The envelope contained a number of photocopied chapters of books and articles. Material he knew: on the isolation and characterization of globin genes; on hybrid plasmids; on Bill Rutter and William Goodman’s work on cloning the insulin gene. And material that was unfamiliar: a few pages of Hayek, some essays on civil society and governmentality. She told him it would be a good idea if he familiarized himself with what was in these pages, since if any one with a uniform asked, he should say that the articles were part of his studies. But the likelihood was, and she examined him carefully as she said this, that no one would bother to ask.
Since he was then as ignorant about recent history as he was adept in the lab, it had taken him a little time to grasp the full sense of her words. She had gestured him closer to her on the white sofa as if an intimacy were about to be revealed and asked him to imagine what it would be like to live in a country where basic rights didn’t exist, where all information was monitored by a policing state, where censorship was rampant, where access to books and ideas and foreign newspapers and travel was severely curtailed - so that the individual was ground down into thinking that such an existence was the only possible existence. The norm of human life.
As she talked, he had begun to feel himself trapped in a dark and dizzying maze where the exits were all barred and the signs spoke only lies. He had sensed the relief of a window, glimpsed the hope that even a small ray of light might bring. He had understood that as those windows and lights multiplied, the walls of the maze must crumble.
It came to him that what he was about to take on, however small, was important.
The following morning before boarding his train, as he shaved and studied himself in the mirror, he concluded that Simone had been right to say no one would bother to stop him. He was in that sense a perfect courier. With his round national health specs, his slightly pink though no longer spotty skin, his tumbled hair and unremarkable features, he looked utterly innocuous, a nondescript young man, an over-grown English schoolboy. But Simone had done something remarkable. She had given his very innocuousness, his social invisibility, a meaning.
It was a meaning he came to take pride in. It straightened his shoulders, gave an added bounce to his step. And it remained a secret between himself and Simone, all the more precious for that.
Over the years, after that first successful mission, he gradually realised that he was hardly alone, that Simone, apart from her more public role as the head of an international relations think tank, managed a whole network of carriers - academics, scientists, businessmen, musicians, tourists - messengers who covertly brought the West to the East and occasionally the dissident East to the West, and allowed for some uncontrolled flow of information and ideas. It was a loose network and Stephen hadn’t knowingly met any of its Western links. In the East, as he grew in stature and reputation and was invited to seminars and conferences, he increasingly made his own.
His profession helped. Simone must have spotted that it would early on, had probably singled him out for that very reason. As a scientist, he was for many of the countries of the eastern bloc, a man almost beyond suspicion, a respected and prized member of society, a carrier of progress. Even during the iciest days of the cold war, Academies of Science in the east kept up some links with western scientists, and if their directors were not always the first people Stephen wanted to speak to, there were usually others lower in the ranks with whom conversation and exchange were fruitful. These, he would mention to Simone. In due course he would find that by some complex network of diplomacy and funds a travel grant had been arranged for them, a visit to a Western institute or university, a chance to taste a different world.
He had grown adept at the work which lay beneath the surface of his official work. He knew how to bind and rebind volumes so that articles of quite a different nature could be slipped into scientific treatises with titles impenetrable to the English or French or German speaking lay-person, let alone a Czech or Polish policeman. He knew how to crumple letters amongst old chits in his pocket or strap documents beneath shirt and sweater and jacket. He knew how to read cues, how to spot which conference delegates or seminar members were party hacks or spies. He knew how to put an impassive mask on his face, control the twitch of eyebrow and lip, so as not to belie contacts met in inappropriate settings. He knew scores of safe dropping points in any number of countries - loose floor boards, gaps between wall and blackboard in seminar rooms, empty churches. He knew how to look bored or impatient when a custom’s official searched his luggage, how to explain at tedious length and with excruciating attention to detail what each supposed chapter of a book contained. And on the two precarious occasions when he had been stopped, once in Czechoslovakia early on and then more dangerously in Roumania, he had handled himself well enough so as not to implicate any of his contacts.
