Dr Berlin

by Francis Bennett

  He didn’t have her patience. His job had been removed by a man who was dead. Only one person, he was told, could change that policy. There was, he knew, no hope that the decision made against him could ever be reversed. It was wrong, absurd, dangerous. He was not prepared to accept it. In his mind he pushed aside his mother’s structures about duality. Those may have been the tactics for the past. The present demanded more direct action. He would stick out his protest. He would force the authorities to test his resolve.

  *

  Three weeks later he was persuaded by a friend to go to a student concert at the Conservatoire. He had grown a beard by then, and his hair was longer. He was thinner too because he had eaten so little. He heard Kate playing. As he listened, he found he had tears in his eyes. Was this the same girl he had rescued from the Lenin Library? She had a power, a maturity, a command of the music that touched him. He wanted to climb over the rows of chairs in front of him and take her in his arms and kiss her. As he listened, his heart moved inside him and he fell in love.

  When it was over he hung back, waiting for her to appear, wondering if she would speak to him.

  ‘Hello,’ Valery said. ‘You probably won’t remember me.’

  She turned at the sound of his voice, and for a moment looked puzzled. Then she smiled at him. ‘You look different,’ she said.

  2

  ‘Mascha! Come here!’

  The dog was racing away through the undergrowth in pursuit of its prey, and took no notice of the command to return. Marshal Gerasimov looked surprised that his authority should be so easily ignored. In the distance Berlin saw two pigeons rise lazily into the morning air, wings flapping loudly. The tail of the dog was visible above the long grass.

  ‘Damn animal. No discipline at all.’

  Berlin followed Gerasimov into the cemetery, presumably once the village burial ground, now long neglected. The gravestones appeared through the undergrowth like the heads of resting animals, the wall surrounding it collapsed in many places through want of repair.

  ‘At my age, a graveyard is a comforting place,’ Gerasimov said, ‘where I meet old friends.’

  Why the old general had brought him to this place miles from Moscow was a mystery. Less than an hour before he had received a telephone message that Marshal Gerasimov wished to see him. A car had been sent. He sat beside the silent, chain-smoking general as they were driven out of the city and deep into the countryside. He was given no explanation for his presence.

  ‘You do not need to believe in any religion to know that after a life of struggle the dead have the right to rest in peace.’

  Long grass, ground elder and ivy had overgrown many of the graves; time and the ravages of the Russian winter had damaged and dislodged tombstones and weathered the inscriptions, so that all too often they were unreadable. Occasionally Gerasimov used his stick to attack the undergrowth in his search for a particular grave.

  ‘We should honour those who dedicate their lives to the service of the state,’ he continued, ‘and not ignore them when they die.’

  Was he thinking of his own funeral? Of the huge garlanded photograph of a younger version of himself that would be paraded like a banner before his open coffin, while a long line of whispering mourners followed him into the graveyard for his burial with full military honours?

  ‘Viktor was fiercely proud of his independence,’ Gerasimov said. ‘He always believed he was the author of his own survival. It wasn’t so, of course, but he was too valuable to be told the truth. It would have broken his heart. Even the Central Committee came to recognise that.’

  The dog returned and leaped up at Gerasimov, who bent down to stroke her. ‘Too old to learn new tricks, aren’t you, Mascha? Like your master.’ He threw a stick for her and she ran off after it.

  ‘Viktor believed he owed nothing to anyone. He had no idea of the battles that in his absence were fought on his behalf, or he pretended to know nothing because it suited him. He had no favours to repay. Perhaps it is as well that not all of us follow the same creed.’

  Did he detect regret in the old man’s voice? Did he too have secrets that he could never share, moments when his own life had been dependent on the support of others? Gerasimov had survived so many upheavals since the Revolution. What accommodations had he had to make along the way? What debts were still outstanding, waiting to be redeemed from those who in the past may have saved his life? Or was his power based on the fact that he had outlived them all?

  The old general stopped in front of a gravestone and was silent for a moment. Berlin followed his gaze. The name Yelena Gerasimova and the dates 1902–1954 were inscribed on a tilting granite slab.

  ‘Today is the anniversary of my wife’s death,’ he said suddenly. ‘It was her wish to be buried where she was born but the village is deserted now, and no one tends the graves. I do my best but it is not enough. Her life was cruelly cut short but she lived long enough to learn of the birth of her grandson. Now he is dead too. My son and I buried the boy next to his grandmother.’

  He used his stick to push away the long grass from a newer gravestone nearby. Nikolai Gerasimov, aged eight, the freshly carved inscription read. If the old man felt any emotion, he kept it to himself. His dark grey face, eyes buried under enormous jutting eyebrows, stared down at the two graves. He was lost in his private thoughts.

  ‘Sometimes I can hardly remember what Yelena looked like. I can remember the boy as if I had seen him yesterday.’

