‘Other men are out of uniform. Why not you? The war’s over.’
The last time he had said that, his voice had been shrill and the points of his cheeks red with anger. There was no hint of that now, only that familiar coldness that told me his anger had cooled to indifference.
‘It doesn’t always seem like that in Berlin.’
‘That’s a poor apology for inaction. Berlin is not a microcosm of the rest of the world. I thank God I can see more clearly than that.’
‘We may have defeated one enemy but there’s another in his place now. Someone has to guard the gate.’
The thought was not mine but my American companion’s. I was surprised at how easily I had accepted his analysis of what was happening.
‘The Russians aren’t the enemy some people would have us believe. They’re weak, economically in chaos, they can’t build a war machine without starving their people, and the Russian man in the street has got too much sense to stand for that. Their leaders want us to believe the opposite and their propaganda is very successful. We mustn’t allow ourselves to fall for it.’
That was as close as he could get to saying that I was a victim of their propaganda and he was shocked that a son of his could be taken in so easily. I remembered the speed with which we had seen the Russians set up their own puppet administration in the Eastern Zone of Berlin in defiance of the Allied agreement. It had all the hallmarks of a carefully planned operation by a well-prepared apparatus, and its accomplishment had left us breathless. It was an illegal act under the treaty, and the Russians had calculated that there was little we could do about it. They’d been right. We’d let them get away with it.
‘It looks different when you’re living next door to them.’ I hadn’t the energy to put it more strongly than that.
‘Leave Berlin, Danny. You’ve done enough. Come back where you belong. There’s unfinished business.’
I had completed my second year at Cambridge when the war broke out and I had joined up at once. My father had opposed me then and he was still, years later, unreconciled to my view that the war had made a return to undergraduate life impossible.
I wanted to tell him that I was never coming back but somehow I couldn’t. I hadn’t the heart or I hadn’t the courage, and I suspect he knew it.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, and to my surprise he dropped the subject. A year ago he would not have done that. Was this real evidence of a change in him? Or had he softened in the time I’d been away?
‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said with uncharacteristic warmth.
My father and I never found it easy to spend much time in each other’s company. We never developed any intimacy in our relationship. One of the strange legacies of the war was that we had been forced to spend so long apart that in our minds our relationship had grown closer than it really was.
‘I will always be thankful that you were spared when so many others were not. Go and say hello to the children. I’ll join you when I’ve finished.’
I played with the children after their bath and wondered how these small individuals could be related to me. They saw me as I saw myself, more as their father than their brother. But their bright faces and their laughter touched me, as Celia knew they would, which is why she left us alone.
We had dinner soon after Celia had put them to bed. My father was full of university gossip: who was going for preferment where and how mistaken they were to imagine they might get it (‘Overestimating one’s worth has become a new sport here. No doubt they’ll award a blue for it soon’); who had written what and what dreadful rubbish it was (‘God knows who’ll read it’); and how publishers were good for nothing (‘the idlest profession in the world’). Twice Celia asked me about my life in Germany but both times my father steered her away from the subject. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not.
Celia left us alone after dinner and we returned to my father’s study with a bottle of whisky.
‘Cambridge hasn’t changed by the sound of it,’ I said. ‘Still the same old place.’
‘I only wish that were true.’ The bitterness in his reply was unexpected. ‘I thought the war might expand horizons, bring some breadth of vision to us. Wishful thinking. We’re more trivial than ever. More inward-looking. More conscious of ourselves and jealous of each other. The world might as well be in darkness for all the notice we take of what happens outside the gates of this fenland refuge.’
‘Can you blame people for escaping here? Cambridge is as good a place to hide as any.’
‘Oh, I blame them,’ he said with surprising venom. ‘I blame them all right.’
Then he stopped. Whatever he had wanted to say, he had changed his mind. Since our last meeting something must have happened to allow doubts to surface. Doubts about what I didn’t know; he had covered up too quickly to allow me more than a moment’s glimpse. But though he was now doing his best to conceal his concerns from me, the moment was too strong to ignore. My father was in the grip of a deep anxiety.
‘Who wants to hear the miserable litany of an old don in his declining years? No one, thank God.’ He pulled down the blackout on himself and switched his attention to me. ‘Tell me about Berlin.’
He questioned me intently on the work I was doing, when I thought the civilian administration might begin to take over, did I think the good Germans could make democracy stick? I cannot say that my father opened his heart to me that night because he didn’t. But we talked with an openness I hadn’t experienced before, and we avoided the treacherous subject of our relationship with each other.
‘It’s getting late. You’ve had a long day.’ My father got to his feet. He was bringing the conversation to an end, not because he was tired but because he was afraid of where it might lead.
‘What’s all this? What are you working on?’
I was standing by his desk. There were newspaper cuttings on the lectern I had not noticed before.
‘Ah, that.’
