Dr Berlin (8 page)

Berlin sat in the back of the Zil as it raced through the empty streets of Moscow. The telephone call had woken him from a deep and dreamless sleep. The message was brief and direct: he was needed now. No reasons were given. The anonymous voice had instructions to issue orders, not explanations. He knew it would be like this because murderers, thieves and informers always meet their destiny in the anonymity of night.

The car came to a halt in a courtyard inside the familiar building. He was escorted through a side door into a world of artificial light where day and night no longer had any meaning, past the security guards, across the marble hall, into the elevator and up to the third floor. Not a word was spoken. The hand that guided him might have held a gun such was his ready obedience to the slightest pressure on his back.

This was the fortress within the fortress of Soviet Russia. In the offices that led off this brightly lit corridor the lives of his fellow citizens were ceaselessly monitored. His was among them, he was sure. The records of who they were, what they did, what they said – what they thought even? – were assembled, annotated, analysed and archived in endless shelves of indexed files hidden in guarded cellars deep in the bowels of the building. This was the great state machine of secret bureaucracy, whose rumoured existence was the source of the universal fear so essential to the exercise of absolute power. This building that was never in darkness was both the engine
and the symbol of Soviet power. Its inhabitants were the guardians of the socialist ideal, who kept a permanent vigil against those who threatened to destroy the greatest experiment in engineering human nature the world had ever seen.

‘In here.’

The room was no different to so many he had entered over the years. The walls were bare except for a poorly reproduced black and white photograph of Lenin, arm raised, fist clenched, mouth frozen at the moment of command: ‘Forward, Comrades, forward’, a familiar icon of power. Next to it on the wall was the dusty outline of another picture, long since removed, of Stalin, the now disgraced former leader. How naive of someone – Lenin presumably – to assume that the repetition of such tawdry images would exhort the population at large to believe what their own eyes told them was not true, and yet at the same time how inspired. How had he known that the empty rhetoric would work its dangerous magic and the deceit succeed? Berlin would never understand the gullibility of the masses. Their thought processes mystified him.

He waited. However urgent the summons, you were always kept waiting. Then a voice would say,
Thank
you
for
coming
at
such
short
notice.
That was how every interview began, with a cynical disregard for what both he and his interrogator knew to be the truth. After so many years and so many visits, why maintain the pretence that he had any control over his presence in this room?

‘Thank you for coming at such short notice.’

His interrogator was not one he had seen before. He was a man of his own age, scrubbed and shining, uniformed and eager, the familiar outward skin of the ambitious officer – he’d met his kind before. He disliked zealots as much as he disliked new faces. Hadn’t he earned the right to a single controller by now, someone whose idealism had been worn down by the realities of Soviet life? No doubt it was a rubric of the system that it was dangerous to allow any degree of comfort into the
relationship. Hence, tonight he was facing the Zealot for the first time.

‘You visited our Chief Designer recently. How did you find him?’

Berlin was continuously surprised at the way these people felt it necessary to disguise their intentions. They were not remotely interested in his assessment of Radin’s health. They had more urgent questions. They had summoned him to this building in the middle of the night because they wanted to know what Viktor had said to him.

‘He was failing. That was obvious. He can’t last much longer.’

‘He’s outlived all his doctors’ predictions,’ the Zealot said. ‘Either he is stronger than we thought, or his doctors are poor judges of the progress of his disease.’

If only these people were more sympathetic, how much easier their job would be. But sympathy and interrogation do not lie easily together.

‘Tell me, what did you talk about? Were there any last things to be settled between you?’

Last
things.
The echo of the sentence in Radin’s note was deliberate. They would have intercepted his letter, and now they were curious about its consequences.

‘He seemed very tired. His mind wandered. What he said was inconsequential.’

He concealed the truth without thinking. Why he did so he was not sure. Usually, during these official interrogations, his life was suspended and he was transformed into someone else, a man who told his questioners what they wanted to know because he had no moral strength to resist them. In rooms like this one he had betrayed his students, his colleagues, sometimes even his friends.

Now, for reasons he could not fully determine, he had given a reply that meant while Radin remained alive, he would keep his secrets safe. He had taken a stand.
Why?
His refusal was an unexpected act of dissent, of resistance to the
idea that he should betray Radin because he had betrayed others. Now there was no going back. He was trapped in his own lie. He would have to sustain the deception.

‘What did he talk about?’

‘His childhood, his early interest in rockets, the death of his son.’

That was risky. Viktor had told him once how his son had died but he couldn’t remember any details now. Stick to what you know. Don’t elaborate.

‘Did he mention Baikonur?’

‘Not that I recall, no.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Quite certain.’

The Zealot was writing on the pad of paper. Berlin craned forward. With an eye skilled from years of practice, he was able to read the name of his interrogator: Colonel Medvedev. A name he would remember, along with so many others.

‘You spent over forty minutes in his company. You must have spoken about something.’ Behind the impatience was the scepticism that his interrogator would have been trained to employ. It was a trap, of course. He must be careful.

‘I listened to the ramblings of a dying man. It was a disturbing experience. So little of what he said made sense. I was shocked at his deterioration since my previous visit. Much of the time he seemed not to remember who I was.’

Was that going too far? When you wanted to reveal nothing, the trick was to stay as close to the truth as possible because you could never be sure what additional evidence your interrogators might have collected. It was always dangerous to give them information they could check the moment you had gone.

Radin’s son had been a pilot. He remembered now. Hadn’t his MIG fighter crashed while trying to take the world air-speed record from the Americans?

‘The nursing staff reported that he was confused after you left.’

Good old Viktor, fooling them to the last. He’d put on an act and they’d fallen for it.

