18.

  On the Sunday night, they had a farewell party. Margarita put her hair up and changed into her green dress, after agonising if green suited her. When she came down to the kitchen, Kai-Olaf was bent like a blacksmith over a horse, a wine bottle between his thighs. The cork came out with a satisfying pop, and Kai-Olaf looked up and passed her the bottle without seeming to notice what she was wearing or how she had done her hair. On the table was bread, butter, pork pâté, cheese, cake, a couple of bottles of rum and a regiment of wine and beer bottles.

  It was bitterly cold outside, but it was all cosiness and rosy cheeks inside the house. The wine and the beer flowed, and they had a sing-song, with Peter Maslowski accompanying on his banjo. They sang the chorus of their favourite, ‘The Trumpet of the Revolution’, over and over. Margarita glanced around the room, which was filled with laughter and noise. There was Vicky, with her characteristic habit of throwing her hair back impatiently from her forehead as she spoke, only for it to fall back a few moments later. Everybody was chatting nineteen to the dozen, apart from Paul, who disapproved of parties as a bourgeois distraction, and was in his room with Rosa. But for the rest of them, that night, capitalism was nothing but a passing cloud to be blown out of the sky by a stiff breeze.

  As the night went on, many of them exchanged stories of how they had become communists. Margarita sat between Vicky and Ulrike listening, breathing in the smells of tobacco smoke and beer and wine and sweat: the familiar smells of these long nights with the comrades. There were a variety of reasons for joining the party. Yannick shouted at the top of his voice that it was the 1918 uprising which had got him involved. Fighting on the streets of Berlin in 1919 with the Spartacists pulled Ulrike in to the cause, and Karl and Rosa Luxembourg’s sacrifice convinced somebody else. The bloody insanity of the Imperialist War. The loathsomeness of the Kapp Putsch in 1920. The human cost of the hyperinflation of 1923. The strikes. The famine. The poverty and the unemployment which stunted so many thousands of lives.

  It was Margarita’s turn. After Vicky had refilled her glass, she began to tell them her story: how she had met Stanislav Markovich Feldman and been swayed by his arguments for returning to the Soviet Union (she said nothing of their romantic involvement), and then how Bi had encouraged her to learn more. How attending lectures and reading books like The ABC of Communism, which explained the nature of historical materialism, had been a revelation to her. How she had gradually come to see the truth of the Marxist analysis of society.

  She noticed Kai-Olaf gazing at her with those unnervingly blue eyes.

  After speaking, Margarita felt suddenly tired, and she leant her cheek against Vicky’s shoulder. The wine was making her head spin and the words of the next speaker floated past her in a blur. She felt overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness. She thought of her sister, and had a pang of envy that she would become a mother in June. Sometimes she wondered whether, in her heart, that was what she most wanted too.

  She snapped back to attention when Kai-Olaf started to speak. He mentioned a man called Jan, but said most of them already knew what an important influence he had been, so he wouldn’t bore them with it again. But there had been another experience, a personal experience, that had taken place outside Lvov, in Poland. Kai-Olaf had been working for the Communist Party in Moscow, and was staying in the city on his way back to Berlin. It had been a Sunday afternoon, one of those days that stays in the memory – a blue sky without a single cloud and the sun shining as though for ever. He had joined a group of students and other young communists for a picnic on the riverbank, under the leaves of the hazel trees – a chance to paddle and catch minnows. Most of them were Jews.

  Kai-Olaf had been telling them about the situation in Russia, when they had heard a sudden bellowing. The next minute, a gang of youths wearing the badge of some Catholic organisation had been upon them. They had kicked and punched everybody indiscriminately, like madmen, their violence implacable, beating flesh to a pulp and turning the picnic into a bloodbath. Two of the brutes had chased Kai-Olaf into the middle of the river and had held his face under the water, shoving it against the stones of the riverbed and screaming at him to show them his cock. Even after they’d satisfied themselves that he wasn’t circumcised, they had beaten him just the same. If he hadn’t managed to free himself and run for his life, they might well have killed him that afternoon. For months afterwards, he felt guilty that he’d saved himself but left the rest to their fate.

