The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2 Page 6

  Either we start very early, said Münzenberg, or we’ll never make it. In our club, we apprentices studied history, politics, art, and literature, and that was all done in a very orderly fashion, one of us would sit up front at the lectern, ring the bell, one of the young workers would stand up, give his presentation, which was followed by discussion, with each person raising their hand. Until then, I had been reading Jules Verne, Cooper, Karl May, played cards; now I was acquainting myself with Lassalle, Engels, Bebel, Mehring, Haeckel, and Forel. The strict discipline was one of the foundations of the gatherings. We sixteen-year-olds would wear our Sunday best with stand-up collars. In casting off our sweaty work shirts, in getting changed after the day in the factory, we were in a sense preparing ourselves for an existence on a higher plane. But that year, nineteen hundred six, bore down on me like a waterfall. The solemn beginning quickly turned into a stormy confrontation with our circumstances at work, in the union, the Party. From the older heads we received only condescension, rejection. In the meeting room they only wanted to allow presentations which, as they put it, were tailored to the cognitive abilities of the youth. We ended up being part of a process of transformation without knowing anything about the conflicting opinions among the Party leadership. Reformism, revisionism, for us, that was nothing but reactionary thought. We railed against the debasement within the Party, its abandonment of the revolution, its nationalism, its policy of forming an alliance with capital, with the military. Though we retained the ordered structure of our studies, we also possessed a readiness for revolt, for we viewed a logical, systematic attitude as a prerequisite for participation in the building of a party such as had been organized in Russia following the events of nineteen hundred five. Within a few years we developed a new concept of the proletarian youth, and we drew this from our experience of the abuse that had been meted out to us. When I arrived in Zurich, much of it still bore the influence of our readings of Herzen, Kropotkin, Bakunin; anarchism belonged to the first stage of revolutionary struggle, which was a generational struggle, and before we found our way to Plekhanov, Lenin, to Iskra—which also coincided with our shift toward the Bolsheviks—we read Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, and Strindberg. There were always, he said, two apparently contradictory forces working within us: one demanding patience, discipline, the other spurring on our radicalism; one constructive, the other raging against rigid relations; and then it turned out that these were just two sides of the same coin, and that both had to be accommodated if we wanted to realize our full potential. Ibsen, Strindberg, they would almost have elicited our expulsion from the workers’ union, for, in the eyes of some functionaries, such literature promoted moral decay. They considered the reading of realist, socially critical novels and plays more dangerous than the scientific instructions for social transformation found in our nascent studies of Marx. The name of the progenitor was not yet frowned upon within the Party, but in the depictions of the downfall of bourgeois institutions, particularly the family, the old-guard Social Democrats sensed a danger that also seemed to threaten their own organizational apparatus. The fear of a ruthless analysis of human coexistence, which inevitably led to animosity toward art and literature, this impulse that was always confined to the unconscious, immediately denied when put up for debate, continued to cling to the workers’ movement as a petit-bourgeois, reactionary hangover that was responsible for its tendency to make compromises, its narrow-mindedness and dogmatism. In our struggle to break the old educational ideals, in our effort to find a new form of life, we came across those who demanded that the coming revolution be total, that the entire human being be seized by it, from the impulses of dreams through to practical actions. In nineteen twelve we had caught wind of these signs of cultural upheaval and we immediately incorporated them into our political onslaught. That which, four years later, was so emphatically expressed at Cabaret Voltaire by those who had fled the orgy of mass murder, we soaked up in its first inklings. Living surrounded by international newspapers and periodicals, by flyers and manifestos, emissaries traveling to and fro, we had absorbed the creations of the likes of Cravan, Picabia, Duchamp, Arp, and Apollinaire, nobody knew where we had developed the openness for such experimentation, the explanation was perhaps simply once more that our senses had been sharpened by all the humiliations and castigations. I hate assaults, wanton violence, punch-ups, he cried, and yet we belong to the generation that arrived at scientific thinking through misery and poverty, through a constant attempt to escape from figures of authority, through homelessness and vagrancy. I don’t want to glorify that in any way. There are better ways to gain a sense for recognizing connections. But we were taught this insight through violence and terror. The new came, as always, from Paris. In