Buoyed up by their success, they agree to meet again. She does not remember what they said at their first meeting, only the excitement of their discussion. She herself has said little.
The next time four have become nine. There is hardly room for them in the flat. Her eyes and throat burn from the smoke of their cigarettes. She does not have enough glasses. Three of them have to drink vodka from cups.
‘If the risks of meeting like this are to be justified,’ says Leon Gromsky, ‘and if we are to consolidate the position Ruth Marchenko has so courageously set up for us, then these gatherings must have some purpose. I propose a statement of aims.’
Andropov has already prepared her for this.
‘Establish the common ground between you. It is important, at this stage, that first you talk, get used to each other. Then organize yourselves, make plans. There will be time for action later:’
She encourages them to talk. ‘First we must organize ourselves,’ she says. ‘There will be time for action later.’
They are impressed by her wisdom.
Pavel Lykowski, whose youthful face conceals the most brilliant mind in the Institute, smiles at the possibility of future action. She wishes he would drink less at these meetings but she does not know how to broach the subject without sounding like his mother. She knows Pavel dislikes his mother.
Led by Alexei Tomasov, a researcher in her department, they agree the need for an agenda. What topics should they discuss? Prompted by her meeting with Andropov the night before (or was it earlier that morning?), she proposes they begin by discussing the implications of the scale of destruction caused by the explosions in Japan.
The importance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she tells them, is that they provide the only available evidence of the impact of nuclear explosions on concentrated areas of social and economic activity. (Why can’t she says ‘towns’ or ‘cities’? What’s happening to her?) They have never before discussed among themselves the possible consequences on the civilian population of a nuclear explosion. If the information and analysis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are correct (and they have no reasons to doubt the official reports, copies of which are in the Institute’s library), then they are involved in a process that could lead to the deaths of many thousands of innocent people. A nuclear bomb is by its very nature indiscriminate.
Two meetings later the possibility of casualties from a single bomb has grown from a few thousand to millions in a war in which the exchange of nuclear weapons lasts only a few hours. Civilians will die, they agree, in increasing numbers because nuclear destruction cannot discriminate between military and civilian targets.
What can they do? They agree that, on the basis of the projections they are making, using the empirical evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they cannot remain indifferent in the face of the appalling truth that they now openly acknowledge to each other.
‘Organize,’ Gromsky says, echoing Andropov’s words. ‘Now is the time to organize.’ (Organization is the Soviet solution to any circumstance.)
‘And change the world,’ Elizabeth Markarova whispers knowingly to Ruth. Is this cynicism? The voice of weary experience? Or a new-found belief?
There are murmurs of assent. No one knows what this means but it sounds right. It is what people in their position ought to be saying to each other.
‘Create a movement, subvert and oppose, above all oppose,’ someone says (who? Gromsky? Probably).
‘Stop the murder of innocent people,’ Lykowski shouts in support at this point. ‘Change for ever the nuclear policy of the Soviet Union.’
He is hastily subdued by Tomasov and Gromsky, who are aware of Ruth’s concerns about arousing the neighbours. Others take up the idea. Warn the world of the dangers it faces. Make a better, safer world. Banish nuclear weapons. Banish war. Nuclear energy as the servant of society, not its destroyer. They are carried away by their own enthusiasm and the vodka that they have brought, concealed in the folds of their overcoats, as they paint the future of their dreams.
Say no. Say no. We must teach the world how to say no.
Ruth is alarmed. They continue to talk and drink. In their heads they are fighting a war and winning. In reality, she sees this event running away with itself. What began as a lone voice of protest only a few days ago has grown with alarming speed into a rebellion that is straining to free itself of her (or of any) control. The conventional reserve which dictated the initial actions of herself and her colleagues has been discarded in favour of a reckless openness within the group that has formed around her. Sooner or later a careless word or an undisciplined act will betray them. She fears the brutal response of the secret police to any talk of opposition. She tells Andropov of her anxieties.
‘Hold them back,’ he says urgently. ‘You must exercise control over them. That is your essential task now. You must succeed.’
This is the moment of greatest risk in his plan, when he is dependent solely on her to achieve what he wants. She feels inadequate and desperate. There is no one she can turn to. She tries her best to bring them back to reality.
‘Courage,’ her companions say, defying her efforts. They are beyond the reach of argument by now. ‘We will win.’
‘We will be betrayed,’ she says. She reminds them of the powers of the secret police whose spies surround them.
They laugh at her fears. The secret police are buffoons, they reply. We will outwit them. Their task is of major importance, Gromsky tells her (he is drunk). They alone can save the world from destruction. That has become their mission. In their own country, they will be listened to because their skills as nuclear scientists cannot be replaced.
‘Where are the other nuclear scientists in the Soviet Union?’ Tomasov asks. ‘Without us they can do nothing’. They will tell the state what to do and the state will have to obey. What a bargaining position. ‘We are inviolate.’
Ruth knows, as they do, that other institutes are working on the bomb too. They are not inviolate. Far from it. She cannot hold them back, she tells Andropov. She bursts into tears of strain and despair.
