He worked the fabric of my dress through his fingers the way a Muslim manipulates worry beads. I slowly opened my thighs so he would understand he had been invited in. “Tickled,” I murmured with an encouraging smile.
His lips trembled when we kissed—it was almost as if he were stammering. Then he said something quite memorable, and it sticks in my mind that he managed to say it without the faintest trace of a stammer. “If we have sex, knowing me, I am bound to take it seriously.”
“Knowing me, I’m bound not to.” I regretted the words the instant they passed my lips. Which I suppose explains why I quickly added, “Who can say I won’t make an exception for you?”
* * *
As a child, I assumed everyone had a controller. In my case it was my maternal grandfather, Israël Kohlmann. I’ve lost count of how many delicious summers I spent at his country estate in Kerkaszentmiklós, a Hungarian village within hiking distance of the frontier with Croatia. Grandfather was the only Jewish landowner in the neighborhood, but if there was anti-Semitism in the Hungarian air I was too young and too carefree to get a whiff of it. When I think back to those summers, I remember rope-skipping down the long poplar-lined gravel alley that led to grandfather’s manor house; I remember hiding for days, with the rest of the family and the servants, in the dark cellars when the Reds, and later the Whites, pillaged the countryside during the dreadful years of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution; I remember swimming with my male cousins in the Kerka, the river that gave its name to the village. It was before I had breasts, I was stark naked and I was as fascinated by their genitals as they were by the absence of anything remarkable between my legs. My controller, which is to say my grandfather, must have learned about the nude swimming because one day I returned home to find a bathing costume set out on my bed. When I went swimming with the boys after that I wore it.
Sometimes.
Having been raised by a controller, I found it perfectly normal, when I was recruited by Moscow Centre, to be reporting to a controller. The first one called himself Dmitri. He had a theory that a female agent was best debriefed in a bed, so I used to whisper in his ear as he made love to me while loud American jazz played on the gramophone in case microphones had been concealed in the room. I told him whom I had observed talking to whom, I described the mood in the workers’ tenements, I summarized what had been discussed at district meetings, I suggested who among the comrades might be pro-Soviet enough to be recruited by Moscow Centre as an agent. One day I turned up for my semimonthly debriefing to discover Dmitri had been summoned back to Moscow so suddenly he’d left his treasured collection of American jazz behind, which seemed strange to me at the time, though I didn’t put two and two together until years later when I read about the purge within the ranks of the NKVD.
His replacement, an overweight man in his fifties with tufts of hair pasted across his scabrous scalp, instructed me to call him Boris. He wore a monocle in the socket of his good eye, the other had been replaced by a glass eye after a grenade exploded in his face during General Frunze’s conquest of the Soviet city that now bears the general’s name. With a thumb hooked under one suspender, Boris would puff away on a cigar; from time to time he would wave his hand to create a porthole in the smoke and take long looks at my body with his good eye. I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, thinking the least I could do for a Red Army hero was reward him with a fleeting glimpse of thigh. In the end he would lose interest in my thighs, the porthole in the smoke would close, and he would debrief me through the smoke.
Two weeks before my Englishman turned up in Vienna, Boris, too, was suddenly summoned back to Moscow; he departed so hastily he left a wife and a son behind, who promptly entrained for Italy and were never heard from again.
The third controller, whom I found waiting for me at the safe-apartment in the Judenplatz, a little square at the heart of Vienna’s first Jewish ghetto at the end of an alleyway north of Schulhof, was, to my surprise, a woman, which supported the hunch I had that women were considered equal to men in the Soviet Socialist Republics and thus could rise to positions of importance. Depending on the time of day and the brightness of the light coming through the single window, she looked to be in her early forties or middle fifties. Her hair had been pulled back in a tight knot, her thin lips (without a trace of lipstick) looked as if they had never entertained a smile, her eyes were so heavy-lidded I could not make out their color. She instructed me to call her Arnold.
