Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  For a fortnight she went into hiding, avoiding all the cafes where they might see each other, and spent a few miserable days with an old boyfriend. It was when he tried to seduce her that she realized how much she was missing Ludwik. She thought of him all the time. Further resistance seemed useless. She parted from her old friend and went to find Ludwik.

  They made love in her room one joyous afternoon, which had turned to dusk and then night. Lying in her arms, he had started to say something, but she had covered his mouth with her hand.

  ‘Shh. No talk of pain tonight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think grief-filled days have ended for us.’

  Ludwik was sated, but the melancholy broke through. ‘Who knows what tomorrow will bring?’

  ‘It is this night that truly matters, Ludwik. Let’s imagine we’re gods in heaven.’

  They had blotted out all anguish-ridden memories, blotted out the dividing line between yesterday and tomorrow. There were to be no tears and lamentations for the past. Her ultra-romantic mood had surprised and infected him at the same time. He began to laugh at the sheer pleasure of it all.

  Lisa dragged him back from the window where he was threatening to inform the world of his happiness. He kissed her eyes and she comforted him. ‘What’s the point of pining over what Fate might or might not bring? Does that make you happy?’

  Both of them felt relieved. Both of them were intoxicated with each other. Both of them were still very young. Something had changed, but just as he thought that their relationship had reached a new and higher stage, she set up new emotional barriers and became withdrawn. She did not wish to be beholden to him or anyone else. It was still too soon. She needed time to think. She suggested that they part for a few months to see if they could survive without each other.

  ‘I’m scared of falling in love with you, Ludwik. I don’t know why. I just am. Please be patient.’

  At first he exploded. Hurled insults. Abused her in Yiddish, which she did not understand. Then in Polish and German, which she did. Calm returned. They decided to split up. Ludwik had made a superhuman effort and distanced himself from her.

  One night, after the others had left the meeting in Krystina’s room, Ludwik confided in her. ‘I’ve built a brick wall round my heart. I need to strengthen the fortifications before her artillery begins to open fire. She doesn’t want to capture my heart, you understand, she only wants to break down the wall.’

  Krystina understood only too well. She advised total rest, a change of air and concentrated political work. Krystina was a great believer in the theory that revolutionary ardour always triumphed over the other sort. And so Ludwik went to Warsaw. Here he was trained by an old Jewish printer in the art of forging documents, passports, but not banknotes. For that, his mentor told him, a special skill, which Ludwik, alas, did not possess, was required. After a month’s intensive training he returned to Vienna. He had brought back instructions and a set of false passports which Krystina had requested from Dzherjhinsky. Ludwik proudly displayed the passports he had worked on himself. Krystina congratulated him, but, determined to keep him busy, she assigned him a set of urgent tasks and a grateful Ludwik immersed himself in underground political work.

  ‘Is the cure working, Ludo?’ Krystina asked him one day.

  Ludwik shook his head in silence.

  Lisa realized within a few weeks that she wanted him more than anything else. She began to yearn for him. She felt as if a light had gone out of her life. She laughed at his old jokes. She recast their conversations. She reread his letters and wrote new ones to him every day. Still no reply. Something told her one Friday morning that he was back in Vienna. She began to stalk the Cafe Zentrale every day. She knew his cafe hours and was convinced she would ambush him, but, unknown to her, Ludwik and the four Ls had stopped coming during the day.

  Late one afternoon, in a despondent and desperate state, she stayed longer than usual, drowning her grief with black coffee. Perhaps he was still in Poland. Perhaps her imagination was overpowering reality. The Zentrale was built on the model of a cathedral. Pillars everywhere. Lisa used to sit at a corner table near the front entrance, which was virtually sealed off from the rest of the cafe by twin pillars. From this vantage point she had a clear view of the table usually occupied by Krystina and the five Ls.

  Anyone observing Lisa from a distance would have seen an intense and beautiful woman scribbling furiously, and assumed she was a writer. In fact she was doodling; her fountain pen was moving in circles, reproducing the depression occupying her head.

