Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,14

the sky over Prague. He could not stop seeing Zita carried away in the floodwater. He had nearly lost her once; today he could have lost her forever, and it would have been his fault. A drowning victim saw scenes from the past, visions that made death seem inevitable, desirable, consolatory. Aleksandr Kerensky, the Winter Palace, the war: he hadn’t known her then. They had met for the first time two years later, in March 1919, at the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party.

* * *

He had arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd suffering what he thought was typhus but turned out to be food poisoning. It had taken him days to recover his strength, and then he’d had to make his way to Moscow. The temperature never went above zero degrees Celsius, and the Hotel Lux, on Tverskaya Street, where the foreign press was quartered, was unheated except for two hours in the evening. From his hotel, it was a short walk to the Hotel Metropol, which had been nationalized by the Bolsheviks and renamed the Second House of Soviets. There, in the great hall, he had seen Bolsheviks with earnest, furrowed brows and threadbare garments the color of dust milling around like, well, he didn’t know what they were like. Industrious ants, maybe. In the crowd he’d seen the philosopher Peter Kropotkin; the English writer Arthur Ransome; the recently installed president of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Béla Kun; Maxim Gorky; Joseph Stalin; Nicolay Bukharin, editor of Pravda; Vyacheslav Molotov; Feliks Dzerzhinsky, chief of the newly formed security police, the Cheka. He saw Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, by then known as Lenin, with his entourage. As Lenin made his way to the front of the hall the crowd shifted, allowing Miklós to see a young woman seated at a table in an area reserved for the party’s inner circle. She smiled and gestured to him, and he crossed the floor. She held out her hand and said, “Comrade Kuznetsova. Zita Kuznetsova.”

She invited him to sit with her. The astrakhan collar of her coat framed her face, which was heart-shaped, delicate. Her almond-shaped eyes were violet blue. She kept taking out the tortoiseshell combs in her hair and replacing them more securely. She asked: Where was he from, what paper did he represent? Had he known Professor Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht?

He had, in fact, once interviewed Karl Liebknecht; apart from that, no, he did not know them.

They were murdered in cold blood, she said. The German president, Friedrich Ebert, ordered their execution. “Socialists killing Communists, it was an atrocity,” she said. “I adored Professor Luxemburg. My dream was to meet her.” She placed a hand on her breast, smiling wryly, as if to simultaneously confess and renounce this sentiment.

There were 301 registered voting delegates at the Eighth Congress and 100 nonvoting; she was a nonvoting delegate. She took a small green tablet from her coat pocket and, after picking off the lint, swallowed it, grimacing. For pain, she said; she had a toothache and a bit of fever. He offered to help her find a dentist. To be honest, she said, she preferred toothache to dentistry. “You don’t need to suffer,” he said. She smiled, her gaze warm, confiding, and he was lost. He heard indistinctly, as in an echo chamber, the speech of Vladimir Lenin, which began with the mantra of the revolution: Peace, Bread, and Land. Russia was shipping grain to Germany, Lenin announced, to feed unemployed German workers and their families. Worldwide Communism, a solidarity of workers, an end to the exploitation of the working class by capitalists and landowners: this Lenin predicted.

Miklós took notes in his self-taught version of Gabelsberger shorthand. Zita watched, amused. She moved her chair closer to his in order to observe more closely. She supplemented his rudimentary Russian, translating key points of Lenin’s speech. Lenin began identifying people in the hall for special recognition. He identified the chief of police, Dzerzhinsky, while, Miklós noticed, avoiding any mention of the newly formed Cheka, with its power to arrest, imprison, and carry out executions. Miklós had heard credible reports of torture, hanging, people being thrown into pits and buried alive. Even as the Eighth Congress convened, these horrors were being unleashed. In March, in Kharkov, a thousand people had been executed.

Lenin said: You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

The next speaker, the commissar for education and enlightenment, spoke about an increase in the number of free libraries in

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