“But that’s a man’s name,” I said.
“Precisely. That way if you are careless enough to refer to me, everyone will think your controller is male.” She dipped the nib of her pen into a small jar of ink and looked up expectantly. I started to speak in German but she waved a forefinger the way my grandfather used to when he was cross with me. “Today we will speak in English so my colleague can follow the conversation,” Arnold said.
Looking across the room, I could make out what appeared to be a tall, thin comrade sitting in a corner so shadowy his features were scarcely visible. He was wearing a dark suit and tie. He was obviously a chain-smoker because several times I noticed him lighting a cigarette on the burning end of one that had been smoked down to a stub. The embers glowed in the murkiness each time he sucked on the cigarette, creating just enough light to reveal a triangular mustache on his upper lip.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” I asked Arnold.
“He knows who you are. You have no need to know who he is.”
Laughing nervously, I mumbled something about her not being very polite.
“Politeness is for the captains of industry who exploit the proletarian classes. To the business at hand. Your report.”
I launched into an account of my recent activities: the smuggling of firearms into the workers’ tenements and gunpowder to munitions factories.
“If civil war breaks out and the housing projects are attacked,” my controller asked, “in your opinion how long can the workers hold out against Dollfuss’s Heimwehr militias?”
“The workers’ militias have a small number of rifles and pistols, perhaps one firearm for every twenty workers. They don’t have much ammunition for the weapons they have, something like four or five rounds per weapon. They will be at a great disadvantage in a pitched battle with the Heimwehr.”
“Describe the mood in the great housing projects.”
“The mood is revolutionary. A spark could ignite an uprising. Since Dollfuss disbanded parliament, he rules, like every tyrannical dictator, by decree. He has already outlawed the Communist Party. If he outlaws the Social Democrats, who still control the Vienna city council, it will be the last straw. There will be a storm of protests. Whether the protests turn violent will depend, in my opinion, on how Dollfuss and his militia ruffians react.”
“I am told you have rented your spare room to an Englishman.”
I fumbled in my handbag for a cigarette and a book of matches, lit the cigarette, and dragged on it to still my nerves. Was I in a pickle with Moscow Centre for bringing an Englishman into my circle of friends without my controller’s permission? “He turned up at my door,” I explained. “A British Communist vouched for him, the comrades at Rote Hilfe gave him my address.”
“What is his name?”
“You surely know his name if you are aware he rents my spare room.”
“What is his name?”
“Harold Philby. His friends call him Kim.”
The gravelly voice of the man sitting in the shadows across the room reached me. “Are you sleeping with him?”
I glanced at him. A thin plume of his cigarette smoke drifted toward the ceiling. “Yes.”
My controller asked, “What can you tell us about his political orientation?”
“He considers himself a Marxist and a Socialist and admits to being attracted to Communism. In any case he is an enemy of Hitler and an admirer of the Soviet Union, which he considers to be the rampart against the spread of Fascism. In his mind’s eye
, he sees himself as a foot soldier manning this rampart here in Vienna, working to thwart Dollfuss in the short term, to thwart Hitler’s eventually annexing Austria.”
“Is his family left-wing?”
“From what I could gather, I would suppose the opposite to be true. His father, Harry St John Philby, is something of a minor celebrity in England. Kim told me he’d been a member of one of the British expeditionary armies that drove the Ottoman Turks from Arabia. Since then he fancies himself an Arabist—he taught himself Arabic, converted to Islam, and went off to live in Jiddah, where he runs a modest business importing Ford motor cars. If Kim’s father holds political views at all, they must surely reflect his establishment roots.”
“What, then, accounts for his son’s being a Marxist and a Socialist?”
