Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  ‘True, but it would alert every other intelligence service in Europe and things will become difficult. I need someone to carry out little tasks for me, someone I can trust. Gertrude?’

  ‘Why her? Do you still trust her after the English affair?’

  ‘She confessed everything. These men may satisfy her physical needs, but she does not respect their intellects. You know she was suicidal a few years ago. I’m worried that if she thinks I’ve disappeared without trace she might try to kill herself again.’

  ‘I’m not convinced,’ said Lisa and frowned.

  ‘You never liked her?’

  ‘No.’

  Ludwik laughed.

  Twenty-six

  IT WAS IN NOVEMBER 1992 that I plucked up enough courage to talk to your mother. She was sitting in the kitchen in our flat, sipping tea. I knew I had to tell her before she read it in some newspaper. We had both been active in the movement that had finally toppled the regime. In 1989, we were part of the human stream rushing past the buildings where once the bureaucrats had held sway and then through the Wall to the other Berlin, only to see the fruits of their victory stolen by the Christian Democrats. I lost my job exactly one year later.

  My throat was tight with fear. ‘Helge.’

  She knew immediately from my tone that it was serious. ‘Have you murdered someone, Vlady?’

  ‘Worse.’

  Her voice became subdued. ‘You’d better tell me.’

  I sat down opposite her and confessed. I told her that I had seen Winter several times without telling her. She frowned at that, but when I told how Winter had actually drafted the last three letters the KDD had sent to the Politburo, she stared at me in disbelief. I told her that I had never named names. Never. I was seduced by Winter’s inside information from Moscow and his detailed knowledge of our own Politburo. Winter was a supporter of Gorbachev, a reform Communist. She stopped me at that point.

  ‘Vlady, are you telling me this to test our relationship? Is this some stupid game you’ve devised?’

  ‘No. I’ve told you the truth.’

  She slapped my face, pulled my hair and aimed a glass at my head.

  ‘You betrayed us, you bastard. You deserve to die! You should die! I hate you. I must have misjudged you. How could I have thought that you had integrity?’

  ‘Listen, Helge. Please listen. He threatened me. Told me if I didn’t see him they would let it be known that Gertrude worked for them. They would award her a posthumous medal.’

  ‘I hope they’ll award you a posthumous medal after you’ve hanged yourself.’

  ‘Helge, I told them nothing. They knew everything.’

  ‘What are you really saying? If you gave them no information, why did they need you?’

  ‘I’ve told you about Winter. He’s an old Communist. He wanted to save something from the wreckage – we all did in our different ways. He needed an organization to pressure the Party leadership, and we obliged. One-third of our members were planted by the intelligence services.’

  ‘And our leading ideologue was getting tactical advice from the top intelligence chief in the DDR. Aren’t you at least ashamed, Vlady?’

  ‘I felt that Winter was on our side. His intimate knowledge of world politics and of the developments in the old Soviet Union was very useful for us. I felt I was using him as much as he was using me. Where do you think I got the transcripts of Gorbachev’s talks with Honecker? Have you forgotten their impact? It gave us the courage to come out on to the streets. We knew that Moscow would not send in the tanks like in ’53.’

  ‘If it was all so innocent, why didn’t you tell me you were seeing Winter?’

  ‘I would have if I didn’t know you so well. You would have disapproved and executed me morally. I need you, Helge.’

  ‘You’re lying again, Vlady. Why not admit you were ashamed because you knew what you were doing was wrong. Morally wrong, certainly – but much more. It was a betrayal of your comrades, who were taking risks with you and for you. Have you forgotten the way the younger comrades looked at you when you spoke? Hope was written on their faces. And now you tell me that the words you spoke were not your own; Comrade Winter wrote your script. Look at yourself in the mirror.’

  I could not reply to her. I just sat there, sat motionless, benumbed and crippled with remorse. She looked at me with pity and contempt.

  ‘Why are you telling me all this now?’

  I remained silent.

