Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  No, I never raised the subject of Dietrich’s offer of a revolver with Kim. Perhaps I was afraid he would tell me I’d invented it. I had fallen for my Englishman and I wanted this particular fragment—this evidence of humanity—to be reality and not fantasy.

  I can still reproduce in my brain the shrieks rising from the tenement windows when the giant bulldozers arrived at the first barricade and began punching gaps in it. Several young Communists shot fireworks that shrieked en route and exploded in sparkling circles when they slammed into the bulldozer cabs. We could hear rifle bullets ricocheting off the plows. Kim seized my hand and pulled me into a doorway. I remember a narrow staircase winding up and up, each floor smelling of garbage or urine or cooking kerosene. Then a blast of cold air hit my face. I was on the roof, peering over the parapet. Far below, as if in a sinkhole, I could see automobiles being lifted like toys and flung to one side. Thick black smoke rose from the tires that had been soaked in kerosene and set afire. Tanks churned through the gaps opened by the bulldozers, their treads crushing furniture, the machine guns in their turrets spitting sparks in all directions. A figure raced toward one tank carrying a can of kerosene with an oil-lamp wick burning in its throat. As he raised his arm to throw it he was cut down by a strafe of bullets. A second figure appeared out of nowhere to pick up the can but it exploded in his hands before he could throw it. For an instant the explosion illuminated the street like a burst of lightning. I believe I recognized the comrade before he was engulfed in flames, it was my onetime lover, it was the Dietrich who had leaped to his feet to tell the Hungarian professor that his Marxist theories were boring him to death. And the crazy thought crossed my mind: At least he didn’t die of boredom.

  When the tanks broke through the second barricade, shoving aside the upright piano and the mangled furniture, the Communists with us on the roof began throwing bricks down at the hunched shadows advancing behind the tanks. The comrades in the street fought heroically. For a brief moment it looked as if the attackers were hesitating, but perhaps that, too, was fantasy imposing itself on reality. Soldiers in helmets and greatcoats surged through the gaps in the barricade and spread out in the street, shooting at anything that moved in doorways or windows, smashing open the street doors of the tenements with rifle butts, launching what turned out to be a methodical search of the apartments. One of the comrades on the roof burst into sobs. Another shook him by the shoulders. “We must save ourselves,” he yelled.

  Kim pressed his lips to my ear. “We, too, must save ourselves.”

  I heard a voice I recognized as mine say, “Why must we?”

  “To fight Fascism.”

  I have a vague memory of being pushed over parapets to other roofs. White sheets were flying from chimneys in sign of surrender but the Heimwehr gangsters weren’t taking prisoners. Howitzers started to shoot out the ground floors behind us so that the tenements would collapse into themselves. I remember spiral staircases, I remember clammy tunnels with large rusting sewage pipes running through them, I remember air passages that were so narrow you had to walk sideways, I remember cellars packed with doctors trying to staunch the flow of blood from wounded men, with women trying to staunch the flow of mucus from the noses of sobbing children. Kim found an English acquaintance, an artist of some sort, I think his name was Spender, we’d had a drink once on the terrace of the Herenhoff, drifting like a dazed soul in a cellar filled with dazed souls. Kim tried to shake him out of his stupor but Spender pulled his arm free and cried out, “Sunt lacrimae rerum—they weep for their houses, which are crashing down around their heads.”

  Shaking his head crossly, Kim murmured, “Lacrimae rerum gets it wrong—these are tears for events, not things.”

  After an eternity the cellars and the tunnels gave way to stingingly icy air, to a night sky brimming with stars, to alleyways filled with cartons of shoes, some of them with limbs attached, to narrow streets rank with cordite, to checkpoints manned by nervous soldiers who aimed rifles and flashlights at us as my Englishman frantically waved his passport. A British citizen and his girlfriend caught up in a war, let us through, for God’s sake. My apartment. The dull but not unpleasant thud of artillery shells exploding across town—it reminded me of the dry thunder over my grandfather’s estate that brought no rain. I remember my Englishman gazing out the window at the low clouds on the horizon tinted bloodred by fires burning out of control beneath them. He was drinking schnapps straight from the bottle when he turned his back on the fires and told me, out of the blue, that he’d once been b-b-b-b-b-buggered by a schoolmate.

