Innocence To Die For

by Eidinow, John

  ‘What’s Lenin’s 25-year old policy for Tsarist Russia to do with it? We’re fighting for our lives against the most vicious dictatorship in history.’ A small, plump, bald man in his mid-40s was jumping up and down with fury. ‘If we don’t resist, Hitler’s barbaric hordes will crush the working-class for ever, its leaders will disappear into concentration camps and never be seen again. All hope of progressive government will be gone. Fascism will be triumphant.’

  A few scattered handclaps were drowned by booing.

  The professional tugged at metal-beater’s sleeve. As he sat down, the other rose: the booing stopped.

  ‘Comrade, before I deal with your point, permit me to advise that you have been jumping on your hat. Though as it’s the Neville Chamberlain model, possibly that’s not a bad thing.’

  Cheers and laughter filled the hall. The small man sat down, looking deflated. He bent awkwardly to pick up a black homburg, the crown completely flattened.

  ‘But the real point is that if we allow emotion to dictate our actions, it is not only our hats we risk losing—’

  Another wave of laughter and cheers punctuated his speech. ‘History calls upon us to identify where the interests of the international working class lie, objectively. In the final analysis, it can never be in their sacrificing themselves to make the world safer for imperialist capital. Lenin’s guidance is as clear and central today as it was when he gave it because it is the product of correct historical analysis.’

  He spoke articluately and precisely, with a clipped Oxford accent. ‘In reply to those who said, “Fight for the Russian capitalists because otherwise you will fall under the heel of the German capitalists,” Lenin said, “The alternative is false; choose neither, but unite your forces and establish the power of the people.”’

  He raised his voice and spoke more slowly, gesturing to emphasise each phrase. ‘Comrades, a war between imperialist powers can only mean a strengthening of the imperialist tyranny of the victor.’ He paused for effect, repeated the phrase, then went on as if taking the audience into his confidence. ‘Comrades, at this moment, we await the official guidance from Comrade Dimitrov, that is indeed the case. However, as readers of the Daily Worker know, we already have already been telegraphed that: “There is no doubt whatever in the minds of the Soviet people that this war is an imperialist and predatory war for a new re-division of the world.”’

  ‘Dimitrov?’ Peter whispered in her ear.

  She replied without looking at him. ‘Comintern general secretary. Stalin’s man.’ She had moved to the edge of her seat.

  Metal-beater was staring into space, his face empty of expression. He did not, Peter noticed, join in the vigorous and prolonged applause – from a claque scattered through the hall – that followed the text of the telegram, or at least not until the very end and then slowly pressing his hands together. Peter wondered if Nick Harry was somewhere in the hall, keeping his finger on the pulse. He looked round the audience. Not as far as he could see, but the baths’ vine-swathed Moorish arches, all lavish red and green Victorian tiling, were a sight to relish.

  The small man was on his feet again, waving his battered hat. ‘This is madness. Victory for Hitler means catastrophe for working people and all hope of social progress. It can mean only the destruction of the working class movement and its enslavement, and disaster for all anti-fascist forces.’

  The claque booed. The Oxford accent cut in. ‘You have a greater belief in the invincibility of Hitler’s forces than I do, comrade. We in the Party must take care not to join the social opportunism of the ruling class or be deceived by its propaganda and allow ourselves to be led astray. They and their supporters see the war as a means of strengthening their capitalist-imperialist grip. We see them as hyenas quarrelling over the corpse of capitalism.’ Applause and cheers erupted round the hall. ‘My analysis is clear: this is an imperialist war conducted by the ruling classes and not a people’s anti-Fascist war.’ However, they had to be patient and await the advice of Comrade Dimitrov before going further, always remembering that the international unity of proletarians and party must spell the doom of international capital.

  The scything tone, the intensity, the lapidary delivery held Peter rapt. In comparison, how flaccid the speakers for a peace settlement seemed. Except for Miriam. The formidable Miriam. What he would give to hear her debating Britain’s pulling out of the war with Oxford accent.

