Read Online Young Philby by Robert Littell - Free Book Online

the wounded to makeshift infirmaries in baby carriages. A pothole in Piccadilly Circus makes me think of shell craters pockmarking the streets around the Karl-Marxhof tenements when the Heimwehr thugs opened fire with their howitzers. I come across a discarded shoe in a Maida Vale trash bin and I see the small mountain of shoes in the alleyway behind the Karl-Marxhof infirmary. Some of the shoes—dear God in heaven!—some of the shoes still have human limbs in them. I spot Spanish tourists walking two abreast toward Harrods—the fragment that leaps to mind is an endless line of prisoners, their hands clasped behind their necks, being marched two abreast through the debris-strewn streets toward what the English during the Boer War called a concentration camp.
    Oh, my eyes have seen horrors that my brain would give anything to stop remembering.
    I’m working on it.
    Sometimes the fragments join in a sludge of memories.
    The night of the twelfth of February: With the leadership arrested, with the revolutionist factions decapitated, our Socialist and Communist friends wandered the streets in confusion, not sure where to make a stand, not sure what form the stand should take if a stand were to be made. The armed Schutzbund militias retreated to the tenement blocks to defend the barricades. It must have been nearly midnight when Kim and Dietrich and I reached the epicenter. I remember scrambling over barricades thrown together with automobiles and delivery wagons and pushcarts and heaps of tires and a mountain of furniture. Eventually we came to the fortresslike tenements at Karl-Marxhof. Dietrich found Sonja behind a second barricade. She and other girls were tearing sheets into bandage strips and folding them into cartons. A hundred or so young Communists, red ribbons tied around their upper arms, manned the barricade. A handful carried rifles, the others an assortment of clubs made from table legs. One young man wearing a greatcoat with a fur collar appeared to be armed with a carpet sweeper. Many of the Communists sprawled on couches that had been dragged down from apartments and formed part of the defense system thrown up to block the street. A young Communist with his pointed beard dyed bright red climbed onto a kitchen table and, using a megaphone fashioned out of cardboard, delivered a fiery speech. Only part of what he said reached my ears, something about how the first shots of the next great war were being fired here in Vienna. The Communists manning the barricade cheered him. Oh, yes, an absolutely indelible memory: Sergius began to pound out the Internationale on an upright piano wedged into the furniture that had been piled on the barricade. Several of the Communists began to sing the words. People watching from the tenement windows joined in. Soon the entire street resounded with the glorious words of the Internationale . To my amazement, I will say to my delight , tears sting my eyes now when I think of it, everyone was singing in Russian.
    Vstavay, proklyat’yem zakleymyonniy
    Ves’ mir golodnykh i rabov
    Kipit nash razum vozmushchonniy
    I v smertniy boy vesti gotov.
    My Englishman and me, we tried to warm ourselves at a furniture fire blazing in the middle of the street. I don’t remember what time it was when the attack began, only that it was still too dark to make out the dials on the small wristwatch Grandfather gave me for my fifteenth birthday. We heard a distant roar that sounded like motors coughing into life beyond the barricades. This next fragment—it is within the realm of possibility that I fantasized it, and repeated it to myself so often I began to think of it as something that really happened. In my fantasy, Dietrich, hearing the motors drawing closer, offers Kim a revolver. Kim looks down at it as if he’s not sure what it is, then says, “I could not shoot a b-bullet at another human.” “Even if the other human is shooting at you?” Dietrich asks. Kim shakes his head slowly and I