Never did anyone display a more upright and incorruptible character than my husband. In the three years we spent in the Soviet Union, H.’s every thought was devoted to working in the service of Socialism, combating Fascism, helping the Party.
Only after she had fallen in love with him had she realized what a great longing she’d always had to be knowable to another person: to be one with herself, and at the same time with another. Everything within her that she had secretly identified as wrong, all the trespasses she had committed, imagined, inherited, or desired — he’d laughed away all her shame and, with it, her susceptibility to blackmail. Love had meant saying what was in her heart, and this saying meant freedom, and for the first time her fear of not being good enough had gone away.
And hadn’t Lenin’s principle of criticism and self-criticism within the Party originally presupposed — and also set as its goal — absolute equality among all comrades and their mutual trust? Was it not this principle that was to facilitate growth? The more radically the individual set his own limitations aside, the more firmly the whole cohered. Why had G., then, whom she had always referred to as her clever friend, not sacrificed his friendship with A.?
Truly we are coming to know one another in the course of these exchanges, we see each other quite clearly. This is my profound insight, what I understand here as a Bolshevik, what I experience: Bolshevism’s power, its intellectual power, is so strong that it forces us to speak the truth. As Communists we should show our faces, in other words show the entire person. You can’t just say that you didn’t have time to be vigilant because you had to bring money to your wife at your dacha. When we have been successful in creating a clean atmosphere, we will truly be able to work cleanly and productively.
Until recently, she’d shared her husband’s view that it was crucial they scrutinize their own ranks closely to keep the core stable. She’d reclined on the sofa as he sat in an armchair, reading to her from the thick volume containing the latest report on the court proceedings. After Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev — the original revolutionaries, once lauded as Lenin’s stalwart brothers-in-arms — Bukharin, too, had made a public confession, declaring himself guilty of conspiracy and treason, and he had been condemned to death and shot. In his last plea, he’d said: When you ask yourself, “If you must die, what are you dying for?”— suddenly a pitch-black void appears before you with shocking clarity. There is nothing worth dying for if you want to die unrepentant. He’d taken this opportunity to declare his loyalty to the Soviet Union one last time.
She and her husband had met Bukharin right at the beginning of their time in Moscow. The very day they arrived, he had telephoned the hotel of the Austrian and German comrades who’d just escaped from their own countries — countries where they’d been in hiding — and personally delivered a piece of bread and bacon to each of their rooms.
Now, would she still have a chance to describe the sound the pages of the thick book made as they turned? Page after page, she heard in her husband’s voice the way these living beings were transformed into ghosts.
Only now that she is alone has she begun to ask herself if it is really necessary to radically cut away everything that is weak or gravitates to the fringes. The core of a sphere, her little sister would probably say (she who was always so good at math), is basically just a point, but one whose size approaches infinity on the negative axis. But what was the core? An idea? An individual? Could it be Stalin? Or the utterly disembodied, utterly pure belief in a better world? And whose head was this belief supposed to inhabit if the day came when not a single head remained? An individual could lose his head, she’d thought two years ago, but not an entire Party. Now it was looking as if an entire Party really could lose all its individual heads, as if the sphere itself were spinning all its points away from it, becoming smaller and smaller, just to reassure itself that its center held firm. Approaching infinity on the negative axis.
In Vienna her husband used to laugh whenever a theater critic wrote: He wasn’t playing Othello — he was Othello. Old-fashioned was his word for this mania for perfect illusions. He interpreted the flawless melding of actor and mask as the pinnacle of bourgeois deceit, and now, in the Land of the Future — where the labor of all for all supposedly had been stripped of deception, where individual gain resulted in profit for all, while egotism and tactical maneuvering could be eliminated before they arose — he himself stood accused of duplicity? Had they, as people on the run, changed their names so often their own comrades had lost all memory of what lay behind the names? Why else was there so much talk of costumes and masks? Or had they, locked in battle with an external enemy, begun to turn into this enemy without realizing it? Would this new thing hatching out of them bear them ill will? Had their own growing gone over to the other side unbeknownst to them?
The head of any dialectically functional human being contains all thoughts. It’s just a question of which thought I let out. Obviously man is guilty. Yet the thought also arises that man is innocent. I cannot escape this dilemma by constantly harping on the young poet D., who is innocent. It keeps coming down to the same thing: on one hand, innocent D., and on the other a random arrest. The man is innocent, and I see that he is innocent, I try to help prove his innocence, and then he is arrested, and this means that the arrest was random. But since an arrest is never random, it is therefore proven that the man is not innocent. Therefore I am willing to concede the point to you, in a case where you are in the wrong.
On this bit of steppe, 45.61404 degrees latitude north, 70.751954 degrees longitude east, there are only three months a year without frost. In only a few weeks, the grass will lose this green tint it displays, it will turn brown, and when the wind blows one stalk against the other, it will rustle faintly. Before the first snow falls, tiny ice crystals will cover the blades, and even the little stones on the surface of the steppe will without exception be covered with hoarfrost and freeze together. Once the frost sets in, it will no longer be possible for the wind to blow the stones about.
The weekend before his arrest, her husband had gone to a meeting and, upon returning, in distinct contrast to his usual habit, had said nothing at all about what had been discussed there. It was nearly dawn when he got home, and he did not laugh away her fears, baring his teeth and flipping back his strand of hair; she had seen him this tight-lipped only once before, that time two years earlier when he had learned that his application for membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been approved, but hers had not.
Now that her husband has been taken away, she knows that when she sits here putting her life to paper, she is playing not just with her own life, but with his as well, not just with her own death, but also with his; or is she playing against death — or does all this pro and contra make no difference at all? She knows that with every word she writes or leaves unwritten she is playing with the lives of her friends, just as her friends in turn, when they are asked about her, are forced to play with hers. G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, had to the bitter end refused to sacrifice his friendship with the Trotskyist A.