The Russian Jerusalem (3 page)

It is almost Spring, a little slushy underfoot, ice floes still moving over the brown river, a glinting bright sun on the streets.  

Two men walk towards me, one in a flat cap, stocky with thick glasses; he is square, like a Pole or a North German, with a thick bull neck. The other is sardonic, lanky of leg with a thin face, a cigarette sticking to his full under lip, and heavy lidded eyes. He looks French or perhaps Italian; he smells of Gitanes. Both would instantly be recognisable to a Russian as figures of Jewish life. They talk with animation: Isaac Babel, the most Jewish, the most Russian of writers. And Ilya Ehrenburg, the cleverest of cosmopolitans.  

‘Will these trees ever make it into spring?' Babel is grumbling. ‘In the south there will be chestnuts in full flower by now, poplar fluff everywhere. And in Paris too, I imagine. What brings you here, Ilya? You love Paris. The old streets, the accordions…'  

‘Stalin's command.'  

‘A bad joke, my friend. But I forgive you. Will you come home for a meal? We shall have dumplings with sweet apricots. Come on. My wife thinks you don't like her. She is beautiful, supremely intelligent, and not in the least literary, which for me is a plus. An engineer. But I think you feel loyal to my first wife in Paris.'  

‘A little sorry for her.'  

‘She left me when I took up with another woman years ago. And when that went wrong, and I went to Paris to persuade her to give our lives together another shot –'

‘I know. She would not return to Russia.'

‘Well, I can't live in Paris, Ilya, not even to see my daughter grow up.'

‘Heine spent twenty-five years in exile.'

‘Listen. Heine was celebrated as a wit in Paris. I should be a taxi driver. Is it true that Stalin summoned you back to Russia?'

‘So the Ambassador told me in Paris. Our French friends thought it a good sign. That Stalin is becoming more liberal.'

‘You should have stayed in France. They believe anything there. Even the latest confessions. What do you care? You were never a Communist.'

‘I care because the friendship of Western democracies is shit. And there is the little matter of Adolf Hitler.'

‘You were in Spain?'

‘I was. Isaac, they say you meet Stalin often at Gorky's dacha.'

‘Legends, Ilya. They also say he wanted me to write a novel about him.' Babel's eyes crinkle up mischievously. ‘Would that be a sensible ambition? At the moment, all I want is to warm myself in a little Odessa sunshine. I don't need elegant furniture. I can write on a kitchen table.'

‘What are you writing now?'

‘Not much.'

‘Are there problems with censorship?'

‘I censor myself. Two lines out here, a phrase or two there…'

‘No more stories?'

‘In any self-respecting capitalist country, I would have long since died of starvation.'

‘You have stopped writing altogether?'

‘No. I write scripts. With Eisenstein. Sometimes they are even made into films.'

‘The whole world would be excited to see them.'

‘You speak for the world, let me speak for Moscow. What I like most these days is to potter in junk shops with bits and pieces for sale. Second-hand slippers, a stuffed eagle. There is no room for them in my flat, sadly.'

‘You were always a collector.'

‘Be very careful how you write about your past, Ilya. But I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs. You know the whole scene by instinct, even without living here. Yesterday a woman came to see me. Her husband is in trouble. He is not an enemy of the people, she says, so why does he confess to such crimes? He has done nothing wrong. I explain: everyone has to confess. It's their Soviet duty.'

‘Isaac, I shall leave for Paris tomorrow. Can I do anything for you?'

‘How is it you come and go as you like? You must have the ear of the great.'

‘No. I have the ear of Paris, where a great many intellectuals admire our Soviet way of life. So I have my uses.'

‘Hmm.'

‘Some things don't play so well over there. That's all.'

As the two men pass us, they look sideways, perhaps out of habit, perhaps sensing our presence, perhaps suddenly made cautious as they approach the yellow stucco building of the Rostov house. Ehrenburg pauses to relight his pipe.

Outside the house there are police who are sorting out a quarrel between two drunken men.

‘Who knows what that is about,' Ilya shrugs.

‘Look at that magnificent woman. Over there. A Georgian, would you say? Or perhaps Azerbaijani. That is
what it is about. It is not political. We love large women in Moscow.'

‘Fat women?'

‘The fatter the better. So. I wish you much merriment, Ilya. There is nothing finer. And good food. On Gogol Street in Odessa there is a bakery where you can buy bagels with poppy seeds. You know Solomon Mikhoels?'

Ehrenburg is startled.

‘He is well, I hope?'

‘He can't forget his first wife. He goes into the closet and kisses her clothes. You see how intensely we make relationships? Tell my daughter she is a princess. With a run-down king for a father.'

They pass, and their voices can no longer be heard. Babel, the thicker set of the two, looks indestructible. Ehrenburg, with his cough and lack of muscle, looks altogether weaker.

But he will survive.

Ehrenburg and his wife Lyubova are leaving for Moscow by train, taking a roundabout route to avoid Nazi Germany. They are both in low spirits. He has seen dead children and exhausted old women in the streets of Barcelona, and fears the war in Spain has moved decisively against the Republicans. He is disgusted by French cowardice and treachery. There are constant rumours of war with Hitler. Strikes. Confrontations between Right and Left.

Ehrenburg is the most famous Russian journalist in the West. He has been at the centre of the emigration in Berlin, Paris and Madrid since his days in Montparnasse before the First World War. His wit, charm and command of French has made it easy for him to make friends with notable figures in the arts, including Picasso and André Malraux. No longer a Bolshevik, he remains a furious opponent of Fascism, and thinks the Soviet Union the only force capable of standing up to Hitler.

He had been told many times that when Soviet diplomats or journalists are called back to Russia, they often disappear. In Spain there were rumours of widespread purges and assassinations. People who whispered of them were often convinced Bolsheviks. Even though he had seen the Cheka at work in Kiev in the Civil War, Ehrenburg always dismissed these stories as exaggerations and more or less believed what he said. Rulers only did what was useful to keep themselves in power. What advantage could there be in such indiscriminate butchery?

He intends to make a very short trip to Moscow. He has taken Lyubova with him, in the hope that her jealousy will be assuaged in his company. He has never promised fidelity and never deceived her, but he knows she is afraid of being abandoned. He is the only centre of her life. A talented painter, she has never pursued her work with much energy. She even developed a nervous disorder in the muscles of her legs after his affair with the beautiful Denise LeCache.

He has no great fear about returning to the Soviet Union for himself. His reports for
Izvestia
were not much censored and, rather as he had on the front line, walking between shells, he feels safe enough. This time, however, he does not know what he is walking into. It is December 1937. The year of the Great Terror.

He plans to stay with his daughter Irina, the child of an early passionate love affair with Yekaterina Schmidt. Irina is his only child, but he is content to have her stay in the Soviet Union. He is not possessive. She lives with her husband Boris Lapin in the Writers' House in Lavrushinsky Lane. Pasternak lives in the same ten-storey building.

He and Lyubova are exhausted when they arrive. The streets are deep in snow and a wind is getting up which drives icy flurries into their faces. It is minus 20 degrees and even with their ear flaps down and tied under the chin, the cold bites into their flesh. And although Irina and Boris help to bring their baggage into the house like dutiful children, Ehrenburg detects some anxiety in their welcome.

He observes that Irina looks morose, even sullen, almost as if she were angry with him for returning. The strangeness is palpable. Even going up in the lift there are signs of it. A notice forbids the flushing of books down the latrines and threatens tenants who do so.

Ehrenburg points to it and asks, ‘Is it a joke?'

His daughter is furious with him, touches her finger to her lips.

‘You really know nothing then?'

He stares at her and shrugs. Lyubova looks frightened.

‘Why did you come back?' Irina demands.

He has no answer for her, but helps Lyubova out of the lift, feeling physically weak himself.

In the flat, he asks about old friends. The news is black.

‘How is Boris Pilnyak?'

‘Taken.'

‘But why?'

‘How should I know why? Nobody knows.'

‘In prison then?'

Ehrenburg has been in prison, as a schoolboy revolutionary, in a Tsarist gaol. They beat him and broke his teeth. But what he remembers is the loneliness of it, how the sounds of an early morning streetcar made him sick for home. He read Chekhov. Perhaps Gorky, or was that later? His father bribed someone and he was released. Some of this he tells his daughter.

