The Girl from Krakow (21 page)

“So, what are you going to do?”

“What are we going to do,
joven
?” Lister patted Gil’s hand. “Yes,
we
. I am sure you are going to help me.”

“Yes?” Gil was trying not to decline immediately. He didn’t even want to ask what Lister had in mind. Inviting Lister to go on was all he could think of.

“Romero, your Catalan is wonderful for a Galicianer. Better than mine.”

“I’m not from Galicia.”

“Not the one in Spain,
joven
. I am from that Galicia. You are from the one much closer, the Austro-Hungarian Galicia. You’re probably a Pole, and you certainly never saw the inside of Gers.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Beg as you wish, Dr. Romero.” He gave the name a mock dignity. “But you really can’t fool me. To begin with, I have the ear of a native speaker, even if I don’t have the tongue of one. You’re no Catalan. And I have the list the Spanish party composed of everyone who went through Gers. You are not on it. I’ve checked.”

There was no point in denials, though Gil was not going to help Lister learn the full provenance of his identity. With a sigh he asked, “So, what are we going to do?”

“We are going to build me a little protection, in case the first secretary of the Spanish party, Diaz, or that witch Ib
á
rruri, decides to sell me to the NKVD.”

“La Pasionaria?” It was the only way Gil had ever thought of Dolores Ib
á
rruri. The name was synonymous with
“¡No pasarán!”
—They shall not pass! “What could she possibly have against you?”

“You are not listening. She and I, we both want to survive in Stalin’s scorpion cage. So we both have to be ready to sting each other. I’d sell her out with as little qualm as she’d hand me over, if that’s what it takes so I can continue to fight for Spain.”

“But what could she do to hurt you?”

“She may have trumped-up party documents that implicate me with the
ICL
.
”

This was a set of initials that Gil wished he had never heard. But he had, from Lena in Paris that summer of 1936. The
International Communist League
.
“General, no one could accuse you of supporting Trotsky. You led the Republican divisions against the POUM yourself in 1937.”

“It won’t matter. I’ll only be accused of killing them to cover my tracks. It’s the twisted logic of the NKVD.” Gil nodded regretful agreement. “That’s where you come in,
joven
. I’ve got some dirty linen too. And you are going to store it for me.” Suddenly there was a sinking feeling in the pit of Gil’s stomach. Lister was going to make him part of history whether he liked it or not—a dangerous part. Gil shook his head. Lister mistook it for disbelief. He nodded. “Yes, sister Ib
á
rruri was playing footsie with the anarchists, the left deviationists, even the socialists. She was doing it even before Stalin and the Comintern called for the Popular Front. So,
we
can fight fire with fire.” An index finger poked painfully in Gil’s chest as Lister emphasized the
we.

“My friend, over the next few weeks and months, I am going to get you the original Spanish Communist Party archive, with security reports going back to the early ’20s. You are going to hide them somewhere very clever, somewhere no one will think to look. You are not going to tell anyone, including me, where you will hide them. All you will do is send a letter to someone in Alma Ata, in Siberia, an envelope with nothing in it, but with the location where you hide the material as the return address. That is all,
joven
. If I don’t know where you have hidden it, I can’t betray that location to the NKVD or anyone else.”

Gil couldn’t help admiring this man, but he was not going to take risks for him. This was worse, much worse than the knowledge he had been burdened with by the dying NKVD captain’s confession. “But I can betray it,” he told him, “and I will spill everything if they torture me.”

“Relax,
joven
. With luck the security organs will never know of your existence. With a little less luck, you will be back in Poland or wherever you come from by the time they do find out about you. And with the most luck of all, none of these unpleasant truths about
La Pasionaria
Ib
á
rruri will need to be revealed. Let’s just say this is the price you pay for being allowed to continue to masquerade as a Catalan hero of the Spanish Civil War. If you refuse, the least we will do is make you look like a real spy.”

Gil began trying to think out the problem even as he walked through the lobby of the Metropole Hotel that night. Turn the material over to the security organs immediately? Impossible. He’d be swept up for a Polish spy as soon as they had his identity, and dead even before they discovered his Paris connections. Do as Lister demanded—hide the documents away? That would be a death sentence too if Lister ever had to use the material.

