Making Enemies (37 page)

She stands by the window, the curtain drawn against the glare of the sun, the raging heat of the late afternoon trapped with her in the airless room. Her thin dress sticks to her like glue. She wants a glass of cold water but her fridge has broken, and however long she runs the tap the water is never quite cold. The fan on her desk whirrs irritably and disturbs her papers, bringing her back to the present and drawing her towards the letter she knows she must write.

For the moment that can wait. She stares sightlessly down at the street below and sees again only the images in her mind.

Her mother is asleep next door, a pale figure visibly shrinking with each day that passes. How much longer will she last? Once it was months – now it is weeks, possibly days. There is nothing to do but make her comfortable and watch her slowly die. Valery has gone swimming with his friends. At the moment she wants him out of the house as much as possible. He is devoted to his grandmother, and she is afraid of what her death will do to him in his present state. He has achieved a certain notoriety in the apartment block because of his newly discovered English father. There have been some difficult moments at school (one of his teachers refused to have him in her classroom for a few days) but such incidents appear to have subsided for the present. What causes her anxiety is that she cannot know if the revelation of Stevens as his father has damaged him.

Her own life, like that of her colleagues at the Institute, remains suspended. They exist in a cushioned limbo. No work is done at the Institute but no action is taken against them. None of their privileges has been rescinded. They have not been questioned or harassed. They are not followed in the street by the secret police (or if they are, they remain unaware of it). On the surface, life goes
on as normal. They turn up at the Institute each day: Gromsky, Tomasov, Lykowski, Elizabeth Markarova and the others. They drink tea (Gromsky drinks vodka, no longer secretly), and they talk, openly now – what is the point of concealment when their lack of activity reveals their position? There is a growing sense of unreality about their lives because their position causes no reaction. They are left to their own devices. They are isolated, ignored and powerless. She fears the group will lose its coherence and do the authorities’ task for them and destroy itself. Perhaps that is their plan.

Stevens’s arrival in Moscow appears to have deflected Lykowski from his search for the murderer of the pensioners in the block near D4. She hopes this is permanent. His attention is now focused on a meeting with Stevens, the reasons for which she is not sure of but she is afraid to arrange this without Andropov’s approval, and he refuses to answer her requests for a meeting.

Then there is Stevens and his unexpected presence in her life. How extraordinary that, after all these years, he is here, in Moscow. At times she finds it hard to convince herself she is not still living in the world of her mind.

‘He has been here, in my apartment. He has eaten at this table, sat in this chair. He has met my mother who didn’t understand why he couldn’t speak Russian. He has spent as many hours as he could with his son.’

Not as many as he had wanted. (Why can he spare so little time with her? Why won’t he tell her what he does all day in Moscow?) To her surprise she is relieved at this. She is pleased at how well they have communicated through the common language of science. But the science Stevens talks is heretical in a country where Lysenko’s aberrations are accepted orthodoxies. She cannot allow him to make Valery forget the importance of the double life. Stevens may insist on telling him the truth but if the boy is to survive, he must conceal his knowledge. That is not something Stevens truly understands, even now.

But he is here. She sees him often. Her dream has come true.

*

Some days after his arrival in Moscow he knocks on her door clutching a bunch of flowers he has bought in the market. She kisses him in greeting, puts the flowers in a vase and offers him vodka.

‘I would introduce you to my mother,’ she says, ‘but she is not
well. She spends most of her days asleep now. Perhaps later, if she wakes up.’

He looks around the small, shabby apartment which, to her eyes, looks smaller and shabbier than ever before.

‘I have often tried to imagine where you lived.’

‘It is very small,’ she says. ‘Apartments are hard to come by in Moscow. It was difficult after my father died. Our official Party flat was taken away from us.’

‘Are these your father’s?’ He points to the shelves of volumes of political theory – Marx, Lenin, Stalin – that over the years her father religiously accepted from the state publishing house but, she knows, never read.

‘Yes,’ she says. She has always hated what he cynically referred to as his ‘badges of office’.

