Heym The Architects

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-907970-13-9
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

It is 1956, and Daniel Wollin returns to East Germany after sixteen years of Soviet imprisonment. A brilliant architect, Daniel is taken in by his former colleague, Arnold Sundstrom, who has become hugely successful since their exile in Moscow. Together, the two men work to redesign the nation for the Communist future. But with Daniel's arrival, Arnold's young wife, Julia, begins to uncover the lies that hold her marriage together and the mystery behind her own parents' deaths in Russia many years ago. A novel of political intrigue and personal betrayal, The Architects tells a story of love and friendship in a world governed by surveillance and mistrust. 'Totally absorbing . . . Stefan Heym is, by any measure, a literary phenomenon.' - Times Literary Supplement 'Heym was unique in the history of European literature.' - Telegraph 'A leading figure in the East German literary scene.' - Tony Judt 'A splendid find, a compelling drama.' - Will Wiles 'Brave, vivid and uncompromising, a chilling portrait of a man and a society struggling to find traces of humanity in themselves and others as their world comes under threat from life-shattering secrets and the tightening grip of brutal ideology.' - Chloë Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds

Autoren/Hrsg.

Heym, Stefan

Leseproben

PROLOGUE

They would soon reach Brest, he heard one of the guards mention. The guards were playing dominoes, noisily banging the small black pieces on a board laid across their knees, and smoking Machorka. The car swayed and rattled, and the stench of sweat and agony refused to lift despite the open vents and door.

Brest, he thought. Since last year – this much had penetrated taiga and prison wall – the town and fortress of Brest had been Soviet. Beyond them lay the border, lay Germany bloated with Nazi conquest.

The blurred anxiety, his since being told he would be deported, now came into focus; it took energy to assure oneself that nothing more terrible lay ahead than a transfer from the frying pan into the fire. He had settled with life. The death of Babette, cruel though it was to think of it this way, was the finish to a worry; fear for Julia remained, but even that was blunted by the hope that Sundstrom, with his talent and connections, might have escaped arrest and be taking care of the child. His own road ran in a straight line: the forthcoming ceremony at the border – that act of friendly international cooperation by which one police force handed an inconvenient Communist to another – led to a new jail and further questioning, though no longer by Dmitry Ivanich or Ivan Dmitrych, and then to a camp, German this time, and reunion perhaps with comrades he hadn’t seen for seven years, since 1933, survivors like himself.

The car lurched; the segment of landscape in the open door swayed. His heart contracted in sudden shock: what would he tell them?

This was a new angle; it held its own particular terror.

Tell them the truth? That he and Babette had been arrested like enemies of the people, at four in the morning – four ten, to be precise – and imprisoned, and starved, and beaten, and kept from sleep during the day and questioned at night, night after night, till their nerves screamed and their brains sagged? That they had done everything to coerce him into signing a confession to something he had never done, Ivan Dmitrych and Dmitry Ivanich shoving that sheet of yellow lined foolscap at him over and over again, hour after hour? That he had been left to rot in a cubicle of solid putrefaction, jammed in with an ever-changing number of men – Men, how proud that sounds, Gorky once had said – men confused and stupefied, staring blindly into space or slashing out over a drip of kasha, breaking into shrill hysterics or dying dumbly; men, like himself, left to wait for a decision that was to be made by some authority unknown at some time not scheduled?

Tell this truth to people who had suffered equal horrors and had kept their spirits alive and intact by the fierce, unquestioning faith in the country whose territory now ended beyond Brest and in the idea that gave birth to this country and in the bright, beautiful, glorious future that that idea radiated? Tell it to men in Sachsenhausen, or Buchenwald, or Dachau, who would have to weigh their belief and their faith against what they knew of him, Julian Goltz, Communist, member of the Reichstag; who, at the pain of losing what held them together in their time of trial, could only conclude that he was what he had refused to confess to Dmitry Ivanich and Ivan Dmitrych: a traitor?

It was a new angle that quite pardonably had escaped him in his fear for his child, Julia, whom he hoped was with Sundstrom; in his sorrow over Babette, dead in the wintry cold of her cell; in his revulsion at the monstrosity that his party had become. He admired the devilishness of the police mind that had dreamed up this new torture by dilemma, this tearing of a man’s conscience by his own loyalties, and he wondered if it had been a German or a Russian police mind. Or perhaps the thing was done without design: an incidental outgrowth, minute in proportion to the greater issues, of a pact signed at Moscow and toasted in champagne. The situation was not without humour. He had resented that his day in court, permitted the ordinary criminal, had been denied him by the methods of Dmitry Ivanich and Ivan Dmitrych. Now it would be granted him – inside a German concentration camp, with his own comrades his judges over an issue whose truth they would have to deny.

