A Patriot in Berlin

  To escape from Westarp, Francesca either brought a sandwich to the office which she ate at her desk, or waited a good half-hour after Günter had left for lunch before herself going down to the restaurant. The Germans all ate early anyway – a heavy meal at midday, or shortly after: if Francesca waited until around quarter to one, she could be reasonably sure of eating some soup or a salad alone with a book or a scholarly review.

  The day of Serotkin’s return, she followed this tactic only to find that the Russian had done the same thing, and finding themselves side by side at the counter, and at the desk where they paid for their food, they could hardly avoid sitting at the same table.

  Held under Serotkin’s arm as he carried his tray was a copy of The Economist: like Francesca, he had clearly hoped to be able to eat in peace but he put on as brave a face as she did and, after the initial awkwardness, looked at her with almost a twinkle in his eye. ‘You don’t like German food?’

  Francesca glanced down at the salad. ‘We aren’t used to eating hot food in the middle of the day.’

  ‘We like to eat hot food at midday and in the evening.’ He dug into the dish of the day – smoked pork, red cabbage and dumplings.

  ‘But you don’t get fat,’ she said, glancing at Serotkin’s slim figure.

  ‘We don’t always get to eat as much as we would like,’ he said.

  ‘Are there shortages?’ she asked, the compassionate note back in her tone of voice.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you have a family, Andrei?’

  He hesitated. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘I have a wife and a child,’ he said, ‘but I am separated from my wife.’

  ‘I guess there’s as much divorce in Russia as there is in the United States.’

  ‘We are separated, not divorced.’

  She stood corrected. ‘Are they in Moscow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should have them visit you here in Berlin. I’d like to meet them.’

  Serotkin did not respond to this but took another mouthful of food. ‘Are you married?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘I’m not married but I have a friend. He’s divorced.’

  He nodded. ‘You should be married.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘You are a beautiful woman but you are no longer young.’

  Francesca was taken aback by this abrupt, double-edged compliment delivered in an offhand manner. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ she said with a slightly forced laugh.

  ‘Is that a proverb?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘But not true.’

  ‘I think it’s true enough, if you think of the growing number of divorces.’

  ‘They are not caused by the haste with which people marry, but by their false expectations of what marriage should be.’

  ‘Such as?’

  He shrugged. ‘Rapture. Fulfilment. Hollywood romance.’

  ‘Is that what you and your wife wanted?’

  He frowned. ‘No. Our differences were … ideological.’

  ‘She was a Communist?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated, as if about to say one thing but, thinking better of it, said another. ‘Under our system, there were particular difficulties. It was impossible for a young couple to have their own flat. And women were expected to work. They were expected to work by the government, but they were also expected to look after the home and care for the children …’

  ‘By the men,’ said Francesca.

  ‘By tradition,’ said Serotkin.

  ‘Didn’t the tradition change?’

  ‘Traditions will not change if they stem from ineradicable aspects of human nature.’

  Francesca’s face became a little flushed. She put down her fork. ‘But surely no one in Russia believed that it was inherent in human nature that women should work in a factory but also do all the chores in the home?’

  ‘They believed that women should work in the factory because that followed from the principle of equality between the sexes.’

  ‘Of course, but in the home …’

  ‘Marx and Lenin never pronounced on who should wash the dishes or iron the clothes.’

  ‘So it was left to the women?’

  Serotkin shrugged. ‘Of course. That was the tradition.’

  ‘The women shouldn’t have put up with it,’ said Francesca.

  ‘But it was the women who wanted it that way.’

  ‘Wanted it?’

  ‘No Russian woman could love a man who washed dishes or ironed clothes.’

  Francesca scowled. ‘Then they’ve sure got a long way to go.’

  Serotkin finished his plate of food. ‘Does your … friend do his own cooking and cleaning?’

  ‘Sure, well, he has a maid, I guess, and we usually eat out because we’re both busy.’

  ‘Do you have a maid?’

  ‘Sure …’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Yes. A Jamaican.’

  ‘Because you’re busy?’

  ‘Yes. But that actually doesn’t have anything to do with it …’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Francesca looked up from her yoghurt: she could not tell because of the beard whether or not Serotkin’s smile was ironic. ‘The fact is,’ she said, ‘that if Duncan and I were to get married, we should share the chores.’

  ‘And the labour to earn your living?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But …’ He hesitated, as if considering how far he should go. ‘If there is no division of labour within a marriage, if all the labour and all the chores are shared, then what binds the man to the woman or the woman to the man?’

  ‘Well, love …’

  ‘And if love goes?’

  ‘Then … nothing, I guess.’

  ‘Which puts a heavy burden on love.’

  ‘I don’t see how else things could be arranged.’

  ‘In the past, you see, among our Russian peasants, a man could not survive without a woman nor a woman without a man. They remained together because separated they would not survive.’

  ‘And that was good?’

