Only those small groups at the university who could be bothered to study the history of the Soviet Union were still keen to know who Malenkov was, or Berija, or Breshnev. Who nowadays wants to read up on Gosplan’s abortive twenty-second Five Year Plan or is interested enough to pick my brains on the twenty-sixth Party Congress? Capitalism had won the battle. The triumphant progress of the free market was not conducive to Utopian scenarios or momentous decisions. And the fruits of victory were as bitter as a mouldy lemon on a dark November day in a bygone time in a Moscow which, with its Coca-Cola ads, Marlborough Men, an inane, babbling Yeltsin, nouveau riche mafiosi and small boys begging on the streets reminded me more of a Third World country. It could just as easily have been Brazil. Or Upper Volta. The only real difference were the nuclear weapons. Were it not for them it is unlikely that anyone would have taken much notice of Russia now. There was nothing special or ferocious about Moscow or the Russian bear. It was all just a big mess, one which really did not concern the rest of the world.
I was sick of this new, melted-down order and I was sick of myself. I lay on a big bed in a modern hotel in Slovakia’s impoverished capital, knowing full well why I was feeling so bloody sorry for myself. Why, after dinner, I had stayed on in the bar to drink first cognac and later whisky. It was the meeting, two days earlier, with the former prime minister of the Czech Republic that had ruined the trip for me. My mood was not helped by the fact that I had toothache. One of my back teeth was giving me gyp. It acted as a constant reminder that this old bag of bones was very much the worse for wear. That I was, in every possible way, going downhill. Less hair, fewer brain cells, deteriorating teeth, shortness of breath on stairs, a waning libido. I had to admit, though, that it was the former Czech prime minister who had destroyed my last vestiges of good humour.
There I was, lying in that modern hotel with toothache, hearing in my head again and again the leader of our delegation’s deliberately spiteful introduction of me. With a couple of well-chosen words he got his revenge for the Research Council grant I had snatched from under his nose twelve years earlier. In academia we never forget a slight.
In his atrocious English he had said:
‘And now here is Mr Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen. One of our leading experts in and researchers into Soviet affairs. Particularly the Breshnev years.’
The former prime minister, with his beautifully cut hair and immaculate suit, had looked at me with his ice-blue fish eyes:
‘What a lot of useless information you carry around in your head,’ he said. Then he turned his X-ray gaze on young Lena, she of the long legs and the useful degree in ‘Transitional problems in the phase between plan economy and the global market. A study in options.’
‘Extremely helpful findings – for us too,’ the arrogant bastard had said, holding both her hand and her eyes for just a little too long before releasing her fingers with a glance at the hidden and yet so obvious secrets of her Wonderbra which made the normally hard-nosed Lena blush. Power is a tremendous aphrodisiac and the Czech was outrageously well-preserved.
Fuck them all! Fuck the modern world! It sucks! As one of my numerous offspring would say. But I too had blushed, because he had hit me where it hurt. I had stood there trying to take comfort in the knowledge that I had had a fine academic career and no one could take that away from me. I had my history doctorate. My thesis had been described as a brilliant study of stagnation phenomena in the Breshnev era. It had been widely cited in international history journals and had earned me a guest lecture at America’s Harvard University in 1981, the year before the old bugger died. Unfortunately, my thesis had arrived at the conclusion that the inherent strength of the Soviet system outweighed its structural weaknesses. Reform was possible. The Soviet Union would enter the next millenium fortified and reinforced. The bipolar world dominated by the two big players, the USA and the USSR, was here to stay.
