Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  ‘Penetrated?’ Ludwik smiled. ‘Who’s the lucky woman in the Embassy?’

  ‘Nobody in the Embassy. For once he is being a total professional, not mixing work with pleasure. He is sending us such incredible reports that the Moustache thinks he is being duped.’

  Ludwik had become pensive again. ‘Stalin is an odd monster. Like others who use their cunning to outwit more intelligent opponents, he cannot believe that there are other dictators even more devious than him. Stalin believes he can outfox everyone. Hence his refusal to accept intelligence reports which go against his own limited instincts.’

  His friends nodded in agreement. They were leaving that night and Freddy tried to lighten the mood.

  ‘Remember our river at Pidvocholesk, Ludwik? When we stood on the bank waiting to jump in the cold water, we always knew we would reach the other side. Didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ludwik replied in a sombre voice, ‘but water flowed down that river, not blood.’

  Ludwik moved in the thought-channels of his century. He wished that the eclipse that had blighted his life would disappear, that the sun would shine again. He wanted the Spanish Republic to triumph because he understood, better than many of those who fought for the Republic, the international impact of such a victory. If his work made such a triumph possible, then it would be worth hanging on for a few more years.

  As the train began to move he thought of Freddy and Schmelka. How had they managed to survive in the furnace? How?

  He began to dream again. Franco crushed and humiliated, fleeing to his refuge in Rome. The red flag flying defiantly over Madrid and Barcelona, Burgos and Valencia. A set of chain reactions. A popular uprising in Italy. Mussolini toppled. A democratic Republic in Rome. Hitler on the defensive. Splits inside the very heart of the German élite. Perhaps even a Junker coup d’état in Berlin. And then a revival of the German workers’ movement. Socialist and Communist unity against the fascists. Strikes against the Nazis.

  The dream always ended in Moscow. The spider in the Kremlin dislodged, his cobweb dismantled. A new leadership which united the old guard and the best of the new. Trotsky recalled from his Mexican exile to take charge of the Red Army. The release of all political prisoners. And Stalin? Stumpy, stocky Stalin would be in the dock, charged with murder. His face ashen, his low forehead lower than ever before, wearing his grey tunic and grey breeches, but his boots would no longer be shining because there would be no one to polish them. And the sentence?

  As the train approached Paris, where Felix and Lisa anxiously awaited his return, Ludwik sighed and listened to his inner voice. Cold, hard and realistic. Always realistic. Intolerant of sentimentality or romanticism:

  If only it were so, but it will not be. Don’t wait. Don’t hope. Scatter. Disappear. The Terror rages in Berlin and Moscow. A frenzied delirium has gripped Spain. Everywhere the monotonous beat of merciless hearts, immune to all pleas. Pitiless eyes which pierce everything like a cold Siberian wind. Young lives prematurely truncated.

  It was past nine in the evening when Ludwik found himself, tired and out of breath, pressing the bell on the front door of his top-floor apartment. He had been away for nearly five weeks. Lisa peered through the hole, sighed with relief and unbolted the door. He let his suitcase drop to the floor and embraced her in silence. Tears of relief slid down her cheeks. He wiped them and kissed her eyes, then her giant forehead.

  ‘Papa!’

  A pyjama-clad Felix rushed into the corridor and was lifted off the ground by two strong arms.

  ‘I was worried you would never come back.’

  ‘I promised you I’d be back this week, and here I am. Now, let’s go back to your bed.’

  As he entered his son’s tiny bedroom, Ludwik noticed a French edition of War and Peace on the table, near the glass of water. Felix had already read Anna Karenina, but in Russian.

  ‘It’s difficult enough in Russian. Why read it in French?’

  ‘Mama helps with the more difficult words and I skip all the boring bits myself. I love the battles.’

  ‘And the love scenes?’

  ‘They’re all right,’ Felix answered, averting his head slightly. He then told his father how the teacher at school had not believed him when he told the class that his favourite writers were Tolstoy and Shakespeare.

  ‘I told them the story of Anna Karenina in French and recited Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar in Russian.’

  Ludwik laughed.

  ‘Did he apologize?’

  Felix shook his head.

  ‘They never do, do they?’

  ‘Papa, is it true that Tolstoy hated Shakespeare?’

  ‘Alas, yes.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps the old Count was simply jealous of a superior talent.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘When you’re twenty-five or even thirty, read Tolstoy again. You’ll understand. I used to read and re-read Tolstoy and every time I learnt something new about him. He was a deeply moral man. I think he was offended by Shakespeare’s irony, his mocking of life, his cynicism. He thought Shakespeare was amoral. Didn’t understand that this was part of his creative genius as a writer. Just as much as his own sense of morality. Tolstoy used to say that Harriet Beecher Stowe was far more talented than Shakespeare!’

  ‘Who is she? What did she write?’

  ‘A book about the lives of American Negroes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s good, but to compare it to Shakespeare? Ridiculous, even though the Count was serious. Now, lights off, and sleep.’

  Father and son exchanged kisses. Felix made a mental note to find a Russian edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Later that night Lisa told Ludwik of Gertrude’s phone call. ‘She sounded hysterical. Someone from Moscow had told her how the old Bolsheviks were being tortured in prison. She wanted to break now. I calmed her down, but you’ll have to see her tomorrow. She even talked of suicide.’

  ‘Things are bad in Moscow. They want me to go back. Schmelka says I must not, but to make them less suspicious, he suggests a brief trip by Felix and you. I’m not sure.’

  ‘I am,’ said Lisa. ‘Felix cannot stay here on his own. So we will go. Not another word. That’s settled. If we don’t do it, it means a break before we’re ready and that’s even more dangerous.’

  Nothing was settled. They argued for most of the night. At one stage, unable to make any headway through what he considered to be rational argument, Ludwik lost his temper and shouted at her, calling her an obstinate Ukrainian beetroot, insisting that he would not risk Felix’s life for anything in the world, demanding that she obey him.

  ‘I am no longer requesting, Lisa. I speak now not as your lover, but as the head of our entire intelligence operation in Europe. I order you not to take Felix with you to Moscow.’

  Lisa remained calm and refused to capitulate. ‘Anything could happen to you here. The enemy could kill you. Our own people could order your liquidation. And then what would happen to Felix? I will feel safer if he remains with me.’

  It was well past three when Ludwik acknowledged defeat, turned his back on her and fell asleep.

  _______________

  *Unified Marxist party, strong in Catalonia. It was sympathetic to Trotsky. Its leader, Andres Nin, was assassinated by Stalin’s agents.

  Sixteen

  To: Professor Vladimir Meyer,

  Berlin

  From: Sao,

  Moscow, 1994

  Dear friend,

  I have suffered a terrible blow and I want to share the pain with you. None of my other friends will understand, perhaps because none of them are friends like you and I. Before I start, I want you to know that I’ve been thinking of you a great deal for the last few months. I have not forgotten your request, but I have been out of Moscow for most of the time since we last met. Buying and selling. Helping the flow of commodities from one market to the next. Does anything else really matter these days? Please don’t reply to
this question. I’m not in the mood.

  I wanted to write from Beijing, but your refusal to let me buy you a fax machine made this impossible. Letter writing is so boring these days and such an effort. Only the fax machine has revived this lost art, but your hostility to new technology means that I will fax this to Suzanne in Paris and she will post it to you.

  When I return to Berlin, I will give you a detailed account of my adventures in Mongolia and how the North Koreans wanted to pay me in bags of heroin … Incidentally Pyongyang, too, is full of prostitutes. I wanted to try one just to see whether she would commence her activities by citing some ‘on-the-spot guidance’ she had received from the Great and Beloved Leader Kim-il-Sung or his son and heir, the ‘Dear Leader’, Kim Jong Il, but you will be pleased to hear that I resisted the temptation.