  When she came out of her reverie, she looked at her watch and suppressed a curse. Five to nine. It was dark outside. Just as she was about to leave, he walked in on Krystina’s arm with the other four Ls in attendance. They were all laughing. Lisa was livid. Tears poured down her face. Anger, frustration and jealousy mingled with relief. They were so absorbed in each other that none of them had seen her. They sat at their usual table.

  She was staring at Ludwik’s back, while at the same time she could see part of his face in the wall-mirror. Why didn’t he look sad? What had Krystina just said to make them all laugh? Anger was once again beginning to temporarily displace love and Lisa thought of walking out without attracting his attention, when, all of a sudden, he turned round and stared straight at her. For a moment they looked at each other in disbelief. Then he stood up, as if in a trance, hurried to her table and sat down facing her. Their faces were taut with emotion. Neither of them could speak. Far from abating, the fever now had both of them in its grip. She nodded. He understood. They walked out together, closely observed by Krystina and the four Ls.

  They went to her room. The heaviness began to lift, their passion erupting like a tropical storm, clearing the air of mutual recriminations and making them laugh at their own stupidities. Whenever one of them started to speak and half apologize, half explain, half analyse the ebb and flow of their emotions, the other would interrupt at an early stage. Lisa did so by kissing him, the movements of her lips and tongue making further talk unnecessary. Ludwik decided to imitate her. He had woken up in the morning feeling excessively tender. He stroked her head, then kissed, stroked and nibbled her nipples.

  ‘I love you, Lisa.’

  She looked at him and gave a distracted smile. His heart sank. Were they going to go through yet another cycle of emotional conflict?

  ‘I’m just a bit worried about my essay, you know. Professor Loew should have returned it last week. It’s on the nervous system and –’

  ‘Lisa!’ he shouted. ‘My nervous system can’t take any more rejections from you.’

  This made them both laugh and they had made love again. Sweet memories flowed like the Danube.

  ‘The Landtmann! Remember, Ludo?’

  He smiled. Lisa grinned. The first time they had met, 1913. The Archduke had not yet visited Sarajevo. On the surface, Vienna appeared as solid as before. Underneath, however, the cracks were beginning to show.

  Lisa is sitting with a lover, a fellow medical student in the Cafe Landtmann. Their coffee cups are half full, the glasses of water lying on the table have not been touched. A stern young man, wearing a torn jacket, check shirt, trousers which are too short for him and black socks, walks in clutching a copy of Arbeiterzeitung. From his appearance it is obvious that he is a student, but they have never seen him before at the Landtmann. He is staring straight at her now and smiling. Lisa is amazed at how a smile can transform a face so completely. Her lover whispers in her ear: ‘He’s trying to pick you up. How do you think he will try and start a conversation?’

  Before Lisa can reply, Ludwik has walked up to their table. He addresses her in German, but with a strong Polish accent.

  ‘Excuse me, Fräulein. In weather like this even two-headed eagles can melt.’

  The opening is undoubtedly original. Lisa bursts out laughing and finds it difficult to stop. Her companion joins her, but is more restrained. Ludwik’s smile disappears. Lisa is now out of
control. Suddenly a voice from an adjoining table interrupts their first meeting.

  ‘To melt an eagle requires more than a newspaper.’

  Ludwik turns round as if hit by a bullet. A woman in her late fifties, dressed in a black cotton blouse and long skirt, a beautiful white silk shawl covering her shoulders and wearing a red straw hat is inspecting Ludwik closely. Her eyes are boring holes in him. He blushes. (Yes, he actually blushed.) Apologizing hastily to Lisa and her friend, Ludwik escorts the older woman out of the cafe.

  They laughed now at an incident which was very recent but seemed an eternity away.

  ‘If it could always be like this, Lisa. What more do we need?’

  ‘And the revolution? Forgotten? I hope you’re not as fickle to me,’ she teased.

  It was getting dark outside. They had spent the whole day in bed. The realization made them feel decadent and happy.

