Young Philby (7 page)

By the time Sergius turned up, we were each nursing a third cup of coffee. Out of breath, his eyes tearing from the cold outside, Sergius scraped over a chair and tried to get the attention of one of the waiters.

“You have the key?” Dietrich demanded.

“What key?” Sergius said.

I could see from the look on Sergius’s face that he was finding the situation comical. Either that or he was trying to mask his nervousness. “The key to the coal bin,” I said.

A waiter passed. Sergius plucked at his sleeve. “Beer,” he said. He grinned at Dietrich. “Why do you need coal at a time like this?”

Dietrich leaned across the table. “This is not the moment to fool around. We’re supposed to retrieve a machine gun and ammunition from the coal bin that you have the key to.”

“I have the key to the coal bin on”—Sergius mentioned an address in a back street not far from the café. “The bad news is the only thing hidden there is coal. We don’t own a machine gun.”

“Why are you here?” I asked the comrade.

“I was sent to tell you there is no machine gun. You can go see for yourselves if you want. There were a few rifles and pistols hidden in the coal bin, along with some cartons of Italian fireworks, but they’ve already been distributed to workers.”

“Who ordered you to set up the machine-gun p-post on the roof?” Kim asked Dietrich.

“Our cell leader.”

“Telephone him.”

“Can’t. He’s on a police wanted list. He never sleeps in the same bed two nights in a row.”

“What do we do now?” I asked Kim.

He looked from Sergius to Dietrich to me. “We ought to head for the epicenter.”

“The tenements?” I said.

My Englishman nodded.

We heard trucks rumbling down the cobblestones outside. Kim and I rushed to the door of the café. Half a dozen flatbed trucks loaded with coils of barbed wire were driving slowly past the Herenhoff, the headlights of one truck illuminating the cargo in the truck ahead of it. Several of the trucks towed howitzers, their muzzles covered in canvas. I will admit I was quite alarmed at the sight of field artillery. As for Kim, I never detected the faintest suggestion of fright on his face or in his voice. Under that boyish grin he had nerves of steel. In my mind’s eye I see Kim, sensible as usual, counting the trucks passing in the street and nodding as if he had stored the information and understood its significance. The painfully shy
Homo erectus
who had washed up on my doorstep in a previous incarnation no longer existed.

What a difference a hundred days can make.

*   *   *

Even after Kim brought me to safety in London, flickering images of the next several days—which is how long it took for Dollfuss to eradicate Socialism in Austria—would haunt me. (Kim claims they are fragments shored up against my ruin. Lovely phrase. He says he swiped it from a poet. I forget his name. Fragments. Ruin. Why not?) I notice a baby carriage in Hyde Park and I see orderlies in soiled white laboratory coats ferrying the wounded to makeshift infirmaries in baby carriages. A pothole in Piccadilly Circus makes me think of shell craters pockmarking the streets around the Karl-Marxhof tenements when the Heimwehr thugs opened fire with their howitzers. I come across a discarded shoe in a Maida Vale trash bin and I
see
the small mountain of shoes in the alleyway behind the Karl-Marxhof infirmary. Some of the shoes—dear God in heaven!—some of the shoes still have human limbs in them. I spot Spanish tourists walking two abreast toward Harrods—the fragment that leaps to mind is an endless line of prisoners, their hands clasped behind their necks, being marched two abreast through the debris-strewn streets toward what the English during the Boer War called a concentration camp.

Oh, my eyes have seen horrors that my brain would give anything to stop remembering.

I’m working on it.

Sometimes the fragments join in a sludge of memories.