How could he extricate himself? He couldn’t entirely. But he could make the whole thing look like a cock-up. That might help him wriggle off the hook.

The packages started coming in October 1942, about one a month, wrapped in brown paper, tied up with string, marked “Medical Journals.” With the first one came an address in Alma Ata to which he was to send a card with the hiding place in the return address. That evening Gil remained late at his desk, updating his patient records. Then he climbed three flights to the medical records department, a vast open space surrounded by filing cabinets with patient records going back to prerevolutionary times. Walking around the room, he made a mental note of the file cabinets containing records more than thirty years old. They were the next batch to be burned at the end of the year, numbers 43 to 63. He then went to the typing desk, removed an envelope with the hospital’s return address, and put it in the typewriter. Above the words “Records Department, Maternity Hospital No. 6,” he wrote “files numbers 43–63,” typed the Alma Ata address, smudged any fingerprints he might leave on the envelope, and left it in the “out” tray. If anyone ever looked for them, they would learn the files had been burned as 30-year-old medical records.

Then Gil took the unopened package of “Medical Journals” home. When he arrived he opened the coal grate, stoked up the fire, unwrapped the package, and carefully consigned each page to the flames, trying as hard as possible not to read any of it.

The Comintern was indeed terminated in June the next year, just as Lister foretold. One evening during a bridge game at the home of Dalglashin, the third secretary of the foreign ministry even mentioned the matter. Had Gil been ordered to elicit something indiscreet by his Spanish friend?
Was the room wired for sound?
Suddenly Gil lost all track of the cards that had been played.

“Comintern dissolved?” Gil tried to sound indifferent.

“Yes, Comrade Stalin’s way of assuring the western allies that their local communist parties will be loyal to their own countries, not to Moscow. If he means it, I don’t know what all those foreign party secretaries here in the Soviet Union will do to survive.” Gil made no comment.

He went home that night consumed with fear. What if someone now came for the records?

A year later the packages ceased coming. When Enrique Lister began to appear on the cover of patriotic magazines in the uniform of a Red Army general, Gil was able to breathe easy again.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
he war’s most pressing problem for Gil turned out to be less world historical and more cosmically coincidental than infighting among Spanish communists.

One morning in late 1943, a new patient file came to Gil’s desk for a young Muscovite housewife named Karla Guildenstern. Quickly he ran his fingers down the patient’s details until he came to husband: Urs Guildenstern. Place of birth: Karpatyn, Western Ukraine. Occupation: Physician, Red Army, on active service, evacuation hospital, Leningrad front. Of course he’d get priority for his wife at the best hospital he could get. That meant the Krupskya.

Gil had to think. Could he risk seeing this woman? Her husband was a doctor. She was sure to discuss the examination with him. He would ask what her doctor’s name was. He would remember the history, the shame. Even if he didn’t, a pregnancy, if that’s what she had come for, would eventually lead to a meeting with Urs at his wife’s bedside.

Then what would Urs do? Ignore it, pretend nothing had ever happened, turn his back, ignore the pain Gil’s affair with Rita had caused? Or would Urs make a scene? Still worse, would he unmask Gil Romero as Tadeusz Sommermann?

Now different questions washed these out of his consciousness: If Guildenstern had remarried, then what about Rita? Did she get out? Had they divorced? Was Rita alive or dead? Did Urs know? Did he know anything about her fate? The only way to answer these questions was to do the thing he could not, at all costs, do: reveal himself to Urs Guildenstern.

Gil’s decision was quickly made. He picked up the telephone and called the waiting room nurse. “I am feeling ill. I must go home. Please shift all my intake for the rest of the day to Dr. Ivanoff.” He took off his white coat, slipped out his door, and was walking away from the building within a few moments.

A few days later, Gil called for the file on Guildenstern, Karla, Mrs. She was indeed pregnant, due May 15, 1944. If she was going to deliver in his hospital, in the Krupskya of all places, the likelihood of meeting Urs would be close to a certainty. Gil had six months to deal with this problem.

By the end of 1943, people in Moscow could already see the end of the war, though it was still years away. At Stalingrad the previous winter, the Germans lost 600,000 men and their commanding officer, von Paulus. Hitler had made him field marshal when already surrounded, knowing that no German field marshal had ever before surrendered himself. Von Paulus turned out to be the first.

