Making Enemies (2 page)

For the rest of the morning, sitting in the lecture theatre, she hears only his voice in her head, nothing from the platform. At lunch she eats with her colleagues, listening to their complaints, their bitter assessments of their fellow physicists, their criticisms of a way of life of which they are secretly jealous. She says little, her mind is elsewhere. To her surprise Stevens brings his coffee to her table and sits down beside her. He fetches sugar when she asks for it. She registers the disapproval of her colleagues and feels pleased.

At the start of the afternoon session Stevens takes his place on the platform. She watches him put his hands to either side of his head as if to shade his eyes from the light, lean forward on his elbows and then slowly, very slowly, survey the auditorium until he can see where she is sitting. He drops his hands at once, sits back in his chair and stares at her.

She asks herself: what is happening? Why am I like this? Why is he like this? She thinks back over what has happened between them. There is no concealment in his expression, no dissimulation. She is unused to this directness and she finds it disturbing. In her society men and women are practised in the art of concealment. The idea of revealing what you think or feel is extraordinary. But when he talks to her, he tells her the truth. That has not happened to her before.

That evening, at a reception, she wonders if he will seek her out again. Surely not. It is too risky. She stations herself near the exit, talking to a dull Polish mathematician and watching over his shoulder as Stevens gathers up a group of colleagues at the other end of the room and then, with handshakes and smiles, slowly makes his way towards the door where she stands. At least she will catch a glimpse of him, perhaps a smile, a wave, the promise of a meeting tomorrow. She admires the casual way he spots her (did she imagine it or had he already seen her standing by the door?) then greets her as if they had known each other for years.

‘Ruth.’

He reaches past someone to touch her outstretched hand in greeting. They’re going to eat at a restaurant nearby. Why doesn’t she join them? He gathers her up into his group, introduces her to people whose names she doesn’t catch and sweeps her out into the warm summer evening. She submits to her conquest with abandon.

They eat in the garden of an inn popular with the students, seated on benches around a long wooden table. There are a dozen of them, British, Dutch, German, two Italians; mathematicians and physicists. She is the only Russian. She sits as far away from him as she can. But throughout the evening she feels his eyes on her, even when she has her back to him. Once, or does she imagine it? she sees him raise his beer glass and toast her secretly across the table. She experiences a moment of fear that others might see but nobody does. Or she thinks nobody does. She is grateful that it is dark enough to hide her confusion. She is sure her face is on fire.

It is an extraordinary evening, unlike any other. They talk enthusiastically about their work, these young scientists, ‘the sons and daughters of quantum physics’, Stevens calls them. They share an excitement in their discoveries, a confidence in the role that science must play in the life of the planet, an eagerness for the new world of quantum mechanics, how they will unravel the deepest secrets of nature to release atomic energy and the uses to which this source of energy will be put. She shares in the sense of brotherhood that Stevens stimulates in them, how they share ‘a responsibility to work together for the good of mankind, a confederacy of scientists to whom science and democracy mean more than nationality’.

‘We must be leaders,’ Stevens tells them. ‘Not in a political sense. We must work alongside politicians to achieve the new world we can all sense within our grasp. We must
influence
politics with our understanding of what can now be achieved through the application of science.’

The flames of the candles burning on the table are reflected in their glasses as they raise them to acknowledge Stevens. Did that happen, or was it an illusion? That summer night, did they swear allegiance to one another, did they create a brotherhood that would ignore political loyalties? If only she could remember now.

She responds to their optimism and envies their innocence (there is no innocence left in the Soviet Union, there is only caution).

Later on (is it midnight? Later still? She has lost all track of time by now), they walk in a garden, she and this English professor. (She can’t remember where it is or how they got there.) Where the rest of the party is by now she has no idea either; for a time they were with them, drinking and debating, and then they were not. Did he engineer that? She doesn’t care how it has happened, she knows they are alone, perhaps they are alone in all the world, and she feels
reckless and free and excited. They stand watching the stars in a clear, dark sky. It is very still and warm.

Suddenly, under the branches of a walnut tree he takes her hand in his: she is surprised how hot his hand is. Then he apologizes immediately and releases her hand as if it had burned him. He retreats from her. Perhaps it is embarrassing to her, he is so sorry, he is not good at this sort of thing. But he is glad she was there at dinner. He smiles at her, that open, defenceless smile that touches her heart. The moonlight shines through the leaves and makes a pattern on his face. In that moment she loves him more than she knew it was possible to love anyone.

