Making Enemies (6 page)

Throughout all the articles I sensed a pessimism I had not encountered before. This was not the rhetoric of the politician, seeking to persuade. It was the desolate cry of the parent who sees his child running headlong into the path of an oncoming car.

‘Is Valery home?’

Her mother nods. She goes into Valery’s room. He is sitting on the bed facing the wall. His school books are open on his table. For a moment she thinks he is crying, but she dismisses the thought. He has not cried for years.

‘Valery?’

He says nothing and does not turn to face her.

‘What is it? What’s happened?’

She sits on the edge of the bed and puts her hand on his shoulder. He does not respond to her touch. It is as if she were not there. Suddenly, she is terrified.

‘Valery.’

She pulls him roughly so he has to turn towards her. His face is pale and drawn and his cheeks are wet with tears. He looks at her as if he had never seen her before and says nothing.

‘I cannot help you unless you tell me what’s happened.’

She holds his stiff body against hers. She wants to cry but there are no tears.

‘Tell me,’ she says.

He points to the ceiling. ‘How do I know they are not listening?’

‘We are not important enough for that.’

She doesn’t believe it herself but her son is satisfied. He dries his eyes on his sleeve and talks in whispers.

‘These men came to see me at school today. They asked me questions.’

They stand in the opened door of his classroom looking in, these two men. Andropov’s men. How she hates the power he has to terrify her into submission.

Which one? the teacher’s expression asks. Which innocent victim
do I deliver today? He can offer no resistance on behalf of his pupils because his will was broken years before in a camp a thousand miles away. They look around the room and point at Valery Marchenko.

A chalk-stained finger beckons him. His heart beating faster with every step, he walks through the ranks of his classmates. There is not a movement, not a murmur: all he can hear is the sound of his own boots on the wooden floor. He submits without resistance to the guardianship of the two strangers.

They walk him down the corridor, one of them holding his arm in case he should try to escape, until they find an empty room. They push him roughly inside, close the door, sit him down in a chair facing them and the questioning begins.

They ask him about his mother because they are using him to frighten her.

When does she leave the apartment in the morning?

When does she return?

What does she talk about?

Who are her friends?

They will have sown ideas in his head, she is sure, because that is how they do these things. The few certainties in his life will have crumbled in their presence. He is too young and they are too skilful and too brutal for him to find any escape.

She sees the depth of her son’s confusion. He is terrified, unsure, he has no idea what is happening nor why they are questioning him. She feels the anger well within her, the familiar controls on her emotions threatening to burst under the strain of her fury. How can we live like this? How can we submit our children to interrogation so they are turned against their parents?

Then the mechanics of years of self-discipline move into place. Accept, she reminds herself. Slip away into the shadows. Live where you cannot be noticed, out of sight, on the margin. Where you’ve always lived.

But she cannot avoid the grief in her son’s eyes nor the coldness of his skin against hers. Anger sits in her heart.

‘What else did they ask you?’

‘Were you a member of the Communist Party?’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘I said no.’

‘You were right.’

‘They said my father betrayed the state.’

‘They were trying to frighten you.’

‘They said the son of a traitor is a traitor himself.’

‘Then they are lying.’

‘How do I know?’

That was why he had cried. It was a familiar betrayal, lies as evidence to threaten the bond between mother and son. How can she prove her love for her son except by the life she lives? By the touch of her hand, by a kiss on his sleeping cheek, or by her anxieties, her evasions, all the sacrifices she has made and must make to protect him? How can she tell him this? The state knows she can’t, which is why they dress their lies in the clear lines of truth, why they present their case to the defenceless child, why they must destroy the one relationship that can still threaten their dominance.

What can she say to him? How can she tell her own child that his ordeal is to remind her that powerful forces still control her existence? She resists the temptation to say anything.

‘How do I know?’

That is his question. How can he be sure of anything any more in a world where the few certainties of his young life have been suddenly and brutally challenged?

There is only one honest way to answer his question. She must initiate her son into the double life, describing the secret territory of the heart which lies untouched in a country where emotions, loyalties, even love are dictated by an external authority, not by the truth you feel.

‘They will tempt you with their certainties,’ she tells her son. ‘Their truths will have the appearance of the hardest rock, the toughest steel. They will build their positions out of the impeccable logic of their Marxist-Leninist arguments, which they don’t understand – they can only repeat what they have been told to say, the ideology that has outlawed doubt, where every piece fits tightly with its neighbour.’

She sees his white face, the deep, black shadows under his eyes, she sees him growing older before her. She has always known that one day this moment would come when she would have to tell him the truth.

‘You cannot fight that,’ she says, ‘not one person against this edifice of power. Nor should you try. But quietly and secretly within yourself, you must resist it. You must learn, too, how to be patient.’

‘Does that mean there are two truths?’ he asks.

‘No,’ she says, ‘there is only one truth. But sometimes, often, that truth must be hidden. You must learn to distinguish between the apparent and the real.’

‘Then we live with lies,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We live with lies because we accept as truth what we know cannot be true. We betray ourselves with each lie we tell, but knowing that doesn’t stop us doing it, day after day.’

‘Why do we have to live like that?’

‘That is how we survive.’

Tell him the truth, a voice screams within her. Tell him everything you know, everything you have wanted to tell him for years. Surely he is old enough now? Surely he has a right to know? Tell him.

But she can’t. She hasn’t the strength. She cannot bring herself to tell him what she so desperately wants him to know.

‘Why are we made to live like that?’ he asks her.

‘If I knew the answer to that I would tell you,’ she says. ‘How can a belief in social justice, in the equality of men, how can all that is good in theory become so perverted in reality? The doctrines which govern our lives ignore that men are weak, that power corrupts. Soviet man has banished weakness, ideology transforms his nature. That is what we are taught. Never that men will always seek power, that they will adopt whatever philosophy they must to achieve power over others. It is the truth we are afraid to acknowledge.’

‘Is it hard to live like that?’ he asks quietly.

‘The double life is a struggle that never ends. It will not prevent you from making compromises, some of which, many of which, perhaps, you will be ashamed of. But it will allow you to live, it will teach you an inner patience while you wait for better days. Always hope, even in moments of greatest despair – especially then. Always believe there can be another kind of life and that one day it will come.’

(Is that what she did? Were there not moments of despair when, in the safety of her imagination, she flew to the side of her secret lover for his protection?)

‘Look at this,’ he says, showing her an exercise book lying open on the bed.

She sees his familiar blue script, she recognizes the biology from her own youth, she reads what he has written and then the remarks scrawled at the bottom of the page. She knows then that her son
was not afraid of the bullies who asked him questions, they did not make him cry. What has broken his heart is the judgement he has received in the classroom.

Misguided and wrong,
she reads.
The dictates of Marxist-Leninism disprove your argument. Poor work.

‘The central theory of molecular biology,’ he tells her, ‘is that genetic information flows from nucleic acid towards protein. If we believe that acquired characteristics can be inherited, then genetic information must flow from protein to nucleic acid. That is not scientifically possible. Yet that is what I am told to believe. How can I?’

How like his father he is, she thinks, in his defence of his own certainties. How dangerous this trait will be. The boy is a good scientist; at times she thinks he could be more than that. He understands instinctively ideas that she has had to learn. He is being asked to believe in a dogma that he knows cannot be true. What can she tell him?

‘Madness rages through our lives like a forest fire,’ she says. We all turn towards the heat, we warm our hands and our bodies, we see the flames reflected in the eyes of our neighbours. This is the answer, we say. This is how we will stay warm.

‘But soon the fire moves on, the ashes grow cold, we shiver, and because we have known great warmth we are now colder than ever. Then we will turn on each other and say, why did you betray us, why did you pretend this was the truth? Why did you not tell us that the fire would move on?

