Dr Berlin (23 page)

If they all despised him so much, why was Grigor here at all?

‘In a country like this, Andrei says, you must cherish the innocent. He has a strange loyalty to Grigor that I’ve never understood.’

When she was introduced to Penkovsky he was sitting alone in a corner of the room, and was already visibly drunk. For Kate’s benefit, he began reliving past glories, self-consciously playing the role of the great artist, telling her in a loud voice of the Western stars he’d met at film festivals in the fifties, and what he thought of them.

‘Dietrich, Palmer, Bergman, Hepburn – beautiful, glamorous women. I knew them all. “Grigor,” they would purr, “we admire your work, you are a great director, you must cast me in your next movie.” At night they would come to my room to offer themselves to show how much they wanted me to direct them.’

She could find little that was innocent about the transparent exaggerations of his supposed success. If he did not actually mention Stalin, it was clear whom he meant when he knowingly talked of his ‘important admirers at the highest level in the state’. What could Berlin see in someone so obviously fraudulent, so immodest?

When she mentioned Penkovsky’s name later in the evening, Berlin said: ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ To her annoyance she found herself agreeing.

To his friends she remained an object of open curiosity. Why would a young English woman come to study music in Moscow? they asked her. Weren’t there other places she could have chosen? What temptation could have drawn her to this dreadful city that they all dreamed of leaving but knew they never would?

‘I’m Vinogradoff’s pupil,’ she replied. ‘Isn’t that reason enough?’

‘She is a wonderful cellist.’ Berlin would put his arm round her shoulder to demonstrate his belief in his verdict. ‘One day she will be recognised across the world. Everyone will know she was trained in Moscow, that it was here, among us, that she found out who she truly was. When she is an international star, we will have something to celebrate.’

But didn’t she hate Moscow? Wasn’t it a dull and dirty city?
Wasn’t she longing to return home? The implication was clear. What sane person would give up life in the West for a year in Moscow? Her reply was always careful, noncommittal.

‘We are here to study, Vinogradoff tells us,’ she said diplomatically. ‘For his students, Moscow begins and ends with the Conservatoire. He doesn’t allow time for anything else.’

She was surprised at the frankness of the criticisms she heard and told Berlin so. He laughed and said she mustn’t mistake the Muscovite cynicism his friends affected for something it wasn’t. How else was life possible in a country where saying what you believed was so dangerous? A little cynicism among friends was a necessary escape valve, it kept you sane and out of harm’s way. It was as close as he had yet come to telling her about the true constraints under which he lived.

When they were alone, she accompanied him to GUM where she saw things for sale that were available in no other shops that she visited in the city. When she questioned Berlin about this, he smiled, put his fingers to his lips and whispered, ‘There are ways of bending the rules, remember.’ She did not pursue her questions because she didn’t care what his answers were. Nothing mattered so long as he was beside her and she could feel his warmth, hear his voice and respond to the touch of his hand upon hers. In rare moments of self-appraisal, she admitted to herself that her understanding of Moscow, indeed of this strange country she had chosen to visit, was defined by her relationship with Berlin. Anything beyond what he chose to show her did not exist.

*

One night she asked: ‘Tell me about the Great Patriotic War.’

‘Weren’t you there when I gave my lecture?’ Berlin did not look up from the essay he was correcting.

‘Yes, I was.’

‘Then there’s nothing more I can tell you.’

She was not sure if he was teasing her or if his dismissal of
her request was more serious. She put down the score she had been studying.

‘In England, we don’t call it the Great Patriotic War,’ she persisted.

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ He rubbed his eyes and stretched. ‘I expect Stalingrad gets little more than a paragraph in English history books. The West has never accepted the role the Soviet Union played in the defeat of fascism. Our victory at Stalingrad changed the course of the war. If our resistance hadn’t seriously weakened the Nazis, your invasion of France in 1944 might have turned out very differently.’

Didn’t we make sacrifices too? she wanted to ask. Didn’t we stand alone against Hitler when all Europe had crumbled? Why was Andrei being so maddeningly myopic in his views over this? She felt tears gathering in her eyes. A distance had opened up between them the size of a canyon. Any further pretence was impossible.