She remembers standing on tiptoe, reaching up to put her arms around his neck, drawing his face towards her, that dear, open smiling face, and then she is kissing him, was it once or many times? How can she know after so many years, except that she remembers the shyness of his kiss, the tremble of his body in her arms. She puts her hands to his face and kisses his eyes and his lips, and she feels his arms around her, pulling her body closer to his.

How long they stay like that she does not know. With her lips still on his face, she moves in his embrace, very slowly at first, almost carelessly, so that his hand touches her breast. She hopes he will think it is accidental. But she does not remove it, she lets it lie there for a while, and then she covers his hand with hers. She looks up at him and smiles, leans her head against his shoulder and then leads him by the hand through the garden, through the deserted streets of the sleeping town and up the stairs to her room.

‘Did sexual intercourse take place?’ Andropov asks.

Why are men always interested in sex? Those days had not been about sex or not only about sex, but about something more fundamental even than that. How can she explain that to this man?

They stand facing each other in the darkness of her room. She whispers ‘Wait,’ and goes into the bathroom. There she takes off her shoes, her dress and her underclothes. She likes her dress, it does not disgrace her, though she sees how unfashionable it is by comparison to the dresses she has seen in the streets of Leiden. But she is ashamed of her underclothes, worn grey through use and darned. She washes her hands and face and between her legs, cleans her teeth and combs her hair. She wears no jewellery apart from her wedding ring and she does not bother to remove that. Then she turns out the light and goes back into her bedroom. For a moment,
before she is used to the dark, she sees nothing and she thinks he has gone. Then she notices his clothes tossed carelessly over the back of a chair. He is in bed, lying under a single sheet.

She gets in beside him, her heart beating so loudly she is sure he will hear it. They lie beside each other for a while, not touching. Then she reaches for his hand and turns her body towards his, her head down as if she is afraid to look at him. He takes her chin in his hand and raises her face so he can see her in the moonlight that streams in through the open window. Then slowly and softly he begins to kiss her.

Afterwards, while he sleeps, she holds him in her arms and feels a sense of completion she has never known before. She tries to define the emotion. Is it love? She has only experienced what she imagines is love once before, and it was with Marchenko in the first months. It was nothing like this. There was no tenderness in what he did to her, no meeting of equals, only a man with his desire and she with her ability to satisfy it. She recognizes now what she has always known but refused to admit. She does not love Marchenko, has never done and will never do so.

She lies against Stevens, and knows that in this room and on this night in this strange foreign town, her being and that of this man whom she hardly knows, fused for one moment. She was not obliterated by this act (as she has been before), she was enhanced by it, liberated: perfected, that is the word she chooses. In giving herself to this man she has been brought to an undreamed-of perfection. She is now more herself than she has ever been. She exults in the emotions of tenderness that flow through her. She is lost to one world but she has found herself in quite another.

They are lovers until the end of the week. Everyone knows about their relationship at once (at conferences everyone always knows who is sleeping with whom) because she is constantly by his side. He insists they eat together though she thinks this is unwise, but he will hear nothing of her objections. When she is with him, she cannot resist smiling at him. She takes time off with him from the conference to buy some lipstick, skin cream, scent, some special soap for the bath and new underclothes. She goes to the hairdresser. Stevens wants to buy her a dress but she refuses to let him do this.

She expects her colleagues to criticize her behaviour (she even fears she may be sent back early to Moscow) but they don’t, though they express their disapproval (or jealousy) through their silence. She
is not sure why they don’t criticize her. Perhaps they realize that these events may be stored away for future use. Patience is one of the arts of living under communism. You hoard the indiscretions of your colleagues and neighbours against the day when the evidence can be used to your advantage.

Isn’t that what Ivan had done? Isn’t that why she is in this room now, answering Andropov’s questions? The day of reckoning always comes (it is one of the few certainties of life in Soviet Russia), but for these few days in Leiden she chooses to forget so many of the lessons she has learned in her adult life. She knows she has made enemies, but she consoles herself with the thought that everyone has enemies, so what does it matter? Recklessly, she gives no thought to the future because she sees none beyond the end of the week.

‘You don’t deny it? I am surprised,’ Andropov says.

‘What is there to deny? It all happened so long ago. It was not important then. How can it be now?’

At the end of the week, Marchenko returns to Moscow, Stevens to Cambridge. They part knowing it is unlikely they will meet again, though they say to each other that they will move heaven and earth to make such a meeting possible. In the emotion of their parting, promises are made. There are other conferences and Stevens has his red university diary with him. He skims through the pages and recites the names of cities she has heard of but never seen.

Milan. Basle. Oslo.

She says she will try, but the decision is not in her power; she thinks it will be difficult if not impossible to persuade the Institute’s authorities to let her go.

