Cold Light (70 page)

He shook his head. She could see his tears. ‘It made me stronger.’

There was a miserable contradiction in these last words. They were from another Frederick, not the one lying on his bed.

She let go of his hand and picked up his Scotch and offered it to him.

Frederick didn’t take it. She put it down on the bedside table. She found herself caressing his hand. He then said, again more to himself, in a tone that was neither contempt nor affirmation, perhaps echoing her mocking words at the café, ‘Long live the victorious banner of our Party. Long live Marxism-Leninism.’

She thought that he sobbed.

Then he seemed to become angry with her, even though she had said nothing. ‘For God’s sake, Edith, we weren’t playing party politics the way Labor and the Liberals are. We were not out to change the government. We were out to change the world, the system, the nature of things, to what Australians wanted to make of this country right from the start.’

Then he said, ‘The Central Committee is still Stalinist. If they could, they would’ve shot me or sent me to a work camp. The secret speech, by destroying the myth of Stalin’s infallibility, inadvertently destroyed, as well, the infallibility of the leadership system in all the national communist parties. The suppression of the Hungarian revolt has exposed the falsity of the claim that the communist state is a proletarian state. Lambert said that during the uprising, workers arrested the secret police – the AVH – and stuffed money in their mouths and hanged them in public. The AVH had been running concentration camps where people were worked to death.’

Did she like her brother? She had not looked down on him for being in the Party, but she supposed she considered him misguided, blinded by ideology. Who wasn’t?

He shouted out, ‘We were the first to be right about Fascism, yet we were the last to be right about Stalin. I wish they would shoot me.’

He frowned. ‘I have been lied to by people I trusted in the Party. As a consequence, I have lied to other people, who trusted me. A lifetime of being lied to and then of spreading the lies.’

It was if he were writing his will and testament. He breathed deeply, as if it were his last breath. ‘Stalin has killed the Communist Party – and those who ape Stalin. And may have killed communism as well. At least in our lifetimes.’

She watched her crumpled brother and heard the jargon tumbling from his mouth – it was like some discharge from an illness.

He said, ‘Nat Seeligson put his head in the kitchen oven. There’ve been others – hanged themselves, shot themselves.’

She shook her head, indicating that she did not know Seeligson, and sipped her gin. Frederick said, ‘The Melbourne poet who worked on the
Guardian
.’ He laughed. ‘Not so good as a poet, but a good comrade. Gassed himself.’

He was near tears. ‘I wish they had shot me.’

Over the years with Janice and Frederick, and in discussions with Ambrose and people at the League, she had come to understand the seductions of a Great Cause for those who wanted an all-embracing, all-knowing commitment. The right way to live.

She knew its logic and its compassion. She thought she could easily have gone to where Fredrick went and to be where he was now.

He then said, ‘I did not leave the Party; the Party left me.’

She saw his pipe lying on the floor. His Stalin pipe.

She leaned over, picked it up and put it on the bedside table.

After some minutes, he seemed to become oblivious to her presence. She said she would visit tomorrow.

From the door of the bedroom, she observed him with dispassion. She tried to imagine what it would mean to someone who strived to be a revolutionary to be expelled in the eyes of his comrades – to have failed the cause; to now be a revolutionary without a revolution and without comrades.

She nearly said, ‘You can now make another life,’ but realised how callous that would sound.

Perhaps realising that she was standing at the door looking at him, he said to the ceiling, ‘Any economic system that periodically throws millions out of work and out of their houses, degrades millions of its citizens, humiliates them, disregards them, injures them, starves them, makes those who are least able to fend for themselves take the brunt of any economic downturn, is an evil system.’

She nearly asked if he meant Stalin’s Russia, but she saw that he was describing America and Australia.

Then, to her surprise, he quoted their father. ‘As Dad used to say, “We have to be against the master and servant relationship, against the divine, against the imperial, against the aristocratic, and against the arrogance of wealth.” I thought we had the answer with communism. We have to find another answer, another communism. Or perhaps what we had wasn’t correct communism.’

