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The Quiet Revolutionary
WE WERE to spend a fortnight in quarantine, but the fortnight became three weeks, and three weeks a month, a terrible, never-ending month. I was in black despair most of the time, and lay on my bed crying and sobbing for hours. My poor mother must have suffered badly, seeing me like that. I don’t remember her ever complaining. Yet she must have suffered at least as much as I did, having been so rudely torn away from all her previous life, and still weak from her recent illness. I did not realise it at that time and, selfishly, felt only the acute sadness of having had to leave behind almost all that I had loved and cherished for a whole nineteen years. And I saw only the bleakness of the present and uncertainty of the future. Never once did I experience the thrill of setting out on a new life. I was so engulfed in my own grief that I was hardly aware of the rest of the family. Even my stepfather with his little son could not have felt very happy at this start to a new life and this welcome to the country of his birth.
We lived in large barracks, thirty or forty people in each, all jumbled together. We were relatively lucky, as our beds were right at one end so that we had a corner to ourselves. The beds stood in two long rows with a wide passage between. In the middle of this passage was an iron stove where we dried our washing and occasionally cooked. Meals were provided, but sometimes we wanted something else. There were no partitions, except round the washroom with its row of wash basins. There we lived, with nothing to do, within the confines of the barbed wire which surrounded the camp.
In time we did manage to slip out and go to the nearby village. I could not believe my eyes when I saw how those German peasants and small farmers lived. Their houses had two, three or more rooms, with proper bedsteads with metal frames and shiny brass knobs. For a meal the table was laid with a separate plate for each person, with a spoon, knife and fork for everybody. It was amazing compared to the Russian villages. Sometimes we went for short walks over the meadows. My mother even managed to get some Easter eggs for us and hide them in the grass so that, according to our old custom, we could look for them. These were the few lighter moments. But everybody’s nerves were on edge and there were arguments within the families and quarrels among the different groups of inmates.
To top it all, there was the news of the right-wing Kapp putsch on 13 March 1920, when heavily armed troops marched on Berlin and declared the Social Democrat government overthrown. The Social Democrats themselves simply fled. But the militant workers started to arm themselves, the trade unions declared a general strike, and Kapp and his supporters were ousted. Only then did the Social Democrats return, to re-impose ‘law and order’ with rigorous methods. The news did not mean much to me or my mother but it must have been disquieting for many of the ex-prisoners of war and repatriates, including my stepfather. I do not remember him ever discussing politics, but I do not think he was particularly right-wing.
Eventually, at the beginning of April, we were on the move again, to Berlin. My first impression, from the train which runs right through the centre of the town from east to west, was of huge, solid, grey buildings. I had exactly the same impression when I returned from my first visit to Paris in January 1935: massive greyness and heaviness.
We arrived at another repatriation centre, in a confiscated school building in the western part of Berlin, near a railway station. Here men and women were accommodated on separate floors in the large classrooms. The children remained with their mothers, unless they were teenage boys. On the ground floor was the dining room, where we were fed peculiar dishes, such as barley gruel with prunes – pretty revolting. We were issued with vouchers for articles of clothing from a special store, as we could not very well walk around in our Russian winter coats in April. I got a dark green, loosely woven, cheap-looking spring coat with which I wore a black and white beret which I had made myself in a style rather the vogue in Moscow at that time.
I do not remember how long we stayed at that refugee centre, but as soon as my stepfather had found his feet and my mother had regained some strength, the hunt for a flat began. We were on the list of people needing accommodation, but flats were scarce in Berlin. And we could not afford to rent anything expensive. In her desperation my mother began to ask strangers in the street if they knew of a flat or furnished rooms to let. Eventually she met a working-class woman who used to spend the summer months with her retired husband in a shack on a small allotment outside Berlin. She was willing to let us have their flat for a few months. It was in the well-known working-class district of Roter Wedding in the northern part of Berlin. (The name Roter, meaning Red, came from the predominance of Communist voters, but Wedding is just a name and has nothing to do with English marriages.) The flat was tiny, in a drab block: you entered through a very small kitchen, then there was a living room, and off that a small windowless room, more like a large cupboard, which served as a bedroom. No entrance hall, no bathroom, just a tap in the kitchen and a sink. But it meant escape from that dreadful refugee centre – anything was better than that.
Contrary to his expectations, my stepfather could not get work with his pre-war employer. Nor could his relatives help him. He had a bachelor brother, a very respectable teacher at a boys’ grammar school, and two portly spinster sisters, all approaching middle age, all three living together, seemingly comfortable, respectable and middle-class. They were quite friendly towards us, but without any warmth. Even with their long-lost brother their relations seemed rather cool. All this must have been very disappointing for him. Quite by accident my stepfather met an old school friend in the street, who managed to get him a job in the town hall or some government department, not the job he had hoped for and not well paid either, but a beginning. That same friend also recommended me to an acquaintance of his at a bank. Much to my surprise, they took me on.
My sister was still determined to become a hospital nurse, but she could not start training until she was eighteen. So my mother found her a job at a chocolate factory near where we lived and for several months she sat there, with young working-class girls, wrapping up chocolates and placing them one by one into pretty boxes with pretty pictures on them. They were searched every day as they left the factory, but were occasionally allowed to buy chocolate cheaply. Yet my poor sister did not have even the minimum preparation for a working life that I had had! My brother and stepbrother had to be found places at a school, but my brother found it difficult to adjust to the school curriculum, different from that at his school in Moscow or the children’s home. He never really settled down.
Eventually the housing authority offered us a flat in the heart of the West End of Berlin, in a street off the Kurfürstendamm, famous for its expensive cafes, restaurants and theatres, and the elegance of its inhabitants. The new flat was at the other extreme from the flat in Wedding, and we knew we would feel quite out of place. But we had already turned down a couple of others, and if we had refused this time we might be taken off the register altogether. So we accepted it. As it turned out it was not in the front part of the house, but at the back, across the courtyard. Most houses in Berlin, as in Russia, were built around a courtyard, sometimes even with a second courtyard beyond that, and the quality of the flats – and the rent – diminished according to the distance from the street. In our new house only the front part had a staircase laid out with lush red carpet runners and decorative plants in pots in the lobby. There was only one caretaker for both parts of the house, a snobbish woman who, having seen us move in, considered us somewhat inferior to the people in the flats at the front.
The flat itself was beautiful: four rooms, bathroom, kitchen, all very spacious, and a large closed-in balcony overlooking a back garden with tall trees. We had plenty of space, of air and sun – only next to no furniture! We had beds, a dining table and a few straight chairs, some saucepans and crockery, given to us by our stepfather’s sisters.