‘I don’t know what to think any more. Whenever you talk about the past, I feel confused.’

Berlin heard the distress in her voice and came over to her. ‘What is it? What’s worrying you?’

‘Nothing, Andrei. I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.’ She wiped away her tears and tried to smile.

‘Tell me,’ he said gently.

‘It might upset you.’

‘You won’t know unless you ask me, will you?’

She hesitated. ‘Your history is so different to what I learned at school. Sometimes the same events have utterly different meanings. Sometimes they don’t exist. When I agreed to come to Moscow I never imagined the differences between us could be so enormous. Nothing in Russia is what I expected, nothing is what it seems.’

Would he understand that she was speaking in code? All she could see between them was an unbridgeable gap, one that got bigger with every hour that passed. Her anxiety kept her awake at night. If the differences were as big as she believed
them to be, how could they possibly stay together? To imagine not being with him was impossible.

‘What can I say? You come from the capitalist system. Here we live according to the dictates of Marxism. These are different worlds. Isn’t it a rule of physics that there can be no reconciliation between opposites?’

‘Do you believe that, in your heart?’ She was unable to conceal her desperation.

‘I must believe it. What else can I do? I live here.’

‘I have been here three months, but I know nothing about what life in Russia is truly like.’

He lit a cigarette. ‘That’s how it should stay.’

‘I want to know, Andrei. You must tell me.’ Couldn’t he understand her fears? Surely he knew her well enough to realise why she was upset?

‘You must never know,’ he said with a firmness that frightened her. ‘Never.’

‘Why not?’

‘What few illusions you may have left are precious. I can’t take them away from you.’

‘You’re protecting me,’ she protested, tears of despair falling down her cheeks. ‘You’re treating me like a child. Don’t I mean more to you than that?’

He looked thoughtfully at her. ‘If I believed you needed to know the truth about us, then by now you would be familiar with the lies, the hypocrisies, the injustices, the betrayals, the cruelties and the absurd inefficiencies that make up our daily lives. But you are not a historian nor a sociologist nor a political reporter, nor indeed a spy. Therefore what use is that information to you? You are a musician with a wonderful talent. You have come here to nurture that talent. When you leave Moscow, I want you to take away a musicianship that will astonish those who hear you. When I hear of you playing in the concert halls of the world in years to come, when I listen to your recordings, I want to know that that is what we gave you. I want your success to remind me that something
beautiful and unique and unspoiled can come from this city of the damned. Only your music matters. Anything else is of no importance at all.’

She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and whisper that she would never leave him, that she would stay with him for ever. Instead, she told him, ‘You are keeping me away from the truth.’

‘If I am, it is for your own good.’

‘If I want to look—’

Before she could say anything more he had taken her hands and pulled her into his arms. As he kissed her he whispered, ‘Trust me. Trust me, please. One day you will know I am right.’

*

Her letters to her father became shorter and more evasive. She doubted he would even notice. At the end of November, he wrote asking when she would be returning. He presumed the communists in the Conservatoire recognised such Western ideas as term-time and vacation, even if they ignored Christmas. She avoided answering for as long as possible. She felt a duty towards her father but if the idea of more than a few hours away from Berlin was intolerable, how would she cope with a fortnight apart? Would Berlin still be there when she returned? Would he want her still? Her rational self said yes, of course, a passion of such intensity would endure a short separation. But what if the passion were one-sided? The obstacle was not Berlin, it was her own uncertainty about herself and what she meant to him. The truth was, she was afraid to go away in case there was nothing to come back to, and that would break her heart.

She worried about how she would tell her father that she was not returning home for the holiday. What reasons could she give? Berlin had said nothing about her departure. Was that a sign that he wanted wanted her to go? She longed for him to ask her to stay. She tried to engineer the subject but either he
misunderstood or he was deliberately avoiding the issue. She hung on for as long as she could, and avoided committing herself to any definite course of action.

