A Patriot in Berlin

‘Presumably not,’ said Diederich hastily.

  ‘As to the word “cosmopolitan”,’ Serotkin went on, opening a Webster’s Pocket Dictionary on the table in front of him, ‘it is defined here as “belonging to the whole world, not national, local …”; but it would also be a pointer to the suppression of such art in that “cosmopolitan” was the term of abuse used for such art by Stalin and the advocates of socialist realism.’

  ‘Just as the word “degenerate” was used by the Nazis,’ said Günter Westarp.

  ‘And the word was used, I seem to remember,’ said Dr Kemmelkampf, ‘by the exhibition in Munich in 1957.’

  ‘Which in a sense,’ said Diederich, ‘is the model for our exhibition.’

  There was a short silence. Then Dr Kemmelkampf cleared his throat. ‘I have to say … of course, this is purely a personal opinion … that the title proposed by Dr Serotkin does seem more arresting than the title we had provisionally chosen.’

  ‘It would certainly look good on a poster,’ said Günter Westarp.

  ‘And I think the embedded reference to the show in Munich,’ said Stefan Diederich, ‘is an important consideration.’

  They waited in silence. Francesca looked around the table for allies. The director of the New National Gallery shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of surrender. Frau Dr Koch and Julius Breitenbach, there in an advisory capacity only, avoided meeting her eyes.

  ‘Dr McDermott?’ asked Stefan Diederich.

  She too shrugged her shoulders in capitulation. ‘OK. If that’s what you want. Excursus it is.’

  SIX

  Andrei Orlov’s wife Tatiana lived in an old-fashioned block on the Malya Bronnaya, an area favoured by writers and artists. The lift was antique – an ornate cage of the Tsarist era quite unlike the functional tin boxes that carried most Muscovites up to their apartments.

  Nikolai Gerasimov pressed the button for the fourth floor with a sceptical look on his face. Despite recent events, he still had faith in progress and therefore doubts about anything old. With a clank, the lift started moving. Gerasimov looked at his watch. It was past four. The boy would be back from school. There was no record of a resident babushka. Tatiana Orlova should be at home.

  He rang the bell. A woman came to the door. He first saw the back of her head because, as she opened it, she turned to shout behind her: ‘Come, Igor, it’s Drusha …’

  She then turned and saw that it was not the girl Drusha whom she was expecting but a tall, muscular, slightly pockmarked man who, from the look in her eyes that momentarily followed the expression of surprise, knew that she knew who he was, where he came from and why he was there.

  ‘I am Nikolai Stefanovich Gerasimov,’ he said politely, still instinctively deferential to the daughter of a man once as powerful as Keminski. ‘If it is not inconvenient, I would like to make some enquiries.’

  Because she knew, she did not ask what the enquiries were about but stepped aside to let him in. ‘A friend of my son’s is coming to play,’ she said in a matter-of-fact manner, her eyes avoiding Gerasimov’s by looking at the ground.

  ‘This won’t take long.’ He started to remove his shoes but with a wave Tatiana Orlova told him to keep them on. ‘There’s clay all over the floor,’ she said as she closed the door and led Gerasimov down the corridor. As he passed the kitchen Gerasimov glimpsed a young boy writing at the table.

  They came into a large room – immense, for a private apartment – that clearly served as her living room and studio, and probably her bedroom too: there was a single bed behind a screen in the corner. In the centre of the room, about five feet from the window, a tripod stood on a square of linoleum, and on top of the tripod on a square board a lump the size of a human head, swathed in a cloth like a turban. From the marks on the linoleum, Gerasimov assumed that this was a lump of clay, covered to retain the moisture. Against the wall, on a shelf, there were some finished works – abstract shapes with no resemblance to any natural form.

