Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  ‘You’re not running away?’

  ‘As matter of fact I come to Cambridge to see you.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine you were aware of my existence until today.’

  ‘Yes, we know of Professor Stevens in Soviet Union.’ Krasov grinned. ‘Not widely, you understand, but where it matters.’

  ‘I’m flattered. But that doesn’t explain your presence here.’

  ‘I am messenger. I bring greetings from old Russian friend.’

  ‘Do I have any old Russian friends?’

  ‘Ruth Marchenko,’ he said. ‘Isn’t she your friend?’

  Stevens was stunned. ‘Is she alive?’

  ‘I am told she was few days ago. Of course, in Soviet Union, in few days, much can change.’ Again the grin.

  Ruth Marchenko.

  How can he describe that moment? It was like a huge rush of water bursting through a door that had remained tightly shut for years. The past rushed out at him, throwing him off balance with its roaring flood of memories.

  ‘So, you remember her?’ Krasov asked.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘She will be pleased. She was afraid you forget her.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Quite well, I think.’

  ‘How have you come across her?’

  Krasov smiled. ‘Marchenko is my friend also. We grow up together. We are neighbours. Our parents are friends. She is good woman, always good to me. Clever too. She is nuclear physicist but you know that already.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘We have not seen each other for sixteen years.’

  ‘She lives in Moscow with her mother and son.’

  ‘She has a son?’

  ‘Sure. Her husband was engineer, like me. I was trained as engineer, you know. Husband is dead. She works on secret project at the Institute of Nuclear Research. She has good reputation in Soviet Union.’

  ‘She is well?’

  ‘I think, yes. We have shortages, worse than here. Marchenko is lucky, she is scientist, she has privileged life.’

  ‘Yet something is not well,’ Stevens said, ‘and you are here to tell me about it. Am I right?’

  Krasov looked at him over the rim of his glass. ‘I am happy you understand,’ he said. ‘Yes, Marchenko has problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘Her life is in danger.’

  ‘In danger from what?’

  ‘I will need a little more whisky before I can tell you that,’ Krasov said, handing his glass to Stevens.

  *

  ‘What did he tell you about me?’ she asks.

  He describes how she stood up at the monthly progress meeting to ask her questions; how a group under her leadership presented a list of demands to the Institute’s directorate; how she and her colleagues matched the directorate’s failure to reply with a progressive slowing down of the work on the Soviet nuclear bomb, until nothing was done.

  ‘He told me that, almost single-handed, you brought the Soviet nuclear programme to a halt,’ Stevens replies. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘More or less,’ she answers.

  ‘You must have been very brave.’

  She is not listening to him. Wait, she wants to say. This is the story I came to Helsinki to tell you but what Krasov told you is not my story. Wait. It is like her story but it is not what happened. Krasov gave Stevens the version he was instructed to tell. How is he connected to the Institute? Who is telling him what is going on? Why? What is happening?

  Who told Krasov to go to Cambridge to speak to Stevens? Krasov is taking instructions from someone, that is obvious. Someone unknown who knows about her. She doubts it is Andropov but if not Andropov, who? Maybe there is some other purpose at work now, a secret agenda she does not understand but which frightens her. Maybe Krasov is working against her. That is what distresses her. Her oldest friend, Little Krasov, whom she has always trusted, is betraying her, and, hanging over everything, who are they after: her or Stevens?

  She wants to stop Stevens telling her anything more, she wants to say to him, don’t believe any of this, it is an invention, a trap, all lies. There is no truth any more, it is lost, obliterated, forgotten. Krasov lied to you. I was acting on instructions. Nothing is what it seems.

  Listen, the voice inside her says. Listen to what he tells you. Let him finish. You may learn something. If Stevens is in danger, then you must help him. If you are in danger, then you may help yourself. Remember those who depend on you.

  ‘Krasov told me,’ Stevens said, ‘that you and your colleagues feared the continuing silence of the political authorities to your opposition. With each day that passed you became more sure that when they did react to your refusal to work, they would do so repressively. They would arrest you, try you secretly and execute you. That was the message you had asked Krasov to come to Cambridge to give me. I was your last resort. Am I right?’

  Before she can answer his question there is something she must know first.

  ‘When did Little Krasov come to Cambridge?’ she asks. ‘What month?’

  ‘January.’

  January?

  ‘Can you remember the exact date?’

  He takes out his red leather university diary that she remembers so well.

  ‘It was the day of the Governing Body. January the ninth.’

  ‘The ninth?’

  ‘What does that tell you?’ he asks.

  That was at least a week before she had asked her question at the monthly progress meeting. Ten days before the secret committee was formed. How did Krasov know everything before it had happened?

  ‘I asked my question at the monthly progress meeting on January the eighteenth. The events that Little Krasov described to you had not yet happened on the day that he told you about them.’

  ‘Good God.’ Stevens stares at her.

  ‘He was lying to you. What his purpose was, I don’t know.’

  ‘Did what he described happen?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘But later.’

  ‘Days later, yes.’

