Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  ‘My friends, meet each other and be happy. Leonid Krasov. Daniel Stevens.’ He took our hands and joined them in his own ceremony of greeting.

  Krasov’s eyes were black and heavy lidded and much too large for his face. He looked up at me and smiled, holding me in his gaze as he held on to my hand.

  ‘I have known this man for years,’ Krasov said to me. ‘Why do I not hear of you till now?’

  His voice was a luxurious bass impaired by a slight hesitation which broke his sentences into irregular rhythms. It was either a speech impediment or a self-conscious mannerism, born perhaps of an innate caution that allowed him time to choose the right word.

  ‘Some secrets, Leo, I keep even from you.’

  Krasov was a journalist, stationed in London, Monty had told me. He worked for Tass, the Soviet news agency. They had met during the war and become friends. If Krasov was a communist, he appeared to have kept his ideology well away from Monty.

  ‘You see,’ Krasov explained, ‘to Russian, friendship is gift. If we believed in God, we would say it was gift from heaven.’

  He held his glass towards us. ‘To friendship.’

  We toasted each other.

  ‘Tonight,’ Krasov said, ‘tonight you see before you gloomy Russian.’

  ‘You Russians are always gloomy,’ Monty said. ‘The more you drink the gloomier you become. You know the story about Igor and Tatiana? Igor and Tatiana want to get married but the war is still on and they are worried about the future. “I may not be alive in a year’s time,” says Igor. “Oh, Igor” says Tatiana. “You are such an optimist.”’ Monty roared with laughter at his own joke and once more heads turned towards the table.

  ‘If you were born Russian,’ Krasov said, ‘you would be gloomy too.’

  ‘The war is over, Leo. We won, remember? There are reasons to be happy.’

  ‘It is peace that frightens me.’ Any self-mockery in his voice had vanished. Monty caught the change of mood at once.

  ‘Are they threatening to send you back to Moscow?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. There are new men at embassy. I think they do not like me.’

  ‘Have they said anything to you?’ Monty asked. Krasov shook his head. ‘Made any move at all?’ Another shake of the head. ‘Then there’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘They are more subtle than you think, Monty.’

  ‘You people? Subtle?’ Monty roared in disbelief. ‘You Russians couldn’t hide a scone in a tea shop.’

  ‘They follow me. They are outside now, this minute, as a matter of fact. At first I thought it was your people, until I heard them speaking Russian. I am used to them now, in fact we are almost comrades. They do not try concealment. They want me to know they watch me night and day. Something is going on and I do not know what it is.’

  ‘What can I do, Leo?’ Monty leaned across the table, his voice conspiratorial.

  ‘You, Monty?’ Krasov laughed bitterly. ‘You can fill my glass, tell me world is better place, and when I am gone you and Danny can drink to my memory.’

  ‘I’ll stop those bastards.’ Monty had got to his feet. Krasov put out a restraining arm and smiled at me.

  ‘I love this man. World is black and white to him. He kisses you on cheek or hits you on jaw.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can do?’ I asked.

  Krasov shrugged his shoulders. The gesture made him look even smaller. ‘I have been in London too long. They fear I become soft. This is probably true. They are reminding me that I am Soviet citizen and they are making sure that when order comes to return to Moscow, I will obey.’

  ‘Will you do what they tell you?’ I asked.

  ‘What choice do I have? I am Soviet citizen. If I am not wanted here, I cannot stay.’

  ‘Come on, Leo. You can’t go back to Moscow,’ Monty said. ‘Not after the years you’ve spent here. You wouldn’t last a minute.’

  ‘I have had good life here. Why should it not end now?’

  ‘Because it can’t.’ Monty brought his fist down on the table and the glasses and cutlery danced. ‘Because I won’t let it happen.’

  I had been watching Krasov eat. For a diminutive man, his appetite was astonishing. He reached across with his fork to spear a roast potato on the side of Monty’s plate.

