Making Enemies (17 page)

There is an immediate, noisy rejection of this view. It is too extreme. The state would not kill so many innocent people in order to tell a few scientists that from now on they must toe the official line. That assumption is absurd. There are many better ways to do that. Lykowski is shouted down. He shouts back. This senseless act is a declaration of war, he says. Let the hostilities begin. He at least is ready for the fight.

Gromsky takes a more cautious line. ‘It is too easy to give in to paranoia,’ he says, risking the accusation that he is on the side of the state. ‘We must not imagine that every act has a sinister connotation, that in the Soviet Union an innocent explanation can no longer exist. Until there is hard evidence to the contrary, it must be seen for what we firmly believe it to be – an accident, albeit a terrible one.’

Tempers boil up and spill over. Gromsky and Tomasov both demand that Lykowski resign from the committee. His continued membership should be put to the vote. Before there can be a show of hands, Lykowski has physically attacked Tomasov and knocked him to the ground. The two men have to be forcibly separated from one another.

Ruth has said nothing so far but now she has to act. She knows it may already be too late to reconcile these two positions and that this quarrel could destroy their committee. She speaks as calmly as she can, hoping her voice will quell their hot tempers and that her words are those Andropov would choose. (If only he had written this scene for her.)

Their disagreement is not a sign of any fundamental division within the committee, she says, it is a measure of their insecurity, their nervousness at the inaction of the authorities in the face of their own unprecedented behaviour. Each day they wait for a blow to fall that never comes. She urges them to hold their nerve, not to do the work of the authorities and destroy themselves through their own quarrelling. Their cause is too important to think of failure.

Nerves are soothed and the discussion continues more calmly. Lykowski’s position is reviewed and rejected. Lykowski walks out in a fury.

‘Find the survivors and get them to tell you I am wrong,’ he says as he leaves. ‘I know that you won’t.’

His words hang in the air long after the members of the committee have left and the room is empty. She has not moved since their departure. She feels exhausted, hollow and cold. Where does she stand in all this? She is closer to Lykowski than she wants to admit, and this makes her fearful. So much in their lives is the result of manipulation. Why shouldn’t this explosion be one more act in a long and tarnished history of official lies and deception?

Then her imagination falters. She refuses to understand politics. She has shrunk her life to its essentials: her work, her mother, her son, their collective survival. She cannot comprehend the mind that can have ordered the murder of so many innocent people. What kind of person can have done that? What possible motive could they have? Then she wonders if the mind that can order the deaths of innocent people in a block of flats is so different from the mind that can order the dropping of an atomic bomb on a city centre.

‘This is Krasov,’ the voice hissed in my ear. ‘We must speak. It cannot wait.’

It was three in the morning. I had gone to bed soon after we had eaten and, exhausted, I had fallen into a deep sleep. I had awoken to Krasov’s urgent entreaties to get up and a vigorous shaking. I put on some clothes and joined him downstairs. The fire in the stove was no more than a few glowing embers, but Krasov revived it and soon the heat was almost as strong as before.

‘Where to begin? Is that not the question? What do you know?’

He was in a strangely animated mood. I wondered if he had been drinking. There was a bottle of vodka on a table by his elbow but it had hardly been touched. Maybe he had a bottle in his room. More likely his nervousness was due to the strain of being cooped up in the middle of nowhere, waiting for an event to take place over which he had no control.

‘Monty told me his version of events.’

‘You believed him?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Monty, like all Englishmen,’ he said, an unexpected bitterness in his voice, ‘always speaks truth.’

‘Tell me your version then,’ I said.

‘My version? Why not say, tell me truth, Krasov? Tell me truth?’ He turned on me angrily, his voice rising.

‘If you prefer that.’

‘You think I tell lies because I am bloody communist.’ His voice was shaking with emotion.

‘For God’s sake, Leo! Get on with it or I’m going back to bed.’