Sometimes he thought that his research, as much as the spy fiction he had always loved, had formed him for this new task. The language of molecular genetics with its bits of information, its regulator genes and promoters and operators, its translational control sites and switch sites and terminators, had made him into a carrier of the code, a useful bit of messenger RNA moving deftly through the system, helping to produce those proteins necessary to the continuation of life.
If he had started off with no particular idea of why he was doing what he was doing - except that Simone had asked him - he quickly learned the why. It wasn’t that he had any particular politics. He didn’t believe in either Capitalism or Socialism or Communism or any ideologically enforced ‘ism. What he did gradually realise he believed, more from seeing its negation than in any absolute sense, was that openness of borders, of information, was crucial. Otherwise policing of its citizens became the state’s primary function.
Simone had put it for him once in her inimitable way. What we need, Stephen,’ she had said, ‘is to respect personal secrets and for the state not to have any. The state must be open and the individual must be allowed privacy.’
Yes. He concurred with that.
The rain was falling, heavier now as they crossed the windy sweep of the river. In the distance, domes and spires wavered like shadows of themselves against the cloud. Closer to, a new hotel spread brash opulence along the borders of the Vltava. There was scaffolding everywhere. The city was in a frenzy of renewal, shedding recent history with builders’ dust, reasserting its place in the centre of Europe with each freshly treated stone.
Despite the rain, the double row of taxis waited along Revoluzni Street, their voluble drivers urging tourists towards open doors. Stephen took a shallow breath. The air raked his nostrils and throat with familiar toxicity. It was still heavy with the particles of years of uncaring Soviet pollution, gritty with rubble, topped with a reek of sewerage. After a day or two, only his eyes would tear their alertness to it.
He leapt into the first cab without haggling over a fare. Whatever he did, it was inevitable that he would be charged at least double the metered rate. He told himself he didn’t mind these frontier tactics, these signals of the deregulation which also brought freedom in its train. But they rankled a little, as did the MacDonald’s sign poised at the entrance of the Old Town Square like a symbol of liberty.
What was it that Jan had said to him on his last visit. ‘Instead of the Politburo, we now have governors of banks to determine our future. Instead of bosses, promoted not on merit, but on grounds of loyalty to the party, we have management consultants who have just as little experience of running things. But never mind. Money is better than ideology. It is more neutral.’
Stephen could see its supposed neutrality everywhere. In the bright new coats of pastel paint, in the litter of shops which sold everything from Czech glass to artificial Polynesian flowers to English porcelain to German appliances, in the multi-lingual signs which beckoned tourists to bars and cafés and museums. He wondered whether that generous neutrality had begun to extend to hospitals and schools, to the terrifying level of pollution which foreshorte
ned lives. To Academies of Science. But that took far longer, as everyone knew. And that in part was why he was here. To help the extension.
The taxi turned away from the river and up past the dilapidated greenhouses which bordered the botanical gardens. He had rarely seen anyone but himself in these gardens, but today, despite the rain, he spied an old woman with an umbrella poised over herself and a shaggy haired mongrel who walked sedately to heel. He smiled. People walking in gardens and parks somehow reassured him, if nothing else at least of the fact that he was English.
As he neared his destination, excitement gripped him.
‘Tu, doleva.’ He pointed the driver to the colonnaded doors of the stately, if dilapidated, edifice on the left. With only a briefly admonishing, ‘how much?’ he paid him and raced into the shelter of the building.
A blast of disinfectant mingled with the subtler scent of mouldering plaster greeted him as soon as he swung open the heavy door. The Institute shared its premises with a sprawling hospital. Somehow the splendour of the baroque frame which housed them acted as a constant and mournful rebuke to their present crumbling state.
He nodded briefly to the dour receptionist who had earned her face in a previous regime and walked hurriedly up to the third floor which housed the Institute. The gothic-faced clock at the end of the long musty corridor told him it was only eleven o’clock. He slowed his pace so that his footsteps didn’t echo with quite so much resonance. The place seemed eerily empty.
