The Question of Bruno

THE SORGE SPY RING

The book was auburn, with black slanted letters on the spine reading “Spies of WWII,” and, impressed onto the front cover, black letters, tiny trenches, with golden brims, reading: The Greatest Spies of World War Two. The book was big and weighty. I’d put it on my knees, but then its weight would spread my legs and the book would close itself and slip to the floor. And I’d lie on my belly and rest my head on the scaffold of my hands and read. When my elbows would begin to ache, I’d recline my cheek on the thicker half of the book, incline the other half, feeling the sticky moisture connecting my cheek and a spy’s face, secrets of WWII just inches away from my absorbing pupils.

There were lots of black-and-white pictures: a five-man column — surrounded by soldiers pointing rifles — with their hands on the napes of their necks; when I would narrow my eyes, they’d look like black-and-white butterflies; the head of a chubby member of the Rote Kappelle,¹, with an asymmetrical face: nose slightly on the left side, right eye hardly opened and seemingly asleep, mouth kept shut with effort, as if there was a spring of blood behind the feeble lips — I just knew from his face that his hands (swollen wrists, bloody, burning trenches under the cuffs) were handcuffed; a picture of General Montgomery standing, arms akimbo, turned sideways, looking at the upper-left corner of the page, with the timeless beret parallel with his gaze: General Montgomery’s doppelganger, just the head, looking at me with odd pensiveness, as if painfully aware that he could never be General Montgomery; a row of blindfolded people in white in front of the ready firing squad and a smiling officer, his right arm raised, pointing at the upper-right corner of the picture. And, near the end, there was Sorge—”at the outset of his mission in Japan”²—framed by a door behind his back, standing legs apart (left foot NW, right foot NE) in a dark trenchcoat, one hand pocketed, the other somewhat clenched, holding a purse or a camera case; and his head: fiendish ears, large and ill-shaped; lips shut tight, as if his teeth were biting the inside of his lower lip; the wide base triangle of his nose, its top angle connected, by two deep furrows, with two dark dots in the corners of his mouth; lightless twin-holes, at the bottom of which were his eyes; and the black-inked helmet of hair.

The picture was obviously retouched: Sorge’s anxiety was burdened with someone else’s curtained body. One could see the sharp cut at the verge of his collar, where his head, guillotined in a shadowy laboratory, was attached to a headless trenchcoat — plus an inexplicable excess of neck-flesh on the left side³. But I believed that Sorge was in that trenchcoat. I believed that he was about to enter the door-apparition behind his back. I believed in the totality of that picture, I believed in the apparent, and I trusted books. I was ten.

In the winter of 1975, I began to conceive the idea that my father⁴ was a spy. He had been pursuing a degree at the Leningrad Energy Institute and had often been away, going to Leningrad or Moscow⁵ or Siberia or wherever far away. At the 1975 New Year’s Eve my father was in the middle of a blizzard, immobilized at the Moscow airport; my mother⁶ was staring through the window, watching snowflakes parachuting on Sarajevo; and I was patrolling our home, vaguely missing my father, anxious to accost Grandpa Frosty (in Socialist Yugoslavia, Santa Claus became Grandpa Frosty and used to arrive on New Year’s Eve) at the very moment of his arrival and force him to exchange a plain fountain pen and fluffy sweater (both of which he had sent in advance) for some spy devices. A poisonous fountain pen;⁷ a disguise kit⁸ (with a fake mustache and contact lenses that could change the color of my eyes); a matchbox containing a micro-camera; and a cyanide ampoule, were on the list of my desires. Tired of patrolling and longing, I asked my mother what she would think if I became a spy and she said she wouldn’t mind too much, but she would be afraid for me, just as she was afraid for my father and said she would be lonely and sad if I’d change my identity and forget about her and she said she wanted me to be better than my father, not to be somewhere else all the time. That night, falling asleep by the plastic tree, on guard for Grandpa Frosty, I was imagining my father being somewhere else, in a black trenchcoat, stealthily walking down a dark hall, stopping in front of a door, looking down the tunnel-like hall behind him, unlocking the door with something in his hand, entering the room (my dreamy gaze passing, like a camera, through the wall, following him), finding the desk drawer in the darkness, turning on the desk lamp, turning it away from the window, breaking the lock of the top drawer, taking the matchbox out of his pocket, taking the file out, photographing the documents ⁹ (with blurred headings) with the matchbox (whose snapping I attempted to reproduce: “sllt sllt”). But wait, I hear footsteps, heavy thumping, I turn off the light, the footsteps open the door, cut the darkness with the flashlight, like a sword. I’m afraid that he (she?) could smell my fear, my heart is as loud as a tank engine, the door is closed and everything is fine, but I do not dare to be relieved. I uncurtain myself and continue photographing and then I hear a woman sobbing and there is another door and I open the door and a torrent of light rushes in, and a Japanese woman¹⁰ says, with a sorrowful smile: “You must go to bed now. Go undress yourself.”

From his journeys to the Soviet Union, my father would bring me dull Soviet toys which all had a sour, oily smell: gray toy car (Volga) that was sticky when touched and produced a hideous high-pitch whining sound when (seldom) driven; dun plastic train station, meant for my long abandoned train; military olive-green gun that ejected little (vomit-orange) plastic balls, instantly banned and then consequently disposed of by my mother; plethora of books about the victorious Red Army,¹¹ which I couldn’t read since they were in Russian, but I liked the pictures (plain peasant faces, scared stiff of the Army photographer’s camera) of the heroes who neutralized a German machine gun by throwing themselves at the barrel or jumped into a terrified German trench, with a cluster of hand grenades attached to their chests. But at the beginning of 1975, after a few cold nights at the airport, he brought me something beyond words: a portable telegraphic system. It was in a gray (naturally) box with a thin booklet, which had a smiling black-and-white boy with gigantic earphones on his head (but no earphones in the box). My father unpacked it: two buzzer-keys and a coil of shining copper wire. Then he put one key in our dining room and the other one in the bedroom (buzz-buzzbuzz-buzz) and the electric current (he said) carrying a Morse-encoded message¹² went over the bedroom floor, passed my father’s curled socks (he’d take off his socks first thing when he got back home), went through the kitchen, speedily crawling by my mother’s feet (going to the bathroom to vomit again), then diving under the carpet (lest someone, most likely, I, stumble over and fall onto the glass-top table to be “cut in pieces”) of the dining room and then reached the key (buzz-buzzbuzz-buzz) in front of the amazed me. I could not decode the message, so I could not reply, which made me eager to learn Morse code. My father knew Morse code very well (which fueled my suspicions) so he decided to train me. He’d tap messages at the dinner table (my mother digging a crater in the mashed potatoes and rolling her eyes) and I’d try to decode them, forgetting to chew and swallow, the mashed potatoes becoming liquid in my mouth. He’d tap “hurry up” at the bathroom door, where I was getting carried away over a book. I was getting better, I even sent him a couple of simple messages (“want dog”), but my father sustained his teaching patience only for a week or two, then he was busy, then he was off to the Soviet Union again. I continued practicing Morse code for a while, but then I abandoned practicing because it was boring to send messages into a void. Several times I played a whole spy game: I’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom (my mother innocuously watching The Sound of Music), photograph the stuff in the top drawer, the unlocked one, of my father’s desk (mainly bills) with a matchbox (a real matchbox), then I would crawl out of the bedroom, behind the back of my unsuspecting dozing mother, and go to my secret shelter under the glass-top table, and send haplessly coded messages back to the bedroom, imagining that they meant something, picturing someone at the other end of the copper wire. It was all over when I shattered the glass top, almost beheading myself while practicing seeing (seeing clearly, I should say) in the dark — a skill necessary, I believed, for any spy, let alone a great one. My mother terminated the telegraph line and I was left to send messages by telepathy (a brief and only partly successful attempt). When my father came back from the Soviet Union in April, he brought me a too-light, atrociously deformed, pigskin soccer ball.

