And really, whose job was it to disappoint them? It wasn't the task of a working reporter to explain that this war was no Christian morality play, but rather a pagan saga—the story of Ragnarok, the last battle, twilight of the gods, death of the old world order. That was the business of historians, Butler supposed, or of poets; people working calmly in quiet rooms.
From somewhere in the wastes of Rownje, an explosion went off like the thump of distant fireworks. Cleaning up UXBs, a nice job for the shtraf brigades. The one-armed driver—stabbed by guilt?— cocked his head toward the sound, then faced Butler with the sharp, appraising gaze of the bloody-minded opportunist. A character type not prominent in War and Peace but well represented in, say, Gogol's Dead Souls. Well, so are we all, thought Butler—that is the kind of war it is.
“Say, did you hear they found the place where the Gestapo did their interrogations?” the man said. “And outside, executions. It's an old tsarist mansion with high walls all around. I could get you in there. You'd have an exclusive.”
The older one from Murmansk shook his head. “Sammy here's a frontline man. He likes to write about real soldiers, real fighting, not these other things, the torture, the occupation.”
Butler smiled and turned away, wondering why Russians liked to call him Sammy. Maybe they felt it sounded American. Inside the ruined library, officious young women behind a folding table proffered travel directions, commissary vouchers, clean linen, first-aid kits, Russian phrase books containing the latest official jargon, a newly commissioned hagiography of Comrade Stalin and the latest tidings from the major Red Army commands. XVII Army, 2 Bielorussian Front, commanded by Comrade General
I. Shretsev, sends its greetings to patriots everywhere and proudly declares the liberation of Vitebsk. Butler knew a couple of these good Communist ladies in a vague, genial way. As he stood blinking his eyes, adjusting to the interior gloom, a Georgian brunette sporting a red beret and sergeant's insignia gave a little cry of recognition.
“Comrade Sammy! Here, we are holding several items of post for you. Packages from abroad.” Flashing a smile, she ducked into an alcove screened by a panel of brightly dyed Azerbaijani cotton.
Butler glanced around the room. On one wall, over disintegrating plaster, a notice board displayed recent press clippings, accounts of the Red Army's progress in rolling back the German aggressors, and a Pravda tract by Ehrenburg, the Rimbaud of hot-blooded propaganda. (“One cannot bear the Germans, these fish-eyed oafs; one cannot live while these gray-green slugs are alive. Kill them all and dig them into the earth.”) Stacked on the concrete floor, a jumble of Western publications ranging from months-old copies of Look and the Saturday Evening Post through cheaply printed Maquis broadsheets to last week's Stars and Stripes, its cover glumly adorned with Mauldin dogfaces. The only comfortable chairs in sight had been claimed by a pair of earnest Indochinese and a drunken Brit, who was known, for reasons Butler had never learned, as the Reaper. The latter gave him a quick, collegial nod.
From the screened alcove tottered a pile of cardboard boxes, followed by the lady sergeant, struggling to postpone the inevitable collapse.
“Let me help you, tovarich,” said Butler, springing forward. His arms briefly tangled with hers, and a few boxes clunked to the floor.
“I'm so sorry.” The sergeant was lightly panting.
Butler studied the line of perspiration at her temple, running down skin as dark and fine as polished wood. “Nothing to worry about,” he said softly in passable Russian. “I'm sure anything valuable will already have been stolen.”
She giggled, met his eyes, flushed becomingly.
“Why don't we just set it all down over here,” Butler suggested, edging them into a corner, “and we shall see what we've got. Maybe I can shed some of this stuff right now.”
One of the larger packages, postmarked Washington, D.C., held half-pound bags of unground A&P coffee beans, a dozen cartons of Lucky Strikes, a stack of phonograph records and several pairs of extra-sheer nylon stockings.
“These are…for you?” the lady sergeant asked, switching to broken English and charmingly failing to mask her open-mouthed wonder.
“No, they're for you,” said Butler, pressing the nylons into her hands. “A gift from the people of the United States.”
The sergeant stared at him, then broke into a laugh. “Ah, the well-known American largesse,” she said, reverting to the polished, Ballet Russe elocution native to Leningrad. Foreign Press Liaison ranks were weighted toward politically reliable university students with a flair for languages.