  What did that have to do with the thugs running riot in the workers’ tenements across the city?

  * * *

  Kim forbade me to leave the apartment—the streets were crawling with Heimwehr patrols hunting down Socialists and Communists. He himself went outside two, sometimes three times a day. I could see him from my window, hunched over the handlebars of his motorcycle, waving his British passport to get past checkpoints or patrols. He had given himself a mission—scrounging old but serviceable overcoats and suits and ties from the journalist Gedye and the artist Spender and their English friends, delivering the clothing to the Schutzbund comrades trapped in cellars and sewers, many of them wounded; their only hope of fleeing was if they could pass themselves off as civilians caught in the crossfire, and for this they needed clothes that weren’t battle worn and bloodstained.

  After the three-day civil war, comrades, several of them with festering shrapnel wounds, all of them exhausted, made their way to my apartment. Some stayed only long enough to disinfect their wounds with alcohol, others (having no place else to go) camped. The Hungarian professor and three students occupied the spare room, two on the bed, two on the rug folded to make a mattress. Three young Communists who had crawled through sewers to escape the epicenter lived in the sitting room. Kim and I shared what food we had with the others as we clustered around the shortwave radio post trying to make sense of the BBC bulletins through the static. I translated the news into German for the comrades. According to the BBC, fifteen hundred had been killed and another five thousand had been wounded when Dollfuss crushed a Communist uprising in Vienna. (Some Communist uprising!) In what appeared to be a meticulously planned operation, Socialist and Communist leaders were being rounded up. Those who managed to avoid arrest were fleeing abroad. Opposition headquarters had been closed down. With the movement crushed, the workers’ militias collapsed in disarray. The BBC correspondent reported seeing women frantically digging up the gardens at the Engelhof when word spread that weapons were buried there. The workers’ tenements, long considered to be impregnable Socialist fortresses, had been occupied by the army and the government’s Heimwehr militia. Workers’ rest homes and holiday camps across Austria had been closed by the police. Terror gripped Vienna. Civilians caught with rifles or pistols were being shot out of hand.

  In my apartment, we existed in a kind of suspended animation. Kim sat next to my phonograph, his head in his hands, listening to scratchy records of Beethoven sonatas, each of which, to the professor’s dismay, he could identify by its opus number. When we ran out of coal, we started breaking up furniture and burning bits of it in the stove. First went the legs and backs of chairs. We burned the curtain rods, the drawers in the dressers, then the dressers themselves, even the wooden cooking spoons. We burned the frames of my grandfather’s paintings I’d rolled up and pawned to raise money for German refugees flooding into Vienna after the Reichstag fire. We burned the frames of the two small charcoal designs I’d bought in Paris—I would have pawned these, too, but they were signed by someone the pawnbroker never heard of named Modigliani and had no value.

  Sonja appeared late one night, her face stained with dirt, her eyelids swollen from unshed tears. Because of the cold, she never removed her overcoat so the boys didn’t get to see if she was still wearing her low-cut blouse. Pity. It might have warmed them a bit. When I told her how Kim and me, we’d watched the attack on the barricade
s from the roof, she said the comrade I’d seen throwing a can of kerosene at a tank wasn’t Dietrich, the way I thought. Poor Dietrich, she said, along with the young Sergius, who never stopped taunting his executioners, had been dragged from a coal bin and taken to a city park and shot into a newly dug trench by a firing squad made up of Fascist women. When I asked how she knew that, she smiled a bizarre smile and said, “Dietrich came to me in a dream and told me.”

  Late one night a week or so after the February events, Kim came to me in a dream—so I thought until I felt his breath in my hair. I couldn’t see his face but I could feel the tension in his body. We could still hear sporadic rifle fire in the city and I supposed he was going to say something about being unable to sleep because of it. “We must leave” is what he said.