“I am only guessing, of course, but it can be explained in part as a rebellion against a domineering father, rebellion, too, against the stifling social class in which he was raised. He speaks often of England’s enormous unemployment in the wake of the Great War and the Great Depression, how nothing was done by Ramsay MacDonald’s supposedly Socialist government to remedy this. Kim’s worldview seems to have been formed during his undergraduate years at Cambridge University, where his closest friends were all leftists. Several had worked in the coal mines before obtaining scholarships to university. Kim himself joined the Cambridge Socialist Society. I don’t know if there was a Communist cell in Cambridge; I don’t know, assuming a cell existed, if he became a member. But there is absolutely no doubt about Kim’s determination to take part in the struggle against Hitler and Fascism.”
“From time to time you are on record as recommending Austrian or Hungarian comrades as potential recruits to Moscow Centre. Would you recommend your English roommate?”
“Intellectually and emotionally, there is no question whose side he is on. As he is fresh from university, he has had little field experience in organizing cells, in propaganda techniques, and none at all in living clandestinely. But I can say that he has a mental agility—”
The man sitting in the shadows interrupted. “What does that mean, mental agility?”
“He is a fast learner,” I said.
I could hear the man in the shadows laughing under his breath. “Those of us who are still among the living are all fast learners.”
My controller glanced at reminders she had jotted in ink on the palm of a hand. (I made a mental note of the technique—it was a good way to hide reminders, since they would wash off with soap and water.) “If we were to decide to recruit your Englishman,” she said, “how do you think he would react?”
“Kim? Why, he would be flattered. He would be thrilled.”
“Would he be able to keep his recruitment secret from his family and his Cambridge friends?”
“He would be bursting to tell me. But the answer to your question is yes, I believe he is capable of keeping secret things secret.”
“In your opinion, would he be more useful as a foot soldier manning the ramparts, as you put it, or as an agent operating covertly?”
“I do both.”
The man in the shadows had a sense of humor. “She has a point,” he said with a faint snicker.
My controller didn’t have a sense of humor. “We are not scoring points,” Arnold said with obvious irritation. “We are laying the foundation for world revolution.”
“I quite agree,” remarked the man across the room. “World revolution is our goal. But first we must recruit activists who can help us eradicate Fascism from the heart of Europe—comrades willing to put their lives at risk smuggling arms, informing on governments and their militias.”
My controller turned back to me. “In your opinion, is your Mr. Philby capable of leading a double life?”
“He is certainly capable of compartmentalizing his life. I have seen him convince English chums on the terrace of the Café Herenhoff that he’d come to Vienna to see the sights and sample the schnitzel. He would have to be taught the ropes, of course. He was rather innocent, naïve even, when he arrived in Vienna. He has matured since.”
“No doubt thanks to you.”
“I don’t deny I have played a role in advancing his maturity.”
“What have you taught him?”
“To speak German more grammatically.”
From the shadows, the man repeated the question. “What have you taught him?”
“I taught him…”
“Comrade Friedman,” the man said, “we count on you to respond to our questions without hesitation. Collecting intelligence has a great deal in common with the assemblage of a jigsaw puzzle. The information you give us could assist us in filling in gaps in the puzzle.”
“I taught him how to love a woman. He had no experience in this matter. I taught him how to deal with the police if he were to be arrested: to tell the truth as often as you can, to stay as close as possible to the truth when you are obliged to lie. I taught him some of what my previous controllers taught me: how to be sure you are not being followed, how to slip away if you are being followed, how to fabricate invisible ink using urine and write messages between the lines of a genuine letter, how to easily alter your appearance. I myself change the color of my hair once or twice a month. I also taught him simple word substitution codes that can be used to communicate with people outside if he is arrested.”
“Examples, if you please.”
“I taught him Send me a toothbrush and tooth powder means I have given them false names and false addresses. The message Send me a bar of soap means I have been forced to give them true names and true addresses.”
“May I say, Comrade Friedman,” the man in the shadows remarked, “that Moscow Centre is pleased with your work.”
I will admit his words went through my body like an orgasm. My fingertips tingled with pleasure. I was almost speechless with gratitude. “I thank you,” I managed to mumble.
