Free Europe Central by William Vollmann Page B

for them on the platform. He led them into one of our black, flat-topped Russian automobiles whose chests sloped doubly down over the wheels, like the clasped mandibles of praying mantises; Karl helped her in, and although the car proceeded very slowly, on account of the ice, before they knew it, they found themselves exactly where they were supposed to be. The luggage got sent on to the hotel.
    Karl had been hoping to stretch his legs; he’d been looking forward to a promenade on the Tverskaia, but was told that there wasn’t time, on account of the delay with the train. He looked sadly across the street into the window of a pastry-shop. Now here stood the curator, shivering and waiting. Here stood the pretty interpreter, who had long dark hair. The man in raspberry-colored boots, who seemed much taken with some private joke, waved goodbye and rode away with the driver. Then Käthe and Karl had to check their overcoats. Käthe was feeling a bit dizzy; she didn’t know quite why; Karl had to help her out of her coat. She had longed so much to be here, and now she hardly even felt curious. And she worried about doing something wrong, of leaving something important in her coat pocket, or somehow offending these Russians although they seemed so jolly—this interpreter, for instance, who must be nervous, for she kept trying so fervently to be welcoming that Käthe couldn’t think. The interpreter’s name might have been Elena; Käthe couldn’t remember anything the way she used to. Karl would certainly remember it, but how could she ask him when the girl stood right here? Never mind. The curator was twittering and beckoning. This husband who used to bring her red roses in bed, who wept when he saw her completed work, and who used to examine Peter in the consulting room, then share with her his every worry about the boy’s fragility, what a fine man he was! He murmured sweetly in her ear: I’m completely proud of you, Käthe.—She took his hand.
    On the walls of the exhibition hall, her grief was already in place, framed and captioned: woodcuts in the main gallery, lithographs on the left, important etchings on the right, drawings in the other gallery; this was perhaps not exactly the way she would have done it, but the nervously ecstatic curator, who kept biting her nails, gazed on her so worshipfully that she had to express total satisfaction with the organization, selection and illumination of Käthe Kollwitz’s uncountable roundeyed, upgazing children, pallid figures leaning on their hands, pale and grimy women whose faces were lit by exploitation’s arc lamp. They were all real people whose tragedies were tied as much to life itself as to anything else: Grete, whose insanity had a strong sexual component and who at thirty was married and remained a virgin; Anna, who’d experienced bleeding and pain from constant sexual intercourse and who had considered suicide; that old Proletariarfrau who’d stood grim and angry outside the morgue after those two hundred and forty-four Communists were shot. In the midst of other agony-angled, grief-distorted compositions, her woodcuts loomed largest, with their gaunt pseudo-realism.
    And here was an enlarged photoportrait of her from long ago. In her twenties she had strangely resembled Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who as it happened was only two years younger than she. Both women had the same intense eyes, the same lips clenched as if to hide their fullness. Käthe stared at her youthful self for a long time. For some reason, she knew not why, she dared not look at Karl.
    They introduced her to the Soviet people, explaining: Her family was involved in the workers’ movement. So densely was the hall ornamented with her life’s work, and in such a loving fashion did all these Russians regard her, that she hardly knew who she was. They photographed her seated in the center of a gathering of our Soviet artists, her ancient eyelids drooping, young women leaning lovingly