No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  “It is only obvious,” Chatto said.

  Four days of talk confirmed their attraction. Finishing each other’s sentences, interrupting each other, speaking in unison, they talked their way into bed. Though Agnes had not yet experienced sexual love, her Greenwich Village years had at least taught her how to go to bed with a man.

  “I have something to tell you,” Agnes whispered one night in the darkness of their room. The steady pulse in Chatto’s neck stirred against her lips. The icy coldness that had once gripped her when she was aroused, that spread from breasts to belly to genitals, no longer numbed her. Chatto was the sun. There was no possibility of frost. “I’ve been married before.”

  “Marriage is not a consideration to politically enlightened men and women,” he said. She got up on one elbow to study his face. In the darkness she could not see him, but she felt his warmth, sensed his quick mind working, smelled his spicy odor that to her was the scent of India.

  “Actually,” Chatto said, pulling her back down beside him. “I, myself, am married.”

  “You’re married?”

  “The politically enlightened person draws no distinctions between the single and the matrimonial state,” he said. “The freedom of the individual is paramount in all social arrangements.”

  Agnes jumped out of bed. “I’m not as enlightened as you!”

  He followed her to the wardrobe where she began to dress. He was smiling.

  “What’s so damn funny?”

  Chatto snapped to attention. “I am no longer smiling,” he announced. “I will tell you about my marriage.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “My wife is a nun,” he said. “The Catholic woman left her Hindu husband and went to live in Ireland.”

  “In a nunnery, I suppose.”

  “Just so.”

  “Then you don’t love her?”

  “I don’t love her,” he said. “She doesn’t like to talk.”

  “Or listen,” Agnes said drily. But her eyes and mouth were not dry as she reached for him. Chatto took a very long time removing the undergarments she had just put on, yet no time at all in leading her back across the room to his bed.

  In the weeks that followed there were long, intimate talks and evenings with Indian nationalists who dropped in from all over the world. Her husband, for that is what she came to call Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, was a giant figure in exile, known to all Indians, the man who had persuaded the German government to support them, the scholar and activist from a great Brahmin family of Bengal. Her respect for him mingled with eroticism, and eroticism transformed itself back into respect. As with Lajpat Rai, she was overwhelmed by his brilliance, but this time she took her teacher for her lover.

  When she glanced at the writing materials lying undisturbed on her small desk, she dismissed feelings of uneasiness. Chatto captured all her attention. She would never lose interest in this remarkable man. She no longer needed to write to prove she was somebody. She would never want to move on to see what kind of woman she might be in another context. Chatto was a magnet and her entire mind and body aligned itself to his field of force. In her letters to Florence she never admitted that her friend had been right: when she, the feminist, fell for a man, she’d fallen harder than anyone.

  “Now that I’m in Berlin,” she said to Chatto one day as they sat drinking tea in their room on West Falischestrasse—already they’d moved twice to avoid British agents who wanted both of them deported—“I can see that the independence work we did in New York didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The leaders in India barely knew we existed.”

  “’A hill of beans?’”

  “Of no significance.”

  “One can never be sure of one’s own significance,” Chatto replied tartly. As she began to see more and more of his dark moods, she realized he no longer felt politically significant; Germany had stopped subsidizing the Indian exiles in Berlin.

  “When Germany lost the war,” he told her, “Indian revolutionaries lost Germany,” and he said no more. Without German support, he fed and housed, out of his own pocket, the steady stream of students and visitors who came to meet him. He still wrote letters on the letterhead of the Berlin India Revolutionary Committee, made a few speeches, took long walks with Indians, and brooded over the Third World Congress of the Communist International to be held in Moscow in March.

  “In Moscow,” he told her as they lay in bed, her head on his shoulder, “we will meet Lenin. It will be a coup for both of us.” He kissed her. “I will regain leadership in the movement and you will publish an interview with the foremost Bolshevik.”

  Next day, silent and grim, he scooped rice out of the burlap bag they bought each week from the Indian grocer on Kurfurstendamm. Agnes stirred the pork dish he insisted on serving to their Muslim visitors. When the guests were Hindu, he served beef

  “Many Indian traditions are foolish,” he grumbled when Agnes questioned him. “A people who remain half-starved because they will not eat beef or pork when it is plentiful can never be free.”

  “I decline with thanks,” said their Muslim guest that evening, a young man who persisted, even during meals, in wearing a hat he had found, a woman’s straw hat with grapes dangling from the brim. Agnes withdrew the plate of pork and looked at Chatto uneasily. The student asked a question and Chatto responded in Persian, at the same time remarking under his breath to Agnes,

  “He wears a hat with grapes but refuses to eat pork. Explain the logic.”

  Agnes laughed and turned her face away. The young man looked hurt.

  “Please,” Agnes said. She touched his hat.

  Chatto spoke to their guest, then translated for Agnes. “I told him it is a summer hat for women, that he is a man, and that it is now winter.” Chatto ducked his head and murmured something more in Persian, something effective, because the young man removed the hat and dug into his rice, although he still refused pork.

  “I will help in your kitchen,” their guest announced when the meal was finished, but Chatto urged him to linger over tea since the meeting of the Berlin India Committee would not begin until eight o’clock. Agnes, he explained, would wash the dishes and straighten the room.

  Among those Indian men who, in twos and threes, silently climbed the stairs to the fifth-floor apartment was someone most unwelcome to Agnes: Herambalal Gupta. It had been nearly four years since she’d slept with him in Greenwich Village, but he still frightened her. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him seat himself on the floor. His face glowed in the lamplight. Under his turban, Agnes knew, his hair was thick and black. Once again, as in the firelight of her little room, it seemed to sway above her breasts. The old fear of arousal combined with a new fear: somehow Chatto and his friends would find out, not what Gupta had done, but what she had done.

  Toward the end of the evening when Chatto spoke, she pulled her attention away from Gupta long enough to second her husband’s opinion. “Chatto is right,” she declared. “India’s first task is to gain independence. Before ties with Russia, before Communism in India, we must shake off England.” She pushed the hair away from her face. Her forehead felt clammy.

  The men sat without speaking. From across the room Gupta stared at her longer than necessary. Chatto noticed and, with a short speech, brought the meeting to an end.

  “The work in Germany is proving to be more difficult than it has been in the past,” he said. “There have been many changes in the world, not the least within Germany itself. We must now look eastward for help. Next month in Moscow when we meet with fellow revolutionaries from around the world we will take the pulse of the movement. And we will personally speak to Bolshevik leaders.”

  As the men rose from their cross-legged positions on the floor, Agnes, too, stood to say good-bye. But Chatto stopped her with his hand, the command gesture, the plea that worked so well, and preempted her remarks. Gupta bowed low to Agnes. His touch of sarcasm did not go unnoticed.

  “My dear young woman,
” Chatto began when the door had closed behind the last of the visitors, “in a roomful of Indian men you will gain more respect by a few well-chosen words than by—”

  “Equal participation?” Agnes finished his sentence. Relief at Gupta’s departure made her strong again. “You give lip service to independence, but I think you mean independence for men.”

  “Nonsense. If you are going to babble like a woman… ” He began to pace about the small room.

  Agnes picked up cups and teapots and set them down hard at the sink in the corner. “It is fine for me to cook curry for a small army of Indians every day of the week! It is fine for me to brew pot after pot of tea! It is fine for me to go without necessities so that guests may be treated well! But it is not fine for me to speak in a meeting! You are England and I am India!” She stormed to the far corner of the room where she knelt on the floor and began to unroll the bedding.

  “You have a great deal to learn!” Chatto roared. “Not all the people I work with are as enlightened as I! They are not yet ready to listen to an American female tell them about India! You must work with me, not against me! It is I who must regain a footing in the revolutionary world! It is I who must find an alternative to working with Germany!”

  She listened to him rail. Finally she lay down on the bedding and grew still.

  “The work of India must go on,” he said.

  “Like the Ganges,” she snapped. “Forever. Drowning you, drowning me.”

  He knelt and lay down beside her. “You are impatient, Miss Smedley,” he whispered into her ear. “Individualistic. From the West you have learned to think of yourself and of comfort. It will not do for a revolutionary.”

  Agnes stared into the darkness. If the river of India flowed over Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, one of its own, how much faster did it flow over an American woman who never finished grade school. A woman who presumed to write. A low-class woman who had been loose with men. It seemed to Agnes that Herambalal Gupta lay in the bed between her husband and herself.

  In a dream, canny and shrewd, she willed the river to roll over him, and the river obeyed. It trickled in from India, grew to be a ditchful of water, then a creek like the creeks running through Colorado coal camps. Gupta struggled in the water that flowed down the center of the bed. On the far bank Chatto still slept while the brown water, sluggish and inevitable, rose and spread onto the flood plain of the bed. Realizing what she had done, Agnes kicked off the covers and tried to stop the river as, crying, babbling in Persian and English, all three of them were carried along by the holy, dirty water.

  Chatto grasped her by the arm and shouted “Swim!” He shook wet gray hair from his eyes and spat out Ganges water like a fountain. “We have an appointment in Russia!” he cried. “You are going to interview Lenin!”

  The room was still littered with the boxes and bags Agnes had been too ill to unpack when they returned from Moscow. With his back to her, Chatto looked down at the traffic that passed the busy corner on West Falischestrasse.

  “Your reputation hasn’t helped,” he said, as if speaking to the world outside their room instead of to her.

  “It was a long time ago,” Agnes whispered. Her throat, as so often happened these days, particularly in the afternoon, as if her body could get through only part of a day, tightened and constricted in painful spasms. The sick headaches brought on bouts of vomiting. She closed her eyes against the light coming in from the window and gingerly changed position on the bedding.

  “I refer to the reputation you have today.”

  She opened her eyes but had to close them again. Ever since the summit meeting in Moscow where they didn’t get to interview Lenin, where Chatto didn’t regain the reins of leadership, where the Berlin Indian Committee had been referred to as “defunct revolutionaries” and “museum pieces,” Agnes had battled physical ailments and depression. Now she waited to hear about her reputation, so ill that she felt herself slipping into agreement with Chatto, no strength to defend herself.

  “People say you talk too much, you have too many opinions, you are not Indian, you have never been to India. That you give me bad advice and that I follow it.” Chatto was pacing back and forth in their small room. “Indians don’t like you.”

  She was too tired to say out loud, “I don’t like Indians.” But at least he was not talking about Gupta.

  Chatto stopped pacing. He stood for a moment at the window, then whirled around. “Everyone knows you slept with Gupta! He talks about it openly! You have humiliated me!”

  “It was years ago,” Agnes said without inflection. “I’m not your property.”

  Chatto paled. The skin around his eyes grew mottled. Stepping over to the corner where Agnes lay, he bent down and struck her across the face.

  Stunned, she struggled to a sitting position against the wall, braced herself, and then stood, wobbly on her feet. Chatto was gulping mouthfuls of air. He covered his ashen face with his hands. Agnes, unable to bear her pain and his both, set out across the floor. When she reached him he took his hands from his face and leaned against her until both of them nearly fell.

  “Forgive me!” he whispered, agonized. “Please forgive me!”

  She could not prevent herself from comforting him, from holding his clammy face between her hands, he who refused to wear a turban, he who questioned all things Eastern and all things Western. He whose worth others now questioned.

  “Why is my reputation talked about, not Gupta’s?” she whispered.

  He put his hand across her mouth, this time gently. “Let us not speak of it,” he said, and once more buried his face in her hair. Unable to stand, she returned on hands and knees to the bedding in the corner. When Chatto had left the room, she lay in a stupor. Mother seemed to hover over her with large, still eyes, thickened hands, a martyred spirit. Helplessness dogged both of them.

  In the months that followed, Agnes had to force herself out of bed. Fearing a breakdown and not realizing she was already in the midst of one, terrified of an anonymous, early death, she spent a day here, a day there in panicky activity: gave an English lesson, typed out fragmentary pieces on her typewriter, looked for a job, though scarce jobs went to Germans, not Americans. Then either Chatto, or she, or both, would grow newly discouraged and, feeding off each other’s depression, retire to their room to bicker and sleep. Chatto stormed out often, but he always came back.

  “Your suffering sounds dramatic,” Florence Tannenbaum wrote in the deepest, grayest part of winter. Gray streets and gray buildings of Berlin were indistinguishable from gray sleet, gray slush. Gray 1922. Gray Europe. “Since you’re in Europe,” wrote Florence, “why not drop in on Dr. Freud?”

  Agnes was furious. “Why not advise me to drop into Heaven and have tea with God?” she wrote back. “It is far from possible, I assure you. Freud charges money; it also takes money to go to Vienna; and it requires a passport which I don’t happen to have …”

  “Enclosed is $25,” Florence wrote back, “for psychoanalysis. I will send a check every month until you are self-sufficient again.”

  Holding Florence’s check between her thumb and first finger, Agnes lay back on the bed. How could she accept such a sum of money every month? How could she not accept it?

  There was a silk sari Chatto’s sister had given her. She would send that to Florence. There was a broken strand of pearls, and she would send that, too. When she was well again she would give English lessons and write articles. She would pay back all the money she ever borrowed from Florence. And she would never again laugh at psychoanalysis, or at Florence.

  She clutched the check. Her mind began to spin again in the same useless circles, always the same questions that could not be answered: how to live with Chatto? How to abandon a great man? How to abandon India?

  She felt herself begin the familiar descent into semi-consciousness. Concentrating on the check in her hand, she got to her feet, crossed the room, vomited in the sink from dizziness, cleaned the sink and herself, and set
out for the underground station, one foot placed methodically in front of the other. In the pocket of her coat she held onto Florence’s check.

  From reading the catalogue of courses given at the University of Berlin, she knew about the Psychoanalytical Institute associated with the school. Many of the analysts had studied with Freud himself. There were trainees who might agree to see a desperate American woman for a session or two.

  At Unter den Linden, Agnes got off the underground train. Unaware now of the overcast sky, the grit and smell of coal smoke, the dirty snow along the sidewalks, even of the haggard people she passed carrying satchels of paper money for small purchases, she passed through the gate leading to a large, gray stone building. Inside she made inquiries of a man standing behind a counter. Three times he had to explain that the Institute was in a neighboring building. She retraced her steps toward the great front door. When she looked back, he was still watching her.

  The receptionist at the Institute also watched her, but more in the way of study than disbelief. The woman opened a black book. “I will make an appointment for you to see Dr. Schmidtke three weeks from today,” she said.

  Agnes sank into a chair. “Is there someone I can see now?” she whispered, holding out the check. But the woman was already consulting the black book.

  “Perhaps a short appointment could be made sooner,” she said. Agnes wept with gratitude.

  “Frau Dr. Naef can see you at three o’clock. Will that be acceptable?”

  The sun broke through a cloud. “Even the weather knows,” Agnes said. Her laughter was pitched too high.

  Without a word the woman left the room again. When she returned she motioned for Agnes to follow her. “Dr. Naef will see you immediately. It can be only a few minutes today.” They walked down a hall. She knocked on the door, then whispered, “Frau Dr. Naef is a doctor, not a trainee. She is very good.”

  A woman in her late forties wearing a dark skirt and white medical smock opened the door and invited Agnes into a comfortable room furnished with a patterned rug, two soft chairs, a small desk, and a couch. When the door was closed, Agnes sat on the edge of her chair. “I don’t need the couch,” she said.