When my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my little sister Hanna (July 4, 1975–January 31, 1985), my father was away, again. This time he was in Baku, the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan (whence, in August, he brought me four tin oil-drill towers and a box of little pipes that would have formed a pipeline, had they ever been connected). I was left home alone for lengthy periods of time and was watched over constantly, I believed, by Comrade Tito himself. It was because Branko Vukelic had told me that one shouldn’t use Tito’s name in vain, for Comrade Tito had TV monitors at his palace in Belgrade, at which he could see every single resident of Yugoslavia, at any given moment of their lives.¹³ “Now,” Branko Vukelic said, “if you use Tito’s name to swear and then you lie, or if you use Tito’s name to curse, he can see you. And if he sees you, he may decide to die and punish us all.” I was very careful thereafter not to swear, lest I be guilty of Comrade Tito’s (or someone else’s, for that matter) death. It was soothing to know, however, that I was being monitored, when I was all by myself, that if someone came to abduct me (the police or the devil himself) it would have been seen and I would have been doubtless retrieved from the sneaky villains. It also meant that I had to wash my hands after using the bathroom, couldn’t pick my nose and stick the snot to the underside of the chair, nor could I belch like a hog. I tried to locate the cameras that must have been transmitting images from our home to Tito’s residence. While Mother and Father were away, I looked into vases; I looked behind the pictures on the wall, breaking the one with them in Vienna, on their honeymoon (for which I was ruthlessly beaten when my mother came back from the hospital); I looked into lamps and light switches; I looked everywhere and the only place I could figure out as a camera location was the TV set (model Futura). It was a perfectly logical location, for, from the position of the TV, almost every nook of our home was visible — in fact, everything in the apartment except Mother and Father’s bedroom. When I wanted to be alone, I’d go to their bedroom and lie in their bed, smelling the ethereal residues of their absent bodies, watching their wedding picture on the opposite wall (they’re smiling, with a circular lamp behind them acting the moon), still suspecting that there was Tito’s camera behind their happiness.

At the time of my poor sister’s birth, I was still obsessively entertaining the idea that my father was a spy, but I hadn’t been able to find any tangible evidence. My suspicions had swollen because of my father’s long phone conferences in Russian with somebody who had never been identified; because of the letters (in colorful envelopes embellished with eventful stamps) coming from Moscow, Vladivostok,¹⁴ Stockholm, New York; because of his mysterious smiles, when he would be watching the news, as if he knew more than the bland announcers; because of his comments about the politicians: “He won’t last long,” or “He’s dead all right”; because of his secluding himself behind the bedroom door and never letting anyone see what he was doing there.

When Tito went to Cuba (a TV image of Tito and Castro hugging, smiles stowed with false teeth: Tito in his white, elaborate field-marshal uniform, Castro in his olive-gray sergeant’s uniform plus the immortal curly beard) I reckoned that I wasn’t going to be watched or, even if I was, it would be done by some of his lower officials who wouldn’t dwell over me as caringly as Tito himself would. Thus I decided to venture into going through my father’s drawers, closets, suits, and suitcases, all conveniently located in the bedroom, out of the reach of Tito’s men. I even unplugged the already turned-off TV and put a thick (Turkmenistan) blanket over it. I took down, carefully, the wedding picture and rolled down the shades. First I went through (two) suitcases, finding (two) hotel brochures: the Lux¹⁵ in Moscow and a Holiday Inn in Vienna, with pictures of reception desks, desolate rooms, and swimming pools. The Lux Hotel brochure had a smiling Russian beauty (silky braids, rose cheeks, big eyes, etc.) on the front page. The Holiday Inn brochure had a picture of a spacious hall, with an immense lantern, dissolved into glittering crystal tears, hanging from the top of the picture. I went through the inside suitcase pockets, finding business cards (in various languages, in sundry alphabets); finding unintelligible notes on napkins and exhausted railway tickets; finding a lighter (a miniature camera? No!) and a pack of Soviet cigarettes (Sputnik, with an ostentatious picture of an ascending spaceship on the box); finding mysterious rubber objects (condoms, I was to find out, a couple of years later).

Now I want the reader to assume the role of the camera, to move the objective toward me and peek over my shoulder, following my gaze. I want the camera to focus on the objects that I am about to uncover. I want the thrill of discovery to be rendered with the exactness of the detail. I want this to be documented. Turn on the light. Roll.

The left closet. First the underwear. You have to look under the neatly built pyramid of undershirts. Nothing. Under the panties. A book, with pictures: Figurae Veneris — A Love Manual. ¹⁶ Men and women, naked, assuming acrobatic positions, hairy crotches. Never mind. Towels. Nothing. Bedspreads. A cloth-covered notebook, with Mother’s name written on it, with a lock, no key. Hell. Leave it as if nothing happened. Now the drawer. Sheets of paper, documents, sorted into three separate, puzzling, stacks. First stack: floor plans of a house,¹⁷ plus charts with numbers summoned at the bottom of the last page: 1,782, twice underlined. Second stack: diplomas and resumes. Flip through: “… worked to develop more efficient ways of transmitting energy … particularly interested in international nets … Sincerely.” Third stack: four files. First file: receipts. Second file: paid bills. Third file: a diploma: “… is hereby confirmed to have graduated at the University of Sarajevo and to have attained the title of Engineer and Energy Transmission Manager.” Fourth file: pictures from the wedding. Mother holding the wedding wreath. Father touching her above the left elbow, as if pushing her to step across the edges of the picture. Mother laughing, with her chin up. Father is about to spread his arms in a gesture of asking. Mother and Father in the center of the picture, a man and a woman stepping into the picture from opposite sides, with symmetrical grins. Father hugging the woman whose back is turned toward the camera (zoom). A twinkle of sweat on Father’s forehead. Mother hugging the woman (zoom). Tears reaching the nostrils. On each picture a globe lamp behind them: dazzling, fake, immobile moon. Cut.

The middle closet. Roll. First, the shelf above the suits. Boxes of slides, almost all of them from the USSR, the rest from vacations on the Adriatic coast. Random picks: the cracked Tsar’s Knoll and my father minute by its side; Father between two guards in front of the Lenin Mausoleum: Father sending a smile toward the camera, the two identical guards behind his back, eternally erecting their left legs, with skillfully expressionless faces and the slender rifles pointing toward the respective upper corners of the picture. Mother, Father in bathing suits and myself in a baby suit in the front, and Grandpa¹⁸ and Grandma behind us (Grandma wearing a black scarf and a buttoned-up black dress), on a pebbly beach, with three towels, like welcome rugs, at our feet. Look at this: Father’s camera (Laika) and a cylindrical plastic box containing a telescopic lens. A bottle of Valium¹⁹ (“Keep out of reach of children”). A stack of blank sheets. A box of envelopes. An address book. A: Aliluyev, Alexander, rue de Victorie 101, Paris; B: Bulgakov, Sergei, Andreyevski Uzhvis 45, Kiev; V: Vadimovich, Vladimir, P. O. Box 6165, Geneva. A glass, with the Sputnik (leaving the diminishing planet behind) painted on it, full of pens and unsharpened, virgin pencils. A black-and-green Pelikan fountain pen. A heap of hotel brochures: the Luxembourg Hotel, Paris — a smiling chef over a stove, with unidentifiable blots ostensibly sizzling in the pan; the Tripoli Hotel, Tripoli — a hall with dismal sofas summoned around a forlorn table, as vacuous as if every form of life was terminated by the flashbulb. A pocket notebook (zoom) with pairs of English and Serbo-Croatian words: birth—rodjenje; blind—slijep; work—rad; arrest—hapsiti; son—sin; mother—majka; money—novae; death—smrt. The right closet. Let’s go through his suits. Blue suit: nothing. Blue suit two: nothing. Black suit: nothing in outer pockets, a personal thermometer in the inside pocket. Gray suit: the Party²⁰ member ship card, a key, a piece of paper, with a local phone number (zoom) with an “S” above it, a pack of matches (Aeroflot), a plastic spoon, a red-white-blue marble. White suit: nothing in the outer pockets, nothing in the inside pockets. Except the little pocket down here. It’s a tiny plastic cylinder, like a bottle of pills, with a gray lid, you have to press the lid down, there’s a film inside (could I have more light, please), unrolling: snapshots (negatives) of papers, one after the other, thirty-four of them, last two shots are of a river dam, it seems, and there is a miniature figure (zoom, damn it), no — can’t see. What’s on the papers? They look like documents (headings blurred), they seem to be in Russian. Would you turn off that camera and leave the room please; I need some privacy, I have just obtained proof that my father is a spy.²¹

Besides greasy toys (for me) and large cans of pickled fish (for my mother) my father brought stories from the USSR: about his travels down the Volga River, passing by towns, one after the other, made of cubicles, factory smokestacks, and an enormous Lenin statue (making a step forward, pointing toward the future); about the greatest dam in the world, on the Yenisey River — watching the boiling river at the foot of the dam was “like watching the Red Sea splitting”; about the Turkmenistan people who rode purebred horses as if they’d grown out of them; about thousands of miles of taiga, where prehistoric creatures lived and where you’d never be found if you were lost; about places so cold that your blood would just stop flowing if you stopped moving; about places where vodka was so cheap that nobody drank water. Many stories featured Professor Venykov — my father always referred to him as Professor Venykov, as if that was his christened name. The stories of Venykov were stories of placidity: about long conversations by the always warm samovar, with affordable caviar and pickled pike liver; about walks down the Nevski Prospekt, while Russian children played hockey on the frozen Neva; about Venykov reminiscing about his childhood: cherry orchards around Kiev, swimming in the Dnieper, fighting, at the age of nineteen, as a partisan in the last war;²² about his beautiful wife and two girls who were solving complicated mathematical problems when not playing piano-cello duets; about chess games²³ in the community sauna. My father claimed that Venykov’s home was his home in the Soviet Union.