‘I have to go to Helsinki for a few days,’ Berlin told her one night. ‘Why don’t you come too? You’ve never been to Helsinki, you might enjoy it.’

It was what she had been waiting for. Her heart raced. ‘When?’ she asked.

He had to give a lecture there on 20 December. They would leave on the eighteenth, and be back in Moscow by the twenty-sixth. Just over a week, no more. It was not for long.

She pretended to be disappointed. ‘That’s our Christmas,’ she said. ‘I should go home to see my father.’

‘Of course you must see your father. How selfish of me to want you here. Forgive me. I should have said nothing.’

She leaned over and kissed him. ‘Poor Daddy,’ she said. ‘He’ll have to spend Christmas with his sister this year.’

The taxi pulled up, its lights shining brightly in the dark. Pountney watched Koliakov get out, pay the driver and walk off into the ill-lit mews. He followed at a distance. For a man who’d drunk as much as he had, his step was remarkably steady. He rang the bell of number 16, one short stab. Not a summons, a signal: it’s me. The door opened at once. No caution, Pountney noted, even though it was well after midnight. For a moment a woman in a silk dressing gown was clearly visible. She put her arms round Koliakov’s neck and kissed him, drawing him into the apartment as she did so. The door closed.

Hart was right. Koliakov had a dirty little secret. Her name, Hart had told him, was Georgie Crossman.

*

As Pountney drove home, memories swept over him of those fateful weeks in the autumn of 1956, when a brave nation had taken to the streets of Budapest only to be slaughtered in their thousands by their Soviet oppressors. At first the British had deceived themselves into thinking that nothing was happening in Hungary by ignoring Martineau’s warnings. Then they had deceived their American allies and invaded Suez in a misguided attempt to regain their imperial role, or so he had argued later in
Wrong
Time,
Wrong
Place.
Angered at what he saw as a betrayal of the moral position he had expected the Foreign Office to uphold, Pountney had resigned. Walking down King Charles Street for the last time, with no job to go to, no idea of what to do with himself, he’d had no regrets, only a feeling of enormous relief. No more buttoning your lip when you disagreed with policy. No more flattering ministers you despised. He was his own man now, free to do as he chose, even if he was experiencing a bewildering mixture of terror and excitement at this possibility. His future might be formless, but he knew his decision was right.

Within days he’d been contacted by Danny Stevens. He’d never met a publisher before. He was as impressed by Stevens’s determination to track him down – he can’t have been easy to find – as by his enthusiastic belief that Pountney had something to say that others might want to hear. Over lunch in his office in St James’s, he convinced Pountney to put his anger to work in a book about Hungary and Suez.

‘I don’t want a balanced view,’ Stevens had said. ‘This is not considered history. It’s a contemporary record. I want the reader to share your outrage at what you thought was morally wrong. Tell us what happened from your point of view. In this case, partiality is a strength. Hold nothing back. Give us the fever of the times and make us relive those shameful weeks in all their mayhem and madness. Tell us what it felt like to be there.’

Martineau.
Eva
Balassi.
Abrasimov.

They were people from another time, another life. He remembered their faces, frozen in the black and white photographs that were included in his book: a youthful Martineau, dressed in white, in his college cricket team in Oxford; Martineau on his wedding day, looking not a day older, with the glacial, elegant Christine by his side, smiling with her face but not her heart; Martineau in fur hat, greatcoat and boots, photographed in front of the railings of some unnamed building in a wintry and desolate post-war Moscow, a stolen moment from his glory days, when single-handedly he ran the Soviet spy ‘Peter the Great’ who for a short but valuable time brought British Intelligence to within a heartbeat of the power in the Kremlin.

Then there was Eva Balassi – beautiful at sixteen, a smiling member of the Hungarian women’s swimming team in a group photograph taken at the Dynamo Stadium in Moscow; Eva with her daughter, Dora, then aged four or five; Eva at the Olympics in London in 1948, shyly holding her gold medal; Eva acting as translator to a British mission to Budapest in a dark coat and hat, the days of her sporting triumphs long behind her, a new mature beauty apparent. No wonder Martineau had fallen for her.