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Haakon, Haakon, believe me, I am serious, I have real reason to believe, and I cannot tell you why, but I assure you I have real reason to change my mind about Russia. They are not what you believe them to be. You must not continue your trust, your blind faith, in the policies of the U.S.S.R.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Julius Robert Oppenheimer, what a pleasure, at last!”
Oppie looked around before taking the outstretched hand. He knew Russians liked to use all three of a person’s names; the man he was greeting had already introduced himself as Stepan Zakharovich Apresyan.
They were in an open area of grass bordered by trees, and although the park was crowded this August day no one else was nearby. “Actually,” Oppie said, as he released his grip, “the J doesn’t stand for anything.”
“Ah,” said Apresyan, in the knowing tone of one used to keeping secrets. “No. Of course it doesn’t.”
Oppie was sure that Apresyan—the Russian-born son of an Armenian priest, youthful and eager at thirty-two—doubtless had reviewed a full dossier on him, just as Oppie had gotten Groves to provide him with the file on physicist Igor Kurchatov, Oppie’s equivalent in the Russian atomic-bomb program.
“We’ve had our eye on you for a long time,” Apresyan said, looking him up and down as if he were a mythical beast at last sighted in the wild. “You appear, if I may, thin. Are you well?”
Oppie shrugged—and he could feel how bony his shoulders were as he did so, feel how much of a scarecrow figure he was. The weight he’d lost in war-time was not coming back.
“I’m fine,” he said, pleased that no cough followed the words. His throat was always raw, but being here, in the company of this man, the vice consul from the Soviet Consulate General in San Francisco, had made it as dry as the sands back on La Jornada del Muerto.
The two of them were walking west in Golden Gate Park on a sunny afternoon, heading toward Ocean Beach and the Pacific. They quite likely were being shadowed by both the F.B.I. and the N.K.G.B., or whatever they were calling it now, but the park was three miles long, and the air was filled with the sounds of boisterous kids and exasperated parents calling out to them. Like the best of children, Oppie thought, he and Apresyan might be seen but they wouldn’t be heard.
Continuing along, they came to the California Academy of Sciences, which had been located in the park since 1916 and now consisted of three buildings: the North American Hall of Birds and Mammals, the Steinhart Aquarium, and the Simson African Hall. Nature in all her splendor surrounded here by even more nature.
The Academy dealt solely with what they called natural sciences: the old-fashioned gentlemanly pursuits of stargazing and weather-forecasting, of studying plants and animals, of collecting rocks and fossils. Physics didn’t fall under its mandate; his field was, Oppie mused, therefore an unnatural science. Perverse. Not in accordance with accepted standards of right and wrong.
And this—this—was an unnatural meeting, or certainly would be thought such by many he had to deal with. The J-for-nothing Robert Oppenheimer who had spurned Haakon Chevalier’s overture on behalf of George Eltenton, who had severed his ties with Communist-front organizations, who had counseled his former students to do the same, walking—fucking strolling—along with a Soviet official whose job title everyone knew was simply a congenial public shield for espionage work.
“Your English is impeccable,” said Oppie.
Apresyan was handsome with deep-set eyes and full lips. He tilted his head. “Languages are my thing,” he replied, and Oppie smiled at the ostentatious use of Yankee slang, a move worthy of himself. “I speak thirteen of them. Russian, English, Turkish, Arabic ...”
Oppie could read nine languages, but the pool of ones he could converse in was smaller. “Dutch?” Oppie asked, picking a tongue any random eavesdropper would be unlikely to know.
“Ja inderdaad,” replied Apresyan.
“Good,” replied Oppie, also in Dutch. “Let’s speak that then.”
Apresyan nodded his assent. “I’m pleased you reached out. It’s been a while since you’ve been a party member.”
Even in Dutch, Oppie felt the need to issue a denial. “I’ve never been a member of the Communist Party.”
“No? Weren’t you, Professor Chevalier, and, oh, many others, including that history professor, Gordon Griffiths, for one? Weren’t you all members of the Berkeley faculty Communist club before the U.S. entered the war?”
“Je vergist je,” said Oppie. You’re mistaken.
“Of course, of course,” replied Apresyan; the knowing tone was the same in Dutch as English. “I must have heard wrong.”
They walked a few dozen yards along the path, birds hopping out of their way. Oppie was wearing his usual hat, but he could feel the afternoon sun on the back of his hand.
“Still,” said the vice consul, “there are benefits to being in the Party. And for you there’d be special benefits, including membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. If ‘Comrade Oppenheimer’ doesn’t sit well on the tongue, perhaps ‘Academician Oppenheimer’ does?”
Oppie’s heart was racing. “I’m not looking to defect.”
“Surely ‘emigrate’ is a less-problematic word? And surely, as you yourself have often said, the world would be a safer place if atomic secrets were more evenly distributed. Right now, not only is America the sole country to have the bomb, it’s proven that it’ll use it, too. There need to be checks and balances. The threat of retaliation is what will keep the bomb from ever being used again. And no one would want a repeat of the horrors of the past, would they?”
When Oppie thought of Russia, he thought of ballet, of careful choreography, of performers hitting their marks. And this lithe Russian certainly knew how to hit his. The path turned, and there, in front of them, was one of Golden Gate Park’s great attractions: the Oriental Tea Garden, or, as it had been known until the war, the Japanese Tea Garden. Created for the 1894 World’s Fair, the garden had transitioned from temporary exhibit to permanent installation. A Japanese horticulturalist named Makoto Hagiwara had moved into the house here with his family to serve as custodians. Makoto-san died in 1925, but his daughter Takano took over the work. Kitty, who had often visited here when they lived in Berkeley, had admired Takano’s arrangements—until she and her children were evicted in 1942 and forced into one of General Groves’s internment camps.
