But since Kostik continued to tremble even after his long confession (although the interrogator did not raise his voice, and moreover, to put him at ease and at the same time to deride him, addressed him as "Citizen"), Captain Morozov, prompted more by a strange inspiration than by a tip from one of his informers, ordered the experts to compare Kostik's fingerprints with those found on a jimmy used as the murder weapon on one Karl Georgievich Taube four pears before in Tumen. The result was positive. Thus the veil over an apparently senseless murder was at least partially lifted.
PICTURES FROM THE ALBUM
Karl Georgievich Taube was born in 1899 in Esztergom, Hungary. Despite the meager data covering his earliest years, the provincial bleakness of the Middle European towns at the turn of the century emerges clearly from the depths of time: the gray, one-story houses with back yards that the sun in its slow journey divides with a clear line of demarcation into quarters of murderous light and damp, moldy shade resembling darkness; the rows of black locust trees which at the beginning of spring exude, like thick cough syrups and cough drops, the musky smell of childhood diseases; the cold, baroque gleam of the pharmacy where the Gothic of the white porcelain vessels glitters; the gloomy high school with the paved yard (green, peeling benches, broken swings resembling gallows, and whitewashed wooden outhouses); the municipal building painted Maria-Theresa yellow, the color of the dead leaves and autumn roses from ballads played at dusk by the gypsy band in the open-air restaurant of the Grand Hotel.
Like so many provincial children, the pharmacist's son, Karl Taube, dreamed about that happy day when, through the thick lenses of his glasses, he would see his town from the bird's-eye view of departure and for the last time, as one looks through a magnifying glass at dried-out and absurd yellow butterflies from one’s school collection: with sadness and disgust.
In the autumn of 1920, at Budapest's Eastern Station he boarded the first-class car of the Budapest-Vienna Express. The moment the train pulled out, the young Karl Taube waved once more to his father (who was disappearing like a dark blot in the distance, waving his silk handkerchief), then quickly earned his leather suitcase into the third-class car and sat down among the workers.
CREDO
Two important factors prevent a better understanding of this tumultuous period in the life of Karl Taube: his illegal activities and the numerous aliases he used. We know that he frequented émigré cafés, that he collaborated with Nevsky, that he socialized not only with Hungarian, but with German and Russian émigrés as well, and that under the aliases of Karoly Beams and Kiril Beitz he wrote articles for left-wing papers, An incomplete and thoroughly unreliable list of his works from that period includes some hundred and thirty treatises and articles, and we cite here only several that can be clearly identified because of a certain vehemence of style (which is only another name for class hatred): Religious Capital; The Red Sun, or Of Certain Principles; The Inheritance of Bela Kun; White and Bloody Terror; Credo.
His biographer and acquaintance of those émigré days, Dr. Tamas Ungvary, gives us the following description of Taube: "In 1921, when I met Comrade Beitz in the Viennese editorial office of the magazine Ma, which was dited at that time by the indecisive Lajos Kassak, I was most surprised by Beitz's modesty and calm. Although I knew he was the author of the Bloody Terror, Credo, and other texts, I was unable to reconcile the intensity and force of his style with that calm, quiet man wearing thick glasses who seemed somehow shy and ill at ease. And strangely", continued Ungvary, "I heard him more often discussing medical problems than political ones. Once, in the laboratory of the clinic where he worked, he showed me neatly lined-up jars containing fetuses in different stages of development; every jar was labeled with the name of a dead revolutionary. On this occasion he told me than he had shown his fetuses to Novsky, who literally became nauseated. This quiet young man, who at twenty-two gave every impression of being a mature man, soon came into conflict not only with the police, who discreetly followed his movements from the start, but with bis fellow militants: he thought that our actions weren’t efficient enough, and our articles lukewarm.” After four years in Vienna, disillusioned by the slow progress of revolutionary ferment, he left for Berlin, which he believed to be "the nucleus and heart of the best émigrés from European prisons.” From then until 1934 we lost all trace of him. In some articles written under a pseudonym, it seemed to me, and I don't think I was mistaken, I recognized a sentence of Taube's that sounded "as if it contained a detonator" (as Lukacs once said), I know that until his arrest he collaborated with Ernst Thalmann. Then, In the spring of 1935, we read the speech he delivered before the International Forum in Geneva, where he forecast all of the horrors of Dachau and once more warned the world of the danger: "A phantom stalks through Europe, the phantom of fascism.” The weaklings who were impressed with the strength of the new Deutschland, her tanned young men and strong Amazons parading to the sounds of stem German marches, were for a moment taken aback, listening to Taube’s prophetic words. But only for a moment; then Taube, provoked by a famous French journalist, took off his jacket and, embarrassed but resolute, rolled up his shirt to expose the still-fresh marks of heavy lashes on his back. But once official Nazi propaganda responded by calling Taube's public testimony “Communist provocation," they abandoned their doubts: the spirit of Europe needed new, strong men, and they would arise from blood and flames. So that same journalist, who had been momentarily shocked by the raw wounds, dismissed all doubt and contrary evidence, disgusted by his own weakness and the squeamishness of his Latin race, "which snivels at the mere mention of blood."
THE LONG WALKS
One rainy autumn day m 1935, crossing the Latvian-Soviet border, Dr. Karl Taube again became Kiril Beitz, perhaps wishing to erase once and for all the scats of his moral and physical suffering. He arrived in Moscow (according to Ungvary) on September 15, although another source gives a somewhat later date: October 5, For two months Taube, alias Beitz, walked the streets of Moscow as if under a spell, the frozen rain and snow fogging the thick lenses of his glasses. Evenings he was seen arm in arm with his wife, wandering around the Kremlin wall captivated by the wonder of the electric lights, which illuminated the Moscow night with revolutionary slogans in big red letters. "He wanted to see every thing, to see and touch, not only because of his myopia, but to make sure that it wasn't a dream ” says K. S. He spent little time in the Lux Hotel-the residence of all the elite European Comintern members, where he was allotted an apartment-and he socialized without much enthusiasm with his former colleagues from Vienna and Berlin, During the two months of these constant wanderings, he got to know Moscow better than any other city in his life; he knew all the housing developments, every street, park, municipal building, and monument, all the bus and streetcar lines. He already knew all the shop signs and slogans: "He learned his Russian," wrote one of his biographers, “through the language of posters and slogans, that same action-speech that he himself most often used."
One day be realized to his dismay that, with the exception of the buttoned-up and formal employees of the Comintern, he actually hadn't met a single Russian, This sudden discovery deeply affected him. He returned from his walk shivering and burning with fever.