‘I am persuaded that Berlin is a serious candidate. Asking him to speak is in the true Blake-Thomas tradition. Therefore I cast my vote, which under Article Twelve of the Rules and Regulations I am constitutionally allowed to do’ – here he held up in full view of the committee the minute book – ‘in support of Marion Blackwell and her candidate, Andrei Berlin.’ He looked round the table, pleased with his judgement. ‘And that, I think, takes care of the business of the day, does it not?’
2
1
Berlin sat enclosed in a pool of light cast by the reading lamp on his desk, his mind floating in an unfamiliar world of acronyms, technical terms and baffling scientific calculations.
Engineer Kuzmin had painstakingly assembled information on each incident that had occurred in the construction of Radin’s rocket: spring clips that did not spring, hatches that did not close, sealants that did not seal, screws that did not fit flush as they were designed to do, engine clips that broke under stress. He had logged every fault, the date and time of its discovery; he had described the nature of each malfunction and marked the failure of each test; he had recorded estimates of the time needed for repairs or the process necessary to get the equipment to work. He gave the dates for his submission of each of many reports detailing his findings.
Reports of these malfunctions, Kuzmin wrote, had been persistently ignored by senior officials in Baikonur. Requests for re-testing when vital components had failed were rejected so often that his staff no longer considered such requests worth making. Repeated appeals to extend the launch schedule to allow more time for the completion of essential tasks had been dismissed out of hand. The Ministry in Moscow had issued its instruction. The launch was to take place on time as planned. Kuzmin’s fear was that it would be a disaster.
Even in Kuzmin’s flat scientific style, Berlin could trace his deep dejection at a situation over whose solution he could have no influence. His response was mirrored by his account of the reaction of his staff, their initial concerns rapidly turning to incredulity at the indifference of those in authority to what they reported, then despair as the list of untended faults grew larger, and finally resignation at the impossibility of doing what they knew needed to be done. What was the point of reporting anything? Kuzmin asked helplessly, when the pleas of his team went unanswered because no one in authority was prepared to listen to voices from below, except to damn them unjustly as reactionary saboteurs.
‘Unless some action is taken to reinstate essential control procedures and recognise the difficulties of working on new technologies that cannot always be made to perform faultlessly on time,’ he warned finally, ‘and unless we allow ourselves more time for testing, we will put our space programme in jeopardy. We will suffer disasters in future as we have done in the past, and we will lose our lead in space technology to the Americans.’
He was writing this account solely for the Chief Designer, who, he knew, would be disheartened by the evidence of the decline in standards that had set in so quickly since his ill-health had taken him away from Baikonur. Had he still been present, Kuzmin was sure that none of this would have happened. The new directorate appeared to have little understanding of or sympathy for the complexities of building a rocket on this scale. In desperation, Kuzmin was begging Radin to use his influence to intervene to ensure that the launch was postponed until every detail had been fixed.
Berlin admired the man’s courage. Such outspoken remarks were rare. No wonder he had written the report only for Radin. Who else would believe him? It was a bitter irony that the disaster he had predicted had taken his life.
Only one mystery remained. Why had Radin given him this report? Information of this kind was an unwelcome gift. It could prove dangerous to know too much. A warning bell rang in Berlin’s head. He may have known Radin for years, he may have loved him like a father, but he must still be careful. Viktor did nothing without a purpose. Even on his deathbed he was capable of ensnaring Berlin in some hare-brained scheme.
Where are the voices of truth, Viktor had asked, the men and women with the courage to tell us what we know in our hearts to be true? If Viktor was appealing to some better self that he imagined lived within him, then he was mistaken. Berlin was a historian. Historians recorded events, analysed motives, made judgements, debated their importance. They were not actors in their own drama.