My father betrayed all the signs of a schoolboy caught smoking behind the bicycle sheds.
‘That is what Celia calls my fall from grace.’
I look a cutting from the lectern. I saw his name under the title of an article.
‘Good God.’ I was genuinely surprised. ‘You never told me you were writing for the papers.’
‘My weekly sermon to the masses.’
‘This paper doesn’t reach the masses.’
‘To a professor of physics, being read by more than five people is reaching the masses. Being understood by more than five people is more than one can hope for in a lifetime.’
‘What made you do this?’
‘Why does anyone do what he affects to despise? It pays well and my colleagues hate it. What further justification should one look for?’
‘What do you do in these pieces?’
‘What I’ve always done, only now I do it in the public prints as well. Expound. Disturb. Provoke and generally pontificate. A thousand words each week on a topical issue. Political. Social. Economic. Even moral, if I choose it. I am told I am quite successful. There’s talk of extending my contract.’
He looked at me, an image of impish delight. ‘What gives me most pleasure is the jealousy my journalistic exploits arouse among my colleagues. Two nights ago in hall, the senior tutor leaned towards me before grace and muttered: “How could you stoop so low?”’
‘How did you answer that?’
‘I said if the University paid better, then professors with young and expensive wives wouldn’t have to prostitute themselves to make ends meet.’ He laughed at his own remark. ‘You’re wondering how this began, aren’t you? Quite by accident. I did a broadcast for a colleague who was ill and the editor of this rag heard it and rang me up. I was all for turning down the proposal but Celia wouldn’t have it. That woman is ruining my life.’
‘May I see what you’ve written?’
‘Good heavens, no. You’ve got far better things to do with your time.’
‘I’d like to.’
‘Take them to bed with you then. With luck you’ll fall asleep before you’ve read a single word.’
He gave me a folder full of cuttings.
‘They edit me. They cut bits out. They rewrite sentences. I find it very unsettling. I’ve not been edited since I was an undergraduate. What’s worse, they do it rather well.’
*
I did not sleep much that night. I read what my father had written not once but again and again. As I did so, I began to sense the cause of his anxiety. There was a struggle going on within him, a conflict between the beliefs that had made him a pioneer in nuclear research and something new, a moral position he had reached, I presumed, in the year since we had last met. What had led him to this point I had no idea. If I had never really known my father before, now I knew him even less.
The West had exploded a nuclear device, his argument went, and the world knew that the Russians were racing to build a similar or better weapon. There was talk now of a ‘superweapon’, whose destructive powers were many times greater than those of any atomic device. The dangers the world faced if either side were to explode such a device were too grim to contemplate. We had within our power the ability not only to wreak havoc upon our enemies but upon ourselves as well. We could blow up the world through a never-ending chain reaction, cause the end of civilization, create a poisonous desert after a thermonuclear storm in which life in any form would be unsustainable. The earth would be a poisoned graveyard, hurtling pointlessly through time. Was this to be the legacy of the war to end all wars?
We had harsh choices to make, made harder by the debts we owed to the New World. But choices, however difficult, had to be made if the possibility of a lasting peace, a world for ever freed of conflict, was not to slip out of our grasp. That, surely, was what the sacrifice of the war years had been for.
Throughout all the articles I sensed a pessimism I had not encountered before. This was not the rhetoric of the politician, seeking to persuade. It was the desolate cry of the parent who sees his child running headlong into the path of an oncoming car.
6
RUTH
‘Is Valery home?’
Her mother nods. She goes into Valery’s room. He is sitting on the bed facing the wall. His school books are open on his table. For a moment she thinks he is crying, but she dismisses the thought. He has not cried for years.
‘Valery?’
He says nothing and does not turn to face her.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
She sits on the edge of the bed and puts her hand on his shoulder. He does not respond to her touch. It is as if she were not there. Suddenly, she is terrified.
‘Valery.’
She pulls him roughly so he has to turn towards her. His face is pale and drawn and his cheeks are wet with tears. He looks at her as if he had never seen her before and says nothing.
‘I cannot help you unless you tell me what’s happened.’
She holds his stiff body against hers. She wants to cry but there are no tears.
‘Tell me,’ she says.
He points to the ceiling. ‘How do I know they are not listening?’
‘We are not important enough for that.’
She doesn’t believe it herself but her son is satisfied. He dries his eyes on his sleeve and talks in whispers.
‘These men came to see me at school today. They asked me questions.’
They stand in the opened door of his classroom looking in, these two men. Andropov’s men. How she hates the power he has to terrify her into submission.
Which one? the teacher’s expression asks. Which innocent victim do I deliver today? He can offer no resistance on behalf of his pupils because his will was broken years before in a camp a thousand miles away. They look around the room and point at Valery Marchenko.