My irritation brought him to his senses. He got up, opened the stove and dropped in a couple more logs. His action took the sting
out of his anger. It seemed he was disappointed with my presence.

‘I expected Monty would be here.’

‘You can’t be surprised he didn’t come.’

‘He sent you in his place?’

‘Yes.’ There seemed no point in denying it.

‘Why? You do not work for him.’

‘I’m here and I’m all you’re going to get. Either you speak to me or I’m on the next boat out of Finland.’

‘Monty is my friend. Do you believe that? I treat him badly. I betray our friendship.’

I could hear the beginnings of a long Russian lament, morbid reflections on the impossibility of friendship, the harshness of fate, ending in tearful embraces. I wanted none of it.

‘What happened between you two is none of my business,’ I said. ‘Say what you want to say and I’ll report it back to Monty.’

‘It starts with my meeting with your father in Cambridge. I told him there was small but growing movement in Soviet Union of physicists against nuclear bomb. I knew that was his position too. I said he should take heart. Maybe soon good sense would win.’

I remembered my father’s reaction as I entered his study and I doubted very much that Krasov had said anything of the kind.

‘That’s nonsense, Leo,’ I said. ‘You gave him news that upset him. We both know that.’

‘That is what I told him.’

‘That was a part of what you told him.’

He smiled. ‘Now I understand why Monty send you. Sure. That was not all I say. I tell your father that an old friend of his was still alive but in trouble. She is nuclear physicist in Soviet Union. She is leader of anti-nuclear movement. Your father must support her from outside Soviet Union or she will die.’

‘What kind of support?’

‘He must lead anti-nuclear movement in West. He must get others to join in.’

‘Who is this woman?’

‘Her name is Marchenko. Your father knows her since many years. Perhaps he has not told you about her?’

A ghost from his past? Was that what Krasov had brought to my father’s house in Cambridge all those weeks ago? Was that why he had looked so shocked?

‘I tell your father that Marchenko is blackmailed by intelligence
service. She must do what they tell her to do or first they will kill her mother, then her son, then her.’

‘What did my father say?’

‘He ask: what must she do to stay alive? I answer: the peace movement she has started must have international support from other physicists. Their voices must be loud enough for governments of the West to hear what they say and then to discuss nuclear treaties with Soviet government. That way Marchenko will be saved.’

‘If your government wants to talk to ours, aren’t there more established routes for unofficial contact?’ I asked, making no attempt to disguise my scepticism.

‘Is not government. Is not official,’ he hissed at me angrily.

‘Who is it?’

‘How little you understand. Is opposition.’

‘Political opposition to Stalin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your story’s too far-fetched for me, Leo. You’ll have to do better.’

I saw his eyes burn with deep anger, the muscles in his cheeks tighten.

‘Listen to me,’ he snapped. ‘Then maybe even you will understand what is happening.’

‘Try me,’ I said unhelpfully.

‘There has been disaster to nuclear research in Soviet Union,’ he was saying. ‘Huge explosion in laboratory, radiation leaks, many people very sick, many people dead. Some of our best scientists are killed. This time Soviet programme is set back months, perhaps a year, is too soon to say. Many people are seeing how dangerous it is to make nuclear bomb. News of explosion is reported to Central Committee and suddenly there is disagreement. There is a challenge to Stalin. Behind closed doors of Kremlin, there is struggle for power between two groups, those who believe in nuclear weapons, and those who don’t.’

‘Who will win?’ I asked.

‘Is too soon to say,’ he said. ‘That is why I bring message for Monty. He will understand.’

‘What is that message?’

‘Everything must be done to support those who are against the development of nuclear weapons. Since I bring message from Marchenko to your father, much has changed. This is now fight between
old Russia and new Russia, the true revolution against those who are in power now. We must fight Stalin and his people because they are evil. We must bring them down. If we do not, there will be war between Soviet Russia and West, and many millions will die. Russia is my country but it is society gone mad, lives of human beings have no value. Our leaders are barbarians. They have no heart, no beliefs, they have only power.’

