Agent Sonya Read online

  Ursula was dismayed. “How is this possible?” she reflected. “We’ve got enormous tasks ahead of us; we are the only communists on this ship; we know that we have to work together for a long time, and we have a dispute about something trivial like that!”

  Patra was trying to read Hegel’s Science of Logic. This is something no one should ever feel obliged to do. Ursula watched him as he waded through the dense German, his face contorted with concentration.

  He appealed for help. “With your education and a professor as a father, you’ll be able to understand all this without difficulty.” Ursula replied that she had never read a word of Hegel and that an eight-hundred-page nineteenth-century book of German dialectical metaphysics was not her idea of deck-chair reading.

  “It’s much easier for you,” he retorted, “but you are too lazy to put in the necessary work.”

  “I’m just as dedicated as you, but I don’t have to prove it by ploughing through Hegel.”

  A little later, he proudly showed her a postcard he had bought for his mother in Lithuania, a hideously kitsch castle bathed in a pink sunset.

  “It’s the most expensive one the purser had,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s beautiful?”

  “No. It’s gaudy,” she answered truthfully, and immediately regretted it.

  “I see,” Patra hissed furiously, tearing up the postcard. “Well, I’m only a worker, and I don’t understand these things. A barbarian with no culture…whereas you’re an intellectual.”

  Now she was angry. “That’s enough. I will no longer let you squeeze me into this role, I’ve worked as a communist too long for that, and if you continue like this, I will lose all respect for you.”

  Patra took a step back. “I didn’t mean that,” he mumbled.

  They came from different worlds, the rough-edged Baltic seaman and the middle-class German Jewish woman of letters. “He seemed to be annoyed by any advantage I might have acquired in life; my education, my fluent English, my greater confidence in handling people.”

  That evening, after tucking Michael into his berth, she found Johann on the stern deck, gloomily smoking his pipe on a pile of rigging. She was determined to patch up the quarrel. “Spontaneously, I told him everything I admired about him: his ardour and sensitivity, his zeal, his enormous willpower and his greater experience.”

  “Shall I tell you what I think of you?” he replied.

  He spoke fluently, as if narrating a bitter story from memory:

  “Every morning she appears in a different dress, in order to show off her admittedly good figure, and every morning she smiles amiably to at least twenty people. She likes making new acquaintances, but she doesn’t care that this lot here are all petty bourgeois. She sparkles with her knowledge of English and French, especially in the presence of her uneducated travel companion, who doesn’t understand a word; and she takes pleasure in making him aware that he is only a prole who doesn’t know how to behave. He didn’t stand up when she came into the room—how embarrassing—and he spooned the sauce from his plate, and he kept his cigarette butts. When he makes such mistakes, she attacks him like a hawk. He is a communist, and has learned and learned, but not good manners. The Party has used him, the sailor, for courier services. Once, in Brazil, the police caught him. He had incriminating letters with him and managed to tear himself free. They fired at him, the shot grazed his shoulder, he escaped and hid for three days, missed his ship, was left without a penny, and all the time he forgot to ensure that he learned good manners. Now he’s on this damn steamer, for the first time in bourgeois society, and knows he mustn’t stand out; he is constantly watching the fine nincompoops, observing everything, what fork they shove into their mouths, how they do not eat sandwiches by hand, but cut them into small pieces and impale them on sticks. He sweats like a ship’s boiler, he’s so damned insecure, but what sort of understanding could an intellectual from a rich family have of that?”

  No one had ever spoken to Ursula this way. She felt her anger rise. “Never before had anyone thought me stuffy, vain, pleasure-seeking or malicious.” Take a few deep breaths, she told herself. Then she replied.