‘That is how it is with us now. This political theory we live with is a forest fire that rages and burns, consuming many in its path, but one day it will burn out, leaving a trail of damage and despair, ruin and decay, nothing on which we may build our lives. The question is: how do we survive between now and then? Some bend, some come out fighting. I cannot tell you what you must do. You are old enough to make your own decisions. But never despise those who did not choose your path. We each fight our own battles in our own way.’

She sees the sadness in his eyes. The innocence of his childhood is gone. He realizes, she knows now, that this is how she has spent her life. He is wondering how many sacrifices she has made. What truths she has concealed from him, and why. He must now have an instinctive sense of what she has had to do for him and for his grandmother.

She holds him in her arms, the last time she will ever embrace him as a child. When they leave this room, their relationship will be changed for ever.

‘Mother,’ he says to her softly, holding her tight. ‘Mother, mother.’

To her those words sound like a farewell. She wants to cry again but still no tears come. They cling to each in desperation as he, for the last time in his life, draws his strength from her.

‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’

I cornered Celia in the kitchen the following day as soon as my father had left the house. I’d got the impression that even in the twenty-four hours since my arrival, she had been trying to avoid me because she was reluctant to answer the question she knew I was going to ask.

‘Wrong?’

She took the steaming kettle off the stove and sat down at the kitchen table.

‘Something’s happened since I was last in Cambridge and you don’t want to tell me about it.’

She poured water into the teapot and looked thoughtful.

‘Geoffrey begged me not to say anything,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I knew it wouldn’t work. You were bound to hear it sooner or later. I had hoped it wouldn’t be from me.’

I said nothing. Celia poured tea for us both.

‘Promise you won’t say I told you?’

‘I won’t breathe a word.’

‘It’s Philip Ridout,’ she said. ‘He’s dying.’

‘What of?’

‘Cancer.’

Ridout was my father’s assistant. He had come up in my second year, had got a double first in physics and had been working with my father ever since. ‘Best pupil I ever had,’ my father had told me once. ‘Brilliant mind. Quite outstanding.’

‘He’s in Addenbrooke’s.’ Celia’s eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s so awful, Danny. The doctors say there’s nothing they can do. That poor boy. Only twenty-four.’

I had never liked Philip Ridout. He was a shy, unprepossessing man, but highly intelligent, whose one interest in life appeared to be theoretical
physics. My father had taken to him at once and as soon as his degree was completed had made him his assistant, his relationship with Laurentzen having ended. A year later, my father had brought his assistant into the house and had set us up as rivals for his affections. I didn’t like it but I could accept it because I was used to my father’s ways and I had learned to live without his affection and approbation years before. (Ridout, I’m sure, was oblivious to my father’s manipulations.) It was when he intimated that Ridout was the son he had always hoped I would become that I drew the line. This, as much as anything, had underlined my quarrel with my father a year before. Ridout was the innocent victim of a situation he was unaware of, but even so I couldn’t bring myself to feel any affection for him, either then or now.

‘How’s Geoffrey taken it?’

‘All the time Philip gets thinner and thinner and more and more ill and Geoffrey refuses to accept what’s happening. He keeps talking about when Philip recovers and can get back to the laboratory.’

That didn’t surprise me. My father had always ignored any obstacles in his path, an attitude that applied as much to people as it did to problems. While it had brought him distinction in science, it had led to poverty in human relationships.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. It seemed a feeble response to the awful news, particularly as I knew how fond Celia had become of Ridout over the many months he had lived in the house.

There had been an accident in the lab, she said. Philip was burned, not badly, but they kept him in hospital for a couple of days. A few weeks later he began to complain of stomach pains and wouldn’t eat. That’s when they diagnosed cancer.

‘He’s young, so it’s galloping through him. The doctors are saying he’s only got a matter of weeks.’

I asked her if the cancer and the accident were related. Celia wasn’t sure. ‘But how does a perfectly healthy young man develop such a raging cancer so quickly?’

‘Do you know anything about the accident?’

