While I was at it, I decided I might as well type it out. I had seen OGPU mentioned in other books, and knew that it was the same as the NKVD or, indeed, as the later KGB, that is, the Soviet Secret Service. Beria was, of course, the notorious Lavrenti Beria, Commissar of Internal Affairs, chief of the secret police for many years, and, up until Stalin's death, Stalin's most astute and ruthless instrument in the organisation of plots, liquidations, purges, settlings of scores, forced recruitment, repression, blackmail, smear and terror campaigns, interrogations, torture and, needless to say, espionage. As for SMERSH, an acronym I did not know, Fleming explained in an author's note signed by him, that:
SMERSH – a contraction of Smiert Spionam – Death to Spies – exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet government. At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikov was its chief. My description of his appearance is correct. Today the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them – at No. 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow…
I had a quick look at Chapter 4, which, under the tide 'The Moguls of Death', opened with the same or similar facts:
SMERSH is the official murder organization of the Soviet government. It operates both at home and abroad and, in 1955, it employed a total of 40,000 men and women. SMERSH is a contraction of 'Smiert Spionam', which means 'Death to Spies'. It is a name used only among its staff and among Soviet officials. No sane member of the public would dream of allowing the word to pass his lips.
When pedestrians walked past No. 13 of the wide, dull street in question, the narrator went on, they would keep their eyes on the ground and the hairs would prick on the back of their neck or, if they remembered in time and could do so inconspicuously, they would cross the street before they reached the ominous, inelegant, ugly building. But who knows, and I had no idea where to look in order to check if SMERSH really had or hadn't existed or if the whole thing – starting with that author's note – was a novelist's trick to support and confirm a false truth.
I returned to Rosa Klebb and Chapter 7. The truth is that, until then, I had never read a single line by Ian Fleming, but like nearly everyone else, I had seen the early Bond movies. In the cinematographic version, the character was, I seemed to remember, an older woman with short, straight, red hair, who was utterly lacking in charm or scruples, and who, in the end, confronted Connery in a way that proved unforgettable to the boy I must have been when I saw From Russia with Love in Madrid (I presumably had to sneak into one of the more accommodating cinemas: under the idiotic censorship laws of the Franco regime the Bond films were deemed suitable only for over-eighteens): she operated a mechanism that made terrifying knives appear horizontally out of the tip of one shoe (or possibly both), each blade being impregnated with a fast-acting and deadly poison, a mere scratch from one of those blades would ensure instantaneous and inevitable death, and so the woman kept aiming sharp-bladed kicks at Bond or Connery, who kept her at a distance with a chair, as animal tamers do at the circus with decrepit lions and tigers bored with such puerile tricks. In the film, as I also remembered, the role of the ruthless Klebb had been brilliantly played by the famous Austrian singer and theatre actress (who made only very rare screen appearances), Lotte Lenya, the greatest and most authentic interpreter of the songs and operas of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera being the most famous) and, if my memory serves me right, the wife and widow of the latter, who had continued composing for her until his death, which occurred, of course, some time before the film adaptation of Ian Fleming's novel. And Fleming, let me say, and judging only by the few pages I read in Wheeler's study, seemed a better writer, more skilful and perceptive, than snooty Literary History has so far deigned to concede. The description that followed of Rosa Klebb, for example, contained some curious and rather valuable insights, I copied a few paragraphs:
… much of her success was due to the peculiar nature of her next most important instinct, the sex instinct. For Rosa Klebb undoubtedly belonged to the rarest of all sexual types. She was a neuter… The stories of men and, yes, of women, were too circumstantial to be doubted. She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance. For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this psychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with. In her, the herd instinct would also be dead… And, of course, temperamentally, she would be a phlegmatic – imperturbable, tolerant of pain, sluggish. Laziness would be her besetting vice… She would be difficult to get out of her warm, hoggish bed in the morning. Her private habits would be slovenly, even dirty. It would not be pleasant, thought Kronsteen, to look into the intimate side of her life, when she relaxed, out of uniform… Rosa Klebb would be in her late forties, he assumed, placing her by the date of the Spanish Civil War… The devil knows, thought Kronsteen, what her breasts were like, but the bulge of uniform that rested on the table-top looked like a badly packed sandbag…
('A bag of flour, a bag of meat,' I thought, 'that's what they use to practise sticking in bayonets and spears.')
The tricoteuses of the French Revolution must have had faces like hers, decided Kronsteen… of coldness and cruelty and strength as this, yes, he had to allow himself the emotive word, dreadful woman of SMERSH.
Fleming also seemed very well-informed (SMERSH aside; I would have to ask Wheeler about that, he would be sure to know whether the organisation was real or an invention), the mention of the POUM and Andres Nin was an indication of that, even though he insisted on calling the latter 'Andreas'. According to his version, Nin might have been killed by a foreign woman – who may, who knows, have been 'singularly beautiful' in her youth in Spain – who had also been his collaborator and lover, to make the treachery and the bitterness still worse. Wheeler, at any rate, had made the link between the reference in the Doble Diario to 'several women' detained in Barcelona in June 1937 and the unkempt, sinister, neuter character in From Russia with Love (they would never have detained her), for he had marked the paragraph in Chapter 7 with two vertical lines and written in the margin 'Well, well, so many traitors'. So many indeed, in my own country then, and at other times, and, of course, at all other times since time immemorial, from the beginning of time itself and everywhere. How was it possible that there could have been and were so many betrayals, or so many successful betrayals, that is, ones that were never suspected or detected before they were carried out? What is this strange proclivity we have for trust? Or perhaps it isn't that, perhaps it's a desire not to see or know, or a proclivity for optimism or for complaisant deceit, or perhaps it is pride that leads us to believe that what happens and has always happened to our peers will not happen to us, or that we will be respected by those who – before our very eyes – have already been disloyal to others, as if we were different, and perhaps pride makes us think for no good reason that we will be spared the misfortunes suffered by our ancestors and even the disappointments experienced by our contemporaries: all those who are not 'I', I suppose, who are not and will not be and never have been 'I'. We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we – that is, I alone – will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us. In the Doble Diario, which I had picked up again, there were a few articles by my father, from the time when, despite the war, he was still trusting and confident: one dated 2 July 1937, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the publication of Descartes's Discours de la Méthode in 1637 in Leiden; another dated 27 May, deploring the craze for changing the names of streets and squares (and even cities) which was prevalent in both 'the rebel-controlled zone' and in 'the loyal zone' (his terms) and, in particular, in Madrid: 'It is highly regrettable,' he said, 'that we should thus imitate the rebels, because we should never imitate them in anything.' Or: