The Russia House (24 page)

She had turned away from him and he had the side view of her face cut against the empty sky. He took another nip of Scotch.

‘You said he might be a physicist,’ he reminded her.

‘He was trained as a physicist. I believe he has also qualified in aspects of engineering. In the field in which he works, I believe that the distinctions are not always closely observed.’

‘Where was he trained?’

‘Already at school he was regarded as a prodigy. At fourteen he won a Mathematics Olympiad. His success was printed in the Leningrad newspapers. He went to the Litmo, afterwards to post-graduate studies at the University. He is extremely brilliant.’

‘When I was at school those were the people I hated,’ said Barley, but to his alarm she scowled.

‘But you did not hate Goethe. You inspired him. He often quotes his friend Scott Blair. “If there is to be hope, we must all betray our countries.” Did you really say this?’

‘What’s a Litmo?’ said Barley.

‘Litmo is the Leningrad Institute for Mechanical and Optical Science. From university he was sent to Novosibirsk to study at the scientific city of Akademgorodok. He made candidate of sciences, doctor of sciences. He made everything.’

He wanted to press her about the everything, but he was scared of rushing her so he let her speak about herself instead. ‘So how did you get mixed up with him?’

‘When I was a child.’

‘How old was the child?’

He felt her reticence collect again and then dissolve as if she had to remind herself she was in safe company – or in company so unsafe that to be further compromised made little difference.

‘I was a great intellectual of sixteen,’ she said, with a grave smile.

‘How old was the prodigy?’

‘Thirty.’

‘What year are we talking about?’

‘1968. He was still an idealist for peace. He said they would never send in the tanks. “The Czechs are our friends,” he said. “They are like the Serbs and the Bulgarians. If it were Warsaw, perhaps they would send in the tanks. But against our Czechs, never, never.” ’

She had turned her whole back to him. She was too many women at once. She had her back to him and was talking to the sky, yet she was drawing him into her life and appointing him her confidant.

It was August in Leningrad, she said, she was sixteen and studying French and German in her last year at school. She was a star pupil and a peace-dreamer and a revolutionary of the most romantic kind. She was on the brink of womanhood and thought herself mature. She was speaking of herself with irony. She had read Erich Fromm and Ortega y Gasset and Kafka and seen
Dr. Strangelove
. She regarded Sakharov as right in his thinking but wrong in his method. She was concerned about the Russian Jews but shared her father’s view that they had brought their troubles on themselves. Her father was Professor of Humanities at the University, and her school was for sons and daughters of the Leningrad
nomenclatura
. It was August 1968 but Katya and her friends were still able to live in political hope. Barley tried to remember whether he had ever lived in political hope and decided it was unlikely. She was talking as if nothing would ever stop her talking again. He wished he could hold her hand again as he had held it on the stairs. He wished he could hold any part of her but best of all her face, and kiss her instead of listening to her love story.

‘We believed that East and West were drawing closer together,’ she said. ‘When the American students demonstrated against Vietnam, we were proud of them and regarded them as our comrades. When the students of Paris rioted, we wished we could be beside them at the barricades, wearing their nice French clothes.’

She turned and smiled at him again over her shoulder. A horned moon had appeared above the stars at her left side and Barley had some vague literary memory that it boded bad luck. A flock of gulls had settled on a roof across the street. I’ll never leave you, he thought.

‘There was a man in our courtyard who had been absent for nine years,’ she was saying. ‘One morning he was back, pretending he had never been away. My father invited him to dinner and played him music all evening. I had never consciously met anyone who had been freshly persecuted so I naturally hoped that he would talk of the horrors of the camps. But all he wished to do was listen to Shostakovich. I did not understand in those days that some suffering cannot be described. From Czechoslovakia we heard of extraordinary reforms. We believed that these reforms would soon come to the Soviet Union and that we would have hard currency and be free to travel.’

‘Where was your mother?’

‘Dead.’

‘How did she die?’

