The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  She had not shown interest of any kind in her sentencing, no curiosity about her crime, whatever it was. She had merely done her work, mostly in the mess hall, cleaning, serving the officers. As the years went by, her status evolved toward a kind of indecipherability that seemed to bother no one in particular. She was sexually obliging to the commandant and to anyone else particularly importunate, but her nervelessness was a depressant to ardor, and after a few years it simply became a part of the accepted convention that Clementa (she had given that out as her name, and said she had forgotten her surname, so she had been given the name Wolf) was left alone. She never initiated a conversation, but she would now reply, giving brief, perfunctory answers as required. Her Russian had become fluent, and it was discovered about her, when she absentmindedly picked up a book in English from the officers’ lounge she was cleaning, that she was apparently conversant with that language, because she did not conceal that she read the text without difficulty.

  Two Russian officers, one of them elderly—indeed, he had been recalled to duty notwithstanding that his retirement had come in 1939, and now he was nearly seventy—had taken a personal interest in her. The first, a colonel, had told her that there was really nothing in her dossier that presented serious difficulty and that if she wished him to do so, he would attempt to arrange for her release. She thanked him, but said she had no place to go, and would therefore remain where she was. Ten years after she had got to Vorkuta she caught the eye of the second, a spirited Ukrainian captain, a widower, apparently something of a war hero, now attached to the KGB and doing duty in a prison camp because of an informed suspicion in Moscow that three or four of the camp’s inmates had histories much more interesting to the KGB than the prisoners had let on at the time they were interrogated and sentenced. This required the captain to preside over extended interrogations that kept him in Vorkuta for almost three months, in the course of which he fell in love with Clementa Wolf.

  She treated him like everyone else, but Captain Gouzenko persevered, even as with the prisoners. It did not discourage him that for over two weeks he appeared to be making no headway whatever. But then, on that third Sunday, she suddenly began to go beyond the entirely perfunctory talk to which she was given. What she said was greatly disjointed, but the captain encouraged her to reformulate her thoughts and her sentences. He invented a game they played together, designed to stretch “their” memories. He would supply one datum, on his side of the board, relating to his early childhood, and she would do the same. Gradually there came a reconstruction of sorts. She knew now that she had a family, and knew their names. But the memory of them was purely factual, as if they had been the mother, father, and brother of friends. She remembered that she and Henri had played games together, and remembered some of the practices of those games, but nothing of what once they had signified to her. In a month, he knew her story; and she herself knew it, for the first time in a decade. She remembered the Nazis coming and putting her on the train. She remembered the liberation, and—on this point the captain questioned her most diligently—expressed no resentment at her treatment by the liberators. She had supposed that that was how the Russians were supposed to be; at least that was the impression she had always got—savage and rapacious, like all soldiers who had suffered. She had no complaints to make against those who had rescued her from the Nazis, the murderers of her parents and her foster parents.

  On this matter Captain Dmitri Gouzenko showed a most relentless curiosity, probing as to why she did not resent the raping, the imprisonment, the forced labor. Clementa said she had not really reflected on the matter; she assumed that they were men carrying out orders and obeying instincts, which instincts were certainly preferable to those exercised by the people who had dominion over the society in which she had been brought up.

  There was here, finally, the beginning of an analytical intelligence, even if there was nothing left of an emotional memory. Dmitri spent many engrossing hours with his beautiful dark-skinned protégée, whom he patiently, with the help of the commandant’s wife, instructed in basic cosmetic literacy. At one point late in the evening, when he had taken much vodka (Clementa consented to taste the vodka, as an act of docility, but did not finish the little jigger glass), Dmitri had led her quietly to his quarters. She knew what was expected of her, addressed no complaint, and in the dim light Dmitri Gouzenko looked down on the body of a girl not quite thirty, whose eyes’ glaze he had known; but he saw now, for the first time, something else: a rising sense of keenness, of self-recognition other than as merely a vehicle of others’ convenience. He approached her thoughtfully, patiently, tenderly, and he felt for the first time, as indeed it was the first time she had so responded, that there was latent passion there. The following night he knew it, and she knew it. By the end of the week she had experienced passion, and Dmitri marveled at it and at her surprise at finding that she had feelings she could at first just experience, and then begin to express.

