Belomor Read online

  By now Klemperer has lost all bearings, all will, and yet he sets even this down, as being of interest: why can he not observe any details; why does he see only the theatrical fires around him, the burning beams and rafters in and above the stone walls of the terrace at his side? At which point, he is struck by the calm figure of a statue on the terrace—some jewel of baroque artifice, gazing out across the river landscape: who is he? In the distance, new buildings are catching alight, they glow and founder in their turn, great palaces turn blue and silver in the flames. The hours pass; dawn comes, though it can barely be seen through the fiery dark. Eventually Klemperer’s wife finds him in the huddled crowd; they reunite: she relates to him an incident in her adventures in the burning old town, when she had wanted to light a cigarette but had no matches. Something was glowing before her on the ground; she wanted to use it—she realised it was a burning corpse.

  *

  When a city has lived through such things, do they linger? Does their memory stay, somehow, in the air, imprinted? It is not clear that places can endure disaster on this scale, or escape from the shadows the past leaves for our minds to sense—and many visitors to Dresden in the post-war decades, when a socialist regime held sway in Eastern Germany, found the atmospherics of the streets and restored buildings almost unbearable: the air of loss and damage was exacerbated by the official cult of suffering that was imposed upon the town. Through the firebombing, Dresden had become a victim city: it would now serve as a temple, dedicated to the progressive cause of peace.

  This message required a symbol, the starker the better. There was one to hand. As the smoke settled and the rainfall died away, those few survivors in the city’s ruins with the inclination to survey their surrounds absorbed the view that stretched before them: there were the hulks of broken buildings and half-tumbled towers, as far as the eye could see. Bellotto’s painted Dresden had been erased—except for one monument: the Frauenkirche was still standing; the dome still rose high above the old city’s shattered façades. For a day, it stood there, its stone flanks veiled by plumes of haze and by the shimmer from hot currents of rising air: it seemed quite intact—but the next morning, at the stroke of ten, it collapsed upon itself. Fire had been carried by sparks through its smashed windows into the interior; the painted wooden pews and the internal cladding had been burned away; the masonry of the giant supporting piers turned molten: they lost their strength. With a grating, fracturing sound, the structure subsided. Dust from the collapse hung above the site for several hours; at last it cleared: nothing remained upright except the high, curved chancel and the outside wall of the north-west stair-turret.

  This gaunt ensemble had an elegance. It remained untouched as efforts to remake the city began—within three years, a fresh metropolis had been put together in the wreckage: brick and concrete collective apartments; new avenues, wide, for ease of surveillance; low, bleak office blocks. It was at this point that the Saxon office for the preservation of historical monuments decided the time was right to rebuild the Frauenkirche: the rubble from the ruins was examined, and undamaged blocks of stone that might be used in a reconstruction project were singled out. But higher counsel soon prevailed: as the wounds and scars of wartime were masked across Germany, the church came, once more, into its own. It was a shrine again, a memorial for all those who had felt the sting of man’s aggression against his fellow man—and the remains preserved this badge for many years.

  It was still the great sight to see in Dresden when I travelled there on a reporting trip, by train, in the company of a Polish peace activist named Berenika. It was late in 1987, a year of tensions, but few resolutions—a year that has now receded to that midpoint in the mind’s recollecting landscape when events disclose their freight of meaning, and fall into relief. It was a dull mid-afternoon. We had just passed through Leipzig’s main station. The train gathered speed. We were in a crowded carriage full of sad-eyed Kazakh Red Army recruits in their greatcoats and uniforms. Everybody round us in the compartment was smoking with furious concentration.

  ‘I’ve never cared for Dresden,’ said Berenika at this moment, turning to me conspiratorially.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The sullen people, the cold, the grit in the air, that sense of being in frontier territory but having the borders closed, the enclosed feel you get from the deep valley like a wall around the town—all that would be enough, but it’s that ridiculous ruin, that church of nothing, those blackened symbolic stones. You can’t enter Dresden without being thrown back constantly into the past, as though time was a trap with no escape.’

  ‘Why go there, then?’

  ‘In my line of things, you have to go to every peace conference,’ she said: ‘Otherwise, you’d never get visas for the trips that matter—the ones to the West.’

  ‘And what do you put on your visa applications and entry forms? Activist?’

  ‘Philologist—no one knows what it means, so no one asks questions: it always works! Besides, this is a fraternal country—all friends now. Though I must say I find it hard to forgive the Germans for what they did to Poland, even though it was so long ago. Whenever I arrive at Berlin Friedrichstrasse, I feel ill at first, my head starts spinning, I feel like a traitor to my own cause—and then I remember that my cause is internationalist. Even so, these German meetings are difficult: you always have it in your mind that there are spies among the people you come across, reporting everything you say back to the secret police.’

  ‘It’s that extreme?’

  ‘You know how harsh the system is here; but that harshness can also be an ally—there are people here to learn from: people who’ve looked into the heart of life. People without the usual illusions: writers who talk of tragic things, but without weight; actors for whom acting is release. And there’s one man who taught me a great deal about this world and its contorted affairs.’

