Viktor, Viktor, she is saying. Her hands are outstretched in greeting. He knows that it is her touch that has healed him.
Mother, Mother. Is that smiling young man next to her his dear son, Kyrill? Kyrill. Is that you?
As he reaches towards the faces he loves his eyes close and he falls slowly and willingly into a soft and endlessly enclosing darkness.
IVAN’S SEARCH FOR HIS FATHER
It was film night. The decision had been taken three days before: they would not use the official cinema. The nights were far too hot to be shut up in a room without proper ventilation. They’d set up an open-air cinema. Rig up a screen. Bring chairs, rugs for the children. And the film? By popular demand, Ivan’s Search. What else?
For Andrei, the day passed too slowly. Seconds were like hours, minutes like days. He wanted to help with the preparations but was told he couldn’t, he’d only get in the way. The fathers would build the cinema for a night, while the mothers sunbathed and swam. The children played on the beach, except for Andrei, who hung around, watching the construction of the makeshift cinema from a distance.
‘It won’t be dark till much later,’ his mother said. ‘You must eat now. You’ll be hungry if you don’t.’
‘Where’s Father?’ he asked.
‘He’s coming soon.’ He caught the bewilderment in his mother’s expression. She had no idea where his father was. ‘I’ll save him something for later.’
He ate reluctantly and tested the state’s denial of religion by secretly praying for the sun to fall out of the sky and bring night sooner. His prayers were not answered. He was not sure whether to be pleased or sad. Would nothing make the time pass?
His elder brother Anton teased him. It was just a film, he said. Films were nothing but light projected onto a screen: illusion, make-believe, stupid dreams. What was Andrei getting excited about?
Don’t get angry, Andrei told himself. He wants you to lose your temper so he can demonstrate his superiority.
‘Leave him alone,’ his mother said wearily.
Andrei caught his mother’s eye and said nothing. She knew what he felt because she felt it too. Anton was talking nonsense. Films were real, adventures that sucked you into their stories so that you became the people you were watching. Anton spent too much time trying to attract girls to want to believe in anything but himself. He couldn’t understand that intoxicating feeling of being another person living in another world – a world of dreams, but what dreams, what adventures. He could be a pilot flying his plane through a blizzard on a mercy mission to save a dying mother-to-be; or a soldier single-handedly defending his elderly parents’ home against the enemy; or a young boy taking his sick father’s place in the shift at the mine to earn money to keep the family alive. These were the adventures he watched on the screen, and these were the dreams he wanted in his own life. When the film was over, he relived them again and again in his mind until he became the heroes whose exploits he so admired.
He left the communal dining room to find the open-air cinema. It was still hot. He took the long route so as not to get there too soon. He walked along an endless corridor, passing door after door. He counted the numbers. Seventy-two. Seventy-four. Eighty-six. Eighty-eight. One hundred. How many people were staying here? He knew that in this vast building there were many more corridors like this, and that outside in this seaside resort there were many more accommodation buildings, say, four hundred rooms in each building. Families of four shared rooms. Perhaps sixteen hundred people at any one time were all here for a holiday. All, like his father, had been rewarded with a Black Sea trip for their efforts in building the Soviet state of which they were so proud.
He continued down some stairs, along another corridor, past the entrance to the open-air swimming pool – deserted now, the water stilled and waiting for the morning, the slowly darkening sky reflected on the smooth surface of the water, the smell of chlorine making his eyes smart. On he went past the gym, also deserted, past the cinema, its door closed.
Why did he go in? Was it to pay homage to the heroes whose thrilling exploits he dreamed of at night? Or did he hear hushed voices inside, curiosity making him creep into the darkness? Later, when he tried to remember, his memory played tricks and he couldn’t be sure what had made him do it. Whatever his motive, he pushed open the door and slid in silently, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark before he moved. He was aware at once that someone else was in the cinema: he could hear a man’s voice whispering, then a woman’s. Why anyone would want to talk in the dark in an empty cinema when everyone knew that tonight the film would be shown out of doors escaped him. He crept into the auditorium, keeping low between the seats, and listened.
‘Please.’ A man’s voice, pleading.
‘We can’t. We simply can’t.’ A woman’s voice. A firm denial.
‘Why not?’
‘Someone will see.’
‘It’ll be dark. They’ll all be staring at the screen.’
Silence. A sound like kissing, then a sigh.
‘That’s unfair. I said no, I meant it.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘You’re a pig.’ Another silence. More kissing? This time he wasn’t sure. ‘I won’t do it. I won’t come.’
‘You will. I’ll be there, waiting. You won’t be able to resist me.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
Then, from outside, a whistle, the signal that they were ready to begin. Without thinking he ran for the door and the noise alerted the speakers. He didn’t think they could identify him in the darkness, but it was always possible. He ducked between the rows of seats to hide himself. Only at the last moment did he look back, and then only for an instant. As he opened the door, a shaft of light cut through the darkness. He saw two heads, close together, eyes staring – no time to identify them before they too ducked out of sight. Were they frightened of being seen, or was that his imagination? He ran for his life.
