The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  That was, of course, precisely what Werner wanted. Whether it was originally he who made the suggestion or I, I cannot remember, and it makes no difference. I believe that Werner suggested I should pretend to her that we had known each other in Germany, so as not to arouse her suspicion. If he did make the suggestion, I turned it down, probably on the grounds that I am a bad liar. There was, of course, no question of telling her what Werner was doing. That would have been a breach of Party discipline amounting to treason, and entirely inconceivable to me at that time.

  We met for lunch in one of the two 'free-market restaurants' in Baku. Free-market restaurants', as distinct from professional canteens, were at the time tolerated but considered disreputable places which only foreigners, black marketeers, and other `parasitic survivors of the N.E.P.' would frequent. Every town had one or two such restaurants--most famous among them the Cafe Metropole in Moscow--and it was common knowledge that every word spoken at such a place could an hour later be found on the desks of the G.P.U. But they were the only places where you could get abundant food and drink (at exorbitant prices) in an almost pre-Revolutionary atmosphere, with smiling waiters and a gypsy orchestra. And the attraction of this was so strong that although it meant a black mark against one's name to be seen in one of these places, they were always crammed full.

  In spite of the shashlik and the drinks and the gypsies, it was an unhappy lunch. Nadeshda had not wanted to come. She had, in fact, at first proudly refused to come, but her eyes, shimmering with curiosity and desire, had betrayed her. I felt a wrench each time I saw the wistful little girl appear behind the classic profile; it made my heart choke with misery, and I would almost have preferred her to remain haughty and unapproachable. To hold a young Greek goddess in your arms, as I now was occasionally privileged to do, is blasphemy and sacrilege. During the whole phantom-chase for Helena, the need to worship had always accompanied desire; now I discovered, with awe and joy, that the need to worship may be stronger than desire.

  It was an unhappy meal. Nadeshda had come after all, but not in her new jumper and suede shoes. She was wearing her black tailored suit. There was almost a hush in the restaurant as she wended her way among the tables with her floating, weightless walk, to the corner where Werner and I were waiting for her. Werner's eyes for a moment became round and goggling. She greeted us with the graceful little bow of her head that I knew so well. But I felt that she disliked Werner at first sight.

  I cannot remember whether I ever told Nadeshda that I was a member of the Party. But if I didn't, she had guessed it. About Werner I had only told her that he was a young German whom I had met by chance in the co­operative store, and that he was working at the PROFSAYUS. Now I realised that bringing them together had been a mistake. Werner and I obviously lived in two different worlds, and yet there was an equally obvious intimacy between us, a common tie which, given the circumstances, could only be the Party. At first, I thought that Nadeshda was jealous of this intimacy from which she was excluded; then I realised that she was not only jealous but frightened, and that her distrust of Werner automatically included me. I felt that a disaster was happening, that irreparable damage was being done, and that I could do nothing to prevent it.

  I had seen Nadeshda frightened before, on a single occasion, when for the first time we were alone in my room and some unhappy experience of the past made her expect that something inconsiderate or even brutal would be done to her. So I knew what she looked like when she was frightened, and that now she was frightened of Werner. She was frightened in the manner of the brave. She held her head a little higher than natural, and a great stillness came over her; her body seemed becalmed, waiting without motion for the axe to strike. I had told her, only half mockingly, that on that earlier occasion she had made me think of Marie Antoinette under the guillotine. Now, as I watched her sitting at our little table, I again saw her hold her head slightly I 1igher than natural, and the revealing stillness of her poise. In Russia it is not considered a sign of cowardice to behave in an affable manner towards people of whom one is afraid, and personal pride is not considered a virtue. But Nadeshda did not smile at Werner a single time. She was polite, cool, wrapped in her stillness and miles removed from us, though I could inhale her scent.

