As everybody was leaving at the end of the cell meeting one Thursday, Vicky told Margarita that she was expected at a meeting at the KPD headquarters on Bülowplatz the following day.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Half past six.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Margarita arrived far too early, well before six, and was made to wait almost an hour and a half. As the fingers of the clock approached half past seven, the building was still full of busy people, with no sign of anyone going home.

  Vicky eventually ushered her to an office on the third floor where a middle-aged man in a grey waistcoat told her, without any introduction, that he’d be interviewing her.

  ‘Interview?’ she said, bemused.

  Vicky caught her eye before leaving, and grinned.

  Later, as they left the building, Margarita turned to Vicky and said, ‘I’m not sure if I should take it.’

  Vicky paused a moment to light her cigarette, ‘You’d turn down an offer like that? How could you?’

  Margarita had doubts about her own capabilities.

  ‘You don’t have any choice but to accept. Think about it. You and I will be working together from now on. Momentous events are about to happen. There’s going to be a revolution. Of that, I’m absolutely convinced.’

  Margarita duly began working at the International Arbeiter-Hilfe, the IAH, a movement under the wing of the KPD. But although it was a full-time post, the salary was so pitiful it meant she had no choice but to continue to live under the same roof as her sister and brother-in-law, which she thought might become problematic.

  She raised the matter with Vicky who just said, ‘You’re getting the same as everybody else. Money doesn’t grow on trees you know.’

  Margarita decided her only option was to lie, so she told her sister she had found a position with an insurance company a stone’s throw from Bülowplatz.

  ‘Are you enjoying the work?’

  Oh yes, she could truthfully say, she was enjoying it immensely. Although the hours were long the work was pure joy – a combination of planning policy and strategy in the office, and political activism out on the street – and for the first time in her life, Margarita felt that she was doing something truly worthwhile.

  She was sent to Potsdam, to cover the court case of some junker by the name of Rittmeister Gunther von Kunz, who had shot a young worker in the face. The provocation for this had been catching the man picking mushrooms at daybreak on his estate. This wasn’t the first occasion von Kunz had stood in the dock, for a year or so previously he had beaten two young girls black and blue with a leather strop for gathering kindling on his land for their mothers. What did Rittmeister Gunther von Kunz assert before his equals? That he would never dream of shooting an upright citizen, but he didn’t give a damn about shooting the two barrels of his gun at society’s scum. Of course he was found not guilty; Margarita wrote that the verdict was a foregone conclusion. After all, Potsdam was a city loyal to its ancient Prussian heritage: everybody knew as much, and knew too that the chief of police, the judge, the jury, and every other member of the legal system shared the same ideal of justice, which was that its ultimate purpose was to protect the sanctity of ownership, and that justice was only a means of maintaining order to the advantage of those who owned the most. The report of the court case was Margarita’s first article in Die Rote Fahne.

  ‘You can never reconcile property rights with social justice,’ Vicky maintained. ‘Because the first will always stamp out the second.’

  Margarita was still in awe of Vicky’s energy and her commitment to the cause. She felt she needed to prove her mettle, especially as her boss, Willi Munzenberg, came down heavily on anybody he thought was slacking. Her daily routine included organising conferences and meetings. Sometimes the meetings would be held in indoor venues such as cellar jazz bars, stinking of sweat and smoke, but others were held out on the streets. This world of discussion and debate, notwithstanding the petty squabbling and malice, which often curdled the atmosphere, was pure delight to Margarita.

  12.

  The minute she was through the front door, Larissa couldn’t wait to give Margarita her news.

  ‘You’ll never believe who I saw today.’

  Her former governess, Duchess Lydia Herkulanova Vors had been brought to the hospital bleeding badly. Margarita was all agog and Larissa was wide-eyed as she told her sister what had happened. Duchess Lydia’s mistake had been to put herself in the hands of some backstreet abortionist in Wedding.