It was almost dark outside, the sky completely clear, the stars distant pinpricks of glistening light. Lanterns had been lit, and one or two people had torches. A sheet had been suspended between two trees to serve as a makeshift screen. The projector was rigged up on a table, its front resting on a pedestal of books so that it would throw its image high onto the screen. Benches and chairs had been brought out of the main building, with rugs spread on the ground at the front for the children.
It was cooler now. A breath of air was occasionally blown from the sea by the light evening breeze. The air smelled sweet. His mother, he saw, was already seated, keeping the chair next to her for his father. She waved at him and pointed to the rug. Anton was with his friends at the front, a group of boys noisily pretending to be uninterested in what was going on. Suddenly someone shouted, ‘Lights out, we’re ready,’ and one by one the lanterns were extinguished.
All was darkness and quiet. These was not a sound, even from Anton. Andrei rested his chin on his knees and looked up at the screen as a light began to flicker across it. He was momentarily disturbed by a child standing up in front of him and playing his torch on the audience before his mother reached forward to snatch the torch from him.
He had that familiar feeling of excitement in his stomach as the film began. Ivan’s Search for His Father, the children around him murmured aloud. The sound rattled from an old loudspeaker that had been placed under the screen. Occasionally it played tricks with the words, making the dialogue hard to hear. Occasionally, too, the night breeze rippled the oblong screen, making the images dance and distort, at which the children giggled, to be hushed by their parents. But none of that mattered. Andrei was transfixed by what he saw.
Into his view, there appear a wide prairie; trees, birch and oak; a river snaking its way through a field; a village going about its daily business, the men in hats and boots, smoking pipes, some on horseback, others in shirtsleeves, working in the fields harvesting, stacking sacks of corn in a barn. The women, scarves around their heads and wea
ring full skirts, nurse children or wash clothes. A boy about his own age, with huge eyes and cropped blond hair, Ivan, is in the fields with his friends helping with the harvest. There are shining faces, old and young alike; images of contentment, of time suspended, of life as he had read of it in story books at school.
Then the picture changes. Horses thunder across the plain, throwing up dust and stones, a posse of men with hard faces and guns in their saddles is riding somewhere. He sees again the village he has only just left but now the faces are full of fear as the peasants scatter, mothers clasp their babies, dragging their younger children by the hand as they try to escape the marauders. He sees burning brands being thrown into houses, men being shot in the street, women falling and being cut down where they lie, vainly protecting their children with their bodies. Ivan runs as his mother and brothers are trapped in their home. The barn alongside their house is set alight. Smoke forms a huge column in the sky, blacking out the sun. Night falls, the village burns. Flames fill the screen and his imagination. The village dies.
3
1
Berlin sat in the back of the Zil as it raced through the empty streets of Moscow. The telephone call had woken him from a deep and dreamless sleep. The message was brief and direct: he was needed now. No reasons were given. The anonymous voice had instructions to issue orders, not explanations. He knew it would be like this because murderers, thieves and informers always meet their destiny in the anonymity of night.
The car came to a halt in a courtyard inside the familiar building. He was escorted through a side door into a world of artificial light where day and night no longer had any meaning, past the security guards, across the marble hall, into the elevator and up to the third floor. Not a word was spoken. The hand that guided him might have held a gun such was his ready obedience to the slightest pressure on his back.
This was the fortress within the fortress of Soviet Russia. In the offices that led off this brightly lit corridor the lives of his fellow citizens were ceaselessly monitored. His was among them, he was sure. The records of who they were, what they did, what they said – what they thought even? – were assembled, annotated, analysed and archived in endless shelves of indexed files hidden in guarded cellars deep in the bowels of the building. This was the great state machine of secret bureaucracy, whose rumoured existence was the source of the universal fear so essential to the exercise of absolute power. This building that was never in darkness was both the engine and the symbol of Soviet power. Its inhabitants were the guardians of the socialist ideal, who kept a permanent vigil against those who threatened to destroy the greatest experiment in engineering human nature the world had ever seen.
‘In here.’
The room was no different to so many he had entered over the years. The walls were bare except for a poorly reproduced black and white photograph of Lenin, arm raised, fist clenched, mouth frozen at the moment of command: ‘Forward, Comrades, forward’, a familiar icon of power. Next to it on the wall was the dusty outline of another picture, long since removed, of Stalin, the now disgraced former leader. How naive of someone – Lenin presumably – to assume that the repetition of such tawdry images would exhort the population at large to believe what their own eyes told them was not true, and yet at the same time how inspired. How had he known that the empty rhetoric would work its dangerous magic and the deceit succeed? Berlin would never understand the gullibility of the masses. Their thought processes mystified him.
He waited. However urgent the summons, you were always kept waiting. Then a voice would say, Thank you for coming at such short notice. That was how every interview began, with a cynical disregard for what both he and his interrogator knew to be the truth. After so many years and so many visits, why maintain the pretence that he had any control over his presence in this room?
