Poets and Chess Players #10: In Which The Skepticism of Comrade Polzin Is Sorely Tested
‘God’ was not real. ‘God’ could not hurt him. And the man from The Center would not look for him here.
This is chapter 10 of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial. Previously, Viktor held an uneasy interview with a neurosurgeon who believes his test subjects can predict the future, while - in Geneva - Matia discovered that German counterintelligence has the Soviets under surveillance. This time, Comrade Polzin, pagan barbarian, finds himself confronted with several unwelcome intrusions into his understanding of the situation.
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Viktor Polzin walked quickly through the old market square, his head bowed beneath a spattering of cold rain and his mind entangled in thoughts of the task before him. Somehow, he had got to convincingly play a down-and-out hospital psychiatrist in even more detail than yesterday, while suppressing a number of uncomfortable suspicions about Weiss’ motives along with his own unreasonable fears. Much of him would have liked to walk away from this meeting, but it was the best chance he had of finding any new information. He had yet to hear from Popov, and in any case he had begun to doubt that Haber had made it as far as France. No, Weiss knew something he wasn’t telling. But if this was a trap-
He froze alongside a shop, raising his head just high enough to stare into his reflection in the window. Behind him, a man in a green hat turned suddenly away to step into the doorway of the nearby Austria Tabak, but too late. All thoughts of breath left Polzin’s body as he recognized the profile. The man must have followed him here from the print shop.
Suffocating panic grabbed him by the face, hard and hot, like a sack dropped over his head. Electricity shot through every limb. For a long, horrible moment, he just stood in front of the window and shuddered. And then the world started to move past him again, as if in a dream. Was he dreaming? - was he dying? - his feet were numb, and he couldn’t control them. He was staggering as he went; any moment now he expected the man in the green hat to catch up to him and put out a hand. If he had been followed from the print-shop, it was by someone who knew his base of activities. Obviously, The Center was checking up on him.
What did they know?
Polzin pushed himself through a group of middle-aged ladies and off down an alley, moving by instinct. Another alley, then, and into another street. He had to get back to the shop and burn those files - quickly - now -
His head spun as he caught sight of his tail again. No, he didn’t dare go back that way; he had to hide. Let the man walk on first. He stumbled across the road and into a stream of people trickling down the sidewalk, forcing himself to throttle his pace to meet theirs. Another mistake. There was a little woman directly in front of him, presumably elderly - he had to guess, her head swathed against the cold and rain in a dark blue scarf - drifting along at half speed, holding him back behind her. By the time she finally turned off into a large, square doorway near the street-corner, he was following the woman in blue so closely that she held one of the ornate doors open for him.
Oh, hell, why not.
Trembling, Viktor Arkadyevich ducked through the door and into the back of a long, dim room. The air was stale, sweet, and cold all at the same time. Unlit chandeliers hung from the high rounded vault, which was painted white to make the most of the half-light struggling through the dormer windows. A faint yellow glow from the far end registered to his reeling senses, barely, as candlelight. The unfamiliar forms before him finally fell into place. He’d been tricked across the threshold of a Catholic church.
Viktor had never before been inside a church which was still in service. During his time in Berlin, he had avoided them altogether; and the religious buildings of Moscow and Barcelona, at least those which had not been reduced to rubble, had been put to better uses long ago. He struggled to temper his breathing as he recalled the mosaic colors of young nuns’ brains and blood spattered across each other’s naked bodies, their beautiful faces smeared with spit and worse. Some revenge, surely, was by now long overdue… He reminded himself forcibly that he was a modern man, possessed of the anti-superstitious spirit of the modern age. Comrade God was the stuff of peasants’ jokes and nightmares. ‘God’ was not real. ‘God’ could not hurt him. And the man from The Center would not look for him here.
He stepped up to the back of the last pew without removing his hat and leaned against it as he looked around, unsure how far into the room he wanted to venture. His intrusion didn’t seem to have been noticed; a ritual of some sort was proceeding at the front of the church, assisted by the singing of a pitiful six or seven congregants1, but none of them had so much as turned around. Viktor recalled a Spaniard saying that in the bad old throne-and-altar days, such a crime as this was to be punished by death. He might have felt more thrilled by getting away with it if the reward weren't so underwhelming. Decades of official rhetoric had impressed upon him that a priest was, at base, a swindler - a kind of stage magician, a charismatic parasite who awed the stupid folk of the world by waving his hands around in the smoke and then disappeared behind his screen or rail to laugh at them. These people seemed almost not to notice their priest at all. He had to squint to make out the figure of a little man bent beneath the age-darkened oil painting which surmounted the altar, physically humbled by his yoke of office in the form of heavy robes. The priest didn’t seem to notice them either. What, then, had they come for?
The singing petered out; and as he watched, the priest turned and uttered one or two deliberate words aloud, then swiveled to return to his silent labors. Someone let out an audible sob as an old man intoned the opening of the next hymn.