‘Learn a few phrases and quote them publicly,’ he explained to her once. ‘Don’t bother to read these books, no one does – they’re far too heavy to read. See them as your credentials. Medals of loyalty to the Party. Display your knowledge of them to protect yourself from the doubts of others. People are wary of opposing anyone who can quote the orthodoxies.’

‘These are mine,’ she says.

The Cyrillic script on the spines defeats him so she reads out the titles. Tolstoy and Chekhov he knows (‘
Anna Karenina
very depressing,
Uncle Vanya
marvellous’) but not Dostoevsky (‘too much altogether, those brothers. Too deep for me.’)

He wanders around the room, picking up objects to examine them, taking books from the shelves even though he can’t read them. He peers at photographs: her as a child, a smiling five-year-old in sepia, hands gripping the skirt of her dress; her parents smiling fixedly on their wedding day; her grandparents stiffly upright in front of a statue of Lenin; stilted groups at their summer dacha when they entertained her father’s friends, politicians and Party officials (how she hated those occasions); a portrait of her father, heavily retouched, a middle-aged man with the face of a thirty-year-old.

She wants to believe he is taking it all in but she detects a restlessness in his actions. There is some distraction, some anxiety on his mind, that he won’t tell her about. At first she puts it down to his unfamiliarity with Moscow. Only later does she sense the strain he is under. She wishes she had the courage to ask him, but she doesn’t because she is afraid to hear the truth. This evening with her, and
subsequent evenings, are, she suspects, no more than an interval in some other unrevealed drama.

‘And Valery?’ he asks self-consciously. ‘Is he here?’

‘It was too hot to stay in,’ she says. ‘He went to the swimming baths with his friends. He will be back later.’

‘Does he have his school books here?’ he asks. ‘May I look at them?’

She fetches Valery’s exercise books from his room and Stevens settles down in a chair while she prepares supper.

‘You must be pleased,’ he says as they sit down to eat. ‘He’s very good.’

She has never before shared her son with anyone. He is her possession, hers to guard and protect. She finds it strange to answer questions about his education, which university he will go to, what branch of science he will make his own. She is surprised at the resentment she feels. She does her best to conceal her emotions. She does not believe that Stevens notices her unease.

Is it an act of supreme folly or supreme courage to go to the enemy’s camp, sit at his table and warn him of the dangers we face if the development of nuclear weapons is not brought under control?

We believe that Professor Stevens deserves the heartfelt thanks of the citizens of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, indeed every country on the planet for daring to speak the truth. To many of us involved in the teaching of science to younger generations, the prospect of the destruction of all life as we know it is too terrible to imagine. That is why Professor Stevens’s act is one of great moral courage. He has dared to imagine the unimaginable; he has reminded us of the uncomfortable truth of our responsibilities, that each generation holds the planet in trust for the next.

Yet our political leaders ignore trusteeship. They argue that their duty is the defence of the realm, and they advance the failures of the ’thirties to attend to this very duty as one of the contributory reasons for the war just ended. The greater the destructive nature of the weapon, they argue, the greater the possibility of peace.

We stand shoulder to shoulder beside Professor Stevens in the belief that the level of potential destruction of a nuclear arsenal invalidates this argument. We are no longer talking about the defence of realms, but the survival of
Homo sapiens
. National barriers will offer no resistance to the deadly hurricane of a nuclear chain reaction. There can be no winners or losers now, no victors and vanquished. There is life on earth, or there is nothing, a void, a poisoned emptiness.

Professor Stevens is right to speak out. We join our voices to his. We hope the growing chorus of sanity from peoples of all nations will drown the folly of our national leaders for the benefit of this and all succeeding generations.

He comes to see her again (she has lost count how many times now), bringing flowers. He spends time with Valery, asks after her sleeping mother, paces around the apartment, leaves at midnight. He makes no demands of any kind on her.

Tonight he is with her again. Her mother is asleep. (In the rare moments when she is awake she says nothing, eats nothing – soon she will be a presence without substance. How she wishes her mother would die. Her life seems so pointless.) Valery comes home at eight, and she translates the conversation between father and son. When they are together, it seems she has no independent existence: she is merely the means of communication between the two of them. They have supper together. She wonders if he notices the poor quality of the meat and vegetables. They talk. Valery goes to bed. It is midnight and still very hot.

‘I must go,’ Stevens says, without moving.

Does she want him to stay? Is that what he is asking? How should she respond?

‘Stay a little longer,’ she says, refilling his glass. ‘It’s too hot to move.’

Is that the sign he wanted? Has she said the right thing?

He asks about her life. He tries to get her to comment on Soviet society but she is circumspect. How does she know someone has not placed a microphone somewhere in her apartment while she was away in Helsinki? She reveals little, makes a few comments. It is a life, much as any other. They manage. He listens but doesn’t question her.

‘I must go,’ he says later, and this time he stands up. Then she is in his arms again, she doesn’t know how this happens, and he is kissing her. This time she is the led, he the leader. As she feels the
strength of his arms around her, her mind travels back to that summer night in Leiden. How cool it was then, how perfect, how gentle the heat. Now it is stifling, the air squalid and damp with humidity. They are eight floors up in a cramped apartment, near them are a dying woman and a teenage boy.

He murmurs to her, words she can hardly catch let alone understand. She accepts his kisses, she holds his head in her hands (wasn’t it like this all those years ago?). She feels his hands across her back. There is a desperation in his gestures as if she will evaporate under his grasp. (She is so hot she might do just that if he doesn’t let go of her. She can hardly breathe.) She is aware of the sudden urgency in his touch.

She has not slept with a man since Miskin and that was many months ago. Somehow with Miskin it was never satisfactory (her memories are of fumbling fingers, buttons refusing to undo, clasps sticking, obstacles undermining their lovemaking). She remembers Leiden, and the feeling that in giving herself to him she had brought a sense of perfection into her life. Will she risk losing that memory if she sleeps with him now?

She leads him to the bedroom and the narrow bed with the hard mattress. The walls are paper-thin. Valery must be asleep, surely. Whatever they do they must do it quietly. She does not turn on the light. The room is illuminated by the street lights below. (Wasn’t it moonlight in Leiden, not this awful neon?)

‘Wait,’ she says. She goes into the bathroom (why can she never get rid of the smell of human waste, no matter how hard she tries?) and takes off her dress. She stares at her reflection in the mirror. She assesses the damage of the years, dark shadows under her eyes, pallid skin, grey hair (damp over her forehead), furrows on her cheeks, stippled lines around her lips as if a string were being pulled tight around her mouth. How dry her skin is. (For years she kept in her drawer the empty bottle of skin cream she had bought in Leiden until in frustration she threw it away. Why is there never face cream in the Soviet Union?) The redness of her neck. How heavy her bosom is – she has inherited that from her mother. She is old and dry and ugly. How she hates herself. She wants to cry.

Look at me, she says to the mirror. ‘How can he possibly want me now?

Dressed only in her slip she goes back into the bedroom. He is sitting on the edge of the bed, his cuffs unbuttoned, his tie off, the
top button of his shirt undone. He holds out his arms towards her and takes her hands in his. She stands in front of him. Their knees touch. He smiles reassuringly up at her.

‘We must be very quiet,’ she whispers. ‘The walls, are so thin here.’

‘Do you remember Leiden?’ he asks.

‘I will never forget it,’ she says.

‘Nor will I,’ he says.

‘Was it love or passion?’ she asks.

‘Do you separate love from passion in Russia? Is that a Politburo diktat too?’

‘I fell in love for the first time that night,’ she says. ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’

‘Of course. It was all very unexpected.’

‘No more than that?’

‘Wonderful, too,’ he says shyly. ‘Wonderful and exciting.’

‘I heard your voice and immediately I was in the grip of something, a force I had never experienced.’ Now they have begun to talk of that time she cannot stop herself. ‘It raged inside me, dictating my every action. I was no longer in control of myself. I fell in love with you the moment you first spoke to me. I have never forgotten how that felt.’

At last she is telling him what every day for too many years she has longed to tell him. That part of her dream, too, has come true.

