Ever since her husband’s arrest, she has felt like a stranger in this land, even though when they first arrived, it was a homecoming, despite the fact that they’d never set foot here before 1935. A homecoming to the future that was to belong to them. Our metro, she and her husband said when they saw the newly opened underground stations for the first time, our Gastronom No. 1, when they went shopping for the first time in this gigantic grocery store, where there were thirty-six kinds of cheese, and a stunning cornucopia of foodstuffs of all sorts, items whose names had been all but forgotten in Vienna and Prague; the saleswomen wore little white bonnets, and they didn’t touch the cheese, meat, sausages, bread, or vegetables with their hands, but only with forks or rubber gloves. Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited. To be sure, there were still small old shops where one could find flour being sold in hand-twisted sacks made of newsprint, here and there the customs of a bygone, unsanitary age still survived, but they would soon no doubt disappear amid the gleam of modernity. Once she had even sent her mother a package containing cheese, goose fat, caviar, sausages and bonbons. Let her mother see that she, the wayward daughter, had done everything right after all. Anything flourishing in the Soviet Union was flourishing in her own life as well. Her mother thanked her in a letter, asking how things were with her. And she had been proud to be able to write in her response: very good. A time comes when a daughter shouldn’t have to give any other reply to her mother’s question as to how she is doing. The very good will now remain with her forever, come what may. Her husband is very good, she writes when her mother asks her whether H., too, is keeping welclass="underline" for a person who doesn’t know the truth, it makes no difference whether someone has been arrested or is just far, far away. Very good, she writes, when her mother asks her about her apartment and work. The reality behind this very good has gradually shifted, but that is nothing her mother needs to know. It is only a pity that her father, who was always on her side, did not live to see her time of happiness.
When the passport of a German friend expired, he couldn’t get his residency permit extended. He was invited to visit the German embassy in Moscow to have his passport renewed. Invited to present himself to the Fascists who had him on a list, invited to turn himself in. He died not quite two months later at a concentration camp outside Weimar. He passed the test. Another comrade went to the German embassy and emerged with a new passport. He was received by the NKVD and shot as a German spy. He did not pass the test. Both are dead.
After Hitler’s seizure of power I came to Prague. I have to say that I was profoundly depressed at the time. Never before in my life had I left German soil. It was very hard for me to say goodbye. I know that all I wanted was to get back to Germany as quickly as possible. I even considered wearing a disguise. Of course that would have been madness. In night after night of discussion, Comrade F. convinced me to go to Moscow. But I find it difficult to write here. In point of fact, we were rejected by Germany and don’t yet have roots in the Soviet Union.
Her passport, too, has been a German passport ever since the Anschluss. Her passport, too, expired three weeks ago. Three times now the Soviet official she handed her document to for inspection took one look at it and slammed his window down in her face. Without a valid passport there’s no extending her residency permit, no propusk, but she needs one in order to be allowed to go on living in her apartment. At least the building superintendent is still letting her go upstairs to her apartment at night, when no one will see, but it won’t be long before the apartment is assigned to someone else. And then where will she go?
While she is writing the account of her life, she listens for the sound of the elevator. The day the elevator stops on her floor at around four or five in the morning — that will be the end. During the day, she sits in the coffeehouse Krasni Mak, red poppy, translating poems from Russian to German for her own edification. Without a propusk, there’s no getting a work permit either. The money she has left from her husband will be enough, if she spends it frugally, for the next two weeks at most. Then what?
At night, instead of sleeping, she works on the account of her life, which she is using to apply for Soviet citizenship. But what if there is no right answer on this test? Will there eventually be only a single thing left to feel sure of: that each of the comrades dying, here or in Germany, has finally reached his goal, while each who has survived all of this, here or in Germany, purchased his life with treason?
Sometimes she would take her father’s glasses off his nose to clean them. She and her friend had sometimes stood side by side, comparing their legs. Once she had lain awake all night long beside her friend’s fiancé, weeping. For Comrade G. she had sliced through an entire stack of paper at one go. Before she kissed her husband for the first time, she had grabbed him by his shock of hair, pulling him toward her. Was she ever even the same person? Were there any two moments in her life when she was comparable to herself? Was the whole not the truth? Or was everything treason? If the person who is to read this account remains faceless to her, what face should she be showing him? Which is the right blank face for a blank mirror?
4
My husband was arrested on October 25, 1938.
Comrade Sch. in his yellow suit jacket always used to say contemptuously when two comrades fell in love: They’re privatizing. France, England, and America had meanwhile recognized Hitler’s government. If a person was now in love with the wrong idea, this put him objectively — whether he saw it this way or not — on the side of the Fascists. Friendship, love, and marriage were indeed a sticky subject in times when all signs were pointing to war.
Today we know that enemies of the people have slandered upstanding comrades in the name of political vigilance and brought about their arrests. I am convinced that the case of my husband H. is precisely such an instance and that his innocence will be demonstrated.
When she was a child, her father sometimes made faces for her in the dark, and precisely because she loved him so much, she was never entirely sure that her father was still her father at these times. She had always considered it possible that he might at any moment be transformed from the person she knew so well into something deadly, and then this deadliness would prove to be his actual nature. Just a single moment of truth like this could reveal his entire life to have been dissimulation.
Hadn’t she sat in church on Sunday, a good Christian girl, while the next day, people might perhaps be spitting at her Jewish grandmother when she went to do her shopping at the Naschmarkt?
She’d reproached herself as a duplicitous wretch when she betrayed her best friend with her desires. Always there had been these dependencies, always the fear of desiring too much or not being good enough, leading to lies, to dissimulation, to silence. Redhead, redhead, ding-a-ling, fire burns in Ottakring, always the fear of giving too much of oneself or too little, Jewish sow, always the rungs separating human beings, the inferiorities, always someone pushing someone else downstairs, someone falling, knocking over the person below. Had not they, the Communists, made it their business to even out the gradient so that everyone could stand freely without falling, without pushing, shoving, being pushed or shoved, free — and without fear?