Agent Sonya Page 14

  In 1934, Berta finally sold the house on Schlachtensee at a much-reduced price, packed up the family’s belongings, and fled to England with her younger daughters, Barbara, Sabine, and Renate. There they were reunited with Robert, who had obtained a post at the London School of Economics, researching colonial demography. A little later, Brigitte joined them. Olga Muth, the family nanny, was offered the choice of whether to stay or go. As an Aryan, she faced no threat in Germany and could find another job in Berlin. Moreover she spoke almost no English, and the Kuczynskis’ prospects in Britain were at best uncertain. “But she chose to stay with the family” and duly squeezed into a small rented flat in North London with the rest of them. The Kuczynskis were now refugees.

  Of Ursula’s immediate family, only Jürgen remained in Berlin, dodging from one hiding place to another, writing unstoppably, the long-winded mouthpiece for an increasingly desperate Communist Party.

  Ursula’s radio traffic to Vladivostok included reports on sabotage, partisan morale, Japanese counterinsurgency measures, and military and political intelligence gleaned from fellow expatriates, including von Schlewitz. She was transmitting and receiving messages at least twice a week, taking down “the fastest incoming signals without making any mistakes.” But it was frustrating, time-consuming work. The transmitter-receiver was weak. Frequently the Vladivostok signal was jammed, or unintelligible. The fragmented messages had to be repeated, time after time. She often sat down to begin the deciphering process at 3:00 A.M., working by a dim light behind shuttered windows, knowing that Michael would wake in a few hours. She dared not light the stove in case the smoke drew attention to her nocturnal activities. “I sat at the Morse key in my tracksuit, wrapped in blankets, with fingerless gloves on my hands. Aeroplanes circled over the house. One day they were bound to catch me….I wanted so much to climb into my warm bed.” Every transmission was a bout of Russian roulette.

  But when the radio was working well, and the regulation five hundred letters of text, divided into batches of five, lined up like ranks of soldiers marching into battle, she felt a strange, secret elation. “My house with its closed shutters was like a fortress. Misha was fast asleep in the next room. The town slept. Only I was awake, sending news of the partisans into the ether—and in Vladivostok, a Red Army man was sitting and listening.”

  They needed a backup team. Chu agreed to provide someone to be trained in radio operations. A young Chinese couple duly appeared, bringing greetings from the partisan leader and a ready-made cover story: Wang would teach Ursula Mandarin, while his wife, Shushin, a skilled seamstress, would mend and make her clothes, and help with the housework and childcare. Wang was polite but ponderous, whereas Shushin possessed a hunger for knowledge, a decent command of English, and a visceral loathing for the Japanese. Despite her childlike looks, she had two children of her own, aged four and two, who were living with her parents. “Wang resembled Johann in his serious, thorough manner, and the amused, laughing Shushin was similar to me.” The women struck up an immediate bond. “She was so delightful; when she practised Morse code, her fingers danced on the keypad.” After each radio lesson, they would drink tea, complain about their menfolk, discuss politics, and tell the stories of their very different lives. Shushin made Ursula a wide summer coat with a concealed pocket in the lining, the size of two radio valves. One evening the conversation took a dark turn: What would it be like to be captured by the Japanese? Are men or women better able to withstand imprisonment and torture?

  “Do you think that the extra worry of leaving children behind would wear a mother down?” Shushin wondered.

  Ursula was still pondering the question, when Shushin volunteered her own answer: “I don’t think whether or not you will be able to bear it depends on the amount of suffering. Perhaps it’s the children who make us strong.”

  Michael was almost four years old, picking up Chinese from his playmates and expanding his vocabulary in three languages. Ursula delighted in his “intelligent, pensive questions” and his insatiable curiosity. “I would love to have four children like him,” she wrote. Patra had started collecting traditional Chinese musical instruments, and took Michael with him on shopping expeditions. Ursula seldom accompanied them. “Both would have found me an intrusion.” She loved to see this uncomplicated relationship developing, for Johann was an instinctive parent. She wondered if they might one day have children of their own.

