Another man in raspberry-colored boots who said he was an art critic pointed to one of her etchings and brusquely demanded that she explain it.
Well, Käthe said, that’s the typical misfortune of a worker’s family: A man drinks or gets sick, then he becomes a parasite or goes crazy, or kills himself. And then, you know, the woman’s misery is always the same.
But here that doesn’t happen anymore, because we’re all part of the collective.
I’m so glad, she said. It’s very, very good to be in a place where there’s actually hope!
The man nodded unsmiling and wrote something in a notebook.
They’d devoted an entire room to her Weavers’ Series, whose every wrinkle was dark, the ground made of fine lines, everything marching or progressing or fissuring: outstretched hands, bent bodies, fists grasping stones, dark houses with corpses on the floor, crazed widows reaching at nothing. This was the work whose gold medal had been vetoed by the Kaiser himself.
A proletarian woman cried out, very vigorously, but through the darkhaired interpreter, that since Frau Kollwitz had lost her son in the last war, she doubtless was at one with us in our unflinching class hatred.
I have experienced those feelings, yes.
It’s really true about your child? inquired the intrepreter. Frau Kollwitz, I am so very very sorry! And also in my family…
And the curator fluttered excitedly about, exclaiming over everything.
Käthe knew that these new friends of hers, with their soulful Slavic natures, saw at least as deeply into her work as her compatriots, and indeed, their comments, particularly regarding the Weavers’ Series, lacked for neither passion nor intellect. All the same, the interpreter, who’d known nothing of the most important event in her life, not to mention the poor curator, who like many of her peers throughout this world found herself so burdened by the necessity that this event be successful that she had no time to communicate with the creator of the work; the woman who thought to substitute hatred for sorrow; these people began to infect her with disappointment, which she battled as desperately as any Old Fighter ever fought an enemy.
Frau Kollwitz, is it true that the rightists call you an enemy of the nation?
Karl laughed proudly, and with a half-smile she agreed that it was.
Several of her new colleagues—such clever, frail young theoreticians! it goes without saying that all but one of them were doomed—opined that since revolution was a dynamic and ultimately all-embracing process, art ought to be dynamic, too; they pointed out to her that paintings and etchings could depict only moments, whereas a film could actually unscroll time when the projectionist plucked it out of its jar. Furthermore, so one young man insisted in excellent German (he wore small oval spectacles as Hans had done when he was a student), the temporal sequence of a movement could be more effectively conveyed through acoustical than through optical articulation.
That’s all beyond me, she replied calmly. She was hardly listening to him. There was a woman she’d seen in the street that morning, an old woman who obviously knew nothing but hard work; she could have been one of her husband’s patients. She kept wishing she’d embraced that woman.
Your “Woman with Dead Child” is superb propaganda, the young man was saying. With great effectiveness it mobilizes us against the bloodbaths and massacres which will remain inevitable as long as capital dominates the world.
Thank you, she said.
You think I have no compassion. I can see that now. To you I’m just a fool in love with an idea.
It’s a beautiful idea, she said, as politely as she could. (How tired she was!)
That seemed to encourage him. Coming a little closer, he confessed: I used to believe that if I lived out my life without making anybody feel compassion for me, I would have done well. And I loved the masses because they didn’t excite my compassion, even when they perished.—I see your disappointment and disapproval (or is that compassion in your eyes?) Maybe I can’t explain it. At that time I’d simply made up my mind: To hell with personal feelings! I wanted to live only as part of a collective.
She had to laugh a little. She liked him now.
And is that still what you want?
Of course.
The young man, whose name was Comrade Alexandrov, offered to escort her and her husband to a Shostakovich concert. This Shostakovich was apparently the darling of the Soviet Union just then. His Second Symphony would soon premiere in Leningrad, the young man said. Karl was happy because now he’d finally get his promenade. He’d lived with her for all these years, and the Weavers’ Series was not exactly novel to him. In point of fact, she herself had lived with it for so many years that it was almost dead to her; when she’d seen it again tonight, all she could think of was that there were a few details which should have been done differently; for the rest, it was what it was. As for the promenade, Käthe would rather have gone home.—I think the concert would be wonderful, she said, stroking her husband’s grey hair.
Look, Käthe! he cried out in astonishment. That store sells nothing but butter! And everyone’s queuing up for it!
Correct, said the young man, shooting him a long look. The Romanovs left our country in a shambles.
Karl grew silent. As for Käthe, she hadn’t even seen the store he was talking about. The sidewalk was so icy and the night so dark that all she could do was watch her footing. Actually, there was quite a bit to see. The Museum of Atheism was open. The tapering metal lacework of the Shukhov Radio Tower wasn’t quite finished; the windowed bays of Zholtovsky’s electric power station wouldn’t glow for two years yet; but no one could deny that we were ahead of Berlin. (Red Kiel, Red Leipzig, Red Munich, Red Frankfurt, Red Stuttgart, all fallen like Alexander II’s statue!) A shivering old lady stood in a doorway, trying to sell dough-and-sugar figurines. Käthe would have bought one, simply for pity, but Comrade Alexandrov, who reminded her more and more of her son Hans, said they hadn’t time. She didn’t look at Karl’s face.
The composition which they attended, the Scherzo in E-flat Major, had the flavor of something modern, but not quite new. Her husband, as she could see quite well from the vagueness of his smile, did not like it at all. How much he had to endure for her! She for her part preferred Schnabel, whose music she called clear-consoling-good. Whenever she listened to Beethoven on the gramophone, the heavens opened. This scherzo was like a peek into hell. The stench of grief rose up from its grey and lifeless earth. As Shostakovich’s notes wailed out, the great hall seemed to get so cold that she wouldn’t have been surprised to see icicles on the ceiling. All the same, there was something about the music which haunted her, not simply its acoustic color, which beneath the greyness resembled a gruesome aurora borealis, but a desperate encoded message which baffled her. She said as much to Comrade Alexandrov, who suavely replied: Why then, if he’s incomprehensible then he’s failed.—She thought that rather harsh. At the end she saw this Shostakovich, for they called him onstage to take his bow. She thought him a nice-looking boy, somewhat nervously high-spirited. Everything in Russia was so strange…
You look tired, Frau Kollwitz. If you wish, we can go back to your hotel by sleigh. You might enjoy the lights of Tverskoi Boulevard.
Truth to tell, she certainly was very, very tired, but she found herself saying: Thank you, that sounds beautiful, but I’m all right.
As you wish.