  In cold despair, I drank glass after glass of wine. With the second bottle i hc tension somewhat eased, but only on the surface. Then, on top of all this, I discovered that Werner's unusual timidity was not merely a homage to Nadeshda's beauty, that he was also labouring under a social inferiority complex. When we were alone, there had been no sign of it; in the Party, relations between working-class and middle-class were reversed. But at that restaurant table he was a minority of one against two, with a different technique of manipulating knives and forks--and against that perennial nightmare not even Marxism is a remedy. To complete the nightmare, there was my own deep-rooted feeling of guilt towards the proletariat of which Werner was the perfect symbol--the deformed street-urchin, the cat-killer, the hunted and persecuted, who had already made a hundred times greater sacrifices for the Party than I, the middle-class intellectual, ever would. I could do nothing to comfort Nadeshda and allay her apprehensions; she had I,rcome incommunicado. But at least I could put Werner at his ease by stressing the intimacy and solidarity between us. Nadeshda's behaviour must seem to him simply upper-class arrogance. Her manner turned Werner and me into allies. In every triangle there are two corners on the base, and the third one is the lonely apex. As the meal progressed, Nadeshda became the lonely apex.

  I was not conscious of a choice. I was pushed into it. I made it unthinkingly and automatically. But that excuse applies to most betrayals. One does not decide at a given moment: `I am going to be a traitor.' One slides into treason by degrees.

  After that meal there was a period of a week or ten days out of my three weeks in Baku, when Nadeshda avoided me. On the telephone she pretended to be busy. There had been no quarrel, not even an unfriendly word. Then we met by chance in the street, and from that moment until my departure was again as it had been before--on the surface. Below the surface nothing ever was it had been before. She gave no explanation why she had avoided me, and I did not press for one.

  One day I had to go to the post office. I received my mail poste restante. Nadeshda accompanied me. There was a cable for me from Berlin which had something like this: `Stockholm and Madrid settled. Zurich and Warsaw doubtful. Cable itinerary and rush material.' It was from my agent, Karl Duncker, and referred to the serialisation of my articles in the foreign press. But to anybody who did not know that, it must have sounded puzzling and spicious.

  I stuffed the cable into my overcoat pocket. On the way back Nadeshda, acording to her habit, walked at my side with her hand in the pocket of my overcoat, her fingers locked in mine. We parted at her office. When I got home, the cable was no longer in my pocket.

  It may have fallen out by chance. For a variety of technical reasons this as unlikely.

  I had no explanation for this episode at the time. Today I have. If I had had it at the time, I would have carried a considerably smaller load of guilt during the past twenty years.

  There seemed to be only two explanations. Firstly, that Nadeshda herself worked for the G.P.U., and that her whole behaviour, including her apparent mistrust of Werner, had been an elaborate comedy. I would not have resented that beyond a slight hurt to my vanity. I was on the side of the G.P.U., and the G.P.U. was on my side. It would have been a wonderful relief to know that I had merely been made a fool of by the shamans. But this hypothesis was untenable for a simple reason. The G.P.U. read all my cables anyhow, quite officially, in the censor's office; they had no need to steal them.

  If, on the other hand, Nadeshda was a foreign agent, an assumption which every fibre in my body rejected, I still could not see what foreign power would be interested in a cable addressed to a Mr. Arthur Koestler, journalist. The whole thing was absurd. But then I remembered how, in my apparat days, I had eagerly collected ev
ery scrap of information, relevant or irreleant, to fill my reports to Edgar. This made the assumption a little less absurd.

  In the end, I reported the incident of the cable to Werner.

  There is one aspect of time-travel in which science-fiction writers have ever been interested, and which for a while interested me to the point of obsession. If a time-machine could be made, it would be possible to undo what one has done in the past.

  Denunciation is an elementary duty of every Party member, and a test of his loyalty. During the Purges, women denounced their husbands, and boys were made to sign public statements demanding that their fathers be banged. Denunciation is a scientifically fostered epidemic, the Party's prinipal method of waging germ-warfare against the human spirit.

  During my seven years in the Communist Party, the only person whom 1 denounced or betrayed was Nadeshda, and she was the person dearer to me than anybody during those seven years. It is no exaggeration when I say that I would have died for her readily and with a glow of joy. The Party to which I betrayed her I did not love; I had qualms and doubts about it, and moments of exasperation. But I was part of it, as my hands and my guts were part of oI ysel£ It was not a relationship; it was an identity.