  The platform was bringing the meeting to a close. In a final word, metal-beater reminded the audience that policy remained support of the war in a broad left front, working for a popular front government, campaigning for it in pubs and air-raid shelters, in factories and shops. Few were listening, Peter thought. The stewards were already opening the turnstiles.

  ****

  Holding Peter’s arm, Dinah was deep in thought as they walked along. They caught up with the man who had jumped on his hat; he was trying to reshape the crown and brush his footmarks away. He looked up at Dinah. ‘Aren’t you Professor Altschuler’s granddaughter?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I saw you with him at one of the Freier Deutscher Kulturband’s soirées in Downshire Hill.’

  ‘Some time ago perhaps.’ She looked slightly displeased.

  He held out his hand to Peter. ‘Rutherglen Stanley. And you are?’

  ‘Peter Hill. You once taught classics to the top forms at my prep school? King Edward’s?’

  ‘That’s right. For a bit after the war. Now I’m in publishing.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your hat, Mr Stanley.’

  ‘I’m sorry this stupid hat allowed that totalitarian to get away with a joke.’

  ‘He was certainly quick off the mark.’

  ‘That’s what being president of the Oxford Union does for you.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘We read Greats at Balliol, though he was two years behind me. He had a Stalinist mentality even in those days. Remarkably able, though.’

  They had reached the river. A line of silver shone like an arrow along the tideway, reflecting a sliver of moon back into the night sky. ‘This is another lost cause.’ Stanley lifted his hat high above his head. ‘Farewell, old friend. And thank you!’ He threw the hat like a discus, high over the river. They watched it wheel and drop, a sinister dark bird, fluttering on to the thick, fast-flowing waters. ‘Care for a drink? Wash away the taste of all that treachery.’

  ‘Treachery?’ Dinah had spoken.

  ‘To the spirit of democracy. To all the working people who are suffering under Hitler’s vile Nazi system. To those who’ve been tortured and have died in the anti-fascist cause. To all those innocents who don’t know what a totalitarian government would mean.’

  ‘But if revolutionary defeatism is now the only way to international socialism? The cause we serve. Refusing to chose between two imperialisms?’ She seemed to be tilting from anger to the verge of tears.

  ‘Pigs will fly. Hitler and his gang will never surrender their power over every aspect of life, every part and every person, once they have it.’

  ‘And what hope for socialism, if we simply back one imperialist against another? Fail to stand up for our own cause?’

  ‘Hitler’s concentration camps are full of socialists, and it would be the same here if we can’t keep him at bay. Look, my dear, in truth this so-called objective analysis is about one thing and one thing only: Stalin’s grubby deal with Hitler. Stalin has to justify his villainous pact with the Nazis and he’s theorising his selling out. That’s as plain as a pikestaff. These dialecticians can argue themselves into any view they need at the time. Now, how about that drink?’

  Peter looked at Dinah, who shook her head. ‘Thank you, but I must get home.’

  ‘Another time, perhaps.’ He and Peter exchanged cards.

  They crossed the bridge. Just before they parted on the embankment, Rutherglen Stanley turned to Peter. ‘Hill, where do you stand on the debate tonight? I take it you aren’t committed to the CP lin
e. If you’ll forgive my asking.’

  ‘By all means. I haven’t studied Lenin, but I can see the logic of the argument for revolutionary defeatism, the internal logic.’ He felt Dinah stiffen. ‘However, I also think that the whole idea of international capitalism fighting itself into the ground, destroying itself in a sort of civil war, leaving international proletarianism triumphant—I think that’s just an illusion. Hitler’s tanks will shatter it. What you’ve said about Stalin needing to justify his deal with Hitler sounds right. In the end, Hitler simply has to be defeated. We have to find our way to that. Find the social and moral unity to make victory possible.’ He heard Dinah let out a breath.

  In silence, Peter and Dinah walked on into the shuttered, silent city streets. Dinah had let go of his arm and retreated into herself. A bus suddenly loomed up out of the gloom and ground to a halt just ahead of them. She waved at the conductor.

  ‘This will take me right home,’ she said. ‘Don’t come out of your way for me.’

  He watched the bus out of sight, then traced a path to the Embankment and turned along it towards the Victoria Tower outlined against the sky. How distant she had seemed. So suddenly. As he went, he wondered if she would want to see him again.

  ****

  She didn’t call. Messages left with the store went unreturned. Should he return to the teashop and wait, or wait on the pavement? Take her hand, talk to her. He saw again how she mounted the bus, turning her back, without a look round. The dismissive phrase. No arrangement to meet. Probably she’d seen him at once as a social fascist, with his talk of social and moral unity, his hopes of war bringing social improvement. But he wouldn’t pretend to beliefs he didn’t have, even for love. She hadn’t said she loved him.

  ****

  He went away for a weekend’s shooting. Back in London, he could wait no longer; he bought a dozen roses and took them to her home.

  As he rapped with the little cast-iron knocker, he poised himself for her pushing away the roses without a word and closing the front door in his social fascist face. The blackout was tight—no visible sign of anyone indoors. He knocked again.

  A man’s voice called from inside. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘A friend of Dinah’s, Peter Hill. I have something for her.’

  The door opened on a dark hallway. A shadowy figure beckoned him. Feeling awkward, he stepped inside. The overhead light clicked on, dim in a blue shade. He found himself holding out the roses to a man of medium height wearing a frogged, velvet smoking-jacket buttoned up to the neck. Grey hair streaked with black was thinly brushed down over a round head that poked forward questioningly, bird-like, and seemed large for his narrow shoulders. Dark eyes surveyed him without expression from under a bulging brow. The thin nose was prominent, the lips full.

  Peter recovered himself. ‘Professor Altschuler? I’m Peter Hill.’ In the silence that followed, he felt more was required. ‘You very kindly gave me your copy of Hymns to the Night.’

  ‘Hymnen an die Nacht. Ah, yes. My granddaughter’s Ritter ohne Furcht und Tadel. Knight in shining armour, as you would say. I have not quite understood how you came into her life, but I am grateful that you were there to protect her.’ The German accent was pronounced but the speech was measured and the language confident.

  ‘Not a very successful protector.’

  ‘You lived up to the occasion. Your class would not have prepared you to be a street fighter. I was grateful. She is the apple of my eye, so to say.’

  ‘I have the highest regard for Dinah.’

  The professor inclined his head.

  Peter waited. The hall smelled of damp, with a breath of stew – no, goulash – lying on it.

  ‘Let me suggest we leave the hall.’ The professor gestured towards the door opening into the front room. ‘It is more comfortable, though not much more, than out here.’

  On either side of the hall, books were stacked in piles. In the tiny front room, square with a neatly black-curtained bow window, more books were lined up in piles along the walls, moving in rows out into the room, many interleaved with strips of paper. Notebooks were scattered everywhere together with loose sheets and slips of paper covered in thin, precise writing that filled the pages and crawled up the sides.

  ‘Would you like me to relieve you of the roses? I am sorry my granddaughter is not here to receive them in person, but I am quite sure she will be delighted by them.’ He left the room, shuffling slightly in embroidered slippers, blue and gold. The smoking-jacket was revealed as richly plum-coloured.

  Peter took in his surroundings. Two velvet-covered library chairs in front of a gas-fire. By the chair with its back to the window, under a plain standard lamp, stood a gate-legged oak table, its surface covered in notebooks and slips of paper. A large wireless stood in the bow, its aerial pinned along the ceiling. Next to it, a gramophone. What looked like a couch from a railway-station waiting room stood against the back wall, its seat awash with books and papers. Above it, pictures, photographs, hung from the rail, but the light was too dim for the contents to be plain. Nothing that spoke of Dinah.

  ‘May I offer you a glass of plum brandy after you have done me the honour of calling?’ The professor had returned with a small decanter and two liqueur glasses. ‘Please take a seat. Dinah will not be here, I am afraid. She is staying with a sick friend.’ He sat in the chair under the lamp, resembling even more a large bird with its head jutting forward. The dark eyes, reminiscent of Dinah’s, held Peter’s, then fell away.

