‘I’m not much of a dancer, as you well know.’

  ‘It’s only an excuse to get close to someone, that’s the important thing.’

  ‘What have you and Bruno said to this man about me? Seriously?’

  Her sister smiled and raised an eyebrow suggestively.

  ‘Lala, why must you meddle in my life?’ Margarita felt suddenly irritated.

  ‘I’m just trying to look after you. You don’t want to be on your own forever, do you?’

  ‘I’m happy as I am, thank you very much.’

  ‘You’ve had nobody since Stanislav Markovich. When did he go back to Russia? It was ages ago.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ answered Margarita, though she remembered it all very well.

  ‘It must be two years ago at least.’

  She hadn’t even told her sister that she’d come across Stanislav Markovich again, when he’d been on a visit to Berlin and had been giving a reading from his newly published novel at the Marxist Workers’ College. He had read for almost an hour, the lamp on the podium casting dark shadows under his eyes. As she’d listened, Margarita had quickly realised it was semi-autobiographical. Lenin was the guiding light at the centre of everything, as Stanislav recollected his own encounters with Vladimir Ilyich when he was living in exile in Paris before the 1914–1918 war. He’d brought the man vividly to life: how he loved Pushkin and Beethoven, and walking in the mountains. He’d portrayed a generous personality with a complicated nature, somebody who chose to dedicate his whole life to liberating the working class and creating a new society unlike any other in the history of the world. He’d finished the reading by describing touchingly the feelings of immense public grief in the bitter cold of Lenin’s funeral in January 1924.

  Over coffee afterwards, many had been eager to talk to Stanislav, and Margarita had observed him from a distance. What had brought their romance to an end was Stanislav’s insistence on going back to Moscow, where he thought a better future awaited him. Margarita had understood his ambition, his hankering for a career with prospects after living hand-to-mouth for so long in Berlin. He had begged her to go with him, and she had considered it very seriously, but in the end the thought of leaving her mother and sister had made it impossible.

  Eventually, Margarita had approached him. Stanislav had stared at her in stunned disbelief for a moment before recollecting himself. He’d introduced the dark-haired young woman standing next to him. ‘Lyuba, this is Margarita Kozmyevna… Margarita, this is my wife.’

  ‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ Lyuba had smiled; she’d had unusually green eyes.

  ‘Good things, I hope…’ Margarita had replied, half smiling at Stanislav.

  He’d taken out his pipe and told her that he and Lyuba had been living in Paris for some months, where he’d been trying to establish himself as a novelist. It was not the easiest life, and it was only by doing a little lecturing and journalism that he’d kept the wolf from the door. They were living in a shabby little hotel on the Avenue du Maine, with the usual narrow dark stairs, smelly corridors and threadbare rooms. Under the window of their room was a pissoir, with a wooden bench nearby where lovers came to hold hands and kiss and cuddle for hours. He’d spend hours at this window every day, trying to write and staring out at the world. On the other hand, he spent his evenings mostly in the Rotonde, discussing literature with Mayakovskii and like-minded writers. Their aim was to produce art as a force for good in people’s lives, promoting a new, communist, world-view.

  ‘An artist’s lot is not an easy one,’ Stanislav had claimed.

  ‘He has to take on all sorts of dreary commissions for newspapers,’ Lyuba had added.

  Margarita had been curious. ‘So you didn’t stay long in Russia in the end then?’

  I travel to and fro at the moment. I’m not an émigré, I’m a Soviet citizen. That’s what’s on my passport.’

  ‘It’s good to know where you belong in the world,’ Lyuba had said.

  ‘And what about you?’ he’d asked. ‘I never would have expected to see you here of all places.’

  Margarita had smiled. ‘I’m not as prejudiced about the Soviet Union as I used to be.’

  ‘It’s good to see you in any case.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  Margarita was pulled out of this reverie when Larissa gave her an admonishing little punch on the arm. She caught a sudden glimpse of herself in the mirror facing her and realised with embarrassment that she was beautiful. Sometimes, she’d look down at her legs and be surprised that she had any at all, as she normally hid them under long skirts. Why was she so ashamed of herself? Larissa was always telling her she had a good figure and should show it off.

  ‘If you could just manage to put a smile on your face you might find yourself in luck tonight,’ her sister teased.

  ‘Larissa, I really don’t need any of your kind of luck. I’m very capable of looking after myself without any interference from you.’

  Larissa was used to her sister’s protestations, but as far as she was concerned there was nothing sadder than seeing her sister go off to concerts or the pictures all on her own.

  ‘Look, he’s looking over, now smile, can’t you? Here he comes…’

  Once her sister was on the dance floor with Norbert, Larissa went to sit with Bruno. ‘Could you undo the button of my collar?’ he asked her, and she complied. ‘That’s better. Gracious me, it’s stifling in here,’ he complained, stretching his legs out in front of him, and flicking the ash from his cigarette. They watched Norbert and Margarita dancing.

  ‘Has he said anything?’ asked Larissa eventually.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But he must have said something, surely?’

