In Moscow, the night of April 27, 1937, Margarete Buber-Neumann noticed that one of the KGB agents who came to arrest her husband was wearing small, round rimless glasses, which gave his very young face an intellectual air. That impression is substantiated by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who suffered from the harassment of the secret police and says that the youngest of them were known for their sophisticated tastes and a weakness for literature. At one in the morning, there was pounding on the door of their room in the Hotel Lux, where employees and foreign activists of the Comintern were housed. In 1920, Professor Fernando de los Ríos had lodged there, sent by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party with the task of reporting on Soviet Russia. He had interviewed Lenin and was surprised by the man’s resemblance to the Spanish writer Pío Baroja, and by his scorn for the liberties and the lives of common people.
With beating hearts we fixed our attention on the sound of boots coming closer and closer. As happened every night, Margarete — Greta — had lain awake in the dark, listening to footsteps in the corridors, jumping every time the lights in the stairway were turned on. If the lights on the stairs and in the corridors of the Hotel Lux were turned on after midnight, it was for the KGB men, who prowled the dark, empty streets of Moscow in black vans everyone called crows. They didn’t use the elevators, maybe out of fear that some mechanical failure or interruption of electrical current would allow a victim to escape. But the victims never escaped, they didn’t even try, lying motionless, paralyzed, in their rooms, in the bleakness of their lives, and when finally the KGB did come for them, they offered no resistance, didn’t fight or scream with rage or panic, didn’t have a weapon ready to shoot their way out or blow their head off at the last instant. For years Heinz Neumann, leader of the German Communist Party, knew that he was a marked man, that his name was on the list, and still he went with his wife to the Soviet Union after the triumph of Nazism in Germany. He did not try to take refuge in a different country but lived in Moscow, aware of how the circle of suspicion and hostility was tightening around him every day, how his old friends stopped talking to him, how one after another comrades disappeared, those he had trusted but who had turned out to be traitors, Trotskyite conspirators, enemies of the people. Now no one visited him and his wife in their room in the Hotel Lux, nor did they visit anyone for fear of compromising them, of contaminating others with their always imminent disgrace, postponed day after day and night after night. If the telephone rang, they sat looking at it without daring to answer, and when they picked up the receiver, they heard a click and knew that someone was listening. There was a time when they covered the telephones with blankets or heavy clothing because a rumor said that even when the receivers were down it was possible to hear conversation in a room.
In the summer of 1932, Heinz Neumann and his wife had been Stalin’s personal guests at a resort on the Black Sea. The night of April 27, 1937, when the pounding comes at their door, Greta Neumann is lying wide awake in the darkness, but her husband doesn’t wake up, not even when she turns on the light and the uniformed men enter. The three of them stand around the bed, and one of them, maybe the youngest, the one with the rimless glasses, yells his name, but Neumann turns beneath the blankets and faces the wall, as if refusing with all the strength of his soul to wake. When finally he opens his eyes, an almost childish horror floods his features, and then his face turns slack and gray. While the men search the room and examine each of his books, husband and wife sit facing each other, and both feel their knees trembling. A piece of paper falls to the floor from one of the books, and the guard who picks it up identifies it as a letter from Stalin sent to Neumann in 1926. “Worse and worse,” murmurs the guard, folding it back again. The husband and wife’s knees touch, each with the identical tremble, like an ague that can’t be stopped. Outside the room, in the hotel corridors, as outside their windows, they begin to hear the faint sounds of people waking up, of the city coming to life before the first light of day. The dawn came slowly behind the window curtains.