I had a large room to myself and I managed to hire a piano, still hoping to be able to continue with my studies. It proved impossible. I was working full-time and did not know how to find an evening music school, if there was one. I also had little time to practise, especially as my stepfather objected to it in the evening. Now he was no longer a newcomer into our home. Now it was his house. I felt I could not impose my own will any more, even though I more or less earned my own keep. Above all, I felt that serious study had to be everything or it was nothing. I did not like the idea of just dabbling so I gave it up. For ever. It was a wrench, and for a year or so afterwards I avoided listening to music and could hardly keep back my tears when I accidentally heard the sound of a piano from somebody’s open window.
At the bank I was introduced to such simple tasks as filing and checking the entries of stocks and shares by a thin, friendly girl and a fat, good-natured boss. I was soon transferred to another department, sharing a desk behind long counters with a girl slightly older than myself. Gerda was my introduction to Germany’s middle class. In time we became good friends and continued to see each other long after I had left the bank and she had got married. Sitting opposite each other, adding up endless columns of marks and pfennigs, all of which had to tally with parallel entries by the end of the day, we evolved a method of adding up and talking to each other at the same time. We discussed philosophy and she introduced me to contemporary German writers – Strindberg, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse – and others hitherto unknown to me, such as the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen.
I was lucky to have met Gerda, because her friendship made life in Berlin a little more bearable. Her mother was a very shrewd widow who had managed to preserve the money her husband had left her by dabbling in stocks and shares and property. She had a sharp face and a sharp mind for business, but she received me at her house in a very friendly way. She had a middle-aged brother who was a homosexual – the first I was aware of meeting. He was a very pleasant person and rather intrigued me.
Gerda was a girl of strong principles: she had been in love with a cousin but decided not to marry him because of the possible harmful effect on the children of such a close marriage. The cousin announced that he would console himself in a monastery where he could indulge himself in his two other passions: books and wine, while Gerda accepted the proposal of a very pleasant, quiet young man just out of university, who was very much in love with her and frequently came to meet her after work. She was pleased every time it rained because then they could walk with arms linked under one umbrella, which would otherwise have been considered improper as they were not yet officially engaged. I found it somewhat ridiculous that she was already putting by things for her future married life: linen, cutlery, anything that she might be given as a present or that she had bought herself from her monthly salary. She had a special trunk for this ‘bottom drawer’. If such a custom had ever existed in Russia, it had faded years ago.
On the other hand, I was also introduced to less prudish behaviour between the sexes, and to jokes or remarks which I either did not understand or found objectionable. There was a young woman in the office who often looked rather tired and pale on Monday mornings, and her male colleagues took this as an opportunity to make suggestive remarks, which she accepted with amazing equanimity. Then there was a pleasant, good-looking and rather shy bank clerk who used to pass my desk rather more often than necessary. Eventually we became acquainted and he invited me to go sailing with him and his friend on Sundays. The friend had a girl friend, a jolly, plumpish widow in her early twenties. That was very enjoyable. But one evening he put the text of a new hit-song on my desk, which went something like ‘Why must it be great love straight away? Why can’t one be happy just for one night?’ I was indignant. Relationships between the young of both sexes in Russia were free and easy, as far as I was aware; there was no flippancy, nor was there an excessive obsession with sex. I don’t remember now what happened to that young man, but before he faded out of my life I had an enjoyable evening with him at the opera, listening to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, and in the dress circle too!
I had eventually overcome my grief about the end of my music studies, and when I earned a little more I regularly queued up on Sunday mornings for opera tickets – gallery, of course! You had to arrive long before the performance to get a good standing place, but I preferred to sit on the steps in the dim light with other young music-lovers and follow the score, borrowed from the library. I also began to visit museums and picture galleries, concerts and theatres, in which Berlin excelled. There was the Reinhard Theatre, and the left-wing Piscator, and guest performances by Soviet companies: Tairov, Meierhold, Vakhtangov and the Hebrew theatre Habima. Yet I never lost the feeling that all this was only temporary and that sooner or later I would return to Russia.
At the same time I was trying to take up some sort of training or studies. University was out of the question, primarily because I had no Latin, so I enrolled with the Berlin Handelshochschule, a school of economics or commerce. It offered a variety of lectures in the late afternoon and evening. But it was not primarily economics or commerce that interested me – more often than not I attended lectures on civil rights, philosophy, politics, and even chemistry. During the second year I dropped out altogether, having decided that commerce was not for me: it would only lead back to an office, albeit in a somewhat more elevated position than that of a shorthand typist.
We didn’t make any contact with the emigré organisations in Berlin. My mother was probably too preoccupied with everyday care for the family, or too exhausted. Olya had started her nursing training at last and lived in the hospital, and I was probably too shy. Possibly, being of mixed origin and with a German stepfather, we did not quite fit in either of the two groups, German or Russian. Moreover, the majority of the Russian emigrés at that time were people who had fled the country in 1917 and 1918, and by devious routes, via Finland, Turkey, Siberia and even China. The great majority found their way to Paris, where they settled. Those who came to Berlin were mostly intellectuals and former well-known members of the various political parties. As newcomers, we had no contact with them.
In 1921 I did, however, join the Russian Famine Committee, set up to help alleviate the terrible suffering in Russia. Among its Russian organisers were some well-known politicians, including Milyukov and Gessen. There I met the young Nabokov, who later became a famous writer, author of the novel Lolita. He always seemed to me slightly conceited in his attitude to people who were not his friends.
But I did make friends with a Russian-Jewish girl, Lida, and her two friends, both Russian students. In the summer of 1921 we all went on a hiking tour through the Riesengebirge, a mountainous area in the south east of Germany, near the Czech border. It was a rather ridiculous walking tour, but we enjoyed it. None of us had ever done this before or carried a rucksack on our backs, and we had no idea where to begin. We bought a map of the area, took a train to some station or other, got off, and began to climb right up to the mountain crest, staying with farmers on the way. We carried our food with us, occasionally buying something from the farmers. Instead of being up at the crack of dawn, we used to get up at nine or ten in the morning, dawdle around, walk through the midday and afternoon heat and by four or five in the afternoon start to look for somewhere to spend the night. And we just marched on, never descending into the beautiful valleys or small villages on the slopes.
After about eight days of this we reached the foot of the highest mountain, the Schneekoppe. We stayed at one of the two inns and managed to get up at six in the morning to tackle the peak, over five thousand feet above sea level. But when we sat around the breakfast table on that grey windy morning and watched the hikers in the distance struggling up the mountain against the wind and rain, with no prospect of a view from the top, we wondered, was it worth the effort? And decided it was not. So after a good meal and a further rest, we turned our backs on the inhospitable Schneekoppe and made for the railway station in the valley below and the train back to Berlin. The zig-zag run down took three hours. I found it rather ridiculous and disappointing to climb for eight days and then get down in three hours. But we had had a good time.