I got a couple of good years out of Gorbachev, but after that there were no more invitations from the major universities in the US and Europe. And I was no longer a regular guest in the blue television news studio, providing clear, concise answers to the presenter’s carefully rehearsed questions. Because the whole flaming set-up had collapsed! I had actually got it wrong. And my fellow academics knew it. No journalist was likely to read every line of a doctoral thesis which came to the wrong conclusion, but my colleagues had memories like elephants, a fact of which I was reminded by the sound of their barely suppressed, gleeful sniggers when the former prime minister made his spiteful remark. They knew that I knew that at the time when I completed my highly acclaimed thesis and was able to put the letters Ph.D. after my name I was still far too young. Added to which, there had been no vacant professorships at the time and now it was too late. My knowledge was sadly outdated. I would never be able to boast the coveted title of Professor. For the rest of my days, until I started drawing my nice, fat pension I would have to make do with calling myself Lecturer in History. Trailing out every day to the south side of the city and the University of Copenhagen’s concrete jungle, where the thinking was often as low-slung as the ceilings in the hideous classrooms. Here, Teddy, as I was known to everyone, high and low, went around feeling sorry for himself, without of course knowing that he was doing so. Here, Teddy made a half-hearted attempt to teach and do research, in order, at least once in a while, to publish a scholarly paper. Here, Teddy gave guidance to future generations, fitting them to take over the bastions of power. Here was Teddy, an academic relic, who, for some strange reason, society was still paying. And paying well.
I lay on the bed, fulminating, the alcohol in my blood causing my already well-developed talent for viewing my life and my career as an exercise in martyrdom to increase to the point where it gained the upper hand. I should have been leading this delegation. Instead I was merely a member, paying all my own expenses – although I was sure to find some loophole whereby the Institute would end up reimbursing most of my costs.
There were forty of us on this trip organised by the Danish Foreign Affairs Association. The majority were elderly tourists for whom this offered the opportunity of an organised cultural tour of Central Europe. Because these were not your ordinary charter tourists. No, no. They travelled in order to broaden their minds. Six of us would be speaking at various symposiums and conferences to politicians, journalists and civil servants; giving talks inspired by the tenth anniversary of the transformation of Eastern and Central Europe, but since NATO planes had bombed Yugoslavia a couple of days after we left Denmark our conversations often ended up revolving around the war which we were not supposed to call a war. At heart we were actually all agreed that NATO had taken the only logical step, but that it had simply come to late. Just to be contrary, though, I doggedly maintained that it was immoral not to send in ground troops. That this was a clear sign of just how pampered and egoistic we were in the West; we were more concerned about not getting killed ourselves than about not taking the lives of others. Our style of warfare was a logical consequence of our civilisation. The safety of the bomber pilots was more important than the sufferings of Kosovo Albanians. We could not cope with casualties within our own ranks. Our politicians could not stomach the thought of Western men being killed and they refused to countenance the media’s pictures of such things. What we wanted was a cartoon war. A real-life version of Star Wars. But my heart really was not in this discussion. Milosevic was simply another villain in history’s long line of villains. I ought to have studied Stalin instead, like my friend and colleague Lasse. As he so rightly said: pure evil and the endeavour to comprehend it never go out of date. Lasse too was only a lecturer, but with all the newly opened archives on the Stalin era he was in seventh heaven. He now had enough material to keep him busy for the rest of his natural. Not only was he a great guy, he was also a true scholar who loved his subject. I really envied him. He was still married to the same woman. He had children only with this one woman. They had a good life and try as I might I could not convince hi
m that he was not happy. Like me he was on the wrong side of fifty, but with something as rare in our circles as a silver wedding celebration to look back on and his beloved archives to look forward to it was also hard to persuade him that, on the whole, life was turning out to be rather like a bad movie. Another thing that annoyed me was his refusal to face the fact that, deep down, modern man was in a hell of a mess.
