One Man's Flag

by David Downing

  Kollontai smiled. “I’m writing a piece for Communist magazine on exactly that.”

  “Communist?”

  “It’s the Bolshevik magazine. I have become a Bolshevik,” Kollontai added simply. “They’re the only Russian party that truly opposes this war.”

  “So why?” Caitlin asked.

  “I was actually there in the Reichstag when they voted the war credits,” Kollontai said. She shook her head, as if still unable to believe what had happened. “I was horrified. It felt like everything was lost. My German friends—Klara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg—they were as shocked as I was, but, having said that, I should add that it wasn’t really a surprise to them. The German Party has been moving to the right for years, and when the moment came, I don’t think most of the leaders had any doubts which way they should jump. If they opposed the war, that wouldn’t have stopped it—not in Germany at least—so why put twenty years of social advance at risk with a mere gesture? It was easier to point out that fighting czarist Russia was a progressive thing to do. And let’s not forget personal ambition. All of a sudden, the establishment was treating the party leaders as equals, asking for their opinions, offering them important jobs. A lot of heads were turned.”

  “I think it was the same in England,” Caitlin said, remembering Sylvia’s sad account of her mother’s and sister’s embrace of the war.

  “How about America?” Kollontai asked. “Will I find support for an antiwar position, or are people just taking sides?”

  Caitlin shrugged. “I don’t think there’s any appetite for joining the war,” she said carefully, “but I haven’t been home since it started, so I’m not best qualified to say. I can put you in touch with people in New York and San Francisco whom you might find interesting. Women mostly.” She named several and described their areas of concern. “They’re all feminists of some sort, and some would call themselves socialists.”

  Kollontai looked doubtful. “They sound—forgive me for being blunt, but I get the impression that these are bourgeois . . . middle-class women, idealists of one kind or another.”

  “I suppose they are. Most American socialists are men, and most of them think that women’s issues can be safely left on the back burner until after the revolution.”

  Kollontai smiled. “It is the same in Russia. The feminists think they can win equality in a capitalist society, but socialist women know that capitalism makes equality impossible, because all relationships under capitalism are property relations. Including those between men and women.”

  Caitlin looked at her. “I can see that in theory, but in practice? Are you saying that all relationships between men and women are doomed from the start?”

  The Russian woman shook her head. “It is not as simple as that. More working-class women are going to work, becoming economically independent, taking more control over their own lives. And some middle-class women are beginning to understand the psychology of their dependence on men and the ways in which they themselves have connived at their submission. Some women from both classes have said, ‘Enough, I’d rather spend long stretches of my life alone than imprison myself in a relationship which can never be equal.’

  “But all that said, most women have no desire to live like nuns. Here, let me read you something . . .” She walked over to her desk and searched through a pile of paper for the appropriate sheet. “I hate quoting myself, but I was pleased with this section—it says exactly what I meant it to say, and a friend translated it into English.” She cleared her throat. “‘But when the wave of passion sweeps over her, she does not renounce the brilliant smile of life, she does not hypocritically wrap herself up in a faded cloak of female virtue. No, she holds out her hand to her chosen one and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of love’s joy, however deep it is, and to satisfy herself. When the cup is empty, she throws it away without regret and bitterness. And goes back to work.’”

  “That is good,” Caitlin agreed, wondering whether she was capable of living and loving like that.

  “The future will be better, but we have to live in the present,” Kollontai said. “I have had a husband and several lovers—I have one now. He’s in Sweden at the moment, and I’m looking forward to his return. He’s a kind man, and we think a lot alike, but if we’re still together two years from now, I shall be surprised. Because no matter how enlightened the man is, he’s been brought up to see men and women differently, and the progressive man’s desire for an equal partner will always be at war with his need for her to be feminine and all that he thinks being feminine entails—the modesty and the spirituality and the submissiveness, whether in love or sex or argument or anything else. We are both trapped in his preconceptions, and he cannot accept our independence. Or, more often than not, satisfy us physically. I think most women feel this, but they tell themselves they’ve chosen the wrong man and try another. They don’t realize that every relationship is corrupted, to a greater or lesser degree, by the kind of world they’re living in.”

  “I’m not entirely convinced,” Caitlin said. McColl might have deceived and betrayed her, but he had certainly satisfied her physically and shown no obvious inclination to subvert her independence. Or at least that was what she’d thought before the betrayal came to light. “It seems too mechanical to me. I mean, I accept the fact that economics determines a lot, including the way men and women have come to see each other. I’m just not sure that it determines everything. The world seems much richer than that, somehow. Its possibilities, I mean.”

  “Ah,” Kollontai said, a gleam in her eye. “Let’s talk about that.”

  And they did, exploring their differences and agreements for several hours, until even the Norwegian daylight had begun to fade and the chances of finding a cab had just about disappeared. “There’s a spare room and bed,” Kollontai announced, “and we can send for your luggage in the morning.”

  They sealed the deal with a schnapps, giggled their way through the production of an omelet, and had another glass for luck. McColl had been hovering in the back of Caitlin’s mind throughout their conversation, and now she found herself spilling out the story of their relationship.

  Kollontai’s response was brutally clear: “You’re still in love with him!”

  Caitlin was quick—too quick, she realized—to deny it. “No I’m not. How could I be?”

  Kollontai smiled and shook her head. “These things have a natural span. Yours got interrupted in the middle. Your mind’s said good-bye, but your heart has unfinished business.”

  “How the hell could it ever get finished?” Caitlin exclaimed.

  “I don’t know,” Kollontai answered placidly. “Maybe you just need to talk it through with him.”

  Caitlin threw up her arms. “Even if that seemed a good idea, I have no idea where he is.” She wasn’t sure which she found more upsetting—not knowing where he was or caring that she didn’t.

  “That does make things difficult,” Kollontai admitted. “What is the British Okhrana called?”

  “God only knows. In cheap novels it’s usually the Secret Service.”

  “Do you know where their headquarters is?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Caitlin said, though of course she knew where he lived. Or had lived a year ago. He might have moved since then, might be dead. For all she knew, he had volunteered that August and died in France that fall. She thought she would have felt something if he had, but that was probably just sentimental nonsense. There’d been no sudden constriction of her heart at the moment her brother died.

  Caitlin was Kollontai’s guest for the next four days. The two women walked each morning in the sun-dappled woods above the hotel and usually ate a large bowl of sodd—a mutton, potato, and carrot soup—in the nearby village before returning for an afternoon’s work. While Kollontai put the final touches to her magnum opus, Caitlin read through those sections that had already been roughly
translated. She found much to agree with in the Russian’s writing and much to discuss in the evenings that followed. She hadn’t felt so stimulated, so engaged, since her days in New York City as a young journalist. Kollontai was trying—successfully, it seemed to Caitlin—to weave a coherent political program out of those three issues that felt most important to them both: the exploitation of the poor, the oppression of women, the slaughter now under way on so many battlefields. It seemed so simple, yet it encompassed the world. Lying awake one night, Caitlin found herself feeling sorry for her dead brother and for all the others who allowed their political dreams to be circumscribed by borders.

  Kollontai had several contacts in Berlin she thought Caitlin should talk to, and as the German frontier guards were likely to go through any written material she was carrying, Caitlin spent an hour memorizing the names and addresses. The Russian also urged her to attend an antiwar conference due to take place in Switzerland early in September and promised to send a letter of introduction to the organizing committee before she herself took ship for America. When the two of them finally parted company at the Christiania railway station, Caitlin felt that she’d found a new friend. One she might never see again, given the state of the world, but no less important for that. As the train carried her south into Sweden, she started work on an article she hoped would encourage her fellow Americans to attend one of the meetings on Kollontai’s upcoming tour.

  It was late evening by the time the train reached Halsingborg, and as her ferry chugged across the Skagerrak, the summer sun was sinking behind what a male passenger insisted was Hamlet’s castle. “To be or not to be?” he asked Caitlin, with a smile he no doubt considered seductive.

  “Not to be,” she told him coldly.

  Another train took her down the coast to Copenhagen and a dingy hotel almost next to the station. She was hoping to interview the suffragette leaders who had won Denmark’s women the right to vote earlier that year—Sylvia had given her two names and addresses—but all of the next day and most of the one that followed were eaten up by long waits at the American legation and the German consulate. By the time her transit passes and visa were finally issued, there were only hours to spare before her departure, and a frantic ride in a highly expensive taxi failed to find either woman at home. Arriving at the station, she had barely set foot on the train when the guard blew his whistle. When it reached the small port of Gedser just before midnight, she found the one small hotel already full and was forced to spend the night on a very hard bench in the departure lounge, surrounded by her luggage.

  The twice-weekly sailing left at seven, the sun already high in the sky, the Baltic almost flat in the warm, windless air.

  In Copenhagen she’d been offered a choice of two routes. One was overland, took twelve hours longer, and involved a transit of the Kiel Canal crossing in which passengers were held at gunpoint to prevent them from raising the lowered window shutters and spying on the German Navy. So Caitlin had chosen the sea crossing, which she only now discovered involved a passage liberally strewn with mines. Several male passengers mounted a permanent watch in the bow, and their cries of alarm whenever a piece of driftwood bobbed into view kept everyone’s nerves on edge. When the houses of Warnemünde finally loomed into view and the two-hour crossing drew to its end, Caitlin breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.

  It had turned into a beautiful summer day. Standing in the queue outside the long wooden shed that housed those supervising the entry formalities, she went over the questions she wanted to ask in Germany. Why had the German socialists signed on to the war? Kollontai’s explanation had been convincing, but Caitlin wanted to hear it firsthand from those most closely involved. Did they still think they’d done the right thing, and were the German people still behind their government and army? Were the ordinary soldiers still behind their leaders, or had the reality of war turned their initial enthusiasm into something else—quiet determination perhaps, or something much less positive? And lastly, on a more personal note, what reward had the Germans promised Colm and his friends in return for their sabotage mission? She knew the name of the Deutsches Heer major who had overseen their explosives training on the farm outside Dublin, and if the man hadn’t died in the last seven months, she meant to seek him out.

  It was a fine list of questions, she thought, one any journalist would love to sink her teeth into.

  Two sentries in Landwehr red and blue flanked the entrance to the shed, and the queuers shuffled in between them, clutching their luggage and papers. Inside, a row of uniformed officials sat behind two long tables, examining the visas and passing the suitcases on for searching. Caitlin had been waiting only a few moments when she noticed another, less obvious group of officials. These men, all in plainclothes, were stationed all around the hall, lurking and staring and accosting any traveler they deemed suspicious.

  She didn’t feel worried. The names and addresses that could give her away were all in her head, and there was nothing in her suitcase to suggest she was anything other than what she claimed to be—a journalist from a neutral country seeking a German perspective on the war.

  Her official was courteous enough, if short on smiles. He was handing back her papers when another voice asked in perfect English for her intended address in Germany.

  It was one of the plainclothes officials, a short, sharp-nosed man with a serious five-o’clock shadow.

  She resisted the temptation to question his credentials and told him she was going to Berlin.

  “Where in Berlin?” he persisted.

  “At the best hotel I can find,” she said. “Can you recommend one?”

  Ignoring her question, he barked out a few words in German, causing the official behind the table to hastily scrawl something across her entry form. “You will report to the central police station by tomorrow evening,” he told her, reverting to English. “With the address at which you are staying.”

  “Where is the central police station?” she asked, but his attention had moved to the piece of paper that the soldier searching her suitcase had just brought back. It was Sylvia’s letter of introduction to the two Danish suffragette leaders, which Caitlin had neglected to jettison. How could she have been so careless?

  He read it through, folded it up, and placed it in his pocket. “No documents in English are allowed into Germany,” he said brusquely, and turned away.

  Caitlin felt relieved, though on reflection she could think of no good reason to be so. The letter was hardly incriminating, unless being a friend of Sylvia Pankhurst had become a crime. The connection could encourage the German authorities to watch her more closely than they might have done otherwise, but protesting now was pointless and might make matters worse. She would just have to learn to be more careful.

  She picked up the returned suitcase, gave the official her brightest smile, and walked on through to the outside world, where the Berlin train was waiting.

  The scheduled journey time was just over four hours, but one of these was spent in the Rostock station, where connecting services were awaited and passengers invited to take lunch in a capacious platform buffet. Caitlin wasn’t that hungry but took care to see what remained on offer after a year of blockade. There was certainly a lack of variety but no sign of an overall shortage—starving Germany into submission would clearly take a while yet.

  As she left the buffet a train pulled in on the adjoining platform and began to disgorge its passengers. Those in the rear coaches were all soldiers, in varying states of health. While some almost ran for the exits and others strode along nonchalantly behind them, the final third hobbled slowly past, supporting themselves with sticks and canes. Curiosity aroused, Caitlin followed in their wake, out through the booking hall and onto the forecourt, where a large crowd had gathered. Women were embracing their husbands, boyfriends, sons, and brothers, wide-eyed children regarding their returning fathers. Her eyes were drawn to one couple—a limping soldie
r with a bloodstained bandage around his head and a young blond woman in a cornflower blue dress, both with tears streaming down their cheeks as they clung to each other.

  Watching them, Caitlin found herself stricken by an overwhelming sense of loss and for several moments couldn’t think why. But then she realized—it was envy. Were Kollontai’s few weeks of joy the most she could ever hope for?

  The thought rolled around in her mind as the train steamed south across the North German plain and was only banished by the scene awaiting her in Berlin’s Stettin Station. This time around, the next train over was preparing to leave, the soldiers leaning out the windows talking to relatives and friends on the platform below. They all seemed to be shouting to make themselves heard; there were many brave smiles and a brittleness in the air that seemed not too far from hysteria. How many would come back minus a limb? How many would come back at all?

  A whistle sounded, the engine billowed steam, and everyone seemed to be shrieking at once. As the train pulled clear of the platform and the waving arms disappeared in the dusk, those left behind walked back up the platform, heads bowed and silent, all animation drained from their faces.

  Except for one woman who simply stood there gazing after the vanished train, quietly sobbing her heart out.

  The Abominable Huns, as the British had taken to calling them. Hold the presses, Caitlin thought—Germans are human, too!

  Waiting for Bagchi

  The ten days of surveillance that followed proved less productive than McColl had hoped. Four different men were spotted in the backyard at one time or another, but never all at once. In the first three days, two went out for food, one to visit a backstreet printer, one, ever so smartly dressed, to sit with a young woman and her chaperone on a Ballygunge veranda. In the next three, one man visited a house in Black Town, another a photographer’s studio across the river in Howrah, a third Thacker, Spink and Co.’s bookshop on Government Place, where he purchased Jack London’s Iron Heel.