  “May I answer your charges one by one? I don’t think you have to wait until we have a classless society to be friendly with individuals from other classes. Being happy is the flip side of being friendly. And it does not mean superficiality. If I am depressed, I try to be alone so as not to influence others with my bad mood. You’re right, I like getting to know people. People interest me greatly. They are whimsical, funny, sad, bad, admirable, everyone has their own fate, through society and through themselves. And now the ridiculous dress question: I have four of them. Of course I enjoy putting them on. Don’t you feel how pleasurable it is coming out of a cold March to discard the old winter clothes and suddenly to be in a southern summer, to run around sleeveless and without stockings, to lie in the sun, to swim in the pool? I thought you were enjoying all this too. These are our pleasant hours. So, those are the little things, your other accusations are much more serious—”

  Patra interrupted: “Before you go on talking, those are pleasant hours for me too.” Then he walked away.

  The next day the ship docked at Colombo. The three of them went ashore, the little boy screeching in delight at the sight of the monkeys in the trees. They sat in a hillside café, overlooking the sea, Michael on Patra’s lap.

  That evening at sundown, as the liner steamed out of port, they leaned on the rail again, side by side. “Our arms touched, as one’s arm might brush a neighbour on a crowded train. I moved my arm a bit further away.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” said Patra.

  “Don’t I?”

  A pause.

  “It’s late, I have to check on Misha.”

  “Are you coming back again?”

  “It’s late.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  When she returned, Patra was gazing out across the ocean. He did not hear her approach.

  She thought: Go and stroke back the hair that is blowing in his face.

  Instead, she quietly stood alongside him.

  “Much of this is my fault,” she said, “but I don’t know how long I can endure it if you insult me like that.”

  “Would you leave if you could?” he asked.

  “Why think about something that is impossible?”

  “I wouldn’t leave you.”

  Patra fell silent, staring down at the stern wake. But then “he looked up, gazed out over the water, looked at me and stroked the hair from my face.”

  A point had been passed.

  But still she held back. She had loved and lost one fellow spy already. “I resisted succumbing to the atmosphere of an ocean voyage with romantic evenings and constant togetherness.” They would soon be working together. He was her senior officer. In many ways, they were incompatible. She told herself: “Rather let there be no beginning than a tortuous path with no end, because the work will keep us chained together.” She was powerfully drawn to him, the heady combination of physical desire, forbidden love, and the promise of adventure.

  Patra was pressing but patient. “I know there is something serious between us, and if you don’t see it that way yet, I can wait.”

  The two spies were sailing to China to fight an underground war in which both might well perish. The other passengers on the Conte Verde saw only a happy young couple, falling in love.

  RUDOLF HAMBURGER WAS WAITING ON the dockside when the Italian liner steamed into Shanghai. The months without Ursula and Michael had been painfully lonely. Rudi had buried himself in his architectural work and the furniture business, fearful they might never return. And now here they were: his fair-haired son clutching a ball; his wife, lovely in a sleeveless white dress, even more beautiful for the weight she had gained in Russia. He took them back to Avenue Joffre, his “great
happiness” overflowing. The family was reunited. Patra withdrew quietly to a hotel.

  Rudi’s happiness lasted just a few hours.

  “It was not easy to tell him that we were only coming for a visit,” Ursula later wrote. She and Michael would soon be heading north to Manchuria, she explained, as gently as she could, and they would not be traveling alone.

  A different sort of man might have launched into recriminations and remonstrations, demanding that she leave Michael with him, flinging around crockery, threats, or lawsuits. Rudi absorbed the grim announcement without a scene. “He was very depressed but, as always, calm.” But he flatly refused to accept that this separation might be permanent; he would not give up his son, or his wife. In his own way, Rudi was as obstinate as she was. “Rudi possessed a special kind of persistence which nobody would suspect beneath his gentle exterior,” she wrote. “He did not reproach me in any way or make any difficulties; he even accepted that I might not be living alone in Mukden.”

