Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [114]
During the meticulous courses in counterpropaganda Heinrich Hirsch, for the first time, was exposed to Jefferson, Lincoln, and Paine and Western thought. All of the Anglo/American ideologies were thoroughly dissected and destroyed in the classrooms, but at the same time, a new flood of thought opened.
For the first time in his life he was able to read that all of the world’s ideas were not discovered by Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Added to his earlier confusions and disillusions, Hirsch knew that he could become an agent of the revolution only through the fear of power and the silencing forever of his own voices of inquisitiveness.
Something else happened to him in Ufa. Heinrich had reached his twenty-third year without ever having sex with a woman. He had always been too tired from his studies and too dedicated to indulge in such nonsense.
In Ufa he met Maria Majoros, the young daughter of a Spanish Communist who, like his own father, was a martyr of the Communist world.
At what moment does one try to describe the first awakening? What happens when the long suppressed emotion bursts alive like springtime? How does one tell of the sensation of first love? First a meeting of the eyes ... then, perhaps, stolen glances ... going out of the way to be at a place where you know she is passing ... a first rendezvous filled with trembling and fumbling, and then ... a knowing of love.
It was discovery that there were other things on this earth that belonged to most men that had been denied him.
Wild great cries of love to each other in stolen places ...
BULLETIN!
HEINRICH HIRSCH AND MARIA MAJOROS WILL APPEAR BEFORE THE KOMSOMOL COMMITTEE FOR THE PURPOSE OF SELF-CRITICISM.
Who told on them? Did it really matter? Was there ever life away from prying eyes?
They took their medicine. They stood side by side daring not to look at each other. The portrait of Stalin glared down at them; it always did. The angry eyes of the Komsomol Committee executives scorned them, and they confessed their shame.
“I beg for the understanding of my comrades for this petit bourgeois indulgent act I have committed,” Heinrich Hirsch said of the love of the only woman he had known. “I am humiliated for allowing myself to forget my Communist upbringing and behavior unworthy of a member of Komsomol.”
For an hour Heinrich Hirsch was berated; and then, Maria Majoros, a woman of proud Spanish blood, blurted her “confession”:
“The manifestations and provocations of my act with Heinrich Hirsch are contrary to the duty of a socialist woman. I beg mercy from my comrades to prove myself again worthy of making my contribution to world revolution.”
When the further debasement of Maria Majoros was over the girl was sent away from Ufa, never to be heard from again.
Heinrich Hirsch, the twenty-five-year-old deputy to Rudi Wöhlman on the German People’s Liberation Committee, had now finished his journey into the past at the flat on Geyer Strasse 2.
The old woman in the room was still filled with a fear of the strange young man.
“Don’t be frightened, Mutter,” he said softly, “I just wanted to see what it looked like.”
He walked outside into the shambles of Berlin. The homecoming was done.
Chapter Five
IGOR KARLOVY REQUISITIONED A mansion in Karlshorst for his billet. It was relatively undamaged, and the twelve rooms were the most luxurious he had ever been in. The headquarters office was established in the main drawing room; he did his own work in his enormous, lush bedroom. Reports poured in from all over the city with data for the dismantling of the Berlin industrial complex. In a few days he was due to hand in his own findings to Commissar Azov and the German People’s Liberation Committee.
A sound of singing reached his ears, the voices of his men. Igor took off his glasses, put them down for a moment, and listened from his desk. The