by Steven Conte
You asked about Marlen, and with deep gratitude I am able to report that he did survive the war, though not unscathed, as he was badly wounded in 1945 on the outskirts of Berlin. He recovered, though, and has since done very well for himself, rising quite high in the state media, first in production and lately in management; recently he has moved with his wife, Anna, and daughter, Nadia, to a fine apartment in central Moscow. Party membership is a prerequisite for this kind of success, but to the best of my knowledge Marlen hasn’t actively harmed anyone in getting where he is. Mind you, he’s shockingly conservative. What is it about military service and conservatism, I wonder. Is it because, having sacrificed so much for their country, ex-soldiers can’t bear to see time’s erosion of what they once fought to defend? If so, it’s another reason to outlaw war (if any other reason is needed in the Atomic Age). In Marlen’s favour I should point out that his daughter not only tolerates but even loves him – no small thing for a nineteen-year-old who is far from being conservative herself (as you deduced, my little gifts from the West are mostly for her). Even his wife shows signs of loving him a little.
It is generous of you to suggest I could go back to writing fiction, but sadly it’s out of the question. For a start, in the Soviet Union any literature worth the name either can’t be published or, if it is published, causes the writer no end of bother with the state. I’m thinking here of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Do you know of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich? An indispensable work. Or even Pasternak. Personally I find Dr Zhivago rather lightweight and overwrought, but there’s no denying Pasternak’s courage in intermittently standing up to the authorities, including to Stalin himself (being lucky helped, not to mention naive). And then there’s Mandelstam, whom naivety couldn’t save. And Akhmatova, a brave woman and an extraordinary poet. I met her once, and although she was perfectly courteous towards me I couldn’t help thinking, then and afterwards, that compared to her I was a hack and a time-server. She was literature, I was its lickspittle; she would have died for it, I used it to get a nicer apartment.
In your kindly way I hear you objecting to this, and since you won’t be able to reply to this letter for many months I will raise those objections on your behalf in order to despatch them straight away, saving both of us time. You don’t see me as a coward, you say? At Yasnaya Polyana I gave you and Metz hell? Well, yes, I did my best, but as I pointed out to you in my previous letter, my behaviour at Yasnaya Polyana was an aberration, a bout of hysteria, if you will, since for the previous fifteen years I had been an unremitting coward, too scared to write, too afraid to utter a syllable about anything that mattered. When Viktor was arrested I did nothing to defend him, and when he was executed I fled Moscow with Marlen for the comparative safety of Yasnaya Polyana. There I laid low, stayed silent, raised Marlen to manhood and saw him safely off to university. The Secret Service kept away. I wasn’t exactly happy, but then again nor was anyone else I knew. And I wasn’t dead. Then came your invasion and initially I was thrilled, convinced that the Soviet system was about to collapse; I remained hopeful, even when Marlen was conscripted (to defend the regime that had killed his father, the regime I myself had fought to establish). If only the Germans are sensible, I told myself, half the population will go over to their side and half will stay at home. But as we know now, the Germans weren’t sensible. By the time Yasnaya Polyana fell it was amply clear that you had come not to liberate or even to conquer in the customary way but to enslave and exterminate, and, oh, how I hated you for it. Onto you and your comrades I poured all my pent-up rage, and how liberating that was. Marlen’s life was being imperilled every day, but nothing I said or did could help or harm him, and I revelled in that, because finally, finally I was having my say. Shouting the praises of Soviet rule turned out to be a sublime release from having to whisper under Soviet rule; and while I knew Metz could have me shot at any time I didn’t care, at least not in the beginning. I must admit that I also derived a certain illicit pleasure from suddenly finding myself among foreigners, even foreign invaders, especially when one of them turned out to be a decent man, since under Stalin consorting with foreigners was a shortcut to the gulag.
