In the two years that passed between one sentence and the next, her friend G. was arrested while performing illegal work in Germany and shot at Brandenburg Prison, and her lovely friend Z. was behind bars. She’d heard that poet J. — cat hair on his jacket, his teeth brown from smoking — had gone underground, but she never heard from him again.
Certainly all decisions about whom one should form alliances with — when and at what cost — had to be reevaluated moment by moment. Before you set out to fight the enemy, you had to know who the enemy was. But who could know for sure?
G. had long since been buried in Brandenburg soil, his two eyes shut forever — the Nazis had condemned and executed him on charges of high treason. If he were still alive, they would no doubt be charging him with high treason here in Moscow as well, since to the end he maintained a close friendship with A., the latter-day Trotskyite. Given that Hitler seemed not to be going anywhere and the formation of factions was proving to be part of the general collapse, this friendship (which at the time was not yet a crime but only something difficult to understand: an error perhaps, a case of thickheadedness, shortsighted obstinacy, but also perhaps, who knows, the result of meticulous tactical deliberations on the part of the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement G.) would most certainly have metamorphosed into an unpardonable wrong. But by executing G. for treason in 1934 at Brandenburg Prison, the Fascists had ensured that what would remain in his comrades’ memory was his fame. Death is the beginning of immortality. Meanwhile, the doors to the hall of fame have been sealed up, and the Beyond is nothing more than an endless strip of sand between the fronts, a no-man’s-land in which all those who have gone missing over the last few months — now including her husband — will be forced, dead or alive, to walk on and on unto all eternity on their bloody feet.
She, too, had been acquainted with A., the latter-day so-called Trotskyite, ever since the first time she participated in a meeting of the Communist cell Vienna-Margareten, and she’d run into him a few times after his expulsion from the Party in 1926, the last time in Prague, shortly before she left for Moscow. This portly comrade had come late to a meeting of Austrian emigrants and had taken the last remaining empty chair, right next to hers, then he had spent the entire evening silently smoking, only once addressing her in a low voice, asking what had become of their mutual friend G. G. had recently been sent to Berlin, she’d replied, that’s all she knew. I understand, the so-called Trotskyite had responded. The smoke of his cigarette had hovered above him, motionless and thick, and for a moment the smell reminded her of J., the poet who’d gone underground. When they were all saying their goodbyes outside afterward, she had impulsively hugged A., whom no one else was deigning to so much as shake hands with, but it seemed to her that he returned the hug more out of exhaustion than friendship.
I committed a serious error in November 1934. In Prague I participated in a meeting of Austrian Schutzbund supporters at which the Trotskyite A. was also present, and I did not report this to the Party organization. I was severely chastised for this by the Party leadership, but the reprimand was removed from my record after conversations with Comrades Sch. and K. when I practiced honest self-criticism with regard to my lack of vigilance.
Was it better to call an error you had recognized by its name, thereby taking away the power with which, years later, it threatened to destroy you? And did not the forcefulness of an error’s attack fundamentally reflect the passion with which you had once committed it — in other words, was it you yourself creating your own downfall without knowing how and when?
Should she even mention that her self-criticism had been accepted? Did the expunged punishment require her report? Surely there were papers covering all of this, other people’s reports. Surely she was mentioned in one or the other self-criticism written by someone else, or in the account of someone else’s life. So should she simply leave unmentioned what had been expunged? But that might be interpreted as malicious concealment on her part. Should she drag this expunged punishment back out into the light? (But then it wouldn’t be expunged any longer, would it?) It was a matter of honesty, such honesty as left each individual lying there as if naked before the other. But who would this other be? And what is the deepest layer one can lay bare? In the end, does coming clean mean scraping the very flesh from your bones?
And then, what are bones?
At the beginning of the 1920s they had studied the movements of money in their evening gatherings, its way of fluttering about, and the arbitrary power it was gaining over humankind.
Today, inflation can destroy a person more thoroughly than an E. coli infection, G. had said.
Then, fifteen years later, something began to flutter about and gain power over humankind, something that none of her friends and neither her husband nor she herself could put a name to. Had the time so quickly come to an end when words themselves were reality, just as real as a bag of flour, a pair of shoes, or a crowd being stirred to revolt? Was it the case now that reality itself consisted of words? Whose eyes would piece together the letters she was writing into words, and the words into meaning? What would be called her guilt, her innocence? Did every word matter? What are bones?