  Tatiana Orlova invited Gerasimov to sit down on the sofa that divided the area used as a studio from the rest of the room. She herself sat on a wooden chair, crossed her legs and leaned forward – the posture of someone ready to listen. She was wearing blue workman’s overalls, smudged with the marks of clay. She was tall and could have been beautiful if she had not been so thin. With more flesh on her bones, her nose would not have been so angular, her cheekbones so protruding, her bosom so flat. The leanness of her face made her eyes seem large – certainly in contrast to the slits of Ylena’s piggy eyes. In the sunlight from the window, Gerasimov saw grey strands in her black hair.

  ‘Well?’ She looked up, impatient to get things under way.

  ‘I am from the state security service of the Russian Federation.’

  ‘Yes.’ She waved her hand as if to say: ‘Dispense with the formalities.’

  ‘You will doubtless be familiar with …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your husband, Andrei Anatolyevich Orlov, as you know, worked for the former Committee for State Security.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we are now trying to make contact with some of the former employees to, as it were, tie up loose ends.’

  Gerasimov found, to his irritation, that he was speaking with a certain nervousness without understanding why. Was it because of her connections? Or because she seemed so indifferent to his presence in her flat?

  ‘I have had no contact with my husband,’ she said. ‘So far as I know, he is not in Moscow.’

  ‘He is in the West.’

  She neither acknowledged that she knew this or that the information caused her any surprise.

  ‘Did you know this?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he was in the West?’

  She hesitated ‘I did not know it, but I assumed it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He has not been to see Igor.’

  ‘Normally, he would come to see his son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How often?’

  She shrugged. ‘When he’s in Moscow, once or twice a week.’

  ‘Did he say, when he last came, when he would come again?’

  ‘He said he would be gone for a time …’

  ‘Did he say for how long?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he give you no clue at all as to why he was going to the West?’

  ‘Perhaps to look for work?’ She said this coolly, looking Gerasimov straight in the eye. ‘After all, he lost his job.’

  ‘He was offered a post at the Tretyakov.’

  ‘That was given to one of his men.’

  ‘You knew that?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘He could have had a job there if he had wanted it.’

  ‘Not one suited to his talents.’

  ‘Your husband was, I think, a convinced Communist.’

  ‘Not only my husband …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And …’ She hesitated. ‘It was more complicated than that.’

  ‘You must forgive me if I appear to be intruding on a private matter, Tatiana Ivanovna, but I understand that your separation from your husband was caused by ideological differences?’

  She smiled again, a sour, sad smile. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sometimes ideology is an excuse for other things.’

  ‘But there was no other woman and no other man.’

  ‘Oh, but there was.’

  Gerasimov looked perplexed. ‘That was not our understanding.’

  ‘The other man was Jesus Christ.’ She said this evenly.

  ‘I see. And the other woman?’

  ‘Mother Russia.’

  She spoke with no trace of irony, and it struck Gerasimov that perhaps her impressive, incurious manner was the mask of someone who was mad – that the insanity of believers, like the insanity of dissidents, was not, after all, a contrivance of the Fifth Chief Directorat
e. In the present circumstances, however, he was more likely to achieve his objective if he treated Tatiana Orlova as if she was sane.

  ‘You became a believer?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he did not?’

  ‘He believed,’ she said, ‘but not in God.’

  ‘In Russia?’

  ‘Not just in Russia. The Union.’

  ‘He was therefore against the plans of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev for a new treaty between the republics?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so was in favour of the coup?’

  ‘He was not in the Soviet Union during the coup.’

  ‘And if he had been?’

  She looked at him coldly. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘He remained a Communist?’

  ‘So far as I know, he has not torn up his Party card.’

  ‘But he believed …’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In Marxism and Leninism.’

  She hesitated. ‘It is some time since I discussed such things with him …’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then? He believed in Marxism and Leninism, yes, but only, I think, as a means to an end.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He would say …’ She stopped. ‘Is this relevant?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘He would say that a nation must share a belief, whether or not it was true.’

  ‘Then why not become a Christian like you?’

  ‘Because religion is the opium of the people.’ She smiled. ‘He thought Christianity was too gentle …’

  ‘While Communism was strong?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Our people no longer seem to share his point of view.’