  ‘Are you scared that Winter or someone might grass on you? That we would read all about in the newspapers?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Is that a real possibility?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Winter told me that a journalist was asking him questions about me.’

  ‘You still see Winter?’

  ‘He’s very active in the PDS, Helge. We were all thinking of joining at one stage, weren’t we? For heaven’s sake, Winter was amongst the best of them.’

  Helge could take no more. She walked out of the apartment in a rage. I rushed out after her, trailing her like a dejected dog. Finally she stopped, and turned round to confront me.

  ‘Vlady, I cannot live with you any longer. I need to be with other people. The very sight of you sickens me. Really. How will I face them after this? Please stop following me.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘To my friends. I might stay in the hospital tonight. As for tomorrow…?’

  I returned to the apartment not knowing which way my life would turn. Could I begin afresh, renew myself, win back Helge’s love and, later, her trust? Every half hour I would ring her room in the hospital. No reply. At three in the morning I fell asleep.

  The next morning you rang and told me that Helge had told you she was going to leave the apartment, move to New York and live on her own, but without giving any reason. You automatically assumed that I had been unfaithful. I did not correct you, my son. I felt you would not have understood anything else. There was not a drop of politics in your blood. Forgive an old man his stupid pride – I should have told you everything at the time.

  What stunned me was the speed with which Helge left for New York. I was hurt, assuming that she must have made plans to leave me long before I confessed my guilty secret. I even thought she might have a lover and they had both run away together. Months later I discovered by pure accident that a colleague at the hospital had been offered the New York job, but had been unable to go because her mother was seriously ill. She had recommended Helge, who flew over and was offered the post the same day.

  So your mystery is solved, Karl. What I have written is the real and only reason for our break-up. Do you think she was right? I do. I often think of how I can redeem myself in her eyes. I need her, son.

  Twenty-seven

  SAO HAD LEFT ME ALONE in his apartment on the rue Murillo. He had left for Hanoi to bring his Vietnamese lover and their son back to Paris. I hated being alone. I wanted Helge at my side. Sao had brought me everything I had asked for from Moscow. It was next door in his study. I delayed the inspection, Karl. I felt uneasy, as if on the edge of an abyss. My cursed instincts warned me that something unusual awaited me.

  I made myself a large pot of coffee and returned to Sao’s study. Ludwik’s suitcase filled with clothes and books lay on the floor. The two files Sao had bought for me were marked ‘Gertrude Meyer’ and ‘Ludwik’: a smell of stale Russian cigarettes, bundles of documents with marks where rusty paperclips had been removed, and Ludwik’s passports.

  I turned first to Ludwik’s file, so bulky in comparison to the other one, and was surprised to find a collection of snapshots. I had no idea who most of the people in these photographs were, but there were some recurring images. Ludwik with a woman. She had a strong face with striking features. Then a child began to appear in the photographs. I sighed. My instincts had not been so wrong.

  The woman in the photograph was Ludwik’s wife or companion and the boy with t
he intelligent eyes was their son. Of that there could now be no doubt and so Gertrude had either been living a fantasy or had deliberately lied to me. The third option, that she had indeed had a short-lived affair with Ludwik, of which I was the consequence, seemed unlikely. I was now fairly certain that Ludwik was not my father. There was not a single photograph of Gertrude with Ludwik.

  I saw the original of Ludwik’s famous letter to the Central Committee which my mother had memorized and recited to me a number of times. There had also been the memorable occasion when she had retold the story of Ludwik’s letter to the assembled ranks of the KDD, no doubt after obtaining permission from Winter and in order to enhance her own credentials as a dissident.

  I flicked through the documents, many of which were trivial and uninteresting, till I came across an envelope marked:

  TOP PRIORITY: For the special attention of Comrade J.V. Stalin.

  The Execution of the Arch-Traitor ‘Ludwik’.

  My hands trembled as I removed the typewritten report from the envelope. The paper had faded and was on the verge of disintegration. I spread each of the pages carefully on the table. Then I carried every sheet individually to the photocopier. The task completed, I sank into Sao’s leather armchair and began to read.

  From: H. Spiegelglass.

  6 September 1937

  From the very first time I met Ludwik, I understood that we were dealing with a traitor and a criminal of the very highest intelligence. Once he had handed in his so-called ‘Letter to the Central Committee’, our agents were on his trail. We knew he was in touch with Western intelligence agencies. Either Berlin or London could have taken him, but it soon emerged that he was playing off one against the other, presumably to see which of them offered him more money.

  Having studied this man’s record and character very closely, it soon became clear to me that his sentimentality and his weakness, which led him often to blur the frontier between friendship and professional work, would enable us to trace his whereabouts. This judgement was vindicated much sooner than we expected.

  We knew that Ludwik had several women working as agents in Europe. I had already established contact with two of them in Britain. There were others in Germany and Austria. One of these, G.M., a German Communist I met in Britain, was particularly close, if not intimate, with Ludwik. I took another German agent, K.W., to see this woman.

  K.W. began to cultivate G.M. in June of this year. Soon he declared himself as a fellow German Communist working for us and told her that he was in love with her. She, in fact, had genuinely fallen for K.W.’s charms and they became intimate. K.W.’s report on the details of his seduction are appended to this report. From it you will see that physical love, of which G.M. had been deprived for far too long, played a central role in our victory. Her loyalty to Ludwik was based on hero-worship and her love for him. His refusal to countenance sexual relations with her had, as K.W.’s report shows, built up certain resentments. I am only adding these details because I was told by Comrade Yezhov that Comrade Stalin wanted a complete report with nothing left out, no matter how small and insignificant it might appear.

  Once K.W. had succeeded in winning her confidence, he told G.M. that Ludwik had betrayed our movement and had to be captured and executed before he was taken by Berlin. She resisted this line of argument, but K.W. told her that even if Ludwik did not go willingly to Berlin, they would find him and make him talk. The future of our German operation could be threatened.

  It was at this juncture that she confessed that Ludwik had been in touch with her and she was going to meet him and his family. Accordingly, we moved our operation to near the Franco-Swiss border. We sent her with a box of poisoned chocolates for the whole family. That would have made it easy, but the sight of Ludwik’s young son, Felix, unnerved her, and she snatched the chocolates away from him. Her behaviour was odd, but Ludwik’s suspicions were not aroused. She said she had to rush off, but made an appointment to see him a few days later.

  All our operatives were on a state of alert. She met him in a café near the station at Territet. They took a walk and our car drove near them and stopped. Both of them were bundled into the car. Then he realized that she had betrayed him and started struggling. He grabbed her by the hair on her head and she began to scream. It was 4 September, 1937. Our team was on the Chamberlandes road, not far from Lausanne. We stopped, threw him out of the car and executed him. He was treacherous to the last. He shouted: ‘Stalin’s system is built on terror. It will not last. Long Live the World Revolution…’

  At this stage we had to make a choice. Should we go to Finhaut and execute the traitor’s family and risk being captured ourselves? I was contacted by phone and ordered to return the team to Paris.

  The military precision of our operation…

  I could read no more, Karl. My stomach was gripped by a horrible fear. I felt sick. The accounts I had received from Gertrude of Ludwik’s capture had been remarkably short of detail. She was the woman who had led them to Ludwik? Was it … could it be? I wanted to jump out of Sao’s top-floor window.

  Then I opened the file marked ‘Gertrude Meyer’. Nothing of interest here, unless something had been removed. There was a dull, departmental report commending her loyalty and a note reporting her safe arrival in Berlin and the setting up of the new liaison group under Winter in Germany. I assumed that her post-war crimes would be recorded in the DDR archives. I went back to Ludwik’s files and found a letter from Lisa to Freddy in Moscow; it had been written just before Lisa and Felix, helped by Belgian friends, left for the United States. It made me weep, Karl, and I wondered how you would react. I weep for Ludwik and Lisa and Felix and for ourselves. My mother was an assassin. How does that sound to you, my boy?

  My dear, dear Freddy:

  I don’t know if this letter will ever reach you, but I am sending it to our old safe address. It will go to Vienna, then Prague and reach you from Kiev. It must reach you, Freddy.

  You will receive no further news of Ludwik. He is dead. They killed him last week. His body was discovered riddled with machine-gun bullets. They earned on firing even after he was dead, as frightened hunters do when they cannot quite believe that they have actually shot a tiger.

  Ludwik was preparing to go to Rheims where he had arranged a meeting with the Dutch Socialist leader, Sneevliet, but before that he had an assignment with Gertrude Meyer. Remember her? It was she who betrayed him to the NKVD.

  Felix was worried when I returned from Territet without Ludwik on Saturday. For the next two days he kept asking about his father. I read about it in the first edition of a Lausanne newspaper on Monday morning. I told Felix a few hours later and we both sat on the side of the road and wept.

  Ludwik knew that they would not let him live for too long. Every morning he was still alive he would smile grimly as if to say ‘I’ve lasted another day.’ Every day brought fresh hope and fresh fear. He said once: ‘Now I know what it must be like for all the others in Moscow.’

  He was desperate, with the backing of independent-minded socialists, to tell the world of Stalin’s crimes and to warn Trotsky that a special unit had been working on his assassination for quite some time.

  The last week we were together, Ludwik began to imagine things. He began to see all of you; on a train, he thought the conductor looked like you. On a bus he imagined that the driver resembled Larin. He had never felt so alone in his life, and so cut off from his friends and comrades. One day when I was more depressed than usual, we started talking about the old days in Vienna and about all of you and Krystina, and one memory followed another. The only time he really laughed was when talking about all of you in Pidvocholesk.

  ‘When we were young,’ he said, ‘we were desperate to leave Pidvocholesk. Each of us had a burning desire to see the world, to turn our backs on Galicia. And now here I am in the midst of splendid scenery, and I would give anything to taste the scalded milk my mother used to give us on cold winter nights. It was burnt till it had turned
the colour of oats.’

  Another time he reminded me of Leviné’s speech in the dock at Munich: ‘We Communists truly are dead men on leave, but who would have thought that we would be hunted down and killed, like Misha in Kiev, by people who call themselves Communists and are carrying out the orders of the Communist Party?’

  Last month we went to Vevey, a picturesque little town by the side of the big Lake Geneva and found ourselves admiring St Martin’s church. As we were looking at the gravestones in the cemetery, we found two English names, Ludlow and Broughton. Who were these seventeenth-century Englishmen? We went into the church and asked the Pastor. To Ludwik’s amazement, the Pastor knew their entire history. The two Englishmen were revolutionaries. Edmund Ludlow was one of the judges who tried Charles I; Broughton had read the sentence of death. By pure chance we had stumbled on the graves of two of Oliver Cromwell’s closest comrades. They had fled here after the Restoration to escape execution. They had been alerted by Thurlow, Cromwell’s chief secretary, who warned them that their lives were in danger.

  In Vevey they had been greeted as heroes and the local villagers had prevented any suspicious strangers from coming near the village. Lieutenant-General Edmund Ludlow’s house had been fortified and guarded: every boat approaching the beach was carefully scrutinized.

  Any tramp who wandered into Vevey was seized and thoroughly searched. Innocent tourists were viewed as suspicious characters. Ludlow’s chamber had a bell at the sound of which all the citizens were ordered to arm and rush to the Englishman’s house. The two men had married again and died natural deaths. The tablets in their honour spoke of them as ‘the defenders of the liberties of their country.’ Their descendants were still in Switzerland.

  Ludwik and I stared at each other in amazement. Both of us were thinking the same thing. If only the three of us could be protected by the Swiss villagers of today and live out our lives in peace. Ludwik said, ‘It was a more civilized century than ours. We only know how to produce orphans.’