Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  A hundred pounds was a fortune in working-class Vienna. “You actually have one hundred pounds sterling?”

  He nodded.

  “Show it to me.”

  Kim was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs we’d carried into the parlor for the committee meeting later that night. He rested his left ankle on his right knee, unlaced the hiking boot and pulled it off. Then he produced the wedge of bills that had been taped to the underside of the tongue in the boot. He handed the money to me. I counted it. There was a hundred pounds sterling, all right, in crisp five- and ten-pound notes. The bills were so new I feared the ink would rub off on my fingers.

  “How long did you plan on this lasting?”

  “Actually, I thought, what with living on the proverbial shoestring, I m-might be able to stretch it to a year.”

  “Twelve months?”

  “That’s the usual length of a lunar year.”

  I snatched up a pencil and began doing sums on the back of an envelope, converting pounds to schillings, adding up what he would need for rent and board. “In Vienna you can eat for six schillings a day if you’re a vegetarian.” I looked up. “You are a vegetarian?”

  “I am now.”

  “Good. I read an article in our Socialist newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung suggesting the average person lives 2.4 years longer if you don’t eat meat.”

  “Does your b-budget include cigarettes?”

  “How much do you smoke?”

  “A pack a day.”

  “Haven’t read anything suggesting cigarettes are bad for your health. But you’ll have to cut back all the same to pinch pennies.”

  “If I smoke less than a pack a day I s-stutter more. You’re also forgetting petrol for the motorcycle, assuming we continue to make use of it in Vienna.”

  “Oh, we will certainly use it. I’ll get our transport committee to pay for the petrol.” I tallied up the columns. “I think seventy-five quid will see you through the lunar year.” I counted out seventy-five pounds and handed it back to him.

  He looked down at the bills, then up at me. “What are you planning to do with the other twenty-five?”

  “Congratulations. You have just joined the Vienna Relief Committee. By coincidence, annual membership for Englishmen on motorcycles happens to be twenty-five pounds.”

  “But I came here to join the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution.”

  The moment had come to begin his education. “If you want to work for the Communist cause, you will have to do it discreetly. In time I can put in a good word for you in certain circles. Meanwhile you must play the role of a naïve young English idealist who has come to lend a hand with refugees. The Austrian Communist Party, along with the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution, have been declared illegal by Dollfuss and his gang. We Communists work through the Relief Committee, which is legal. Your twenty-five pounds will get four or five of the German comrades you saw sleeping on mattresses to safety in France.” I looked at him. “Can I interpret your silence as agreement to make this contribution?”

  “D-do I have a choice?”

  I scraped my chair closer to him until our knees were almost but not quite touching. (Didn’t want him to panic.) “You always have a choice—that’s what life is about. Choices. Not making a choice is a choice.” I must have smiled, which is what I usually do when I am about to make a suggestion that I don’t want the suggestee to accept. “You can keep the hundred pounds, pack your rucksack, and go back to England if you don’t want to join us.”

  “I am very happy here in Vienna, thank you.”

  The comrades who turned up for the committee meeting were impressed when I told them the Englishman had contributed twenty-five pounds to the Relief Committee. The professor from Budapest, an illegal who was trying to stay one step ahead of the Austrian police, wasn’t. “You gave him back seventy-five?” he asked me in Hungarian. “What the devil’s wrong with you?”

  Kim looked at me. “You speak Hungarian?”

  “I am Hungarian,” I told him. “I was raised by my grandparents in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire.”

  “But I have heard you speak German.”

  “My grandparents sent me to gymnasium in Vienna. I’ve been here since. This is their apartment.” I told the Hungarian professor, “The Englishman will be invaluable to us when the revolution starts. With his motorcycle and his British passport and his pale English face he will be able to pass police checkpoints. We got past two of them today, Dollfuss’s Heimwehr militia bullies didn’t even search our rucksacks.” I translated what I’d said into German for the district committee comrades. One of them, his eyes fixed on Kim, asked me in German, “How can you be sure he is not a double agent?”

  Kim, who spoke German the way English people speak any language other than English, which is to say with discomfort, said, “Sie k-können nie sicher sein.” Turning to me he asked in English, “Would your friends feel m-more at ease if I were to repair to my room?”

  The Hungarian professor said in Hungarian, “If the short count”—he was referring to Chancellor Dollfuss, who was notoriously dwarflike—“wanted to spy on us, he wouldn’t try to infiltrate a district committee, he’d try to infiltrate the Party’s Central Committee.”

  “You can stay,” I told Kim. To the others I said, “Right now he is too innocent to be a single agent.”

  “I’m not sure I should take that as a compliment,” Kim remarked.

  “The great advantage to innocence,” I remember telling him with a suggestive smirk, “is that there is a certain amount of pleasure to be had in losing it.”

  “Our Litzi is being sexual,” one of the comrades, a university student with long bushy sideburns named Dietrich, told the others in a mocking singsong voice. They all laughed. Except me. Dietrich was one of my former lovers.

  A bit flustered, I turned to the professor and invited him to begin his lecture. Removing his eyeglasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and third finger, speaking a German more imperfect than Kim’s, he began. “Industrial capitalism rests on the pedestal of the theory of equilibrium, which holds that the process of producing something creates just enough purchasing power to buy it. The Great Depression and the subsequent distress of the world’s working classes have demonstrated that this convenient theory of equilibrium no longer—”

  Leaping to his feet, Dietrich cut off the professor in midsentence. “Your Marxist theories are boring me to death,” he declared. “They have become irrelevant. The rise of Fascism has focused the attention of many of us on things other than economics. We should be talking about how to stop Hitler from annexing Austria—”

  Dietrich in turn was interrupted by Sergius, at seventeen one of the youngest workers’ militia delegates to a district committee. “Look at the glasses of tap water Litzi has set out on the low table,” he said. “The glasses are still but the water in them is trembling, as if what’s going on in this city—what’s going on in Europe—is shaking the crust of the earth.”

  “The water is trembling because Dietrich leaped to his feet,” one of the worker delegates said with a soft laugh.

  “The water is trembling,” I remember saying, “the way the ground trembles before an earthquake. Revolution will explode in Vienna. There is a good chance it will spread to the entire capitalist world.”

  Sonja, Dietrich’s current girlfriend and the only other woman in the room, raised her hand. She was, like me, in her early twenties; unlike me she was strikingly beautiful, with the high cheekbones and deep-set coal black eyes associated with Caucasus mountain tribes. I seem to remember that one of her grandparents was Uzbek. “For shit’s sake, Sonja, we’re not at the university,” Dietrich snapped unpleasantly. “You can speak without raising a hand.”

  “I want to put a question,” she announced.

  “By all means pose your question, dear girl,” the Hungarian professor said.

  Sonja leaned forward
, her breasts swelling over her low-cut Austrian peasant blouse. Her cleavage was not lost on the voyeurs present. “I am, as you know, the Socialist party’s representative on the district committee,” she said. Unaccustomed to speaking publicly, she took a deep breath before plunging on with a fierce intensity. “I am a Marxist but not a Communist. And I ask the question that many of my Socialist comrades ask: Which is the greater evil, German Fascism or Soviet Communism?”

