The End of Days (16 page)

But what was right could only be right when it was uttered and codified
by the Party, that’s what the Party was there for: to be the wisdom of many, not the
wisdom of one. An individual might lose his head, but not an entire Party.

*

Instead of taking on Hitler jointly, Communists and Social
Democrats jointly erred; on the basis of two carefully differentiated, but equally
faulty, assessments of the situation, they apparently arrived at two carefully
differentiated but equally faulty positions. The Social Democrats described the
Communists as
radicalinskis
, as terrorists and subversives, while the
Communists decried the Social Democrats as the murderers of the workers, the slaves
of Big Capital and
Social Fascists
. Once labels of this sort were applied,
an alliance was no longer possible. But did all these words matter?

In the two years that passed between one sentence and the
next, her friend G. was arrested while performing illegal work in Germany and shot
at Brandenburg Prison, and her lovely friend Z. was behind bars. She’d heard that
poet J. — cat hair on his jacket, his teeth brown from smoking — had
gone underground, but she never heard from him again.

Certainly all decisions about whom one should form alliances with
— when and at what cost — had to be reevaluated moment by moment. Before
you set out to fight the enemy, you had to know who the enemy was. But who could
know for sure?

G. had long since been buried in Brandenburg soil, his two
eyes shut forever — the Nazis had condemned and executed him on charges of
high treason. If he were still alive, they would no doubt be charging him with high
treason here in Moscow as well, since to the end he maintained a close friendship
with A., the latter-day Trotskyite. Given that Hitler seemed not to be going
anywhere and the formation of factions was proving to be part of the general
collapse, this friendship (which at the time was not yet a crime but only something
difficult to understand: an error perhaps, a case of thickheadedness, shortsighted
obstinacy, but also perhaps, who knows, the result of meticulous tactical
deliberations on the part of the
intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement
G.)
would most certainly have metamorphosed into an unpardonable wrong. But
by executing G. for treason in 1934 at Brandenburg Prison, the Fascists had ensured
that what would remain in his comrades’ memory was his fame.
Death is the
beginning of immortality.
Meanwhile, the doors to the hall of fame have
been sealed up, and the Beyond is nothing more than an endless strip of sand between
the fronts, a no-man’s-land in which all those who have gone missing over the last
few months — now including her husband — will be forced, dead or alive,
to walk on and on unto all eternity on their bloody feet.

She, too, had been acquainted with A., the latter-day
so-called Trotskyite, ever since the first time she participated in a meeting of the
Communist cell
Vienna-Margareten
, and she’d run into him a few times after
his expulsion from the Party in 1926, the last time in Prague, shortly before she
left for Moscow. This portly comrade had come late to a meeting of Austrian
emigrants and had taken the last remaining empty chair, right next to hers, then he
had spent the entire evening silently smoking, only once addressing her in a low
voice, asking what had become of their mutual friend G. G. had recently been sent to
Berlin, she’d replied, that’s all she knew. I understand, the so-called Trotskyite
had responded. The smoke of his cigarette had hovered above him, motionless and
thick, and for a moment the smell reminded her of J., the poet who’d gone
underground. When they were all saying their goodbyes outside afterward, she had
impulsively hugged A., whom no one else was deigning to so much as shake hands with,
but it seemed to her that he returned the hug more out of exhaustion than
friendship.

I committed a serious error in November 1934. In Prague I
participated in a meeting of Austrian
Schutzbund
supporters at which
the Trotskyite A. was also present, and I did not report this to the Party
organization. I was severely chastised for this by the Party leadership, but the
reprimand was removed from my record after conversations with Comrades Sch. and
K. when I practiced honest self-criticism with regard to my lack of
vigilance.

Was it better to call an error you had recognized by its
name, thereby taking away the power with which, years later, it threatened to
destroy you? And did not the forcefulness of an error’s attack fundamentally reflect
the passion with which you had once committed it — in other words, was it you
yourself creating your own downfall without knowing how and when?

