X. FIELD BEDS

Gramsci’s skin is as pale as ash, his teeth are loose, his stomach revolts against everything they offer him. His convalescence, which had been going so well in Silver Wood, has come to a halt, Reverend has to admit. After a short-lived improvement—how hopeful they were!—it has now gone in the other direction. The doctor demands Gramsci’s diet be checked again, a nurse hurries through the halls in order to rap the female cooks’ fingers but when she comes back it is clear that, as far as Silver Wood’s kitchen is concerned, no mistakes have been made. According to the current state of science, it should be going better; if anything, however, science is just another bourgeois relic and those who trust in it are fools.

Gramsci complains of memory loss. He has barely finished reading about the fall of Milan when he has to start over. Milan falls again. Gramsci’s tics have become so strong that new entries to Silver Wood take off in fright. For the last few days, he has been suffering panic attacks in the middle of the day. In Italy, the black shirts are marching on Rome, fifty thousand men have come to topple the government and make their vision of a dictatorial one-party state a reality, they are camping out on overflowing fields. Mussolini travels with the night train from Milan and is named prime minister by the king.

Eugenia had said it so casually, as if she were telling him that Reverend would show up an hour later the next day: if Giulia is in Moscow on the weekend, and she most likely will be, she’ll come for a visit. Sunday. If she’s in Moscow. But who said she was coming to Moscow? There are so many reasons to postpone a trip. On every street corner the Revolution continues to crumble and has to be secured by faithful comrades.

Gramsci is lying in bed, exhausted, looking out the window onto the pale green paths disappearing into the distance. An old couple, chronic gastritis sufferers, walk by arm-in-arm. Earlier he’d been talking with Eugenia about Trotsky, about how heavy the palm fronds in the Villa Torlonia will be when summer pulls at the trees with all its weight, but now Rome has disappeared and Trotsky is gone. It’s Monday already. He waits for the knock at his door. Listens to the silence. Perhaps she did not come after all, perhaps she wasn’t interested in going to Moscow on the weekend. But he knows that if he leaves his room, that’s the very moment she’ll knock. If he goes for even a thirty-minute walk through the park, they’ll miss each other. And so he doesn’t risk it. When the knock finally comes, it is only Reverend.

 

Gramsci doesn’t dare go to bed at night, sleep evades him for a long time, and, when at some point it does arrive, only a thin, twilit dream envelops him, one in which all the day’s anxieties repeat themselves. He should concentrate on his dietary mealtimes, make them the temporary centre of his life, Reverend orders him. ‘And less reading of the newspaper!’

‘Didn’t I tell them?’ Gramsci whispers to the retinue from his sickbed. ‘Didn’t I always tell the comrades that the fascists were no normal bourgeois party? That the tyrant did not have one face and three names—Turati, Don Sturzo, Mussolini—but one name only, Mussolini, and, in any event, two godfathers?’

‘Could be,’ Reverend says calmly, ‘but here and now we’re concerned with recuperating and not the goings-on of the Comintern’s session hall. You concentrate on your mealtimes, Comrade Gramsci.’

He wants to reply but Reverend declares the visit over.

‘Mealtimes, Comrade, mealtimes.’

Should they go through the letters the patient receives from Italy and withhold the worst ones? the head physician asks his assistant in a whisper.

‘That would be like attempting to constrain the Revolution of the Proletariat just because of a few idiots!’

‘Most of the time there are a great number of idiots. That aside, I would indeed be happy if our Revolution spared us from them,’ he replies and directs his team out. Gramsci hears the entourage tramp down the hall, chitchat and chirping out in the corridor, a door opening, then quiet. He moves over to the small table they’ve allowed him to work.

‘Did you come to Moscow on Sunday, as you had announced?’ he writes. ‘You weren’t in Moscow at all, no? Otherwise, you certainly would have visited me, at least for a moment. Will you be coming soon? Will I see you again?’

He quickly folds the piece of paper. Quickly, before he reconsiders. Folds it a second time before he begins to feel ashamed of his, what? Lack of discipline. It must be a lack of discipline, for it is something with which he is unfamiliar. Of course Giulia won’t answer him, how could he believe otherwise? There’s no reason for her to, and even if she wanted to, he’d just be a curious insect she’d paste into her revolutionary herbarium and label with an informative note. You study beetles, you don’t touch them. You deal with beetles carefully.

He sticks the letter into an envelope, but knows it could always not arrive. The Revolution hasn’t made the post any more reliable. In fact, somewhere between here and Ivanovo, the letter could easily fall prey to the whims of a postman suddenly asking himself what this all had to do with him: this country, this time, this recently ended war. Russia was big enough to get by without him—a postman in a suburb of Moscow—and he lets the mail pouch fall into a ditch at the side of the road, right where four years ago he saw a young boy fall, his forehead burst open, as stone-cold dead as those love letters now lying there that will never arrive anywhere and thanks to which perhaps some relationships will come to an end, but the postman doesn’t care any more, he walks away, and who could blame him?