an age when capital was preparing the most enormous episode of plunder and barbarism ever seen, we dogged, haggard former messenger boys, who were supposed to be made into wolves, found our way to the idea of fraternity, to a celebration, the kind that had often rung out here in this city, in the midst of the most brutal brawl. With these words he came to a standstill, swung his arms out wide, standing in the Parc des Expositions, behind the Porte de Versailles, where the suburb of Vanves began. The gray of his eyes was of an almost blinding brightness. With his stocky figure, his high brow and dark hair, he resembled Hodann; in their mannerisms of speech and gesture their affinity was even more prominent. Münzenberg had founded another periodical; he was always longing for such a mouthpiece. Cut off from the Party, he had found a funder in Aschberg—that peculiar patron of the left—and the first issue was just about to appear, in October. Thomas, Heinrich, and Klaus Mann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger, Kerr, Döblin, Olden, Schifrin, Roth, Schickele, Werfel, Ernst Weiss, and Graf were all involved; Hodann was also providing him with contributions—I had accompanied him to Münzenberg’s apartment on the corner of Rue Voisembert and Rue du Quatre-Septembre, in a new building which clashed with the soot-blackened tenement houses of the neighborhood. Having ended up in a conversation, Münzenberg dragged us out, first of all to a bistro on Avenue Renan, then past the warehouses, under the railway bridge, into the exhibition park, all spaces were too cramped for him, he needed plazas, fields, panoramas around him, and with his knickerbockers and laced boots, he looked to be dressed to go mountain climbing. His thoughts always seemed to be in a dialogue with the outside world, it was as if he grasped every word, every image out of a boundlessness, and yet his most incidental remark was marked by a strong inner resonance. With spluttering laughter, Hodann mentioned that there should no longer be any room in the Party for a man like Münzenberg. If for no other reason, he said, than that you write that the most precious thing in the Party is the militant, the member, the person. That is an insult to the all-powerful leadership. And how can you advocate freedom of opinion today, he cried. How can you write that the paper will maintain its independence. Independence, that is a lack of partisanship, that is subterfuge, so as to be able to criticize the Third International, the Soviet Union. Independence, even from the Second International, is worthless today, because everything is either/or, for or against. I asked myself whether these motives could indeed suffice for Münzenberg’s expulsion. The explanation seemed to me to lie in the concentration of power, in the clash of rivalries. As far as I was able to judge, Münzenberg and the other leaders of the Party wanted the same thing. It was just that the call to come together was not to be issued by him, but rather by the group that was now taking over the Politburo. What other option was he left with besides editing a paper himself in which he could advocate the idea of unity. Working toward this unity, even from divergent starting points, was better than remaining silent. And yet for him, a man who had contributed to the establishment of the Communist International, this forced independence must have meant a loss of belonging, an agonizing sense of being severed from all attachments. In nineteen fourteen, he said, when we made a stand against the Social Democrats’ support for the war, we were thrown out of the Party, all of the youth associations were
dissolved by the geriatric leadership due to their antimilitary stance. There was one revolutionary stream approaching us from the Russian underground, with its political charge; and from Paris, the current of the artistic revolution. The two collided above us in Zurich, but not in order to numb us, but rather to exculpate us, to deliver us unto clarity. In September of nineteen fourteen, said Münzenberg, I stood next to Lenin for the first time. Radek and Bukharin had already arrived in Switzerland a few weeks earlier, while the Austrians still had Lenin interned in Kraków. At the end of the month, Trotsky arrived in Zurich. When I think about that time, he said—about the monstrous supremacy of the warmongers, and about those few who in Bern, later in Zurich, often starving, always pressed for money, living in meager quarters, planned to smash the rule of greed—their feat in October still seems virtually unimaginable. That Lenin immediately put me to work, he said, spurred me on, but it also brought a certain sense of unease; his personality was so dominating, his strength as a leader so indisputable, that something inside of me still wanted to rebel against him. I never even came close to forming a connection with Trotsky. We Young Socialists were involved in printing and distributing his pamphlets about the war and the International, smuggling them across the border into Germany in the winter. In Trotsky’s presence something adventurous, anarchistic always arose; he was at once fanatic and bohemian, just as interested in discussing Jarry, Kandinsky, Marinetti, Picasso, or de Chirico as insurrectional strategy. With their conflicts, fought out primarily in the press, Lenin and Trotsky complemented one another. Trotsky was the only one who dared to express his own opinion in front of Lenin. It was precisely because of this independence that Lenin appreciated him. Their hefty clashes were not testament to irreconcilable differences but rather to an inextinguishable, dialectical vitality. Just as the revolutionary moment could only develop out of antagonisms, out of paradoxical preconditions, artistic development was also unthinkable without tensions, conflicts, extreme strain. It’s not something I’ve often spoken about, said Münzenberg, and perhaps I am only now seeing it clearly, now that I’ve been maneuvered into this isolated position, but my political ideas were strongly linked to the image of a cultural revolution. In the summer before the Zimmerwald Conference, in the clandestine meetings, the heated conversations among small groups of professional revolutionaries, we were steered in the direction that from then on was supposed to apply to all of our activities. The splinter groups from the old Erfurt Party found their way to a common line, declared their revolutionary program on the fifth of September. Our paper as well, Freie Jugend [Free Youth], was renamed Jugend Internationale [Youth International], relationships were being forged between countries, we could not imagine anything but the struggle against the war turning into a proletarian world revolution. Zimmerwald was a beginning, he said, full of half-measures. And while we were organizing the next meeting, in Kienthal, in order to advance Lenin’s International, the artistic revolts—seeming much more intransigent, more cunning than our activities—overtook us. The tumult that arose when the word Dada was snatched blindly from a French dictionary on the eighth of February nineteen sixteen made us temporarily forget our conviction that the material revolution was inseparable from the intellectual. The artists in Spiegelgasse were as unaware of their actual task—namely of complementing the political revolution—as the politicians who refused to assign any revolutionary capacities to art. Huelsenbeck, Ball, Tzara, Arp, and the other drumming, freely associating poets on the stage declared all political and social ambitions rotten and corrupt, they despised sober-mindedness and planning as prerequisites for the success of the revolution, saw only chaos as being fruitful, but were unaware of how they were running the risk of once again replacing that which had been toppled with something mystical, irrational. They called what they produced anti-art. We, on the other hand, had no interest in breaking with the works of the past, we saw a historical continuity between them and the evidentiary signs of new social relations. Cutting ourselves off from earlier achievements would have meant placing ourselves in a vacuum. Because of this, our agreement with many manifestations was accompanied by a resistance; we often gave the productions a different meaning than what was intended by the creators. Since early nineteen sixteen, Spiegelgasse had housed the entire revolution, for that was when Lenin moved in there as well. The old man, as we called him—for that is what the forty-five-year-old already resembled, with his almost bare skull—condemned the spleen of the artists, their veneration of uselessness, as was being expressed in the performances in the grotto. The planning took place at the top of the hunchbacked alley; deep down below, fantastical unreason was unleashed. Spiegelgasse became the symbol of the violent coupling of the waking and the dreaming revolution. I asked Münzenberg about where the alley was situated. From the Limmatquai, said Münzenberg, you walk along Marktgasse, turn into Münstergasse, and it’s the first one on your left, going straight up the hill. The first door on the left, with few stairs in front of it, leads to the cabaret. At night, a racket pervades from the low, arched windows that makes the walls shudder. I can still see Radek, he says, the way he stretches his arms out to the side to prop up the walls of the narrow alley. From there it was straight up the Zürichberg, over bumpy cobblestones, to the square that joins up with Napfgasse and where the building in which Lavater had lived was located. He had received Goethe there, in seventeen sixty five, I think it was, before the supporter of the French Revolution became a counterrevolutionary, he also received a visit, on a hike, from the young Hölderlin. Büchner had often walked across this square, while he was a lecturer in anatomy at Zurich University; he lived until his death a dozen paces farther up, in the building on the corner of Spiegelgasse, the Brunnenturm. Next door, number fourteen it was, where the alley fell away again, Lenin and Krupskaya had rented a room, on the second floor, at the shoemaker Kammerer’s place. He had his workshop on the corner, number twelve. I often stopped in at his place, reminiscing about old times. Münzenberg had stopped at some scaffolding, wanted to scuttle up the ladder, I held him back. Yeah, he yelled, the room was about four meters long, three meters wide, the ceiling not much more than two meters high. Dark-stained wooden molding crisscrossing the walls. Two windows, the curtains usually drawn shut. Beside the door an iron stove, with the chimney bent off at a right angle. Shoved between the