  He must be in his mid-seventies now, Berlin imagined. The deep furrows on his face told of an ingrained weariness, of battles with words as well as weapons, while the worn skin showed that the struggles of a long life were exacting their slow revenge on him. He might look exhausted, but Berlin was in no doubt about the strength of his belief in a creed that for him held the only true answer to the ills of the world. His conviction would remain unshaken until the day he died. He would never doubt the dogma, only those who had failed to live up to its high demands, a weakness to which he was implacably opposed. He saw himself surrounded by men and women who lacked his austere vision, who were too selfish, too weak or too undisciplined to accept the challenge to change the nature of society that he had so readily adopted as a young man.

  ‘Yelena was an artist. Did you know that?’

  ‘You may be surprised to learn that I have one of her early paintings in my apartment.’

  Painted on wood when she was in her early twenties, about the time she married Gerasimov, it showed a young man in a fur hat and winter greatcoat, binoculars round his neck and rifle at his side, sitting in a station waiting for the train to take him to war. He stares at the painter, his youthful expression unable to conceal his emotions of alarm and anticipation – there was no attempt to conceal the ambivalence of the young soldier’s feelings. From the moment he’d seen it, Berlin had loved its honesty. It had pleased him when Kate had said she loved it too.

  ‘She destroyed too much of her own work,’ Gerasimov said suddenly. ‘I didn’t discover that until shortly before she died. When I asked her why, she claimed she was dissatisfied with what she did. After her death I learned that she destroyed her paintings to protect my career. Too much truth would have damaged my prospects of promotion.’

  Yelena Gerasimova was best known for a popular book of drawings the state had published in 1942 entitled Journey to the Russian Soul. It in she showed how Soviet citizens coped with the deprivations of war. There was a heroic, sentimentalised aspect to these sketches that Berlin found unconvincing and surprising, so unlike the painting on his wall. What she published was little more than propaganda, which possibly accounted for its extraordinary success. Had she lost that ability to see the truth that he had so admired in her earlier paintings? There was a persistent rumour, which continued even after her death, that for each picture published there was another which showed the true suffering of the people and the ravishing of their land – burned fields, ruined crops, slaughtered animals, destroyed villages, bar
ren faces of raped and widowed women, endless corpses of peasants, women and children as well as men, murdered by the invaders. Berlin knew no one who would admit to having seen any of these drawings, yet references to their existence refused to die.

  ‘Sometimes I think she died of a broken heart. She taught me that you must never sacrifice the truth. It is all we have.’

  The old man stared down at the gravestone. He was not praying – an old communist could not believe in an afterlife – he was remembering. Then he resumed his walk. The dog trotted obediently in front of him.

  ‘I have given my life to the cause of communism,’ Gerasimov continued. ‘I believe that life without social justice is no life at all. Marxist-Leninism is the only doctrine that sets its face firmly towards the goal of liberating mankind from its terrible burdens and creating a just society. We may deviate on the way, we may take wrong turnings, we may even make mistakes, but nothing must deflect us from that single and praiseworthy objective of a fair, equal and open society. That belief has sustained me in my moments of greatest terror in a long and sometimes dangerous life.’

  The old man’s vision was as strong today as it had been when he was a young communist. Berlin saw that his words were born out of anger and hurt, and his belief that the marchers on the path to progress had taken wrong turnings.

  ‘Viktor was right to blame the politicians for the desperate state our country is in. Our politicians are among the most dangerous people in the Republic today. I have listened to too many of the First Secretary’s threats to the West, most recently over the status of Berlin. He is playing with nuclear war as if he were playing with a child’s marbles. He refuses to acknowledge the terrible risks he runs. He should remember that just causes are not won by the extermination of civilians but by the strength of belief in the cause.’

  Berlin looked back. Were there a hundred graves in this cemetery? Twice that number? It was hard to judge. He felt a certain relief that, as witnesses, the dead were blind and deaf. They could not identify who said what, nor could they repeat what was spoken in their presence. He was beginning to understand why they were walking in this graveyard: the silence of the dead was their security.

  ‘We have built up a huge defensive force. We are not invulnerable to enemy attack, but we have a prodigious ability to defend our homeland. What the First Secretary conveniently forgets is that we lack the ability to strike back at our enemies.’

  ‘Surely that can’t be true.’ Berlin spoke without thinking.

  Gerasimov stopped in the shadow of an ancient cypress. ‘Now you see how successful we are at selling propaganda to our own people. Do you know how many missiles we possess with which to attack the West?’

  ‘Thousands.’ An imprecise figure, he admitted, but one he was sure of. He had heard it from too many sources for it not to be true.

  ‘Our arsenal consists of less than two hundred long-range missiles, only a handful of which have any capacity to strike at the heart of Europe. None can reach America and most are inaccurate. Our chances of coming within five miles of the target are less than one in ten.’

  ‘Two hundred missiles?’ Berlin was incredulous. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘Whether you believe me or not doesn’t make what I am saying any less true.’

  ‘What about this orbiting space platform which will launch nuclear weapons?’

