_August._
_Darlingest Mother and Dad:--_
We were arrested four days ago--and you will wonder why I keep on
writing. It relieves my nerves. Ever since the _revision_ Marie and I
have gone over and over the same reasoning, trying to get at why we were
arrested. To write it all out may help the restlessness and anxiety
and--yes--the panicky fear that rises in my throat like nausea. Life is
so terribly insecure. I feel as though I had been stripped naked and
turned out into the streets, with no person or place to go to.
It was four o'clock, and we had just finished dinner. In an hour and a
half we were leaving for Odessa. All our trunks and bags were packed,
and our traveling suits brushed and pressed. Panna Lolla was crying at
having to part from Janchu, and mending some stockings for him. He was
asleep. Marie and I were sitting in our little salon, rejoicing that we
should be in Bucharest in a few days where there was no war and we could
speak French again. War--blood-tracks on the snow, and cholera and
typhus camps under a burning sun. To shut it out for one instant and
pretend that the world was the way it used to be. What a heaven
Bucharest seemed!
And suddenly the door of our apartment opened. Six men came into the
room, two in uniform, the other four in plain clothes. It never occurred
to me that they had anything to do with me. I thought they had mistaken
the door. I looked at Marie questioningly. There was something peculiar
about her face.
The four plain-clothes men stood awkwardly about the door which they had
closed softly behind them. The two men with white cord loops across the
breast of their uniforms went over to the table on the right and put
down their black leather portfolios. They seemed to make themselves at
home, and it angered me.
"What are these people doing here?" I asked Marie sharply.
She addressed the officer in Polish, and he answered curtly.
"It's a _revision_," she replied.
"A what?"
"A _revision_," she repeated.
I remember that I consciously kept my body motionless, and said to
myself, "There is nothing surprising in this. There is nothing
surprising in this." Everything had gone dark before my eyes. My heart
seemed to stop beating.
Marie laughed and the sound of her cracking, high-pitched laugh came to
me from far off.
The officer said something to her, and she stopped abruptly as though
some one had clapped a hand over her mouth.
"What did he say?" I managed to articulate. My own language seemed to
have deserted me.
"He says it is a matter for tears, not laughter."
Her voice was sharp and anxious. I was relieved at the spite and vanity
in his words. They made the situation more normal. I felt myself
breathing again, and my stomach began to tremble uncontrollably.
I kept my eyes where they were, fighting for my self-control. So many
terrifying thoughts were trying to penetrate my consciousness. I tried
to shut out everything but my realization of what I was looking at. I
kept my eyes glued on the officer's boots; shiny black boots they were,
that fitted him without a crease, with spurs fastened to the heels. I
shall never forget the stiff, red striped trouser-legs and those shiny
black boots that didn't seem to belong on the body of a living man, but
on the wooden form of some dummy.
Janchu began to cry from the bedroom, and Marie got up to go to him.
Quickly a plain-clothes man with horn-rimmed spectacles slipped in
between her and the door. The officer, who had now seated himself behind
the table, raised his hand.
"Let no one leave the room," he said in German.
"But my baby is crying," Marie began.
"Let him cry!" And he busied himself pulling papers out of his
portfolio.
Soon Janchu, seeing that no one paid any attention to him, toddled in
and climbed into Marie's lap. He sat there sucking his fingers and
looking out at the roomful of strange men.
An army officer entered and spoke to the head of the secret service. He
wore a dazzling, gold-braided uniform, and preened himself before us,
looking at us curiously over his shoulder. When he had gone, the head
told us that we were to have a personal examination in the salon of the
_pension_.
A secret-service man escorted each of us, and we walked down the
corridor, past the squad of soldiers with their bayonets, and into the
salon, where we were delivered into the hands of two women spies. They
undressed us, and we waited while our clothes were passed out to the
secret-service men outside. Panna Lolla tried to twist herself up in the
window curtains. Marie and I grew hysterical at her modesty, looking at
her big, knobby feet and her fiery face, with her top-knot of disheveled
red hair. We were given our clothes again, and went back to our
apartment.
The rooms were in confusion. All our trunks and bags were emptied, one
end of the carpet rolled back, the mattresses torn from the beds. The
secret-service men were down on their knees before piles of clothes,
going over the seams, emptying the pockets, unfolding handkerchiefs,
tapping the heels of shoes; every scrap of paper was passed over to the
chief, who tucked it into his portfolio. I watched him, hating his
square, stolid body that filled out his uniform smoothly. His eyes were
long and watchful like a cat's, and his fair mustache was turned up at
the ends, German fashion; in fact, there was something very German
about his thick thighs and shaved head and official importance. As I
have learned since, he _is_ a German and the most hated man in Kiev for
his pitiless persecution of all political offenders. They say he has
sent more people to Siberia than any six of his predecessors. They also
say every hand is against him, even to the spies' in his own force.
I trembled to spring at him and claw him and ruffle his composure some
way. Instead, I sat quietly, my hands folded, and watched the spies
ransacking our clothes. I began to feel a sharp anxiety as to what they
would find. It was all so mysterious. What were they looking for? At one
moment it was ridiculous, and I felt like laughing at the whole affair;
and then the next, the silence in which the search was conducted, the
apparent dead-seriousness of the spies' faces, the deliberation with
which the chief turned the bits of paper over in his hands and
scrutinized them and put them carefully away, struck me with a cold,
sharp apprehension. I had the sensation of being on the very edge of a
precipice. I felt as though the world were upside down and the most
innocent thing could be turned against us. Every card and photograph I
tried to catch a glimpse of before it went into the black portfolio. And
suddenly I saw the letter about the Jewish detention camp, which I had
forgotten all about. I saw the close lines of my writing, and it seemed
as though the edge of the precipice crumbled and I went shooting down. A
cold sweat broke out over me.
"But why are we arrested?" I heard Marie ask in German.
"Espionage," the chief answered shortly.
"But that is ridiculous. We're American citizens."
No reply.
"Can we leave for Odessa to-night?"
No reply.
Marie stopped her questions.
"What money have you? Come here while I count it," one of the spies said
to me. He slipped me one hundred roubles on the sly, before turning the
rest over to the chief. I held it openly in my hand, too dazed to know
what to do with it, till he whispered to me to hide it. "You may want
it, later," he said.
"Frau Pierce will go with us," the chief said, closing his portfolio;
and I understood that the _revision_ was finished. "Frau G---- can stay
here under room-arrest, with her little boy."
He spoke to no one in particular, but addressed the room at large, his
face impassive, and his voice without an intonation. The spies stood in
the midst of the tumbled clothes, watching us silently, ominously.
Janchu now crept up into Marie's lap again. As a matter of course, I
went into the other room and changed into my traveling suit.
"May I take my toilet things?" I asked the chief.
"Ja."
"You'd better make a bundle of bedclothes," the spy who had given me the
money whispered to me.