  Again, she smiled. ‘They have turned to worship the Golden Calf.’

  Gerasimov looked puzzled. ‘What golden calf?’

  ‘When Moses was up in the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments, the people of Israel turned away from God and started to worship a golden calf.’

  Gerasimov nodded. ‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that in view of recent political developments, your husband might have felt authorized to retain state funds?’

  ‘Again, you ask me to speculate.’

  ‘It is my duty.’

  She sighed. ‘Would he feel authorized? By whom?’

  ‘General Khrulev, for example.’

  ‘I was told that Khrulev was dead.’

  ‘Then certain figures in the parliament – Rutskoi, for example, or Khasbulatov?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Or even, perhaps, by himself?’

  ‘You mean, would he steal state funds like everyone else?’ She laughed. ‘No, comrade. Whatever else he may be, Andrei is not a thief.’

  The doorbell rang. Tatiana Orlova got to her feet. ‘That must be Drusha. Will you excuse me a moment?’

  Her courtesy annoyed Gerasimov. After she had left the room, he stood to look around. The room lacked any of the luxuries that Gerasimov would esteem – a colour television, a video recorder, a compact disc player – but had an old oak wardrobe, a table covered with a silk cloth, a huge old samovar: all things from before the Revolution, antiques like her beliefs. ‘Privileged bitch,’ he said to himself, ‘pretending she never fucks or farts.’

  He looked behind the screen at her narrow single bed. Georgi’s words came back to him: ‘Women need servicing, regular servicing, thorough servicing’; but it looked as if there was no one to service this dried out, stuck-up, would-be nun.

  He could hear children’s voices from the corridor. A single woman with one child in an apartment this size! Perhaps he should offer to move in with her. He would fuck some colour back into her cheeks.

  A brave idea. When Tatiana returned, Gerasimov saw that her first glance – a wistful glance – went not to the Russian Harrison Ford but to the turbaned lump of clay. Then, impassively, she looked over to where Gerasimov was standing by the bookcase next to her bed and asked: ‘Are there any further questions?’

  He was on official business. He must be correct. ‘Can you think of anyone else … a friend, perhaps, who might know where he has gone?’

  She did not sit down. ‘You probably know about his friends better than I do.’

  ‘He had no girlfriend?’

  ‘What does it say in his file?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Is that so difficult to understand?’

  He could see that she regretted putting the question, even before he answered, because it enabled him to say, as he did: ‘Not now that I have met you, Tatiana Ivanovna …’

  The compliment was unwelcome. ‘The children …’ she began.

  ‘Yes, I am going.’ He walked towards the door. ‘I would be grateful if you would tell me if you hear from him.’

  She said nothing.

  As he walked past the kitchen, he glanced in and saw that the boy now sat at the table with a girl of twelve or thirteen. Tatiana made no move to introduce them. Gerasimov moved on down the corridor. ‘A fine boy,’ he said. ‘His father must be proud of him.’

  Again, she did not answer. Gerasimov sensed that she was impatient to get him out of the house. ‘Remember, a telephone call or a postcard,’ he said as she opened the door.

  ‘You will know,’ she said, leaving it uncertain as to whether he would know from her or by intercepting her mail and her calls; and then without bothering to say goodbye she closed the door.

  Gerasimov was angry. At first he did not know why he was angry – whether it was at the condescension of Orlov’s wife or because of the frustrating lack of results of his investigations: probably both. It was quite apparent that both Partovsky and Tatiana were holding something back. Both were too well acquainted with the methods of the former KGB to try to conceal what Gerasimov might discover from other sources; both had appeared to give straight answers to his questions, but neither had cared to confide or to speculate. Both had seen him as an adversary; both in their own way were aiding and abetting the absent Orlov by their minimal cooperation.

