Dr Berlin

by Francis Bennett

  Without knowing why, she had imagined that a group of them would eat together, and now she was alone with him, walking in the streets of Moscow. It was cold, and for the first time she felt uncertain. The evening had taken a direction she had not expected. Being alone with him had never been part of her plan. Come to think of it, there’d been no plans for after the concert because in her heart she hadn’t imagined he would turn up.

  They entered a restaurant, a place of endless unoccupied chairs and tables, soulless decorations and grim lighting. A group of sullen waiters stood around doing nothing. One of them was reading a newspaper. In the gloom she made out two solitary figures hunched over their plates.

  ‘We are full,’ she heard one of the waiters say. ‘There are no free tables.’

  ‘They are too busy reading the paper and smoking to attend to us,’ Berlin said in English. She caught a momentary look of indecision on his face.

  ‘I’m quite happy to go home,’ she said.

  Berlin said something to the waiter, who gestured resignedly towards the stairs. Kate was guided into a smaller dining room on the first floor, smoke-filled and crowded. As they sat down, he briefly acknowledged one or two smiles and waves. He chose dishes for her – she was too overwhelmed by what was happening to concentrate on what to eat – and filled her glass repeatedly with a delicious white wine.

  ‘Better than some of the student places you must have been to,’ he said. ‘I hate student parties. The wine always tastes like rocket fuel and the songs and poems are so dreary. When I was a student we worked hard but when we relaxed we laughed a lot. We had fun. Today everyone is so serious. What’s happened to your generation? Why have you lost the ability to let your hair down?’

  It was after midnight when they left. As she emerged into the night, the street revolved around her, and for a moment she had to lean against Berlin. He put his arm round her shoulder. The rush of cold air cleared her head and her nagging conscience, silenced for so long, sprang into life. What was she doing alone with a strange Russian whom she hardly knew – a man more than twice her age? Was this why she had come to Moscow? She was a music student, studying under one of the world’s greatest cello players – she should be in bed in her hostel, or preparing for tomorrow’s lesson. But her ability to listen to her more rational self receded with every step she took. She had no idea where she was going, nor did she care. She had submitted herself willingly to powers beyond her control. Tonight she was bidding farewell to the prudence that had governed her life. She was no longer the shy student who played truant from her music to attend his lectures. Berlin’s presence beside her transformed her into the woman in her dream. But now he was playing the tune and she was the one being drawn ever closer to the music.

  An official car roared past and disappeared. The street was deserted and silent – that Moscow silence again. She clung tightly to Berlin’s arm.

  *

  His flat was high up in a huge modern building and full of books, a few paintings – she liked one of a young soldier, in a greatcoat and hat, holding an unfamiliar rifle in his hand, waiting anxiously to board a train that would take him away to the front. There were some photographs – his parents, she imagined: his mother was a tall woman with thick blonde hair. Berlin, she noticed, was very like her – and a bronze head and shoulders of his mother, sculpted when she was young. Kate was struck by the innocent beauty of the portrait of a young woman on the threshold of life, her expression open and trusting before the cruel secrets of life in the Soviet Union were revealed to her. She was reminded of the faces she had seen on the public statues in the city, usually a young man and woman striding determinedly towards the much-promised ‘radiant future’, their hands held high, one holding a hammer, the other a sickle.

  ‘Is that your mother?’ she asked Berlin.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Before she married my father.’

  ‘She’s very beautiful,’ Kate said. ‘Who did the portrait?’

  ‘My father was a sculptor.’

  ‘He must have loved her very much.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Look at the face. She’s so full of life, so eager, so hopeful.’

  ‘For a time he loved her. At least I think he did.’

  ‘I know I’ve seen her face before,’ Kate said. ‘Why does it seem so familiar?’

  Berlin laughed. ‘My father sculpted many of the public statues in this city, and elsewhere. My mother was his model and his inspiration.’

  He had a cream-coloured Deccalian gramophone like her father’s, with its familiar egg-box speaker – surely he couldn’t have bought that in Moscow? – and next to it stood his collection of long-playing records.