Seeing nothing comprehensible there, he turned and saw that behind him was a niche containing a large and unpleasant Pietà.2 Looking at it, he now recognized immediately the fragments of the statue in Dr. Haber’s empty flat: the sword-pierced Mother so common in Spain. La Dolorosa, the Spaniards said, and they would surely give her something to cry about. His Soviets had laughed and challenged Umjagchenie Zlyh Serdec, the Softener of Evil Hearts, to do her best on them.
He thought again of that trip to Linz, and stepped casually back to lean against the wall so that he could pull his small scraps of prizes from his inside coat pocket. One, Weiss’ addresses, and the still-encoded message further up the page; two, Adelina’s letter - shit, he had forgotten all about Adelina. He couldn’t imagine how the man got anything done with all these women intruding on his life. Her, the radio girl, the mother, perhaps the blonde…not to mention the Lady’s disapproving visage, left just where Polzin himself was sure to find it.
Viktor looked sideways at the statue and curled his lip at the realization that he’d unwittingly stepped into its line of sight. Hadn’t he just said he wasn’t superstitious? Its being there or here meant nothing - the image seemed to be a popular one. MONAKH was a man of petty tragedies, and apparently he was in good company. It comforted these people to think that something cared.
Anyway, he still had one more clue: the scientific paper. Viktor had begun to suspect that some secret ink on the back had faded - what else could this nonsense be good for? - but when he unfolded it and looked again, the words were no longer garbled to him. Descartes and Jung in light of Hess: mytho-psychic archetypes and the dual nature-of-being, towards a productive union of physiologic and psychologic data on intuitive knowledge and the dream state: a study proposal. In plain German, a philosophical justification for Weiss’ work. It was typewritten, not typeset - preliminary even to the preliminary purpose it was intended for - and annotated in pencil, in two different hands. He felt cold. Haber and Weiss hadn’t been vague acquaintances, but active collaborators.
It was twisted, but it made sense. Viktor recalled again Miss Löwe’s impressions of MONAKH as a man too intelligent to be content with the life he let her see. He shuffled meaningless mechanical data all week for his employer, turned in tips to FRANZ for someone else to analyze, and - then what? Sketched out a sad novel on the train, attended Friday Vespers at the local cloister, and retired to his cell to kneel on the cold floor for an hour before bed? The arrival of his old friend Otto would have seemed like an answer at last to all those prayers for his sacrifices to mean something. Now here again was that old friend, lying to a fellow doctor’s face about where his ideas had come from. Something else had happened, something seriously wrong, and he couldn’t imagine who might willingly tell him about it.
He folded the papers into his pocket again, wanting more time to think this over but beginning to feel exposed back here. Although he remembered the woman who had let him in, she seemed to have disappeared. Well, the Westerns liked to line their church walls with side-alcoves for idols and such, didn’t they? - she must have ducked into one of those. It stood to reason that the best way to hide was to follow suit. Viktor slipped past several tall wooden boxes and a row of colored marble facsimile-columns, and into one of the recesses.
His stomach immediately clenched all over again, and he sat down very heavily in a chair pushed against its wall. Propped up beside the ridiculous baroque altar, cutting straight through all its gold-frosted pomp, was a nearly life-sized painting of a tortured Man.3
Viktor had burned enough religious art to recognize a Man-of-Sorrows when he saw one; but he had not seen one of the German school, with its uneasy union of romanticism and brute reality. Thorns crowned the Victim like a coil of barbed wire, and His bruised wrists were tied by knotted ropes. The Holy Face was handsome, but within it blood and tears welled together from Christ’s glassy eyes. The Holy Wounds were visibly open to the bone; the blood that pulsed from them matted His hair, varnished His feet, and dripped to the bottom of the scene as though it was about to spill out of the painting and onto the floor. Viktor was aware of other details, but they were unimportant. He was fixed in place by terror at the idea that those feeble, foolish eyes were fixed on him. As the Christ watched and wept, he felt all over again the agonies of blood-wet rope tearing into his own arms just before he blacked out at the pain of his finger falling away. And there was no mercy in Lubyanka: the NKVD man had waited until he could be revived before beginning to close his shears on the thumb.
He wrenched his eyes away. The identification forced by that gaze felt - grotesque. Did human beings really look willingly at such a thing? Trying to find some other target, his eyes fell on a smaller picture mounted some seven feet above the floor, labeled ‘VI, Veronika reicht Jesus das Schweißtuch’.4
She was draped all over with this black sheet like Veronica in a Passionsspiele. Then she put a towel over my head for a moment, and when she pulled it back I could see it was soaked with blood.
Viktor found his hand raised to his own head as he recalled the dead man’s words on the tape, identifying himself with the Christ, and cursed beneath his breath: it was purely coincidence to meet that image here: a statistical anomaly, if it was even that. Psychic archetypes and proper religions be damned - where else would the idea have come from in the first place? Steeped in sadistic visions like this, it was no wonder at all that someone would imagine such things. He pushed himself to his feet and walked again towards the doors of the church, having had quite enough of this. He had evidence of his own failures to destroy. If his tail was still there, he’d take his goddamn chances.