Regrettably, our friendship did not last long. Lida was anxious to study engineering, and the only place she could find was at the technical college at Bingen, on the Rhine, a long way from Berlin. The two boys also started on some studies and we gradually lost touch with each other.
So I did get to know people here and there. Olya was among people at the hospital: patients, doctors and nurses, and became friends with a few of them. It was not easy for her. The work was hard, the people and customs strange, but she was training for something she had always wanted to do. And she used to come home on all her days off. Andryusha was worse off. He left school as early as possible and became an apprentice gardener somewhere out of Berlin, though he did not last there very long.
I think the most lonely person of us all was my mother. She must have been very homesick, without friends, no money, sitting in a half-empty flat, feeling the contemptuous looks of the caretaker upon her every time she came home with her meagre shopping. Far from the ‘land of milk and honey' visualised by our stepfather, we had arrived just as the German inflation was gathering speed, to reach astronomical heights by 1923. Even in 1921 we ate mostly hash made from ox lungs, margarine, cheap liver sausage and artificial honey, with my mother eating the tiniest share, enough just to survive. I remember her sitting forlorn on a straight chair against a wall, in a long brown cardigan, sipping hot tea from a glass in a holder. I really think she gave the family all the food there was, living primarily on tea. No wonder she never picked up properly, either physically or psychologically. Although we did not realise it, she took out all her frustration and disappointment on little, defenceless and puzzled Willy – who just could not do anything right. I really felt sorry for him.
But my mother was not well. In the summer of 1923 the doctor diagnosed tuberculosis of the lungs and suggested a few weeks’ rest at a sanatorium. But she would not hear of it, though she could probably have gone under the national health insurance scheme. It was bad luck for my stepfather, too, having already lost his first wife. It was not surprising that there was a certain tension between them, though at that time I did not notice it. I did not contribute to her peace of mind either – to my eternal regret – still moaning about Moscow and my music studies. In addition, I began to develop rather progressive ideas about free love, the status of illegitimate children and so on, and began to expound these ideas to my mother. Though I was not living up to these ideas, I must have worried her at times.
I also began to question the alleged wickedness of the Bolsheviks. Though still not particularly interested in politics, I could not help hearing about financial crises, economic instability, changes of governments, and the strife among political parties in this or that country. Yet the Bolsheviks had managed to hold power for four or five years now. The civil war was over, and conditions seemed to be improving, especially after the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which had allowed the limited re-introduction of private enterprise, while the government retained control over the important branches of industry. There was a trend among some of the Russian emigrés to become more conciliatory towards the Bolsheviks and a group started to publish a journal, Smena Vekh (The Changing of the Milestones), which no longer viewed the October Revolution through the eyes of deprived owners of confiscated property. I do not remember who the initiators of the journal were, or how well founded and objective was their analysis of Bolshevik theory and practice – whether it merely reflected the New Economic Policy. The journal interested me greatly and for a while I began to wonder about the past and to argue in defence of the Soviet regime.
By contrast, the economic situation in Germany had been deteriorating for some time. Inflation had reached astronomical heights, then came to an abrupt end. It had reached its peak in the late summer of 1923, with the value of the Deutschmark falling continuously and prices in the shops doubling practically every few hours. (As a guide, when we arrived in Germany in March 1920 the rate of exchange was already 240 DM to £1. By the summer of 1923 it was 265,000 DM to £1, and by December it reached 15 billion DM to £1.) Yet I never saw anybody carrying their wages in suitcases, as is sometimes said now. There was no need to. The bank notes were simply printed over, so that a 10 DM note became overnight a 100 DM note and then 100,000 DM or more. The bank I worked for paid our salaries every morning, enabling us to go shopping over the lunch hour – by evening the prices might easily have doubled. If shops did not take their money from the tills to the banks in time, they no longer had enough to replenish their stocks for the following morning. Food became scarce, because the peasants and farmers no longer wanted to sell their produce for German money. A few dollars, however, represented a fortune.
The end of inflation, which came abruptly at the end of 1923, was catastrophic. For anyone with money in the bank, businesses and wealthy people, it lost its value overnight. Working people suffered less in this respect since people who were paid hourly, weekly or monthly did not have bank accounts and lived from one week or month to the next. Olya and I kept our money in envelopes marked for rent, for food, or a relatively large purchase such as shoes or a coat. Many firms were unable to survive.
Early in January 1924 my mother fell seriously ill. My stepfather was doing a lot of overtime – it was the time of the year when ledgers had to be closed and balance sheets drawn up. One day he was not back home by midnight and my mother went to meet him as he walked home through the Tiergarten, a huge park near our home which divided Berlin in two. In her frail state, probably not dressed warmly enough, she caught a chill on that frosty night, took to her bed, and never got up again. Even today, more than sixty years later, I cannot think calmly or without pain of her illness and death, and the loneliness of it.
I was then working with a small merchant bank quite near our flat, which enabled me to go home at lunch time to give her something to eat. But for the rest of the day, till the evening, she was on her own. Even in the evening she did not have much company or attention from any of us. Then my sister took leave of absence from the hospital to look after her for the last few weeks. Even so, we three grown-up people never sat with her at night to offer her a glass of water, or say a few comforting words. Then one Sunday afternoon she began to slip off into a coma, alternately lamenting her children, especially me – as the eldest I would have to take on some responsibility for the family. She made my stepfather promise to look after us and he assured her, ‘Your children are my children’. Then she lost consciousness, but lingered on through the week till the following Saturday morning. It was 24 January, the same day that Lenin died.
I don’t remember that winter very clearly. My sister returned to the hospital. My brother, I believe, was still an apprentice and my stepfather was out a lot. I do not even remember mourning my mother very much. I think I felt that in some ways it was a blessing for her to be out of it all and not have to worry any more about whatever may befall us.
After the inflation, my small bank lingered on till the end of April 1924, then folded up – and I found myself without a job. Luckily I found another within a few weeks, dealing with correspondence and bookkeeping (of which I knew precious little) for a firm that sold wallpapers and furnishing materials.
One Sunday afternoon I went for a stroll, feeling rather melancholy as I watched other people walking in pairs or small groups. I stopped to look at one of the windows of a large department store, and when I turned round to go home, I bumped straight into a man behind me. We both apologised, and realised that we were both Russian. There was thus a bond between us, and he asked for my permission to see me home. He was a Georgian from Tiflis. When we parted in front of my house we kissed and made another appointment. This was the first of three totally accidental encounters, which, each in its own way, changed the course of my life.