  One week later they were married, in the office of the commandant, both wearing overcoats because the coal heater was working only fitfully. It proved no problem for Mrs. Dmitri Gouzenko to leave the home she had known the longest of any she had frequented and follow her husband to Moscow, where he was pursuing with such success his career in Soviet intelligence. By the end of the decade he was able to show off his gifted wife, who also spoke German and English and read French, to his little company of intimates. He took pains not to conceal her story, and she got around to listening with stoic resignation to his telling it. People were as people were, was what she had learned; and the Nazis were the worst. The Russians were also bad, but at least one could say about them that their society was at the service of a great social ideal. Dmitri had talked to her about that ideal, and although she had never really studied Marxism-Leninism in any detail, she accepted it, if only because Dmitri did, and as far as she knew, Dmitri’s patience, his resolution, his great love of his country and of its ideals, were exemplary.

  She wondered, though in ways altogether detached, about Henri. She remembered him, in an abstract way, as having been the light of her life. She remembered this only as an objective fact, as she remembered the feelings Juliet had for Romeo. It was their life together that she remembered, but not the experience of it; a life that had been totally extinguished one dark day. She had not seen him for nearly twenty years, since the night he went away to England, and she remembered even wondering why he had not written to her, though she knew that there had been difficulties. She more or less assumed that—of course—he had been killed, fighting alongside the English, or by a bombing during a raid, or however; her own rescue from disaster was surely unique in her family. When the Nazis came, and the Wurmbrands were made to stand before the riflemen—hands clenched, Uncle Hans holding a Bible in the other hand; all this in front of her, in the garden, at high noon—everything that came before receded in concreteness, and although she could remember scattered details without difficulty (her mother, the last day she had seen her, was wearing a red evening gown, and smelled of lavender), she was in no way involved in her former life. It might have been someone else’s. Dmitri had roused her from her traumatic lethargy, and now she had feelings again. But feelings only for what happened now, what happened to her, to Dmitri, to their two-year-old girl, Nina, whom she named after the wife of Chairman Khrushchev, and to the twenty schoolchildren aged fourteen and fifteen to whom she taught German history with emphasis on the terrible reign of the Nazi Party, whose followers continued to dominate the western half of the country. So that when Dmitri came home that afternoon and told her that her brother was in fact alive, she felt only a twinge of curiosity—not, really, much else.

  Where did he live? she asked, and what was he doing? Dmitri replied that, unhappily, he had to report to her that her brother was in league with the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, with headquarters in Berlin, and that it was now Dmitri’s assignment to track him down. If indeed he is helping the Nazis, Clementa remarked, t
hen he should be tracked down, indeed her very own mother and father would hope that the Russians, and Dmitri in particular, would be successful in any such enterprise. Yes, she said matter-of-factly, patting her little girl on the face to stop her crying, yes, she would cooperate; what was she supposed to do?

  12

  Henri Tod met with Stefan Schweig at the cellar of Number 12, as they designated this particular meeting room of the Bruderschaft, though meeting room was perhaps inappropriate to describe Number 12, inasmuch as not more than five or six people could with any comfort convene there. It served primarily the function of a mini-armory, where the paraphernalia of the uglier face of covert activity were collected, provided they were small—large machines, suitable for reproducing ugly pictures of Ulbricht, were kept in the roomier quarters of Number 22. Number 12 had the basic lethal weapons, plus a very few that served special purposes—silencers in particular, and telescopic sights. And a cabinetful of this or that drug or opiate or poison, useful but only provided that Sophie was there. As trilingual secretary to an American general who liked to go out and review the troops and other delights, there were times when Sophie, whose father had been a pharmacist, was simply not there, and if one of those times was also a time when the Bruderschaft required some Prussic acid, why, her absence worked to the advantage of the designated consumer.

