Dr Berlin

by Francis Bennett

  ‘Hello. I’m Georgie.’

  He stared at her, unable to move. She was as young as Kennedy had said, with a strong body and thick auburn hair. She wearing a black peignoir, which she held closed with her right hand. In her left she held a cigarette. It was uncanny, disconcerting. He found himself falling dizzily back into the past.

  ‘Let me make you comfortable, shall I?’

  She helped him off with his jacket and carefully placed it over the back of a chair. She stubbed out the cigarette and took off her peignoir. She was naked now except for a pair of high-heeled shoes. She showed no embarrassment in front of him.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  Vodka, he wanted to say. Wasn’t that what they’d always drunk together?

  ‘Whisky, please.’

  The cut of her hair was different. But the shape of her face, her eyes, the colour of her hair, the shape of her body were mysteriously the same. It was like seeing a photograph that was almost but not quite in register.

  ‘That’s better, isn’t it? Now the shoes.’ She knelt down in front of him and untied the laces. ‘What’s your name then?’

  ‘Alexei,’ he said. His voice sounded as if he were speaking from another room. Why had he chosen the name Alexei? It brought back a flood of bad memories.

  ‘Alexei,’ she repeated. ‘Foreigner, are you?’

  ‘American.’

  ‘Over here for long?’

  ‘For a time.’

  ‘I’d love to go to America. My girlfriend’s been to New York and Hollywood. Skyscrapers and stars, she said. That’s what America is. Wonderful, eh? Perhaps one day, when I give all this up. Who knows, eh? Dreams. That’s what keeps us alive, isn’t it, darling?’

  All the time she was talking she was working on him, taking off his tie, unbuttoning his shirt. Her words were a magician’s patter, a stream of inconsequential phrases to distract you from the trick that is about to be performed on you.

  ‘That’s better, isn’t it? More comfortable after a long day, eh?’

  He said nothing because he was numbed into a frozen silence. Her body had the pubescent roundness of a girl becoming a woman, thin legs, a flat stomach with only a small light triangle at the groin, strong breasts on which a necklace, a golden chain with a single heart, rested carelessly. Only I never saw her naked. Her skin was as pale as marble and he was struck by the desire to touch her, to see if she was real. I never touched her once. Horrified and excited, he reached forward.

  Eva Balassi.

  He had met Eva in Moscow, during the war, when they had both been students. She’d arrived in 1939 as part of a small intake of Hungarian communists – though he was never convinced that the beliefs she professed were real. Her studies were disrupted by the outbreak of war, which prevented her return home. He had thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and all his life he had never had reason to change his mind. He had fallen in love the moment he set eyes on her but in Moscow she had preferred the military cadet Alexei Abrasimov, and she had had his daughter. Years later, during his posting to Budapest, he had come across her again, older now but still as beautiful, a young widow with her teenage daughter. He had wanted her as desperately as he had before. This time he had lost her to the Englishman Martineau. Had she ever understood what he felt about her? Most nights he was sure she hadn’t. There were some moments, rare occasions when he felt optimistic, when he managed to convince himself that she knew only too well of his devotion to her.

  Now the reincarnated image of the woman he had worshipped for years was standing before him. He was touching her breasts and she was smiling at him.

  ‘They’re nice, aren’t they?’

  Suddenly she pushed her breasts together and squeezed them so that her nipples brushed his mouth. It was a vulgar, assertive gesture that immediately upset him.

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Stand there,’ he said, ‘quite still. Let me look at you. You are very beautiful.’

  She laughed in acknowledgement of what he had said but he knew she was untouched by it. She must be used to being told she was beautiful. It meant nothing to her because she felt nothing for those who said it.

  Suddenly she was sitting on him, her hands working to arouse him. He lay back and let her do what he had paid her to do, knowing that this was not what he wanted, part of him wishing he had never come.

  *

  ‘You all right, dear?’ she asked later. ‘You’re not a talker, are you?’

  ‘You remind me of someone I knew once,’ he said. He was lying on his back on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Outside he could hear the afternoon sounds of the street.

  The girl laughed. ‘There’s always someone, isn’t there? Someone you’ve lost and want to be reminded of.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘Tell me about her. Did you love her?’

  Inside him some restraint burst and he wanted to tell her everything, to confess the misery of his infatuation for a woman who had never seen him as more than a friend but whose brief appearances in his life had led to a torture he could never escape.

  ‘From the first moment I saw her.’

  ‘Did she love you?’

  ‘Not as I wanted her to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I never told her what I felt.’

  ‘You should have done that.’

  ‘How could I? She went off with someone else.’

  ‘You’ve got to be bold and tell a girl what she wants to hear. It makes us melt inside.’

  ‘It was all a long time ago.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘She disappeared. Perhaps she’s dead. Who knows?’

  ‘You can’t live in the past, dear, can you?’ She kissed him suddenly on the cheek and got up. In that moment he saw her for what she was, a woman who had allowed him to use her body. She would wash away the signs of his presence and prepare herself for the next man. How could he have imagined she was like Eva? He felt sickened at his weakness.

  ‘See you again, will I?’

