The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Paul Dietrich, on the other hand, my official liaison with the German section of the Comintern, was a jovial and rotund native of the Saar. He was of working-class origin, an easy-going and amiable character and a henpecked husband, married to a hysterical female called Lilly, who repeatedly tried to commit suicide in the Comintern's famed Hotel Lux. Paul and I were on friendly terms; three years later we again worked together during the campaign which preceded the Saar referendum; he was called back to Moscow in 1936 and shot as a spy in 1938.

  Our meeting with Tretyakov was short and stiff. I dutifully accepted his verdict, promised to exercise more Bolshevik self-criticism in the future, and to rewrite the articles. On our way back to the Comintern building in the Maneshnaya, Paul comforted me with the reflection that, as Tretyakov and Becher were rivals, and as I had arrived with a letter from Becher, I could not reasonably hope for a better reception.

  I touched up my articles and sent them again to MORP. They were returned without a word of comment. This I interpreted as a tacit approval, and now took the batch to be officially censored at the Press Department of NARKOMINDYEL, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

  Head of the Press Department at that time was. Constantin (Kostya') Umansky, a short, elegant and handsome young man in his thirties. Thanks to his personal charm, cynical wit and apparent frankness he was on excellent terms with the foreign correspondents in Moscow; the fact that he got away with these dangerous qualities was ascribed to the personal favour of Stalin. Umansky was later appointed Consul in New York, then Ambassador in Mexico; he was killed during the war in a mysterious aeroplane accident.

  He received me most affably, and we often met later on. He read my articles on the spot and approved them after a few insignificant cuts. When I told him about my experiences with Tretyakov, he laughed, patted me on the shoulder, and advised me to steer clear of MORP:

  `You are officially a bourgeois correspondent, so you had better stick to us here in the NARKOMINDYEL and keep away from those Comintern zealots. We'll look after you--but keep your mouth shut about your Party nembership and Comintern connexions. Officially, I know nothing about them.'

  Working on the 'NARKOMINDYEL line', Umansky was full of departmental animosity against the `comrades on the Comintern line'. I have spoken before of this dualism between the two aspects of Soviet power. In their mentality and style of living, Comintern and NARKOMINDYEL are wo worlds apart. The people in the diplomatic service are supposed to be men of the world, to mingle with bourgeois society and lead a respectable existence. The Comintern people, quite to the contrary, are supposed to live up to a puritan and ascetic ideal. Hence their hearty dislike for each other.

  Umansky was not only contemptuous of the zealots of the Comintern; he was also a clever propagandist who knew that effective propaganda in the capitalist Press must be camouflaged by an attitude of critical objectivity. Fellow-travellers and Communist writers whose Party membership was not generally known to the public (as was my case), were the more useful the better they succeeded in convincing their readers of their detached neutrality. Criticism of minor blemishes of the regime was from the Foreign Ministry's point of view not objectionable so long as it served as a bait to put some key-motive of Soviet propaganda across.

  Having obtained Umansky's clearance for my articles on European Zussia, I set out, some time in the autumn of I932, for the Caucasus and Central Asia.

  VI. Onions and Odkolon

  THE train journey from Moscow to Orchonikidse in the Caucasus took, in I932, four days and three nights; I doubt whether it takes much less nowadays. These four days and three nights I spent in a sleeping-car compartment with citizen Vera Maximovna who occupied the berth above mine.

  I never spent a more chaste eighty hours alone with a woman. The Russians think nothing of throwing men and women together in sleeping cars; it is an old Russian tradition like swaddling their babies and whipping each other with birch-rods in the steam-bath. It is also one of the reasons why kvmandirovkas are so popular among the higher ranks of the hierarchy who are entitled to sleeping compartments. Every long train journey becomes a kind of lottery game where the prizes are unknown beforehand. A bribe to the conductor, however, often improves the chances.

