The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

`You admit that I have no Free Will?' I asked, to make quite sure.

  `You certainly haven't.'

  `And you?'

  `Oh, me'-suddenly Maria began to cry. I had never seen her cry and I had not imagined that she was able to cry. Her face became like a wrinkled baby's. She got quickly up and walked out of the room:

  The atmosphere in the house on the lake became altogether too much for me. I found it difficult to concentrate on my work; sitting at my desk, I felt the tensions and stresses emanating from Maria's room a floor lower down, as a Geiger-counter indicates the presence of radioactivity. I reacted to it with chronic irritation and resentment, but these were merely the surface ripples over an undercurrent that drew me towards her, of an attraction which I could not explain to myself because it was different from any other that I had experienced before. It was neither a physical attraction nor an intellectual one, for I always got the better of her in argument. Yet these scorings of points were as meaningless as my victory with the soup-bowl had been, and had no bearing on that different kind of reality, or different frame of experience, from which I felt excluded, and toward which I yet felt, reluctantly yet irresistibly, attracted. It was the attraction of a secret whose very existence I denied.

  But whereas my verbal victories left me frustrated, Maria seemed to derive a secret satisfaction from her defeats. I had thought that after the scene with the tureen she would be angry or sulking, but over dinner she was in higher spirits than I had seen her for some time. If this fool of a guest was capable of throwing a tureen full of soup at the window, he was perhaps capable of putting the uncle to flight.

  Nevertheless, it was evident that this tete-a-tete could not go on for much longer. I had often talked to Maria about Nemeth, for I felt that there existed certain deep affinities between these two, and one evening when Maria was playing the Bach Quadruple Fugue which I had also heard played by him, I said:

  `I wish old Nemeth were here.'

  Maria closed the piano, and said: `Why don't you send him a wire and ask him to come? Or, even simpler, let's ring him up.' So we put through a call to Budapest, got Nemeth about midnight in Juci's flat, and I explained to him that his presence was urgently needed to help us with table-lifting and interpreting the bhagnvad ghita. `But of course,' said Nemeth. 'It sounds a very reasonable idea. I am glad that you are through with Hegel and so on, because, you see, that contradiction between Voluntarism and Determinism is just too childish . . .'

  `What does he say? whispered Maria.

  `He is demolishing Hegel . . . Nemeth, when are you coming? Tomorrow??

  'Yes, why not? There are trains, I suppose? Have you read Karl Barth?

  `Nemeth, have you got the money for the fare??

  'No, not really. You could send me the train ticket, I suppose?

  So the next day, Maria wired the money, and Juci wired back that Nemeth would arrive the day after that at 4.30 p.m. in Lugano. At four o'clock we drove into Lugano, greatly excited. As we were approaching the station, Maria said:

  `He is not on the train.'

  I said: `He always misses trains, but now Juci is looking after him and you can rely on her.'

  Maria said: `He is not on the train. There is trouble in his family.'

  It had now become an established convention that I would be mockingly sceptical regarding Maria's second sight; but I knew that Nemeth would not be on the train. He was not. We went to a cafe near the station and had some grappas. When we got out an hour later, there was Nemeth, standing on the empty, sunny square, a lonely unkempt figure, with a battered fibre suitcase next to him on the pavement.

  `What is the trouble in the family?' I asked, after introductions. `Oh, you know that? Nemeth said with his habitual absence of surprise. `My sister had a miscarriage, but it doesn't matter.' As for the train, instead of taking the Arlberg Express to Zurich, he had started half a day earlier and had come by a series of slow trains via Italy, changing four or five times--a feat that must be unique in the annals of travelling between Budapest and Lugano.

  On the drive home, I chatted away. Maria and Nemeth said little; there was no need for it. They had exchanged a glance, not of scrutiny but of recognition, and now they could sit back and relax, good-naturedly tolerating my existence, which had become so irrelevant that I had to chatter away even more vigorously to prevent myself from evaporating into thin air.

