7

Islington, February 1945. Eileen had somehow managed to find them a permanent flat to replace the one the doodlebug had wrecked. It was just as he liked it – up high, in the roof, where one could at least put out incendiaries – but as others told him, it was vacant precisely because it was in the roof, and therefore a death-trap in a raid. On the way downstairs, through a partly open door he heard his neighbour, a broken-down drudge of just thirty, whose husband had disappeared into some prisoner-of-war camp in the Far East, hard at work at the kitchen sink he last week had helped her unblock. His lungs weren’t feeling strong. Thank God I’m going down instead of up, he thought.

He reached the ground floor, opened the door and let in a swirl of chilling, late winter air that disturbed the dusty entrance parlour and set his chest off. He wrapped his scarf tighter and did up the top buttons of his greatcoat, which covered the captain’s uniform he was wearing. He had taken up Astor’s offer to become a war correspondent and was on his way to the airport and Paris. It was an indulgence, he knew. The book! He should have been getting on with the book, but how often did a writer get a chance to see the front? Anyway, to see totalitarianism close up, to find out what it was really like – that was the thing.

He threw his duffel bag over his shoulder and tramped around Canonbury Square, its Georgian terraces once smart but now the borderlands of the East End. The district hadn’t had an easy war – everywhere the pavements and walls were cracked, some held up by large wooden beams, and possibly a quarter of the windows in the street were smashed and boarded up. He walked past Kopp’s flat. Kopp had somehow found his way out of both communist and fascist gaols, ending up uncomfortably – and suspiciously, he sometimes thought – close to Eileen. A moment later he was into the prole quarter of Upper Street.

Instantly he rounded the corner the street was in upheaval, with people sprinting for cover. He heard a curious double crack, followed by a sudden rushing sound. ‘Gas pipe, bang overhead,’ said a passing workman in filthy overalls, who grabbed his arm and pulled him into a doorway. Immediately there was a wallop, unbelievably loud, which shook the pavement and the remaining windows of the shopfront, even though the rising column of smoke and debris suggested it had landed a mile or more away. ‘Gas pipe’ was the name Londoners had given to the Germans’ new and more deadly rocket bomb, officially known as the V-2.

‘Blimey, what’s the next war going to be like?’ the man said.

Orwell thanked him, noticing how, after hearing his voice, the man seemed to regard him as a sort of exotic species, not often sighted in this part of London. He walked off and turned south towards the Angel, marvelling at how quickly people resumed their normal activities, although not a suburb away some poor souls had likely just been wiped out.

*

Paris, March 1945. It was the lonely hour of three p.m. in Closerie des Lilas. He looked around the near-empty room. The afternoon sun was warming him feebly through the front window. It was the same yellow light he recalled here from the ’twenties.

Back then, the café still had some of the glamour and disreputability of its glory days, when the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald would gather each afternoon to write and to drink themselves into oblivion and insanity. Even by 1929 such men had begun to seem relics, the last great figures from a time before literature had been conscripted into political struggles. It was a more innocent world, he mused, with a buoyant freedom that you could feel in your belly – a spirit almost impossible to conjure up now. Today there were no writers in the café, just a group of chess players silently engaged in battle, the waiter quickly refilling their glasses when they were empty.

He looked up at the clock. In wartime, no one ever managed to arrive on time. The waiter was watching him. ‘Encore du café, s’il vous plait,’ he said.

As he waited for his coffee, he reached into the pocket of his greatcoat and absentmindedly fingered the loaded pistol – a Colt .32 – which Hemingway, whom he had interviewed the previous day, had chosen for him from the armoury of weapons he kept in his suite at the Ritz. With the Nazis gone, rumour had it, Stalin’s French agents were at large, assassinating the party’s opponents whenever an opportunity presented. Suspected Trotskyists like him were still the enemy. He kept his right hand on the gun. One could never be too certain, especially in a café like this, which seemed for some reason the sort of place they would shoot you. A figure approached and he gripped the gun tighter.

‘Monsieur Orwell.’ It was a man perhaps half a dozen years older than himself, tall and thin, with thick blond hair brushed back from a noticeably care-worn face. His faded grey suit, along with his pale features, gave him a ghostly appearance. ‘Józef Czapski.’ The man gave a slight bow.

‘Monsieur Czapski. Delighted.’ They conversed in French.

‘Koestler tells me you are the one Englishman who can help tell the truth about Poland. He sent me your articles from Tribune.’

The waiter came over and took Czapski’s order, Orwell noticing the hint of contempt on the man’s face on hearing a Polish accent.

Czapski outlined his story. A soldier in one of the elite Polish regiments, he had been taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939, and held first at a prisoner-of-war camp in a place called Starobilsk, but subsequently moved on to another at Gryazovets.

