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you be sure he is not a double agent?”
    Kim, who spoke German the way English people speak any language other than English, which is to say with discomfort, said, “Sie k-können nie sicher sein.” Turning to me he asked in English, “Would your friends feel m-more at ease if I were to repair to my room?”
    The Hungarian professor said in Hungarian, “If the short count”—he was referring to Chancellor Dollfuss, who was notoriously dwarflike—“wanted to spy on us, he wouldn’t try to infiltrate a district committee, he’d try to infiltrate the Party’s Central Committee.”
    “You can stay,” I told Kim. To the others I said, “Right now he is too innocent to be a single agent.”
    “I’m not sure I should take that as a compliment,” Kim remarked.
    “The great advantage to innocence,” I remember telling him with a suggestive smirk, “is that there is a certain amount of pleasure to be had in losing it.”
    “Our Litzi is being sexual,” one of the comrades, a university student with long bushy sideburns named Dietrich, told the others in a mocking singsong voice. They all laughed. Except me. Dietrich was one of my former lovers.
    A bit flustered, I turned to the professor and invited him to begin his lecture. Removing his eyeglasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and third finger, speaking a German more imperfect than Kim’s, he began. “Industrial capitalism rests on the pedestal of the theory of equilibrium, which holds that the process of producing something creates just enough purchasing power to buy it. The Great Depression and the subsequent distress of the world’s working classes have demonstrated that this convenient theory of equilibrium no longer—”
    Leaping to his feet, Dietrich cut off the professor in midsentence. “Your Marxist theories are boring me to death,” he declared. “They have become irrelevant. The rise of Fascism has focused the attention of many of us on things other than economics. We should be talking about how to stop Hitler from annexing Austria—”
    Dietrich in turn was interrupted by Sergius, at seventeen one of the youngest workers’ militia delegates to a district committee. “Look at the glasses of tap water Litzi has set out on the low table,” he said. “The glasses are still but the water in them is trembling, as if what’s going on in this city—what’s going on in Europe—is shaking the crust of the earth.”
    “The water is trembling because Dietrich leaped to his feet,” one of the worker delegates said with a soft laugh.
    “The water is trembling,” I remember saying, “the way the ground trembles before an earthquake. Revolution will explode in Vienna. There is a good chance it will spread to the entire capitalist world.”
    Sonja, Dietrich’s current girlfriend and the only other woman in the room, raised her hand. She was, like me, in her early twenties; unlike me she was strikingly beautiful, with the high cheekbones and deep-set coal black eyes associated with Caucasus mountain tribes. I seem to remember that one of her grandparents was Uzbek. “For shit’s sake, Sonja, we’re not at the university,” Dietrich snapped unpleasantly. “You can speak without raising a hand.”
    “I want to put a question,” she announced.
    “By all means pose your question, dear girl,” the Hungarian professor said.
    Sonja leaned forward, her breasts swelling over her low-cut Austrian peasant blouse. Her cleavage was not lost on the voyeurs present. “I am, as you know, the Socialist party’s representative on the district committee,” she said. Unaccustomed to speaking publicly, she took a deep breath before plunging on with a fierce intensity. “I am a Marxist but not a Communist. And I ask the question that many of my Socialist comrades ask: Which is the greater evil, German Fascism or Soviet Communism?”
    Dietrich, who was a die-hard Communist, rolled his eyes, which made me wonder what the two of them talked