That was a concept Viktor could never understand because his life was a perpetual drama and he was its leading player. He was driven by a vision that never released him from its grasp. His imagination might soar to the stars but it never stretched far enough to accept the plain fact that not everyone was like him – had it done so, Berlin believed, his achievements would have been much less. If Viktor was appealing to him to do something, he had chosen the wrong man. Berlin felt relieved. He could not respond because he had no ability to do so. Action lay outside his competence. Therefore he should feel no guilt for ignoring a dying man’s appeal. He was off the hook.
2
At first Kate had hated Moscow. In those early days, a week in that gloomy, heartless city seemed an eternity, a year a sentence without reprieve, even though the Moscow she found was not what she had expected. The heart of the city was not ugly concrete blocks as she’d imagined: its buildings were well proportioned, there were wide avenues and parks, churches, museums and libraries. The metro stations were like underground temples. What depressed her was the neglect, the disrepair, the tawdriness of the place. Was she the only one who longed for restoration and a coat of paint? Did the citizens of Moscow really need the ever-present icons of Stalin and Lenin and the ubiquitous red stars perched on the top of building after building to remind them they lived in the Soviet Republic? Wouldn’t they respond to other colours in their lives, other icons?
If the path to socialism brought universal benefits, why were there daily queues of women and old people outside the shops? Why were there so few goods for sale? One week you might be able to buy milk but not butter, the next some scraggy meat but no vegetables. And fruit – how infrequently she found any fruit. She was not surprised by the sad demeanour of the people in the street, but why were they reluctant to look you in the eye – what did they think she might do to them? Why were their clothes so shabby, their skin so pallid? When she went on the tram, why did the old women point at her blonde hair and move away? In her letters home she concealed her unhappiness from her father. Every day she wondered how she would see out the month, let alone the year.
*
‘That wasn’t right. I’m sorry.’ Kate breaks off before he can say anything, her voice petulant and troubled. ‘I’ll play it again.’
She is playing the second movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. She knows she should let Vinogradoff comment on her performance but in her irritation at the quality of her playing she can’t help herself. Better that she should tell him she knows she hasn’t got it right than let him assume she thinks any different. She goes back a couple of bars and repeats the phrase, but the effect is no better. Despondently, she waits for his comment. She is sure it will be critical.
‘The mistake was in your head, Kate. You play fine the first time. Sometimes, I think you are hard on yourself without reason.’
Her lessons with Vinogradoff take place each week either alone in his cramped apartment, where they are now, or with other students at the Conservatoire. To her surprise he refuses to play the cello with her. He prefers to make his points on the piano.
‘If I play for you on the cello,’ he explained at their first lesson, ‘perhaps I will then hear myself in your performance. That is not why you are here, is it?’
Just as well, she thinks. I can copy anything you do, I can mimic you to perfection. One night in her third week at Malaya Gruzinskaya Street she had drunk more than she should have and made the other students laugh by giving a ‘Vinogradoff performance’. Not only had she played like him, but she had reproduced his physical mannerisms as well, the nervous pull at the lips, th
e way he bowed forward over the instrument one moment and then leaned away from it the next. Afterwards, she was ashamed of what she’d done, and she hoped it would never get back to Vinogradoff. But it had made her life a little easier, and had diminished the suspicion with which the other Eastern Bloc students regarded her.
‘Just for an evening,’ she wrote to her father, remembering the laughter and applause, ‘the ice between us seemed to thaw a little.’
‘I don’t seem able to make it sound the way I hear it in my head.’
The admission is made with more passion than she has intended. Will he understand her irritation with her own performance? She is desperate to show him what she is capable of. Why can’t she feel at ease in his presence? In the few weeks since her arrival in Moscow, Vinogradoff has not heard her play as he did when he came to London. Something is lacking and it frustrates her, making her lose confidence. She blames this on the strange city she has chosen to study in, so very different to anything she has encountered before.
‘You are trying too hard to show us what you can do, Kate,’ he tells her in his slow, accented English. ‘Please understand, you have nothing to prove. You would not be here if we did not believe that you could become a true musician. Have confidence in yourself. Trust the musicianship you carry inside you. When you play, you must release this gift you have been given so we may all share in it.’