  *

  His head ached badly. Moscow had got on his nerves this time – too much tension, too much bureaucracy, and the business about Radin. Absurd! The man was dead. What was the point pretending otherwise? The world would find out soon enough. He could see a Smolensky lookalike giving the instruction: ‘The Chief Designer is dead. We will deny his death and the world will believe us.’ Didn’t Moscow understand the scepticism the West brought to every statement they made? You cannot lie every day and then expect to be believed when it suits you.

  He closed his eyes. Smolensky was well over the speed limit. The car had diplomatic plates. He smiled bitterly to himself. Nothing to worry about.

  4

  ‘He was a man who achieved what he was capable of, and there are too few who do that in this country,’ Ruth Marchenko said. ‘He was only a year or two older than me. Sometimes I think this nation is damned. Why do we lose those we need most?’

  She turned to face her son, tears in her eyes. Valery held his mother as she sobbed. He’d had no idea that Radin’s death would affect her in this way. Perhaps their friendship all those years ago had been more intense than he had understood.

  Early one summer, when he was thirteen, Ruth had taken Valery aside and instructed him that he was never to mention the name of the man who was coming to their apartment that evening. He was to wipe from his memory what was about to happen. Valery did not understand, and Ruth gave him no explanation, but he obeyed willingly. He was too devoted to his mother to think of doing anything else. For a few months a small man with thinning spiky hair, a beaky nose and damaged hands was a regular visitor to their apartment. He would arrive in the evening, stand in the doorway of their minute kitchen and talk to Ruth while she cooked. Some nights he would eat with them. His concentration was always on Ruth. Valery was ignored as if he did not exist.

  Sensing her son’s mute hostility, Ruth
talked about Radin. He was a wonderful scientist, she whispered, a visionary who could see beyond the confines of the world they lived in. He was planning to build huge rockets that would one day take men to the moon. Valery was impressed by this account of Radin’s ambition – how could he fail to be? But it did not make Radin into a man towards whom he could feel any instinctive sympathy. Was it his hands? He remembered the first time he’d seen them. They reminded him of uncooked pastry. He could hardly hold a knife and fork. He noticed his mother cutting up Radin’s food before she served it to him, as if he was a cat. A man to command respect but not affection.

  Behind the glowing account of Radin’s achievements, he sensed his mother’s ambivalence. He was sure she had discovered qualities in Radin that she did not like. His presence in their apartment made Ruth unsettled, anxious, not herself. His conclusion was that Radin posed an unformulated threat to him and his mother, and he resented his presence and the secrecy that surrounded it.

  Then one day Viktor stopped coming. His mother offered no explanation. Valery did not dare to ask why. His impression was that in some unexpressed way Ruth herself was relieved.

  ‘I was at school with his wife, Elza,’ Ruth was saying. ‘I knew Viktor before she did. She and the children stayed with us for a few weeks when their marriage broke up. You probably don’t remember, you were too young. I felt sorry for Elza. Viktor changed after his awful experiences in the war. The man who returned from prison was not the man she’d married. In his suffering something had been taken from him and its absence broke Elza’s heart. I respected Viktor, but Elza was right. He was impossible to live with. He was a driven man, obsessed by his work, frightened that he would never have enough time to complete the tasks he’d set himself. He lived every day expecting that he’d be snatched away before his work was finished, which is why he drove himself and those who worked for him so hard.’

  After her friendship with Viktor was over she had told Valery how, during the war, he had been wrongly imprisoned and tortured. His hands had been broken deliberately to force him to betray his colleagues, but somehow he had endured the pain and said nothing. His disability was proof of his remarkable courage but also a sign of the mental wounds that never allowed him to forget what he had suffered. His terrible experience explained his driven nature, his restlessness, his sudden outbursts of anger at the Institute when his high standards were not met by those who worked with him, and his overwhelming drive to succeed as if he knew that he would not live to any great age.

  ‘And now he’s dead.’

  ‘If only I could believe that,’ Valery said.

  *

  ‘How did your presentation go?’ Ruth asked later. ‘What did the Project Committee say?’

  The meeting had taken place at the offices of the Space and Technical Commission. This was the first such occasion over which Grinko, as Acting Director of the Institute in Radin’s absence, had presided. Valery and his small team had taken weeks to prepare their presentation on the advantages of using robots to explore space. He had told his audience what his robots could do if they were landed on the moon. He explained how they could travel around using solar power, take photographs and send the images back to earth, excavate the surface of the moon or those of planets, extract samples of rock and dust and bring them back to the mother ship; how they could measure the chemical content of the atmosphere; how they’d be cheaper than people and more reliable.

  His audience had listened to him in silence. When he had finished, Grinko had risen slowly to his feet. He was speaking, Grinko stated, a sneer never far from his expression, on behalf of the Chief Designer, who unfortunately was not able to attend this meeting and for whom he was deputising. Men were essential to the discovery of other worlds. No machine could ever take their place. It was folly, if not a dangerous waste of scientific resources, to propose that machines could do the same work with even a small degree of success. Why were precious funds being wasted on robotics when the space programme would never agree to go down that route? The work of Marchenko and his team was valueless. It had no part in the Soviet space programme, as laid down by their esteemed colleague, the Chief Designer. He sat down to a standing ovation from the same scientists and engineers who had privately encouraged Valery, and who had criticised the waste of resources on a project they considered would bring little reward.