We met again and it seemed only natural that I wanted to invite him home. To my surprise, my stepfather banned him from ‘his’ house and wanted nothing to do with ‘this exotic Georgian’. He warned me that Rapho had no intention of marrying me and would only get me ‘into trouble’. The thought had not even entered my head! I knew that my stepfather wanted me to marry a weedy young student, a member of his own ex-students’ club who once took me to the horse races (the only time I ever went, and I promptly lost twenty marks).
After the October Revolution Georgia had enjoyed a short period of independence when the right to self-determination was conceded to some nationalities. Rapho had been elected a deputy to the Georgian parliament, under the new president Chkheidze. When, in 1921, Georgia became one of the Soviet Socialist Republics and was again incorporated into the USSR, Rapho had emigrated, together with other politicians. In Berlin they lived on subsidies from the govemment-in-exile. Rapho also had some connections with the Georgian Orthodox Church, and had an estranged wife in Tiflis and two small sons. He told me something about a civil divorce, but that was not recognised by the Church.
The only result of my stepfather’s warnings was to estrange me even further from him, and send me head over heels in love with Rapho. I was too busy to concentrate on my rather exacting work. Rapho’s frequent visits to my office, in a small house behind the shop, did not help. And when I finally bridged the gap between the theory and practice of free love, and everything in my personal life became simpler and clearer, it was too late to save my job. My predecessor had left me detailed instructions for the payments due to various authorities, but, probably dreaming of her impending marriage, she had omitted to draw my attention to the next tax payment due shortly after she left. I was not yet experienced enough to detect it. So the inland revenue people were upon us. They were reasonable and realised that there was no ill intention behind the non-payment, but my bosses got cold feet and, much to their regret, had to replace me with a more experienced person. I think that was the only time in my life that I was simply sacked.
At home things had been going from bad to worse, and eventually came to a head. My stepfather gave me an ultimatum: give up the exotic Georgian or leave ‘his’ house – which meant he would also wash his hands of my brother and my sister, who was about to sit her final exams. I reflected very carefully and came to the conclusion that if I did let him dictate my life, we had no guarantee that one day he would not find some other excuse to get rid of us. The very fact that he linked his ‘care’ for our brother to my behaviour made me suspicious. So I took a furnished room near where I worked. My stepfather did not even let me take my mother’s sewing machine, which he did not need, or a tea and dinner set which I had bought as a present for my mother. Nothing but my personal things.
My moving out was a godsend to him. Soon after his arrival in Berlin he had met an old childhood friend, a war widow with a son of about twelve. She had come to our house once, when my mother was still alive, a plump, robust and jolly person. I later had the feeling that my stepfather’s overtime hours were spent with her rather than in his office. And sure enough, we heard a little later that Willy Schünemann had married for the third time. None of us ever saw him again – or little Willy, which we regretted. At the time I felt that had I met him in the street, I would not have stopped to shake hands. But with the distance of time, I thought that perhaps he, and above all little Willy, had found a pleasanter and quieter life with his third wife. He had behaved in a mean way towards us and towards our mother, but, after many hard years, perhaps he was entitled to an easier life.
The day I moved out was the day I was given the sack. Not suspecting that might happen, I had rented a comfortable furnished room near my work, with breakfast and supper provided. It was much too expensive now that I faced unemployment in four weeks, so I paid my rent in advance and gave notice. In the meantime I enjoyed the comfort and Rapho’s unrestricted visits.
The labour situation was difficult at that time, but I hoped for the best and began to look for another job and another room. My sister had finished her training and opted to live out of hospital so that I could live with her. We took a cheap room in a good middle-class area of Berlin, but at the rear of the building. Our room was long and narrow. Behind the door was a washstand (the water had to be fetched from the kitchen) and a wardrobe, opposite a largish bed. Beyond the bed was a table with two chairs; the window faced the door, and opposite the table was a rather dilapidated red plush sofa. We also had limited use of the semi-dark kitchen, which we shared with the landlady. Her husband was hardly ever visible, and I think they only had one other room. But they were quite pleasant people and tolerated Rapho.
Rapho used to visit fairly frequently, and when my sister was on night duty the whole set-up became rather comical. She had to sleep beforehand so we would shield her from the light of the lamp by opening a big black umbrella behind her head and one door of the wardrobe, to cut her off from the rest of the room. Today I cannot understand how she ever managed to get the required rest, but she never complained.
Rapho and I would sit reading or talking very quietly; sometimes he would read poetry to me, or charm me with Georgian songs (he had a pleasant voice), or with skilful drumming of the most intricate rhythms with his fingers and hands on the edge of the table. He taught me one or two songs in Georgian, one of which I still remember. He also taught me how to cook real Caucasian pilav (or plov) – rice with braised lamb, chestnuts, scrambled eggs and whatever else you fancy, all placed in little heaps under the rice. I taught him German and discussed how he could find work. It was pretty hopeless but – although I was in love with him – I could not understand how a grown man could go on living on subsidies, instead of trying to earn his living, be it only selling matches or flowers on a street comer. This was of course an absurd idea and Rapho would have found it quite beneath his dignity. I strongly objected. If I had learned anything from the Bolsheviks it was that no honest work was dishonourable (though selling matches on street comers was not exactly work of social importance). And there were so many examples, as I pointed out, of members of the Russian aristocracy now having to earn their living as taxi drivers or waiters.
After a while there was talk that the funds of the Georgian government in exile were running short and the subsidies might be cut altogether. But Rapho had also been a member of some Church Council; he therefore approached the Papal nuncio in Germany for assistance. He was eventually offered lodgings and an allowance in a Catholic institution in Vienna. He obviously did not want to leave me and Berlin, but it seemed the only way out for him. I was pretty desperate, and we both hoped the separation would be temporary (especially as I did not share his religious leanings). In the meantime, however, we were – with my sister’s assistance – very happy on my unemployment pay.
One day a neighbour let me know that a local engineering works, the Berlin-Anhalt Maschinen AG, or BAMAG, was urgently looking for a typist. I applied and got the job, a most boring one: typing out endless tenders, detailing machine parts, tools and equipment in the minutest detail. But it was a job. During those three months of unemployment (the only time I had ever been unemployed) I had started to teach myself shorthand and mastered the rudiments fairly quickly (the German system used at that time was very much simpler than the English one). It was just as well. Soon afterwards I was asked by the personnel department if I would be interested in a transfer to the department that dealt with foreign correspondence. Of course I was. And with the help of a manual I converted the German shorthand into French. So with some application on my part and no doubt some indulgence on the part of the actual correspondents, I tackled the job.
In the midst of all this came Rapho’s departure. I must have been distressed, but I remember little of that time, except that we frequently wrote to each other and hoped that we would be united again before long.