  He’d already made a vow to promote the work of the Communist Party to the best of his ability, but this incident hardened his resolve even more. Here was the only party committed to purge the world of the hatred which was so deeply ingrained in Poland, Hungary and Romania, and even in France and Germany – a hatred that had been nurtured and allowed to flourish for centuries by a corrupt and venal Catholic Church.

  ‘What’s between you and Kai-Olaf?’ asked Margarita when she and Vicky finally went to bed late that night.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Vicky, I’m not a fool so don’t treat me like one. I can tell there’s something.’ She got into bed. ‘When did you first meet him?’

  ‘You really need to know right this minute?’

  Of course, she did, she was itching to know.

  They lay there in their bunks in the dark, and Vicky began to speak.

  The first time Vicky visited Moscow was for the Comintern’s Congress of 1921. At the same time, Emerick was in Vienna for the European Socialists’ Congress, where he and Otto Brauer, the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, hoped to establish an International Workers Union as an alternative movement to the Comintern. Although Vicky and Emerick were still married and living under the same roof, since the Halle congress, they were barely speaking to each other.

  The visit to Moscow renewed Vicky’s hope, and on her return to Berlin, her article condemning the International Workers Union as a movement of liberals, petit-bourgeois, reformists and fools was the lead article in Die Rote Fahne, which then offered her a permanent position on the paper. The Social Democratic party wrote a coruscating response to her article in their own newspaper and subsequently both the Leipziger Volkszeitung and Freiheit, the Independent Socialist Party’s paper, wrote critical pieces as well. However, Vicky’s pamphlet was responsible for persuading some members of the Independent Socialist Party to defect to the KPD and the Comintern. Her husband Emerick told her she was nothing more than Lenin and Karl Radek’s little poodle and, as his wife, she was making his own position untenable.

  What was more important to her? The KPD or him?

  Vicky told him it was only a matter of time before what now remained of the Independent Socialist Party returned like a little bird to its nest in the Social Democratic Party.

  ‘Must you keep spouting that line at me day in, day out?’

  Emerick was furious with his wife, but was also increasingly concerned about her health. From when she was a child, Vicky had always had a weak chest, and now the punishing hours she spent working for the KPD had finally caught up with her. Her doctor told her in no uncertain terms that if she didn’t rest, her health would be irretrievably broken. Even then, she was reluctant to give in, but Emerick told her firmly, ‘The revolution can wait for you to get better.’

  The KPD paid for her to stay at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Her room there had a balcony, and the view was beyond anything she could have imagined. She sat for hours watching the play of shadow and sun on the snow-capped summits by day, and, after nightfall, the silvery moonlight dimly reflected on the smooth, silent slopes, with the vast universe above, dappled with a billion stars.

  Vicky carried on working just the same – against the express orders of her doctors – writing articles from her bed advocating a United Socialist State of Europe. She had never been more convinced that Lenin was right. A Europe-wide civil war was the only way forward; pointless to live in hope that somehow a communist order would flower from the soil of capitalist goodwill. The workers thought like trade-unionists, in terms of short-term objectives, rather than adopt a more long-term strategy for real gains. Unfortunately, that was how Emerick thought too. But the revolution had a fresh smell – pure and clean like brand new leather. It was imperative to learn from the mistakes of the past. True communism needed tough men and women with a clear vision and an untiring commitment to destroy capitalism and start anew.

  Two months went by. Vicky claimed she was well enough to return to Berlin. Easy enough to peddle lies in a letter – letters never betrayed themselves with a blush. But when Emerick came to visit her and saw for himself that she was by no means fully recovered, he suggested taking her to Italy for some sun instead. He reminded her that the last time they’d had a holiday was on their honeymoon three years previously, in 1919, and that had only been a week in Paris. Vicky knew this was a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage, and felt that she couldn’t refuse.