  The audience’s ovation underlined the point that Grinko was representing the beliefs of the Chief Designer. They all knew that Radin was dead, yet they preferred to believe the myth of his absence. Valery was the victim of a policy whose course could only be changed by a man who was dead. The conclusion was as clear as daylight: the policy would never change. He left the chamber bruised and depressed.

  ‘Grinko made it clear that our work has no place in the space programme. As long as the myth of Radin’s return to life remains, nothing will change.’

  ‘Will you challenge the decision?’

  ‘Where would it get me?’

  ‘If you don’t do something Grinko could force you to disband your team.’

  ‘If no one will listen to me, what choice do I have?’

  ‘You can’t let them destroy your work,’ Ruth said. ‘You can’t drop what you’ve done, it’s too valuable.’

  ‘What do you suggest I do?’ He was angry. Her demands on him were unrealistic. Surely she of all people should understand the pressures he was under. ‘As long as Radin is officially alive, his colleagues will cling to the orthodoxies of his position even more tenaciously than before. They’re all much too frightened to make even a slight deviation from the path he chose in case that reveals to the world that Viktor Radin is dead.’

  ‘Where does that leave you?’

  How could he answer her? Was this a setback or a defeat? That was the question he had asked himself as he walked down the boiling street to his mother’s apartment. The decision against him had no justifiable basis in science. Radin was a great man, his contribution enormous, his courage beyond belief – that was undeniable – but he had played his part and now he was gone. It was the turn of others to develop new ideas, to challenge the assumptions of the past. They could not fool themselves that Radin was still alive and directing the space programme. The dead could not be allowed to design the future. That way would lead to catastrophe.

  Yet the lie had won, as he had seen it win so many times before.

  ‘If I knew, I’d tell you,’ he said.

  IVAN’S SEARCH FOR HIS FATHER

  It is time to change the reel on the projector. Some of the children in the front stand up and watch the process. Andrei closes his eyes so that the images of what he has been watching are not lost. He opens them only when he hears the familiar ticking of the projector and he knows that the next part of the story is coming.

  *

  There are six of them, probably all about his own age though they seem bigger. They catch him scavenging for food in dustbins, and they mock him, shout insults, call him a gypsy. They are on a spy hunt, Ivan learns, searching out strangers in the neighbourhood and reporting them to the authorities. He is a stranger, therefore he must be a spy. They must arrest him, they say. He runs off to escape because he fears they might beat him up. He is too exhausted to go far. He has eaten nothing in two days. They do not seem to be starving, they do not have hollow cheeks and sticking-out bellies. He decides to follow them; perhaps they will lead him to where he will find food. He tracks them carefully, keeping his distance, hiding in doorways or ducking into alleys so they won’t notice him, but never losing touch.

  They are exploring an old derelict house that has collapsed through neglect when the quarrel begins. Ivan is too far away to hear what it is about, but he can see them gesticulating at each other and he can hear their shouts, though not what they are saying. He watches the pushing and shoving that go on before the group divides. He creeps closer. Reds against Whites, the new against the old. It is not the first time he has seen that game.

  It quic
kly becomes apparent that it is more than a game. The Reds run back towards a pile of broken masonry left at the base of a wall which provides their armoury. A hail of stones forces the Whites to scurry for safety. A council of war takes place. One of the Whites points to the other side of the building. Keeping low, the three boys race away as fast as they can. Dismayed by the sudden disappearance of the Whites, the Reds emerge from their citadel. They have stuffed their pockets with as many stones as they can carry, and they have stones in their hands. They advance warily, searching for the enemy: no sign. On, on they go, bravely, towards the line where they have last been seen.

  Ivan can guess what will happen next. The Reds will be surprised by the Whites who will have gone round behind them and captured their armoury, leaving the Reds exposed. It is a clever trick. Cautiously, the Reds peer round the wall, expecting White opposition. As they do so, there is a yell behind them and a new hail of stones begins. The Whites have established themselves by the armoury and are celebrating its capture by pelting their opponents with anything they can lay their hands on.

  The Reds take shelter behind the wall as pieces of brick and cement shatter on impact, sending dust and sharp pieces of stone in all directions. There is a small return of fire – the ammunition the Reds had brought with them quickly runs low – and then a hurried consultation. Ivan can imagine what the discussion is about. Should they stay and fight to the end, or should they escape to fight another day? It is clear that there is a disagreement over tactics. The leader wants to stay and fight, his troops to retreat. Punches are thrown and suddenly two of the Reds run off, leaving their leader isolated and alone. He peers round the end of the wall to be greeted with another bombardment and triumphant shouts as his opponents catch sight of the deserters, now out of range.

  From his vantage point Ivan can see that one of the Whites has detached himself from the others and is creeping undercover to cut off any possibility of the Red leader’s escape. If the remaining Red doesn’t get out now, he will be captured and then what will happen? Three against one? Impossible odds. He has seen the effect of that in his own village on the night of the attack. Terrible memories boil within him.