The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

And so to the room and to Laurel. She flew into Lanny’s arms—or rather she started to, and then she was afraid that he might fall to pieces; she stared at him in fright, he was so awful. He had a week’s growth of brown whiskers and he had lost fifteen or twenty pounds; he looked like the ghost of his usually well-kept self.

  ‘Oh, Lanny, Lanny!’ She began to weep; she couldn’t help herself. She told him she hadn’t fainted at the telephone, she had just grown faint and had to sink down suddenly. ‘Oh, what did they do to you?’

  He said he would tell her by and by; he was never going to tell her all, but he didn’t say that. He said he had a few bruises but nothing serious; the main thing was that he needed sleep, to lie down and forget the whole world for twenty-four hours.

  Then he remembered his rescuer. He told Laurel that this officer had saved his life. So Laurel dried her tears; she was ashamed of herself, she said. She thanked the handsome Russian; she never would be able to thank him enough, but she would keep on trying. She too had had almost no sleep for seven days and nights. She too had lost weight and looked like a ghost of herself.

  They must both sleep, the colonel said. He took charge of the situation in military fashion. He would get himself a room. Laurel explained, ‘You won’t be able to, the hotel is packed to the door. I only got this because it was Lanny’s’. Tokaev said, ‘Perhaps they will let me sit in a chair in the lobby. I will make out. I am a soldier’.

  But Laurel wouldn’t hear of that; she was a lady, and consideration for others was her deepest instinct. They had only one room and bath, but it was a large room, and there was a couch in it; the officer could sleep on that. They would shut off the telephone and sleep as long as they wanted to.

  Lanny was already on the bed. He took off his coat but forgot about his shoes; he was asleep before Laurel got to him. She unlaced his shoes and took them off, but he didn’t know it; he was like a log. She went into the bathroom and changed to a dressing gown and then lay down beside her husband. The officer decorously turned off the light and then took off his own coat and shoes and lay down on the couch and went to sleep.

  IX

  Tokaev was the first to awaken. It was late in the morning, and he saw the others sleeping soundly. He put on his coat and took his shoes in his hand and stole out into the passage. He rode down in the elevator and had a wash and a shave and a shoe-shine and then ate breakfast. There was a radio in the lobby; it was turned on in decorous volume, and several people were listening. Tokaev heard the statement that Lanny Budd had escaped from his captors in East Berlin and was now safe in the West sector. Now he was sleeping; the audience of R.I.A.S. would hear his voice later. One of the bellboys told the Russian that R.I.A.S. had been giving this item of news every half-hour. Everybody in the hotel knew that Lanny Budd was sleeping upstairs, and they were in a state of excitement about it.

  Tokaev had left his hat in the room, but he did not go back for it, he was afraid of disturbing the sleepers. He got into a taxicab and gave the address of the place where his wife and child had sought refuge. They had no telephone, so he had not been able to let them know during the night.

  Laurel woke up sometime in the afternoon. She was afraid to move for fear of disturbing Lanny, so she just lay still and said her prayers. Lanny had said that God was helping him, and now Laurel repeated all the words of thanksgiving she had learned in her early days. She found it easier to accept the idea of God than Lanny did; the reason was that her psychic experiences had set free her mind. She did not believe that her mind was shut up in a little bone box called a skull; she believed it was part of the universe. Herbert Spencer had said that a man could no more conceive of God than an oyster could conceive of a man.

  It was night when Lanny woke up. The room was completely dark, and he had a nightmare moment; but then he felt around him and discovered a soft mattress and a pillow under his head; he remembered, it was all right, he was in his hotel room. He spoke, but no one answered. He could guess that Laurel had gone to get something to eat.

  He sat up carefully. He was sore in half-a-dozen places, but he wasn’t dizzy. He got to the edge of the bed and put his feet down and ventured to stand up. He could stand; he had had a rest and was all right. He didn’t know where the push button was and had to search for it. Then he got the light turned on, and it dazzled his eyes; he discovered that they ached, and it would be some time before he could stand light. There was a lamp with a shade, and he turned it on and turned off the overhead light.

