The End of Days (15 page)

By joining the Communist Party, she had catapulted
herself into the middle of this life. She, too, was now one of those in whose bodies
and souls the present had finally found itself after centuries of inertia and was
beginning to race forward; it was a present far too large and swift for one person
alone, but together they would be able to hold their ground upon the crest of time,
even when it was traveling at a gallop. In her account of her life, all of this is
represented by a single sentence:
In 1920 I joined the Communist Party of
Austria; I was vouched for by Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the
Communist movement, and Comrade U., who at the time ran the local group
Vienna-Margareten.

She is required to list those who vouched for her, even
though U. — who has since been expelled from the Party and condemned to death
in absentia for high treason by the Soviet courts — now lives in Paris. In
other words, she was vouched for by a leftist sectarian back when she was young. Did
they mean to pin her down as the young person she had been, her very youth now a
cause for reproach?

In her first account of her life, the name U. had still been worth
dropping.
Comrade U., now a respected functionary of the Communist
International, and Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist
movement, vouched for me when I joined the Communist Party of Austria in
1920
.

In the second account, written when she was applying to be accepted into
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, she had simply said:
Comrade G., the
intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, and Comrade U. vouched for
me.

By that time, the
respected functionary of the Communist
International
was no longer taking part in Comintern assemblies and held no
position of any sort; a rumor was circulating that she had conspired with Kirov’s
murderers, but no one knew exactly how.

Now, in this third account of her life, she explains:
At the time I
was influenced by U., an enemy of the people, and while I was not an active
participant in the debates being held at the time, I did, like her, take an
approving stance in our group’s discussions of the meaning of the June Uprising
of 1919, thereby unintentionally contributing to the formation of factions which
caused damage to the Austrian Communist Party.

And so the past moved through the movements taking place in the present.
But could looking at things in a certain way really change the things
themselves?

When her father died shortly after the end of the war, she
was convinced that he had died of the war, even though he’d been nowhere near the
front: what had killed him was profound exhaustion after years of struggling to
support a family under catastrophic circumstances.

Her mother, on the other hand, had shouted after her down the stairs
when she was moving out of her parents’ apartment the spring after her father’s
death that her father obviously hadn’t been able to stomach seeing his older
daughter doing everything in her power to go to the dogs.

Her little sister, to be sure, did not share her mother’s opinion that
the older girl was to blame for their father’s death, but she was just as
disinclined to agree with her sister that their father had privately capitulated. It
was out of protest against the modern age, she told her older sister, an
insurrection of his heart against life’s unreasonable demands — in other
words, it was basically his strength and radicalism that drove him to his death, and
these are both things you inherited, she said.

The older girl replied that she was unfortunately unable to believe that
retreating could count as a protest.

But it does, the younger one said, it really does! Only through his
death, she said, did their father finally succeed in returning to where he’d
basically wanted to be ever since 1917: at the side of the late Kaiser, and in his
own way he had declared the modern age bankrupt.

Unfortunately, the modern age doesn’t give a damn about his opinion, the
older girl said.

Death can also be a sort of strike!

Hmm, the big sister said, I don’t know.

But then the two girls had already reached the entrance to the building,
and the older one didn’t want to go upstairs for fear of running into their
mother.

And so each of them — she herself, her mother,
and her sister, too — described her father’s death in quite different terms,
even though the fact of his death confronted all of them in equal measure; each of
them assigned it a different cause and meaning, as though it could be spoken of only
in terms of this or that story, as a sort of dead stub that in some form or other
had fused with each of their lives. Each called his death by another name, and
probably this naming helped them to at least obscure the fact hidden behind the
name, if not forget it outright, to prevent this gaping maw from possibly luring
those who remained alive down into the underworld.

The doctors, though, following the dictates of their profession,
recorded with the utmost objectivity nothing more than the scientific explanation
for her father’s end in the Registry of Deaths:
myocardial
insufficiency
.

She couldn’t help thinking of this the first time she read the Manifesto
of the Communist Party, when she began to hope that perhaps there was a doctor who
could treat the severe illnesses from which mankind as a whole was suffering.

*

As she heads to the common kitchen to fetch some hot water
from the samovar for her tea, a wind rises up far away on a bit of steppe, 45.61404
degrees latitude north, 70.75195 degrees longitude east, collecting a few grains of
sand that get caught amid the blades of grass, while other grains of sand lying
beside the tufts are carried off. For weeks now it hasn’t rained there. A beetle,
emerging from nowhere, on its way nowhere, passes the time by creeping up one of the
grass blades, where, having reached the top, it turns around again and goes on its
way facing down. The blade of grass bent a little beneath the weight of the beetle
when it reached the tip — bent almost imperceptibly, since the beetle’s weight
was so slight, but still it was something. Now that the six-legged visitor has
returned to earth and is once more making its laborious way among the other stalks
belonging to this tuft of grass, the stalk is standing erect again, trembling ever
so slightly from time to time in the tranquil air we describe as a lull.

The Jews, she thinks on her way back to her room, knew what
they were doing when they decided never to call God by his name. Lenin once wrote
that a glass was not only indisputably a cylinder made of glass, it was also a
drinking vessel; it was not just a heavy object such as might be used for throwing,
but could also serve as a paperweight, or to hold a trapped butterfly. Lenin had
read Hegel, and Hegel in turn had said that truth was the whole. She always used to
drink tea with her husband late into the night. Now she is sitting here alone. Could
it be a mistake to have Lenin’s
Philosophical Notebooks
right there on her
shelf? Has Lenin been outlawed yet? Could he have been a classic author when she set
out to get her tea, but already a criminal by the time she returns with her cup? He
lies across the Neva from her in his coffin made of glass; if he were to turn over,
everyone would see.