oven and the corner of the room, a table, where they ate, and a narrow sofa. In the corner by the window, a washstand with a small bowl. Which was also used for writing. Above it, a mirror hung from the molding. The double bed in the center. Dominating the room. Fluffed up pillows, huge duvets. Then a few chairs, a chest of drawers. Otherwise no space. You had to shuffle sideways. They had negotiated the right to use the kitchen. Rent was twenty-eight francs a month. Apart from the innkeepers, there were also other occupants. Emigrants. An Italian, a few Austrian actors, a German woman with her children. In the morning, Lenin would wait at the front door so that the postman didn’t have to climb the steps with all the letters and newspapers. He stored his correspondence in cardboard boxes that Kammerer had given him. Below the label Bottine were the names of Gorky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Luxemburg, Chicherin, Shlyapnikov, Trotsky. Yes, said Münzenberg, the drumming from the depths could be heard from up here, at night, when the windows could be opened. They opened onto the courtyard. Had to be kept closed during the day, and even still a relentless, cloying stench of blood and entrails pervaded the rooms through all the cracks. There was a sausage factory below. Lenin alternated between complaining about the rattling of the meat grinder and the drumbeats. Now we had climbed up the wooden stairs, were standing at the railing, overlooking the trees, the pavilions. Münzenberg could still see Spiegelgasse before him, which descended from the Brunnenturm to the narrow street that was named after the fences that bordered a series of gardens. Kammerer stepped out in front of the entrance to his shop, arched back at an angle, inspecting the rows of shoes in the window. Out the front of Restaurant zum Jakobsbrunnen, on the ground floo
r of the building of number fourteen, draymen were setting down cases full of clinking bottles. It was bright here: the alley opposite opened out into a forecourt. Above numbers sixteen and eighteen ran Ruff’s butcher’s shop, with a proud announcement between gold garlands that their sausages had received the highest of accolades. It was Lenin’s most trying year, said Münzenberg. Behind him, three years of ostracism, more than one and a half decades of exile. Being cut off from the events in Russia had become almost unbearable. His colleagues scattered across the world. Contact with them made difficult. His health poor. Sleeplessness. Splitting headaches. We were often frightened by his gaunt face. Moments when he felt stranded. The continual fear of missing the revolutionary situation, arriving too late. Sometimes, at meetings, in the Schwarzer Adler at Stüssihof, he managed to perk up. But his vitality seemed artificial, hectic. Then he’d go back to sitting for hours on end, brooding. A monstrous energy stored within him. Every day, from nine till six, he was in the libraries. Writing, writing. The book on imperialism, countless articles, flyers, pamphlets. Who visited him in his apartment, I asked. Only a few people, said Münzenberg. Krupskaya was ill as well. They lived largely in isolation. Zinoviev came occasionally, Balabanoff, Radek too. Or people he had invited after meeting them at gatherings, hoping to influence them. If there were more than three guests there, they sat on the bed. Agitation, furor, as Radek expressed his disbelief that the war would bring about the proletarian revolution. Did he ever meet Armand, I asked Münzenberg. Just the one time, he said, evasively. The mention of this name touched upon something that went too far, was too violent to be absorbed. What was she like, I asked again. There was something intoxicating about her, he said. Big hat, veil, plumes. Then: we younger ones wanted to introduce Lenin to writers, artists, wanted to drag him out of his isolation. But he would just sit there with his watch in his hand, staring at the second hand. From time to time I lost track of him, said Münzenberg. He homed in on a single point. For us there was so much to do. We drifted about the city. Münzenberg pressed his nose flat with his index finger. How can I convey, he said, what happened in those foundational months. If we spoke of the two poles of the revolution, he said, then we were invoking knowledge that we had attained primarily via philosophical channels. Even if it seemed that the artistic revolution was being waged on a different front than the political one, and was not fighting for social changes, in positioning itself against the tired conventions and seeking to smash norms that had long ago revealed their coercive character, it was indeed related to our revolution. With its struggle for the liberation of forms, of movements, for the renewal of language, of the gaze, it had to exert an influence on our senses, our search for a transformed existence. Art has no power over reality, said the politicians. And with reality they meant solely the reality of the external world. They didn’t see how threadbare this reality had become. In Switzerland, all events that were important to us took place in a strange shelteredness. Zimmerwald was a rural idyll, close to Bern, suited to forest getaways, relaxing holidays. Kienthal was a village at the foot of the Blüemlisalp. It wasn’t until we arrived at the train station that we found out where the conspiratorial journey was headed. Along the Lötschberg railway line to Reichenbach, in the Bernese Oberland, then, like a group of tourists, in hay carts to Hotel Bären. Spiegelgasse consisted of traditional, noble-looking houses, with gables and turrets, as if made of gingerbread. But behind the windows, explosive material was gathering. With our dreams, ideas, and plans, we were reshaping reality. At the end of April of sixteen, we dislodged our meeting place from its idyllic frame and transported it into a world-historical context. But what, the artists down in the alley might have asked themselves—presuming they were even taking notice of our activities at all—could the Kienthal Resolution achieve. Weren’t the differences of opinion between the socialist factions still present, weren’t the German and Russian groups still split into two hostile camps, hadn’t the social chauvinists once again managed to prevent the foundation of a Third International, were the proletarians not still shooting at each other from the trenches, wasn’t the only place to find meaningful activity among those who rejected all order. The aim, said Münzenberg, was to mount the hypothesis of a comprehensive social and artistic revolution, and then to produce the evidence of the interrelation of the components, which until that moment had always been treated separately. To do so we didn’t need to demand that art, which had assigned itself the task of toppling the intellectual reality, also bear a political mission. It did what its means were best suited to do. Nor was it incumbent upon politics to drag art along with it. The new, he said, still insufficiently outlined even today, consists in recognizing the two forces in their unique characteristics and equivalence, not to pit them against one another but rather to bring their parallel courses, their simultaneous creations together to form a common denominator. What did match up was the intensity of revolutionary artistic and political actions, as well as their internationalist objectives. What seemed irreconcilable was the derision, the irony of the one, with the seriousness, the sense of responsibility of the other. Citizens, students, workers, vagabonds, drifters of the world, unite, sang the Dadaists, in a mockery of the call from Kienthal to the working-class soldiers of the world. And if in April of sixteen it seemed as if the arm of the arts was reaching past us with exaggerated drama, said Münzenberg, a year later, the masses of working people in Russia did rise up, and Lenin’s theses drowned out the bubbling broth of words at the soirées in Cabaret Voltaire. We had imagined something, he said, which couldn’t yet be defined, which for now consisted only of premonitions, intimations. In nineteen seventeen we had little time left to continue pursuing the trains of thought which underpinned the idea of the cultural revolution; surprisingly, they were later taken up by Lenin, who despite refusing to see even the beginning of a politicization of the arts in the uproar in Spiegelgasse, declared that the revolutionary must possess the capacity to dream. Because practical daily tasks always took precedence, it seemed as if this term, cultural revolution, which Lenin used frequently during his final months, had receded into the background; yet according to its meaning, conceived by Lenin primarily as an opposing force to the bureaucratized, doctrinaire party apparatus, it continued to have an effect on us. Now that the time seems ripe for bringing together the lines that formed back then, I see that with cultural revolution we were referring to the break that formed the prerequisite for the fulfillment of the political struggle. Lenin spoke of a laborious process, and even I, during the years in which I lost sight of my earlier ideas, had attempted to put art in the service of the Party, to force it to promote the cause of ideological education. But art is the means, he said, of loosening the rigidity of political institutions, and of reminding us of the diversity of our perceptions. Propaganda, said Münzenberg with a laugh, and we watched the traffic streaming back and forth along Avenue Renan, between Issy and Porte de Versailles, circulating around the roundabout, flowing into Boulevard Victor, Boulevard Lefebvre, into the never-ending Rue Vaugirard, behind the gray sea of roofs we saw the green of the park of the Michelet school and the military training fields which stretched on until the Seine, propaganda, he said, I was tasked with creating this apparatus, it had to be conjured up out of nothing and made into a weapon to confront the powerful press of the bourgeoisie; with our writings we had to gain influence over the millions of people who for half a century had been numbed, inundated with lies and trash, we had to publish the truth about their situation. From that point on—it began in the summer of twenty-one, he said pensively—I scarcely concerned myself with art itself, I might have dealt with cultural questions in my journalism, but our focus from the Zurich years was never mentioned. Artistic, literary elements had to be absorbed into the needs of the political propaganda. We measured quality according to the extent to which a work served to strengthen the Party, to ameliorate the hardship afflicting the Soviet state. The catastrophic famine and the aftereffects of the civil w