‘Of tuberculosis. She was already ill when I was born. On 20th August there was a closed showing of a Godard film at the Club of Scientists.’ Her voice had become strict against herself. ‘The invitations were for two persons. My father, after making enquiries about the moral content of the film, was reluctant to take me but I insisted. In the end he decided I should accompany him for the sake of my French studies. Do you know the Club of Scientists in Leningrad?’

‘I can’t say I do,’ he said, leaning back.

‘Have you seen
A bout de souffle
?’

‘I starred in it,’ he said, and she broke out laughing while he sipped his Scotch.

‘Then you will remember that it is a very tense film. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was the most powerful film I had ever seen. Everyone was greatly impressed by it, but for me it was a thunderbolt. The Club of Scientists is on the embankment of the river Neva. It is full of old glory, with marble staircases and very low sofas which are difficult to sit on in a tight skirt.’ She was sideways to him again, her head forward. ‘There is a beautiful winter-garden and a room like a mosque with heavy curtains and rich carpets. My father loved me very much but he was concerned for me and he was strict. When the film was over we moved to a dining room with wood panels. It was beautiful. We sat at long tables and that was where I met Yakov. My father introduced us. “Here is a new genius from the world of physics,” he said. My father had the fault of sometimes being sarcastic with young men. Also Yakov was beautiful. I had heard something about him but nobody had told me how vulnerable he was, more like an artist than a scientist. I asked him what he was doing and he replied that he had returned to Leningrad to recover his innocence. I laughed and for a girl of sixteen produced an impressive response. I said I found it strange that a scientist of all people should be seeking innocence. He explained that in Akademgorodok he had shown too much brilliance in certain fields and had made himself too attractive to the military. It appears that in matters of physics the distinction between peaceful and military research is often very small. Now they were offering him everything – privileges, money to make his researches – but he was still refusing them because he wished to preserve his energies for peaceful means. This made them angry because they customarily recruit the cream of our scientists and do not expect refusal. So he had returned to his old university in order to recover his innocence. He proposed initially to study theoretical physics and was looking for influential people to support him, but they were reluctant because of his attitude. He had no permit to reside in Leningrad. He spoke very freely, as our scientists may. Also he was full of enthusiasm for the Gorodok. He spoke of the foreigners who in those days passed through, the brilliant young Americans from Stanford and MIT, also the English. He described the painters who were forbidden in Moscow but permitted to exhibit in the Gorodok. The seminars, the intensity of life, the free exchanges of ideas – and, as I was sure, of love. “In what other country but Russia would Richter and Rostropovich come and play their music specially for the scientists, Okudzhava sing and Voznesensky read his poems! This is the world that we scientists must build for others!” He made jokes and I laughed like a mature woman. He was very witty in those days but also vulnerable, as he is today. There is a part of him that refuses to grow up. It is the artist in him, but it is the perfectionist also. Already in those days he was an outspoken critic of the incompetence of the authorities. He said there were so many eggs and sausages in the Gorodok supermarket that the shoppers poured out by bus from Novosibirsk and emptied the shelves by ten in the morning. Why could not the eggs make the journey instead of the people? This would be much better! Nobody collected the rubbish, he said, and the electricity kept cutting off. Sometimes the rubbish was knee-deep in the streets. And they call it a scientific Paradise! I made another precocious comment. “That’s the trouble with Paradise,” I said. “There is nobody to collect the rubbish.” Everyone was very amused. I was a success. He described the old guard trying to come to grips with the ideas of the new men and going away shaking their heads like peasants who have seen a tractor for the first time. Never mind, he said. Progress will prevail. He said that the armoured train of the Revolution which Stalin had derailed was at last in motion again and the next stop would be Mars. That was when my father interrupted with one of his cynical opinions. He was finding Yakov too vociferous. “But, Yakov Yefremovich,” he said, “was not Mars the god of war?” Immediately Yakov became reflective. I had not imagined a man could change so quickly, one minute bold, the next so lonely and distressed. I blamed my father. I was furious with him. Yakov tried to recover but my father had thrown him into despair. Did Yakov talk to you about his father?’

She was sitting across the valley from him, propped against the opposing slope of the rooftiles, her long legs stretched before her, her dress drawn tightly over her body. The sky was darkening behind her, the moon and stars were growing.

‘He told me his father died of an overdose of intelligence,’ Barley replied.

‘He took part in a camp uprising. He was in despair. Yakov did not know of his father’s death for many years. One day an old man came to Yakov’s house and said he had shot Yakov’s father. He had been a guard at the camp and was ordered to take part in the execution of the rebels. They were shot down in dozens by machine guns near the Vorkuta railway terminal. The guard was weeping. Yakov was only fourteen at the time but he gave the old man his forgiveness and some vodka.’

I can’t do this, Barley thought. I’m not equal to these dimensions.

‘What year was his father shot?’ he asked. Be a hamster. It’s about the only thing you’re fit for.

‘I think it was the spring of 1952. While Yakov remained silent, everybody at the table began to talk vehemently about Czechoslovakia,’ she continued in her perfect archaeological English. ‘Some said the ruling gang would send in the tanks. My father was sure of it. Some said they would be justified in doing so. My father said they would do it whether they were justified or not. The red Czars would do exactly as they pleased, he said, just as the white Czars had done. The system would win because the system always won and the system was our curse. This was my father’s conviction as it later became Yakov’s. But Yakov was at that time still determined to believe in the Revolution. He wished his own father’s death to have been worthwhile. He listened intently to what my father had to say but then he became aggressive. “They will never send in the tanks!” he said. “The Revolution will survive!” He beat the table with his fist. You have seen his hands? Like a pianist’s, so white and thin? He had been drinking. So had my father and my father also became angry. He wished to be left in peace with his pessimism. As a distinguished humanist, he did not like to be contradicted by a young scientist whom he regarded as an upstart. Perhaps also my father was jealous, because while they quarrelled, I fell completely in love with Yakov.’

Barley took another sip of Scotch.

‘You don’t find that shocking?’ she demanded indignantly as her smile leapt back to her face. ‘A girl of sixteen, for an experienced man of thirty?’

Barley wasn’t feeling very quick-witted, but she seemed to need his reassurance. ‘I’m speechless but on the whole I’d say they were both very lucky,’ he said.

‘When the reception ended I asked my father for three roubles to go to the Café Sever to eat ice-cream with my companions. There were several daughters of academics at the reception, some were my school comrades. We made a group and I invited Yakov to join us. On the way I asked him where he lived and he told me: in the street of Professor Popov. He asked me, “Who was Popov?” I laughed. Everyone knows who Popov is, I said. Popov was the great Russian inventor of radio who transmitted a signal even before Marconi, I told him. Yakov was not so sure. “Perhaps Popov never existed,” he replied. “Perhaps the Party invented him in order to satisfy our Russian obsession with being the first to invent everything.” From this I knew that he was still struggling with doubts about what they would do concerning Czechoslovakia.’

Feeling anything but wise, Barley gave a wise nod.

‘I asked him whether his apartment was a communal or a separate one. He said it was a room which he shared with an old acquaintance from the Litmo who was working in a special night laboratory, so they seldom met. I said, “Then show me where you live. I wish to know that you are comfortable.” He was my first lover,’ she said simply. ‘He was extremely delicate, as I had expected him to be, but also passionate.’

‘Bravo,’ said Barley so softly that perhaps she didn’t hear.

‘I stayed with him three hours and took the last metro home. My father was waiting up for me and I talked to him like a stranger visiting his house. I did not sleep. Next day I heard the news in English on the BBC. The tanks had gone into Prague. My father, who had predicted this, was in despair. But I was not concerned for my father. Instead of going to school I went back to look for Yakov. His room-mate told me I would find him at the Saigon, which was the informal name of a cafeteria on the Nevsky Prospekt, a place for poets and drug-pedlars and speculators, not professors’ daughters. He was drinking coffee but he was drunk. He had been drinking vodka since he heard the news. “Your father is right,” he said. “The system will always win. We talk freedom but we are oppressors.” Three months later he had returned to Novosibirsk. He was bitter with himself but he still went. “It is a choice between dying of obscurity or dying of compromise,” he said. “Since that is a choice between death and death, we may as well choose the more comfortable alternative.” ’