  When we got back to the house, Nemeth put his suitcase down on the veranda, absent-mindedly drank two grappas, then went to sniff at the music on the piano. While I was volunteering to show him to his room, Nemeth and Maria were already playing the Double Concerto; so after I had carried his suitcase upstairs, I sat behind them, watching the movements of their backs, and getting occasional glimpses of their profiles. Nemeth, with his inward-turned, bulging eyes between the sharp nose and the softly-rippling hair, looked more than ever like an Egyptian scribe of the Third Dynasty. Maria simply looked ten years younger, a parched mermaid put back in her element. The brace over her teeth had vanished between half-parted lips. It had never occurred to me before that Maria's lips, too, were equipped with mucous membranes. Sitting side by side on the petit-point piano-stool, their arms parallel and their fingers dancing on the ebony keys, their profiles sometimes turned toward each other with a silent `Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' I represented the native tribes.

  Shivering with envy and jealousy, I yet had to admit that two or three reincarnations ago, Maria and Nemeth had been brother and sister somewhere at the foot of the Himalayas, living in enviable incest. Or perhaps Nemeth was the little white elephant, and Maria the dying lotus flower, her stem invaded by nibbling dark insects. I comforted myself by being cynical about it. The fact remained that they had a common language which I did not share, or rather, in which I could only bellow and stammer. The Greek word for the stammering foreigner is, as we know, `barbarian'.

  I stayed for another week; then my money arrived on a Monday and I told Maria that I would have to leave on Wednesday. She expressed polite regret.

  On Tuesday night we all got slightly drunk. There was a full moon, and after dinner we went out in a boat on the lake. I was rowing, then I passed the oars to Nemeth and jumped into the warm lake in my flannels and sandals.

  There was a milky mist over the water, and as I swam behind the boat, wallowing in the pains of jealousy, I noticed to my sudden horror that it was unfounded. Nemeth and Maria sat in the boat facing each other like strangers, Nemeth splashing awkwardly with the oars, Maria sitting in the stern, hunched and shivering. Presently they changed places, and she took over the oars. Moonlight oozing through the mist over the water has the trick of making a face either very beautiful or like a corpse's, according to the angle of the shadow which it casts over the eyes, and Maria suddenly looked dreadful. Were they both phoneys after all, and did the secret language only exist in my imagination? Had I been taken in by a tendency to romanticise, to glorify a neurotic female and an elderly, sponging litterateur? What about detachment and the Eightfold Path, if it wasn't worth a soup-tureen? I crept back into the boat, dripping, greeted by both with silent relief.

  My train left in the afternoon the next day. At lunch, Maria looked like a shrivelled old woman. We had a last, embittered argument. I had said something about my dread of another hack job that was waiting for me. Maria said acidly: `If you hate it, why do you do it, instead of going on with your novel? I quoted, venomously, Marie Antoinette's `Why don't they eat cake? But it was useless. Maria believed in Communism as a`new way of life', and deplored the existence of poverty in the abstract, but she was quite incapable of understanding the concrete economic facts of life. So, in a different way, was Nemeth. `Frankly,' he said with gentle boredom, `I have never understood this dreary obsession of the Marxists with economics.' The previous day he had absent-mindedly borrowed fifty francs from Maria-­and yet that previous day I had almost agreed with him. Now I was longing to hear the word `Comrade' again, even from Jan, to repent of all my deviations and swear
eternal allegiance to the Party. I felt as if I were suspended on a pendulum gone wild, swinging from one extreme to the other.

  It swung violently back again in the afternoon, when I said goodbye to Maria. Again the three of us were walking across the square in front of the railway station. We were talking desultorily. Suddenly Maria stopped in the middle of the square. It was the second and last time that I saw her crying. But this time she put her long, thin arms round my neck and her face against mine. For a moment she stood like that, trying to control her trembling. Then I felt the cool touch of her metal brace against my temple, and I had the instant sensation of infinite peace, as if a faith-healer had laid his hand on me. The next moment, Maria and Nemeth were gone.