The night of the twelfth of February: With the leadership arrested, with the revolutionist factions decapitated, our Socialist and Communist friends wandered the streets in confusion, not sure where to make a stand, not sure what form the stand should take if a stand were to be made. The armed
Schutzbund
militias retreated to the tenement blocks to defend the barricades. It must have been nearly midnight when Kim and Dietrich and I reached the epicenter. I remember scrambling over barricades thrown together with automobiles and delivery wagons and pushcarts and heaps of tires and a mountain of furniture. Eventually we came to the fortresslike tenements at Karl-Marxhof. Dietrich found Sonja behind a second barricade. She and other girls were tearing sheets into bandage strips and folding them into cartons. A hundred or so young Communists, red ribbons tied around their upper arms, manned the barricade. A handful carried rifles, the others an assortment of clubs made from table legs. One young man wearing a greatcoat with a fur collar appeared to be armed with a carpet sweeper. Many of the Communists sprawled on couches that had been dragged down from apartments and formed part of the defense system thrown up to block the street. A young Communist with his pointed beard dyed bright red climbed onto a kitchen table and, using a megaphone fashioned out of cardboard, delivered a fiery speech. Only part of what he said reached my ears, something about how the first shots of the next great war were being fired here in Vienna. The Communists manning the barricade cheered him. Oh, yes, an absolutely indelible memory: Sergius began to pound out the
Internationale
on an upright piano wedged into the furniture that had been piled on the barricade. Several of the Communists began to sing the words. People watching from the tenement windows joined in. Soon the entire street resounded with the glorious words of the
Internationale
. To my amazement, I will say
to my delight
, tears sting my eyes now when I think of it, everyone was singing in Russian.

Vstavay, proklyat’yem zakleymyonniy

Ves’ mir golodnykh i rabov

Kipit nash razum vozmushchonniy

I v smertniy boy vesti gotov.

My Englishman and me, we tried to warm ourselves at a furniture fire blazing in the middle of the street. I don’t remember what time it was when the attack began, only that it was still too dark to make out the dials on the small wristwatch Grandfather gave me for my fifteenth birthday. We heard a distant roar that sounded like motors coughing into life beyond the barricades. This next fragment—it is within the realm of possibility that I fantasized it, and repeated it to myself so often I began to think of it as something that really happened. In my fantasy, Dietrich, hearing the motors drawing closer, offers Kim a revolver. Kim looks down at it as if he’s not sure what it is, then says, “I could not shoot a b-bullet at another human.” “Even if the other human is shooting at you?” Dietrich asks. Kim shakes his head slowly and I hear him say, “There must be another way to fight the good fight.” Dietrich says, “Find it.” Kim nods. “I will.”

No, I never raised the subject of Dietrich’s offer of a revolver with Kim. Perhaps I was afraid he would tell me I’d invented it. I had fallen for my Englishman and I wanted this particular fragment—this evidence of humanity—to be reality and not fantasy.

I can still reproduce in my brain the shrieks rising from the tenement windows when the giant bulldozers arrived at the first barricade and began punching gaps in it. Several young Communists shot fireworks that shrieked en route and exploded in sparkling circles when they slammed into the bulldozer cabs. We could hear rifle bullets ricocheting off the plows. Kim seized my hand and pulled me into a doorway. I remember a narrow staircase winding up and up, each floor smelling of garbage or urine or cooking kerosene. Then a blast of cold air hit my face. I was on the roof, peering over the parapet. Far below, as if in a sinkhole, I could see automobiles being lifted like toys and flung to one side. Thick black smoke rose from the tires that had been soaked in kerosene and set afire. Tanks churned through the gaps opened by the bulldozers, their treads crushing furniture, the machine guns in their turrets spitting sparks in all directions. A figure raced toward one tank carrying a can of kerosene with an oil-lamp wick burning in its throat. As he raised his arm to throw it he was cut down by a strafe of bullets. A second figure appeared out of nowhere to pick up the can but it exploded in his hands before he could throw it. For an instant the explosion illuminated the street like a burst of lightning. I believe I recognized the comrade before he was engulfed in flames, it was my onetime lover, it was the Dietrich who had leaped to his feet to tell the Hungarian professor that his Marxist theories were boring him to death. And the crazy thought crossed my mind:
At least he didn’t die of boredom
.

When the tanks broke through the second barricade, shoving aside the upright piano and the mangled furniture, the Communists with us on the roof began throwing bricks down at the hunched shadows advancing behind the tanks. The comrades in the street fought heroically. For a brief moment it looked as if the attackers were hesitating, but perhaps that, too, was fantasy imposing itself on reality. Soldiers in helmets and greatcoats surged through the gaps in the barricade and spread out in the street, shooting at anything that moved in doorways or windows, smashing open the street doors of the tenements with rifle butts, launching what turned out to be a methodical search of the apartments. One of the comrades on the roof burst into sobs. Another shook him by the shoulders. “We must save ourselves,” he yelled.