‘It is so much harder to play here than at home,’ she tells him in a sudden moment of confession. In this alien city, the familiar certainties of her life have deserted her. Her mind is permanently in turmoil.
‘It never ceases to be hard for any of us,’ Vinogradoff says, assuming her comment is philosophical. ‘You must work at the talent you have. You are among friends here. That is important. We are your musical friends.’ He smiles encouragingly at her. ‘Do you feel ready to play this at your recital?’
Each student is encouraged to play in the informal recitals that take place in the Conservatoire every fortnight. So far she has avoided performing before an audience on the grounds that she has not yet settled in. Vinogradoff has endorsed her refusal. She must play only when she feels she is ready. She knows he does not want her to play in public until she has overcome the inhibition he senses in her. This is the first time he has brought up the subject.
‘Do you think I should?’
‘It’s a difficult piece; it demands courage,’ he replies. ‘Why not show them you are brave enough?’
‘I’m not sure I am at the moment,’ Kate replies, knowing this isn’t the answer he wants. ‘My courage seems to be in short supply these days.’ Vinogradoff says nothing. He looks at her with his sad, hooded eyes. How she hates to disappoint him. ‘May I think about it?’
‘Please,’ he says, ‘think positively. It is an important step.’
Whatever encouragement he gives her, she is not yet the master of this music. Something in it still escapes her. Vinogradoff is right. She must find the courage to play before an audience if she is to win his approval. First, she has to overcome her own fears.
3
‘He was smiling, Gerry.’ Julius Bomberg was working himself up into a rage of indignation. ‘The bastard was actually smiling as he said it.’
They were lunching in the staff canteen. In his passion to express his views, Bomberg had upset his glass of water with a flamboyant wave of his arm. The plate of shepherd’s pie that he had hardly touched now appeared to be floating on his tray. He seemed not to notice. He cared little for food and he resented the time it took to eat it. His energies, fuelled by cheroots and his own noxious brew of black coffee, had greater ambitions to satisfy than filling his stomach.
‘He wasn’t smiling, Julius. He was grimacing.’
‘Same thing,’ Bomberg said dismissively. ‘A colonel in the British Army sat there in front of the camera, cool as you like, and said that if we have to go to war with the Soviets over Berlin, we will do so and damn the consequences.’ Bomberg looks for a response but Pountney says nothing. ‘You can’t deny he said that, can you, Gerry?’
‘How can I? It’s there on film.’
‘The man wants to go to war, Gerry. He wants to fight. He’s typical of the military on both sides. Bursting to get their hands round each other’s throats and damn the rest of us. How can you possibly drop something as good as that? You’re crazy. You’re cutting the best bit.’
When he had shown his film to Bomberg that morning, he had not received the endorsement he expected. He was dismayed to discover Bomberg’s determination to make him include the quote from the officer in the British Zone of Berlin. Changing his mind was going to be difficult.
‘The context is wrong, Julius. My piece is about economic migration, not the risk of war with the Soviets. How the GDR will survive if this exodus continues. Talking about the likelihood of a conflict is out of place. The quote doesn’t fit.’
‘Sooner or later their government has to put a stop to this migration. They can’t sit back and do nothing while the country empties, can they?’ Bomberg was in full flow now, arms flailing, voice loud, caught up in the energy of his own indignation. ‘So they swallow Berlin into East Germany. Then what happens? The Western presence in Germany is challenged by the Soviet Union. Threat and counter-threat. Neither side will budge. East and West bid each other up in a war of nerves, each side pours in tanks, troops and high-powered generals, until armed to the teeth they stare at each other across a street in Berlin. Meanwhile, the world holds its breath. Someone sneezes. A trigger is pulled, and within seconds a shooting match begins. Each blames the other for starting the war. By the end of the first day one side threatens to explode a nuclear bomb if the other doesn’t pull back. Neither yields an inch. Next day a nuclear bomb is exploded and that’s it. There isn’t a third day because the world came to an end the day before. In a matter of moments and without thinking about it, a thousand years of European civilisation has been reduced to dust and millions are dead. And this smiling officer says keeping our troops in Berlin is worth the risk of destroying Europe and murdering its citizens. The man’s insane.’
