The Baltic States were Soviet provinces, their histories rewritten, their exiles, scarcely heard, cherishing their lost independence like Australian Aboriginals the songs of dreamtime. Despite Khrushchev’s sensational onslaught on his tutor, Stalin, safely dead, as a paranoiac, criminal incompetent, the Embassy, with punctilious courtesy, was denied access to most Fleet Street and BBC sanctums and Westminster lobbies. No country had dared remind the Kremlin of wartime promise to respect Baltic freedoms. Several thousand Estonians were granted British asylum; some, known to be in Soviet pay, left undisturbed. Of nineteen Estonian quislings, eleven had been summoned to Moscow, unlikely to return, the remainder holding Party positions in Tallinn, formerly Reval.
At first, I had merely to scrutinize visas, dossiers, suspect photographs, investigate the disappearance of a portfolio or identity card, the forgery of a signature, a non-existent address, occasionally meeting mild, solemn British Council officials. My German associations at first assured if not suspicion then considerable reserve and perhaps would obstruct promotion. However, determined to reach higher and, with staff too few and underpaid, I was soon promoted to the Research Department, a small basement room, musty, neglected. Yet its files could astonish me like fiction, which some surely must be: a 1942 Nazi plot to invade Ulster and collaborate with the IRA; Lithuanian crowbars battering Jews to death, 1943, a Bishop Brzgyes forbidding all succour; Khrushchev jovially assuring Budapest writers that had he shot some of them he need not have had to defeat the 1956 Counter-Revolution.
From a back room in Portobello Place, a monthly news sheet, Eesti Hääl, ‘Voice of Estonia’, was published. To this I contributed a poem, very old, very bad, then, rather better, a short memoir of my pre-war days. Their impact was insignificant, but publication was ascent.
For the February Independence Rally, a few scores of ageing people assembled in a church hall, decorated with national flags, faded posters, proclamations signed by defunct notables, a few blown-up photographs, amongst them Päts, so often scorned at the Manor.
The First Secretary addressed us. We should be resolute, we should be ready. But for what? He implied, for very little. Following a brief choir performance, several readings, obscure or merely dull, the Ambassador pronounced the finale, in tones in keeping with his long, narrow features.
‘At home, our people preserve courage, hope, continuity. There will be false dawns, false prophets, Great Power amorality, cynicism. Our own resistance can falter. Josef Stalin once declared that the chief saboteurs are those who never commit sabotage, and, God preserve us, he was right.’ He finished, inclining towards a solitary press representative, by commemorating British sailors’ brave help for Estonians fighting Red Army, White Guards, in 1918, winning Independence and free Baltic waters.
My cubbyhole, cramped by drab brown walls, patched where pictures had once hung, was nevertheless mine alone, like the Turret where, Emperor Earth, I had watched the Pole Star, Nail of the Sky. At liberty to explore, I could ignore the Swabian warning against selling the dog and barking myself. The full text of the Pact demonstrated Goethe’s observation of Hatred in love with Hatred. Its Secret Protocol divided Poland into two slave settlements, recognized Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, outlined future treatment of Finland and Romania. Signing, Ribbentrop, I read, cock-crowed that he had the world in his pocket. His smirk at Hitler’s praise that he was greater than Bismarck smeared German history. He promised the Party that he had reduced Britain to trembling submission.
Ribbentrop ended on the rope, but Europe was simmering with nuclear threats. Balance of Power, Balance of Terror. The First Secretary issued constant warnings of SMERSH, Moscow’s Special Branch.
The Paris Conference had sprouted many replicas, Cold War manoeuvres financed by Moscow and Washington: concerts, exhibitions, books, journals, university posts, peace rallies. The Ambassador quoted Marx, that history is made behind backs. In the Germanies, communist and capitalist, ex-Nazis had unobtrusively climbed to high position, helped by Stille Hilfe, Silent Aid, conspirators bankrolled by the unrepentant and satyric. Lately, the West German security chief resigned, fled east, returned, pleading that he had been abducted under the influence of drugs.
The British, strangely late, were hunting a Fourth and perhaps a Fifth Man, leagued with the Cambridge Old Boy spies. The Wiesenthal Centre informed us of the East German secret police, Stasi, employing former Gestapo experts in pornography and drugs. A Stasi agent, Mr Allen, we knew, but could not prove, sat on CND National Council. Three KGB agents worked in the Royal Institution of International Affairs. The Odessa Association, said to receive Vatican funds, still flew Nazi scientists to Syria, North Africa, Ireland and across the Atlantic. The First Secretary learnt that Downing Street had considered reviving the Home Guard, against parachutists.