  “Leave the apartment?”

  “Leave the apartment. Leave Vienna. Leave Austria.”

  “With your British passport, you could leave. I would never make it past the frontier.”

  “We’ll get you a British p-passport.”

  “How?”

  “Wives of British citizens are given British p-passports. I stopped by the embassy this afternoon to verify this.”

  “We’re not married.”

  “Things are calming down in Vienna. Shops, offices are starting to open for b-business. So is the town hall. I went there after I went to the embassy. I spoke to the clerk who does marriages. I slipped him five pounds, I said I would give him another fiver when he performed the ceremony. He said he c-can marry us in three minutes—matter of signing and stamping a piece of p-paper. We could be there when they open for business at eight. We could be at the embassy by eight-thirty. With a signed and stamped certificate of m-marriage, we could get you a British p-passport and be on the way to Italy by nine.”

  When I didn’t immediately say anything, he said, “Right. Someone has just suggested m-marriage. You could have the d-decency to react.”

  “What about the professor and the others?”

  “They have a better chance of surviving if you’re not here when the police break in the door.”

  “I am not against marrying you, Kim, but I prefer to stick it out in Vienna.”

  “You can’t, Litzi. You were arrested once so they know you’re a Communist. They may even know you give reports to a woman with a man’s name who doesn’t deliver flowers in winter. Your name will be on lists. It’s only a matter of time b-before they come around looking for you. On top of that you’re Jewish. Everybody knows Hitler intends to annex Austria. Anschluss is only a question of time. He wants to get his pound of flesh from the Jews who refused to let him study in the Vienna Art Academy. Ah, if only they’d admitted him, he might be an artist starving in a garret in Vienna instead of Chancellor of Germany in B-Berlin. Litzi, if Dollfuss doesn’t kill you for being a Communist, Hitler will kill you for being Jewish.”

  In the darkness, Kim kissed me. I distinctly recall his lips were not trembling. Mine were. He had taken charge of his life and mine. We were married at eight-fifteen the next morning by a town hall clerk who badly needed the talents of a dentist. I signed the register identifying myself as a student without religious affiliation. Kim claimed to be a British tourist. Next to “Religion” he wrote, in English, “None that I am aware of.” At nine the British Consul handed me a brand-new British passport with an old photograph of me glued onto one page—I had dredged it up from the metal box under the bed; it was me before I’d seen piles of shoes with limbs still attached to them. There was no mistaking the innocence in my eighteen-year-old eyes. In the photograph my hair was shoulder length and sun-bleached. The consul, a kindly gentleman who was counting the days until he could return to Scotland, asked me if blond was the original color. I told him I had dyed my hair so often I wasn’t sure. He said not to worry, that if the frontier police noticed the discrepancy, they wouldn’t find it remarkable that I had transformed myself into a redhead. All the girls were doing it these days, he said. He wished us good luck and Godspeed. I told him I didn’t believe in God. Kim coughed up a laugh and said he did believe in speed. The Consul said he did, too. He saluted the newlyweds from the small balcony over the embassy’s polished brass entrance as we saddled up in the courtyard below. Kim wore his rucksack on his chest, I wore mine on my back. It contained clothing and (in the hope they might one day be worth something) my two small rolled-up Modiglianis. I hung on to Kim’s shoulder straps as he stomped the motorcycle into life.

  Was it the airstream in my face that brought tears to my eyes as we headed through the achingly familiar boulevards of my beloved Vienna toward England, a country nine hundred miles away, give or take, that I could scarcely imagine?

