Lee Pressman’s recollection of these matters differs materially from mine. Testifying under oath before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in 1951, he denied that he had ever known Dr. Rosenbliett. But, then in 1948, Lee had greeted my first testimony about his Communist membership in the Ware Group as “the stale and lurid mouthings of a Republican exhibitionist.”
By 1951, he was prepared to concede that he had been a Communist, that the Ware Group had existed, that he had been a member of it. He named three other members whom I had named. He could not remember four other members whom I had also named, and he insisted that he had never known me in Washington. He had seen me, he testified, only once. That was when he said I had brought into his New York office for legal advice a man named Eckhart, for whom he subsequently did some business. Pressman’s files on the subject were no longer extant and his recollection had dimmed. He placed the year of my visit with Eckhart as 1936. I had placed Pressman’s meeting with Dr. Rosenbliett and me in 1937.
About the date Pressman may or may not be right. But about the other parts of his recollection Pressman is unqualifiedly mistaken.
First, the facts about our Washington association and Pressman’s connection with Dr. Rosenbliett are substantially as I have reported them. Second, I have never at any time been in any office of Pressman’s in New York or anywhere else, though I once visited his Washington apartment. Third, I have never known anyone named Eckhart.
Nevertheless, an Eckhart exists. I have seen photographs of him, but I have never known him. Curiously enough, he resides, or resided until recently, in Mexico City.
I thought it odd that Pressman opened his testimony, in 1948 (he was then denying my testimony in full), by demanding to know if any witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities had charged him with espionage. He was assured that no one had. Nor is any such charge implied in what I have written here. The purchase of arms for the Spanish Republicans, even under Soviet auspices, and on Dr. Rosenbliett’s peculiar terms, does not constitute espionage. So brisk a lawyer as Pressman must know that, even if he does not, for example, know the present whereabouts of Dr. Rosenbliett.
XXI
The underground disgorged one other ghost. Some time in 1937 or 1938, Hideo Noda, the perpetual phantom from Don’s dead Japanese apparatus, flitted through New York again.
Bykov instructed me to meet him and to send him to a candy store far out in Brooklyn where Noda would be met by a Russian who would direct his further destiny. I saw Ned only for a moment, to give him the address. I did not ask, of course, where he had been since I had sent him on to a hotel in Southern France. Before Noda had been alert, somewhat as birds are, as if in him mental and physical brightness were one. Now he seemed a little faded and tired. Our brief meeting was stiff. Perhaps he still considered me a “diversionist mad dog” and was disappointed to find that I had not, after his denunciation of me to the Party, been purged. But-I suspect that Noda was so silent because, had he begun to speak, the words that came out would have been: “Oh, horror, horror, horror!” I stood and watched Ned as he walked away, something that I did not often do. I never saw him again.
In 1939, the New York Times published his rather impressive obituary. In Tokyo, the promising Japanese-American painter Hideo Noda had died suddenly, of a “cerebral tumor.” He was in his twenties. I wondered whether, in Ulrich’s words, Noda had “been shot by them or shot by us.”
XXI
Almost until the very end, I felt that there must be something human about Colonel Bykov if I could only reach it. For without it he was a caricature. But no man is a caricature. At last I gave up, chiefly from lack of interest. I decided that in his case the caricature actually was most of the man. It was a special kind of caricature. It was one of the images in which Communism creates those who have never known anything else. Most of Bykov’s life had been lived under Communism. He believed that he was constantly enveloped by the American secret police because he could not imagine a society in which the secret police were not everywhere. If he could have imagined anything so badly organized, he would have been revolted. He was an awed admirer of Nechayev, the 19th-century Russian who carried the logic of revolution to its limit, teaching (Lenin, among others) that murder, kidnapping, arson, robbery and blackmail, all crimes, are justified if they serve the socialist cause. From Bykov I first learned the name of Nechayev, who also served Dostoyevsky as the terrible prototype of Pyotr Stepanovitch Veskhovensky in The Possessed.
