Sometimes as I walk past some newly manicured bit of Moscow I wonder what my distant relative Leonid would make of these changes. But I only know – or think I know – what he would have said, because it’s what most former party members say when you ask them: ‘times change and one has to change with them.’ (You can always recognise a party member by his reluctance to say anything of interest.) A couple of years ago I went, as I then thought very bravely, to interview Leonid’s former KGB boss, Pavel Sudoplatov, a very old and once a very powerful man; in the words of the New York Times, ‘the last of Stalin’s wolves’. As Stalin’s wolf, he fell from favour when Stalin died, spent 15 years in prison and emerged in 1968, unrepentant and disgraced. He’d been ‘a spy’, he said, ‘a professional since 1921’, when he was ‘still a teenager’. As a professional he told me nothing. Now he has published his memoirs in English, French and German. (‘I don’t like to see my name in print,’ he said when I first met him.) The book, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, was written with his son Anatoli and – I would have thought uniquely in the annals of war and its aftermath – two Americans, Jerrold and Leona Schecter, who not only translated the material but effectively made of it a book Americans would want to read.*
Americans may or may not be reading it: they have certainly been reading about it. In the mid-1940s General Sudoplatov was in charge of atomic espionage – of the flow of information from Los Alamos to Moscow. In 1992 when I asked him about this part of his working life (my distant relative was at this point his deputy) he was outraged: ‘The American bomb,’ he screeched, ‘was made by foreigners, by immigrants … We did it all by ourselves, with our own scientists, our atomshiki.’ Since then he has evidently changed his mind about what to say, because in Special Tasks he makes what has come to be seen as the electrifying claim that the parents of the American bomb, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr and Szilard, were not only keen that their knowledge be shared with the Soviets, but one way or another made sure that it was. In America the response has been unanimous: as far as I know, there is no one who has written on the subject who hasn’t been outraged. Many people in Russia, too, are outraged, the scientists especially, who don’t want to hear what General Sudoplatov pretended not to want to hear when I talked to him: that Kurchatov and Co. were merely following a recipe. One of the peculiarities of the new Russia is that in a newspaper still named in honour of the Komsomol movement it’s possible to treat the whole business with even-handed irony:
American and Soviet physicists have been disturbed by the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov … The American people are disturbed and saddened. Sudoplatov’s book came out there and they discovered damaging facts about their heroes. The Russian people are quiet … We have more pressing reasons to be sad. But our physicists are very upset. If we are to believe Sudoplatov we stole the atom bomb. The American physicists blurted the secret out to Soviet spies, the Soviet spies transmitted the information to Beria, Beria gave it to Kurchatov and Kurchatov made the bomb. No one wants to believe Sudoplatov.
It could be that the American physicists were traitors and ours … mmm. Shaming.
Moskovsky Komsomalets, 29 June
General Sudoplatov’s book was the reason for my visit to Moscow. The Russians have only read extracts from it, and may not be allowed to read more, though a translation is due at the end of the year. At present the two Sudoplatovs are under interrogation – the general, because he is old and unwell, at home, his son at the offices of the military procurator. Neither is being tortured, no one is pulling out their teeth as they did Leonid’s, but there is a chance that they will have to stand trial for betraying state secrets. Or they may be stripped of their honours: the son, who teaches at Moscow University, would no longer have the title of Academician, the father would be un-rehabilitated and with that lose his pension.
Many people besides the physicists wouldn’t be shocked if that happened: the children of the general’s former colleagues and employees, for example, who don’t like the way he has spoken about their fathers – truthfully or untruthfully, I can’t always judge, but more informatively than they are used to and more self-servingly than he should have. There are those, too, who say that it is inappropriate to receive a pension from the KGB and then spill its beans and those who believe that in speaking of the past one should respect the traditions of the past; that one should not disclose people’s names or say in the manner of today, ‘I was responsible for X’s assassin ation,’ but instead: ‘I fulfilled a very important party task.’
I was with Nikolai Khokhlov, one of the general’s former intelligence officers, who now lives in the West, when he bought a copy of the book. He looked his own name up in the index and discovered something he’d never known: that in 1952 he’d been on the point of murdering Kerensky. Khokhlov’s account of the incident is not quite the same as the Sudoplatovs’, however. In his own book, In the Name of Conscience (1959), he describes himself as having had enough of killing and refusing to go to Paris to liquidate the unnamed enemy; he even praises Sudoplatov for letting him get away with it when it would have been more normal to have him shot. As the general now tells it, Khokhlov had simply shown himself to be an incompetent agent and, in any case, the operation was called off. Who knows the real reason – if there was a real reason – Kerensky wasn’t shot? But it’s unlikely that Khokhlov was incompetent if, of all their agents, the KGB had chosen him for the job. There was certainly a look of triumph on his face after he’d read the book: he may not have wanted to be an agent but pride, too, was at stake. A few days later he said: ‘You know, I saved Kerensky’s life.’
*Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster by Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold and Leona Schecter.
Brussels
‘Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late 1940s; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with an exhibition on cities at the Hayward. Reisman divided social behaviour into three categories: ‘anomic’, ‘adjusted’ and ‘autonomous’. ‘Anomie’ is bad – everyone knows that – and something that has long been associated with urban life. But who could be sure, as David Reisman was, that an ‘autonomous’ citizen, no matter how uncomfortable, was better off than one who had taken the trouble to adjust – unless they’d told themselves that adjustment was un-American, the sort of feebleness Charlton Heston might despise? And if you could choose one or other way of being which would you go for? And where would you live?
I had been asked, specifically, to say something about cities I’d lived in and those questions are ones that I find troubling. I was born, not long before the Second World War, in the United States, where until the age of nine I lived in a succession of different towns and states, of which New York was the last, the place from which I left the country for good. I didn’t know at the time that we weren’t going back; and it was only later that it occurred to me that I’d spent the rest of my childhood in some sort of exile.
We were moving – it was now the late 1940s – to Europe. More particularly, we moved to Brussels: a dark, rainy, unfriendly, unseductive, unappealing, charmless city. At the time I wouldn’t have been able to say any of that. For one thing, I wouldn’t have been allowed to: Brussels was where we had to be and if I didn’t like it, it was because, my mother said, I was unwilling to make the effort. David Reisman perhaps would have been pleased with me. I found it all very difficult. Again, we moved often. Not that it mattered: I don’t remember knowing the neighbours or playing with the children next door or downstairs, as everyone did in the States. There was a tennis club to which families like mine belonged but very few places where one could detach oneself from one’s family. I missed the comic books (missed them all the more for not having been allowed to r
ead them), the roller-skating rink in Central Park, the Lexington Avenue drugstores, the Hershey bars and Hamburger Heaven: all important markers of a New York child’s place in the world and signifiers, too, of a world in which there was much to desire. Belgian children ate the same serious chocolate as their mothers and fathers ate and didn’t have places of their own to go to: they stayed close to their parents and wherever they went walked behind them like the Duke of Edinburgh behind the queen.
What I remember most clearly, besides the gloom and the rain, is the formality: having to shake hands with my classmates three or four times a day – schoolchildren and office workers always went home for lunch – and being told off for all kinds of things that were nobody else’s business, like eating in the street, or sticking my tongue out at children I didn’t like the look of. My father was quite a prominent figure in what was, in the days before the EU, a very small world and I was known as ‘the little Wilmers girl’, whose misdeeds were inevitably seen by someone who knew who I was and considered themselves obliged to tell tales. ‘In the devious world of Villette,’ Tony Tanner said of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, most of which is set in Brussels, ‘everyone spies on everyone else, the watcher is watched with a minimum of eye-to-eye contact. It is a very voyeuristic world.’ Baudelaire, who also noted the spying, said it was boredom that led to it.
When I was 14, in the early 1950s, I was allowed to leave. My father was English and I was sent to an English boarding school. Which is how, eventually, I came to live here. Wondering what to do with myself after I left university, I took up some unwelcome advice I’d been given and went every day to a place in Kensington High Street where young women were taught a few secretarial skills. On my first morning, as I came out of the Tube, I was alarmed to hear someone shouting a bit further up the road. ‘Alarmed’ because I thought something might be required of me. A minute later a mad woman stormed into view: she was quite well dressed, not a tramp or a beggar, but a straightforward middle-class mad woman, addressing the world. That sort of thing seemed to happen quite regularly around there, with women of different ages but similar habits. And no one ever paid any attention. Without doubt, London was the right place to live.
My family left Brussels in 1960 and several decades went by before I thought to go back to have a look and found that I hadn’t imagined its dreariness: Brussels, it turned out, wasn’t a metaphor for my forced separation from the neighbourhood drugstore, or a virtual city thought up to express my pre-adolescent or late childhood gloom. It was in actual fact much as I’d remembered it. The difficulty is to know who or what to blame. You could say that a place that worships an undistinguished statue of a little boy urinating deserves to be held in contempt. But that statue is just around the corner from the medieval Grand-Place, which the Blue Guide describes as the most beautiful square in Europe. There are plenty of old streets of the kind that are admired in Paris or Bordeaux and some exceptionally nice old buildings; there are trees; the streets aren’t lit with sodium lights; there are shops, there are cafés; the roads aren’t too wide or the pavements too narrow; the art galleries have wonderful things in them, there’s an opera house and an orchestra and all that sort of thing: what’s wrong with it? As a child I might have said food was what was wrong with it. Too much food, too many long meals, too many restaurants, too many fat bellies. I might still say that now but it wouldn’t explain why it’s a city that seems to interest no one, not even Belgians. There are three Belgian writers whose names are known outside Belgium. None of them wrote about his own country. Simenon went to France, Hergé to Tintin-land and Maeterlinck took flight with his bird. And of English novelists, only Charlotte Brontë wrote about Brussels, that ‘great selfish city’, as she called it.
The narrator of Heart of Darkness is obliged to make a stopover in Brussels to collect the documents he needs for his journey. He arrives to find two crones ‘guarding the door of Darkness’, two tricoteuses whom he describes ‘knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool,’ he continues. ‘Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again – not half, by a long way.’ Door of Darkness, gateway to the Congo: the association says much of what needs, or needed, to be said about Brussels. I wonder whether the Union Minière, which in my time owned the Congo in much the same way as United Fruit owned Guatemala, still exists. It was one of the few enterprises my parents talked about whose activities I could imagine. The most often mentioned, and most perplexing, was the ominously unparticularised Société Générale, which in fact owned the Union Minière (and thus the Congo) and a great deal besides. Reading Conrad might have done more to alleviate my discontent (‘divine discontent’, my father called it, but I wasn’t so sure) than the many Angela Brazil-type school stories through which I plotted my escape.
Marx and Engels worked on The Communist Manifesto in a house – now inevitably a restaurant – on the Grand-Place. A few French writers – Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Victor Hugo – spent time in Brussels when for one reason or another they had to leave France. Edith Cavell, the English nurse who said ‘Patriotism is not enough,’ was executed by the Germans in 1915 for helping fugitive soldiers escape to Holland. I was about to say that nothing else happened in Brussels, nothing at any rate to catch the imagination, when I remembered the Duchess of Richmond’s ball and the battle that followed (‘who would guess … upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise’). But I don’t suppose Byron ever went to Brussels, and the Battle of Waterloo apart, it’s a city without associations. What you see is what there is to see. Geneva, where my family moved after Brussels, is quite a bit duller still, but in my mind it is buoyed up by its past and its connection with larger things. There isn’t even a river passing through Brussels on its way from one place to another: there was one once but it got cemented over. What can be said in its favour is that, unlike London, it names its streets after people who have done something more useful or more glamorous than acquired the land on which the houses were subsequently built. I live near Primrose Hill. What are the streets around there called? Oppidans Road, King Henry’s Road – in honour of Eton College, of course, from which the land was bought.
In my eyes, Brussels would have been more interesting had it at least been bombed. The one thing I wanted to see, arriving in Europe in 1947 or 1948, were signs of the war: but Brussels had been occupied by the Germans and there was nothing to see – only whispers and rumours about fat-cat collaborators. One fat cat had a daughter in my class: he wore a camel-hair coat and before long his children were known by their mother’s name. The king, too, was in trouble for having been too close to the Germans. On that matter feelings ran high, and there were stickers everywhere, including my bedroom, in the form of a one-way sign with the word ‘non’ written across it. A referendum took place; the no-sayers won; and the king’s son, the unhappy Baudouin, was invited to reign in his place. In the 25 years between the end of the war and the debacle in the Congo it was the one exciting moment in that city where, Baudelaire said, ‘only the dogs are alive.’
I hadn’t intended to go on like that about Brussels, so I had to tell myself it had some significance as a dystopia of a mild and unthreatening kind. What I’d wanted to talk about was urban oppression more generally and the sense cities can give you of being in the wrong novel or, worse, magazine. New York, for example, was a great children’s book. Now when I go there I feel as if everything I look at or walk past has a frame around it – the seedy parts as much as the affluent. A frame of the kind that is provided by the edge of the page in a glossy – or too chic to be glossy – magazine. From the uptown stoops and the families sitting on them to the ubiquitous fire escapes, everything that remains of what once made New York so likeable has been appropriated by fashion editors; one thing only is still untouched and unglamorised: the steam from the subway that comes up thro
ugh the grates in the sidewalk. Otherwise, in the parts of Manhattan that I know, from Riverside Drive to the Meat District, it’s all style. Even if I were to walk up and down in front of the Plaza yelling and railing like the former habituées of Kensington High Street – by this stage in my life a dangerously real temptation – I’d probably be thought to be making a fashion statement. I won’t do it, though. Adjustment and freedom may have trouble getting on with each other: what David Reisman seems not to have known is that autonomy can be quite pointless as well as quite painful.
What if You Hadn’t Been Home
This is how it begins: ‘July 26 2010. Today would be her wedding anniversary.’ Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it:
Seven years ago today we took the leis from the florist’s boxes and shook the water in which they were packed onto the grass … The white peacock spread his fan. The organ sounded. She wove white stephanotis into the thick braid that hung down her back. She dropped a tulle veil over her head and the stephanotis loosened and fell. The plumeria blossom …
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 20