“Here,” Butler said, reaching into the folds of his expensive overcoat, the sort senior Party types got to wear. “I have some stories here that need to be filed, but I expect to be occupied all afternoon. I wonder, if you get a few minutes?”
The sergeant nodded, brisk and businesslike, stacking the sheaf of papers atop the nylons—interrelated clauses of a wordless contract—and regarding Butler with a certain expectancy, wondering if there was more.
There was. Butler quickly inventoried the stack of parcels, culling this or that item for immediate use, stacking the rest against the wall. Soon the pockets discreetly sewn into his coat lining were filled. He smiled at the sergeant, giving her the hapless shrug of a man comically overwhelmed.
“Would it be possible to have the rest of these items shipped forward?
I'm with the 104th Guards, Special Reconnaissance, near Przemysl. Perhaps if someone is driving out in the next day or two …”
“Of course, comrade. I will see what can be arranged. Will you be checking in again today?”
“I'll be tied up,” said Butler in colloquial English, which everyone knew from the movies. “Got to catch up with the folks back home.”
“And home is…Washington, D.C.?”
Butler shook his head and smiled.
No sign announced the place he was looking for. The place had no name, and neither did the man who waited there.
Puak, he was called: a Russian word meaning spider. It was not a name but a mask, a fitting image; as Stalin, for example, meant steel, and Füchschen meant little fox. His position vis-à -vis the 4th Ukrainian Front was undefined and, for all Butler knew, nonexistent. To say he was Moscow's man in Rownje—a typical correspondent's formula—meant nothing, because Moscow, in such a context, might mean any number of things: the Stavka, the Chekha, the NKVD, or any of the rival power blocs within these shadowy organizations. Unquestionably Puak had been sent here by certain higher powers, but who those powers were and what their ultimate motives might be remained as mysterious as the man's true identity.
Butler chuckled when he saw the dull brass plaque engraved with what the casual eye would take for a street number, 1965. In truth this was no address but rather a date: the glorious year, just two decades hence, when—according to a prophecy attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky—world Capitalism would have breathed its last and the enlightened rule of the proletariat would reach from pole to pole.
Fixing the date there struck some as pessimistic and others as starry-eyed, but to Butler it seemed about right. Today was 1944, and Nazism would surely be destroyed within the year. There would follow a time of upheaval and hardship in Europe—the sort of messy, confusing, and expensive situation from which Americans always strive to extract themselves. They had abandoned Europe in the Twenties and would do so again, Butler was certain, in the Fifties. With the Yanks out, the Soviets would soon be running the show. The old empires would be dismantled, and former colonial subjects—accounting for the bulk of the world's population—would look to the USSR as the great liberating power, a beacon of hope and a model for the future. The United States, thus isolated, would hold out a while longer as a privileged island of revanchism, secure between its shining seas. But that game couldn't go on forever. In the absence of global markets to exploit, America would fall victim to the greed, decadence and hedonism of its own elite. It would die of consumption. As to when this would occur, well, 19
65 was as good a guess as any.
He stood for a minute outside the building where the brass plaque hung, too small to have been a house, more likely a shop or storefront. For some reason, the notion of a cobbler's workshop came to mind—an echo, perhaps, of one queerly affecting story among the thousands about the Rattenkrieg at Stalingrad. Most of these were pure fiction, but the tale of the shoemaker's son turned spy was sufficiently quirky and human-scale that it might actually have happened. And true or not, it would have appealed to Puak.
So it was with no small delight that Butler stepped over a freshly swept threshold into a room that looters had cleared of everything except a long workbench bearing a couple of decades' worth of small hammer marks and the dull black sheen of shoe wax. A man who looked like a Lower East Side cop sat at one end of the bench, calmly twirling an old-fashioned billy club like the ones the Tsar's police had wielded against factory workers on the streets of St. Petersburg. Here, in a town where you could pick up automatic firearms off the sidewalk, this object seemed wonderfully quaint, until Butler looked more closely at the thick, blond-haired man whose narrowed eyes and taut shoulders suggested a readiness to demonstrate the weapon's efficacy on your skull.
“Excuse me, comrade,” Butler said politely. “I hope I'm not disturbing you. I was looking for—”
The blond man pointed a thumb toward a doorway at the rear of the shop.
