Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  It was if he were writing his will and testament. He breathed deeply, as if it were his last breath. ‘Stalin has killed the Communist Party – and those who ape Stalin. And may have killed communism as well. At least in our lifetimes.’

  She watched her crumpled brother and heard the jargon tumbling from his mouth – it was like some discharge from an illness.

  He said, ‘Nat Seeligson put his head in the kitchen oven. There’ve been others – hanged themselves, shot themselves.’

  She shook her head, indicating that she did not know Seeligson, and sipped her gin. Frederick said, ‘The Melbourne poet who worked on the Guardian.’ He laughed. ‘Not so good as a poet, but a good comrade. Gassed himself.’

  He was near tears. ‘I wish they had shot me.’

  Over the years with Janice and Frederick, and in discussions with Ambrose and people at the League, she had come to understand the seductions of a Great Cause for those who wanted an all-embracing, all-knowing commitment. The right way to live.

  She knew its logic and its compassion. She thought she could easily have gone to where Fredrick went and to be where he was now.

  He then said, ‘I did not leave the Party; the Party left me.’

  She saw his pipe lying on the floor. His Stalin pipe.

  She leaned over, picked it up and put it on the bedside table.

  After some minutes, he seemed to become oblivious to her presence. She said she would visit tomorrow.

  From the door of the bedroom, she observed him with dispassion. She tried to imagine what it would mean to someone who strived to be a revolutionary to be expelled in the eyes of his comrades – to have failed the cause; to now be a revolutionary without a revolution and without comrades.

  She nearly said, ‘You can now make another life,’ but realised how callous that would sound.

  Perhaps realising that she was standing at the door looking at him, he said to the ceiling, ‘Any economic system that periodically throws millions out of work and out of their houses, degrades millions of its citizens, humiliates them, disregards them, injures them, starves them, makes those who are least able to fend for themselves take the brunt of any economic downturn, is an evil system.’

  She nearly asked if he meant Stalin’s Russia, but she saw that he was describing America and Australia.

  Then, to her surprise, he quoted their father. ‘As Dad used to say, “We have to be against the master and servant relationship, against the divine, against the imperial, against the aristocratic, and against the arrogance of wealth.” I thought we had the answer with communism. We have to find another answer, another communism. Or perhaps what we had wasn’t correct communism.’

  She made to leave but he called her back. She went and stood by the bedside. He took her hand and said, ‘You must understand what it’s like, Edith. When I used to wake of a morning, I would think, I am an organiser for the Communist Party, and I felt bigger than my body. I was continuously conscious of my role. I was my role. Even when people opposed me, I felt stronger. I felt responsible. I felt enlivened. I had authority. I had answers to all the questions.’

  Her thoughts went back to her days at the League. ‘I do know what it’s like to have a great role.’ It was true. She had felt it somewhat with the UNRRA, but not as strongly as when she was an officer of the League of Nations.

  ‘Do you want to know how I feel now?’

  She stood there.

  ‘I feel as if several rat-sized animals are running about inside my body.’

  ‘I’ll come again tomorrow.’

  He went back to looking at the ceiling, an arm across his forehead.

  As she was leaving again, he said to the ceiling, with some anguish, ‘I didn’t want you bastards to be right about the Soviet Union.’

  She had to go. She left the room and went out to where Janice was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, flicking through a Party magazine. Perhaps she had been listening to what went on in the bedroom.

  Janice looked up and said, ‘The weirdest thing is that someone had reported Fred to the Control Commission for having been seen with a suspected SIS agent from the British High Commission – that is, of course, the Major.’

  ‘Ye gods.’

  ‘That wasn’t why he was expelled, but evidently it was raised along with anything else they could throw at him.’

  She put out her cigarette. ‘And, of course, it should have been raised.’

  ‘Will you resign?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Edith found this odd. ‘Can a member of the Party, such as you, still remain with an expelled member?’