  ‘A dissident?’

  ‘Of a kind. More a philosopher. I’d have to say he helped me to see very far: he opened up views and perspectives inside my head. Maybe it would help you to talk to him.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps I can look into it, and ask, and see what might be possible.’

  And so it was, some hours later, as the chill evening descended, and rain began to fall in the square before the Frauenkirche ruins, their stones deep brown in that half-light, and standing against the sky like giant execution scaffolds, that Berenika and I made our way down a wide, still street, turned into the doorway of a collective apartment building, and climbed the stairway to its top. HAFFNER—the name was printed on the little sign beside the bell. She rang it loudly; the door opened—and though years have passed, I cannot entirely free myself from the spell of that encounter, or shake the conviction that those hours paved the way for much in my life that still lay far ahead. Indeed, the further in time that evening recedes, the more clearly I can summon up Haffner’s most striking ideas, his intuitions and his suddenly unveiled paradoxes—they send forward their echoes now, and the suspicion begins to form in me that our lives are shaped by influences we barely sense; that we trace out our paths in the world unknowingly, registering strange, distant resonances in our hearts. I see him as he was then, alert, his being concentrated in his eyes like some caged animal—yet there was also a softness about his manner, a delicacy, a courtliness that was itself a resistance against the surrounding world. His loyalty was to the republic of letters; he lived for words, that was plain at once: his ideal was to send the mind in flight, cutting and weaving through a concept-laden sky.

  Such was Stefan Haffner as he seemed that night, in the dark hours of actually existing socialism. He greeted us as if a visit of this kind was quite routine, and led us down the tight, angled corridor into a study, dimly lit, book-lined, shrouded by thick plumes of cigarette smoke: from the double window, through its thick half-drawn curtains, one glimpsed the darkened city stretching off below. I tried to gauge him. He was grand in his manner, tall, with
greying hair; at that time he must have been already in his fifties, and there was at first a tone of resignation in his voice, as he touched on politics: the shadow play of the bloc, the regime, its factions—subjects over which he ranged in sharp detail, with an air of sovereign contempt, the corners of his lips downturned as though he were draining to the dregs some bitter medicine—but gradually, as he sketched his picture of the forces and energies that lay masked beneath the surface flash and glimmer of events, he seemed lifted up, his words and way of speaking changed: how deep the contradictions in the system had become, how short its future life would prove to be; how abrupt the West’s looming seizure of control; how total the destruction of memories, so that the entire record of the East German state, and all the thoughts and hopes of those who lived under it, would be no more than a footnote in the flow of time, a curiosity, at best, reserved for historians of neglected shadows.

  ‘And so we live on, or we survive,’ he said, ‘hoping for deliverance, even though that deliverance would prove the fatal blow to the whole world around us—and the pattern is already set, the sentence passed.’

  I listened to these ideas of his, which seemed at that time woven from the cloth of fantasy, and made some polite reply.

  He leaned forward. ‘Naturally, you think I’ve lost myself—that I’m in a dream,’ he said: ‘But sometimes the man who lives in his dreams is the only one who sees the truth—and that truth is close at hand. I make you a promise: before you die, you will be able to visit Dresden, and see a perfect western city—the face of freedom, with all its wondrous beauties lovingly restored. The ruins will be rebuilt: they’ll sweep all the grime and the rubble aside; or no, better still, the palaces and churches will be recreated, one by one, but incorporating every single stone from the past, to give each of them the bite of authenticity. You’ll be able to walk along the river promenade, and see the old palaces reflected in the water, just as they were a hundred years ago; you’ll stroll through the market, past great banks and handsome arcades, and above you there will be the stone bell of the Frauenkirche, rising into a perfect, cloudless blue sky.’

  ‘You think we can destroy and remake the past at will—just like that?’

  ‘Of course: haven’t you noticed that we love annihilation so much? History has a pulse of its own, it has its rhythm: it’s like a piece of music. If you want to read its shape and plot you have to find the key, to tune your mind, to follow closely—follow as if your life hung on it. Only then does the theme give itself away. Places have their music, they have their evolving destinies, just as surely as men and women do. I’m surprised you even want to doubt me: if you stand back, far enough, events and experiences always take on a form. Or you can look on history as a picture, a distanced, panoramic view: look from the days when the city was first ordered into being; it becomes clear; it’s as if we were conforming to some great architectural geometry, with positions determined by a far perspective—and we have instincts that compel us to fit into its waiting shape.’

  ‘It’s certainly not the standard interpretation of the headlines,’ I said.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  With this Haffner reached towards me: he held out a pack, blue, with a bright curve of gold Cyrillic letters on the front. I looked at it.

  ‘Belomor. Belomorkanal.’

  ‘The strongest in the world,’ said Haffner, rather proudly.

  ‘And why do you smoke them?’ I asked: ‘It surely can’t be the aroma.’

  ‘There is a reason,’ he said. ‘A deep reason. Would you like to hear the story? It has its detours—but maybe you’ll think it worth the ride.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ I answered.