When the Red Army returned to Yasnaya Polyana, so did my habitual cowardice, but after the war it wasn’t fear that prevented me from writing. No, it was simply that I had nothing new to say, let alone a new way of saying it. In your letter you ask whether writers, like scientists, should be able to surpass the work of the giants who precede them by standing on their shoulders. I believe that the answer is no. Literature doesn’t work that way; or, rather, it does work that way but only in a narrow, technical and ultimately trivial sense. I could bore you with diagrams of the influence earlier writers have had on later ones (in fact, you may have given me an idea for a paper), but instead let me describe to you a sculpture I came across in 1962 in a small, out-of-the-way chapel in Naples. It was in marble and portrayed the dead Christ laid out on a bier, his body muscular and draped in a diaphanous shroud, both the flesh and the fabric sculpted in extraordinary detail. To my untutored eye the sculptor’s technique seemed superior to anything else I’d seen in Italy, including by Bernini or Michelangelo. And yet who was this sculptor? Even now I couldn’t tell you; my minder from the embassy was in a hurry to leave and I failed to remember the name. What I do recall is that the work dated from the 1750s and was considered so unimportant that it didn’t feature in my (admittedly rudimentary) guidebook. Here was a work whose creator had clambered onto the shoulders of giants and, in a technical sense at least, surpassed them. But for what? Nobody cared. It was a derivative work and, by the 1750s, already passé.
So please, no more talk of me returning to writing, which would only end with me producing something second-rate and forgettable. I’m done with it. Instead let me tell you about Sydney, the city I’m in, a subtropical metropolis on the eastern coast of Australia which is seamed with luxuriant vegetation and teeming with parrots and other exotic fowl, all of it clustered around a gigantic harbour comprised of multiple inlets and bays. And the beaches! Golden sand and great breakers rolling in; sharp light and a salt-shot breeze. Coming from Moscow I am struck, as I always am in the West, by the vulgar commercialism of the place, but even so I’m besotted. In the winter of 1941 could we have imagined that such a place existed? And had we done so – feelingly, I mean, as one imagines the setting of a well-written novel – might we have behaved in different ways? Oh, I’m speaking nonsense, I know. I’m rather drunk on this city, which seems to belong to a different century, a different planet, even, than the one we thought we were occupying in 1941. And yes, as you point out, I owe it all to Lev Nikolayevich, who has kept me employed for years and now whisks me around the world. (I have delivered two papers here, one in English and one in Russian, both of which were respectfully received.)
Now for the part of this letter I’ve been putting off. Paul, I am sorry but we can’t write to one another openly, let alone meet in person. I hate to put it like this but I have too much to lose. All international mail into and out of the Soviet Union is opened, as you know; and if you were to appear at an academic conference and speak to me for more than five seconds my minders would make it their business to find out who you were. This would be bad enough if you were an ordinary citizen of West Germany, but far worse given that you’re a former politician. Perhaps I have failed to convey to you how suspicious and inflexible our government remains (though I’m sure you will have drawn your own conclusions from the recent events in Prague). Under Khrushchev our situation improved for a time, but his de-Stalinisation program spooked many who had wielded power under Stalin and were thereby implicated in his crimes, and now that Brezhnev is president those people are back in charge. One of my colleagues, who’s a poet, claims that the most Russian of all words is ‘cement’ (no matter it comes from the French), not only because we build with the stuff whenever possible but because invariably our institutions are rigid. Lacking true legitimacy (of the kind your mayora
lty no doubt enjoyed) the communist state, like the Tsarist regime before it, will probably fracture and collapse one day, though by then you and I will presumably be dead. The century has sunk its teeth into us, I’m afraid, and even now is mindlessly shaking us about.
When I say that I have too much to lose, please know that corresponding with you is very high on the list of pleasures I aim to keep. Does it matter if our letters continue to be infrequent? Evidently when the British settled Sydney in the late eighteenth century the mail was at best sporadic, so that someone writing home to a loved one had to wait a year or more for a reply. Such a delay must have made letters extremely precious, and I propose we treat our correspondence similarly, as something providential. That way you can picture me as the dauntless if crazy woman I was, rather than the ill-tempered hag I’ve become. For my own part I suspect that meeting with you in person would only confirm that you’re still despicably handsome, still admirable, and one of the kindest men I’ve known.
