The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

I met most of the leading members of the Institute in Alex's flat: the Head of the Institute, Professor Leipunsky, in charge of the Department for Nuclear Fission; Lev Davidovich Landau, the infant prodigy of Russian physics who, together with Leipunsky, played an important part in the development of the Russian atomic bomb; the head of the laboratory for Crystallography, old Professor Obremov; and a British physicist, Martin IZuhemann, whom Alex had brought to Kharkov. Every member of that illustrious crowd of scientists, who used to come to the flat after dinner to play cards or relax over a cup of tea, was to testify five years later that Alex was a Gestapo spy who tried to induce them to sabotage and assassination. They were neither cowards nor evil men; they had to testify as they were ordered. At a later stage of the Purge, they were all arrested in their turn and signed confessions accusing each other and themselves of the same fantastic crimes, At the end of the Purge in 1939, some of them, including Landau, Leipunsky and Shubnikov, were released and allowed to return to their work. Ruhemann was deported to England, and is still a member of the Communist Party. The end of Alex' and Eva's story I shall tell later.

  To obtain my exit permit proved almost as difficult as it had been to obtain my visa. When it arrived, the relief was even greater. Alex saw me to the train, chatty, round-faced and jovial as always. His parting words were, as the train started moving:

  `Whatever happens, Arthur, hold the banner of the Soviet Union high.'

  Part Three

  EXILE 1933-36

  I apologise

  For boasting, but once you know my qualities

  I can drop back into a quite brilliant Humility....

  CHRISTOPHER

  XV. Poetic Interlude

  THE first lap of my journey into exile took me in a third-class compartment through Poland and Czechoslovakia to Vienna. It lasted nearly three days, most of which I spent in typing out Bar du Soled, blissfully happy to be back in Europe. The moment we passed the frontier a magic change of atmosphere had taken place. The station buffets were piled with foodstuffs I had not seen for a year--sandwiches with cheese, eggs, sausages and ham; coffee and buns and pastry. There were foreign newspapers, books and magazines on the stalls; the platforms and ticket-windows were no longer battlefields; and, what struck me most, the people in the train all had different personalities instead of being molecules in a grey, amorphous mass. They were mysteriously alive, they were individuals, and some of them, oh wonder, even had dogs. Nobody in Russia kept a dog--but I only noticed that now.

  I felt excited like a schoolboy who has escaped from an austere college to a matinee in a circus, and this mood was to prevail for several weeks. It was indeed a childish mood, for from a more adult point of view my prospects were grim. My flat in Berlin and all my possessions had, of course, been confiscated by the National-Socialist regime. My career was finished, too: I was a German journalist proscribed in Germany. The savings from my years of prosperity I had given to my parents before I had left for Russia. The roubles that I had earned there could not be converted into foreign currency. I was now nearly twenty-seven, without a job, without a country, and comletely destitute for the second time in my life. The first time this had happened to me was at twenty, when I had run away from home and had nearly starved in Palestine. That had been seven years earlier. Strangely enough, exactly seven years later I was to find myself shipwrecked for yet a third time--in 1940, when Europe foundered and all I could save was a toothbrush and a diary.

  To lose one's home, one's hopes and possessions every seven years seems a rather repetitive and humourless type of behaviour. Insurance companies call a person with that kind of pattern `accident prone' and regard him, with perfect justification, as a bore and a nuisance. The mitigating factors in my case are that when Hitler took power in 1933, and when he conquered Europe seven years later, the majority of Europeans became accident prone. Anglo-Saxon readers (and critics) often miss this obvious point and, rather flatteringly, regard the misadventures of the chronicler as of his own making, an emanation of his perverse mind. In fact, I was luckier than any of the people who have played a part in this book so far, or who will in pages to come; with few exceptions, they are either dead or have vanished in the dense fogs of the East.

  Though I had known penury before, I started on my new career as a political refugee in a kind of holiday mood and without feeling sorry for myself. I do not mean that I am a stranger to the comforts of self-pity. Minor upsets and tribulations will release floods of it; but in the so-called major crises of life I have always found a redeeming element of the grotesque. There is terror and tragedy, but also an absurd incongruity in the ravages of a flood, when saucepans float down the stream next to a hairbrush and a dead hen, and children have the time of their lives being rescued in rowing boats. Though subject to frequent fits of depression, real disasters usually fill me with a wild elation. And though I have always jealously clung to my possessions, and their partial damage or loss (a stolen shirt or a stain on the furniture) make me angry and sad, the total loss of all I had, on each of the three occasions when it occurred, aroused a feeling of liberation, the excitement of a fresh start. It is, I suppose, part of the apocalyptic temperament, of the all­or-nothing type of meutality--a temperament that lacks fortitude in minor crises but thrives on catastrophes.