Should she even mention that her self-criticism had been accepted? Did
the expunged punishment require her report? Surely there were papers covering all of
this, other people’s reports. Surely she was mentioned in one or the other
self-criticism written by someone else, or in the account of someone else’s life. So
should she simply leave unmentioned what had been expunged? But that might be
interpreted as malicious concealment on her part. Should she drag this expunged
punishment back out into the light? (But then it wouldn’t be expunged any longer,
would it?) It was a matter of honesty, such honesty as left each individual lying
there as if naked before the other. But who would this other be? And what is the
deepest layer one can lay bare? In the end, does coming clean mean scraping the very
flesh from your bones?

And then, what are bones?

At the beginning of the 1920s they had studied the movements
of money in their evening gatherings, its way of fluttering about, and the arbitrary
power it was gaining over humankind.

Today, inflation can destroy a person more thoroughly than an
E.
coli
infection, G. had said.

Then, fifteen years later, something began to flutter about and gain
power over humankind, something that none of her friends and neither her husband nor
she herself could put a name to. Had the time so quickly come to an end when words
themselves were reality, just as real as a bag of flour, a pair of shoes, or a crowd
being stirred to revolt? Was it the case now that reality itself consisted of words?
Whose eyes would piece together the letters she was writing into words, and the
words into meaning? What would be called her guilt, her innocence? Did every word
matter? What are bones?

Ever since her husband’s arrest, she has felt like a stranger
in this land, even though when they first arrived, it was a homecoming, despite the
fact that they’d never set foot here before 1935. A homecoming to the future that
was to belong to them.
Our metro
, she and her husband said when they saw
the newly opened underground stations for the first time,
our Gastronom No.
1
, when they went shopping for the first time in this gigantic grocery
store, where there were thirty-six kinds of cheese, and a stunning cornucopia of
foodstuffs of all sorts, items whose names had been all but forgotten in Vienna and
Prague; the saleswomen wore little white bonnets, and they didn’t touch the cheese,
meat, sausages, bread, or vegetables with their hands, but only with forks or rubber
gloves.
Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited.
To be sure, there
were still small old shops where one could find flour being sold in hand-twisted
sacks made of newsprint, here and there the customs of a bygone, unsanitary age
still survived, but they would soon no doubt disappear amid the gleam of modernity.
Once she had even sent her mother a package containing cheese, goose fat, caviar,
sausages and bonbons. Let her mother see that she, the wayward daughter, had done
everything right after all. Anything flourishing in the Soviet Union was flourishing
in her own life as well. Her mother thanked her in a letter, asking how things were
with her. And she had been proud to be able to write in her response: very good. A
time comes when a daughter shouldn’t have to give any other reply to her mother’s
question as to how she is doing. The
very good
will now remain with her
forever, come what may. Her husband is
very good
, she writes when her
mother asks her whether H., too, is keeping well: for a person who doesn’t know the
truth, it makes no difference whether someone has been arrested or is just far, far
away.
Very good
, she writes, when her mother asks her about her apartment
and work. The reality behind this
very good
has gradually shifted, but that
is nothing her mother needs to know. It is only a pity that her father, who was
always on her side, did not live to see her time of happiness.

When the passport of a German friend expired, he couldn’t get
his residency permit extended. He was invited to visit the German embassy in Moscow
to have his passport renewed. Invited to present himself to the Fascists who had him
on a list, invited to turn himself in. He died not quite two months later at a
concentration camp outside Weimar. He passed the test. Another comrade went to the
German embassy and emerged with a new passport. He was received by the NKVD and shot
as a German spy. He did not pass the test. Both are dead.