  His eyes flashed. ‘Yes. I think it was good, because it meant that necessity held families together instead of mere … whim.’

  Francesca found herself growing almost angry. ‘So you’d like to see women back in the home?’

  Serotkin took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered one to Francesca. She shook her head, surprised that anyone could imagine she might smoke. ‘Have you read the work of Valentin Rasputin?’ he asked.

  ‘Rasputin? The monk?’

  He frowned, just as a tutor might frown when a student gave a particularly crass answer to one of his questions. ‘No. Valentin Rasputin. He is a contemporary writer, a Siberian. Some of his works have been translated.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know them.’

  Without asking Francesca whether she minded or not, Serotkin lit his cigarette. ‘Rasputin depicts an ideal woman who comes from the Russian tradition. She is not assertive and ambitious – a scientist or a writer or an engineer – but someone warm, stable, affectionate and strong; a mediator, if you like, between the sky and the soil.’

  A cloud of heavy blue smoke drifted towards Francesca. It had an unusual, sweet aroma. She fanned her face with her hand. If Serotkin saw this gesture as a complaint, he did nothing to show it.

  ‘It seems to me,’ he went on, ‘that Western women no longer see themselves as the companions of men, but rather as their competitors, their rivals …’

  ‘They just want their due,’ said Francesca irritably.

  ‘Their due?’

  ‘Well, their rights.’

  Serotkin smiled. ‘To what?’

  ‘To equal treatment.’

  He nodded. ‘In the factory …’

  ‘And the office.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the home.’

  He drew smoke into his lungs.
‘By equal you mean the same?’

  ‘Sure. Equal means the same.’

  ‘A nut and a bolt may be equal but they are not the same.’

  ‘And is that how you see men and women? As nuts and bolts?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And what if a bolt doesn’t want to be a bolt but would rather be a nut?’

  ‘We are what we are.’

  ‘That’s fatalistic.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And un-American.’

  ‘I dare say.’ He took another drag on his cigarette.

  As if by tacit agreement, Francesca McDermott and Andrei Serotkin kept their distance in the days that followed this first encounter after Serotkin’s return to Berlin. They met in the office, of course, and Serotkin did indeed prove invaluable in tracing paintings from collections in the former Soviet Union. Francesca’s knowledge of Russian was rudimentary; none of the others knew any at all. It was therefore Serotkin who made all the calls that required a Russian speaker and on a Cyrillic typewriter obtained by Julius Breitenbach typed the letters to the lenders.

  However, his presence in the office was a mild irritation. It was not so much the recollection of his obnoxious opinions that annoyed her as her own inability to make him out. Serotkin did not fit into any of the predetermined categories that Francesca stored in her mind. She was not someone who allowed her first impressions of a person to become her definitive judgement and, while confident in her ability to judge character, she was not so arrogant as to imagine that her experience of human nature in Wisconsin, Michigan, New England and, to some extent, New York qualified her to assess those from an entirely different culture like Serotkin. She was also always ready to encounter the enigmatic; but to her enigma meant silence and reserve, whereas Serotkin had been open, almost insolent, in the way he had assaulted her with his offensive views on the position of women. How could anyone, even a Russian, hold such antediluvian views? But then how could anyone in this day and age smoke untipped cigarettes?

  She had been thrown, she realized, by her assumption that a Russian academic would be like the kind of European academic she had encountered from time to time. She had been encouraged in this assumption by the quality and good taste of his clothes. She should have been alerted, she saw now, by her very first impression – that quality she had referred to as ‘dashing’ which she could now neither analyse nor define. Was it only because she had expected a stooping old professor that she had been taken aback by the appearance of a man so fit and slim? He had moved with such confidence around her office, as if used to having his own way with the things and people around him. And there had been the look in his eyes – those murky eyes whose colour she could not remember – that at times encouraged a kind of camaraderie but then betrayed perhaps a sneer, even a trace of cruelty and contempt. Sky and soil! Nuts and bolts! Had he been teasing her over lunch or had he meant what he said?

  She soon discovered to her consternation that, when it came to the exhibition, his opposition to her ideas was in earnest. A postponed decision on the scale of the exhibition was on the agenda of the next meeting of the organizing committee which Serotkin attended. Francesca argued as before for a show of limited size on a single site showing only major works by the artists chosen. ‘Having looked at the different galleries,’ she said, ‘I would favour the New National Gallery in West Berlin. It is the only one with the kind of facilities we will require.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Serotkin abruptly. ‘It should be a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the entire body of Russian experimental art.’

  The meeting was held in the overheated conference chamber at the Prussian Ministry of Culture. Stefan Diederich was in the chair. He looked down the table to Günter Westarp. ‘What do you feel?’

  ‘I think, Herr Minister, that while I appreciate the force behind Dr McDermott’s argument which she advanced so eloquently at our last meeting, there is also something to be said, in terms of our political objectives, for thinking on a grander scale.’

  ‘Grand does not always mean large,’ said Francesca.