  And now for my story. I returned to Moscow a month ago. Three days after my arrival, I went to the old flat which I had shared with my friends. We had never relinquished this flat, partly out of sentimentality and partly because it was still used to house visitors from other towns. The lift wasn’t working. I climbed up five flights of stairs. The front door was unlocked. I knew immediately that something was wrong.

  I went in and saw their dead bodies on the floor. No blood. No trace of a battle. Two of my oldest and closest friends, with whom I had first started on our business enterprise, had been murdered. Think about it, Vlady. We survived the war. The Americans couldn’t kill us with all their bombs and napalm. Russian gangsters walked in and strangled them. Took them by surprise. Nothing was taken from the flat, not even the dollars hidden under the mattress. Nothing was touched. The killers must have been expected. They were obviously men my friends had traded with. Who were they?

  At first I was scared. If them, why not me? I thought of my two children in Paris. My friends, especially you. I wanted to get a taxi to the airport and get the first plane out, leave this sick, dying town forever. All the good memories evaporated. Then I began to feel ashamed at my own cowardice. I felt angry.

  I remembered the heavy insurance we’d paid Yeltsin’s gang over the last eight months – dollars and yen to help speed up the ‘reform process’, you understand. Why should I let them get away with murder? I went straight to the top. Tsar Boris was busy with other things. He was confronted with a parliament which is in permanent opposition. Solution? Destroy it and gain more power for the President. You must have seen it all on television. Amazing how they destroyed their White House, backed by the Western leaders. Remember the US major who defended the destruction of Ben Tre, a small town by saying: ‘The only way we could save Ben Tre was by destroying it.’ Yesterday’s war. That’s exactly how Yeltsin is saving Russian democracy. I watched it on CNN in my hotel room, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept seeing the two dead bodies in the flat. My friends. Finally I switched off the TV and began to ring everyone I knew in Yeltsin’s entourage. Most of them were in hiding, unsure of the outcome. This did not surprise me.

  Late that night I finally got hold of Andrei K., the Tsar’s private banker. He was not so busy. He asked me to come over to his office in the Kremlin. I had always wanted to see the inside of the Kremlin, but not at two in the morning. I went anyway and spent three hours with Andrei. When I knew him in the old days, when he was a reform Communist who couldn’t believe they had someone like Gorbachev in power, he used to dress in blue denims and a sweater. That night he was wearing a tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers and a bow-tie. His hair was well groomed, his absurd little moustache was disgustingly neat. He was in an exultant mood, constantly refilling his glass, and the whisky was talking.

  ‘We have made Russia safe for the free market,’ he told me. ‘Democracy has won. Better a horrible end than a horror without end, eh, Sao? You agree, eh Sao? We’re teaching our people that it is sometimes necessary to pay a high price in order to gain the benefits of civilization.’

  It was obvious that Andrei had known fear, and now wanted revenge against those who had reduced him to this state. His desires, hidden below the surface, were now uncontainable. He talked a lot of nonsense. I let him go on for a while. His inner emptiness was now combined with an anger, but this only served to render his banalities even more commonplace than before. I wanted to tear off his silly, little bow, dip it in whisky and stuff it in his mouth just so that he would stop talking. His voice was beginning to drive me mad. At last he paused and opened a new bottle of whisky.

  I looked straight into his eyes and asked who had killed my colleagues. The look on his face changed. He looked uneasy and moved his eyes away from mine. He expressed his sorrow. He made no attempt to pretend that he wasn’t aware of the killing. You see, he knew my friends very well. In emergencies they used to hand over thousands of dollars to him.

  I shouted at him. I demanded an investigation. He said there was no need for one. My friends had been killed by a gang of army officers who resented our role in the arms trade. The same people, he said, who were trying to seize power. He warned me to be careful. ‘We are in transition, Sao. You know that well. At such times nobody is safe. I am truly sorry that your friends are dead, but please don’t grieve unduly. Save yourself. I suggest you leave Moscow tomorrow.’ I slapped his face hard. I couldn’t help myself, Vlady. He slumped into a chair. I asked him once again, but this time in a soft voice: ‘Who killed my friends?’