  Moscow did not know the partnership between the Mukden spies had become more than just professional, and she was happy to keep it that way. “We worked well together,” she wrote. “He was more complicated than me, with his reserve, occasional anger, intolerance and nervousness, and I had, in the meantime, learned not to irritate him, to give in to him in almost everything.” In espionage, she trusted him completely; in love, less so. A young Russian woman rented the room next door to Johann, “a slender, pretty doll, a pink bow in her yellow hair.” Ursula was immediately suspicious. “Ludmilla is soon going home to her parents in Harbin,” Johann reported, a shade too airily. She resented her own jealousy, but reflected: “I need to know where I am with this Casanova.” Johann was irascible, demanding, and quite possibly unfaithful; yet he was also tender and, despite his insecurities, strong. He was a considerate lover. And he knew how to build an excellent bomb.

  “We loved each other, lived in danger together, we were comrades, I loved that he muttered in his dreams, that he was proud of me when I looked good, worried when I stayed away too long, that we argued and then became reconciled, and longed for each other when the journeys separated us.” She could talk to Johann about politics, revolution, and the funny remarks made by the little boy they almost shared. “We talked about what Germany would be like when the Nazi era was over, and what communist Germany would be like.” Johann was disheartened that so many working-class Germans had supported Hitler as he tightened his grip on power and turned on the Jews. “I have lost confidence in my own class,” he said. They agreed to celebrate when they sent the one hundredth radio transmission.

  After a rendezvous with Chu in the city of Anshan, a two-hour train ride to the south, she went to the local market and spotted a porcelain mender like the one they had seen in Hangchow, “an elderly fellow with a thin white beard.” She noticed that his hands were trembling as he reassembled a broken bowl. They fell into a halting conversation, and she asked about the little porcelain gong he carried on a pole. The old man picked up the object. “I’m working today for the last time,” he said. “I have sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now in three days’ time, I will lie down to die.” Ursula was momentarily speechless. The old man pressed the porcelain gong into her hand. “Take it,” he said. “You will live long.”

  That evening, back in Mukden, she told Johann the story of the porcelain mender repairing his last bowl, and handed him the little gong for his collection: a love token, promising longevity.

  In January 1935, Rudi came to visit, bringing presents for Michael and spare parts for the radio. Ursula informed Moscow: “Rudi is now a convinced communist and does not want to stay politically inactive any longer.” He returned a few months later, bringing bomb-making ingredients. Rudi spent hours playing with his son in the garden. Michael had grown close to Patra, but his father’s sudden, unexpected, unexplained appearances were moments of the purest joy. Years later, in what he called “phantom mosaic fragments,” he recalled his childish memories: being swung around by his father in the garden, the texture of Rudi’s tweed jacket on his cheek, his mother reading aloud until he fell asleep: “The happy child of a happy German family in China.”

  Rudi did not inquire about Ursula’s relationship with Johann, or demand to know when they were coming back to Shanghai. He exerted no pressure. But he had not given up on his family. Hamburger was a strange combination, a traditional-minded radical, a gentlemanly revolutionary. One friend later described him as “the last Victorian Communist.” To k
eep up appearances, and for the sake of his son, he was prepared to play happy families, still hoping his own might be truly happy again one day.

  Early in 1935, Moscow ordered Patra to construct a wireless for Shushin and Wang. Ursula took the train to Tianjin with Michael and bought more radio valves, which she smuggled back across the border sewn inside her son’s teddy bear. A few weeks later, Shushin and Wang departed, taking with them the second radio set assembled by Johann. She did not know, and did not ask, where they were going. “I found the farewell to Shushin, my only friend, very difficult.”