  ‘Krasov said he was your friend.’

  ‘Until I heard what you told me, he was my friend.’

  ‘Tell me what happened at the Institute. You and your colleagues refused to work on your nuclear bomb programme. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On what grounds did you refuse?’

  How can she answer that? She refused because she was instructed to do so by Andropov. She feared the consequences if she did not obey. Only later (how much later?) did she come to believe the arguments that he gave her; only then did the cause whose script he had written become her own. How can she explain that conversion to Stevens?

  ‘A number of us who were working on the bomb had become aware of the possible consequences of what we were doing,’ she says. ‘It was a slow process, it didn’t happen all at once. We studied the effects of the American bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We created models predicting the effects of explosions of different sizes of nuclear bomb. We came to understand the implications of the work we were involved in.’

  ‘So you acted on your beliefs,’ he says.

  What choice did I have? she wants to say. At that time she had no beliefs – they came later.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, not sure if she’s telling the truth.

  ‘Krasov said your life was in danger. Was that true?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘You aren’t certain?’

  ‘It was a strange time. Nothing happened as we expected it to. We made our protest and there was no reaction. Only silence.’

  ‘Krasov made a good case. He convinced me.’

  ‘I had no knowledge that Krasov was coming to Cambridge to see you, nor that he knew anything about what was happening at the Institute.’

  ‘Then why did he tell me that he was speaking on your behalf?’

  Someone must have told him about Le
iden, she wants to say. Why can’t Stevens see this? Have the years taught him nothing about the ways of the world?

  ‘If I knew I would tell you. He is the agent of someone – who that someone is, I do not know. What they want I do not know. Krasov and his masters were using me without my knowledge. I am sorry that you believed him.’

  ‘If I hadn’t been convinced, I wouldn’t be here now. At least we have that to thank him for. He has brought us together again.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ she said. ‘We did not choose to meet like this.’

  *

  ‘She is a brave woman,’ Krasov said. ‘But you know that already.’

  ‘Will she survive?’ Stevens asked.

  ‘How do I know?’ There was an unexpected coldness in his voice which disturbed Stevens.

  ‘I suspect you know a great deal more than you are telling me,’ Stevens said.

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘You want me to say yes, but how do I know if such an answer is right? What if I say yes and I am wrong?’

  ‘Tell me what you think.’

  ‘Without your help, no, I doubt she will live much longer.’

  ‘What kind of help?’

  ‘You must make it impossible for the authorities to execute her.’

  ‘How would you suggest I do that?’

  ‘You must defend her.’

  ‘I’m a scientist, Krasov, not a lawyer.’

  ‘You write in newspaper. So, write about Marchenko. Tell the world what she and the others are doing. How brave they are to risk their lives to bring peace. You have contacts in Government. Remind them not all Russians have lost their conscience. You know scientists from other Western countries who agree with these views. Tell them about Marchenko and her crusade. Get them to join their voices to yours. Raise your voices loud enough, all of you, and our leaders may hear. Whisper and they never will. Do you understand what I am asking? Is important message.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Will happen as I say. Her life is in your hands. Ah, here is your son calling us to eat.’

  15

  DANNY

  It was much later when the singing began. We had eaten by then and were in the sitting room, sprawled before a blazing fire, the remains of a bottle of claret within reach. We had exhausted politics; whether or not the country would run out of coal before this bitter winter ended; how best to supplement a ration-book diet; and a philosophical discussion on the state of the post-war world. My father’s unexplained excitement had cooled.

  Perhaps it was the presence of the piano that drew Krasov back into memories of his past. He stood by it for a long time before he played a note or two. No one said anything. Then he sat down, stretched his fingers and played a chord. Then another. He bent low over the keyboard, his eyes tightly shut, and started to sing to himself.

  It was a truly Russian song, he explained, full of boldness and pathos, happiness and grief. Something precious, youthful love at its most extreme, was found and then lost. As we listened, the darkness around us was filled with the events of the song. We saw reapers in the field, among them a young peasant boy, tall and blond, and beside him a girl. All day long he works beside her, inspired by her beauty. At sunset, as the reapers drift away from the field, he declares his love. But as she looks up to take his kiss, a gypsy rides by, his black hair flowing in the wind, his gold earrings glinting in the dying sun. One call of her name and she has slipped from the boy’s arms and is gone, lost in the night. The young farmhand’s heart lies broken like the stalks of corn he holds in his hands.

  It was an extraordinary performance, dramatic and powerful, and we clapped him when he had finished. For a moment, in the half-light, I saw my father’s face strangely contorted as he listened to this song of love that might have been. Krasov bowed and thanked us, claiming his singing was without merit. He refused to sing any more, saying that songs about his mother country filled him with memories that only made him sad.

  It was my father who suggested Rogers and Hart. He had an unexpected passion for popular music, and no voice at all. But Celia could sing and my father asked her to do so now, if Krasov would play. Celia hummed the tune, Krasov picked up the chords. She smiled at him and broke into a song.

