How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts.
One night during the winter of ’41, while everyone was asleep, the woman on duty pulled the cold right leg of a dead woman out from beneath the warm leg of a sleeping woman, she dragged the lifeless body out of the barrack, and brought it to the barrack for the dead. At such temperatures it takes less than two days for a body like this, including all the flesh covering its bones, to freeze into a skeleton.
Many years ago one person said a word, and then another said another word, words moved the air, words were written down on paper with ink and clipped into binders. Air was balanced out with air, and ink with ink. It’s a shame that no one can see the boundary where words made of air and words made of ink are transformed into something real: as real as a bag of flour, a crowd in which revolt is stirring, just as real as the sound with which the frozen bones of Comrade H. slid down into a pit in the winter of ’41, sounding like someone tossing wooden domino tiles back into their box. When it’s cold enough, something that was once made of flesh and blood can sound just like wood.
INTERMEZZO
Comrade Ö., who always used to refer privately — i.e. in conversation with his wife — to Comrade H. as a narrow-lipped hysteric, places her dossier on the left-hand stack on his desk, not the stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade B.
Comrade B., opening the file, remembers that he once visited H. and his wife at their dacha many years ago and that the wife had baked an excellent apple strudel. But an apple strudel cannot be sufficient grounds for sparing a counterrevolutionary element. For this reason he places the dossier on the left-hand stack, not the stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade S.
Comrade S. wonders whether, if Comrade H. were to be arrested — and was she still a comrade to begin with? — she might say something disadvantageous about him in the hope of saving her own skin. Had he ever said anything to her that might somehow incriminate him? Since he cannot remember anything of the sort, he places her file on the left-hand stack on his desk, not the stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade L.
Comrade L. reads the account Comrade H. has written of her life, which is included in her dossier, up to the point where it becomes clear that the Comrade H. who was recently arrested is her husband. This H. once literally accused him during a debate of having no balls. For this reason, without hesitation, he places the account of the life of Comrade H. — the wife of Comrade H. and someone he never actually met in person — back in her dossier, he closes it and places it on the left-hand stack on his desk, not the stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade F.
Comrade F. knows Comrade H. quite well, and also knows her husband, who has already been arrested. He considers it utterly implausible that the two of them could be Trotskyist spies as has been alleged. The stack on the right-hand side of his desk already contains five dossiers of good friends on whose behalf he means to intercede directly with Stalin. More than five can’t possibly work, of this he’s quite aware.
He gets up and takes a bottle of vodka from the shelf. While he is filling his glass all the way to the rim, placing it against his lower lip and knocking it back, he thinks about how during one of the last Writers Union debates he was described as a hopeless drunk.
He goes back to his desk and places the dossier of Comrade H. to the left. Later he forwards all the files from the left-hand stack to his Soviet Comrade Shu.
Soviet Comrade Shu. is required — according to NKVD Order No. 00439, Order No. 00485 and other orders relating to national arrest quotas — to make fifty arrests from each of the following groups: Germans, Poles, Koreans, Greeks, and Iranians by the end of this month, October 1938. To assemble these lists, he proceeds alphabetically, in other words begins with the letter A. for each nationality.
Working through the Iranian contingent, he gets to the letter N.
With the Greeks, to S.
With the Koreans, to L.
With the Poles to D.
And with the Germans to F.
As he is preparing these lists, he makes a minor error, confusing the name Comrade H. used to enter the Soviet Union with her real name. In the fake German passport she used to enter the Soviet Union four years ago, her name was Lisa Fahrenwald, F. for short.
But she’s still lucky to have wound up at the end of the list, because the first ten persons in each contingent fall into Category 1. For Category 1 the sentence is: death by firing squad.
But for Category 2 — in other words, for the remaining forty persons on each list, including H., who figures here mistakenly under the name Lisa Fahrenwald — the sentence is only: prison camp, eight to ten years.
But things might also have gone quite differently.
Comrade Ö., who always used to refer to Comrade H. privately — i.e. in conversation with his wife — as a narrow-lipped hysteric, would still have placed her dossier on the left-hand stack on his desk, not the stack to his right. And the stack on the left would still have been forwarded to Comrade B.
But if Comrade B. had, for example, not only remembered Comrade H.’s excellent apple strudel but also stopped to consider that if she were to be interrogated, she would quite likely mention him as an acquaintance if not a friend on the basis of his visit to their dacha; he would probably have found it advisable to place her dossier on the right-hand stack.
But if this thought had not occurred to him, if Comrade H.’s dossier had remained there on the left-hand stack, then after the file was forwarded, Comrade S. might perhaps have remembered that right after the assembly that past March at which their Party group had responded to Bukharin’s conviction, he had been standing with Comrade H. and his wife and in a moment of high spirits he’d told a political joke.
