The little girl wore a beatific smile and the grandfather smiled beneath his cap, the father is executed during the purges of the following year, the mother exiled in the north, and the mother dies of typhoid, though not according to a KGB note found later, the note asks Moscow what shall we do with this woman who most likely knew certain things? and the reply slip is rubber-stamped: ‘For Elimination’.
The little girl was luckier than her father and mother and the great communist philosopher who gave philosophy lessons to the people’s father, I would like, the people’s father told him, to learn all about Hegel, and everything went smoothly, and when the professor reached the dialectic of reason he was dispatched to a camp, Sarah Lilstein hears the voice of her friend Aïno Kuusinen, wife of one of the leaders of the Komintern, said I was invited with my husband Otto, in 1928, Black Sea, a cruise, lovely boat, a small very ordinary cabin, a sailor brings champagne, biscuits, lovely song on the gramophone, ‘Souliko’.
I myself shall serve my guests, says Stalin. We sip our drinks, Stalin replays the record, he drinks, stares at us, laughs, when the Georgian song ends he plays it again, serves another round of drinks, laughs louder and louder, starts to dance, plays the record once more, replays the same song all through the afternoon, it grows less and less lovely, Stalin jigs up and down, he shouts with laughter, he is drunk, from time to time he stands at the ship’s stern, gazes at the water and the wake as it closes up behind the ship, then returns looking bored.
Again he starts jig-jigging to the music of the gramophone and all the while never stops observing us, the Komintern transmitted to the NKVD information given to it by the NKVD, you’ve got it, closed-circuit, Willi Münzenberg has links with Radek, Radek is shot, Münzenberg refuses to return to Moscow, a three-year reprieve, the NKVD finally catches up with him in a forest in France, that’s the story, Stalin is happy, why did we ever allow that drunken Georgian to grow so big?
Why? Because you were bastards, cowards, fools, psychopaths, monsters, devils, that’s the answer you’ll get from the moralists, psychologists and believers, so lump them together with the Orthodox popes, the rabbis, the bastards, the cowards, the commissars, the psychopaths, it’s no use, Stalin already did it, he had the brain of an Orthodox pope, a psychopath and a rabbi, and a commissar too; when they all landed up together at twenty below, each of them given a pick to hack at the permafrost, and among them some were innocent, Sarah tried to do something, no longer out of duty but from the remorse she felt at not having done what now clearly appeared to have been the duty she should have done when everything was already beyond the reach of remorse, or rather she acted not from remorse but because from that time on there could never be anything else, not remorse nor hope, even hope had become something dirty, Thälmann died at Buchenwald and his secretary Werner Hirsch died in the Lubyanka, Sarah spoke and talked and spoke out.
‘So you see, young Frenchman, the worst of it was reading what my mother thought at the end of her life, my mother never betrayed anything or anyone, I don’t think she ever committed a crime but when she stopped and looked back over the road that had been travelled all she saw was a petrified storm, even in Doctor Zhivago, at the end there is no paradise but there is still a desire for it, a hint of “in spite of everything” with the young people who will fall in love, a red scarf tied round their necks, it still reads like a progressive novel, whereas in the good doctor’s notes was a half-century predicated on a paradise to come and it turned my stomach.’
*
That morning, in the Konditorei in the village, Lilstein’s other interview had proved to be very difficult, much more so than his talk with the ‘young gentleman of France’. Kappler had wasted no time and immediately barked at Lilstein:
‘They put pressure on the Hungarians to fight and then left them in the lurch, CIA broadcasts told the Hungarians to take up arms, to set up a central military command, you know all this far better than I do, Lilstein, Radio Free Europe told the insurgents, go to it, reinforcements are on the way, the station was CIA-controlled and people believed what it said. That’s why I’m going back to Rosmar.’
Kappler’s voice booms in the dim light of the Konditorei, even the patron behind the bar does not succeed in ignoring a voice which threatens to explode at any moment. Kappler continues to speak and in his voice there is hatred for anyone who refuses to believe what it says. Lilstein has never seen his old friend like this:
‘I’m going back to Rosmar because the Americans made the Russians believe that they would intervene to help the Hungarians, they said to the people of Györ and Budapest go ahead NATO is coming to the rescue, the Russians laid about them as only they know how, maybe they only went at it so hard because they thought NATO might turn up and NATO didn’t budge, I know now that there’ll be no cavalry riding in from outside, I hate Russian tanks but I hate even more the scum who are now shedding crocodile tears, they landed the Hungarians in the deepest shit and now they’re staging a great international weeping-and-wailing-fest, there’ll be no serious intervention from outside.’
And Lilstein knew then that he would lose, that Kappler had looped his loopiest loop, no hope of any intervention from outside, he has just one hope left, that something might turn up from inside the country itself, that’s why he’s going back to the GDR, Lilstein has twigged that Kappler still had that one hope left: he wanted to make a difference.
If he was to be prevented from returning, this last hope had to be destroyed, Lilstein had a choice, either kill off the object of that hope or cut the legs from under the man who hoped it, at first he opted to destroy Kappler’s hopes, he did not draw pictures for him or offer an analysis, he just said:
‘All my Minister’s good at is scratching his arse, and he’s the second highest-ranking minister of the State which you wish to join, he’s the Interior Minister of the Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ State and a member of the Politburo of the Unified Socialist Party of Germany, the second most important person in the country, and all this Minister is good at is arse-scratching, and that’s the kind of country you want to go back to?’
That made Kappler laugh a long, optimistic laugh, he glanced up towards the patron of the Konditorei, pointed to the empty carafe, the man came over to serve them, Kappler joked with him, he was almost relaxed.
So then Lilstein decided to disable Kappler, he had a choice of allowing him into the GDR to be roasted on a slow spit or do him real damage so that he might live:
‘I know exactly why you want to come over to us, Herr Kappler: eccentricity. You pretend to be eccentric because you’ve turned into a second-rate author, a writing machine, an old bruiser.’
And Lilstein put in the boot:
‘You’re trying to act like a somebody because nowadays you write like a nobody.’
Kappler flushed, Lilstein went on: