“Come to the point.”
“The p-point is, my fantasizing about Sonja should be seen as a sign of sexual health. It’s like—like doing bloody pushups or running bloody laps. To stay in shape, to keep the b-bloody libido fit, men need to fantasize. Listen, Litzi, women have this enormous advantage. You are able to make love to an overweight soak of a man in his sixties who has a small p-pecker and a big bank account and an annual income that can keep you in the style to which you would like to become accustomed whether or not you are attracted to him.”
The boil had been pierced. He needed three matches before he succeeded in lighting the cigarette twitching between his lips. I could see his hand trembling as he held the flame to the end. Smoking took the edge off his anger. Settling onto the bed, he noticed that I was propped up against the pillows. Naked. “What was that all about?” he asked.
“Something tells me it was about your father.”
He thought about this. “Sorry I went spare. My sainted father made the mistake of taking for lawful wedded wife someone who thought of marriage as a gilded cage. Talk about women being unfair, given half a chance she would have locked herself and her husband in and thrown away the key. It was so b-bloody Victorian. Her idea of happiness had something in common with rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. She loathed everything my father loved—the endless empty quarter of Arabia, the B-Bedouin camps in the middle of nowhere, the flatbread baked in the oven of the sand, the stench of humans who don’t have enough water to waste it washing, the wells where the camels get first dibs and the chaps riding them come jolly second. Oh, Dora dipped her big toe into the desert once or twice, joining St John when he let a bit of air out of the tires of his Ford station wagon and set off into the sand tracks toward a horizon that somehow remained out of reach. That’s what horizons are about, isn’t it? To lure you toward p-places you can’t get to, to tease you with the unattainable. Ahhh, my sainted father has his faults—which of us doesn’t?—but he appreciates b-beauty in all its forms: desert sunsets, blinding sandstorms, veiled women with mysterious eyes, handwoven silk that clings to the female b-body arousing fantasies of the body the silk clings to, B-Bedouin warriors racing their camels to an oasis. Once St John came across a Bedouin racing his camel to an oasis—he turned out to be the Wahabi ruler of the Najd in Central Arabia named Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud. I’ve actually met the b-bloke, a six-footer who receives guests with princely hospitality. My tent is your tent sort of thing, except when he says it, he means it. St John once told me ibn Saud was the greatest Arab since the Prophet Mohammed. Mind you, doesn’t say much for the other Arabs, but what the hell. When the Turks were driven from Baghdad, Father persuaded the Foreign Office to put his p-pal on the throne of an invented entity called Saudi Arabia—the b-bugger was so grateful he rewarded St John with an Arab wife, by whom I expect to have half siblings in the not-too-distant future. As my father has converted to Islam, he can legally have two more wives. Why not? Four seems quite a sensible number to me. Whilst my sainted father gallivants around the Middle East trying to reach horizons that elude him, Mother is at home in London, thank you, tending the tea roses in her gilded cage.”
“Is that what brought you to Vienna, Kim? Trying to get to a horizon your father couldn’t reach?”
While he was mulling this over I said, “Well, I don’t see our relationship as a cage, gilded or otherwise. I certainly don’t feel ambivalent about your erections. And you can look down Sonja’s blouse till you’re blue in the face.”
* * *
Every day brought its ration of rumors: a friend of Dietrich’s who worked at a frontier customs post reported that Hitler’s storm troopers had crossed the Bavarian Alps and were marching on Lintz (false), a woman who delivered eggs to the chef who cooked for Dollfuss heard he was counting on Italy’s Mussolini to prevent an eventual German annexation of Austria (true), my Soviet controller had it from an unimpeachable source that the Socialist workers’ militia had been secretly mobilized with orders to overthrow Dollfuss and create an Austrian Socialist Republic (false). “Keep your ear to the ground,” Arnold instructed me. “Let me know if you hear anything.”
All I heard was the falling snow muting the sound of traffic below my window. If you concentrated hard enough on the flakes drifting through the yellow light of the new electric streetlamps, it looked as if you were rising through the snow into the night sky. And then, ominously, one evening in February, the tap water in the drinking glasses stopped trembling. Kim and I exchanged looks. (When we compared notes much later, we discovered both of us had thought the same thing: that the earth might have somehow stopped rotating on its axis.) About the time we noticed the stillness of the water in the glasses, all the lights in the apartment, along with the shortwave radio tuned to the BBC foreign service, went out. Kim padded over to the window and peered up and down the street. “There’s n-no electricity on the block,” he said quietly. “Even the streetlamps have g-gone out.”
“What do you think it means?”
“It m-means the generators have stopped generating electricity.”
I should say here that electricity stoppages were the rule in Vienna, not the exception, and we had candles ready at hand. I lit several. When the telephone rang Kim said, “I’ll get it.” He put the receiver to his ear and listened. “Woher wissen Sie, dass?” he demanded.
“How does who know what?” I asked impatiently.
“It’s Dietrich,” Kim told me. “He says the electricity has gone off in Karl-Marxhof. He says Dollfuss’s Heimwehr gangs are stringing barbed wire across the streets leading to workers’ tenements.”
“The revolution has started,” I whispered breathlessly. “The workers will rise up and sweep away the capitalists and the Fascists. Vienna will become the second Paris Commune. It’s my rendezvous with history.”
Kim, more levelheaded than me, said, “The Paris Commune was crushed in six weeks. If it’s really revolution, the workers in Vienna won’t last six d-days—the Heimwehr mob are armed to the teeth, our Schutzbund comrades will fall back into the tenement b-blocks but I don’t see how they can hold out for very long.”
I called the telephone number my controller had obliged me to memorize. A woman answered and said, “If you’re calling for roses, we don’t deliver in winter.” I said, “But we’re already twelve February—the winter is almost over.” Having exchanged pass-phrases, my controller said: “Report.” I told her about the electricity going out, about the barbed wire.
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?” I demanded.
The telephone line went dead in my ear.
“What was that all about?” Kim asked.
“I make reports,” I explained.
“To whom?”
“To a woman with a man’s name who doesn’t deliver roses in winter.”
Kim had the bright idea of telephoning Eric Gedye, the correspondent who covered Austria for the Daily Telegraph. He was a fixture at the Café Herenhoff, which is how we came to know him. “Electricity seems to have gone out in the city,” he told Gedye. “Any idea what’s up?”
I could see Kim shut his eyes as he pressed the telephone to his ear. “So it’s b-begun,” he murmured. He listened for a moment. “Don’t know what we’ll do. I suppose we’ll wait for instructions.”
He turned to me when he’d rung off. “The Dollfuss people are putting about that nonsense of an armed uprising by the Schutzbunders. Gedye says it’s a p-provocation—Dollfuss is using it the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire—to purge Socialists and Communists. Your short count has b-banned the Social Democratic Party and declared marshal law. His soldiers have occupied the Social Democrats’ headquarters in Lintz and started shooting up tenements in the city. The power plant workers here in Vienna have gone out on strike in p-protest. The army are bringing howitzers into Vienna to attack the tenement blocks.”
The telephone rang again. Was it my imagination or had the ring become shriller, had t
he interval between rings grown shorter? I snatched the telephone off the hook before Kim could reach it. It was Dietrich. He was yelling in order to be heard over the bedlam in the background. “We’ll go immediately,” I yelled back, startled by my own voice, which seemed to reverberate through the apartment.
“Why are you yelling?” Kim asked when I’d hung up.
“Because Dietrich was yelling,” I said. In my excitement I remember thinking this was a perfectly rational explanation. “He says we are to meet him at the Herenhoff and wait for orders.”
We pulled on galoshes and coats and hurried downstairs. I wanted us to use Kim’s motorcycle but he said it would attract too much attention, so we wound up going on foot. Walking through the falling snow, with the flakes melting on the skin of my face and muffling our footfalls on the sidewalk, it was hard to imagine that Vienna was on the brink of civil war. The Herenhoff was swarming with clients jammed onto benches reading newspapers by candlelight. Others were shouting at the top of their lungs to people who were immediately across the table from them. (I had always imagined people would whisper during a civil uprising. When I mentioned this to Kim, he actually burst out laughing. It was the last time he would laugh for weeks. Laughter, it seems, was the first victim of Dollfuss’s small war.) Waiters in black Spencers threaded between the tables, the trays filled with mugs of beer balanced on palms high over their heads. Dietrich had managed to save two seats at a miniscule table at the back near the toilets. “Where is Sonja?” I shouted.
“She is helping to throw up barricades in the streets around the Karl-Marxhof tenements with her Social Democrat friends, who are having second thoughts about Stalin being a greater menace than Hitler, about Hitler being a greater menace than Dollfuss. Listen, Litzi, our cell leader has ordered us to set up a machine-gun post on a roof of the university off the Ringstrasse.” Dietrich looked at Kim. “You are welcome to join us, Philby.”
My Englishman never hesitated. “Course I’ll join you,” he shouted. “P-puts me a game up on my sainted father. My first revolution and I’m only twenty-two. He didn’t get to chuck the Turks out of Mesopotamia until he was thirty.”
“Sergius is coming by to give us the key to a coal bin with guns and ammunition hidden in it,” Dietrich said.
“Right. Does either of you know how to work a machine gun?”
Dietrich and me, we avoided each other’s eye. “It isn’t difficult,” Dietrich said. “One of us will feed in the belt of bullets. The second will pull the trigger. The third will wet the burlap wrapped around the barrel to keep it cooled.”
“You must have learned that from All Quiet on the Western Front,” Kim remarked. He plucked an indigestion tablet from a small tin and popped it into his mouth.
“I learned it at a field camp where Communist instructors showed us how to use firearms,” Dietrich said.
The filaments in the overhead electric bulbs flickered, then went dark again before coming on full force. Conversation in the café died away and we all stared at the fixtures, holding our breaths as we waited to see if the lights would remain on. They did. Kim shrugged. “Feeding in bullets sounds like something I can do,” he said in a normal conversational tone.
A fat Viennese gentleman at the next table said, “This is not the moment to be joking about bullets, young man.”
Dietrich, suddenly emotional, reached across the table to wring Kim’s hand. “I consider you to be one of us, Philby,” he announced.
By the time Sergius turned up, we were each nursing a third cup of coffee. Out of breath, his eyes tearing from the cold outside, Sergius scraped over a chair and tried to get the attention of one of the waiters.
“You have the key?” Dietrich demanded.
“What key?” Sergius said.
I could see from the look on Sergius’s face that he was finding the situation comical. Either that or he was trying to mask his nervousness. “The key to the coal bin,” I said.
A waiter passed. Sergius plucked at his sleeve. “Beer,” he said. He grinned at Dietrich. “Why do you need coal at a time like this?”
Dietrich leaned across the table. “This is not the moment to fool around. We’re supposed to retrieve a machine gun and ammunition from the coal bin that you have the key to.”
“I have the key to the coal bin on”—Sergius mentioned an address in a back street not far from the café. “The bad news is the only thing hidden there is coal. We don’t own a machine gun.”
“Why are you here?” I asked the comrade.
“I was sent to tell you there is no machine gun. You can go see for yourselves if you want. There were a few rifles and pistols hidden in the coal bin, along with some cartons of Italian fireworks, but they’ve already been distributed to workers.”
“Who ordered you to set up the machine-gun p-post on the roof?” Kim asked Dietrich.
“Our cell leader.”
“Telephone him.”
“Can’t. He’s on a police wanted list. He never sleeps in the same bed two nights in a row.”
“What do we do now?” I asked Kim.
He looked from Sergius to Dietrich to me. “We ought to head for the epicenter.”
“The tenements?” I said.
My Englishman nodded.
We heard trucks rumbling down the cobblestones outside. Kim and I rushed to the door of the café. Half a dozen flatbed trucks loaded with coils of barbed wire were driving slowly past the Herenhoff, the headlights of one truck illuminating the cargo in the truck ahead of it. Several of the trucks towed howitzers, their muzzles covered in canvas. I will admit I was quite alarmed at the sight of field artillery. As for Kim, I never detected the faintest suggestion of fright on his face or in his voice. Under that boyish grin he had nerves of steel. In my mind’s eye I see Kim, sensible as usual, counting the trucks passing in the street and nodding as if he had stored the information and understood its significance. The painfully shy Homo erectus who had washed up on my doorstep in a previous incarnation no longer existed.