‘You have lived in a Soviet concentration camp?’ Orwell desperately wanted to know what it was like.

‘For two years, yes.’ When the German invasion of the Soviet Union began in 1941, Czapski continued, he had been freed and sent to find eight thousand officer comrades, who were to be the nucleus of a new anti-Nazi fighting force. ‘I found them eventually: shot in the back of the head and dumped in a mass grave outside the village of Katyn. The graves of even greater numbers of civilians – bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, the educated – are now being discovered in other places.’

‘The Soviet newsreels said they were shot by the Germans.’

‘Just as the German ones said they were shot by the Soviets.’

The truth, it seemed, depended on whose newsreel cameras were passing over the mass graves at any given time.

‘They were shot in the back of the head,’ Czapski said, as if to settle the matter. ‘The Germans favour less personal methods.’

He remembered what Arthur Koestler had told him: the NKVD always shot their victims in the back of the head. So it was true. They really did live in an age when such things were possible – the leadership of a whole nation exterminated in the name of human equality and brotherhood. ‘Do you have evidence?’

‘Evidence? That depends what you mean. You won’t find a single document in the whole of Poland or the Soviet Union to prove anything. It has all been destroyed or hidden or rewritten.’

‘A cover-up.’

‘There is a giant hole in the world where the Soviets bury the truth. One day it will be uncovered, but for now it is sufficient to know that the dead don’t speak.’

‘I was in Barcelona.’

‘Koestler told me. It’s one of the reasons I knew I could trust you with this.’ Czapski reached into his shabby briefcase. ‘You asked for evidence. Here it is.’ He handed over a book written in French. ‘Just small traces of the truth; scattered facts that have survived. I need you to help me get it published in England and America.’

It was more a pamphlet than a book, thin and poorly printed. The glue holding the pages together had long ago dried up and crumbled away, though enough of the spine remained for him to see the book’s title: Souvenirs de Starobielsk. He scanned it while Czapski talked. Thumbing through dates, lists and eyewitness accounts of terrible atrocities, he recognised immediately its supreme importance. The survival of inconvenient facts meant everything.

‘I will do all I can.’

They talked for another hour, then Czapski prepared to leave.

‘One more thing, Monsieur Czapski.’

‘Anything.’

‘You met officials in Moscow. Did you ever meet Stalin?’

At the mention of the name, Czapski flinched.

‘No.’

‘A pity. Everyone else I know who has met him has turned out to be a fool.’

‘I will tell you, though, without him in 1941, the Germans would have taken Moscow. I’m certain of it.’

‘A generous admission.’

‘It is the truth. That is enough.’

They shook hands and Czapski left. Orwell observed him as he walked out onto the street and merged into the crowd. It was a strange sensation, like watching a visitor from the grave, the bearer of a memory they had forgotten to destroy.

*

Hotel Scribe, Paris, 30 March. He was lying on his bed, smoking idly, trying to recall for his dispatches the events of the past week. He had pursued totalitarianism beyond the Rhine, into the lair of the fascist beast, where he had collapsed while artillery bombarded a village in which a detachment of the SS was making a suicidal stand. Feverish, sweating, gasping for breath, coughing blood, he had reached a makeshift military hospital in the rubble of Cologne – where the doctors once again diagnosed bronchitis – and then made his way back to Paris.

The halting, uncomfortable journey had reminded him of something from his childhood, and now he remembered what: the rout of mankind from The War of the Worlds. From the window of the truck in which he had cadged a lift, he had seen millions of people on the move: ragged displaced persons seeking revenge on their tormentors; miserably dressed prisoners of war – dirty, bearded, exhausted, gathered into vast barbed-wire holding pens, from which, he presumed, many would eventually be chosen and submerged in the great slave labour camps in the east. Here and there he saw groupings of graves where Jews and Russian prisoners had dropped on their death marches. In villages the locals would turn away from the pitiful refugees; some would jeer and spit. Everywhere were roadblocks and traffic jams and rubble-strewn roads littered with burnt-out tanks and vehicles; he surmised there wasn’t a bridge left standing between the Rhine and the Marne, and hardly a town or city between Stalingrad and Brussels whose centre hadn’t been pounded into a pile of dust. London, he could now see, had got off lightly. It occurred to him that if he had predicted in 1925 that peaceful and civilised Europe would be laid to waste like this – to become a set of ruins governed by resentment, distrust and revenge – he would likely have been labelled a lunatic.

On reaching the Hotel Scribe, he had taken out his typewriter to record his dispatch for Astor. ‘To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation,’ he typed. For the first time, he was no longer certain he would live to see the world rebuilt. And even if it was rebuilt, maybe it would all happen again, people’s memories being so short.

