The Violent Century (26 page)

Spit shrugs again. I won’t argue with that, she says. Makes a moue of distaste at the hot chocolate. Too sweet, she says. So what
do
you want, Professor Feldman?

– I want to pass along a message, Galina says.

– A message.

– Yes.

– Who from? Spit says. And what about? Thinking, this has been a waste of time. Thinking, Is this what it has come to, playing nursemaid to batty old women in Viennese coffee bars?

– The Red Sickle, Galina says. And, into Spit’s sudden stillness: He wants a meeting.

103.
WESTMINSTER
1978

– Are you saying the Red Sickle wishes to … The Minister removes and polishes his glasses. When he coughs his whole body shakes, and the handkerchief he clasps to his mouth comes back bloodied. He replaces the glasses and stares over at the Old Man. Wishes to
defect?
he says.

– Well, the Old Man says – perhaps dubiously. If you recall the incident in Laos, minister?

– Yes, yes?

– Oblivion did have a little chat with him then, Minister. They discussed the possibility, as it were. At my request, naturally.

The Minister barks a half-cough, half-laugh. Naturally, he agrees. And the result?

The Old Man shrugs. He is very loyal, he says.

– I can’t imagine why, the Minister says. It’s not like the Union of Soviet Heroes is in the greatest of shapes. You remember Stalin’s purges?

– Indeed, the Old Man says. The Minister barks another painful laugh. The Great Soviet himself ended up in a Siberian work camp, he says.

– Still, the Old Man says.

– Yes?

– Stalin is dead, the Old Man says, almost reproachfully.

– So they fared slightly better under Brezhnev, the Minister says, and waves a feeble hand. So what. The Minister sighs and looks across the desk at the Old Man. So what does the Red Sickle
want
? he says.

– To begin with, the Old Man says, he just wants a meeting.

104.
BERLIN
1978

Had Fogg been there (and where
was
Fogg, in all this time, was he hiding at the Hole in the Wall, then, imprisoned in a fog of his own making?), he would have barely recognised this place, where once the Nazi ministries stood, this divided land, this Wall. Armed guards patrol on both sides and, right there where once a Russian checkpoint stood forlorn in the long night of post-war Berlin, now there are guard booths, banks of sandbags, vehicle barriers. The Old Man himself is here. The Old Man, having followed Professor Feldman’s path, her papers, the way she had disappeared back to the Soviet Union and was never seen again. A meeting, yes, but it is harder to arrange, a delicate weaving of a web until this moment, the Old Man driving into East Berlin in the back of a Mercedes with blackened windows, the head of a delegation for an East–West meeting on UN resolution 1540, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Second Amendment, Übermenschen, and on the other side of the table, sole representative of the Union of Soviet Heroes, the Red Sickle.

Installed in an anonymous hotel with thick carpets swallowing sound, meeting in a once-grand ballroom, across a long table, the wood chipped but lovingly polished, two great crystal chandeliers dangling above their heads, coffee served in silver pots, and they are observed, of course they are, by functionaries on both sides. The Old Man gathers his papers together, tidies them, aligns the edges and with a decisive movement lays them down. Let us begin … he says.

How did they converse? Did they find a moment of privacy? The public bathroom, or over coffee and rich pastries, at recess time? Or was there no verbal communication, a note, perhaps, slipped into the Old Man’s hands, which he opens in the car as they cross Checkpoint Charlie back into West Berlin?

We don’t know. All we know for sure is that, at some point, the Red Sickle had communicated with the Old Man. A brief message, when it boiled down to it. Forget the logistics, the nightmare of trying to accede to the Red Sickle’s request, forget even what’s coming, another war, in another, more remote part of the world …

Help me get Rusalka out of Russia
, is what the message says.

105.
WESTMINSTER
1978

– We have to consider it is a trap, the Minister says. His cough rocks his skeletal body. He looks up at the Old Man and grimaces. How come you don’t grow old and die? he says.

– I live to serve, the Old Man says, and the Minister laughs. A trap, he says.

– That’s certainly the way I would have done it, Minister.

– What does he want?

