Young Philby (3 page)

Ah, the Englishman … You won’t believe how innocent he was when he appeared on my doorstep: handsome in a timid sort of way, painfully unsure of himself, suffering (I later learned) from chronic indigestion, talking with an endearing stammer that became more pronounced when the subject turned to social or sexual intercourse. I could tell right off—girls are born with a sixth sense for body language—he’d never gotten laid, at least not by a female. Whether by a male is another matter entirely. Late one night, when we could hear artillery shells exploding in the workers’ quarter across town, the Englishman downed a schnapps too many and told me he’d been b-b-b-b-b-buggered, as he put it. I never did discover if this initiation took place at one of those posh British boarding schools that don’t light grate fires until water freezes in the faucets or later at Cambridge. I happened to have had enough intercourse with the King’s English, not to mention the King’s Englishmen, to know what
buggered
meant. Forgive me if I don’t share the details. I’m rambling. Oh dear, I do ramble when I talk about the Englishman. Yes, I was saying that, sexually speaking, he was green behind the ears when he fell into my life. I would have been surprised to learn he’d ever set eyes on a young woman’s breast, much less touched one. He certainly didn’t know how to unfasten a brassiere. When we finally got around to sharing a bed, which was ten days after he moved into my spare room, it quickly became apparent he had only a theoretical notion of feminine anatomy. But, to his credit, in sex as in espionage, he was a quick study.

“Where did you learn to fuck like that?” I drowsily asked him the morning after that first night.

“You b-bloody well taught me,” he said. “Your org-gasm is on my lips. I can taste it.”

This, friends, turned out to be quintessential Philby, Kim to his mates, Harold Adrian Russell to the upper-crust English swells who happened by our table to sponge cigarettes when we took tea, as we did almost every afternoon, even in winter, on the terrace of the Café Herenhoff.

But I skip ahead—the tale is best told chronologically. Try to imagine my stupefaction when, responding to a knock so tentative it was almost inaudible, thinking it was the Negro come to deliver coal, I opened the door of my three-room flat to find a young gentleman shifting his weight from foot to foot in excruciating uncertainty, a rucksack hanging off one lean shoulder, a small but elegant leather valise on the floor next to his swanky albeit scuffed hiking boots. My first fleeting thought was that I was in the presence of someone who had wandered into the wrong century. He had the soft pink cheeks of an adolescent who almost never needed to shave; disheveled hair with the remnant of a part in the middle; wrinkled flannel trousers with a suggestion of a crease; frayed trouser cuffs pinched by metal bicycle clips; a belted double-breasted leather motorcycle jacket with an oversized collar turned up; a beige silk scarf knotted around his throat; motorcycle goggles down around his neck; a worn leather motorcycle bonnet, the kind someone might have worn when motorcycles were first invented, hanging from a wrist. “There is no number on your door,” he said, “but as you are b-between six and eight, I decided you must be seven.”

I worked my fingers through my freshly minted blond pageboy to see if the chemist’s peroxide was still damp. “What were you hoping to find at number seven?” I demanded, laying the foundation for the emotional wall I meant to raise between us.

My visitor, speaking English with the barest curl to his upper lip, said, “I was led to b-believe I might be able to let a room at Latschgasse 9, ap-partment number seven.”

The more he stammered, the more I saw my emotional wall crumble. “And who led you to believe that?”

“One of the comrades at the Rote Hilfe Alliance that assists p-persecuted refugees.”

“What brought you to Vienna?”

“My motorcycle brought me to Vienna. I took the liberty of p-parking it in your courtyard next to the rubbish b-bins.”

“I am not inquiring about your mode of transportation. I am inquiring about your motivation.”

“Ahhh. Motivation.” I remember him shrugging in confusion. I was to discover that clichés irritated him, the more so when they spilled from his own lips. “Vienna is where the action is,” he said. “Or will b-be. I came to do my p-part.”

I thought about this. “Are you saying you rode a motorcycle all the way from England
to do your part
?”

“Not counting the channel, it’s only nine hundred miles, give or take.” He favored me with a shy smile. “If I may be so b-bold, what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why are you in Vienna?”

“I have a rendezvous with history.” In those days, like these days, one couldn’t be too vigilant. “Don’t change the subject. How did you know about Rote Hilfe?”

