Odiniktsev’s oration continued.
‘And now we in the socialist world are struggling to implement our various national plans. We are striving to liberate the peasantry from ignorance and poverty with a new way forward in agriculture. We are rebuilding industry from the wreckage and bringing security, health and education to the masses. We are forming a new culture. Great progress has already been made and yet we are only taking our first steps along this road.
‘I ask you to look to the example of the Red Army in the face of the Nazi advance. What sustained them? What was the source of their heroism? Patriotism, yes. Hatred of Fascism. Belief. Acceptance of sacrifice. These things, yes. But there was also vigilance. For all that they faced from the brutality and firepower of the Fascists they faced also the enemy within – cowards, deserters, turncoats, paid agents. Our intelligence services had ceaselessly to comb through the ranks to rid our army of this infestation. Justice in these cases was swift and exacting. It had to be. We were fighting for the survival of freedom, for the future of civilisation itself.
‘I ask you now to look at two further examples. They are in every way different from the soldiers of the victorious Red Army. I choose them not only because of who they are and what they have done, but also for what they represent.
‘In the first case we have a man with a past. This past was not revealed voluntarily, but rather through actions and words let slip in an unguarded moment. The meaning of vigilance is not to react to something that has already happened. It is to anticipate. It is to look all around a person – his tastes, his past, his family and his associates. I present you with the case of Pawel Gorny.’
Pawel and I looked at each other. I felt the blood drain from my face. What had he done? The drawing? Our laughter? Maybe that his parties had been making too much noise? We listened to Odiniktsev.
‘A Pole, as most of you will know. But what is he doing here, in Berlin, capital of the new German Democratic Republic, first line of defence, I need not remind you, of invasion from the West? This we do not yet know. Perhaps we never will. But the question should cause us to look a little further. And what do we find? Father a professor of economics at the University of Warsaw before the war. Mother from a land-owning family. Both capitalists. Both class enemies. Of this there can be no doubt. When a child he joins the deceivingly named Boy Scouts, a proto-Fascist youth movement founded in England and exported around the world for the purpose of spreading its reactionary philosophy. And what happens when his country is invaded? Does he join the partisans? No, I am afraid he does not. Instead he joins the Home Army with its oath of allegiance to the reactionary government-in-exile in London. Well, you may say, a person can see the light, can they not? They can change. I remind you that we are at war. A war fought not with artillery and bayonets and bullets, but with ideas. We face a corrupt but for some seductive ideology, heavily financed and dispatched to us with cunning and treachery through its agents. They have the idea in the West that if they wait long enough and work hard enough we will rot from within, and fall into their hands. Can we look the other way in cases like that of Pawel Gorny? I think we must all agree. We cannot afford to.’
I turned again to Pawel. He was looking down at his hands and feet as if they did not belong to him.
‘I have spoken of the qualities that sustained the Red Army during the Nazi onslaught. Think of them among the fires and broken buildings of Stalingrad, fighting with shovels and knives. And even with their hands. Victory came to them because of their belief in its necessity. No other result could be contemplated. Even in the face of the most terrifying assaults, unbroken during all hours of the day and night, month after month, their supplies all but gone, bodies piling up around them, they did not doubt. Think of those men, and then think of the second example I bring before you. Dieter Kroll. Another who has come to Berlin from elsewhere, in his case England. This Berlin so saturated with spies. Welcomed into the Party. Given a home, a job, access to our industrial workers and cultural groups. Yet it seems that Dieter Kroll is suffering from a crisis in belief. What is it that has brought him to this? Torture? A bribe? Intellectual anguish? No. It was an argument among farmers in a village hall. That was enough to undermine Dieter Kroll’s belief in our socialism. We must ask ourselves, comrades, is this the kind of man we need in the Party?
‘What has brought this to light? We return again to vigilance. In these cases the vigilance of Comrade Gottfried here and a young man working in his department. It is them that we have to thank. Vigilance and belief. Each has no use without the other.
‘I have only a single motion to put before you, comrades. The expulsion of Dieter Kroll and Pawel Gorny from the Party. Our courts will attend to the rest. Who is in favour?’
The engineer in charge of the boilers in our building raised his hand first. The others knew what they were to do. I kept my hands in my lap and looked over at Pawel. He was stuffing his cartoon into his briefcase. I stood and walked towards him. He sensed me there and looked up at me.
‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you and fuck your Party. What’s the prize for your vigilance? Are they going to make you chief egg distributor? Don’t come anywhere near me again. And if you need a pimp, look somewhere else.’