Three prisoners are sitting in a cell and they get to talking.
Why are you in prison?
I was for Bukharin.
What about you?
I was against Bukharin.
And you?
I am Bukharin.
The three of them had shared a laugh. But what if Comrade H. — was she still a comrade to begin with? — happened to remember during an interrogation that he had told this joke, that would certainly be his downfall. And so Comrade S. would have chosen the right-hand stack and not the one to his left.
Only if his memory had failed him would the file marked H. still have wound up on the left-hand stack and been forwarded to Comrade L.
Comrade L. might, who knows, suddenly have started musing while he was flipping through the file: Wasn’t this H. the woman whose splendid red hair he had often admired from afar during assemblies without ever having been introduced to her? He would casually have asked his secretary, who was just coming in with more files, if she knew what H. looked like, and his secretary would have said: Oh, one of those Jewish carrot-tops. Hereupon, and after the secretary’s departure, he would have placed the account of H.’s life on the right-hand stack.
Although she was apparently the wife of Comrade H., who once publicly accused him of having no balls.
But as far as he knew, H. had been arrested.
After this he would have paused for a moment before continuing to sort the files and tried to imagine what H., the Jewish carrot-top with the milky skin, might look like between her legs — was her hair down there red as well, or maybe blond?
But if, for example, his secretary had not come into the room just at the moment when Comrade L. was holding H.’s dossier in his hands, the file would most probably have wound up on the left-hand stack on Comrade L.’s desk and been forwarded to Comrade F.
Now Comrade F. knows Comrade H. quite well, and also knows her husband, who has already been arrested. He considers it utterly implausible that the two of them could be Trotskyist spies as has been alleged. The stack on the right-hand side of his desk already contains five dossiers of go
od friends on whose behalf he means to intercede directly with Stalin. More than five can’t possibly work, of this he’s quite aware.
Perhaps he gets up and takes a bottle of vodka from the shelf. And thinks, as he fills his glass all the way to the rim, places it against his lower lip, and knocks it back, how during one of the last Writers Union debates he was described as a hopeless drunk.
Perhaps he goes back to his desk, looks through the files of his friends once more, finally taking one of them and placing it on the other stack, to his left, while placing H.’s file on the stack to the right.
And a short time later, he forwards only the files from the left-hand stack to his Soviet Comrade Shu.
And if not? What if he didn’t trade H. for one of his five friends but instead passed her on to Comrade Shu.?
Then Comrade Shu. might, upon making a careful study of H.’s file, have been able or, indeed, compelled to see that Lisa Fahrenwald — F. for short — was actually Comrade H., and so she would not have been included in the contingent of German comrades on this day, neither in Category 1 nor in Category 2.
One week later, when it was time for letters H. through M. to be arrested, H. would — exceptionally — have been spending the night at the home of her old friend O. after running into her by chance at Café Krasni Mak and talking about her loneliness, something she was only able to discuss openly with a friend she had known so many years.
I’ve never been so lonely in all my life since they arrested H., she would have told her friend. At this, O. would have taken her by the arm and led her out of the café, she would have strolled with her down Arbat all the way to the apartment house where her room was. Late at night, H. would have told her friend about nine-year-old Sasha and the paper airplanes and begun to cry. Hereupon O. would have put a mattress on the floor for her in the alcove of her tiny room and kept her friend H. with her overnight.
For this reason, the NKVD officials would not have found her at home that night, the night when it was the turn of the letter H., and that was that; the following week, it would already have been the turn of the letter N, for example, Neuwiedner, and meanwhile Comrade H.’s application for Soviet citizenship would have been approved, forever removing her from Comrade Shu.’s jurisdiction.
By the end of 1938, the arrest of secret police chief Yezhov would have put an end to the era of the arrests of people by contingent, though many of those arrested under Yezhov would never reappear. Comrade H. would have written many more letters in an attempt to discover how and where her husband was, but not one of these letters would have ever been answered. She would have asked about him many more times, and many more times seen and heard one or another official slam his window peevishly down before her. Others fared better with their questions and learned at one or the other window that their husbands or sons were in a different prison, or already in exile, where, to be sure, they would possibly starve to death or freeze. Then they would start shouting or speaking entreatingly, while others just stood there quietly weeping, or fell silent altogether.