In our own street a bomb had been defused. Yesterday, a Baltic exile had been front-paged, lying on a Blackfriars railway track like a smashed crab.
In Europe’s black underside, Hungarian ministers had suddenly gibbered that they were British spies, a Bulgarian general was hanged for unbelievable deals with Israel. A famous American atomic scientist was dismissed on suspicion of pro-Soviet sympathies. McCarthy inquisitors spread black wings over Hollywood, several of my favourite stars displaying timidity – or need to engineer rivals’ eclipse.
Samizdats from Estonia divulged underground resistance throughout the Soviet Bloc, organized by Dr Vilem Bernard, Czech Social Democrat.
Elementary research disclosed to me that, with the Pact shattered, many Estonians had welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators, and even a Soviet-managed bank co-operated with the Nazis in melting down gold from victims’ teeth. Balts had volunteered for the SS Einsatzkommando, Special Employment Unit, execution squads corralling Jews, Nationalists, commissars, for the bullet in the neck, electrodes clamped to the testicles, exhaustion in oil-shale compounds. There was also what Wilfrid called Urfeindschaft, the motiveless or mischievous. ‘I wanted to see,’ a Latvian youth explained, ‘how they fell … whether they squawked.’
Today, imported wholesale into the Baltic States, Russians had priority in housing, tax relief, universities. Farms, ports, factories, banks were collectivized, Russian enforced in schools, supervised by another Special Branch, Spelssluzhba. Robespierre’s wit, ‘He who trembles is guilty’, was little disputed.
Nevertheless, not all Estonians were Mussulmen, listless dokodzaga. Some were joining Bernhard’s crusade; others were Forest Brothers, sabotaging ships and railways, raiding arsenals, ambushing lorries. Quislings were knifed behind the shed, shot in the woods. Subversive cells flickered, some had vanished, betrayed by the Third Man, head of British Intelligence’s Soviet Section.
From barely legible papers I knew that Soviet deserters were amongst the Forest Brothers. At fearful Stalingrad 14,000 had been executed for attempted flight. Some might have reached Meinnenberg. I remembered the lines of Walther von der Vogelweide:
The World is fair to look on, white and green and red,
But within, it is black of hue, dismal as the dead.
The British, resourceful, leisured, had, with sporting generosity, acclaimed the first Russian sputnik, the young imagining it as overture to a second creation, which supported a Labour politician’s foretelling as mathematical certainty the West collapsing in competition with Communism. A satirist reviled Churchill as confederate of Bomber Harris, murderer of Dresden and Berlin, Never to Be Forgotten, Never to Be Forgiven.
My own prospects were further encouraged when the First Secretary suggested I write booklets on Estonian culture and history. Here I found friendship with the librarian. Elderly, his head, yellowy and chipped as a walnut, was always slightly askew, as if badly reset after an operation ambitious though illegal, so that I was tempted to straighten it, despite likelihood of a sharp crack. Nicknamed Mr Tortoise, he had published some youthful novels, later a thesis, accepted by Tartu University, on the symbolism of black in medieval art, his argument st
ructured on a very dark fourteenth-century Sienese painting. Subsequent cleaning, however, proved that, originally, it had been exceptionally vivid. This destroyed his competitive ardour, but he was now tireless in supplying texts, translations, long-forgotten knowledge.
The pamphlets satisfied my seniors, who then demanded I compile a more literary miscellany for distribution to North America, Scandinavia, and to be smuggled into Estonia itself. This was testing, adventurous. I was encouraged to contact genuine writers and scholars, though response from Baltic Nobel Laureates, while possible, was improbable, like addressing the Queen as ‘Babe’.
Estonia’s sole world figure, already hanged, filling few sentences, was Alfred Rosenberg, the Führer’s racial Mephisto.
Mr Tortoise quickly listed likely contributors from Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Princeton, Ottawa, and I immersed myself in novels, verse, plays, rural traditions. Oral Livonian verse seemed hinged on protecting land, roof, family and on hopes flying like gulls over the Sound, black and white upon blue and grey. I read lamentations of Tsarist conscripts, epic hunts, clan feuds, the propitiation of ancestors, the recipes of shamans. Of talking eagles, bears mating with humans – Forest Uncle on the way – elks in the sky, a star-god seducing a housewife, trees with runes, some scrawled by themselves, cow-girls outspread naked on brilliant meadows, dun landscapes patient as cattle.