  ‘I thought jazz was forbidden in Russia,’ Kate said teasingly, skimming through his albums.

  ‘There are ways of bending the rules.’

  ‘And sometimes you do?’

  ‘Not everyone lives like this.’

  ‘Will you play this for me?’ She had chosen a record at random. He took the vinyl record out of its cover and inspected it lovingly for the presence of dust, wiping it carefully with a special yellow duster he kept in a plastic wallet. He put the record on the turntable. ‘This is not your kind of music, I know. But listen. It will touch your heart.’

  The sound of a sad trumpet filled the room, a solitary lament which slowly possessed her with its mournful magic.

  ‘I discovered Miles Davis the first time I went to California,’ Berlin was saying. ‘I’d never heard of him before. He is a trumpeter of genius. On this recording, he plays with his great friend, the pianist Bill Evans. Discovering this music was a revelation to me. The moment I heard it, I entered a world I did not know existed.’

  Berlin was right. This was music she was aware of but had never listened to. She found it touched her in a way she had not expected – it was music of emotion, sadness, poignancy; of fate as something that could not be altered, of raw passion that flared but did not last, and yet from whose demands there could be no escape, not if you were true to what you felt. There is only one voice you must listen to, each note was telling her, the voice in your heart. Listen to it carefully. No evasions, no dissimulations, no resistance. Live for the moment because there is nothing else. Be true to who you are. It is all you have, and it is soon gone because youth is short. As the music played, she became the creature of its impulses, obedient and trusting.

  She sat on the sofa, her shoes off, her legs curled under her. Was it one o’clock? Two? Who were they listening to now? More Davis? Count Basie? Ellington? The Modern Jazz Quartet? She no longer cared. The boundaries between dream and reality had broken down, and she no longer knew if she was awake or dreaming.

  She remembered her glass being refilled, once, twice, how many times? She listened to Berlin without hearing what he was saying. Probably it was about the musicians. He had met them in jazz clubs when he had visited California. In the dimly lit room – why had he only switched on one lamp? – she was transfixed by the intensity with which he spoke. His voice, his eyes, his face seemed to envelop her, defining the limits of her world, allowing her no escape. Wherever she looked, he was there, gazing back at her, this strange and beautiful Russian man who had swept so unexpectedly into her life.

  At some point he got up from the chair to sit beside her on the sofa. She remembered letting him kiss her, putting her arms around him. How thin his neck was, how strong the body under his clothes! Then she pushed him away dreamily when his hands were on her. She knew then that he wanted her, and she felt not fear but a mixture of delight and confidence that she was the one he had chosen. If she wanted she could say no or yes to him. As the music played, the idea of saying no seemed a betrayal of herself, impossibly remote.

  *

  It was still dark outside when she woke. She looked at her watch. Five forty-five. She got up to look out of the window. In the hours of night the world had been transformed. The first snow of winter was settling on the pavements and
streets, on the tops of the street lights, on the window ledges and roofs of the buildings opposite, transforming Moscow into a magical city, a new world. It would not last, she knew. Soon boots would tramp across the snowbound pavements, cars and trams would throw up explosions of snow as they passed, blackening them with soot and oil and grime, and Moscow would become its grim old self again. But for this short time, as the world stirred before waking, the city was hers, transformed into a pure white landscape of temporary but infinite beauty.

  ‘Andrei?’ No answer. She prodded him awake. ‘I’ve got to go home.’ She dreaded the idea of leaving him even for a moment.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Nearly six.’

  ‘It’s too early. Go back to sleep.’

  She looked at his face. The tension had gone from him. He seemed younger than he had last night, paler and more vulnerable. His eyelids quivered occasionally, responding to an inner tension she could only guess at. She bent down and kissed his forehead softly, then brushed his lips with hers. He didn’t stir.

  ‘Goodnight, my love,’ she whispered. ‘Goodnight.’

  8

  1

  ‘Mr Hart is waiting for you, sir. Would you come this way, please.’

  Pountney was shown into a small room on the first floor of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Hart was talking to a man he’d never seen before.

