Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  He is muttering to himself, meaningless phrases, words in no order, a growl from some demented inner being that is now, in front of her, struggling to assert its control of the mind of this poor man, a wild and dangerous force fastening him in its grip.

  He turns towards her and though in the darkness she cannot see his expression, she senses that his battle against the voices is lost. He lets out a cry, a long, hollow exhalation, not just of breath leaving his body but of all hope pouring out of his soul. This is no longer the Miskin she knows. He has fought and lost. The demons have won.

  *

  The Miskin story is all round the Institute within twenty-four hours. He has been found wandering in the streets of Moscow; someone has taken him to a hospital where he has been diagnosed as suffering exhaustion from overwork. He is now being treated at a clinic outside Moscow.’

  The story is believed (why shouldn’t it be? She knows the authorities will never have the courage to admit that one of their senior scientists has gone mad but that is what everyone understands). The general comment is ‘poor Miskin’. Very few people know much about him, he is acknowledged to be a private man, and in a day or two his absence is hardly mentioned. No one asks which clinic he is at nor if they should visit him. Miskin has vanished. Whatever is wrong with him, they all have to get on with their lives.

  Within a week his name has been removed from his door. She knows he is never coming back. Why does she feel no guilt about this episode, only an intense relief? The secret of her relationship with Andropov is safe. She has survived again.

  5

  DANNY

  ‘The Finns don’t know about your visit,’ Monty had warned, putting his finger to his lips. ‘Nor does our embassy. You’re to keep it that way. Not a peep to a soul.’

  I knew next to nothing about Finland. I had a Finnish friend at Cambridge before the war, and one long and drunken night he had tried to explain to me the moral dilemma facing that distant country, and its relationship with its vast and powerful neighbour. I remembered little now of that evening except his warning that, if war came, the Finns would side with the Germans because Russia was their common enemy. They had done and they had lost. Russia now had its boot firmly on the neck of the Finns and there was nothing they could do about it. I had an uneasy feeling that they would be very unhappy if they knew why I was about to enter their country.

  The train pushed on through the grey winter day. We passed through Danish customs without incident. Monty or someone had provided me with an alternative identity. I was a representative from an English printing company on my way to Finland to discuss the purchase of wood pulp.

  ‘The Finns have trees,’ Monty said, ‘so why shouldn’t we buy them?’

  It was late morning when I boarded the ferry for the short journey across the Oresund from Copenhagen to Malmo. The bitter cold had intensified, a strong wind blowing down from the north over snow-laden lands. Ice was forming in the grey choppy waters. I wondered how long it would be before the ice-breakers came out.

  From Malmo, the train went north. Slowly the snow-covered flatlands of southern Sweden gave way to thickly wooded countryside, broken by the occasional lake, frozen silver in the afternoon light, the only signs of life coming from the smoking chimneys of solitary factories.

  ‘Paper mills,’ I said to myself, trying to sound knowledgeable.

  Soon I fell asleep, and in my dreams I relived my return to Berlin.

  *

  ‘Schokolade? Zigaretten?

  A child emerged from the ruins. He had an ancient, wizened face, pale and drawn with hunger and exhaustion and a body that would have fitted someone half his age. If I think of that child now my heart is torn, but at that time we were used to such sights and most of us were beyond feeling by then. Toby Milner referred to them cynically as the ‘hope of the future’, and we all knew what he meant.

  ‘Schokolade? Zigaretten?’

  I pushed the boy away. He retreated and then for some reason decided to follow me. He was undemanding, so I took no notice.

  I let myself into the battered building (how it had remained upright and almost intact in that street of ruins always astonished me). The boy slipped in past me before I could stop him and ran ahead up the stairs. He stood beside me as I found the key and opened the door. The room was in darkness.

  ‘Miriam?’

  I turned on the light but there was no answer.

  I could tell that Miriam had not been there for some days. The air seemed stale and there was already an untouched quality about the room.

