Free The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon

maintained, after his arrest, that he had worked for the Comintern, which was supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of the Soviet authorities.
    12 The encoded message carrying reports on Sorge’s (and his co-spies’) activities were sent regularly, although at different, previously agreed upon, times. Max Klausen was the telegraphist (and only the telegraphist). Sorge trusted his blunt ignorance and his (“almost admirable”) lack of will. The radio operated from Voukelitch’s home in the Bunka apartment complex, across from a rather malodorous canal, named Ochanomizu—”honourable tea-water“; or from Klausen’s apartment, in the Akasaka district, with the windows perennially behind curtains of drying bed sheets and underwear; or, almost never, from Sorge’s place (No. 30 Nagasaka-cho) in Azabu, an affluent part of the city. The book used for coding messages was an edition of the
Complete Shakespeare
, probably one of the Cambridge editions from the late twenties. Max Klausen: “We would send the number of the play in the book (we called it
the Book)
, then the number of the act, then the number of the scene upon which the scramble-code would be based. I had never read Shakespeare and found it quite boring, but Sorge was able to quote lengthy passages from any play. I remember once we used a passage, I forgot from which play, where there was a phrase ‘God’s spies.’ Sorge recited the whole passage (I also remember butterflies in that passage) and then said: ‘We’re God’s spies, except there’s no God,’ and we got a kick out of that and laughed like mad.”
    (The passage that Klausen alludes to is from
The History of King Lear
and goes as follows:
    “… so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,
And take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.”)
    13 On the outset of Sorge’s mission to Japan, Berzin told him: “The only thing you should trust and rely upon is the omnipresence of surveillance. There’ll be eyes everywhere, and nowhere.” Sorge was all too well aware of being watched: even on the Junker flight, he felt a gaze adhered to his body (although that may have been Mary Kinzie). Once in Japan, the following things made Sorge aware of the surveillance:
    a) he was being watched by Maritomi Mitsukado, a reporter for
Juji Shimpo
, who would always somehow find him in any bar or at any party and then ask a transparent question like: “Do you think this tyranny will last forever?” (Sorge: “What tyranny?”);
    b) his maid and laundryman were frequently questioned and tortured by police;
    c) a woman he slept with (name lost) got up in the middle of the night and went through his pockets, finding nothing;
    d) in bars and restaurants, even at the Imperial Hotel, he was constantly monitored by plainclothesmen of the Thought Police (sticking out of the careless crowd by being too focused on him);
    e) his house was searched and his suitcase examined, during his absences;
    f) most of all, it was a sense that he developed, a sense that someone’s gaze was always at the nape of his neck, like a wart.
Sorge: “When you know you’re being watched, you assume a role and play it, even when you sleep—even when you dream. Most of my life I played Richard Sorge, and I was someone else, somewhere else. The ubiquitous surveillance makes everything look differently—you see things through someone else’s eyes. Everything is more present—more real—because you see nothing alone.”
    14 Sorge’s group maintained radio contact mainly with Vladivostok (code name: “Wittenberg”) and, seldom, Moscow (code name: “Munich”).
    15 In 1924, upon a decoy invitation from the Moscow Marx-Engels Research Institute, left by the illustrious scholar Chichikov, Sorge left Germany for good and went to Moscow. Having spent some