by Robert Moss
The little light bulb on the desk beside the telephone flashed red. Piatnitsky picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, and hung up without speaking. He scrawled a note. “I expect you had a brush with the Intelligence Service.” Like Max, he pronounced the last phrase in English. “The first of many, perhaps. Great Britain remains the most fanatically anti-Bolshevik power in Europe.”
He refilled their glasses with scalding tea from the samovar bubbling beside his table.
“You delivered your packages,” he said. “That’s what counts. And you did whatever was required to protect them. I don’t forget these things. Max Fabrikant wasn’t wrong about you.”
It was the first time anyone had mentioned Max’s surname. Johnny had no means of knowing whether it was merely another cover. Max had hinted that Osip Piatnitsky was his ultimate boss and the man he most respected in the headquarters of the Communist International. Johnny had gleaned a few crumbs of information about the elusive Comintern chief from the other foreign guests at the Hotel Bristol.
Piatnitsky was the chief of the Orgbureau and the man most feared by party officials in other countries. He was the man who paid their salaries, and who decided when to dump them. Piatnitsky’s domain included the OMS, which was talked about in hushed tones. “OMS” stood for Otdel Meshdunarodnoi Svyasi, the “International Communications Department.” The title was a masterpiece of understatement. The OMS was the heart and lungs of the Comintern. It provided the means for agents to operate all over the world. Its assets included diamond dealers in Antwerp and London, a forgery factory on the Lindenstrasse in Berlin, a smuggling ring based in Copenhagen, a battalion of radio operators and a liaison man in every major port. Beyond all this, Piatnitsky’s men kept watch over the others.
“We’ve learned the lesson of Hamburg,” Piatnitsky said. “One of our mistakes was that we failed completely to infiltrate the armed forces and the police. The revolution cannot succeed unless the so-called forces of order are demoralized and divided. We have to undermine the foundations before we can bring the fortress down. Insurrection is a science; there are rules that must be followed. We are opening a new school to teach those rules. You’re one of the lucky ones. You’ll attend the first course.”
Listening to Piatnitsky then and later, in seminars for all the students from the M-school, Johnny began to realize the vastness of the enterprise on which he and his comrades were embarked. Piatnitsky talked of Shanghai and Bucharest, Java and Capetown, as if they were suburbs of Moscow — or vegetable plots in the garden of his dacha. Events separated by thousands of miles, societies made even more remote from each other by differences of language, colour and religion, all proved to be intimately connected.
A Chinese student told him about preparations for an armed revolt in the Dutch East Indies. This, he learned, was the opening gambit in a complicated game plan. The Comintern hoped that risings in Java and Sumatra would tempt the voracious Japanese to intervene. This, in turn, would stir the British to assert themselves to defend their own stake in the Far East. If the exercise succeeded, two imperialist powers opposed to Russia would be locked in conflict with each other. With Britain and Japan diverted, Russia would have a free hand to pursue its main objective in the Orient: revolution in China.
“We are at war with the whole of the capitalist world,” Piatnitsky declared in the course of a three-hour speech at the M-school. “The war can end only with the triumph of the world revolution.”
Viewed from such commanding heights, setbacks like the collapse of the Hamburg rising were parochial and unimportant. Today Russia was the besieged citadel of the world revolution. But it would not be alone for long.
The M-school occupied a Red Army barracks on Pokrovskaya Street. The “M” stood for “military,” and the courses included bomb making, marksmanship and street-fighting tactics, as well as all the techniques of clandestine operations: codes and ciphers, secret inks, dead-letter boxes and so on.
One of the instructors was a Russian general, Petrenko-Lunev. He had fantastically detailed knowledge of bridges, telephone exchanges and armaments plants in Germany and Great Britain. He talked as if he had personally reconnoitred each one to see where best to lay the charges. When the general talked, he had a curious habit of rubbing his right thumb and forefinger close to his ear.
“It comes from checking fuses in the dark,” Petrenko-Lunev explained sheepishly one day, when he caught Johnny watching him closely.
He referred to Germany with affectionate insolence as Wurstland, and his German pupils didn’t seem to mind. Some of them even picked up the habit.
The Russian general wasn’t much older than his students, and his heart was set on going to Shanghai, where the next revolution was expected to start.
The dream exploded the day he took a bottle bomb from a Czech student in Johnny’s class, the German-speaking group. Petrenko-Lunev wanted to demonstrate how the bomb should be thrown to make certain of blowing up a tank. The flustered Czech had gotten confused about what type of fuse he had attached to the bomb, the slow-burning or fast-burning type. It cost the Russian instructor his right arm to set him straight. The bomb went off as he reached down to pick it up. He gave a terrible scream and fainted dead away, while Johnny and one of the girls in the group tried to stanch the torrent of blood from the socket of his arm. The Czech doubled over and retched for a very long time, making a sound like a cistern that wouldn’t shut off. To Johnny’s amazement, Petrenko-Lunev reappeared before he finished his course, brandishing his pointer with his left arm instead of the right, paler but still enthusing about a mission to Shanghai. The Russian general, with his right sleeve pinned across the breast, seemed living proof of what all of them felt: they were indestructible. Destiny had joined the party.
