Making Enemies (23 page)

Somewhere in the depths of the night a clock strikes two. Andropov checks his watch. He has his back to her. If she were to creep out of the room now, would he notice her absence? For the last hour he has said almost nothing: she has sat there waiting, exhausted, trying to find the courage to ask the one question that controls her waking mind.

Andropov the Silent.

‘May I remove my jacket?’

His question startles her. He has never before asked her permission to do anything.

‘As you please.’

She watches him unbutton the tunic and hang it carefully over the back of a chair, brushing something off the sleeve as he does so. He loosens his tie. He sits down opposite her again. There are damp patches on his shirt and small beads of sweat along his hairline. It is a warm night, but not that warm.

‘Would you like me to open a window?’ she asks.

He shakes his head. His hands are on the table in front of him, the fingers laced together, eyes cast down. He is very still. His behaviour is unusual and that disturbs her.

‘What is your opinion of what we are doing?’ he asks.

A harmless question. Except he has never asked a question like it in all the time she has been meeting him. Now he has asked her two questions in a matter of seconds.

‘I do as I am instructed,’ she says defensively. ‘I have no views.’

‘Put aside the rules for a few minutes.’

If she did not know better she would say he was asking her to drop the deference she adopts at their meetings, to break her private refusal to discuss anything with him and ignore the instruction she
gives herself, that she must do what he wants and give him nothing else.

‘Why?’

‘It is very late. We are alone here. Let us be our true selves for once.’

Andropov the Alone. Of course. Perhaps he has no wife, no girlfriend, no parents, no one to share anything with. Perhaps he wants her now to play the role of confidante. She feels her sympathy rising and fights it back as she remembers Miskin’s terrifying accusation that Andropov was her lover.

‘If I was myself I would be home in bed.’

He lights a cigarette, then offers her one. She declines. He blows out smoke and says: ‘You are free to go. The driver has instructions to take you home.’

The familiar cold tone she prefers. A moment of potential embarrassment has passed.

‘Thank you.’

She turns towards the door, gathering her coat. This is the first time he has let her go without accompanying her.

‘If you have any questions,’ he says, ‘I am prepared to answer them.’

A last chance to know more. Should she take it? Should she leave? The only question that matters bursts into her mind but she is still too frightened to ask. She stands by the door, undecided.

‘Why do you keep me here like this? You could have let me go an hour ago.’

She looks at him carefully. His face is very white and there are dark patches under his eyes. For the first time she sees how young he is – early thirties, possibly even younger – an unlined face, fine blond hair cut short, white hands, the raised knots of lavender veins, pale blue-grey eyes behind tinted glasses. Is this the man Miskin described as having blood on his hands, a murderer?

‘I have been trying to find the courage to speak to you,’ he says.

‘When you bring me here, I am your prisoner. You can say what you like.’ Why should she help him? None of this is her doing. All she wants is to be at home in bed.

‘Dr Marchenko.’

His hands tighten their grip, the veins protrude still further with the strain.

‘Yes?’

‘Sit down.’

An entreaty, not a command. So the moment hasn’t passed. She sits down. The act of returning to the table is her signal of assent to his request.

‘Are there secret microphones here?’ she asks.

He shakes his head. ‘My people sweep each apartment half an hour before we use it. If there were anything they would have discovered it by now. Nobody is listening to us.’

Nobody is listening
. How many times in her life has she heard that phrase? Somewhere, she knows, someone is listening to the beating of her heart.

‘I do have a question.’

He is wary, tense, alerted by her tone of voice. She knows he wants to talk about himself but she cannot let him do that. She must know whether Miskin’s warning is true or not.

‘The explosion in D4 can’t have been an accident,’ she says firmly.

‘Why not?’ Eyes still cast down. He refuses to look at her.

‘I know which of our experiments is dangerous. Nothing we have been doing recently could possibly have caused that sort of damage if it had gone wrong. It was a massive explosion. There is therefore only one conclusion to draw.’

‘The official report concludes otherwise,’ he says sullenly.

