They talk as they walk, she says talk to me, which makes him suddenly mute, two or three times during their walk their hands have touched, when she said talk to me it depressed him because in the old days those were the words which signalled that he was about to be scolded, when she felt his mind was somewhere else though he was with her, and here in the street in the middle of New York City, she says talk to me, so you must laugh, talk, whatever, he begins to resent her mentally for asking this so as to ensure that all of a sudden he can’t say a thing, he refuses to look for the exact word for whatever it is when you ask someone to do something and by the very act of asking you prevent the person you’ve asked from doing what you’ve asked, talk to me, he closes up like an oyster, the reunion is already ruined.
The Lena who has come back is a Lena he had forgotten, the one who says talk to me, hawk-eyed, the one who says ‘you don’t love me, you don’t know how’, blink an eye and she’s gone, he feels close to tears, they’re standing in front of a shop window full of soft toys, huge cuddly clockwork toys, bears mainly, taller than grown men, and Hans starts laughing like a kid as he looks at these mechanical bears, childhood and innocence mixed up with a dirty story about a bear and a hunter, the hunter brings down a huge bear, two metres tall, dances round the corpse, kicks it in the ribs, returns rejoicing to his village, he feels a tap on the shoulder, he turns round, the bear’s there in front of him, two metres tall, right paw raised, claws, the palm as big as the hunter’s head, a smile on the face of the bear, can’t tell the rest, around them kiddies are laughing, Hans laughs until the tears come, he doesn’t want to leave the shop window, Lena laughs to see him like that, come on, she takes his hand to lead him away, won’t let go of it, you’re incorrigible, you deserve a good hiding, what’s got into you?
He doesn’t dare tell her the story about the bear, the hunter kills a bear two metres tall, he goes back to his village to fetch people to carry the animal back, on the way a tap on the shoulder, it’s the bear, very much alive, on its back legs, two metres, right front paw raised, the bear’s palm as big as the hunter’s whole head, the bear lowers his left paw.
Hans and Lena walk hand in hand, as they did outside the Waldhaus, in the old days, before the war, their whole future is ahead of them, they’re in the chalet in Vermont, no, in Colorado, she’s cold, he says I’ll warm you up, he is alone on the bridge of the ship, morning, Manhattan, the bliss of arriving, he knows the names of skyscrapers by heart, like he knows the peaks in a mountain range, he hears the boat’s siren, he adds mist, tattered shreds of blue through the mist, it grows clearer and clearer, Hans has stopped wasting his life, that was all a long, long time ago, in 1925, one of his favourite dreams, four years before the Waltenberg Seminar.
Once again he is in the lounge of the Waldhaus for the 1929 European Seminar, he is talking to this obstreperous adolescent who wants to reach out and take the whole world in his arms, he feels invaded once more by the same fierce joy as a journey to New York produces in him, he could leave at the end of the Seminar, with this young man, not New York, this time, but Venice.
Sitting behind Kappler and Lilstein at the Waldhaus in his easy chair in the main lounge, the man holding forth on the Neuville index, he of the strictly measurable quantity of human energy, had concluded his little talk, he was speaking now of his château in Italy, grounds infested with vipers, only one way of dealing with them, offer a reward for every viper brought in dead, to begin with it worked very well but after a while we realised that it had given rise to a thriving trade in dead vipers which extended for over a hundred kilometres, and moreover the locals deliberately left enough reptiles roaming through the grounds to ensure that we went on being a weeny bit scared.
Kappler smiled, spoke of the usefulness of vipers in the world of politics, Kappler, the absolute democrat, told Lilstein to read Lenin and Stalin because he thought it would save him, Lilstein was a cultured young man who was hurtling towards communism while letting his mind stray from time to time to the maid’s armpits and regretting the business with the air rifle, Kappler wanted him to be armed:
‘And don’t be one of those fools who shout out randy old snake every time some socialist gets up to speak.’
And very soon Lilstein was quite capable of making a connection between the instructions of Stalin and expressions used by Lenin, he even guessed several months in advance which of Lenin’s phrases Stalin would actually use, he repeated snippets once or twice, without seeming to be quoting anyone, and one day that same quote surfaced in one of Stalin’s pronouncements, it made certain comrades shake in their shoes, it’s the sort of thing that enables a man to rise in an organisation, that and arriving at the right time, respecting deadlines, knowing how to handle the files, how to report back, in a few sentences of not more than ten words each, and doing nothing before receiving precise instructions, written or verbal but always in front of witnesses.
He had one other precious quality: he never seemed sure of himself; he appeared both remote and anxious, this is what saved Lilstein later on his stool in the Lubyanka, in the early 1950s, the impression he gave his captors of feeling slightly guilty, no indignant protests, nor stubborn resistance nor cooperation in making disclosures nor garrulity either, he looked at the lamp when they told him to look at the lamp and when they turned the lamp away he looked at the telephone, as if he were expecting a call which would bring this mistake to an end.
Occasionally he would look up at the man interrogating him, simply to avoid a possible ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you’, but not for very long either, so as to escape a ‘stop looking at me with those cretinous eyes’, and from time to time make a slip, say one word instead of another, or a ‘I don’t recall’ to allow the interrogator to unload his aggression, never allow him to get to the hate stage, hands, look at their hands, don’t provoke the moment when they form into fists or when they’re placed flat on the desk, don’t concern yourself with other people, the underlings, a slap in the face, or even the ear, that stuff doesn’t matter, the one to watch is the man sitting facing you, or maybe on occasion it’s someone who steps noiselessly into the room, you haven’t turned round but you sensed he was there by the way the one who is sitting straightened, never let them fill up with anger or calmness, you’ve only one hope, the stool is vile but that’s because it doesn’t show any traces, they don’t want to do you too much damage, if your morale remains good that gives you a way forward, they haven’t yet handed you over to the butchers, there’s no one yet who is anything like the ones he’d encountered before, kein Warum, here you can, you could ask, you still have a full set of fingernails, make them want to keep you here.
Lilstein was a useful kind of a guilty party for the average accusers who are only too well aware that there isn’t much in the file, he wasn’t innocent, in those days they ended up liquidating the innocent, no one was going to admit to a mistake, with the guilty things were more violent, they howled like dogs as they died and then it was all over, whereas with someone like Lilstein with his little lies, his mild protests, his way of correcting previous statements, it all served to allow the mills of daily routine to keep turning, between two other much more significant cases, and he really did know Lenin’s writings.