As she heads to the common kitchen to fetch some hot water from the samovar for her tea, a wind rises up far away on a bit of steppe, 45.61404 degrees latitude north, 70.75195 degrees longitude east, collecting a few grains of sand that get caught amid the blades of grass, while other grains of sand lying beside the tufts are carried off. For weeks now it hasn’t rained there. A beetle, emerging from nowhere, on its way nowhere, passes the time by creeping up one of the grass blades, where, having reached the top, it turns around again and goes on its way facing down. The blade of grass bent a little beneath the weight of the beetle when it reached the tip — bent almost imperceptibly, since the beetle’s weight was so slight, but still it was something. Now that the six-legged visitor has returned to earth and is once more making its laborious way among the other stalks belonging to this tuft of grass, the stalk is standing erect again, trembling ever so slightly from time to time in the tranquil air we describe as a lull.
The Jews, she thinks on her way back to her room, knew what they were doing when they decided never to call God by his name. Lenin once wrote that a glass was not only indisputably a cylinder made of glass, it was also a drinking vessel; it was not just a heavy object such as might be used for throwing, but could also serve as a paperweight, or to hold a trapped butterfly. Lenin had read Hegel, and Hegel in turn had said that truth was the whole. She always used to drink tea with her husband late into the night. Now she is sitting here alone. Could it be a mistake to have Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks right there on her shelf? Has Lenin been outlawed yet? Could he have been a classic author when she set out to get her tea, but already a criminal by the time she returns with her cup? He lies across the Neva from her in his coffin made of glass; if he were to turn over, everyone would see.
This was a weekend in early spring, perhaps around Easter. A lake outside Berlin.
Utterly disgraceful, someone should put a stop to it, such a ne’er-do-well.
We wanted to paddle across in our kayak.
Serves him right.
I remember that the weather was not on our side that day.
Turned out to lack all talent.
It seemed as if winter was moving in on us again.
We did ask ourselves what detours had brought him here and wondered about the strange writer’s life he was leading. Then we said: Why get involved with filth like that?
It snowed that last night, there was even sleet. Thin sheets of ice were floating around on the lake, but they broke apart as soon as the prow of our boat touched them.
A handful of comrades thought he had a gift.
That evening he read us his latest story in parting.
Gifted — that can mean all sorts of things.
The next day we went our separate ways.
We cannot continue to employ the designation “gifted” if he is being expelled from the organization as a writer of trash.
Hurriedly, and in fine spirits, our friend strolled off. One week later he left for Moscow.
Only a single person said he agreed with me, in a whisper: it was him. Dear comrade, I said, if you share this opinion, do stand up and say so aloud. He said that he would, but soon after he disappeared.
He stopped just the one time, to turn around and wave to us.
Shocking what he tried to pull.
I shall always see his face before me.
Tried to incite me to.
His solid, almost stocky figure.
To say that the book is garbage.
His closely shorn, stubbly hair.
Unmasked in his dream of being a writer, just in time.
Those watchful eyes.
Banished from literature.
. that were now filled with joyful expectation.
The case involving the existence of a group in Moscow with an absolute idiot at its head — the individual in question — has now been rectified.
3
A good friend of her husband’s, the theater director N., had given her and her husband a letter of introduction to Yagoda, the head of the secret service, when they emigrated to the Soviet Union. Her husband didn’t want to use it, why not, she said, he said: cronyism isn’t Socialism, and he flipped the strand of hair out of his face, she said, that isn’t cronyism, it’s just one comrade lending another a helping hand. If we do our work well, we won’t need any help, her husband said, then he tore up the letter and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Meanwhile Yagoda has been relieved of his duties, arrested, and — recently, during the third show trial — indicted, then condemned to death and executed. Perhaps Yagoda’s successors are coming up the stairs this very moment. Did her husband really tear up the letter of introduction, or did she — as she sometimes imagined, dreamed, or perhaps even really remembered during the nights following his arrest — retrieve the scraps of paper from the wastebasket, glue them together, and put the document back in the drawer? Then it would be found now and would provide a justification for her arrest. She absolutely must finish the account of her life before she is arrested. Then this piece of writing can do battle with that letter, assuming someone really has found it, or will find it and wish to use it as evidence against her and her husband: paper against paper.
*
With the roller to the side of her typewriter, she scrolls back up the last eight lines, then strikes the “X” key over and over until the paragraph she has just written becomes illegible. Then she goes on writing.
Active in.
While fighting.
Journey to.
At work on.
He, he, and she.
Hitler’s victory in the election most certainly spelled defeat for the German working classes, but at the time could one really describe it as a defeat for the Communist Party of Germany, as her husband had done?
Sch., the man in the yellow suit jacket — now a delegate to the Communist International — had replied to her husband: If the Social Democrats hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the Communists, but instead had joined with the Communists to create a united front against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have been a majority for Hitler.
We didn’t lose the workers to social democracy, we lost them to the Fascists, her husband had said, and then asked: Why? Because of this question — which he had ultimately been asking himself, not the delegate to the Communist International — he had been severely chastised by the Party, and demoted to performing lower-level Party work.
Her husband had spent one year in Berlin without papers collecting membership dues from a group of five Party members.
Shortly after her husband had left for Germany, she went for a walk on frozen Lake Neusiedl with her friend G. and asked him whether they ought to wish that Marx had been wrong, in other words that when capitalism went to seed, it wasn’t because the petit bourgeois had slid down into the proletariat, but because the proletariat had slid upwards into the petite bourgeoisie and in their new capacity as petit bourgeois had voted for Hitler.