I next met Herman in an Automat. He was late. I waited the prescribed fifteen extra minutes, then fifteen more. He was a stranger; he might have lost his way. Presently, I saw him weaving between the tables. I thought: “How clumsily he walks.” He sat down, spoke thickly and nervously and left almost at once. Not until he was gone did the perfectly obvious fact flash on me: Herman was drunk. I could not grasp it at once because I could not believe that an underground Communist would come drunk to an appointment.
My relations with Herman grew steadily worse. Each of us disliked and distrusted the other. Neither of us concealed his feelings. Herman thought that I was stupid. I thought that he was irresponsible and corrupt. Our meetings became mere brush-offs. After a few contemptuous words and impatient gestures, he would dismiss me. He would not give me any work to do. I was no longer in touch with Ulrich and Maria, and had no right to ask to get in touch with them. I was completely at Herman’s mercy. It is practically impossible to convey to a non-Communist the subtle destructiveness of this relationship, not because it threatened my life (with a man like Herman that was always an ultimate possibility), but because it threatened my life’s whole meaning. After a few weeks of that treatment, I began to be demoralized.
One morning I was moping in a cafeteria. I had passed a sleepless night and had not even taken the trouble to shave—a breach of underground rules. Suddenly, Ulrich sat down beside me. I never asked him how he knew I was there, or whether our meeting was chance. To me he looked much as he must have looked to the two condemned men he freed from the firing squad in Sebastopol.
Ulrich took one good look at me and said: “You are not going to work with Herman any more. You are coming back with me. I don’t care what happens.” “He’s no good,” I said. “You’re wrong,” said Ulrich angrily. “You always see things in black and white. Herman isn’t black and white. He’s a very clever rascal.”
I did not see Herman again while I was connected with that apparatus. But I had a lurking feeling that the clever rascal had jotted down my name in his doomsday book. I was relieved when Maria told me that Ulrich had won his fight with Herman, who had been recalled in disgrace to Moscow. There, she said with a triumphant laugh at so complete a humiliation, Herman had been made a “Red Professor.” Neither she nor I then knew that, with an initiative unheard of among Communists, Herman had gone directly to Molotov, had told him that he had highly important contacts in Washington, but that jealous cliques in the Fourth Section kept him from developing them. Molotov sent Herman back to the United States as an agent of the G.P.U., the Soviet secret police.
That is why, one night months later, as I was walking down Broadway, I suddenly saw Herman walking toward me—a transformed Herman. He was elegantly sheathed in an expensive, form-fitting overcoat. He wore an equally expensive hat, very dashingly flipped and angled. I thought: “It’s against all the rules. But if I don’t speak to him, I shall never believe that I really saw him.” We exchanged a few uncomfortable words. Then I broke off and said: “Good luck.” “Good luck to you,” said Herman with deliberate, blood-chilling emphasis. I know now that my sudden appearance, as if I had been shadowing him, may well have stirred immeasurable fears in his mind.
A few days later, I told The Doctor: “Herman is back.” “I know that,” he said. “And I know what you don’t know. Herman is very sick. He is in a hospital.” Soon he told me: “Herman is dead.” “What happened?” I asked. “Pneumonia,” said Dr. Rosenbliett. I was sure, from something in The Doctor’s manner, that Herman had not died of pneumonia.
He had, in fact, been murdered.
XXI
I have heard four versions of Herman’s death. I heard the first from Dr. Rosenbliett some time after he had told me that Herman died of pneumonia. I heard the second from Ludwig Lore, the former editor of the Volkszeitung. Later on, in my underground days, I met and dealt with Lore when he was writing “Behind the Cables” as a columnist on the New York Evening Post. It was Lore who first told me that Herman was also known as “Oskar.”
Colonel Bykov also knew Herman as Oskar. He gave me a third version of his death. General Walter Krivitsky first told me that Herman’s real name was Valentine Markin. He gave me the fourth version.
Dr. Rosenbliett’s final version was this. Herman had been drinking heavily. Late at night, he went, alone, into a cheap bar somewhere in midtown Manhattan. He drank more and flashed a big roll of bills. Two toughs followed him out of the saloon, and, on the deserted street, beat him up, robbed him and left him lying in the gutter. Herman died in a hospital of a fractured skull complicated by pneumonia.
Ludwig Lore’s version, richer in detail, was substantially the same as Dr. Rosenbliett’s. Lore, a generous man, had been Herman’s close friend. It had fallen to him to hush up the story, to cover up the curious discrepancies in Herman’s identification papers and, finally, to see that he was quietly buried in a Brooklyn cemetery.