He stood and walked to the door. There was the sound of chairs scraping across the floor and briefcases snapping shut. Odiniktsev, Gottfried and the two officials were leaning into each other, conferring. Office workers stood up in their suits and stretched their arms as though they had just risen from sleep. I watched Pawel, and then saw Dieter. He was backing out of the room, his hand raised toward me, his mouth opening and closing as if he was looking for air, his blue gaze going into me like a blade.
Dieter and Pawel did not return to the office for distributing eggs. I did not see them again. Two Germans not far from the age of retirement took their places within a few weeks. Gottfried stayed on, but told me he was soon to take up his new position with military transport. He was not alone, he told me, in noting my abilities. I asked him nothing about Dieter and Pawel. There was a form of silence we assumed about individuals when those individuals entered into an unfortunate conflict with the progress of History. It was the boiler engineer in the building who told me what had happened. Pawel was cutting trees in a gulag and Dieter was undergoing psychiatric treatment in the hospital wing of a prison outside the city of Chemnitz.
I tell the stories of Dieter, Pawel and Jerzy because they happened. Those were the times we lived in and that is the way that we were. I offer them in good faith and with the hope that it will be understood that they are not told here for entertainment or to lift the weight of my guilt or, least of all, to offer vindication to those who later triumphed when the whole edifice came falling down around us. What did we do by not keeping our movement whole? We let ourselves be washed over by greed and vapidity and the virus of loneliness. How did it happen? We became paranoid. Was that to do with the guns and the words that were aimed at us from the West or the spies that came to us from there and moved beneath us in places we could not see? Did I hear somewhere that it is only the paranoids who are in full possession of the facts? What about us was so offensive? Well, who knows or cares now. I tell the stories to describe a sadness. A dream was broken. It was a beautiful dream to have when Jerzy first showed it to me as we looked out over all that had been ruined by war. A dream in which to believe. It was company for me. It transported me from one part of my life to another. For Jerzy it was more than that. It was, for a time, all that he was.
Jerzy, as ever, was a spectator with a better view. He saw revolutionaries with their own beautiful dreams come together and harden into a caste. He saw the Party bear down on the people, the Central Committee bear down on the Party and the Dictator bear down on them all. He saw the whole ugly apparatus of gulags and spies and bullets put into people’s heads in the night profaning his belief and his labour. He had already seen it by the time he was to deliver his lectures at the military academy. T
here is not much thought spared any of it now. But for Jerzy then it was an anguish. His mind could not hold together all that he knew and saw and felt. He ate until he nearly exploded. He took his family to Africa. They waited with him until he was ready to return.
The dream I had was light. It pleased me to look at it and to think of it. I struggled for a time to give it more substance. I thought it right to do that. I was responsible to it and guided by it, but I never gave myself to it. Not wholly. I hadn’t the means. When it went it was a sadness, nevertheless. It happened inside me before I knew about it in my mind. Some kind of internal alignment had shifted. I could no longer receive what I had received in the past. I went on looking for it, I yearned for it at times, but it was gone. It wasn’t because of Jerzy and what I imagined he had seen. It wasn’t Angelina, at least not altogether. Nor was it Gottfried or Odiniktsev and what they did to Pawel and Dieter. I did not see them as bad men. They were men of faith. They bore the marks that had earned them this faith. For me, it was more to do with Pan Kazimierz and his spectacular coat made of seal pelts, his ungainly hair, his poems and his frenzied dancing, the melancholy sound he could get from his violin when he went into his orchard in the evening, the day he broke down in the corridor of his school when a small boy looked up into his eyes and handed him a pear. I remember him running out of his house in a snowstorm with a bottle of vodka and then sailing off the roof of a barn astride a barrel. He landed in a snow bank buried up to his neck and then he got up and did it again. He couldn’t stop laughing. I studied him. I followed him. I loved him. I tried to be like him. He stayed with me through my years in Berlin. It was he who caused that movement inside me, it was he who would not continue to receive the dream, it was he who would not tolerate everlasting method, the controlled and scrutinised life, History as science, charts and programmes and manifestos and Five Year Plans and posters of blonde-haired women driving tractors, their blue eyes alight and their jaws set as they rumbled on into the future. It could not be. Yet it was a sadness, this passing, for when it went there was vacancy.