Bykov did not belong to the generation that had made the Revolution, and they seemed as alien and preposterous to him as foreigners. They belonged to another species and he talked about them the way people talk about the beastly or amusing habits of cows or pigs. Most of the surviving revolutionary leaders were shot while Bykov and I knew each other. As each foredoomed man made his brief transit from the dark agony of prison and torture into the Klieg-lighted agony of public trial and back to the darkness of execution cellar and death, Bykov had an appropriate slur or sneer for each.
“Stalin will show them,” he would say as if the thought gratified a kind of gluttony, “he’s a tough boy, a tough boy. Put your hand in his mouth and he will bite it off.”
When Karl Radek was on trial for his life, Bykov gleefully recalled a barracks prank involving the Old Bolshevik, who had been one of the outstanding minds and wits of Lenin’s circle. Radek (in better days) had been asked to address the officers of the G.P.U. Two or three times he telephoned to make sure that a special G.P.U. car would call for him. “We sent him a car,” said Bykov, spluttering with laughter. “We sent a tank. We invited him to get in. ‘Please to get in, Comrade Radek,’ we said politely. He was an old fox. At first he did not want to get in. Then he was ashamed. So he got in. We drove him through the roughest streets. We nearly beat his brains out against the top of the tank.”
Leo Kamenev was almost the only man I ever heard Bykov mention without a malicious splutter. After the former commissar and Soviet ambassador to Italy was purged and shot, Bykov suddenly said: “I saw Kamenev once. We were in a Moscow streetcar. It was so crowded we could not move. He was just standing there. Nobody took any notice of him.” There passed over Bykov’s face the sheepish expression that replaced distrust or cynicism only in moments of embarrassment. “It gave me a queer feeling,” he said. “An old man, like that, who had been a big, powerful man, who had been a commissar, and he was simply standing in a streetcar. Nobody looked at him and he did not look at anybody.”
“What is the matter with him?” I thought. Then I realized what was distressing Bykov. Kamenev on the streetcar was the living evidence that careers have an end.
“Where is Juliet Poyntz?” Bykov once asked me when the press had reported her disappearance and it was as clear to Bykov as to me that the G.P.U. had murdered the defenseless woman. “Gone with the wind,” he answered himself gayly. For he liked to collect topical tags.
Brutality stirred something in him that at its mere mention came loping to the surface like a dog to a whistle. It was as close to pleasure as I ever saw him come. Otherwise, instead of showing pleasure, he gloated. He was incapable of joy, but he had moments of mean exultation. He was just as incapable of sorrow, though he felt disappointment and chagrin. He was vengeful and malicious. He would bribe or bargain, but spontaneous kindness or generosity seemed never to cross his mind. They were beyond the range of his feeling. In others he despised them as weaknesses.
Bykov was Jewish, but he was a violent anti-Semite. His hatred of rabbis was pathological. If we passed a rabbi on the street, Bykov, who was otherwise so careful, would stop dead and stare while his face worked with anger. With one hand, he would grab my sleeve. With the other, he would point while he sneered in an audible voice: “Look! Look!” I would have to pull him away. Apparently, he could not control himself.
His sense of human relationships was also inhuman. Somewhere in the G.P.U. manual, there must be a passage which says that, when two underground w
orkers meet, the senior is to inquire about the junior’s family. As a sign of our improving relations, Bykov at one point took to inquiring about my family. He always asked as soon as we met, in the same way and the same order, like a military roll call: “How is your wife? How is your daughter? How is your son?” Then he would snap with relief from what was plainly a detested civility to the business at hand. At first that amused me. Later it annoyed me. At last I broke the rules one night to ask him if he had any children of his own. “No,” he answered as if I had insulted him.
Unlike most Russians to whom children are quite literally the flower and fruit of life, to be celebrated always with a great out-welling of love and joy, Bykov showed no interest in children whatever. Sometimes if a child ran across his path, he would curse.