‘It is time to form a committee,’ Andropov instructs. ‘Give them a world they can understand. They are the creatures of committees. They will respond.’
Elizabeth Markarova is her ally. She whispers to Ruth one day in the ladies’ lavatory, ‘We must form a committee.’ They agree that discipline must be imposed or the advantage they have gained will be lost; their energies will be wasted through disorganization, which is no doubt what the political authorities expect. With Markarova’s help, during a difficult meeting, a committee is formed. Votes are taken. Roles are assigned. Energies that threatened to get out of hand are now channelled. There is even an ‘agitation secretary’, a concession to the possibility of future action. The vote goes against Pavel Lykowski for this role. He is inconsolable. Slowly some kind of order is restored. Ruth’s anxieties diminish.
Further meetings are planned, other venues chosen. No longer will they risk always meeting at her apartment. A strategy paper will be presented, Gromsky says – he is now political secretary. The drafting has begun but like so much Soviet activity, it is already behind schedule. When completed, it will be discussed and agreed and will form the basis of the demands that they will put before the Institute’s directorate.
There is heated discussion at this point and the committee threatens to divide into two camps, those who believe they must plan each stage with care, and the hotheads (Ruth is surprised that Tomasov supports Lykowski in this), who are all for action now. What action is unclear, but anything to keep the cause alive. Prudent counsels prevail.
Ruth is elected Comrade Chairman, an honour she tries to decline. Elizabeth Markarova deserves that honour, she argues. They will have none of it: her candidacy is put to the vote and she wins. The event now has a momentum of its own. She sees a new excitement in the faces of her companions, she senses the pitch of the emotions in their hearts, she feels the extraordinary energies that have been release
d.
She remains untouched by everything she says and hears. She performs her role for Andropov faultlessly. She feels hollow, empty and vulnerable. She is giving the performance of her life because she knows her life depends upon it.
*
He is taking her on a journey but where to she doesn’t know and he does not tell her.
He arrives at their midnight meetings without papers (never even a briefcase) and he hands her none. He allows her to take no written notes. He insists they both commit everything to memory.
‘There must be no evidence,’ he says, ‘to prove that these conversations have ever taken place.’
At each meeting he reveals the next stage in his complex design, the shape of which she cannot comprehend. It is like unfolding a map an inch at a time. Each day she knows the distance she has travelled, but she is denied a sense of direction or destination. He tells her what she needs to know, not what she wants to know. She has tried questioning him but he refuses to answer her. Now she has given that up. She accepts.
The routine has become predictable. He asks her to describe the latest activity of her ‘group’, as he calls it. Where did they meet? Who was there? Who said what? What decisions have they taken? This irritates her because she is certain he already knows what has gone on (she cannot bring herself to believe that he hasn’t got an informant on the committee). Perhaps he asks for her account to test her commitment to him. She hates it but there is nothing she can do.
Then he gives her a prepared position for the next meeting and they rehearse the arguments. She dislikes the sublimation of her own identity that this act demands but she has travelled too far with him now to reject his script. Without his guidance she is disorientated and vulnerable. She does what he asks and she performs well, as he knows she will.
After each meeting with Andropov, she lies in bed trying to calm her disturbed mind into a short and troubled sleep (has Andropov no home to go to? Is that why he keeps her up so late?).
Why is he making her do this? What does he want to achieve? But she can find no answers (or none that makes any sense) and Andropov has offered no explanation. She is forced to accept his silence because her greater anxiety is that one night he will not summon her. Then she will have no script to guide her and the truth of her deceit, her inability to speak without his prompting (she still does not have any conviction about what she is doing) will be revealed to her colleagues at the Institute.
*
Once, without warning, Andropov comes to her apartment. He arrives at one o’clock in the morning, pressing the bell twice and terrifying her, while she is clearing up after an unexpected meeting of the committee. She is alarmed her friends will have seen Andropov as they leave the building. He is amused by her distress.
‘I have played this game a long time,’ he says. ‘I can become invisible when I wish to.’
She begs him never to do this again and so far he has kept away. He has seen how his visit has distressed her. She sees his compliance as a sign of her importance to him but she is so exhausted from the strain of her deception that she is unable to make anything of this.
Andropov says he is pleased with their progress. The committee is doing its job well. She reminds him that the directorate has rejected every recommendation her committee has so far made. (She remembers the unfamiliar, shiny corridor, the knock on the door of the deputy director’s office, the wait until the light changed from red to green, the formal greetings, Comrade Deputy Director, Comrade Marchenko, the splinter of wood on the leg of the chair on which she tore her stockings, the serrated edge of the paperknife he used to open her envelope, his concentration as he read the first page of the letter – ‘Recommendations,’ Gromsky had said, ‘Demands,’ Lykowski had shouted – her departure down the same empty corridor after his mumbled response that he will reply to her in due course, and then later the one-line letter of rejection.)
