Partisan Years Pt. 07

"I am for it."

"You will be many women," he said. "And live many lives, but your own will always be at the service of the People."

"Natalia Yakovlevna died a long time ago," I said. "Away in Byelorus, on the floor of a dacha."

He nodded.

Within days I was on the move to Leningrad, the child in me weighing now, not like a parasite, but like a terrible responsibility.

The student, I met her in June when I was already showing, was like me in face, but taller, more aristocratic, fuller-bodied once, though the siege of the city had left her gaunt and permanently barren. How she played and sang when I lived with her in that empty Kommunalka. Those long months were the happiest since before the war, though grief tinged them all.

The child was a girl, born October, as the autumn rains came off the Baltic and the trains brought men home from Manchuria, from Saxony, from Bohemia and Macedonia and Albania and all the rest of Europe. There are no easy pregnancies, especially not in a ruined, half-starved city in a ruined, half-starved country, but such trials are so small beside the one's I'd endured already. Lev's daughter, my daughter, small and dark and blackhaired, a Soviet Jew, born to soldiers, born to a world at peace.

In 1946, I returned to my labors on behalf of the toiling masses of the world. We fought the OSS in France in shadow war, but they were better ballot stuffers and it was the placaters who took the Elysee.

In Italy too, we would've won a fair election. But I did not take these defeats hard, though it was strange to have a child with me during clandestine political work, and I was not so skilled as I might've been; the long recovery from pregnancy deprived me of several months of practical training. In 1947 I returned to Leningrad to rectify this, and I left my daughter with the music student. Alyosha was there; it was his apartment too, though they were unmarried.

Then came Germany.

What to say?

The SED, nearly all of them, came through twelve years of the camps. Men who have been starved, beaten, held alone in cells for a decade or crammed by the dozen into bunks meant for single men, who have survived famine, typhus, firebombing, faked executions, torture, the loss of thousands upon thousands of their comrades, are strong and hard the way broken glass is strong and hard.

The liberals, the social democrats, the Christian Democrats (where were they from '33-45 I ask. The camps! But on the other side of the bayonet and the baton from our comrades), they will tell you now that it was us who sabotaged reunification. But it was they, the Americans and the English, with their secret printing of Marks, their refusal to hold a referendum, their refusal to demilitarize and denazify Germany, who made a peace in Europe impossible. There was an Iron curtain, yes that Fascist Churchill was right. But it was made of the Pittsburgh steel in the glacis plates of Pershing tanks.

And this was bitter. I worked with Jewish survivors, with SED men and old KPD activists, with trade union men and POWs to make Germany safe, to make it peaceable, to knit back together the continent the industrialists of the Ruhr had torn asunder. All for naught.

And one night in 1948, in Hamburg, where I was on assignment, a man came to the basement flat where I lived. It was raining.

He knocked. I opened the door armed, for one of the Englishmen had cornered and raped me some months earlier, he thought me a lowly Russian exile. I will not describe it except to say that it was hideous, and afterwards I went several weeks without a night spent sober, collecting what men I could in the Hamburg bars in the haze of that old fever.

Now, old Pfrondorf's adjutant stood before me.

"They've taken Alyosha," he said. "Today."

"Why?"

"Beria, I think," he said. "The appeasers are on the march in Moscow. Damn them. Damn them all."

I raced for Leningrad by all means to hand. Train, car, barter, bicycle, foot.

The music student had not begun to smell.

Alexey, my love.

And to my sister.

I have sent the girl to a safe place. The people who keep her think I am traveling. Of course, in a way, I am. To meet you again, Alexey, where the green fields are rich and the sun shines on you effulgent and all the terror of love and life will feel like the shadow of a passing cloud on a high summer's day.

For they have shot you, my brother, my love, my life. To what end? All our fire, all our storm, for what?

Natasha, I am sorry that I was weak. You will know where to find the Rubles. The girl is at (She wrote the apartment number). I'm sorry for the shame his capture and my weakness will bring on you.

She lay in the bath. She'd climbed in wearing her dark wool sweater, pushed the sleeves up, opened the veins.

I stood in shock. My last friends gone. All I had now was the child, who only half knew me. What could I do? Soldier for a disgraced commander.

I burned the note. Then I called for them to come and take the body, and then I cleaned the flat and went to fetch my child, my baby Nadezhda.

"Aunt Lena's got to work like mama," I told her. "But we're going to stay in Leningrad. Uncle Alyosha will come back. And she will too, only we must wait very hard."

For some days I waited for the black car and the prison lights. But I was not significant enough to warrant torture and murder in factional struggle. Someone in the party had mercy on me and for a year and a half I worked to finish my printing certificate. In those days, everyone had to work, everyone had to study, and there was so little time to pause and grieve, for all the world must be made whole again.

But Alyosha wasn't dead. They beat him, they made him work in the far end of the world, made him hurt and crushed him low. But he got through. And then, as the forties ended with the Red Dawn shining in the east, and the heavy snows of November 1949 buried Leningrad, he came home to me, to Nadya and the empty bed in the large bedroom and the music books and the piano stilled forever.

We did not speak of anything for a long while, a month perhaps. Then it was time, again, to serve the Soviet Union, and off we went east. I went to Manchuria with Nadezhda, to do political work and aid in setting up printing plants. Alyosha came with me. We lived, more as brother and sister than as anything resembling lovers, for a few months, then he crossed the Yalu to war and passed, for a time, beyond my reach.

These were the golden years, before my facility for language weakened, before the rot in the USSR was so evident that the Chinese divorced us. In those years we built socialism from Potsdam to Pyongyang. You would not believe it now, but in those years we made such strides, and the West's puppets were such sordid little men, with their massacres and their strikebreaking. And, after Stalin died, we had the thaw.