  Indeed, Number 12 was, so to speak, the launching pad for terminal operations. It was not used regularly; but neither was it used stingily. Henri Tod had attracted his disciples around one basic proposition plus another that he described as a corollary to it, in language that might have been expected from a man formally trained in philosophy. The basic proposition was that when the alternative modes of living were apparent, human beings would choose freedom. He came to this social conclusion, which he believed to be profound, and profoundly believed, as a very young scholar freshly arrived from extensive training in Great Britain. And he had come back to Germany with the end in mind of planting in the public consciousness a second proposition, namely that the Communists were Nazis. And that therefore any apostolic attention given to Communist ideology other than as social filigree was sheer frivolity, a form of autohypnosis exercised by either philosophical naïfs or charlatans. The awe and esteem in which Tod was increasingly held was fortified by the swelling number of Germans who, given the alternative, indeed proceeded to choose freedom. It was that enormous human traffic, westbound, that brought on the crisis everyone knew was now coming to a head.

  But Henri Tod’s corollary was that history tended to be dominated by the phenomenon of inertia. That unless individuals act decisively, antisocial forces tend to come together and form glacial tides creating their own momentum; thus the tyrannies survive, as the sloth persists; and the people, submitting, becoming the individualists manqués the political philosopher Professor Michael Oakeshott had written about. The immediate condition for testing the social law of Henri Tod—that the people will choose freedom if they are given the alternative—was that the alternative had to be available. The mortal enemy of freedom, he generalized, was the inertial conspiracy which denied the alternative. Thus if the alternative had been more dramatically recognized by more people critically situated on July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler would have succumbed to, rather than survived, the inadequate attempt by Stauffenberg to assassinate him. Indeed, if an alternative to Hitler had been dramatized from the beginning, he would not have accumulated the power he did.

  In Berlin, Tod would lecture his growing fraternity on the objective, namely the destruction of Communism-Nazism. He mingled with his young disciples, discoursing with them quietly wherever life was lived—at the corner of the bar with one or two members of the Bruderschaft, drinking schnapps or beer or wine (in the conventional division of Bavarian beer drinkers, Rhenish wine tasters, and Prussian schnapps drinkers, Henri the tea drinker did not fit at all); or in one of the meeting halls, though always discreetly—there were no public meetings. What he told them was at once simple, and complex. What was simple was that Berlin was the key to the future of Europe, as Hong Kong was the key to the future of Asia—and probably the world. Because in Berlin and only in Berlin, the great social point could be dramatically made: the people would choose freedom (and opportunity) over against slavery (and stagnation). If Berlin was kept operative as the permanently open sluice gate for human idealism, then eventually the glue that caused the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to stick together would dissolve. That substance, Tod would lecture, was no different from what had temporarily mesmerized virtually all of Germany into consenting to follow the orders of the mad and sadistic Hitler. If Hitler’s borders, so effectively sealed early in his reign, had been more porous, he would not have lasted.

  The purpose of a few men, annealed in idealism, vision, and courage, was then twofold: to keep Berlin open; to help those in Communist Berlin who were especially inhibited by the Communists to make their way across the dividing line of the city.

  And the ugly part (Tod always began by acknowledging it as that): to discourage individual acts of sadism against those who chose freedom and to punish, most severely, those who organized most effectively to prevent East Germans from achieving their freedom.