Once toward the end of our relationship, in the days of our personal cease-fire, Bykov announced that he meant to introduce me to his wife. I recognized this as the supreme gesture of good will. We met in a restaurant, instead of a movie house. Mrs. Bykov was several inches taller than her husband. She was a Russian woman in early middle age, plain but attractive, very blonde, very brainless, very shy, due in part to the fact that she spoke no English, in part, I felt, because she was afraid of her husband. Something made her appearance rather odd. At last, I discovered what it was. She was one of those women who wear glasses as if they are advertising them. Her pince nez did not blend with that most ordinary face.
It was an uncomfortable meal. I could not communicate with Mrs. Bykov. She was the only Russian I had ever met who could not speak German. She sat blankly, now and again moving forward in her chair and venturing a few Russian words. At such times, Bykov’s eyes would glaze with their sullen look. He would answer glumly and she would slump back as if slapped. Bykov sometimes spoke English to me for practice. He was speaking English then. Suddenly, without any bearing on our conversation, Mrs. Bykov uttered a perfectly intelligible English sentence. “It’s a gay farce,” she said, clearly, but without any expression whatever. Then she lapsed into silence. It was exactly as if a parrot had suddenly spoken behind us.
The conversation continued. Mrs. Bykov suddenly spoke again. “It’s a gay farce,” she said, looking at me with a little, pleading smile. She said it three or four times in the course of the meal, always the same four words, always in the same expressionless tone.
I wondered in what Soviet book or play that one English line occurred, which she had memorized for special occasions in the same way that Stalin had memorized one line of English to surprise American visitors to the Kremlin: “This way to the water closet, gentlemen.”
I gave up the human hunt in Bykov after a brief cultural exchange. With most Russians, music is an instinct. So when Bykov confided to me one night that music moved him deeply, I thought: “Of course. This is the missing piece. This is the side that I have overlooked.”
I thought of Chicherin, in the commissariat of foreign affairs, going to the piano, after all-night diplomatic sessions, to humor his antagonist, the German ambassador, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, by faultlessly playing Beethoven. I thought of Grigori Piatakov, the vice-commissar for heavy industry, playing Mozart between the massive sessions on hydroelectric projects. I thought of Lenin denying himself the right to hear any music at all because of the emotional turmoil it caused him.
I asked Colonel Bykov what music moved him. “Devenatsi god,” he said. He saw me struggling with the Russian words and turned them into German: “Der zwölfte Jahr.” Then I understood: der zwölfte Jahr—the twelfth year—Tchaikowsky’s 1812 Overture.
XXII
The Washington espionage apparatus had been short-lived. It was about to end. My break with the Communist Party, which I had been quietly preparing, was about to end it. Its life had been crowded into the space of a year and a half, roughly from September, 1936, into April, 1938.
When I try to evoke what that life was like, it comes back to me as a succession of brief cases, of Washington streets at night, of a tight little world beyond the law, turning upon an axis of faith and fear. It was the only world that then mattered, composed of trusted, clandestine people, knit invisibly by a common historical conviction in whose name they performed the rites of a common crime, and by the fact that each carried the fate of the others in his hands. I see them now only as glimpses of people, standing, walking or talking in ways that are unimportant in themselves, but have become for me the residue of memory.
There is Alger Hiss, unlocking the door of the 30th Street house.
Priscilla and I have been waiting for him and turn at the sound of the key in the lock. It is a transmission night. Alger knows that he will find me sitting there. He smiles a smile that is sometimes a little tired and grave, but invariably gracious. On a chair, he conspicuously lays down his brief case. Then he peels off his long gray overcoat and the scarf he wears with it. When the cocker spaniel jumps on him, he says: “Down, Jenny, down!” with a trace of pettishness that I never hear him use except to the dog. In that tone is the only tension he ever shows.
