Radu Jörgensen

radiators. A creature always pallid, with a smile that had pretensions to concealing thousands of hidden meanings, the editorial secretary (a great dissident, so I had been told) suddenly entered and displaying the said enigmatic smile tossed an article on Castro’s desk. It was an article that he had passed – that had passed the censorship he had put in place – and was to be printed the very next day. Yes, Castro knew about it, he knew about it, and had specially allowed it. “Let him break his own neck,” he added.
          Where is he supposed to break his neck, I wondered, in a magazine where there wasn’t room to publish even three lines among all the illustrious contributors, the winners of peace prizes, the Nobels and the Goncourts, the experts in human rights, the exiled philosophers, and the intellectuals who had been political prisoners? And then Castro went out in order to write up his editorial on the electronic typewriter “donated to us by Mr Genscher,” as he proudly used to put it. I picked up the article from the table and read it. […] I couldn’t understand how the author would be breaking his own neck by publishing it. Above all I was intrigued at why a man that the Intellectual group published on a weekly basis and eagerly courted should have to break his own neck. […] The article had a broad democratic viewpoint and was one of the best I had read.
            I didn’t know at the time and nor do I know today how he could “break his own neck,” but break it he did, for it was the last article he published. Either the members of the group had understood it differently or it had been “presented” to them differently. Afterwards, I saw him at the newspaper office a few times, increasingly humble, increasingly stooped. The first time was one week later, when I was present at his meeting with Castro. After deliberately having made him wait in the antechamber for a long while, Castro had come out of his office, as if in passing, to collect from the hall the letters and the magazines that daily arrived from all over the world. Without shaking his hand, although the little old man had politely risen from his chair, Castro had scolded him with a wagging finger, as if he were a pupil whose parents had been summoned to school:
           “Have you any idea what you have done? Enough is enough. We’re through. Collect the money for your articles to date and get out.”
Then Castro vanished back into his office. As the little old man was looking in bewilderment now at me, now at the secretary, the head of The Intellectual stuck his head around the door of his office and added demonstratively:
          “I don’t want to be disturbed. I’m going to be on the phone to Prague.” And then to the old contributor, heightening the already embarrassing atmosphere, he added a monosyllabic “Yes?” as if he were asking a child finally to admit that he had made a mistake and never to ask to sit at the same table as the grown-ups again. I was struck not so much by the fear of the article-writer or that final demonstration of cheap theatricality on Castro’s part, in his role of disappointed benefactor, as much as the fact that a microbe, a virus had infiltrated the machinery which the intellectuals of the group, the uncompromised elite, had conceived.
         ...Nästa Södertälje! Nästa... The train was about to stop.