‘Why don’t we speak the truth for once?’ she says. ‘No one can hear us. There will be no evidence this conversation ever took place. Everything we say will be deniable. Yet in our hearts we will know we have once faced each other as we are.’

He blinks frantically. A shadow seems to pass over his face. She has called his bluff.

‘I see the official version won’t satisfy you.’ He lights another cigarette. He looks up at her, taking off his glasses to clean them on his handkerchief. Anything to avoid looking at her directly.

‘Answer my question,’ she says. She has become the interrogator now.

He plays with the cigarette lighter in his hand. She watches him turning it over and over, polishing the steel case with his thumb. He is searching for the courage to tell her what he knows, or the lie to conceal what he has done.

‘The explosion in D4 had nothing to do with the experiment that was being conducted. A bomb was placed in an air vent and timed to go off in the early hours of the morning.’

‘Why?’ she asks.

‘The intention was to damage the place. Break a few windows. Blow in a door. Make it look as if something had gone wrong.’

‘Instead of which the laboratory was razed to the ground and months of vital work were lost.’

‘Mistakes were made,’ he says coldly.

‘And people died,’ she says.

‘Building a nuclear bomb is a dangerous business.’

I had nothing to do with it, he’s saying. Andropov the Innocent?

‘How could anyone justify the destruction of even a corner of the laboratory? What possible purpose could that serve?’

He puts his head in his hands. It is the first sign of weakness he has ever shown her. Is he at the limit of his strength, or is he simply acting remorseful to impress her?

‘In order to conceal their own inability to deal with the problem at the Institute, the political authorities put out a rumour that your resistance was crumbling. I assured my superiors that there was no danger of your protest collapsing. For their own reasons, they chose to ignore me and put their faith in the political commissars. Some form of action, they argued, was needed to revive your flagging morale. They wanted concrete evidence of the volatile nature of the process of making nuclear bombs. They wanted proof of how dangerous it was, proof that was undeniable. They devised the idea that an explosion in the laboratory would strengthen your opposition to the development of the bomb.’

‘Why?’ She is incredulous.

‘The damage would illustrate how precarious this process is.’

Still she is mystified. ‘You created the Institute’s opposition to the bomb,’ she says. ‘You wrote the script and you have won the argument. We are your creatures. We have done as you instructed. How could you let such a thing happen?’

‘We are not alone in this. Others, interests are involved. We are both part of something larger.’

It is out of my control, that is what he is saying. Is he warning her too? Krasov was right. If Andropov is involved with others, then so is she. Now she knows how her name appeared on papers Krasov has read.

‘Part of what?’

‘Even if I knew I would not tell you that.’

‘But you allow yourself to be manipulated by these people you won’t name.’

‘We are only manipulated if we are forced to do something we don’t believe in. That’s the question I asked you. For weeks now I have fed you a script which argues that to build nuclear weapons without secure international safeguards for their control is wrong. That is the basis of your opposition. Have we been successful because you did as you were told? Or do you actually believe in the arguments you professed were your own?’

She knows she is no longer the naive woman who stood up in the lecture theatre (how many weeks ago? It seems like another life) and quoted statistics she had learned off by heart. Andropov still gives her the script but the voice is no longer his alone. The words he has given her have opened her eyes and the arguments have convinced her. That and the terrible experience amid the destruction at D4, where that night statistics became truth and the truth overwhelmed her, all that has given her an authority and a certainty she has never possessed before.

‘Is what we are doing right?’ he asks again.

‘Yes. Yes,’ she says urgently.

She prefers Andropov without doubts, the man who only gives her certainties, who questions nothing. It is easier to deal with conviction.

‘You believe in it?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’

‘There is a price we cannot afford to pay.’

‘What is that?’

She is drawn in now, there is no going back. She justifies her reply by telling herself that this might be the only opportunity she will ever have to discover the nature of the man in whose power she finds herself.

‘The destruction of everything we have worked so hard for.’ Still she does not understand. He sees her questioning gaze, her frown. She does not know what he is working for. ‘The creation of a new society.’