There is Julian Wadleigh, waiting alone on a nighttime street. He is hatless. His short hair sticks up. He peers near-sightedly in an effort to make out whether the man walking toward him is really I. Above him the leaves of Norway maples hang limp in the streetlights where insects swoop.
There are Abel Gross and his wife, sitting in the soft light of a shaded lamp in their little house somewhere in suburban Washington. For some forgotten reason, David Carpenter has taken me there. Their baby has just been born and Mrs. Gross is quietly sewing while we talk.
There is George Silverman, driving me in his Ford, talking incessantly, so that there is one narrow shave after another with the swarming Washington traffic. He gnashes the gears whenever he shifts. At my protests, he advances a revealing argument. A car is a mechanical convenience. The sensible attitude toward it is to wear it out as fast as possible and trade it in on a new one. On principle, he never takes any care of his car. Then he switches to a subject much on his mind: he hopes that his son will become a violinist, but he is afraid that the boy will not.
There is Harry Dexter White. I see him sauntering down Connecticut Avenue at night, a slight, furtive figure. I am loitering near the Ordway Theater, where he has insisted (probably out of laziness) that I meet him for the third time in a row. Yet he is nervous at the contact, and idles along, constantly peeping behind him, too conspicuously watchful. He has a book under his arm. His wife has just written a book of Bible stories retold for children, for their two daughters, in fact. She wants Carl, whose reputation for literacy has reached her, to have a copy. In a dark shady side street beyond Connecticut Avenue, White slips the book under my arm. I still have it.
There is Felix, prematurely bulky in his overcoat, but with an immature face. He is lurking among the parked cars on a street behind the Union Station. He sees me, hesitates to recognize me until I smile that it is all right. We stroll off together. I have a brief case under the arm next to him. He suddenly draws it out and walks in the opposite direction.
There is Carpenter, who, as I walk toward him, I see in the distance, small and dingy, walking toward me. He scarcely greets me. He has microfilm in his pocket. He knows that he must not give it to me until I ask for it—a security measure. While we talk, we discuss his sources, his problems, our next meeting. Then I say: “All right!” His hand slips into his pocket. He passes me a little package. I slip it into my pocket. We walk in opposite directions.
There is Bykov. I am standing at the back of a movie house in New York or Brooklyn. I do not sit down. Bykov rises from the audience. I see him, silhouetted against the screen as he puts away the glasses through which he watches pictures. He slips up to me—sullen, piggish eyes forcing a hypocritic smile (these are the days of our great reconciliation). We go out and begin walking. Now and again, he glances back. Once he grips my sleeve. “Why is that man following us?” It is night. The street is absolutely deserted except for us and a stooped, very old J
ewish man slowly making his way home. “Are you afraid the rabbi will catch you?” I ask in German. For a moment he is sheepish. Then he curses and laughs a nasty laugh. We walk for miles, through other dark deserted streets, through dark parks where other scarcely discernible figures drift past us. Like Carpenter, I must not turn over the film until Bykov asks me for it. “Give it to me,” he says nervously after peering around. I give him the spools of film which I have carried in my tobacco pouch. He snatches them. We part.
I have another memory of a different kind. It is at our house on Auchentoroly Terrace in Baltimore. Alger and Priscilla arrive rather early in the morning. Priscilla looks downcast and we ask her why. “On our way over,” she says, “we saw a sweet little field sparrow, and while we were looking at it, a sparrow hawk flew down and carried it away. It was screaming.” Alger says something about nature’s way of keeping life in balance.
Those are my dissolving impressions, after fourteen years, of people who believed that they were contributing to the future welfare of all mankind, finding in their effort the meaning of history and their own lives in the third decade of the twentieth century. Cocker spaniels and Bible stories retold for children. A man racking out his car and worrying about his son’s future as a violinist. Another man quietly discussing underground work while his wife sews for their newborn child. A chief of military intelligence, cringing at the sight of an aged Jew on a lonely street, and a gentle girl close to tears because a hawk has snatched a sparrow.
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