Moscow, then, Stevens says. He will come to Moscow in January. He will give a paper to the Academy of Sciences. Only a few months to wait, then they will be together again.

For a moment they dream of a few days in the city in which she has spent all her life. But in their hearts they know how enormous are the obstacles they must overcome and that makes their parting so difficult. Now, all these years later, she knows that what they dared not say to each other that day has come true. They were not to meet again, and now there is no likelihood that they will ever do so.

‘Perhaps there are people who would not share your view that your affair with Stevens was unimportant.’

She hears the threat in Andropov’s voice, but she cannot stop herself defying him.

‘They would have to explain their reasons,’ she says.

Enemies, she thinks, have long memories. She never expected the enemy to be the man with whom she briefly shared her life.

‘Stevens was married. So were you.’

‘Adultery is not a crime.’

‘We are dealing with deviant not criminal behaviour.’

‘I cannot see why a brief encounter with an English physicist so many years ago is of the slightest concern to anyone. It was a trivial event.’

Andropov considers her answer. She does not know whether it is important in his eyes, since he has chosen to resurrect the event after so much time, or whether it is just an excuse to arrest her.

‘Let us wind the clock forward sixteen years. What has happened to Stevens? He is still at Cambridge, he is one of the most important scientists in the British nuclear programme, he is a Nobel prizewinner. He has an international reputation,’ Andropov is saying, but she is hardly listening to him: a flood of memories is enveloping her. It is a joyful process, remembering those days with Stevens.

‘He was always going to succeed. It was obvious even then.’

She says it carelessly, without thinking. It is her only mistake but it is enough. Andropov has been waiting for such a moment. He has caught her off guard. In those few words, she has betrayed herself and possibly Stevens too, and though she stops herself from saying anything more, it is too late. She has revealed her secret to Andropov, and he knows that Stevens is not dead for her, that some memory lives on deep within her, nourished secretly all these years. That is what he came to find and he has not been disappointed. He has learned her weakness, and now he has the power to exploit her. She knows he will do so mercilessly.

Andropov leans back into his chair, confident and relaxed. She shivers even though she is not cold.

‘If we believe all they tell us,’ Toby Milner said at the end of a grim day of listening to men and women denying a past that was undeniable, ‘there weren’t enough Nazis in this country to fill a paper bag, let alone form an army. So how did Hitler manage to survive for so long? That’s what I’d like to know.’

The snow was falling again and had started to settle in drifts. It had been snowing on and off all day, and the bitter wind had returned. The city was silent.

‘God, I hate this place. Why can’t we go home and leave them to it? They got themselves into this mess in the first place.’

Many of us in Berlin thought like that. We saw ourselves working for the people we had defeated. We saw the efforts that were being made to rebuild their country and obliterate the evidence of the recent past, and we wondered how much was being done to restore our own shattered homes. From what we heard and read in the newspapers, not enough.

‘Here we are, babysitting the people who yesterday we tried to kill. And what does our vanquished enemy do? He tries to make us believe that he was really on our side all the time. Always someone else’s doing. Him or her but never me. Pitiful.’

‘Can you blame them for turning against each other if that’s how they think they’ll survive?’ I asked.

‘I blame them for everything,’ Milner said bitterly. ‘In particular, I blame them for keeping us here, in this godforsaken hole.’

I’d been in Berlin for eight months by then, working for the Allied Control Commission. Our task was to interview the locals living in the British zone of occupation to find suitable people to take part in the new civilian administration the Allies were setting up. We were expected to exclude former Nazis and communists
from our selection. It was a thankless exercise, without certainties and with little reward.

Each morning we were greeted by the same lengthy queues of hopeful Germans; each day we asked the same questions and we listened to the same stories, so often pathetic inventions to hide a truth we all knew. We inspected papers, some genuine, some forged, some stolen, the currency of hope on which to build a new life out of the ruins of the old. Each day we made our decisions, a tick or a cross, a simple mark on which so much depended. That is the true expression of victory, the exercise of absolute power.

‘Don’t you worry about the ones you let through?’ I asked. ‘Putting the guilty back into their old positions of power?’

I found it increasingly difficult to know if my judgements were right. I was haunted by the thought that I might be reinstating the old guard of unreformed Nazis or a new guard of communist activists.

‘Nobody gets it right every time,’ Toby said. ‘We’re bound to make mistakes. It’s a question of degree. Are we more right than wrong? That’s how I look at it. You’ve got to come away at the end of each day thinking you’ve got money in the bank.’

‘I wish I could see it like that.’

‘You know where you go wrong? You treat them as people.’

‘They are people.’

‘Wrong. They’re problems. Nothing more.’