There followed a period of which I am not particularly proud, except that I knew when to extricate myself. I was occasionally ‘loaned’ by my department to the director-general and once or twice to the head of the finance section, a Herr Stadler, whose secretary was ostensibly rather busy. This was, as I later realised, a mere pretext; he had simply got his eye on me. I was perhaps a little flattered, and I felt lonely without Rapho, so I accepted an invitation to a dinner dance in a garden restaurant one summer evening. And I continued to accept his invitations to elegant restaurants, having wine and lavish meals served with a confusing array of cutlery. Thinking back, I must have been very naive. I don’t know what attracted me to Stadler. He was not particularly good-looking, quite a snob and rather conceited. But he was a good conversationalist and particularly knowledgeable in economics, which he tried to explain to me. He came from a wealthy, old-established bourgeois family from the Ruhr. A childhood friend of his, a man called Hofmann, worked for the same firm in Berlin. He had charmed and seduced a very sweet and innocent girl, and sometimes we four spent a pleasant evening out or a Sunday in the country. Hofmann had a fiancée waiting for him in Dusseldorf, whose trust he could not possibly betray. It did not matter about Hella, who was deeply in love with him and kept hoping he would forget that other loyal girl. The hypocrisy of his behaviour, especially as he was a Catholic – so was Stadler – did not strike either of them as objectionable.
But it was, of course, also a question of class: Hella was the only child of a grocer who had made good during the war. Her parents had given her a very good education and she was also good-looking, with delicate features and large grey eyes. So though she was good enough to be the sweetheart and plaything of a young, bourgeois gentleman, she was not fit to be his wife. I found this attitude shocking. Hofmann confessed to me that he himself loved Hella but he could not go against tradition and the expectations of his parents and bride-to-be. Eventually Hella had a nervous breakdown and a broken heart, and was shipped off by her parents for a long stay with relatives in Sweden.
For my part, I felt that my relationship with Stadler was plainly unsatisfactory. When he started to tell me about the elegant and entertaining young women from the ‘rag' trade, with whom I neither could nor wanted to compete, and as his phone calls became less frequent, I made short shrift. Olya and I had moved into two very pleasant rooms near the Tiergarten. On the ground floor there was a cafe, and night after night there came the sounds of the latest hit-song Yes, we have no bananas. Olya was, as always, very patient and understanding with me, and accepted whatever I did. But our brother was more troublesome. He had left his gardening job and managed to find work with an insurance company based in Hamburg. He upset a colleague and got into trouble with his firm, so that I had to go up to Hamburg to help sort things out. Perhaps I should have helped him more in one way or another, being the eldest. As it was he rather drifted, unable to settle.
As our mother had died of tuberculosis, all three of us were under medical supervision. Now I began to have some trouble with my lungs. The doctors were very careful and put me on the sick list for two months, to be followed by three months in a sanatorium. Fortunately BAMAG allowed me full pay for all of those five months. As it was spring, Olya and I decided to rent a room out of town, but near enough for her to commute. The room we found was small but adequate and it had a pleasant garden. The only snag was the mosquitoes – a veritable plague, as they bred on a nearby pond. We could never sit out in the evening, and before going to bed we had to splash a bottle of ammonia all over the room so as not to be eaten alive.
The sanatorium was also near enough for Olya to visit me on her days off. I had a really enjoyable and restful time there, and spent much of it reading, as we had to rest on deckchairs in the garden for most of the day. The majority of the other patients were not severely ill and some, myself included, were allowed out for short walks in the surrounding countryside. I even started to learn Spanish there. At weekends we organised our own enter-tainment, and, as we were all girls, there was a relaxed and uninhibited atmosphere.
Rapho finally faded from my life. I remember him briefly visiting me at the sanatorium and bringing me a Russian book, an anthology of prose and poetry, which I still have. He had had an offer of work in the Papal library at the Vatican, in Rome. Any getting together again was now hopeless.
When I returned to BAMAG I found I had been transferred to some other work and now shared a room with an extremely pleasant ex-naval officer. When work was slack he would tell me of his feelings as he stood on the deck of his cruiser, or whatever ship it was, observing the sea and the sky and the stillness of it all when there was no fighting, which gave him a somewhat detached and philosophical outlook on life. We got on well together when I occasionally had to work for him, but he confessed that he would not like to have me as his private secretary, as I tended to be too independent. I, for my part, was more than ever determined to break out from routine office work and the subordinate role of a woman at work.
But before turning my back on BAMAG there is one other memory, of Isya, a young engineer temporarily posted to the head office in Berlin. I don’t know how we met, but our point of contact was again that we were both from Russia, or rather in his case the Russian area of Poland. He was very proud of being a descendent of Sephardic Jews from Spain (the East European Jews were Ashkenazi). Isya sang old Jewish and Yiddish songs, of which I espeically remember one, a song about ‘The Old Question’, to which there are many answers yet no answer. In the actual song both question and answer are merely hummed without words, yet perfectly conveying both. Isya gave Olya and me our first wireless: a small wooden square with some wire spirals, a crystal, and a needle which had to be manipulated until you hit upon a sound. I might have forgotten Isya had it not been for his old Yiddish songs and his wise advice not to mourn things past, but to try ‘to catch the melody of each new minute’.
Except that there was not much melody in my life right then. I seriously began to rack my brain to see how I could earn my living and at the same time acquire new skills. I began to scan the newspapers. At that time eurhythmics were very fashionable in Germany – a style of movement – sometimes to music, sometimes just to a beat – developed from Isadora Duncan’s ideas. There was a proliferation of classes and schools, run by well-known dancers who rejected classical ballet. I had been keen on dancing since my childhood so I looked into the possibility of joining such a school. Unfortunately, practically all required full-time attendance in order to get a teaching diploma, which would mean finding evening work. There seemed to be nothing except work in cafes and bars, serving or performing with other girls. I did not care, and innocently went for interviews, to be told by one or two potential employers that my figure was not quite suitable or my legs too fat. One very kind and grandfatherly manager asked me why I actually wanted a job in a bar, seeing that I was not quite the type. And he very gently told me so.
Then I saw an advertisement for a fairly well-known dancing school which was looking for young girls to join a team for performances at a very large dance-café, twice nightly, at 5 pm and 12 midnight – and no contacts with the customers. I applied, was given an audition, and was accepted! I simply could not believe it. The engagement was for a trial period of a fortnight, but this would be extended if the management and customers approved of us.
