rarely in touch with him, which, to be honest, is the way I preferred it, now that our contacts had grown cooler, less frequent, or perhaps had ended altogether: there are siblings and cousins, there are childhood friends with whom, as adults, one doesn't know what to do. Perhaps I am such a person for someone else or for some old flame. I was not persuaded, though, that I would have behaved any differently if placed in Comendador's position. I couldn't prove it, though, not having experienced it in the flesh as they say. Who knows? No one knows until it happens to them, and not even then. The same person might react in different or contradictory ways depending on the day and the degree of fear and on mood, depending on what is at stake or on the importance he gives to his image or history at each stage of his life, depending on whether he is going to tell someone or keep silent about his behaviour afterwards, be it noble or petty, base or elevated. Or depending on how he hopes it will be seen subsequently, on how it will be told or recounted by others should he die and not be able to. No one knows about the next time, even if there has been a first, what happened before imposes no obligations, nor does it condemn us to a series of repetitions, and someone who was generous and brave yesterday may turn out to be treacherous and craven tomorrow, someone who, long ago, was a coward and a traitor may today be loyal and decent, and perhaps the future has more influence and imposes more obligations on us than the past, the unknown more than the already known, the as-yet-untried more than the tried and rejected, the still-to-come more than what has already happened, the possible more than what has already been. And yet. Not that anything that happened is ever completely erased, not even the bloodstain and that stubborn ring rubbed and scrubbed away, in time an analyst would have doubtless found some microscopic trace on the wood, and in the depths of our memory too – those rarely visited depths – there is an analyst waiting with his magnifying glass or his microscope (which is why oblivion is always blind in one eye). Or even worse, sometimes that analyst exists in other people's memories to which we have no access ('Will he remember, will he realise?' we wonder uneasily. 'Will it still rankle with him or will he have forgotten? Will he recollect meeting me before or will he treat me as a complete stranger? Will he know about it? Will his father have told him, or his mother, will he recognise me, will they have told anyone else? Or will he have no idea who I am, what I am, and know nothing at all? ['Keep quiet, say nothing, not even to save yourself. Keep quiet, and save yourself.'] I'll know by the way he looks at me, but perhaps I won't, because he might want to deceive me with that look.'). There is much that both does and does not belong to me, in my own memory, to go no further. Who knew, who knows, no one knows. And probably Nin himself did not know that he would resist to the grave, when his political neighbours tortured him in the language he had learned and which he had served so well. There, right there, near my own city, Madrid, where I no longer live. There, in a cellar or in a barracks or a prison, in a hotel or a house in Alcala de Henares. There, in the Russian colony, in the town where Cervantes was born.
And there was Nin in Fleming's novel, quite near the beginning, it didn't take me long to find him, Wheeler had marked the paragraph as he had in the
The paragraph came towards the end of Chapter 7, entitled 'The Wizard of Ice', which, in Spanish, would be an untranslatable pun on The Wizard of Oz. 'Of course', I read in that paragraph:
Rosa Klebb had a strong will to survive, or she would not have become one of the most powerful women in the State, and certainly the most feared. Her rise, Kronsteen remembered, had begun with the Spanish Civil War. Then, as a double agent inside POUM – that is, working for the OGPU in Moscow as well as for Communist Intelligence in Spain – she had been the right hand, and some sort of a mistress, they said, of her chief, the famous Andreas Nin. She had worked with him from 1935-37. Then, on the orders of Moscow, he was murdered and, it was rumoured, murdered by her. Whether this was true or not, from then on she had progressed slowly but straight up the ladder of power, surviving setbacks, surviving wars, surviving, because she forged no allegiances and joined no factions, all the purges, until, in 1953, with the death of Beria, the bloodstained hands grasped the rung, so few from the very top, that was Head of the Operations Department of SMERSH.
While I was at it, I decided I might as well type it out. I had seen OGPU mentioned in other books, and knew that it was the same as the NKVD or, indeed, as the later KGB, that is, the Soviet Secret Service. Beria was, of course, the notorious Lavrenti Beria, Commissar of Internal Affairs, chief of the secret police for many years, and, up until Stalin's death, Stalin's most astute and ruthless instrument in the organisation of plots, liquidations, purges, settlings of scores, forced recruitment, repression, blackmail, smear and terror campaigns, interrogations, torture and, needless to say, espionage. As for SMERSH, an acronym I did not know, Fleming explained in an author's note signed by him, that:
SMERSH – a contraction of Smiert Spionam – Death to Spies – exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet government. At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikov was its chief. My description of his appearance is correct. Today the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them – at No. 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow…
I had a quick look at Chapter 4, which, under the tide 'The Moguls of Death', opened with the same or similar facts:
SMERSH is the official murder organization of the Soviet government. It operates both at home and abroad and, in 1955, it employed a total of 40,000 men and women. SMERSH is a contraction of 'Smiert Spionam', which means 'Death to Spies'. It is a name used only among its staff and among Soviet officials. No sane member of the public would dream of allowing the word to pass his lips.
When pedestrians walked past No. 13 of the wide, dull street in question, the narrator went on, they would keep their eyes on the ground and the hairs would prick on the back of their neck or, if they remembered in time and could do so inconspicuously, they would cross the street before they reached the ominous, inelegant, ugly building. But who knows, and I had no idea where to look in order to check if SMERSH really had or hadn't existed or if the whole thing – starting with that author's note – was a novelist's trick to support and confirm a false truth.
I returned to Rosa Klebb and Chapter 7. The truth is that, until then, I had never read a single line by Ian Fleming, but like nearly everyone else, I had seen the early Bond movies. In the cinematographic version, the character was, I seemed to remember, an older woman with short, straight, red hair, who was utterly lacking in charm or scruples, and who, in the end, confronted Connery in a way that proved unforgettable to the boy I must have been when I saw