  ‘I gained the taste for them on the spot,’ said Haffner then, and he settled back, and with a minimum of words, impassively, stripping back the successive episodes in his narrative to their purest essence, situated himself as a young man, in the years after the war, under Russian occupation, when Dresden and the cities of the east were piles of stones. Years passed. He studied; his gifts were clear; he went to Berlin, then Moscow, and Leningrad: he had become a specialist in the German links of Dostoyevsky.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Why? Do you find me like a character from that author?’

  The flashing eyes, the face worn out by hidden passions, the edge of temper, barely held in check—but certainly, I thought, and it dawned on me that we stood at the threshold of some upwelling dramatic narration.

  ‘Perhaps,’ was what I said.

  ‘It’s normal that we model ourselves on the figures in the novels of our favourite authors,’ said Haffner, sharply: ‘Normal—how else are we to occupy those works from the inside, knowingly, truly? Beside, Dostoveysky had particular ties to Saxony’—he ran his hands down the spines of a multi-volume edition in the bookcase close beside him. ‘Every true student is chosen by his subject—there is no freedom in the decision; and it was my great fortune to be chosen by my teacher as well.’

  It was in Leningrad that he found his master, in a lecture hall. This was the academician and scholar of old texts Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev, who, by chance, had lived as a child in an apartment with a view of the Vladimir Cathedral—the same view that Dostoyevsky saw from a corner of the last home he occupied before his death. It was a literary descent line! Haffner made himself a devoted apprentice: he absorbed all he could of the restrained, discreet instruction that came his way. He lavished on the older man the feelings one might have for an ideal father: worship, tender respect, unflinching love.

  ‘But it was plain to me,’ he said then, with a frown, ‘that there were many things my teacher chose to keep private from me. He would speak, but not reveal. He had been made by events he preferred hidden. His way of seeing the world came from elsewhere.’

  At last this mystery was resolved. Haffner was seated one evening at the corner table of Likhachev’s communal apartment. ‘It was one of those haunting white nights that figure in so much of the writing of Petersburg, and it may be that I saw myself then as a character in one of those stories. We had spent long hours talking. I had been telling him about my childhood years—years in the rubble, harsh times: I would never repeat those recollections now. He was moved by what he heard—and surely amused as well: what absurdity! A young man trying to instruct him in life’s hardships. He began speaking about the place of suffering in literature, the sadnesses the masters of the Russian tradition had seen, and how they were mere premonitions of the greater troubles of our age. By degrees, his subject shifted, until I realised that he was describing to me his own experiences in his student years, when he himself was arrested, sentenced and transported to penal servitude on the camp island of Solovki, in the Arctic north. He spoke of those times in a soft, even voice, sighing repeatedly. Eventually he got up, and came back with a manuscript, its pages held inside a torn, shabby notebook. I remember very well what he said then: “I would like you to take this, and read it, overnight. This is a story few know. There is little I can teach you beyond what lies here. By giving it to you, I am, in more than one sense, placing my life in your hands.” He passed it to me as if he was handing me the entrance ticket to a new world. What he told me was true; much did change for me that night.’

  Haffner took the pages, went back to his dormitory accommodation, and plunged in. Rather than a recitation of ordeals, the memoir was a description of the men and women Likachev had found on that isolated prison archipelago, lost in the waters of the White Sea. By the year of his arrest, so the talk on Solovki went, the number of the inmates and jailers on the island was equal to the population of Belgium. Conditions were bleak; diseases were constantly ravaging the prisoners; the tasks of the labour gangs were exhausting: and yet there was little trace of this in the narrative.

  ‘I made my way through, marvelling at the simplicity with which he expressed himself, and at the way his handwriting, which was of the utmost elegance, could convey even in its lettering the distinct states of emotion tha
t were present on the page. But what most struck me was the gentleness and generosity with which he wrote. He presented the characters and thoughts of others: he dwelled on them. As for himself, he was scarcely there—and it was as I was reading him, in that white, pale light of the small hours, that I realised the true task of a writer is to destroy himself, remove himself: be present, but not visible. Each of his descriptions had a focus: it was as if one were staring at them through a clarifying glass. I still see the words he used to paint the portrait of the Solovki Kremlin, that monastic fortress which had become his home—it had thick walls of boulders, covered by a coat of orange lichen, and round those bastions men and women in their hundreds swarmed: people from every far-flung reach of a continent were constantly colliding; it was a place, as he described it, of repeated sad and happy encounters, of constantly exchanged tales and memories; indeed, the world of the imagination, of books and stories from afar that the inmates told each other, seemed more real than the typhus and the mosquitoes all round them. And beyond the prison compounds and the labour sites, there was the realm of Solovki, beckoning, a sparse, lovely realm: pale polar birches, rocks, the shining, everchanging sea—and the constant variations in the look of the landscape, the advance of the seasons, the rhythm of the days, the long winter nights and sunrises and sunsets, the sudden shifts in the weather: they all seemed to underline how fleeting is the time allotted to us on Earth.’