As the war receded from Moscow, its café society was still willing to risk some visibility. And it had taken up exotic and interesting people such as Dr. Guillermo Romero. Gil and Lister made it a point of never finding themselves in the same bar, party, or reception after the night they had met. But for many in Moscow, the Spanish Civil War was a fragrant memory, a badge of honor unsullied by tactical compromise with Nazis. These people were eager to have a Catalan for a guest, even if he made no claim to membership in the International Brigades.

Standing alone one night, with champagne cocktail in one hand and an American Lucky Strike cigarette in the other, Gil was surveying the guests at the party, especially the women. He had just been assailed by the scent of Arpège cutting through the tobacco smoke. It brought Paris back with a stab of longing. Suddenly he wondered,
Could Lena possibly be somewhere in this crowd?
His reverie was interrupted by a tall man smoking a pipe, who walked up to him making such strong eye contact Gil was momentarily afraid he was about to be arrested. The man’s graying hair was parted nowhere at all, and some of it hung lank over his brow. His clothing was rumpled, high quality, and professorial. When he proffered his hand, it was ink-stained. Drink in his left hand, Gil had to put his cigarette in his mouth to shake the hand. The stranger gave his name, but Gil did not quite hear it in the noise around them. “Sorry,” Gil said, “I thought you said ‘Ehrenburg,’ a writer I used to read in Paris.”

“That’s what I said, Ilya Ehrenburg.”

Despite himself, Gil’s eyes opened wider. He did not even realize he was repeating the name out loud. “Ilya Ehrenburg?” He closed his mouth, thinking,
Next I’m going to be introduced to Charlie Chaplin!
Gil had indeed first read Ehrenburg’s journalism, stories, and novels in Paris. In the romantic imagination of the left, he was second only to Hemingway as the iconic foreign correspondent in Spain. Unlike Hemingway, Ehrenburg had made his way to the front and remained there long enough to become something of a hero among the Spanish.

Gil put down his drink and grabbed Ehrenburg’s forearm as if to see whether he was an apparition. “
Con mucho gusto!
I am Guillermo Romero.”

Ehrenberg smiled warmly and replied in Spanish, “We had better speak Russian. You never can tell who may want to listen.” He changed to Russian. “They tell me you are from Barcelona and you were a Republican stalwart.”

“I did not fight, alas. I was a doctor there, as I am here, in a maternity hospital. I was in the western Ukraine and joined the Red Army medical service when the Germans attacked. Technically I am a Pole, so I was demobilized when the Anders army formed.”

“Did you see much fighting before you left the service, Romero?”

“It was a six-month-long retreat, but we started getting some business when the army took its stand at Dnepropetrovsk.” The unwelcome recollection of the NKVD captain’s deathbed confession came back to him.

“Tell me, Doctor, does the Hippocratic oath require you to treat Wehrmacht wounded or Waffen-SS soldiers?”

“I am afraid it does.”

“Even though the Wehrmacht’s medical service doesn’t treat Soviet soldiers.” There was a question in the statement.

“The Hippocratic oath has never given much pause to German military medicine, comrade. Their medical orderlies carry sidearms to put their own soldiers out of the misery their fatal wounds cause.” Gil offered this bit of intelligence even though it had come to him as rumor.

“I’m afraid I side with them in this matter. We need to kill them all,” Ehrenburg admitted.

“I know. I have read that article you wrote in
Pravda
. ‘
Kill.’
Wasn’t that the title
?
”

“Do you disapprove?”

“We can’t kill them all, and they aren’t all Nazis. Think of the Germans in the Thälmann Battalion in Spain. There must have been a difference between them and Nazis. Besides, articles like the one you wrote will make it hard to get any of them to surrender.” Here he was, a nobody, criticizing Russia’s preeminent wartime correspondent, one of his own few genuine heroes. But Gil needed to make a mark on Ehrenburg. This was someone Gil wanted to remember him.

Ehrenburg threw up his hands in mock surrender.

Gil said, “Enough politics.”

Ehrenburg replied, in Spanish, “Not enough, but not here.”

“Back to the Hippocratic oath then? How do we reconcile it with Marxism-Leninism? This is a question I have been struggling with since I was a student in France.”

“What is the problem? It’s just a relic of the outworn bourgeois class structure that gave it birth,” Ehrenburg replied.

“That won’t do, comrade. The Hippocratic oath was propounded two thousand years before the advent of bourgeois capitalism.”

“I suppose you are right.”

Gil didn’t notice the concession. “Besides, suppose we write off the Hippocratic oath as a bit of middle-class morality, frothy superstructure, a device to control the proletariat in the interests of the capitalist classes. Why can’t the same analysis apply to our own socialist morality? What reason is there to extol the higher morality of ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’? Isn’t that just more superstructure, the product of a new socialist substructure?” Ehrenberg was not interrupting, so Gil just went on to the end of his little lecture. “There’s really no basis for morality at all.”
If Lena were not in the room,
Gil thought,
her ghost was certainly haunting it.

“I see.” Ehrenburg seemed impressed. “Lenin once quoted Proudhon’s line, that property is theft. He went on to say, ‘Yes, but theft is theft too.’ I think there is a moral in what you have just said for Lenin’s observation.” He smiled. “But I can’t think of what it is at the moment.” Gil laughed. Then Ehrenburg said, “Let’s meet again. Do you play chess?” Gil nodded vigorously. “Which is your hospital? I’ll track you down there sometime.”

“Maternity Number 6.”

“Aha, the hospital of the
Nomenclatura
. Very good.”

All that winter and spring, Ehrenburg would call and arrange to meet Gil at some chess club or other. They’d play three games, smoking and nursing small tumblers of vodka, usually drawing one game and splitting the others. Then they would go for long walks. Both understood that real conversations had to be reserved for the walks. It always remained a mystery to Gil why a world-renowned journalist would seek him out almost as a confessor, he who was uniquely unsuited to the role!

It was also suspicious to Gil that Ehrenberg never mentioned Enrique Lister, though they must have known each other well in Spain. Like Lister, Ehrenburg was wholly committed to Soviet power and the ideal of communism, but torn by the horrors of Stalin’s rule. Ehrenburg never hinted at any knowledge of Gil’s real origins. His Spanish ear was not good enough to detect Gil’s nonnative pronunciation, and he had no Catalan. It was entirely possible that between Lister and Ehrenburg, their mutual acquaintance with a Catalan gynecologist might never come up. More improbable things had happened, such as Guildenstern’s new wife ending up in Romero’s waiting room.

Ehrenburg had been in Paris in the teens, ’20s, and ’30s, long before Gil arrived. He told endless stories about Diego Rivera, Modigliani, Picasso, André Gide, his marriages and love affairs, his novels, screenplays, and even a movie or two he had made. He would recount the times he had been in favor and out of favor, arrested by the Cheka, predecessor to the NKVD, deported by the French, censored when his reporting on Nazi Germany ran afoul of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Ehrenburg’s eyes glistened as he described the fall of Paris to the Germans. “I was the only foreign correspondent there besides the German ones.” It was an experience made possible by that very treaty that joined Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as allies, since few other non-German reporters could remain there. He talked about his friendship with the Spanish anarchist leader Durrutti and about the POUM, for whom he had a warm spot of which surely Lister could not have approved. Together they remembered sultry nights on the Ramblas—the Flamenco bars, the dives. Once when they were both drunk, each promised the other they would walk together down to the waterfront at Barceloneta once more.

Mainly Ehrenburg gave Gil war news he couldn’t print in
Red Star
, the Army newspaper he wrote for. It was read by more than two and a half million Soviet soldiers. Ironically, the first time Ehrenburg came for him at the hospital, it was Gil who put the great reporter straight.

Ehrenburg had won all three games, and they were leaving the chess club. When they got to the open street, he began to speak. “You heard the latest German propaganda? The Germans say they have found twelve thousand bodies buried near Smolensk. ‘Doctor’ Goebbels is trying to get the world to think the Russians shot twelve thousand Polish officers in ’40.” Ehrenberg was mocking. “And the lengths they’ve gone to dress the whole thing up—dragging in forensic detectives from the occupied countries, foreign POWs, as if these people have any choice but to sing Goebbels’s tune. And the Poles in London believe the Germans! Outrageous!”