The End of Days

1

A woman sits at a desk writing an account of her life. The desk is in Moscow. This is the third time in her life she’s been asked to write an account of it, and it’s entirely possible that this written account will put an end to her life, possible that this piece of writing will be transformed, if you will, into a weapon to be used against her. It’s also possible that this piece of writing will be kept in reserve and that from the moment she turns it in she’ll be obliged to live up to it, or to prove herself worthy of it, or else confirm the darkest suspicions that might arise from it. In the last case, the words she’s writing here would also — after a brief or protracted delay — be something like a misdiagnosed illness that eventually, inevitably, would kill her. Didn’t her husband always say that in the theater there’s never a gun hanging on the wall that isn’t going to be fired off at some point? She remembers Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and how she wept when the shot was finally fired. But perhaps she’ll succeed — after all that’s why she’s sitting here, her one hope, and the reason she is taking such pains to find just the right words — perhaps she’ll succeed in writing herself a way out, in extending her life by means of a few letters more or less, or at least making her life less onerous; there’s nothing left for her to hope for now than to succeed in using her writing to write her way back into life. But what are the right words? Would a truth take her farther than a lie? And which of the many possible truths or lies should she use? When she doesn’t even know who will be reading what she writes?

There’s only one thing she doesn’t assume: that this piece of writing will be nothing more than a sheet of paper with ink on it, slipped into a folder and forgotten. In a country in which every child and every cleaning woman and every soldier can recite poems by Lermontov and Pushkin from memory, that would not be likely.

2

I was born in 1902 in Brody to a civil servant and his wife, in other words I had a bourgeois background. And what exactly made this background bourgeois? Perhaps the fact that when her grandmother fled from Galicia to Vienna more than twenty years ago, she dragged along an edition of Goethe’s Collected Works? Her father’s salary wasn’t enough for her parents to employ a maid even during their very first years in Vienna. She never had piano lessons, nor did her sister play the violin. She knows of course that her background is considered bourgeois because her father, instead of being a factory worker, was an official at the Meteorological Institution. I earn my money with my buttocks, he liked to say, meaning all the hours he spent in a chair poring over data. Even so they’d nearly starved. Despite this fact, both her first account of her life, which she’d written when she applied for a visa to enter the Soviet Union, and the second one, composed apropos of her unsuccessful bid to be admitted into the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, were marred by this bourgeois background of hers, as no doubt this third one would be as well. Her background stuck to her, there was no helping it, and she was stuck to it as well. She’d been able to remake her thinking from scratch, but not her family history.

Never would she possess the same level of freedom as her husband, who was free for all time, doubly free — and in principle free even now that he was in prison, since he’d completed an apprenticeship as a metalworker before beginning to write, he’d been a laborer, a doubly free laborer; in other words: possessing nothing that could tie him down, he could go anywhere he wanted. From a societal perspective, he was immune to blackmail. The working class has nothing to lose but their chains. But did she herself really have more to lose? Had she perhaps inherited not only the myopia but also the fearfulness of her father, who all his life was obliged to worry that some trifling offense might prevent him from rising on schedule from one pay grade to the next and in the worst-case scenario — a revolution, say — even cause him to lose his position? Were hands by nature more honest than heads? As a young girl, how she would have loved to work with her hands, creating something that hadn’t previously existed — but ever since that day at school when a crafts teacher had held up the doll’s dress she had made, presenting it for the entire class to see as an example of what she called shoddy and sloppy work, since this day at school she had lost her faith in the work of her hands. If there were such a thing as being born to grace, there was probably also a gracelessness you could be born to. Sloppy and shoddy. She had later made the workers’ struggle her own all the more fervently.

In 1909 my family relocated to Vienna. Prolonged adversity spurred me to become politically active for the first time at age fourteen, spearheading an anti-war demonstration in 1916. Since I had not yet benefited from Marxist schooling, it was merely an outpouring of pacifist sentiment that prompted my resistance.

In her first account of her life, written as part of her visa application, she had gone on at this point, writing: . but my resistance arose out of a passionate hatred of the war. Was the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917 not also identical with the decision on the part of the Bolsheviks, alone among all the peoples of the world, to autonomously cast off the burden of this inhuman war, despite the enormous sacrifices this required?

If the world revolution had succeeded in those days, the uniting of the proletarians of all countries would have been not only the start of a new world but also of an eternal peace. What cause could people possibly have to slaughter one another? What cause could the Austrians have to make the Italians bleed, what cause the Germans to slit open the French? None at all.

To be sure, there had been peace in 1918, but the European borders were not dissolved, they were only pushed this way and that. On the other hand, everything outside the Soviet Union, the border between those who worked and those who lived off others’ labor, remained right where it was. Ever since the start of this miserable peace nearly twenty years ago, the young Soviet power stood all on its own against a united front of European reactionaries — in a new war, the Soviets would be not one enemy among others, but the sole enemy. And this war would surely not be long in coming. From where she sat today, she cast a critical glance at the young peace-loving girl she once had been. She had understood even then that there was a difference between the blood that flowed during a revolution and the blood that was spilled in a war. She also knew that all wars are not created equal.

After the end of the war and my father’s death, still working in complete political isolation, I began to write antimilitaristic articles that I submitted to the Workers’ Journal — unsuccessfully at the time — while also writing my first novel, Sisyphus.

She wasn’t just politically isolated back then — she was completely alone. And lonely. But she doesn’t write that. Still, something that at the time was nearly her undoing proved to be a blessing in disguise: recently she heard that the man she’d once almost killed herself over was a longstanding member of a Trotskyist group. He’d been known as W. back when she first met him, then she encountered him again as Comrade E. at an assembly, and later — like so many of them, herself included — he had meandered through various identities, becoming Za., whose articles she sometimes read, later going by P. when he was in hiding, as a comrade once told her, but she hadn’t known what name he’d been using recently for his work in Leningrad. Over the past few months she’d occasionally heard mention of the Trotskyist, Zinovievist, and Bukharinist Lü., but it never occurred to her to suspect this was the same man she’d once been so in love with. Only a few weeks ago, when she happened to see a photograph of a defendant named Lü. in the newspaper, she had recognized him.

I demand.

During the Spanish Civil War.

An unacceptable.

Where I was, not at a congress.

I must object most vigorously.

In the trenches.

Could also have taken a different path.

When F. tried to pin the blame on me.

And since then never again. I demand.

Delayed detonation, surely you can.

