After the fall of 1931 I never saw him again. We weren’t at all close, neither personally nor politically.
Once he came and sat with me as I was drinking a glass of beer. He made a very bad impression on me. I never saw him again.
He can’t hold his drink at all. Usually the first glass is enough for him.
Sometimes he’s just pretending!
That’s right, I’ve seen that.
Did Comrade Br. ever run into Comrade T. at V.’s apartment?
Not that I recall, but it’s always possible. I’d rather err on the side of assuming he did.
Why do you consider this a possibility?
According to what I’ve heard, the two of them knew each other.
S., L., M., and O. were once there too. A female journalist from Sweden was there, then K. and Sch. Once H. with his wife, and besides them, Comrade R., and Ö. with his wife — I think that’s all of them.
I was there once, too.
Oh, right, Fr. and also C.
Pretty much everyone was tipsy.
I consider it my duty to emphatically put a stop to these evenings, no matter how festive. When alcohol is being consumed, it is impossible to monitor whether a political remark is being made that can no longer be monitored.
I was at his apartment once on New Year’s Eve when the entire place was full and there were a large number of comrades in attendance.
Was I there?
No.
Was I there?
No.
Me?
No.
Once I went to his apartment because he had invited me ten times.
I was off traveling all the time, so I didn’t have any sort of relationship with V. at all.
That V. managed to escape being unmasked by us as two-faced until the very end is of course quite disconcerting. The moral I draw from this is that his behavior was not entirely correct.
One evening after a meeting, she had told H. about her Sisyphus, and he had talked to her about his plays. A few days later the two of them went together to a gathering of so-called revolutionary writers, and suddenly everything that had been separate for so long and separately had made no sense fell into place. After all what did having a world view mean if not learning to see? Was it possible to change the world if you found the right words? Could the world be changed only if you happened to find them?
The question of whether Comrade O., who had written something about the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, was permitted to describe the Freikorps soldier as meticulously as she did his victim was really about whether she was allowed to know in advance what she was writing or whether, on the contrary, it was her duty to be constantly searching. It was also a question about the irreversibility of good and evil, in short, fundamentally, about whether people could be educated, about whether hope had boundaries or not. Whether this or that classic author, while writing, was a participant in his time or whether he stood outside it as an observer was as much a question of life and death as the question of whom the factories belonged to. Was a revolutionary poem in sonnet form a capitulation to the enemy, a retreat in disguise, and was poet J. — cat hair on his sweater, his teeth brown from smoking — perhaps trying to imprison the revolution in fourteen lines? Everything would have been different if the social-democratic pigs hadn’t locked up our leadership back in June. Sitting in this gathering, she had felt for the first time in her life that literature itself was something real, just as real as a bag of flour, a pair of shoes, or a crowd being stirred to revolt. Here the words themselves were something you could touch, there was no transition from literature to what was called reality — instead, the sentences themselves were a reality. Van Gogh had cut off his own ear, why shouldn’t it hurt just as much when a figure in a play cut off someone else in the middle of a speech? Was it in order to write that the Communists had come into this world? Did every word matter?
