Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

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 Doble Diario and in other books, a meticulous, attentive and, at the same time, impulsive reader, he wrote mocking interjections in the margins, or scornful notes to the author (he never let a piece of false reasoning pass, or a lie or ignorance or sheer stupidity, issuing terse, emphatic judgements such as 'Silly' or 'Foolish'), or, now and then, enthusiastic ones, as well as comments intended merely as reminders to himself, and exclamation marks or question marks when he did not believe something or thought it unintelligible, and occasionally he had scribbled 'Bad' (deceitful and incompetent writers, Tello-Trapp or whoever, had incurred quite a few of those), indicating with an arrow the statement condemned by his shrewd mind and his exacting mineral eyes, or 'Excellent' when a phrase seemed right to him or moved him, 'Quite moving', I read once, in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia I think. 'Quite right', he sometimes wrote approvingly, in Benet's book for example, and 'Quite true' occurred often in Thomas, whom he must have known in person since the latter taught at a university very near Oxford, Reading, a place famous for its old prison and for the ballad written there by prisoner C.3.3., not another alias exactly.

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 From Russia with Love in Madrid (I presumably had to sneak into one of the more accommodating cinemas: under the idiotic censorship laws of the Franco regime the Bond films were deemed suitable only for over-eighteens): she operated a mechanism that made terrifying knives appear horizontally out of the tip of one shoe (or possibly both), each blade being impregnated with a fast-acting and deadly poison, a mere scratch from one of those blades would ensure instantaneous and inevitable death, and so the woman kept aiming sharp-bladed kicks at Bond or Connery, who kept her at a distance with a chair, as animal tamers do at the circus with decrepit lions and tigers bored with such puerile tricks. In the film, as I also remembered, the role of the ruthless Klebb had been brilliantly played by the famous Austrian singer and theatre actress (who made only very rare screen appearances), Lotte Lenya, the greatest and most authentic interpreter of the songs and operas of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera being the most famous) and, if my memory serves me right, the wife and widow of the latter, who had continued composing for her until his death, which occurred, of course, some time before the film adaptation of Ian Fleming's novel. And Fleming, let me say, and judging only by the few pages I read in Wheeler's study, seemed a better writer, more skilful and perceptive, than snooty Literary History has so far deigned to concede. The description that followed of Rosa Klebb, for example, contained some curious and rather valuable insights, I copied a few paragraphs:

… much of her success was due to the peculiar nature of her next most important instinct, the sex instinct. For Rosa Klebb undoubtedly belonged to the rarest of all sexual types. She was a neuter… The stories of men and, yes, of women, were too circumstantial to be doubted. She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance. For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this psychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with. In her, the herd instinct would also be dead… And, of course, temperamentally, she would be a phlegmatic – imperturbable, tolerant of pain, sluggish. Laziness would be her besetting vice… She would be difficult to get out of her warm, hoggish bed in the morning. Her private habits would be slovenly, even dirty. It would not be pleasant, thought Kronsteen, to look into the intimate side of her life, when she relaxed, out of uniform… Rosa Klebb would be in her late forties, he assumed, placing her by the date of the Spanish Civil War… The devil knows, thought Kronsteen, what her breasts were like, but the bulge of uniform that rested on the table-top looked like a badly packed sandbag…