In the Garden of Beasts

Martha. After a few moments Boris stopped stroking her hair and gave her a hug, his signal that it was time for her to go to bed. She curtsied and in grudging, quiet German said, “Auf Wiedersehen, Fräulein Marta.”
    Boris took the girl’s hand and walked her from the room.
    In his absence, Martha gave his quarters a closer examination, and she continued doing so after his return. Now and then she glanced in his direction.
    “Lenin was very human,” he said, smiling. “He would have understood
your
corner.”
    They lay on the bed and held each other. He told her of his life—how his father had abandoned his family, and how at sixteen he had joined the Red Guard. “I want my daughter to have an easier life,” he said. He wanted the same for his country. “We’ve had nothingbut tyranny, war, revolution, terror, civil war, starvation. If we aren’t attacked again, we may have a chance to build something new and unique in human history. You understand?”
    At times as he told his story tears slipped down his cheeks. She was used to it now. He told her his dreams for the future.
    “Then he held me close to his body,” she wrote. “From below his collarbone to his navel, his honey-colored hair covered him, as soft as down.… Truly, it was beautiful to me, and gave me a deep feeling of warmth, comfort and closeness.”
    As the evening came to an end, he made tea and poured it into the traditional cup—clear glass in a metal frame.
    “Now, my darling,” he said, “in the last few hours you have had a small taste of a
Russian
evening.”
    “HOW COULD I TELL HIM,” she wrote later, “that it was one of the strangest evenings I had ever spent in my life?” A sense of foreboding tempered her enjoyment. She wondered whether Boris, by becoming so involved with her—establishing his Martha corner in the embassy and daring to bring her to his private quarters—had somehow transgressed an unwritten prohibition. She sensed that some “malevolent eye” had taken note. “It was,” she recalled, “as if a dark wind had entered the room.”
    Late that night Boris drove her home.

CHAPTER 31
Night Terrors
    T he lives of the Dodds underwent a subtle change. Where once they had felt free to say anything they wished within their own home, now they experienced a new and unfamiliar constraint. In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall. A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, “How is Uncle Adolf?” Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety.One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government. After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, “Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.”
    Jews, of course, experienced it most acutely. A survey of those who fled Germany, conducted from 1993 through 2001 by social historians Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, found that 33 percent had felt “constant fear of arrest.” Among those who had lived in small towns, more than half recalled feeling such fear. Most non-Jewish citizens, however, claimed to have experienced littlefear—in Berlin, for example, only 3 percent described their fear of arrest as constant—but they did not feel wholly at ease. Rather, most Germans experienced a kind of echo of normality. There arose among them a recognition that their ability to lead normal lives “depended on their acceptance of the Nazi regime and their keeping their heads down and not acting conspicuously.” If they fell into line, allowed themselves to be “coordinated,” they would be safe—though the survey also found a surprising tendency among non-Jewish Berliners to occasionally step out of line.Some 32 percent recalled telling anti-Nazi jokes, and 49 percent claimed to have listened to illegal radio broadcasts from Britain and