That’s how it will go, Gramsci thinks as he seals the envelope. Who really believed in a quickly concluded revolution? The Revolution is continual, and the disorder and chaos in people’s heads will remain a constant too. One could consider the loss of a few love letters good luck.

 

And then she’s simply out in front of his door. Gramsci is bent over his daily correspondence. A statement to Zinoviev, a letter from Bordiga, reports about the situation in Rome: comrades are being hauled out of their offices and assaulted in the middle of the street. The knocking continues and he only raises his head belatedly, neither yells Come in! or makes his arduous way across the room to open up himself. The door opens. And there she is. And he’s here. Trapped.

To leave the room he’d have to squeeze past her. Just stay calm. He can feel that he’s about to start trembling, something will twitch, his face, his hand, he tries at least to quiet his mind, he thinks about Sorel’s historical bloc which he imagines to be like the connection between skin and bone, but even if one doesn’t fall in love with a woman because of the shape of her skeleton, it still contributes to the harmony of her appearance. The way her skin is draped over it. To sexual excitement.

He stares at her and doesn’t even know if she’s received his letter. And if she has read it, what she thinks about it. Whether she’s comfortable with him writing, perhaps she just wants to tell him that he can refrain from doing so. Then she should say so, so that it’s out, this leaden moment finally done and over with.

Although he hasn’t invited her in, she walks across the room as if it were normal. Not a word about the letter. Her soft gait. At the same time she doesn’t have any reason to be in his room; she walks here, then there. Gramsci is beside himself, he wants to throw her out. What are you thinking, Comrade, don’t you have anything better to do than keep the executive committee from working?

And then she finally sits on a stool which is right up against the window—and how much closer he is now to her legs, her thighs—then gets back up, stays standing close to him.

‘They’ve raided the newspapers,’ he says flatly.

‘What newspapers? What are you talking about?’

‘In Italy. The democratic newspapers. Mussolini’s squadristi have barged into the editorial offices and smashed everything to bits. And they are beginning to detain communists. They have nothing on our comrades, but they are arresting them and dragging them off the streets.’

‘They won’t manage to do that.’

‘The fascists are going to win. In Italy, they’re going to win,’ Gramsci says.

‘Don’t speak like that.’

‘But I’m just telling you how it is.’

‘Then it’d be better you not speak at all.’

Her hand seems to brush his shoulder in passing, but what does ‘in passing’ mean at moments like these? The tiniest gesture can hurl the whole story in another direction. Prudence. He cannot handle it here any more. He jumps up too quickly; Giulia observes him in astonishment.

‘We’re going for a walk.’

‘If you say so, Comrade.’

And she trails behind him at an appropriate distance.

Outside, they can already smell the coming fog. Every day is cooler now, autumn is approaching, soon the dried leaves will be rattling in the treetops, will turn brown and fall.

‘You wrote me,’ Giulia remarks in her withdrawn voice.

‘I did not mean to inconvenience you.’

‘It made me happy.’

‘I did not mean to inconvenience you,’ Gramsci repeats.

‘You are odd,’ Giulia says and laughs. ‘But look at the birches. You can never be sure if the leaves are green or white, a quick gust and everything changes, that’s what I like so much.’

‘Your sister cannot stand birch trees.’

‘And you believe her? My sister is not afraid of the white birch, but the brigades of the White Army. Haven’t you noticed?’

Gramsci tears off a branch, extends it to Giulia—a timid attempt to tease her perhaps? She waggles a finger at him, ‘Please, now is not the time.’

‘Do you always listen to what your sister has to say?’

‘How so? What did I do?’

‘You turned towards her whenever you spoke. As if she had to nod her head in approval.’

‘You just imagined that.’

‘I simply observed you closely.’

‘No, it’s just that . . . Sometimes I simply don’t understand what’s happening around us any longer. Here . . . in Europe . . . naturally, the Revolution will be victorious, but then again . . .’

‘You should not confuse historical development with a law of nature,’ Gramsci responds with a laugh.

‘But isn’t it so? Isn’t this crisis inevitable?’

‘I do not believe in the inevitable,’ he replies, ‘and I don’t want to. It would mean that we are superfluous.’

‘Do you believe that women should wage war?’

‘Do you believe that any one should wage war? Or would you rather be on the side of the pacifists?’

‘There aren’t any pacifists any more. The pacifists had the wrong opinion in this country, and that will not be tolerated.’ Giulia takes the branch out of Gramsci’s hand. ‘Eugenia doesn’t talk about the Civil War. But the two bearded men upstairs on the second floor, they talk about the White Army dead and those nights when every sound can mean an attack. If I really think about it,’ Giulia says, tilting back her head, ‘my sister’s right. The white trunks are horrific, and the green leaves turning over every second too, suddenly white, the whole fickle populace, and in the end they’ll stab us in the back as well.’

‘Indeed, we have to win the minds of the people. If you simply tell them how to live, they’ll turn against us.’