  Janice shrugged, which Edith took to mean no. In fact, to mean, No, and it doesn’t matter to me.

  She took Janice’s hand. ‘You can’t walk out on him now. Not at this point in his life.’

  Janice said dully, ‘I’ve never seen him crack before. He’s no longer a deliberate man. Once they lose it, they lose it for good.’

  She let Janice’s hand go. ‘You mean, you really would leave him for the Party?’

  Janice did not reply and then said, ‘To be honest, I wanted a man who loved the revolution more than he loved me.’

  ‘As a woman should love Jesus more than her husband?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. But I think I would rather stick with the Party and be wrong than betray the cause and be right.’

  ‘Do you want me to find a doctor for him – a psychiatrist?’

  ‘Let’s see if he pulls himself together. Psychiatry in this country isn’t going to help him. He’s a broken man.’

  ‘How long has he been this way?’

  ‘Weeks now. He keeps listening to Beethoven.’

  ‘Beethoven?’

  Janice gave Edith the weary look and wound a finger at her temple, but not in an amusing way. ‘Lenin – Lenin had a love for Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata but wouldn’t listen to music at all. He said it made him want to pat the heads of the people. He said that one had to beat their heads, not pat them. So Fred’s listening to Beethoven – disobeying Lenin.’ She shook her head with irritation. ‘Like a child. Or a madman.’ In Janice’s tone she detected disgust with Fredrick.

  Janice had not offered her another drink or asked her to sit.

  ‘Can he appeal against the expulsion?’

  ‘He could appeal to the National Congress, but it only meets every three years. I think the next meeting is nearly two years off. Can be a special congress, but that’s unlikely.’

  Looking up at her, Janice said, ‘He won’t tell you about this because he’s humiliated, but before the expulsion he was given an opportunity to go to a Party school and write a self-criticism – an idea from the Chinese-trained cadres, such as Mortimer. So he went to the self-criticism school. They didn’t have dunces caps on their heads, but they sat at school desks and he wrote a few thousand words about his parents and their bourgeois tastes and background. And about you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Your time with the League of Nations. He had to describe why you were a class enemy. Turner and others had to go through a similar school, but Fred, instead of seeing the self-criticism as valuable, saw it as humiliation. He couldn’t see that he should be required to do it after all these years in the Party.’

  At first Edith had thought that Janice was ridiculing the idea, but she could see that she thought it was somehow a form of therapy.

  ‘It didn’t seem to have helped Turner, either. After it, Turner got him to go to one of the Outlook magazine meetings – it’s being put out by people who have broken with the Party – and Fred went along actually thinking he might get them to rejoin and work from within the Party.’

  Janice shook her head with contempt.

  Edith said, ‘Our upbringing was far from bourgeois.’ She did not remind Janice of her own upbringing.

  ‘You can’t see yourself,’ Janice said. And then, with a wave of a hand, another cigarette between her fingers, she said, ‘
You don’t run a revolutionary party like parties in so-called democracies. It isn’t a debating society. What you people constantly debate has already been concluded within the Party. We have moved on from those debates. You are riddled with false consciousness. You have so-called free elections when the newspapers and radio are controlled by the capitalists. You can’t see that the real motive forces are economic and controlled by a few, while most people are insecure and in pain.’

  Edith poured herself another gin, waving the bottle at Janice, who shook her head.

  Janice went on, ‘Let me put it another way: you do not play in an orchestra with your own rules. Stalin had the hardest job in the revolutionary cycle. Marx and Engels gave us the theory. Lenin gave us the Party to conduct the revolution. It was Stalin’s job to create the new generation of the Party, which had to implement the revolution.’ A darkness crossed her face. ‘Fred shouldn’t have been an organiser. I would’ve done it better. And I should’ve been sent to China as well as Mortimer.’