What was Angelina like? She had dark hair to the shoulders. Brown eyes. She wore plain dresses without sleeves cut just above the knee, a long scarf around her neck. She moved silently. You couldn’t think she was much in the world, the way her eyes were. They so rarely seemed to be looking at anything directly. She liked to walk at night. Always she seemed a little out of focus. You couldn’t entirely see her. She looked as if she was listening to music only she could hear.
She could not abide the company of women. She liked schnapps, and she liked red wine. She particularly liked the red wine that came to us in those days from Hungary. No matter how much of it she drank, her step would be no less certain. Her step was slow and smooth. She could look amused sometimes, her lips turned up at just one corner. You wouldn’t know the thought that brought this about, and you would not ask her. But if you told her something that really got to her – something grotesque, some story of human helplessness – she could lose all control. Her laughter would threaten her breath and she made sounds that were without grace, her arms moving like a drowning person’s.
You could not say that truly she had warmth, or sympathy, or honour. She could be vain, in her quiet way. I would think that if a person passed out of her life, a picture would remain of that person, and a story, but no feeling. She lived in what was around her, with the past far away. It was as if anything that had happened to her up to any one time was all in another country. She was without fear. She never complained. She could follow each turn of your mind, see where the light fell and where was the shade. She could take you by surprise in a hallway or in a park. She would look down at your lips and then up into your eyes and you would feel yourself felling down into her as though from the top of a cliff. She felt her beauty deeply. You could see it in the way she looked at a painting or a waterfall. In an instant she could make the world around you go away and there would be only you and her. I was awed by the way she arranged her long slender arms, the movement of her eyes when she looked to the side, the way she folded her things before placing them in drawers, the splay of her fingers when she ate an apple. I go around and around and always I come back to this. I cannot make it stop. I cannot break it.
You could never feel you had the whole of her. But all the same, I gave myself to her piece by piece.
Last night when sleep would not come I watched the end of a movie on the television. It seemed to be about a family living in a small town in America. I watched the husband leaving home for work, his wife at the front door waving goodbye to him. It was a sunny morning, the light falling through the trees on to her face. She had a towel in her hand, a little apron around her waist. Her hair was tied up with a ribbon. She was pretty and slender. Her eyes sparkled in the sunlight. She was loyal and honest and devoted and bore life’s iniquities with steadiness and without complaint. The music rose as she watched her husband. She was full of love for him. His weaknesses could not lessen it. How fine to have a woman like that at our side, we think, or are meant to think. But it is not this kind of woman, for some reason, that I have been drawn to, nor M. either, it would seem. It is not this kind of woman that enters into our beings like an opiate and has us running out into the night.
I am alone here and will be. I hit the wall with my small bony fist in a sudden and useless fury for all the years I do not and did not have Angelina with me.
I did not tell Angelina what I heard from the boiler engineer about Pawel and Dieter for nearly a week. I came and went heavy with the thought of them and of Jerzy. ‘Why are you staring at walls?’ she asked me. ‘Am I?’ I said. ‘I hadn’t realised.’ And I hadn’t. I heard about them on a Monday and on Sunday I made her a stew of pork and olives I bought from a colleague who had been to Yugoslavia. We had it with some beer. Afterwards I lost the track of something she was saying. She reached up and turned my face towards her with her hand. ‘What it is?’ she said. I told her where Pawel and Dieter were, and about my part in putting them there. She took a short breath. She drew me in towards her. I lay with my head on her chest, her hand running through my hair. She shook her head as if she heard slow music. I listened to her heartbeat. She held me close to her. We lay like this in the silence, the sky darkening, the light in the room just a faint pale grey. I felt her warmth, the roundness of her breasts. I kissed her neck, her ear. I moved up and kissed her mouth. She shifted until I was above her, her hands holding my face. She drew me down and we kissed again. She began to move beneath me. I felt a vapour, warm and thick, rising from her skin. I breathed it in. It seemed to concentrate. She reached for me, her legs felling open around me, and then I was inside her. Her back was like a drawn bow, the veins high in her neck, the skin flushed a pale rose, her hands behind to pull me to her, a flame scurrying over the ends of my nerves, the thick humidified cloud rising from her body and circling my head, and this was all there was, no thought, no pictures, no past or future or any other being, just this here and now holding all pain and sadness and power and wonder, just this brimming over of life one into the other until we reached the end, she and I, in a moment somewhat different from what we had known, the note of it high and sustained until it faded, slowly, waveringly, like a falling leaf. We lay beside each other in the darkness, our breathing slow. After a long while she moved on to her side to face me.
‘There’s nothing for us here,’ she said.
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