– The Red Sickle won’t defect, the Old Man says. But he is desperate to get Rusalka out of Russia. She is living in Moscow, at a State sanatorium. He wants to get her the medical help she needs, in the West.

– And in return?

– And in return, the Old Man says, he is willing to make us a deal. Sighs. To turn, he says, almost regretfully.

– A double agent? Him?

– It is strange, the Old Man murmurs, what men will do for love. Do I have your authorisation, Minister?

Pushes the forms across the desk. The Minister, with a sigh, reaches for a pen.

106.
BERLIN
1979

And so, one year later: the River Spree. The Wall runs along its eastern shore. This is the point where it could all go wrong, the breaking point: the Wall, the guards, lights cutting through the darkness, the water lapping at the shore. From the Wall to the western bank this is still East Germany, to reach safety you must reach the western shore, emerge, alive and dripping, from the water. First you must scale the wall. First you must swim the Spree.

October 5, 1961. Udo Düllick. Drowned in the Spree.

October 14, 1961. Werner Probst. Shot in the Spree.

…

October 8, 1962. Anton Walzer. Shot in the Spree.

November 19, 1962. Horst Plischke. Drowned in the Spree. Body recovered four months later.

…

November 4, 1963. Klaus Schröter. Drowned in the Spree after being shot.

…

February 14, 1972. Manfred Weylandt. Drowned in the Spree after being shot.

…

And so on, through the years, history recounted as a series of failed escapes: they did not just use the Spree, everywhere you could scale the Wall they tried, and died: shot, shot, hit by a train, fell from the fourth floor of a building, shot, shot, suffocated, beaten with an iron bar, hit by a train, fell
off
a train, jumped off a roof, drowned, drowned, shot and, finally, in nineteen eighty-nine, Winfried Freudenberg, last of the escapees, crashed in, of all things, a hot-air balloon while trying to escape.

Sometimes, we think, you just couldn’t make this shit
up
.

Like a lurid paperback the yellowed pages turn, the margins scribbled in, time passes for all, for you and us, for all but the changed.

For she is there. Somewhere, Klara V—

– Come on, the Old Man says, tense, his teeth around a Churchill cigar (though Churchill, too, is gone now, a stroke in sixty-five), come on, come on—

A cold night. A dark night. Fog creeping on the water and along the bank, the lights that cut through it are yellow and diffuse. Come on, come on!

And no Fogg, not even Oblivion, just the Old Man and an extraction team, but what can they do, they must wait on the western bank, on the far shore, wait breathlessly, nervously, the Old Man chomping on the cigar, those noxious fumes rising into the air, such a rich mixture, chemicals from East Berlin’s factories, pork cooked in butter wafting in from the west, Come on, the Old Man says—

A flash of light from the other side of the river, once, twice, and is gone. The Old Man strains against the bad light, could that be a small, lithe figure crawling along the top of the Wall? For a moment it hesitates, suspended as it is up there, in the darkness. Then it falls, like a stone, it falls through the air and turns, gracefully, and hits the dark waters and disappears underneath. Silence, silence, and the Old Man’s teeth break through the tobacco-leaf skin of the cigar, he drops it, never taking his eyes off the river, a shout in the distance, on the other shore, an alarm raised, shadowed figures appear on the wall, the sound of gunshots is deafening in the night, tracer bullets light up the sky and in their firefly light one can see the churning water of the Spree, punctured by bullets, Come on, the Old Man says, come on! until, right at their feet, a head emerges from the river, water streaming like tears down long, black hair, hands reach out, grab her, pull her to the bank, to the West, to safety, the gunshots cease, abruptly.

A silence, pure and precious, settles over the night.

Rusalka rises from the river, water droplets like precious stones caught in her hair …

Collapses into the Old Man’s arms.

Her eyes are white, unseeing.

The Old Man carries her, as gentle as a lover, to the waiting car.

107.
LAKE GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1981

They walk along the lake shore, the Old Man and the diminutive Russian woman. Her black hair is permanently wet, her blue eyes turn, from time to time, in mute query to the man beside her. Rusalka, lithe and yet fragile, and something inside the Old Man will never be the same again.