‘He didn’t put it like that, Julius.’
‘Tell me I heard it wrong.’ Bomberg’s mockery was tangible.
‘What he said was, “If the Soviet Union denies the Allies their legal access to West Berlin, the West will have to find some way to convince them that on this issue we mean business.”’
‘Game, set and match,’ Bomberg said furiously. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. The Allies are preparing to go to war over Berlin. Doesn’t that terrify you? Doesn’t it make you think that maybe you should do something to try to stop it, like draw our audience’s attention to what’s going on?’
‘The man’s a soldier, Julius. That’s how soldiers think. It’s not policy. It’s his opinion, which isn’t unreasonable given the aggressive behaviour of the Soviets.’
‘The way he’s talking, Gerry, we could all wake up dead tomorrow and no one would know why. You’ve got to include that quote.’
‘If the situation deteriorates, there’ll be plenty of other opportunities to get the military view. We can use this clip then.’ His knowledge of Bomberg told him that if you let him bully you once, he’d never leave you alone after that. If you wanted to work with him successfully, you had to defend your corner or be swept away in the storm.
Bomberg was silent. The storm wasn’t over, it had temporarily blown itself out.
‘Look, hurry up and finish, will you, Gerry?’ Bomberg took a cheroot out of his pocket and tore off the cellophane wrapping. He put it in his mouth unlit. ‘I want to smoke this thing. We’ll carry on upstairs.’
Bomberg was calling time on lunch. Pountney hated eating with him. He’d take a couple of mouthfuls of what was on his plate, and that was that. When he was done, you were done. Pountney pushed his tray aside unfinished. The cod may have seen better days, but the sponge pudding with hot treacle sauce looked enticing. Oh well, too bad.
*
Over the previous decade, Julius Bomberg had made his reputation pushing forward the boundaries of current affairs on television. He was responsible for a number of innovations that were now setting the agenda. If there was a theme to the choice of subjects on his programmes, it was the need to expose the devious strategies the powerful used to conceal the truth from those they governed.
This national obsession with secrecy, Bomberg argued, eyes blazing behind tinted spectacles, suggested that there was something rotten in the vital organs of the government, and his job, their job – here fingers stab at Pountney and his colleagues – the raison d’être of a current affairs programme like theirs – was to prevent this sickness spreading by telling their audiences what was going on.
‘Ignore what sociologists tell you about class distinction in our society, OK? There are only two classes that matter,’ he maintained, ‘the few who are in the know and the many who aren’t. In this country, secrecy divides us even more than wealth or birth. It is the great enemy of democracy, the means by which governments of all colours exploit the governed. Secrecy is an unrecognised crime perpetrated every day against the men and women of this country by those they vote into office. Our task is to oppose by all means within our power the bureaucratic machinery of government that tries to conceal its activities from public scrutiny. Our watchwords must be scepticism, vigilance and persistence. We believe in a transparent society. We’re here to show the buggers up for the liars they are. OK?’
Pountney and Julius Bomberg had met on their first day at Cambridge. Their names were painted in white, one above the other, on a black square at the bottom of C staircase in Milton Court. Bomberg J. T. (Julius Timothy, as Pountney discovered) and Pountney G. R. (Gerard Raymond). They had rooms opposite each other, 3a and 3b, on the second landing, though Pountney saw little of his neighbour. Bomberg’s life was lived outside the college. If he slept at all – and Pountney had little evidence to suggest that he did – then it was only occasionally and during the hours that others were awake. By the end of their first term, pieces were appearing in Varsity under Bomberg’s byline.
Dr Berlin Page 4