She made to leave but he called her back. She went and stood by the bedside. He took her hand and said, ‘You must understand what it’s like, Edith. When I used to wake of a morning, I would think,
I am an organiser for the Communist Party
, and I felt bigger than my body. I was continuously conscious of my role. I
was
my role. Even when people opposed me, I felt stronger. I felt responsible. I felt enlivened. I had authority. I had answers to all the questions.’

Her thoughts went back to her days at the League. ‘I do know what it’s like to have a great role.’ It was true. She had felt it somewhat with the UNRRA, but not as strongly as when she was an officer of the League of Nations.

‘Do you want to know how I feel now?’

She stood there.

‘I feel as if several rat-sized animals are running about inside my body.’

‘I’ll come again tomorrow.’

He went back to looking at the ceiling, an arm across his forehead.

As she was leaving again, he said to the ceiling, with some anguish, ‘I didn’t want you bastards to be right about the Soviet Union.’

She had to go. She left the room and went out to where Janice was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, flicking through a Party magazine. Perhaps she had been listening to what went on in the bedroom.

Janice looked up and said, ‘The weirdest thing is that someone had reported Fred to the Control Commission for having been seen with a suspected SIS agent from the British High Commission – that is, of course, the Major.’

‘Ye gods.’

‘That wasn’t why he was expelled, but evidently it was raised along with anything else they could throw at him.’

She put out her cigarette. ‘And, of course, it should have been raised.’

‘Will you resign?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Edith found this odd. ‘Can a member of the Party, such as you, still remain with an expelled member?’

Janice shrugged, which Edith took to mean no. In fact, to mean,
No, and it doesn’t matter to me
.

She took Janice’s hand. ‘You can’t walk out on him now. Not at this point in his life.’

Janice said dully, ‘I’ve never seen him crack before. He’s no longer a deliberate man. Once they lose it, they lose it for good.’

She let Janice’s hand go. ‘You mean, you really would leave him for the Party?’

Janice did not reply and then said, ‘To be honest, I wanted a man who loved the revolution more than he loved me.’

‘As a woman should love Jesus more than her husband?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that. But I think I would rather stick with the Party and be wrong than betray the cause and be right.’

‘Do you want me to find a doctor for him – a psychiatrist?’

‘Let’s see if he pulls himself together. Psychiatry in this country isn’t going to help him. He’s a broken man.’

‘How long has he been this way?’

‘Weeks now. He keeps listening to Beethoven.’

‘Beethoven?’

Janice gave Edith the weary look and wound a finger at her temple, but not in an amusing way. ‘Lenin – Lenin had a love for Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata but wouldn’t listen to music at all. He said it made him want to pat the heads of the people. He said that one had to beat their heads, not pat them. So Fred’s listening to Beethoven – disobeying Lenin.’ She shook her head with irritation. ‘Like a child. Or a madman.’ In Janice’s tone she detected disgust with Fredrick.

Janice had not offered her another drink or asked her to sit.

‘Can he appeal against the expulsion?’

‘He could appeal to the National Congress, but it only meets every three years. I think the next meeting is nearly two years off. Can be a special congress, but that’s unlikely.’

Looking up at her, Janice said, ‘He won’t tell you about this because he’s humiliated, but before the expulsion he was given an opportunity to go to a Party school and write a self-criticism – an idea from the Chinese-trained cadres, such as Mortimer. So he went to the self-criticism school. They didn’t have dunces caps on their heads, but they sat at school desks and he wrote a few thousand words about his parents and their bourgeois tastes and background. And about you.’

‘Me?’

‘Your time with the League of Nations. He had to describe why you were a class enemy. Turner and others had to go through a similar school, but Fred, instead of seeing the self-criticism as valuable, saw it as humiliation. He couldn’t see that he should be required to do it after all these years in the Party.’

At first Edith had thought that Janice was ridiculing the idea, but she could see that she thought it was somehow a form of therapy.

‘It didn’t seem to have helped Turner, either. After it, Turner got him to go to one of the
Outlook
magazine meetings – it’s being put out by people who have broken with the Party – and Fred went along actually thinking he might get them to rejoin and work from within the Party.’

