The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  XXXII. Arrest

  FORREST and I spent a few days together in Valencia, to discuss with various Government departments matters relating to the Spanish News Agency. It was difficult to find accommodation in the overcrowded town, but Michael Kolzov--the Pravda correspondent, whom I have mentioned in an earlier chapter--took us in with Russian hospitality; so the first night Willy and I slept on the floor of Kolzov's hotel room. When we had turned out the lights, and I was on the point of falling asleep, Kolzov's voice suddenly rose in the silence, uttering these words on a curiously flat note­-after which he fell into silence again:

  'Attenzione, Agence Espagne. Tomorrow, in Moscow, starts the trial of Piatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, Muralov, and accomplices; we are all expected to report the reactions of the Spanish working class.'

  This clipped announcement sounded so eerie in the dark room that both Forrest and I still remember the scene. The date was January 22, 1937.

  Three days later, the night before I left Valencia for Malaga, a small cosmopohtan crowd of a peculiar kind was assembled in the Hotel Victoria. Present were Michael Kolzov, Wystan Auden, Basil Murray, a Roumanian pilot from the Malraux Squadron with a game leg, a Norwegian girl­journalist, Gerda Grepp, and myself. That party has remained memorable to me because I had an acute attack of anxiety, accompanied by a premonition of doom, which in this case proved justified. Among the guests at that party, Auden is the only one who has escaped unscathed, and he and I are the only ones who survived. The Roumanian pilot was shot down in combat in the course of the next few days. Basil Murray died, also a few days later, from an overdose of drugs. A fortnight later, I was in a condemned cell in Seville. Kolzov was in due time recalled to Russia and shot. Gerda Grepp, who lived with me through the agony of Malaga, contracted tuberculosis and died during the war. I only met Auden again twelve years later, yet he too still remembered that party, and its strangely oppressive atmosphere. It had originally, I think, been created by the pilot who, when we all got a little drunk, kept repeating that he knew he was going to die, hopped around excitedly on his game leg, and had to be carried to bed.

  At this point a major difficulty arises with this autobiography, for which I must ask the reader's indulgence. The next six months formed the most decisive period in my life, its spiritual crisis and turning-point. Yet the detailed story of that period I have already written and published fifteen years ago under the title Dialogue with Death; and I have no other choice but to refer the reader to it. In this book I must confine myself to a summary outline of events, and to the elaboration of certain aspects of the experience which could not be treated in the earlier book.'

  Dialogue with Death was written in the late autumn of 1937, immediately after my release from prison, when the events were still vivid in my memory. It was based mainly on my prison diaries, which I had succeeded in smuggling out. When I started on this autobiography, I intended to incorporate Dialogue with Death, with a few cuts, into the present volume. But this did not prove feasible. The book is written in a different style, and from an entirely different perspective, by a man fifteen years younger, still under the impact of a shattering experience, and while the Spanish War was still on. The last-mentioned circumstance was responsible for a deliberate under­playing of the spiritual side of the experience, as it would have been frivolous to indulge in introspective reflections while my comrades fought and died in Spain--or so at least it seemed to me at the time. Also, the transformation that I underwent during that experience was at first an unconscious one, and it took some time before it seeped through and altered my conscious out­look; thus, for instance, I only broke officially with the Communist Party nine months later.

  In short, the incorporation of the earlier book into the present one would have amounted to grafting a foreign body onto it, disrupting its unity. It would, in fact, read like a very long quotation in a foreign language--and in more than one sense, for it dates from the period when I still wrote in German, and the English version is a translation. Thus Dialogue with Death must stand, for what it is worth, as a document on its own, and as a separate volume of this autobiography.

  (In all foreign editions, including the American, Dialogue with Death appeared as a self­contained book. In the original English edition, however (Gollanez and Left Book Club, 1937). It formed the second part of Spanish Testament, the first part of which consisted of' the earlier propaganda book on Spain that I had written for Muenzenberg. Spanish Testament is (and shall remain) out of print; Dialogue with Death has been reissued in England under that title, in the form in which it was originally written.)

