Lanny said to Laurel, ‘I have been asked not to talk about this call. Suffice it that we have an underground in East Berlin, and in Moscow too’.
‘The Reds have an underground here’, replied Lauel; she would not be comforted.
VIII
They boarded the plane, and she was tense while it was rising into the air and for the first half-hour. By that time they had passed out of the Russian zone, and three hours or so later they landed at London. Alfy met them and drove them to The Reaches, the family home on the upper Thames where Lanny had spent so many happy hours from boyhood on.
The M.P. had already talked with the authorities concerning the case of Tokaev and reported that everything could be arranged; so that was one load off Lanny’s mind. Alfy had been in prison in Spain, so he knew how it felt; Lanny had got him out, so he would do anything that Lanny asked him to do. Alfy had recently been married to the daughter of a local squire; the father was a staunch Tory, and the daughter a member of the Labour party—something quite common in these times. The young wife was hoping to present Alfy with an heir, and it would be Lanny’s pleasure to take back a favourable report upon her to the Pater, who was stuck in New Jersey while Lanny went gallivanting over Europe.
They rested for three days in that peaceful English countryside, which had not been changed either by war or by socialism. They went punting on the river and listened to the young generation singing the old songs and others that would become old in due course. When the time came for them to travel to Prestwick, Alfy proposed that they make a motor tour out of it—three or four hundred miles through eight counties of England and two of Scotland. They would pass through the Lake country that Lanny had read so much about in Wordsworth’s poems.
Ordinarily the art expert would have been pleased; but he examined his sitting-down place and decided that being jounced in a car all day would seem too much like the torture chamber in the prison. Sleeping cars were made for sleeping, and that was what he needed still. So Alfy drove them to the station and they boarded the night express.
In the morning they stepped out into what had been a small fishing village on the wild west coast of Scotland and had been magically transformed in wartime into one of the great landing fields of the world. Here the bombing planes had come by the score every day; the cargo planes, taken out of mothballs for the Berlin airlift, were still coming. Lanny and Laurel were bound the other way, and were never coming back again, so Laurel vowed. But it was a difficult time for prophesying.
IX
The newspaper reporters consult passenger lists. Some had met Lanny at London and more met him at La Guardia Field. He had become the man of the hour, and they plied him with questions. He was glad to answer; it was one more chance to wake up the American public and make them realise what the Soviet peril had become.
Freddi Robin was there to meet them and drive them to Edgemere. Lanny rested a couple of days and regained more of his lost weight. Then came a call from the State Department; they wanted to see him and have a full account of his experience for their files. They were building up an elaborate ‘J’accuse’ against the cold-war enemy. Lanny had tape recordings of his R.I.A.S. talk, and he turned one over to the Voice of America and took another with him by the night train to Washington. He visited ‘State’ and talked with the men of the Bureau of German Affairs. He dictated a precise and careful account of his kidnapping and torturing; he signed it and swore to it.
He had been asked to notify the President’s office when he was in town, and he did so. As a result he was invited on one of those weekend cruises in peaceful Chesapeake Bay. That meant that he had two days and nights in which to put the fear of Stalin into the heart of Harry Truman and the other guests on board the yacht. He told what Monck had to say, and the other men of C.I.C. He told about Einsiedel and about the refugees, and above all Tokaev. It does not happen often that an American gets a look into the inner circles of the Politburo and listens to Stalin discussing his tactics and policies. Here was a high-ranking officer of Stalin’s Army, a highly trained technician in the most abstruse and most dangerous of sciences, and his message was, ‘Stalin means war’.
Tokaev was going to write a book and give it that title, and Lanny set out to pound it into the President’s mind. ‘Stalin means war in the same way that a lion means meat; it is the nature of the creature, it is what he is built for. When Stalin talks peace it means he is not ready for war. When he is ready for war he will wage it. He will wait until he has enough A-bombs to destroy America’s war potential and until he has enough planes to fly them over the North Pole. When that time comes, Mr President, he will make you another peace proposal; and while you have your pen in hand, about to sign, the bombs will fall on you’.
Said Harry Truman, ‘It is hard for an American to believe there are such men in the world’.
30 SIT THEE DOWN, SORROW
I
Lanny had one other urgent duty; he must talk to Bess. He told Laurel of this, saying that he hoped his experience might have some effect in opening his sister’s eyes. He had not told Laurel what he had said about Bess in the East Berlin prison, nor did he intend to tell Bess; he hoped to accomplish his purpose without that.
He called up and made a date and went to her apartment in New York. She would have read about his experience in the papers, of course, and he could guess that her party masters in Moscow would not have failed to take action in the matter of Lanny’s accusations. Would they believe them? The best guess was that they wouldn’t know what to believe, but would surely be asking questions. Would they have told her who had made the accusations? That would have been contrary to all that Lanny knew of their techniques.
It was a hot September day, and Bess was wearing a light-coloured peignoir. She looked tired and worried and was chain-smoking. She guessed that he had come to make her hear his story, and she didn’t relish the ordeal. ‘I read about it in the papers,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to go into details’.