  ‘You’re continuing your work.’ Peter gestured at the notebooks and papers.

  ‘I also teach German. But, yes. Fortunately, we were able to bring most of my papers when political circumstances forced me from Vienna, and I hope to complete my study of Novalis, to make sense of all the fragments he left through his brief life, to show him finally as sublime. The German Dante. One who walked in the night and found the splendour of the earth.’ He raised his glass. ‘To life.’

  ‘To life.’ Peter followed him in gulping his brandy down in one, catching its biting fragrance as its warmth coursed down.

  ‘I’m ashamed to say that I’ve not really encountered Novalis.’

  ‘Few have, Mr Hill, compared with the multitude who know Goethe, Schiller, Heine, even Kleist. And it will be even fewer with German culture under the heel of the barbarian. I must preserve the light, the splendour here. If I am allowed.’ He leaned forward with the decanter. ‘One for the road?’

  Back in the dimness of the hall, the professor gripped his arm and pulled him down, whispering into his ear. ‘You must agitate. Ceaseless agitation. You must go into the factories and mines and out into the countryside and agitate, be a familiar visitor among working people, among the poor and oppressed in their cellars and tenements and agitate there, agitate without pause, relentless, for a general strike now.’ He harshly drew breath. ‘Against the slavery of managers and stockholders, the faceless men of capital who control the toilers’ lives from afar and the silk-hatted politicians who are their puppets. Form revolutionary clubs. Set up a printing press. Produce leaflets to call the people to arms. A revolutionary journal to tell the truth. Above all agitate, agitate. Intensive, unyielding, remorseless. The bourgeoisie will collapse.’

  His eyes gleamed, his voice was hoarse with whispering, his fingers dug into Peter’s arm. ‘The power of money will be brought down. A socialist society will be born from the ruins. Meet violence with counter-violence. No quarter to those who give no quarter.’ He flicked off the light and pushed him towards the door. ‘When you have to strike out, always make with the fist with copper coins between your fingers, or keys. Now go. Agitate. Agitate.’ The word followed him into the darkness as the front door shut.

  ****

  On the pavement, Peter grappled with the change that had transformed the professor, the violence of his whispered monologue compared to the earlier measured professorial delivery, the Viennese charm and grace. Walter Thomas had said the professor was not quite hims
elf: was this what he’d meant? Was it the brandy? Did Dinah have to deal with this daily? Not knowing if she would be met by Jekyll or Hyde, Novalis or Trotsky, on her return? On the other hand, was he being fair? Perhaps the professor simply meant it, not understanding British society and industrial conditions. Had Dinah justified her getting to know him by presenting him as a fellow Communist, an agitator? Obviously there were agitators; he’d heard them that night in the baths. More than one had demanded ‘General strike now’. He tried to imagine himself going off to some factory in the north to agitate, like a student in a Gorkii play. Agitate, agitate. He laughed.

  ‘Someone’s happy,’ said a woman as a couple brushed past in the darkness. A man said, ‘Put that laughter out!’

  Then, what of Dinah? He was no closer to seeing her, though now he knew she was occupied. And he’d met her grandfather. He resolved to be patient.

  ****

  When he heard the coins drop into the box, he knew. It must be.

  ‘Peter. Is it you?’

  ‘It is. Dinah, is that you?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Really? Really you?’ He couldn’t help himself.

  ‘I’m sorry. Really sorry. I had your messages, but life has not been so easy. I want to thank you for the roses. They were so beautiful and a lovely surprise. Uplifting. It was very kind of you.’

  ‘I’m glad you like them. I was very pleased to meet the professor.’

  ‘He is very happy to know you.’

  They couldn’t see each other for some days, he explained. He was going to The Hague. To see his mother, at her command.

  They made an arrangement, meeting in their teashop, on his return. Then, just as she was about to ring off, an afterthought: her grandfather had been talking about sending a document, actually an academic paper, to an address in The Hague. Could Peter possibly take it and post it there, even better deliver it? She would drop it into his office on her way to work.