No notes came. He kept their appointments every Wednesday. But the magic didn’t work because magic cannot be one-sided. Bill Gant remained what he was, a tired man whose reserves of life had been wrested from him by the demands of a mad wife. He could not be revived because there was no longer anything left to revive. He came to Marion for comfort and relief, for someone with whom he could share the misery that was slowly destroying him. He made love to her with a clumsiness that upset her, as if he was careless of her feelings. He slept in her arms, not peacefully, but twitching and sometimes calling out. Too late she learned that Bill Gant was a lost soul, and that lost souls have nothing to give. They can only take. The relationship, she realised, was indeed one-sided. She felt empty and resentful. That he needed her was clear. That she had made a mistake in believing they might have a life together was also clear. She was trapped in an affair she now wanted to end because she had overestimated her own powers. In his fragile frame of mind, wouldn’t rejection destroy him?
She continued to let him come to her flat; she allowed him to make love to her; she dreamed of ways of breaking off the relationship but on each occasion, as Bill described the worsening of what he called ‘this business with Jenny’, her nerve broke and she said nothing. She had fooled herself and now she was caught in a plot of her own making.
No, this wasn’t how it would end because it wasn’t ever going to end. There was no way out. Her life would be an endless cycle of Wednesdays, dreary apologies for late arrivals, bicycle clips on the dressing table, clumsy grapplings with each other’s bodies and endless stories about Jenny, each one worse than the last. She felt a sudden desperation spiral up inside her, bringing tears to her eyes. Only with an effort was she able to control it.
Bill Gant was eating a piece of cheese when she came into the kitchen. He’d put plates on the table and cut some bread.
‘All I could find,’ he said. ‘The cupboard is bare and so is the fridge.’
No thinly cut French ham today, no mushroom salad with a sweet French dressing, no treacle tart. She’d not had time to go shopping. The truth was, she hadn’t even thought about it. She’d only got back to the flat ten minutes before he arrived.
‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, more sharply than she’d intended. ‘You’ve already had a sandwich. Here—’ She handed him his bicycle clips. ‘You forgot these.’
She brought out an opened bottle of white wine from a cupboard and poured him a glass. Bill looked uncomfortable, shifting his weight from one foot to another.
‘Marion.’
‘Yes?’
‘The thing is …’ He stopped in mid-sentence, at a loss for words. It was bound to be more bad news about Jenny and her regular visits to the local sanatorium. ‘I had to take Jenny into Fulbourn last night.’
Poor Bill. No wonder the years of coping with Jenny’s bouts of mania had run down his energies and come close to finishing him.
‘I’m so sorry.’ She wrestled with her guilt. She could imagine the strain he was under because of Jenny. Had she been too hard on him earlier when she’d attacked his opposition to Berlin? All she had done was make his mood worse. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to make love. ‘You should have told me at once.’
‘She’d complained of not feeling well all this past week.’ The words burst from him with an intensity that defined his misery. ‘I tried to convince myself that there was no danger of something brewing up. When I got home yesterday, she was sitting in a corner, crying. She wouldn’t let me come near her. I tried to reason with her but she wouldn’t listen. Eventually I had to call an ambulance. She screamed when they took her away. Said some terrible things, all of them without foundation. Everyone in the street heard her.’ Suddenly he burst into tears. ‘I can’t take much more of this, Marion. I’m at the end of my tether.’
She held his head against her as he wept, patting him gently until his tears stopped. She’d met Jenny once, a couple of years ago, at a faculty do, a pale, silent, vacant figure who had clung desperately to Bill’s side, wouldn’t talk to anyone, drank a glass of water and asked to be taken home early.
‘Forgive me. I don’t know what came over me.’
She waited while he slowly pulled himself together, her arms around him protectively, feeling guilty at her outburst, comparing her selfishness with his desperate need for sympathy which she had all but denied him.
‘I’m not going to desert you,’ she said. The moment called for convenient lies. Truth would have to wait for another day.
‘Thank you.’ He looked up at her soulfully, smiled briefly and touched her hand. ‘I knew I could rely on you.’
She looked at him with compassion in her eyes, wondering if he knew that compassion isn’t love and, if he didn’t, how she would tell him.
Poor Bill? Poor Marion.
5
Viktor Radin’s hands were burning. The pain brought him reluctantly out of the warm, enveloping mists of unconsciousness, forcing him to open his eyes. The same white-walled room, the same bed, the same saline drip keeping him reluctantly alive. If only he had the strength to tear it from his arm he could be done with the process here and now. The glare of the day had gone but it was not yet dark. While he’d been asleep the blinds that had earlier been lowered against the sun were now raised so that he could see into the garden as the shadows lengthened. No clocks anywhere – he had asked for them to be removed. Another day was passing. How many more would he have to endure before the darkness came?
His looked at his hands, swollen and useless on the sheet, a cruel cartoon image of hands, misshapen and broken, the relic of the time of madness that he tried so hard to forget and never could. A fire was burning in his fingers, spreading across his palms, into his wrists and up his forearms. Only once before had he experienced pain like this, and he had buried that time in his life years before. Why was it all coming back to him now?