‘I heard that Philip was doing an experiment with plutonium and it went wrong. Geoffrey refuses to talk about it. I’m convinced Philip was irradiated, though Geoffrey’s adamant he wasn’t and Philip won’t take the accident seriously. I think they’re both concealing the truth from me.’

Celia appeared more distressed than I expected. I could only imagine it was because there were other things she hadn’t told me.

‘This isn’t just about Philip, is it?’

I could see the conflict between her loyalty to my father and the attraction of a sympathetic listener. She came down in my favour.

‘Philip’s illness has changed Geoffrey. He talks less, he’s restless, more prone to anxiety, as if some kind of conflict was going on inside him. Have you noticed it? I’ve tried to get him to talk about it but if I bring up the subject he pushes me away. I can’t let it go on like this, I’ve got to do something but I don’t know what. Will you help me, Danny?’

I saw that for the first time, Celia did not know how to deal with my father. I wanted to help her but I had no more idea what to do than she did.

*

That evening, I walked with my father along Trinity Street to the Union. He had been invited to speak to one of the University’s political societies. We were expected at seven-thirty. I could hear Great St Mary’s chiming the half-hour as we entered the building. My father’s respect for punctuality had not diminished.

‘Good evening, sir. This way, please.’

We were led to a room behind the debating chamber. It was already full of undergraduates. A thin young man with lank, fair hair came forward to meet us.

‘Professor Stevens? How good of you to come.’

My father was introduced to a tall, stooping man in his early forties. At first glance there was nothing memorable about him but a few moments in his presence brought an undeniable if grudging respect. If there was little that was obviously likeable about Watson-Jones, there was no doubting the sense of power that clung to him. Where it came from I never knew but it was part of the man, and whatever his political fortunes it never deserted him.

‘We’ve not met. My name’s Simon Watson-Jones. I see we’re in opposite camps tonight.’

They shook hands. The fair-haired young man looked at his watch and asked if they would accompany him to the platform.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. If I may call you to order.’ The room fell silent as people took their seats. ‘It’s my great pleasure to welcome our speakers tonight, Professor Stevens of this University, nuclear physicist and Nobel prizewinner, and Simon Watson-Jones, alumnus of Peterhouse, barrister-at-law and member of His Majesty’s loyal opposition.’

The topic to be discussed was, he knew, close to the heart of the
Society. Was a Future Without War a Dream or a Reality? The Society had invited a prominent physicist and politician to put their views. The politician had elected to speak first.

Watson-Jones got to his feet, withdrew his papers from his pocket and faced his audience.

Only in his dreams, he said, could he see a future without war or the threat of war. Society survives not on dreams but on the acceptance of the world as it really is. In 1939, when political activity had failed, war was inevitable. Were we wrong to fight Hitler? To defend our morality, our institutions, our way of life forged over centuries of our proud history? Of course not. Would we decline to fight if these selfsame institutions and values were threatened again? Of course we wouldn’t.

He was not advocating war – he abhorred its horrors and its suffering as much as the next man – but he was a realist who accepted that the defence of right called for vigilance and, sometimes, for sacrifice. That call would never go away.

Democracy had triumphed in 1945. Now we faced a threat that challenged the new society we were trying to build out of the ashes of the old. If we had freed ourselves once from the dictator, we must always be prepared to defend our freedom with our lives.

Was it credible that in the Soviet Union human nature would be perfected by the dogmas of Marxist-Leninism, that social justice would reign for ever more, that all men would live in harmony? Or were such propositions lies and propaganda? Wasn’t it more likely that the socialist experiment in Russia was cover for an arrogant adventurism that wanted to impose its own anti-human society in as many countries of the world as it could?

He would leave the audience to make up its own mind but he knew where he stood on the issue. Faced with this threat of communism, a system that must take advantage of any weakness in its opponents, could we truly allow ourselves to renounce war? Could we put at risk by such a quixotic gesture our hard-won freedoms? Did we honour those who had sacrificed their lives by saying that their experience was so terrible that it must never be repeated?

‘They died in defence of freedom. We must always be prepared to do the same. If that means developing our own nuclear weapons, and in my view it does, then so be it. Such is the price of peace, and I for my part am prepared to pay it.’

