Who's on First (7 page)

“What was Kapitsa's mood when you saw him?”

“You wouldn't believe. We met together at six, at a friend's apartment, then to a restaurant together, then walking over Moscow. He took me finally to the train. We talked, yes, about Vorkuta. And, yes, we talked about his work, his
huge
fascination with the physics of rocketry. But what he talked about most, what he talked about ninety percent of the time, was Tamara.”

“Tamara?” Blackford asked.

“Tamara—I can remember Viktor's words—I have a good memory, you know, Julian—Tamara is ‘more beautiful than Juliet, more learned than Madame Curie, more gentle than the River Don'!”

“Yes, but can she dance?”

“What?” said Vadim.

“She sounds okay,” said Oakes.

“Okay! Viktor proves himself
mad, crazy
about his Tamara. He says to me, stopping right there, in the middle of Red Square, he says, ‘Look at me, Vadim'”—“Serge” himself recognized this breach of security procedures. He began again. “He said, ‘Look at me … Am I disgusting to a beautiful twenty-three-year-old girl?' I took my beloved Viktor in my arms, and I say to him, ‘Viktor, you are thirty-six years old. Six months ago you looked like a corpse. Today you do not look thirty-six, that is true. But you have color in the cheeks. You have gained ten? fifteen? kilos. You are wise, you are brilliant, you are one of the
finest
men God
ever
made. If you want Tamara, she will be lucky to have you!' Viktor was overjoyed, he was so happy—I could not even begin to tell Viktor what was my intention. But—we walked past Lenin's Tomb, talking, and suddenly he winks at me and he turns most solemnly”—Vadim made the low bow of the Russian peasant—“toward the tomb, put me in front of him so no one can see, and does
this
with his middle finger.” Vadim executed the internationally recognized fico. “I whisper to him, ‘Do it once more for me,' and he did—but that was the entire whole of the political conversation. If I told him I was intending to leave Russia it would only have done something greatly to hurt his happiness. Because he could not leave Tamara.”

“What does she do?” Trust asked.

“She was then a technical assistant. She too is a physicist.”

“And that was your last communication?”

Vadim, well into his second brandy, was well into prolixity. It transpired that, as prisoners, he and Viktor had developed a highly intricate code based on numerals. They used to practice it, for distraction, hour after endless hour. No such code, of course, is unbreakable, Vadim reminded them. “But I sent a letter on my way out of Vienna, to the apartment of Viktor's friend who let us use it. It was a letter to say thank you, and of idle chatter about what I have seen in Vienna, written on a typewriter. I made the ribbon to stick, and then started pushing different numbers, putting the ribbon on, and off, as if to be fixing the ribbon. Then at the closing of the letter I asked my friend please to pass it along to Viktor. No one yet knew of my defecting. What I typed in our special code was: ‘My dear Viktor: I do what I do because I must. I shall not write you in case you suffer more, and do not write to me. Always your devoted …'” This time he paused. “I gave my name.”

“Did he marry Tamara?” Oakes asked.

Trust broke in. “We've put together”—he took a file from the drawer of an antique buffet and opened it as they walked into the formal living room—“everything we could find, every public reference, every bulletin; we did as much poking about in Moscow as we could. Our guy asked some routine questions here and there, and here it is: They were married in April 1954. Both Tamara and Kapitsa have had three promotions in the last two years. She is now a full-fledged associate at the aerodynamics laboratory, and he is one of its six research directors, working under General Bolknovitinov. The whole thing is under the general supervision of Academician Nesmayanov, then of Korolyov, the General Groves in the situation, who reports to the chiefs of staff and directly to the Kremlin.

“The Kapitsas have an apartment at the Tyura Tam compound. No children. No notoriety of any sort, that we can come up with. And listen—Kapitsa and his wife have already been abroad. Last year, as part of a scientific exchange visit, Viktor went to Rome with a Russian delegation and delivered a lecture. Tamara was with him, and handled the slides during Viktor's lecture. We found out, in Rome, that the group—there were thirty of them—traveled together everywhere, from the conference, to the hotel, to the sight-seeing places, to the restaurants. There were no incidents, no irregularities, nothing.”

“And Tamara was with him,” Vadim said, as if to himself. “That is bad, that is very bad.”

“Why do you say that?” Trust asked.