“Thank you, comrade.”
Butler ducked, as he often needed to do in these Eastern towns, and stepped through to a dim, low-ceilinged chamber that must have served as the old cobbler's living quarters. A small tile stove in one corner gave off a cozy warmth. A paraffin lamp burned yellow-white beneath its muslin shade, casting a glow of evening over scrubbed wooden walls, wide floorboards, lace curtains and a single scarlet geranium blooming in a rusty jar whose scrollwork proclaimed a fine brand of Finnish sweets, a treat someone must have fetched home long ago, before the Revolution, from a trip abroad.
The small, wraithlike man sitting alone in the room had chosen the largest chair in the darkest corner, as though to further diminish himself.
Butler had to step around the small table bearing the lamp to get a look at him, and even then his form remained indistinct.
Puak was fine-boned and amber-skinned, with Asiatic features. He looked physically weak but morally fierce. If someone had told you his real name was Khan, as in Genghis, you would have believed it. Or, just as readily, you would have believed he was a first cousin of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic. There was an unworldliness about him, yet those dark eyes could belong only to a man who has seen the world down to its writhing, molten core. He sat in perfect stillness, as if this visitor were not fully present or real to him.
Butler never knew how to start. He turned his head, soaking up the room's homey, proletarian charm. “Nice place you've found here,” he said, playing the oblivious American. “Pretty flowers. You could forget there's a war on.”
“Oh, no,” said Puak quickly. His voice was musical and perhaps, just detectably, effeminate. “I'm afraid nothing could ever make me do that.” He motioned to a chair near the lamp.
Butler sat down but kept his posture erect. It was much too early to relax.
“And how are things at the front?” Puak said mildly.
A maddening question, in that it could be pointless small talk or a booby trap. “The front has been static the past few weeks,” Butler replied guardedly, “since the summer offensive. Straightening out the line, bringing up supplies. Sending reconnaissance teams over. Grabbing sentries to interrogate. Building up for the next push, which ought to carry us right across the old prewar border.”
“Carry us,” Puak said, his tone neutral, academic. “Have you lost your journalistic objectivity?”
Butler felt more at ease now, settling into the dialectic. “Perfect objectivity is an ideal,” he said, “like perfect justice. We strive for it. Under true Socialism, we may achieve it. But at the present stage of history, ‘objectivity’ too often serves as a code word for apathy. Or worse, a shield to defend the status quo. If one makes a correct appraisal of the world situation, then he is obliged to take sides. He must align himself with the people, the workers, in their struggle. But in taking sides, he drops the pose that most people call objectivity, when in fact they mean something like noninvolvement, or detachment, maybe indifference. So if you suggest that I've lost my objectivity as a journalist, then I would agree. In this qualified sense.”
Puak nodded. He might or might not have been impressed by Butler's analysis, or have cared. “I don't suppose you've tried that line of reasoning on your editors.”
Butler smiled and shrugged. “There are editors and editors. The people I write for appreciate my point of view.”
“Do you have much of an audience in America?”
From anyone else, this would have constituted a wise-ass remark. With Puak you never knew.
“Even in America,” said Butler, “there is a progressive press. A small one, mostly centered around New York and Chicago. Some of Roosevelt's people—the circle around Eleanor—openly sympathize. That's one tactic they've found to dampen the revolutionary impulses of the people. They encourage weak forms of social-democratic thought and institute harmless measures like the WPA. Keep the progressives inside the tent pissing out, as the saying goes.”
Puak nodded. He knew the expression. “Rather like the SPD in Weimar Germany,” he said in the same mild tone, and let the idea hang there.
“To an extent. You can never draw exact parallels between the American system and European parliamentary rule. But yes: you could say the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands was an effective tool for blocking the rise of a truly proletarian movement in Germany. Better to give the people a fraction of what they deserve than nothing at all. Co-opt the opinion-makers, as FDR has done with artists and writers. God knows they come cheap.”
“Which is why the Kommunist Partei Deutschland considered the SPD its most dangerous opponent, correct? Rather than the Hitler party?”