  ‘That is unquestionably true,’ said Westarp, glancing nervously around the table at everyone but Andrei Serotkin. ‘And from the purely artistic point of view, which is naturally the point of view that one would expect Dr McDermott to take, she is undoubtedly right; but it would hardly help those living in East Berlin and eastern Germany to feel that this was part of their tradition if the exhibition was confined to a gallery in the western half of the city.’

  ‘I concur with this last stated opinion,’ said Dr Kemmelkampf, the civil servant in the Ministry of Culture with responsibility for the exhibition. ‘There is something to be said for the more comprehensive option simply because it would necessitate the use of sites in the two halves of the city. The symmetry of the two architectural gems from different epochs, Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in West Berlin and Schinkel’s Old Museum in the east, would itself symbolize the reintegration of the old and the new.’

  ‘What is in the Old Museum at present?’ Serotkin asked Diederich.

  ‘Social realists like Strempel and Cremer …’

  ‘Paintings of heroic labour by Willi Sitte,’ said Günter Westarp, ‘and Waldemar Grzimek’s statue of a worker on a collective farm.’

  ‘So wouldn’t it help to make the point to remove their paintings to make way for works by Kandinsky and Chagall?’

  ‘Most emphatically,’ said Diederich.

  ‘But think of the expense and the organization,’ said Francesca. ‘As it is, we have set ourselves the almost impossible task of organizing a major exhibition in under a year. If we aim to bring to Berlin every work of art by all of the artists on our list …’

  ‘As far as finance is concerned,’ Stefi interrupted, ‘the bigger the better. The foundations to which we look for funding are more likely to be enticed by something grandiose than by something … refined.’

  ‘And if the political will is there,’ said Kemmelkampf, the civil servant, ‘then the organizational means can always be found.’

  Stefan Diederich turned to Francesca. ‘Are you persuaded?’

  She shrugged. ‘Sure. If that’s how you all feel …’

  The meeting proceeded to consider less controversial matters, and towards four in the afternoon drew to its end.

  ‘Is there any other business?’ asked Diederich.

  Serotkin raised his hand.

  ‘Dr Serotkin?’

  ‘I was unfortunately absent at the last meeting when this committee reached its decision on the title of the exhibition which was, I believe, “The Indomitable Spirit: Russian Art in Exile”.’

  ‘Do you object to the title?’ asked Stefan Diederich.

  ‘In my view, it is imprecise, and should be reconsidered.’

  Francesca could not withhold a sigh of exasperation. ‘We went into it at great length, Dr Serotkin. We have already had stationery printed …’

  ‘The title is misleading,’ said Serotkin, ‘since much of the work we are considering was done in Russia. It might make it more difficult – perhaps impossible – to secure loans from Russian museums if we persist with a title of this kind.’

  Frowning, Stefan Diederich turned to Günter Westarp. ‘Can you remember what other titles we had in mind?’

  Günter Westarp nervously tugged at his moustache. ‘“The Triumph of the Spirit: the Modern in Russian Art”.’

  ‘That was rejected,’ said Kemmelkampf, ‘because it was thought that it had a resonance with Riefenstahl’s film made under the fascists, The Triumph of the Will.’

  ‘I have a proposal,’ said Serotkin.

  ‘Please …’ said Diederich.

  ‘“Excursus: the Cosmopolitan in Russian Art”.’

  There was a silence. Diederich looked up the table. ‘Would anyone like to express a view on this proposal?’

  ‘I think it’s terrible,’ said Francesca.

  ‘Would you care to elaborate?’


  ‘Well, why Excursus?’

  ‘It is a short word,’ said Serotkin, ‘that seems to encapsulate most aptly what we want to convey.’

  Francesca was close to losing her temper. She turned to the chairman, Stefan Diederich. ‘With no disrespect, it seems to me that perhaps Dr Serotkin does not understand the precise meaning of obscure words in the English language. Excursus comes from the Latin and means “digression”. It is untranslatable into some modern languages. For those who know what it means, it will suggest that the art exhibited is somehow an aberration, and if placed alongside the word “cosmopolitan”, it will give the impression that we do not regard it as a genuine manifestation of Russian culture.’

  Serotkin smiled at her with the condescension of an adversary in a game who knows he will win. ‘It is precisely because “excursus” is a universal and untranslatable word that it will provoke interest in the exhibition.’ He stretched out his hands. ‘Imagine, in large lettering, on a poster. Excursus. It will catch the eye. It also has an affinity with the word “exodus” and as such will be a subtle reference to the exile of so many of the artists who, as latterday children of Israel, escaped from the oppression of the Russian pharaohs into a land flowing with milk and honey …’

  Francesca frowned: she could not make out whether or not Serotkin was entirely serious. ‘I think you mean,’ she said, ‘like latterday children of Israel, not as latterday children of Israel.’

  Serotkin said nothing.

  ‘Unless you meant to refer to the fact that some of the artists were Jews.’