Why all this beating around the bush?

Lü., his closest friend.

With me? Never!

This beating around the bush.

Br., just one.

F. is sowing suspicions.

Cannot work like this.

Not in the hinterlands!

A functionary who writes on the side, not an author.

A clear path.

I ask myself why Br. is not presenting an argument.

And I ask myself why F. is unleashing his cynical.

Taken into consideration as well.

Why is F. so intensely pessimistic?

Have any of you. how two-faced?

Neither a productive nor a constructive.

Br.’s sectarianism to closer scrutiny.

Rather, on the contrary, quite harmful.

Just look at the introduction and the sentences altered in the Russian version.

That isn’t true.

The introduction is.

That isn’t true!

Not forward-thinking.

Empty allegations and underhanded.

The introduction is not the same.

Do you mean to claim.

I’m not alleging anything, I’d just like. it’s not the same as in the Russian version.

Do you mean to claim that.

Nothing more to say on the subject.

Declare my resignation.

I too lay down my post.

Why don’t we just go ahead and dissolve.

Perhaps we should.

I really have nothing more to say on the subject.

We might in fact in the presence of.

A reprimand might be.

But not in the presence of.

Why in the world?

Of a Party representative.

Leave me out of it.

During this period I supported myself by working at a stationery shop. In none of these accounts has she written that she often used to nap during her lunch hour on the paper-filled shelves in the back room of this small shop. The cousin who owned the shop had given her permission. The large sheets of paper were fresher than any bedsheet, and just as if she were getting into bed, she always took off her shoes before she filed herself away in one of these compartments. She was constantly tired during those first few months when she was no longer living with her mother and sister, constantly tired because she was spending her nights writing her novel. She had so often wished for her father to return to life, and perhaps she succeeded, perhaps her words did bring him back to life again, assuming they were the right words.

Several times a quiet young man had purchased red paper from her, then asked her to cut it to leaflet size right there in the shop with the big cutting machine. Silently, he had watched her set up the machine and then turn the big crank to slice through an entire stack of paper at one go. I first made contact with the Communist Party of Austria through Comrade G. At some point she had spotted a wayward handbill, now printed, lying in the gutter, and had recognized its color. She picked up the leaflet and began to read.

Comrade G. didn’t come into the shop again all summer, but when he appeared in September, he looked at her not with two open eyes but only one and a half. He now resembled the enormous weary lizard that had been put on display in the Schönbrunn Menagerie, one of the few post-war acquisitions.

While he was standing beside her at the cutting machine, watching her arrange the stack of paper, she asked:

An accident?

Someone knocked me down and beat me.

Really?

A soldier.

A soldier?

Yes.

Why?

The putsch.

She’d read about it. On Hörligasse, a handful of Communists had even been killed, but here in the Alser District, life had gone on as before.

And your eye?

It won’t stop watering.

I’m sorry.

While she was cranking the wheel that pressed the stack of paper together, it occurred to her that from now on it would never again be possible to tell for sure whether this quiet man perhaps had reason to weep, or whether it was just his eye shedding tears on its own.

Would you like to come some time?

While she was slicing through the stack of paper at one go, he wiped his damp cheek with the back of his hand and told her that his Communist cell always met on Wednesdays.

I see.

So it was possible to sacrifice your health and possibly even your life for something other than love, you could keep yourself preserved until it was time to throw your life and body into the jaws of time for a good cause.

But in Hungary it’s all over already, she said, meaning the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

We’re learning, he said, and the world still has no idea what is happening here, but soon it will be astonished.

It would also never again be possible to tell for sure whether he was laughing so hard there were tears rolling down his cheeks or just laughing, she thought, and she began to wrap the freshly sliced stack of paper in paper.

The comrade who is me and Comrade B. are walking down Tverskaya when the comrade who is me sees him. He is walking on the other side of the street. He waves to the comrade who is me. The comrade who is me waves as well, and I ask, Shouldn’t we call him over to our side of the street? For God’s sake, what if someone sees us! If someone sees us, he’ll see he was only waving to the comrade who is me. I beckon, and he comes over, B. turns away. We stroll up and down Strastnoy several times. The conversation is superficial. We discuss lighting, the use of a greenish light. His tone is cordial. We spend approximately a quarter hour together. Then he says goodbye. Should it now be considered an error that the comrade who is me and Comrade B. spoke to him? In any case, we spoke to him.

One Wednesday, for the first time in her life, she met people who didn’t just grumble about how awful everything was, but instead clearheadedly investigated why this machine known as progress kept undermining the well-being of mankind.

Otherwise, what was the point of being young in a time like this when progress itself was still young, one of them asked — a man the others called Comrade H. — and with a quick toss of his head, he flipped a strand of hair off his forehead, a gesture she would later come to know so well.

It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

Now that mankind had finally, thanks to the inventions of the modern age, acquired the means to raise itself above the limitations imposed by the need for survival, it was now time for them to ensure that mankind was actually taking advantage of these means, cried a pudgy comrade known as A. and he got to his feet to describe the rising up of humanity with a powerful sweep of his arm. And not, he went on, so as to pile up immeasurable wealth for just a few individuals, not so as to conquer new markets and cheaper sites of production through the subjugation of the colonies, to simply redistribute natural resources in the next war. No! We are standing at a beginning, he exclaimed, not somewhere in the middle, but right at the starting point — and again he scooped up a mighty armful of air and shoved this air across to the middle of the table, dispersing the cloud of smoke that had gathered there and sending it swirling in all directions. Then he sat down again to roll himself a fresh cigarette.

It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

Comrade U., who spoke quietly so that people would listen to her, said, nearly whispering, that the distribution of the generated revenues would have to be regulated, since the moment it was possible for an individual to enrich himself, that’s what he’d do.

Precisely, H. said, adding that it was in any case high time to take private ownership to the cleaners, time for mankind to become one with itself, on a truly massive scale! Those who have never been allowed to use their teeth for anything more than biting their tongues should now be fed and allowed to digest and grow — even to take a crap! he shouted, laughing as he bared his own teeth. Flesh to flesh, he cried, flipping back his strand of hair.

Beautiful Z. smiled, and Comrade U., once more speaking at the edge of audibility, opined that Comrade H. was perhaps going a bit too far, but that in principle he was probably not wrong: the massively widespread alienation of labor could only be a preliminary phase that would eventually lead to a world in which the masses would also benefit from these massive quantities of labor.

