The Secret Lovers (35 page)

Upstairs, Carlos gave her tea. Really, he thought, she is attractive, she would be something to subdue, with all that intelligence showing in her face, and all that unveiled hostility to men.
There was a great deal of anger in her. She described, in a rush of French like a jet of bile, what had happened: the three bodies in the dim light, the two men caressing her, the strangeness of it
and the terrible excitement, for this sort of woman lived for forbidden things. And then she opened her eyes to find the two men kissing not her, but one another. They went on as if she
weren’t there, murmuring to one another in Russian. She was fascinated, the mysteries of the male body were being revealed to her in the way they handled each other. But she let it go too
far. Kolka, after he had rested, came back to her and she admitted him, but as soon as he had satisfied her she was filled with disgust. Kamensky woke, he had fallen asleep, and found Kolka and the
girl together; he had flown into a rage, speaking only Russian. The girl realized that it was Kolka he refused to share, not her.

Carlos heard the story with less surprise, and with much less repulsion, than would have been possible in most Spaniards. He had grown used to homosexual practices at school in England; he saw
nothing wrong in them in others. He understood that most men, when they love most deeply, love other men, though not usually with a sexual dimension. The French girl, a woman scorned, was less
tranquil. She told Carlos she wished to leave Madrid, leave Spain, because she feared that she would kill the lovers if she remained. He arranged passage for her within the week; he could have sent
her sooner but he wanted to know more about Kamensky. She told him all that she knew—willingly, sometimes with tears, sometimes with sudden shrieks of fury that burst from the depths of her
body. She meant Kolka and Kamensky no harm—she was heartsore and she thought that Carlos was a friend.

Carlos told his controller in the NKVD about the love affair. Now the secret agents saw a way to use the man they called Kamensky. They let the affair between Kamensky and Kolka Zhigalko run on.
The two were discreet—after all, there was nothing strange about a man becoming Kolka Zhigalko’s inseparable friend. No one but Carlos, and the people to whom he sent his secret report,
knew that they were secret lovers. The meetings in Kamensky’s room went on as usual. No one much missed Solange, the French girl. Journalists, soldiers from the International Brigades, every
class and type of foreigner came every night to drink cognac and talk. Now that Kolka had an interpreter, everyone loved him more. It became evident that he had, in addition to his body and his
face, an incandescent mind. Carlos, of course, had known this all along, and everyone else had felt it; Kamensky made it visible to all, translating Kolka’s long drunken speeches,
interpreting his poems, explaining his silences.

One night, when Kolka had fallen into a melancholy mood, a little Frenchman, an officer in the International Brigades, wandered into the room looking for Kamensky. He’d been wounded and he
carried his arm in a sling. Kolka had been lying on the bed with his eyes closed. He sat up and saw this Frenchman and leaped to his feet with a bellow of joy. It appeared that he and the Frenchman
had fought together against the tanks of the White Army in front of Petrograd. They embraced and the Frenchman uttered a howl of pain as Kolka crushed his shot arm between them. Torrents of Russian
ran between Kolka and Kamensky and this Frenchman, whose nom de guerre was André Girard. Soon André was a nightly visitor; when he was wounded again, Kolka gave him his room and moved
down to Kamensky’s room. Kolka nursed André, who had a head wound, by day. By night he slept with Kamensky. Soon the Frenchman was up and around. Kolka remained with Kamensky.

Carlos was ordered by the NKVD to make friends with André Girard as he had done with Kolka and Kamensky. But André knew nothing of Kamensky, and of Kolka he would only say that he
was the most important man in the Russian Revolution, because one day he would write about it. André had perfect literary judgment; he read languages as easily as Carlos and Kamensky spoke
them, and when he saw genius he recognized it. Kolka, he said, was the sort of writer who appeared once in a century. Someday he would put Russia, all of it, onto the page. Kamensky tolerated the
attachment between André and Kolka; André was a plain, small man, there was even something comical in his looks—you saw that he was going to be fat in a few years. He was no
sexual threat; besides, André was ravenous for women. Oddly enough, he had a great deal of success. He was amusing, intelligent—and wounded. Girls came to him.

Carlos’s controllers in the NKVD wanted to have access to Kolka s room. André was seldom in it at night; usually he went to a woman’s room after the party in Kamensky’s
room. Kolka’s room, one will remember, was directly above Kamensky’s. The spies made a hole in the floor, under the bed, and installed a microphone and a camera in such a way that they
could not be detected. With the camera they took hundreds of photographs of Kolka and Kamensky on the bed below. Kamensky took such pleasure in the sight of his lover that he had him with the lamps
lit. He made things easy for the photographer. A stenographer, one of those coarse-bodied Russian girls, sat in Kolka’s room with a pad on her knees and earphones on her head, taking down in
shorthand the things that Kolka and Kamensky said to each other in Russian when they were alone. Carlos observed this scene once; it was enough.

One day the NKVD man showed the photographs to Kamensky. While Kamensky looked at these travesties of his form and Kolka’s, the NKVD man read him excerpts from the transcript of the
stenographer’s shorthand notes. Carlos was told that Kamensky sat through it all, unmoving. Then, like a snake, as the NKVD man put it to Carlos, Kamensky struck. He slapped the spy’s
face, a half-dozen rapid, stinging blows. As a boyar would strike a serf, Carlos thought; in the depths of the NKVD man’s mind that image was awakened, too. Kamensky had made an error. Now
the NKVD man, who had simply wanted to use him, had a personal reason to destroy him. He showed no sign, or believed that he showed no sign, that Kamensky’s blow had stung him. He smiled at
Kamensky.

“Done like a prince,” he said. “When you’ve done what I am going to tell you to do, I will have something to tell you.”

“For you I will do nothing.”

“No? Someday, perhaps, you will go back to Russia. It is ours.”

“Not yours forever.”

“Perhaps not. But Kolka Zhigalko will go back. You know how puritanical the government of the proletariat is. What if the Cheka”—he used the old term for the secret police, so
that Kamensky would understand—“were to have these pictures, these transcripts, our testimony?”

Kamensky saw that he was being made the instrument of Kolka’s death. He didn’t hesitate. He bargained: one act on behalf of the NKVD in return for the pictures and the transcripts,
and for Kolka’s safety. It was a delusion; nothing would save Kolka now and Kamensky knew it. But Carlos, thinking on the matter, decided that Kamensky, abandoning himself to emotion, felt
that he had to make the effort. He had to do something, and he had the sort of mind that would perceive the lasting damage to himself of committing an act of treachery and disguising it as an act
of atonement. There was no question of Kolka staying in Christendom; he was an incurable Russian, he longed to return to Russia, he would never leave it once he did go back. Kamensky knew all that
because he was the same. Later, Kolka told Carlos that Kamensky had told him that he, Kolka, was the breathing apparatus that Kamensky needed to live in the poisonous air of a country other than
Russia.

What the NKVD wanted was simple. Some time before, the secret police of the Spanish Republic had found several hundred bourgeois hiding in the deserted Finnish embassy in Madrid, The NKVD had
located another abandoned building, also a former embassy. They were going to hoist the flag of some remote Asiatic country over it, and hope that secret Nationalists would seek refuge there. There
was a list of people, some of them Fas­cist agents, some of them Anarchists whom the Soviet apparatus wanted to destroy, some of them Social Democrats, some of them merely men the NKVD wanted
to kill for their own reasons. Many of these last two classes were friends of Kamensky. The NKVD wanted Kamensky to warn them that death warrants were out for them, and to tell them where the false
embassy was so that they could take refuge there. The bargain was struck; it would have terrified a man who had a smaller appetite for guilt than Kamensky, or who loved the man he was saving less
than Kamensky loved Kolka Zhigalko.

Kamensky lured his friends to the embassy, one after the other. The NKVD listened to their conversations with hidden microphones. Then they killed them—twenty-seven murders altogether. The
victims were taken into the basement and shot. Their last sight was the heap of the dead who had come down the stairs before them. Before each execution—the executioners had the condemned
kneel in order to receive a revolver bullet in the spinal cord in the descabello style of the NKVD—they told the man who was to die that Kamensky was the one who had betrayed him.

At the end of it, the NKVD man delivered the transcripts and the pictures and the negatives to Kamensky. He told him what had been done in the cellar of the false embassy.

“Your class believes in God,” the NKVD man said. “Think of it, highness—twenty-seven souls ascending to the Heavenly Father, cursing your name as they fly to
Him.”