*
They came for him before dawn, as Elza had warned him they would. Why had he never listened to her? Why had he always mocked her anxiety? They banged on the door of his apartment, shouting his name. Confused and frightened, he had got out of bed and let them in. When he thought about it afterwards, it seemed like a dozen policemen or more but it was probably only two or three. They ordered him to get dressed, giving no explanation. He obeyed automatically. Elza stood by the door of the bedroom, a worn dressing gown over her nightdress, white-faced and terrified, crying silently as he hurriedly gathered a few clothes into a holdall. Before he could say goodbye, they pushed him out of the apartment, down the stairs and into a waiting car, Elza too terrified even to touch him as he passed. The noise had woken Olga, and his last memory before the door of their apartment was slammed shut was the voice of his daughter calling for him out of the darkness. Its poignancy nearly broke him. Were those the last words he would hear his daughter speak? Would he ever see her again?
‘Why are you arresting me? Where are you taking me?’ he asked repeatedly, as the car raced through the deserted city, the street lights dimly reflected in what remained of the snow. His captors gave him no answer. His mind refused to imagine what might happen to him. He was hustled into the Lubyanka, an officer on either side holding his arms in an iron grip, down in the elevator to the basement, along a corridor and finally into a cold, windowless room furnished only with a desk, a chair, a table and a lamp.
‘Why have you brought me here? I demand to know.’
He was bound to his chair with ropes that tore into the skin of his wrists and ankles and he quickly lost any feeling in his hands and feet. His interrogation began at once. He was accused of betraying the Soviet people by giving secrets to German spies. He denied the accusations, saying he had given away no secrets: he was a loyal Soviet citizen. They appeared uninterested in his defence. They held photographs in front of him and shouted the names of his colleagues who, they claimed, were traitors too, working for the enemy. Who else belonged to this secret organisation? Where did its meetings take pl
ace? Who was its leader?
There was no secret organisation, he told them, no meetings, no leader. His captors refused to believe him, calling him a fascist spy, and threatening that, unless he confessed his crimes, he would be taken out and shot.
He had given secrets to no one, he repeated, his voice betraying his desperation. He was an engineer, he worked in a laboratory, dedicated to the task of designing a missile that would transform the Soviet war effort. He went home at night to his wife and children so tired he could hardly think. He had no opportunity to betray secrets to anyone, and no reason either.
They ignored his denials – did they even hear the words he used? – and taunted him with what they would do to Elza and his children if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to know.
He broke down, sobbing, unable to exercise any control over himself now, repeating again and again that he had done nothing wrong. His accusers were mistaken. He was innocent of any charge against him. He was part of a team of engineers and designers, working on rockets whose power would help defeat the German invaders. He was not the man they were after. It must be a mistake. They should let him go. He had important work to complete. They must let him go.
Their response was to strike him in the face and kick his legs, knocking over the chair so he lay helpless on the floor, where they kicked him again, telling him they’d do worse to his wife and daughter, but still he had told them nothing because he had nothing to tell. How do you confess to crimes you have not committed? Or blame men you know to be innocent?
Later on – is it minutes or hours, is it still night or has the day dawned? – at a nod from his interrogator, they untie him. For one hypnotic moment he imagines he is being released. He is unable to move because he has lost all feeling in his arms and legs. He is lifted from the chair and taken to the back of the room. They roll up his sleeves, remove his watch and force him to kneel before a table, palms down on the wooden surface. They pull off his leather belt and lay it over his wrists. Then, with hammer and nails they secure the belt so that he cannot move his hands. Behind him, one man holds his head, another his shoulders. He cannot imagine what they are about to do.
While his interrogator continues to shout more questions to which he has no answers, another man systematically shatters first the ends of his fingers, then the joints, the knuckles and the bones in each hand, hammering them with a wooden mallet. With each question he cannot answer, another bone is broken. Radin experiences pain of an intensity of which he has never dreamed. Unconsciousness is the only relief from his suffering but every time he loses himself in merciful oblivion, they throw icy water over him. When he revives, the questioning and the hammering continue.
Give us the answers we want, they say, and you will save your hands.
For one brief moment in his ordeal his mind escapes from the pain, travelling outside his body, and he sees with great clarity what is happening to him. He is aware of the bleeding mess of his hands, the bloodstained table, the marks of blood on his forearms, his shirt, his face and neck, the twisted expressions of his torturers, who stand so close to him, and the overpowering stench of their bodies. He senses their anger against him, an anger whose origins he cannot comprehend; he hears them shout again and again that he and his colleagues are traitors who should die for their crimes against the state.
He sees a way out of his torture. Why not identify one of his colleagues as a traitor? Someone must have betrayed him without cause – why should he not do the same to another? For a moment he is attracted by this escape route. He will reveal that one of his fellow scientists has betrayed secrets to the Germans and that will be it – a lie but the pain will cease. They may even let him go. It is tempting, to end his terrible suffering.