What a difference a hundred days can make.
* * *
Even after Kim brought me to safety in London, flickering images of the next several days—which is how long it took for Dollfuss to eradicate Socialism in Austria—would haunt me. (Kim claims they are fragments shored up against my ruin. Lovely phrase. He says he swiped it from a poet. I forget his name. Fragments. Ruin. Why not?) I notice a baby carriage in Hyde Park and I see orderlies in soiled white laboratory coats ferrying the wounded to makeshift infirmaries in baby carriages. A pothole in Piccadilly Circus makes me think of shell craters pockmarking the streets around the Karl-Marxhof tenements when the Heimwehr thugs opened fire with their howitzers. I come across a discarded shoe in a Maida Vale trash bin and I see the small mountain of shoes in the alleyway behind the Karl-Marxhof infirmary. Some of the shoes—dear God in heaven!—some of the shoes still have human limbs in them. I spot Spanish tourists walking two abreast toward Harrods—the fragment that leaps to mind is an endless line of prisoners, their hands clasped behind their necks, being marched two abreast through the debris-strewn streets toward what the English during the Boer War called a concentration camp.
Oh, my eyes have seen horrors that my brain would give anything to stop remembering.
I’m working on it.
Sometimes the fragments join in a sludge of memories.
The night of the twelfth of February: With the leadership arrested, with the revolutionist factions decapitated, our Socialist and Communist friends wandered the streets in confusion, not sure where to make a stand, not sure what form the stand should take if a stand were to be made. The armed Schutzbund militias retreated to the tenement blocks to defend the barricades. It must have been nearly midnight when Kim and Dietrich and I reached the epicenter. I remember scrambling over barricades thrown together with automobiles and delivery wagons and pushcarts and heaps of tires and a mountain of furniture. Eventually we came to the fortresslike tenements at Karl-Marxhof. Di
etrich found Sonja behind a second barricade. She and other girls were tearing sheets into bandage strips and folding them into cartons. A hundred or so young Communists, red ribbons tied around their upper arms, manned the barricade. A handful carried rifles, the others an assortment of clubs made from table legs. One young man wearing a greatcoat with a fur collar appeared to be armed with a carpet sweeper. Many of the Communists sprawled on couches that had been dragged down from apartments and formed part of the defense system thrown up to block the street. A young Communist with his pointed beard dyed bright red climbed onto a kitchen table and, using a megaphone fashioned out of cardboard, delivered a fiery speech. Only part of what he said reached my ears, something about how the first shots of the next great war were being fired here in Vienna. The Communists manning the barricade cheered him. Oh, yes, an absolutely indelible memory: Sergius began to pound out the Internationale on an upright piano wedged into the furniture that had been piled on the barricade. Several of the Communists began to sing the words. People watching from the tenement windows joined in. Soon the entire street resounded with the glorious words of the Internationale. To my amazement, I will say to my delight, tears sting my eyes now when I think of it, everyone was singing in Russian.
Vstavay, proklyat’yem zakleymyonniy
Ves’ mir golodnykh i rabov
Kipit nash razum vozmushchonniy
I v smertniy boy vesti gotov.
My Englishman and me, we tried to warm ourselves at a furniture fire blazing in the middle of the street. I don’t remember what time it was when the attack began, only that it was still too dark to make out the dials on the small wristwatch Grandfather gave me for my fifteenth birthday. We heard a distant roar that sounded like motors coughing into life beyond the barricades. This next fragment—it is within the realm of possibility that I fantasized it, and repeated it to myself so often I began to think of it as something that really happened. In my fantasy, Dietrich, hearing the motors drawing closer, offers Kim a revolver. Kim looks down at it as if he’s not sure what it is, then says, “I could not shoot a b-bullet at another human.” “Even if the other human is shooting at you?” Dietrich asks. Kim shakes his head slowly and I hear him say, “There must be another way to fight the good fight.” Dietrich says, “Find it.” Kim nods. “I will.”
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