  Foremost of these offenders, of course, was Ulbricht. But Tod, early on, had ruled against killing Ulbricht. To do that, he argued, would be to give the Soviet Union the excuse it most wanted for resorting to intervention. True, the Soviet Union’s armed legions were, every day, gathering along the perimeter of East Berlin in greater density. But clearly there was a felt reluctance actually to intervene, as had been done five years earlier in Hungary, and this notwithstanding that it was actually the Russians, not the Germans, who had juridical rights to govern Berlin—the right of conquest, shared with Americans, British, and French. But so great was the investment by Moscow in the pretense that the Warsaw powers were individually governed that it had been left primarily to Ulbricht, to his “council,” and to the omnipresent Vopos—the young, uniformed Communist-Nazis—to do the dirty work. Although it might be said that Ulbricht was the principal formal enemy, it was not for such as the Bruderschaft—the growing secret fraternity of young, idealistic Germans—to take on the job of dealing with Ulbricht. It was, however, the responsibility of the Bruderschaft to take on the job of dealing with Ulbricht’s most unpleasant agents, and indeed the mission tonight, being planned at Number 12, was to arm in order to effect the elimination—incidentally from East Berlin, coincidentally from the planet—of a double agent, caught out.

  Stefan Schweig had been born on the day that Adolf Hitler marched into the Rhineland, which made him twenty-five. His father had been killed, in Italy; his mother had nursed him in the hatred she felt for Hitler, and for the whole monstrous nationalistic atavism for which he stood. When Stefan’s father was killed, his mother treated the news as more or less inevitable—or such was the memory of her eight-year-old son. Later, during the awful privations of 1945–48, she protected him by working as a subway janitor and, taking the earliest opportunity, she lectured her son that there were no interesting differences between the Communists and the Nazis “except for professors, who always study the unimportant things.” Stefan had not known what his mother meant by that, and in any event had a problem in reconciling her generalization with the sacrifices she was making to keep him in school, where he was exposed to professors for long hours every day.

  But as he grew older, he began to understand. As Henri Tod understood instantly what Stefan meant when he said that the taxonomies of the social scientists were inverted. What Nazism and Communism had in common was that both systems sanctioned the killing and torturing of innocent people, and if one saw that, all else that was sayable about the nice ideological differences of the two systems was, well, trivial.

  It was not trivial in the life of Stefan Schweig—notwithstanding that this would not be his maiden killing—that on this night either he or Henri Tod, depending entirely on chance or opportunity, would execute o
ne Aristophe Spender. He needed, in order to satisfy his sense of obligation to the distinctions laid down by his dead mother, to repeat to himself that Aristophe Spender was not an “innocent person.” Else? Else he, Stefan, was a Nazi, a Communist, a killer of innocent people.

  He had had trouble, he confessed one day to Henri Tod, on the matter of “civil authority.” Stefan was a Catholic, and a Catholic, he reminded Henri, does not “execute” anyone. A Catholic is permitted to pull the trigger knowing that a bullet will then enter the brain of the man whose head lies between the crosshairs. But this must be a military act. And the “military” is a duly constituted division of government, as distinguished from the Bruderschaft. To which Henri had said that this was of course in general true, but that a larger view of natural law entitled the individual to deny the civil authority of those who exercised power in East Germany, and that such was the existing situation. After all, did Stefan Schweig believe that those who had met to murder Adolf Hitler on July 20 had violated the civil law about which the Scholastics had spoken? Stefan let the matter go, even though he did not feel that his curiosity had been entirely satisfied. Was he, tonight, going out as a soldier of an inchoate army of justice? Or had he appointed himself, or rather been appointed by Henri, a “civil authority”? But no more time for this.

  Sophie had brought coffee, and had laid out on the kitchen table in the cellar the weapons from which Henri would choose those especially appropriate to the occasion. They knew the four sites in East Berlin in which their mark spent, at a guess, 85 percent of his time. There was his bachelor apartment, on Neue Blumenstrasse. There was the restaurant-bar he most generally frequented; indeed it could almost be said about Aristophe Spender that he had office hours at the Löwen-Eck. Almost every day he visited his mother, if only for a half hour or so, during which he watched television and drank the tea his mother brought him. And, of course, there was the Helsingforser Platz, where he was the superintending dispatcher of the state taxi fleet, operated mostly by veterans, many of them partly crippled, who were also the important sources of the information he sold regularly to the Bruderschaft.