The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (12 page)

There are certain rules to a successful deception, of which my personal favourite is–stick with what you know. That is not to say that truth should ever be incorporated into your lies, but rather that good research is the key to a consistent lie. It was in 1956 by no means impossible for a citizen of the West to enter the East–far easier, in fact, than for a citizen of the East to head to the West–but to declare yourself as such was to invite immediate attention and scrutiny, and this was, I felt, something I could not necessarily afford.

I had, in my twelfth life, after receiving Christa’s message, embarked on what I believe would come to be known, in the 1990s, as a portfolio existence. I travelled extensively under the flimsy cover of “executive businessman” and dabbled with whichever intelligence services I felt might be of most use to me in order to keep as broad an eye as possible on global events. In 1929, aged eleven, I bought up stocks as the markets collapsed, and by 1933 I was the sole shareholder in one of the fastest-growing investment brokerages in the northern hemisphere. An actor by the name of Cyril Handly was paid a very reasonable wage to impersonate me, it being unwise for a fifteen-year-old boy to be caught as CEO of
a large investment company. He was precisely what a chairman should have been–dignified, well built, with a carefully cultivated accent, refined tastes and a reasonable but not unhealthy belly on him, and his combination of judicious silence and fiery retribution worked well in the office until in 1936 his enjoyment of the role became a little too much to tolerate when he began sacking reliable members of staff during board meetings. I relocated the company to Switzerland, paid Cyril off with a retirement home in Bali, and employed a rather younger actor to impersonate my son, newly risen to become head of the company, buying his complicity with a mixture of reasonable fees and, in a twist that surprised me more than anyone else, regular lessons in economics, finance and accountancy which led to, by 1938, my having complete confidence in his ability to run the company with the barest interference from me.

“Invest in American arms, steel, chemicals and petrol,” was the only guidance I gave him in 1938, as the world slid towards war. “Pull out of the Skoda arms factory, and withdraw all foreign personnel from Singapore.”

By 1948, Waterbrooke & Smith–two names chosen for no reason other than their entire lack of connection to myself–was one of the most successful companies in the northern hemisphere, with extensive and occasionally illegal contacts in South-East Asia and Africa, and growing interests in Chile, Venezuela and, in a move which I quietly had to question, Cuba. The company was successful, unethical and above all provided me with a continual influx of both ready cash–a mild interest–and global information, without my ever having to show my face.

It was one report, a tiny note in the hundred that arrived at my door every week, which sent me to Russia. The title of the document read, “Limited Exposure to PJC/9000 Portable Radio (Commercial)”.

In it an analyst briefly discussed the company’s recent investment in a radio transmitter-receiver set which had gone on the market in West Germany some two months before, whose range and quality of signal had been recognised and rewarded in the last week
by a contract with the air force to fit out its stations with the new equipment. Technical specs were attached, and flicking through them I saw nothing remarkable until my eye, wandering down the page, glimpsed the operational frequency of the transmitter. It was some two hundred thousand hertz outside the normal range of the equipment of the time, and while this relatively low number, in terms of radio frequencies, might not have set off many alarm bells, the mechanism by which it appeared to achieve this effect was something which should not have been invented, let alone been available on commercial markets, for another thirteen years.

Asked to think about East Germany in the 1950s, picturesque is not the word which leaps to mind. World War Two had not been kind; the Soviet tanks as they ploughed towards Berlin had not been kind. The years of uncertainty until the elections of 1948, when certainty became rather too certain indeed, had not been kind, and finally the dawn of the 1950s had brought with it a certain grey resignation. The flat landscape left no place to hide the harsh realities of an economy where intellectualism was bourgeois, labour was freedom, and brotherhood was obligatory. The people had been promised cars, so incredibly unreliable little bangers which leaped like startled hippos over every pothole, slamming the heads of the many people crowded into the tight back seats, were wheeled out with the pomp of cardboard coffins. The people had been promised food, so forests were torn down and wheat sown where no farmer would have dreamed of growing it, while industrial fertilisers stained the flat still waters of the northern lakes a scummy grey-brown.