Janice shook her head with contempt.

Edith said, ‘Our upbringing was far from bourgeois.’ She did not remind Janice of her own upbringing.

‘You can’t see yourself,’ Janice said. And then, with a wave of a hand, another cigarette between her fingers, she said, ‘You don’t run a revolutionary party like parties in so-called democracies. It isn’t a debating society. What you people constantly debate has already been concluded within the Party. We have moved on from those debates. You are riddled with false consciousness. You have so-called free elections when the newspapers and radio are controlled by the capitalists. You can’t see that the real motive forces are economic and controlled by a few, while most people are insecure and in pain.’

Edith poured herself another gin, waving the bottle at Janice, who shook her head.

Janice went on, ‘Let me put it another way: you do not play in an orchestra with your own rules. Stalin had the hardest job in the revolutionary cycle. Marx and Engels gave us the theory. Lenin gave us the Party to conduct the revolution. It was Stalin’s job to create the new generation of the Party, which had to implement the revolution.’ A darkness crossed her face. ‘Fred shouldn’t have been an organiser. I would’ve done it better. And I should’ve been sent to China as well as Mortimer.’

Edith found this last outburst off-centre. There was a bitterness there about her lack of recognition by the Party. There was no trace of the heretical flippancy from the Janice they’d first met. Janice said, ‘Stalin’s actions will be seen as insignificant bumps in history. The important thing is not the mistakes: it is our analysis of the mistakes, and timing. Even Khrushchev himself said in the speech that the information he had just divulged should only be made known to the public by degrees.’

Janice stood up, indicating that Edith should now leave. Edith went to shake hands, but Janice ignored her hand.

With a cold, solid face and with no humour, Janice looked at her and said, ‘You probably don’t know this, but I want to say it to you. As an organiser, your brother felt he was owed sexual privileges, as part of the elite. He felt it was part of his pay.’

She took this in. ‘I don’t see that in his nature. Sexual privileges? From whom?’

‘It is in his nature. Just as the Nazi SS felt they were entitled to erotic privilege. He’s not the only one of the Party apparatchiki who thinks this. Turner, for example.’

She supposed Janice meant sleeping around in their circles. She hadn’t seen any evidence of this in Frederick, but she could understand that it was a difficult ethical question for someone in authority in an authoritarian party. She had seen men exploit their position this way.

At the door, Janice then said, ‘I may as well tell you all the home truths. Edith, you’re a snob and you always will be. All that use of French in conversation – it’s time you stopped playing Lady Edith. And I think you’ve contaminated your brother.’

Janice then opened the fly-screen door and showed her out. Standing at the doorway, she said, ‘I may as well tell you the rest: you’re also well on the way to being a drunk.’ She leaned over and plucked a dead bloom from a flower in the window box. ‘Do what you will with that free advice.’

A self-criticism school for her as well.

She replied to Janice, saying, ‘I think you meant to say “decadent bourgeois liberal”.’ She meant it as a throwaway line as she continued on her way out of the front yard. She was pleased with her comeback.

As for her use of French, she had thought that Janice wanted to practise her French. But perhaps she did overuse it. Perhaps she would concede that.

This was a strange turn in Janice. As with all unexpected attacks or affrights, Edith, as she had grown older, now chose to respond with cautious composure. Some years back, at the League, she had in fact been forced into a wrestling fight with Jeanne. Oh dear. What had that been about? Her now mellowed temperament did not allow the sting – the pain – of Janice’s remarks to reach her or unbalance her, and almost always now her mind cautioned her not to react spontaneously. She felt a deliberate, strategic calm. She kept well hidden the fact that Janice’s words had flabbergasted her.

Janice called to her from the doorway, ‘And I always believed your Major was not only a spy but also an invert. I don’t know what that makes you.’

At the gate, she turned to where Janice still stood at the doorway and said firmly, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow to visit my brother,’ speaking as if what Janice had said was of no concern, granting it no power of disruption to her life.