  He sat on the bed and took off his clothes and felt himself carefully inch by inch. His shoulder was sore and there was a blue and green bruise, but he could work the shoulder in every direction and he made sure it wasn’t broken. Then the same for his elbow; then for his sore behind—there was no way to break that.

  He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a sight; no wonder Laurel had wept. He was dirty and wanted a bath, but he was afraid to get into the tub alone; he would wait until she came. His razor was here, but he was afraid to use it; he would let one of the hotel barbers come and shave him. They would do anything for him now; he was a celebrity!

  The only trouble was they would expect him to talk. He would have to tell his story everywhere he went. It was, of course, his patriotic duty to tell it. Monck would impress that upon him, all the Army would impress it upon him. He would tell it once over R.I.A.S.; they could make a recording and then run it as often as they pleased. Yes, that was the solution; he would get a tape recording from R.I.A.S., and he would get one of those little machines, and when anyone wanted to hear his story he would take the person into a separate room, start the machine going, and then go out and shut the door! His sense of humour had come back, so he was not permanently damaged.

  X

  Laurel came in and took charge. She was going to watch him and make a fuss over him. He was hungry; all right, he could have some food, but only a little at a time. He could have one slice of wholewheat bread and one glass of milk and one glass of orange juice. He said that would do for a start, and she telephoned for it to be sent up. Then he had to let her see his bruises. She shed a few more tears over his emaciated body; she wanted him to go to a hospital and be examined, but he insisted that he was all right and there was nothing a hospital could do for bruises.

  He told her a little of what he had been through, the parts which would not shock her too much. The bright light, the lack of sleep, and the insane project of making him confess that he had plotted to take the life of Stalin. She sat staring at him in dismay. So it really was true! She had heard these stories about what they did, but she had been only half able to believe them. They were really a mad people; it was a mad regime, they were trying to make a mad world! He told her about Tokaev, the rescue, and what he had told about himself. He had gone, no doubt, to join his family. He would have to come back because he had left his hat.

  ‘We must do something for him, Lanny’, she said—the conscientious one. He answered that he would do everthing possible. Never so long as he lived would he forget the sensations of that moment when he had realised that he was being carried out to freedom.

  Laurel helped him to get a bath, keeping watch to make sure that he did not slip or grow faint. She laid out clean clothes, and he put them on. She got the barber up, so that he would no longer look a fright. Then she mentioned that Monck and Shub were waiting in the lobby. She had promised to let them see Lanny as soon as he was able; and of course Lanny wanted to see them.

  They came, and he stretched out on the bed. Lanny told how the kidnapping had been accomplished and about the Conveyor—not all of it, not until Laurel was stronger and more self-contained. He told how he had been rescued by a Russian officer who had come over to the West. He didn’t name the officer; the Reds would know his name, of course, but whether Tokaev would be willing for the West to hear it was a matter for him to decide.

  Shub said that the news of the kidnapping had been telephoned to R.I.A.S. immediately, and R.
I.A.S. had been on the air at intervals for the last week, talking about the case and making demands of the Soviet authorities. Monck told of the repeated demands which A.M.G. had made, and of Laurel’s coming, and how he had taken her to see General Clay, and how the general had arranged for her to see Marshal Sokolovsky. From first to last the Soviet authorities had denied that they knew anything whatever about Lanny Budd; they hadn’t even admitted it now, when R.I.A.S. had been reporting his escape for some twenty hours.

  Shub excused himself; he wanted to hurry back to R.I.A.S. and put that story on the air. He said that the whole of Germany was eager for it; it was another Kasenkina case. The reporters of the press associations were clamouring to know where Lanny was, but the secret had been kept. For the first time he learned that the hotel had posted a guard outside his door during all the time he was sleeping; Laurel had ordered it and paid for it.