  The mitigating circumstances, which I kept and keep repeating to myself, were that I rather over-emphasised to Werner the possibility that the cable had simply fallen out of my pocket; that he did not seem to take the matter seriously at all; that I was quite sure that the all-knowing shamans would find out the exact truth of the matter, and that it would turn out to be a harmless solution which had escaped me. Lastly, I could not know at the time that a denunciation of this kind would be regarded, when the Terror started three years later, as sufficient grounds to condemn any person, and to turn Nadeshda's fate into Marie Antoinette's.

  The explanation which came to me too late, and which I feel to be true, 1, the most unbearable part of this story. Nadeshda had never asked me any personal question beyond what I told her about myself. She was curious bout Paris and Berlin, and the Jordan and the Nile; she seemed to have no criosity regarding my personal circumstances. In my blindness I did not realise that there is no woman without a devouring curiosity about her lover.

  Nadeshda, the haughty ballerina's profile, had been too proud to betray her curiosity. Nadeshda, the wistful captive child, had pinched the cable to know

  wether it came from a mistress or a wife in far, far-away glittering Paris or Berlin. It was the child whom I had denounced.

  There is only one comforting aspect to all this.

  One day Werner asked me with apparent casualness why I did not take

  Nadeshda with me on my journey through Central Asia. A leave from the

  Soviet could be arranged, she would officially act as my interpreter, and I would have a wonderful time.

  The suggestion obviously originated from Werner's superiors. It could again be interpreted in two different ways. The first was that the G.P.U. wamted to use Nadeshda to keep me under observation. But I had already asked her, more than once, to come with me, and she had refused. If she were working for them she would have accepted, according to their instructions.

  The remaining possibility was the reverse one. They wanted to use me to keep her under observation. I told Werner frankly that I thought this was the purpose of his suggestion. He said with an unusual undertone of seriousness: `If she is all right, as you believe that she is, this is the best way to help her.' Logically, he was right.

  I again begged Nadeshda to come with me. She refused: she could not leave her aunt, nor her job. I said that I could probably arrange for her to get leave for a kommandirovka as my interpreter. She asked with a little smile, bringing her eyes close to mine so that they shimmered in a faint squint: 'Arranged--through whom?' I said: `Through Intourist.' It must have sounded quite natural, for she watched me with a puzzled look. The guides and interpreters of Intourist were, of course, all working for the G.P.U., but I did not necessarily have to know that. For a moment she seemed to hesitate, and everything was in the balance. Then she tossed her head back with a single, final `No.' It sounded almost fierce, but a moment later she proposed gaily that we have dinner at the 'free-market restaurant' to hear the gypsies. I said I had thought that she did not like to be seen there. She answered again with a single word, a smiling nichevo.

  I reported my failure to Werner. He said with his little grimace and his

  soft, steady gaze: 'Du wurdest gewogen und zu leicht befunden'-`Thou hast

  been weighed and found wanting.' This talk took place one or two days before my departure from Baku. From my hotel window I could sometimes hear the wail of the little steam-boat on the Caspian Sea which would take me away to its Eastern shore. There was a pause, then Werner said very deliberately: `Why don't you tell her to get herself a job in some other town?' He then explained, more by hints than by direct statements, a curious fact of which I was unaware at the time, but which I have since found confirmed in the reports of a number of refugees from Russia. If a not very important person attracted the suspicions of the local G.P.U., he or she could usually escape the consequences by taking up residence in another part of the country. The overworked G.P.U. rarely bothered to follow up the cases of such insignificant people, once they were removed from its local sphere and responsibility. It would have been quite impossible to keep track of the millions who had fallen under suspicion in a country where millions were on the move. If Nadeshda could be persuaded to leave her ominous aunt and go to live somewhere else--in Leningrad, for instance, where she had friends--the chances were that she would be safe. If, on the other hand, she stayed in Baku, sooner or later she was bound to get into trouble.