‘Thank you for coming at such short notice.’
His interrogator was not one he had seen before. He was a man of his own age, scrubbed and shining, uniformed and eager, the familiar outward skin of the ambitious officer – he’d met his kind before. He disliked zealots as much as he disliked new faces. Hadn’t he earned the right to a single controller by now, someone whose idealism had been worn down by the realities of Soviet life? No doubt it was a rubric of the system that it was dangerous to allow any degree of comfort into the relationship. Hence, tonight he was facing the Zealot for the first time.
‘You visited our Chief Designer recently. How did you find him?’
Berlin was continuously surprised at the way these people felt it necessary to disguise their intentions. They were not remotely interested in his assessment of Radin’s health. They had more urgent questions. They had summoned him to this building in the middle of the night because they wanted to know what Viktor had said to him.
‘He was failing. That was obvious. He can’t last much longer.’
‘He’s outlived all his doctors’ predictions,’ the Zealot said. ‘Either he is stronger than we thought, or his doctors are poor judges of the progress of his disease.’
If only these people were more sympathetic, how much easier their job would be. But sympathy and interrogation do not lie easily together.
‘Tell me, what did you talk about? Were there any last things to be settled between you?’
Last things. The echo of the sentence in Radin’s note was deliberate. They would have intercepted his letter, and now they were curious about its consequences.
‘He seemed very tired. His mind wandered. What he said was inconsequential.’
He concealed the truth without thinking. Why he did so he was not sure. Usually, during these official interrogations, his life was suspended and he was transformed into someone else, a man who told his questioners what they wanted to know because he had no moral strength to resist them. In rooms like this one he had betrayed his students, his colleagues, sometimes even his friends.
Now, for reasons he could not fully determine, he had given a reply that meant while Radin remained alive, he would keep his secrets safe. He had taken a stand. Why? His refusal was an unexpected act of dissent, of resistance to the idea that he should betray Radin because he had betrayed others. Now there was no going back. He was trapped in his own lie. He would have to sustain the deception.
‘What did he talk about?’
‘His childhood, his early interest in rockets, the death of his son.’
That was risky. Viktor had told him once how his son had died but he couldn’t remember any details now. Stick to what you know. Don’t elaborate.
‘Did he mention Baikonur?’
‘Not that I recall, no.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Quite certain.’
The Zealot was writing on the pad of paper. Berlin craned forward. With an eye skilled from years of practice, he was able to read the name of his interrogator: Colonel Medvedev. A name he would remember, along with so many others.
‘You spent over forty minutes in his company. You must have spoken about something.’ Behind the impatience was the scepticism that his interrogator would have been trained to employ. It was a trap, of course. He must be careful.
‘I listened to the ramblings of a dying man. It was a disturbing experience. So little of what he said made sense. I was shocked at his deterioration since my previous visit. Much of the time he seemed not to remember who I was.’
Was that going too far? When you wanted to reveal nothing, the trick was to stay as close to the truth as possible because you could never be sure what additional evidence your interrogators might have collected. It was always dangerous to give them information they could check the moment you had gone.
Radin’s son had been a pilot. He remembered now. Hadn’t his MIG fighter crashed while trying to take the world air-speed record from the Americans?
‘The nursing staff reported that he was confused after you left.’
Good old Viktor, fooling them to the last. He’d put on an act and they’d fallen for
it.
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
‘Did he give you anything before you left? Any letters or notes?’
His interrogator stared at him. This was the simplest test of all. Berlin knew that if he looked away they would take that as a sign of guilt and know that he had lied. Then the atmosphere in the room would change, the questioning would take on a more aggressive tone. He was prepared for that. He accepted the challenge and returned it.
‘If he had, it would be in your possession by now. I would have handed it over immediately.’
That is the language of the man who has sold his soul, the syntax of lies and subservience, of pretended humility and compliance, as he buries his moral identity in sordid moments of betrayal to secure his own survival.
‘Where would our space programme be without our Chief Designer?’ His interrogator took out a cigarette and lit it. He looked reflectively at the ceiling, as if declaiming what he had been ordered to memorise. ‘He put the first satellite into space, then the first man. He invented the super-rocket that will allow us to colonise the moon. He is the author of all our great achievements in space. Without him, we would certainly not have the pleasure of humiliating the Americans so frequently.’
Radin as great servant of the state, whose successes in space caught the imagination of the world on a scale no one had imagined. How dramatic the newspaper headlines had been, proclaiming Soviet superiority over the Americans after Gagarin’s flight. How quick the politicians had been to catch on to the idea of space spectaculars to promote the virtues of the communist system. How cleverly the First Secretary, the Politburo, the Central Committee had been to promote Radin’s achievements as their own. Viktor could do nothing. He had neither public face nor voice. He was the invisible genius on whose back others were shamelessly riding. Men who don’t exist can’t protest.
Dr Berlin Page 7