‘Do you have any proof for any of this?’ I asked.

That touched Krasov on the raw. He suddenly became very angry. ‘You do not believe me, do you? You think me excitable Russian, yes?’

I drew in my breath: I wanted to say yes, you are excitable; no, I don’t believe you. I wanted to ask, why are you telling me all this, what does it mean, what am I doing here at three in the morning in the middle of nowhere talking to a mad Russian? But on he raced.

‘The world is now a very dangerous place,’ he said. ‘We have maybe few weeks, maybe month or two, when we can try to stop Soviet Union and West building these terrible weapons which will destroy us. That is appeal that you must take to Monty. This is our chance. He must help us – Marchenko, me, others – or maybe we are all destroyed.’

I looked at the man in the reflected light of the fire. It was too neat, too orderly, too coincidental. My acceptance of his story was dependent on too many events that I could not believe in. Little Krasov, I thought, to whom truth was a coin he tossed in the air. The trouble was, he didn’t care whether it came down heads or tails, as long as he was safe.

How much longer can she hold Stevens’s attention? It is morning now, there are people on the beach. The day has begun. She must complete her story before her time runs out. She tells him about the meeting with Pavel, when he forced her to face the truth she could no longer avoid.

‘You believe me, don’t you? I can see you do, even though you won’t admit it.’

‘Pavel, please.’

‘Tell me I’m right.’

He stares straight into her eyes. His skin is very pale, dusted with freckles the colour of his hair. But his eyes are dark and intense.

‘Go on, say it. Say you believe me.’

‘How can I admit something for which there is no evidence?’ she asks.

‘Evidence?’ His laugh is full of bitterness. ‘What about the historical evidence of consistently excessive behaviour? What about the evidence of crimes against the people? What about the betrayal of every principle on which our so-called glorious revolution was based? What about the way our lives have been stolen from us in return for lies and empty promises? You don’t need me to prove anything to you, Ruth. All you need to do is open your eyes and see what’s happened.’

But opening her eyes is what she has promised herself she will not do. Her task is to protect her mother and son – and herself, only because they will not survive without her.

‘No, Pavel. No.’ She turns away.

‘Ruth.’

He grabs her arms as if to shake her. She tries to push him off but his grip is too strong. He forces her to face him.

‘Listen to me, Ruth. Believe me. What I am saying is true.
Khudiakov and the others in D4 were murdered. So were the pensioners. I am sure of it.’

She breaks away from his grasp. ‘You mustn’t do this to me, Pavel. Please. No.’

‘I have telephoned hospitals all over Moscow. No one can give me details of elderly patients with serious burns brought in during the early hours of the eighteenth of February for the simple reason that none were. I contacted the state mortuary. There were no unusual numbers of dead brought in that day. Sixty people or more have disappeared, Ruth. You can’t close your eyes to that. Sixty old people have vanished.’

In her heart she believes him. She knows she is trapped in an event which is rapidly running out of her control. How she wishes it were possible to tell him so.

*

‘Here,’ Andropov says, tapping the glass partition with his lighter. ‘Stop here.’

The car draws to a halt outside her apartment block and she gets out. He says nothing to her, he doesn’t even bother to look at her, it’s as if when she arrives home she no longer exists for him. He taps the partition once more and disappears into the night.

She looks at her watch. One-thirty. She does not go up to her flat. Unseen by the babushka (the view from her desk doesn’t extend this far), she walks quickly round the corner where Tomasov is waiting. She gets into the car he has borrowed and together they drive off in the direction of D4.

Alexei has reconnoitred the area earlier in the evening and found a quiet street nearby where he can park out of sight of what remains of the laboratory. He takes Ruth to a vantage point, a low wall from behind which they can time the frequency of the patrol, a policeman with a dog every fourteen minutes.

‘Time enough? If we’re quick? Nothing will go wrong.’

