Read The Question of Bruno Online
Authors: Aleksandar Hemon
The Question of Bruno (7 page)
He got up and paced around the dining room, pulled out a couple of books from the shelf, flipped through them detachedly, and put them back. He turned toward us, smiled, said: “Pardon me,” and slipped into the bedroom.
Mother and I heard noises coming from the bedroom: thumping of suitcases, a screech of a drawer, a snap of a locked drawer, din of sundry things being thrown on the floor. Mother held my hand, squeezing it—her hand, moist and faint. Slobodan walked out with a suitcase, shoving something into his pocket. He produced a little box (with a painted bee landing on a flower) out of his hand and said: “Condoms, my boy. Had
your father had this on, you would have rotted, stuck in a sewage pipe, years ago.” My mother plucked the box out of his hand and said: “Get out!”
“If you wish to talk to me, feel free to call me. My boss always says that love has political limits.
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Please, call me.” He wrote the phone number on the wall by the front door: 71–782, then opened the door and walked out. Before my mother closed the door, he shouted in the echoing hall: “We should get together sometime, now that you’re alone.”
Mother reluctantly opened the bedroom door: an open suitcase; a pile of suits (hanger-hooks looking like bowed swan heads); the Sputnik glass shattered, pens and pencils scattered around, like corpses. On the bed, there were two symmetrical foot-shaped dents, and mounted ripples on the bedspread around them.
After a month or so, Hanna and I went with our mother to
visit Father in jail. The visiting room looked like a decrepit hotel hall, with stained and torn sofas and armchairs sorted into separate throngs. Father came followed by a guard
31
in a wan blue uniform (the rim of his cap touching the top of his eyebrows). Mother immediately burst into tears and hugged Father. He sat down between Hanna (“Tata! Tata!”) and me, putting his arms around us (thin, bloody wristlets). The tip of his left eyetooth was broken and under his left ear, at the root of the jaw, there was a huge bruise, as if a shadow of the ear.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” he said.
“Shut your fucking mouth!” roared the guard.
“Did they torture
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you?” Mother asked.
“A slap or two.”
“Shut your fucking mouth!”
“How’s your school?” Father asked me.
“Fine.”
“He got the best grade in the class
33
on the history test.”
“Good,” he said. “Good.”
“What do they want from you?” Mother asked. “They’re interrogating me. They want me to sign a statement.”
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“Shut your big fucking mouth! This is the last time I’m telling you.”
Father was sentenced, after a brief (closed to the public)
trial, to three years of hard labor and was shipped off to the Zenica prison on January 7, 1978. There was footage shown on TV of my father (and four obscure men) in the courtroom handcuffed, as the voice-over spoke about “disseminating foreign propaganda,” about “the internal enemy who never sleeps,” about “Tito and his vision,” about “protecting what our fathers bled for.”
“We have seen it before,” the voice said. “And we’ll see it again: dissembling intellectuals, spreading dissent like a lethal germ. But this is what we have to tell them: stay away from the clear stream of our progress or we’ll crush you like snails!”
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The years of Father’s imprisonment passed uneventfully: my sister was growing, learning to speak, learning to be sad; my mother became reticent; and I was going through all those adolescent things: the deepening of the voice, rebelling, reading
(The Stranger, The Trial, The Metamorphosis);
falling in
love (a Nina, until her father forbade her seeing me). But I participated in all this half-heartedly, as if it were all happening to someone else and I was watching it with languid amazement. No one was visiting us and we were going nowhere. Only Slobodan would call once in a while (“Your father is locked behind walls with desperate men, my boy, and your mother needs all the support she can get”). Once a month, we’d go to see Father. We’d sit on the bench in the prison yard, even in the winter, exchanging petty information about our walled-off lives, too aware of the gaze of the remote guards and the sharpshooter in the watchtower. In the spring of 1979, Mother and Father sat on the bench, for two hours, mainly mute, while I was catching stray butterflies for Hanna, and morose prisoners, staring at each other’s napes, revolved around a guard (chanting: “Left-right! Left-right!”). When we came back home (after a two-hour ride in a bus full of drunken, vomiting soldiers) Mother burst into tears while unbuttoning her (black) shirt, sat on the chair and wept for hours, ignoring my repeated questions, pushing me away.
In September 1979, I wrote my first poem,
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in less than an hour, as if hallucinating. The poem was entitled “The Loneliest Man in the World.” It was about Sorge and it was more vicarious self-pitying than anything else. I’m translating it (in fact, only the
first of ten tedious stanzas) from memory, for I annihilated the notebook (with other, much less memorable, poems) at the peak of the campaign of self-loathing and destruction
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(which also included shaving every single hair on my body) in my late teens:
Tokyo is breathing and I am not,
The curtain of rain glued to my face.