  ‘To Russians,’ Krasov said, turning to me, ‘fate is immutable force. This man does not believe in fate. That is how I know he is not Russian.’

  Suddenly Monty turned on Krasov.

  ‘You bastard. They’ve told you, haven’t they? They’ve recalled you. You know you’re going home.’

  Krasov was silent.

  ‘All this is play-acting, isn’t it? The farewell scene, only I’m not to know. That way you can slip out of my life without saying goodbye. Goddamnit, Leo. That’s not fair.’

  Krasov shrugged his shoulders. ‘What can I say?’

  ‘Bastards.’

  Krasov leaned towards me. ‘Monty, when he is like this, can be forgetful. Would you tell him that he has not yet ordered pudding? You laugh, but I have weakness for your English custard, poured over jam tart. I would like some now, please.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can do?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Of course there is,’ Monty said. ‘He can stay here.’

  ‘I am not spy,’ Krasov said. ‘I have no information to sell. I am journalist. You have enough journalists already in West.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘And I do not believe in capitalism. I believe West is doomed. Socialism will triumph, you will see.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Leo. You don’t believe that rubbish any more than I do.’

  Krasov leaned towards me again. ‘I see you are not touching your tart,’ he said. ‘It would be shame to waste it.’ He pushed his empty plate towards me and took mine.

  ‘Your appetite’s indecent,’ Monty said.

  ‘I only eat when I am unhappy,’ Krasov answered.

  The evening drew to an inconclusive end, Monty increasingly silent because of his distress, Krasov becoming gloomier the more he drank. It was nearly midnight when we stood in the street.

  ‘Show me the bastards,’ Monty said, ‘I’ll fix them for you.’

  Krasov put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Do not give them satisfaction of knowing we have talked about them.’

  He smiled up at Monty. ‘Au revoir, my friend.’ He turned to me. ‘Next time we have jollier evening, yes?’ We shook hands.

  ‘What next time?’ Monty said.

  ‘Maybe we will meet in heaven. If there is one.’

  He smiled briefly and bowed. Then he was gone.

  10

  RUTH

  Along the vertical line of the graph are the percentage values of those killed, marked in descending order from a hundred per cent at the top, through eighty, sixty, forty, twenty per cent to nought at the bottom. The horizontal line is marked in kilometres, ranging from nought on the left to five on the right. The description reads: ‘Distance from the hypocentre.’ The line on the graph joins a series of dots starting in the top left-hand corner and swooping downward in a slow curve, showing that most deaths occur within two kilometres of the explosion, but that a tail of deaths continues between two and a half and four and a half kilometres.

  The graph ignores the lingering impact of radiation and the slow deaths that spread outwards. This is a measurement of the impact of a single nuclear bomb on its target.

  One bomb.

  What are the lessons to be drawn? Survival in an atomic attack depends entirely on distance from the centre of the explosion. The force of a nuclear device covers areas vastly greater than traditional bombs. There can no longer be any distinction between military and civilian dead. What she is looking at is a mathematical representation of the indiscriminate nature of mass slaughter, the work of a man-made machine of death which, when exploded, deals out a greater destructive power than any weapon before it.

  She remembers the awesome statistics she has read of the effects of the ex
plosions in both Japanese cities.

  Hiroshima. 6 August 1945. 78,000 dead. 13,000 missing. 37,000 wounded. Three-fifths of the city destroyed. Nagasaki. 9 August 1945. 70,000 killed. Nearly half the city destroyed. Vaporized bodies. Melted eyes and skin. Burned-out humanity.

  And still the poison spreads, the slow dying continues, the aftershock of the explosion casts its deadly shadow far into the future. Parents to their children, born and unborn, perhaps to their children’s children. How long will it go on?

  The spread of destruction and death terrifies her. Why should a single graph have a greater impact on her than photographs and newsreels and the graphic accounts of survivors? Because this is her territory: clinical, neutral, the unchallengeable verdict of mathematics.