Then the rehearsals started. On one occasion we were practising a jump and turn which I could not manage. The trainer got rather impatient and asked me where I had been trained that I was unable to do this. I timidly admitted that I had never been to any dance school and had never done anything except social dancing. She was astonished, showed me how to do it, and kept me on. Then another surprise: the leading dancer in the short piece from the ballet Si j’étais Roi had to give up for some reason and her part was given to me. But that, I think, was more because of my innocent looks and long blonde hair, when most girls had already had theirs fashionably cut. The other dance was the Blue Danube waltz, which I really liked, and for which we wore flowing gauze dresses. Unfortunately, our Madame, as we called her, had tried to save on our costumes, and they were simply not lavish enough for that café. After the trial fortnight the contract was not extended. So there I was again: still at the BAMAG and nothing else in sight.
I seemed to be drifting in an unsettled search for an aim in life. Olya and I still lived together, but we had moved so often that we had adopted an attitude that if we did not like a place we could always move out again after a month’s notice. I was still looking for the chance to train at a school for eurhythmics, and for a suitable job to go with it.
Then, in the spring of 1928, I found both. The job was as secretary (and office girl, being the only employee) with Herr Herring, a tall, stern and very German man – so he seemed to me – who had recently returned from years of working in South America and had taken over the German sales of some medical equipment manufactured in France. This involved a great deal of correspondence in French, and occasionally English. I also had to boil his two eggs daily for lunch and make him coffee or cocoa – and the grumbling there was if the eggs were not done precisely as he liked them! He was a great grumbler. I often thought later that it was from him that I learned to grumble, having up to then been quite an easy-going person. But he was satisfied with my work and also took a certain personal interest, unwanted and unasked for, in me and Olya, knowing that we lived on our own and had no older friends or ‘protectors’. We were even invited to his home several times, a large house out of town, with a garden. He had two charming little daughters and a somewhat subdued, self-effacing wife, who was very pleasant and hospitable to us. He must have been quite a despotic husband as he was rather a despotic boss.
But he paid me well and had full confidence in me. I had the keys to the office and the showroom, as he usually came late, was often out during the day, and left early. Actually, I rather objected to any private contact with him, as in many ways he had quite a wrong image of us, or at any rate of me. I was not at all the ‘well-brought-up’ young girl with a lady-like outlook on the world that he imagined me to be, and I objected to his Germanic ways and Aryan views. Once, when I lost my temper, he gave me a little lecture on the Scythians or Tartars, who invaded and dominated old Russia for a long time. According to him, this had made the Russians so unpredictable and had caused all that violence after the Revolution! He also made disparaging remarks about the Jews, which made me secretly wish that his two blonde little daughters would one day defy him and marry Jews or some other non-Aryans. But I kept quiet, appreciating the well-paid work, the relatively short hours, and above all my relative freedom at work.
Years after I had stopped working for him and soon after Hitler had come to power, he contacted me again and asked me to dinner. His wife had died and he had become friendly with a member of the old Russian aristocracy, a princess, and he wondered whether I happened to know her. I didn’t. But more interesting was his confession that he had for some time been a follower of Hitler. However, he had become disillusioned with Hitler’s policies: the execution of the Röhm group ordered by Hitler, the persecution of the Jews, and the obvious drive towards a war. So after all my ex-boss did apparently have a broader view of things. He was now at a loss what to do and where to turn.
During the winter of 1928 I had also made the acquaintance of the Pruzhans and Semyonovs, two Russian couples, refugees, though definitely not aristocratic! I answered an advertisement from a Russian woman, who had ‘just come back from Paris and was now accepting trainees’. It was not quite what I wanted, but I thought it might lead to something.
The Pruzhans, Margarita Dmitrievna and her husband David Venyaminovich, had left Russia after the October Revolution. She had been a medium landowner, while he had been a journalist. In their youth they had both been interested in politics and belonged to the Social Democrats – and David told us once how he had taken part in a bank raid in aid of the party. Margarita had a young daughter from an earlier marriage and a son, Igor, who had attended one of the well-known ‘free’ schools in Germany. She was an ardent farmer and gardener and disliked city life. In Berlin she kept an allotment, which she tended most eagerly. I never quite knew what David did for a living, probably a bit of writing for the Russian emigré papers and a bit of small-scale business, as so many of the Russian refugees did. At any rate they survived, in two furnished rooms.
After a visit to Paris, Margarita had the idea of opening a beauty salon in Berlin, combining it with eurhythmic exercises, stimulating baths and light treatment. Her ideas were interesting, but it came to nothing and before very long they left for France again. Before that, however, she had taught me face massage, manicure and in spite of the big age gap we became good friends, and remained so right up to her death some time in the 1960s.
I lost contact during the war but caught up with them again in 1947. They were as warm and hospitable as ever. Yet I was somehow disappointed in Margarita Dmitrievna. She had always been so composed and serene and I somehow needed the support of an elderly person with a more detached view of life. Perhaps it was naive of me, but I was all mixed up. The war had been a terrible experience. Not just the bombing raids and the constant anxiety you felt for yourself and people close to you, on both sides of the divide, but also for all those being maimed and killed at the front. I also had mixed feelings about the war itself, and what attitude to take. I recognised by then that the war was a consequence of the economic and political system, and as such had to be opposed (as indeed a small group of Trotskyists did before and for a while even after the war had started, by propagating a Socialist Anti-War Front, with its own publication). But there was also the strong pull, especially from the anti-fascist German refugees, including those on the political left, to support the war against Hitler. And when it was over, and we felt such compassion for the starving Germans, I also felt resentful that the millions of Social-Democratic and Communist workers had ever let it come to Hitler assuming power and unleashing the war. Also there was the disappointment and disillusionment that our hopes for radical changes after the war were not fulfilled.
So I somehow expected – perhaps unfairly and unreasonably – that Margarita, being considerably older than me, would have a more detached attitude. She might help me regain a more balanced view of things. But that was not the case. She was still burning with resentment, not to say hate, against the Germans who had invaded and looted the enemy countries, and also against the French, who had put up such a poor show in so many ways.
I only later realised what a tough time they had all had in France. She, David, Igor and his young wife, who, amidst a fierce bombing raid, gave birth to their first child in one of the farm outhouses – without electric light, hot water or medical assistance – had set out on foot with thousands of other people for the unoccupied Vichy region of France, fleeing from the invading German army. Motorcars, horsecarts, bicycles, people on foot, with children, bundles, pots and pans, all mixed up, all pushing each other, without regard for the old, the sick, the weak. And the French peasants along the road, sensing business, not giving a glass of water to anyone without a payment. Eventually the Pruzhans found it impossible to carry on and had turned wearily back, surviving the rest of the war lying low on their smallholding. It was unjust of me to expect a serene attitude from them.