‘You believe in that?’ she asks. She is surprised at his innocence.

‘A new order, a new civilization, yes. My father sacrificed himself for it when I was young. He was a Hero of the Soviet Union. I would do the same. I have always believed that we must strive for a new way of life. That is why what we are doing is so important.’

Andropov the Patriot. More than that. Andropov the Guardian of the Flame of Righteousness.

‘The problem is, we have lost our way on the path to the new world. The ultimate victory of the people will not be possible until we have found again the roots of belief that inspired our fathers to break with the past and begin this giant social experiment.’

He lights another cigarette. The world outside the apartment has vanished. There is no one alive except her and Andropov and these confessions.

‘Didn’t you have dreams when you were young?’ he asks. ‘Didn’t you believe in the possibility of changing the world? Don’t you still?’

Andropov the Idealist.

Has she ever believed in anything? The selfishness of youth blinded her to the privileges brought by her father’s position in the Party. Didn’t everyone live like that? Then she fell in love. In the arms of an English scientist in a hotel bedroom in Leiden, she discovered how hollow the values were on which her life was dependent. On her return to Moscow she divided her self into real and apparent, and since then the real has been buried along with all her memories, her true feelings, and she has lived the false life of the apparent. Long ago love destroyed any possibility of her belief in Marxist ideology. No faith has replaced it, only a powerful instinct to survive.

‘I was neither believer nor unbeliever,’ says Ruth the Apparent. ‘I have never questioned anything. This is the life I know, the society to which I belong. As a scientist I am a part of the giant experiment. I never see myself in any other role.’

‘I was a Young Pioneer.’

The first piece of autobiography. Andropov the Idealist, his emotional needs satisfied by the Party and its organizations, its philosophy, its pageants, its rituals, its supreme mastery of young hearts and minds that so cleverly conceal the vacuum within. She sees him, shirt off, body wet with effort, the young man in the posters of her youth, working on the land alongside its peasants, believing that every swing of the axe is another blow against the old world.

When had the deception been discovered, his beliefs shattered? When had he lost his faith?

‘I never believed the stories about the privileged,’ he says. ‘I thought they were put about by our class enemies. I denied them fervently. We had created a society of equals where privilege no
longer existed. That was why I joined the Party. We were all one.’

‘Then you discovered the stories were true,’ she says.

He stares at her. Suddenly his blue-grey eyes no longer reflect her questions back at her; she can see through them, into his heart. The yearning for belief has not left him.

‘I wanted to be a scientist,’ he says. ‘That was my ambition. I came to Moscow to study. I fell in love with the daughter of a Party official.’

‘I was the daughter of a Party official.’ she says.

‘She took me to her home and I saw the corruption at the highest level. Everything I had denied was true.’

Andropov the Betrayed. The loss of faith. That was it, the admission she has fought so hard for. But now she has it, what can she do with it?

‘Was it so very terrible?’ she asks, thinking of the life her father’s position had provided, the larger apartment, the dacha in the country, the plentiful supplies of food, the official cars. Was that corruption or just reward?

‘To discover your belief is hollow? To possess something of value on which your whole life is based, only to have it taken away from you, to end up with less than before? Can you imagine the emptiness?’

Andropov the man who lost his ideals. Why has she never had ideals herself? Is there something deficient in her life, in the narrowness of its focus – her work, her mother, her son?

‘I had nothing else in my life. When my faith was stolen, a terrible wrong was committed.’

She sees then who he is, she sees with a piercing clarity the twisted purpose behind everything that Andropov is doing. He is Andropov the Puritan, his self-appointed task to be the watchdog of the Party’s ideals, to use whatever power he has to rekindle the flame of purity that had once burned so fiercely within him. He is yearning for certainties; he is ready to be consumed by a fire greater than himself. How easily he can be used by those with darker purposes, who exploit the emptiness within him. He has become their creature without knowing what is happening to him. Andropov the Fanatic.