I’ve said that.”
“We are told that she telephoned to Dr. Shumberg—our classmate, Kirill Olegyevich Shumberg. I don’t know how she got his name.”
“He’s a big cheese, very involved with the government. I may have told you that he keeps a careful eye on my own research. But he is also a skilled practicing surgeon. He did the ectopic operations on my Nina.”
“Here is what I’ve pieced together, talking with her regular doctor and with the surgeon who was all set to proceed with the operation. Ursina apparently was told that Shumberg was very skilled and sometimes had succeeded in saving the life of the baby as well as the mother.”
“I have heard that that can sometimes be done. When he operated on my wife there was simply no question of doing any such thing. It is very unusual. But you told me Ursina was dead?”
“Yes. She died on the operating table.”
“But that is inconceivable!”
; “No, Linbek, it is not inconceivable. I have done research on the matter. It can and does happen, every blue moon. What is inconceivable is that the mother should be permitted to die if the surgeon sees that there is no chance of saving the fetus.”
“Is that the same thing as telling me, Volodya, that Shumberg committed a very gross error?”
“That is one explanation for Ursina’s death, Linbek.”
CHAPTER 43
Nina Titov, petite and lively, with short dark curly hair, was a full-time wife and mother. She had known from the beginning that her husband, Lindbergh Vissarionovich, was wedded to his laboratory work. She promised on their wedding night that she would not seek to understand what it was he was doing. He greeted this news gratefully. In odd mentions of his work, Linbek stressed less its confidentiality than its inscrutability. “To understand, Nina, you would have to be a fifth-year student.”
Nina did not probe the mysteries of radiology, but she paid close attention to Linbek’s personal requirements, looked after his comforts, and worried over his occasional blue moods. Almost always these had to do with problems, direct or indirect, in getting on with his work, and in communicating his concerns to foreign scientists, getting from them their intelligence and insights, even as he sought to give them his own.
Their first-born son, Aleksei, was a surmounting joy for Nina. When he was three, she once again became pregnant, but this time, after a few weeks, she knew that something was wrong.
She called Linbek’s old classmate, Kirill Olegyevich Shumberg, the prominent obstetrician. He diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy and performed surgery. She was very distressed over the lost child, and when, two years later, she had yet another ectopic pregnancy, she hesitated a few days before proceeding to surgery. In college she had studied Russian literature. She knew practically nothing about medicine or human biology, but she knew all she needed to know in order to do research in any field. She went the next morning to the university medical library to read about ectopic pregnancies.
Last Call for Blackford Oakes Page 17