Another Green World (7 page)

“Excuse me, comrade,” Butler said politely. “I hope I'm not disturbing you. I was looking for—”

The blond man pointed a thumb toward a doorway at the rear of the shop.

“Thank you, comrade.”

Butler ducked, as he often needed to do in these Eastern towns, and stepped through to a dim, low-ceilinged chamber that must have served as the old cobbler's living quarters. A small tile stove in one corner gave off a cozy warmth. A paraffin lamp burned yellow-white beneath its muslin shade, casting a glow of evening over scrubbed wooden walls, wide floorboards, lace curtains and a single scarlet geranium blooming in a rusty jar whose scrollwork proclaimed a fine brand of Finnish sweets, a treat someone must have fetched home long ago, before the Revolution, from a trip abroad.

The small, wraithlike man sitting alone in the room had chosen the largest chair in the darkest corner, as though to further diminish himself.

Butler had to step around the small table bearing the lamp to get a look at him, and even then his form remained indistinct.

Puak was fine-boned and amber-skinned, with Asiatic features. He looked physically weak but morally fierce. If someone had told you his real name was Khan, as in Genghis, you would have believed it. Or, just as readily, you would have believed he was a first cousin of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic. There was an unworldliness about him, yet those dark eyes could belong only to a man who has seen the world down to its writhing, molten core. He sat in perfect stillness, as if this visitor were not fully present or real to him.

Butler never knew how to start. He turned his head, soaking up the room's homey, proletarian charm. “Nice place you've found here,” he said, playing the oblivious American. “Pretty flowers. You could forget there's a war on.”

“Oh, no,” said Puak quickly. His voice was musical and perhaps, just detectably, effeminate. “I'm afraid nothing could ever make me do that.” He motioned to a chair near the lamp.

Butler sat down but kept his posture erect. It was much too early to relax.

“And how are things at the front?” Puak said mildly.

A maddening question, in that it could be pointless small talk or a booby trap. “The front has been static the past few weeks,” Butler replied guardedly, “since the summer offensive. Straightening out the line, bringing up supplies. Sending reconnaissance teams over. Grabbing sentries to interrogate. Building up for the next push, which ought to carry us right across the old prewar border.”

“Carry
us,”
Puak said, his tone neutral, academic. “Have you lost your journalistic objectivity?”

Butler felt more at ease now, settling into the dialectic. “Perfect objectivity is an ideal,” he said, “like perfect justice. We strive for it. Under true Socialism, we may achieve it. But at the present stage of history, ‘objectivity’ too often serves as a code word for apathy. Or worse, a shield to defend the status quo. If one makes a correct appraisal of the world situation, then he is obliged to take sides. He must align himself with the people, the workers, in their struggle. But in taking sides, he drops the pose that most people call objectivity, when in fact they mean something like noninvolvement, or detachment, maybe indifference. So if you suggest that I've lost my objectivity as a journalist, then I would agree. In this qualified sense.”

Puak nodded. He might or might not have been impressed by Butler's
analysis, or have cared. “I don't suppose you've tried that line of reasoning on your editors.”

Butler smiled and shrugged. “There are editors and editors. The people I write for appreciate my point of view.”

“Do you have much of an audience in America?”

From anyone else, this would have constituted a wise-ass remark. With Puak you never knew.

“Even in America,” said Butler, “there is a progressive press. A small one, mostly centered around New York and Chicago. Some of Roosevelt's people—the circle around Eleanor—openly sympathize. That's one tactic they've found to dampen the revolutionary impulses of the people. They encourage weak forms of social-democratic thought and institute harmless measures like the WPA. Keep the progressives inside the tent pissing out, as the saying goes.”

Puak nodded. He knew the expression. “Rather like the SPD in Weimar Germany,” he said in the same mild tone, and let the idea hang there.

“To an extent. You can never draw exact parallels between the American system and European parliamentary rule. But yes: you could say the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands was an effective tool for blocking the rise of a truly proletarian movement in Germany. Better to give the people a fraction of what they deserve than nothing at all. Co-opt the opinion-makers, as FDR has done with artists and writers. God knows they come cheap.”

“Which is why the Kommunist Partei Deutschland considered the SPD its most dangerous opponent, correct? Rather than the Hitler party?”

