by Nir Baram
‘I’ll see whether I can help,’ Sasha said.
‘No rush, no rush.’ He winked at her.
‘Listen,’ she said in a soft voice. His cheerfulness and vigour astonished her. ‘I read the protocol of your investigation. I have to say that you’ve done some serious things, but I’ve seen worse. I believe that you were simply influenced by the wrong people.’
‘You know me, Sashka.’ He affected a gloomy smile. ‘After all, we can talk to each other sans façon, I’ve always been easy to influence.’
‘I remember that there were people who were actually influenced by you,’ said Sasha. Seasoning his words with French—a language not in favour here—also seemed strange to her. ‘Maybe you don’t know the nature of this organisation. We aren’t the prosecutor’s office of the Soviet Union. Even if we are informed about a crime, we aren’t required to provide information to other agencies—if we see sincere signs of remorse, of course.’
‘I understand that very well and that’s why I have cooperated.’
Something was bothering her again: Morozovsky was behaving as if he were playing checkers with an old friend. ‘So, for example, when you testify that in 1932, at a meeting in Citizen Konstantin Varlamov’s home, members of the Leningrad Group claimed that the struggle against the kulaks led to dreadful cruelty, that the corpses of peasants were strewn all over the country, that the party took bread away from their villages when they were dying of hunger, your position remains unclear. You’re sitting there like a ghost.’
‘You know me, my little Sashka.’ Morozovsky stretched as if he had just woken up. ‘I was a spear carrier. Nobody listened to me.’
‘I was really puzzled by that bit,’ Sasha said, ignoring his last remark. ‘The main problem in the dossier is that your crimes don’t seem to have any history, so that even you don’t seem to know when you joined up with the enemies of the people. To write a sincere confession, it’s always best to start at the beginning.’
‘And where’s the beginning?’
‘There are all kinds of beginnings. In my opinion, the most precise beginning is 1924. You were involved then in Trotskyite manipulation of the election in the workers’ faculty at the university.’
‘That’s in the protocol, isn’t it?’
‘It says that you didn’t vote with the opposition, and even worked so that the Trotskyites would lose.’
‘Yes, yes, I remember those days well.’ Morozovsky spread his enormous hands on the table. ‘Regrettably the oppositionists won, but that was only because most of the members weren’t really workers, but all sorts of petit-bourgeois individualists who infiltrated the cell.’
‘You didn’t vote with the opposition?’
‘Definitely not, Comrade Weissberg.’ His voice was jubilant, but strangely different. ‘At that time I was subject to the most positive influences: at night I read Lenin’s works, and in the daytime I did my best for the victory of the party. I even remember that, after the election results were known, I couldn’t sleep for days, weeks maybe.’ Morozovsky turned and examined his moustache in the cabinet mirror. ‘Maybe I can explain the source of the error,’ he confided. ‘I made things up to Nadka and your parents and the others to gain their approval. But now we want me to talk sincerely, right?’
‘In their testimony your fellow cell members say you worked for the opposition.’
‘Then they’re lying,’ Morozovsky declared. ‘And I’m someone who’s finished with lies.’
‘We, of course, don’t want lies, only true confession.’
‘Chère madame, if you would be so kind, perhaps I could get a cup of tea. My throat has been hurting for the past few days.’
‘Of course,’ she answered. She went over to the door, knocked and asked the guard for two cups of tea. She turned and looked at him from behind. His back and neck and even his skull seemed impermeable, as if some mighty power were protecting his body even in prison.
‘Sasha, we haven’t seen each other for a few months, but even before I was arrested I heard that you’d risen to greatness, and are earning praise at the highest levels.’
‘I’m just doing my job,’ she said, remaining on her feet. Had she blushed? ‘I really feel that I’ve discovered a truth here that had evaded me for a long time.’
The guard knocked and entered and set the tea down.
‘Yes, many people hid the truth from us,’ Morozovsky agreed and looked at his cup. ‘We did things that weren’t pretty. Nous avons trahi notre peuple et ses droits.’* He put a sugar cube between his teeth and let it fall, as if by mistake, into the tea, which he stirred with his finger.