  Gerda Grepp and I left for Malaga on January 26, in a car put at our disposal by the Press Department of the Spanish Foreign Office. We shared the car with a Polish journalist who went back a couple of days later and plays no part in this story.

  Gerda--who appears as G.G. in Dialogue with Death--was a rare mixture of courage and fragility, efficiency and charm. She was the daughter of a former Norwegian Labour Minister, but she had some Italian blood and did not look at all Scandinavian: she was petite, with a full, soft body and a soft face which, when alert, looked like an intelligent child's, and when tired, like a sleepy kitten's. On our journey she was mostly tired, and I enjoyed fussing over her, ghosting her dispatches for the Arbeiderbladed, and generally spoiling her as far as the circumstances permitted. Her frail, sweet presence made me feel strong and protective, and held my anxiety at bay.

  We arrived in Malaga on January 27 and stayed there together for ten days, visiting the various front-lines, all of which were only a few miles away. The town was cut off from supplies of food and ammunition, half starved, in a state of near-chaos, and practically defenceless. We had made friends with the Military Commander's aide-de-camp. We asked him how long he thought we could hold out if the rebels started an offensive. He looked at us and said:

  `Three days.'

  The offensive started on Feburary 4; Malaga fell on February 8, and I was arrested on February 9. On the 6th, I packed Gerda into a car, tucked the rug around her legs and sent her back to Valencia, along the only road that was still open.

  My decision to remain in the doomed city was due to a variety of confused reasons. I must now try to disentangle these, otherwise the story would make no sense.

  The main reason was the presence in Malaga of a newly acquired friend, Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, who refused to leave the town. He was then seventy-two, but looked no more than sixty--tall, white-haired, agile in his movements, and without a trace of a stoop. An eminent zoologist and former secretary of the London Zoological Society, he will be remembered by future generations of animal lovers as the creator of the Whipsnade Zoo--his life-work, realised after thirty years of effort. He had retired in 1934 to his delightful house in Malaga. It was called the Villa Santa Lucia, and lay at a few minutes' walk uphill outside the town, with a beautiful terraced garden overlooking the sea. Gerda and I had visited Sir Peter with a letter of introduction from the late Philip Jordan, and we had made friends with him at once. I have to call him `Sir Peter', for even during the dramatic moments through which we lived together I used the formal address--partly because of our difference in age, partly because of my unfamiliarity with English custom--and that is how he still lives in my memory.

  Sir Peter explained to us that he intended to stay in Malaga, because all the foreign consuls had left and he thought it important that a responsible neutral observer should remain in the town to see what happened when it was captured. We tried to persuade him to leave, as he had compromised himself by publicly expressing his sympathies with the Loyalist Government in a letter to The Times and at public meetings in England; yet he stuck stubbornly to his resolve.

  On the day when Gerda left, all hotels in Malaga closed down, and I moved to the Villa Santa Lucia. It had a large Union Jack floating from its roof, and so far both parties in the Spanish War had, by and large, avoided interfering with British citizens and British property. I was, of course, not
a British citizen, but the house and flag and the dignified old man living in it gave me a spurious sense of security. Now it was Sir Peter's turn to try to persuade me to leave; but I imagined that there was in his voice an undertone of hope that he would not be left to face the ordeal alone. I thought that if we remained inconspicuous during the first few days, until things calmed down and the British Consul came back to Malaga, he would somehow manage to get us both across the nearby frontier to Gibraltar. Never before had a foreign journalist in Spain witnessed what happened when the insurgents took over a town; from the point of view of the newly founded 'Agence Espagne', this prospect seemed worth the risk. Besides, in view of General Queipo's repeated threats of a`terrible retribution against the Anarchist stronghold' (which Malaga in fact was), we both had the irrational and rather silly conviction that the presence of two `neutral observers' would have a restraining influence on the behaviour of the insurgents when they entered the town. There is a passage in Dialogue with Death, quoting Sir Peter as he explains to me that the rebels would probably shoot fifty thousand people in Malaga without anybody ever knowing what had happencd, whereas if he stayed, they might only shoot forty thousand. I had sent with Gerda an urgent message to the News Chronicle (Malaga's communications were already cut off), asking them to use their influence with the Foreign Office to get Sir Peter appointed at the last minute as acting honorary consul, to mitigate the impending massacre'.

