‘And when you look in the mirror, you now have two unpleasant faces to contemplate: Narcissus and his papa, Monclar’s prosecutor and Pétain’s minister. Please remain seated, you want me to reassure you? You’re not the only one, and there’s worse to come.’
And finally Lilstein gets round to speaking of the death of comrade Sarah Lilstein, Doctor Lilstein, ‘a great figure in the international workers’ movement’, died of pneumonia, Moscow, 1946, pneumonia, a side-effect of Auschwitz, is Lilstein really speaking of his mother or of one of his own victims? Not long ago in Moscow, some well-intentioned soul passed Lilstein a manuscript, the notes the doctor took at his mother’s bedside just before her death, it was an odd gift.
At first, Lilstein had had his doubts, just around the time that he’d also had doubts after learning of the report on Stalin’s crimes attributed to comrade Khrushchev, there certainly were errors, with him as victim, not Stalin, the same blunders as you get in a war, a class war, but it wasn’t Stalin who fouled up, it was his underlings, Michael Lilstein was summoned to Moscow, he was received at the highest level, so you’re finding it hard to believe Khrushchev’s report, Misha? You’ve been through the mill yet you see yourself as an unfortunate exception, an intelligence worker caught up in a regrettable shambles, the stool, the endless screw and the camp, all because of the fall-out from some stupid botch-up, and Iosif Vissarionovich wasn’t in the know, nothing from which to draw sound conclusions, or better still, you sacrificed yourself after convincing yourself that it all served some useful purpose.
And while everything was collapsing around your ears, the others, taking their lead from the role of villain which you agreed to play, became more aware, harder-working, more disciplined, and were freer to be so, and you refuse to believe it when a report says you passed on the names of innocent people, because you did actually pass on names at the time, and you’d have talked so that the terror could go on in its mindless way, it was like giving a razor to a chimpanzee, you were willing to endure the worst in order to save the best, comrade Lilstein, and I don’t want anybody telling you that all you did was to help a chimpanzee play with a razor.
My dear Michael, you don’t believe wholeheartedly in Nikita Khrushchev’s report, so you won’t believe in the other report either, unless that report makes you want to reread the Khrushchev report.
And Lilstein was given an unedited copy of the report attributed to Khrushchev and then the notes written by his mother’s doctor, we’ve always trusted you, we’ve taken a lot of risks on your behalf, Michael, a great many risks, when we decided to send you off in short order to the steppes in the east so that you wouldn’t have to face the sorting of the sheep from the goats after Auschwitz was liberated, don’t you remember the looks on the faces of some of your comrades when the Red Army pulled you out of the camps in Poland? The way they said see you soon? No, you thought you had nothing to fear, at the time it was a bit obvious keeping you well away from the screening process, true you’d acquitted yourself magnificently in the camps, there was no better organiser than you, and at the same time you had one thing going for you, you weren’t popular, that is a valuable quality the way things are these days, a few months in Kazakhstan, the sorting of wheat and chaff became less urgent, a short spell in Moscow so we could have a closer look at you, and we quickly sent you home to Rosmar, that was just ten short years ago.
You did well at Rosmar, Misha, that general was a fool, but he gave you an opportunity to prove yourself, and then we redirected you towards the external intelligence service, that’s what saved you, we needed you, we needed your pre-war contacts, it was urgent, an invaluable source, but you were also dynamite, you’d committed a mortal sin, at a meeting at the start of the 1930s you’d seen your comrade Ulbricht sitting on a platform with Goebbels, it was in the great hall of the Friedrichshain, now that should have got you sorted for good but you were lucky, you were closely acquainted with certain people whom we needed, you had a great big American secret within arm’s reach.
You showed you had what it takes, the men at the top were very pleased, you could have blown up in our faces but you really did us proud, it lasted five very good years, we showed the Americans and the English a thing or two, in 1951 it was your other mortal sin which unleashed the dogs, couldn’t you have phoned Adenauer or Bahr? or Bezukhov? no your name is Lilstein, that’s bad, you had that bastard Abakumov snapping at your heels, even Beria was scared, he might have come to your defence, he could have gone to see the Big Man with the moustache and said this comrade is not a cosmopolitan snake in the grass and I still need him.
Beria didn’t dare, all we could do was take some of the heat out of the situation, have you interrogated on the stool, keep your record out of it, even so at Magadan things got out of hand, and even when Stalin died and you were released and returned to your responsibilities, you had to pledge your enthusiastic support for Beria, it wasn’t the right time, a neutral reunified Germany, a fine idea, but the timing was all wrong, but once again we saved our deposit, we told Malenkov and Ulbricht that you were our source of information about the troublemakers, you spent your time making moves you shouldn’t have made, a real gift for the inappropriate move, we took many risks for you: crawl out of the sandpit, Misha, you’ve got to play with the big boys now.
Lilstein thanked his Soviet comrades who said they’d taken risks so that he would be spared the worst, maybe it wasn’t true, maybe nobody had been taking risks, maybe it was just a by-product of the bureaucracy, and at the time Lilstein had definitely had the feeling that he was being kept out of the limelight, that someone, perhaps the same someone who had pushed him into a car one morning with a blindfold over his eyes, was trying to spare him the worst by toning the treatment down, but after eighteen months in the camp he’d also felt that he was no longer being protected, he was sent out to do harder and harder labour, the sort you come back from feeling weaker and weaker, he saw those around him die more frequently, the comrades who said they’d always taken risks had been unable to take any more, if, that is, they’d ever taken any, but you could always pretend to believe the comrades when those who claimed to have taken risks seemed also to have taken over power, there had to be a side to be on, so some spring-cleaning is called for, open the windows, we’ve always trusted you, Michael, so here, read the notes your mother’s doctor ran risks to take instead of letting the grave swallow the errors.
One morning, the doctor saw, drawing up outside the clinic reserved for high-ranking Party officials, the kind of car which normally brought only his most prestigious patients, just one army officer got out, silver-blue uniform, as worn by Kremlin guards, a colonel’s uniform, a life or death rank, not the sort of man you’d want to meet so early in the day, but the doctor had felt relieved that it was that day and not another because he would be able to tell the colonel that he was going to save comrade Sarah Lilstein using drugs salvaged from the imperialists, he was very hopeful of saving her, a modicum of technical expertise borrowed from the West but also a sizeable input of Soviet know-how guided by the directives of the great Stalin.
The officer said that given the alarming nature of comrade Lilstein’s state of health, comrade Stalin had instructed comrade Ivanov to prepare a speech to honour comrade Lilstein at her funeral and that he had come to make certain arrangements in connection with the ceremony, the doctor said that fortunately there would now be no need for any such arrangement and the colonel repeated that comrade Stalin had instructed comrade Ivanov to write the funeral oration.