Truth is remembering. He who has no memory has no life. Why had he said this? What was she to remember? Their words at the memorial. But what had they said? He had asked her to choose between him and the paintings. She had chosen him. He had said they would return there on Bastille Day and, if her answer was the same, would never be parted again.
Today was Bastille Day. Would he keep the assignation? Reason told her that he would not. He was now one of the world’s most wanted men. With one hundred million dollars, and a safe haven in Russia, it was unlikely that he would linger in Western Europe, let alone return to Berlin. But her intuition argued otherwise.
It was only a short walk from the New National Gallery to the Soviet Memorial. Smiling, Francesca excused herself from the group of admiring dignitaries, critics and curators that surrounded her and made for the ladies’ cloakroom. She went down the flight of stairs, past the bookshop and restaurant, through to the administrative office and out to the car park by the back door.
She did not hurry. She walked between the Philharmonia Hall and the New State Library, garish modern yellow buildings that lay between the gallery and the Tiergarten, the second built close to what remained of the Wall. She crossed into the Tiergarten, and took the path that led to the Soviet Memorial. Her mind was calm and reflective as if she was indeed going to the memorial to honour the Russian dead. It was warm. Young people lay on the grass in the shade of the silver-barked birch trees. Would he be there, she wondered, or was he now in Russia sitting beneath the branches of just such birch trees as these?
She came to the wide boulevard leading from the Brandenburg Gate to the Goddess of Victory. On the other side was the war memorial; beyond that, shrouded by trees, the Reichstag. Francesca waited for a break in the traffic, then crossed the road. A cluster of Scandinavian tourists were looking up at the tanks and the cannon and the great bronze statue of a Soviet soldier.
Francesca stood there, quite still, remembering what Andrei had asked her a month before, and the answer she had given with no inkling of what the question involved. Now, as she put the question again, in the full knowledge of what he had done, and suspecting that at the outset he had been planning the destruction of all the works of art, she realized that the answer she would give would be the same. Life, her life, did mean more to her than all that dead art, and even if Andrei was a murderer, a torturer and a thief, she was committed to him for better, for worse. He was a man who loved his country and was tormented by its fall from power. He had done terrible things: the image of the tortured woman remained imprinted in Francesca’s mind; but for her sake, he had spared the works of art. If she was given the chance, she had no doubt, the savage Muscovite could be tamed and ennobled by her love.
From the group of tourists behind her, someone stepped forward and in a quiet voice said her name. ‘Francesca.’
She turned but at first did not recognize the bespectacled man.
‘I did not know if you would remember,’ he said.
Now she saw who it was.
‘Or that you would come if you did.’
She smiled. Tears came into her eyes. She longed to embrace him but dared not.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘It was terrible, I realize, but it was the only way. The other man …’
Smiling, she interrupted him. ‘So it is grey, after all.’
‘What is grey?’
‘Your hair.’
‘No, it’s brown. He took off the rimless glasses as if to show her what he was really like. ‘But it could be black again, if you like, and I could grow another beard.’
‘I like you …’ She raised her hand and touched his cheek. ‘I like you any how.’
Her gesture, and words so softly spoken, led him to blush and then look at her with an expression of both gratitude and relief. ‘We cannot be long,’ he said. ‘You may have been followed and I would not want them to think –’
She shook her head. ‘I slipped away.’
He looked over her shoulder into the crowd. ‘Even so …’ He turned, and together they walked a few paces in the direction of the Goddess of Victory. ‘I came back to explain –’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I love Russia.’
‘I know.’
‘I felt that it was the only way.’
She hesitated, then asked: ‘Was it your idea, to torture that poor woman, or were you ordered to do it?’
‘I was ordered to do what had to be done to recover the money.’
‘Was it you who did it?’
‘No. It was the Chechen. But I told him to do it, and I was there.’
‘Did you mean to destroy the paintings?’
A flash of hatred came from his eyes. ‘Yes. That was to be for my personal satisfaction.’ The memory passed. He smiled. ‘But then there was you. You loved the paintings and I … well, I loved you.’
By way of reply, Francesca moved up against him and covertly took hold of his hand.
‘I have little to offer you, Francesca. Here in the West, I shall always be a fugitive. Even in Russia, my future will depend upon how history unfolds. I shall be poor: all the money has gone to the cause. It is a wretched prospect when compared to the life that awaits you back in Boston.’
‘No life awaits me back in Boston. You are now my life.’
‘Francesca.’ The sound of her name was a cry of joy.
‘Can we live by Lake Baikal,’ she asked, ‘like a couple in one of Rasputin’s stories?’
‘Of course.’
‘In a wooden house surrounded by birch trees?’
‘Protected from the outside world by the vastness of the forests and the infinity of the skies.’
She heard a sound from somewhere behind him like that of a ball hitting a bat. As she looked over his shoulder to see what had caused it, he moved forward and for an instant Francesca thought that he was taking her into his arms; but his arms remained limp and his eyes turned to look up at the sky. His mouth opened. A gurgle came from his throat. He began to fall. She held him up. Over his shoulder, she saw the other Russian, Gerasimov. In his hand was a revolver. On his face was a grin. He came closer, poked his gun into the nape of Andrei Orlov’s neck, fired a second shot, stepped back, and ran off towards the Russian consulate on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the background to this novel, I should like to acknowledge my debt to The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922 by Camilla Gray (Thames and Hudson, 1962) and KGB Today. The Hidden Hand by John Barron (Hodder & Stoughton, 1984). Passages from Ivan Turgenev’s On the Eve (William Heinemann, 1895) were translated by Constance Garnett and are reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of The Executors of the Estate of Constance Garnett. The poem ‘My Beloved Will Arrive At Last’, translated by George Reavy, is from Desire to Desire by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Copyright © 1976 by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., and is reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Extracts from Goethe’s Faust Part One (Penguin Classics, 1949), translated by Philip Wayne, are Copyright © the Estate of Philip Wayne, 1949, and are reprinted by permission of Penguin Books. The translations of Mayakovsky’s poem ‘Left March’ is by Herbert Marshall in Mayakovsky and his Poetry (The Pilot Press, 1942); of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin by Charles Johnson (privately printed, London, 1977). The epigraph from Tibor Szamuely’s The Russian Tradition (Martin Secker & Warburg) is Copyright © the estate of Tibor Szamuely 1974 and is reprinted by permission of Secker & Warburg Ltd.
About the Author
Piers Paul Read, third son of poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read, was born in 1941, raised in North Yorkshire, and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College. After studying history at Cambridge University, he spent two years in Germany, and on his return to London, worked as a subeditor on the Times Literary Supplement.
His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published in 1966. His fiction has won the Hawthornden Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, A Married Man and The Free Frenchman, have been adapted for television and a third, Monk Dawson, as a feature film. In 1974, Read wrote his first work of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which has since sold five million copies worldwide. A film of Alive was released in 1993, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. His other works of nonfiction include Ablaze, an account of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl; The Templars, a history of the crusading military order; Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, and The Dreyfus Affair. Read is a fellow and member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. He lives in London.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by Piers Paul Read
Cover design by Kat JK Lee
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4466-0
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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PIERS PAUL READ
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Piers Paul Read, A Patriot in Berlin
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