  ‘You should have seen her, the woman had made mincemeat of her…’

  ‘Please Larissa, you can spare me the gory details.’

  Her sister complied, knowing that Margarita would have been horrified if she had described how the woman had managed to perforate the womb with her steel knitting needle, and then compounded the damage by using forceps to extract the foetus, bringing a good lump of innards along with it onto her kitchen table. Either she was blind drunk, or she thought she was pulling on the umbilical cord, but when she realised she simply stuffed as much as she could back in, although she at least had the grace to run to her neighbour for help, a woman in the same line of business as herself. The neighbour took one look at the bleeding Duchess and ran into the street to flag down a car, knowing the ambulance would arrive too late to save her. So she was rushed to hospital on the back seat of an old Hispano-Suiza which had seen better days. By the time they manoeuvred her from the motor car onto the stretcher Duchess Lydia was in agony and close to death. She was immediately taken to theatre, and was lucky enough to have an excellent surgeon operate on her. As it happened, Bruno was under his tutelage and so he had been tasked with dispensing enough cold puffs of gas to anaesthetise Duchess Lydia for the duration. Although the surgery was successful, Duchess Lydia was very weak after losing so much blood, but to their surprise, she rallied. When she first regained consciousness and opened her eyes she swore she could see her husband – murdered by the Bolsheviks – standing in front of her. She said he was covered in blood, but that he held her hand and urged her not to give in, to fight for her life…

  ‘Of course, nobody understood a word of what she was saying, but Bruno knew she was speaking Russian, so he asked one of the nurses to go and fetch me,’ Larissa explained to her sister. ‘When I arrived, she was delirious, raving about how the communists had stolen all her possessions, how she wasn’t good enough for her husband, and then crying out for his forgiveness and swearing on her life to stay a widow until the grave in order to preserve the sacred memory of their wedding day. Don’t you think that’s so sad?’

  ‘Who was the father?’ asked her older sister.

  ‘She didn’t say a word about that.’

  Larissa came home with daily bulletins about Duchess Lydia as she slowly recovered her strength. After a few days, she was well enough to receive visitors, and when Margarita went to see her during her lunch hour she found her sitting up in bed, reading.

  ‘Dear Margarita Kozmyevna, what a nice surprise. Are these for me? How lovely, thank you.’

  A nurse took the flowers to put in a vase. Margarita didn’t want to stay longer than necessary as the smell of hospitals always made her feel queasy, and she was glad when Larissa joined them. Her sister had already warned her that the official version of events was that a burst appendix had brought Duchess Lydia to the hospital and Margarita was happy to maintain the fiction, although the three of them realised that her secret was no secret at all.

  ‘I have so much work to do,’ Duchess Lydia told them. ‘I’m trying to arrange a conference in Munich for the Monarchists towards the end of November or the beginning of December. We need plenty of time to make sure we arrange it properly. And I’m meant to travel to the south of France this month, to Antibes, to see none less than the Archduke Nicholas Nikolayevich. I’m to ask him personally if he’ll grace us with his presence.’

  She told them sadly that she thought this might be the last chance to bring everybody who loved Russia together as one, in order to decide how best to move against the Soviet Union, because the communists were gaining increasing diplomatic recognition from more and more countries as the lawful government of Russia. Personally she would never recognise the Soviet regime and she was convinced that it was still possible to defeat the enemy if only they all pulled together and acted as one. She reasoned that the communists were no longer driving the revolution but that the revolution was driving them. The ideal of social equality was an empty aspiration – merely a bloody fantasy, because the attempt to make equal what God had created as unique was at the heart of modern paganism.

