‘What you do in your work, then, guv?’ he would ask. ‘Sounds like an easy life to me, reading and writing all day.’
‘Leave the poor man alone,’ Esther would call out from the depths behind the shop. ‘He’s got better things to do than listen to you.’
‘This is man-to-man talk,’ Manny would shout above the noise of his machinery. ‘You stick to your kitchen, woman.’ He would wink at me and continue to ask questions.
Esther would emerge with her shopping basket. ‘He’s a terrible man. Don’t listen to him,’ she’d say to me. ‘I don’t know why I married him.’
They had a son, Joe, who was the fulfilment of all their dreams. He was a brilliant linguist and had won a scholarship to Cambridge to read Russian. ‘He make ’is mark, that boy, I tell you,’ Manny said, working on a leather sole. ‘Where all those brains come from, I never know, not from his mother and me, that’s for sure.’
They were good to me, Esther particularly, looking after me while her son was away, feeding me, taking messages, doing my washing, cleaning the flat when she thought it needed to be cleaned. She never said much, but sometimes when Manny was busy in the shop she would ask me into her kitchen for a cup of tea and she would listen to me talk, nodding, encouraging me to continue. I sometimes imagined she was the mother I had lost when I was thirteen. I know she saw me as an orphan, someone who needed caring for and that was the role God had created for her, to care for the men in her life. I was simply a late arrival.
*
I saw little of my father after my return from Berlin. On the rare occasions I went to Cambridge he appeared withdrawn and preoccupied. He never mentioned Krasov’s visit nor its aftermath and nor, loyally, did Celia. But I detected a new urgency in his newspaper articles. He was openly arguing for the international scientific community to organize itself in opposition to the use of nuclear weapons by governments. He wanted to see set up a new, politically neutral international authority into whose control governments would surrender these weapons. His vision was idealistic and hopelessly impractical. I read the occasional flurries of outrage his increasingly radical opinions stimulated in the letter columns of his newspaper. If the letters illustrated anything, it was how isolated he was in his views.
My father sat on a number of Government scientific committees but he seldom got in touch with me when he was in London. When we did meet, he asked no questions about my job. He disapproved of my working for Watson-Jones (‘very third-rate man, can’t think what you see in him’ was his only comment when I told him what I planned to do after leaving the army), and he wanted his disapproval to hurt, and it did. I was affected by his silence and he knew it. In the few conversations we had together, he steered well away from any endorsement of the life I had chosen. In return, I stayed away from Cambridge.
I never told him about my trip to Finland nor that I had seen Krasov. The heightened atmosphere of that strange night meeting lost its threat on my return home. Sitting in my office in Eccleston Street, the urgency and importance of what he had said looked very small and its truth was questionable. Had Krasov really said those words? I convinced myself he had, but I felt increasingly that his real purpose had been to emphasize his own importance, to show that he still counted. There were moments when my anger with my father almost prompted me to tell him who Krasov was and what he had done, but I didn’t, not least because I doubted if my father would have let himself understand what I was talking about. Krasov wasn’t a weapon to use against him.
*
Perhaps it was more in my mind than anything else, but I felt that my relationship with Monty was strained. He had telephoned me when I got back from Helsinki, to fix a time when he would come to Berlin to discuss my Finnish visit. But he cancelled each arrangement we made and when I pressed him he had changed his mind. ‘Put it on paper,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think.’
I was left with the impression that he had lost interest, that the importance Krasov had assumed a few weeks before had been overtaken by events I knew nothing of, relegating me to a reminder of a past whose relevance had faded. I was irritated because Finland seemed no longer to matter to him, while to me the country had become the embodiment of all my dreams.
I kept my report to Monty as brief as I could make it.
Go to Finland, find Krasov, was my brief. Ask him what he wants. Judge whether he’s genuine or not. I did as you instructed.
