They walked and walked, with Russia curving ecstatically all around her like the Soviet trams swerving in double tracks through the mosaic of paving-stones, the intersection almost empty, a few sparse stragglers crossing behind the tram, then nothing but stone blankness and concrete blankness flat and eternal.
And now I think we’ll take a tram, Frau Kollwitz. Herr Doktor Kollwitz, don’t you agree? Your wife looks done in.
Hands folded, the tram driver watched her through his round mirror.
The janitress and her little boy were sleeping on a mattress under the stairs, the child’s plump cheek pressed against the mother’s weary mouth, her workworn hand around his neck. Karl’s observant old face, rendered pseudo-enthusiastic by the lenses of his spectacles, turned itself upon the sleepers, and then he sighed.
The next morning, while Comrade Alexandrov took her husband to see Red Square, which bored him, and Saint Basil’s Cathedral, whose domes, variously patterned in balloon-stripes, pinecone-knurls, ice cream swirls and ocean-waves, he reported to be quite fairytale-like, she stayed in; she was old; she wanted only to sleep. Karl, who was so devoted to her, and who always told her how much good and luck she brought him—how she loved him; how she hated him! Marriage is a kind of work, she’d once told her friend Lene Bloch. He’d never understood why she needed to be alone. It hurt him. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him! She’d learned to conceal from him how happy she became when she withdrew alone into Peter’s room. Even Russia stifled her today; she must be really, really old.
Then there was a parade on Red Square, with Lenin’s Mausoleum always in the background, so she went to see that: a military parade, then armed workers, followed by demonstrations. In its own way it was as lovely as a service in the Marienkirche. Karl, the empathetic Social Democrat, hurrahed with the rest of them, although he didn’t understand a word. It was then and there that she made the pencil drawing entitled “Listening,” which would be lithographed the following year with the title translated into its Russian equivalent, Slushayuoshchie, the eyes rendered more bright and innocent still, and the contrast increased. (Otto Nageclass="underline" Out of Moscow, Käthe Kollwitz brought with her a beautiful page which was later worked in stone.) At that time, “Listening” was simply a pencil drawing of three rapt young heads gazing upwards, the farthest with its mouth agape like the dead child—but there is life in this young man’s eyes, amazement and inspiration, for he hears the words of Comrade Stalin! Next comes a head with closed lips; he is lost in the speech; then in the foreground, seated on his lap, snuggling in against his right arm, with its head on his shoulder, is the child, white-faced, wide-eyed, the mouth open, utterly curious and surprised but in the same position as so many of Kollwitz’s dead children, head back lifelessly. But what am I saying? It wasn’t lifeless at all! When they used to drink coffee or hot chocolate with the children in some café under the trees, the little ones sometimes gripped the backs of the chairs, peering over them at the world just like that! And Peter had said…
Her husband said: I keep dreaming of elaborate Russian cakes.
This story, like this book itself, is derivative. In his unsurpassable A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, the Serbian writer Danilo Kiš relates a fable: Édouard Herriot, highest-ranking French Radical Socialist, charismatic orator, effective politician (thanks in part to him, France recognized the Soviet government), has come to pay a visit to Odessa. Monsieur Herriot, Comrade Herriot I can almost call him, has one weakness: He’s squeamish about the persecution of priests. Unfortunately, he’s due to arrive in four hours, and we’ve long since converted Saint Sophia Cathedral into a brewery! What to do? Steady now! Take down the antireligious banner outside. Under my personal supervision a hundred and twenty inmates of the nearby regional prison camp carried out another restoration of the church, in less than four hours. And Herriot is tricked.
What about Käthe Kollwitz? Didn’t she also want to be tricked? If nothing else, didn’t she crave to feel just once the antithesis of that morbid grief she’d been condemned so long to tunnel through? So what if it were false light? At the end of that year, back in Berlin, she took up her diary and commended Moscow with its different atmosphere, so that Karl and I came back as if we had both had a good airing. It would be a simple matter to write this story as a parable of the heart which through its very empathy was duped. But she saw the janitress even though they wouldn’t have wanted her to. She sensed secret meanings in Comrade Alexandrov’s tone. The speeches on Red Square meant less to her than the rapt children who listened. She was all too well aware that the jury of the Prussian Academy, like their predecessors in the Kaiser’s day, would have preferred to insert her somewhere within the list Frauensport, Frauenheim, Frauenhaus (obsolete for bordello), Frauenkauf, rather than recognizing her as an artist. Why not give her the credit of supposing that she also saw through their Soviet equivalents? For example, when Comrade Alexandrov, perhaps genuinely wanting to know, but more likely wishing to determine the extent of her cooperation, requested her views on the emiseration of the German proletariat, she looked steadily into the man’s face, then replied: When the man and the woman are healthy, a worker’s life is not unbearable.
In retrospect, what should she have thought or understood? Joy in others, being in harmony with them, had always been one of the deepest pleasures in her life; shouldn’t that be everyone’s? Given the limitation of her bourgeois origins, shouldn’t the fact of her empathy for the working class have counted sufficiently in her favor for “posterity” not to expect anything else of her? It may well be that her impressions of Russia are of a piece with the memorial to Peter, which once depicted Peter himself, but now depicts his parents. I sometimes fear that this is the case with everyone’s impressions of everything. (Danilo Kiš would say all this much better in his trademark ironic style; unfortunately, he’s now in the same place as Peter.) Perhaps she really did continue working without illusions. It would be too cheap to write that someone eavesdropped on her while she drew “Listening.” But even if that were true, and even if she didn’t notice, what then?
I’ve read, not in her daybooks, but in the account of Comrade Alexandrov, to whom I am very close, that at one point when he uttered a remark which she might have construed as sinister, for it seemed to call on her to praise Comrade Stalin’s portrait (darkhaired, dark-moustached, not quite Asian, almost smiling), she simply replied: We each must fulfill our own obligation.
It’s fair to say that this new Red Russia of dog-nosed, sprawling trucks and flat-roofed trams literally intoxicated her, and that for this pretty, darkhaired Elena—yes, her name actually was Elena—who explained to everyone that the reason Frau Kollwitz had taken up etching was in order to distribute the maximum number of prints to the working class, Käthe suddenly felt a surge of physical feeling, such as she had not felt for any woman since she was much, much younger. She heard a ringing in her ears. Gamely, she tried to sing the “Propeller Song…”
When it was time for her to go they made another party for her, of course, and when she arrived at the train station she found some people spontaneously organized in her honor; some of them even had banners. Among them stood a young photojournalist from Odessa; he asked permission to take her picture with his dead father’s camera; in a low shy voice he informed her that he was hoping that an editor he knew would agree to publish a portrait of the great artist K. Kollwitz in Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia. She was feeling very tired by then, really, really tired; but she also felt sorry for him, so she nodded.