“Has he no connections in Moscow?”
“None. Listen, Comrade Jordan. Do you know about the two kinds of fools?”
“Plain and damn?”
“No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia,” Karkov grinned and began. “First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls. Then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool.
“Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. That is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool.”
“But why do people trust him here?” Robert Jordan asked.
“His face,” Karkov said. “His beautiful gueule de conspirateur. And his invaluable trick of just having come from somewhere else where he is very trusted and important. Of course,” he smiled, “he must travel very much to keep the trick working. You know the Spanish are very strange,” Karkov went on. “This government has had much money. Much gold. They will give nothing to their friends. You are a friend. All right. You will do it for nothing and should not be rewarded. But to people representing an important firm or a country which is not friendly but must be influenced–to such people they give much. It is very interesting when you follow it closely.”
“I do not like it. Also that money belongs to the Spanish workers.”
“You are not supposed to like things. Only to understand,” Karkov had told him. “I teach you a little each time I see you and eventually you will acquire an education. It would be very interesting for a professor to be educated.”
“I don’t know whether I’ll be able to be a professor when I get back. They will probably run me out as a Red.”
“Well, perhaps you will be able to come to the Soviet Union and continue your studies there. That might be the best thing for you to do.”
“But Spanish is my field.”
“There are many countries where Spanish is spoken,” Karkov had said. “They cannot all be as difficult to do anything with as Spain is. Then you must remember that you have not been a professor now for almost nine months. In nine months you may have learned a new trade. How much dialectics have you read?”
“I have read the Handbook of Marxism that Emil Burns edited. That is all.”
“If you have read it all that is quite a little. There are fifteen hundred pages and you could spend some time on each page. But there are some other things you should read.”
“There is no time to read now.”
“I know,” Karkov had said. “I mean eventually. There are many things to read which will make you understand some of these things that happen. But out of this will come a book which is very necessary; which will explain many things which it is necessary to know. Perhaps I will write it. I hope that it will be me who will write it.”
“I don’t know who could write it better.”
“Do not flatter,” Karkov had said. “I am a journalist. But like all journalists I wish to write literature. Just now, I am very busy on a study of Calvo Sotelo. He was a very good fascist; a true Spanish fascist. Franco and these other people are not. I have been studying all of Sotelo’s writing and speeches. He was very intelligent and it was very intelligent that he was killed.”