We began our tour in Warsaw. The Polish capital lay cool and clear in the spring light. The city had changed a lot in ten years. Stalin had given the poor Poles a yellow wedding-cake skyscraper to remind them every day of who was in charge. Now, though, hemmed in as it was by modern skyscrapers in glass and concrete, Stalin’s gift did not dominate the skyline in quite the same way. Warsaw was teeming with cars and mobile phones, advertisements and neon signs, nightclubs and beggars. It had it all. The reek of low-octane petrol was gone. The limp salami of communism had given way to imported Danish hams and French cheeses. The party’s lies to the horse-trading of democracy. A normal country which was happy to be a member of NATO and hoped that Russia would eventually pull back to a point somewhere beyond the Ural Mountains, to that Asia to which it belonged, even though the Poles realised, of course, that it probably was not going to be that easy. We met all the right people, everybody said the right things, the tourists made notes and asked tentative questions and during the long, tedious meetings I thought of Lena’s breasts, and neither the talk nor the breasts excited me in the slightest.
The leader of the delegation, Klaus Brandt by name, chivvied us about as if we were a bunch of schoolkids on a class outing. He told us off if we were late for the bus and looked aggrieved if we did not go into raptures over his meticulously planned schedule. He had a way of looking like a mother who is not angry, but disappointed, if we skived off a meeting at which some bureaucrat was to deliver yet another deadly dull speech. As Lasse and I in fact did one afternoon, opting instead to take a walk around the city, past the monument to the gallant Polish soldier, through the streets and down to the Old Town, rather than having to hear about the in-fighting within the Polish government. The ochre-coloured buildings of the Old Town – which was in fact brand new, having been totally rebuilt after the war, and ought therefore to have been called the New Old Town – were bathed in sunlight and looked quite charming. Lots of pedestrians were unbuttoning their coats and doing as all we northeners do in the early days of spring: lifting their faces to the blessed sun.
We ate a hearty lunch at a small restaurant. That meal would have cost a Polish academic a day’s wages, but we consumed our roast wild boar with great relish and not a twinge of guilt; we drank Californian wine with the food and Czech Becherovka with the strong coffee, and I was smitten by Lasse’s sincere delight that everything had gone so well ten years earlier. That for the first time in history the Poles had the chance to be the masters of their own destiny. All of a sudden in 1989 a cat-flap had been opened and the Poles had realised, along with everyone else east of the disarmed Iron Curtain, that they had to seize this opportunity. Lasse had never flirted with socialism or Marxism. He had studied his Stalin too well for that. It had immunised him against any belief in a Utopia. And a year on a student exchange to the University of Moscow had dispelled any illusions regarding the possible blessings of the so-called Really Existing Socialism. Not that I had cherished any such illusions either, but I had leaned more to the Left in the seventies. It had simply been easier, even though I too had done my obligatory year in Moscow, living and working in conditions that would have caused any Danish student to rebel. But in the long-ago seventies it had been less trouble just to go with the flow. Those years had not been so easy for Lasse. As a conservative he had found himself pushed out onto the sidelines and had for a spell been faced with half-empty classrooms when he was boycotted for having said in a newspaper interview that basically there was no difference between the aesthetics of communism and of Nazism. Such statements did not go unpunished twenty years ago. Now he was a highly respected lecturer and students were queueing up to have him as their guidance tutor. He was that rarity in the academic world: an honourable man with no hidden agenda. Unlike the rest of us, he did not need to keep getting his name on this and that scholarly article as a way of masking idleness and intellectual burnout. For many years I thought it was all an act, that he had chosen to play a part, but I had come to see that he was that most uncommon of creatures, a good person. I cherished him as my friend.
We ordered another round of Becherovka and coffee, savoured the cinnamon scented liqueur. There were not many people in the restaurant. The tourist season had not yet started, and the Poles could not afford it. Brisk little waitresses flitted about, sweeping crumbs off the blue-checked tablecloths. The place was redolent of the spirit of Central Europe, that and red cabbage. I leaned across the table and eyed my friend. Lasse wore his years well. He was tall, with a slight stoop, and as always he was wearing his drab grey tweed jacket. He had fine-drawn features and a full head of hair. Only now it was grey. He wore narrow-framed glasses and had a rather feminine mouth, wide and soft-looking. His teeth were very white. I lit a cigarette:
‘Shouldn’t you be giving that up,’ he remarked placidly.
‘Yes,’ I said, blowing smoke in his face and making him waft the air impatiently with slender hands marked by the first liver spots.
‘Why did you really come on this trip?’ I asked.
‘I had some time to spare. And I wanted to see how things had been going here. Take my nose out of the archives. Look at real life instead of the relics of the past. Broaden my empirical horizons. Anyway, Lisbeth’s in New York.’
Lisbeth worked within the broad field of IT. It was a gold mine. She had originally trained as a teacher, but the world of computers had got to her, rather like one of the viruses she was so skilled in combatting. For people like Lisbeth the advent of the new millenium was a licence to print money. IT specialists are the crusaders of our day, travelling the world, ridding worried businesses of heathen foes, real or imaginary, known as computer viruses. She earned at least twice as much as Lasse. Not even that seemed to bother him, I thought peevishly.
‘So – what have your archive-weary eyes observed?’ I asked.
‘Well, most of it’s positive. It’s very healthy to come to a country like Poland. People’s hands don’t shake here when they talk about democracy and freedom. They’re just so happy to have these things. It’s quite ridiculous, really. I mean we’re all free. That goes without saying, right. But not here. Here they don’t take it for granted.’
‘Not yet maybe, but they will.’
‘With any luck. That’s what it’s all about, after all,’ he said and took a sip of his Becherovka.
‘In any case, this is excellent, and I get to spend time with you,’ he said.
‘Daddy won’t be pleased,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well. That’s his problem. We’re grown men, aren’t we?’
‘Well, you are at any rate.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean, Teddy?’
I drew on my cigarette, considered him for a moment.
‘How many women have you actually slept with in your life?’ I asked.
Lasse stared at me in amazement. When he was baffled a horizontal crease appeared between his eyes. He must have gone through life in a constant state of bafflement because the crease was now permanent, merely deepening when something took him by surprise.
‘That’s an odd question, I must say,’ he replied. ‘How many have you slept with?’
‘Other than my three wives I haven’t really kept score.’
‘And you’re proud of that? Sort of like a big-game hunter?’
‘Not really. It’s just that my dick has always been one step ahead of my brain,’ I said, making him smile. Then he grew serious.
‘Seven,’ he said.
‘You know the exact number?’
‘I remember every one of them. You don’t remember all of yours. What’s better? O
ne unique experience or loads of superficial ones?’
‘Point taken, Lasse. I’m just amazed by you and Lisbeth. Your fidelity to one another. Over twenty-five years with the same woman. How the hell do you keep the spark alive? Can you really manage to keep your eyes off Lena’s tits? Never imagine her lying starkers on your big hotel bed?’
‘Numbers six and seven were after Lisbeth.’
Now it was my turn to be surprised.
‘Does she know?’
‘She knows about number seven. That lasted some months. Number six was just a one-off,’ he said quietly and drank his coffee, as if we were simply discussing how many millions Stalin had left to starve to death.
‘When was this?’
‘Fifteen years ago.’
‘And afterwards?’
He regarded me with his soft, brown eyes:
‘We never spoke of it again. And I made a decision. It was either Lisbeth and our kids or the other woman, or women. And I’ve never regretted the choice I made,’ he said.
‘Sounds like a pretty simple choice to me.’
‘Nobody says it was easy.’
‘You make it sound as though it was an existential choice,’ I said.
‘Spare me the sarcasm. It was not an easy decision to make, but I’ve never looked back. Maybe my sex-drive just isn’t that great.’
‘I never noticed a blind thing.’
‘Ah, well,’ he said with that soft smile that made his Ph.D. students go weak at the knees with gratitude. ‘I’m not as much of a talker as you. You could always smooth-talk your way to good grades, and into girls’ beds. I don’t have your gift of the gab.’
The Woman from Bratislava Page 2