  They travelled down to Naples, Capri and Pompeii. It was August and the streets were baking. One morning they climbed to the top of Mount Vesuvius, she on the back of a donkey, he walking at her side.

  ‘I love you,’ Emerick told her on the summit, his voice a note higher than usual.

  ‘I love you, Vicky,’ he said again, as they made their descent.

  ‘I love you too,’ she answered.

  But when Emerick arrived back at the foot of the mountain, he confessed that there was an empty feeling in his heart.

  He took her with him to Rome at the beginning of September, where he was due to attend the International Federation of Trade Unions Congress. That’s what was paying for the holiday. As she walked around the Piazza Venezia on her own one afternoon, Vicky saw Kai-Olaf coming towards her. She wasn’t sure to begin with if it was him, and she had to shade her eyes from the sun to see him properly. She hadn’t seen him since January 1919, when he came to Frankfurt with a crew of sailors from the Kiel mutiny in order to spread the revolution.

  What an exciting period that had been. Vicky remembered the heated discussions in the Schleisinger Eck, an old tavern on the corner of Gallus-strasse. She remembered going over to the city barracks, to release the soldiers who had been imprisoned there for refusing to obey their officers. She remembered her elation when the first soviet was elected. Their confidence and conviction grew, but Berlin was slow to react. The revolution was building up a head of steam, but why was the Social Democratic Party so reluctant to lead it? Why were they so infuriatingly cautious in all their decisions? They should have published a manifesto. But it was the revolutionaries in the Schlesinger Eck who did that, on behalf of the Soldiers and Workers’ Soviet.

  They distributed the manifesto and thousands upon thousands of people spilled out onto the streets in a sea of red flags and ribbons – men, women, children, all making their way as one to the Osthafen fields on the city outskirts. People were jubilant, feeling in their hearts that the dawn was about to break, that the revolution was bound to prevail.

  But staked against the new German republic was the older power of the great estates of East Prussia, as well as the iron, coal and metal barons of the Ruhr.

  ‘Our mistake in 1919 was that we weren’t ruthless enough.’ Vicky had said this to Margarita more than once. ‘That was the lesson I learnt too late.’

  Like arresting that wretched Frankfurt chief of police, instead of shooting him in the head. Vicky had been so naive.

  On the Piazza Venezia, she and Kai-Olaf had sheltered from the searing heat under the canopy of a little trattoria. Vicky didn’t need to ask him; she’d known full well he was there on Comintern business. He’d told her what Mussolini was up to, and how fascism was on the march throughout Italy. He’d been in Bibbiena, a small town not far from Arezzo. Stopping for a drink at a café, he’d been told about a stonemason called Giulio, who had just returned from America, where he’d been working for three years in order to save enough money to marry. One night, he happened to be drinking in the same bar as a group of fascists from Arezzo. They started baiting him, and the leader of the group ordered him to shout ‘Evviva Mussolini!’ When the young man refused to do it for the third time, the fascist took a pistol out of his belt and shot Giulio dead right there. Within a fortnight, the fascist had been set free, with no charges brought against him.

  Three days later, as their train approached the outskirts of Berlin, Vicky told Emerick that their marriage was at an end.

  ‘I know,’ he replied, without taking his eyes off the fields that streaked past the window.

  Vicky arrived back in the city on the day that Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Foreign Minister, was shot dead in broad daylight by three Nazis as he drove through the streets in his open-topped motor-car. Vicky knew that she had made the correct decision. The fascists were flexing their muscles, ready to smash all opposition to smithereens.

  ‘I was right, not Emerick. The communist way is the only way Margarita.’

  ‘I agree,’ answered her friend. ‘The communist way is the only way.’

  It would take strength and determination to fight capitalism and fascism – and those qualities were only to be found in the Comintern and the KPD.

  ‘But you still haven’t answered my question,’ said Margarita.

  ‘What question?’ asked Vicky in a sleepy voice.

  ‘What is there between you and Kai-Olaf?’