  Partovsky, he could understand. No one likes to turn in a fellow officer, particularly a former commander whom one has admired. Gerasimov would have sympathized with Tatiana, too, if she had still been Orlov’s wife. No woman can be expected to betray the man she loves. But they were separated and ideologically opposed. Tatiana should welcome the defeat of the coup, the death of Khrulev and the sacking of hard-line officers like Orlov from the new security service of the Russian Federation. She should have seen Gerasimov as her protector – a knight in shining armour. Instead, she had treated him as a vulgar interloper who had no business poking his nose into her life.

  ‘Privileged bitch,’ he said for the second time, as if the coarse words spoken into the cold air of the dusk could somehow wipe the impassive expression from her face. He was angry not just with her but also with himself – for having fancied her, for having paid her a compliment, knowing quite well that it would be thrown back in his face. The overalls had angered him; her art, like her religion, was the kind of pretension that only the élite could afford.

  Gerasimov returned to the Lubyanka and spent what remained of the day planning the evening ahead. He had been sleeping for the last fortnight on his sister’s sofa, but sensed that he had already outstayed his welcome. He remained determined not to return to Ylena. He wanted her to suffer. In the end he would move back into their flat on the Ulitsa Akademika Koroleva, but he would first have to get over the rage he still felt at the thought of Ylena with Georgi and that night at the Cosmos Hotel.

  Gerasimov was running short of old friends to land on. The patience of most of them had worn thin. The last resort would appear to be Klaudia, an old girlfriend whom he saw from time to time. She would certainly give him a bed for the night unless someone else happened to be in it, but she lived right out in Prazskaya and he could not turn up empty-handed. It would mean sacrificing the bottle of vodka locked in the bottom drawe
r of his desk: a high price to pay for a night either on Klaudia’s sofa or in Klaudia’s bed.

  He could stay in a hotel, but that would be tricky. It would not be easy to find a room. It would be recorded by the militia and so would find its way into his file, giving an impression of ‘domestic instability’ that might affect his future career. In the end, Klaudia seemed the most satisfactory solution. He called her. Her drowsy voice answered the telephone. She said he could come but warned him that she had nothing to eat.

  Gerasimov scrounged some ham and a tin of pilchards from the Lubyanka canteen and, since there was no petrol in the Samara, set off for the suburbs on the metro, changing at Prazskaya onto a bus. He reached Klaudia’s flat by nine. It was quite clear that she had made no effort to tidy up or improve her own appearance. As always, it was hard for Gerasimov to recognize the bright-eyed blonde he had screwed when she was eighteen in the fat slut of thirty-five with her unbrushed hair and worn slippers.

  He was not offended: the great advantage of Klaudia was that though she gave nothing she expected nothing in return. He went through the routine pretence of being pleased to see her. She looked indifferent until he gave her the bottle of vodka, at which point she perked up. He brought out the ham and the tin of pilchards. She had some bread. They ate and they drank. Klaudia started on a long, plaintive story about how she had been done down by her supervisor in the typing pool at Radio Moscow where she worked. Gerasimov tried to listen but he longed to sleep. His mind wandered. He filled their glasses. He was getting drunk. Klaudia started shaking her finger at him. He tried to focus once again on what she was saying. It was the old story that they should have married; that it was because of him that her husband had walked out on her; he was so jealous; just because she was seeing … and so on. He had heard it all before. Like the bottle of vodka, it was the price he had to pay for a night’s board and lodging.

  And Klaudia, as always, was thrown in. By the time they had finished the bottle, the vodka had produced illusions of desire. They staggered from the kitchen into Klaudia’s bedroom and fell onto her bed. Gerasimov went to work, too drunk to feel much pleasure, simply doing what had to be done. And as he groped her flabby body, he began to imagine that she was Ylena. His grunts became angry, his thrusts became blows. Then he thought of the lanky, stuck-up sculptress and became angrier still, yanking back strands of Klaudia’s hair which, being mistaken as a sign of passion, only heightened her excitement until, after a few more brutal thrusts, Gerasimov slumped onto her in a stupor, spent and steeped in self-disgust.