  When I arrived in Vienna, I had not even enough money left to take a taxi. I left my luggage at the station and proceeded by train to the flat of Dr. Hahn, my old friend of the duelling fraternity 'Unitas'. I had wired him from Moscow, but the wire had never arrived. It was a lovely Viennese late­summer day, but I was still wearing my knee-boots and breeches--my only good suit was in my suitcase, as I had not wanted to sleep in it for three nights in a railway carriage. I ran into Hahn as I was getting off the Number Eleven tram a few yards from the house where he lived. He found my unexpected arrival in such a costume a capital joke, and asked me whether I had come straight from the icy steppes of the Polar Circle. `No, from Samarkand,' I said earnestly. `What a liar you are,' said Hahn. `The Eleven doesn't go to Samarkand. It's the Seventeen.'

  Photo by Fred S'aeir,, New York

  I spent three or four days in Hahn's flat, celebrating a series of sentimental reunions with old friends and girl-friends. It was now quite inconceivable to me that I had ever planned to abandon Europe. But though I had only been away for a year, it was also painfully evident that I was returning to a changed continent. The malignant tumour that Germany had become, was eating into Europe's living tissue, destroying its human substance. The fall of Austria lay still five years ahead in the future, and was accordingly unimaginable; but parliamentary rule and the freedom of the Press had already been strangled by Dollfuss, the bigoted dwarf-dictator. The Social Democratic Party, which in Austria had been more powerful, enlightened, and successful in creative achievement than anywhere else in Europe, was now pursuing the same policy of retreat and piecemeal capitulation which in Germany had led to its ruin. A few months later, in February 1934, the rank and file of the Austrian Schutzbund (the Socialists' para-military organisation) was to rise, leaderless, in revolt. Their bloody defeat marked the end of a century of socialist progress in Central Europe.

  Everywhere in Vienna I felt the same uncertainty and nervous tension, the same foreboding of doom that had haunted me during the last pre-Hitler summer in Berlin. I had become as sensitive to this kind of atmosphere as a rheumatic to approaching changes of the weather. In later years I was to have ample opportunities to exercise this Cassandra-gift, first in Spain, then in France. It rests mostly on semi-conscious impressions and observations of insignificant detail. The old waiters in the cafes still addressed their old clients as 'Herr Doktor', but the warm familiarity had gone; there was an undefinable estrangement and aloofness, as if everybody were holding something back. The air was full of afterthoughts, of interrogation marks suspended in the cigarette smoke. In the trams, the passengers seemed to be aware of the brand of newspaper their neighbour was reading, of the badge he was wearing.
My discomfort became more acute as I strolled into the aula, the great entrance hall of the University. Each pillar in the colonnade held its memory; yet in this place, for me the most familiar in Vienna, I also felt the most acutely the change to hostility and estrangement. The dominant types in the aula were now burly louts in leather shorts and white knitted knee-stockings. With stupid and provocative stares, they trampled over the mosaic pavement of the alma mater in their ridiculous mountaineering attire, displaying hairy legs. White stockings and leather shorts were the unofficial uniform of the Austrian Nazis. They were symbolical of the Austrian krand of Fascism: a fanatical, folksy provincialism. Desolately I searched for the girls--the lovely, lively, sophisticated, flirtatious girl-students of Vienna. They, too, had been either ousted by, or transformed into, a new type--the dowdy, blowsy, sweaty, pigtailed Gretchen. Pigtails, pigtails at Siegmund Freud's University! They were intended as a political badge, the counterpart of the bare knees of the young men.

  I was told that the traditional Saturday brawls, the spice of my University days, had ceased. Under the colonnades, Nazis, Socialists, Liberals and Zionists exchanged glances of hatred, but no blows. Perhaps because each party felt that this time a fight would not end with black eyes and bloody noses, but with corpses in the aula. It did, a few years later.

  I felt that Vienna was doomed. But at that time I still believed that the Communist revolution would eventually resurrect it.

  A trivial little incident has remained in my memory through all these years. I was sitting with my old friend Bruno Heilig in the Cafe Herrenhof, the old and famous haunt of Vienna's litterateurs. Heilig had been on the Berlin staff of the Ullsteins together with me, and had escaped from the Nazis in the nick of time. Now he was editor of the Austrian Zionist paper Die Stimme. He was a man in his thirties, with greying hair and an open, energetic face. We were discussing some harmless non-political subject, when Heilig interrupted me with an amused smile: `Why do you talk in a whisper?' he asked. `Do I? I said, `I thought I was talking normally.' `In Berlin you used to yell, and now you whisper,' he said. `That is all I want to know about Russia.'

  Five years later, the Nazis caught up with Heilig in Vienna, and sent him to Dachau. He survived and wrote a moving book about his imprisonment. (Men Crucified, London, 1941)

  Before continuing my journey to Paris, I wanted to visit my parents in Budapest. With my remaining roubles I had bought in Moscow a ring with a diminutive diamond stone, which was now my only capital. I sold it in Vienna for a sum which just paid for my return ticket to Budapest, and a few days' living. That was all I needed for the moment, as my railway ticket from Moscow to Paris via Vienna was still valid.

  Just before leaving Vienna, however, I learnt that my mother was not in Budapest; she was staying for the summer holidays with my cousin Margit in a village in Slovakia called Kalna, where Margit's husband, Dr. Miklos, was the village doctor. It was only a short detour on the way to Budapest, so I went to join my cousins in Kalna. I was received with traditional Hungarian hospitality, stayed for a fortnight, and regained some ten pounds of weight lost in Russia. It was to be the last family reunion. During the next war, Margit, her two adolescent children and her aged mother (my mother's sister) ended their lives in the gas chamber of Auschwitz.(See Arrow in the Blue. My mother's brother, Otto, who lived near Berlin, escaped a similar i,ice by drowning himself in Lake Koepenick.) Margit's husband was luckier; he died of a tumour before they were all arrested. They were completely unpolitical, harmless provincials--a peaceful village doctor and his family. Their accident-proneness was entirely due to the hazard of a Jewish origin.

  I have only a vague memory of their home--a one-storeyed, long and narrow white-washed house, such as the richer Hungarian and Slovakian peasants used to build them. There was a small rose-garden, and a tiny strawberry patch whose scant fruit only the children were allowed to pick. Newspapers were only read on Sundays. Berlin and Moscow were distant abstractions, and their two dictators shadowy, legendary figures like Nero and Caligula.

  The outstanding event of my visit was a soccer game, one Sunday afternoon, between the local eleven and a visiting team. As a traveller from distant lands, I was given the honour of acting as referee. The referee in the last game had been beaten up by the sturdy Slovaks of the local team for awarding a penalty against them, but I was assured that, as the Doctor's guest, I would be treated with consideration. All went well except that during half-time, when I walked up to my family seated on the bench of honour, my mother, in full view of both teams and spectators, began wiping my sweaty face and fussing with the scarf round my neck, admonishing me not to run about so much or I would contract pneumonia. A veteran newspaperman and member of the Communist world conspiracy, to her I was still a little boy who would catch his death' by getting too hot.

  To this day the periods of my life which I spent in jail are passed over in silence by my mother, and the word `prison' is never mentioned by her. She has never asked me what it was like to be in a concentration camp or under sentence of death, nor how or why I had been reprieved. Such things simply do not happen to `a young man of good family', which I am still supposed to be, and to remain to my death. The silent assumption is that I made it all up in my books, to make them more interesting. The Victorian generation to which she belongs had the miraculous capacity of wading through the Flood while barely wetting their feet; perhaps because it would have been unthinkable for them to lift their skirts higher than their ankles.

  Well rested and fattened up on the ducks, geese, and spring-chickens­with-creamed-cucumber from Margit's backyard--('you didn't have roast goose in Russia for a whole year? Poor boy, how schrecklich it must have been')--I proceeded, in a slight haze, and somewhat in doubt about the nature of reality, to my native town, Budapest. I found my father broke as usual, and full of `colossal' projects. Having just failed to capitalise the invention of salting pigs alive (see Arrow in the Blue), he was now negotiating the sale of the entire Hungarian red-pepper harvest to England. Hungarian red pepper, known as paprika, is a celebrated spice, much sweeter and milder than chili.

  `Have you got a buyer?' I asked cautiously. `Everybody in England will buy,' he said enthusiastically. `Who doesn't like paprika?

