The Woman from Bratislava (2 page)

I FIRST NOTICED
the woman in Warsaw. She showed up again at a couple of gatherings in Prague, but she did not make herself known until Bratislava, and my meeting with her is, I suppose, as good a place as any at which to begin my story. She presented herself at my door with her staggering secret at an inconvenient moment: a surfeit of alcohol was still working its way through my system and my mind was awash with self-pity.

I had got drunk, and when I did that I missed the Soviet Union as badly as a slighted lover can miss his faithless sweetheart. I actually did not drink that much any more and seldom got really plastered. Partly because it gave me no pleasure – the booze was more wont to make me drowsy – and partly because after the fourth whisky I usually started thinking about my third wife and then I got depressed because in my own clumsy fashion I did in fact love her, but I was afraid that she was drifting away from me. I belong to a generation which bandies the pronoun
I
as freely as our parents used that discreet word
one,
and I make a living out of analysing things; nevertheless, in that cold, war-torn spring of the century’s last year I had seemed incapable of figuring out why, more and more often, I found myself feeling jealous and afraid of losing her. And the process of analysis is very important to me. Besides being my job, the ability to deduce, to discern
connections
is the crucial difference between us and animals. And if I am totally honest – and why should I not be – the capacity for reflection and analysis is also what separates the intellectuals from the rest, who simply take life as it comes rather than doing
anything
about it. In this, the final spring of my arrogance, I regarded myself as a man with a sincere desire to behave with dignity, but
also with discernment in every stage of existence. This was indeed how I had always seen myself: as an individual in control of his life, both the professional and the private, despite the fact that both were, in truth, a shambles. I liked to think of myself as being smart but casual. The neatly pressed seams – the real and the imaginary – had to be there, though without being too obvious. Both sorts were, however, becoming more and more creased as time went on. The ability to fool oneself, to view oneself in the wrong light is, after all, only human. Too much self-awareness can lead to suicide. Another annoying side effect of drinking too much was, quite simply, the ease with which I succeeded in
staining
my clothes and making an unholy mess of my life. I had not wanted to get drunk, nor had I really wanted the Soviet Empire to collapse, and these two things were in a way connected.

Not to put too fine a point on it: I was lying fully clothed on a bed in a spanking-new, ultra-modern hotel in Bratislava, in Europe’s youngest state, Slovakia, yearning for the cold war and the great Empire. I missed the dear old terminology: Politbureau, Central Committee, Satellite States, Iron Curtain, East-West, Rearmament, Middle-distance Rockets, Summit Meetings, Berlin Wall. Being one of the few capable of reading between the lines of
Pravda
and being invited onto television to do just that. I missed the hammer and sickle, the cobbles on Red Square in the days when the Kremlin was a power centre, and longed to see the snow on the frozen canals in the beautiful, ramshackle city once known as Leningrad. Back when life consisted of great existential
questions
and not, as now, when the three main topics of discussion in the media and among one’s own acquaintances were early
retirement
, pension schemes and the smoking ban – this last debated so hotly that you felt you had been transported back to a time when all the talk was of the necessity for revolution and the imminent triumph of the working class. The world no longer made any sense, and no one now was interested in the knowledge I possessed. I was like a sculptor who had once been awarded first prize for my
socialist ability to sculpt a splendid Lenin out of cold marble. The things I knew and could do were of no use today.

Only those small groups at the university who could be
bothered
to study the history of the Soviet Union were still keen to know who Malenkov was, or Berija, or Breshnev. Who nowadays wants to read up on Gosplan’s abortive twenty-second Five Year Plan or is interested enough to pick my brains on the twenty-sixth Party Congress? Capitalism had won the battle. The triumphant progress of the free market was not conducive to Utopian
scenarios
or momentous decisions. And the fruits of victory were as bitter as a mouldy lemon on a dark November day in a bygone time in a Moscow which, with its Coca-Cola ads, Marlborough Men, an inane, babbling Yeltsin,
nouveau riche
mafiosi and small boys begging on the streets reminded me more of a Third World country. It could just as easily have been Brazil. Or Upper Volta. The only real difference were the nuclear weapons. Were it not for them it is unlikely that anyone would have taken much notice of Russia now. There was nothing special or ferocious about Moscow or the Russian bear. It was all just a big mess, one which really did not concern the rest of the world.