In the late summer of 1976, upon a fabricated invitation from the Sarajevo Micronet Research Institute (which my father obtained through his connections), Professor Venykov came to visit us. He arrived at five o’clock in the morning, having driven nonstop for sixteen hours, from Budapest to Sarajevo (only a sip of vodka, once in a while, to keep him awake). He avoided ringing the bell and cautiously knocked at our door, not quite being there. Father and Mother hesitantly left the bed (Mother taking Hanna in her arms), exchanging timorous glances, not being able to step out of their respective dreams. My father looked through the peephole (“Professor Venykov!”), opened the door and snatched him inside, looking down the hall before closing the door. They exchanged exclamations for a while (Father: “Professor Venykov!” Venykov: “Ay, moy Pyotr! Moy Pyotr!”) then my father pointed toward my mother and me, making a motion with his hands as if opening the door behind which we were hidden (“Molodyets, Pyotr! Molodyets!”). Venykov had a pear-shaped body on the top of which there was a bald head (with a wart, like a miniature knob, on his forehead). His eyes were tired — red cracks were rushing toward turquoise irises. Behind the smell-screen of sweat, onion, and vodka, I could still discern the oily odor of my toys.

Venykov had a bath and shaved, but wore the same shirt as before (a white shirt with a pear-pattern, including leaves on the stalks). We had breakfast — Venykov enthusiastically ate away a heap of bananas (Mother informing me, by a weighty glance, that bananas are not to be touched, except by Venykov), entirely ignoring the boiled eggs and sausage. “It’s hard to come across bananas in Leningrad,” my father translated Venykov’s bananapeeling remark. After the breakfast, Venykov opened one of his (two) suitcases and pulled out, one by one, a throng of rotund matyoshky (we already had dozens on a remote shelf). Then he put a bottle (Stolichnaya), wrapped in a sheet of Literaturnaya Gazeta, in my father’s hands. As my father was peeling the bottle, Venykov was dismantling matyoshky, echoing each other, all facing different directions, as if blind. “Nuh!” Venykov said, touching the head of the largest matyoshka. “Nuh!”

That night we all watched Brigadoon on TV (Venykov mumbling, “Duraky!”) Despite my father’s protests, he went to sleep in his car — a Volga resembling a gigantic black cockroach, parked in front of our apartment building.

“Why doesn’t he sleep here?” I asked.

“He feels uncomfortable in a foreign country,” Father said. “He’s afraid of being treated as someone other than himself.”

I had been more or less convinced that my father was a spy, and I somehow learned to live with it. I could still catch a shadow passing over his face — a shadow of something that he had been doing and nobody was supposed to know about. He was still making phone calls in Russian, and the film multiplied. Venykov delivered to him an envelope, and he locked it in the lower drawer of his desk. The conversations they had in Russian, behind the bedroom door, or walking ahead of my mother and me, never sounded like conversations — rather like lectures or briefings. I couldn’t, however, make myself believe that Venykov was a spy — not once I saw him peeling a banana (his gaze following the descent of the peel) or devouring a baklava, or humming with Julie Andrews and making his hand dance in rhythm, while watching The Sound of Music. I figured that he could be a benign cover or just a naïve courier.²⁴

The Venykov weeks passed uneventfully: he was playing chess with my father (Mother: “What’s the score?” Father: “One thirty-one — one twenty-seven.”); visiting the mountains around Sarajevo; buying cheap Italian jeans from smugglers for his girls (a smuggler to his accomplice: “Get me size thirty for Brezhnev! ); going to movies²⁵ (You Only Live Twice, From Russia with Love, True Stories VI); talking to my father behind the closed doors. We’d watch his Volga, before going to sleep, seeing flashes of flesh as he was putting on his crimson pajamas. Near the end of the third week, at the end of the day that included a movie (Arabian Nights), a dinner (Bosnian cuisine), and plenty of delectable Turkish coffee, Venykov agreed to sleep in my room. Lying between my parents (my sister in her crib), I could hear the hum of Venykov’s snoring, occasionally interrupted by the smacking of his lips. Mother: “He’s not going to stay forever, is he?” Father: “He’s got to go back. His wife and children are there.” Me: “Why can’t they come here?” Father: “They just can’t.”

The following day, Venykov packed up before any of us got up (although my sister bawled pitilessly, alarming us, I suppose), had a quick breakfast with us, then kissed my forehead, shook his index finger with my sister, hugged my mother and father (slapping his back dramatically), turned on the cockroach-car, and drove back to Leningrad. “He’s home,” announced my father two days later, after a brief phone conversation. In my room, Venykov left the scent of his newly purchased aftershave (Pitralon) and a crumpled brown sock under my bed.

In October 1977, my father was arrested.²⁶ There were no screeching cars in the middle of the night, no marble-faced men in leather coats, no terrified, shivering neighbors too scared to look through the peephole, no breaking doors — not even loud fist-banging at the door. They simply called him on the phone. He hung up and said to my mother: “They want me about some traffic violation. It must be a misunderstanding. I’ll be back shortly.” He put tennis shoes (Puma) on his bare feet and was gone. He did not come back home that sleepless night or the day after. My mother was tirelessly making frantic phone calls, none of which lasted more than one or two minutes, for nobody wanted to talk to her. Her dread was increasing, and she was trying to repress it (soundlessly sobbing), while Hanna moaned all the time (refusing to eat her liquid foods). My entertaining the idea that Father was a spy had never been much more than a way to embellish my vacant childhood, but with Father’s arrest, it suddenly became palpable. My spine tingled with the pride in the ability to sense his spyness, while, at the same time, I was scared, beginning to realize that we were up against something beyond my feeble comprehension. My limbs became weightier and larger, my motion beyond my control. I constantly felt an urge to hide under the bed or in the closet, but all I could do was watch my mother swing (with ululating Hanna in her arms) back and forth, like a metronome.

Four days after my father’s vanishing, Slobodan came. He rang the bell patiently, while my mother was alternately looking through the peephole and at me, deliberating whether to open the door. “I’m a friend,” Slobodan announced. My mother opened the door, but kept it chained. “Madam,” he said and showed her the inside of his wallet. “I’m Inspector²⁷ Slobodan.” “State security,” my mother mumbled. “No need to behave like a hysterical woman,” he said. “I’m here to help.” Mother unchained the door and let him in. He went straight to the dining room, without taking his shoes off, sat down and wiped his thick glasses and vast forehead with a handkerchief, while Mother and I watched him benumbed.

“I want you to know, madam, that we know everything.²⁸ We have watched, we have listened, we know,” he said. “And I also want you to know that we have no hard feelings about you. We presume that you knew nothing of your husband’s activities. Had you known, you would have informed us, am I right? Feel free to interrupt me. I just feel that that pretty mouth of yours wants to start clattering. Cute children, madam. Are they yours? Just joking — they look exactly like you. What’s the little girl’s name? She’ll be an attractive woman, I’ll tell you. Feel free to interrupt me. You shouldn’t feel that way about me, madam. I’m a nice person. I love this country, you know, I think that we have something here, something like no other place in the world and I can tell you that there are plenty of people who think that way. We don’t want this country, what our fathers bled for, to be defiled — it belongs to us and we want to keep it. And if you don’t like it — well, you’re welcome to leave and go somewhere else, to America²⁹ or wherever the hell you want. Don’t you agree with me? Tell me, don’t you think the same way?”