Well, that’s no laughing matter, G. said, and his eye started watering again, making it impossible to tell whether he was laughing so hard there were tears rolling down his cheeks or perhaps crying, or neither of the two; no laughing matter, he said, and besides: If we can tame Nature, which completely surrounds us, surely we can prevent human selfishness from casting us back into an animal state.

No, youth no longer existed so one could squander one’s youth, or simply wait for the years to pass until one could eventually slip into old age as into rags that others had worn to shreds. It no longer existed for being ground down to make up for the failings of an older generation. Now the point of youth was to be thrown away: for a new world such as the world had never seen before.

They were all in a good mood, they were singing and drinking coffee.

When I was there, all they were doing was dancing. I can’t dance, it was a dull two hours for me.

We showed up and played cards. We didn’t have any particular conversations.

They were already having coffee. There was no discussion of politics at all.

V. sometimes turned up at my apartment, which I took to mean that he liked to smoke and drink for free. I saw no political motivation for his behavior.

And so V. was in my room on several occasions, mainly we talked about bygone days. In early November 1935 I had one last brief encounter with him on the street.

After the fall of 1931 I never saw him again. We weren’t at all close, neither personally nor politically.

Once he came and sat with me as I was drinking a glass of beer. He made a very bad impression on me. I never saw him again.

He can’t hold his drink at all. Usually the first glass is enough for him.

Sometimes he’s just pretending!

That’s right, I’ve seen that.

Did Comrade Br. ever run into Comrade T. at V.’s apartment?

Not that I recall, but it’s always possible. I’d rather err on the side of assuming he did.

Why do you consider this a possibility?

According to what I’ve heard, the two of them knew each other.

S., L., M., and O. were once there too. A female journalist from Sweden was there, then K. and Sch. Once H. with his wife, and besides them, Comrade R., and Ö. with his wife — I think that’s all of them.

I was there once, too.

Oh, right, Fr. and also C.

Pretty much everyone was tipsy.

I consider it my duty to emphatically put a stop to these evenings, no matter how festive. When alcohol is being consumed, it is impossible to monitor whether a political remark is being made that can no longer be monitored.

I was at his apartment once on New Year’s Eve when the entire place was full and there were a large number of comrades in attendance.

Was I there?

No.

Was I there?

No.

Me?

No.

Once I went to his apartment because he had invited me ten times.

I was off traveling all the time, so I didn’t have any sort of relationship with V. at all.

That V. managed to escape being unmasked by us as two-faced until the very end is of course quite disconcerting. The moral I draw from this is that his behavior was not entirely correct.

One evening after a meeting, she had told H. about her Sisyphus, and he had talked to her about his plays. A few days later the two of them went together to a gathering of so-called revolutionary writers, and suddenly everything that had been separate for so long and separately had made no sense fell into place. After all what did having a world view mean if not learning to see? Was it possible to change the world if you found the right words? Could the world be changed only if you happened to find them?

The question of whether Comrade O., who had written something about the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, was permitted to describe the Freikorps soldier as meticulously as she did his victim was really about whether she was allowed to know in advance what she was writing or whether, on the contrary, it was her duty to be constantly searching. It was also a question about the irreversibility of good and evil, in short, fundamentally, about whether people could be educated, about whether hope had boundaries or not. Whether this or that classic author, while writing, was a participant in his time or whether he stood outside it as an observer was as much a question of life and death as the question of whom the factories belonged to. Was a revolutionary poem in sonnet form a capitulation to the enemy, a retreat in disguise, and was poet J. — cat hair on his sweater, his teeth brown from smoking — perhaps trying to imprison the revolution in fourteen lines? Everything would have been different if the social-democratic pigs hadn’t locked up our leadership back in June. Sitting in this gathering, she had felt for the first time in her life that literature itself was something real, just as real as a bag of flour, a pair of shoes, or a crowd being stirred to revolt. Here the words themselves were something you could touch, there was no transition from literature to what was called reality — instead, the sentences themselves were a reality. Van Gogh had cut off his own ear, why shouldn’t it hurt just as much when a figure in a play cut off someone else in the middle of a speech? Was it in order to write that the Communists had come into this world? Did every word matter?

Unfortunately I was often not present at these gatherings, because I was one of the ones who didn’t get invited. My temperament is fairly volatile at times, and Comrade F. took such offense at my outbursts that he called me a worm. If I were to sink to that level, I might say he was a hopeless drunk. I won’t say that, because I don’t want to sink to his level. Of course I make mistakes. I would like to practice ruthless self-criticism. I am insanely despised by Comrade M. and also by Comrade C., whose garrulousness is quite distressing to me, by the way. Now I’m having to prove that I am clean; M. doesn’t have to prove that he is right. It upsets me when Comrade M. forgets my name when he’s reading out the list of contributors. What an expression of disrespect. Of course, I don’t mean to say I think he’s engaging in this sort of politicking as an agent of fascism. I repeat that I cannot prove anything. I had an argument with Comrade C. I began to commit errors. Suddenly, I was taking offense at personal styles of communication, which I never would have done before. Gossip here, gossip there, and then there was the matter at hand. If I remember correctly, it seemed as if C. was constantly pregnant with miscarriages. I insist that by saying these things I am not revealing anything. I’m fighting to have someone finally tell me in a straightforward manner what is going on. What sorts of allegations do you have against me? I am fighting for my honor. I demand that Comrade M. stand up and explain why I wasn’t invited to contribute. Let Comrade M. stand up and let Comrade C. be called in as well. I know my own errors perfectly well. But I don’t want to hear the excuse that I didn’t turn in my articles on time. I met V. here in Moscow and could smell right away that he stank, like a dog that’s always pushing its way into things and can’t look you in the eye. Besides, he told lies. I immediately reported this to the cadre leadership. Every comrade has flaws, if a person says he has no flaws, this means he hasn’t done any self-criticism. By the way: V. always regarded me with the greatest contempt and condescension, which is something I cannot abide, especially when there’s no call for it. In my view, it ought to be possible to eliminate a fellow like that from the territory of the Soviet Union. What is going on? If I speak openly now, from comrade to comrade, I might wind up making a remark that will break my neck. Wouldn’t it be better for us to help one another? I came to Moscow, and a tall fellow with curly hair came to see me. An individual too dim-witted to engage in any sort of work but who is easy prey for any counterrevolutionary element. He brought me a few poems. They were so unbelievably bad that I felt sick to my stomach. I don’t ask to be given a medal of honor, all I ask is that if I am going to be politically isolated, a political explanation be given. I’m not the only one who comes into this room and can’t shake the feeling that a couple of the people here are keeping secrets from a third individual, or a fourth, a fifth, or sixth. The cell must demand absolute openness. At the moment there is only a single person not trying to play me for a sucker, and that is me.