  On the day before Malaga fell, however, I almost changed my nnind. I went, for the last time, to military headquarters and was in the Commander-in-Chief's room when the report came in that the spearhead of the Rebel army's tanks was less than five miles from the town centre, and that resistance had collapsed. The Commander, Colonel Villalba, then got into his car, and without further ado drove off to Valencia (where he was court­martialled and, I believe, shot for desertion). The staff officer, Colonel Alfredo, with whom Gerda and I had made friends, got me almost by force into his car, already crammed full of weeping women--his mother, sisters and relatives. The chaos and panic in the town were now complete, and I thought that if we drove up to the Villa Santa Lucia, Sir Peter might after all still change his mind. But we could not get through--the roads were crammed with refugees, and the driver pretended that the canziuo nuevo leading up to the Villa was already cut off. We drove on, with the refugee stream, towards Valencia.

  But all this time I had the memory of Madrid on my mind, which I had also left in a panic, thinking the town lost, though it was afterwards saved. On that occasion I had at least accomplished my mission; but now I was running away without having said good-bye to Sir Peter, leaving even my typewriter and manuscripts behind. Besides, perhaps the road was already cut off at the bottleneck at Velez, and I would be much safer at the peaceful Villa Santa Lucia. In the end, as we approached the city barrier, I jumped out of the moving car which Alfredo refused to stop, and walked back on foot to Sir Peter's house. He was sitting at his writing-desk by the light of an oil lamp (the electricity supply had long been cut off), completely oblivious of what was going on outside, and slightly piqued because I was late for dinner. When I told him the news, he said that I had been a perfect fool not to leave.

  He was, of course, right. There could be no doubt that Malaga was lost, that after my Seville adventures I would not have much of a chance if caught, and that my presence in Chalmers-Mitchell's house, instead of being a help, would merely endanger his safety. I have tried to explain the reasons, or rationalisations, which had prompted me to stay nevertheless. In Dialogue with Death, these reasons are slurred over because at the time when I wrote it I myself was still unable to understand them. I could not yet face the fact that inverted cowardice, the fear of being afraid, had played a major part in my actions; nor understand the tortuous ways of the death-wish.

  Sir Peter has subsequently published his personal recollections of the Spanish War under the title My House in Malaga. The last but one chapter of the book is called 'Koestler and I are Arrested', and in the following pages I shall let my late friend take over the narrative. It will, I hope, be a relief to the reader (and to myself) to hear somebody else's voice for a change, and to look at the author from a different and detached point of view. It will save me the necessity of repeating my own account from Dialogue with Death, and give the reader an opportunity to compare two independently written auto­biographical versions of an experience which the writers underwent together. So far as facts are concerned, the two narratives only differ in small details-­smaller indeed than one would expect, considering the general unreliability of memory where experiences under violent emotional stress are involved.

  For the understanding of Sir Peter's narrative, an explanatory remark is required. It will be remembered that the head of Franco's Press Department, whom I had fooled in Seville and who had promised to shoot me `like a mad dog' if he ever laid hands on me, was an army Captain by the name of Louis Bolin. By a remarkable coincidence the house neighbouring Sir Peter's belonged to Captain Bolin's uncle, Don Tomas Bolin. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Don Tomas, who was a Monarchist, had taken refuge with his whole family in Sir Peter's house. The family consisted of Tomas, his wife Mercedes, his mother, and five daughters. For a while Don Tomas had been imprisoned by the Loyalist authorities in Malaga, but Sir Peter had obtained his release, and in the end he had smuggled out the whole Bolin clan, at the peril of his own fife, to Gibraltar. How this astonishing feat was performed, is described in detail in My House in Malaga.