  ‘I’ve already told you.’

  19.

  As he hauled himself up the dark stairs to his room on the top floor, Alyosha told himself yet again that he really must find somewhere cheaper to live. Of course, there were certainly cheaper places to be had in Paris – far cheaper – but they were damp hovels, infested with vermin and lice; places to destroy a man’s health forever.

  ‘Confort moderne’ proclaimed the bold letters on the front of the hotel. But this was a feeble attempt to throw dust into someone’s eyes to hide the layers of dust inside. The Hôtel de Nantes was an old building on the Rue du Montparnasse, divided up into a warren of cramped rooms that smelled of rancid fat and stale cigarette smoke. The owner was a portly asthmatic, always with half an ear to the radio, which, when it wasn’t making a noise like an egg frying in a pan, crooned from somewhere under the counter in the reception. He would listen to it constantly, day and night, as though he was expecting to hear tidings of great importance. At his feet lay an ugly old dog, a great ball of fur with a head at one end and a tail at the other – a lazy, good-for-nothing lump.

  Alyosha was adept, by now, at nipping up the stairs when the man’s back was turned, to avoid the ever-more-insistent requests that he pay his rent. It was hard to live outside the world of daily work. But who would be daft enough to take on a Russian with a visa that was due to run out before the end of the summer?

  But the rent was now long overdue, so he had no choice but to go out once more with Leonid Kolosov.

  20.

  Leonid Kolosov was Alyosha’s best friend. In Russia, Leonid had fought in Denikin’s army during the Civil War, but before that he’d been a painter and decorator in Moscow. Fleeing Russia, he’d had a tortuous journey across Europe, tramping hundreds of miles on foot. On the way, he’d worked for a while as a miner, living in a filthy hostel on the outskirts of Sofia, where he’d been struck down by dysentery. Leonid had made his way along the backroads of the Balkans in the company of other ex-soldiers, to the city of Trieste. From there, they had aimed for Florence, and found lodgings in a garret in one of the old medieval palazzi on the Borgo Pinti. Leonid had hoped he might once more make a living with a brush and paint, but there was no work to be had, and so he and a friend had taken up their packs again.

  They’d arrived in Paris with dusty clothes and aching bones. It had been a wonder that Leonid’s friend had even survived the long journey. Leonid had spent the next few months shuffling along the streets, looking for work, wondering whether he’d have to spend the rest of his life with nothing better to do than talk to his own shadow.

  Eventually, he’d found a job as a plongeur in a hotel restaurant on Rue de Vincennes, but soon became fed up of washing the filthy dishes of the three sittings, especially as he was paid the smallest wage for the dirtiest work. To add insult to injury, a pimply French youth had been employed over his head to wear the frac and work in the restaurant as a waiter, after he’d been promised the job more than once. Leonid had been gripped by an almost uncontrollable rage, more violent than he had ever felt before, at the sheer injustice of it. He’d collected his wages and left that day, but for his swan song, he’d emptied the till on his way out. It was while he’d been getting blind drunk with the proceeds that he’d met Alyosha, and shortly after becoming friends, they’d become partners in crime. Breaking into houses was much more lucrative than working.

  This time, they burgled a substantial house on the Faubourg Saint-Germain, full of paintings of aristocratic ladies and gentlemen with pink cheeks and huge wigs, the family coat of arms proudly on display. Other rooms were decorated with Gobelin tapestries, and stuffed with furniture: gilded chairs and sofas, ornate and heavy, and thickly brocaded curtains framing the large windows. It reminded Alyosha of his former home, the house where he’d been brought up in Petrograd. If things had turned out differently, perhaps he could have whiled away his life in a house like this one.

  They had always had a golden rule: that they would only steal money, because money couldn’t be traced. But Leonid was beginning to be tempted by small items of large value, which could be fenced quickly and profitably.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, dangling a finely wrought gold bracelet on his finger. Alyosha told him to put it back, but his friend was having none of it.

  ‘Don’t you worry; I can get rid of it easily.’