My mother said: “Comrade Slobodan, I want you to leave this very moment!”

“I’ll be glad to do so, but not before I take care of several wee things. I need a nice photograph of your husband, for the papers. No? Well, I’ll take the liberty of looking for this and that. You may watch — lest I be tempted to take something for myself.”

My mother retched several times, then put Hanna into the crib and hurried to the bathroom. I heard her vomiting, as if coughing.

“Women, always vomiting. Stay away from women, little boy, that’s my advice. So, tell me about your father. Do you like your daddy? I suppose you do. When I was a boy, I always had a place where I would hide precious little things, you know, marbles, and ticklish pictures and stuff. Do you have a place like that? Does your father have a place like that? Would you show me?

My mother walked back in.

“I was just asking your boy, madam, what does he want to be in his life: What do you want to be, young man?”

“A journalist,” I said.

“Smart, very smart. You’re going to get very far, my boy. Madam, if you’d show me where your husband keeps his private stuff, I’d be thankful beyond words. No? Well, then I’ll just look around, if you don’t mind.”

He got up and paced around the dining room, pulled out a couple of books from the shelf, flipped through them detachedly, and put them back. He turned toward us, smiled, said: “Pardon me,” and slipped into the bedroom.

Mother and I heard noises coming from the bedroom: thumping of suitcases, a screech of a drawer, a snap of a locked drawer, din of sundry things being thrown on the floor. Mother held my hand, squeezing it — her hand, moist and faint. Slobodan walked out with a suitcase, shoving something into his pocket. He produced a little box (with a painted bee landing on a flower) out of his hand and said: “Condoms, my boy. Had your father had this on, you would have rotted, stuck in a sewage pipe, years ago.” My mother plucked the box out of his hand and said: “Get out!”

“If you wish to talk to me, feel free to call me. My boss always says that love has political limits.³⁰ Please, call me.” He wrote the phone number on the wall by the front door: 71–782, then opened the door and walked out. Before my mother closed the door, he shouted in the echoing hall: “We should get together sometime, now that you’re alone.”

Mother reluctantly opened the bedroom door: an open suitcase; a pile of suits (hanger-hooks looking like bowed swan heads); the Sputnik glass shattered, pens and pencils scattered around, like corpses. On the bed, there were two symmetrical foot-shaped dents, and mounted ripples on the bedspread around them.

After a month or so, Hanna and I went with our mother to visit Father in jail. The visiting room looked like a decrepit hotel hall, with stained and torn sofas and armchairs sorted into separate throngs. Father came followed by a guard³¹ in a wan blue uniform (the rim of his cap touching the top of his eyebrows). Mother immediately burst into tears and hugged Father. He sat down between Hanna (“Tata! Tata!”) and me, putting his arms around us (thin, bloody wristlets). The tip of his left eyetooth was broken and under his left ear, at the root of the jaw, there was a huge bruise, as if a shadow of the ear.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” he said.

“Shut your fucking mouth!” roared the guard.

“Did they torture³² you?” Mother asked.

“A slap or two.”

“Shut your fucking mouth!”

“How’s your school?” Father asked me.

“Fine.”

“He got the best grade in the class³³ on the history test.”

“Good,” he said. “Good.”

“What do they want from you?” Mother asked. “They’re interrogating me. They want me to sign a statement.”³⁴

“Shut your big fucking mouth! This is the last time I’m telling you.”

Father was sentenced, after a brief (closed to the public) trial, to three years of hard labor and was shipped off to the Zenica prison on January 7, 1978. There was footage shown on TV of my father (and four obscure men) in the courtroom handcuffed, as the voice-over spoke about “disseminating foreign propaganda,” about “the internal enemy who never sleeps,” about “Tito and his vision,” about “protecting what our fathers bled for.”

“We have seen it before,” the voice said. “And we’ll see it again: dissembling intellectuals, spreading dissent like a lethal germ. But this is what we have to tell them: stay away from the clear stream of our progress or we’ll crush you like snails!”³⁵

The years of Father’s imprisonment passed uneventfully: my sister was growing, learning to speak, learning to be sad; my mother became reticent; and I was going through all those adolescent things: the deepening of the voice, rebelling, reading (The Stranger, The Trial, The Metamorphosis); falling in love (a Nina, until her father forbade her seeing me). But I participated in all this half-heartedly, as if it were all happening to someone else and I was watching it with languid amazement. No one was visiting us and we were going nowhere. Only Slobodan would call once in a while (“Your father is locked behind walls with desperate men, my boy, and your mother needs all the support she can get”). Once a month, we’d go to see Father. We’d sit on the bench in the prison yard, even in the winter, exchanging petty information about our walled-off lives, too aware of the gaze of the remote guards and the sharpshooter in the watchtower. In the spring of 1979, Mother and Father sat on the bench, for two hours, mainly mute, while I was catching stray butterflies for Hanna, and morose prisoners, staring at each other’s napes, revolved around a guard (chanting: “Left-right! Left-right!”). When we came back home (after a two-hour ride in a bus full of drunken, vomiting soldiers) Mother burst into tears while unbuttoning her (black) shirt, sat on the chair and wept for hours, ignoring my repeated questions, pushing me away.

In September 1979, I wrote my first poem,³⁶ in less than an hour, as if hallucinating. The poem was entitled “The Loneliest Man in the World.” It was about Sorge and it was more vicarious self-pitying than anything else. I’m translating it (in fact, only the first of ten tedious stanzas) from memory, for I annihilated the notebook (with other, much less memorable, poems) at the peak of the campaign of self-loathing and destruction³⁷ (which also included shaving every single hair on my body) in my late teens:

Tokyo is breathing and I am not,

The curtain of rain glued to my face.

I don’t live a life, I live a plot,

Having two selves in one place etc.

I wanted to show it to my father, next time we went to visit him, but he was ill and he only wanted to know about the Afghanistan events³⁸ (political prisoners could not watch the news). This time we met him in a miasmic room, with a small window looking at the women’s prison. He was escorted by a guard, whom he nicknamed “Barabas,” and who would help him get up or walk (“You can put me back on the cross now, Barabas”). The prison uniform was dangling from his now scrawny shoulders. “I shrank,” he said.

In January 1980, Father was released from prison, diagnosed with brain cancer, curled into an old man, with most of his teeth missing. He could wear my clothes, and the wedding ring was sliding down his finger — he took it off. We rearranged our place and put the TV in the bedroom, Father taking hold of the remote for the rest of his life. He’d watch TV (mainly the news) all day, sucking a banana, occasionally passing out and then waking up from listless dreams. On his good days, he’d be drinking strong-scented tea³⁹ and tell us stories about his USSR journeys: about Ukrainian weddings, everybody dancing kolomiyka like there was no tomorrow; about nuclear submarines that could stay for days under water (crews going blind); about riding camels in Kazakhstan; about wheat fields spreading as far as you could see and beyond. Every day, he was getting smaller and smaller, as if flesh was being squeezed out of him like toothpaste.

On May 4, Comrade Tito died. He had been ailing for a long time and they had had to amputate his leg. We were, for days, repeatedly shown footage of (monopedic) Comrade Tito smiling, surrounded by glowing doctors (happier than anyone that he was alive), a wrinkleless sheet covering his retained leg. Sirens began wailing at 15:04. I looked through the window and saw everything still: people stood motionless on the street, cars were paralyzed, as if someone had stopped the film in the projector. On the black TV screen white letters emitted: “Comrade Tito has passed away”—no voice-over, no images shown. Sirens stopped wailing. I looked at the street and everybody and everything was gone, as if the ground had gaped open and swallowed it all.⁴⁰ I suppose this is Judgment Day,” my father said and turned off the TV. “I suppose this is the end of it all.”

¹ It seems that the Rote Kapelle network initially sent the information that German forces were going to attack the Soviet Union. Since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was considered to be valid and the source of the information was unclear, Moscow virtually ignored it. But when Sorge sent the confirmation from Tokyo, the information was passed on to the great Stalin himself. He, however, disregarded it and decided to trust Hitler and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Sorge’s report from Tokyo on German intentions was filed under the heading “Doubtful and Misleading Information.”