  The Mukden mission was a time of happiness and fear, elation and exhaustion, love, jealousy, and occasional horror. After a meeting in the mountains with Chu, she was walking back to a nearby village, through a landscape “unspoiled and beautiful,” when she spotted a baby’s body lying on the path: the second dead child she had seen in as many years, and another shocking reminder of the threat to her own. Famine was driving starving peasants with large families to abandon children, usually girls. “Her body was still warm,” wrote Ursula. “What sort of world was it in which a parent must sacrifice one child to save another?” Whenever her spirit quailed, she recalled Chu’s simple gratitude. The young Chinese guerrilla leader “radiated calm and dignity.” She told herself that the cause was worth any sacrifice: “We were fighting Japanese fascism.”

  The Japanese occupiers were convinced, rightly, that Moscow was behind the escalating guerrilla campaign. Foreigners were hauled in for interrogation. Ursula was “invited” to the Mukden police station and ushered into an office with a Japanese officer. “His tightly fitting uniform emphasized his bandy legs. Even though he stood upright, he held his arms out from his body like handles.” Casually the officer said: “Sadityes pozhaluyste,” Russian for “Please sit down.” It was a trick to see if she spoke Russian and might therefore be a Soviet spy.

  “What did you say?” she replied.

  After a short and desultory interrogation, Ursula was released. But the Kempeitai were getting closer.

  “The frequent use of our transmitter, the purchase of chemicals, their storage in our house and transportation, my meetings with the partisans—all took place under continuous Japanese surveillance.” Ursula claimed to have got used to the danger, but her sleep was often interrupted by a recurrent nightmare in which the enemy broke in before she had time to destroy the decoded messages. She began to take sleeping pills.

  Von Schlewitz noticed she was losing weight. “Madam neighbour, today I’m inviting you to dinner, we will order the most delicious and the best,” he announced. Between huge mouthfuls of food and draughts of wine, von Schlewitz “tried tactfully and unsuccessfully to find out what was wrong.” Finally she said: “If a brick falls on my head, you will have to look after Misha.” Von Schlewitz said he would happily do so and would adopt the boy if necessary. “That was too much for me,” wrote Ursula, who snorted at the grim irony of a Nazi arms dealer raising the son of a Jewish communist spy. Still, it was comforting to know her kindhearted neighbor would care for her son if she and Patra were caught.

  Von Schlewitz did not ask why she feared a “brick” falling on her, nor why her son might need adoption, nor why she was so interested in military matters. The boozy businessman probably knew a lot more than he let on.

  In April 1935, Ursula and Johann were eating supper in the stone cottage when they heard a rap on the door. On the threshold stood a breathless Chinese boy of about sixteen. He thrust a slip of paper into Ursula’s hand: a stranger had given him some money and told him to deliver this “message about a serious illness.”

  Ursula closed the door and unfolded the note. It was written in simple English, in Chu’s unsteady hand. She read it, and felt the room pitch sideways. Then she placed the paper in the ashtray, lit a match, and watched it burn. The embers were still glowing when she turned to Johann.

  “They have arrested Shushin.”

  AS SHE ENCRYPTED THE EMERGENCY message to Moscow, Ursula imagined what Shushin must be suffering. Were the delicate fingers that had danced over the Morse code tapper already broken? “We knew how they did it. First the thumb—‘Give us the names!’—then the index finger—‘Talk!’—one by one. If the victim still remains silent, they begin removing the fingernails.” The Japanese must have arrested Wang too. She would not be able to withstand expert torture for long. Ursula tapped out the message, her one hundredth dispatch to the Center.

  The response was swift and precise. “Cut off all contact with partisans. Dismantle and conceal radio. Leave Mukden. Relocate to Peking and set up new operating station.”

  The mission was over. The network, the equipment, and the life so carefully constructed over the last fifteen months must be destroyed immediately.

  Ursula dismantled the radio and wrapped the pieces in plastic bags. The next morning, she and Johann boarded separate trains, changed twice, doubled back, and then met up on the edge of a forest on the northern outskirts of Mukden. Neither was followed. Johann dug a hole and swiftly buried the radio parts.