Somewhere within him a voice that he recognises as his own but he is unsure where it comes from tells him that if he lies, he will become an accomplice in their crime, a new link in an endless chain of lies and corruption. Once he goes down that path, if he is lucky enough to survive, he will have lost himself and become their creature. At that moment the life he has always dreamed of will be at an end. He knows that he has been born to build rockets that will reach the stars. Whatever else he does, he must resist the temptation to give in or he will never realise his destiny. He must resist.
Then he slips into unconsciousness.
*
Two weeks later he arrived in Kolyma at the start of a five-year sentence for anti-Soviet activities. Blood seeped through the crude bandages someone had wrapped around his shattered hands. The bones were set by a prisoner who claimed he had been a medic in another life, but he did it badly and without any kind of anaesthetic, and again the pain was intense. Some bones mended, others didn’t, and the swellings reduced but never disappeared. His hands had been beaten permanently out of shape. They no longer had much feeling or mobility and little strength. He was the prisoner with two enlarged fleshy gloves that could hold little on their own. He was unable to work in the mine, dig trenches or cut trees. He saw the danger of his uselessness. To save his life, he suggested that they put a harness around him and use him as they would a horse or a donkey to pull carts or haul logs. For months, before they moved him from Kolyma, his life was little better than that of an animal.
Eight months later his case was re-investigated, his sentence cut to two years and, after the intercession of his professor, he was moved to a sharaga, an open prison where, with other scientists, also prisoners like himself, he worked on the designs of aeroplanes. For a time he was brought to Butirskaya prison in Moscow, where he was visited by Elza and his children, Olga and Kyrill. On these rare occasions, he felt he was looking at his family through the wrong end of a telescope. Increasingly they were people he did not know, growing older without him, lives that hardly touched his own. When he was in their presence, he kept his hands out of sight, behind his back or in his pockets. Elza knew what had happened to him. His children, he told her, were too young to understand. He found it hard to resist the temptation to take them in his arms.
After the war, he never revealed what he had suffered. He made no complaints about the waste of human resources, nor of valuable research time while he was serving his sentence. Nor was he heard to question the authority that had so cruelly disabled him. When he was told about the great advances made by German rocket scientists in the time he had been away, as he called it, he was not surprised. He studied engineering journals, listened to reports of his fellow engineers who had been to see the V2 factory in Peenemunde, spent hours poring over the spoils with which they returned, and later more hours in conversation with German scientists who had been brought to Moscow to work on the development of Soviet rockets. He settled back into the work he had begun before the war, the task of designing spacecraft that would eventually take a man to the moon and beyond.
His disfigured hands provided long moments of anxiety for the authorities. Radin was now vulnerable because his disability made him an identifiable target for the enemies of the state. Members of the Space Administration Committee feared that he would become a magnet for American agents, that in a desperate effort to reduce the Soviet lead over US technology, they might kidnap or even kill him. Soviet doctors, they learned, could not disguise what had happened to him because they had no cure for the damage he had suffered. The man whose genius was now recognised had to be kept out of sight, the Committee instructed. In the interests of his own safety, they argued, he was to become invisible.
The executive action to remove the evidence of his existence was carried out with clinical efficiency on instructions from the Kremlin. Radin was deprived of a home address, a telephone number and any official place of work. There was no longer any record that he had ever been born, that he married and had children or that he was divorced. His name could no longer be found on internal memoranda, on the circulation list of the minutes of meetings, even on the door of his office. There was no record of his conviction and sentence or of his incarceration. He was forbidden to trave
l abroad for conferences. His photograph was removed from all newspaper archives so it could never be reproduced. There was no reference to him in any edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia. He was not allowed to appear at any public event, nor to receive public recognition for any of his exploits. When he was awarded the Order of Lenin, the medal was presented to him at a secret ceremony in his office, with only two of his senior staff present, and they were sworn to secrecy. In the Kremlin, in the state-owned military-industrial organisations that built spacecraft and missiles and at Baikonur, the secret cosmodrome where Radin’s energy and vision directed the space programme, he was known only as ‘the Chief Designer’.
If within the Soviet Union Viktor Radin had become invisible, in the West his reputation, based on his invisibility, outgrew even his considerable success.
*
Why is he experiencing pain again now, when he has felt nothing in his hands for years? Why, when he closes his eyes, can he see the face of his interrogator and hear his harsh voice shouting at him? He can even smell the sour sweat on his body and his foul breath. Why is this event from so long ago suddenly so close?
At that moment he has the sense that his hands have been touched, that they are no longer burning. They feel as if they have been plunged into ice-cold water. The feeling of coolness and the strength have been restored. He looks at his hands. They are again as they once were, white, with long fingers and well-manicured nails. A transformation has taken place. He has been healed. A calm descends on him as his memory drains into the distance. From somewhere in the room he hears a voice calling softly, Viktor, Viktor.
It sounds like his mother but it can’t be. He hasn’t seen her since she died years ago. How can she be here with him now? He turns towards the voice, and there she is, standing by his bed in her familiar grey apron, a thin, worn figure, her white hair in a bun, smiling at him.
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