  Krasov took up the melody and played a soft accompaniment to her quiet alto, catching her phrasing, echoing it, leading her carefully through the music. He had only to hear the melodic line once to be able to improvise with chords and occasional trills, to catch the bitter-sweet mood of the songs.

  Celia’s voice was not strong but Krasov’s presence, his sympathetic accompaniment, his musicality, gave her a confidence I had not seen before. She seemed to be singing for my father, and the sound of her voice was slowly drawing from him the anxiety whose symptoms he had displayed so strongly earlier in the evening.

  For a time I thought there was more to it than that, a deeper and more personal message. I sensed Celia was singing for my father alone; Krasov and I were forgotten or ignored. It was like listening unobserved to an intimate conversation. With each line she was declaring her love, as if instinctively she knew she had to win my father back, letting the words of the song say what she could find no other way to say. Only later, when I asked myself why she felt she had needed to do this, did my reason prevail and I rejected my memory as fanciful and wrong. Celia and my father were happy. There was no reason to suggest any threat to their marriage.

  We stayed like that until the logs in the fireplace had become glowing ash. Krasov closed the piano, smiled and thanked Celia for her kindness to him. He bowed to my father, kissed Celia’s hand and went up to bed.

  By the following morning he had got it into his head that his pursuers were on his track and knew where he was. He insisted he had to leave at once. Cambridge was no longer safe. He would return to London where Monty would know what to do with him. He must leave now, this minute, he was sorry, please, we should try to understand.

  Bewildered, we watched him go, a small dark figure outlined sharply against the snow.

  PART TWO

  1

  MONTY

  Krasov’s appearance shocked me; he was pale and nervous. My confident drinking companion had vanished. In his place I saw a man frightened and bemused, no longer sporting the bravado which had been for so long his trademark.

  Things were bad and worse threatened, he told me, desperately clinging on to my arm. He could not go back to Moscow because he now knew they would kill him. When I asked him why, all he would say was that there were reasons. He refused to elaborate. I tried to persuade him not to be so melodramatic but he wouldn’t listen. I was his friend, he said. We had good times together. I must protect him. He needed somewhere to hide. Now. At once. Before it was too late.

  The tightening pressure on my arm banished any hope of arguing him out of his position. We couldn’t stand at the cab rank all day. Whether I believed him or not (I wasn’t sure but on balance I didn’t), what mattered was that to Krasov his fear was real. If I was his friend (and I was) I had to help him.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure you’re safe for the present. Then we’ll decide what to do about you.’

  Looking at the neurotic figure beside me in the taxi (he crouched on the floor for the entire journey), I knew I had taken a huge risk in choosing loyalty to a friend over loyalty to the Department. I justified my action by telling myself it was only a matter of time before Krasov in this mood (unlike anything I’d experienced before) asked for political asylum. I was sure Krasov’s defection would deal a significant blow to Soviet self-esteem and be a feather in SOVINT’S cap. A sense of elation overcame my foreboding.

  The flat in Lowndes Square wasn’t an official safe house but somewhere to be used in emergencies. Krasov’s first act on entering was to pull the curtains. I opened them again and gave him his instructions. He was not to keep the curtains undrawn after dark, nor to draw them before it was dark.
(It was now midday.) If he played the wireless, then it was to be played quietly. Not to answer the telephone, except at times agreed with me: I made him memorize the hours when I would call him and the procedure I would use. He was not to answer the door unless he heard the signal first. We agreed the times I would come in to check he was all right. On no account was he to go out for any reason at all. Secretly I decided to put a twenty-four-hour watch on the building.

  ‘How shall I eat?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s enough food here for a week,’ I said, ‘even for someone with your outrageous appetite.’

  ‘Thank you, my friend,’ Krasov said solemnly, as I finished the tour of the apartment. ‘You are saving my life.’

  ‘I’m giving you a breathing space,’ I said. ‘Nobody knows where you are. For now you’re safe.’

  ‘Maybe I am too much trouble,’ he said gloomily. ‘Maybe I change my mind and give myself up.’

  To whom? The Russians? Why was he running away from them? Why on earth had he gone to Cambridge? What had he done that put his life in danger? There were any number of questions to which I wanted answers but for the moment Krasov was in no mood to provide them.

  ‘You’ve got thirty-six hours to think about that,’ I said firmly. ‘For the moment, you’re safe. Be grateful for that.’

  ‘Safety,’ he said. ‘That is concept hard to imagine.’

  I left him trying to do just that.

  *

  Krasov had arrived in London as Hitler began his ill-starred invasion of Russia. At stake was the route through the Urals and the Caucasus to the rich oilfields of the Middle East. Stalingrad was the gate through which the Germans had to pass if they were to gain this prize. We saw our fate in the hands of the Russians, and over the succeeding weeks, as we followed the fortunes of this extraordinary battle, our alliance with the Soviet Union was at its strongest. From the sidelines we prayed the German advance would be stopped but feared it wouldn’t. Then in February, the battle finally over, we cheered the victory and toasted every Russian we knew.