Alexei shakes his head. Ruth will need more time. He has come prepared. He takes off his glasses and puts them carefully in an inside pocket. Then he takes out a bottle of vodka from his knapsack and splashes it over the old clothes he is wearing. Ruth pulls his woollen cap lower over his forehead. She smears some mud from the slush in the street on his face and clothes. With his torn coat, battered appearance and vodka bottle, he looks like a tramp.

‘Ready?’

‘Yes.’

She removes the Geiger counter from the canvas bag in which she has hidden it. Together they wait for the policeman. Alexei checks his watch.

‘Ninety seconds.’

Alexei takes a swig from the bottle, spits it out and emerges from their hiding place. He walks drunkenly in the direction from which he expects the policeman to appear. He carries the vodka bottle in his hand, wrapped in a newspaper.

Ruth, out of sight behind the wall, hears barking, shouts from Alexei, another voice (the policeman), more barking, more shouting, more words, louder this time – they are coming this way. They pass by, so close she can hear the dog’s paws scratching on the pavement as it pulls at its leash.

‘Have a drink, why not?’ Alexei’s voice is raised, drunkenly persistent. ‘There’s more where this came from. How about you, dog? Have a drink yourself! What’s your name, eh? Tell me your name.’

She counts the agreed ninety seconds under her breath, then emerges from her hiding place and runs to the iron gate that has been erected to prevent entry into the laboratory site. She climbs over (it is less difficult than she had imagined), then, trying desperately to balance herself on the uneven surface of the rubble, she stumbles towards the centre of the blast.

She stops, assesses her position (how dark it is, is she where she needs to be? Why can’t she see better?), points the Geiger counter and switches on. The instant clicking almost deafens her. Terrified at the noise, she switches off the machine.

Take your time, Alexei has instructed her. Get as close to the centre as you can before you take any readings.

What about the noise?

No one will hear.

She didn’t believe him then and she doesn’t believe him now. She closes her eyes tightly and remains very still in an effort to control herself before finding the courage to start again.

Sweating and frightened, she switches on the Geiger counter again, takes the reading by the light of a small torch and copies it into her notebook. She is horrified at how high it is. How much plutonium can have been held on the site?

She switches off, gets up, starts forward, misses her footing and
falls headlong. She drops the machine and it rolls away from her into the darkness.

Where is it?

She gets into a crouching position, too frightened to stand up and cautiously looks around, feeling for the counter with her left hand, then using the thin beam from her torch to stab into the darkness.

She can see nothing. She wants to cry with despair. If she does not get out of this awful place in time, she may be trapped here all night. The reading in her notebook has given her an unmistakable message about the dangers of staying too long in this place.

Be systematic, she says to herself. (Ruth the scientist.)

Which way did I fall?

Forward.

I had the machine in my left hand.

I must have thrown it to the left.

Over there. It must be over there.

She switches on the torch and metre by metre scans the area where she thinks it might be.

It takes her a valuable two minutes to locate the instrument. It is two metres away. She retrieves it carefully and blows the dust off it, rubbing the face of the gauge with her sleeve.

She looks at her watch. She’s been inside for twelve minutes. Two minutes left. She must get out now, Alexei will be waiting, she will be overdue if she doesn’t go now, her fall means it has taken longer than they’d planned. She walks towards the gate, too quickly – her feet slip and disturb the rubble. She freezes. (More delay.) Has anyone heard? She walks more carefully now, testing the ground before putting her weight down. Valuable seconds are passing.

Her heart stops. The guard is back, sitting by the gate, two, three metres away, warming his hands before a fire in a brazier, smoking a cigarette. The dog, off the lead, is drinking water noisily from a bowl.

Alexei never warned her of this. She is frightened and cold. Her teeth chatter and she shivers uncontrollably. What can she do? She turns slowly, careful to make no sound at all. If the dog were to worm his way under the gate, he’d smell her in a moment and she’d be done for.

