The Secret Lovers (34 page)

(“The Russian boy’s name was Zhigalko,” Rodegas said, “Kolka Zhigalko”)

Carlos was puzzled, before he met Kolka Zhigalko, that everyone called him a boy; according to his dossier, he was older than Carlos. No one thought Carlos a boy.

When Carlos met Zhigalko, he understood. Zhigalko, pink and curly and smiling, exuded sexuality. Even Spanish girls were eager to sleep with him. There was a wild light in him, which was his
talent. He was prodigally generous with his body, his money, his thoughts. Carlos saw him sweetly—and he supposed, when the time came, passionately—accept the advances of ugly girls. He
saw him permit transparent knaves to cheat him, because he saw that it gave them pleasure. He composed songs for people he took a fancy to, played and sang them, and forgot them; he said they were
for the person to whom he sang them and it would be wrong to preserve them. Zhigalko would go out to observe the fighting in the university city—remember, he was a journalist and a
noncombatant—and he would join in, rescuing the wounded. He had type O blood, the most usable kind; he gave so much of it to wounded men that he became translucent. He had no fear of
anything—not of embarrassment, not of disgrace, not of failure, not of punishment, not even of death. He had the gift of knowing, all the time, in his mind and in his blood, that he was
alive. Carlos asked him, when he knew him better, how he could bear to go to sleep and lose touch with his waking self. “But I dream!” Zhigalko cried.

It was no wonder that the NKVD worried about Zhigalko. To him, they meant nothing. Kolka Zhigalko was a Communist, almost an old Bolshevik, he had gone to war with the Red Army in his teens. But
he had been formed, like all Russians, in the Church and in the language and in those vast spaces of mystical Russia that everyone always uses to explain the fatalism of the Russian character.
Kolka cared nothing for the secret police. How could they imprison him? He thought himself a beam of light. In one of his songs, he made it up in his room in the Gran Via for an English girl whose
lover had been killed by a shell, he sang quite openly about God. Carlos never forgot the lines:
“What is one instant of pain to a man, one passage through its darkness / When he comes
from the bright face of his love for a woman / Into the heart of the Savior?”
What did it matter to Kolka if the secret police killed him? They had nothing to do with what he was.

Carlos understood that Kolka Zhigalko, living as he did, could not survive long. The temptation to protect him was very great, and for a while Carlos did. After all, Kolka was harmless by the
standards of any sane man. He was a passionate Russian patriot, a passionate lover of the international working class. What Kolka did, everything he did, he did for love. He was the only Communist
Carlos ever met—indeed, he may have been the only political zealot who ever lived—whose beliefs made him lovable because they rose from the truth and sweetness of his character in the
same way that the actions of Saint Francis rose from his faith. That was the basis of his genius, and there was no doubt, even among the secret agents who were watching him and pondering whether or
not to kill him, that he was a genius. His battle dispatches were extraordinary; every line he wrote was made flesh as soon as it was read by another person. Of course, what he wrote was not
printed in
Pravda
as he wrote it. He cared nothing for dialectics, for jargon, for official terminology. Kolka thought that revolution had to do with life, and life with humanity, and
humanity with language. The censors removed all that from Kolka’s stories. The odd thing was, Kolka was a true peasant, the son of a brute and a slattern; one of those aberrations that crops
up in all breeds of animals, the one random masterwork in a hundred generations.

Carlos was pressed for incriminating material on Zhigalko. He held back. The pressure was increased. Kolka was in the machine; it was impossible to release him. Anyone who has had to do with
secret life will know that this is the unbreakable truth about it, that once a thing is started, once a case is opened, it can never be abandoned. The file must be completed. The spy longs for the
final fact as the monk yearns for the last Host. Carlos, it must be said, lost his coldness where Kolka was concerned. He saw that Kolka was an artist, and that weighed. He saw that he was good, in
the antique meaning of that word, and that weighed, too. But what weighed most was that Carlos was disgusted by the idea of having a hand in the destruction of such a creature as Kolka. Carlos,
remember, was doing what he was doing because he was a Catholic, coming from fifty generations of Catholics. It is an interesting fact about Carlos that he prayed silently all the time he was doing
murder, or betrayal, or whatever the day’s work brought him. He thought that Kolka’s was one death that God would not forgive him; Carlos was, after all, only the same age as Kolka. He
thought in these terms.