“Because if Tamara was with Viktor, and both in a foreign country, it would have been good if they went for asylum, political asylum. If they didn't, they were scared. Or”—he looked down—“or they do not want to leave Russia.”

Trust got up. “It's late, Serge—what the hell, Vadim. We've got a lot of detail to go over tomorrow. I'm going to go over a few things with … Julian, here.”

Vadim rose. “I too am tired. But”—he looked mischievously at them—“not so tired as to not to take myself upstairs maybe a little vodka-soda. You wish me to bring you something from the kitchen?”

“No thanks,” Blackford volunteered. “Maybe later.” Blackford found himself, rather unexpectedly, on his feet. The least he could do, he reasoned, in deference to someone who had spent eight years in Gulag, and emerged spiritually whole, so far as one could judge. And Blackford tended to judge quickly, though his judgments, while always impatient, were not always reliable.

“I like him,” he said simply to Anthony, after Vadim had gone off noisily to bed.

“I like him, too. There's something about him I'd guess Gulag brought out.”

“This one's a pisser, isn't it?”

“Yeah, the brass in Washington are entitled to be pretty desperate if they figure the Soviet Union is going to outperform us in space.”

“Those goddam Russians,” Blackford mused. “Send people off to slave-labor camps and the next day put 'em to work creating a scientific breakthrough. Maybe we ought to tell them we bought the atmosphere from the Indians, and we're sorry, but No Trespassing.… You don't suppose, Anthony, the Russians are superior to Americans?”

“No.”

“Maybe communism makes sense?”

“Yeah, right: We might ask Rufus to conduct a seminar.”

“Did you travel with Vadim?”

“We came separately. We arrived two hours before you did. I've read his security record. Lives absolutely alone, orders everything he can get his hands on in Russian. He had become reclusive at his little farm in New York. Only Kapitsa could have brought him back into action. He's never got over Vorkuta, the guys who grilled him told me, and I think it's clear that's true.”

“It's clear all right. So is the fact that we can't let him operate in any undercover situation when the cover is off the brandy.” Blackford stood, looking down at his lanky, earnest friend—“Where's my room?”

7

The voice from the loudspeaker on the AN-10 announced curtly that during the refueling stop at East Berlin passengers would remain in their seats. Viktor Kapitsa turned to Tamara—they occupied the rearmost seats and no one, in the half-empty airplane, was occupying the seats across the aisle from them—and winked. She returned the wink, lowered her head slightly, and smiled. She wore her hair in a bun, but it flowed back loosely over the sides of her face, so that there was movement, and a ripple of light, in her brown hair whenever she raised or lowered her head. Her smile was both young and wise: and cautious.

There had been just that one night when they discussed such matters as Soviet authoritarianism explicitly. It was after she told him yes, she would marry him; told him she would never have married any other man, if he had not asked her, and he had broken down with the joy that filled him, and they hugged, and walked and walked until the dawn came in that crystal night during the whole of which the snowflakes came down gently as sanctifying grace.

He talked then about Vorkuta. She knew, of course, about his background. But graduates of
katorga
are disinclined to talk about it, except among themselves. Viktor, in several hours, gave her an idea, but found himself incapable of saying it all. She had heard him speak frequently of his best friend, Vadim Platov, and now he reiterated that he owed to Vadim his survival. “I remember after the first week, I made a very conscious decision. That decision was to die. That was when Vadim wrestled with me. He wrestled with me as desperately as if he had come upon me drowning in the middle of a lake and was determined to bring me to the shore alive with him. It wasn't easy to do. During the work hours we were not permitted to talk, except at the fifteen-minute break for lunch. And at night; in whispers, in the barracks. Vadim took me on. He would force me to listen, force me to use my mind, force me to give attention to what he said. He clearly knew he was engaged in therapy, but he never by any word or movement suggested that I was fainthearted, or crippled, or anything but a human being, with a soul, a mind, and a body that could—theoretically—survive. It took a very, very long time. I came out of it in six months, though I was pessimistic even after that, right up until The Death. We used to play with statistics”—arm in arm they crossed the street, on which traffic had all but disappeared. Tamara knew about Viktor's prowess with figures—“and the statistics weren't reassuring. But Vadim had a way of putting it: ‘If there is one survivor in one thousand, there is no objective reason why you should not be that survivor. In fact, there are more than one-per-thousand survivors—so there's room for me, too.' I have to confess, Tamara, that if something had happened to Vadim, I am quite certain that I would have edged back to desperation, then lassitude, stupor, death. We saw it happen. Over and over again. They could have worn placards: ‘
PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. I AM ENGAGED IN DYING. IT WILL TAKE A WHILE. PARDON THE INCONVENIENCE
.'”