  There was another factor in Rudi’s stoicism. He knew Ursula would be carrying out “secret party work” in Manchuria. Before, he had resented and resisted her espionage, but now he wholeheartedly endorsed it. He was a communist, he declared, propelled to action by the force of history. Their families were in exile, on the run, or facing mounting persecution. His homeland was in the grip of fascism. Refugees were streaming into Shanghai, and the club had become a nest of Nazis where he, a Jew, was now unwelcome. Ursula observed the change in Rudi with wonder: “He was no longer just a sympathizer holding back from commitment, but a communist who was ready to work with us.” She felt a surge of admiration for the remarkable man she had married. But it did not make her love him again.

  Three days after her return, Ursula caught a rickshaw to a small restaurant on the city outskirts where Patra was waiting with a senior CCP official. The unnamed Chinese “comrade” explained that the invasion of Manchuria had brought Japanese forces to the border with Russia, threatening the Soviet Union itself. “Your task is therefore doubly important,” he said. Communist partisans in the mountains were waging a ferocious guerrilla campaign against the Japanese occupiers: “Manchuria is in a state of semi-war.” Ursula and Johann would be the resisters’ point of contact with Moscow. They must purchase parts for a radio transmitter-receiver, travel by train to Mukden, and establish an operations base in the city. As the main Soviet intelligence outpost in Manchuria, they would be responsible for furnishing the rebels with money, weapons, and explosives, sheltering fugitives, identifying individual partisans for training back in Moscow, recruiting and training local radio operators, and passing messages and intelligence back and forth between the Center and the guerrilla leadership. The comrade described how to make contact with the partisans. As expatriate Europeans, they could move around more freely than Chinese, but the Japanese would keep them under close surveillance since “anyone who enters Manchuria from China may be part of the anti-Japanese movement and thus a potential enemy.” Finally, he described the risks. “The Japanese couldn’t simply make foreigners ‘disappear’ as they did with the Chinese,” but if they were caught by the Kempeitai, they would be tortured and then killed.

  Johann Patra went shopping for valves, rectifiers, and wiring. The homemade radio would need to be powered by two large iron transformers, weighing five pounds each. Since these were impossible to conceal in their luggage, they would have to be purchased on arrival in Mukden.

  Ursula needed a cover job, something literary. She visited Evans & Co., an American bookshop in Shanghai, explained that she was moving to Mukden, and offered herself as the shop’s Manchurian representative. She would purchase a stock of books at wholesale prices, sell them at retail price to English readers, and keep any profit. Evans & Co. agreed, happily providing her with a formal letter of appointment and a set of printed business cards. Ursula was now chief executive and sole representative of the “Manchukuo Book Agency,” specializing in educational, medical, and scientific books. And espionage.

  In mid-May 1934, shortly before they were due to depart for Mukden, Ursula left Michael in Rudi’s care, explaining she would return in two days’ time. She did not tell him where she was going. That afternoon, she and Johann caught the train to the ancient city of Hangchow (now Hangzhou), two hours to the southwest, and checked into a charming little two-story hotel, surrounding a pretty courtyard garden.

  “It was a dreamy day,” Ursula wrote. “Hand in hand we walked through the old alleys, teeming with vendors and crowds of people.” They stopped to watch a porcelain mender skillfully piecing together broken rice bowls. The old man carried an ingenious audible advertising device, a bamboo pole with a gong and two chains that emitted a tinkling chime as he walked along. In the garden of a Buddhist temple, they sat on a bench beside a small lake. “We talked about Confucius, the Chinese Red Army, the lotus leaves on the ponds, the passersby, Misha, and the trip to Mukden. We did not speak of the night ahead.”

  Back at the hotel, Johann went to fetch green tea. The sound of the mah-jongg players rose from the courtyard, the bone tiles clicking like muffled castanets. Cool air wafted through the paper window blinds, ruffling a mosquito net on the wide four-poster bed. Ursula was suddenly chilly. She put on Johann’s jacket, remembering the moment, a few months earlier, when he had wrapped his coat around her as her teeth chattered with cold and anticipation.

  She put her hand in the jacket pocket and drew out a photograph.