Yet, for all this, one or two bastions of tradition survived, largely through government omission. The confiscation by the Soviets of much of Germany’s industrial equipment after the war had ranged from factory machinery down to the smallest farmyard truck, and
in corners of the countryside there existed now a population of hardy widowed women who slogged through the fields, scythes in hand, their heads covered with bright scarves and their backs bent beneath the baskets that carried their crops. Blink, and you might imagine it was some idyllic rural scene. Look again, and you might see the hunger in the women’s eyes and the weight upon their shoulders as they stooped to toil.

I was travelling to meet Daniel van Thiel. By buying the company which distributed the anomalous radio, I had acquired information as to its origins, which were, to my surprise, eastern European, the key breakthrough attributed to van Thiel, a former communications engineer in the
Wehrmacht
who, at the tender age of nineteen, had been one of the few to escape the
Kessel
around Stalingrad, put on a flight in honour of his “exceptional skills”. His evacuation was one of the few acknowledgments the German high command had been willing to make that the army trapped on the Volga was doomed. Over ten years later, van Thiel had conveniently discovered his communist zeal, receiving further education not only in East Germany, but in Moscow too, returning from five years of study to reveal designs which my company marketed as “revolutionising communication!” and which I personally felt were still in need of fuller development. He was like an ancient architect given sudden knowledge of the wheel, who had used it to create a pyramid, failing to appreciate that it might be handy on a chariot too.

I was travelling as Sebastian Grunwald, a journalist working on an article entitled “Future Heroes of Our Socialist Revolution”. Van Thiel lived in one of the few towns which might almost be called picturesque in that the tide of industry which was yet to come had not yet reached its high-water mark and pulled down the grey stone cottages, little winding streets and stone-black chapel with its miraculously preserved deep-stained-glass window showing Christ upon the mountain. He lived with his sister, who had dressed in her finest, faded clothes for the occasion and who brought us home-made biscuits and Austrian coffee as we sat in van Thiel’s small sky-blue living room.

“The coffee was a present from Vienna,” he explained as I redundantly opened my notebook for the interview. “Life is good for us now. Everyone’s going mad for East German products.”

Talk to anyone in any sort of public capacity at the time and they would tell you that life was good. Cause and effect were tricky little numbers–the cause need have no direct relation to the effect as long as the effect was prosperity and happiness under the GDR’s regime.

I asked my questions, careful to surround what I actually wanted to know with as much fluff as I could.

How long had he been interested in radios?

Really, really, a father who was an amateur engineer…

… he’d listened to the radio during the bombings, an advance warning when the sirens failed…

… and how had his success affected him?

Proud, proud to be German, proud to be communist, of course.

Was his sister proud?

Was he looking for a wife?

What would he be doing next for his country?

Did he have any other interests or hobbies?

No, of course not, dedicated to his work, a good worker…

… and what of his time in Russia? It must have been incredibly informative.

“Incredible. Incredible!” he exclaimed. “So welcoming, so warm–I hadn’t expected it at all. ‘Comrade, there is no German and Russian; we are all communists!’ ” He mimicked a Russian accent while explaining this, an affectation which slightly threw me. My German is essentially native, but lack of practice takes its toll even on those of us who are mnemonics, and tuning both ear and voice to a regional accent takes time which leaves little room for comedy.

And the idea for the device? Where had that come from?

A mischievous look passed across Daniel’s face. “I worked with some great men,” he explained. “We were all united by finding a common cause.”

It was so much of a slogan, so much a cliché, that I had to smile,
and he smiled right back, recognising the emptiness of his own words and enjoying their effect on me. Then he reached out, took the pencil from my hand, pushed my notebook on to the table and closed it. “The Russians,” he said, “have bad breath and can’t cook for shit. But their science–their science is why they won the war.”

You jest, surely you jest, I intoned. The number of people, the strength of their ideology, the industrial base…

“Bullshit! I met people there, men and women doing things… The Soviets, they’ve seen the future, that’s why they’re going to win, why they were always going to win. What I did… drop in the ocean.”

And the future? What was this future that the Russians had seen?

That would be telling. He laughed, and in another time and another place he might well have gone on to tap the side of his nose. Suffice to say, tomorrow was going to be here today.

Come on, I whispered, come on! Do a favour for a journalist hack who needs to make his bosses happy. Give me a name, just one name–someone you met in Russia, something that inspired you.