He spoke then about his detestation of the system. “Stalin was certainly unique. There cannot have been two Stalins in the history of just one planet. Stalin in a zoo, that would have redeemed the socialist experiment. Stalin as chief of state: that is a condemnation of a system. But I have made up my mind, and you are the principal reason for it. I will never speak about the system. About Soviet politics. Not to anybody. Not”—he gripped her hand—“to you, after tonight. It is the only way. Total abstinence. I am a political celibate, as of this moment and, you will soon discover”—he grinned, and there was, way back there, the trace of the sometime boy—“all my tensions, from the time we marry, will be priapic.” Tamara smiled, and rested her head on his shoulder, as he went on talking.

And that was, and remained, the protocol.

But over the next few years, although they never broke the code, it was a part of their intimacy to experience together the frustrations particular to the system, the forms, the interrogations, the inquiries about fellow workers, the obviously intercepted mail, the eavesdropping, the telephone taps. “I have two tasks ahead of me,” Viktor had said on that white night as he held her back suddenly to avoid a speeding official car. “The first is to help design a rocket that will reach either the moon or Washington, D.C.; the second is to find an apartment for us. The first is an immensely complex project and will almost certainly prove easier than the second.”

They lingered in East Berlin for very nearly two hours, sitting in the hot airplane, and of course no explanation was given. Finally they were airborne, and beer and cold sandwiches were passed around. Viktor munched on his and said, “I wonder if there will be any deviation from the sort of thing we did in Rome?”

“Not according to the schedule.”

Indeed their time was to be taken up from breakfast until their return to the hotel, the Grand. She fished out a sheaf of papers from her purse, and began to read aloud: “Monday. 0730: Convene for breakfast. 0830: Bus departs for Lycée. 0900–1200: Sessions, Lycée. 1210: Depart on bus to hotel. 1300: Lunch. 1400: Return to Lycée by bus. 1430–1700: Lycée. 1700–1830: Bus tour of Paris. 1900: Reception, Soviet Embassy … Shall I go on?”

“Do we get to see Versailles?”

She scanned the three sheets of paper.

“No. But we get to see the Museum of the 1870 Commune.”

“Louvre?”

“Yes, Wednesday.”

“Maybe some evening, after we are taken back to the hotel, we can get out?”

“It says here, ‘No member of the delegation shall leave the hotel except as specified in this schedule. Any emergencies should be discussed with Pyotr Viksne.'” Viksne served them now, even as on the trip to Rome, as (a) tour director, (b) political officer, and (c) KGB agent. On the guest list given to the French, he was referred to as “Academician Viksne.”

“Perhaps we should call him at two in the morning and tell him the toilet doesn't work?”

“Better not. The plumbers' union in Paris may be a Communist union, and we'd be nailed with an Article 58.”

Both of them recognized they were flirting with a transgression of The Protocol. No doubt flying over free territory—they were nearing the Rhine—had made them licentious.

They returned to their reading and, as they crossed Paris on the approach to Orly, craned to view the city they had read about since childhood. Tamara spotted the Eiffel Tower and yelled out her pleasure so loudly that other members of the delegation in turn strained to see out the little cloudy windows of the plane. Ivan Dyakov, with his omnipresent camera, leaned high over Viktor and Tamara to take a picture. At the platform a welcoming committee from the Union of Democratic Scientists met them and there were two or three reporters and photographers. The reporters asked, through interpreters, when the Russians would launch a satellite. Academician Nesmayanov, on behalf of the delegation, smiled, and pulling out a notebook read out in rapid French: “
Nous sommes très heureux de visiter en France pour aider les travaux scientifiques pour la libération du peuples opprimés. Nous seront bien heureux de recevoir, en septembre, les distingués scientistes français pour leur retourner l'hommage qu'ils nous offerent
.” He folded the note neatly, put it in his pocket, and proceeded down the corridor followed by his delegation, without any further thought given to the press.