In the Soviet Union, they would have to say, no man is arrested without cause. Human error? Granted. But any investigating magistrate would clear that up. And could he answer: that’s what I believed, too? Could he give them a thumbnail sketch of Dmitry Ivanich, elongated, emaciated, grey-skinned, with pale eyes and moth-eaten hair; droning out the same questions from

1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. every morning; punctuating the intervals with the crack of his ruler on the bare wood of his desk; waiting, patiently, for the assault on your shuddering nerves to take effect; and, when his voice grew tired, turning the questioning over to Ivan Dmitrych. Could he adequately describe Ivan Dmitrych – short, stocky, smooth-shaven skull, shining bluish eyes impersonal behind thick lenses, tongue sucking at brown stumps of teeth? Who would believe in the possibility of their routine and what it did to a man?

But his judges had had similar experiences, hadn’t they? Well, not quite. Their hell had been at the hands of a police who did not claim to stand for the cause they stood for; the ordeal by interrogation had not been visited upon them by individuals who claimed to defend the socialism they dreamed of. No, theirs had been a different hell, lighter, almost pleasurable. That’s why his judges would not admit that Dmitry Ivanich or Ivan Dmitrych existed; nor the rulers cracking like whips against your sanity; nor that people – thousands? Hundreds of thousands? – were being ground in this mill. Nor would his judges accept the boots tramping the corridors of that Moscow hotel before dawn; and the listening, the sweat cold on your face; and the prayers that the boots pass by your door this one more time. And it was better they disbelieved . . .

He listened to the sounds around him. The clanging of the wheels was unchanged; the dominoes hit the board with undiminished fervour. The prisoners were talking in subdued tones – small talk, as far as he could make out. He hoped the thought that had been tormenting him would never occur to them.

Outside the square of opened door tall birches swayed slowly by, slender white trunks, the October leaves golden yellow; then a low-roofed peasant house. The pastels of the horizon pronounced the distances of this country, this land he had loved since his first step on its soil, since his first word of greeting to the first Soviet soldier he had encountered, the brotherly word Tovarich. He had come on Party orders; he had gone to the Crimea to cure his lungs, ruined in nights of hugging the moist ground of the border forests between Germany and Czechoslovakia.

He stared at the passing landscape and smiled tiredly. How simple things had seemed in those days: a clear front with clear issues, his only doubt the why of a defeat that had turned him – whose voice had roused the masses on the public squares of a dozen German cities, whose biting words in Parliament had driven his opponents to frustration – into a specialist on smuggling and illegal frontier crossings. It had taken painfully long for him to accept the fact that nothing was clear-cut. Even after Dmitry Ivanich and Ivan Dmitrych had become fixtures in his life, he was still trying to convince himself that it was administrative error or enemy cabal. He had begged for pen and paper to write to his friend Arnold Sundstrom and the comrades prominent in the German émigré party organisation. At one time he had wanted to write to Comrade Stalin: not an individual complaint, but a calm summation of principles that acquainted Comrade Stalin with the arbitrariness of his police, the distortion of justice, the mockery of socialist law, so that Comrade Stalin with one authoritative dictum could wipe out this nightmare.

But as he came to know Dmitry Ivanich and Ivan Dmitrych, he saw that they had no personal axes to grind and were small wheels in a big machine that ran along fixed lines and by central directive. He abandoned the idea of reform by petition and concentrated every nerve and cell on a stubborn determination to survive.

On further thought, there was no need to jeopardise Arnold Sundstrom by writing to him. Sundstrom would do what he could, without nudging. As one after the other comrade they knew and trusted disappeared, he and Babette and Sundstrom had talked of certain eventualities – offhandedly, never quite admitting reality and its threat. But there was the child, and Babette had finally jumped the hurdle. ‘You would take care of her, Arnold, wouldn’t you, if anything happened to Julian and me?’ Arnold Sundstrom had lifted the table lamp so that the light fell on Julia, asleep in the small bed at the foot of the large one; he had gazed at the child’s loose curls and sleep-flushed face and said, ‘I promise! – Unless, of course, I am prevented from it by force majeure . . .’

He tried to visualize Arnold’s exact expression at that moment. But his friend’s features remained disconnected, in the abstract: the eyes that usually exuded a slight overdose of whatever emotion they were to convey, the noble nose, the ample lips over the imperial chin, the lionesque mane. Force majeure? . . . Arnold Sundstrom, architect and revolutionary, was not...