“Nach Hitler, kommen wir,” said Butler, repeating a slogan heard frequently during the 1932 election, the last in republican Germany. After Hitler, we shall come. “Sure—if you give the people a genuine tyrant, a thoroughly evil man, they'll see the battle lines more clearly. They'll have no stomach for liberal compromise.”

Puak knitted his slender fingers and bent forward slightly, nearer the light. “And how well would you say that policy has worked, so far?”

Butler's mouth was already open when he perceived the trap. Puak was inviting him either to declare the Communist Party to have been wrong, or else to applaud the outcome of its strategy: the undermining of a democratic regime and the rise of Nazism, with all that had followed. He shook his head. “If history could be lived backward, any corporal could be a field marshal. We were speaking of America, a totally different proposition. The Democratic Party might resemble the SPD in some ways, but the Republicans are not Nazis. You'll never get a Hitler in America. Adolf
at least knows his history. He's evil on a heroic scale. In America you get Senator Bilbo, with his bill to ship the Negroes back to Africa. You get Father Coughlin, shrieking from his pulpit over the radio. And Henry Ford, spending millions to print his anti-Semitic tracts. You get kooks. Wealthy kooks, some of them. Influential kooks, even powerful kooks. But too greedy and self-absorbed to be truly dangerous.”

Puak only stared, as though sizing up the depth and breadth of Butler's personal ideology. “I wonder,” he said finally, “how well in touch with America you are these days. The real America, not your progressive editors. People at their jobs, in the movie theaters, sitting at home in front of their radios.”

Butler shrugged. “I'm still a Yank.” From his mouth, it did not sound altogether convincing.

“Any news from over there?” Puak asked blandly. “Any information from your contacts in Washington?”

A peculiar phrase, thought Butler,
contacts in Washington
, for a lover and a pair of longtime friends. More than peculiar, bloodless—and maybe that was the point. Slowly he nodded. “Yes. I've had a letter from Vava, written just after she met with… the other two. The man and the woman. Then a shorter note, more recent. The woman had dropped by. She told Vava things are in motion, a plan has been hatched, they've identified a source of funding and volunteers are signing on. No further details. Vava didn't think it safe to press her.”

Puak let out a long breath, which might have signaled disappointment, though Butler doubted it. He took it as a given that the Spider had already learned the contents of these letters much as he learned everything else, through a thousand eyes and ears. Butler therefore drew secret pleasure from springing his little surprise.

“I've also gotten a letter from Ingo. It came straight to me at the front— must've gotten redirected somehow.” This was as close as he dared come to saying what he believed, that Puak was having his mail opened. “Ingo Miller, you know, he's the—”

“Thank you, I know who Ingo Miller is.”

Puak's tone was curt but his eyes danced with what seemed to Butler a kind of hunger.

“Here”— he groped in the Astrakhan coat—” I've got it right here.”

Puak waited coolly, hands folded about each other like the ends of a silken cord.

“The thing about Ingo,” said Butler, uncrinkling a thin sheet of stationery, “is that he's always making himself out to be a regular, rough-and-tumble
fellow. A plain talker. Inside, he's more of a …a brooder, among other things. But listen to this.” He read it straight, in English, which Puak spoke as well as anyone, with a tendency toward classical, Johnsonian sentence structure. “‘ Dear Butler, At first I was surprised when Marty told me it was you. Then when I thought about it I wasn't surprised at all. When did you start writing for Australian newspapers? Anyway, it sounds as if you've found your spot.' New paragraph. ‘I've agreed, for the time being, to go along with this. But I would like to be sure of two things. One, it's really Isaac we're talking about. Two, this whole thing isn't some wacky stunt of yours, a fool-the-dumb-capitalists kind of thing. I don't know why you would do this, but you have to admit, it sounds like you, no offense intended.' New paragraph, and the writing changes, as if the next bit were written later. I suspect he'd had a drink in the interim. ‘You and I never really hit it off in the old days, but at least I remember you as being an honorable man at heart who did not mean to hurt people. Which did not stop you from doing it, of course. Speaking of which, Marty says hi. Please write back and give me some kind of assurance on the two points above. And especially, please level with me if there's anything you know beyond what Vava told us—who, by the by, calls you Sammy. Does this mean you have dropped the literary pose?' He ends there. Signed, ‘Your old pal.’ “

Butler looked up to find Puak smiling, though just perceptibly so. Perhaps he was amused by Ingo's epistolary style.