  ‘Just that she wasn’t his type.’

  Larissa couldn’t hide her disappointment.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘He likes girls with a bit more padding up top. He thinks your sister is a bit flat-chested. And he has a point.’

  ‘Big breasts aren’t everything.’

  ‘But for Norbert they’re important. Along with other qualities of course.’

  ‘Do you think the same of me then?’

  Bruno turned his sweaty face to look at her.

  ‘Do you think I need more padding here?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘So you do.’

  ‘No, of course I don’t.’

  ‘I can tell that you do.’

  ‘I’ve never said such a thing.’

  ‘But you suggested it, Bruno.’

  ‘I did no such thing. We were discussing your sister.’ He raised his voice in irritation.

  ‘But it applies to me. I’m even smaller than she is. I’m not good enough for you. I know I’m not.’

  When Margarita and Norbert joined them at their table, it was obvious that Larissa had been crying. She tried to laugh it off when her sister asked her quietly what was wrong, but her eyes still glistened with tears.

  The next day, after Bruno had left for the hospital, Larissa confided in Margarita that she’d been pregnant but had miscarried a few days earlier.

  ‘Does Bruno know?’ asked Margarita.

  ‘No, thank heavens. And he mustn’t either. I don’t want him to think that I’m useless…’

  ‘Of course he won’t think that. You’re not useless Lala.’

  ‘I just don’t know sometimes why he married me. Someone like me. He deserves better. What did he ever see in me?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that darling… look, you’re just upset. There’s no need to worry. You’re both young and healthy. You have plenty of time ahead of you.’

  8.

  Margarita kept to her new resolution of deepening her understanding of communism. She read and studied, and went to as many of the lectures at the Marxist Workers’ College as she could. In the absence of any other choice, she continued to work as a life model, which at least gave her plenty of opportunity to discuss ideas and ideology with Bi, though she now knew plenty of other communists.

  But although Margarita had begun to see the world in a fresh light, certain questions still troubled her. Foremost among them was how could anybody be so absolutely certain about things? Life for her was random, a matter of chance. Perhaps it was possible for people to live as though they were free, but there were other forces working against ideals and dreams, smashing them to dust. She so often felt that her own life was as insubstantial as tissue paper. Bi dismissed her concerns and taught her to concentrate on what was fundamental.

  ‘What is democracy?’ he asked her.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘The right to cast a vote for political parties which are no more than clones of each other, and whose only disagreements revolve around the best way to uphold capitalism. For communists, on the other hand, the history of mankind is a journey towards its emancipation.’

  And so he went on. The more he talked, the more she learnt. It was Bi who persuaded Margarita to join the German Communist Party. ‘The most important thing is to commit to action,’ he told her

  ‘Do you think I’m ready to commit?’ she asked him, gratified but doubtful.

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘But I’m worried that I just don’t know enough yet.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Marxism, I suppose.’

  ‘You know enough. You know you do. There’s something else stopping you. What troubles you? Tell me.’

  She hesitated, oddly ashamed. But Bi persisted and in the end she admitted her fears. ‘Everybody who joins a political party has to give up their freedom of opinion to a certain degree. But that’s especially the case for communists, who must be under Party discipline at all times.’

  Which was entirely a good thing, according to Bi. ‘There’s nothing that ruins individuals more than individualism,’ he told her firmly. Independence of opinion only led to sectarianism and schism. Strict discipline was vital to keep the Communist Party strong and united.

  ‘Look, I want to ask you one simple question: do you want to see a better world being created?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. But the truth of it is, nobody can create a better world single-handed. So the trick is for the individual to harness his will to the will of the working class in order to join the struggle for equality and justice. Walking the communist path isn’t always easy, but what other choice do we have?’

  He scrawled a name on a piece of paper and put it in her hand.

  ‘Go and see her – and tell her I sent you.’

  Margarita did so the following day.

  9.

  A thin girl told her she’d go and fetch Hedwig for her and disappeared through a light blue door. Margarita sat and waited on a wooden bench. Who would have thought? she marvelled, yet what she was doing felt like the most natural thing in the world. Eventually, Hedwig emerged and Margarita stood up. Margarita expected her to shake her hand, but she didn’t; there was something very direct and informal about her.

  ‘Nobody calls me Hedwig now apart from my mother and Bi. Call me Vicky.’

  She led the way to an office where three women were typing. Vicky stamped Margarita’s membership card and welcomed her to the ranks of the German Communist Party – the KPD. Holding the card in the palm of her hand, gazing at the little gold hammer and sickle, Margarita was amazed at how simple the whole thing had been. As she left the building for the summer sun on Bülowplatz, Margarita walked with a spring in her step, joyful in the knowledge that she now belonged to a movement that looked to the future, not back to the past.

  Over the next few months, Vicky and Margarita became firm friends, spending hours in each other’s company. Vicky lent her books and pamphlets and every lunchtime Margarita would diligently pore over Die Rote Fahne in some cheap café and then leave it for whoever else might care to read it. In any event, she didn’t want to risk taking it home with her, for fear of giving Bruno and Larissa some inkling of her secret life.