Unfortunately I was often not present at these gatherings, because I was one of the ones who didn’t get invited. My temperament is fairly volatile at times, and Comrade F. took such offense at my outbursts that he called me a worm. If I were to sink to that level, I might say he was a hopeless drunk. I won’t say that, because I don’t want to sink to his level. Of course I make mistakes. I would like to practice ruthless self-criticism. I am insanely despised by Comrade M. and also by Comrade C., whose garrulousness is quite distressing to me, by the way. Now I’m having to prove that I am clean; M. doesn’t have to prove that he is right. It upsets me when Comrade M. forgets my name when he’s reading out the list of contributors. What an expression of disrespect. Of course, I don’t mean to say I think he’s engaging in this sort of politicking as an agent of fascism. I repeat that I cannot prove anything. I had an argument with Comrade C. I began to commit errors. Suddenly, I was taking offense at personal styles of communication, which I never would have done before. Gossip here, gossip there, and then there was the matter at hand. If I remember correctly, it seemed as if C. was constantly pregnant with miscarriages. I insist that by saying these things I am not revealing anything. I’m fighting to have someone finally tell me in a straightforward manner what is going on. What sorts of allegations do you have against me? I am fighting for my honor. I demand that Comrade M. stand up and explain why I wasn’t invited to contribute. Let Comrade M. stand up and let Comrade C. be called in as well. I know my own errors perfectly well. But I don’t want to hear the excuse that I didn’t turn in my articles on time. I met V. here in Moscow and could smell right away that he stank, like a dog that’s always pushing its way into things and can’t look you in the eye. Besides, he told lies. I immediately reported this to the cadre leadership. Every comrade has flaws, if a person says he has no flaws, this means he hasn’t done any self-criticism. By the way: V. always regarded me with the greatest contempt and condescension, which is something I cannot abide, especially when there’s no call for it. In my view, it ought to be possible to eliminate a fellow like that from the territory of the Soviet Union. What is going on? If I speak openly now, from comrade to comrade, I might wind up making a remark that will break my neck. Wouldn’t it be better for us to help one another? I came to Moscow, and a tall fellow with curly hair came to see me. An individual too dim-witted to engage in any sort of work but who is easy prey for any counterrevolutionary element. He brought me a few poems. They were so unbelievably bad that I felt sick to my stomach. I don’t ask to be given a medal of honor, all I ask is that if I am going to be politically isolated, a political explanation be given. I’m not the only one who comes into this room and can’t shake the feeling that a couple of the people here are keeping secrets from a third individual, or a fourth, a fifth, or sixth. The cell must demand absolute openness. At the moment there is only a single person not trying to play me for a sucker, and that is me.
One evening it was her turn to read a few pages aloud from her Sisyphus manuscript for the first time. Sch., the man in the yellow suit jacket — her name for him to this day — voiced the criticism that the book centered around a petit-bourgeois main character. Was it not precisely this petit-bourgeois indecisiveness that had caused the June Uprising to fail? Did she mean to identify with it? What about progress? But Comrade O, the only older woman in this circle, replied in her hoarse voice that it was progress when one paid heed to the truth, as this young author was most certainly doing. Before striding off upon a new path, must one not have acquired a profound understanding of what was wrong with the old one? Sallow, mustached K. replied with a certain acerbity: Of course you can invest a great deal of effort into always trying to understand everything, but we would still be tugging away at the Gordian Knot if it hadn’t occurred to someone to just slice through it. J., a poet — cat hair on his sweater, his teeth brown from smoking — said that he particularly liked the leisurely pace of her storytelling, and the many repetitions, because they reflected the stagnation from which the book’s hero suffered. Exactly, H. said: for once a story was being told via the language as well and not just the plot — and if they, the revolutionary authors, really were hoping to create a new Adam, the only clay they had at their disposal was language! His strand of hair fell in his face, but he didn’t notice. Hereupon Comrade T., raising her voice more than was necessary to be heard in this small gathering, declared that when an author resorted to gimmicks to make the reader pay attention to the writing, the text lost all power to point to something beyond itself, and she found that a shame. Not a shame, sallow, mustached K. added, but possibly dangerous, because a person who is enjoying something stays right where he is and stops moving forward. Had she been writing at the brink of an abyss, and just in time found friends who could drag her back from its edge? Had her text, which she had written in isolation, now been transformed into something that — through all these critiques and expressions of support — would bind her to these friends more intimately than a kiss might among young people who were merely eighteen years old? She was hurt by what Comrade T. said, while H.’s words, spoken this time without flipping the hair out of his face, sent happiness coursing dizzily through her body down to her fingertips, but neither Comrade T. nor H. was indifferent to what she thought and wondered. Indifference did not exist within this circle; here, every word mattered. It is not enough to be eighteen years old.