  I opened her wardrobe. Her clothes were still there, resting on sheets of newspaper she used as lining paper for the drawers and shelves. Wherever she had gone, it cannot have been planned, or she had not intended to be away for long because she had taken nothing with her.

  By the gas ring there was a jug of milk which had gone bad. I found mildew on the remains of a loaf of bread. Behind me, the boy had found an opened packet of biscuits. I saw him take one and pocket the rest. It seemed pointless to deny him.

  ‘Herr Major.’

  Frau Gassmann was calling from the hallway. I heard her make her way slowly up the stairs. She came in, thinner than ever, her mouth opening wide as she struggled for breath. I greeted her but she waved me away, indicating with her hand that she could not speak yet. She sat down on a chair, her hand on her heaving chest. The emphysema that was killing her had worsened in the time I’d been away.

  I watched the boy’s reaction. He must have seen death many times in his young life. Perhaps he had never seen anyone dying before. He went up to her and touched her arm. She smiled briefly at him, covered his hand with hers, and continued her desperate struggle for breath.

  ‘It happened a week ago,’ Frau Gassmann said eventually. She burst into tears. ‘Two days ago they brought me this.’

  She gave me Miriam’s handbag. I knew at once that she was one more innocent victim of a crime we were powerless to prevent. Every day, men and women were snatched from the streets by the Russians and every day we recorded the statistics. But where the victims went, what happened to them, remained unsolved. All we knew was that they never came back.

  The random nature of the seizures added to the offence of the crime. Cars would stop, doors would open, hands would snatch their victim off the street – anyone, it didn’t matter. We could never make out any discernible pattern. It was all over in seconds. As she screamed for help that was so seldom given and struggled briefly with her captors, Miriam would have known her fate. As a final assertion of her identity, before it was lost for ever, she would have thrown away her handbag. It was the unwritten law of the street that the finder would return it to where she lived, a last poignant message.

  I tried to comfort Frau Gassmann. The boy stood by her, watching her tears, curiosity on his face. I saw him wipe a tear from her cheek with the sleeve of his coat in a brief and unexpected moment of compassion.

  ‘She was very good to me,’ Frau Gassmann said.

  Three weeks earlier in this same room Miriam had given me a present which I had never opened. I went to my briefcase and found her parcel tucked in a corner. I unwrapped a silver-gilt frame and a photograph of Miriam, not as I had known her, but as a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, smiling shyly at the camera, blonde plaits framing her face, her eyes full of hope and expectation that all too soon would be taken from her. I wondered if this was how Miriam thought of herself, or wanted me to think of her.

  ‘She would like you to have this,’ I said to Frau Gassmann.

  ‘No, no, it is yours,’ she said, pushing it away. ‘I cannot possibly take it. She gave it to you.’

  I had no claim on Miriam’s life. I remembered Frau Gassmann telling me that in the final days of the battle for Berlin she and Miriam had hidden in the cellar of the house, terrified that they would die, either crushed by falling masonry as a shell exploded above them, or suffocated in the dust clouds that each explosion released; or worse, raped and murdere
d by the Russian soldiers searching the cellars for surviving Germans.

  They had expected their presence to be betrayed by Frau Gassmann’s cough but no one came, no one shouted Frau, komm, no one pushed them up against a wall at rifle-point and stripped them of their being. They clung to each other in that stinking pit where they had spent so many days they had lost count, close to starving, deafened by the roar of shells and guns.

  Then the awful sound of the bombardment died away, leaving in its place a desolate and echoing silence. The fighting was over, the nightmare ended. They had survived. They emerged into an unfamiliar world of total destruction. Houses, streets, all were skeletons and emptiness, dust and decay. They wept with emotion when they thought how they had managed to keep each other alive and maintain their sanity while all around them the landmarks of their world collapsed in ruins.

  ‘Please take it,’ I said. ‘I know it is what Miriam would want.’