Another intriguing instructor was the German who called himself Emil. He was a big, hearty man with vivid blue eyes set deeply under his bulging forehead. One of Emil’s driving themes was that there was no room in the movement for narrow nationalistic feelings — for Lokalpatriotismus. Theirs was an international cause. They were members of a World Party, of which all the individual Communist parties were merely “sections.” They had no homeland, no loyalties, except the world revolution.
But when Emil got together with the German students over a few beers, his line was somewhat different. “It will all be decided in Germany,” he would say. He was scornful of most of the German party leaders, especially Thälmann, the dubious figurehead of the Hamburg rising who had emerged from the rubble stronger than before. “A top sergeant,” Emil dismissed him. “A wooden-headed, strutting little zealot.” Emil was impatient with those in Moscow and Berlin who insisted that the Social Democrats, not the Fascists, were the party’s main enemy. “One day,” he prophesied, “we’re going to have to join ranks to stop the Fascists. You have to forget about family feuds when the whole damn house is on fire.”
Emil left for the United States before Johnny’s course was over. He had lived in New York before and after the war, and it was rumoured that he had been the virtual dictator of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Tired of the endless wrangling inside the American party, the Comintern was sending Emil to crack heads together.
“We go where we’re sent,” Emil said to Johnny in the midst of a farewell party. “Moskauer Fremdenlegion. That’s what they call us, isn’t it? Moscow’s Foreign Legion. But don’t forget Wurstland, Johnny. One of two things is going to start there: the next revolution or the next world war. Maybe both.”
By day they memorized the basic commandments of conspiratorial work. You confided in no one who did not have a clear need to know. You tried to be invisible, to fade into the background. You lived like a bird of passage, constantly changing lodgings and meeting places and always checking on the neighbours. You shared nothing with outsiders, including ordinary Communist party members, because you belonged to an elite, exacting underground: the Apparat. You trusted no one entirely.
By night the rules were abandoned,
and they flocked together for wild parties at the Bristol and the other Comintern dosshouses, with girls and vodka and impromptu entertainments. One of the favourite games had been dubbed “The Jumble Sale.” As many men and girls as could fit crowded into a room and started swapping clothes — sometimes in the course of a few hands of strip poker, often at random, as the mood took them. The men would wriggle into skirts and stockings, the girls into baggy pants and soldiers’ tunics or peasant-style blouses. Then, at a piercing whistle, the lights were turned off. You had until the lights came on again to retrieve your own clothes — wherever they happened to be. This resulted in much groping and whooping and some unexpected anatomical combinations.
At one of these parties, Johnny was still scrambling about on the floor, squeezing various legs in search of his trousers, when the lights snapped on. At eye level he found a young Red Army instructor called Jacob happily grazing at the ample bosom of a large pink Danish girl.
“We have a better name for this sport in Russian,” Jacob hissed.
“What’s that?”
“Kogo zgreb, togo yevyob. You fuck the one you grab.”
Johnny was still looking for his trousers. He was sure he had lost them to the dark girl with frizzy hair who tried to hide her looks behind wire-rimmed glasses. She made a face at him and showed her empty palms.
“The people’s tribunal will now convene,” announced another young German, one of the few men in the room who had recovered his clothes.
“Citizen Fritz!” he barked. This was addressed to Johnny. Like all the other Comintern recruits, he had been required to adopt a cover name. He had picked the name of a sailor he had known on the Thüringen, Fritz Mattem. This was the name on his new party card and the name under which he was registered at the M-school. Members of the Apparat changed their names more often than some people changed their shirts, but this one would stay with him; it was reserved for contacts inside the party.
Johnny got off his hands and knees and stood bare-legged with his shirttails hanging out. Some of the girls started giggling.
“The charge is bourgeois indecency!” the self-appointed prosecutor continued. “The case is proven! Citizen Fritz is indecent, but not obscene! That, by definition, is bourgeois. The people’s court will now deliberate the sentence.”
“Hit him!” a woman’s voice rang out. It was deep and strident, like the first bar of a gypsy song. It was also oddly familiar. It brought back something of the past, as the sound of foghorns in the Moskva river brought back boyhood memories of the great ocean steamers on the Elbe.
“So decided!” Johnny’s judge pronounced, and they set a tumbler of vodka to his lips and made him drink it down. He spluttered and coughed, and a rivulet of alcohol coursed down from the side of his mouth to his chin.
“Hit him again!” the same woman called out. He was craning around to find her among the press of bodies, but already they were making him tip his head back to swallow another four fingers of vodka.
“Budem zdorovy!” Jacob said encouragingly. “Cheers!”
The second tumbler of vodka went down more smoothly than the first.
“Again!” the woman urged. Now he spotted her, bouncing up and down on one of the iron-frame beds so the springs twanged beneath her. Her white-gold hair fell to her shoulders. She was wearing a high-necked, tightfitting sweater and rumpled grey trousers that were unmistakably his. She seemed much taller, and her body was fuller, her features sharper and more defined. But he knew her at once from her ice-blue eyes and her mocking, infuriating self-confidence.
“Give it to her,” he said to the boy who was pressing the third tumbler on him. “She’s wearing bourgeois pants!”
She laughed, slipped out of his trousers and tossed them across the room. “No, I’m not!” she sang out, with no more embarrassment than she had displayed the night they had met in Heinz Kordt’s room in Hamburg.
“I’m going to spend the night with this one,” Helene announced to the room, draping herself around Johnny’s neck.
10
Romantic attachments were frowned upon in their circle in Moscow. Sex, on the other hand, was accepted as a necessity, and there were only two regulations that had to be observed: proletarian frankness and the higher interest of the party. If you wanted to go to bed with someone you said so, just as Helene had done. If the two of you found you were compatible and wanted to stay together, you didn’t talk about marriage; that was a relic of a defunct bourgeois morality, like religion. The correct procedure was to say, “I want you to be with me as long as the party permits,” or words to that effect.
This wasn’t exactly what Johnny said to Helene, but by the time he had finished his course, it was clear to everyone that they were a couple. Not an orthodox couple, since their lives were pledged to a cause that transcended personal loyalties; and also because spending time with Helene was like standing under a shower with a broken faucet: you never knew whether the water was going to run hot or cold.
In matters of sex she continued to take literally the party’s prescription that there were no taboos. She would vanish for days, and each time he suspected a different man. One was Jacob, who, she told him, was being promoted to the British section of the Fourth Department-Soviet military intelligence. Once he went to her room, opened the door without knocking, and found her cuddling with the dark, frizzy-haired girl from the Lenin School. He found the spectacle both disgusting and disturbingly erotic.
“What’s the matter with you?” Helene asked coolly. “Girls are human, too.”
In these ways, Helene was still inhabited by the same demon he had encountered in Hamburg. In bed she was insatiable. After a wild night of lovemaking she would hurl herself on top of his spent body at dawn, clawing him awake, demanding to ride him. When they fought, which was often, her words flicked at him like a whip. And she used more than words. When she bit or scratched, she drew blood.
Yet there was a stronger force that was driving Helene, and it was this that held him to her. He was astonished to discover a depth of intelligence and commitment that he would never have suspected in the runaway Kordt had picked up at the railroad station, a more natural candidate — it seemed then — for the whorehouses of the Reeperbahn than the Communist underground.
She talked eagerly about what she learned at the Lenin School and had mastered more of Marx than he had even attempted. Once, when she left off grappling on the bed, she launched into a dissertation on the theory of imperialism.
Another time he arrived at her room unannounced and saw a painting leaning against the wall on top of the dresser.
It showed street musicians performing with a fiddle and an accordion in a dark, almost medieval courtyard. People were hanging out of their windows to listen, while an old woman crouched by a fire in an open drum. It was a scene of poverty, yet it was suffused with tremendous warmth and life. The dominant colours were rich, earthy shades of russet and green.
“That’s very good!” he exclaimed. “Who is the artist?”
But already she was hiding the picture away in a drawer. “It’s nothing,” she said curtly.
“But I think it’s wonderful. Why don’t you hang it on the wall, where it belongs?”
“Because there are things I don’t want to be reminded of.”
So she had personal secrets after all. It was only after several months that she confided that the artist was her sister.
“You never mentioned your family before,” he pointed out.
“There’s nothing to be said about them.” Her face contorted, and she was a child again, on the brink of a temper tantrum. “My mother’s a bitch.”
They were both strays, Johnny thought. But he no longer felt this force of animus against his own mother, even though she had rejected him so totally. The hatred that remained was directed at Willi Rausch, the man who had broken up the family and murdered his father. When he thought of his father, it was to remember his moment of heroism, the fleeting, precious moment when
Gottfried Lentz had found wings.
“And your father?” he asked Helene.
“I don’t have a father!” Her eyes glistened. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He let it go. Let her tell him in her own time. Oddly, she chose to return to the subject on an outing to Leningrad, as they were strolling through the splendid halls of the Hermitage museum.
“You know, my father was a Prussian officer,” she remarked. “He didn’t wait to see the baby. My mother says she got married so I wouldn’t be born a bastard. But I was, all the same, wasn’t I?”
She said the bit about the Prussian officer with a kind of pride. Johnny pictured the type he had suffered under in the Kaiser’s navy, the type that recognized only three kinds of people — officers, women and civilians, the last an inferior breed whose wives and daughters were fair game. Perhaps there was something of the father in the daughter.
What was most dangerous in her was something he recognized in himself, though in him it was less voracious, less indiscriminate. She needed to plumb the depths of experience, both physical and mental. The same drive, the Drang nach Absoluten, propelled her in sex, in rehearsals for violence — she was proud of her prowess in unarmed combat — and in ideological debate.
“Man is a process of overcoming,” she said to him one afternoon, when they were sitting in the Alexander Gardens. “And the end of that process is communism.”
She gave form to his own deepest instinct.
Despite all they had lived through — or perhaps because of it — they really believed they were invincible.
2 – Homecoming
Of course, the Fascists are not asleep, but it is to our advantage to let them attack first; they will rally the entire working class around the movement...Besides, all our information indicates that in Germany, fascism is weak.
-JOSEPH STALIN (1923)
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