‘I can’t hate them enough for that.’

‘I don’t hate them and I don’t despise them. The truth is, I don’t care about them any more.’ There was more than a hint of exhaustion in his voice. ‘They sit there in front of me, I listen to their self-pity, their petty acts of betrayal, their self-righteousness and what do I hear? The litany of guilt. They were all in it, every man jack of them, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.’

A dog howled from somewhere inside a ruined house on the other side of the street. The desolate sound seemed to sum up the mood of the city.

‘That’s when I want to put a cross against all their names. But I suppose there comes a moment when you have to stop settling scores and look to the future. Then they become names on a sheet of paper, decisions to be made, right or wrong, yes or no. That’s all. No emotion. No involvement.’

I hated the hopeful faces that looked across my desk each day. But I was prepared to do it because I was ordered to do it. Like
countless others, I had been under orders for years. Obedience was a way of life. I was still too frozen by the experience of war to feel even the slightest pull of rebellion.

Toby Milner touched my arm in a gesture of parting. ‘We’re supposed to be building a new world,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, we’re using the bricks of the old.’

With a wave he turned the corner and disappeared.

*

I never told anyone about Miriam, which means I am ashamed of this short episode in my life. The facts are these. During my months in that ruined city, I shared the bed of a woman called Miriam. I gave her food, sometimes clothes and cosmetics, she gave me herself, or at any rate, her body.

That she was, or had been, technically the enemy was something that never entered my mind. She was simply a lonely woman trying, like so many others, to bring herself back to life. She saw no wrong in the exchange of her body for the material things she lacked, and at that time neither did I. The relationship was one of convenience, and I justify what I did by saying that we both knew it. My presence in her life encouraged her to hope for more. Hoping was a symptom of coming back to life. She knew I would go away, that nothing was permanent. She had only to look at the ruins of the city she had grown up in to know that.

Memory is the enemy of all that cold rationality. When she cried herself to sleep I knew she was remembering how life had once been so different. She had been a schoolgirl when the war began, with ambitions to become a research chemist. She had lived with her parents and her sister in a suburb of Berlin. Home, parents, sister, all her dreams, had been obliterated in the smoke of war. Her thoughts would turn to the past, and she would cry.

‘One more day,’ she said as I let myself into her room. ‘One more day and then I shall be all alone.’

‘Not for long.’

I was hanging my greatcoat behind the door, watching the melting flakes of snow slide slowly down the sleeves to form a pool on the floor.

‘Even one day is too long.’

It was an unspoken convention that there were no endearments between us, no words that might lay claim to an emotional territory
that was out of bounds. But the expression in her voice told me that tonight she wanted the rules to be broken.

‘I’m coming back.’ I hoped I didn’t sound as weary as I felt.

‘My father was in Cambridge years ago. He was a student there. He went to learn English and write a thesis.’

‘What did he read?’

‘He was a philosopher. He said Cambridge was the home of philosophy. He admired G. E. Moore. He admired the English.’ She looked at me over her cup. ‘We have more in common than you know. My father was a teacher too.’

‘I’ve brought you these.’

I opened my briefcase. In it were some tins, meat and condensed milk, a packet of biscuits and some lipstick.

‘Cigarettes?’ she asked. They were cheap for us, but on the black market cigarettes had become a currency of their own. By selling what I gave her, Miriam could supplement what she earned working in the kitchens of our headquarters.

‘Of course,’ I said, putting a carton of two hundred on her table. She never told me that she sold them but we both knew she did.

‘Look at this.’ She had found the lipstick. She tried it at once. ‘It is wonderful. Wonderful.’

She stood in front of the mirror, anointing her lips.

‘Do you like me?’

She turned, smiling.

‘You look lovely.’

‘I look frightful, a mess. Look at me. Look at my hair.’ She laughed. ‘This awful skirt, woollen stockings, mittens, and now lipstick. Absurd.’

But there was a note of excitement in her voice I had not heard before, and she was laughing. She came as close then as she ever did to touching my heart.

‘I have something for you.’ She gave me a small parcel, wrapped in used brown paper, tied with string. ‘Open it later. When you are in Cambridge.’

‘You won’t be there.’

‘You can think of me when you open it.’ She took the parcel from me and put it in my briefcase. ‘We will be together then, if only for a moment.’

I should have been able to read the code. That night she gave me all the clues I needed. If I had wanted to, I am sure I would
have. But I did not have a mind for code-breaking in that city. Her messages remained undeciphered and unanswered.