  How long will it go on? Here, on her notepad, are the mathematical implications of a much larger nuclear chain reaction. She has carefully calculated the size of the explosion, its destructive power and the area over which it will work its devastation. These are her precise, accurate marks, black ink on a white page. These are her numbers, innocent in their ordinariness but terrifying in their meaning. Why should the chain reaction ever end? Why should it not go on and on until there is nothing left to destroy? She remembers what Miskin said when they were at the river … the earth would become a desert, human life would become extinct‚ and for the first time she understands what they are dealing with. She shivers. There is no one in the lab with her. She is quite alone. She looks at the photograph of her son in a simple wooden frame on her desk, and feels again the flutter of fear in her.

  11

  DANNY

  I found Ridout sitting in a wheelchair beside his bed in an almost deserted ward. It was, unusually, a clear morning as I walked along the polished linoleum floors of the corridors at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, pale winter sunlight pouring in through the windows and falling across the line of empty beds waiting for the sick to be delivered.

  ‘Philip?’ Ridout’s eyes opened and he looked at me, startled. ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting anybody this morning, that’s all.’

  He seemed neither awake nor asleep but lost in some world of his own.

  ‘May I stay for few minutes?’

  ‘There’s a chair somewhere. You’ll have to fetch it yourself. Despite this contraption, I’m less than mobile. Someone has to push me if I’m to move.’

  I hadn’t seen Ridout since my last visit to Cambridge, a few months after the end of the war. He had been well then, wholly absorbed in the physics that was his life. Despite his shyness, there was an energy about him, a suppressed force that I had to admire. Now I saw a shrunken, shrivelled figure, all signs of youth gone; grey-faced, skin transparent, his whole frame was brittle with disease. The overwhelming impression was of life retreating into a redoubt from where it would make a last and desperate stand against the cancer, before giving way to the inevitable.

  I found a chair and sat beside him. He summoned what little energy remained within him.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Dying, slowly but surely.’ I was unprepared for the challenge in his voice. ‘Have you come to take a look?’

  ‘I’ve seen enough men die not to need that,’ I said.

  ‘The trouble with a fatal illness,’ he said apologetically, ‘is that watching yourself deteriorate allows you time to become very self-centred. At least if you’re hit by a bullet you’ve little or no chance to think about what’s happening to you, whether you want the process to speed up or slow down. It’s all over in a flash, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you’re lucky, yes.’

  I could understand his anger. The one thought we took with us into battle was that if it was to happen, pray God it was quick. Ridout had already been in hospital for ten weeks and was quite able to monitor his own progressive physical decline. It was not his mind but his body that was failing him. I could well understand why he was still unreconciled to what had happened.

  ‘If the mind went at the same time as the body, things might be easier,’ he said. ‘But from experience I can tell you it doesn’t. That’s where the trouble starts.’

  He struggled to change his position in the wheelchair. The blanket fell off his knees. I picked it up and tucked it back for him, feeling the sharpness of his bones as I did so.

  ‘It’s good of you to come. Your father told me you were home on leave. I’m sure you have better things to do than sit here with me. How’s Berlin?’

  I told him about our difficulties with the Russians. To my surprise the subject appeared to interest him. Briefly, something resembling the force of the past was rekindled within him.

  ‘That’s where your father and I disagree. He believes in the good sense of the Russian people. I say there’s no such thing. He sees it as a political restraint on their gangster leadership. I tell him he’s misguided. He’s optimistic about the future. He sees the Russians freeing themselves from tyranny and I don’t. The leadership is brutal, the people are exhausted. In a society without restraint, there’s nothing you can trust. I’m right but he won’t see it. Good sense, if it ever existed, vanished the moment Lenin came to power.’

  He looked at me and tried to smile, the reddish creases on his dry skin looking as if they were about to crack.

  ‘The Russians respect brute force. Until we can meet them on equal terms they won’t listen to us and there’ll be precious little chance of a continued peace. I can’t die while there are still so many technical problems to be solved. That’s what keeps me going. We have to build our own bomb, and the sooner the better.’