He sat down to rapturous applause from a section of his audience.
Others, I noticed, were more restrained in their appreciation of what he had said.

I had not asked what my father was going to say, nor had he told me. I was struck by his caution, both in content and delivery, as if he was testing his audience, learning his new role of social commentator by a set of careful steps. He warned that we should not see the Soviet Union as inevitably hostile, despite its Marxist ideology and its political posturings.

‘We must not forget,’ he said, ‘that the Soviet Union too has been devastated by war. Their economy is shattered, their people exhausted. The production of nuclear weapons demands not simply a high level of scientific skills, which they possess, but also advanced industrial techniques and resources. There is no evidence to suggest that these exist in that country. For these reasons alone, and there are many others, we must not allow ourselves to see the Soviet Union as our inevitable enemy. We have fought one enemy for more than five years. We must have the courage now not to replace him with another, but to try to create a new era without enemies, a time when we can use the great scientific advances of the last few years to provide a better life for all of us. That is the greatest task that faces us. We must use our experience of the last five years to free our society from the stultifying shackles of war.’

When he finished, there was a round of applause. My father and Watson-Jones agreed to take questions.

Was it not the declared ambition of the Soviet Union to establish communism and eliminate capitalism?

Yes, but one should not confuse the rhetoric of the ideologue with the practical necessities of running a modern state. In other words, we shouldn’t always believe everything the Soviets said. Soviet policy need not be driven by Soviet ideology.

The question persisted in other forms and it was easy to see where the mind of the audience lay. Wasn’t the Soviet state’s basic philosophical position one of enmity to Western systems? Wasn’t it prudent to work on worst-case scenarios, Russia as the new enemy, rather than find ourselves surprised as we had been in the ’thirties?

Yes, our experiences before the war had taught us always to be vigilant, but we must not fall prey to the enemy’s propaganda. That, after all, is what he wanted us to do. Scepticism was as necessary a quality in a democracy as preparedness.

Wasn’t the present expansion of communism throughout Eastern
Europe, possibly into Italy and France, even the spread of sympathizers, fellow-travellers, within the United Kingdom, a threat in itself? My father saw it more as a test of the West’s democratic institutions, which he believed were strong enough to resist such a threat.

How secure was his forecast that it would be five years before the Russians exploded a nuclear device?

Oh, very secure. The Soviets were miles behind the West. Five years was probably an optimistic assessment of when they might explode their bomb.

‘Time for one last question,’ the fair-haired man said.

I saw a hand come up at the back of the room. A young woman stood up.

‘Professor Stevens, do you not feel guilty at the potential for destruction that you and your colleagues have unleashed upon the world? Have you not made the world a much more dangerous place, where nuclear war is inevitable?’

The room went still. Up to now the questions had been impersonal. This was different. Watson-Jones looked at my father. For the first time my father’s fluency appeared to stumble. He hesitated before answering, then said slowly, ‘No, I see no reason to feel guilty. Nor do I believe that the discovery and manufacture of nuclear arms necessarily makes the world a more dangerous place. Nor do I believe in the inevitability of anything, nuclear conflict included. Science must progress, that is the scientist’s duty. We cannot look down one particular avenue, like that of nuclear physics, and say oh dear, that route might lead to unknown dangers so we had better ignore it and pass by. Such a course of action is irresponsible and cowardly. The scientist is an explorer. His task is to map ground never trodden before. Until he has been down a particular path, he will not know what he might find. No paths can be closed to him. I believe that the modern state must respond with appropriate political mechanisms for the control of these discoveries because in some cases, yes, there are dangers. The idea of a nuclear war is abhorrent. But we cannot banish the possibility of conflict by placing a moral block on scientific progress. What we need is growth in the philosophy and practice of contemporary political systems to allow us to control our lives in a proper and responsible manner, giving more strength to the institutions we believe in.’

There was a moment’s silence, followed by a riple of lukewarm applause.