  ‘Which explains why life will always be unfair, girls,’ said Duchess Lydia in the confident tones of the governess she had once been. ‘There will never be a classless society, for the simple fact that man can’t meddle with something he didn’t create in the first place. Russia is befuddled with these ridiculous ideas about social justice but the truth is that the individual is nothing and the Soviet state is all-encompassing.’ Margarita was practically wincing with the effort of keeping her thoughts to herself. Of course it was possible to create a classless society. Did Duchess Lydia want to be a member of a society that encouraged personal greed, or one that created fraternal feelings, based on every member working towards a common goal? And on the tip of her tongue was another question she longed to ask, ‘When was the last time you saw the rich queuing at the baker’s door?’ And then: ‘Was that acceptable? Would the poor be destined to queue from century to century for evermore?’ Everybody was only too familiar with seeing Berliners snaking around the doors of various food shops, with every shopkeeper a paper millionaire, while the poor struggled to buy even the heel of a loaf.

  ‘Will you two join us?’

  ‘Of course we will,’ Larissa answered quickly, ‘Won’t we, Margarita?’

  ‘No,’ she replied crisply, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to attend your conference in Munich.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ asked Duchess Lydia, rather taken aback.

  ‘I’ve only just started a job after a long period of being out of work. It won’t be possible to have time off.’

  ‘What a shame. Perhaps Larissa can come on behalf of both of you.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Larissa said, then paused slightly before adding, ‘but I’ll have to ask Bruno first.’

  Duchess Lydia took a hand of each of the two and squeezed them. ‘You two are such good girls, and you always have been.’

  13.

  By the autumn, Margarita’s new life had not gone unnoticed at home. Larissa was curious about her comings and goings, the long hours at the office, and the weekends when she was out from Friday evening until late Sunday. Margarita’s excuses were wearing thin as the months went by. What really made her sister and brother-in-law suspicious was that she never mentioned meeting anybody, and she never once brought anybody back to the house.

  One day, Larissa came across her sister’s collection of books, which included Marx, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Rosa Luxembourg. ‘According to her, she’s reading so that she can understand the way the enemy thinks,’ Larissa told Bruno that night as she pulled her nightdress over her head.

  ‘What’s there to understand about that lot?’ he asked irritably as he brushed his teeth with his back towards her.

  ‘Quite.’ Larissa plumped up her pillow vigorously.

  Bruno put the brush down and swilled water around in his mouth before spitting it out into the sink. ‘A good honest Berliner. A hardworking young German. That’s what your sister needs. He’d soon put a stop to her stuffing her head with all this Marxist rubbish.’

  Larissa didn’t have the slightest inclination to make love with her husband when the light was turned out, but Bruno was feeling amorous. She turned her back on him, but he pushed his hand under her nightdress and reached for her breast, which was always over-sensitive. Although she’d told him often enough not to squeeze so hard, he never listened, and kneaded away as he always did. Then he tugged at her nightdress, pulling it out of the way over her thighs rather unceremoniously, and pressed his erection against the cleft of her buttocks, his body heavy against hers. He began to thrust, licking and biting the nape of her neck.

  Larissa murmured ‘Don’t!’ without much conviction, as she did every time. She felt weary and too tense to be able to relax, but she knew Bruno wouldn’t leave her alone until she gave in. He grunted laboriously and rubbed his fingers over her forehead and down the length of her face. He squeezed her tightly around her middle and pushed two of his fingers into her mouth. She resisted, trying to free herself from his hold, but Bruno only pulled her harder.

  ‘No…’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think I’m expecting …’

  Bruno froze.

  ‘But it’s early days. I didn’t want to say anything. Not for a while…’

  Bruno touched her cheek lightly with his little finger. ‘Why ever not? It’s wonderful news.’

  ‘I was too afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘That I’d lose it…’

  Bruno hugged her, pulled her closer and kissed her tenderly on her forehead.

  14.

  A crowd of twelve thousand filled the Sportplatz in Berlin for the opening rally. The main speaker was Heinz Neumann, who delivered a powerful speech, in contrast to Ernst Thälmann, who was rather hesitant and uninspiring. But the biggest coup had been persuading Kurt Weil to sing – and his performance did not disappoint.