I don’t live a life, I live a plot,
Having two selves in one place etc.
I wanted to show it to my father, next time we went to visit him, but he was ill and he only wanted to know about the Afghanistan events
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(political prisoners could not watch the news). This time we met him in a miasmic room, with a small window looking at the women’s prison. He was escorted by a guard, whom he nicknamed “Barabas,” and who would help him get up or walk (“You can put me back on the cross now, Barabas”). The prison uniform was dangling from his now scrawny shoulders. “I shrank,” he said.
In January 1980, Father was released from prison, diagnosed with brain cancer, curled into an old man, with most of his teeth missing. He could wear my clothes, and the wedding ring was sliding down his finger—he took it off. We rearranged our place and put the TV in the bedroom, Father taking hold of the remote for the rest of his life. He’d watch TV (mainly the news) all day, sucking a banana, occasionally passing out and then waking up from listless
dreams. On his good days, he’d be drinking strong-scented tea
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and tell us stories about his USSR journeys: about Ukrainian weddings, everybody dancing
kolomiyka
like there was no tomorrow; about nuclear submarines that could stay for days under water (crews going blind); about riding camels in Kazakhstan; about wheat fields spreading as far as you could see and beyond. Every day, he was getting smaller and smaller, as if flesh was being squeezed out of him like toothpaste.
On May 4, Comrade Tito died. He had been ailing for a long time and they had had to amputate his leg. We were, for days, repeatedly shown footage of (monopedic) Comrade Tito smiling, surrounded by glowing doctors (happier than anyone that he was alive), a wrinkleless sheet covering his retained leg. Sirens began wailing at 15:04. I looked through the window and saw everything still: people stood motionless on the street, cars were paralyzed, as if someone had stopped the film in the projector. On the black TV screen white letters emitted: “Comrade Tito has passed away”—no voice-over, no images shown. Sirens stopped wailing. I looked at the street and everybody and everything was gone, as if the
ground had gaped open and swallowed it all.
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I suppose this is Judgment Day,” my father said and turned off the TV. “I suppose this is the end of it all.”
1
It seems that the
Rote Kapelle
network initially sent the information that German forces were going to attack the Soviet Union. Since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was considered to be valid and the source of the information was unclear, Moscow virtually ignored it. But when Sorge sent the confirmation from Tokyo, the information was passed on to the great Stalin himself. He, however, disregarded it and decided to trust Hitler and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Sorge’s report from Tokyo on German intentions was filed under the heading “Doubtful and Misleading Information.”
2
Sorge flew from Berlin to Yokohama on Junker’s first commercial flight from Germany to Japan, with brief stops in New York and Vancouver. Besides the flight log of Flight 1995, kept in the Museum of German Aviation in Frankfurt, there are no records of this historical endeavor. There is no list of passengers, but it is almost certain that the flight was almost full. It seems that the passengers were cosmopolitan, and that the flight was tumultuous (“Winds over the Pacific were just horrid!”); that something was wrong with the heating system, so the passengers were freezing even with miraculously retrieved fur hats and leather gloves; that no one else slept on the flight; that the food was edible, but for some reason there was no water so they all drank champagne (courtesy of Junker); that the plane almost went down in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Pacific; that first men, then women, disgorged themselves all over the aircraft and the vomit froze on the floor; that Sorge briefly befriended a certain Mary Kinzie, an American poetess, which did not go unnoticed by New York gossip-scribes. On September 9, 1933, in the early afternoon, Sorge and his shadowy copassengers arrived at the Yokohama airport, reeking of vomit, emptied of champagne and lobster, with particles of undigested food thawing on the soles of their shoes. Some of them were proud of German air-industry and reliability, some of them were happy to be alive.
3
In the early sixties, in the de-Stalinized Soviet Union, the campaign of Sorge’s glorification was set on course and a number of books that contained Sorge’s pictures and previously unrevealed documents from Soviet archives were published. Most of the books were embellished (if not embroidered) with, so to speak, fictitious additions. At the same time, a street in Moscow and a tanker were named after Sorge. In the spring of 1965, the Soviet authorities issued a postage stamp, at the value of 4 kopecks, in his honor. The commemorative stamp showed Sorge full face on a scarlet background together with a reproduction of the medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.
4
Father: Wilhelm Richard Sorge, a German engineer, a stout man with a nipple-like wart on the nape of his neck and cloudy eyebrows. Working on the Azerbaijan oil fields, when he fell in passionate love with Sorge’s mother. Sorge was conceived and born in Baku.