  I did not bribe the conductor to pair me off with citizen Vera Maximovna. She was well over forty and dressed in the fashion of the 'twenties: in a short, green skirt with a wasp-waist, a pink blouse with a lace decolletage over her flat chest, and a pink ribbon over her forehead. Her hair was dyed with the intention of making it appear blonde, but Soviet dye is apt to play unpredictable tricks, doubtless owing to sabotage on the cosmetics front. From under the pink head-ribbon, some frivolous curls were' peeping out. During the day, Citizen Vera mostly lay on her upper berth, doing her nails and chewing sunflower seeds. At night, she exchanged the ribbon for a white nightcap with lace embroidery. Otherwise she did not undress, except for taking off her blouse while I waited in the corridor; Russian sleeping-cars provided no sheets. In the morning, she rubbed her neck with odkolon, the Russian version of eau de cologne; the water supply of the sleeping car was in remont. Our compartment reeked of a mixture of sweet odkolon and raw onions, of which I had brought a liberal supply from Moscow, to keep up the vitamin balance.

  I was hammering away on my typewriter, or reading, during most of the journey, and on the first and second days successfully avoided getting involved in conversation. On the third day I got out as usual at a station to queue up for hot water to make tea with. When I got back to the compartment with the pot of hot water I found a note on my bed, typed on my typewriter. It said, in pidgin German:

  `Now you have worked enoff and•nryiistpay a little cowtship to Mademoiselle Vera Maximovna.'

  The courtship consisted mostly in Vera Maximovna talking about herself. She talked without restraint, for she took me for a bourgeois newspaperman, and as she regarded me, despite the onions, as a knltiurny choloveik from abroad, she took it for granted that I must loathe the Bolshevik regime as much as she did. Her hatred for it was nearly hysterical, for she was full of the snobbery of the de'classee petite-bourgcoise `who had seen better days'. I became suddenly fascinated in talking to her, for I had never met a real counter­revolutionary in the flesh--little though there was of it on poor Vera Maximovna. If she had found the courage and the opportunity, she would certainly have become a saboteur. She also inspired in me the heretical idea that, contrary to all that Marx said, the only truly class-conscious social stratum was the lower middle class with their ambiguous situation between middle- and working-class, and the half-caste's obsessional yearning for respectability. They, and not the revolutionary workers, were carrying the day in Germany, and Vera Maximovna would have made an excellent little Fascist. She actually was an assistant bookkeeper in a Trust in Leningrad, a position that entitled her to one hot meal a day in the Trust's canteen, less than a pound of black bread, an occasional salted herring, a few tea-leaves from the Co-operative, and little else. She only had the scantiest provisions for the long journey; I suspected that she kept nibbling her sunflower seeds to stay her hunger. Yet, in contrast to the hearty Russian habit of sharing all provisions on a journey, she would only accept the daintiest morsels from mine, `to try the taste of it'. It was so pathetic to watch her watch me eating that I, too, ate very little by day and stuffed myself secretly at night under my blanket; but I feared that she might hear me chewing. She was one of those persons who, when you sleep in the same room with them, always make you feel that they are awake and holding their breath.

  Vera Maximovna was of a romantic disposition. She made frequent references to her soul, and occasional ones to mine. She also got into the habit of letting at night one thin arm dangle down from her berth, slowly moving her manicured fingers in the void, as if in her sleep. She probably expected me to blow a kiss at the moving fingertips, accompanied by a groan of passionate torment. She got so much on my nerves that I was tempted to climb into her berth and pummel he
r black and blue under the pretext of passion, but she would probably have screamed and brought the train to a halt--provided the emergency chain was not in remont.

  Her destination was Yessentucki, a Caucasian spa where she was going to spend her annual leave. A holiday in Yessentucki was a coveted privilege, quite out of keeping with Vera Maximovna's inferior position in the hierarchy; but she had made one or two allusions to a friend `high up in the Trust' whom she was to meet there. Evidently she was the mistress of this important member of the bureaucracy, who either had an eccentric taste, or a fixation on a deceased maiden aunt. It is also possible that I underestimated the attractions of Vera Maximovna, for I had noticed glances from other male passengers in the corridor who clearly envied me for the privilege of our cosy den, with its enticing odour of onion-cum-odkolon.

  Among the stories Vera Maximovna told me, I remember one, about the famine of 1920, which sounded gruesome and incredible. At that time she lived in the province of Samara which, emerging from the Civil War, was in a state of chaos. The peasants had reverted to a kind of semi-savagery, and cases of cannibalism were not infrequently reported. One wintry evening, walking through a dimly lit street, a lassoo was thrown over her head from a ground-floor window. She screamed, and some passers-by saved her while she was being dragged towards the window. Just in time--otherwise poor Vera Maximovna would have been roasted and eaten.