One evening it was her turn to read a few pages aloud from her Sisyphus manuscript for the first time. Sch., the man in the yellow suit jacket — her name for him to this day — voiced the criticism that the book centered around a petit-bourgeois main character. Was it not precisely this petit-bourgeois indecisiveness that had caused the June Uprising to fail? Did she mean to identify with it? What about progress? But Comrade O, the only older woman in this circle, replied in her hoarse voice that it was progress when one paid heed to the truth, as this young author was most certainly doing. Before striding off upon a new path, must one not have acquired a profound understanding of what was wrong with the old one? Sallow, mustached K. replied with a certain acerbity: Of course you can invest a great deal of effort into always trying to understand everything, but we would still be tugging away at the Gordian Knot if it hadn’t occurred to someone to just slice through it. J., a poet — cat hair on his sweater, his teeth brown from smoking — said that he particularly liked the leisurely pace of her storytelling, and the many repetitions, because they reflected the stagnation from which the book’s hero suffered. Exactly, H. said: for once a story was being told via the language as well and not just the plot — and if they, the revolutionary authors, really were hoping to create a new Adam, the only clay they had at their disposal was language! His strand of hair fell in his face, but he didn’t notice. Hereupon Comrade T., raising her voice more than was necessary to be heard in this small gathering, declared that when an author resorted to gimmicks to make the reader pay attention to the writing, the text lost all power to point to something beyond itself, and she found that a shame. Not a shame, sallow, mustached K. added, but possibly dangerous, because a person who is enjoying something stays right where he is and stops moving forward. Had she been writing at the brink of an abyss, and just in time found friends who could drag her back from its edge? Had her text, which she had written in isolation, now been transformed into something that — through all these critiques and expressions of support — would bind her to these friends more intimately than a kiss might among young people who were merely eighteen years old? She was hurt by what Comrade T. said, while H.’s words, spoken this time without flipping the hair out of his face, sent happiness coursing dizzily through her body down to her fingertips, but neither Comrade T. nor H. was indifferent to what she thought and wondered. Indifference did not exist within this circle; here, every word mattered. It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

By joining the Communist Party, she had catapulted herself into the middle of this life. She, too, was now one of those in whose bodies and souls the present had finally found itself after centuries of inertia and was beginning to race forward; it was a present far too large and swift for one person alone, but together they would be able to hold their ground upon the crest of time, even when it was traveling at a gallop. In her account of her life, all of this is represented by a single sentence: In 1920 I joined the Communist Party of Austria; I was vouched for by Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, and Comrade U., who at the time ran the local group Vienna-Margareten.

She is required to list those who vouched for her, even though U. — who has since been expelled from the Party and condemned to death in absentia for high treason by the Soviet courts — now lives in Paris. In other words, she was vouched for by a leftist sectarian back when she was young. Did they mean to pin her down as the young person she had been, her very youth now a cause for reproach?

In her first account of her life, the name U. had still been worth dropping. Comrade U., now a respected functionary of the Communist International, and Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, vouched for me when I joined the Communist Party of Austria in 1920.

In the second account, written when she was applying to be accepted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, she had simply said: Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, and Comrade U. vouched for me.

By that time, the respected functionary of the Communist International was no longer taking part in Comintern assemblies and held no position of any sort; a rumor was circulating that she had conspired with Kirov’s murderers, but no one knew exactly how.

Now, in this third account of her life, she explains: At the time I was influenced by U., an enemy of the people, and while I was not an active participant in the debates being held at the time, I did, like her, take an approving stance in our group’s discussions of the meaning of the June Uprising of 1919, thereby unintentionally contributing to the formation of factions which caused damage to the Austrian Communist Party.

And so the past moved through the movements taking place in the present. But could looking at things in a certain way really change the things themselves?

When her father died shortly after the end of the war, she was convinced that he had died of the war, even though he’d been nowhere near the front: what had killed him was profound exhaustion after years of struggling to support a family under catastrophic circumstances.

Her mother, on the other hand, had shouted after her down the stairs when she was moving out of her parents’ apartment the spring after her father’s death that her father obviously hadn’t been able to stomach seeing his older daughter doing everything in her power to go to the dogs.

Her little sister, to be sure, did not share her mother’s opinion that the older girl was to blame for their father’s death, but she was just as disinclined to agree with her sister that their father had privately capitulated. It was out of protest against the modern age, she told her older sister, an insurrection of his heart against life’s unreasonable demands — in other words, it was basically his strength and radicalism that drove him to his death, and these are both things you inherited, she said.

The older girl replied that she was unfortunately unable to believe that retreating could count as a protest.

But it does, the younger one said, it really does! Only through his death, she said, did their father finally succeed in returning to where he’d basically wanted to be ever since 1917: at the side of the late Kaiser, and in his own way he had declared the modern age bankrupt.

Unfortunately, the modern age doesn’t give a damn about his opinion, the older girl said.

Death can also be a sort of strike!

Hmm, the big sister said, I don’t know.

But then the two girls had already reached the entrance to the building, and the older one didn’t want to go upstairs for fear of running into their mother.

And so each of them — she herself, her mother, and her sister, too — described her father’s death in quite different terms, even though the fact of his death confronted all of them in equal measure; each of them assigned it a different cause and meaning, as though it could be spoken of only in terms of this or that story, as a sort of dead stub that in some form or other had fused with each of their lives. Each called his death by another name, and probably this naming helped them to at least obscure the fact hidden behind the name, if not forget it outright, to prevent this gaping maw from possibly luring those who remained alive down into the underworld.

The doctors, though, following the dictates of their profession, recorded with the utmost objectivity nothing more than the scientific explanation for her father’s end in the Registry of Deaths: myocardial insufficiency.

She couldn’t help thinking of this the first time she read the Manifesto of the Communist Party, when she began to hope that perhaps there was a doctor who could treat the severe illnesses from which mankind as a whole was suffering.