² Sorge flew from Berlin to Yokohama on Junker’s first commercial flight from Germany to Japan, with brief stops in New York and Vancouver. Besides the flight log of Flight 1995, kept in the Museum of German Aviation in Frankfurt, there are no records of this historical endeavor. There is no list of passengers, but it is almost certain that the flight was almost full. It seems that the passengers were cosmopolitan, and that the flight was tumultuous (“Winds over the Pacific were just horrid!”); that something was wrong with the heating system, so the passengers were freezing even with miraculously retrieved fur hats and leather gloves; that no one else slept on the flight; that the food was edible, but for some reason there was no water so they all drank champagne (courtesy of Junker); that the plane almost went down in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Pacific; that first men, then women, disgorged themselves all over the aircraft and the vomit froze on the floor; that Sorge briefly befriended a certain Mary Kinzie, an American poetess, which did not go unnoticed by New York gossip-scribes. On September 9, 1933, in the early afternoon, Sorge and his shadowy copassengers arrived at the Yokohama airport, reeking of vomit, emptied of champagne and lobster, with particles of undigested food thawing on the soles of their shoes. Some of them were proud of German air-industry and reliability, some of them were happy to be alive.

³ In the early sixties, in the de-Stalinized Soviet Union, the campaign of Sorge’s glorification was set on course and a number of books that contained Sorge’s pictures and previously unrevealed documents from Soviet archives were published. Most of the books were embellished (if not embroidered) with, so to speak, fictitious additions. At the same time, a street in Moscow and a tanker were named after Sorge. In the spring of 1965, the Soviet authorities issued a postage stamp, at the value of 4 kopecks, in his honor. The commemorative stamp showed Sorge full face on a scarlet background together with a reproduction of the medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.

⁴ Father: Wilhelm Richard Sorge, a German engineer, a stout man with a nipple-like wart on the nape of his neck and cloudy eyebrows. Working on the Azerbaijan oil fields, when he fell in passionate love with Sorge’s mother. Sorge was conceived and born in Baku.

⁵ Sorge went to Moscow (from Tokyo, via New York, ostensibly visiting Wiesbaden), for the last time, in 1935. In New York, he encountered, for the last time, Mary Kinzie. In her memoirs, entitled The History of Nothingness, Ms. Kinzie depicts Sorge: “When I saw him in 1935 he had become a violent man, a volcanic drinker. Little was left of the charm of the romantic idealist, of the cosmopolitan writer whom I had fallen for on Junker’s flight. Nevertheless, he was still extraordinarily good-looking: his cold blue eyes, surrounded by circular darkness, had retained his capacity for vicious self-mockery. He said: ‘My personality is split between a man who hates himself and a man whom I hate.’ His hair was still potently black, but his cheekbones and sullen mouth were tired” (p. 101).

In Moscow, Sorge visited Yekaterina Maximovna, whom he was believed to have married in 1933, and who died in Siberia in 1943, in a women’s camp, her throat cut by a sharp piece of ice in the hand of a jealous working-unit leader. Sorge was looking forward to meeting General Berzin, but General Berzin was gone and was replaced by General Semyon Petrovich Uritsky, who was arrested and shot as a Japanese spy in November of 1937.

⁶ Mother: Nina Kobelev, a conventional Russian beauty (big eyes, bony pink cheeks, rotund nose, small mouth with thick lips, cobwebby mustache-shadow, long silky hair, etc.), the daughter of Wilhelm’s landlord in Baku. Sorge was born on October 4, 1895, after 37 hours of hard labor. Let us note an obvious thing: Germany was his Fatherland, Russia was his Motherland.

⁷ Having agreed to write the full confession, Sorge demanded a (black-and-green) Pelikan fountain pen and a hard-covered notebook with blank sheets. Yoshikawa himself delivered the writing devices. Sorge thanked him and said, in poor Japanese: “Honourable Procurator, this fountain pen is a poisonous fountain pen.” Yoshikawa replied: “Honourable Spy, it is the redeeming fountain pen.” Then they both laughed.

⁸ Sorge never disguised himself, but changed names often. He bragged to Max Klausen that he had more names than women (“And that is a lot, Max!”). He was known as I. K. Sorge, R. Sonter (Moscow 1924–1928); Johann, Sebastian (Sweden, 1928); Christopher, Christian (England, 1929); Johnson, Jim, Gimon, Marlowe (Shanghai, 1930–1932); Richard Sorge (Tokyo, 1933–1944); and there were many other, unknown, evanescent names.

⁹ Sorge’s activities were much less adventurous than an avid reader would hope. In his written confession, Max Klausen, referring to the years 1933–1939, says: “Six dangerous years passed uneventfully,” pointing toward the routine of everyday spying. Sorge’s spying meant patiently collecting diverse, and sometimes ostensibly trite, information: a gossip about the Anti-Comintern Pact negotiations; a rumor about the Cabinet changes; the essence of a drunken soldier’s swaggering about the military life in Manchuko; someone else’s husband being with someone else’s wife — useful information for the future Index; air of insurgent desires of young army officers, brought from afar by Miyagi; chitchat among foreign journalists; a careless remark of the German ambassador about “everybody being crazy in Berlin about the Russia attack.” In 1936, however, Sorge obtained a position as the unofficial secretary to the German military attaché, Colonel Ott (“an honest, pleasant, gullible man, with oily military hair, and a thousand and one WWI stories”), and in 1939 he became the German embassy press attaché. This position enabled him to access documents that were considered confidential, even top-secret. Only occasionally he would photograph the document, as in the case of the preliminary document for the Anti-Comintern Pact. Mostly, there was no need for surreptitiousness for he would take any desired document to his improvised office (ex-coffee-kitchen, still reeking of beer from the party celebrating the anniversary of the Hitler ascension) where he would photograph it, or even make notes, at his will. In his article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (January 20, 1965), entitled “The Man Who Never Knew Enough,” Victor Venykov aptly notes: “A spy is above all a man of politics, who must be able to grasp, analyze and connect in his mind events which seemingly have no connection. He must have the breadth of a historian, the meticulous powers of observation, the spirit and the mind of Tolstoy. Espionage is a continuous and demanding labor and the spy forms himself in that process. Least of all was Sorge like those secret agents whom certain Western authors have created. He did not force open gates in order to steal documents: the documents were shown to him by their very owners. He did not fire his pistol to penetrate the places which he had to penetrate: the doors were graciously opened to him by the guardians of the secret. He did not have to kill. But he was murdered by the brutal machinery”

¹⁰ In October 1935, Sorge met, at the Rhdingold, Miyake Hinako, a geisha with mild socialist inclinations (“Like many other women I used to read left-wing novels”). She didn’t mind Sorge’s relentless promiscuity (“It is only natural, isn’t it, for a famous man to have several mistresses”). After Sorge’s execution, Hanako-san patiently pestered the strict prison authorities to allow her to recover Sorge’s body. The ascetic coffin was retrieved from the part of the Sugamo prison cemetery that was reserved for nameless vagrants. Decomposition was rather advanced, and only a large skeleton remained. The large skull (she kissed his ex-forehead) and the bones were those of a foreigner; and there were clear marks of damage to the bones — the eternal result of Sorge’s war wounds. Hanako recognized the teeth (and imagined a smile) from their gold filling (from which, in 1946, she had a ring made). She had the coffin removed to the quiet Tama graveyard, just outside Tokyo. “The Society for the Relief of Those Sacrificed in the Ozaki Case” raised funds for Sorge’s gravestone, upon which the inscription, in English and Japanese, reads: “Here sleeps the brave stranger who devoted his life to opposing war, and to the struggle for the piece [sic!] of the world.” In the early summer of 1965, Hanako-san was invited to visit the Soviet Union. At the Black Sea (“This sea is not as black as our sea”—a polite chuckle from the escorting throng followed) resort of Yalta, Hanako-san saw a performance of Press Attaché in Tokyo, a play dealing with Sorge’s life in Tokyo, in which she was rendered by a certain Yekaterina Maximovna.