This was a weekend in early spring, perhaps around Easter. A
lake outside Berlin.

Utterly disgraceful, someone should put a stop to
it, such a ne’er-do-well.

We wanted to paddle across in our kayak.

Serves him right.

I remember that the weather was not on our side
that day.

Turned out to lack all talent.

It seemed as if winter was moving in on us
again.

We did ask ourselves what detours had brought him
here and wondered about the strange writer’s life he was leading. Then we said:
Why get involved with filth like that?

It snowed that last night, there was even sleet.
Thin sheets of ice were floating around on the lake, but they broke apart as
soon as the prow of our boat touched them.

A handful of comrades thought he had a
gift.

That evening he read us his latest story in
parting.

Gifted — that can mean all sorts of
things.

The next day we went our separate ways.

We cannot continue to employ the designation
“gifted” if he is being expelled from the organization as a writer of
trash.

Hurriedly, and in fine spirits, our friend strolled
off. One week later he left for Moscow.

Only a single person said he agreed with me, in a
whisper: it was him. Dear comrade, I said, if you share this opinion, do stand
up and say so aloud. He said that he would, but soon after he
disappeared.

He stopped just the one time, to turn around and
wave to us.

Shocking what he tried to pull.

I shall always see his face before me.

Tried to incite me to . . .

His solid, almost stocky figure.

To say that the book is garbage . . .

His closely shorn, stubbly hair.

Unmasked in his dream of being a writer, just in
time.

Those watchful eyes . . .

Banished from literature.

. . . that were now filled with joyful
expectation.

The case involving the existence of a group in
Moscow with an absolute idiot at its head — the individual in question
— has now been rectified.

3

A good friend of her husband’s, the theater director N., had given
her and her husband a letter of introduction to Yagoda, the head of the secret
service, when they emigrated to the Soviet Union. Her husband didn’t want to use it,
why not, she said, he said: cronyism isn’t Socialism, and he flipped the strand of
hair out of his face, she said, that isn’t cronyism, it’s just one comrade lending
another a helping hand. If we do our work well, we won’t need any help, her husband
said, then he tore up the letter and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Meanwhile
Yagoda has been relieved of his duties, arrested, and — recently, during the
third show trial — indicted, then condemned to death and executed. Perhaps
Yagoda’s successors are coming up the stairs this very moment. Did her husband
really tear up the letter of introduction, or did she — as she sometimes
imagined, dreamed, or perhaps even really remembered during the nights following his
arrest — retrieve the scraps of paper from the wastebasket, glue them
together, and put the document back in the drawer? Then it would be found now and
would provide a justification for her arrest. She absolutely must finish the account
of her life before she is arrested. Then this piece of writing can do battle with
that letter, assuming someone really has found it, or will find it and wish to use
it as evidence against her and her husband: paper against paper.

*

With the roller to the side of her typewriter, she scrolls
back up the last eight lines, then strikes the “X” key over and over until the
paragraph she has just written becomes illegible. Then she goes on writing.

Active in.

While fighting.

Journey to.

At work on.

He, he, and she.

Hitler’s victory in the election most certainly spelled
defeat for the German working classes, but at the time could one really describe it
as a defeat for the Communist Party of Germany, as her husband had done?

Sch., the man in the yellow suit jacket — now a delegate to the
Communist International — had replied to her husband: If the Social Democrats
hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the Communists, but instead had joined
with the Communists to create a united front against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have
been a majority for Hitler.

We didn’t lose the workers to social democracy, we lost them to the
Fascists, her husband had said, and then asked: Why? Because of this question
— which he had ultimately been asking himself, not the delegate to the
Communist International — he had been severely chastised by the Party, and
demoted to performing lower-level Party work.

Her husband had spent one year in Berlin without papers collecting
membership dues from a group of five Party members.

Shortly after her husband had left for Germany, she went for
a walk on frozen Lake Neusiedl with her friend G. and asked him whether they ought
to wish that Marx had been wrong, in other words that when capitalism went to seed,
it wasn’t because the petit bourgeois had slid down into the proletariat, but
because the proletariat had slid upwards into the petite bourgeoisie and in their
new capacity as petit bourgeois had voted for Hitler.

But what about the working classes?

Marx was not mistaken, her friend G. said. The working classes had voted
for Hitler, but H. was still wrong in his theory that the Communist Party had been
defeated.

But Hitler is leading the workers into the next war to defend the
interests of Big Capital, leading them to the slaughter! Haven’t people always said:
A vote for Hitler is a vote for war?

The worse this war turns out to be, G. said, the better for us. For the
masses to turn away from him and come running into our arms, we need the crimes he
is about to commit to be as huge as possible.

She looked down to contemplate this sentence, looked at the thin layer
of snow lying upon the ice, and thought about how shallow the water in this lake
was. The lake was enormous, but when you swam in it during the summer, there was no
point where the water reached higher than your neck.

She didn’t see her husband again until 1934, in Prague,
and from there the two of them applied for a visa to the Soviet Union. Shortly after
their arrival in Moscow, they heard Dimitrov speak at the Seventh World Congress of
the Communist International. In his speech he said the same thing as her husband two
years before: If the Social Democrats hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the
Communists, but instead had joined with the Communists to create a united front
against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have been a majority for Hitler.