Yours,
Katerina
* * *
28 Jonah Strasse
Nuremberg
19 December 1968
Dear Katerina,
Enclosed, at your request, is a selection of news clippings and articles about my political career – some with photographs that will allay your concerns that I might have retained any vestiges of youthful good looks.
Thank you for asking Professor Fleet to send me copies of your novels. I enjoyed both of them very much, albeit in different ways: Three Women for all the usual reasons one values a novel – a compelling plot, well-drawn characters, a powerful sense of a time and place; Europa, 1975 for a kind of visionary, otherworldly ambience that reminded me a little of Kafka. The young woman who wrote them might be long gone, but you can certainly feel proud of her. Would it be possible to publish one or both of the books in translation in the West? After all, they are fundamentally positive about the Revolution, and in this sense are less like Solzhenitsyn’s novels than those of Mikhail Sholokhov, which appear to be acclaimed equally at home and abroad.
Not only have I read your novels (twice) but also some of your scholarly work, which I was able to track down in various university libraries. The specialist language in the essays and your book about narratology certainly tested the limits of my Russian, but nevertheless I found them thought-provoking. In fact, you inspired me to revisit The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as to read for the first time two of Tolstoy’s other late works, The Resurrection and The Devil (as you can see, these days I have plenty of time on my hands). In many ways these are remarkable books, aren’t they; but of course they inevitably suffer by comparison to War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Your narratology book draws attention to how much the late work is propelled by male disgust for women; or, to be more exact, the self-disgust of men who can’t prevent themselves desiring women. It seems to me that there’s more than a whiff of this in Anna Karenina as well, but at least in that novel female desire gets its due (if also its punishment). War and Peace is more generous, both to men and to women. It’s a book that cares about what people want, and this alone goes a long way to explaining its greatness.
You’ve made it very clear that you plan never to write fiction again, but before I let go of the topic altogether I can’t help observing that you seem to have responded rather intensely to that Dead Christ you saw, a work which you claim shows the futility of making art in the shadow of renowned precursors. Surely a sculpture that made you think about the potency of tradition, the relevance of virtuosity, and (I’m presuming here) the impermanence of the body can’t be as worthless as you make it out to be. Indeed, it sounds to me that you remember it just as well or even better than the Michelangelos and Berninis you saw.
But enough. As promised, I will now put aside the topic. Not having produced any books myself I’m in no position to reproach you for ones that you haven’t written. Instead let me turn to the good news (it was news to me!) that your son Marlen not only survived the war but has gone on to provide you with a granddaughter. How rewarding that must be. As a recent retiree I must say I envy you the friendship you obviously enjoy with your granddaughter, which will no doubt help you to stay in the current of life when like me you eventually retire.
In regard to what happened to Julius Metz and Hermann Molineux, I am able to say that both men not only survived the war but managed to get themselves captured by the western Allies, with the result that their internments were relatively brief. Metz accomplished this fairly easily, since by the end of the war he was stationed at a hospital in Munich and was taken captive there by the Americans. Molineux’s path was harder. After avoiding being captured with me and Drexel near Lvov, he had a series of other scrapes, including commandeering a staff car by posing as Albert Speer’s personal physician and driving it thirty kilometres to the British lines. He told me all this personally in 1952 in a restaurant in his home town of Würtzburg, where he had returned after the war to be reunited with his wife. He was fifty-nine and much fatter than when we served together, but as far as I could tell he was fundamentally unchanged, his buffoonery, as you call it, quite unaffected by the war. Not that he had put the experience behind him, exactly. In fact, he was talking about organising a reunion of veterans of the Wehrmacht Medical Corps; and this surprised me because his attitude to the military when he was in it had been sceptical, if not downright contemptuous. In any case, for whatever reason he had become something of an authority on who had died, where, and in what circumstances, as well as who had lived and what they were doing with their lives. It was from Hermann I learned that Major Weidemann, our chief physician at Yasnaya Polyana, had been killed late in 1944 on the day we were overrun near Lvov. Hermann claimed that during the attack Weidemann was seen running to his tent, supposedly to rescue his gramophone, though frankly I suspect Hermann of making this up, as he could never resist doctoring his stories for effect. Hermann himself died (of a heart attack) only months after our meeting, and by the time I heard about it I was too late to attend his funeral. Subsequently, his wife told me he had just turned sixty.