Through the Pruzhans I also got to know Tatyana and Yuri Semyonov, both much nearer my own age and also Russian refugees. The two couples had met in the Caucasus, on their way out of Russia, where they drifted into a commune run by a Russian-Caucasian theosophist – to my mind half philosopher, half charlatan. There Tanya had learned his interesting theories about movements, which demanded great concentration and muscle control. I became her pupil for a short time. Her husband Yuri was a writer and journalist and seemed rather serious and important to me. They too had quite a hard time making ends meet. Tanya was supplementing Yuri’s earnings by hand-painting silk scarves for a shop. They had a child, a little boy, the image of Tanya. She was not an exuberant mother, but when I watched them looking at each other, I felt they were somehow communicating, deeply and silently, and one could feel the common bond between them. Sadly, the boy died from diphteria before he was four years old. Later, when I had already left Germany, they had another son, a blond and blue-eyed Russian boy like his father. But I think Tanya never managed to forget her first-born.
Olya kept in touch with them after I had left and until she left Berlin herself. Through mutual friends I traced them again after the war. They had had a very bad time in a German internment camp and after the war they starved, as practically all Germans did. By the time I managed to send them a food parcel they had left for Sweden. I received a letter from their former landlady informing me of this, and adding that in view of the situation, she hoped that I would understand that she and her family had kept the parcel themselves.
But in Berlin in the winter of 1928 I was lucky. I discovered a school that ran courses in the early evening, five days a week. There was my chance. I had a job where I could, as a rule, leave on the dot of 4 p.m.; I could reach the school easily by 5 p.m. After two years I would get a diploma and the right to run classes and courses myself. Those two years were very hard work: three to four hours daily, plus theory, essays, later the devising or improvising of lessons. No theatres, no concerts, no cinemas any more, except occasionally at weekends. Yet those two years were a most enjoyable and carefree time. I was mentally absorbed and physically acquired a feeling of lightness, almost of weightlessness. The owner of the school, Ruth Allerhand, was very pleasant and an imaginative teacher. She had a young woman assistant called Johnny, slim, with short hair, rather boyish looking and a very good dancer. Johnny and Ruth lived together and we all assumed that they were lesbians.
The pupils, with one or two exceptions, were working girls: secretaries, clerks, and the like. Some seemed quite unsuited to eurhythmics, but all were enthusiastic and did their best. At weekends the entire school or perhaps just a small group of us would go on an excursion out of town, and in the fields or swimming pools we would again improvise all sorts of movements and dances – on those occasions mostly comic ones, at which I was not all that good as I was still rather self-conscious and reluctant to expose myself.
In time I made two lifelong friends at that school. There was Berta, eight years younger than me, curly-haired, small, plumpish, with tiny feet and hands, charming in her movements, full of fun and imagination. She came from a wealthy Jewish family. Her mother was a widow and semi-paralysed, spending her days in a wheelchair. Her sister was a medical student and later worked as a doctor at the Jewish hospital in Berlin.
Berta was very independent. After she had finished the eurhythmic training, she made off for Paris on her own and without any financial assistance. There she found herself a job at a laundry, sorting out dirty linen. I always admired her for her spirit of adventure, coming from that bourgeois home. Eventually she returned home. We maintained only very loose contact until I met her again in Prague in 1936, where she befriended me for a couple of weeks after my escape from Hitler’s Germany. Her sister remained in Berlin, not wanting to leave their disabled mother. When the persecution and gassing of the Jews really got under way at the beginning of the war, Berta’s sister administered poison to her mother and herself. It was one of the many tragic stories of Hitler’s Germany. Berta and I met again in London and still see each other.
My other friend was Lore. She was the complete opposite of Berta. A year older than me, she was not so much stiff as totally unable to relax, either physically or mentally, and totally unsuited to gymnastics or dancing. I never understood what made her take up eurhythmics. But she was good at theory. Perhaps her talents were for teaching, yet it is impossible to be a good teacher without being able to inspire, to improvise, and, up to a point, to perform whatever one teaches. Yet she stuck doggedly to the work and did get her diploma.
Lore and I got on well together, having discovered a common interest in literature, art and even philosophy. She lived in a studio flat together with her artist friend Gertrud, a painter and a teacher. I loved to visit their studio. It was a totally different world. They introduced me to a lesbian cafe, which was strange to me – I did not particularly take to it. And once a year the stiff and somewhat withdrawn Lore let her hair down at the fancy-dress ball of the Berlin Academy of Arts. It was the art event of the year with the rooms splendidly and artistically decorated and everyone in imaginative costumes. Lore thoroughly enjoyed herself. It never attracted me, though. I was once invited to such a ball, but could not enter the spirit of it – whirling around with whoever happened to pass by and catch you.
Having finished at the eurhythmic school and still thinking of branching out on my own, I took a six-month course in physiotherapy and massage at one of the teaching hospitals. Massage was taught by one of the staff nurses, and as a model she used an old paralysed patient who knew every move by heart, a chap full of humour and jokes in spite of his disability.
Throughout those two years I kept in touch with the Pruzhans and Tanya. Yuri, her husband, must have had contacts with the Soviet cultural organisations in Berlin because occasionally he would get tickets for a private film show or a lecture. One day he was busy and Tanya asked me to go with her. The film was Turksib, about the building of the Turkistan-Siberian railway at the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan, linking Alma-Ata with Siberia. The film shows the tremendous difficulties of the construction, carried out by enthusiastic teams of young workers, watched in amazement by the local population riding along the tracks on their camels, trying to race against the first engine, jubilantly decorated and manned by some of the workers. (The film was shown in London in 1971 at the National Film Theatre; and more recently in a shortened version on television). It was a splendid film, yet I hardly knew what I was looking at. This sounds paradoxical, but will become clear.
During the interval, when the lights went on, something made me turn round and my eyes caught for a moment the greenish-grey eyes of a man standing at the back, leaning against the wall with a few other people. Nothing more. Then the lights went out and the film continued. After a while the person next to me left and his seat was taken by the man from the back! Our elbows accidentally touched. I felt as if I had touched a live wire. I could no longer concentrate on the film. It must have been cold that day because I had my hands in a muff. Before long I felt a hand reaching for my muff and pressing a little note into my hand.
The man left hurriedly as soon as the film ended and I went out with Tanya, still clutching the note. It asked, in Russian, for an appointment the following day, suggesting a place. I could have ignored it, but that was beyond me. So I went, and we strolled the length of the Tiergarten. He apologised for the note at the cinema and then we got into conversation, both delighted to have met a compatriot with whom to speak Russian. That was one point of attraction, but there were others, physical and intellectual. Thus began the most romantic and inspiring months of my life – with far-reaching consequences.