“One of my professors at Cambridge is a wheel in the B-British Communist P-Party—he gave me a letter of introduction to the Austrian Committee for Relief from German Fascism. I can show you the letter.”

He started to reach into his rucksack but I waved him off. Anyone could produce a letter. “What is the address of Rote Hilfe? Which comrade gave you my address?” I stood ready to slam the door in his perplexed face if he answered incorrectly.

He produced a small spiral notebook from an inside breast pocket and, moistening the ball of a thumb on his tongue, started to leaf through the pages. I could see they were chock-filled with neat, almost microscopic, handwriting. “Right. Rote Hilfe is situated at Lerchengasse 13, up three flights, right as you come off a very seedy stairwell indeed, down four doors and B-Bob’s your uncle.” He looked up. “Oh dear, I don’t suppose you’re familiar with
B-Bob’s your uncle
.”

“I am able to figure it out,” I said. “Go on.”

“Yes. Right. The Rote Hilfe office consists of four rooms, one of them with used clothing spilling from cartons p-piled to the ceiling, another crawling with shabby soaks whom I took for Communists hounded out of Germany by Herr Hitler after the Reichstag fire. The ones who weren’t p-playing sixty-six were sleeping in their overcoats on mattresses set on the floor. The whole apartment stank of cooked cabbage, though I never saw a stove where cabbage might be cooked. As for the comrade who gave me your address, I only know his nom de guerre. His friends called him Axel Heiberg. They had a good laugh at my expense when they got around to explaining that Axel Heiberg was the name of an island in the Arctic Ocean.”

“Do you always do that?”

“D-do what?”

“Mark down everything you see in a notebook?”

“Actually, yes. When I was eleven my sainted father dragged me off on a grand tour of the Levant—Damascus, B-Baalbek, B-Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Tiberias, Nazareth, Acre, Haifa, Jerusalem, you name it, I’ve been to the souk. He ob-bliged me to keep a journal. I’ve been more or less at it since.” He held out a pale palm. “Philby,” he said. “Harold Philby. Kim to my very few friends.”

“Why very few?”

“In my experience
Homo sapien
usually disappoints. Only
Homo Sovieticus
rises to the historical occasion—challenging industrial Capitalism, National Socialism and its
fuehrer
, and your dreadful Dollfuss here in Vienna.”

I remember being so moved by this declaration that I clasped his hand in both of mine. “Litzi,” I said, perhaps a bit more eagerly than I would have liked. “Litzi Friedman, Latschgasse 9, apartment number seven. I pried away the seven to throw off the police if they should come around looking for me again. Tickled.”

“Tickled?”

“Tickled to make your acquaintance, of course. Do come in.”

*   *   *

“Money.”

“Money?”

“
Zahlungsmittel
in German.
Fizet
őeszköz
in Hungarian.
Valuta
in Italian.
Argent
in French.
Money
in the King’s English, which is a language you speak more or less fluently.”

It will have been early in the evening of Kim’s second day in Vienna; I’d been too tactful to raise the subject the first day. We’d just gotten back to Latschgasse 9 after picking up packets of leaflets at a secret albeit primitive underground printing press and delivering them to workers’ militia headquarters in the great housing projects off the rim road. I will confess it was exhilarating to ride on the back of Kim’s Daimler motorcycle. I became a bit giddy looking up at the church steeples and what the Americans call skyscrapers (some of them ten or twelve stories high) soaring over my head as we sped through the narrow streets of the Innere Stadt. A light rain had begun falling when we turned onto Latschgasse, plastering my shirt to my skin. I noticed that my Englishman (as I’d begun to think of him) didn’t notice. Food for thought: Was the problem with his eyes or what our Viennese Doktor Sigismund Freud calls the libido? Back at my flat, I changed into a dry shirt and dried my hair on a towel, then set out sandwiches and some flat beer and raised the delicate matter of rent. “Yes, money. British pounds. Austrian schillings. German Reichmarks. How much do you have?”

“Are we talking c-cash?”

“We are not talking IOUs. Of course we’re talking cash.”

“Ahhh. Yes. Well. My sainted father paid me for typing up the manuscript of his b-book—he rode a bloody camel across the Arabian desert from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea in forty-four d-days. Hell of an exploit—T. E. Lawrence thought only an airship could cross what the Saudis call
the empty quarter
. Make d-damn good reading if father could find a p-publisher who didn’t think our
Lawrence of Arabia
owned the copyright to desert sagas. Didn’t help that the footnotes were in Urdu, which my father speaks fluently. Or was that Persian? Hmm. About the money, I have loose change left over from that odd job, plus the hundred quid he gave me for my b-birthday.”

A hundred pounds was a fortune in working-class Vienna. “You actually have one hundred pounds sterling?”

He nodded.

“Show it to me.”

Kim was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs we’d carried into the parlor for the committee meeting later that night. He rested his left ankle on his right knee, unlaced the hiking boot and pulled it off. Then he produced the wedge of bills that had been taped to the underside of the tongue in the boot. He handed the money to me. I counted it. There was a hundred pounds sterling, all right, in crisp five- and ten-pound notes. The bills were so new I feared the ink would rub off on my fingers.

“How long did you plan on this lasting?”

“Actually, I thought, what with living on the proverbial shoestring, I m-might be able to stretch it to a year.”

“Twelve months?”

“That’s the usual length of a lunar year.”

I snatched up a pencil and began doing sums on the back of an envelope, converting pounds to schillings, adding up what he would need for rent and board. “In Vienna you can eat for six schillings a day if you’re a vegetarian.” I looked up. “You are a vegetarian?”

“I am now.”

“Good. I read an article in our Socialist newspaper
Arbeiter-Zeitung
suggesting the average person lives 2.4 years longer if you don’t eat meat.”

“Does your b-budget include cigarettes?”

“How much do you smoke?”

“A pack a day.”

“Haven’t read anything suggesting cigarettes are bad for your health. But you’ll have to cut back all the same to pinch pennies.”

“If I smoke less than a pack a day I s-stutter more. You’re also forgetting petrol for the motorcycle, assuming we continue to make use of it in Vienna.”

“Oh, we will certainly use it. I’ll get our transport committee to pay for the petrol.” I tallied up the columns. “I think seventy-five quid will see you through the lunar year.” I counted out seventy-five pounds and handed it back to him.

He looked down at the bills, then up at me. “What are you planning to do with the other twenty-five?”

“Congratulations. You have just joined the Vienna Relief Committee. By coincidence, annual membership for Englishmen on motorcycles happens to be twenty-five pounds.”

“But I came here to join the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution.”

The moment had come to begin his education. “If you want to work for the Communist cause, you will have to do it discreetly. In time I can put in a good word for you in certain circles. Meanwhile you must play the role of a naïve young English idealist who has come to lend a hand with refugees. The Austrian Communist Party, along with the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution, have been declared illegal by Dollfuss and his gang. We Communists work through the Relief Committee, which is legal. Your twenty-five pounds will get four or five of the German comrades you saw sleeping on mattresses to safety in France.” I looked at him. “Can I interpret your silence as agreement to make this contribution?”

“D-do I have a choice?”

I scraped my chair closer to him until our knees were almost but not quite touching. (Didn’t want him to panic.) “You always have a choice—that’s what life is about. Choices. Not making a choice is a choice.” I must have smiled, which is what I usually do when I am about to make a suggestion that I don’t want the
suggestee
to accept. “You can keep the hundred pounds, pack your rucksack, and go back to England if you don’t want to join us.”

“I am very happy here in Vienna, thank you.”

The comrades who turned up for the committee meeting were impressed when I told them the Englishman had contributed twenty-five pounds to the Relief Committee. The professor from Budapest, an illegal who was trying to stay one step ahead of the Austrian police, wasn’t. “You gave him back seventy-five?” he asked me in Hungarian. “What the devil’s wrong with you?”

Kim looked at me. “You speak Hungarian?”

“I
am
Hungarian,” I told him. “I was raised by my grandparents in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire.”

“But I have heard you speak German.”

“My grandparents sent me to
gymnasium
in Vienna. I’ve been here since. This is their apartment.” I told the Hungarian professor, “The Englishman will be invaluable to us when the revolution starts. With his motorcycle and his British passport and his pale English face he will be able to pass police checkpoints. We got past two of them today, Dollfuss’s Heimwehr militia bullies didn’t even search our rucksacks.” I translated what I’d said into German for the district committee comrades. One of them, his eyes fixed on Kim, asked me in German, “How can you be sure he is not a double agent?”