Who else did you know? I’ve already told you about Fabian Drexel, who according to Hermann perished in the Gulag; and by the sound of it you recall the deaths of my two operating assistants, Karl Pflieger and Sepp Winkel, as well as that of our dentist Volker Hirsch. There was also a young doctor named Zöllner you might remember, who was later killed in the vicinity of Voronezh when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine. There were various others you may or may not remember, such as Metz’s orderly Egon Ehrlich, who like Hermann got himself captured by the British, as well as our quartermaster Norbert Ritter, who like me survived the Gulag and who according to Hermann went on to become the manager of a hardware store in Berlin.
Which brings me back to Metz. Before Hermann died he had published my name and address (entirely without my permission) in a newsletter distributed to veterans of the Medical Corp, with the result that a few weeks later I received a letter from Metz. You can imagine how surprised I was, as we had last seen one another in 1941 at Yasnaya Polyana. His letter was friendly, even jaunty, and barely mentioned the war. I already knew from Hermann that after it Metz had set up in Dortmund, not as a surgeon or even a doctor but as the director of a small factory producing prosthetics and other specialised medical equipment; or, as Hermann put it, ‘filling a gap he had done his damnedest to create’. Metz’s letter added little more. He was prospering and at sixty-three was looking forward to handing over management of the firm to one of his sons-in-law. Apparently all three of his daughters were happily married and between them had given him five or six grandchildren, with another on the way. I replied to him politely, dodging an invitation to visit. He answered with at least one more letter, and there were also a couple of Christmas cards, but by then I was getting very busy at the hospital, and, possibly sensing my ambivalence, he stopped writing to me.
I’ve been thinking of how you and I came to know one another at Yasnaya Polyana, by
fits and starts and in the teeth of your (understandable) hostility. Along the way I seem to recall that we discussed our families a little – your aristocratic one, certainly; your husband and son; also my wife, and the brother I lost in the First World War. The members of my family I don’t recall mentioning to you were my mother and father, no doubt because there wasn’t much to tell. They were simple, hardworking country people, and I only mention them now because writing to you has reminded me of an incident in my mother’s life – perhaps ‘development’ would be a better term – soon after my father’s death in 1928. My mother was younger than my father and only forty-nine when he died, and although she had loved him in her way she was a self-contained woman who, I suspected, half-welcomed her widowhood. Certainly it didn’t cross my mind she would ever remarry, and so I was startled six months after my father’s death when she told me an ‘old admirer’ had been in touch, a former schoolmate who long ago had moved to Nuremberg. This admirer, who had also been widowed, had heard of my father’s death and had written to my mother expressing his condolences, adding that he would like to meet up with her ‘for old times’ sake’. As she told me all this, her manner was unlike anything I’d ever seen in her before, a blend of bashfulness, defiance and pride. She wanted my blessing, I assumed – was perhaps even asking my permission – and once I got over my initial shock I gave it to her, declaring with more enthusiasm than I really felt that she should certainly meet this fellow if she wanted to; she was a free woman; she should follow her heart. Her response was scornful. She would write to him, she said, but the past was the past and there was no sense in them meeting. And that’s what happened: they wrote but didn’t meet – not for several more years, in any case, by which time the admirer had married someone else.