“Nach Hitler, kommen wir,” said Butler, repeating a slogan heard frequently during the 1932 election, the last in republican Germany. After Hitler, we shall come. “Sure—if you give the people a genuine tyrant, a thoroughly evil man, they'll see the battle lines more clearly. They'll have no stomach for liberal compromise.”
Puak knitted his slender fingers and bent forward slightly, nearer the light. “And how well would you say that policy has worked, so far?”
Butler's mouth was already open when he perceived the trap. Puak was inviting him either to declare the Communist Party to have been wrong, or else to applaud the outcome of its strategy: the undermining of a democratic regime and the rise of Nazism, with all that had followed. He shook his head. “If history could be lived backward, any corporal could be a field marshal. We were speaking of America, a totally different proposition. The Democratic Party might resemble the SPD in some ways, but the Republicans are not Nazis. You'll never get a Hitler in America. Adolf at least knows his history. He's evil on a heroic scale. In America you get Senator Bilbo, with his bill to ship the Negroes back to Africa. You get Father Coughlin, shrieking from his pulpit over the radio. And Henry Ford, spending millions to print his anti-Semitic tracts. You get kooks. Wealthy kooks, some of them. Influential kooks, even powerful kooks. But too greedy and self-absorbed to be truly dangerous.”
Puak only stared, as though sizing up the depth and breadth of Butler's personal ideology. “I wonder,” he said finally, “how well in touch with America you are these days. The real America, not your progressive editors. People at their jobs, in the movie theaters, sitting at home in front of their radios.”
Butler shrugged. “I'm still a Yank.” From his mouth, it did not sound altogether convincing.
“Any news from over there?” Puak asked blandly. “Any information from your contacts in Washington?”
A peculiar phrase, thought Butler, contacts in Washington, for
a lover and a pair of longtime friends. More than peculiar, bloodless—and maybe that was the point. Slowly he nodded. “Yes. I've had a letter from Vava, written just after she met with… the other two. The man and the woman. Then a shorter note, more recent. The woman had dropped by. She told Vava things are in motion, a plan has been hatched, they've identified a source of funding and volunteers are signing on. No further details. Vava didn't think it safe to press her.”
Puak let out a long breath, which might have signaled disappointment, though Butler doubted it. He took it as a given that the Spider had already learned the contents of these letters much as he learned everything else, through a thousand eyes and ears. Butler therefore drew secret pleasure from springing his little surprise.
“I've also gotten a letter from Ingo. It came straight to me at the front— must've gotten redirected somehow.” This was as close as he dared come to saying what he believed, that Puak was having his mail opened. “Ingo Miller, you know, he's the—”
“Thank you, I know who Ingo Miller is.”
Puak's tone was curt but his eyes danced with what seemed to Butler a kind of hunger.
“Here”— he groped in the Astrakhan coat—” I've got it right here.”
Puak waited coolly, hands folded about each other like the ends of a silken cord.
“The thing about Ingo,” said Butler, uncrinkling a thin sheet of stationery, “is that he's always making himself out to be a regular, rough-and-tumble fellow. A plain talker. Inside, he's more of a …a brooder, among other things. But listen to this.” He read it straight, in English, which Puak spoke as well as anyone, with a tendency toward classical, Johnsonian sentence structure. “‘ Dear Butler, At first I was surprised when Marty told me it was you. Then when I thought about it I wasn't surprised at all. When did you start writing for Australian newspapers? Anyway, it sounds as if you've found your spot.' New paragraph. ‘I've agreed, for the time being, to go along with this. But I would like to be sure of two things. One, it's really Isaac we're talking about. Two, this whole thing isn't some wacky stunt of yours, a fool-the-dumb-capitalists kind of thing. I don't know why you would do this, but you have to admit, it sounds like you, no offense intended.' New paragraph, and the writing changes, as if the next bit were written later. I suspect he'd had a drink in the interim. ‘You and I never really hit it off in the old days, but at least I remember you as being an honorable man at heart who did not mean to hurt people. Which did not stop you from doing it, of course. Speaking of which, Marty says hi. Please write back and give me some kind of assurance on the two points above. And especially, please level with me if there's anything you know beyond what Vava told us—who, by the by, calls you Sammy. Does this mean you have dropped the literary pose?' He ends there. Signed, ‘Your old pal.’ “
Another Green World Page 5