5
Sorge went to Moscow (from Tokyo, via New York, ostensibly visiting Wiesbaden), for the last time, in 1935. In New York, he encountered, for the last time, Mary Kinzie. In her memoirs, entitled
The History of Nothingness
, Ms. Kinzie depicts Sorge: “When I saw him in 1935 he had become a violent man, a volcanic drinker. Little was left of the charm of the romantic idealist, of the cosmopolitan writer whom I had fallen for on Junker’s flight. Nevertheless, he was still extraordinarily good-looking: his cold blue eyes, surrounded by circular darkness, had retained his capacity for vicious self-mockery. He said: ‘My personality is split between a man who hates himself and a man whom I hate.’ His hair was still potently black, but his cheekbones and sullen mouth were tired” (p. 101).
In Moscow, Sorge visited Yekaterina Maximovna, whom he was believed to have married in 1933, and who died in Siberia in 1943, in a women’s camp, her throat cut by a sharp piece of ice in the hand of a jealous working-unit leader. Sorge was looking forward to meeting General Berzin, but General Berzin was gone and was replaced by General Semyon Petrovich Uritsky, who was arrested and shot as a Japanese spy in November of 1937.
6
Mother: Nina Kobelev, a conventional Russian beauty (big eyes, bony pink cheeks, rotund nose, small mouth with thick lips, cobwebby mustache-shadow, long silky hair, etc.), the daughter of Wilhelm’s landlord in Baku. Sorge was born on October 4, 1895, after 37 hours of hard labor. Let us note an obvious thing: Germany was his Fatherland, Russia was his Motherland.
7
Having agreed to write the full confession, Sorge demanded a (black-and-green) Pelikan fountain pen and a hard-covered notebook with blank sheets. Yoshikawa himself delivered the writing devices. Sorge thanked him and said, in poor Japanese: “Honourable Procurator, this fountain pen is a poisonous fountain pen.” Yoshikawa replied: “Honourable Spy, it is the redeeming fountain pen.” Then they both laughed.
8
Sorge never disguised himself, but changed names often. He bragged to Max Klausen that he had more names than women (“And that is a lot, Max!”). He was known as I. K. Sorge, R. Sonter (Moscow 1924–1928); Johann, Sebastian (Sweden, 1928); Christopher, Christian (England, 1929); Johnson, Jim, Gimon, Marlowe (Shanghai, 1930–1932); Richard Sorge (Tokyo, 1933–1944); and there were many other, unknown, evanescent names.
9
Sorge’s activities were much less adventurous than an avid reader would hope. In his written confession, Max Klausen, referring to the years 1933–1939, says: “Six dangerous years passed uneventfully,” pointing toward the routine of everyday spying. Sorge’s spying meant patiently collecting diverse, and sometimes ostensibly trite, information: a gossip about the Anti-Comintern Pact negotiations; a rumor about the Cabinet changes; the essence of a drunken soldier’s swaggering about the military life in Manchuko; someone else’s husband being with someone else’s wife—useful information for the future Index; air of insurgent desires of young army officers, brought from afar by Miyagi; chitchat among foreign journalists; a careless remark of the German ambassador about “everybody being crazy in Berlin about the Russia attack.” In 1936, however, Sorge obtained a position as the unofficial secretary to the German military attaché, Colonel Ott (“an honest, pleasant, gullible man, with oily military hair, and a thousand and one WWI stories”), and in 1939 he became the German embassy press attaché. This position enabled him to access documents that were considered confidential, even top-secret. Only occasionally he would photograph the document, as in the case of the preliminary document for the Anti-Comintern Pact. Mostly, there was no need for surreptitiousness for he would take any desired document to his improvised office (ex-coffee-kitchen, still reeking of beer from the party celebrating the anniversary of the Hitler ascension) where he would photograph it, or even make notes, at his will. In his article in
Literaturnaya Gazeta
(January 20, 1965), entitled “The Man Who Never Knew Enough,” Victor Venykov aptly notes: “A spy is above all a man of politics, who must be able to grasp, analyze and connect in his mind events which seemingly have no connection. He must have the breadth of a historian, the meticulous powers of observation, the spirit and the mind of Tolstoy. Espionage is a continuous and demanding labor and the spy forms himself in that process. Least of all was Sorge like those secret agents whom certain Western authors have created. He did not force open gates in order to steal documents: the documents were shown to him by their very owners. He did not fire his pistol to penetrate the places which he had to penetrate: the doors were graciously opened to him by the guardians of the secret. He did not have to kill. But he was murdered by the brutal machinery”
10
In October 1935, Sorge met, at the
Rhdingold