Ever since her husband’s arrest, she has felt like a stranger in this land, even though when they first arrived, it was a homecoming, despite the fact that they’d never set foot here before 1935. A homecoming to the future that was to belong to them. Our metro, she and her husband said when they saw the newly opened underground stations for the first time, our Gastronom No. 1, when they went shopping for the first time in this gigantic grocery store, where there were thirty-six kinds of cheese, and a stunning cornucopia of foodstuffs of all sorts, items whose names had been all but forgotten in Vienna and Prague; the saleswomen wore little white bonnets, and they didn’t touch the cheese, meat, sausages, bread, or vegetables with their hands, but only with forks or rubber gloves. Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited. To be sure, there were still small old shops where one could find flour being sold in hand-twisted sacks made of newsprint, here and there the customs of a bygone, unsanitary age still survived, but they would soon no doubt disappear amid the gleam of modernity. Once she had even sent her mother a package containing cheese, goose fat, caviar, sausages and bonbons. Let her mother see that she, the wayward daughter, had done everything right after all. Anything flourishing in the Soviet Union was flourishing in her own life as well. Her mother thanked her in a letter, asking how things were with her. And she had been proud to be able to write in her response: very good. A time comes when a daughter shouldn’t have to give any other reply to her mother’s question as to how she is doing. The very good will now remain with her forever, come what may. Her husband is very good, she writes when her mother asks her whether H., too, is keeping well: for a person who doesn’t know the truth, it makes no difference whether someone has been arrested or is just far, far away. Very good, she writes, when her mother asks her about her apartment and work. The reality behind this very good has gradually shifted, but that is nothing her mother needs to know. It is only a pity that her father, who was always on her side, did not live to see her time of happiness.
When the passport of a German friend expired, he couldn’t get his residency permit extended. He was invited to visit the German embassy in Moscow to have his passport renewed. Invited to present himself to the Fascists who had him on a list, invited to turn himself in. He died not quite two months later at a concentration camp outside Weimar. He passed the test. Another comrade went to the German embassy and emerged with a new passport. He was received by the NKVD and shot as a German spy. He did not pass the test. Both are dead.
After Hitler’s seizure of power I came to Prague. I have to say that I was profoundly depressed at the time. Never before in my life had I left German soil. It was very hard for me to say goodbye. I know that all I wanted was to get back to Germany as quickly as possible. I even considered wearing a disguise. Of course that would have bee
n madness. In night after night of discussion, Comrade F. convinced me to go to Moscow. But I find it difficult to write here. In point of fact, we were rejected by Germany and don’t yet have roots in the Soviet Union.
Her passport, too, has been a German passport ever since the Anschluss. Her passport, too, expired three weeks ago. Three times now the Soviet official she handed her document to for inspection took one look at it and slammed his window down in her face. Without a valid passport there’s no extending her residency permit, no propusk, but she needs one in order to be allowed to go on living in her apartment. At least the building superintendent is still letting her go upstairs to her apartment at night, when no one will see, but it won’t be long before the apartment is assigned to someone else. And then where will she go?
While she is writing the account of her life, she listens for the sound of the elevator. The day the elevator stops on her floor at around four or five in the morning — that will be the end. During the day, she sits in the coffeehouse Krasni Mak, red poppy, translating poems from Russian to German for her own edification. Without a propusk, there’s no getting a work permit either. The money she has left from her husband will be enough, if she spends it frugally, for the next two weeks at most. Then what?
At night, instead of sleeping, she works on the account of her life, which she is using to apply for Soviet citizenship. But what if there is no right answer on this test? Will there eventually be only a single thing left to feel sure of: that each of the comrades dying, here or in Germany, has finally reached his goal, while each who has survived all of this, here or in Germany, purchased his life with treason?
Sometimes she would take her father’s glasses off his nose to clean them. She and her friend had sometimes stood side by side, comparing their legs. Once she had lain awake all night long beside her friend’s fiancé, weeping. For Comrade G. she had sliced through an entire stack of paper at one go. Before she kissed her husband for the first time, she had grabbed him by his shock of hair, pulling him toward her. Was she ever even the same person? Were there any two moments in her life when she was comparable to herself? Was the whole not the truth? Or was everything treason? If the person who is to read this account remains faceless to her, what face should she be showing him? Which is the right blank face for a blank mirror?
4
My husband was arrested on October 25, 1938.
Comrade Sch. in his yellow suit jacket always used to say contemptuously when two comrades fell in love: They’re privatizing. France, England, and America had meanwhile recognized Hitler’s government. If a person was now in love with the wrong idea, this put him objectively — whether he saw it this way or not — on the side of the Fascists. Friendship, love, and marriage were indeed a sticky subject in times when all signs were pointing to war.
Today we know that enemies of the people have slandered upstanding comrades in the name of political vigilance and brought about their arrests. I am convinced that the case of my husband H. is precisely such an instance and that his innocence will be demonstrated.
When she was a child, her father sometimes made faces for her in the dark, and precisely because she loved him so much, she was never entirely sure that her father was still her father at these times. She had always considered it possible that he might at any moment be transformed from the person she knew so well into something deadly, and then this deadliness would prove to be his actual nature. Just a single moment of truth like this could reveal his entire life to have been dissimulation.
Hadn’t she sat in church on Sunday, a good Christian girl, while the next day, people might perhaps be spitting at her Jewish grandmother when she went to do her shopping at the Naschmarkt?
She’d reproached herself as a duplicitous wretch when she betrayed her best friend with her desires. Always there had been these dependencies, always the fear of desiring too much or not being good enough, leading to lies, to dissimulation, to silence. Redhead, redhead, ding-a-ling, fire burns in Ottakring, always the fear of giving too much of oneself or too little, Jewish sow, always the rungs separating human beings, the inferiorities, always someone pushing someone else downstairs, someone falling, knocking over the person below. Had not they, the Communists, made it their business to even out the gradient so that everyone could stand freely without falling, without pushing, shoving, being pushed or shoved, free — and without fear?
Never did anyone display a more upright and incorruptible character than my husband. In the three years we spent in the Soviet Union, H.’s every thought was devoted to working in the service of Socialism, combating Fascism, helping the Party.
Only after she had fallen in love with him had she realized what a great longing she’d always had to be knowable to another person: to be one with herself, and at the same time with another. Everything within her that she had secretly identified as wrong, all the trespasses she had committed, imagined, inherited, or desired — he’d laughed away all her shame and, with it, her susceptibility to blackmail. Love had meant saying what was in her heart, and this saying meant freedom, and for the first time her fear of not being good enough had gone away.
And hadn’t Lenin’s principle of criticism and self-criticism within the Party originally presupposed — and also set as its goal — absolute equality among all comrades and their mutual trust? Was it not this principle that was to facilitate growth? The more radically the individual set his own limitations aside, the more firmly the whole cohered. Why had G., then, whom she had always referred to as her clever friend, not sacrificed his friendship with A.?
Truly we are coming to know one another in the course of these exchanges, we see each other quite clearly. This is my profound insight, what I understand here as a Bolshevik, what I experience: Bolshevism’s power, its intellectual power, is so strong that it forces us to speak the truth. As Communists we should show our faces, in other words show the entire person. You can’t just say that you didn’t have time to be vigilant because you had to bring money to your wife at your dacha. When we have been successful in creating a clean atmosphere, we will truly be able to work cleanly and productively.
Until recently, she’d shared her husband’s view that it was crucial they scrutinize their own ranks closely to keep the core stable. She’d reclined on the sofa as he sat in an armchair, reading to her from the thick volume containing the latest report on the court proceedings. After Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev — the original revolutionaries, once lauded as Lenin’s stalwart brothers-in-arms — Bukharin, too, had made a public confession, declaring himself guilty of conspiracy and treason, and he had been condemned to death and shot. In his last plea, he’d said: When you ask yourself, “If you must die, what are you dying for?”— suddenly a pitch-black void appears before you with shocking clarity. There is nothing worth dying for if you want to die unrepentant. He’d taken this opportunity to declare his loyalty to the Soviet Union one last time.
She and her husband had met Bukharin right at the beginning of their time in Moscow. The very day they arrived, he had telephoned the hotel of the Austrian and German comrades who’d just escaped from their own countries — countries where they’d been in hiding — and personally delivered a piece of bread and bacon to each of their rooms.
Now, would she still have a chance to describe the sound the pages of the thick book made as they turned? Page after page, she heard in her husband’s voice the way these living beings were transformed into ghosts.
Only now that she is alone has she begun to ask herself if it is really necessary to radically cut away everything that is weak or gravitates to the fringes. The core of a sphere, her little sister would probably say (she who was always so good at math), is basically just a point, but one whose size approaches infinity on the negative axis. But what was the core? An idea? An individual? Could it be Stalin? Or the utterly disembodied, utterly pure belief in a better world? And whose head was this belief supposed to inhabit if the day came when not a single head remained? An individual
could lose his head, she’d thought two years ago, but not an entire Party. Now it was looking as if an entire Party really could lose all its individual heads, as if the sphere itself were spinning all its points away from it, becoming smaller and smaller, just to reassure itself that its center held firm. Approaching infinity on the negative axis.
In Vienna her husband used to laugh whenever a theater critic wrote: He wasn’t playing Othello — he was Othello. Old-fashioned was his word for this mania for perfect illusions. He interpreted the flawless melding of actor and mask as the pinnacle of bourgeois deceit, and now, in the Land of the Future — where the labor of all for all supposedly had been stripped of deception, where individual gain resulted in profit for all, while egotism and tactical maneuvering could be eliminated before they arose — he himself stood accused of duplicity? Had they, as people on the run, changed their names so often their own comrades had lost all memory of what lay behind the names? Why else was there so much talk of costumes and masks? Or had they, locked in battle with an external enemy, begun to turn into this enemy without realizing it? Would this new thing hatching out of them bear them ill will? Had their own growing gone over to the other side unbeknownst to them?
The End of Days Page 14