¹¹ Sorge worked for the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army Intelligence, which none of the members of his ring (Klausen, Voukelitch, Ozaki, Miyagi) knew — they all referred to “the Moscow center” and were happy to work for peace in the world. Jan Karlovich Berzin (real name: Peter Kyuzis) was the all-seeing head of the Fourth Bureau. He was the son of poor Latvian parents, born in Ogre, 1890. At the age of nineteen he was arrested by the Tsarist police for involvement in an assassination plot (a plan to throw a hand grenade at the chief of the Okhrana in the Bolshoi had failed), was sentenced to death and then pardoned because of his youth. He spent some time in prison but surfaced again in 1917 as a member of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party and charged at the Winter Palace. He was the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in Soviet Latvia in the spring of 1919, when the military success of the White armies led him to take over command of the Latvian Rifle Division. His first act of command was shooting the previous commander (name lost) with his Luger, having accused, tried, and sentenced him for “revolutionary feebleness” in front of the petrified Rifle Division, right through his left eye (the unfortunate previous commander’s brain spurting on the numb political commissar, who later committed suicide). The legend of this execution followed Berzin when he was being made head of the Fourth Bureau and reached Sorge the day before he was to meet him. Berzin and Sorge quickly became friends (Sorge: “I respected his blood-red facial scars and his bright gray hair”). They used nicknames when addressing each other: Berzin was Starik, Sorge was Ika. In 1935, Berzin was arrested and strangled with piano wire (a rather creative execution) as a German spy. It seems that Sorge never found out about Berzin’s political death. He never mentioned him, however, after his last visit to Moscow in 1935. Sorge never admitted working for the Red Army, and the Soviet Union maintained, after his arrest, that he had worked for the Comintern, which was supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of the Soviet authorities.

¹² The encoded message carrying reports on Sorge’s (and his co-spies’) activities were sent regularly, although at different, previously agreed upon, times. Max Klausen was the telegraphist (and only the telegraphist). Sorge trusted his blunt ignorance and his (“almost admirable”) lack of will. The radio operated from Voukelitch’s home in the Bunka apartment complex, across from a rather malodorous canal, named Ochanomizu—”honourable tea-water“; or from Klausen’s apartment, in the Akasaka district, with the windows perennially behind curtains of drying bed sheets and underwear; or, almost never, from Sorge’s place (No. 30 Nagasaka-cho) in Azabu, an affluent part of the city. The book used for coding messages was an edition of the Complete Shakespeare, probably one of the Cambridge editions from the late twenties. Max Klausen: “We would send the number of the play in the book (we called it the Book), then the number of the act, then the number of the scene upon which the scramble-code would be based. I had never read Shakespeare and found it quite boring, but Sorge was able to quote lengthy passages from any play. I remember once we used a passage, I forgot from which play, where there was a phrase ‘God’s spies.’ Sorge recited the whole passage (I also remember butterflies in that passage) and then said: ‘We’re God’s spies, except there’s no God,’ and we got a kick out of that and laughed like mad.”

(The passage that Klausen alludes to is from The History of King Lear and goes as follows:

“… so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,

And take upon’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies.”)

¹³ On the outset of Sorge’s mission to Japan, Berzin told him: “The only thing you should trust and rely upon is the omnipresence of surveillance. There’ll be eyes everywhere, and nowhere.” Sorge was all too well aware of being watched: even on the Junker flight, he felt a gaze adhered to his body (although that may have been Mary Kinzie). Once in Japan, the following things made Sorge aware of the surveillance:

a) he was being watched by Maritomi Mitsukado, a reporter for Juji Shimpo, who would always somehow find him in any bar or at any party and then ask a transparent question like: “Do you think this tyranny will last forever?” (Sorge: “What tyranny?”);

b) his maid and laundryman were frequently questioned and tortured by police;

c) a woman he slept with (name lost) got up in the middle of the night and went through his pockets, finding nothing;

d) in bars and restaurants, even at the Imperial Hotel, he was constantly monitored by plainclothesmen of the Thought Police (sticking out of the careless crowd by being too focused on him);

e) his house was searched and his suitcase examined, during his absences;

f) most of all, it was a sense that he developed, a sense that someone’s gaze was always at the nape of his neck, like a wart.

Sorge: “When you know you’re being watched, you assume a role and play it, even when you sleep — even when you dream. Most of my life I played Richard Sorge, and I was someone else, somewhere else. The ubiquitous surveillance makes everything look differently — you see things through someone else’s eyes. Everything is more present — more real — because you see nothing alone.”

¹⁴Sorge’s group maintained radio contact mainly with Vladivostok (code name: “Wittenberg”) and, seldom, Moscow (code name: “Munich”).

¹⁵ In 1924, upon a decoy invitation from the Moscow Marx-Engels Research Institute, left by the illustrious scholar Chichikov, Sorge left Germany for good and went to Moscow. Having spent some weeks in different (apart from German roaches) apartments, Sorge finally settled in the Lux Hotel, Room 101. The Lux was the place where all foreign comrades working for the Comintern lived. Indeed, a day after he took off his socks, poured down his throat a gigantic glass (with misty fingerprints all over) of vodka and unpacked his two suitcases (one of which was full of books: Das Kapital, Doctor Faustus, Seven Sweet Little Girls, etc.), he was visited by comrades Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock. The three Comintern activists were infamous for never leaving the proximity of each other (“They were called the ‘Three Kings,’ but then Klopstock disappeared in the late thirties, I think”). They talked to him all night long, becoming friends along the way, and effortlessly recruited him for the Comintern Intelligence Division.

PYATNITSKI: “The Comintern is not a party but a world organization of national Communist parties. It toils for world Communism, for the incorporation of the whole world into a single Communist society.”

KUUSINEN: “That is, it seeks to do away with private ownership of the means of production, with class exploitation and oppression, with racial tyranny, and to unite nations in accordance with a single master plan.”

KLOPSTOCK: “In form and theory, the Comintern is the brains directing activities of the sections as they endeavor to achieve a goal for this stage in the development of world Communism.”

ALL: “Welcome!”

In the thirties the Lux Hotel became a virtual detention camp, for foreign comrades were more liable to become foreign spies. The hotel tenants’ revolutionary activities were palsied, as they were perennially waiting for the NKVD footsteps to stop before their doors. A car stopping noisily in the middle of the night, in front of the hotel, would have a suicide or two as a consequence. No tenant would let the cleaning personnel into his or her apartment, and after a while cleaning was abandoned altogether. Hence already uncontrollable roaches multiplied exponentially. By 1941, none of the residents from the thirties were left in the hotel, apart from now gigantic cockroaches and a comrade from Yugoslavia, mad and dying, preserved only due to a careless bureaucratic error.

¹⁶Beside German Imperialism (1927), a study of the political will that led to the slaughter of WWI, and The Accumulation of Capital and Rosa Luxemburg (1922), a study of the life and theories of the great German revolutionary, Sorge’s most important work was Marxism and Love (1921), a work about human relationships in the context of merciless exploitation. In the Introduction, Sorge writes: “Thus love is not possible in a class society, for every human relationship is a relationship of property, exploitation, and ideological subjugation. Love as a concept can be achieved only in a classless society, where a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Just as the decisive intensification of class struggle, exposing the cruelty of capitalism, leads towards the revolution, the intensification of purely sexual relations would expose the inhumanity of individual human relations. The consequent objectified vacuum of inhumanity would simply require a revolutionary action. Love, to sum up, is not what we need now — what we need now is sex!” Scholars claim that Marxism and Love is more a product of the unfulfilled desire for Christiane, the wife of Kurt Gerlach, his teacher at the Kiel University, than a product of studious research. Some, however, tried to show that Marxism and Love (and some articles like “Anal Sex and Revolution” from 1923) influenced Wilhelm Reich. Sorge himself was not too proud of his early theoretical work: “I am convinced that my handling of these difficult theoretical questions was cumbersome and immature, and I hope that the Nazis burned every last copy.”