He thought about it a while, then grinned. “OK,” he said. “But you didn’t get this from me. The guy you need to look out for, the man who’s going to change everything… his name is Vitali Karpenko. If you ever go to Moscow, if you ever get to meet him, remember–he’s going to change the world.”

I smiled and laughed, dismissing the idea with a shrug, and picked my notebook back up to ask the rest of the empty questions I had prepared. When I left, van Thiel shook my hand and winked and said I was on to a good thing in my line of work. Germany would always need people who understood the big ideas. Four days later he was found hanging from the quaint wooden rafters of his traditional wooden house by an old bit of hemp rope. A note on the desk stated that he had betrayed his country by selling his ideas and his soul, and he could no longer live with the grief. The verdict was suicide, and the bruising around his ribs and hands dismissed as incidental injuries sustained post-mortem, when the police came to cut him down.

Two days after that, under the name Kostya Prekovsky, I boarded a cargo ship hauling coal to Leningrad, one set of travel documents in my pocket, another stowed in the false bottom of my bag, and an escape passport already deposited in an unused signal box just beyond Finland Station, ready should I need it. I was looking for Vitali Karpenko, the man who could change the future.

It is not I, but he, who takes the night train across Europe.

It is perhaps the universal experience of travellers–I have only my own view to judge it by–but there is a moment, in the dead hours of the night, when a man may sit upon a platform in an empty station, waiting for the last train upon a long journey, and regardless of the personal experience of that individual, he ceases to be an “I” and becomes a “he”. Perhaps another creature stirs in this dead place: a traveller, back bent, eyes too weary to read a book; a government apparatchik on his way back from an unsuccessful meeting straight to an early-morning reproach; two or three strangers gathered beneath the hissing white lights whose sound is inaudible by day, when the trains race through the station and doors clatter and clunk, and which by night become the base sound of the universe. When the train pulls in, it seems to be a long way away for a very long time, then suddenly here, and longer than you had imagined. The doors bend in the middle as they open, heavy and unwieldy. The toilets stink of urine, the nets above the seating sag from too much baggage for too many shaking miles. Three people board the last train to Leningrad, and no one gets off.

I sit by the window, a false name in my passport, a dozen languages mixing in my mind, not sure which one will make an appearance on the end of my tongue, and look at my reflection in the window of the carriage, and see a stranger. Someone else travels on the sleeper train through Russia, alone with the beating of the bumpers beneath the wheels of the cart. Someone else’s face is too white against the blackness outside. Someone else’s head bumps against the cold window with each jerk of the engine, each shriek of the brake.

Thoughts, at such times, happen not in words but in stories told about someone else’s life. A child approached a man, dying in Berlin, and said the world is ending, and these words meant nothing at all. Death has always come to the man as death always will, and frankly the man couldn’t be more or less interested in death than in a curious tropical beetle, save that death brings with it the tedium of youth once again. Bombs have fallen and people have died, and frankly why should a change in the process of these events be of any interest, since the outcome is always the same?

And then again.

Vincent Rankis hit a professor in Cambridge, punched him right in the jaw, and for what? For two words uttered in hope–Cronus Club.

A child threw himself from the third floor of an asylum; a wandering monk asked a Chinese spy how to die, and Vincent Rankis exclaimed at the wonders of the universe, and wanted more.

What is the point of you?

A man on a train to Leningrad hears the voice of Franklin Phearson in his mind, and is briefly surprised to see his own features flinch in the window. What is that? Is that pain at an unwelcome recollection? Is that guilt? Regret?

What is the point of you, Dr August? Do you think all this was just a dream?

An argument with Vincent in my rooms in Cambridge.

We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the trials of war. We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.

When I am optimistic, I choose to believe that every life I lead, every choice I make, has consequence. That I am not one Harry August but many, a mind flicking from parallel life to parallel life, and that when I die, the world carries on without me, altered by my deeds, marked by my presence.

Then I look at the deeds I have done and, perhaps more importantly considering my condition, the deeds I have not done, and the thought depresses me, and I reject the hypothesis as unsound.

What is the point of me?

Either to change a world–many, many worlds, each touched by the choices I make in my life, for every deed a consequence, and in every love and every sorrow truth–or nothing at all.

A stranger takes the train to Leningrad.