  At first he claimed that they were part of the anti-reform wing of the army. When I asked for names, he shrugged his shoulders. I knew he was lying. I told Andrei that if nothing was done, I would go public. I warned him that if anything happened to me, my lawyers had been instructed to publish everything. ‘This includes your name and those of five others in the President’s entourage. I have everything. When you were paid, how much, and even the numbers of your bank accounts in Zurich.’

  At this point he collapsed. I was promised a private inquiry. I told him all I wanted was names, and left.

  Within two days he told me that his earlier information had been wrong. He had been told that the murderers were drug-traffickers, who had already been arrested and sent to prison. They had told the police that the Vietnamese had owed them money. I stared into Andrei’s frightened eyes. He knew as well as I that we never traded in drugs. He started crying. He swore that none of them knew who was responsible for the killings. He had given me false information just to get me off his back. I felt this was probably the closest I would get to the truth, but before I left I warned him that unless I got a name I would expose his whole gang. I also pointed out that killing me would ensure that the information would appear in Le Monde the next day. My lawyers had very clear instructions.

  I tell you all this so that you will understand that when I asked Andrei to secure me the files you wanted from the KGB archives, he was only too eager to help. History means nothing to them any more. They would sell anything. But I did not even have to pay. I was received by a KGB general who wanted to discuss the whole business with me, but I told him the papers I had demanded were for a friend. He shrugged his shoulders and handed them over. I have all the files you wanted with me, and even the belongings of the man Ludwik. Extraordinary, how much material they kept on file. They really meant it when they stamped on people’s files: TO BE PRESERVED FOREVER. There’s even a suitcase. I will hand them over to you when I return to Berlin in a few months’ time. At least I have made you happy, my friend.

  I have never felt so sad in Moscow as on this trip. Not just because my friends are dead. Ever since the collapse, people here have been living in a vacuum. The intelligentsia no longer seems able to defend the best of the old culture. The culture that exists is badly damaged. No attempts to reclaim or even invent a common past, except, of course, for the idiots who glorify Tsarism and the Church. This is a crushed people. Like Germany after the Treaty of Versailles. My old friend Zinaida burst into tears in the middle of a conversation last week. This is not so unusual in Moscow and so I held her hand to comfort her. I thought it was because she was poo
r and needed money and food. I was preparing to offer her some dollars when she looked into my eyes and said: ‘You don’t know why I’m crying, do you?’ I shook my head. She dried her eyes, took out a crumpled newspaper clipping from her handbag and handed it to me without a word. It was the result of a survey. Izvestia, a much-liked daily paper, had asked sixteen-year-old Russian girls in all the big towns what they wanted to do when they left school. Forty per cent answered: ‘Hard-currency prostitution.’ Zina told me that in the Baltic States the figure was much higher. You know, Vlady, that after the war in my country conditions were bad. There were many young women who became prostitutes in Hanoi, but they were ashamed.

  Later that night, after many glasses of wine, Zina confessed that one of these young girls was her eighteen-year-old daughter, Irina. I was very shocked, Vlady. I know the young woman. She’s attractive, intelligent, well bred. She doesn’t need to think of prostitution. A girl like her in Hanoi would be aiming to become an interpreter attached to the Foreign Office or something like that, but not Irina. When Zina shouted at her, the girl screamed back: ‘And why not, Mother? It’s non-taxable income! And why are you shouting at me Mama? Look at our country. When you go for shock therapy you must be prepared for shocks.’ Zina could not think of a reply.

  The sky today was a beautifully sharp, clear blue, but I don’t think I will ever return to Moscow again. I find this city too full of menace. It scares me. It will explode one of these days. It is better to stay well away.

  I have just looked out of the window. Even the full moon looks like a turnip.

  I hope you’re well and not feeling too gloomy, though this wretched letter is unlikely to raise your spirits. You have to learn how to rise above the neurosis that afflicts the whole of the old DDR. Understand? I will see you very soon, my friend. Keep calm and don’t panic.

  Your friend,

  Sao