The morning commuters were long gone by the time Hoffner arrived in the South End: Lindenstrasse was virtually empty. Even so, he stood on the corner for perhaps ten minutes, gazing from his newspaper to the few passersby, none of whom seemed the least interested in Luxemburg’s building. Satisfied, Hoffner tossed the paper into a trash bin and headed for Number 2.
This time the landlady let him in without so much as a question. Breakfast was in the offing, but Hoffner politely refused and asked if anyone else had come to the flat since his own visit: the woman recalled no one.
Luxemburg’s rooms were untouched, except for a few very subtle changes: the teacup had been rinsed and returned to its shelf; several of the pictures had been straightened on the wall; and the smell of dried wood had been aired out, although the windows were once again shut tight. K, as it turned out, was more than just a secretive man; he was a neat one. Hoffner found that in keeping with the tone of the note.
The purpose for the return visit, however, was a bit more difficult to pinpoint. In fact, it took Hoffner nearly twenty minutes to find what K had sent him back for. When Hoffner did find it, he realized it was in the most obvious, and therefore least likely, place to have been searched. Sitting atop her desk-and side by side with the unread speeches-was a stack of books and papers held together by a rough piece of cord. K had been clever: the stack had been placed in such a way as to seem a part of the speeches. Hoffner now saw it otherwise. He stepped over, sat in Rosa’s chair, and began to loosen the knot.
Within half a minute he was flipping through one of her private diaries, February through May 1914. The other volumes chronicled her life in equally short and arbitrary installments: July 1911 through January 1912; November 1915 through July 1916; and an entire book devoted to August 1914. The beginning of the war had marked the end of the International; with German workers voting to fight against their French and English brothers, Luxemburg’s dream of a Universal Socialism had come crashing down. It had been the great disaster of her life-”workers of the world” choosing country over one another-and had thus inspired pages and pages of grief-stricken prose, all with the requisite hair-pulling of a Greek tragedy. Hoffner quickly moved through them.
The more startling discovery was the collection of loose letters slotted into each of the books. Hoffner estimated several hundred from a first glance-through: it was clear that they had been hastily included, the addressees and dates even more haphazard. There were more than thirty names, with dates reaching as far back as 1894, the most recent from only a few months ago. The one constant was the writer. They were all from Rosa.
How, then, thought Hoffner, had K amassed nearly two hundred of Rosa’s private letters in just over a week? The answer-and K’s identity-obviously lay with the recipients, but Hoffner knew any attempt to contact Luxemburg’s coterie would elicit only blank stares and denials: the remaining Spartacists-her band of left left-wingers-would never give up one of their own to the Kripo.
He also knew there would be nothing in the stack to tell him who K was; even so, Hoffner needed to make sure. He went to work on the names.
Of those who had received letters, only three had a K in either initial. The first was Karl Liebknecht, and unless he had risen from the dead, it was highly unlikely that he had been the one to show up at the Alex last week. Hoffner eliminated Liebknecht.
The second was a Konstantin Zetkin-Kostia, in the letters-a boy fifteen years her junior, the son of Luxemburg’s good friend Clara, and, from what Hoffner could make out, Rosa’s lover for a short period of time. That, however, hardly distinguished him from any number of the other correspondents: Paul Levi, her lawyer; Leo Jogiches, her mentor; and Hans Diefenbach, her doctor-who had actually married Rosa during her last stint in prison, but who had died at the Russian front before reaping the benefits-had all kept in contact with her both before and after the affairs; all, of course, except for Diefenbach, although there were a few diary entries in which Luxemburg had carried on some lively conversations with him postmortem.
What made it clear that she would never have allowed Zetkin to compile her letters was the fact that the boy simply didn’t have the smarts to do it. Zetkin was a classic Luftmensch, all air and no substance, and although Rosa had tried to mold him into something artistic, the journals made it clear that he had been a lost cause. Hoffner quickly recognized that Kostia Zetkin was not his K.
That left Karl Kautsky. Most of the letters were addressed to his wife, Luise, but even Hoffner had heard of the very public falling-out between Luxemburg and her onetime comrade. It was generally agreed that squabbles among socialists made for the most entertaining reading in town: vitriol and sarcasm never had quite the same shrillness elsewhere, and the newspapers knew it, even if most of their readers never understood the finer points. In fact, no one understood the finer points; they were meaningless, anyway. The comedy was in the personal swipes, and Luxemburg had given Berlin a tour de thtre with her dismantling of Kautsky. Suffice it to say Kautsky had not been the one to lead Hoffner to the flat.
K had left nothing in the letters that could be tied to himself; he was too clever for that. He had signed the note for a reason, but for now, his identity would have to wait.
Hoffner sat back. He noticed a decanter of brandy on a nearby shelf, and, reaching over, brought it to the desk. There was a glass among the papers, and he poured himself a drink. He imagined that K had brought him here to see the real Luxemburg-stripped of the caricature of fanaticism-and while the pages did paint a more flesh-and-blood picture, Rosa remained distant. There were moments of raw emotion, but they came across too self-consciously: pain was never simply pain-it was acute, or frantic, or unbearable-beauty never less than triumphant. There was a morality to socialism that seeped into everything. It was as if she had been unable to separate herself from the woman who shouted down to the crowds, even when writing for herself. A few lines would hint at more, but then, just as quickly, the exclamation points would return-the heightened sense of purpose-and the other Rosa would slip quietly away.
Hoffner refilled his glass and realized that the room had been cast in much the same way. During his first visit he had seen it as a place for gatherings, warmth: now that seemed contrived, as well. The pillows and photographs were placed too perfectly to be inviting. There was an earnestness to the intimacy, which made it all the more suspect.
Glass in hand, Hoffner stood and moved across to one of the bookshelves. He scanned the titles and pulled out a volume of Pushkin: maybe he would find more of her in how she read than in how she wrote? But here, too, her marginalia lived in the extremes: Pushkin was either a genius or a fool. The same held true for Marx and Korolenko, a special diatribe reserved for a collection of essays by a man named Plekhanov. No matter where, her words, like herself, were intended for display. There seemed to be no private Rosa in any of it.
Hoffner finished his drink and began to squeeze the book back into place. He was having trouble getting it in when he heard the sound of something falling behind the row. He peered in through the gap, but it was too dark. Pulling a handful of books from the shelf, he found a thin volume lying flat on its back: it was little more than a pamphlet. He placed the stack on the desk and retrieved the book.
At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. It had been years since he had seen it, a standard edition of Mrike’s poetry. Not that it was so momentous a find: every first-year university student could recite a few passages from memory. But it seemed odd to find it here, in and among the weighty tomes. Then again, it really hadn’t been with them, tucked safely behind. Hoffner pulled over a chair and opened the leather cover.