Kim pressed his lips to my ear. “We, too, must save ourselves.”

I heard a voice I recognized as mine say, “Why must we?”

“To fight Fascism.”

I have a vague memory of being pushed over parapets to other roofs. White sheets were flying from chimneys in sign of surrender but the Heimwehr gangsters weren’t taking prisoners. Howitzers started to shoot out the ground floors behind us so that the tenements would collapse into themselves. I remember spiral staircases, I remember clammy tunnels with large rusting sewage pipes running through them, I remember air passages that were so narrow you had to walk sideways, I remember cellars packed with doctors trying to staunch the flow of blood from wounded men, with women trying to staunch the flow of mucus from the noses of sobbing children. Kim found an English acquaintance, an artist of some sort, I think his name was Spender, we’d had a drink once on the terrace of the Herenhoff, drifting like a dazed soul in a cellar filled with dazed souls. Kim tried to shake him out of his stupor but Spender pulled his arm free and cried out, “
Sunt lacrimae rerum
—they weep for their houses, which are crashing down around their heads.”

Shaking his head crossly, Kim murmured, “
Lacrimae rerum
gets it wrong—these are tears for events, not things.”

After an eternity the cellars and the tunnels gave way to stingingly icy air, to a night sky brimming with stars, to alleyways filled with cartons of shoes, some of them with limbs attached, to narrow streets rank with cordite, to checkpoints manned by nervous soldiers who aimed rifles and flashlights at us as my Englishman frantically waved his passport.
A British citizen and his girlfriend caught up in a war, let us through, for God’s sake
. My apartment. The dull but not unpleasant thud of artillery shells exploding across town—it reminded me of the dry thunder over my grandfather’s estate that brought no rain. I remember my Englishman gazing out the window at the low clouds on the horizon tinted bloodred by fires burning out of control beneath them. He was drinking schnapps straight from the bottle when he turned his back on the fires and told me, out of the blue, that he’d once been b-b-b-b-b-buggered by a schoolmate.

What did that have to do with the thugs running riot in the workers’ tenements across the city?

*   *   *

Kim forbade me to leave the apartment—the streets were crawling with Heimwehr patrols hunting down Socialists and Communists. He himself went outside two, sometimes three times a day. I could see him from my window, hunched over the handlebars of his motorcycle, waving his British passport to get past checkpoints or patrols. He had given himself a mission—scrounging old but serviceable overcoats and suits and ties from the journalist Gedye and the artist Spender and their English friends, delivering the clothing to the
Schutzbund
comrades trapped in cellars and sewers, many of them wounded; their only hope of fleeing was if they could pass themselves off as civilians caught in the crossfire, and for this they needed clothes that weren’t battle worn and bloodstained.

After the three-day civil war, comrades, several of them with festering shrapnel wounds, all of them exhausted, made their way to my apartment. Some stayed only long enough to disinfect their wounds with alcohol, others (having no place else to go) camped. The Hungarian professor and three students occupied the spare room, two on the bed, two on the rug folded to make a mattress. Three young Communists who had crawled through sewers to escape the epicenter lived in the sitting room. Kim and I shared what food we had with the others as we clustered around the shortwave radio post trying to make sense of the BBC bulletins through the static. I translated the news into German for the comrades. According to the BBC, fifteen hundred had been killed and another five thousand had been wounded when Dollfuss crushed a Communist uprising in Vienna. (Some Communist uprising!) In what appeared to be a meticulously planned operation, Socialist and Communist leaders were being rounded up. Those who managed to avoid arrest were fleeing abroad. Opposition headquarters had been closed down. With the movement crushed, the workers’ militias collapsed in disarray. The BBC correspondent reported seeing women frantically digging up the gardens at the Engelhof when word spread that weapons were buried there. The workers’ tenements, long considered to be impregnable Socialist fortresses, had been occupied by the army and the government’s Heimwehr militia. Workers’ rest homes and holiday camps across Austria had been closed by the police. Terror gripped Vienna. Civilians caught with rifles or pistols were being shot out of hand.