  By passing me this tip, Werner had given me proof that he believed in Nadeshda's innocence, and that he wanted to help her. This was the one comforting aspect to which I have referred. There was even a faint possibility that he had not considered the story of the cable worth reporting. Whether he had done so or not, I shall never know. Sometimes I believe in one possibility sometimes in the other.

  My boat was to have left shortly before midnight. There had been the usual delay. By four o'clock in the morning Nadeshda and I were still tramping up and down the deserted docks of Baku. There is a fine black snow falling day and night on Baku from the oil-towers and the huge cleumneys of the refineries. About one o'clock in the morning a drizzling rain had started. Nadeshda's hair was soaked; she never wore a hat or scarf. She did not mind it getting wet; she only minded the smell of petrol which got into her hair with the rain. Shampoo was unobtainable in Baku. The image of Nadeshda washing her lovely hair with kitchen soap made me ache.

  I had said good-bye to Werner at the hotel so that Nadeshda would see me off alone. We were engaged in a monotonous argument that had gone on for hours. I had told Nadeshda that it would be better for her to take a job in Leningrad. She had asked why. I had said: 'Just because.' She had asked again. I had given the same answer. It was impossible for me to say more. My Russian vocabulary was limited. So was Nadeshda's French. What remained unsaid could fill a volume.

  It was understood that there would be letters, and that after completing

  journey I would come back to Baku. Neither of us believed in it. There was nobody around in the docks, except an occasional Red Army patrol. The other passengers were already on the boat, asleep. We tramped up and down through the drizzle and the smell. I clutched her cold fingers in my overcoat pocket, and every minute was added torture. Then it started again: Why did you tell me to go to Leningrad? She had never before been so insistent. Yet it was impossible for me to say more.

  In the darkness, Nadeshda's face looked the same as it had appeared to me as it had the first time in the door of the sleeping-car compartment, an eternity of three weeks ago. It had reverted to its haughty, forbidding purity. There was nothing else to say. Her hand in my pocket had become a lifeless object, polite loan.

  I waited for the redeeming whistle of the boat, as a ma
n about to be hanged must wait impatiently for the trap to open under his feet, to get it '' At last the whistle sounded. We walked slowly to the gangway, then stopped. I wanted to kiss her, and could not. She made no move. She bent her head, her hair dripping, and looked at her shoes. They were the new suedes. She said: `Now they are ruined.' Those were the last words that I heard from her.

  I walked up the planks and was shown into the stuffy dormitory full of snoring corpses. For some security reason nobody was allowed up on deck. So I could not even wave Nadeshda good-bye.

  The crossing of the Caspian, from Baku to Krasnovodsk, takes about twenty-four hours. During that time I did not move from my bunk. I was in a state of apathy which, during the day, turned into acute physical discomfort. Then I discovered that I was ill. Or rather, I found a previous notion confirmed that Nadeshda was ill and that now I was to share her illness.

  The illness was gonorrhoea. I accepted it without shock or surprise, with only an aching tenderness for the slim, lonely figure left behind on the quay in Baku. I felt so dead and alone in the middle of the Caspian Sea that I cherished my affliction because it was part of her. That type of affliction has become practically extinct since the mass production of antibiotics began. But at the time, in Russia, with its primitive standards of hygiene, it was epidemic. In men, if treated in time, it was usually cured within a fortnight or three weeks. In women, it was more stubborn and serious. That Nadeshda had had another lover before me, I knew. That this humiliation should have befallen her, just her, the pure and lovely apparition from a vanished world, seems to me the perfect symbol and fulfilment of her destiny.

  I have hesitated for a long time whether to mention in these pages our illness, or whether to suppress it. I feared, not so much to arouse indignation, but to provoke a snigger. I believe that to omit certain facts is legitimate so long as the omissions are not relevant to the essence of the narrative. But I feel that this sickness is relevant because it sums up the degradation of human substance, the annihilation of human dignity, the poisoning of human relations which was inherent in the time and place. And also, because it proves that the gods delight in reserving their worst tortures for their darlings, the innocents.