* * *
We had our first fight, my Englishman and me, on our hundredth anniversary—a hundred days since we’d met, ninety since we’d begun to sleep in the same bed. I learned more about him from that first fight than I’d learned from the ninety-nine-day armistice preceding it. It began when I remarked, with extreme casualness, “I saw you looking at Sonja during the meeting tonight.” We had reached my apartment, windblown from the motorcycle ride across Vienna. “Not that it matters,” I quickly added, “but you were undressing her with your eyes, though I have to say, when she leans forward there’s not much undressing left to do.”
“It obviously matters or you wouldn’t have mentioned it.” Kim tossed a shoulder. “Identify the crime? She is very p-p-pretty.”
I threw his words back in his face. “‘If we have sex, I am bound to take it seriously.’”
“But I do take our relationship seriously.”
“Whatever happened to monogamy?”
“We are not m-m-married.”
“We sleep together every night, which while it lasts is roughly the same thing as being”—here I made the blunder of imitating him—“m-m-married.”
He reacted the way a bull does to a cape—figuratively speaking, he pawed the ground and charged. I had never seen him quite so livid. “You’re flogging a dead horse, Litzi. I fantasize about Sonja when she leans forward and I catch a glimpse of her b-breasts. Every b-bloke around the table fantasizes about her. That’s why she leans forward. I fantasized about you when the rain p-plastered your bloody shirt to your bloody b-body.”
I was in a dark mood, too—before Sonja, all the boys around the table fantasized about me. So I flogged the dead horse at hand. “In the end you men are all the same,” I said. “Anybody—any body—that inspires an erection becomes an object of fantasy. Tell me something, Kim, where does fantasy stop and reality begin? To put it another way: Does fantasy ever stop and reality ever begin?”
“Depends on the situation. Every situation, sexual or otherwise, has a bit of b-both, I suppose.”
“So what you
’re saying is that every time you get an erection, you’re responding to a bit of reality and a bit of fantasy?”
“Sounds to me as if you’re suffering from erection envy.” He shook his head in disgust. “Women are so b-bloody unfair.”
“How unfair? Why unfair?”
“Look, in a heterosexual couple, it’s the male of the species who has to supply the erection if there is going to be sex. All you girls have to do is spread your b-b-bloody legs. If your lips aren’t lubricated by desire, we can fix that with saliva.”
“You’ve certainly come a long way on the subject of sex.”
“I owe it all to you.”
“Fuck off, Kim.”
“I did. I fucked off from Cambridge. I fucked off from England. I fucked off from my sainted father, though come to think of it he was the one who suggested Austria as the place to fuck off to. I wound up in Vienna. I wound up in your apartment. I wound up in your b-bloody b-bed. I’ll fuck off from here, too, if it suits me.”
I was flinging my clothes on the floor as I pulled them from my body. “Why are we unfair, for God’s sake? Where do we get it wrong?”
Kim went around the room collecting my clothing and folding things over the back of a chair. “At the end of the day,” he said, “you hold our erections against us because if we can get them with you, we can get them with anybody we fancy. Through no fault of ours, we p-produce serviceable erections when we are attracted to the b-body of the female in question. No attraction, no erection. Even with all your mechanical expertise, no attraction, no erection. Women hate the simple truth: Men may appreciate your intellect or your charm or your cooking or your p-political courage or your humor, but we can’t come up with erections unless we appreciate your b-bloody b-body. I could find myself in b-bed with what’s her name—the chairman of the philosophy department at the university…”
“You can’t even remember her name, how could you find your way to her bed. It’s Frau Voggel.”
His voice turned hoarse and he paced the bedroom brandishing a cigarette he had neglected to light. “Frau Voggel, yes, right. I could be in b-bed with the fat cow Frau Voggel, chatting about that legendary celibate Immanuel Kant, which is what we talked about after the concert last week, but I couldn’t get an erection if my b-bloody life depended on it.”