  I had intended to stay only for a few days. Apart from visiting my parents, my purpose in coming to Budapest had been to sell a few non-political newspaper articles on Central Asia, the cradle of the Hungarian race, so as not to arrive completely penniless in Paris. Instead of a few days, I stayed for nearly three months. The reason was an unexpected stroke of good luck. On the day of my arrival I had given the typescript of Bar du Soleil to my old friend, Andor Nemeth. Two days later he arrived with the startling news that Budapest's leading modern repertory theatre, the Belvarosi Szirthaz, had bought the play for a considerable cash advance.

  I have briefly mentioned Nemeth before; I must now speak of him at some length, for during the next ten years we were to be linked in an intimate and bizarre friendship which included literary partnership, a shared taste for the absurd sides of existence, and shared misery. During my stay in Budapest, and on later occasions in Switzerland and in Paris, we were inseparable, and were known by our mutual friends as `the firm'. Our association was to end in a ghastly scene which still haunts my dreams.

  Andor Nemeth was the most baroque personality that I have known. In his youth he was regarded as one of the subtlest writers of Hungarian prose of his generation. His tragedy was that owing to incurable laziness, the impossibly high standards that he set himself, and his indifference to popular recognition, he never finished a novel.

  He was about ten years my senior. In 1914, at the outbreak of the first world war, he had just received his diploma as a teacher of Hungarian and French literature, and had been sent on a scholarship to the Sorbonne. The day when France declared war on the Austro-Hungary monarchy, all Hungarians in Paris were ordered to leave the country within twenty-four hours. Nemeth, typically, overslept the departure of
the last-train. He was interned, together with all other Hungarian civilians caught in France, in a former monastery on the island of Noirmoutier, and spent the four years of his captivity writing a book about it. There was another Hungarian writer interned at the same place, Aladar Kuncz, similarly occupied. Nemeth's book was planned as a long psychological novel, Kuncz's book as a straightforward reportage. Nemeth's book was never finished; Kuncz's book became a bestseller.

  When the war was over, Nemeth took train for Budapest. He only got as far as Vienna, for meanwhile the Communists under Bela Kun had staged their revolution in Hungary and communications were temporarily interrupted. He went to the Hungarian Legation, and found the building deserted except for the newly-appointed Charge d'Affaires, who happened to be a school friend of Nemeth's. He asked Nemeth what his plans were. Nemeth said that he had no plans, no money, and nowhere to sleep. `You know what,' said the Charge d'Affaires, `so far I have got no staff. Why don't you join me and become First Secretary?? 'Why not, indeed?' said Nemeth. Three months later, the Communist regime in Hungary was overthrown and Nemeth, as a Member of its diplomatic staff, automatically found himself in the role of a political emigre. He had never joined the Party, though. The Charge d'Affaires had given him an application card, but Nemeth had forgotten to fill it in.

  Admiral Horthy's counter-revolutionary terror led to a mass emigration of Hungarians, including the whole progressive intelligentsia, to Vienna. The emigres published a daily paper, and Nemeth joined its staff. While still at school, I had read in that paper--the Becsi Magyar Ujsag--several of his short stories and essays. They seemed to me the strangest and subtlest pieces of Hungarian prose that I had ever seen. Nemeth was something like a Hungarian Kafka, though at that time--in 1921--Kafka was still practically unknown, and neither Nemeth nor I had read him. I particularly remember one short story, written in the first person singular. The narrator described how he intended to go out for a walk; how his mother, a wizened little woman, begged him to take her too; how on his refusal she started to cry, then changed into a little grey mouse and crept into his pocket; how in the crowded tramway he had to keep his hand in his pocket to protect her from being squashed; and how his lady friend deserted him because of the mouse in his pocket. On getting home, the mother changes back into her natural liape and resumes the darning of his socks under the oil lamp, while the narrator reflects a trifle sadly that his outing had been rather spoilt. The story did not have the nightmarish quality of Kafka's Metamorphosis; it was written in a minor key of melancholy irony. Unlike Kafka's terrible indictment of the tyrannical father, the clinging, clasping mother is accepted with a resigned shrug. Nemeth was singularly free from resentment, envy and ambition. He was politely bored by people, but I know of not a single example of his showing active dislike for a person. He took it for granted that the world was a hopelessly absurd place, and accepted it with a shrug of his shoulders, speckled with dandruff.