  Gerasimov laughed bitterly. ‘It exists only in the imagination of the First Secretary, nowhere else. There are no plans, no blueprints, no preliminary sketches for such a weapon. It does not exist. Probably it will never exist. It is a complete invention.’

  ‘Does the West know that?’

  The old man shook his head. ‘The CIA continually overestimates our military capability. Our leader exploits the West’s ignorance with his daily threats to use these non-existent weapons. His policy of aggression is a betrayal of the beliefs that have sustained me all my life. The victory of communism must come through example and argument, not aggression and war. We must all share in the achievement we have sacrificed so much for.’

  A breeze disturbed the branches of the cypress so that it seemed to bow in honour to the old soldier. Gerasimov walked on, head bent. The dog was way ahead of him now, following her own trail.

  ‘I have sent enough young men to their graves already; I have no wish to see more slaughtered. We will only go to war if we ourselves are the victims of an unprovoked attack from the West, which is unlikely to happen. We cannot wage an offensive war because we have insufficient resources to do so. Yet that is the prospect our leader peddles every day when he makes these wild and dangerous statements. The West believes him, and arms itself accordingly. We are heading for disaster.’

  They walked on in silence, the path leading them out of the cemetery and along the edge of a field.

  ‘Last night a decision was taken by the Politburo to sign the treaty with East Germany that will make Berlin into an open city. The attempt by the military to oppose this plan failed utterly. We are now committed to a perilous course of action. By making Berlin part of a sovereign state, we invalidate the legal right of our former allies to remain in the city. Naturally they will not succumb to our demands to surrender their position willingly. They will claim that our absorption of Berlin into East Germany is an illegal act, and in support of their position they will build up their military forces. We will do the same. There will be a steady increase of tension as threat is met by counter-threat, until each side is lined up against the other, ready to resort to force if so instructed. I am sure I do not have to tell you that such a policy runs risks of unimaginable dimensions. When we face each other across the streets in Berlin, the prospect of a local conflict getting out of control will be very great.’

  ‘Would the West risk going to war over Berlin?’ What he meant was, would they judge the principle of upholding their position worth the risk?

  ‘Why should they give way before the bullying of a Soviet leader? My judgement is that they will stubbornly resist our plans. They will declare our act illegal and refuse to negotiate. The First Secretary has committed himself publicly. He will not back down. To do so would be to reveal himself before the world as a magician who has run out of tricks. What happens when you have two sides, neither of which will give way to the other? You don’t need to be a soldier to predict the outcome. Now do you understand why I fear this situation so greatly?’

  ‘Can nothing be done to prevent a catastrophe?’

  ‘If someone who had lied to you repeatedly came to you one day and said, believe me, this is the truth, would you do so?’ The scepticism was all too evident in Gerasimov’s voice. ‘Through the continual use of lies we have destroyed the meaning of the language we use. Our words have lost their value. We can no longer communicate. If the tension in Germany rises to breaking point, we may have to pay a terrible price for exhausting words of their true sense.’

  Berlin remembered the films he had seen at school, propaganda films, he knew, but none the less terrifying, of atomic bombs exploding. The huge cloud bursting out of the earth and slowly forming into a mushroom shape against the dying sky, bleaching itself of colour until it was dust grey and poisonous, and always the neutral voice of the commentator, describing the effects of a nuclear explosion in Zone 1 (‘bone and tissue melts and matter vaporises’), Zone 2 (‘steel window frames melt, houses collapse like cards in the nuclear wind’), Zone 3 (‘you may survive the immediate blast but your body will be burned and poisoned and you will die a slow and painful death’). Watching the blinding glare of the explosion, he imagined the force of the unnatural wind and heard the thunderous roar as matter disintegrated and the nuclear storm destroyed everything in its path, leaving behind only a burned-out wasteland of acidic ash. It was a lasting vision of the end of the world.

  ‘If we are forced into war with the West, the people of this country will suffer dreadfully. They will be ordered to fight on the promise that victory will inevitably be ours because th
ey have been taught that our ideology is invincible and our weapons are superior. They will quickly discover that such promises cannot be kept. The superior weapons will fail to materialise because they do not exist. Ideology is no defence against bullets and shells and bombs. The people will see that they have been betrayed by their own leaders. Millions of innocent men, women and children will die unnecessarily because they have been misled. We will all be responsible for their deaths.’

  They walked on in silence. The dog Mascha had returned and was circling them, occasionally running up to Gerasimov and burying her face in his hand as if expecting to find some reward there.

  ‘You can’t stand by and let that happen.’ Berlin spoke with more intensity than he had expected.

  ‘Do you think I have stood by and done nothing?’ The old marshal was becoming angry. ‘I have argued against this policy continually, I have supported my case with figures, I have told the truth again and again, but what I have said has not been believed.’ He stared at Berlin. ‘My warnings have been ignored. What more can I do?’

  A sudden breeze set the branches swaying so that they sighed in chorus at Gerasimov’s words. ‘Without the ability to listen to reason, there can be no hope. We have blinded ourselves to the truth. In this country, reason has lost the battle and the war.’