  In one of his suitcases he had a Budd automatic. Laurel had got it out and put it under her pillow—not under his, because he was sleeping too soundly. She was the one who was keeping watch; when he went out on the streets of Berlin she would be with him, and she would have that gun in her handbag. They were back in the days of his Puritan forefathers, who had marched to church with muskets over their shoulders—and had not stacked the muskets at the door.

  29 SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

  I

  Colonel Tokaev came to get his hat. They made much of him, seated him in a comfortable armchair, and ordered a cold drink for him; then they listened to an extraordinary story. He took them into a place seldom visited by Americans, the holy place of Bolshevism, the conference room of the Politburo in the Kremlin, with Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, and the rest of the inner circle discussing their policies and the date of the inevitable war—la lutte finale!

  Tokaev was the son of a peasant in the province of Vladikavkaz, in the North Caucasus. He was five when World War I broke out and eight when the Bolsheviks seized power, so he had known nothing else. When he was nineteen the local trade union had recommended him to the Leningrad Mining Academy, and thereafter he had received an elaborate technical education under a state grant. For this he said he would always be grateful to the revolution; it was one of the good results which had been shared by millions.

  But he had got the idea of freedom firmly fixed in his mind and had been revolted by the cruelties practised upon the kulaks, of whom his family was one. He didn’t like being ‘collectivised’, and when he returned to Moscow he spoke frankly about the ruin it was bringing to the peasants; so he got into trouble with his party groups and was severely reprimanded and later on expelled. Then he got into trouble with the N.K.V.D. section in the Military Air Academy. His crime was that he had told a funny story about Stalin; and as the rumour spread it became that he was engaged in a plot against Stalin’s life. That was when he was beaten and kicked into insensibility. He said, ‘My boxer’s physique was reduced to a skeleton, sparsely clothed in flesh and bandages’.

  That had been more than ten years ago, and he had succeeded in having his case reconsidered and his record cleared. He was graduated from the Military Air Academy and taken on in their aerodynamics laboratory. Soon he became its head and a professor of the Academy.

  Then came World War II. Stalin and Hitler made a deal and divided Poland; and then, in less than two years, Hitler attacked Stalin. When the Hitler forces approached Moscow the Academy was moved to Sverdlovsk, and from there Tokaev had watched what he called the ‘fantastic butchery’ of the war and Hitler’s final defeat by that ancient ally of the Russians, General Winter. At the end of the war the colonel had been sent to Berlin as First Soviet Secretary to the Allied Control Council. He had started work in the Karlshorst mansion, soon to be known as the ‘Berlin Kremlin’.

  Then for the first time this Soviet officer had got a glimpse of the outside world. All his life he had been told about the ‘misery’ and ‘poverty’ of that world as compared with the happiness and prosperity enjoyed by Soviet citizens. He was astounded by what he saw. As he told Lanny and Laurel, ‘The average German working-class home was a palace compared with the hovel provided for the Soviet labourer; it was graced by luxuries, such as a radio, which in Russia could have been afforded only by a party boss or a Stakhanovite’.

  The Red armies had plundered and raped, and the inhabitants of Berlin fled and hid at the sight of any Russian; this had greatly hurt the feelings of the gentle colonel of aerodynamics. He watched with dismay the contradictory course of his colleagues, who wanted the Germans to love them, even at the time they were being plundered. The Reds had set up a ‘House of Soviet Culture’ in Unter den Linden; they fed the German population on potatoes and propaganda, while at the same time they took away all the machinery from the factories and left it to rust in the rain on the way to Russia. They had formed the Socialist Unity Party to organise the German people for political purposes; and Lanny remembered the glimpses he had got of this party through the eyes of Karl Seidl.

  A presidential agent had watched these events from the American and the German points of view; it was fascinating to him now to see them from the point of view of the new enemy. After a little more than a year of these propaganda activities the Reds had felt secure enough to call a general election in Berlin. ‘They had to give a gloss of democracy to what they were doing’, said Tokaev. ‘They were astounded when they carried less than twenty per cent of the vote, while the despised and persecuted Social Democrats polled nearly fifty per cent. They spent an enormous amount of both labour and money on the campaign, and they got nowhere’.