  The train journey to Paris was not unlike the crossing of the Caspian after I had left Baku. The encounters with Nadeshda and with Maria had, on their different planes, both touched me to the core. Both had lived under the threat of their destinies, and when it was closing in on them, I had failed them both. In each case there had been mitigating circumstances which one could plead before a court, but not before oneself. In both situations cleverness of the mind had been no help against blindness of the heart. I believed that, with Nemeth in the house, Maria would no longer be lonely and afraid. I did not see that Nemeth, who was also a refugee from reality, and lived in the same world as Maria, could not protect her for precisely that reason; whereas I could, because I was a mocking sceptic and a stammering barbarian. But Maria knew or felt it; that was why, at the moment of parting, she had lost control over herself. Then she had pulled herself together, accepting what was to come, and giving me absolution with that single, soothing touch of her lips.

  There is little left to tell. A week after I left, the uncle appeared on the veranda, where Maria and Nemeth were taking their aperitifs. She had a fit worse than any before. A few days later, Nemeth had to return to Budapest, leaving Maria in a doctor's care. A few weeks later, she was taken to an institution. A few months later, she was dead.

  XXVIII. Homage to a Spy

  FOR a few months during that year I also had a part-time job in a press agency, run by one of the most remarkable personalities I have met. He was Alexander Rado, a Soviet agent who, during the war, became the director of the Red Army's European espionage network in Switzerland. The history of the network and the tragic end of Alex Rado have been described in detail by his deputy and successor, Alexander Foote.'

  Alex Rado was by profession an expert in cartography, and as such a member of several geographical societies, He was short, rather fattish, with a round, gentle, scholarly face. He was kind and warm-hearted by nature but very shy and inhibited in personal relations, as true scholars sometimes are, and also rather absent-minded and awkward in his movements, so that he always reminded me of that pathetic character, the Fat Boy in school, bad at games and the good-natured target of practical jokers.

  There were no sinister over- and undertones in Alex Rado's character. He was the modern, Puritan type of spy, motivated entirely by idealism and devotion, like Richard Sorge or Ignatz Reiss. He was a Hungarian like myself, and I had known him for years, though I cannot remember whether I first met him in pre-Hitler Berlin or in the Paris exile.

  At the time when I worked under him, Alex was in his middle forties. His wife, Lene, came from a Berlin middleclass family and was also a long­standing and trusted member of the Communist Party. Lene had the slim good-looks, the caustic humour and quick wit of the typical Berlinerin; she excelled at impudent repartees, which was not considered good manners in Patty circles. I once ran into her by chance in the Luxembourg Gardens. My fortunes were then at their lowest ebb, and I was shambling along dispiritedly in a pair of crepe-soled tennis-shoes, because those were the cheapest you could buy and I had no others. Lene took my arm and burst out laughing. `My poor Arturo,' she giggled, `you have no idea how silly you look. You may become a tramp, but never a class-conscious proletarian.'

  It was the ideal marriage of contrasts--Lene, slim, nimble, coquettishly malicious; Alex, round, slow and awkward, with a heart of gold under tissues of fat. They had two young children, and a charming old lady living with them who was either Alex's or Lene's mother. They lived in a little house in the hilly suburbs near the observatoire of Bellevue. Now and then they invited me to dinner; these occasions have remained in my memory, for the Rado's house was a haven of peace for me. They were practically the only family among the Communist emigres who led a normal life and had a real home--not a hotel room or furnished apartment, but a house with their own furniture, including a diningroom with children and a granny around the table. Their closest friends and neighbours were the writer Anna Seghers and her husband, Dr. Radvany, who had an apartment in Bellevue or Meudon. They, too, were of course Communists and, by a curious coincidence, Radvany too was a Hungarian married to a German wife.

  All I knew about Alex, apart from his overt professional activities, was that in Party circles he was rumoured to be vaguely `connected' with some apparat or other. But that meant very little. There were lots of different apparats, and lots of different ways of being connected with them. Since it is the duty of every Party member to pass on any relevant information which happens to come his way, most Communists who occupy a position of some consequence in their professional life have some `connexion' with one apparat or another--usually the political, or industrial intelligence branch of their national Party, or of the Comintern. The conspiratorial etiquette of the Party requires, however, that such relatively harmless contacts should be kept just as scrupulously secret as espionage in the strict sense of the word. Thus when I thought of Alex's rumoured activities as an apparatchik, I imagined that they were more or less of the nature of my political reports to Edgar in the Berlin days.

