Free Young Philby by Robert Littell

First went the legs and backs of chairs. We burned the curtain rods, the drawers in the dressers, then the dressers themselves, even the wooden cooking spoons. We burned the frames of my grandfather’s paintings I’d rolled up and pawned to raise money for German refugees flooding into Vienna after the Reichstag fire. We burned the frames of the two small charcoal designs I’d bought in Paris—I would have pawned these, too, but they were signed by someone the pawnbroker never heard of named Modigliani and had no value.
    Sonja appeared late one night, her face stained with dirt, her eyelids swollen from unshed tears. Because of the cold, she never removed her overcoat so the boys didn’t get to see if she was still wearing her low-cut blouse. Pity. It might have warmed them a bit. When I told her how Kim and me, we’d watched the attack on the barricades from the roof, she said the comrade I’d seen throwing a can of kerosene at a tank wasn’t Dietrich, the way I thought. Poor Dietrich, she said, along with the young Sergius, who never stopped taunting his executioners, had been dragged from a coal bin and taken to a city park and shot into a newly dug trench by a firing squad made up of Fascist women. When I asked how she knew that, she smiled a bizarre smile and said, “Dietrich came to me in a dream and told me.”
    Late one night a week or so after the February events, Kim came to me in a dream—so I thought until I felt his breath in my hair. I couldn’t see his face but I could feel the tension in his body. We could still hear sporadic rifle fire in the city and I supposed he was going to say something about being unable to sleep because of it. “We must leave” is what he said.
    “Leave the apartment?”
    “Leave the apartment. Leave Vienna. Leave Austria.”
    “With your British passport, you could leave. I would never make it past the frontier.”
    “We’ll get you a British p-passport.”
    “How?”
    “Wives of British citizens are given British p-passports. I stopped by the embassy this afternoon to verify this.”
    “We’re not married.”
    “Things are calming down in Vienna. Shops, offices are starting to open for b-business. So is the town hall. I went there after I went to the embassy. I spoke to the clerk who does marriages. I slipped him five pounds, I said I would give him another fiver when he performed the ceremony. He said he c-can marry us in three minutes—matter of signing and stamping a piece of p-paper. We could be there when they open for business at eight. We could be at the embassy by eight-thirty. With a signed and stamped certificate of m-marriage, we could get you a British p-passport and be on the way to Italy by nine.”
    When I didn’t immediately say anything, he said, “Right. Someone has just suggested m-marriage. You could have the d-decency to react.”
    “What about the professor and the others?”
    “They have a better chance of surviving if you’re not here when the police break in the door.”
    “I am not against marrying you, Kim, but I prefer to stick it out in Vienna.”
    “You can’t, Litzi. You were arrested once so they know you’re a Communist. They may even know you give reports to a woman with a man’s name who doesn’t deliver flowers in winter. Your name will be on lists. It’s only a matter of time b-before they come around looking for you. On top of that you’re Jewish. Everybody knows Hitler intends to annex Austria. Anschluss is only a question of time. He wants to get his pound of flesh from the Jews who refused to let him study in the Vienna Art Academy. Ah, if only they’d admitted him, he might be an artist starving in a garret in Vienna instead of Chancellor of Germany in B-Berlin. Litzi, if Dollfuss doesn’t kill you for being a Communist, Hitler will kill you for being Jewish.”
    In the darkness, Kim kissed me. I distinctly recall his lips were not trembling. Mine were. He had taken charge of his life and mine. We were