Oppie had never been to Japan. Bob Serber and Phil Morrison had gone shortly after the destruction of Hiroshima, after the annihilation of Nagasaki, to glean what knowledge they could from the devastation, but Oppie had stayed home. He couldn’t face the aftermath, but here, suddenly, in front of him, risen ghosts: a five-tiered pagoda, a meticulous rock garden, bonsai trees, and Buddhist and Shinto sculptures. Fountains and little waterfalls mocked him with aqueous laughter.
Those poor little people.
“We can offer you a lot,” said Apresyan. “A beautiful home in Moscow. The best laboratories. The best equipment. Unlimited funds. And you’d work right alongside Kurchatov.”
“I’ve no interest in making bombs anymore,” said Oppie. “Even my interest in controlling their use is secondary now. I want to talk to Kurchatov, and to others—others who he will know but I’m not even aware of. Your best minds in physics, especially ...” He paused as a young couple holding hands came down the garden steps, waiting until they were out of earshot; Dutch and English weren’t that different when it came to technical terms: “... de fysica van fusie.” The physics of fusion.
“Ah, then America is proceeding with a hydrogen bomb,” said Apresyan, as calmly as if remarking on the weather.
“I didn’t say that. You’ve researched my past; you know that before the war my field was stellar physics—the fusion that powers stars and what happens at the ends of their lives. There are ... problems ... in that realm that we—that I—need help with.”
They passed the arching Drum Bridge, a wooden semi-circle over a stream with climbing slats instead of stairs, and continued through the elegant landscaping, scarlet and salmon-pink flowers punctuating the green. A serene Buddha, eyes closed, ignored them.
“Well,” said Apresyan, “Dr. Kurchatov’s energies remain focused, naturally, until the current imbalance of power can be resolved. If you could help him with that, I’m sure the Academy would welcome him turning to more arcane matters.” Oppie said nothing, and after a time, the Russian went on: “And, speaking of power imbalances, the West really does owe us a first-rate physicist since Gamow left.”
At the last Solvay Conference, in 1933, George Gamow had defected from the Soviet Union. A year later, he was teaching at George Washington University; it was he who had recruited Edward Teller to the United States from London. Although Gamow had declined to work on the Manhattan Project, his areas of interest of late were astrophysics and cosmology; Oppie hoped to bring him on to the Arbor Project’s Patient Power solar-research team.
“I simply want to open a conduit,” said Oppie. “A channel of communication between those of us working on ... on certain problems here in the United States and those in Russia who might have valuable insights. A two-way street, as it were.”
They were well out of the Oriental Garden now; indeed, they were past Crossover Drive. “We’ve held receptions at the consulate before with visiting Soviet scientists,” Apresyan said. “But, although I assure you that Dr. Kurchatov is most happy in Russia, after the unfortunate loss of Gamow, you can surely understand that our top minds cannot be brought to the very shadow of the Presidio.”
A large striped ball about the size of a desktop globe went bouncing across their path, and a trio of boys chased after it. Oppie lit his pipe and smoked it in silence. As they got farther west, he could smell dung from the bison paddock and, soon, salt air as seagulls wheeled overhead.
And then they came to the end of the park, and, Oppie had assumed, the end of their business. The Dutch Windmill, no longer used for park irrigation and falling into disrepair, was to their right, and in front of them was the road that separated the park from the sands of Ocean Beach. Beyond that, the Pacific—“the peaceful,” earth’s own sea of tranquility—stretched to the horizon, azure meeting cerulean.
Oppie was about to quip something along the lines of them likely being the only ones to pass by the Dutch windmill today who were actually speaking Dutch when Stepan Zakharovich Apresyan pointed just past the shoreline. “See that small boat? The red one?”
Oppie tilted his head down a bit so his porkpie brim would better shield against the afternoon sun. “Ja.”
“It’s a speedboat, manned and ready to go. There’s a Russian trawler, the Krylov, in international waters. Just cross the road, board the boat, and ...”
Oppie waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, Oppie said, “I have a wife.”
“A wife who has run off on you repeatedly,” replied the vice consul. “A wife who, to be honest, wasn’t the woman you really wanted to marry. But if you wish, she can easily be collected, too.”
“And two children.”
“Yes, including a daughter you offered up for adoption.”
Oppie’s eyes went wide, and Apresyan shrugged amiably. “We were only searching for certain information, but you know the saying: a wide net catches many fish. He gestured out at the ocean. “That boat has an anchor, but do you? New York, Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden, Berkeley, Los Alamos, Princeton.” He turned to Oppie. “Jij bent niet het type dat een band vormt.”
The most direct translation was, “You’re not the type to form bonds,” but ...
His heart fluttered.
But, yes, it could also be rendered as, “You’re not the ‘attached’ kind.”
Oh, Robert. Robert, Robert.
“There’s a new life waiting,” Apresyan said. “A rewarding one, a wealthy one.”
If only ..., Oppie thought. Somewhere fresh; a place where no one would care, anymore at least, about what had happened with Haakon Chevalier. Somewhere far from Jean’s ghost; far from Trinity’s ashes.
But he couldn’t go. There was work to be done. There was a world to be saved.
“I’m sorry,” said Oppie and he could hear the wistful regret in his own voice. “I can’t. But, please, I implore you, let Kurchatov contact me; let him and me talk.” He switched at last back to English. “Good day, Mr. Vice Consul.” Robert turned and headed back into Golden Gate Park.
From behind him, fading into the distance, over the sounds of traffic and gently crashing waves, he heard Apresyan say, “Dosvedanya, comrade,” but Oppie didn’t turn around.