Short-haired, taciturn, alien, I was most at home ranging pre-Christian Estonia and a personal, hallucinatory London, city of the scared boy-king in the Tower, Fagin and Copperfield, Holmes and Watson, all so distinct from the masses in an indifferent, international metropolis, still visibly torn by the Reichsmarschall. I would not forget St Paul’s, giant head and shoulders intact above flame and smoke. Westminster Hall, lofty, spare, testified a people upright into my own time, when others cowered, appealing to worthless treaties, pledges from cheats. But Londoners could now be stifled in what the Ambassador deplored as the New Appeasement, though maybe awaiting some call, some marvellous gesture, if not from what had been so admired in the Manor, some mannered, debonair Sir Anthony. Abbey and Palace kept elaborate façades, but power lay quiet within briefcases and where puny Estonia had no being.
A foreigner’s England could be extraordinary, if theatrical. The clash of Shakespeare’s eloquent, brutal nobles and the witty repartee of their ladies were alike gritted in animal independence. Rulers had stood trial, barely credible voyages had succeeded, Churchill in his pomp been sturdily ejected, still gripping the Flag, soon to be slowly lowered over far-away lands, provoking shrugs or complex silence.
British scepticism might show superior insight, a belief that authority is justified only when creating conditions for its own abdication. Having helped salvage Europe, these perplexing people disowned their authority, rejected European leadership offered almost without bargaining, withdrawing as if from sha.
Mother had been proud of the British Empire, deceived by pageantry. Father studied but rarely mentioned it. The Herr General praised techniques by which the few manipulated the many.
Unlike Paris, London, loaded with heroic symbols, statues, memorials, titles, discouraged conceit. A junior, employed by another and unreal authority, I needed to discover London beyond plush ceremonial and sour nostalgia and was unable to forget a message from a statesman no longer recognizable by any Londoner, ‘England is either great or is nothing.’
2
After my paralysis in Suzie’s bedroom, we continued as if before, laughing at small incidents, talking incessantly, but I ceased manoeuvres towards her bed.
I had no rights of judgement, was myself probably a natural collaborator. Meinnenberg was evidence that, in fear, despair, hunger, behaviour is unpredictable and unprincipled. The Pact dissolved opposites in an hour; opposites might be identical. The most popular boy at school had been ostracized, overthrown, at news that his mother had died in a car crash. Why? None of us spoke of it, none of us knew, but we all united in hating him.
That photo of Suzie throbbed like torn flesh. The bald scalp, pink as Greg’s swine, exuded repellent images over the spirited, independent girl with whom I had imagined a future. Hair from collaborators had been waved as if in witches’ Sabbath. Hair from criminal camps insulated submarines, stuffed mattresses of Party whores and of M. Bousquet, merciless dandy; hair from the Gestapo guillotine at Breslau, and from those who died on the gallows towering over Taptvere Park, Tartu, stark as Leningrad’s Bronze Horseman.
We wandered shadowy places, giggled, laughed, but like children on a birthday of disappointments. She sensed change, but in silence. Rain and Seine mist quietened the boulevards. Days were smaller, colder and when, queerly defiant, she at last drew me to bed, my ardour convinced neither of us. Her play, inventiveness, climatic shudders had been learnt in other and unappetizing quarters. Our grapplings, twists, heaves were the transitory glitter of fireworks, her nakedness mere camouflage, and, despite gasps and murmurs, our deeper silence could not be dislodged.
Winter stiffened like pack ice. My joylessness was infectious. Priggish, conformist, I could give her only good manners. Reprieve would not arrive. One day she failed an appointment; we would not meet again.
Not desolate but sad, oppressed by dishonest evasions, I immured myself with Wilfrid’s books, records, wine, he himself reported by Le Soir to be in Vienna.
A curtain had fallen, removing dazzle. Paris was bleak. The girl who ran might have been fleeing some poisoned love.
Dependence on Wilfrid was too soft an option, a benevolent prison, which, perhaps, with infinite tact and very deftly, he was unlocking. Like God, he experimented and, if dissatisfied, withdrew.