The atmosphere in Madrid that winter was extraordinary. It was cold, Madrid is so cold in winter; there was no fuel to speak of, there was little enough food. One saw people in bandages
everywhere, working and fighting. Shells were falling in the streets. The Moroccans and the Spanish troops of Generalissimo Franco were at the gates of the city. There were three great battles in
November, and bombing by airplanes at night. The people were in something that resembled a religious hysteria. They went about the streets crying incessantly, “¡No pas-ar-án!
¡No pas-ar-án!”—they shall not pass! It was a murmur, a buzzing, like the chant of some primitive religion coming out of a sealed tomb. Carlos felt that he had come to the
rim of existence. He was exalted, against his will, by the bravery of these Madrileños, by their obstinate refusal to submit. On the other hand, always remember, he was their deadly enemy, a
wolf among them. What in God’s name would happen to Spain if those people—so courageous, so maddened by their hatred of all that Carlos was in his true self—should conquer? For a
month or two in Madrid, in the winter of 1936, he thought that they might be irresistible.

At about this time, Carlos saw a way in which he might save Kolka Zhigalko from the secret police—or, if not save him, then at least prevent his death. A few weeks before, another
journalist, traveling under a League of Nations laisser-passer, had come to Madrid and got a room at the Gran Via Hotel, directly below Zhigalko’s. This man wrote for French and Belgian
newspapers, and also sent feature stories to the English and American weekly papers. Like Carlos, he spoke a great many languages. He was ten years older than Carlos and Zhigalko, or perhaps a
little more. A handsome man, a splendid conversationalist. He had a cynic’s wit; faith and emotion in others amused him. He knew something about everything. Soon he knew everyone in Madrid.
It was extraordinary how he got about. It was a gift quite as great, in its way, as that of an artist; this man could meet a man or a woman once, speak three sentences, and stay in the other
person’s mind forever. Had he been an American or an Englishman he would have become the head of government. But, as Carlos found out, this man had no country.

Naturally the NKVD was interested in him. They couldn’t believe that anyone who operated as this man operated was not a master spy for some imperialist power. They opened a dossier on him.
He went about, almost alone in Madrid, under the name on his papers, which Carlos took to be his own name. The NKVD gave him a code name. In their secret conversations he was called Kiril
Alekseivich Kamensky. Sometimes, secret symbol within secret name, “K.A.K.” But usually Kamensky. He maddened them; they could not get a grip on him. Who was he? Where did he come from?
They learned some things about him—that he was a man of the Left, that he was
not
using his baptismal name after all. Finally they learned that he was a Russian. Before, they had
been curious about Kamensky. Now they hungered for him. Carlos was told to befriend him, entrap him, take the bones out of his flesh.

Kamensky was the most approachable man in Madrid. There is a kind of intelligence operative called an antenna—he makes himself visible so that information will come to him. That’s
what the NKVD thought Kamensky was. They gave Carlos information to feed him, thinking that it would be transmitted to his masters. It was thought that he must be working for the British secret
service; the Russians were, if anything, more convinced of the omnipotence of English espionage than Carlos’s uncles. Perhaps, too, they thought, he was a Nazi agent, but they held that
theory in reserve. Kamensky hadn’t the Nazi style—he was too fine. His looks, his speech, his mind, his manners all argued that he could not be a follower of Hitler. So the NKVD, louts
judging louts, looked at the matter. The information Carlos gave to Kamensky appeared in his newspapers. That, thought the NKVD, only proved how clever he was. They instructed Carlos to give him
more information, chicken feed as they called it; Kamensky printed some of it, and told Carlos he hadn’t used the rest because he hadn’t been able to verify it. There was consternation.
What deep game was Kamensky playing? If he didn’t want our false information, what true information must he be obtaining for his masters, and how was he obtaining it? Kamensky became their
obsession. Carlos urged them to consider the possibility that Kamensky was what he said he was, a genuine journalist. Impossible, they said. He must be trapped.