A root which neither of them see causes Giulia to stumble, Gramsci rushes forward, grabs her arm, their first vigorous, if unplanned, contact—but who wants planned contact? It has to be sudden, and this contact would have been even more vigorous had Giulia not quickly regained her balance. They look at each other bemusedly, Gramsci’s hand still on her forearm. They are standing close to each other, a silence has come between them and it’s growing longer and more embarrassing and more urgent. How do you get out of this? Under normal circumstances by now—but everything speaks against normal circumstances: the place, the time, those involved, so enough with those normal circumstances which would potentially lead to a kiss introduced by a casual movement, but then all of a sudden, with hidden determination, their lips meet.

Just don’t lose control! This is Comrade Antonio Gramsci, a man in a weak state, in body as well as mind. And next to him stands Giulia Schucht, no less fragile. In order to recover from this shock, they have to calm down in an arbour, in that dubious corner of the premises where the bushes smell like musty fruit because that is where the gardener dumps whatever is inedible. Giulia sits far enough from Gramsci so that, if someone comes by, they can move further away from each other. They make their way back to Tolstoy, to Lenin and the necessary united front, they have to team up with the socialists in order to make headway against the fascists, anything else would be an illusion, and Giulia speaks about the festering and bubbling in Italy, about King Vittorio Emmanuele III and how he’s had himself photographed next to the socialists. ‘Have you seen the photos?’

Giulia glows when she speaks; for him, it’s as if it’s the first time anyone has spoken to him, not only with him, and he knows that he must be careful even if he no longer wants to be careful. The stomachs of people who have long been hungry grow smaller and then engulfed by the superfluous acids. When they wolf down anything they can get their hands on, it is easy for the stomach wall to tear, and then, right as the first feeling of being full has set in, they begin to bleed. Their last feeling will still be hunger.

The two say goodbye to each other in the corridor, in the dark, at this hour the lights have been turned off. Behind one of the doors Patient Genovyev is snoring, a short while ago he shaved off his moustache but that did not help against his saw-like sleep. Giulia’s fingers are cold as she gives Gramsci her hand in farewell. Her chin briefly at his cheek. Then her tripping along through Genovyev’s sleep.

Gramsci’s bed: 90 x 180 centimetres. Sheet cold as a washcloth. He thinks about how, back in her room, Giulia must be undoing the lacing of her skirt, thinks about her loosening the last loop of the labyrinth of lace and simply sliding down her sleeve, how she lets her shoulder free, the obscure movement below her collarbone.

Gramsci hears a dripping sound from one of the corners of his room; perhaps it’s the little heating stove. He begins to get undressed, lays his jacket over the stool, undoes his shirt collar and lays it on top. Somehow one will get to sleep. Will get up tomorrow. Alone. The dripping grows louder, it’s no longer coming from the heater in the corner where all of a sudden it’s eerily still but from the hall. His first thought is to go over to the stove and check if everything is fine. He opens the door instead.

A strip of light is falling across Giulia’s throat, she is standing in the hall before his door, her face in shadow; for anyone but Gramsci she’d be unrecognizable.

‘They’ve put in field beds,’ she says.

‘Field beds,’ Gramsci repeats and holds his unbuttoned shirt together. Beneath his hand he can feel the mound of his chest, the hill of gristle.

‘Three of them and they’re already asleep,’ Giulia says. ‘On my bed too. I cannot wake them, it’s much too late.’

Down below, near his navel, the fabric is wide open.

Giulia looks past him, casts a glance at his bed and then quickly lowers her eyes. Ninety centimetres for two, movement impossible, sleep precluded and just don’t think about touch. What if he has another one of his fits? How easy it was to talk with him about Tolstoy and syndicalism. And now—she has already taken a step into his room.

‘I don’t have a second blanket,’ it occurs to him.

‘It’s too warm for me as it is,’ she replies, but of course she’s lying, of course he’ll have to give her the blanket. She comes even closer. That’s her skin, that’s her smell, that’s her hair, cool to the touch like the bark of a sycamore tree. She makes him feel shy, standing here in front of him as she is, in the middle of the night.

‘You can’t even keep your bed free?’ he asks. He only wants her to go. He has no idea what to do with her. He has no idea how he is supposed to act.

‘I did . . .’ she says and stops, doesn’t move, stares at the floor. If only it was Terracini in front of him. Gramsci has to go to sleep or in the morning he’ll be tired when he sits down at his desk, he’ll be shaky and unfocused, a foggy monster. That he cannot allow, he cannot allow any of this.

‘Let’s go and lie down,’ she says quietly.

‘This is ludicrous!’ he cries, his final attempt to chase her out. To once more have the upper hand in the empty room. ‘You’re just a spoilt little daughter of the bourgeoisie.’ Now he is growing loud, his neighbours no doubt awake. ‘Oh, the poor elite that can’t do without a single night’s sleep.’

‘Let’s just go and lie down,’ she repeats.

They do not get undressed in front of each other, they just slip off their shoes, and even to do that they turn away from one another. Ninety centimetres, austerely divided in two. Which yields less than 40 centimetres, for neither of them dares to take the centre. For six hours, their breathing is shallow and flat.