*

As she heads to the common kitchen to fetch some hot water from the samovar for her tea, a wind rises up far away on a bit of steppe, 45.61404 degrees latitude north, 70.75195 degrees longitude east, collecting a few grains of sand that get caught amid the blades of grass, while other grains of sand lying beside the tufts are carried off. For weeks now it hasn’t rained there. A beetle, emerging from nowhere, on its way nowhere, passes the time by creeping up one of the grass blades, where, having reached the top, it turns around again and goes on its way facing down. The blade of grass bent a little beneath the weight of the beetle when it reached the tip — bent almost imperceptibly, since the beetle’s weight was so slight, but still it was something. Now that the six-legged visitor has returned to earth and is once more making its laborious way among the other stalks belonging to this tuft of grass, the stalk is standing erect again, trembling ever so slightly from time to time in the tranquil air we describe as a lull.

The Jews, she thinks on her way back to her room, knew what they were doing when they decided never to call God by his name. Lenin once wrote that a glass was not only indisputably a cylinder made of glass, it was also a drinking vessel; it was not just a heavy object such as might be used for throwing, but could also serve as a paperweight, or to hold a trapped butterfly. Lenin had read Hegel, and Hegel in turn had said that truth was the whole. She always used to drink tea with her husband late into the night. Now she is sitting here alone. Could it be a mistake to have Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks right there on her shelf? Has Lenin been outlawed yet? Could he have been a classic author when she set out to get her tea, but already a criminal by the time she returns with her cup? He lies across the Neva from her in his coffin made of glass; if he were to turn over, everyone would see.

This was a weekend in early spring, perhaps around Easter. A lake outside Berlin.

Utterly disgraceful, someone should put a stop to it, such a ne’er-do-well.

We wanted to paddle across in our kayak.

Serves him right.

I remember that the weather was not on our side that day.

Turned out to lack all talent.

It seemed as if winter was moving in on us again.

We did ask ourselves what detours had brought him here and wondered about the strange writer’s life he was leading. Then we said: Why get involved with filth like that?

It snowed that last night, there was even sleet. Thin sheets of ice were floating around on the lake, but they broke apart as soon as the prow of our boat touched them.

A handful of comrades thought he had a gift.

That evening he read us his latest story in parting.

Gifted — that can mean all sorts of things.

The next day we went our separate ways.

We cannot continue to employ the designation “gifted” if he is being expelled from the organization as a writer of trash.

Hurriedly, and in fine spirits, our friend strolled off. One week later he left for Moscow.

Only a single person said he agreed with me, in a whisper: it was him. Dear comrade, I said, if you share this opinion, do stand up and say so aloud. He said that he would, but soon after he disappeared.

He stopped just the one time, to turn around and wave to us.

Shocking what he tried to pull.

I shall always see his face before me.

Tried to incite me to.

His solid, almost stocky figure.

To say that the book is garbage.

His closely shorn, stubbly hair.

Unmasked in his dream of being a writer, just in time.

Those watchful eyes.

Banished from literature.

. that were now filled with joyful expectation.

The case involving the existence of a group in Moscow with an absolute idiot at its head — the individual in question — has now been rectified.

3

A good friend of her husband’s, the theater director N., had given her and her husband a letter of introduction to Yagoda, the head of the secret service, when they emigrated to the Soviet Union. Her husband didn’t want to use it, why not, she said, he said: cronyism isn’t Socialism, and he flipped the strand of hair out of his face, she said, that isn’t cronyism, it’s just one comrade lending another a helping hand. If we do our work well, we won’t need any help, her husband said, then he tore up the letter and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Meanwhile Yagoda has been relieved of his duties, arrested, and — recently, during the third show trial — indicted, then condemned to death and executed. Perhaps Yagoda’s successors are coming up the stairs this very moment. Did her husband really tear up the letter of introduction, or did she — as she sometimes imagined, dreamed, or perhaps even really remembered during the nights following his arrest — retrieve the scraps of paper from the wastebasket, glue them together, and put the document back in the drawer? Then it would be found now and would provide a justification for her arrest. She absolutely must finish the account of her life before she is arrested. Then this piece of writing can do battle with that letter, assuming someone really has found it, or will find it and wish to use it as evidence against her and her husband: paper against paper.

*

With the roller to the side of her typewriter, she scrolls back up the last eight lines, then strikes the “X” key over and over until the paragraph she has just written becomes illegible. Then she goes on writing.

Active in.

While fighting.

Journey to.

At work on.

He, he, and she.

Hitler’s victory in the election most certainly spelled defeat for the German working classes, but at the time could one really describe it as a defeat for the Communist Party of Germany, as her husband had done?

Sch., the man in the yellow suit jacket — now a delegate to the Communist International — had replied to her husband: If the Social Democrats hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the Communists, but instead had joined with the Communists to create a united front against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have been a majority for Hitler.

We didn’t lose the workers to social democracy, we lost them to the Fascists, her husband had said, and then asked: Why? Because of this question — which he had ultimately been asking himself, not the delegate to the Communist International — he had been severely chastised by the Party, and demoted to performing lower-level Party work.

Her husband had spent one year in Berlin without papers collecting membership dues from a group of five Party members.

Shortly after her husband had left for Germany, she went for a walk on frozen Lake Neusiedl with her friend G. and asked him whether they ought to wish that Marx had been wrong, in other words that when capitalism went to seed, it wasn’t because the petit bourgeois had slid down into the proletariat, but because the proletariat had slid upwards into the petite bourgeoisie and in their new capacity as petit bourgeois had voted for Hitler.

But what about the working classes?

Marx was not mistaken, her friend G. said. The working classes had voted for Hitler, but H. was still wrong in his theory that the Communist Party had been defeated.

But Hitler is leading the workers into the next war to defend the interests of Big Capital, leading them to the slaughter! Haven’t people always said: A vote for Hitler is a vote for war?

The worse this war turns out to be, G. said, the better for us. For the masses to turn away from him and come running into our arms, we need the crimes he is about to commit to be as huge as possible.

She looked down to contemplate this sentence, looked at the thin layer of snow lying upon the ice, and thought about how shallow the water in this lake was. The lake was enormous, but when you swam in it during the summer, there was no point where the water reached higher than your neck.

She didn’t see her husband again until 1934, in Prague, and from there the two of them applied for a visa to the Soviet Union. Shortly after their arrival in Moscow, they heard Dimitrov speak at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. In his speech he said the same thing as her husband two years before: If the Social Democrats hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the Communists, but instead had joined with the Communists to create a united front against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have been a majority for Hitler.