  Every Thursday evening she’d make her way to the Schünemann bierkeller, where her cell held their weekly meetings in a back room. Aside from Vicky, who was the co-ordinator between the cell and the KPD, there were three or four other earnest young woman in their twenties, like Margarita, but the rest were men. Most of them were unemployed, with families to feed, and had the defeated look of hunger and exhaustion about them. There was also an intense but mild-mannered young man, who taught Latin in a school in Lichtenberg and who always chewed the end of a pencil; a journalist; and a ginger-haired youth whose complete inability to sit still annoyed the older members. They all smoked throughout the meetings almost without exception.

  Keen to show her commitment to the cause, Margarita often spent her Sundays with her comrades, going door-to-door in the working class neighbourhoods of Wedding and Neukölln, distributing pamphlets and selling communist publications. Sometimes it was difficult not to be discouraged by the lack of interest, and at other times they had to bolt down the tenement stairs to avoid a good kicking. But often Margarita was welcomed, and she felt she was truly beginning to spread her wings, in the company of others who felt the same as she did.

  One Sunday morning, she came face to face with an old friend from her days working in a cake factory when she had not long arrived in Berlin from Russia. Her friend hugged her and invited her in to the apartment, but when her husband saw the pamphlet in Margarita’s hand, he snatched it from her, tore it to pieces, and bellowed at her to get out.

  ‘Aldrich, she’s my friend!’ remonstrated his wife, pink with embarrassment.

  ‘Do I have to tell her again?’ he said belligerently, straightening up, his fists welded to his thighs. ‘Get out, I said.’

  He’d been a solider in the Freikorps, and hated the Reds, with their lying Jewish-Russian sloganeering about some mythical international brotherhood. The only socialism he recognised was the socialism of the trenches – that’s where true German solidarity had existed among working men. He still felt that sense of brotherhood, every bit as strongly as the implacable hatred he felt towards those bogus socialists and rapacious Jews who had stabbed their treacherous knife into the back of the army in 1918.

  ‘Now get out, and don’t you dare show your face here again you stupid bitch.’

  The door slammed shut.

  10.

  Margarita was always careful to keep her KPD membership card hidden, and most of the time managed to guard her tongue against saying anything that might upset Larissa or Bruno, who after all were providing her with a roof over her head. She had realised over the months that her brother-in-law was not as politically neutral as she first thought, and was in fact an old-fashioned nationalist, who voted for the Deutsche Nationale Partie, though he wasn’t a member. Prior to that, he’d voted for the Catholic Party, as all his family were Catholics. Although he never proclaimed much on the subject of politics, and found the whole idea of going out canvassing for any political party rather vulgar, Bruno was highly suspicious of socialism, and positively antagonistic towards communism, ever since someone at the hospital had told him that they had nationalised the women in Russia so that they belonged to everybody. When Margarita had protested that this was completely absurd and obviously untrue, he’d told her that she could take it from him that it was true.

  ‘Where did you hear such a thing?’ she’d demanded as he repeated the claim over supper one evening.

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You can’t remember because it’s nonsense, that’s why.’

  Affronted, Bruno had insisted that the information had come from a very reliable source. Things had become heated and Larissa had tried to intervene, but to no avail. Bruno loathed losing an argument, and would never admit defeat, even when he was on thin ground, always insisting on having the last word.

  ‘Have you ever stopped for one second, Bruno, to ask yourself why you think like you do?’ Margarita had asked him challengingly.

  ‘Because this is how all sensible people think,’ he’d answered unhesitatingly. ‘Communism is nothing but an abhorrent chaos. Anyway, what makes you so very interested in my beliefs all of a sudden?’

  Margarita had refused to let it go. ‘What do you think is more important? The past or the future?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s more important?’

  ‘What do you mean, woman?’

  Margarita had explained that many people felt the need to cling to an apparently perfect past when faced by a world which seemed to be changing too quickly. They preferred to distance themselves from the present for some fantasy of a perfect society which had never actually existed. What led even perfectly intelligent people to think like this was insecurity and fear.

  ‘Me? Frightened?’ He’d been clearly affronted. ‘Frightened of what?’

  ‘Of change.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Bruno had laughed. ‘I’ve never heard such rubbish in all my life!’

  Margarita had asked him quietly, ‘Why won’t you think about what I’ve just said?’

  ‘Who’s been feeding you all this tosh about change, eh?’

  ‘You’re too conservative to realise how conservative you really are.’

  Perhaps it was his need for security which lay behind his choosing to marry young, Margarita had mused to herself. But she had learnt one important lesson: the sheer futility of challenging her brother-in-law. It was wiser to stay silent.

  11.

  It was Vicky who first mentioned Margarita to her boss, Erich Lange. After reading other members’ reports about her, he was impressed enough to pass her name along to Ernst Thälmann, the Chairman of the KPD and a Reichstag member.