Krasov’s story is easy to summarize. During his short visit to Cambridge in January he told my father that a Soviet nuclear scientist whom he claims my father knows (please check this, a woman called Ruth Marchenko) had been blackmailed by the Soviet intelligence service to put pressure on my father to organize international support for a group of dissident scientists within the Soviet Union, who were refusing to work on the Soviet bomb. (What form that pressure took he wouldn’t say.)
By the time I caught up with Krasov in Finland, his story had moved on. There was now, he claimed, the possibility of momentous political change within the Soviet Union. In the weeks since his meeting in Cambridge, the Russians had suffered a major setback in their own nuclear programme (a laboratory had exploded) and this disaster had encouraged a countermove by a kind of peace party that, from within the Central Committee, was now challenging Stalin’s leadership. (Have you ever heard a whisper about opposition to Stalin?)
If this group was to win (I was left in doubt about where his own hopes lay), the West had to seize the opportunity with both hands to negotiate a non-nuclear treaty with the Soviets. To carry conviction, the louder the anti-nuclear outcry in the West, the greater the chance that a sane government would emerge in Russia and with it a genuine opportunity for a lasting post-war peace. He begged me to tell you this and to urge my father to redouble his efforts in support of moving international opinion against the bomb.
Is that plausible? He told me a tall story and in his heart he knew it. Every time I challenged him on a detail, he lost his temper. Krasov is a congenital liar. He will defend to the death that what he tells you at the time is true. But if circumstances demand it, he’ll deny his own words an hour later. He doesn’t understand what truth is.
Should you respond? Unless I’ve missed something (and I could have) you’re better off washing your hands of him. My judgement is that the man has an overdeveloped sense of his own importance, and he’s a troublemaker. Stay away, Monty. That’s my advice. Let him stew with the Americans. See what they make of him.
I know Monty got the letter because he telephoned to tell me so. He said he understood how difficult it must have been for me in Finland, on my own like that. (No mention of Hammerson. I wondered if he knew.) He was grateful for what I had done. (What had I done, I wondered? but he didn’t say.) I asked if he wanted to meet to discuss what I’d written. No need, he said, the matter was closed now, he had moved on to other things. New times, new agendas. We would get together soon enough, have a pint and a bite to eat, talk it all through. He’d get in touch when I was back in London, I could be sure of that. Auf Wiedersehen.
He didn’t get in touch after my return from Berlin, and I found it difficult to make contact with him. When we finally met for a drink in a gloomy pub in Whitehall, he arrived late, apologetic and distracted, his attention clearly somewhere else.
‘Krasov’s with the Americans now,’ he said. ‘No doubt he’s spinning them a few yarns.’
‘Will they believe them?’
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘It depends how much they want to believe him. They’ve not had much luck with defectors recently.’
I took that to mean he hoped they’d buy what Krasov had to sell, however dubious the merchandise. He seemed oddly amused at the prospect. Was ensuring the Americans bought counterfeit goods his payback for the humiliation he’d suffered after Senator Shearing’s visit? If that was so, had he got me to Finland to ensure that Krasov the liar got to America?
‘What about Krasov’s opposition theory?’ I asked, keeping a lid on my suspic
ion that Monty was using Krasov for his own private revenge on the Americans. (Surely this was too extreme?) ‘Rivals to Stalin?’
This was the only element in Krasov’s story that might have had a grain of truth about it.
‘That?’ Was it my imagination or was Monty being deliberately evasive? ‘Baloney. Don’t believe a word of it. Our people in Moscow took one look at it and laughed their heads off.’
Somewhere in the snowy wastes of that distant land we had faced Soviet bullets, Hammerson had been wounded and captured, Krasov had escaped by the skin of his teeth, we had all lived briefly at the edge of our lives and for what? The risks we had taken had achieved nothing. Finland was a pointless exercise. It was a bleak moment in our relationship.
‘I’m sorry,’ Monty said, looking at his watch. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere else. The enemy never sleeps.’