‘Times have changed,' she says sternly. ‘They let you have books in gaol then?'

‘Yes.'

Her laugh is scornful and bitter. For a while, he tries to get under the black curtain of resentment with jokes, but nothing amuses her. He becomes serious.

‘Don't writers speak up for Pilnyak?'

‘Nobody would dare,' she tells him.

Lapin listens to this interchange uneasily. He is a talented writer, and a courageous explorer of remoter parts of the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg approves of him as a husband for
his daughter. Now Lapin interrupts Ehrenburg brusquely, advising him.

‘Please don't ask anyone else these questions. And if someone raises such matters, just keep quiet.'

Now Ehrenburg listens to the lift going up and down in the Writers' House on Lavrushinsky, and every time the lift stops, with a jerk, he looks up. He understands. No one else is asleep either. The whole house of flats is listening. They are wondering when the next arrest will come, and who it will be. One day perhaps there will be a knock for him. He keeps a case packed with two changes of underwear.

One night, while he is walking his dog, unable to sleep, Ehrenburg meets Pasternak with a dog of his own. They walk through the snowdrifts together in a shared, troubled silence, until Pasternak begins to wave his hands and mutters, ‘If only someone would tell Stalin what is happening.'

It was common in those days for people to comfort themselves with the thought that Stalin knew nothing of what was happening to the intelligentsia.

Ehrenburg's plan had been to return to Spain in two weeks, but when he asks for an exit visa his request is unexpectedly refused.

‘Things take time, now, Ilya,' he was told. ‘You have to be patient.'

‘But I am needed.'

‘We know about your work in Spain.'

‘It's not just a question of Spain. Talented writers in the West must join the fight against Fascism. Stalin appointed me to that fight. I should be there.'

No one is impressed by the argument.

The weeks tick by. His daughter's tension becomes even more visible. He guesses unhappily that his presence makes her own position dangerous. He longs to see Babel, the ‘wise rabbi' as he thinks of him, but he is said to be in Yalta for his asthma. Ehrenburg hopes it is true.

‘My life has come to resemble vaudeville,' he tells Lyubova.

‘You have always lived like a chameleon,' she replies, not altogether affectionately.

In January, his daughter tells him that Vsevelod Meyerhold has lost his theatre. Ehrenburg is thrown onto the defensive, as if personally responsible.

‘I have always defended his genius. I saw his triumph in Paris. Everyone admired him. From Picasso to René Clair.'

Worse is to come. Stalin arranges for Ehrenburg to be given a pass for the trial of his old friend and patron Nikolai Bukharin, once editor of
Izvestia
, who, with twenty other defendants, is accused of forming a cell led from abroad by Leon Trotsky. There is no outcry, although Bukharin had been not only a good friend to Ehrenburg but also an honest supporter of many writers in trouble.

In court, Ehrenburg can barely recognise his once handsome friend. The thin, broken man in the dock is little more than a shadow. In a low monotone, he confesses to monstrous crimes, sealing his own fate. Ehrenburg can barely speak when he returns to Lavrushinsky Lane. He lies down on the sofa with his face to the wall and refuses all food.

On 15 March, after Bukharin's execution, Ehrenburg writes directly to Stalin, begging permission to return to Spain. It may be that the letter never reached Stalin.
Ehrenburg is simply told that his request has been denied, and he is advised to have his books and belongings brought from Paris.

Trapped.

He reflects that he had often been close to death. In Spain his car had collided with a truck carrying artillery shells. He has always lived on his wits and his pen. Rashly, and against the objections of Irina and Lyubova, who fear such an impudence can only bring about his arrest, Ehrenburg writes a second letter to Stalin. He has no great hope that the risk will pay off. For weeks they hear nothing. He listens to the elevator stop and start, quarrels with his daughter.

Waits.

Then, inexplicably, Stalin responds with permission.

A few days after May Day 1938, he and Lyubova are allowed to leave by train for Helsinki. Once in Finland, they sit on a bench in a public garden, unable to talk to one another, bewildered by their own escape. For a time.