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?

Never did anyone display a more upright and incorruptible character than my husband. In the three years we spent in the Soviet Union, H.’s every thought was devoted to working in the service of Socialism, combating Fascism, helping the Party.

Only after she had fallen in love with him had she realized what a great longing she’d always had to be knowable to another person: to be one with herself, and at the same time with another. Everything within her that she had secretly identified as wrong, all the trespasses she had committed, imagined, inherited, or desired — he’d laughed away all her shame and, with it, her susceptibility to blackmail. Love had meant saying what was in her heart, and this saying meant freedom, and for the first time her fear of not being good enough had gone away.

And hadn’t Lenin’s principle of criticism and self-criticism within the Party originally presupposed — and also set as its goal — absolute equality among all comrades and their mutual trust? Was it not this principle that was to facilitate growth? The more radically the individual set his own limitations aside, the more firmly the whole cohered. Why had G., then, whom she had always referred to as her clever friend, not sacrificed his friendship with A.?

Truly we are coming to know one another in the course of these exchanges, we see each other quite clearly. This is my profound insight, what I understand here as a Bolshevik, what I experience: Bolshevism’s power, its intellectual power, is so strong that it forces us to speak the truth. As Communists we should show our faces, in other words show the entire person. You can’t just say that you didn’t have time to be vigilant because you had to bring money to your wife at your dacha. When we have been successful in creating a clean atmosphere, we will truly be able to work cleanly and productively.

Until recently, she’d shared her husband’s view that it was crucial they scrutinize their own ranks closely to keep the core stable. She’d reclined on the sofa as he sat in an armchair, reading to her from the thick volume containing the latest report on the court proceedings. After Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev — the original revolutionaries, once lauded as Lenin’s stalwart brothers-in-arms — Bukharin, too, had made a public confession, declaring himself guilty of conspiracy and treason, and he had been condemned to death and shot. In his last plea, he’d said: When you ask yourself, “If you must die, what are you dying for?”— suddenly a pitch-black void appears before you with shocking clarity. There is nothing worth dying for if you want to die unrepentant. He’d taken this opportunity to declare his loyalty to the Soviet Union one last time.

She and her husband had met Bukharin right at the beginning of their time in Moscow. The very day they arrived, he had telephoned the hotel of the Austrian and German comrades who’d just escaped from their own countries — countries where they’d been in hiding — and personally delivered a piece of bread and bacon to each of their rooms.

Now, would she still have a chance to describe the sound the pages of the thick book made as they turned? Page after page, she heard in her husband’s voice the way these living beings were transformed into ghosts.

Only now that she is alone has she begun to ask herself if it is really necessary to radically cut away everything that is weak or gravitates to the fringes. The core of a sphere, her little sister would probably say (she who was always so good at math), is basically just a point, but one whose size approaches infinity on the negative axis. But what was the core? An idea? An individual? Could it be Stalin? Or the utterly disembodied, utterly pure belief in a better world? And whose head was this belief supposed to inhabit if the day came when not a single head remained? An individual could lose his head, she’d thought two years ago, but not an entire Party. Now it was looking as if an entire Party really could lose all its individual heads, as if the sphere itself were spinning all its points away from it, becoming smaller and smaller, just to reassure itself that its center held firm. Approaching infinity on the negative axis.

In Vienna her husband used to laugh whenever a theater critic wrote: He wasn’t playing Othello — he was Othello. Old-fashioned was his word for this mania for perfect illusions. He interpreted the flawless melding of actor and mask as the pinnacle of bourgeois deceit, and now, in the Land of the Future — where the labor of all for all supposedly had been stripped of deception, where individual gain resulted in profit for all, while egotism and tactical maneuvering could be eliminated before they arose — he himself stood accused of duplicity? Had they, as people on the run, changed their names so often their own comrades had lost all memory of what lay behind the names? Why else was there so much talk of costumes and masks? Or had they, locked in battle with an external enemy, begun to turn into this enemy without realizing it? Would this new thing hatching out of them bear them ill will? Had their own growing gone over to the other side unbeknownst to them?

The head of any dialectically functional human being contains all thoughts. It’s just a question of which thought I let out. Obviously man is guilty. Yet the thought also arises that man is innocent. I cannot escape this dilemma by constantly harping on the young poet D., who is innocent. It keeps coming down to the same thing: on one hand, innocent D., and on the other a random arrest. The man is innocent, and I see that he is innocent, I try to help prove his innocence, and then he is arrested, and this means that the arrest was random. But since an arrest is never random, it is therefore proven that the man is not innocent. Therefore I am willing to concede the point to you, in a case where you are in the wrong.

On this bit of steppe, 45.61404 degrees latitude north, 70.751954 degrees longitude east, there are only three months a year without frost. In only a few weeks, the grass will lose this green tint it displays, it will turn brown, and when the wind blows one stalk against the other, it will rustle faintly. Before the first snow falls, tiny ice crystals will cover the blades, and even the little stones on the surface of the steppe will without exception be covered with hoarfrost and freeze together. Once the frost sets in, it will no longer be possible for the wind to blow the stones about.

The weekend before his arrest, her husband had gone to a meeting and, upon returning, in distinct contrast to his usual habit, had said nothing at all about what had been discussed there. It was nearly dawn when he got home, and he did not laugh away her fears, baring his teeth and flipping back his strand of hair; she had seen him this tight-lipped only once before, that time two years earlier when he had learned that his application for membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been approved, but hers had not.

Now that her husband has been taken away, she knows that when she sits here putting her life to paper, she is playing not just with her own life, but with his as well, not just with her own death, but also with his; or is she playing against death — or does all this pro and contra make no difference at all? She knows that with every word she writes or leaves unwritten she is playing with the lives of her friends, just as her friends in turn, when they are asked about her, are forced to play with hers. G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, had to the bitter end refused to sacrifice his friendship with the Trotskyist A.

I understand that Comrade H. has been living for approximately three years together with his wife, Comrade H., in Moscow. He met her before this, but three years ago is when they entered into wedlock. Did Comrade H. question other comrades with regard to his wife’s earlier life, or was she his only source of information?

My wife, Comrade H., as many of you know, has been a member of the Communist Party of Austria since 1920.

Immediately before her departure to Moscow, she had contact in Prague with the Trotskyite A.

I can’t respond to that, I was still in Berlin at the time.

We have not only the right but also the duty to speak about everything we know.