He had stopped coughing blood, but the fever had not subsided. His illness, seemingly defeated four years earlier, was massing, once again, for an assault. He pulled from his rucksack the document he had prepared before leaving England, ‘Notes for My Literary Executor’, against the possibility that a fascist sniper wouldn’t miss him a second time. But now he knew the real enemy was somewhere inside himself. He made a handful of corrections, then threw the pages down. It was a poor list of books to be remembered by, especially as it wouldn’t be added to unless Warburg could find some paper for Animal Farm.

Animal Farm! While in Europe, he’d almost forgotten about the little book, so long was it taking to get published. The thought of it bucked him up. After years of trying, he had finally found the style he wanted – for the first time he had managed to write about politics without sacrificing his artistic purpose. It was bound to succeed. He couldn’t allow himself to die now, with success so close.

He forced himself over to the sink, counted out eight M&B tablets (he would blitz the bacteria into submission!) and washed them down with a glass of water, refusing to look in the mirror. As he stood, shakily, there was a knock on the door. He opened it, holding onto the lip of the sink to be safe, to find the bellboy, who passed over a tarnished plate containing a telegram. It was from the Observer – no doubt Ivor Brown, the editor, wondering what had become of his dispatches.

He opened the telegram carefully, putting the envelope aside to reuse. It was from Brown, but not about work. In his feeble condition, he had to read it three times to be sure he comprehended its simple but terrible message: EILEEN IS DEAD.

That night he drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. His mind worked its way through the single fact he had got from the short telegram: she had died on the operating table, probably of a heart attack in reaction to anaesthetic. She had been just thirty-nine. As he tossed and turned in the stuffy room, he saw Eileen, lying on a trolley bed, rolling down a hospital corridor a mile long, smiling peacefully at him. Then she was trapped in a sinking ship, slipping deeper under the green water, looking up at him, but he was doing nothing to help her. She had no reproach in her eyes, but they both knew she was down there because he was up here …

*

It took him two days to get to Newcastle and the funeral, and now, back in Islington, having dropped Ricky off to be looked after by the Kopps, he turned, finally, to the letters Gwen had collected from Eileen’s hospital room.

‘Dearest, your letter came this morning … I am typing in the garden. Isn’t that wonderful? Richard is sitting up in his new pram, naked from the nappy down, talking to a doll. I have bought him a playpen and a high chair and a truck too, the latter for an appalling amount of money. I had to forget the price quickly but I think it’s important he should have one …’

He began to cry, but then steeled himself and read on. Facing the truth – one had to do it, always.

‘Gwen rang up the surgeon Harvey Evers and they want me to go in for this operation at once. You see, they’ve found a grwoth (no one could object to a “grwoth”, could they?). This is a bit difficult. It’s going to cost a terrible lot of money. What worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the expense, but this thing will take a longish time to kill me if left alone, costing money all the time.’

The only thought he could rouse to stop himself breaking down completely was that she had been oblivious to what lay ahead.

‘You may never get this letter, but there’s something I want to impress on you, which I have expressed to you before. Please stop living the “literary life” and become a writer once more. This will mean getting out of London. From my point of view, I would infinitely rather live in the country on £200 a year than in London on any money at all. Everything would be better for Richard too, so you need have no conflicts about it. To this end, I have been in contact with Astor’s man on Jura, about the empty farmhouse, Barnhill. He tells me it is quite grand, with five bedrooms and all else we need in order to live there twelve months of the year …’

He finished the letter, but at the end of the packet found another, brief and handwritten.

‘Dearest, I’m just going to have the operation, already enema’d, injected (with morphia in the right arm which is a nuisance), cleaned & packed up like a precious image in cotton wool and bandages. When it’s over I’ll add a note to this and get it off quickly. This is a nice room – ground floor so one can see the garden. Not much in it except daffodils & I think arabis, but a nice little lawn. My bed isn’t next to the window, but it faces the right way. I can also see the fire and the clock …’

He turned over the page, looking for more. Two tears trickled down the sides of his nose. He remembered what they had said to each other in Barcelona: to remain true to each other, to stay human in spite of everything, that was all that mattered.

Stop living the literary life and become a writer once more. He wiped his tears on a handkerchief, folded her letters and placed them back into the envelope.

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, pushing aside a mass of typed notes to find the old chocolate box. Inside it, beneath the glass paperweight, were the yellowed clippings from the late 1930s, and underneath them, two hardback notebooks. The first was the old keepsake book he had used as a diary; he set it aside. The second, with its maroon cover – the one he had purchased two years ago, just before he’d had the idea for Animal Farm – was the one he was after. He flicked through the pages until he came to the title The Last Man in Europe.