  Edith found this last outburst off-centre. There was a bitterness there about her lack of recognition by the Party. There was no trace of the heretical flippancy from the Janice they’d first met. Janice said, ‘Stalin’s actions will be seen as insignificant bumps in history. The important thing is not the mistakes: it is our analysis of the mistakes, and timing. Even Khrushchev himself said in the speech that the information he had just divulged should only be made known to the public by degrees.’

  Janice stood up, indicating that Edith should now leave. Edith went to shake hands, but Janice ignored her hand.

  With a cold, solid face and with no humour, Janice looked at her and said, ‘You probably don’t know this, but I want to say it to you. As an organiser, your brother felt he was owed sexual privileges, as part of the elite. He felt it was part of his pay.’

  She took this in. ‘I don’t see that in his nature. Sexual privileges? From whom?’

  ‘It is in his nature. Just as the Nazi SS felt they were entitled to erotic privilege. He’s not the only one of the Party apparatchiki who thinks this. Turner, for example.’

  She supposed Janice meant sleeping around in their circles. She hadn’t seen any evidence of this in Frederick, but she could understand that it was a difficult ethical question for someone in authority in an authoritarian party. She had seen men exploit their position this way.

  At the door, Janice then said, ‘I may as well tell you all the home truths. Edith, you’re a snob and you always will be. All that use of French in conversation – it’s time you stopped playing Lady Edith. And I think you’ve contaminated your brother.’

  Janice then opened the fly-screen door and showed her out. Standing at the doorway, she said, ‘I may as well tell you the rest: you’re also well on the way to being a drunk.’ She leaned over and plucked a dead bloom from a flower in the window box. ‘Do what you will with that free advice.’

  A self-criticism school for her as well.

  She replied to Janice, saying, ‘I think you meant to say “decadent bourgeois liberal”.’ She meant it as a throwaway line as she continued on her way out of the front yard. She was pleased with her comeback.

  As for her use of French, she had thought that Janice wanted to practise her French. But perhaps she did overuse it. Perhaps she would concede that.

  This was a strange turn in Janice. As with all unexpected attacks or affrights, Edith, as she had grown older, now chose to respond with cautious composure. Some years back, at the League, she had in fact been forced into a wrestling fight with Jeanne. Oh dear. What had that been about? Her now mellowed temperament did not allow the sting – the pain – of Janice’s remarks to reach her or unbalance her, and almost always now her mind cautioned her not to react spontaneously. She felt a deliberate, strategic calm. She kept well hidden the fact that Janice’s words had flabbergasted her.

  Janice called to her from the doorway, ‘And I always believed your Major was not only a spy but also an invert. I don’t know what that makes you.’

  At the gate, she turned to where Janice still stood at the doorway and said firmly, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow to visit my brother,’ speaking as if what Janice had said was of no concern, granting it no power of disruption to her life.

  Yet as she walked to the bus stop she realised that this Janice frightened her, and she wondered if she could face her again tomorrow. She would.

  On the bus she pondered the change in Janice. Nervous tension from Frederick’s collapse? The collapse of the Party? Or had she always been thus? Had the friendly – and in the past, the almost intimate – Janice been only some attempt to seduce her into the Party? To use her in some way? Had this Janice been there all along, concealed for whatever reason? Or had this crisis in the Party evolved her, hatched her?

  It was a repudiation of her brother and it was a repudiation of Edith. More, the venom probably contained Janice’s last repudiation of her own family.

  Back at Arthur Circle, she pondered whether she was a drunk. She never lost control of her body when she drank. And rarely of her tongue. Sometimes, perhaps, of her vocabulary. She did not see her drinking life as wasted. It had been the accompaniment to some of the most memorably pleasant and educative of times. These days, she stopped well before drinking too much, and she rarely had a hangover. She feared at times that it was doing harm to her body, but then it anaesthetised her angst, though it was not as good at doing that as it had once been.