Impasse. A useless life, Goethe wrote, is an early death. Imagination is quickened by gaps, by not knowing too much, and, rather too glibly, I began suspecting impatience or malice lurking beneath Wilfrid’s forbearance. I was diseased by uncertainties, seeing myself in a Blue Train, stationary on the wrong track. Instinct urged me towards Mother’s people, her Landed gentry, on the island of Byron and Dickens, juicy milords, flawless police, red buses. Her fables exuded perpetual scarlet-and-gold parades, resplendent bishops with sermons beginning, ‘Those of you who read Greek …’ In one anecdote, the patrician Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, mistook Hitler for a footman and handed him his hat. Unlikely. Unfortunately.
Arrival in post-Suez London was no bugle-call rag. Knowing no one, anonymous as a burglar, I was bidden to no grandee mansion, no candle-lit banquet or crimson opera-box. Landed gentry, of hunt balls and royal polo, brick-faced countesses, had apparently disfavoured Mother’s defection to a Baltic Baron and her son, Herr Nobody. Had they allowed me any, their smiles would have been sunlight on ice. I was a misfit, quaint, like the great Mr Bevin, ‘not one of us’, first tasting caviar and remarking that the jam tasted fishy. Not a Sir Anthony observation. They might fear me urinating on the Persian rug.
3
Silent voices of stone, fumes, cloud, dirt, more amorphous than Paris, slowly seeping into me, were concealing other contours of grey, monarchical London, socially ramped like a ziggurat, while wooing all with parks, street theatre, movement. Giant cranes slanted like surreal giraffes, high-rises mounted further, behind Victorian terraces and Regency columns grew immigrant enclaves. Immigrant myself, as if wearing the Tarnhelm, cap of invisibility, I attracted few glances, my friendliest exchange was with a little Malaysian waitress. ‘Kinda worried,’ she said, after my short absence.
I had hoped for some welcome in coffee bars – Che, Partisan, Lumumba, Vega à Go-Go – brimming with sumptuous rubber plants, radical posters, the exuberance of youth, denimed, duffled, embracing with madcap clamour or teenage sullenness. But the young, too, ignored me, while jeering amongst themselves at taxpayers and literates. They were more generous to striking miners and unmarried mothers than to beggars. Denied immediate fellowship, I could only watch, in cavern or small indoor stadium, their dervish jives, their flashes of unicorn grace. Occasionally, sloping in all weather at outdoor t
ables, they offered me sale of an ‘anti-Fascist biro’ or wanted my signature for a petition against Belgian imperialism, censorship of an underground paper or for Princess Margaret, to assuage racialism, to marry a Jamaican. They invited me not to a party, a jive, a happening but only to join their hilarity when a wealthy socialist sent his son to Eton, the better to meet his social equals.
In the USA Trilling was accused by students for teaching Jane Austen, thus showing support for US foreign policy. Zealots wrecked a Hampstead cinema for showing a film anti-Mau Mau, and, in a Bristol church, ‘Logic Is Fascist, Clarity Confuses’ was sung to a hymn tune. The Pill was promised, like Iduna’s Apples of Perpetual Youth. A girl offered me mescaline, guaranteeing visions of minute Alps, dust particles enlarging to Arizona, a trouser thread to green veins of Antarctica. I was allowed to subscribe for the funeral of a drugs martyr, a trainee doctor, blinding himself by seeking a third eye.
Did any such joylets read, ponder or, despite a vogue for meditation, risk solitude? They were rowdily post-war, post-Christianity, post-democracy, unpatriotic without being international. Mother’s remembered music-hall song, ‘Be British was the cry / As the ship went down’, would have baffled them, like Greek, Sanskrit, Esperanto. The Vice-Supremo of the Holocaust was, illegally but righteously, kidnapped, then hanged, by Israelis. ‘Who’, a young agitator against capital punishment, demanded, ‘is, I’d say was, this Eichmann?’ The newly erected Berlin Wall was accepted as protecting the People from Imperialism, and a student leader was wildly applauded for announcing that, had he to choose between the destruction of the venerable Abbey and the death of a human being, however worthless, he would unhesitatingly save the latter.
The Saturday Knights, helmeted, visored, black-leathered, sat motionless on motor cycles, awaiting signal to crouch low, then roar off, to pillage seasides and maul flick-knife rivals. The young had the mystique of cabals and élites, though regularly rebuked by their elders as too rich, too happy, too irresponsible. The obsolescence of Empire. One youth winked at me, tapping his military greatcoat. ‘Redistributed from supplies, mate. We’re doing the country good, armies aren’t needed now. Aldous says …’
Secret Protocols Page 16