‘I think you ought to hear them from my own lips’, he persisted.
‘I know, you want to harrow me. You think you can weaken my faith in my cause; but you can’t’.
‘I think you ought to hear what happened to me’, he said.
‘I know that you are fighting the Soviet Union by every means in your power; you have declared war on them, and naturally they were trying to shut you up’.
‘And you justify the torturing of prisoners, Bess?’
‘I don’t justify it, I just know that all armies do it’.
‘You are mistaken, I assure you; the American Army does not do it’.
‘They wouldn’t tell you what they were doing’.
‘As it happens, they told me precisely. For weeks I was interrogating prisoners; first, in General Patch’s Seventh Army, then in Patton’s Third. I was told exactly what to do, and I was forbidden to use any sort of threats or violence’.
‘They knew you were a nice fellow, so they gave you the pleasant jobs’.
‘That is a foolish thing to say, Bess. Other men were briefed with me. Torture was unknown in our Army. Face the facts: your Soviet crowd had me in their power, and they tried to make me confess to a conspiracy to kill Stalin. They knew perfectly well that it was a complete invention, and they tortured me to make me sign a confession. They told me again and again that they meant to keep on torturing me until they broke me down and made me sign it. When I talked to you about such things you called me a redbaiter; you swore it didn’t happen. Now I ask you to face the fact that I was there. I went through it and I know. I mean that you shall know about it too’.
‘Don’t get melodramatic, Lanny’, she said, lighting another cigarette. ‘There are a great many plots to kill Stalin, and naturally they find out about them. If they become over-suspicious and accuse the wrong person, that is only a human failing. They are not supposed to be superhuman’.
‘But neither are they supposed to be subhuman. Don’t you see that it is the princip
le of dictatorship that breeds this over-suspiciousness? Force and terror make it impossible for any human being to have a sense of security. It makes for spying and intrigue, it makes all frankness and sincerity impossible’.
‘I see that. But it is a stage of development through which we have to pass’.
‘But what becomes of morality in the meantime? What becomes of the common decencies of life if torturers are permitted to compel people to sign their names to a conglomeration of falsehoods? Can a party exist when its members cannot trust one another, when they spy and betray one another to torturers?’
‘I know, Lanny, I know’, she said. ‘We don’t have gods to deal with, we have only human beings, with all their weaknesses’.
II
He saw that she was worried, and he knew that she had plenty of things to worry about. He was deliberately leading her along one path; but he must be tactful about it and not wake her suspicions. ‘If it hurts you to hear of your brother’s being tortured seven days and nights, I won’t tell you about it; but at least let me tell you what is going on in East Berlin and East Germany. I have just come from there, and it has been a long time since you’ve been there’.
He began with the story of Karl Seidl, how he had joined the new Socialist Unity Party and had been forced to start spying upon his comrades, and had fled from it—a decent worker who had been driven out of the Communist party and back to the Social Democrats—who could speak the truth freely. He told about R.I.A.S. and its Spitzeldienst—telling the workers in East Berlin who in the factories were spying and reporting on them. He told about the clearing house for refugees which he had visited and about the various persons he had interviewed and what the officials had told about their experiences. He told about Einsiedel—not naming him or saying anything to identify him, since he was still among the enemy. There was a young German who had been carefully trained in the Antifaschule and had been made a Communist editor and now was in revolt against the job of following the party line regardless of all facts.
He saw that he had got her attention. She was no longer fighting against him, she was listening with curiosity and making questions. It was a fact that he had been there and she had not; he had been among the scenes which were of the greatest importance to her, and she could not question the stories he was telling. She might resent his interpretations, but she accepted the fact that he had met the persons and heard the words he was repeating.
He came to Tokaev. She couldn’t fail to be curious about her brother’s rescue and how it had been engineered. He told her the story of the Soviet officer’s career, every detail that he could recollect; and certainly there was no Communist in the acquaintance of Bessie Remsen Budd who could take her into the Kremlin and let her sit in on the secret councils of Stalin and his trusted lieutenants. He didn’t say ‘Stalin means war’, he just repeated the questions Stalin had asked of Tokaev, and what Molotov had said about the matter, what Malenkov had said, what Mikoyan had said. Every word of this story bore the stamp of truth, and Bess could not doubt that she was there among the high gods of her Olympus.
And this Russian-born and Soviet-trained officer, this highest product of all their techniques, had sickened of them and was now on his way to England to tell the government of that country all the secrets he had learned. He hadn’t been bought and he hadn’t been accused of any crime, and Bess could find no fault in him; he was a true revolutionary idealist and had suffered moral revulsion and had fled from an odious thing.
‘And then Kasenkina’, said Lanny. ‘You read her story, no doubt’.
‘I read it, Lanny’.
‘You got it in New York; I got the Berlin angle. I met people there who had known Zenzinov and his record in the Revolution. Do you believe for one moment that Alexandra Tolstoy is what Molotov called her, “a White-Guard bandit”? The Reds had set up a Communist school in New York, a perfect little Soviet, with intriguers, spies, torturers, everything exactly like home. Everywhere the smell is the same, the smell of moral decay’.
III
He had her listening now, and he told her his own story. He spared no details, the freezing and the baking, the glaring light, the deprivation of sleep, the browbeating and threats, the wheedling and pretended sympathy, and, above all, the patent fraudulence. Bess was not the callous person that her creed required, and the recital shook her. He made note of the fact that she no longer got angry. He saw her clenching and unclenching one hand, and with the fingers of the other she was grinding her cigarette absent-mindedly in the tray. He thought that his opportunity was on the way, and he said with tenderness in his voice, ‘Tell me, Bess, can it be that you have not noticed the low moral tone of the party?’
‘I have noticed it, of course’, she answered; ‘but as I told you before, I have to work with human beings, and in spite of their defects’.
‘You have made heavy sacrifices for them’, he said. ‘Has it never occurred to you that you yourself might some day be betrayed, that you might fall victim to party intrigue and suspicion?’
He saw that she was biting her lip, and he politely looked away so as not to embarrass her. He waited, and finally she said, ‘Lanny, if I take you into my confidence, will you betray me?’
‘How could you think of such a thing, Bess?’
‘I mean by talking about what I tell you. I don’t want anyone else to know, not even Laurel’.
‘I understand’, he said, ‘and you know my position. If you tell me anything against the government I cannot promise secrecy; but anything personal I will keep between us, of course’.
‘Something terrible has happened to me’, she blurted out, ‘and I don’t know what to make of it’.
He still did not look at her, because he was afraid his eyes might betray him. ‘You can trust me, Bess’.
‘Nobody else seems to trust me. The C. I. Rep. has heard some rumour about me and is investigating me’.
Lanny knew that phrase; it meant Cominform Representative, a man sent by Moscow, who took precedence over all American party members and officials. He was Stalin in America, no less. At Yalta, Stalin had promised Roosevelt to abolish the Communist International. What he had done was to change its name from Comintern to Cominform, and the same officials went on doing the same jobs. That was a vozhd’s idea of being subtle.
‘That is bad news indeed’, said Lanny to his sister; ‘but you know how it is, old dear, you are a member of the haute bourgeoisie. You are the daughter of a crocodile and the sister of a cannibal’.
‘Don’t be cruel, Lanny. The comrades have known all about me, and they have always trusted me’.
‘And what have you done now?’
‘I can’t find out; that’s the painful part about it. I have had three sessions with the C. I. Rep, nearly four hours each time. He questions me about everything in my life, everything I’ve said, everybody I’ve known, every place I’ve ever been—and he won’t tell me what the charges are’.
‘Did you have a bright light backed by a reflector shining in your eyes all the time?’
‘No, I didn’t have that’.
‘Did you have to sit on a stool that was only half as wide as your buttocks?’
‘Oh, Lanny, don’t be horrid!’
‘I assure you the experience is horrid. You can be thankful that you are in America where they can use only words—except in extreme cases’.
‘What am I to make of it, Lanny? What am I to do?’
‘Don’t you know that you are prominent in the party and that there are half-a-dozen others who would like to take your place? Have you never pointed out anyone’s incompetence? Have you never had to suspect a traitor or to shut up a fool? Every time you have done things like that you have made an enemy, someone to suspect you and watch you and make up tales about you; someone who hopes to take your place’.
‘What place have I, with a ten-year jail sentence hanging over me?’
‘You have a wonderful place. There are plenty of people willing to b
e martyrs if only they can be talked about, if only they can be important. They see themselves coming out of jail to become rulers of the world. You are in a system which glorifies hatred; they call it “class hatred, class war”. But class is an abstraction—classes are made up of human beings, and so are parties. People who hate classes hate human beings, and they learn to hate one another. That is what I’ve been trying to tell you for years, Bess’.
‘You’re just taking the occasion to preach at me’.
‘You asked me for advice, and I can only tell you what is in my mind. Hate breeds hate, and it brings out all the worst in human beings. Is the C. I. Rep. a Russian?’
‘Yes, of course’.
‘Well then, how can you expect him to come over to this country, which he hates, and meet class enemies, whom he hates, and think no evil about them? How can it seem possible to him that you can have the father you have and the environment you have and still be a genuine hater of the bourgeoisie? To him it is a contradiction in terms, it is a denial of the whole Diamat, the whole gospel of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism. The C. I. Rep. has only to take a walk up Fifth Avenue to know that he can never really trust any American. The terms on which a man holds power in Moscow today are that he hates all Americans on principle’.
IV
‘Lanny’, she said, ‘it is a dreadful thing to give everything you have to a cause and then discover that you have no place in it, nobody trusts you’.
‘And the man won’t tell you what you are accused of?’
‘He tried to make me believe that it is other people who are suspected. Everybody I know is being questioned. He must have several others working on the case’.
‘And what does he want you to do?’
‘He doesn’t tell me anything. But he says I may be summoned to Moscow’.