Read Online Young Philby by Robert Littell - Free Book Online Page A

hear him say, “There must be another way to fight the good fight.” Dietrich says, “Find it.” Kim nods. “I will.”
    No, I never raised the subject of Dietrich’s offer of a revolver with Kim. Perhaps I was afraid he would tell me I’d invented it. I had fallen for my Englishman and I wanted this particular fragment—this evidence of humanity—to be reality and not fantasy.
    I can still reproduce in my brain the shrieks rising from the tenement windows when the giant bulldozers arrived at the first barricade and began punching gaps in it. Several young Communists shot fireworks that shrieked en route and exploded in sparkling circles when they slammed into the bulldozer cabs. We could hear rifle bullets ricocheting off the plows. Kim seized my hand and pulled me into a doorway. I remember a narrow staircase winding up and up, each floor smelling of garbage or urine or cooking kerosene. Then a blast of cold air hit my face. I was on the roof, peering over the parapet. Far below, as if in a sinkhole, I could see automobiles being lifted like toys and flung to one side. Thick black smoke rose from the tires that had been soaked in kerosene and set afire. Tanks churned through the gaps opened by the bulldozers, their treads crushing furniture, the machine guns in their turrets spitting sparks in all directions. A figure raced toward one tank carrying a can of kerosene with an oil-lamp wick burning in its throat. As he raised his arm to throw it he was cut down by a strafe of bullets. A second figure appeared out of nowhere to pick up the can but it exploded in his hands before he could throw it. For an instant the explosion illuminated the street like a burst of lightning. I believe I recognized the comrade before he was engulfed in flames, it was my onetime lover, it was the Dietrich who had leaped to his feet to tell the Hungarian professor that his Marxist theories were boring him to death. And the crazy thought crossed my mind: At least he didn’t die of boredom .
    When the tanks broke through the second barricade, shoving aside the upright piano and the mangled furniture, the Communists with us on the roof began throwing bricks down at the hunched shadows advancing behind the tanks. The comrades in the street fought heroically. For a brief moment it looked as if the attackers were hesitating, but perhaps that, too, was fantasy imposing itself on reality. Soldiers in helmets and greatcoats surged through the gaps in the barricade and spread out in the street, shooting at anything that moved in doorways or windows, smashing open the street doors of the tenements with rifle butts, launching what turned out to be a methodical search of the apartments. One of the comrades on the roof burst into sobs. Another shook him by the shoulders. “We must save ourselves,” he yelled.
    Kim pressed his lips to my ear. “We, too, must save ourselves.”
    I heard a voice I recognized as mine say, “Why must we?”
    “To fight Fascism.”
    I have a vague memory of being pushed over parapets to other roofs. White sheets were flying from chimneys in sign of surrender but the Heimwehr gangsters weren’t taking prisoners. Howitzers started to shoot out the ground floors behind us so that the tenements would collapse into themselves. I remember spiral staircases, I remember clammy tunnels with large rusting sewage pipes running through them, I remember air passages that were so narrow you had to walk sideways, I remember cellars packed with doctors trying to staunch the flow of blood from wounded men, with women trying to staunch the flow of mucus from the noses of sobbing children. Kim found an English acquaintance, an artist of some sort, I think his name was Spender, we’d had a drink once on the terrace of the Herenhoff, drifting like a dazed soul in a cellar filled with dazed souls. Kim tried to shake him out of his stupor but Spender pulled his arm free and cried out, “ Sunt lacrimae rerum —they weep for their houses,