A chalk-stained finger beckons him. His heart beating faster with every step, he walks through the ranks of his classmates. There is not a movement, not a murmur: all he can hear is the sound of his own boots on the wooden floor. He submits without resistance to the guardianship of the two strangers.
They walk him down the corridor, one of them holding his arm in case he should try to escape, until they find an empty room. They push him roughly inside, close the door, sit him down in a chair facing them and the questioning begins.
They ask him about his mother because they are using him to frighten her.
When does she leave the apartment in the morning?
When does she return?
What does she talk about?
Who are her friends?
They will have sown ideas in his head, she is sure, because that is how they do these things. The few certainties in his life will have crumbled in their presence. He is too young and they are too skilful and too brutal for him to find any escape.
She sees the depth of her son’s confusion. He is terrified, unsure, he has no idea what is happening nor why they are questioning him. She feels the anger well within her, the familiar controls on her emotions threatening to burst under the strain of her fury. How can we live like this? How can we submit our children to interrogation so they are turned against their parents?
Then the mechanics of years of self-discipline move into place. Accept, she reminds herself. Slip away into the shadows. Live where you cannot be noticed, out of sight, on the margin. Where you’ve always lived.
But she cannot avoid the grief in her son’s eyes nor the coldness of his skin against hers. Anger sits in her heart.
‘What else did they ask you?’
‘Were you a member of the Communist Party?’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I said no.’
‘You were right.’
‘They said my father betrayed the state.’
‘They were trying to frighten you.’
‘They said the son of a traitor is a traitor himself.’
‘Then they are lying.’
‘How do I know?’
That was why he had cried. It was a familiar betrayal, lies as evidence to threaten the bond between mother and son. How can she prove her love for her son except by the life she lives? By the touch of her hand, by a kiss on his sleeping cheek, or by her anxieties, her evasions, all the sacrifices she has made and must make to protect him? How can she tell him this? The state knows she can’t, which is why they dress their lies in the clear lines of truth, why they present their case to the defenceless child, why they must destroy the one relationship that can still threaten their dominance.
What can she say to him? How can she tell her own child that his ordeal is to remind her that powerful forces still control her existence? She resists the temptation to say anything.
‘How do I know?’
That is his question. How can he be sure of anything any more in a world where the few certainties of his young life have been suddenly and brutally challenged?
There is only one honest way to answer his question. She must initiate her son into the double life, describing the secret territory of the heart which lies untouched in a country where emotions, loyalties, even love are dictated by an external authority, not by the truth you feel.
‘They will tempt you with their certainties,’ she tells her son. ‘Their truths will have the appearance of the hardest rock, the toughest steel. They will build their positions out of the impeccable logic of their Marxist-Leninist arguments, which they don’t understand – they can only repeat what they have been told to say, the ideology that has outlawed doubt, where every piece fits tightly with its neighbour.’
She sees his white face, the deep, black shadows under his eyes, she sees him growing older before her. She has always known that one day this moment would come when she would have to tell him the truth.
‘You cannot fight that,’ she says, ‘not one person against this edifice of power. Nor should you try. But quietly and secretly within yourself, you must resist it. You must learn, too,
how to be patient.’
‘Does that mean there are two truths?’ he asks.
‘No,’ she says, ‘there is only one truth. But sometimes, often, that truth must be hidden. You must learn to distinguish between the apparent and the real.’
‘Then we live with lies,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We live with lies because we accept as truth what we know cannot be true. We betray ourselves with each lie we tell, but knowing that doesn’t stop us doing it, day after day.’
‘Why do we have to live like that?’
‘That is how we survive.’
Tell him the truth, a voice screams within her. Tell him everything you know, everything you have wanted to tell him for years. Surely he is old enough now? Surely he has a right to know? Tell him.
But she can’t. She hasn’t the strength. She cannot bring herself to tell him what she so desperately wants him to know.
‘Why are we made to live like that?’ he asks her.
‘If I knew the answer to that I would tell you,’ she says. ‘How can a belief in social justice, in the equality of men, how can all that is good in theory become so perverted in reality? The doctrines which govern our lives ignore that men are weak, that power corrupts. Soviet man has banished weakness, ideology transforms his nature. That is what we are taught. Never that men will always seek power, that they will adopt whatever philosophy they must to achieve power over others. It is the truth we are afraid to acknowledge.’
‘Is it hard to live like that?’ he asks quietly.
‘The double life is a struggle that never ends. It will not prevent you from making compromises, some of which, many of which, perhaps, you will be ashamed of. But it will allow you to live, it will teach you an inner patience while you wait for better days. Always hope, even in moments of greatest despair – especially then. Always believe there can be another kind of life and that one day it will come.’
(Is that what she did? Were there not moments of despair when, in the safety of her imagination, she flew to the side of her secret lover for his protection?)
‘Look at this,’ he says, showing her an exercise book lying open on the bed.
Making Enemies Page 6