‘Rejection,’ Andropov says, ‘is the only response they know.’ The commissars do not know how to cope with the demands made of them. Their hope is that continual rejection will stifle the root of their opposition. He reminds her that it is her task to ensure that this does not happen. He asks after the progress of the list of demands Gromsky is preparing (she is surprised he doesn’t refer to it as a policy document). She gives him the bad news that it is delayed. He tells her that keeping up the pressure is important. She must pursue Gromsky. He gives her a list of points for inclusion in the document.
He commends her own performance and reminds her of comments she has made during a recent meeting. She knows then that someone within the committee is Andropov’s creature too, one of whose purposes, at least, is to report on her. She wonders if this man or woman knows she is simply the vehicle for Andropov’s design. She assumes not. She is now even more confused about Andropov’s role.
*
One night she takes her courage in her hands and asks Andropov once more why he is asking her to do this. Why is he stirring up this opposition within the Institute when he himself has said that its work is so important, that Soviet foreign policy calls for the manufacture of the Soviet nuclear bomb? What is the true purpose of this strange drama in which she finds herself playing so unexpectedly important a part? How does the creation of an opposition to nuclear development within the Soviet Union help the cause of damaging the processes of nuclear research in the West?
He turns towards her and smiles. The light from the lamp on the table beside him flashes momentarily across the lenses of his rimless glasses. The smoke from his cigarette clears from in front of his face and she sees his cold blue eyes staring at her. For a moment she suspects he is near to telling her and she waits, holding her breath. Will he pull back the black cover he has thrown over the cage of her life and reveal a chink of light? But his discipline reasserts itself and a brief smile is all he will concede. He says nothing. She must be content with his smile.
*
Now they appear to have entered a period of relative calm. For a while there are no new instructions, though Andropov insists they must continue to meet as before.
‘The initial move has achieved its objectives,’ Andropov tells her. What objectives? she wants to ask but doesn’t.
His mood is expansive; he offers her a cigarette, something he has not done before. She wonders if he is finding reasons to prolong their meetings which now could be over in five minutes or less, as for the moment he seems to have little or nothing to say to her. But he keeps her there as long as before, usually up to an hour or more. The conversation moves away from the strict agenda of the early meetings. He asks after her mother and her son. At first she is suspicious and says little. Slowly she senses that his questions are genuine, that he wants to talk to her. She wonders why. Is it possible that he is lonely?
They are sitting in a pool of yellow light in the living room of a small apartment somewhere in the city. She has, as usual, no idea where they are tonight, and has given up trying to discover where he takes her. The curtains are pulled. They are alone. His driver waits in the car in the street many floors below. (How many? Seven? Eight? She can’t remember). He smokes. Sometimes he offers her a cigarette. They don’t drink anything, not even tea. She wonders if the apartment has a kettle. Outside she hears the distant noise of the city, a lorry plunging through melting snow in the street, the wail of a siren, a human cry, part curse, part despair, all the sounds of Moscow at night. Never before have they frightened her but now she starts at each sound.
Andropov is talking about the official reaction to her committee’s latest demands. He calls it ‘her’ committee. She hates that. The political directorate at the Institute, he tells her, is puzzled by this prolonged upsurge of discontent about which they can do little. What has caused it? Why will it not go away? Why has their offer of improved privileges (cheap rates to rent a summer dacha, better-quality winter coats at GUM, cheaper than those bought anywhere else in Moscow) had no effect? They are baffled by events. They have no idea what
tactics to employ to quieten it down.
‘What’ll we do?’ she asks.
‘Wait,’ he says. ‘For the moment, we will do nothing. We must not add to their confusion – that will only make their response more rigid.’
‘Do nothing for the present,’ she tells her committee later. ‘We have achieved our first objective, we have confused the directorate. Let’s see how they react to their confusion. That may create new opportunities for us.’
There is some complaint at this, the more fiery members of the committee scenting blood and wanting to go for the kill.
‘We have them on the run. We must push, push, push till they fall over. We have an opportunity now which will not recur.’ (This is Lykowksi who, with all the skills of a politician, has ruthlessly promoted himself and his opinions. Sometimes she wonders if he is not an agent provocateur.)
She argues that the power of the authorities is absolute, they must never forget that, and that they are fooling themselves if they think they can push them over. After all, she says, hoping it is true, they are all responsible people and their demands are legitimate. They require a legitimate response. Fight orthodoxy with orthodoxy (Andropov’s phrase) and not as a rabble. Their great asset, she reminds them (Andropov again) is that they are more organized than their opponents. That is their strength, which they must not squander. To her relief, and with support from Gromsky and Markarova, she wins the argument and restrains the hotheads.
She does not report this to Andropov but the following day he tells her: ‘The authorities will never fall over. You were right to remind your colleagues of that.’
He is putting her on notice that every move she makes is watched, every word she speaks is recorded. Sometimes she finds the strain so great that she wants to scream the truth in the middle of a committee meeting. Then there flashes across her mind the faces of her mother and son and she knows that any revelation of her double life is impossible. The truth would condemn them as well as herself. There is no way out for her, as Andropov knows. She is locked into the deceit.
Making Enemies Page 14