  Seven

  I WAS FOUR YEARS OLD when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Your grandmother Gertrude and I were in Moscow at the time. Gertrude had asked to stay on in the Soviet capital and help with the German language broadcasts of Radio Moscow. Friends pleaded with her to let them take me out of the city. At one point she had weakened and was on the verge of surrender, but I refused to leave her. I threw a tantrum, broke glasses, threatened to jump out of the window, and so on. I put on such a frightening show, and it worked. They were scared. And so I stayed on in Moscow as well.

  You know something, Karl, most of the people we met were not scared at all. Hitler had united us and we had forgotten the horrors of the purges and the murderous collectivization drives. And even though I was very small, I can still remember the looks on people’s faces. Perhaps it is not all memory. Perhaps my own memories have become intertwined with what Gertrude told me then and later, after the Nazis had been defeated. You might find this strange, but there was a great deal of laughter in Moscow during the war years. It was as if through this bigger catastrophe we could transcend the tortures imposed on us by our own rulers.

  The Germans were on the outskirts of the city. Stalin had to arm the population. I had older friends, aged ten and over, who were actually given rifles and joined the irregular defenders. I was desperate to go with them, but my mother wouldn’t let me out of her sight.

  I was dragged to the radio station with her and had to sit through interminably dull, heroic broadcasts to ‘German people, to all German patriots’. Yes, patriots. Stalin’s own broadcasts were now very nationalist in tone, but the fools did not understand that most German ‘patriots’ were willingly or reluctantly backing the Nazis and hoping for a victory in Moscow. Where Napoleon had failed, thought the German high command, Hitler might succeed.

  Stalin, too, was obsessed by Napoleon. The Tsar’s victory against the French general who sought to extend the Enlightenment through the bayonet was seen as a heroic and patriotic precedent. Those Red Army generals who had not yet been executed were released and sent to the front.

  When Gertrude came home at night she would talk to me about her childhood and why she had fled Germany. In normal times I would probably have fallen asleep, but the excitement of the war, the charged atmosphere, the real heroism of ordinary people who lived in the same block – all this made me sit up and listen.

  Years later, when I had forgotten some of her story, I would question her again and again till it became part of my own memory. I think she used to talk to you at night as well when you were in bed. You must have been about seven or eight at the time, but she would tell me laughingly, ‘Your Karl will turn out to be a bourgeois. He always drops off at the wrong moments.’

  She, of course, knew everything about being a bourgeois. It was the summer smells that would draw out her childhood experiences, and Munich, a city she always loved. She told me about the big garden of the old family house in Schwaben. Her excitement when the first wild strawberries were sighted, the invigorating scent of pine needles.

  A few nights before she and her lover David left for Berlin, they went to the theatre to see Ernst Toller’s revolutionary play Masse-Mensch, which was a call to arms. Gertie, in particular, was hypnotized by the story much more than the performance.

  I’ve read the play, Karl, and it is truly awful. Reading it as a citizen of the DDR, I was repulsed, but not your grandmother. Till the last, she remembered the iron revolutionary will embodied in the words of the mass chorus which had gripped David and her simultaneously by the heart and the head:

  We, from eternity imprisoned

  In the abyss of towering towns;

  We, laid up on the altar of mechanical

  And mocking systems. We,

  Whose faces are blotted in the night of tears,

  Who from eternity are motherless –

  From the abysses of factories we cry:

  When shall we work in love?

  When shall we work at will?

  When is deliverance?

  Toller’s play only strengthened Gertrude’s resolve. She would never be like the woman in Toller’s play. She would never flinch from violence. She would never let humanist prejudices gain the upper hand.

  It was in Berlin that she met my father for the first time. She told me the story so often, never missing a detail. Always exactly the same. Her tone became slightly high-pitched and artificial when she recounted the episode. I sometimes wondered what lay behind the anguish.

