Fall of Giants

“As I said before, we are not helping you out of goodwill-nor would you expect us to. It’s practical politics, that’s all. For the moment, your interests coincide with ours.”

Lenin looked as he had when Radek insisted on buying him new clothes: he hated the idea, but could not deny that it made sense.

Walter said: “We’ll give you a similar amount of money once a month-as long, of course, as you continue to campaign effectively for peace.”

There was a long silence.

Walter said: “You say that the success of the revolution is the only standard of right and wrong. If that is so, you should take the money.”

Outside on the platform, a whistle blew.

Walter stood up. “I must leave you now. Good-bye, and good luck.”

Lenin stared at the suitcase on the floor and did not reply.

Walter left the compartment and got off the train.

He turned and looked back at the window of Lenin’s compartment. He half-expected the window to open and the suitcase to come flying out.

There was another whistle and a hoot. The carriages jerked and moved, and slowly the train steamed out of the station, with Lenin, the other Russian exiles, and the money on board.

Walter took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his coat and wiped his forehead. Despite the cold, he was sweating.

{V}

Walter walked from the railway station along the waterfront to the Grand Hotel. It was dark, and a cold east wind blew off the Baltic. He should have been rejoicing: he had bribed Lenin! But he felt a sense of anticlimax. And he was more depressed than he should have been over the silence from Maud. There were a dozen possible reasons why she had not sent him a letter. He should not assume the worst. But he had come dangerously close to falling for Monika, so why should Maud not do something similar? He could not help feeling she must have forgotten him.

He decided he would get drunk tonight.

At the front desk he was given a typewritten note: “Please call at suite 201 where someone has a message for you.” He guessed it was an official from the Foreign Office. Perhaps they had changed their minds about supporting Lenin. If so, they were too late.

He walked up the stairs and tapped on the door of 201. From inside a muffled voice said in German: “Yes?”

“Walter von Ulrich.”

“Come in, it’s open.”

He stepped inside and closed the door. The suite was lit by candles. “Someone has a message for me?” he said, peering into the gloom. A figure rose from a chair. It was a woman, and she had her back to him, but something about her made his heart skip. She turned to face him.

It was Maud.

His mouth fell open and he stood paralyzed.

She said: “Hello, Walter.”

Then her self-control broke and she threw herself into his arms.

The familiar smell of her filled his nostrils. He kissed her hair and stroked her back. He could not speak for fear he might cry. He crushed her body to his own, hardly able to believe that this was really her, he was really holding her and touching her, something he had longed for so painfully for almost three years. She looked up at him, her eyes full of tears, and he stared at her face, drinking it in. She was the same but different: thinner, with the faintest of lines under her eyes where there had been none before, yet with that familiar piercingly intelligent gaze.

She said in English: “‘He falls to such perusal of my face, as he would draw it.’”

He smiled. “We’re not Hamlet and Ophelia, so please don’t go to a nunnery.”

“Dear God, I’ve missed you.”

“And I you. I was hoping for a letter-but this! How did you manage it?”

“I told the passport office I planned to interview Scandinavian politicians about votes for women. Then I met the home secretary at a party and had a word in his ear.”

“How did you get here?”

“There are still passenger steamers.”

“But it’s so dangerous-our submarines are sinking everything.”

“I know. I took the risk. I was desperate.” She began to cry again.

“Come and sit down.” With his arm still around her waist, he walked her across the room to the couch.

“No,” she said when they were about to sit. “We waited too long, before the war.” She took his hand and led him through an inner door to a bedroom. Logs crackled in the fireplace. “Let’s not waste any more time. Come to bed.”

{VI}

Grigori and Konstantin were part of the delegation from the Petrograd soviet that went to the Finland Station late in the evening of Monday, April 16, to welcome Lenin home.

Most of them had never seen Lenin, who had been in exile for all but a few months of the last seventeen years. Grigori had been eleven years old when Lenin left. Nevertheless he knew him by reputation, and so, it seemed, did thousands more people, who gathered at the station to greet him. Why so many? Grigori wondered. Perhaps they, like him, were dissatisfied with the provisional government, suspicious of its middle-class ministers, and angry that the war had not ended.