  II

  Tokaev continued his story: One day while he was in his East Berlin flat the telephone rang and he was instructed to be flown to Moscow immediately. A few minutes later there was a second call; another high officer in Moscow was ordering his immediate flight; and a few minutes later there was a third call. He was told that it was a summons to appear before the Council of Ministers and that he might see Stalin himself. Nothing must be permitted to interfere with his instant coming.

  The reason for all the hullabaloo was a thing called the ‘Sänger Report’. Sänger was a famous German scientist who toward the end of the war had presented to Hitler a plan for an enormous piloted rocket plane which would be capable of flying all the way across the Atlantic, dropping a bomb on New York or Washington, and coming back. A copy of this report had fallen into Tokaev’s hands, and he had submitted a summary of it to the Council of Ministers. Nothing in the whole world could excite them so much as being able to drop an atomic bomb on New York and another on Washington.

  The humble colonel really knew about the subject, and the first thing he knew was its enormous complications. There would have to be a comprehensive research programme, involving prolonged work by experts and the construction of many laboratories and workshops. The Soviet Union was far behind other nations in the sphere of reactive and rocket technology. To examine this Sänger project would be invaluable, because of the experience which such research would give to Soviet scientists. There were German scientists in the Soviet Union, and others in Germany who might be persuaded to come. A commission of four was appointed, and Tokaev was one of them. He began making reports, and so before long he was summoned before Stalin and the leading members of the Politburo, in that same oval conference room with which Lanny was familiar.

  ‘This sudden rise to power was very exciting’, said the colonel, ‘but it was the beginning of my ruin. When Stalin asked me direct questions about the people who were working in my field, I had to tell him they were incompetent and that he would never get anything accomplished through them. I had to say these things, even in the presence of the persons, and that, of course, made them my furious enemies. The worst of all was Vasili, Stalin’s son, whom he had promoted to general in the Air Force. He is an ignoramus and a fool, a man incredibly vicious and with a temper almost maniacal. He got himself appointed as the fifth member of the commission, and then he would make the most preposterous
suggestions and demands; I would have to report them to Stalin, and Stalin would sit down on him, but that would only cause him to hate me more than ever.

  ‘It was our job to locate Sänger and other German scientists and persuade them to come to Moscow to work. We were supposed to make the most eleborate promises, which we had no intention of keeping; but they did not trust us and would not come. Vasili’s solution of this problem was simple: he proposed to kidnap them. It made no difference where they were, in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Vienna or Paris, he would take them to Russia by force and make them work.

  ‘I gave my faithful services for more than a year and saw that I was accomplishing very little. Every day I became more aware of the evil consequences of despotism, and in the end I began to associate myself with a group which was determined to end it. I was surrounded by enemies, but I had a few friends, and these began to warn me of the plots against me. I was ordered to Moscow; and you know how it is, if you are arrested in East Berlin the Germans know about it and there is a scandal, but if you are arrested in Moscow you just disappear and not a word is heard about it. So I didn’t go to Moscow; I made one excuse after another. I was ordered three times, and then the M.V.D. began making things impossible for me; they took away my private telephone, they sent spies to invade my home, and my friends gave me a final warning’.

  ‘Your story ought to be told’, Lanny said, and Tokaev answered ‘I will tell it when I get to England. I can say it in three words “Stalin means war!” I am one man in the free world who can say that he has been present at the inside discussions of the Politburo, with the vozhd. From first to last the coming of war was taken for granted as you would take for granted an axiom in geometry. The only question was, when would they be ready and sure they could win. I heard one man, Mikoyan, venture to suggest that it might be the wiser policy to improve the condition of the Russian people and spread the ideas of communism by that means. His suggestion was ignored, and I can tell my friend Mikoyan that if he ventures to broach that idea very often he will find himself out of the Politburo and in a slave-labour camp’.