  Gertrude first saw Ludwik in the bar of the Fürstenhof on Potsdamer Platz. A cold November night in Berlin: November 7, to be precise. For some reason that last phrase always irritated me. November 7, to be precise. I mean it could never be ‘November 7, to be imprecise’ could it? We all knew it was the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Perhaps it was the religious undertone that annoyed me.

  She was tense, nervous, overexcited. Ludwik was an emissary from the Communist International and the Fourth Department of the Red Army. Military intelligence. She was only one of the six members who had been selected for clandestine work by the Berlin leadership of the German Communist Party. All six dropped everything. Personal identities, nationalities, formal membership of the party were repressed. They saw themselves as the eyes and ears of the world revolution, operating behind enemy lines. Ludwik permitted her to retain her first name purely on the grounds that he had never met a Communist called Gertrude. He was like that. Quirky, funny and someone who was loyal to his friends, even when loyalty clashed with the party line.

  ‘Fräulein,’ Ludwik said, bowing to the barmaid in an exaggerated fashion, ‘two glasses of your finest Riesling, please. Today is November 7, our child’s sixth birthday. And please join us.’

  ‘Thank you kindly, Ludwik. Your child’s name?’

  For a moment Ludwik was flummoxed. Then he smiled and raised his glass.

  ‘To Vladimir. We call him Vlady, you know, after his father.’

  Gertrude had been too nervous to laugh and, anyway, wasn’t it a bit undisciplined of him, making jokes about Lenin and the Revolution? Not that the barmaid understood, but Gertrude felt the sacrilege.

  Her instructions had been to dress well. Pseudo-proletarian garb was not encouraged in her new field of work. This posed no problems for Gertrude. For her first meeting with Ludwik she was dressed in a dark brown check jacket and matching skirt, black tights and a beige blouse, fastened at the neck with an old amethyst brooch, which had once belonged to her grandmother. Her smooth, black hair was gathered in a knot and rested gently on her alabaster white neck. Her spectacles lay on the table and they were ugly. He made a mental note to recommend a new optician.

  Ludwik noted that she spoke frankly and pleasantly, with a smile in her eyes, which were deeply shadowed. Why were they shadowed? What miseries was she living through in her life? He had read her file thoroughly. He knew about Munich and the break with her family. He knew about the short-lived marriage to David Stein in Wedding, but he did not know the reasons underlying the heavy shadows below her eyes, which neither the make-up nor her spectacles c
ould conceal.

  Gertie, for her part, wondered how Ludwik, who did not seem much older than her, had become such a senior figure in the Comintern. He looked very ordinary. Could he really be an intellectual? For her the face of an intellectual was symbolized by Rosa Luxemburg, Eugen Levine, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky.

  She stopped mid-stream in her thoughts. Ludwik was a Slav, not a central European Jew. She was only half right. His mother was a Russian, his father a Galician Jew. From his mother, Ludwik had inherited a large forehead and dark blond hair. His eyes were blue, like his father’s, and when he smiled his face was wreathed in wrinkles. Gertie noticed that he had thick, peasant’s hands but beautifully manicured nails. No tobacco stains. No disfigured edges.

  During dinner, Ludwik suddenly became stern. His face hardened, his eyes turned cold and piercing. He told her she was being recruited for one reason: her ability to speak English, French and Russian made her invaluable. He explained that her job would not be easy. It meant a great deal of travelling within and outside Germany. She was to leave for Moscow within two weeks for technical training; after that she would be given a new passport. She had immediately to break all links with the German party and return her membership card. She was not to be seen with sympathizers.

  ‘Do you have a lover?’

  ‘I don’t see how that affects anything.’

  ‘Is he a comrade?’

  ‘No!’ her tone was defiant.

  ‘Well?’ Ludwik was persistent.

  ‘He’s a photographer, if you must know. A Social Democrat, but not active. I mean he …’

  Ludwik smiled.

  ‘Fine. Excellent. Can he be trusted?’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To take some photographs we might need from time to time?’

  ‘Will he be paid?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then he can be trusted.’

  ‘Why did you break with David Stein? A wonderful human being, a good comrade. Why?’