Jan had written to him about that. Told him jokingly that he didn’t think it was merely a matter of his directorship, but everyone, all the best people, were leaving. It was hardly surprising, given that a senior researcher now earned less than a cashier in a shop. It would change, Jan had reassured him, perhaps tried to reassure himself. Periods of transition were difficult. Always difficult. And it was not a time for despair.
Stephen circled round a uniformed cleaning woman who was mopping the floor with the unhurried precision of a somnambulist. She turned a disapproving face on him as he tracked through wet to knock on the door of the lab.
‘Dr. Caldwell,’ the Assistant he knew from previous visits gave his name the particular lilt of a V and smiled with an edge of fluster. ‘I’m afraid Dr. Martin is in a meeting. We were not expecting you until twelve.’
‘I know. I just want to deposit these.’ He pulled the two styrofoam cages from his case and opened a freezer. ‘In here if I may?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked at him doubtfully. ‘Perhaps better I just ask.’
‘There won’t be a problem,’ Stephen said with that definitive edge he had heard Jan use to such effect. Hesitation, diffidence, entreaty, had no place in a world which had learned its social relations from authoritarian masters. ‘None at all,’ he emphasized. ‘It’s all arranged. Don’t let anyone touch. I’ll see you later.’
He walked out of the lab before she could ask anything more and paused half-way down the corridor at a door marked WC. Locked. He had momentarily forgotten the protocol of keys. Keys for cabinets which held dishes or paper or instruments or files. Keys for everything, including the loo.
The door opened suddenly, almost toppling him.
‘Stephen!’ Jan Martin embraced him warmly. ‘Welcome. Welcome. It’s been too long.’
At arm’s length, they inspected each other for a moment. As always, Stephen was filled with an impression of fierce nervous energy, austerely contained. Jan was all taut wiry movement and hawk-nosed intensity, like a conductor poised to spring into action at the pulse of some wild internal beat. The smile, when it came, was a contradiction, a continual surprise. It was boyishly mischievous.
‘You’ve caught me out. I was taking a break. From boredom. But I’m afraid I have to return to it. For a few minutes at least. Boredom with big planning words is a necessary part of our week. Even though everything has changed.’ He tapped his forehead in self-derision. ‘I will be with you as soon as I can. Here take the keys to my office.’
He pulled a heavy ring from his pocket and passed it to Stephen. ‘Or perhaps you would rather wait in the restaurant. The one round the second corner, where that pretty young woman from the provinces tried to make an assignation with you last time. You remember? The Czerny Pivovar?’
Stephen flushed. ‘Your office. I have some work to get on with. Has the new computer arrived?’
Jan shook his head wryly. ‘Soon. I’m told soon. Now, very soon. Something important on your neuro-transmitters to show me?’
‘No. Something else.’
‘What…?’
‘After your meeting.’
‘A mystery. I’ll have to make it quick.’
Jan’s directorial office was an airy imposing room with windows on two sides, high ceilings from which the paint peeled in great strips, pale greenish walls on which the grimy rectangular outlines of a former occupant’s professional diplomas were still evident and a dearth of furniture. There was a utility desk and a table arranged together to form a ‘T’, three plastic chairs of varying shades of orange and grey and a filing cabinet of pre-computer age proportions. Beside the bookcase in the far corner of the room, there was also incongruously a chaise longue with elegant lines covered in a tatty blue fabric.
When Jan had first moved into this office just after the Velvet Revolution of ‘89, Stephen had thought his wife, Hanka, must have placed it there. For just above it, on the bookshelf stood a portrait of Hanka in a pretty curving iron-work frame. The two objects appeared to belong together and with nothing else in the room. But now the photo of Hanka seemed to have disappeared.
Through the window, he could see a child playing in the courtyard, skipping forlornly in the drizzle as if someone had forgotten her existence. Beneath her toque of a hat, her hair shone. She looked up at him and curled her lips into a shy smile. The shyness reminded him of Cary. He found himself waving vigorously and wondered for a moment whether the girl in the courtyard could be Jan’s daughter. But, no, she was far too young. Jan’s daughter was a teenager now. She had been a baby when he first met Jan way back in 1981.
That spring, Stephen had bought his first car, an ancient mini that rattled mercilessly when it reached 60 mph. But he had decided to drive in any case. For the adventure of it. He was bound for a conference in Vienna and would then make his way across Moravia to Prague, where through the head of his lab at Cambridge he had wangled an invitation from a group of geneticists at the Academy of Sciences. And from there, all being well, he would go on to Poland. He was eager to see unknown countryside and Simone had armed him with a list of contacts at possible stopover points along the way. These he memorized carefully.
He left Vienna early and by mid-morning had reached the border near Brno. Armed uniformed guards patrolled barbed wire and barrier in the midst of empty fields which looked too innocent to merit such vigilance. At a brusque gesture, Stephen handed over his passport. It was studied with slow precision. A gruff command motioned him towards the side of the road and a small cabin-like building. Stephen parked, aware that his passport had been carried off, aware too that a second guard was watching him with tense menace.
He waited in the car for some thirty anxious minutes, before he determined to stretch his legs. But when he opened the door of the mini, a rifle butt urged him back into his seat. He calmed himself by running a series of molecular structures linked to his current research through his mind. By the time the first guard returned to lead him unceremoniously from car to cabin, he was relatively composed.
It was as he walked up the wooden steps, that Stephen noticed the doors and boot of the mini being flung open, his luggage hauled out, scattered. He tried a protest which met with no response. The man had no English. No expression either, in the square, narrow-eyed face beneath the cap. He looked about forty, a sullen, slightly paunchy, broad-shouldered, but un-readable forty.
He led Stephen through a bare office into a tiny, windowless room and locked him in. A single light-bulb hung from brown wire
over a rickety chair. The heat was suffocating. Sweat gathered in his armpits, trickled from his forehead. Minutes turned into hours. His captors had little to keep them busy. Only a single lorry had made the border crossing while he sat in his car. They could decide to use Stephen for entertainment. Or perhaps, after they had pondered the books and papers in his case, they would send for an English-speaking official. That was the optimistic guess.
He didn’t like to consider the pessimistic one.
He sat in the hard-backed chair, examined the wall, paced out the cell-like dimensions of the room. He plotted his chances for making a quick escape back across the border, once they moved him from this cubicle. He reached into his jacket pocket for a pen and a piece of paper so that he could reconstruct the lay of the land. It was then, he came across the letter. Of course. The letter. He banged loudly on the door, carried on with increased emphasis until the guard appeared.
Waving the letter in the man’s unblinking face, Stephen pointed to the address. He insisted with his few words of German that the number at the Academy of Sciences in Prague had to be tried. They were expecting him.
The guard stared at the letter with animal dumbness. Stephen heightened his protest, evoked the British Embassy, recited Professor Klima’s number in a stentorian voice. At last, the man went off with the letter, not before once again locking Stephen’s door.
As the hours passed, with nothing to signal their passage except the hands on his watch, Stephen wondered whether his guards would return only to find him dissolved in a mixture of urine and perspiration. At least it wasn’t blood. He banged on the door again, was faced by the same sullen guard. He demanded a WC, was relieved to find himself being led to one, decided that this could only be a good sign, that something in his favour had occurred.
At about five o’clock, he was roused from he didn’t know what gloomy reverie by the sound of voices. His door opened and his guard led him out of his cubicle into the main office where a youngish man was sifting through the texts which had once lain in Stephen’s case. Clear, coldly sombre eyes examined him. Overly precise English landed in his ears. He was being grilled about his reasons for coming to Czechoslovakia, the contents of his documents, his motive for having a Polish visa in his passport. Stephen matched his impassivity to his interrogator’s.
The Things We Do For Love Page 13