Читать книгу Hope - Len Deighton - Страница 6

In 1945 Europe was devastated. Food was scarce and bitter hatred was in the air. Parts of France, Belgium, Holland and the western half of Germany was battered but the vast area of land over which the Red Army had advanced was now largely rubble, a barren wasteland where millions of ‘displaced persons’, undernourished, infirm and undocumented, wandered in confusion.

Stalin ordered his Red Army to cling tight to all their gains. His promises made to Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, that the people of Eastern Europe would be allowed free elections, were ignored. The nations of Eastern Europe became satellites of Russia, ruled by expatriates who had been tutored in Moscow. Red Army soldiers complete with tanks and artillery remained in evidence everywhere.

With American generosity, programs such as the ‘Marshall Plan’ slowly revived the countries of Western Europe. But American hopes for a revised and truly democratic Russian political system faded as Moscow exerted its brutal power at home and abroad. An Iron Curtain had come down between the nations of the West and those in the East, and there was no reconciliation. Russia’s military occupation zone was the eastern half of Germany and its heartless rule was fuelled by memories of the barbaric German violation of the Russian Motherland.

In the summer of 1961 the communists built a wall to surround the Western Sector of Berlin. It was, said Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian Premier, ‘a barrier to Western Imperialism’. Anyone in the East trying to take a closer look at Western Imperialism was likely to be shot. Hundreds were killed in attempts to get to the West and the East German border guards were given commendations and bonus payments for killing escapers.

Situated amid this ocean of repression called the Soviet Zone of Germany there was a small island of capitalism. This was the sector of Berlin that had been assigned to British, American and French control. These three sectors of Berlin covered about 185 square miles and about two million people lived there. Technically it remained a ‘military occupation zone’ where soldiers still made all the important decisions. To get from this British-American-French ‘island’ to ‘West Germany’ traffic was confined to three specific highways, all of them over 100 miles long. Wandering off the approved roads could lead to difficulties. On a journey from Prague to Berlin, I was detained in a Russian Army barrack complex until, in the small hours of morning and with a help of an amiable Russian colonel and my bottle of duty-free cognac, I was released to continue my journey.

Any writer who pins his story to fixed dates had better hold on to his hat for it is likely to be a rough and rocky ride. My whole Bernard Samson series was based upon the belief that the Berlin Wall would fall before the end of the century. There were many times when I went to bed convinced that this assumption had been a reckless gamble, and there were many people asking me where the plot was going. Sometimes I thought I heard a measure of Schadenfreude. More than one expert advised me to forget the Wall, tear my plan down, and radically change its direction. I didn’t yield to my fears. I stuck to my lonely task and to the original scenario and eventually was vindicated.

It is unlikely that the true and complete story of the collapse of the Wall and the whole communist system will ever be told. But the overall pattern is now fairly clear and the signs were there long before the newspapers and the TV camera crews arrived for the finale. The election of Karol Wojtyla to be John Paul II, a Polish Pope, changed the world’s history. Here was a fearless man not afraid to declare that communism was a vile and repressive tyranny that denied the freedom that everyone deserved. His outspoken challenge, unlike those of most politicians, did not vary from time to time and place to place, no matter how unwelcome it was to some of his audiences. His words frightened the dictators, disturbed the apparatchiks, and made Poland’s Catholics into a network of frontline activists. The Polish-American Catholics of Chicago provided a great deal of the money; the CIA added more and worked with the Vatican to route it to Poland’s anti-communist networks. George Kosinski personifies the muddled, almost schizophrenic, mindset of many Poles. His fears and double-dealing provide us with a glimpse of the struggle, and Hope depicts the vital days when the USSR was deciding whether to move with military force against its recalcitrant ally or hold still and hope for the best. Warsaw was deeply in debt to Western banks and Moscow was in no position to pick up the bill. Bernard Samson is in Poland and near the frontier when the Soviet Union was poised and ready to occupy its politically unreliable but strategically essential neighbour. The events depicted here reflect the tension as the Poles waited for the tanks to come rolling westwards.

As Poland’s communist regime was being undermined by the bravery of the Polish Pope, the Lutheran Church in communist Germany became more and more important in the struggle against Moscow. In Hope Bernard’s journeys to the East record the fierce repressive measures the German regime resorted to when it became the final outpost of the communist empire.

Tying a story to events is not something to be undertaken lightly. But having a timescale for the stories provided some benefits. Hope was bountiful: with the astonishing Hurricane that tore a path through London, minor asides such as the Swiss elections and the devastating collapse of the world’s stock exchanges. At the end of the year the Pope and Gorbachev met in the Vatican. What more eventful background could any writer wish for?

I was lucky to find so much of my story in Poland where communism collapsed so suddenly. The attractions of Warsaw are there for anyone to inspect but I was lucky to find the hideous Rozyckiego market so perfect for my purpose. Explorations into the countryside brought me to the Kosinki’s grand old family mansion, a place even more mysterious than I had envisioned. Both places are faithfully described here in the book; there was no need to change a thing. As with many of the research trips I have made for my books I found it very beneficial to return to the location at the season it was to be depicted in my story. The Polish countryside in winter is not to be found in the tourist brochures but despite the discomfort and inconvenience I liked this strange fairy-tale mix of dreams and nightmares.

Every writer has different priorities, which makes reading fiction so rewarding. After the basic idea, my own priority has always been dialogue. From dialogue characterization must follow and from characterization comes motivation and plot. For all of the above reasons I try to inform the reader by dialogue and, when I read and reread the drafts of my books prior to publication, I search for ways of transforming authorial comment and description into dialogue.

At a creative writing school in California the students read (and enjoyed) studying the Bernard Samson books in reverse order. They noted and analyzed the changing character of Bernard and were kind enough to show me some of the results. By assigning various specific fictional characters to student teams the class unravelled the complex weave of the plot. Even without such close examination most readers immediately see that Bernard – without telling outright lies – is inclined to bend the truth to his own advantage.

But dialogue and characterization is more important than truth and plot. The purpose of characterization is to demonstrate the changes that take place as the story proceeds. I consider this process vital. Whether the time span is short as it is in Bomber (when there is only 24 hours from cover to cover) or long as in Winter (a family story lasting half a century) the characters must be seen to change, and that means to change in response to the events of the story. The Bernard Samson books take the characters through several years and the man we join in the first chapter of this book, Hope, is older, wiser and more psychologically battered than the man in the first book, Berlin Game. But Bernard, whatever his shortcomings, is always a loyal friend to us.

Len Deighton, 2011