ar had to be overcome. The foundation of the Workers International Relief coincided with the release of the first illustrated workers’ newspaper. Lenin had summoned me. During the war, he had contributed to the formation of our Young Communist International; now, with the revolution having remained isolated, he called on me to initiate the international aid efforts. My first visit to the Kremlin. As Münzenberg paused, as if he had only now become aware of the chasm that had opened up between July of twenty-one and October of thirty-eight, I asked about the setting in which he met Lenin, what the rooms were like. Once again I wanted to picture every single detail that formed part of the environment of an event; if a mental image did not materialize before me, I pressed for further details. His apartment was in the long building with its deeply recessed windows, the former arsenal, right on the northeastern corner of the wall between Manege Square and Red Square, on the top floor, at the end of the vaulted corridor in which the footsteps rolled like muffled thunder. Located next to the parlor was Lenin’s personal library, Münzenberg recalled having seen some books by Nexø, in English, Heine’s collected works, a few volumes by Bebel, Mehring, Lenau’s poems, Hugo’s novels, Hauptmann’s The Weavers, Man of Straw by Heinrich Mann; apart from that, primarily pamphlets against Social Democracy, disputes between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. He was shown through the conference room—the room of the Council of Ministers, in which wicker chairs with flared backs sat around the large, green-topped table and old maps of Russia and Western Europe hung on the walls—into Lenin’s small office. There was a leather sofa and four leather club chairs for guests, Lenin himself used a simple wicker chair, behind him he had two short, rotating book stands with reference books, literature he had just used, stuffed with slips of paper. Two telephones sat on the desk, along with a bronze sculpture. It wasn’t until Münzenberg had told me about the palm in the wooden bucket in front of the window, about the portrait of Marx against a red background painted by a worker, about the white-tiled stove and the adjoining room of the telephone operators and had mentioned the faded maps, which here too hung from the wood-paneled walls, that it occurred to him what the sculpture depicted—namely, an ape, sitting in contemplation, one hand on its chin, the other hand holding a human skull. And his apartment, I asked. It was along the same corridor. In his bedroom there was a narrow brass bed with pillows piled up high, next to it a nightstand, on top a small arc lamp with a silk shade, the same set-up could be found in Krupskaya’s room, as well as a desk with a blue-green tablecloth and a wardrobe with mirrored panels. One could look from the windows onto the courtyard in front of the gate of Troitskaya Tower. The kitchen, that’s where you sat for a cup of tea, a piece of bread; hectored by my persistent questions, Münzenberg described the wooden seats at the table with its oilcloth, the iron stove, the coal bucket, the basket with kindling and pieces of firewood, the sink, the vitrine, a few cups inside it, no two of the same kind, a couple of plates, small pots, bowls, an iron heating up on the stove. But then, after having been cajoled into talking about it, all of this must have seemed to him a distraction from things that were more important at this point in time; and yet his storytelling had conveyed the impression that the things he was evoking were more present to him than all the efforts at a reorientation that his newspaper—optimistically named Die Zukunft [The Future]—was supposed to work toward. It was as if he were embarrassed to have divulged so much about himself. He jumped down the rungs of the metal frame, Hodann held him back by the arm to keep him from running away from us, no, cried Münzenberg, I won’t do them the favor of throwing myself down on my knees and apologizing, that is the difference between me and my accused comrades, I still stand behind everything I’ve done, I’m still the same person I’ve become, I dare to criticize what needs to be criticized. For this criticism does not serve the purpose of damaging the Soviet state but of promoting it. What I wrote more than a decade and a half ago, that the first workers’ state has to be protected, I write now as well, and I am finally addressing what Lenin, already gravely ill, saw before him, the cultural revolution, to usher in an epoch of democratization. And for that they slander me, he cried, them, the grovelers, the opportunists, Katz, who was my apprentice, Šmeral, who was a member of the Imperial Council of the Habsburgs when we founded the Young Communist International, they try to gag me, because I refuse to agree with their hypocrisies, they try to get rid of me, because I am inconvenient for them. As Katz stepped out of the tent he was staring at his open hands, as if to read what had been presaged in their lines. He stayed silent for a long time on the way back through the tunnel, and then his voice, with its sparse words, was different, barely recognizable. Beware the ropes, he said, assuming her Bohemian-tinged German, she saw only rope, only rope, from which we hang.