Vladimir was a Soviet Russian, sent to Berlin by the Soviet government for an unspecified period of time. I never got to know anything about him, nothing beyond his first name, that he was bom and brought up in Byelorussia and was of Jewish parentage; and that he lived somewhere in the centre of Berlin. I did not know his surname, his address, his telephone number, whether he had a wife and family in Moscow. Nothing. I accepted all this without a murmur. He must have had a strong personality and I suppose I felt it was this or nothing, though he later often said he would like to take me back to Moscow with him. Even then, I never asked any questions. Vladimir was far too interesting and fascinating a man, and far too attractive to me to give him up because of non-compliance with conventional customs and habits.
But he was also a very busy man and we met mostly in snatches and at the most unexpected times. Not being master of his own time, we rarely made appointments in advance, but he would ring me, sometimes as late as ten in the evening, or at odd moments during the weekend, and we would go to a small cafe near where Olya and I lived, or for long walks through the Tiergarten. Very occasionally he would visit me at home for a short time.
When I eventually learned about the life and work of Soviet workers abroad, I realised he must have felt trapped in a private apartment. He seemed to feel most at ease on walks, in a cafe, or occasionally in a hotel room. Even then, he would go off quite suddenly, saying he expected a phone call from Moscow (mostly late at night, whilst I usually stayed on). It was all very unusual. In the middle of a walk, a discussion, an interesting conversation, a carefree, high-spirited mood, he would look at his watch and we would part abruptly. And if it was not too late, and not too far, I would accompany him to the comer of the street where he lived, in order to delay the parting for another half hour or so, and then we would say goodbye and turn in opposite directions. Sometimes I wondered whether I should follow him surreptitiously to find out which house he would enter. But apart from the fact that he would probably have easily detected my intentions, it somehow seemed undignified to me, something, which in the circumstances I just could not do. That was the rule of his game, and I accepted it.
Vladimir was an intellectual, well read, well versed in literature, music, art, all the things that interested me too. He had joined the Bolshevik Party during the 1917 Revolution whilst still a student. I once wondered why he did not try to proselytise and convert me to communism, not noticing that without the sledgehammer technique of some party members I met later (especially activists and officials) his way of opening my eyes to social conditions in the world around me influenced me far more than any propagandist or agitator could have done. He gave me a German edition of Larissa Reissner’s book Oktober, which I still possess. It contains brilliant reports by this young and talented revolutionary journalist from the battlefield of the civil war, vivid studies of coal-miners, reports from Afghanistan, from Germany and so on. I was fascinated. She died in 1926, not on a battlefield but of typhus; she was greatly mourned, according to Vladimir, who attended the State funeral, by a grief-stricken Karl Radek, her companion after the death of her husband Raskolnikov.
It was Larissa Reissner’s stories, and Vladimir’s own attitude to his work that made me wonder: what is it that makes these people renounce their personal lives and ties, and live first and foremost for their work? What force is there behind the communist idea and the Communist Party that can extract such sacrifices? I began to ask questions, but, most of all, I decided to find out for myself. But I had to do it my own way, without any assistance from Vladimir. On the contrary, I did not even want him to know. In this rather childish way, I thought, I could also get something of my own back. I depended so entirely on Vladimir. I could never make a move of my own in regard to him. We never went together to a theatre or concert. When I took a fortnight’s summer holiday at the seaside, Vladimir said he might join me for a couple of days, but of course he never came. So now I felt that I must act independently.
I had heard of the Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (IAH), the International Workers’ Relief – a mass organisation, officially independent, but actually run by the German Communist Party (KPD). I am not sure how I heard about it, whether Vladimir mentioned it, or in connection with the strike of the Berlin transport workers, which was taking place at that time – the IAH had organised soup kitchens for the strikers and their families. I went to see the Berlin district organiser, Erich Lange, and – ridiculously and naively – offered to organise keep-fit classes for working girls and women (I had finished my training and had my teaching diploma). Erich Lange, though still young, was even then an old hand as a party official and organiser of the Berlin district. Diplomatically he thought my suggestion a very good idea but suggested I should first get a little acquainted with the activity of my local group – and he told me where and when the branch met.
So one fine evening when walking around with Vladimir, it was my turn to be secretive. I stopped at a comer in front of a pub and told him I had some business there and had to leave him now. He did not ask questions either, and did not stop me. But to anybody versed in the work of party organisations in Germany it must have been quite obvious what I was up to.
So I joined the IAH and from then onwards attended the branch meetings quite regularly. I do not now remember whether I eventually told Vladimir about it or not. But when I began to show an outspoken interest in communist ideas, Vladimir told me of the years of the revolution and the civil war, when he was already an active member of the Bolshevik Party. He told me about Mikhail Borodin, who was sent to China by the party to conclude an alliance, which in fact handed over the Chinese communists to Chiang Kai-Shek – a policy which Borodin did not agree with privately, but nevertheless carried out. Vladimir also told me other stories, which later made me think that with all his devotion to Soviet Russia, he was probably not a one hundred per cent follower of Joseph Stalin.
Then one day, in October or November 1930, Vladimir vanished from my life as suddenly and unexpectedly as he had entered it. He rang one evening – how lucky that I was in! – to tell me that he had been transferred to Paris and that he was leaving in a couple of hours. There was no time to meet or say goodbye. It was not in his hands; he simply had to obey instructions. And in any case, what difference would it make? What could we say to each other that we hadn’t said before many times?
I was stunned. Would I ever hear from him again? How would I ever get to know when he would have to go back to Moscow? Or if anything happened to him? I would hear about it, he said. How, he did not say. And I never heard anything. Two years later, when some Soviet delegates came to an IAH conference I accompanied one of the Russians to the Soviet Trade Delegation to see somebody there on business. I suddenly had a hunch, and asked the man whom the delegate had come to see, a head of department or some other high official, whether he knew Vladimir and whether he could tell me anything about him. He said he did not know him, but from the momentary consternation on his face and the lowering of his head, I could see that my intuition had been right. But it no longer seemed to matter that I did not get a satisfactory reply. By that time I was involved myself and personal concerns had moved to second place.
Even the parting itself did not make me despair, as would have seemed natural – there had been so many partings since leaving Moscow. I had a new outlook on life, new ideas and a new activity, and Vladimir had also managed to instil in me a certain self-discipline and strength of mind. My first impulse after that last phone call was to go to the street where he had lived to see whether I could still catch him coming out of one of the houses. But then I saw the senselessness of this and accepted the truth of his last observation: what could we tell each other in a hurry that we had not already told each other about ourselves and our feelings for each other?
Yet I could not remain at home. I dressed and went out, retracing our many walks through the Tiergarten, and then I returned home. That was the end. I was immensely sad, but not in despair. On the contrary. I felt I was now free to become more active. After a few days I went to the district office and enrolled as a member of the German Communist Party. I felt that in this way I was closer to Vladimir and, as I had already been active in the IAH for some time, it seemed the logical step to take.
Margaret Dewar Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 18 February 2023