  Frau Gassmann cried again and with a show of reluctance accepted the photograph. She looked at it, kissed it and cried once more. The gesture disgusted the boy and he turned away.

  ‘She was so young,’ she said. ‘She had her life to live. Why didn’t they take me? Mine is ending. A few days sooner, what does that matter? It is so cruel. So cruel.’

  By now the boy was bored by her performance and was looking around the room for anything else he could steal. He found a packet of cigarettes in a drawer and that too disappeared into the pockets of his overcoat.

  We locked the room and I helped Frau Gassmann downstairs.

  ‘Will you come back?’ she asked.

  ‘Whenever I can,’ I said.

  We both knew that I was lying. We both knew, too, that in a few weeks Frau Gassmann would probably be dead as her lungs finally seized up and she could breathe no more.

  ‘Goodbye, Herr Major.’ She kissed me and watched me leave, clasping the photograph to her bosom.

  ‘Schokolade? Zigaretten?’

  Out in the street, the demands began again, more insistently this time, and echoed by the boy’s friends, who had emerged from the dark ruins of the house opposite. They were a street gang, orphans, homeless, wandering from ruin to ruin, stealing what they could, living off the scraps of a civilization that itself was living off scraps. The only morality they knew was eat or die, and too many of them were dead already. The casualties of war continue long after the last shot has been fired.

  I pushed the boy away but he persisted.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, English.’

  As I walked away a hail of stones and broken masonry fell about me. ‘The hope of the future,’ I thought, as I wiped cement dust from my lips and brushed down my greatcoat with my hand.

  *

  ‘I’ve often wondered what you did all day,’ Monty said as he threw himself down in the chair opposite my desk.

  ‘Good God! What are you doing here?’

  I was genuinely surprised to see him. He had given me no warning he was going to be in Berlin.

  ‘Come to see you,’ he said. ‘What else could drag me to this hole?’ He leaned forward conspiratorially but his voice boomed as usual. ‘It’s late. The pubs are open. Won’t you show me this circle of hell?’

  We ended up in a bar where the only occupants were a group of elderly Germans sitting in silent contemplation of their beer. It had little to recommend it but at least it was warm. Monty settled in a corner seat and I bought him a drink.

  ‘How’s tricks?’ he asked.

  ‘You didn’t answer my telephone calls,’ I said accusingly. ‘You never got in touch after the business with Krasov.’

  ‘Mea culpa, Danny. Sackcloth and ashes. L’Affaire Krasov was not our greatest moment. It was an almighty cock-up. Was there much about it here?’

  ‘Kidnapping is a daily event in Berlin. No one takes much notice any more.’

  ‘If Krasov had been taken by his own people to stop him changing sides, we’d have been in the clear,’ Monty said bitterly. ‘But it wasn’t like that at all and that’s what hurts.’

  ‘What happened? What went wrong?’ This was the official Monty I was dealing with, not the Cambridge Monty. The wrong man had turned up in Berlin and he had something to tell me I suspected I didn’t want to hear.

  ‘When we heard that a pathetic, drugged figure strapped to a stretcher had been lifted from the ambulance into the plane, we knew then what the Soviets wanted us to understand: that Krasov the would-be defector was being dragged back to Moscow against his will.’

  ‘You told me you were sure Krasov wanted to stay in the West,’ I said, trying not to sound accusing.

  ‘That’s what we originally thought, and that’s the story the press reported.’

  ‘Only it wasn’t true?’

  He shook his head. ‘It was a Soviet trick and we fell for it. Krasov isn’t the disaffected journalist he led us to believe he was. He’s an officer in Soviet intelligence, and a willing player in a carefully organized deception. What we saw was all done for public consumption. The Soviets broke every rule in their book and played this one to the gallery.’

  ‘Who was in the gallery they were playing to?’

  ‘The Americans.’

  It wasn’t hard to guess the rest. The Soviets had humiliated us on our own patch by snatching him from our grasp in the most public way possible. Our security was shown to be hopeless. American confidence in us, always shaky, was now badly dented. Anglo-American unity was under threat and Monty and his people, I guessed, had been caught in the line of fire in the recriminations that followed Krasov’s very public departure from London. When there is an unexpected reversal of policy, the policy-makers look for a scapegoat. Monty was a sitting target because he had let Krasov slip through his fingers. I began to understand his bitterness.

  ‘It was all an act, Danny, a performance put on for the benefit of the press and the Yanks. The bastards ran rings around us. Made us look bloody idiots in our own backyard. Not good. Not good at all.’

  There was no bravado in this account, only the pain of professional humiliation and the hurt of personal betrayal. Krasov, after all, had been Monty’s friend. I had some sympathy for his distress but why had he come to Berlin to tell me this?

  ‘What are the bastards up to?’

  What they’re always up to, I wanted to say. Out to deceive us, confuse us, humiliate us, defeat us in any way they can. They’re brutal opportunists. If we leave the door open a fraction of an inch, their hordes will pour through in an instant.

  ‘No theories?’ I asked.

  ‘Theories galore,’ he said grimly. ‘But none that sticks.’

  We finished our beer and at Monty’s insistence went out. He wanted to walk, he said, he wanted to absorb the atmosphere. He asked me to point out where the Russian Zone began. He’d never been this close to the enemy before.

  ‘So that’s where the bastards are,’ he said, growling into his beard. We looked across at the flickering lights of the Soviet Sector.

  ‘What happens now?’ I asked.

  ‘God knows. There’s an official enquiry but it won’t resolve anything. The Department’s under scrutiny. The Americans accuse us of leaking secrets to the Soviets. We’ve lost our form recently. The Soviets have made monkeys of us and now the Yanks are piling on the agony. It’s not been a good few weeks for any of us. Who knows what’s going to happen now? There are times when I feel like chucking the whole thing in, and this is one of them.’

  This was Monty in an unexpectedly confiding mood. In the space of an hour or so he had revealed more about himself than he had since we were boys together.

  ‘I’m in the shit, Danny,’ he said. ‘Well and truly up to my neck, as you can imagine. That’s why I’m here. I need to talk to you. For God’s sake, I’m even being blamed for the present crisis.’

  Crisis, I asked? What crisis?

  ‘Oh God, Danny,’ he said. ‘You don’t know anything stuck out here in this infested backwater, do you?’
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br />   Immediately after Krasov’s departure, he told me, they’d had a visit from an American political delegation led by Senator Shearing. There was a real expectation on both sides of the Atlantic that this might lead us to retie the knots that bound us to the Americans, revive our wartime collaboration, get all cosy about nuclear secrets again, all that. A lot of work had been done behind the scenes before the delegation left for Britain, especially by our people in Washington, and there’d been a general feeling of optimism that something positive would come of this visit.

  ‘God knows, we need their know-how and their dollars if we’re not to bankrupt ourselves making our own bomb.’

  But the Krasov business put a stop to that. It gave the anti-British brigade in the American camp all the ammunition they needed to say no to renewed collaboration. Because of foul-ups like Krasov, they wanted their nuclear secrets anywhere but near our slippery fingers. That argument won the day. No deal. No collaboration. We were on our own and likely to remain so. That was the worst news possible. We were going to have to build our own bomb now, and we were going to have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find the money for it.

  ‘Our relationship with the Americans is at an all-time low,’ Monty said. ‘Someone has to take the flak for that and it happens to be us. Our friends in high places appear to have vanished into thin air. The Department’s feeling very exposed.’

  Two British Army lorries went by, their wheels throwing up slush from the melting snow on the roads.

  ‘In my bad moments I think the Russians and the Americans are conspiring against us. If it hadn’t been for Krasov, we’d probably have access to American know-how today. The Soviet timing was perfect. It scuppered any hope of us and the Yanks getting cosy again.’