  Strange as it may seem, I believed her story to be quite possibly true. There was something in the way she told it that had the ring of an actually lived experience. Sporadic outbreaks of cannibalism during the famine of 1920 are admitted by Soviet historians. That first famine was a direct consequence of the counter-revolution and foreign intervention, so a full disclosure of its horrors served the interests of Soviet propaganda. Regarding the famine of I933, the situation was, of course, reversed.

  Did similar horrors take place in I932-33, while I was actually touring the

  country? The answer is, probably yes. When the gates of the German extermination camps were opened after the second World War, it became known that the eating of human flesh, dead or not-quite-dead, had been a repeated occurrence in the camps and was officially listed by the Germans as a capital crime. The history of polar explorations and of shipwrecked men adrift abounds with similar examples. In short, cannibalism is not quite so remote from civilisation as we commonly believe; but one rarely meets people who have come into direct contact with it, or can plausibly pretend to have done so. This was one of the reasons why meeting Vera Maximovna made such an impression on me.

  The other reason is the profession she had practised before the Revolution. I had asked her once or twice what she had been doing in those bygone days, but her only answer had been a coy smile and the promise that she would tell at the moment when we were `to part forever'. She kept the promise on the platform in Orchonikidse, where I left the train. By then I had grown quite fond of her. She took my arm--which caused me a curious sensation, mixed of affection and gooseflesh, as it were.

  `I promised to tell you what I was before,' she said. `Can you guess?

  I couldn't.

  `Up to my twenty-fifth year,' said Vera Maximovna, `when the Bolsheviks closed down all convents and monasteries in Russia, I was a nun in the Convent at Yaromir.'

  I had never seen her say her prayers. Perhaps, underneath her hysterical hatred for the Bolsheviks, she regarded them as her liberators.

  VII. A Dream in the Caucasus

  CROSSING the Caucasus has retained a curious significance in my life. The name itself has a magic ring in my memory, as if a bell were tolling with heavy reverberations. On the farther side of the white mountain range which divides Europe from Asia I was to run into my first emotional conflict with the Party and to meet some exceptional human beings who, many years later, appeared as characters in Darkness at Noon. It was, of all places, between Tiflis and Baku that I lost my political innocence.

  The railway line from Moscow to Tiflis does not cross the Caucasus; it throws a huge loop around the forbidding mountains, by-passing them along the Caspian Sea. But in summer, when the passes are open, one can take a short-cut by car over the famous Georgian Military Highway. It starts at Orchonikidse (formerly Vladikavkas), and leads across the nearly 7,500 feet high Kasbeck Pass straight down into the vineyards north of Tiflis. Thus the Georgian Military Highway served the strategic purpose of saving me a further eight hundred miles in the company of Vera Maximovna.

  It was early in the afternoon when I left the train at Orchonikidse. By the rime the Station G.P.U. got me a bed, a dinner voucher and a reservation for a seat in a car travelling to Tiflis on the next day, it was evening. There was as not much point in visiting Party headquarters, so I went for a stroll through the darkening streets. Orchonikidse is a small town in the foothills of the Caucasus, built on a plateau some 2,500 feet high on both banks of a wild mountain river, the Terek. Its background is a jagged skyline of glaciers and peaks, brought close by the deceptive transparence of the air. In the distance, second line of white cones, even higher, hang motionless, suspended from the sky. I had now been travelling by myself for several weeks, but for the first time I felt alone in a strange land. After three days in that airless den in the train, the mountain air had a toxic effect which, however, was depressing rather than exhilarating. I took refuge in the international sanctuary for the lonely, the cinema. They played an old silent film with Harold Lloyd, Safety Last--that delightful seasick-making picture in which the comedian keeps hanging on by one hand to the roof of a skyscraper, or balancing at impossible angles along its edge. The suspense was increased by the film breaking every five nunutes, and leaving the howling audience in darkness. That night I had a significant dream. I was climbing up a bare rockface, when I suddenly felt a slackening of the rope to which I was attached, and giddiness overcome me. I woke up trembling, still waiting for the headlong fall to begin.