I spent the night there, even though I had told myself I wouldn’t. The snow was falling too heavily by then and I was tired. I have a memory, not of that night in particular, but of any night in that small, cold room, how we would cling to each other in the dark, and after a time I got used to sleeping without turning over. The need for warmth was as great as that for sleep, and there is no warmth like that of another human body held close.

*

I travelled with an American on my journey home. We nodded at each other as he entered the compartment, the salute of one uniform to another, but we said nothing. I huddled in my corner and looked out of the window as the train set off.

In a world of bullets and bombs you expect destruction. As an inevitable consequence of my makeshift life as a soldier, I had become used to the sight of the torn skeletons of buildings. They looked as if they had been ravaged by a disease whose scars were a bitter reminder of what once had been the homes of people like myself. But I was not prepared for the impossibility of living among the ruins of what I and so many others like me had done to our enemies. I wanted to remove the image, like turning a page in a magazine to look at something else. But at that time in Berlin there was nowhere to turn to.

I looked at the countryside with relief. If the signs of war were there, they were invisible from my compartment window. It was the towns I hated. Each time we passed through a station I tried to close my eyes and forget where I was. But the images of the shattered buildings and the endless piles of rubble were imprinted on my mind. I wanted nothing more than to leave Germany and never come back.

Holland was different. You cannot spend your early life on the edge of the East Anglian fenland and remain indifferent to flat marshy country. I loved the fens then as I do now, and I feel the same attraction in Holland. Endless dark fields passed by that day, the earth hardened by the winter and lined with frozen irrigation canals shining silver in the cold light. Always the same flat line of horizon, wherever you looked, its limits marked by the silhouettes of trees or, occasionally, a windmill.

If Germany was a country living with the unburied corpse of its past, Holland was springing back to life. What you could see of the faces between scarves and hats had purpose. There was none of the dazed, lost look with which I was so familiar. As we pulled into Utrecht, I saw skaters, bodies bent forward, hands held gracefully behind their backs as they leaned into the wind, their movements expressing a pleasure I had not seen for months. My spirits lifted.

‘Care for some coffee?’

My American companion had taken a thermos flask from his haversack and was pouring the hot, black liquid into a cup. I took it gratefully, letting the steam warm my face.

‘Going far?’ he asked.

The train, not unsurprisingly, was prone to unscheduled stops in the middle of nowhere. We were already some hours late.

‘London. If we ever get there.’

‘Me too. My wife’s English. I’ve got a little boy I’ve never seen.’

The carriage door opened, letting in a blast of cold air. Two Dutch women sat down beside us. One of them dropped a package as she settled herself in her seat. The American retrieved it. The woman smiled and said something in Dutch. The American said, ‘You’re welcome.’ The train jerked its way slowly out of the station.

‘You married?’

‘No.’

I smiled but said nothing more, and my companion settled back into the silence of his own thoughts. The Dutch women shared some food, talked quietly to one another, and I slept fitfully as the countryside moved agonizingly slowly past us.

I awoke to someone shaking my arm.

‘Amsterdam,’ the American said. ‘We get out here.’

I took my haversack down from the rack and followed him on to the platform. Dusk was falling and lights were coming on. But the growing darkness could not hide the sharp outlines of damage, even after seven years. Now we had the unenviable task of putting it all back together again. What demons might we be storing up to ruin another generation’s future?

‘Care for a drink? We’ve missed one connection. We’ve got to wait a couple of hours for the next one.’

We found a bar not far from the station and a warm corner. I shed my coat for the first time that day.

‘You stationed in Berlin?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Me too. God, I hate that city.’

‘Too many ghosts?’

‘Times past? No. All that’s buried. Done with.’ He thought for a moment. ‘It’s the Soviets. I hate the way they think they won the war on their own and that victory allows them to dictate the peace. Look at the way the bastards make trouble just for the hell of it. Whatever you give them, it’s never enough. They want more. Sometimes, when you sit across a table with them, you want to grab them by the lapels of their uniforms and knock their stupid heads against the wall. You know,’ he said, finishing his beer, ‘I thought war was bad enough but politics is worse.’

‘Their kind of politics.’

‘Right. Everything is about advantage. Win, win, win, every time, on every little thing.’

Someone had turned on a radio and I could hear dance music, then a woman’s voice singing. The bar was filling up as the working day came to an end. The warmth and the people gave an air of festivity to the place.

‘How about you? What keeps you in Berlin?’

‘I vet the locals. See if they’ve repented.’

‘Have they?’

‘None of them was guilty in the first place, or so they tell me. They were all secretly on our side but they never had an opportunity to do anything about it.

‘Are they suitable citizens to run their own country? Right?’

‘We can’t defeat the Nazis one day and install them back in power the next.’