  The International Arbeiter-Hilfe had organised every aspect of the two-day conference. Nominally independent of the KDP, Willi Munzenberg was in fact their taskmaster, and had overseen everything. They’d worked day and night for many weeks – Margarita harder than anybody. She’d been the first in every morning and the last to switch off her desk lamp every night. Once, she was so exhausted she fell asleep with her head in her arms, waking with a start in the early hours in an eerily empty office. If the purpose of the rally was to raise awareness, promote the cause of the working class, disseminate the ideas of the Communist Party, as well as attract more members and win votes from the Socialist Democratic Party, then their hard work had paid off a hundredfold. For Margarita, perhaps the biggest thrill came when the deputation from the Soviet Union was welcomed onto the stage, led by a blonde young woman called Masha Ivanovna Baburina.

  The following evening, after another full day of events, Masha introduced a Soviet film in the Mozart-Saal. It was located in the Crimea, so familiar to Margarita from the summers of her childhood. As she watched, she could almost feel the heat of the sun on her shoulders and the taste of saltwater on her lips. She gazed longingly at the waves of the Black Sea, where sprightly soviet youths dived into the surf after a long day netting fish or harvesting fruit. There were some scenes in Yalta too, and she was instantly steeped in memories, longing to walk through the town’s small market once more, past the fat, red-faced women sitting on wooden stools next to their stalls, their cheeks shinier than their apples, their sleeves rolled up to expose their strong arms, their knees spread wide, talking and touting, laughing and cuffing the head of any small child foolish enough to try and swipe something with their small hands, ‘get-out-of-here-or-you’ll-really-catch-it-and-don’t-even-think-of-snivelling-to-your-mother-because-she’ll-only-clout-you-harder’. Margarita could practically smell the piles of ripe cherries and apricots, the big bunches of herbs, and the fish lined up in neat rows on the wooden counters, open-mouthed and glassy eyed, their scales gleaming through sprinklings of coarse salt. And that cacophony of voices exhorting you to taste, to try, to buy, and the samovar boiling away, and the sun boiling even hotter, though you knew the sea was just waiting to wash away the accumulated heat of the day and make you deliciously cool again.

  Talking to Masha Ivanovna after the screening gave Margarita a deeper understanding of what was really happening in Russia. It quickly became clear that hope now filled the people’s hearts as society strode confidently towards establishing full communism. There were obstacles in their path to be sure, but it could only be a matter of time before the ideal of a classless society would be realised. As Masha said, she and her two brothers were a testament to how far the Soviet state had already succeeded; born into grinding poverty, her brother Mishka now worked for the government’s housing department in Moscow, while Boris was an engineer in a factory in Sverdlovsk. Masha spoke of her mother, who’d worked for the local soviet at the height of the civil war, delivering messages on her bike until a neighbour betrayed her to the Whites. They interrogated, tortured and raped her, but she didn’t give away the name of a single comrade. In the small village where she grew up, every year the schoolchildren still remembered her sacrifice, and paid tribute to her in a day of song and dance.

  Masha told her of the pitiful living conditions the three siblings suffered following the death of their mother and how they had struggled to survive throughout the rest of the civil war, three little bezprizorni – homeless waifs – stealing rides on trains, wandering the country, finding shelter wherever they could. It was the Komsomol who rescued them, giving them back their dignity as well as a meaning, value and purpose to their lives. Had the working class under the leadership of the Communist Party not won the war against the White Armies, her life would have turned out very differently. She had no doubt that it would have been a miserable existence.

  ‘In what other country in the world would three orphan children have had such opportunities to make the most of their talents?’ she asked.

  Here she was – Masha, daughter of a poor peasant family – leading a deputation to an international conference in Berlin. That was a wonder in itself. As for the unemployment in the bourgeois countries that their deputation had been hearing so much about, this was something that had disappeared forever in the Soviet Union. There was more than enough work for everybody.