, Miyake Hinako, a geisha with mild socialist inclinations (“Like many other women I used to read left-wing novels”). She didn’t mind Sorge’s relentless promiscuity (“It is only natural, isn’t it, for a famous man to have several mistresses”). After Sorge’s execution, Hanako-san patiently pestered the strict prison authorities to allow her to recover Sorge’s body. The ascetic coffin was retrieved from the part of the Sugamo prison cemetery that was reserved for nameless vagrants. Decomposition was rather advanced, and only a large skeleton remained. The large skull (she kissed his ex-forehead) and the bones were those of a foreigner; and there were clear marks of damage to the bones—the eternal result of Sorge’s war wounds. Hanako recognized the teeth (and imagined a smile) from their gold filling (from which, in 1946, she had a ring made). She had the coffin removed to the quiet Tama graveyard, just outside Tokyo. “The Society for the Relief of Those Sacrificed in the Ozaki Case” raised funds for Sorge’s gravestone, upon which the inscription, in English and Japanese, reads: “Here sleeps the brave stranger who devoted his life to opposing war, and to the struggle for the piece [sic!] of the world.” In the early summer of 1965, Hanako-san was invited to visit the Soviet Union. At the Black Sea (“This sea is not as black as our sea”—a polite chuckle from the escorting throng followed) resort of Yalta, Hanako-san saw a performance of
Press Attaché in Tokyo
, a play dealing with Sorge’s life in Tokyo, in which she was rendered by a certain Yekaterina Maximovna.
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Sorge worked for the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army Intelligence, which none of the members of his ring (Klausen, Voukelitch, Ozaki, Miyagi) knew—they all referred to “the Moscow center” and were happy to work for peace in the world. Jan Karlovich Berzin (real name: Peter Kyuzis) was the all-seeing head of the Fourth Bureau. He was the son of poor Latvian parents, born in Ogre, 1890. At the age of nineteen he was arrested by the Tsarist police for involvement in an assassination plot (a plan to throw a hand grenade at the chief of the Okhrana in the Bolshoi had failed), was sentenced to death and then pardoned because of his youth. He spent some time in prison but surfaced again in 1917 as a member of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party and charged at the Winter Palace. He was the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in Soviet Latvia in the spring of 1919, when the military success of the White armies led him to take over command of the Latvian Rifle Division. His first act of command was shooting the previous commander (name lost) with his Luger, having accused, tried, and sentenced him for “revolutionary feebleness” in front of the petrified Rifle Division, right through his left eye (the unfortunate previous commander’s brain spurting on the numb political commissar, who later committed suicide). The legend of this execution followed Berzin when he was being made head of the Fourth Bureau and reached Sorge the day before he was to meet him. Berzin and Sorge quickly became friends (Sorge: “I respected his blood-red facial scars and his bright gray hair”). They used nicknames when addressing each other: Berzin was Starik, Sorge was Ika. In 1935, Berzin was arrested and strangled with piano wire (a rather creative execution) as a German spy. It seems that Sorge never found out about Berzin’s political death. He never mentioned him, however, after his last visit to Moscow in 1935. Sorge never admitted working for the Red Army, and the Soviet Union maintained, after his arrest, that he had worked for the Comintern, which was supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of the Soviet authorities.
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The encoded message carrying reports on Sorge’s (and his co-spies’) activities were sent regularly, although at different, previously agreed upon, times. Max Klausen was the telegraphist (and only the telegraphist). Sorge trusted his blunt ignorance and his (“almost admirable”) lack of will. The radio operated from Voukelitch’s home in the Bunka apartment complex, across from a rather malodorous canal, named Ochanomizu—”honourable tea-water“; or from Klausen’s apartment, in the Akasaka district, with the windows perennially behind curtains of drying bed sheets and underwear; or, almost never, from Sorge’s place (No. 30 Nagasaka-cho) in Azabu, an affluent part of the city. The book used for coding messages was an edition of the
Complete Shakespeare
, probably one of the Cambridge editions from the late twenties. Max Klausen: “We would send the number of the play in the book (we called it
the Book)
, then the number of the act, then the number of the scene upon which the scramble-code would be based. I had never read Shakespeare and found it quite boring, but Sorge was able to quote lengthy passages from any play. I remember once we used a passage, I forgot from which play, where there was a phrase ‘God’s spies.’ Sorge recited the whole passage (I also remember butterflies in that passage) and then said: ‘We’re God’s spies, except there’s no God,’ and we got a kick out of that and laughed like mad.”