Only in his later work did A. develop Trotskyist tendencies. I can assure you that Comrade H. did not identify with him and, above all, where his assessment of the Soviet Union was concerned, she vehemently disagreed.

It seems to me her relationship with A. went beyond mere friendship. In any case, the two of them embraced when they parted on the evening in question, according to the report of Comrade Sch.

I can’t respond to that.

Answer this question: Could Trotskyite, semi-Trotskyite, or oppositional leanings be observed in her?

No, not at that time.

What does “not at that time” mean? I have to say I don’t have the impression that this testimony is completely truthful. What’s hiding behind it? Why does Comrade H. not speak freely about the case of his wife Comrade H. in this context? Why does he have to be prompted by additional questions to speak of it?

There was no question of any opposition on her part in the sense in which we use this term in the Party.

I hope that it is clear to all our comrades how crucial it is for us to spare no effort in critical situations. These criminals who have been torturing our comrades in Germany and sending us their spies must be met with wave after wave of destruction. What if scoundrels or counterrevolutionaries like A. had managed to point a gun at Comrade Stalin? Comrades, we are faced with the question: peace or war?

Would her motherly friend O. — with whom they shared a dacha summer after summer, often staying on into September — conceal or admit under interrogation that they had all expressed doubts regarding the guilt of the young poet D. after his arrest? Might the wife of the author V. (V. had been recently condemned on charges of engaging in Trotskyist activities and shot), who was now supporting herself as a seamstress and had come to her room for a fitting, really have dug around in her papers when she stepped out to the toilet? Why had R., with whom she and her husband had enjoyed so many excellent conversations about literature early in their Moscow days, been sent off to an outpost in the German Volga Republic exactly one week before her husband’s arrest? Who was responsible for cutting the final sentence of the review she had written in July for the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung so that her critique of the book by mustached K. was transformed into its opposite? And was that good or bad fortune? She’s long since stopped getting together with the friends she used to play cards with sometimes in those first years after they arrived, and the literary working groups were dissolved two years ago. Even the assemblies of German Party members have been discontinued. Her friend C., who used to cry her eyes out in front of her all the time over her inability to have children, recently refused to so much as nod in greeting when she walked past Café Krasni Mak and saw her — the wife of H., who has been arrested — sitting at the window.

And she herself?

During the rehearsals for the last play her husband wrote before his arrest, five of the eight actors were arrested over a period of several days, after which rehearsals were canceled until further notice. Comrade Fr., the wife of one of these actors, came up to her yesterday at the café, holding the hand of Sasha, her nine-year-old son, and entreated her to take the two of them in for at least a night. I can’t, she responded. Without another word, the woman turned and went out again, holding her child by the hand. I can’t. Only a few weeks before, her husband had been folding paper airplanes for Sasha during breaks in rehearsal. It seems to her unimaginably long ago now that she learned from the poet Mayakovski: It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

In their fight against the Fascists’ despotism and contempt for human dignity, they had all risked their lives, wrestling with the death that is fascism, and many of them fell victim to it. But if the young, beautiful Soviet Union was, by contrast, Life itself (as she believes even now), then death could no longer serve as a currency here. This fmeant that if even only a single person who fought against despotism lost his life to despotism here, then his death was in vain — deeply, profoundly, in vain — and nothing that remained here deserved the name Life, even if, seen from the outside, it resembled life.

But if in the land of the future, death were still the currency with which you paid a debt you didn’t know you had — in other words if it hadn’t been possible even here to abolish the rift between human beings that goes by the names trade, commerce, and deception, if even here there were still the same accursed two sides to humanity, unbridgeable, just as in any transaction in the old world, that would mean the sale had already gone through, and all her comrades — including her and her husband — were long since betrayed and sold and now served only to bring the seller a good price: one consisting of themselves, paid not just once or twice or even three times, but ten, a hundred, perhaps even a thousand times over.

*

So have things really come so far now that all she can do is hope that the members of the secret police who seized her husband and took him away in the name of political vigilance are merely traitors, enemies of the people, that they are Hitler’s people — possibly even high-ranking ones? Not only her husband but in fact every last one of the comrades whose arrests she’s been hearing about is someone she’s known well for years. She’s now almost certain: if Hitler himself proves to be her adversary even here in the capital of the Soviet Union, only then can the antifascists’ hope for a better world possibly survive their torture and death. Or is it perhaps that Stalin himself — disguised as Hitler, who in turn is disguised as Stalin, doubly masked, doubly veiled, and thus genuinely duplicitous — that Stalin himself is acting as his own agent and, out of fear that in a good world the hope for a better one might be lost forever, out of fear of stagnation, is now trying to murder the Communist movement back into hopefulness? Or perhaps that all of them together are dreaming a nightmare from which there will never be an awakening, and in this nightmare Stalin, the good father, creeps into the rooms where his children are sleeping with a knife in his hands.

Land of ours that blooms and blossoms,

Listen, darling, listen,

Was given to us for time eternal.

Hear me, darling, listen.

Child, thy land is guarded well,

Sleep, my angel, slumber.

Red Army men watch over you.

Sleep, my darling, slumber.

6

When she gets up again to fetch more hot water from the samovar in the common kitchen for her tea, she runs into Indian comrade Al in the hallway. He greets her but today he doesn’t initiate a conversation. No doubt he, too, has heard about her husband’s arrest. Last month, when he was still new in Moscow, she and her husband had gotten into conversation with him while they were cooking, first he had leaned up against the kitchen table, still standing, then at some point hopped up on the table’s edge, his legs dangling, and finally he’d drawn his legs up beneath him, still talking, like a very-much-alive Buddha sitting there on this worn-out tabletop where the Russians had no doubt cut their pelmeni in the age of the Czars, and later Chinese comrades had rolled hard-boiled duck eggs in ashes, and Frenchmen dipped meat in a marinade of garlic and oil. She herself, on the occasion of the Seventh World Congress two years before, had used this table to make apple strudel for her Danish, Polish, and American friends. This congress had been like a powerful amorous coupling, all of them melting into one another, conjoined in their common battle for a humanity finally coming to its senses. After these meetings, she and her husband would often go on deliberating deep into the night, lying in bed, discussing what this new world order should look like, whether it was still an order at all, and what new bonds should replace the old bonds of coercion.

Then L. shoved his way in and started shouting at me. I told him to shut up, then he pushed me over to the side and started grabbing at the front of my shirt.