  2: LONDON, APRIL 1934

  Where a Chap from Cambridge Has the Bright Idea of Spying for the Reds

  Bugger if I remember who came up with the idea of organizing a welcome home bash for Kim. The word spread that the sod was back in town with a Magyar wife in tow and suddenly the party was on the agendum. One of Philby’s Cambridge chums offered his mother’s Cadogan flat—she was said to be traveling on the Continent with her husband and his lover at the time. At the appointed hour Don Maclean came round. Good fellow, Maclean. He’d put on weight since Cambridge, where he earned a first in foreign languages. Straight as a ramrod, sexually speaking, but I don’t hold that against a chap. He and Kim had had a falling-out at university, never did find out over what, think it had to do with Maclean’s having joined the fledgling Communist cell at Cambridge whilst Kim, for reasons beknownst only to himself, never actually pocketed a party card. That asshole Anthony Blunt crashed the party. He was wearing a starched col cassé, you’d have thought the twit was the King of England; he wasn’t bashful about claiming to be a distant cousin of the Queen, he certainly dressed to fit the role he’d assigned himself. Would have turned him away except he was clutching a bottle of half-decent whiskey. Anthony made something of a splash at Cambridge in French art and you could count on him to tone up the conversation if, as was often the case, I toned it down. Bob Wright, Kim’s coal miner mate—Kim had lodged with Wright in Huthwaite when they were both reading economics—appeared with two Malthusian League ladies, one on each arm. He’d picked them up at a stationer’s shop on Kensington High, they’d just come away from a forum on constipation, or was it contraception? With their little yellow badges, Malthusian Leaguers, like the suffragettes before them, were fair game if you were heterosexual. It was common knowledge they preached birth control in order to practice free love. (At the nightly poker games during our Cambridge undergraduate days, there had been a running argument over whether Malthusians wore knickers. As none of us had been able to offer eyewitness evidence, the question had never been resolved to anybody’s satisfaction.) Two girls from Newnham, reeking of water closet (which is to say, working class) perfume, appeared on the threshold claiming to have been invited by someone whose name slipped their minds. Vaguely recognized the one who introduced herself as Mildred, she looked to be up the spout and got brassed off when one of the Malthusian ladies asked her when the baby was due. “Piss off, huh—I’m not pregnant,” she snapped. “I’m starting the Hollywood grapefruit diet straightaway breakfast tomorrow.” I should say here that the mere sight of Newnham girls filled those of us from Cambridge with wistfulness for our misspent youth—wearing identical white blouses and pleated skirts, they had filled the front rows of lectures at Trinity on the dialectical idealism of Hegel. It was a time-honored tradition in those hallowed halls that Newnham girls were duff and no Trinity boy who prized his reputation would deign to talk to one. As the welcome home bash in Cadogan was off campus both in terms of geography and time, I thought it would be tolerable to chat up Mildred before she transformed herself into a grapefruit.

  Broke the ice with “Don’t you think it curious that men shake hands with the same hand they use to wipe their asses?”

  “But surely that’s the point,” she said brightly.

  I inquired as to whether sh
e’d read Lawrence’s Pornography and Obscenity.

  “Lawrence of Arabia wrote a book on pornography?”

  “That’s D. H. Lawrence, love.”

  When she confessed she wasn’t familiar with the book in question, I shared with her the theory making the rounds of London public houses that pornography was literature intended to be read with one hand. Encouraged by the blush spreading across Mildred’s Midland cheeks—a reaction typical of girls with a modest university education—I confided my earnest conviction that Mussolini was queer. I suggested that if one really wanted to distract him from his lustful designs on Ethiopia, all one need do was parade some beautiful fairy across the steps of the Capitol in Rome. Mildred wanted to know if I would be willing to sacrifice myself. “I am as much a patriot as the next faggot,” I said huffily.

  “Jolly good show,” she said. “I shall put forward your name if they call for volunteers. By the by, what is your name?”

  “Guy Burgess.”

  “The Guy Burgess? Oh dear, I’m embarrassed to be seen talking to you. Whatever you have might rub off on me.”

  Whilst talking to Mildred, I’d noticed a most delectable boy climbing the spiral stairs to the sitting room. Anthony, who had already spoken to said boy downstairs, whispered in my ear that he was an unemployed actor working as an usher in the West End. The poor fellow looked to be lost in the shuffle. The usher-slash-actor, his hair slicked back with sweet-smelling pomade, eventually gravitated in my direction as if by inadvertence. We beat about the bush for a suitable interval.