I was sick of this new, melted-down order and I was sick of myself. I lay on a big bed in a modern hotel in Slovakia’s
impoverished
capital, knowing full well why I was feeling so bloody sorry for myself. Why, after dinner, I had stayed on in the bar to drink first cognac and later whisky. It was the meeting, two days earlier, with the former prime minister of the Czech Republic that had ruined the trip for me. My mood was not helped by the fact that I had toothache. One of my back teeth was giving me gyp. It acted as a constant reminder that this old bag of bones was very much the worse for wear. That I was, in every possible way, going
downhill
. Less hair, fewer brain cells, deteriorating teeth, shortness of breath on stairs, a waning libido. I had to admit, though, that it was the former Czech prime minister who had destroyed my last vestiges of good humour.

There I was, lying in that modern hotel with toothache, hearing in my head again and again the leader of our delegation’s
deliberately
spiteful introduction of me. With a couple of well-chosen words he got his revenge for the Research Council grant I had snatched from under his nose twelve years earlier. In academia we never forget a slight.

In his atrocious English he had said:

‘And now here is Mr Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen. One of our leading experts in and researchers into Soviet affairs. Particularly the Breshnev years.’

The former prime minister, with his beautifully cut hair and immaculate suit, had looked at me with his ice-blue fish eyes:

‘What a lot of useless information you carry around in your head,’ he said. Then he turned his X-ray gaze on young Lena, she of the long legs and the useful degree in ‘Transitional problems in the phase between plan economy and the global market. A study in options.’

‘Extremely helpful findings – for us too,’ the arrogant bastard had said, holding both her hand and her eyes for just a little too long before releasing her fingers with a glance at the hidden and yet so obvious secrets of her Wonderbra which made the normally hard-nosed Lena blush. Power is a tremendous aphrodisiac and the Czech was outrageously well-preserved.

Fuck them all! Fuck the modern world! It sucks! As one of my numerous offspring would say. But I too had blushed, because he had hit me where it hurt. I had stood there trying to take comfort in the knowledge that I had had a fine academic career and no one could take that away from me. I had my history doctorate. My thesis had been described as a brilliant study of stagnation phenomena in the Breshnev era. It had been widely cited in international history journals and had earned me a guest lecture at America’s Harvard University in 1981, the year before the old bugger died. Unfortunately, my thesis had arrived at the
conclusion
that the inherent strength of the Soviet system outweighed
its structural weaknesses. Reform was possible. The Soviet Union would enter the next millenium fortified and reinforced. The
bipolar
world dominated by the two big players, the USA and the USSR, was here to stay.

I got a couple of good years out of Gorbachev, but after that there were no more invitations from the major universities in the US and Europe. And I was no longer a regular guest in the blue television news studio, providing clear, concise answers to the presenter’s carefully rehearsed questions. Because the whole flaming set-up had collapsed! I had actually got it wrong. And my fellow academics knew it. No journalist was likely to read every line of a doctoral thesis which came to the wrong conclusion, but my colleagues had memories like elephants, a fact of which I was reminded by the sound of their barely suppressed, gleeful sniggers when the former prime minister made his spiteful remark. They knew that I knew that at the time when I completed my highly acclaimed thesis and was able to put the letters Ph.D. after my name I was still far too young. Added to which, there had been no vacant professorships at the time and now it was too late. My knowledge was sadly outdated. I would never be able to boast the coveted title of Professor. For the rest of my days, until I started drawing my nice, fat pension I would have to make do with calling myself Lecturer in History. Trailing out every day to the south side of the city and the University of Copenhagen’s concrete jungle, where the thinking was often as low-slung as the ceilings in the hideous classrooms. Here, Teddy, as I was known to everyone, high and low, went around feeling sorry for himself, without of course knowing that he was doing so. Here, Teddy made a
half-hearted
attempt to teach and do research, in order, at least once in a while, to publish a scholarly paper. Here, Teddy gave guidance to future generations, fitting them to take over the bastions of power. Here was Teddy, an academic relic, who, for some strange reason, society was still paying. And paying well.