She let out a scream. Icy stabs burned in her belly. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ She stared at the cup with dread, imagining his scalded skin.
He chuckled, withdrew his finger and blew on it lightly. ‘Sasha, my darling, that’s a little trick I learned from the grand master Capablanca when he was visiting Moscow. Don’t you remember that I almost beat him in the international chess tournament?’ He held up a red finger.
She closed her eyes and shrank back, and then opened them again. ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ she shouted. ‘Acts like that won’t help you. Maybe you don’t understand the severity…’
‘Apparently not, since I’m absolutely ready to write a confession,’ he said, playing innocent. ‘All the two of us are doing is looking for
the starting point.’
‘Maybe you should just write it, and I’ll read it later,’ she said. The document might be ready by the end of the day, and she could brag about it to Styopa—the confession of the last traitor of the Leningrad Group. Maybe then he would talk to the district council about the twins.
‘You know I have difficulties with spelling. I’d rather talk, and you write. I can even recite the first lines for you, if you’ll allow me a little nod to a great poet:
In centuries to come I shall be loved by the people
For having awakened noble thoughts with my lyre,
For having glorified freedom in my harsh age
And called for mercy towards the fallen.’*
She looked for a smile of retraction that would diminish the gravity of quoting these lines. Otherwise they would kill him. But his face remained impassive.
She approached the table again. An inauspicious lethargy crept into her movements. She sensed she was making a grave mistake, but still she came closer, as if in defiance of an irrational fear. She paged through the dossier and looked for blank pages, while he kept blowing on his finger that was now encircled by a large white blister.
Suddenly she felt his hand around her left wrist. At first she refused to believe it—it’s a daydream, wake up please, they always said she was dreamy—but his grip tightened. His fingernails dug into her skin. She looked at his mouth, which was twisted with rage, and dozens of little cuts opened up around it. Nevertheless, he still seemed for some reason to be looking at her fondly. She felt her arm being pulled and her eyes rested on his cup of tea. Then he poured boiling tea on the back of her hand. A kind of cracking sound burned in her ears and reminded her of frying eggs. Was he making the sound? She didn’t know. Maybe it was another trick? She took a deep breath, but the breath pushed her away from the pain-suppressing shock and concentrated her whole being on her burning hand: the pain raced in the depth of her flesh as though to break her bones.
Morozovsky brought his face close. ‘Why aren’t you screaming now, you little whore? Suddenly you’re quiet? You handed over Nadka’s poems and buried us all, and then you even dared to interrogate us, one by one? You got your revenge on Nadka: if you write for another two hundred years you won’t scratch the surface of her genius. We all read your miserable poems: “Drowsy in the street, buttoned up in snowy white.” You’ve become the mistress of the world here, writing confessions for people whose boots you aren’t worthy to lick. Jew whore, they should have buried you all in Malaya Arnautskaya, so you could rob each other.’ He breathed in her face, and his breath
steamed like the tea. ‘Where are your parents?’
A burst of pain, more searing than the earlier ones, lodged in her hand.
‘Where are your parents?’
She yearned to faint.
‘What gulag did you put them in? Are they even alive? Where are the twins? Where’s the boy you were always hugging and stroking, where is he?’ Morozovsky roared.
The room filled with people. Hands and fingers held her, and he was still gripping her and shouting, ‘You think I care about dying?’ She heard shouts and wails, but Morozovsky’s scream ruled the room. ‘Did you leave me anything in the world?’
Behind him she saw Reznikov’s high forehead, flushed and ugly. More hands touched hers, pressed the seared skin and kneaded it. She heard a soprano scream of horror—the amateur opera singer Natalia Prikova. She saw a gaping jaw and yellow, stained teeth moving towards Morozovsky’s throat. For a moment she wanted to shout, ‘Watch out, Vladimir! Behind you!’ The teeth sank into his neck, and when they disappeared from sight she saw the reddened cheek of their owner, Stepan Kristoforovich.