‘You’re OK, are you?’ I asked as we got up to leave. I remembered his remarks as we walked through the melting snow on a cold Berlin night. I’m in the shit, Danny. Well and truly up to my neck. What had become of all that anxiety?
‘I’m all right,’ Monty said. ‘Just about. I’ll be in touch.’
I telephoned him a couple of times after that but when we talked he again seemed preoccupied, and though we made arrangements to meet, he left messages cancelling on both occasions. I didn’t see him for a while.
*
And Hammerson? For months afterwards I kept seeing his fall through the snow, his inert body gathering speed as it slid down the hill. Was he alive? I prayed so. Was anything being done to release him? My one attempt to find out, through an American military contact in Berlin, met with puzzlement and incomprehension. Major Hammerson had been recalled to Washington; no one knew when he was due back in Berlin. Was it a conspiracy of silence? I imagined that the Americans were so terrified the Russians might hold one of their serving officers in captivity that they had decided to make Hammerson invisible.
The memory I couldn’t get rid of was of that last fateful night journey through the snow, Hammerson attending to Krasov, befriending the man, caring for him, encouraging him. Was that out of duty? Was he acting in the interests of those who employed him? No, it was more than that, it was the nature of the man himself. I had been startled by the ferocity of his anti-Soviet sentiments, mostly because I found they had an echo in my own beliefs that I had never faced up to. I envied him his simplicity, his fearlessness, his certainty that what he said and did was right.
Now he was gone, and I held the secret of what had happened to him. Some nights the memory tormented me. His face would look up from the snow, blood-spattered and bruised, and appeal to me.
Help me, Danny. Help me, please.
His hands would reach out to drag me into the dark prison of his world and I would wake up, startled and sweating, the images rising up in the darkness and taking all hope of sleep from me.
*
I had left Helsinki with nothing of Tanya’s, though I had asked her for a photograph.
‘I need nothing to remind me of you. Why should you need something from me?’ she had said with an impeccable if frustrating logic. I had wanted to argue the point until I saw that she would not change her mind.
‘If you can recall me in your mind,’ she had said later, ‘you will not need anything else. If you can’t, then having something of mine will not help.’
I admired her fatalism and regretted it. But as the weeks went by, I saw that she was right. If I concentrated I could recall exactly how she was, how she had looked, the sound of her voice and her laugh, what we had done together. Slowly but irrevocably an image of Tanya emerged and stayed with me, a companion in everything I did. For the first time I recognized the places in my life where I was incomplete and I was able to measure my incompleteness. It was a shock to see how much of a delusion my own sense of self-reliance was. I longed for her desperately but there seemed no likelihood that I would be able to see her again.
As the spring slowly broke the icy grip of winter, the possibility of getting back to Finland had all the permanence of a dream on waking.
2
RUTH
‘Remember me?’
It is not the voice she expects when she picks up the telephone, but it is a voice she knows. An alarm is triggered deep in her memory and a discipline she hasn’t used for years moves automatically into place.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m home again.’
No names, no dates, no times, no places. Those were the rules, she tells Stevens, as she continues her story. Give them nothing to work on, the secret listeners on the wire. Play the game and you might stay alive, though in those terrible times (how many years ago? Eight? Nine?), anonymity had provided no certainties.
‘It’s good to hear your voice again.’ The code is still intact. He will be pleased about that.
‘We’ll meet soon, won’t we?’
Somehow he will get a message to her with instructions for their meeting place. How careful he is. But then he works for the secret forces of the state.
‘I’d like that.’
Little Krasov is back in her life.
*
‘Little Krasov’ (she tells Stevens), ‘the boy with the large head and the small body – not weak, just misshapen until he was fifteen when his body filled out, though he was always small. We girls teased him but we protected him too, in our neighbourhood, at school, in the Young Communist League and afterwards when he joined the Moscow Engineering Academy. He was our mascot, our constant companion, and to us he always remained Little Krasov.’