M. says I grabbed hold of him by the shirt. Everyone knows this is untrue. I’ve never grabbed anyone’s shirt, what an idea!

There were eight comrades standing around. I said to L., Don’t touch me. L. shouted back, Don’t touch me. So then I repeated, Take your paws off me.

All of a sudden Comrade M. said, Get your stinking paws off me.

Then L started saying, You’ll be sorry you did that, I’m going to report you to a Party cell.

Then M. shouted, Maybe they’ll wash your stinking paws in innocence for you!

Comrade L. has a booming voice, and he really let rip: Just you wait and see what I do with people like you!

Ridiculous!

In the room she has shared with her husband for the past three years, in whose emptiness she is now setting foot once more, the yellow wall hanging with the embroidered sun from their first Soviet vacation still hangs on the wall. Every morning she leaves the house before dawn and gets in line in front of Lubyanka 14 — the headquarters of the secret police — to ask about her husband; and after this, she goes to Butyrka Prison. In both places the counter clerks slam down their windows in her face. She has already written to Pieck, to Dimitrov, Ulbricht, and Bredel, but no one is able or willing to give her any information as to whether her husband will return, whether his arrest was a mistake, whether he’s being put on trial, whether they’re planning to send him into exile, or shoot him. Or whether he’s already been shot. Suddenly she remembers how her friend’s lover sat beside her that night, his tears dripping quietly to the floor before his feet. Only now does she know as much about life as he knew then. With the arrest of the person who was closer to her than any other, her own life has become fundamentally inaccessible to her.

I petition you for acceptance into the Soviet Federation and request that you give me the opportunity to prove myself as a Soviet.

7

When the elevator stops on her floor at around four in the morning, just before sunrise, she doesn’t hear it, because she has fallen asleep over the papers on her desk. Her forehead is resting on the word vigilance when the officers come into the room to arrest her. The small dark-blue suitcase that has long stood in readiness beside the door is forgotten. When silence returns to the building, the suitcase is still standing there beside the door. It contains a photograph of a young woman with a large hat, stamped on the back by the owner of a photography studio on Landstrasser Hauptstrasse in Vienna; further, a notebook filled with writing, several letters, an Austrian passport, a dirty red handbill, membership papers for the Communist Party of Austria, a handwritten excerpt concerning “Earthquakes in Styria,” a typescript wrapped in paper, a recipe for challah, and at the very bottom, a small dress for a doll, sloppily and shoddily sewn of pink silk.

And now at last she knows whose voices she has been hearing all this time, she encounters them once more at minus sixty-three degrees Celsius. How agreeable it is to be without a body in cold like this. At night in this place far beyond the end of the world, ores are separated from their slag, everything worthless is incinerated, blazing up in flames higher than St. Stephen’s Cathedral: brilliantly colorful formations, bright as the horizon itself, fountains of light more beautiful than anything she has ever seen before, how glorious, this burning of slag in the middle of nowhere, the most beautiful of all things ever.

During the day, the living hack away at the ore-rich clay, carting it off in their tipping wagons, and at night they set these fires. And in these fires, all the sentences the dead spoke back when they themselves were still alive are incinerated — sentences spoken in fear, out of conviction, in anger, out of indifference, or love. Why are you here? she asks a person she knows once uttered the words: We see each other quite clearly in the course of these exchanges. I was thirsty, he says, so I drank water that hadn’t been boiled and died of typhus. And you? she asks a person she knows once referred to a mutual colleague as a writer of trash. I froze to death. And you? What if someone sees us? that person had asked. I died of hunger. Some sentence flies up to the sky, possessing no more, no less weight than the person who once spoke it. And you? I went mad, and only death brought me back to my senses, he says, laughing, and here, seven hundred feet above the steppe, his laughter has a furry consistency. Another bit of air says, All I remember is leaning up against something because I was too weak to go on walking, and someone looked into my eyes as he walked past, since I still had eyes. I’m glad, she hears a woman’s voice saying — hears without ears, just as she sees without eyes — I’m glad, she hears the voice saying, that my tears finally abandoned me along with my eyes, because when I was arrested, my own child renounced me, calling me an enemy of the people, and so I tore up my shirt, twisted it into a noose, and hung myself from a latch.

We see each other quite clearly in the course of these exchanges.

Perhaps someone should investigate the strength of the draft created when a soul flits about like this. Perhaps someday flowers will bloom even here, in the middle of the wasteland, perhaps even tulips, perhaps someday the presence of innumerable butterflies will be just as real as the absence of butterflies of any sort today, at minus sixty-three degrees Celsius. Now, like all the rest of the dead, she has all the time in the world to wait for the arrival of different times. For the living, to be sure — who have no other time at their disposal than the one in which they happen to possess a body — the only bit of color they’re able to behold here at night, together with the dead, are these flames.

8

Last summer, when she was still alive, she, along with the other women, had to dig several large trenches just outside the camp, so when winter came and the ground froze, they would have somewhere to be buried. All of them — she and her friends, her enemies, and also those who were indifferent to them — they all dug graves to be kept in reserve.

On one particular day during the summer of ’41, she drove her pickaxe into the earth at a specific point and began to dig her own grave, without knowing, of course, that this was the exact place on all this infinite earth destined to become her dwelling for the eternal winter. The coordinates 45.61404 degrees latitude north and 70.75195 degrees longitude east would be what people would use to describe this otherwise nameless place, where on a summer’s day, at forty degrees Celsius, she would drive her pickaxe into the dry sand, making grass, tiny insects, and dust fly around, for the earth here was completely dry far down into its depths.

How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts.

One night during the winter of ’41, while everyone was asleep, the woman on duty pulled the cold right leg of a dead woman out from beneath the warm leg of a sleeping woman, she dragged the lifeless body out of the barrack, and brought it to the barrack for the dead. At such temperatures it takes less than two days for a body like this, including all the flesh covering its bones, to freeze into a skeleton.

Many years ago one person said a word, and then another said another word, words moved the air, words were written down on paper with ink and clipped into binders. Air was balanced out with air, and ink with ink. It’s a shame that no one can see the boundary where words made of air and words made of ink are transformed into something real: as real as a bag of flour, a crowd in which revolt is stirring, just as real as the sound with which the frozen bones of Comrade H. slid down into a pit in the winter of ’41, sounding like someone tossing wooden domino tiles back into their box. When it’s cold enough, something that was once made of flesh and blood can sound just like wood.