With a horrifying flash of clarity she understood that they hadn’t freed her yet; his fingers were still gripping her wrist like handcuffs. He was the strongest man in Russia. Hands held her hips, her belly, and squashed her breasts. In a fog she saw red sideburns jumping behind Morozovsky. Her husband’s face was twisted in an expression of madness, his mouth widened into a black pit: she was a little doll, walking on his tongue into that hole. How distorted it was: would it be possible to recompose it? Shouts and whistles and screams. She heard a shot, a horrible howl, more shots, the stifling smell of gunpowder; now people took her and carried her out, laid her on the cold floor. Vaguely she saw Natalia Prikova tear off the grey scarf, which was spotted with blood. They touched her hand, the smooth cloth of the scarf was wrapped around the skin, she screamed and twisted. They pinned her to the floor, and she was silent, looking up at the white electric light, which suddenly became dazzling. Then faces hid it. She murmured that they mustn’t block the sun.
BERLIN–WARSAW
SUMMER 1939–WINTER 1940
They sat in a garden restaurant flooded with sun, paved with fine gravel and surrounded by bright green lawns. Dogs and children raced about, and a kite with the letters NSV glided in the flushed summer sky with its streaks of intense blue. The light filtered onto the tables through the locust trees—his mother always saw in them a pure beauty, and in the spring she would pin a white flower to his lapel for luck—and traced squares on the faces of his colleagues. Platters of cake were arranged on the table, along with cups of lemonade and a pitcher of Berliner Weisse. Waiters circulated on the narrow paths in jackets buttoned up to the neck. The sun’s effects always aroused strange happiness in him. How do you take pleasure in a fine day? You trace the paths of the light: a halo crowns the foliage, pebbles glitter, the bodies of the children and the dogs turn yellow, gathered up into twisting ribbons of light.
‘In my whole life I have never known a Slav who wasn’t a liar. A kind of Asiatic deceit is congenital in them. The mixture of races there has created horribly corrupt human rubbish,’ Georg Weller declared. For an hour Weller, his assistant who was a thin young man with the face of a precocious boy, and Hauptsturmführer Bauer had been entertaining themselves by denigrating the Slavs. Thomas, a little bored, and surprised by their zeal, decided it would be only polite to contribute something to the conversation, and mentioned an article in Germania that discussed the Asiatic influence on the Slavic race. To tell the truth, he didn’t even know what the magazine looked like, but at least one such article had probably been published in it. He was wondering how he could hint to these respectable gentlemen that an hour was more than enough time for gossip, for ‘scientific’ defamation of the Slavic race and for chatting about ‘international politics’. True, Weller, from the Foreign Office, believed that politics provided the most worthy life for a man, especially a man like himself, but since he had invited Thomas to meet for a specific reason they should get to work.
Weller straightened his black tie, now crushed like something from a department store. He turned to Thomas and asked what conspicuous characteristics a Polish man had. It was a deft transition, but Thomas heard the ringing of a bell to announce the beginning of the meeting: he had been invited here because Weller regarded him as an expert on Poland.
Weller’s assistant offered a lame joke about the connection between Slavs and chimpanzees, and searched the others for a wrinkle of laughter in the corners of their eyes. His face seemed to cry out: Maybe you’ll like me after all?
Weller peeled the crust from his cake and heaped a spoonful of cheese into his mouth. Bauer swallowed his Bienenstich, with its topping of honey and almonds. No one laughed.
Thomas wished the young man would shut up. He disliked him and delayed his answer to focus attention on his shame. He wanted to reprimand Weller but in a friendly way: Of course, my good man, but you don’t really expect me to pull an answer out of my sleeve. That would be a frivolous response to such a complex subject.
He was no stranger to meetings like this, where people tried to obtain information without offering anything in return. In such cases, the best strategy was to inundate the listener with information, make him understand its fascination but also its extraordinary intricacy, which only experts can fathom.
‘The research department that I headed,’ he began, ‘synthesised various fields, such as, for example, the connection between the historical-mythological memory of the Jagiellonian dynasty and the vast influence of the Polish-Lithuanian union on the Pole’s system of beliefs and the depth of his identification with the Constitution—I refer to that of 1791—which was, of course, the first one in Europe, not to mention the constant cultural flow from France to Poland, beginning with the historical enthusiasm for Jacobin ideas, the translation of literature, the adoption of academic methods of study, and extending to popular magazines with a French fragrance, so beloved of the women of Poland. These are small examples,’ he warned. ‘The subject, as I said, is immensely complex.’