“So then,” he said after a long pause, “your friend doubts you.”

“He doubts, full stop. That's Ingo.”

Puak flexed the fingers of one hand. “Well. I suppose you must write back.”

Was this a thought or a command? “Yes, of course,” said Butler. “But telling him what, I wonder?”

Puak's mouth puckered in thought. “It is a curious thing. Your friend seems not to like you very much. Yet he considers you a man of honor. He believes you are concealing something, yet he asks you to, as he says, level with him. There are paradoxes here. But we are no strangers to paradox, are we? Especially where the human heart is concerned.”

Butler felt it an oblique compliment to be included in Puak's
we.
He nodded, uncertainly.

In a quick, catlike move, Puak stood up and took a step in Butler's direction. “These people are our partners. Our teammates. We are stepping onto the same field, from our different directions. We are chasing the same ball. The same rules govern our play—chief among them, that a bullet is the ultimate referee.”

In the faint glow of the paraffin lamp, Puak's eyes gleamed like onyx, and his skin had the dry, slightly roughened texture of handmade paper. He looked very old. A revered elder comrade; a man who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Lenin. Who had passed beyond any question of trust or allegiance, simply by having survived. Who now lived a pure, ascetic existence, devoid of ego, lacking even a name, his whole being and essence devoted to the Cause.

He raised a finger. “Let them know everything. Don't tell them. But let them come to understand.”

“Everything. You mean—”

“That the document in question, the memo signed by Heinrich Himmler, is more than a mere piece of evidence. That it is a decisive weapon in the coming struggle. That the Soviet Union intends to acquire it at all costs. That we are using the Americans just as we have used the partisans, as means to an end. That we do not care a damn about any of the people concerned. Not the Little Fox, not your Washington friends, not the local Underground chiefs. Not even ourselves as individuals.”

Butler frowned. “But we have to care a bit, don't we? At least enough to keep everyone alive until the operation is over. I mean, some of these people… Ingo Miller for instance. Isaac the Fox. They're kind of vital to pulling this off, aren't they?”

Puak stared straight into Butler's eyes and, with a smile of infinite compassion, shook his head. “It is not permitted to believe that. I'm sorry, but as Marxists we may not believe that any single human being matters so terribly much. All our science, our understanding of history, tells us otherwise. Life is an aggregate process. History is syncretic. Evolution does not occur at isolated locations but across the whole living field—and this remains true whether we are speaking of an organism or an entire society, a sociohistoric system. What matters is only the whole. Not the part. The body, not the cell. Humankind, not this or that ephemeral personality.”

He turned suddenly away, leaving behind a palpable silence. Butler felt awkward, having heard this deeply felt protestation of faith from an old man fully aware of his mortality, and straining for transcendence. He smiled. “I'm not sure how I feel myself about being an ephemeral personality.”

Puak nodded, his expression kind. “It gets easier with age, I suppose.” He moved back to his chair. “Now listen carefully. I will tell you how this thing must be done.”

*    *    *

A desiccating wind arrived overnight from the east, off the steppe, and did nothing to lighten Butler's pensive mood, nor did a ceiling of clouds the color of a battleship. He awoke tangled in garishly colored blankets in a tent that belonged to one Madame Ladoshka, a camp follower who passed herself off as a Gypsy and earned a respectable livelihood telling the fortunes of soldiers young enough to be her sons.

Butler happened to know she was a Jewess from Minsk, and that before the war she had been a stage actress. When German tanks appeared one morning in 1941, she gathered her few possessions and began walking east. But the Wehrmacht was also moving east, making for Smolensk, so Ladoshka turned south into the Pripet Marshes—a propitious turn, in most respects. Soon she found herself living in a community of partisans run on the principle of a
kolkhoz
, a collective farm. The chairman was an older man who'd fought with the Whites in the Civil War. He fell in love with Ladoshka and treated her tenderly until he was caught in an ambush by the SS, tortured for a couple of days, and left hanging at a crossroads. Ladoshka thus came into possession of his belongings, which chiefly amounted to a large round tent of the type used by Kurdish nomads. She had opened the tent to other women left stranded by the war. But a tentful of women in the middle of a swamp is not a long-term solution to life's problems, so when Marshal Rokossovsky's forces reached Mozyr in the great advance after Stalingrad, Ladoshka rolled up her household and joined the Red Army on its westward march.