I lay on the bed, fulminating, the alcohol in my blood causing
my already well-developed talent for viewing my life and my career as an exercise in martyrdom to increase to the point where it gained the upper hand.
I
should have been leading this
delegation
. Instead I was merely a member, paying all my own expenses – although I was sure to find some loophole whereby the Institute would end up reimbursing most of my costs.

There were forty of us on this trip organised by the Danish Foreign Affairs Association. The majority were elderly tourists for whom this offered the opportunity of an organised cultural tour of Central Europe. Because these were not your ordinary charter tourists. No, no. They travelled in order to broaden their minds. Six of us would be speaking at various symposiums and conferences to politicians, journalists and civil servants; giving talks inspired by the tenth anniversary of the transformation of Eastern and Central Europe, but since NATO planes had bombed Yugoslavia a couple of days after we left Denmark our
conversations
often ended up revolving around the war which we were not supposed to call a war. At heart we were actually all agreed that NATO had taken the only logical step, but that it had simply come to late. Just to be contrary, though, I doggedly maintained that it was immoral not to send in ground troops. That this was a clear sign of just how pampered and egoistic we were in the West; we were more concerned about not getting killed ourselves than about not taking the lives of others. Our style of warfare was a logical consequence of our civilisation. The safety of the bomber pilots was more important than the sufferings of Kosovo
Albanians
. We could not cope with casualties within our own ranks. Our politicians could not stomach the thought of Western men being killed and they refused to countenance the media’s pictures of such things. What we wanted was a cartoon war. A real-life version of
Star Wars
. But my heart really was not in this
discussion
. Milosevic was simply another villain in history’s long line of villains. I ought to have studied Stalin instead, like my friend and colleague Lasse. As he so rightly said: pure evil and the endeavour
to comprehend it never go out of date. Lasse too was only a
lecturer
, but with all the newly opened archives on the Stalin era he was in seventh heaven. He now had enough material to keep him busy for the rest of his natural. Not only was he a great guy, he was also a true scholar who loved his subject. I really envied him. He was still married to the same woman. He had children only with this one woman. They had a good life and try as I might I could not convince him that he was not happy. Like me he was on the wrong side of fifty, but with something as rare in our circles as a silver wedding celebration to look back on and his beloved archives to look forward to it was also hard to persuade him that, on the whole, life was turning out to be rather like a bad movie. Another thing that annoyed me was his refusal to face the fact that, deep down, modern man was in a hell of a mess.

We began our tour in Warsaw. The Polish capital lay cool and clear in the spring light. The city had changed a lot in ten years. Stalin had given the poor Poles a yellow wedding-cake skyscraper to remind them every day of who was in charge. Now, though, hemmed in as it was by modern skyscrapers in glass and concrete, Stalin’s gift did not dominate the skyline in quite the same way. Warsaw was teeming with cars and mobile phones, advertisements and neon signs, nightclubs and beggars. It had it all. The reek of low-octane petrol was gone. The limp salami of communism had given way to imported Danish hams and French cheeses. The party’s lies to the horse-trading of democracy. A normal country which was happy to be a member of NATO and hoped that Russia would eventually pull back to a point somewhere beyond the Ural Mountains, to that Asia to which it belonged, even though the Poles realised, of course, that it probably was not going to be that easy. We met all the right people, everybody said the right things, the tourists made notes and asked tentative questions and during the long, tedious meetings I thought of Lena’s breasts, and neither the talk nor the breasts excited me in the slightest.