Thomas was not satisfied with his answer. It wasn’t fluent enough, and he hadn’t managed to embroider its detail into an overarching story. He was like a rusty spring. For months he had talked only with Clarissa.
The young man scraped snakes of dry cream off his lips, and Bauer, making a show of turning away from him, accused Thomas of obfuscation: Milton set up departments of the national, not the racial, soul, he said, and employed all sorts of psychological theories. Thomas dismissed his words while removing the powdered sugar from his apple strudel with his fork. He avoided Bauer’s transparent eyes, which were a kind of lure for reflection. Weller gave him an astonished look: How come you’re just playing with your strudel? Where’s your appetite?
Abashed, Thomas plunged his fork into a piece and brought it to his mouth. The taste of the sweetened apples repulsed him, but he swallowed and sipped from his drink. Weller was thinking of offering him work, and most likely all the men at the table knew that he was unemployed. The term sickened him so much that he didn’t dare say it even to himself. His endless hours of idleness had taught him that the day’s nightmares were more horrifying than the night’s. They horrify you with their simplicity.
Bauer had probably been invited to the meeting because, having worked with Milton, he would know whether Thomas had truthfully described his role in the company. Aside from that, he couldn’t stand Thomas and would make every effort to come between him and Weller. For most of his life Thomas had ignored types like Bauer. It was beneath his dignity to devote time to nuisances who didn’t understand either irony or good ideas, in fact didn’t understand anything but headlines. Now he was forced to answer that ass? He looked at Bauer with compassion, as though he felt truly sorry for his ignorance. ‘Gentlemen, Jewish psychoanalysis,’ he said, ‘is to blame for everything! The Jews copied German ideas—Nietzsche, for example, or all those notions of self-improvement that
inform the concept of Bildung—and distorted them. Remember, the Minister of Propaganda warned us in 1933 that it was forbidden for Jews to be interpreters of the German spirit. But Milton’s German models aroused the envy of marketing companies all over Europe. In fact, Milton offered a kind of Bildung for business: acquire a deep knowledge of the belief systems in the states where you are active, and shape your own future by constantly improving your ability!’
The young man objected that the idea seemed fantastic to him. Thomas sipped his cold drink; it was best for them to realise that not everything was worthy of his response. Around him they made their spoons and forks dance between their plates and cups. The young man muttered something in condemnation of the Americans, and they all nodded. Thomas sensed that between the young man and Bauer a united front might be formed against him in contempt of his work in the service of capitalism, even though they needed Milton’s know-how. Hence he had to emphasise the Germanness of his work. Anyway, the young man and Bauer were merely phantoms at this meeting.
He stuffed a piece of strudel into his mouth and swallowed it, as if fired by a blazing appetite for those damned apples. A crumb got stuck between his teeth, but at least Weller nodded to him in encouragement. Then he leaned forwards and explained the principles of the model, cordially hinting at an affinity to be found in education and manners, and an elusive, nuanced point of view: ‘When we said “soul” we were referring to race and not to psychological prattle. If the Poles thought it was about their soul, so much the better for them. There’s a prominent trait of the Pole for you: a catastrophic combination of arrogance and obstinacy. History has taught us that the Poles did indeed take Rousseau’s advice “to set at defiance the power and ambition of your neighbours. You may not prevent them from swallowing you up; see to it at least that they will not be able to digest you.” No nation in Europe hatched such crazy plots: any four Poles with a bayonet believed they could defeat the Czar’s army. And if I may be permitted to sharpen my answer to your question: the project was set up and designed in Germany, and the other branches are reflections of the original. Anyway, the main point is that we developed a system that can predict the behaviour of the Polish national. Contrary to the theories of all sorts of “experts on Eastern matters”, who have never actually been to Poland, Milton’s system was perfected through the work of the Warsaw branch.’