As for earning her living, she couldn’t have taken work as a seamstress like the wife of V., who had also been arrested; it had been established once and for all that she was untalented in this regard, sloppy and shoddy. Nor could she apply to become a teacher at the Liebknecht German School in Moscow, since the school had been closed half a year before after the arrest of nearly its entire faculty. At the Marx-Engels Institute, Radio Moscow, the publishing house that printed German-language books in the Soviet Union, and even the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung — everywhere, everyone knew that she was the wife of H., who’d been arrested.
She was most certainly not a whore.
Right?
For two pairs of shoes? One liter of cream? For fifteen potatoes or one half pound of fat?
Esteemed Comrade Dimitrov, please help me. Give me work. Don’t let me drown.
Would it really be so awful to sell her body and its orifices for an hour or half an hour at a time to keep this body alive?
She would never have learned to whom, in the end, she owed the position she found herself being offered at the eleventh hour: translating Soviet poetry for the journal Internationale Literatur.
Where was a poem while it was being translated from one language to another? Only in the few hours she spent in this no-man’s-land of words would she occasionally manage to think of something other than the man she loved and her misfortune.
She would have translated — for starvation wages, but still — and the Germans would have started the war, her husband would have remained missing, and sometimes she would have washed windows here and there to earn a little on the side, and the Germans would have attacked the Soviet Union despite the Non-aggression Pact, and even now her husband would not have returned home, the Germans would have bombed Kiev, and she would have waited and waited, and Dimitrov would have offered to let her write for the underground radio station Institut 101, there would have been air raids over Moscow, and she would have written for the radio, and Moscow would have used boards and paint as camouflage, making itself unrecognizable to the Germans — she spoke German — they had covered up the Moskva with boards as though it were no longer a river, and whitewashed the walls of the Kremlin to look like ordinary apartment buildings, making the golden cupolas suddenly green, at night the air-raid alerts sent her to the metro station, and then she would have gone on waiting until the beginning of October ’41, and then at the radio station she would have encountered someone whose poems she knew and thought highly of.
So pleased to meet you.
You speak Russian very well.
Oh, I don’t know.
Truly.
Someone who was a Soviet poet, and she’d have sworn he almost . . . and with her body . . . and he would have . . . and then the two of them . . . and then, oh . . . simply given away, what? . . . all her orifices, thinking constantly of her husband . . . of course it was out of the question, certainly impossible . . . and therefore at the crack of dawn, even before he . . . and all this time there were air raids over Moscow, and later the doctor would have said: a kidney infection, and then she would have evacuated, Kursk Station: four suitcases, war, a train to Ufa. And only there, in the Urals, would she have, not a kidney infection but her sixth month, Moscow stands firm, and the Soviet poet has left for Tashkent, yes, well, the baby, a boy, never an opportunity to tell the poet, never any letters, she never saw him again; Comrade O. produced a cradle for the baby, she wrote more radio programs . . . scorched earth . . . writing German for Germans; never an opportunity to tell him, never any letters, he was never there. And her husband, H.? Writing to fend off the German Fascists . . . never give the enemy a handhold, never overvalue the private fate of the individual . . . nursed the child for a year and a half while others starved, H. lost forever? And then the breaking free: the immense exertion, the greater the sacrifice made for the cause, the more just the cause must be. The crying baby — truly, it should have been his child, the child of her H. A good article, genuinely important, antifascism and war, a genuinely good program, and her H., genuinely lost forever? A Russian niania for the baby . . . how do you write your way into the hearts of the German Fascists . . . the battle of encirclement, Stalingrad stands firm . . . and if you get in, turn their hearts around inside their bodies? Her child, at three, more Russian than German. And finally the war would have been over, back to Moscow with her four suitcases. And her beloved H. still lost forever in all likelihood, and the distant poet probably still writing poems, in Russian. And her child would have asked, in Russian, where the end of the world was. Her comrades’ invitation, and she thought, why not back to Berlin if it came to that? Her letter to her mother had long since come back to her stamped Evacuated to the East, so she had no family left in Vienna, and probably nowhere else either. In all probability. So: Belorussky Station, to Berlin. Culture work. Rebuilding. And the child: he was still much too young for her to explain to him who his father, or who his
real father — even this father too far away to tell him how his son, and that to begin with . . . besides which, she never wrote any letters, not a single word. A new beginning. Rubble. Sisyphus, finally out of her suitcase and in print.
I want to see my friends!
Who are your friends?
The wolves, the foxes, and the ghosts!
At least he’s still there in Tashkent, or where? The Soviet poet. Never again any news of H. Membership in the Socialist Unity Party. No opportunity to say, or write, and the child not yet able to understand. Her first play performed, a great success: esteemed Comrade H. Could her husband possibly still be alive after all?
Some day when I’m dead, my toys will still be here.
The End of Days Page 16