Seven years I spent in China: I turned thirty there, Nadezhda passed through school, the cities of Manchuria rose from the nothingness of the plains, and though war raged south in Korea, we here were free and equal and at peace, even through the Leap, with all of its catastrophes. So much of the golden haze of those years is that memory, of her growth, of our collective efforts, the imperfect fraternity among the men and women of the great countries of Eurasia, the hopes abroad too: Bandung, Dien Bien Phu, and the great, slow rise of Africa's revolution.

For me, there was love. He was a soldier, a Chinese Korean, veteran of the wars against Japan and the KMT. He'd learned his Russian from one of our advisors in the years in Manchuria and near Yenan. Kim Kwang, one of that proud generation of self-taught intellectuals and brilliant soldiers, tall and trim and nearly princely. His left arm was ruined by an American firebomb, his eye lost to the tortures of the Japanese prisons. He was mine for five years, and I had, in '54, a second daughter.

I will finish what I must say of the course of history since then, and return to my life after.

Let a few words suffice: We were beaten. It was not evident then, not until Afghanistan and Gorbachev. My younger daughter, Alina, was an economist and in the height of Perestroika she told me how the currency reforms would break our union. Of course, that came to pass.

Slowly, imperceptibly at first, all the great gains rolled back. Some you know, Chile in '73, the death of Indira Ghandi, the stubborn survival of Syngman Rhee's fascist dictatorship, the crazed fratricide in Kampuchea, the debt crisis and Volcker, the Capitalist Road in China. Others none now know: the fascist networks in Europe, the overthrow of Sukarno and the murder of a million peaceful comrades in Indonesia by the Americans and their dogs, how Cuba, Angola, SWAPO and the ANC (I played my part there, my last assignment) defeated the Apartheid regime and brought the flaming light of liberty to southern Africa, only for American trade deals to snuff it out.

But the little dot of poison, the little contradictions which made all our failures possible was planted long ago. When the German revolution failed in the year of my birth, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union turned its back on revolution in Europe, and the heart of imperialism continued to beat. We could never muster the moral courage to stamp upon it, even when we had the chance in those five long years after the Great Patriotic War.

The country, the party had turned away from its task, though we did not then know it. And all the common ruin now, the triumph of the Whites in Putin's regime, the death of millions in the '90s, the hardships in the last fraternal socialist countries and their slow decay in this present, hateful century, has it origin there, in the failures of the KPD and the CPSU and in our cowardice. That was socialism's hamartia.

We tried, so many of us, to rectify that. Kiril Denisovich as a military commissar until liquor killed him after Prague. Andropov, and Alyosha and I and a thousand others as secret, loyal foot soldiers.

What of Alyosha? For a generation he was our great spy, the man with the networks and the instinct to foil the west, to poison their agencies and turn their men back upon them. The world of the spy and the revolutionary is a small and strange one, and I knew many of his opponents, some I interrogated or was interrogated by, some I tried to turn, some tried to turn me. But all who knew of Alyosha (he seemed mere rumor for many of those years) feared and respected him.

The English got him, through some remnants of the family he built in the thaw, and took him from us as a prisoner, and bore him off to a soft and cushy prison. He taught music his last year. When I found him in the west, in the waning of the '70s, he was an old and graying man, near to eighty, wrapped in the tight grief of a beaten fighter. And I persuaded him to do the honorable thing, and without a note he went to meet the music student. It was as if I'd killed some part of myself.

But I still had my daughters.

Kim and I parted in 1957, when I went home to Leningrad for further technical and political training, and he left for Hanoi to partake in their revolution. I still had my looks, my form, though older, tired, cooled.

We arrived as the fall turned cold. For so long, the war, all of it, was but a haze, and it seemed then that whole time from Barbarossa to the day Alyosha returned from prison was a single, dull blur.

Kalatazov shattered that peace.

I remember the moment precisely: Nadezhda and I were at the cinema to watch The Cranes Are Flying. That scene, the air raid, with Mark banging on the piano as Veronika listens to the city smashed apart outside, it brought it all back to me, all the misery from Masovka's hands and Heinrich's, and the long, starving years. I did not move for the remainder of the film, even at the end, when all the crowded theater burst into tears at the return of the heroes. I was nineteen again, and pinned to my seat by memory as if by a javelin.

"You're so pale," my daughter said as we walked home. "You've had a shock."

To speak would pour it out.

"My father was a soldier, wasn't he? Like Kim. Were you in the service even then?" She spoke with all the innocence of youth, the inquisitiveness of a person just realizing that their world has flesh and blood and history. "Was it glamorous? Did you meet the diplomats? The Americans? Roosevelt?"

I shook my head.

"No," I said, and knew that I would tell her, not at once, not as you have read it, but all of it. No less.

"In those years, I was a partisan."

Author's Note: I surrender Natalia Yakovlevna and her imperfect fervor to you, reader. She is dead; this tawdry work is her epitaph. It is not mine. There is an element of the self in all the characters we write: I did not suffer as she, but there is a reason I find myself returning to the subjective experience of sexual assault, and one's perception of one's own complicity and enjoyment.

But the prose style and pace of work required to give life to our friend Natasha has exhausted my nervous capacity. I appreciate my readers and apologize that this last piece is so overdue, so unerotic and so long. You can see that I am at war with my natural tendency toward grandiloquence and polemic. I hope you will forgive me.

If there is some other era you wish to see thus depicted, please comment and I will think about it. The dead past is my great love.

The rest is silence.