¹⁷ Sorge’s house was what the Japanese in those days called a bunka jutaku, or “an up-to-date residence,” which was, by contemporary European and American standards, rather small. Alphonse Kauders, who visited Sorge in 1939, described it as “scarcely more than a two-story doghouse in a small garden.” In the upstairs room that Sorge used as his study, the untidiness that surrounded him amused his friends (Kauders: “It was like a Verdun of things”) and horrified his housemaid (“German pig!”), for there was a seeming chaos of books, maps, magazines, and papers. Kauders recalls that many of the books were on economics (notably on the geisha wage system), that there were American movie magazines (obtained from Gimon), and that there was “some quite interesting Asian pornography.” There were one or two fine Japanese prints and some expensive pieces of bronze and china. There were photographs of Japanese creek dams and a photograph of Greta Garbo on the thin walls. The room also contained a gramophone, and a pet owl (fed with local mice and cockroaches) in a cage. Sorge respected Japanese customs by removing his shoes at the front door and by wearing velvet slippers on the stairs and in the tiny corridor. He slept in Japanese fashion, on a mattress laid on the tatami, with his head on a small round, hard pillow. Kauders, describing Sorge’s bathroom, remembers that the fanatically clean Sorge “scrubbed himself daily, as if there was no tomorrow, and then, drawing up his knees, climbed into the wooden tub, filled with scorchingly hot water.”

¹⁸ Sorge’s grandfather, Adolph Sorge, had served as the secretary for the First International during Marx’s lifetime. Grandpa Adolph told Sorge, throughout his childhood, Marx stories: about Marx reading Shakespeare (in English) and the Greek tragedies (in Greek) every July; about Marx and Engels playing tennis (Marx always losing), as the officials of the First International watched them, moving their heads “left-right, left-right, like a clock pendulum”; about Grandpa Adolph, stopping by Marx’s home and taking him to a bogus meeting, covering Marx’s secret trysts with his (recently fired) housemaid; about Marx’s pathological fear of dentists — Engels or Grandpa having to go with him and hold his hand as the blood soaked his immortal beard; about holding, piously, the manuscript of The Communist Manifesto, knowing that it was something that was to change the world forever, “the world that philosophers theretofore only attempted to interpret.”

¹⁹ During his stay in Shanghai, Sorge was a frequent visitor of the infamous opium houses. In 1932, in the middle of the siege of Shanghai, in Gong Li’s opium bar, Sorge had a sensation of the physically split personality: Sorge stepped out of his own body and left it to wallow in its opiatic stupor, while he walked among the defenders, with a German nostalgia for trenches, handing out grenades to poorly clad and armed Chinese, not fearing Japanese bullets, hallucinating about “the eye of the ubiquitous sniper, the infinite preciseness of the supreme sharpshooter.”

²⁰ Sorge was admitted to the Tokyo branch of the Nazi Party in October 1934. In his speech, preceding an orgiastic drinking contest, Colonel Ott said: “One cannot but feel that our cause will be only strengthened by the energy of Dr. Richard Sorge, our beloved fellow German. There’s no better occasion to use, once again, our Führer’s timeless words: ‘We have hundred of thousands of the most intelligent sons of peasants and workers. We will have them educated and are already doing so, and we wish them someday to occupy the leading positions of state and society, along the rest of our educated strata, and not the members of the alien people. We are determined to thwart and thrust aside this alien people that knew how to insinuate itself and seize all the leading positions for itself, for we want our own people for that position.’ I deeply believe that Dr. Richard Sorge’s blood will only enhance the purity of German blood. Welcome, Richard, welcome!”

²¹ The Thought Police inspectors, with the typical bureaucratic thoroughness, made an inventory of the items seized at Sorge’s house upon the arrest. Those bare objects — the physical tools of espionage — were to form the first grim and material skeleton in the body of proof to be forged against him. They included three cameras; one copying camera with accessories; three photo lenses (one telescopic); developing equipment; two rolls of film with photographed documents (the nature of the documents is unknown from the police files); one black leather wallet containing $1,782; sixteen notebooks with details of contacts with agents and notes in an unknown language; Sorge’s Nazi Party card (with membership fees paid until 1951) and a list of Party members in Japan; two volumes of the Complete Shakespeare (no data as to what edition); seven pages of reports and charts in English; and, lastly and fatally, two pages of a typewritten draft, also in English, of the final message of achievement, compiled to be sent to “Wittenberg” on October 15.

²² Sorge: “In the summer of 1914, I visited Sweden on vacation, and returned to Germany by the last boat available. The Austrian Archduke had been assassinated in Sarajevo, and World War I broke out. I volunteered for service immediately, joining the army without reporting to my school or taking the final graduation examination.” This period may be described as “from the schoolhouse to the slaughterhouse.” Sorge was sent to the Eastern Front (Galicia). He was befriended by an old stonesman from Hamburg, a real leftist, whose head was shattered to smithereens before Sorge’s very eyes, a piece of skull bone cutting his face (a permanent scar remained). In July 1915, Sorge was wounded by shrapnel in his right leg. In 1916, a bullet struck him from the back, taking out his bowels. Sorge was transported to a field hospital, conscious, watching with listless amazement his viscera throbbing in his hands. Exhausted surgeons gave him no hope of survival, but patched him up and let him occupy a bed. Sorge’s next-bed neighbor, a Jewish boy, crushed his skull against the bed frame, as Sorge was helplessly writhing in his own pain. In early 1917, fully and miraculously recovered, Sorge was sent back to the Galician front, where he became one of the best sharpshooters in his division, specializing in eliminating enemy snipers.

²³ Sorge was a passionate chess player. He played against Kurt Gerlach (Sorge: 25—Gerlach: 50); Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock (Sorge: 12—Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock: 12); Berzin (Sorge: 131—Berzin: 127); Klausen (Sorge: 1—Klausen: 0); Ozaki (Sorge: 50—Ozaki: 49); Hanako (Sorge: 111—Hanako: 0); Ott (Sorge: 45—Ott: 12); and he played against himself daily.

²⁴ Sorge: “Legitimate and plausible cover is absolutely essential for a spy. I worked as a news reporter and found that the foreign correspondent is conveniently situated for the acquisition of information of various types, but that he’s closely observed by the police. I believe, however, that the best thing an agent can do is render himself an intellectual: a professor, a writer, a scholar. Generally speaking, the intellectual class is made up of men of average or less than average intelligence, and the agent who assumes such a cover would be quite safe from detection by police. Moreover, as an intellectual with extensive scholarly connections (which he would utilize as sources or transmitters of information) he could associate with people who possess information they know nothing about, he could ask ostensibly ludicrous questions and develop trust. I think that intellectuals are the pets of the world, digging holes in the backyards of history. They can move around without arousing suspicion.”

²⁵ In the files of the Frankfurt-Police, dating from 1927, there is a vague and unconfirmed report showing that a Dr. Richard Sorge left for the United States on January 24, 1926, and spent some time in California, working in Hollywood film studios. The only admission, however, made by Sorge of visiting America was on his way to Japan. Herr Alexander Hemon, a researcher at the German Foreign Office Archives, claims that there is a possibility that Dr. Richard Sorge, identified by the police as being in Frankfurt in 1925 and 1926, was “not the Soviet spy who was working in Tokyo and on mysterious missions abroad, but someone else, of whom we know nothing.”

²⁶ On the evening of Tuesday, October 7th, 1941, Sorge had arranged a customary meeting with Ozaki at the Asia Restaurant, in the South Manchurian Railway building. He kept the appointment in vain, devouring sake, absentmindedly flirting with a woman (“a Mary Kinzie lookalike”), gorging on escargot at the next table. Miyagi was due to come to Sorge’s house two days later, but failed to appear. On Friday, October 10th, Klausen and Voukelitch called on Sorge, by a prior arrangement, in an atmosphere of mounting disquiet. Voukelitch telephoned Ozaki’s office and received no answer. Klausen: “The air was heavy, and Sorge said gravely — as if our fate was sealed—‘Neither Joe nor Otto showed up to meet us. They must have been arrested by the police.’”

After Voukelitch and Klausen left Sorge’s house and strayed toward their respective fates (Voukelitch: died of typhus in the prison hospital; Klausen: scorched in his prison cell by an American bomb during an air raid), Sorge could not rest and instead made frantic love to Hanako, who was gentler and smoother than ever. At two o’clock after midnight, a plainclothesman (name lost), with two uniformed, sleepy policemen, knocked politely on Sorge’s door and, receiving no answer (Sorge and Hanako approaching another climax), shouted: “We have come to see you about your recent traffic accident.” Sorge appeared at the door in pajamas and slippers and then was, without further exchange, bundled into an inconspicuously black police car, protesting (in whisper, so as not to wake his neighbors) that his arrest was illegal.