  He wiped his lips with a handkerchief. ‘Would you mind fetching me some water, please? Talking makes me dry.’

  I gave him a glass. He drank from it slowly, then handed it back to me.

  He said: ‘I think your father has developed doubts about the rightness of what we are doing because of my illness. Although he has never said anything, I think he believes that if we had not conducted certain experiments, perhaps I would not be in here now. I think he is using my illness to question the whole idea of the nuclear bomb. That’s the biggest mistake we can make. If we slow down now, if we hesitate for any reason, we’ll lose the race. Then who can guess the consequences?’

  That was the clue Celia was looking for. Philip’s illness had deeply disturbed my father. It had upset his confidence and caused him (a new experience) to question the rightness of his work on the atomic bomb and its successor, the superbomb. His moodiness and withdrawal were the external signs of his struggle with the dilemma he faced.

  Ridout smiled again at me, showing his teeth and the raw, red gums. ‘If you think that the knowledge that you’re dying brings with it a sense of acceptance, you should banish such sentimentality at once.’

  At that moment the flame flickered and started to go out. Its suddenness was like a curtain going down. The look of exhaustion on his face was total.

  ‘Tell your father to listen to what I’m saying. I haven’t got long left now, a few weeks, who knows? But I’m going to hang on till we’ve completed the next stage. There’s work to be done and he’s got to help me. We have to make this bomb. Tell him that, will you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He nodded at me in acknowledgement. ‘We are at odds, he and I, over this issue. I shouldn’t like to die unreconciled.’

  *

  ‘We’ve not met,’ the voice on the telephone said, ‘but we’ve friends in common. Simon Watson-Jones. Ring a bell? Good. I was having a bite with Simon today and he was telling me how much he enjoyed chatting to you the other night. He’d like to see more of you. I’m sure you two have lots to talk about.’

  I couldn’t remember saying more than hello and goodbye to Watson-Jones that evening. I was sure we’d never got into conversation. I was also sure I wasn’t being sounded out. I was being instructed.

  ‘Give him a bell at the House, old boy. He’d be so pleased.’

  To my surprise Watson-Jones recognized my na
me at once when I telephoned him.

  ‘You got my message. Good.’ Did I have time for a drink one evening? Then home for a spot of dinner. Nothing formal. His wife Meredith might be there if she was up in town, perhaps one or two chums. It would be fun. Wednesday at six? Splendid. Meet at the House.

  Two days later I waited in the lobby of the House of Commons while a clerk telephoned his office. I hoped I would see faces I recognized, men and women who had shaped our destiny, but there was no one around I could put a name to. But I felt the invisible engine of power throbbing around me, I could hear it in the busy echo of footsteps on the stone floor as people crossed and recrossed the lobby, formed groups, talked and broke up again; I saw it in the self-absorption on their faces so clearly telling us how important were the issues in which they were involved. How distant seemed the world I came from. Perhaps that is what makes politics so attractive. The thing over which you hold power is out of sight and out of earshot.

  ‘Danny. Good to see you.’

  Watson-Jones appeared from nowhere, smiling and holding out his hand. I had forgotten how tall he was.

  ‘Come along.’

  He led me to the Members’ bar. He ordered drinks and we sat down at a table by the window. The room was almost empty but when he spoke, Watson-Jones’s voice was hardly above a whisper.

  ‘A little bird tells me,’ he said in a confidential tone, ‘that Berlin might be losing its attraction.’

  ‘I hate Berlin,’ I said. ‘I always have done. It’s a scrap heap.’

  ‘Then why stay there?’

  ‘If that’s where the army chooses to send me, that’s where I go.’

  ‘Yours not to reason why,’ he said.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘What if,’ he said, and paused. He knew how to make the most of an effect, even with an audience of one. ‘What if there was an opportunity to leave Berlin and do something that had nothing to do with the army?’

  ‘Return to Civvy Street?’