  She was often pleased with the poise of her intoxication and considered that, when she was drinking, she was nearly always perfectly drunk. And she did not go to sleep in her clothes or fail to remove her make-up. But she had also learned that there were knots in one’s life that alcohol did not loosen, no matter how long those knots were soaked or how often. In fact, some knots when soaked in alcohol became tighter over time.

  And, from what she had seen and heard, there was much heavy drinking done among the leadership of the Party, which was far from perfect.

  As for being bourgeois, she was certainly rich. She had not planned to be rich. And she used very little of her money on herself. She still sent money to the International School in Geneva, to the Humanist Society and other social causes, and often tried to think of productive ways of using it.

  As for being a snob, that also hurt. She knew she had picked up European ways, but she no longer considered these as superior – except for gastronomy. She knew too much about human frailty to feel superior. She had a personal taste and aesthetics, but had long accepted that there were many such personal aesthetics. And her upbringing had been very egalitarian. To hell with Janice.

  She was inclined to excuse Janice because she was having her own inner crisis, but unlike Frederick, she was rushing to the other side of the ship, hoping to stop it tipping over. She was in another disarray, but disarray all the same.

  Then another realisation arrived: Janice was dumping Frederick on her, and dumping her as a friend.

  Dilemmas of Her Own:the Test at Alpha Island

  For some months, Frederick remained withdrawn – what a doctor friend of hers described as neurotic inertia – but he then began to pot plants. Edith visited him frequently, each time girding herself to face down Janice. She rehearsed her replies to Janice: sometimes conciliatory; sometimes abrasive. She also wrote a letter to her, but did not post it. Edith saw that she was reluctant to try to regain affection because it put her at risk of being rejected a second time.

  However, it turned out that Janice discreetly absented herself on her visits, which Edith took as a kind of victory in their war of moral nerves. And then one day she entered the house, calling out both their names, and as she looked around she deduced that Janice had left the house entirely. Frederick confirmed that she had left for good: gone to Melbourne.

  She understood that those who remained in the Party were not to talk with those who had left or been expelled, but she would have expected that wives and husbands were somehow exempt from that.


  Although she knew that the Canberra branch took Party discipline more lightly, she had, last week in Manuka, seen a Party member cross the road to avoid someone she knew to be one of the defectors.

  She was left to deal with her wreck of a brother. She brought books or magazines and food delicacies, but he could barely converse, giving off only broken lines of inner thoughts, coughed from his mouth in disgust or in bewilderment. He would not see a doctor, saying, ‘Can a psychiatrist change the Party leadership? Can a psychiatrist change the economic system?’

  During her visits, he kept at work on his ever-expanding potted garden, as if building a terracotta wall around himself, working robotically while she followed him around, chatting on as best she could.

  He said, ‘They come free from the government nursery – socialist plants. But they’re not members of the Party.’ He made his joke without laughter.

  When Frederick became more talkative, he seemed mostly still to interrogate himself for his errors, as if answering to some ghostly tribunal.

  Once, he turned from his potting and said, ‘Remember I said I wasn’t a proper revolutionary?’ He went back to his potting and then said, ‘Jan’s the revolutionary. I wavered. A revolutionary does not waver.’

  She took to bringing him money. He would take the money, shoving it carelessly in the back pocket of his trousers. Men and their pockets.

  The only time Frederick laughed during these visits was when she had suggested that he get his inheritance back from the Party.

  Their situation reminded her very much of the League people and their low days after its collapse – the mental illness, the suicides – and then again after the newly formed United Nations, which, while continuing to pay the pensions and money due, refused to employ or at least honour the old League staff.

  One day she arrived and he had packed up – his possessions fitted into two suitcases that were sitting there in the kitchen. He said with a light laugh he was going to get a job in Sydney ‘cleaning railway carriages’. But he added that he would look into the possibility of studying economics and government at Sydney University as an evening student under Wheelwright and Buckley, whom she knew to be left-wing economists. She said he might have more to learn from the right wing, given he knew so much about the left.