  ‘Gerry, thank you for coming.’ Hart got up to greet him. ‘I’d like you to meet an old sparring partner of mine. Gennady Koliakov, counsellor at the Soviet Embassy.’

  So this was Koliakov: medium height, orange hair beginning to thin, pale face covered in light freckles, the kind of man whose sensitive skin kept him out of the sun. Not unsuitable for his profession, lived out, Pountney assumed, mostly in the shadows.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Pountney. In some ways, I feel we have already met.’ Koliakov spoke English slowly, as if concealing the remains of a childhood stammer, and with a pronounced American accent. ‘I have seen you on television, of course, and I recall you were the subject of some lengthy conversations between Hugh and myself a year or two ago.’

  ‘I don’t think we want to resurrect the past, Koli,’ Hart said quickly. ‘All that’s done and dusted long ago. We can safely leave it to the historians, don’t you agree?’

  ‘That was thoughtless.’ He smiled disarmingly at Pountney. ‘Will you forgive me?’

  They talked undisturbed for half an hour before a member of the club staff approached Koliakov to say that his driver had arrived. Koliakov got up and looked sadly at Pountney. ‘I did explain to Hugh that I had another appointment.’

  ‘It was good to meet you.’ They shook hands.

  ‘I knew we’d only got him for a while,’ Hart said as soon as Koliakov had left, ‘but I still thought it was worth it. I wanted you two to meet.’

  Before Pountney had a chance to ask why, Hart was already explaining that he’d first come across Koliakov in a thermal bath in Budapest in the summer before the ’56 Revolution. They’d ended up a few weeks later having a drunken evening together. ‘Quite outside the Soviet rule book. God knows how Koli managed it. That’s when he told me about Martineau’s affair with Eva Balassi. I realised then that there was more to him than any of us had reckoned.’ The outbreak of the Revolution within days of their dinner had prevented them meeting again. ‘For a long time we’d assumed Koliakov really was a PCO.’

  ‘PCO?’ Pountney was hopeless with abbreviations.

  ‘Passport Control Officer. Very lowly. In fact he was the senior KGB officer in the Soviet residentz. His job was to monitor the temperature of the local hostility to the Soviets and report back to Moscow on the city’s state of health. We’re pretty sure it was Koliakov who advised the Kremlin to send in General Abrasimov to crush the uprising. He went to ground somewhere in the Moscow hinterland for a while after returning from Budapest – there was a rumour he’d had a breakdown, though it’s never been confirmed. Then a couple of years ago he reappeared in London, bright as a button if you please, with the rank of counsellor.’

  Pountney wasn’t listening. His mind went back to the photographs he had seen of the dead and dying in the streets of Budapest during the brutal Soviet repression of the uprising, of the harrowing stories he’d read in the papers or heard from the exiles he’d met, of the cry for help from a brave people which went shamefully unanswered by the West. Hungary was a tragedy that should never have been allowed to happen. Koliakov had had a hand in it – if Hart was right, he had set the whole terrible process in motion – and whichever way you looked, that hand was stained with blood. Now, over an indifferent glass of wine, they were talking as if their shared memories of that past didn’t exist. How he hated the twisted morality of the intelligence community.

  ‘After what the Russians did in Hungary, you’re still prepared to deal with him?’

  ‘Where would you be if I hadn’t done so? Rotting in a Russian jail, most likely.’

  Sensing Pountney’s sudden change of mood, Hart hurried on. Koliakov’s instructions for London were to get to know a wide range of contacts. Make friends; be seen around. Spend some money if you have to. Show the human face of Marxism. When you’re in with politicians, trade union leaders, journalists and the like, listen and report. He was spying on us, Hart said, no question about it, but there was nothing Merton House could do. Koliakov hadn’t broken any rules.

  ‘Don’t be deceived by the charm,’ Hart continued. ‘The spots on the soul of this leopard are a deep Soviet red. He’s been at this game a long time. He knows all the tricks. He’s a difficult nut to crack, a real hardline bastard when you strip away all the false sophistication.’