Colonel Bykov’s version was very different. I had never discussed Herman with Bykov. But one night that nervous man suddenly asked me: “What happened to the Oskar?” I told him that he had been killed while drunk. “Who killed him?” he asked. “Two hoodlums,” I said. “No,” said Bykov slyly, “the Oskar was killed by the American secret police.” At the time, I thought that this was merely another amusing example of Colonel Bykov’s obsession. He believed that “the American secret police” were omnipresent and operated by the same methods as the Russian secret police. But Russians are masters of confusion and one favorite tactic is to shift the blame for something they have done to their opposite numbers elsewhere. I now believe that Colonel Bykov knew the story that General Krivitsky was later to tell me, and that he deliberately shifted the blame from the Russians to the American police.
Walter Krivitsky, too, denied, that Herman had been killed for his money. His version went back to the time when Herman appealed to Molotov against the Fourth Section. The supreme head of the Fourth Section, General Berzin, an old Bolshevik who had once saved Lenin’s life, had been enraged. When Molotov sent Herman back to the United States, Berzin saw to it that he did not go alone. He sent two of his killers, who caught up with Herman in New York. They knew his habits. They waited for a favorable chance. They followed him into the little midtown bar and out of it. On the quiet street they broke his skull.
It is all but impossible not to be affected by a melodrama working itself out so close at hand, among half a dozen people intimately known, in familiar rooms and streets, in a shared darkness and secrecy.
I did not think often or actively about Herman’s life and death. But, for several years, his memory floated just below the surface of my mind, like a corpse constantly ejected by a whirlpool. I could not quite dismiss the question he raised: Is this the new man that Communism is breeding? I managed not to answer it until Colonel Bykov, who in some ways resembled the dead man, answered it for me.
XXII
In reporting the thinness of my own activities with this particular Soviet underground, the collapse of the courier system, and Herman’s insubordination and death I do not wish to leave an impression that the apparatus was a costly farce that no one need take seriously. In the nature of underground work, there must be roughly two failures to every moderate success. I have reason to believe that the apparatus was engaged in much successful activity which it kept me, as a newcomer, away from but which involved others. The flasks of flashless powder, the photographic workshop just above The Office which was so carefully kept secret from me, remarks dropped by Ulrich, Maria, and especially by The Doctor, point to activities which I had not grown up enough in a conspiratorial sense to have a part in. That I learned as much as I did was chiefly due to the fact that I became so friendly with Ulrich and Maria so quickly.
The Doctor was scarcely less friendly and much more talkative. He told me many things that a junior undergroundling would never ordinarily know. One story he told me sheds light on the more menacing operations of the underground. It was t
he story of how the Russians obtained data about the Chrystie tank. This tank, developed by the American inventor, Walter Chrystie, was of great interest to the Russians. They set on foot an elaborate “combination” (as Communists call it) to secure its plans.
Somehow, possibly through a connection of Dr. Rosenbliett, who seemed to have connections all over the world, the Soviet apparatus discovered that an American Army officer who had access to the secret tank material was also an Irish patriot. He was in touch with the I.R.A., the Irish Republican Army, which was then fighting the British. The Fourth Section decided to secure this officer as a source.
In London, representatives of the Soviet underground made contact with an underground group of the I.R.A. The Russians undertook to send two submarines loaded with machine guns and other arms for the I.R.A. to the west coast of Ireland. In repayment, the I.R.A. agreed that the American Army officer whom I shall call General O’Gordon would regularly turn over to Soviet agents in the United States material relating to Chrystie tanks.
In the United States, the deal was clinched by a politician in Queens, New York (whose name I know), and whom The Doctor claimed as his friend. General O’Gordon, a man in advanced middle age, was introduced to a Soviet underground contact. The general agreed to take to his home on week-ends the secret tank material. He would then turn it over to a Soviet agent who would have it microfilmed and return it in time for the general to replace it in the Army’s files early Monday morning. What the general thought was going on I do not know. But Dr. Rosenbliett quoted a curious remark made by him at his first meeting with the Soviet agent: “I am glad to help the I.R.A., but I would not do a thing to help those God-damn Rooshians.”
From The Doctor I gathered that the system had worked smoothly for some time. There was only one hitch. One afternoon, the Army called up the general and asked him to return at once a document which for some reason was needed. The general was momentarily embarrassed because none of the tank documents was at that time in his possession. They were being microfilmed and he did not know where they were. If Dr. Rosenbliett explained how the general got out of that one, I have forgotten the explanation. But, to avoid unwelcome phone calls in the future, the general, after turning over his material, would go on week-end fishing trips and would not return until the documents were to be given back to him.
This fruitful relationship bore within it the seed of its own defeat. The general was very fond of good liquor in quantity. Prohibition was in force. One of the most important duties of the German couriers in those days, said Dr. Rosenbliett, had been to smuggle in sufficient cognac to keep the general in a co-operative mood. (No doubt, this had been one of Charlie’s and Henry’s duties, one that was kept carefully from me.) The cognac was the undoing of the general. One day he drank too much. He suffered a heart attack and died.
“I never before heard of a source just dying,” said Dr. Rosenbliett.
The Soviet Government never delivered the promised arms to the west coast of Ireland.