  Some of the Bolins' luggage had remained in the Villa Santa Lucia. We were hoping that when the rebels entered Malaga, Don Tomas would soon return from exile, and would then intercede with the Franco authorities in favour of the man who had saved his life and the lives of his family.

  Tomas Bolin did in fact return the day after the Rebel Army entered Malaga, but he was furious because some furniture in his house had been damaged, kept brandishing a huge revolver, and was little inclined to show his gratitude to Sir Peter. Sir Peter's narrative starts on the morning after Malaga had surrendered to Franco. Up to this point we had not been molested:

  ... Perhaps half an hour afterwards, Tomas's messenger came for the field-glasses and the valises of his master. I was in the outside dining-room handing over the glasses and a valise .which I had brought down from upstairs, when Lola came running to tell me that a car had stopped below the garden gate.... I came into the sala from the passage and as I entered it three men in uniform rushed in at the front door with revolvers in their hands pointed at me. One of them, whom I judged to be in command, spoke perfect English, was tall with a weak face, trying to look resolute. Of the others, one was large and plump, the third young and almost frightened, whether from fear of what he thought I might be going to do, or of what they were going to do, I don't know. I said:

  `You know you have no right to come into an English house, protected by the British flag, and behave as you are doing. But put down these,' pointing to the revolvers: `have a cigarette and tell me what you want.'

  The three still kept their revolvers pointed at me, and the English speaker barked out:

  `I know all about you; I am not the kind to be bribed by a cigarette. Up with your hands! I've just seen what you and your friends have done to my people's house.'

  I knew in a flash. It must be, as it was, Luis Bolin, nephew of Don Tomas, Press agent and staff officer of Franco, and the special enemy of Koestler, as of every British or other foreigner who was not wholly on the side of the rebels, willing to be spoon-fed with propaganda by him. I tried to temporise:

  `Please remember that you are doing a very serious thing in behaving in this way to a British subject. So far as my Government is concerned you are only rebels, although I've been helping your people.'

  He flared into fury, but I thought was just a little shaken and he held down his revolver; the other two, however, not understanding English, keeping theirs pointed at me.

  `Much good the British Government is going to do you; th
ey know all about you!'

  Unfortunately at that moment there was a noise just behind me, and I saw Koestler dragging a large valise, one of the Bolins' which he had kindly carried downstairs and was about to hand over to the man Tomas had sent. All three advanced a step and now pointed their revolvers at Arthur.

  `Who is that man, and what is he doing here? You there, up with your hands and come forward.'

  `He is the correspondent of a London newspaper, and he is my guest who came to my house, just like your friends, because he had nowhere to sleep.'

  `He is a spy; I know all about him. How do you come to know him?

  `He is not a spy; he came to me with a letter from a friend of mine on the staff of the newspaper.'

  `What friend? You're lying.'

  `Please behave yourself. If you wish to know, the friend was Philip Jordan.'

  `Philip Jordan? I know all about him too.' (Luis Bolin was a man of cliches rather than of conversation). Then the other two stood close with their revolvers almost touching Arthur over whom Bolin passed his hands, took some papers out of his pockets and shouted:

  `I was sure I knew him,' and then to the others: `Tie his hands.'

  Poor Koestler could do nothing except submit, making, however, an energetic protest. Seldom have I been more thankful than when I remembered that, on general principles, I had refused to let Koestler bring a revolver; the discovery of it would have given them precisely the excuse they wished.

  My servants were now standing in horror and fear at the back entrance to the sala. Pointing with his revolver to one of them, Bolin ordered her to bring some cord. Then I thought that possibly the presence of Tomas might help; he could not stand by and see us in extreme peril, in the room in which his wife and daughters had been sleeping for many weeks. I called out to Lola to run across for him. He must have been lurking quite near, for he came almost at once and stood, also revolver in hand, whilst the two men were binding Koestler's wrists together with a piece of electric wire. I looked hard at him. He flushed, beckoned to Luis and they had a few whispered words. I suppose I owe my life to him; even he could not face having to go back and tell his wife and his five daughters and his mother-in-law that he had done nothing to save `Sir Peter' from being shot. I turned on Luis savagely: