At last he wrangles an appointment with a powerful bureaucrat, one of Stalin’s protégés. In Togliatti’s office, Münzenberg shouts, vindicates himself, pounds the table, puts on an impressive spectacle of power and rage, as if he still possessed newspapers that printed millions of copies, and luxurious automobiles. He must return posthaste to Paris, he says, he must organize the greatest propaganda campaign of all time, recruit volunteers, collect funds, medicines, food, he must supply weapons, cement the solidarity of world intellectuals with the Spanish Republic.
Togliatti, who is blunt, quiet, twisted, and cowardly, a hero of the communist and democratic resistance against Mussolini that was almost entirely invented by Münzenberg’s political publicity, agrees, or pretends to agree, to his request; he picks a day for the return trip and assures Münzenberg that passports will be waiting for him and Babette at the office of the station police. Perhaps Münzenberg asks whether he knows anything about Neumann, whether he is able to do anything for Heinz and Greta. Togliatti smiles, servile but also reserved, demonstrating with restrained villainy his present superiority over the former powerful director of the International. He says that he can’t do anything, or that nothing will happen, everything will work out; he implies that this is not a particularly good time for Münzenberg to ask, just as he is about to leave.
Again the man and woman wearing hats and voluminous overcoats stand on the train platform, shoes shined, their great stack of luggage beside them; they look out of place, and insolent, in their broad lapels and fox furs. They cast sideways glances, nervous, uncertain as to whether they will in fact be allowed to leave.
The hour of departure is near, but their passports are not in the police office as Togliatti promised. All around them they sense the net, perhaps with the next step they will fall into it, perhaps each moment of delay is a planned stage in the culmination of their sentence. But they are not going back to that hotel now that the train is ready to depart, they are not going to give up, lock themselves in a room, keep waiting. Münzenberg grips the arm of his wife, so tall and graceful at his side, and guides her toward the steps of the train as he gives instructions for their luggage to be taken to their compartment. If they are going to be arrested, let it happen now. But no one comes near, no one stops them in the corridor of the train, which slowly begins to pull away at the announced time.
At each station stop, they look toward the platform, searching for the soldiers or plainclothes officers who will come on board to arrest them, ask for their passports, shove them around, and make them get off the train, or maybe surround them without a word, lead them away quietly in order not to create unnecessary alarm among the passengers.
“It was the longest train trip of our lives,” Babette Gross tells the American journalist fifty-three years later. In the dim light of the second morning, they come to the border station. “We thought they would be waiting for us there, prolonging the hunt to the last instant.” With a firm step, as the other travelers fell into line on the snowy platform to have their passports checked, Münzenberg strode toward the police office, the belt of his overcoat drawn tight, the lapels of his coat turned up against the cold, the brim of his hat snapped down over his rustic, fleshy, German face.
Both passports were waiting in a sealed envelope.
I feel their anguish, I lose sleep imagining it was you and I on that train. I am terrified by documents, passports, certificates that can be lost, doors I can’t open, borders, the inscrutable or threatening expression of a policeman or anyone wearing a uniform, displaying authority. I am frightened by the fragility of things; the order and quiet of our lives always hangs from a thread that can snap so easily; our everyday, secure, familiar reality can suddenly shatter in a cataclysm.
The remaining years of Münzenberg’s life are spent on the defensive; he doesn’t give up, but lives with the awareness of approaching horror; his light-colored eyes dilate with fear, though his intellect is still sustained by a relentless will. In 1938 he is expelled from the German Communist Party, accused of being a spy and of working for the Gestapo, and no one comes forward in his defense. He has enough energy left to found another newspaper, to denounce in its pages the dual threat of communism and fascism and urge popular resistance against them. Let all the democracies that have abandoned the Spanish Republic and tolerated the aggressive rearmament and brutality of Hitler, to whom they have handed over Czechoslovakia, hoping to sate his hunger, to appease him at least temporarily, awake from their idiotic and cowardly lethargy. In his newspaper he predicts that Hitler and Stalin will sign a pact to share domination of Europe, and also that after a brief period Hitler will turn against his ally and invade the Soviet Union, but no one reads that newspaper, no one gives any credence to the ravings of a man who seems mad.
AS STRANGE AS THE FACT that this man once existed is the fact that there is almost no evidence of his sojourn in the world. Perhaps no one now lives who knew him and remembers him. Babette Gross, who lived so many years after his death, is a shadow herself. On the tape recorded by Stephen Koch you can still hear the sound of her voice, speaking English exquisitely. Her memory of that man fires a gleam in eyes recessed in sockets that already betray the shape of her skull.
There is a final part of the story that this woman didn’t know and that no one can ever tell, unless the man still lives who in the spring of 1940 tied the rope around the sturdy neck of Willi Münzenberg and hanged him from a tree branch in the middle of a French forest. There are no witnesses; no one ever learned who the two men were who were with him the last time anyone saw him, when one mild June afternoon he was sitting at the door of a café in a French town, drinking and talking, giving every appearance of naturalness, as if the war didn’t exist, as if German armored cars weren’t racing along the highways toward Paris.
The three men left the café, and no one remembers having seen them, three nameless strangers in the great floodtide of the war. Months later, in November, at the first light of dawn, a hunter walks deep into the woods with his dog, which is sniffing excitedly, muzzle to the ground, following a scent to a place where he roots out a corpse half hidden under the autumn leaves, a body pulled into a peculiar position, knees to chest, skull half split by the rope that bit into it during the process of decomposition. Staring into the darkness of insomnia, I imagine a faint light, bluish gray, hazy in the fog, the sound of the hunter’s boots swishing through the leaves, the panting and grunts, the impatience, the choked breath of the dog as it noses the soft, loamy dirt. I wonder how Willi Münzenberg’s identity was attributed to that disfigured and anonymous cadaver, and whether the fountain pen I’ve seen in the photograph of Koestler’s book was still in the upper pocket of his jacket.
olympia
DAYS BEFORE LEAVING, my life had already been turned by the magnet of the journey, pulled toward the hour of departure, which approached with agonizing slowness. I was still here yet distant, though no one noticed my absence, not from the places where I lived and worked, not from the things that were extensions of myself and indicated my existence, my immobilized life, confined to a single city, to a few streets, which I traveled at fixed times between house and office, or between the office and the café where I went every morning to have breakfast with my friend Juan, in the half hour of freedom granted me by labor laws and administered by the clocks where we had to insert a punch card as if it were an open sesame.
Never was I so obsessed with impossible journeys as then, so distanced from myself and from the tangible and real around me. It wasn’t that an important part of me was hidden from others’ eyes; my whole self was hidden. The shell that others saw didn’t matter at all, it had nothing to do with me. A municipal employee, low-grade, an administrative assistant, although having everything in place, married, with a small child. With literary vanity, I sought refuge in being unknown, hidden, but there was also a conformity in me at least as strong as my rebellion, with the difference that the conformity was practical while the rebellion
showed only occasionally as a blurry discontent—with the exception of those daily morning conversations with Juan, who was then living a very similar life, working a few offices away from mine.
Against my principles I had married in the Church, and in precisely nine months my son was born. Sometimes I was struck with remorse for not having dared to live a different life, with a sharp longing for other cities and other women, cities where I had never been, women I remembered or invented, whom I had loved in vain or whom I imagined I had lost for lack of courage. I remembered one woman especially, even though it had been five years since I saw her. She lived in Madrid now and was married, with one or two children; I wasn’t sure of the number because I had only indirect news of her from time to time. I still shivered when someone spoke her name.
There were two worlds, one visible and the other invisible, and I adapted tamely to the norms of the first so I could retreat without too much inconvenience into the second. Many years later, I occasionally dream about those days in the office, and what I experience is not depression but a quiet melancholy. I dream that I go back to work after a long absence, and I do it without distress or any hint of the old bitterness.
Now, at the end of my years, I realize that my docility wasn’t a mask, the false identity of a spy, but rather a substantial and true part of my being: the intimidated and obedient part that has always been one aspect of my nature, the satisfaction that I looked respectable to others as son and student, and later as employee, husband, and father. When I dream of going back to the municipal office I abandoned so long ago, my fellow workers welcome me with affection; they are not surprised to see me and don’t ask about the long absence. For years I liked remembering—embellishing the memory of—my turbulent adolescence, but now I believe the love of conformity dominated my youth, not rebellion, and that love undoubtedly returned to influence me in my adult life, when I accepted marriage and went along with the obligations and little humiliations that made me boil inside: the church wedding, the ritual communion, the family banquet, everything that had been prescribed for an eternity and that I obeyed, unresisting, to the letter of the law. I knew I was deceiving myself, just as I was deceiving the woman I had married without true conviction, as well as the relatives in both families who congratulated one another that finally such a dubious, erratic, and long courtship was over. I never thought about the irresponsibility of my silence, about the bitterness and lies it sowed outside the boundaries of my secret fantasies, seeds that flowered in the real life of the person at my side.
As a boy I obeyed my parents and teachers happily, and the fact that I got excellent grades and was considered an exemplary student filled me with pride. I was the envy of my friends’ mothers, and if a teacher favored me, I felt literally paralyzed with satisfaction. I wasn’t pretending, as I later invented, wasn’t striving to get good grades so I could escape the hidebound life of work in the country that my origins foreordained. I studied because I was supposed to and because fulfilling obligations gave me as much pleasure as living by religious precepts. Until I was fifteen, I went to mass faithfully, and confessed and took communion without once feeling I was performing a ritual alien to me, and for a time I entertained the possibility of becoming a priest.
I have actually had very few outbursts of true rebellion in my life, and most of them were clumsy, senseless, leaving nothing but a memory of humiliation and failure. Once, when I was twenty-two, I gave up everything, my sweetheart and my respectability along with any consideration for my parents or her parents, who had already accepted me as a model son. I had fallen in love with another woman, and when she went off to Madrid I couldn’t get along without her. One night at the end of term, I caught the express train and showed up the next morning at the supermarket that belonged to my lover’s family. From the way they looked at me I realized that what had happened between us was over for her, and had never really been very important, never reached full bloom. I returned that same night, feeling ridiculous and that I had learned a lesson. I made up with my fiancée, and when she put her arms around me, weeping and saying she had always been sure I would come back to her, I thought, with a flash of miserable lucidity, that I was fooling myself, but I did nothing, and for many years I did nothing but drift, and do everything expected or demanded of me.
For a long time, while I worked in that office in the provincial city I had moved to, I remembered a phrase of William Blake that I’d read somewhere, something like “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” I was a mass of aspirations unacted on, of fantasies as unreal as those that kept me company in the quiet solitudes of my childhood. I was always wanting to go somewhere, a misfit never pleased with anything, and suddenly I found myself settled down, paralyzed, in a rut at the age of twenty-seven, making payments on an apartment, receiving good bonuses at work, going from house to office, office to house, imagining trips, daydreaming, escaping through books, hazily surrounded by family and fellow workers, and every morning from nine thirty to ten, during that half hour for breakfast, sharing thoughts with my friend Juan.
Wild sexual interludes with the women we passed in the street, with clerks in the shops, models in magazines, and the satiny, totally untouchable stars of black-and-white movies, that is what my friend and I dreamed about, hopelessly, that and travel, places it was unlikely we would ever be and women who would never go to bed with us and in fact never gave us a second look when we passed them in the streets near our office, the alleyways of the centro, the downtown business district, the cafés where we went for breakfast every morning, always at nine thirty, nine thirty-five, newspaper tucked under one arm, bought every morning at the same kiosk, the mineral water and café con leche and toast the waiter brought without our asking. We had become habitual presences in the morning routine of other people, figures circling round and round like the mechanical dolls that march out to mark the hour on clocks in German squares.
Every morning we walked past the large window of a travel agency featuring a huge poster of New York. We liked that agency because of their posters of faraway places and because a very pretty woman worked there, whom we never saw outside her office or even away from her desk. She was blond and slender, with an extraordinary profile; every morning she was talking on the phone or working at her typewriter, almost always wearing a turtleneck sweater, her back straight yet inclined slightly forward like the wooden bust of Nefertite I saw years later, when I did do some traveling, in the Egyptian museum of Berlin. This girl had a narrow face, large mouth, large, slanted eyes, and a nose with that pronounced tip some admirable Italian noses have. As she talked on the phone, head tilted to clamp the earpiece to her shoulder, she would gesture with a slender hand holding a pencil as she turned the pages of a schedule or catalog with the other, and we would watch with furtive passion, pausing only a moment every morning at the window, afraid of attracting her attention. We saw both her and her reflection, because facing her in the agency office was a large wall of mirrors. Each time we liked to observe some new feature of her beauty: her hair might be loose, or she had pulled it back into a ponytail to emphasize the purity of her profile, or maybe into a bun that revealed the splendid line of her throat and the back of her neck. Behind that glass window, facing the mirror that multiplied the plants adorning her desk and the posters of foreign cities and views of beaches or deserts, she belonged both to the everyday life of the city and to the exotic places of her profession, and part of her appeal to us were the names of foreign countries and cities, and the large color photograph of New York in the window added luster to her image. She may have been no less deskbound than we were, but as she spoke on the telephone and read schedules and made hotel reservations, jotting down things in her agenda, she seemed endowed with a dynamism that was the opposite of our dull work as minor officials; without moving from her desk, she took on the golden tones of East Indian beaches and the bold freedom of the most beautiful women on the Via Veneto, or Portobello Road, or Calle Corrientes, or Fifth
Avenue. We fantasized about walking into the agency one morning and asking in a normal way for a brochure, some information about hotels or flights. But of course we never did, and we never saw her going in or out of her office, never met her in the streets we walked. She existed only inside the travel agency, behind the glass window and in the mirrored wall, just as Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth lived in the black-and-white world of movies; she was as unchangeable and distant as they, and so we watched her a few seconds every morning and continued our brief half-hour routine, the newspaper kiosk, the café con leche and toast in the Café Suizo or the Regina, maybe a stop at the post office, for Juan to mail a letter, and then back to the office before the time clock we had to punch reached five after ten.
There was a sweetness in that routine, in the predictable familiarity of street corners and plazas, the sunlit clarity of Bibrrambla and the shadows of the narrow little streets leading to it, the repeated faces, the synchronized appearances, the same girl in dark glasses who arrived every morning at the same hour to raise the iron shutters of a shop with mannequins and mirrors, the officials and the clerks, the woman in the Olympia Travel Agency, whom we’d named Olympia after the Greek goddess and Manet’s nude, the lottery-ticket vendors, even the beggars and bums were there every day, following a routine similar to mine, each with his own life, with his secret novel, background figures in the novel I was living or inventing for myself, not the novel of what I did but of things that didn’t happen, the trips I never took and the plans my friend Juan and I postponed for a future neither of us much believed in but that served as an excuse for our present inertia.
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