XXIII
Underground work is one test of a Communist. Few other party activities make such insistent demands upon his devotion, discipline, resourcefulness, and courage, because few others require him to demonstrate daily, in action, his revolutionary faith beyond all appeals of country, family, friendship, and personal interest. But few others give him the same sense of participating directly in the revolutionary transformation of our time, for which a Communist exists. It is this sense of revolutionary purpose that gives underground activity whatever appeal it has. Once its startling novelty has worn off, and in my case that happened within the first few months, that revolutionary purpose alone makes it bearable.
For conspiracy itself is dull work. Its mysteries quickly become a bore, its secrecy a burden and its involved way of doing things a nuisance. Its object is never to provide excitement, but to avoid it. Thrills mean that something has gone wrong. The mysterious character of underground work is merely a tedious daily labor to keep thrills from happening. I have never known a good conspirator who enjoyed conspiracy. I have never known one who did not feel: If only I could perform one simple act simply and directly, unhampered by conspiratorial techniques. I have seldom known one who did not think: when will my term of service be up so that I can get on to something less peculiar? It is seldom up for Communists with that practical approach to its mysteries, but there are reprieves.
One came for Ulrich in the early spring of 1934. He told me abruptly one day that he and Maria were going “home”—back to Russia. The apparatus was to be disbanded. It now seems perfectly clear that the apparatus was not disbanded. It was given an interim rest, a common practice, during a change of chiefs. Certainly, Dr. Rosenbliett remained just where he had always been.
I was turned back to work in the underground section of the American Communist Party, where J. Peters was delighted to have me. No doubt, he knew more about the shuffle in which I was a pawn than I did.
I said good-bye to Ulrich and Maria. I never expected to hear of them again. My writing habits had been one of Ulrich’s gnawing worries and they were on his mind still. “No writing,” he warned me. “You are never to write down anything you have seen.” When we shook hands, Ulrich smiled to soften the harshness, but not the meaning, of his last words to me: “Remember, Bob, there are only two ways that you can really leave us: you can be shot by them or you can be shot by us.”
6
THE CHILD
I
“For one of us to have a child,” my brother had said in his agony, “would be a crime against nature.” I longed for children. But I agreed with my brother. There had been enough misery in our line. What selfish right had I to perpetuate it? And what right had any man and woman to bring children into the 20th-century world? They could only suffer its inevitable revolutions or die in its inevitable wars.
One extreme group among the Communists held that it was morally wrong for a professional revolutionist to have children at all. They could only hamper or distract his work. That was one of the penalties of being a Communist. I did not belong to that group, but in general I shared its views. As an underground Communist, I took it for granted that children were out of the question.
Not only left-wing and underground Communists took such matters for granted. Abortion was a commonplace of party life. There were Communist doctors who rendered that service for a small fee. Communists who were more choosy knew liberal doctors who would render the same service for a larger fee. Abortion, which now fills me with physical horror, I then regarded, like all Communists, as a mere physical manipulation.
One dap early in 1933, my wife told me that she believed she had conceived. No man can hear from his wife, especially for the first time, that she is carrying his child, without a physical jolt of joy and pride. I felt it. But so sunk were we in that life that it was only a passing joy, and was succeeded by a merely momentary sadness that we would not have the child. We discussed the matter, and my wife said that she must go at once for a physical check and to arrange for the abortion.
When my wife came back (we were still living in Greenwich Village), she was quiet and noncommital. The doctor had said that there was a child. My wife went about preparing supper. “What else did she say?” I asked. “She said that I am in good physical shape to have a baby.” My wife went on silently working. Very slowly, the truth dawned on me. “Do you mean,” I asked, “that you want to have the child?”
My wife came over to me, took my hands and burst into tears. “Dear heart,” she said in a pleading voice, “we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.” A wild joy swept me. Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and its theories, the wars and revolutions of the 20th century, crumbled at the touch of the child. Both of us simply wanted a child. If the points on the long course of my break with Communism could be retraced, that is probably one of them—not at the level of the conscious mind, but at the level of unconscious life.
I won Ulrich’s reluctant consent to take my wife back to our barn in Hunterdon County, where the child could grow among the things its mother and I loved—close to the earth, the gardens, the thrushes and deer in the mountain woods and the robins in the valley.
Because it was inexpensive, we arranged to have the baby born at Booth Memorial, the Salvation Army hospital on 15th Street in New York City. By then, we were living at Fort Lee, New Jersey.
The night of October 16, 1933, I reached home late, around eleven o’clock. My wife was dressed, sitting at a table with a clock in front of her. She was waiting for me and quietly clocking the intervals between her first labor pains. We rode the long miles downtown while she gripped my hand during her pangs. When they took her away from me, a terrible despair seized me. I felt sure that my wife would die. I blamed myself and I knew that, without her, I did not wish to live.
All night I tramped the streets, as I had done the night when I climbed through my wife’s window. From time to time, I telephoned the hospital. The answer was always the same: my wife was in the delivery room; the baby had not come. At seven o’clock in the morning, the baby still had not come.
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