  There was also another reason why it never entered my head that Alex might be engaged in real espionage. People who were working on that kind of line were never open members of the Party, and were strictly cut off from any contact with the Party. It was, therefore, quite reasonable to assume that although many of my Party comrades had some 'apparat contact', none of them could occupy any position of importance in one of the `real' underground apparats--the Red Army network, or the G.P.U. network--for the simple reason that if they did, I would not have known them.

  This rule held in fact good, and only two exceptions have come to my knowledge later on. One was Alex Rado; about the other, and its unpleasant consequences for me, I shall speak later.

  At the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936, Rado opened a press agency in Paris. Its exact name I have forgotten--I think it was called 'Agence d'Information Inter-Continentale', or something like that. It occupied two rooms in the Immeuble Elysee, an office building in the rue du Faubourg St. Honore. One day, Alex telephoned me and offered me a half-time job in this agency, which I accepted at once. The salary was small, but under the circumstances it meant much to me. I believe that Alex offered me the job out of simple kindness, without ulterior motive--perhaps as a result of my chance meeting in tennis shoes with Lene.

  The news agency had an editorial staff of three: Alex, 'Volodya' and myself. Volodya's full name was Vladimir Posner. He was a good-looking young man of Russian origin, who had, I believe, become French by naturalisation and was a member of the French C.P. Whether he was in any way connected with Alex's underground activities, I do not know. I remember that a couple of years later he was on the point of leaving, or had actually left, the Party, but he eventually rejoined the fold. He has since written several books and has contributed articles to the Communist Press, including some violent attacks against me.

  My work in the agency was simple and pleasant. We produced three or four stencilled broadsheets a week in French and German, which were sent to French, Swiss and Austrian newspapers. Volodya did the French Version and I the German; we culled the material from the foreign press, and from information which Alex gave us. The latter, I assumed, came from the Comintern's political intelligence branch. Most of our
news items dealt with the situation in the Far East, and in particular with the war in China, on which Alex's private sources were most abundant. Our main task was, of course, to boost discreetly the importance of the Communist forces in China, and to present them as a popular movement of agrarian reformers hardly distinguishable from English Liberals. I took it for granted that the agency was founded for this purpose, and was indirectly supported by the Comintern. It struck me, however, as slightly odd that I did not know exactly which newspapers were our subscribers. I asked Alex once or twice, but each time he answered casually that the agency was still in its trial period, and that we were sending the bulletin to a great number of prospective subscribers on approval. I thought he had a reason not to disclose the business aspects of the agency, and among Party members one never presses a question.

  I was also a little puzzled by Alex's rather detached attitude to the whole enterprise. When I turned in my sheets to him at the end of the day, his invariable comment was: `Excellent job'. But then, Alex was an exceptionally nice person, and I knew my job; so why should he quibble? He was shy and scholarly, and not the type of boss who would look for pretexts to assert his authority. I finally came to the conclusion that Alex had been ordered to rig up this rather pointless agency, that he knew there was no future in it, and was simply carrying out his orders with an inward shrug. I thought that he was not very interested in politics, and only happy when he was drawing a map in Mercator's projection. The Hungarian Communist Party has provided the Comintern with a number of eminent `theoreticians': Varga the economist, Lukacs the philosopher, Gabor the literary critic, and others. I regarded Rado as a typical representative of this illustrious crowd of Magyaro-Marxist academicians.

  I was confirmed in this opinion by a curious little episode. One day, I went to see Michael Kolzov, who was at that time the most brilliant and influential journalist in the Soviet Union; it was general knowledge that he was a confidant of Stalin. He had come to Paris to cover some international diplomatic conference for Pravda. Head of the Russian delegation to the conference was Maxim Litvinov, then People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs.