Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
Never did anyone display a more upright and incorruptible
character than my husband. In the three years we spent in the Soviet Union, H.’s
every thought was devoted to working in the service of Socialism, combating
Fascism, helping the Party.
Only after she had fallen in love with him had she realized what a great
longing she’d always had to be knowable to another person: to be one with herself,
and at the same time with another. Everything within her that she had secretly
identified as wrong, all the trespasses she had committed, imagined, inherited, or
desired — he’d laughed away all her shame and, with it, her susceptibility to
blackmail. Love had meant saying what was in her heart, and this saying meant
freedom, and for the first time her fear of not being good enough had gone away.
And hadn’t Lenin’s principle of criticism and self-criticism
within the Party originally presupposed — and also set as its goal —
absolute equality among all comrades and their mutual trust? Was it not this
principle that was to facilitate growth? The more radically the individual set his
own limitations aside, the more firmly the whole cohered. Why had G., then, whom she
had always referred to as her
clever friend
, not sacrificed his friendship
with A.?
Truly we are coming to know one another in the course of
these exchanges, we see each other quite clearly. This is my profound insight,
what I understand here as a Bolshevik, what I experience: Bolshevism’s power,
its intellectual power, is so strong that it forces us to speak the truth. As
Communists we should show our faces, in other words show the entire person. You
can’t just say that you didn’t have time to be vigilant because you had to bring
money to your wife at your dacha. When we have been successful in creating a
clean atmosphere, we will truly be able to work cleanly and
productively.
Until recently, she’d shared her husband’s view that it was
crucial they scrutinize their own ranks closely to keep the core stable. She’d
reclined on the sofa as he sat in an armchair, reading to her from the thick volume
containing the latest report on the court proceedings. After Radek, Zinoviev,
Kamenev — the original revolutionaries, once lauded as
Lenin’s stalwart
brothers-in-arms
— Bukharin, too, had made a public confession,
declaring himself guilty of conspiracy and treason, and he had been condemned to
death and shot. In his last plea, he’d said:
When you ask yourself, “If you must
die, what are you dying for?”— suddenly a pitch-black void appears before
you with shocking clarity. There is nothing worth dying for if you want to die
unrepentant.
He’d taken this opportunity to declare his loyalty to the
Soviet Union one last time.
She and her husband had met Bukharin right at the beginning of their
time in Moscow. The very day they arrived, he had telephoned the hotel of the
Austrian and German comrades who’d just escaped from their own countries —
countries where they’d been in hiding — and personally delivered a piece of
bread and bacon to each of their rooms.
Now, would she still have a chance to describe the sound the pages of
the thick book made as they turned? Page after page, she heard in her husband’s
voice the way these living beings were transformed into ghosts.
Only now that she is alone has she begun to ask herself if it
is really necessary to radically cut away everything that is weak or gravitates to
the fringes. The core of a sphere, her little sister would probably say (she who was
always so good at math), is basically just a point, but one whose size approaches
infinity on the negative axis. But what was the core? An idea? An individual? Could
it be Stalin? Or the utterly disembodied, utterly pure belief in a better world? And
whose head was this belief supposed to inhabit if the day came when not a single
head remained? An individual could lose his head, she’d thought two years ago, but
not an entire Party. Now it was looking as if an entire Party really could lose all
its individual heads, as if the sphere itself were spinning all its points away from
it, becoming smaller and smaller, just to reassure itself that its center held firm.
Approaching infinity on the negative axis.
In Vienna her husband used to laugh whenever a theater critic
wrote:
He wasn’t playing Othello — he
was
Othello.
Old-fashioned
was his word for this mania for perfect illusions. He
interpreted the flawless melding of actor and mask as the pinnacle of bourgeois
deceit, and now, in the Land of the Future — where the labor of all for all
supposedly had been stripped of deception, where individual gain resulted in profit
for all, while egotism and tactical maneuvering could be eliminated before they
arose — he himself stood accused of duplicity? Had they, as people on the run,
changed their names so often their own comrades had lost all memory of what lay
behind the names? Why else was there so much talk of costumes and masks? Or had
they, locked in battle with an external enemy, begun to turn into this enemy without
realizing it? Would this new thing hatching out of them bear them ill will? Had
their own growing gone over to the other side unbeknownst to them?
The head of any dialectically functional human being
contains all thoughts. It’s just a question of which thought I let out.
Obviously man is guilty. Yet the thought also arises that man is innocent. I
cannot escape this dilemma by constantly harping on the young poet D., who is
innocent. It keeps coming down to the same thing: on one hand, innocent D., and
on the other a random arrest. The man is innocent, and I see that he is
innocent, I try to help prove his innocence, and then he is arrested, and this
means that the arrest was random. But since an arrest is never random, it is
therefore proven that the man is not innocent. Therefore I am willing to concede
the point to you, in a case where you are in the wrong.
On this bit of steppe, 45.61404 degrees latitude north,
70.751954 degrees longitude east, there are only three months a year without frost.
In only a few weeks, the grass will lose this green tint it displays, it will turn
brown, and when the wind blows one stalk against the other, it will rustle faintly.
Before the first snow falls, tiny ice crystals will cover the blades, and even the
little stones on the surface of the steppe will without exception be covered with
hoarfrost and freeze together. Once the frost sets in, it will no longer be possible
for the wind to blow the stones about.
The weekend before his arrest, her husband had gone to a
meeting and, upon returning, in distinct contrast to his usual habit, had said
nothing at all about what had been discussed there. It was nearly dawn when he got
home, and he did not laugh away her fears, baring his teeth and flipping back his
strand of hair; she had seen him this tight-lipped only once before, that time two
years earlier when he had learned that his application for membership in the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been approved, but hers had not.
Now that her husband has been taken away, she knows that when she sits
here putting her life to paper, she is playing not just with her own life, but with
his as well, not just with her own death, but also with his; or is she playing
against death — or does all this pro and contra make no difference at all? She
knows that with every word she writes or leaves unwritten she is playing with the
lives of her friends, just as her friends in turn, when they are asked about her,
are forced to play with hers. G.,
the intellectual pioneer of the Communist
movement
, had to the bitter end refused to sacrifice his friendship with
the Trotskyist A.
I understand that Comrade H. has been living for
approximately three years together with his wife, Comrade H., in Moscow. He met
her before this, but three years ago is when they entered into wedlock. Did
Comrade H. question other comrades with regard to his wife’s earlier life, or
was she his only source of information?
My wife, Comrade H., as many of you know, has been
a member of the Communist Party of Austria since 1920.
Immediately before her departure to Moscow, she had
contact in Prague with the Trotskyite A.
I can’t respond to that, I was still in Berlin at
the time.
We have not only the right but also the duty to
speak about everything we know.
Only in his later work did A. develop Trotskyist
tendencies. I can assure you that Comrade H. did not identify with him and,
above all, where his assessment of the Soviet Union was concerned, she
vehemently disagreed.
It seems to me her relationship with A. went beyond
mere friendship. In any case, the two of them embraced when they parted on the
evening in question, according to the report of Comrade Sch.
I can’t respond to that.
Answer this question: Could Trotskyite,
semi-Trotskyite, or oppositional leanings be observed in her?
No, not at that time.
What does “not at that time” mean? I have to say I
don’t have the impression that this testimony is completely truthful. What’s
hiding behind it? Why does Comrade H. not speak freely about the case of his
wife Comrade H. in this context? Why does he have to be prompted by additional
questions to speak of it?
There was no question of any opposition on her part
in the sense in which we use this term in the Party.
I hope that it is clear to all our comrades how
crucial it is for us to spare no effort in critical situations. These criminals
who have been torturing our comrades in Germany and sending us their spies must
be met with wave after wave of destruction. What if scoundrels or
counterrevolutionaries like A. had managed to point a gun at Comrade Stalin?
Comrades, we are faced with the question: peace or war?
Would her motherly friend O. — with whom they shared a
dacha summer after summer, often staying on into September — conceal or admit
under interrogation that they had all expressed doubts regarding the guilt of the
young poet D. after his arrest? Might the wife of the author V. (V. had been
recently condemned on charges of engaging in Trotskyist activities and shot), who
was now supporting herself as a seamstress and had come to her room for a fitting,
really have dug around in her papers when she stepped out to the toilet? Why had R.,
with whom she and her husband had enjoyed so many excellent conversations about
literature early in their Moscow days, been sent off to an outpost in the German
Volga Republic exactly one week before her husband’s arrest? Who was responsible for
cutting the final sentence of the review she had written in July for the
Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung
so that her critique of the book by mustached
K. was transformed into its opposite? And was that good or bad fortune? She’s long
since stopped getting together with the friends she used to play cards with
sometimes in those first years after they arrived, and the literary working groups
were dissolved two years ago. Even the assemblies of German Party members have been
discontinued. Her friend C., who used to cry her eyes out in front of her all the
time over her inability to have children, recently refused to so much as nod in
greeting when she walked past Café Krasni Mak and saw her —
the wife of
H., who has been arrested
— sitting at the window.
And she herself?
During the rehearsals for the last play her husband wrote before his
arrest, five of the eight actors were arrested over a period of several days, after
which rehearsals were canceled until further notice. Comrade Fr., the wife of one of
these actors, came up to her yesterday at the café, holding the hand of Sasha, her
nine-year-old son, and entreated her to take the two of them in for at least a
night. I can’t, she responded. Without another word, the woman turned and went out
again, holding her child by the hand. I can’t. Only a few weeks before, her husband
had been folding paper airplanes for Sasha during breaks in rehearsal. It seems to
her unimaginably long ago now that she learned from the poet Mayakovski:
It is
not enough to be eighteen years old.
In their fight against the Fascists’ despotism and
contempt for human dignity, they had all risked their lives, wrestling with the
death that is fascism, and many of them fell victim to it. But if the young,
beautiful Soviet Union was, by contrast, Life itself (as she believes even now),
then death could no longer serve as a currency here. This fmeant that if even only a
single person who fought against despotism lost his life to despotism here, then his
death was in vain — deeply, profoundly, in vain — and nothing that
remained here deserved the name Life, even if, seen from the outside, it resembled
life.
But if in the land of the future, death were still the
currency with which you paid a debt you didn’t know you had — in other words
if it hadn’t been possible even here to abolish the rift between human beings that
goes by the names trade, commerce, and deception, if even here there were still the
same accursed two sides to humanity, unbridgeable, just as in any transaction in the
old world, that would mean the sale had already gone through, and all her comrades
— including her and her husband — were long since betrayed and sold and
now served only to bring the seller a good price: one consisting of themselves, paid
not just once or twice or even three times, but ten, a hundred, perhaps even a
thousand times over.
*
So have things really come so far now that all she can do is
hope that the members of the secret police who seized her husband and took him away
in the name of political vigilance
are merely traitors,
enemies of
the people,
that they are Hitler’s people — possibly even
high-ranking ones? Not only her husband but in fact every last one of the comrades
whose arrests she’s been hearing about is someone she’s known well for years. She’s
now almost certain: if Hitler himself proves to be her adversary even here in the
capital of the Soviet Union, only then can the antifascists’ hope for a better world
possibly survive their torture and death. Or is it perhaps that Stalin himself
— disguised as Hitler, who in turn is disguised as Stalin, doubly masked,
doubly veiled, and thus genuinely duplicitous — that Stalin himself is acting
as his own agent and, out of fear that in a good world the hope for a better one
might be lost forever, out of fear of stagnation, is now trying to murder the
Communist movement back into hopefulness? Or perhaps that all of them together are
dreaming a nightmare from which there will never be an awakening, and in this
nightmare Stalin, the good father, creeps into the rooms where his children are
sleeping with a knife in his hands.