  The dream had apparently two levels of meaning, but the second only unfolded itself twenty years later, when I was beginning to write the present chapter and, aided by the pages of Red Days, memories came surging back. At the age of fifteen and sixteen, I had been an ardent Alpinist. This passion came virtually to an end one Sunday in 1925 on the Schneeberg, a popular and treacherous mountain near Vienna. Secured to a rope, I was climbing down a rather difficult rockface (a so-called `chimney') when I saw on a ledge, a hundred feet beneath me, the immobile figure of a man sprawling on his stomach. It was the first corpse I had ever seen. The man must have broken his neck during his fall, for his head was grotesquely tucked under his body. There was no blood, except a few drops at the back of his shirt where he had scraped against the rock in falling. My comrade and I managed somehow to complete the descent, but this meeting with Ahor--the archaic horror which had haunted my childhood--deprived me of the one indispensable quality of the Alpinist, Schwindelfrciheit--freedom from giddiness. I had lost my innocence in dealing with mountains. I went on climbing in the Alps for a while, but soon gave it up, for I now had to avoid exposed rock faces, no longer trusting myself not to get giddy.

  Obviously the Caucasian peaks, combined with the film, had revived that Schneeberg memory. But as I am a chronic nightmare-dreamer, there must be a special reason for my remembering this particular anxiety-dream after twenty years (there is no mention of it in the pages of Red Days). This reason, or level of meaning, is not easy to formulate. The key-word is `loss of innocence'--towards the mountain, and towards the Party. The sudden slackening of the rope with the resulting giddiness and its terrifying implications, stand for the unconscious fear of losing faith in Russia and the Communist ideal. At that date, this would indeed have meant for me a headlong fall into the physical and spiritual void.

  The next morning and during the following happy fortnight, all forebodings were forgotten. The car journey of a hundred and thirty miles across the Caucasus Mountains lasted nearly eight hours and was the most exciting landscape experience since the glaciers of Francis J
oseph Land through the 'Graf Zeppelin's' window:

  This gigantic ice-hewn doorstep of Asia has a number of peaks several heads taller than Mont Blanc. They make you dizzy by their sight, and drunk with their breath of snow. In the white silence of the highland valleys stand isolated peaks of bare rock like lonely bachelors on Christmas Eve. We started at eighty-five degrees in the shade. Two hours later our noses were red with frost, but the water in the radiator was boiling. We crept through rocky gorges, barren like dead craters on the moon, crawled round hairpin bends, passed castles in ruins, and the crumbling citadel of the loveliest man-devouring amazon of all times, the Georgian reine soleil, Tamara. Every half-hour we were traversing the territories of another tribe or nation which the Caucasus counts more than forty-five, each stranger than the next: one of the tribes still wore a few years ago steel-plated shirts and mail; a second inhabits an inaccessible valley which the Revolution has not yet reached ...

  The road leads over a pass 7,500 feet high. But before that point is reached there is a mountain village called Kasbek, suspended between heaven and earth like Mohammed's tomb. Our eyes still dazzled by the crystalline glare of the glaciers, we crowded into the semi-obscure taproom of an inn where men in tall fur-caps and with silver cartridge-belts were moving through a mist of charcoal smoke and mutton smell, engaged in a competition of smashing mutton bones with their bare fists, or throwing the bones into the air and cutting them into two in their flight with a stroke of their daggers. We had mutton stew, and tankards of hot tea that tasted of mutton, and cigarettes that tasted of mutton, and some of the men sat with us smelling of ram. My experienced traveller's eye informed me at once that they were either Georgians or Armenians, provided they were not Ossiets, Abchasi, Lesgins, Tchechins, Mountain Jetvs, Tats or Assyrians (who also call themselves Aissors); not excluding the possibility that they were Gessids, Gypsies, Kurds or Talichi. Later on, we were joined by the Commander of the Kasbek militia and all his forces, numbering three. The Commander asked for news of Lady Astor and George Bernard Shaw, who, it seems, had jointly passed through Kasbek back in the early 'twenties. He also treated us to several bottles of Kachetinian Burgundy, whose fulminating effect on us he explained by the rarefied air which accelerates the diffusion of the alcohol molecules in the veins. We then climbed a peak to inspect the ruins of an altar of fire-worshipers, and so back into the car which had meanwhile cooled its temper.