It was, in the end, easy. Through Carlos, Kamensky met Kolka Zhigalko. Kamensky had brought with him to Madrid a French girl, also a journalist, who was obviously in love with him. He, less
obviously, for he was a man who masked his special passions with a general amiability, was fond of her. The four of them—Kamensky, Zhigalko, Carlos, and the French girl—fell into the
habit of meeting in Kamensky’s room during the bombardments. It was a gathering place for a large group of people, mostly foreigners, who wished to show their contempt for the guns and the
bombers by refusing to take shelter. There was always a lot of French cognac to drink, the only supply of it in Madrid in private hands.

The language of this group was French, sometimes English. Zhigalko was no linguist. He limped along in Spanish. In French and English he was worse. But he liked the atmosphere, and because of
his ear—most artists are able to learn languages rather easily, it has to do with their heightened powers of observation, perhaps—he understood a great deal more than he was able to
say. He would sit there, golden curls and blue eyes, the ideal human form incarnate, his face shimmering with the heat of his interest in life, and listen to languages he could not really
understand. Oddly, everyone spoke to Kolka—addressed their best remarks to him, as if he could apprehend meanings, even in foreign tongues, that others would miss. Kolka would smile his
innocent smile, and sometimes make up a song. Sometimes, too, he would struggle with French or English, attempting to say what was in his heart. One night they had all had a lot to drink and the
bombs had fallen quite near. Kolka made a song. Then he tried to translate it; it was in Russian, of course. He tried Spanish; no luck. Then French and English; worse and worse. Carlos had
understood the Russian, but of course, drunk as he was, he dared not reveal his knowledge to the group.

Suddenly Kamensky, who up to this time no one had suspected (except Carlos, who knew) of understanding a word of Russian, addressed Kolka in that language. He spoke it beautifully; it was
evident to all in the room that Kamensky was reciting a poem. At the end of it, Kolka, with Russian tears running over his cheeks, threw his arms around Kamensky and kissed him on the lips.
Russians do that, or did. Kolka said something in Russian; Kamensky said something back. Carlos understood that they were proposing to go up on the roof of the hotel in the midst of the air raid.
The Heinkels were flying over in the dark, dropping high explosive, the antiaircraft guns were firing, shrapnel was falling back on the city. Enemy artillery shells passed overhead, gasping, and
exploded in the streets. These two Russians, very drunk, of course, on cognac, raced together to the roof of the hotel. For the others in the room, that was carrying drunken bravado too far. It was
the duty of Carlos to follow them; his drunkenness was excuse enough to do so.

On the roof he found them, standing at the very edge, facing the flashes of the rebel guns beyond the university on the horizon, shouting poetry in Russian. They remained there until the
bombardment ended, and came back down, shivering—they had been sweating in the crowded room where the party was, and their soaked shirts were beginning to freeze—and with their throats
scraped raw by their counterattack on the Fascist batteries.

Kamensky’s French girl crawled in between the two of them, and kissed them both. When Carlos, the last to leave, departed, they were lying, all three of them, on the bed. Kolka was
singing. After each verse, the French girl, her voice muddy with drink, would ask for a translation. Kamensky only smiled and stroked her hair.

They remained together all night. It was a thing that drunken people in a dying city might easily do. The French girl was desirable, and she belonged to that emancipated class of young women
which existed in the thirties. These girls believed that they had absolute sovereignty over their own lives and bodies, that they could do as they liked, and deal with the consequences. That night
she slept with both Russians. The next day she left, because during the night, out of Kolka’s generosity and Kamensky’s drunken release of his real self, the two men became lovers.

It was the French girl who told Carlos. She came to him to ask if he could arrange transport for her to the French frontier. It was early in the morning, Carlos had just
awakened, and, yawning, he was removing the blackout curtains from the windows of his room when he saw the girl approaching in the street below. She wore the uniform of her type: belted raincoat,
high-heeled shoes, a felt hat with a round brim pulled down on one side of her head, plucked eyebrows, lipstick. She was carrying a heavy valise and she teetered under its weight on her high
heels.