  Johann, with his arm around the hip of a Chinese prostitute. A photo with the date, taken five days earlier in Shanghai.

  She was still staring at the picture when Johann entered with a tea tray.

  Seeing the photo in her hand, Patra broke into a guilty monologue, “the usual trivial thousand words of thousands of men,” self-justifying, urgent, and meaningless.

  “It was just a souvenir, it meant nothing at all, a purely physical matter, long forgotten, it was your fault, you shouldn’t have…and I wouldn’t have…and it has nothing at all to do with my feelings for you…never again will I…Yell at me, hit me…you can’t make such a little thing into…”

  On and on.

  She said nothing.

  Later, they climbed into the big bed. “I only had to say ‘leave me alone’ once,” she wrote.

  Patra quickly fell asleep. Ursula lay awake, listening to the murmur of Chinese voices and the cold clatter of the mah-jongg tiles.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE LONG TRAIN JOURNEY to Mukden little Michael sat between Ursula and Johann, chattering away as the soybean fields and tiny villages slid past. The radio valves were hidden inside rolled-up socks at the bottom of the suitcase. Johann reached for her hand. “We can’t let that stupid matter in Shanghai spoil everything. It doesn’t matter….Come on, be cheerful, like you used to be.”

  Ursula said nothing. “It seemed pointless to accuse him of being a completely different person from me, and of being unable to understand how deeply he had hurt me.”

  At the border, Japanese guards emptied every suitcase and piled their contents onto the platform. Johann had already stuffed the valves between the compartment seat cushions.

  The ancient walled city of Mukden was like a smaller, less glamorous version of Shanghai, a teeming warren of narrow streets and low brick houses, interspersed with grand municipal buildings. A vast shanty town sprawled out from the fortified walls. The foreigners lived in their own enclave. Here the expatriate population was more beleaguered, and the profits were fewer since foreigners had to compete with the incoming Japanese. A peculiar international flotsam had washed up in Mukden: adventurers, crooks, nomads trying to escape the past or looking for a different future. One more unhappy wife running away with her lover excited little curiosity. The city was awash with opium dealers, criminals, and prostitutes. There would be “plenty of opportunities for Johann to enlarge his photo collection,” Ursul
a reflected bitterly.

  At the Yamato Hotel, they unpacked and deliberately left out their printed business cards for Rheinmetall and Evans & Co., for the spies to find. That afternoon, Johann set out to find a hiding place for the radio parts. Ursula left one suitcase full and laid a small thread across the clasp. When they returned from dinner, the thread was gone. The snoopers had made an inspection. “In the hotel we didn’t exchange a single word of importance.” Every waiter was listening.

  It had been agreed that liaising with the partisans, the most dangerous task ahead, would fall to Ursula. General Berzin was emphatic: Patra “should not be exposed to the greatest risk.” Of the two-person team, she was the junior officer, and the more expendable. Initial contact was due to take place not in Mukden but in the city of Harbin, four hundred miles to the north. Johann suddenly announced that he would be going instead of her. Why, she demanded, was he changing the agreed strategy?

  “Well, you are a woman and a mother, maybe it’s too much for you.”

  “We knew that beforehand,” she replied tartly. “I’ll take Misha with me.”

  “You want to put the small child through that long journey and then leave him alone in a hotel for hours? It’s out of the question. If you go, Misha will stay with me.”

  Johann rehearsed the child’s daily routine: mealtimes, clothing, how much cod liver oil to spoon into him. “You can relax as far as Misha is concerned,” he said. “Come back in one piece.”

  Ursula hated Harbin, the largest city in Manchuria and home to thousands of White Russians who had fled the revolution. These were the deserving victims of historical forces, of course, but the ragged exiles made a pitiful sight, reduced to penury, crime, pulling rickshaws, and prostitution. “Many stood at corners, begging,” wrote Ursula. “Of all the cities I have known, Harbin in those days was the most sinister.”