– The water, Rusalka says. They stop and stand there, awkwardly. I listen but I can no longer hear the water, she says.

– Do you like it, here? the Old Man says, inanely. Rusalka tries to smile, fails, nods. Yes, she says. I thought you’d like the lake, the Old Man says, the water ripples under the stars. Rusalka strips off her clothes and enters the water, when she swims she is like a creature out of myth. I’m supposed to be debriefing you, the Old Man murmurs, but to himself, his breath is caught in his chest when she smiles at him from the water.

There was no publicity coup with her defection, nothing to serve them in the media. Did the Russians know? The Old Man suspects that they did, might have set the whole thing up. Got rid of Rusalka cleanly and got the Bureau to foot the bill for her care.

Just how the game has always been played, the Old Man thinks, sitting down on the shore of the lake, tossing stones into the water, Rusalka surfacing in the distance, her hair shiny under the light of the moon.

But it was worth it, he thinks. Not just for Rusalka, but now he has a private channel with the Russians, a conduit in the form of the Red Sickle. Rusalka waves at him and he feels a smile rising from some private place and he waves back. She swims towards him, rising out of the water slowly, her long hair clinging to her naked flesh. The Old Man removes his coat and wraps it around her and for a moment he holds her close. Then they walk back together to the sanatorium.

108.
LAKE GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1983

– I came as soon as I heard, the Old Man says. The director of the sanatorium touches him lightly on the sleeve. I’m sorry, she says. He shrugs her off. There is nothing to be sorry for, he says. His voice is gruff and the director nods and doesn’t press him.

The funeral takes place in a nondenominational cemetery on the outskirts of Geneva. She should have been buried in water, the Old Man thinks, and the sudden anger makes him turn his back as the coffin is lowered into the hard ground, and he walks away.

He arrives back at the sanatorium alone. Remembers a body rising out of the Spree and into his arms.

The Old Man picks up a rock from the ground, turns it over and over in his hands. His hands are old, they are covered in liver spots. He was old before the change, was caught, preserved, a living fly in slowly hardening amber. She killed herself. The words run round and round in his mind. He enters the building, walks to her room. The door is open, the bed is freshly made. No sign of the bedsheet she had pulled off the bed and ripped to tie into a rope. She hanged herself. No sign now, and he pictures her tearing up the sheets, her black hair streaming down her face, frowning in concentration. The way she bit her lips. Fashioning a rope and putting it around her neck. He should have found her a place by the ocean.

– I’m tired, she told him, the last time. She always said it but that time it sounded to him that she meant it. They had walked as they always did, by the lake. I can no longer hear the water.

Perhaps he knew all along. We all live on borrowed time. He looks vaguely around the room but she’s not there, there is no sign of her, and he walks out and closes the door, softly, behind him as he passes.

RUSSIANS INVADE AFGHANISTAN

December 29, 1979

KABUL On Christmas Eve heavy Soviet forces entered Afghanistan. Commandos seized strategic installations in Kabul as armoured columns crossed the border. After a week of heavy fighting, tens of thousands of troops have entered the country by ground and air, with a new Soviet-backed leader installed in Kabul. A spokesman for the Kremlin confirmed Soviet occupation of the country is now complete. Fighting, however, is expected to continue for some time.

109.
WESTMINSTER
1984

– Afghanistan? the Minister says. New minister, younger.

– The Red Sickle has requested another meeting, the Old Man says. The Minister examines him curiously. He is unchanged, externally. They never do change, do they, the Minister thinks, those bleeding Übermenschen. But who knows what they think, who knows what they are like inside. There had been rumours. He waves them aside. What’s in bleeding
Afghanistan
? the Minister says, instead.

– Russians, the Old Man says. Does he sound more tired than he used to? the Minister wonders, uneasily. He shrugs. Send Oblivion, he says. Speak to our cousins in the CIA and see if they have an interest.

The Old Man’s eyes are clear and dry. They bore into the Minister’s eyes as if they can read the contents of his mind, the way one reads a cheap paperback book. The Minister, discomfited, turns his head away.