“Go away,” said Kamensky.

“Before I do,” said the NKVD man, “I wish to tell you that you were entrapped. Kolka Zhigalko is, and always has been, our agent. He ——ed you on our orders and
——ed you, and ——ed you.”

As he spoke these words, the NKVD man turned over the photographs of the acts that he was describing with his obscenities. Another man might have attacked. Kamensky had already made his gesture.
Now he sealed himself from the NKVD man. He stared at him, absolutely cold and absolutely silent, until he went away. Of course what Kamensky had been told about Kolka was a lie; it was payment for
the slaps on the face he had delivered to the NKVD man. But how could Kamensky ever be certain? All Carlos’s life he had heard the phrase, never knowing what it meant, but now he saw it in
reality: Kamensky’s heart was broken.

He stayed in Madrid for a few more days, until the siege was lifted. He remained with Kolka, who of course suspected nothing. He thought Kamensky’s sadness had to do with the fact that he
would be sent by his paper to some other city, and thus be separated from Kolka. But Kolka told him not to worry, he’d find a way to be sent where Kamensky was, nothing could part them. He
pleaded with Kamensky to return to Russia; Zhigalko had powerful friends in the Party, even in the NKVD, he said, and he could make things all right. Kamensky knew nothing could make him acceptable
in Russia, but to please Kolka, he agreed that he would, perhaps, go back.

Then Kamensky, one night on a dark street, walked up behind the NKVD man and shot him in the head. He immediately left Madrid. He did not say good-bye to Kolka, he took no clothes, none of his
things. He just left.

Of course there was an uproar in the clandestine world. Kamensky was sought everywhere in Spain, but he got away. Kolka was inconsolable. He lived in darkness—darkness of two kinds, the
despair of the loss of love, and ignorance of why the loss had befallen him. No one told him the truth. Not Kamensky, not the other Russian Communists, not Carlos. To console himself, Kolka
Zhigalko, with manic energy, wrote a cycle of poems and short stories, beautiful things. André Girard read them and told Carlos about them. He made copies for safekeeping. André did
not trust the revolution; he knew that it would burn the books and slash the paintings of its artists.

Carlos read Kolka’s work. It burned the page in his untidy, almost illiterate handwriting, tiny and cramped, as if no sheet of paper were large enough to contain all that Kolka wanted to
put down on it. Out of this crabbed pen flowed the whole of human passion, the whole of the landscape of our time.

Carlos went to see Kolka, to express his admiration. The loss of Kamensky and, Carlos supposed, the expenditure of energy in the writing of the wonderful stories and verses, had left Kolka
exhausted. He was translucent again, as he had been when he gave too much of his blood to the wounded. There was no gaiety left in him. To Carlos, he said, “I have lost everything.”
Carlos asked him what he meant. In that innocent, reckless way of his, Kolka told him of the love affair with Kamensky.

“You may think it filthy, but I tell you it was love!” Kolka said.

“I know it was love,” Carlos replied.

Carlos had decided that Kolka, to be saved, must know the truth. Carlos took a hideous chance: he told Kolka what had been done to Kamensky, and what Kamensky had done for him. Kolka slumped.
The life, the optimism, the force of hope—whatever it was he had that made him believe that he and his comrades had made a new world, ran out of him. Illusion drained from Kolka. It was like
watching a man bleed to death from a heart wound. Kolka said nothing, he had no last words as the old Kolka. Carlos, by telling him the truth, had killed what he had been.

“The secret police,” Kolka said, and this was his only question, “they must have had a code name for him. What was it?”

“Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky,” Carlos replied.

“Thank you, Carlos,” said Kolka.

Kolka Zhigalko took the pages of his stories and crossed out his own name. In its place, under each title, he wrote, in cyrillic characters twice as large as any others on the page,
B
Y
K
IRIL
A
LEKSEIVICH
K
AMENSKY
. Later he instructed André Girard to change the authors name on
his copies of the works; he didn’t tell André the reason, merely that he had decided to write under a pseudonym.

A month or two later, Kolka went back to Russia. He did have powerful friends, and through their intervention he changed his name in a Soviet court to Kiril Alekseivich Kamensky, which is the
name under which he has been known ever since.