‘I remember the first time I saw you,’ he says. (Did he love her? Will he tell her that?) ‘I was sitting on the platform, bored rigid, wondering what on earth I was doing in that place, when I saw you. You were staring at the speaker, your face was shining and beautiful.’

‘Beautiful, no,’ she laughs with pleasure. ‘Shining, well I expect that was the heat.’

He has let go of her hands and she is sitting beside him on the bed, one leg drawn up under her. She can feel the heat of his body next to hers.

‘Beautiful,’ he says, ‘So beautiful I couldn’t stop looking at you.’ He touches her face with his fingers. She takes his hand and kisses it.

‘In the coffee interval I had to speak to you. I remember pushing rudely past friends and colleagues who wanted to talk to me, saying “Later, later”. I thought that if I didn’t reach you quickly you would
vanish and I would never see you again. Nothing could have stopped me, I could have walked through a concrete wall.’

She wants him to go on and on, to talk to her for ever about those days. She wants to float in her memories of Leiden, with him beside her.

‘And later?’ she asks. ‘What did you think of me then?’

‘How brave you were, how I would do everything in my power to spend the rest of my life with you.’

I have spent the rest of my life with you, she wants to say. But she remains silent. Has he ever thought of her? Has he preserved her in his mind as she has preserved him? Of course not, that would be impossible. He is not sentimental. He has no secret life like her. What man does?

‘I was in a dream,’ she says, ‘for weeks afterwards. I wanted to shout to the world, I know what love is! It is a wonderful thing. Then I discovered I was carrying your child. I was happy, ecstatic with my secret.’

‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘If we had met again, I would have told you.’

‘Couldn’t you have written?’ he asks thoughtlessly.

‘If someone had read that letter, I would have been exposed as little more than a prostitute for sleeping with a Western scientist. Who knows what would have happened then?’

She knows, only she dare not tell him.

‘I’m so sorry. I should not have said that.’

‘Please. There can be no regrets. We have lived our lives apart because that is how it was meant to be. We must count ourselves lucky to have our memories and our son.’

‘You were always more practical than me,’ he says, laughing.

‘Will you stay?’ she asks eventually.

‘Do you want me to?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ she says, with a conviction she doesn’t feel.

They lie naked on her narrow bed with just a sheet to cover them. Suddenly he sits up and looks down at her.

‘I must tell you the truth,’ he says. Is this the moment she has waited for all these years? ‘I loved you. It was not just passion. Passion alone doesn’t possess your soul, doesn’t wrench your heart, turn your world upside down, make you see everything differently. For weeks afterwards I could do little, hardly any research work, little teaching. My memories were the only reality I knew. I thought
I would go mad with wanting you. But you can’t sustain a life at that level of intensity. Cambridge alone was not Leiden with you.’

I could die now, she says to herself, secure in the knowledge that I have loved and been loved.

‘Gradually; I found a sense of proportion. I forced myself to accept what was possible and what was impossible.’

‘It would be impossible to see me again?’

‘I have regretted that decision ever since.’

She is crying silent tears. He wipes the tears away from her cheeks but still she cries.

‘Please don’t cry,’ he says. ‘I can’t bear it. I have failed you. I failed to rescue you from this terrible city where you live. I never gave you the life you deserved.’

‘You could not have rescued me,’ she says. ‘That was impossible. Not to have recognized that would have been madness.’

That is why I found a secret place where I could keep our love safe and undiscovered.

She reaches up and touches his face. ‘We may be older,’ she says, ‘but passion needn’t desert us yet, need it?’

She puts her arms around him and kisses him, his neck, his shoulders, his arms, his chest, all of him, tasting him on her lips, drawing his spirit and his strength into her body, until she cannot tell what is him and what is her. All she knows is that what she experiences is love, the sharp, sweet tongues of love whispering songs she has not heard for a long time.

*

Sometime in the night, she wakes and asks, ‘Why do you stay here? What do you want from us? We have nothing to give you. Surely you know that.’

He sleeps the sleep of the innocent. If he hears her he says nothing.

‘Please be careful,’ she whispers.