²⁷ The procurator directly responsible for the interrogation of Sorge was Yoshikawa Mitsusada of the Thought Department of the Tokyo District Court Procurator Bureau. Yoshikawa had an extensive knowledge of current political and economic thought, including Marxism. It was rumored that he had been a Marxist himself when he was a student at Tokyo Imperial University. Soon after graduating from the university, he had written a comprehensive study of the geisha wage system. It seems that there was some mutual admiration between the two of them. Yoshikawa: “In my whole life, I have never seen anyone as great as he was.” After the sentence, at their last meeting, Sorge asked Yoshikawa to be kind to Hanako-san: “She will marry a professor in the end and have a boring and happy life. Don’t do anything to her.”

²⁸ Some of Sorge’s information, seemingly petty, was passed on by way of the Fourth Bureau to the GPU, which used it to build the foundations for what would become the KGB’s Sixth Division of the First Directorate — the infamous Index. The Index was a vast collection of biographical and personal data about everyone who might, even very remotely, be of use at some time or another, to Soviet espionage. The Index files contained information about sexual preferences (obtained by voyeuristic monitoring or tempting agents); eating (restaurant bills, etc.), and sleeping (calls in the middle of the night, monitoring, etc.) habits; about sports teams affiliations; about reading interests (subscription lists, library records, etc.) and, often, recorded stories, apparently unrelated, which helped the one in charge of the particular individual to assess what sort of person he or she was to utilize. The information could be used for blackmail, or for assuming the right approach when recruiting, or for plugging damaging information into the public’s mind. Cold War defectors brought numerous stories about the Index and, almost without exception, claimed that the official slogan was “We know everything!” In pre-computer times, only the Nazi Gestapo had much the same kind of organization, but it was not nearly as detailed nor all embracing as the Index. There are claims, dating all the way from the sixties, that the United States Government agencies (CIA, FBI, or both) are building a computer database, based on the principles similar to the Index’s, but none of those claims has ever been confirmed.

²⁹ Major General Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s Chief of Intelligence (1941–1951), confiscated all the Japanese Sorge files that survived the leveling of Tokyo and conducted an investigation of the Sorge case, which helped uncover many a Communist network back home in the United States of America. In his book Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring (1952) he aptly notes: “Though the work of Dr. Richard Sorge and his companions belongs to history, the methods of their work should serve as a clear warning for today and for the future. They concern not just the intelligence officer but every good citizen. Some of the implications are frightening. One begins to wonder whom one can trust, what innocent-appearing friend may suddenly be discovered as an enemy.”

³⁰ In August 1941, Hanakosan was summoned to the Thought Police headquarters and urged by a man named Nakamura to break off relations with Sorge (“They don’t know what loyalty means! They don’t know the value of the family!”). The typically Sorgean, sardonic reaction was to invite Nakamura to dinner — an invitation that was embarrassingly ignored.

³¹ In the Sugamo prison, Sorge was befriended, somewhat surprisingly, by Captain Ohashi — the head of the guards. After Sorge had written his confession, Ohashi brought newspapers to Sugamo everyday, together with a supply of Sorge’s own tea. Sometimes, they’d drink tea together in Sorge’s cell (Sorge: “If I am sentenced to death, Captain Ohashi, I shall become a ghost and haunt you”). In October 1944, after the execution day had been set, Ohashi bought some fruit and sake and gave what he described as a “farewell party” for Sorge. Ohashi begged a farewell gift from Sorge — preferably Sorge’s black Italian shoes with leather soles and silk laces. After Sorge was led to the execution, the polished pair of shoes was found in his cell (toes facing the wall), with folded silk socks inside, and a note for Ohashi: “I will never forget your kindness during the most difficult time of my eventful life.”

³² Before getting to Yoshikawa, Sorge went through the obligatory interrogation conducted by lower procurators, which chiefly meant rather routine torture: Sorge was compelled to remain in a kneeling position, in formal Japanese style, for hours, while three procurators struck him repeatedly, stamped their feet on his knees, or twisted his head and arms in a judo hold. On occasions, they’d burn hair or pierced particularly painful points (nipples, testicles, anus) on his body. Every once in a while Sorge would just close his eyes and try to ignore the immense pain. The momentary trance would be smashed by a full-fist blow from behind to his ear or the nape of his neck — the pain would be so intense that Sorge vomited uncontrollably. Naturally, he did not sign the confession under torture.

³³ While in high school, Sorge’s best friend was a Jewish boy named Franz, with whom he shared an interest in German history — particularly Barbarossa and Bismarck. The friendship was abruptly broken off after Franz tried to kiss Ika, over the book about Barbarossa’s incursion, full of pictures of heavily armored German knights on stout curtained horses.

³⁴ Sorge broke down in the-Buddhist chaplain’s room in Sugamo, after the signed statements by Klausen, Voukelitch, Ozaki, and Miyagi were shown to him. Yoshikawa made the following appeal: “What about your obligations as a human being? Your friends, who have risked their lives and families to work with you, for your cause, have confessed and may hope thereby to secure some mitigation, however slight, of their sentences. Are you going to abandon them to their fate? Are you going to betray them? Are you going to be remembered as a typical Western man, caring more about himself than anyone else? If I were in your place, I’d confess.” Sorge said: “Honourable Procurator, I have been defeated, for which I congratulate you,” after which he requested the pen (black-and-green Pelikan) and paper (blank sheet, hardcover notebook). He wrote an autobiographical confession, which amounted to some 50,000 words and began with the words: “For the first time in my life, I want to tell the truth: I have been a Communist since 1928.”

³⁵ Neither the German, Japanese, nor Soviet public was ever informed about Sorge’s trial and execution. Indeed, there was no official acknowledgment from any of the governments, apart from a brief cable from the German ambassador (recently promoted ex-Colonel Ott) in Tokyo, closing the case as far as Berlin was concerned: “The German journalist Richard Sorge who, as previously reported, has been condemned to death for espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, was, according to a communication from the Foreign Ministry, hanged on November 7th.” (Let us note a well-known fact: November 7, 1944, was the twenty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution.)

³⁶ In 1919, Sorge wrote a poem which began with the line: “Eternally a stranger, fleeing from himself” and read it in the Gerlach’s salon before the audience of leftist university professors, Christiane, and Kurt himself. Kurt Gerlach mercilessly mocked Sorge’s poetic instincts: “‘Fleeing from himself — bah! Where would you go? That’s bourgeois gibberish, Ika. Man is a product of social relations — formed in history by history — not a self, not an essence hoarded in the center of the metaphysical fluff. ‘Eternally a stranger’—bah!” Sorge burned the sheet with his poem and made no literary attempts (his confession notwithstanding) for the rest of his life.

³⁷ After the disastrous courting attempt, driven by the choking desire for Christiane (“Dear Ika! I have liked you, even your self-mocking and sardonic wit. But what you did last night is not what a decent woman can bear …”), Sorge attempted suicide. Lacking courage to end his life with his mind clear, he fueled his death wishes with cheap pear schnapps, while a razor lay, ominously, on the table before him. The courage, however, reached its zenith after the second glass, declining rapidly thereafter, until he passed out. He woke up sixteen hours later (reeking of vomit, emptied of schnapps) not knowing where he was or why he was there. After that unfortunate incident, he would see Christiane only from afar, embers of his former desire suffocating under the ashes of orgiastic rampages.

³⁸ During Sorge’s preliminary trial, Stalingrad was under siege. Sorge, who perceived that this was the battlefield where the war was to be decided, took great interest in news about the battle. He’d ask Yoshikawa in the court, whispering, about Stalingrad, while the judge would be talking to his clerk. Yoshikawa would reply in undertone, telling him about the general situation (“They’re keeping their positions,” or “It looks good”). The preliminary judge knew what was going on, but did nothing to stop them. When Stalingrad was saved, Ohashi watched Sorge, through the peephole of his cell, dancing, clapping hands, and kissing the walls with joy.

³⁹ Moments before the execution, the chief chaplain of the Sugamo prison (accompanied by Yoshikawa and Ohashi) offered Sorge tea and cake and said: “Life and death are one and the same thing to one who has attained personal beatitude. Impersonal beatitude can be attained by entrusting everything to the mercy of Buddha.” Sorge said: “I thank you, but: no!”

⁴⁰ Sorge was led into a vaporous, windowless, bare room, with a gallows standing in the center. He was led across the room and placed beneath the gallows, while a noose was affixed around his neck. There was no staircase to climb, no platform to stand on. The trap was in the floor, immediately beneath his feet.