After Hitler’s seizure of power I came to Prague. I have
to say that I was profoundly depressed at the time. Never before in my life had
I left German soil. It was very hard for me to say goodbye. I know that all I
wanted was to get back to Germany as quickly as possible. I even considered
wearing a disguise. Of course that would have been madness. In night after night
of discussion, Comrade F. convinced me to go to Moscow. But I find it difficult
to write here. In point of fact, we were rejected by Germany and don’t yet have
roots in the Soviet Union.

Her passport, too, has been a German passport ever since the
Anschluss
. Her passport, too, expired three weeks ago. Three times now
the Soviet official she handed her document to for inspection took one look at it
and slammed his window down in her face. Without a valid passport there’s no
extending her residency permit, no
propusk
, but she needs one in order to
be allowed to go on living in her apartment. At least the building superintendent is
still letting her go upstairs to her apartment at night, when no one will see, but
it won’t be long before the apartment is assigned to someone else. And then where
will she go?

While she is writing the account of her life, she listens for the sound
of the elevator. The day the elevator stops on her floor at around four or five in
the morning — that will be the end. During the day, she sits in the
coffeehouse Krasni Mak, red poppy, translating poems from Russian to German for her
own edification. Without a
propusk
, there’s no getting a work permit
either. The money she has left from her husband will be enough, if she spends it
frugally, for the next two weeks at most. Then what?

At night, instead of sleeping, she works on the account of her life,
which she is using to apply for Soviet citizenship. But what if there is no right
answer on this test? Will there eventually be only a single thing left to feel sure
of: that each of the comrades dying, here or in Germany, has finally reached his
goal, while each who has survived all of this, here or in Germany, purchased his
life with treason?

Sometimes she would take her father’s glasses off his nose to
clean them. She and her friend had sometimes stood side by side, comparing their
legs. Once she had lain awake all night long beside her friend’s fiancé, weeping.
For Comrade G. she had sliced through an entire stack of paper at one go. Before she
kissed her husband for the first time, she had grabbed him by his shock of hair,
pulling him toward her. Was she ever even the same person? Were there any two
moments in her life when she was comparable to herself? Was the whole not the truth?
Or was everything treason? If the person who is to read this account remains
faceless to her, what face should she be showing him? Which is the right blank face
for a blank mirror?

4

My husband was arrested on October 25, 1938.

Comrade Sch. in his yellow suit jacket always used to say contemptuously
when two comrades fell in love:
They’re privatizing.
France, England, and
America had meanwhile recognized Hitler’s government. If a person was now in love
with the wrong idea, this put him objectively — whether he saw it this way or
not — on the side of the Fascists. Friendship, love, and marriage were indeed
a sticky subject in times when all signs were pointing to war.

Today we know that enemies of the people have slandered upstanding
comrades in the name of political vigilance and brought about their arrests. I
am convinced that the case of my husband H. is precisely such an instance and
that his innocence will be demonstrated.

When she was a child, her father sometimes made faces for her
in the dark, and precisely because she loved him so much, she was never entirely
sure that her father was still her father at these times. She had always considered
it possible that he might at any moment be transformed from the person she knew so
well into something deadly, and then this deadliness would prove to be his actual
nature. Just a single moment of truth like this could reveal his entire life to have
been dissimulation.

Hadn’t she sat in church on Sunday, a good Christian girl, while the
next day, people might perhaps be spitting at her Jewish grandmother when she went
to do her shopping at the Naschmarkt?

She’d reproached herself as a duplicitous wretch when she betrayed her
best friend with her desires. Always there had been these dependencies, always the
fear of desiring too much or not being good enough, leading to lies, to
dissimulation, to silence.
Redhead, redhead, ding-a-ling, fire burns in
Ottakring,
always the fear of giving too much of oneself or too little,
Jewish sow
, always the rungs separating human beings, the
inferiorities, always someone pushing someone else downstairs, someone falling,
knocking over the person below. Had not they, the Communists, made it their business
to even out the gradient so that everyone could stand freely without falling,
without pushing, shoving, being pushed or shoved, free — and without fear?