  Dietrich, who was a die-hard Communist, rolled his eyes, which made me wonder what the two of them talked about in bed. Several of the district party comrades who held Communist Party cards turned away in disgust. And then a curious thing happened. My Englishman, who had been following the conversation attentively, looking from one speaker to the other as if he were at a country club tennis match, addressed himself directly to Sonja. Here, as best I can reconstruct it, is what he said: “When you say Soviet Communism, you of course mean Stalinism. I think we must distinguish between the two. Stalin’s fastidious autocracy must be seen in historical p-perspective. The cadres that organized the B-bolshevik uprising lived as illegals for years, even decades, before the revolution thrust them into positions of power. Even then their grip on p-power was tenuous—they had to defend the revolution against foreign invaders and their White Russian lackeys in a b-brutal civil war. This surely explains, in p-part, the invasive role of the Soviet secret police and the disagreeable purging of the party ranks in the twenties, explains also Stalin’s conviction that he is surrounded by enemies and must eliminate them before they eliminate him. In the pursuit of enemies, real or imagined, Stalin has undoubtedly d-distorted Communism. But Communism, as opposed to Stalinism, is another cup of tea entirely. Communism will carry on after Stalin and Stalinism. To answer your question: Hitler, who has the loyalty of the German military, and Fascism, which has captured the imagination of the German masses, are clearly the greater evil.”

  Blushing in embarrassment, Kim glanced quickly at me. “Our Englishman is less innocent than we thought,” I said. “He has answered the question correctly. Those of us who have pledged allegiance to the Communist cause defend an ideal, not an individual.”

  “You’re saying,” Sonja said, looking intently at the Englishman in her eagerness to understand, “that Stalin is the lesser of two evils?”

  “That’s not exactly—”

  “If Hitler is the greater of two evils, it follows that Stalin must be the lesser of two evils.”

  “It’s more complicated than you’re suggesting.…”

  “The lesser of two evils is still evil?”

  “You’re twisting my meaning.…”

  Sonja would not let go. “You’re saying that Stalin’s betrayal of Communism does not invalidate Communism?”

  “Nobody said anything about Stalin betraying Communism,” Dietrich declared heatedly. “There is a difference between distorting and betraying. Distorting is a tactical course change. It’s trimming your sails to the wind. It’s adapting to an evolving reality so the strategic objective, which is dictatorship of the proletariat, can be reached.”

  Sergius agreed. “It’s Lenin’s two steps forward, one step back.”

  The professor touched Sonja’s shoulder blade. “Stalin is Communism, dear child. Whichever path he decides on, rest assured it is the right path.”

  “With or without Stalin, world revolution is inevitable,” I said. “Talking eternally about it at Latschgasse 9, apartment number seven, won’t speed it up. I propose we put the theoretical portion of our meeting behind us and move on to practical matters. Those in favor?”

  All the members of the district committee except Sonja raised their hands. Seeing she was outvoted, she frowned at Dietrich, who seized her wrist and lifted it for her. The others laughed.

  Dietrich brought up the question of acquiring arms for the workers’ militia units, which skirmished nightly with the toughs in Dollfuss’s militia. An important arms shipment hidden on one of the barges that plied the Danube, which flowed through Vienna’s outer suburbs, had been discovered and confiscated by the police earlier in the week. The story had made headlines in the government-run newspapers. One of the militia delegates pointed out that we were starved for funds, which were desperately needed in order to purchase arms abroad. The district committees had been asked to impose a tax on neighborhood merchants, who up to now had only been asked to contribute voluntarily. We discussed the matter at some length without reaching a consensus. The church bell down the block started ringing the hour. We all counted the rings in our heads. “Twelve,” Dietrich announced. He stretched his shoulders and reached to rub the back of Sonja’s neck. “Twelve,” she agreed, resting her hand on his thigh.

  All of a sudden I could imagine what they talked about in bed.

  * * *

  “Let’s make revolution.”

  “Ahhh.” I can picture Kim clearing his throat, a nervous tic that usually surfaced when he didn’t quite know what to say. “Yes. Let’s.”

  And we did. We smuggled seven Soviet Simonov rifles and four German Walther 41s, broken down into component parts and buried under garbage in collection trucks, to Schutzbunders (the workers’ militia of the Austrian Social Democratic Party) in Karl-Marxhof, one of the fortresslike tenement blocks. We smuggled twenty-one German Bergmann pistols and a dozen Soviet Tula Tokarev automatics, concealed in a baby carriage, to a makeshift arsenal set up in the coal bin cellar of a toy factory. We brought in ammunition for all these weapons, four or five bullets at a time, hidden in my brassiere. We supplied gunpowder wrapped in small cornflower paper satchels to a clandestine munitions factory workers had set up on the top floor of a tenement. We slipped rucksacks filled with leaflets hidden under Hartmann’s hygienic towelettes past checkpoints, with Kim blushing a shade redder than the teenage Fascist militiaman who waved a towelette aloft and cried out to his comrades, “Look what I found!” Carrying cartons labeled as Austrian baby food, we delivered medical supplies to one of the makeshift infirmaries in the massive workers’ housing projects. In the first days, Kim was bewildered by it all: the anxious faces of women and men who unpacked the weapons we brought, the preparations for violence in improvised factories, the cramped and airless cellar bins where meetings dragged on until the early hours of the morning. There were occasions when we were invited to vote and nobody could remember what we were voting on. Groggy from lack of sleep, we often got back to my apartment as Vienna was soaking up first light like a dry sponge.

  I’ll be candid: As the days sped past, I found myself waiting with growing impatience for Kim to make a move, the way men usually do when they want more from a woman than conversation. The back of a hand casually exploring your upper spine to see if you’re wearing a brassiere is as good a place as any to begin. Massaging shoulder blades is always useful. Touching thighs when you’re crammed into a café booth invariably takes the relationship to another level. A kiss on the cheek that, missing its mark like an errant arrow, grazes a corner of your lips must surely be seen as a hint of intimacies to come. The flat of a palm on your stomach daringly close to the undercurve of a breast can only be the seal on a done deal. Under ordinary circumstances all that remains to be decided is the venue: his bed or yours. But from my Englishman, nothing. Zero. He would offer me a cigarette (he smoked those dreadful French Gauloises Bleues) and even hold the flame of a matchstick to the end while I sucked it into life, or accept one of mine (a newfangled Czech cardboard filter tip) without so much as our fingertips touching. In the fullness of time I came to understand that I would have to lead this particular horse to water and make him drink if I hoped to quench my thirst.

  “Let me ask you something,” I blurted out the evening of his tenth day in my flat. “Are you…”

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you…” I grimaced and spit it out. “Queer?”

  We were emptying ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ends into the garbage pail after a late-night meeting of the district committee. Kim looked at
me sharply. I thought I detected a blush on his English cheeks.

  “Queer as in homosexual?”

  I nodded weakly.

  “What m-m-m-makes you ask?”

  I settled onto the sofa next to him, our thighs touching. “Do you find me attractive? Do I attract you?”

  “I find you … intensely ’t-tract-tractive.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Do I have to draw you a diagram?”

  “Actually, I’ve b-b-been working up the nerve to ask you if we m-m-m-m-might—”

  “For God’s sake, Kim, you don’t need to ask!”

  “Ahhh.”

  At which point he did what he could bring himself to do—he grasped a fold of skirt above my knee as if he were staking a claim on the fabric and the body beneath it. “You have to understand, chaps like me are afraid to court b-beautiful girls like you.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “We’re afraid you’ll say no, which would d-demolish the little b-bit of ego we have.” He cleared his throat. “We’re afraid you’ll say yes and we won’t rise to the occasion, which would also d-demolish the little b-bit of ego we have.”

  “I’m afraid, too,” I whispered.

  “What on earth would you be afraid of? You could have any man with a snap of your fingers.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll snap my fingers and no one will hear. I’m afraid the rain will plaster my shirt against my breasts and no one will notice.”

  “I noticed,” he said simply.

  “That’s a start. As for not rising to the occasion, I was married once, I have had experience helping men rise to the occasion.”

  “You make it sound so mechanical.”

  “There is a certain amount of mechanics involved. A woman who is not timid about using her hands and her mouth can make any man rise to the occasion.”