Installed beneath the statue of Softening Evil Hearts was a stone facsimile of a scallop shell, half full of water. Comrade Polzin leaned over and spit into it before pushing his way back out into the street.
Polzin returned to the printers’ office by the most direct route he dared, but he saw no one following him this time. Mechanically, he turned down the familiar alley and wasn’t shocked out of his thoughts until he pushed at the service door and found it wouldn’t open. He drew out a key and turned the two outward-facing locks, but it was no good: the interior deadbolt was still thrown.
Polzin had left, as always, by the back door. He hadn’t locked that. So, who…?
His feeling of unease returning, he retraced his steps and took the street this time to arrive at the front door. The large shop window had - practically speaking - been papered over a long time ago by displays of the work on offer, but he could see enough between them to tell that the office was dark. There was a half-window in the door that Miss Löwe had been cleaning just this morning, and he could see clearly through that that it was also empty. The little sign at the bottom indicated that, although it was ten o’clock on a Saturday, the shop was closed.
He unlocked the door and tried to slip in quietly, jumping as the bell he’d forgotten about rang overhead.
The door leading to the back was closed, and from somewhere behind it came the familiar soft-and-heavy thunk of a body hitting a hard floor, and a yelp muffled by a fabric gag. Polzin abandoned his failed stealth attempt and ran for the door ahead, one hand reaching for the knife he kept strapped under his jacket. He burst through into the hall to find the formerly-bolted door wide open and his papers fluttering in the draft, and tumbled out into the alley, into a sudden sheet of rain, with slowing steps. Curses bubbled over his lips as he realized that sending him around front had bought the culprit all the time he’d needed to vanish.
Another noise of protest sounded behind him, and Comrade Polzin remembered that his alter-ego Herr Graner hadn’t been the only one at the shop today. He retreated into the hallway and checked first the printing room - empty - before finally advancing into his own office, knife still in hand. The radio operator Marta Löwe lay on the floor with something white crumpled into her mouth and tied there, her wrists and knees bound, and a well-developed bruise at her hairline. Polzin knelt next to her and roughly cut the gag free.
“Thank God you came back,” she said, breaking into tears. “I saw his face. He was going to burn me alive.”
Polzin gripped her tightly by the shoulder. “Who?”
“He - I don’t know. He came in as a customer last week, but - but I will have to check the records.” He helped her sit up, and she struggled to raise an arm high enough to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “What’s going on? The police wouldn’t do this. It’s this business with MÖNCH that you’ve been so damn secretive about, isn’t it?”
“Probably so,” he said grimly, his thoughts swirling. “Let’s get this picked up, Fräulein. Perhaps there’s a matter or two that you can help me with, after all.”
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This chapter represents several rough patches in a row, and I completely ran out my queue while trying to get it finished. It’s possible that Chapter 11 will be out on time, but I think it’s much more likely to either be delayed until Friday or see next week skipped altogether. We’ll see!
(Lengthy Catholic-history-note alert.)
I don’t know why, but no good German seems to feel he can say he has assisted at Holy Mass unless he’s made some noticeable contribution to the proceedings. The Teutonic soul being what it is, the Austrians eventually hit on the idea of accompanying the entire thing with devotional hymnody (Singmesse, ‘singing Mass’). By the 1930s this had evolved into the Gemeinschaftsmesse (‘community Mass’) which saw the faithful, led by a lector or cantor, chanting a very loose German translation of the prayers themselves.
In a familiar pattern, the community Mass then proceeded within about a decade from ‘forbidden’ to ‘tolerated’ to ‘required’, with a short downhill slide to ‘proof of concept’ despite half-hearted Vatican attempts to rein the rebels in. While German priests continue to be a byword for liturgical experimentation, the community Mass’ foremost pioneer was actually the Austrian Fr. (later Bp.) Fritz Zauner of Linz. Fr. Wiltgen’s comprehensive report on the political sausage-making of V.C. II, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, includes a remarkably succinct formulation from His Excellency of the liturgical theories of his place and time - which will be more familiar to the contemporary reader as the oft-cited “Spirit of Vatican Two”…but, anyway, I digress.
For nerds/art lovers: This is, more or less, the former Neulerchenfeld parish church of the Sorrowful Mother of God. Their 1733 Pietà is extant in real life, but it doesn’t include a sword; so for fictionalization purposes I’ve replaced it with one version of a widely-copied miraculous image that’s been housed at the Church of the Seven Sorrows in Linz since 1716. (Original: wikimedia)
Compare Guggenbichler’s 1702 Mater Dolorosa at Faistenau in Salzburg, my mental model for KH’s statue. (Image: wikimedia)
Also compare the Orthodox icon ‘Умягчени злых сердец’. (Photo gallery: semelstraya.narod.ru)
Guggenbichler’s 1706 Man of Sorrows is my model for the painting, and not for the faint of heart. (Image: wikimedia)
‘Veronica gives Jesus the handkerchief,’ the sixth Station of the Cross.