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘Did he give you anything before you left? Any letters or notes?’

His interrogator stared at him. This was the simplest test of all. Berlin knew that if he looked away they would take that as a sign of guilt and know that he had lied. Then the atmosphere in the room would change, the questioning would take on a more aggressive tone. He was prepared for that. He accepted the challenge and returned it.

‘If he had, it would be in your possession by now. I would have handed it over immediately.’

That is the language of the man who has sold his soul, the syntax of lies and subservience, of pretended humility and compliance, as he buries his moral identity in sordid moments of betrayal to secure his own survival.

‘Where would our space programme be without our Chief Designer?’ His interrogator took out a cigarette and lit it. He looked reflectively at the ceiling, as if declaiming what he had been ordered to memorise. ‘He put the first satellite into space, then the first man. He invented the super-rocket that will allow us to colonise the moon. He is the author of all our great achievements in space. Without him, we would certainly not have the pleasure of humiliating the Americans so frequently.’

Radin as great servant of the state, whose successes in space caught the imagination of the world on a scale no one had imagined. How dramatic the newspaper headlines had been, proclaiming Soviet superiority over the Americans after Gagarin’s flight. How quick the politicians had been to catch on to the idea of space spectaculars to promote the virtues of the communist system. How cleverly the First Secretary, the Politburo, the Central Committee had been to promote Radin’s achievements as their own. Viktor could do nothing. He had neither public face nor voice. He was the invisible
genius on whose back others were shamelessly riding. Men who don’t exist can’t protest.

Yet this is the man, a voice inside Berlin was bursting to say, whose professional life you frequently made a living hell because of the pettiness of the restrictions you placed upon him in order to shore up your own power, and by the lack of imagination you showed when asked to approve his new plans. How often were his ideas rejected by men without the competence to judge what he proposed? How can you dare to exploit his successes as your own when, within living memory, you tortured him to betray his innocent friends? You systematically smashed his hands, finger by finger, bone by bone, while he screamed in agony, leaving him with a disfigurement that is a permanent monument to bureaucratic insanity sanctioned by a power gone mad.

Radin’s achievements will last for ever, while yours, whatever they are (and they can’t be more than sordid secrets which will one day be exposed to the world’s scrutiny), will end up as a catalogue of crimes for which, if there is any justice in the world, you and others like you will be made to pay.

That was it. He had found his answer. If Radin could remain loyal to a system that had treated him so badly, then he, Andrei Berlin, must remain loyal to Radin. That was how Viktor had come to terms with his injuries. They were the living reminders of his refusal to be broken.

‘It will be a relief when his sufferings are at an end,’ Berlin said.

‘That moment has come.’ The Zealot stood up. ‘The Chief Designer is dead.’

‘When?’ It was the only word he could bring himself to say.

‘A few hours ago.’

Viktor
dead.
That great mind that had created so much silenced at last. That extraordinary source of inventive energy, stilled for ever. Berlin was overwhelmed by a sense of loss. Tears welled unexpectedly in his eyes. He looked away to conceal his distress.

‘I am sorry to have to give you this news.’ The Zealot had
seen his reaction. What would he make of it? How would he record Berlin’s distress in his report on their meeting? ‘You and he were close, weren’t you?’

‘He was closer to me than my own father.’

It was a lie, of course. He had hated his own father. But to a man like the Zealot it sounded right, and that was as good a reason as any for saying it.

*

The ghosts of his secret past came hunting for Berlin that night, and he found nowhere to hide from them. Was he dreaming? Or had he been swept into a surreal world where people he had hardly known crowded round him in silence, staring at him with their accusing eyes? The boy who had defaced a portrait of Stalin in a textbook. The schoolmaster caught with his hand up the skirt of one of the girls in his class. The goalkeeper in his football team who had declared that American jazz was superior to any popular music in the Soviet Union. The engineering student accused of spying for the West because he had photographs of the latest MIG fighter in his briefcase – his passion was to make model aircraft. The woman who had stolen some rubles from his overcoat pocket while cleaning his flat. The researcher he had feared was trying to get him removed from his job. He had invented some charge against him and made sure of his departure from the Department. So it went on. The living history of his betrayals, ghost-like figures from his conscience facing him with the terrible truth of his actions.

Denial was impossible. What he had done, he had done knowingly. He had ruined other lives to protect his own. The system to which he was captive had demanded to be fed, and he had obliged, caring not whether his victims were innocent or guilty, nor whether they had dependants, nor whether their work was valuable to the state. That was for others to judge. His role was to point the finger.

Then he saw another face, familiar to him. The face of his
father, looking at him in horror and astonishment, and saying, ‘You betrayed me too. Why?
Why?
’

When he woke, hours later, he found his pillow was stained with tears.

By ten o’clock, the rumour that the Chief Designer was dead had swept through the Space Institute. By midday the rumour was officially denied when a typewritten statement was issued to all Departments from the Acting Director. The Chief Designer had been seriously ill, he said, but his illness had been successfully treated and he was now back at work, building the new generation of spaceships that would extend the leadership of the Soviet Union over the West.

The brazenness of the invention was greeted on each floor of the concrete building with private disbelief and passive acceptance. If Viktor Radin was back at work, as the official statement declared, then he would either be visible in his office on the second floor, or they’d all be running around in response to the usual string of telexed instructions from Baikonur. Throughout the day his room remained empty and the telex machine silent. Neither was his secretary visible. She had gone home early, reported to be feeling unwell – a diplomatic illness, Valery Marchenko assumed, so she could grieve in private. Radin
was
dead. The Acting Director’s denial was proof enough. Why not come clean and admit it?