She remembers the boastful stories he made up at school when he was teased about the hours he spent in the company of the girls in their neighbourhood.
‘His defence was to keep the boys intoxicated with stories of seeing us naked, how he could wander in and out of our bedrooms unnoticed because he was Little Krasov. Sometimes he would produce sheets of paper on which he had sketched us – we were his “life models”, he said as he passed the drawings around. We all knew he traced these from a book he found. We laughed when we saw his drawings. None of us had bodies like that. Oh, the things he had seen, the things he had done. He would roll his enormous eyes, the boys would jeer and shout and punch each other, but in their hearts they knew Little Krasov had been where they did not yet have the courage to go, and that was the basis of his protected status.’
After graduating from the academy he went to work on an engineering project in the Ukraine, and she lost touch with him. For years they had little news of each other. When he turned up in her life again, a year after the war had begun, he was no longer an engineer. He now worked, he told her, for military intelligence. He had been trained at a special school run by the Red Army general staff, he had learned English (and other skills he did not tell her about) and he was waiting for the final approval of his posting to London from the Foreign Branch of the Central Committee. He would be working as a journalist for Tass. There was important work to be done and he was anxious, to do it.
Little Krasov an agent of the state? That was hard to believe. She remembered a time when Little Krasov refused to join the Party. ‘It’s another of your stories,’ she says when he tells her of his departure for London. ‘I can’t believe in Little Krasov working for the state.’
‘Why not?’ he said, his finger to his lips.
‘Is that what you believe in now?’ she asks, ignoring his gesture for discretion. You cannot change the habits learned in your youth. She has never been discreet with him.
‘I am afraid even to think what I believe.’
Then he had gone to London and she had lost contact again. Years pass. She doesn’t forget Little Krasov but she has her own life to get on with. He never writes to her. If he returns to Moscow in that time (surely he must have) he has never got in touch. Now he has contacted her and she knows London is over, he is back in Moscow and he wants to see her. She is pleased about that. It is always good to see an old friend. But she
knows Little Krasov. Nothing is without a purpose. If he has made contact now it is because he wants something from her. An old instinct revived by Krasov’s telephone call puts her on her guard.
*
He is waiting for her outside the Lux Hotel, dressed in black as usual. She recognizes the faithful worn overcoat with the tattered astrakhan collar. He kisses her and puts his arm through hers. They cross the road and to her surprise, he guides her to the waiting room of Hospital 22, a large echoing hall, filled with rows of people patiently waiting. Around them, like flies buzzing over carrion, the nurses and doctors walk up and down, giving the impression of continuous activity. But the crowd never gets smaller, the number of occupied chairs never diminishes. As names are called and men and women shuffle in and out, newcomers appear at the door and take their places.
Why here? she wants to ask, but before she can say anything he has read her thoughts.
‘It’s crowded,’ he says, his huge eyes working their strange magic once again. ‘Our presence won’t be questioned, we can talk undisturbed for as long as we like. Who would think of looking for us in a hospital waiting room? And it’s warm in here.’
They choose two seats near the back of the waiting area. Krasov takes out a flask of tea and a sandwich from a bag he carries and offers both to Ruth. All around them food is being eaten by men and women who know they must keep their strength up while they wait hours, perhaps even days, for the treatment they need.
‘It helps us blend with our surroundings,’ he says, smiling. ‘Besides, I’m hungry.’ He takes her hand suddenly and speaks with an unexpected urgency. ‘We do not have much time, Ruth. You must believe everything I say. In the past I have lied too often, sometimes to those I love. Now I must redeem myself by speaking the truth.’
The emotional intensity, the way he can shrink the world until it contains only the two of them, the power of those huge dark eyes, the danger and excitement of his presence: that is the Little Krasov she remembers. Memories of old times return. How long since they last met? Three years or more?
Making Enemies Page 23