  Why would Hart tell him this? Was there some unfinished business left over from Budapest? Had more gone on there than Hart was letting on, and were there old scores to settle?

  ‘We’ve been watching him from the moment he arrived in this country, and we’ve not been able to pin so much as a parking ticket on him. Our Soviet friend is as clean as a whistle. He’s been a model citizen.’ Hart paused in his narrative. ‘Until about a month ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘An indiscretion.’

  Pountney laughed. Where would the Intelligence Service be without human frailty? ‘Tell me – was it a man or a woman? Or has he got his hand in the till?’

  ‘A woman, but not the kind of woman you’d expect.’

  ‘A duchess?’

  ‘A call-girl.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s lonely,’ Pountney suggested. ‘Or he has certain specialised tastes that she satisfies.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Pountney had the clear message that Hart wasn’t interested in the possibility of Koliakov’s sexual deviance. ‘A long posting overseas can be quite a problem for some of them when they don’t bring their wives with them.’

  ‘Has Koliakov got a wife?’

  ‘He’s never married,’ Hart said. ‘The rumour in Budapest was that he had an unrequited love for Martineau’s girlfriend, Eva Balassi, whom he’d met in Moscow during the war – I imagined jealousy of her attachment to Martineau was one of his motives in telling me about his affair with Eva. Anyway, our watchers are getting bored keeping an eye on Koliakov when, all of a sudden, he visits this girl. She’s young, eighteen or nineteen, been on the game for two or three years. She works at the respectable end of the trade, you know, barristers, civil servants, the occasional bishop.’

  ‘And now with her new interest in KGB officers,’ Pountney said flippantly, ‘she’s moving into the rougher end of the market.’

  ‘I’m sure our friend doesn’t advertise his origins,’ Hart replied sharply.

  ‘Has he visited her often?’

  ‘Our reports say he’s becoming one of her regulars, yes.’

  ‘It’s not a crime to pay for sex,’ Pountney said.

  ‘That’s why Koliakov is out of bounds to us. We can’t lay a finger on him because technically he’s doing nothing wrong.’ Hart paused to stare at P
ountney. ‘We could of course turn the girl in, but we don’t want to do that.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’d like you to talk to him.’

  ‘You’re not serious, I take it?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be serious?’

  ‘I remember you telling me before I went to Moscow that the days of the amateur were over.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.’

  ‘Come on, Hugh. Your people can do their own dirty work, you don’t need me.’

  ‘Koliakov’s done nothing wrong, that’s why we can’t touch him.’ Hart stared at Pountney. ‘We think he may have the information we’re so desperate to get our hands on.’ Another pause. ‘Look upon it as a favour, Gerry. I did the same for you once, remember?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘I’ve got a long memory.’ Hart refilled their glasses. When he spoke again it was with a renewed intensity. ‘This new missile-carrying Soviet satellite has put the wind up everyone. Whitehall’s in a blind panic about what the Soviets will do next in Berlin. A war committee has been formed. The whisper now is that a general mobilisation is a real possibility. The Americans are sending a new division to reinforce their troops in Germany, and they’ve appointed General Clay to take charge. God knows what weaponry they’re shifting into West Berlin. I’d bet my life on some of it being nuclear. The situation gets more serious by the hour. We’ve got to know whether Soviet aggression is based on bluff or reality.’

  ‘I can’t help you, Hugh. You know I can’t. You don’t need me to tell you why not.’

  Hart ignored him. ‘The key to what happens in Berlin is Radin. If he’s alive, then it’s more than likely this armed satellite exists and the Soviets will get it into orbit pretty soon. As we’ve no defence against it, we will need to get our reaction in first. If Radin’s dead, then it’s much more likely the Soviets are bragging about what they would like to do but probably can’t, at least not in the next few weeks. Without Radin the threat doesn’t go away but it diminishes. It takes the heart out of events right now, gives us a chance to sort this bloody mess out without so great a risk of blowing the world into a billion pieces. So we have to know for sure whether Radin is alive or dead. At this moment, we just don’t know. Finding out the truth could make the difference between peace and war.’