She retreats silently into the darkness. There are no other exits. It is this gate or nothing. It will be all right, she says to herself. The guard will resume his patrol soon. Alexei will wait. He will have seen the guard. He will know she is trapped. He will wait for her. He must.

She stands in the darkness, a solitary figure amid so much desolation.

Suddenly the darkness falls in on her. She can see nothing. There is no light anywhere, only an endless and impenetrable blackness. She has no sense of the world around her. She has ceased to be. She and the darkness are one.

Where am I?

Where am I?
a voice echoes.

What is happening to me?

What is happening?

In that instant the sky lights up, the light is brighter, sharper, clearer than any she has ever seen, illuminating every detail, however minute, with an extraordinary clarity. There is nothing that she cannot see. What is it they called this? What is the phrase she has read? ‘The light of a thousand suns.’

Then the whistling starts, a distant, hollow sound, like the drawing of breath before a scream. In the instant of its life, the noise gathers strength and force as it approaches at enormous speed until she is surrounded, then swallowed up in the intensity of its thunder.

The history of the event she is witnessing lasts only milliseconds but she is able to distinguish the phases of its short life. First the light, then the screaming sound, now the breaking roar as firestorms fill the sky, burning the air around her. The Earth is screaming with the pain of the destruction wrought upon it as the air catches fire, mountains split, oceans evaporate and matter vaporizes. Everything burns.

Then the wind, the tempest. The storm drives her back with incredible force, she is flying backwards faster and faster towards the flames, disintegrating with the world she knows, mountain and flesh and bone together, all one again, primeval dust.

Where once there was substance, now there is nothing. Emptiness. A void. The history of the end of the world in a second or less.

This is what you did
, the voice accuses.
This is what you did
.

What have I done? she asks. What have I done?

Her soul cries in anguish into the fire that consumes her.

The light has gone, the scream has vanished, the thunder has faded, the wind has passed, the flames have died. She is suspended in silence, an invisible witness. A huge grey cloud hangs over everything, its stinking poisons raining over the dead land beneath it, contaminating the emptiness. There is no life anywhere. No marks of life. Nothing. Only an empty graveyard hurtling through the endless night of eternity, trapped in the rhythms of the heavens.

Where am I? she cries again. Where am I?

You are in Hiroshima
, the voice says before it too vanishes into the darkness and she is alone once more among the poisonous dissolution of the ruined planet.
See what you did
.

The moment of hallucination passes. Has she died? Gone mad? She opens her eyes. Consciousness returns. She touches her face: her eyes are still there, they have not become empty sockets; her nose, her mouth, her teeth. She is complete and alive (though her fingers are sticky with blood from a wound in her head). Perhaps nothing has happened, perhaps it was all a dream.

Perhaps.

She sees the gate, the glow of the brazier, the night sky with clouds and stars, the dog eating a bone, the policeman putting coals on his fire.

But somewhere, just out of reach, she hears a distant cry,
Hiroshima
, echoing in her mind.

How long before the guard starts his patrol again? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Every moment is like a century. She is desperate to be away from this awful place, back in the heart of the city again.

The guard has gone. She counts a hundred and twenty seconds and then goes carefully towards the gate. She cannot see if he is in the shadows waiting for her. She counts another minute. There is no sound except her heart beating. Now. She darts forward, climbs once more over the steel bars of the makeshift gate, drops down into the street, adopts the crouching position and runs as fast as she can.

‘All right?’ He has his arm round her. Good, faithful Alexei.

‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Get the readings?’

‘Yes.’

‘High?’

‘It’s terrible.

‘What did I tell you?’

‘What can they have been doing in there?’

Halfway into the city he stops the car by the side of the road, takes out the Geiger counter and ranges it over her body. It ticks aggressively. He tells her to have a bath when she gets back and to destroy her clothes.

‘You’re all right,’ he says reassuringly, ‘You weren’t in there long enough.’

She knows that, but it is good to hear someone else say it.