  Then they sat in the spring sunshine in a little clearing.

  “Let’s talk for a while in the peace and quiet,” Johann said gently. “Do Shushin and Wang have a good marriage?”

  “A very good one.”

  The trail from the Chinese couple led straight to Ursula. “They have been in and out of your house for six months,” said Johann. “You need to leave soon. Someone may be at your door right now.”

  He was right, of course. But if they both left the city with “undue haste” it would raise suspicions. They probably only had a few days, at most, before Shushin and Wang broke and the Japanese Kempeitai came for her.

  “We need to have a cover story,” said Ursula. “The first part is known to everyone: we met on the ship and fell in love. I followed you here from Shanghai. Now we add part two: we break up because you have a new girlfriend.”

  It was the first time she had alluded to Ludmilla, the Russian girl next door. Johann twisted his cap in his hands. For several minutes he was silent. Then he mumbled: “She admired me and listened to me as if I was a scholar.”

  Ursula stared at the ground. Between gnarled tree roots, tiny golden flowers sprouted out of the moss.

  After a long silence she said: “I shouldn’t say this, but if I come home and someone is waiting at my door, I would welcome it. At least then it won’t always be others who suffer.”

  She wept. Johann stroked her hair.

  As they were walking back to the station, Johann stopped and turned to her. “Do you remember how I told you on the ship that we would stay together forever? I meant it then, and today I know it even better. Despite everything, you gave me the porcelain seller’s gong. It’s almost as if the thing with the girl was necessary to show me something I don’t need anymore, and that I need you.”

  Ursula felt numb.

  On the train, they rehearsed their cover story. She would first leave for Peking (now Beijing), and word would spread that they had separated. Johann would follow in a few days. “Write me a farewell note—the usual stuff—you’ve met someone else, and we didn’t understand each other that well. It bothered you especially that I kept secrets from you, a hint that you didn’t know anything about my work. Add something about racial differences that cannot be bridged.”

  Johann looked stricken. “Don’t you care about me at all anymore?”

  “Johann, I am so terribly tired.”

  She told von Schlewitz she had been jilted and was leaving Mukden. The cheerful German arms dealer did not ask questions. If that was her story, he would stick to it when the Japanese turned up, as they soon would. Von Schlewitz waved them off at the station. She never saw him again.

  As the train rumbled southwest, she reflected: “Months of intensive work suddenly broken off. So much remains unfinished.”

  * * *

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bsp; —

  URSULA LAY IN THE PEKING hotel bed, her jaw aching and her mind whirring. During the long journey, a dull toothache suddenly worsened and from the station she had rushed to the nearest dentist’s surgery for an emergency two-hour root canal operation. Michael watched with interest as the dentist went to work with pliers. “So as not to give the child a lifelong fear of the dentist, I did not make a sound.” The torture made her think of Shushin. As the anesthetic wore off, she felt the throbbing pain crawl up the side of her face and into her temple, along with a wave of guilt and nausea. Despite an “overwhelming tiredness” and several sleeping pills, she could not sleep. “We have abandoned our partisans,” she thought. “Chu will come to the next meeting, and I will not be there.” Perhaps Shushin was already dead. She hated Johann for sleeping with Ludmilla, but she needed him desperately. “We had only been separated a few days, and already I was longing for him.” Without the radio she felt defenseless; it had become an integral part of her life, “as his rifle is to a soldier, a typewriter to the writer.” Finally she fell into a drugged sleep.

  Ursula and Michael were waiting at Peking station when the train from Mukden pulled in. Patra swung the boy around and kissed Ursula, long and hard. The next day, he gathered parts to build another radio. The first message from Moscow was surprising: “Hide the transmitter and take four weeks’ leave.” Red Army spies did not usually get holidays. In reality, the Center was trying to assess the damage to the Mukden network. That night they dined on roast duck skin, shark fin soup, and green tea. “We were tired, felt close and happy.”