He saw them as he left the church—some of them. One in a car. Another reading a newspaper in the little park that surrounded the church. A tourist couple—at seven in the morning!—taking pictures of the Seine on the other side of the quai. His picture too, no doubt. As he turned north, a car pulled out of a parking space and trailed him. It was the battered Simca that had appeared one night in early spring as he walked home. He remembered the driver, drunk and grinning as he aimed the car up the middle of the street. They had, he realized, been with him for a long time.
How long? Had Vladi Z., his companion in the internment camp, been one of them? If so, they had been running him, an unknowing provocateur, since the day he left Spain. And he had fled from Madrid after a telephone call from none other than Ilya Goldman. Yet Yaschyeritsa's threats had been real enough. Or maybe not. Had they tried to panic him that far back?
A bullet-headed thug, with pale hair sheared to a bristle, swung out of a doorway and matched his pace. All sorts of specialists, Ilya had said, were now operating in Paris. The city would be crawling with them. He knew that NKVD search brigades, the sort of units that descended on suspicious activity in the villages, could be ten thousand strong. Not that they would try anything like that in France, but they had people in abundance and they used them abundantly.
He wanted to go to the bookstore where he had met Aleksandra, and he wanted to go alone, so he lost the cars by taking the Métro for two stops. That left him with Bullet-head and a fat-faced man in the Moscow version of a business suit. They stayed with him as he wandered around the back of the Fifth—the university quarter—among students hurrying to early class at the various facultés of the Sorbonne scattered through the district. He entered one of the classroom buildings and moved through the corridors and up and down the staircases in a tight press of humanity. When he finally left the building, Fat-face was gone. Perhaps he had given the whole thing up, Khristo thought, humiliated by student derision at his colossal suit, and defected to the registrar. Khristo glanced behind him—not even deigning to use the standard shop-window-as-mirror—and saw that Bullet-head was sweating up a storm, the last man left. A passenger got out of a nearby taxi and Khristo waved it down. Then watched through the rear window as the NKVD man ran in frantic circles looking for another. He rode three blocks, paid the driver, and stood back in a doorway as Bullet-head sailed by in his own taxi, terrified, surely, that such an expense would not be approved by his bosses.
Later that morning, Khristo stood in the bookstore, browsing among the thick, uncut volumes on surrealism and Marx. On the far wall was a poster, in livid red and black, celebrating the Republican effort in the Spanish war. There were stark crosses above graves and a shadowed face of great determination and strength looking into the near distance. In fiery letters, lines from the poet John Cornford were spread across the paper. Cornford, a poet and Marxist from Cambridge, had died at twenty-one, a machine-gunner in one of the international brigades. “Nothing is certain, nothing is safe,” the lines read. “Everything dying keeps a hungry grip on life / Nothing is ever born without screaming and blood.”
He watched the clerks in their blue smocks, moving about the store. How had Aleksandra fitted into this milieu? Her politics, he knew, were the politics of survival, her own survival. Larger questions were not germane—theories bored her; passions belonged in bed, not on the speaker's platform. Her absence stabbed him suddenly, and he said her name silently and dropped a book back onto a table.
“Captain Markov?”
At that name—his cover in Spain—he froze.
Turned slowly to the source of the voice and found Faye Berns. His first impression of her was long hair, washed and shining, and jade-colored eyes, lit up with recognition, meeting his own. On second glance, he saw that her face was sallow and exhausted, that life had not been easy.
“Did I startle you?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “a little.”
She took his arm as they crossed the street to a café. The touch, at first, made him feel guilty, as though it desecrated his sorrow, as though it betrayed Aleksandra. But he could not deny its warmth, he could not deny how good it felt. They sat beneath a striped awning and drank cup after cup of coffee. She told him the story of her life those past few months, her eyes shining with unshed tears as she spoke.
Andres had died.
He had spent a long time dying, as doctor after doctor paraded through a rented apartment near the Parc Monceau that her father had paid for. Their plan, originally, had been to travel to Greece, where Andres had friends who would take them in. Perhaps they'd get married; at times they talked about it. Somehow, the tickets were never bought, there was always something else that had to be done. Renata Braun had left Paris in February, promising to write as soon as she was settled. They waited anxiously for a letter as the weeks went by, but it never arrived. Then Andres came down with a fever.
At first they ignored it. The Paris damp—one had to grow used to a new climate. But the fever was stubborn. Various doctors were consulted, medicines of all sorts were prescribed, but nothing seemed to work. Slowly, the sickness grew worse, until she had to stay up with him all through the night, sponging the sweat from his body, changing the wet sheets. At times he fell into a delirium, shouting and whining, often in languages unknown to her. He was in Anatolia, he thought, and pleaded with her to hide him from the Turkish soldiers—he heard them coming up the stairs. She would go to the door and look out, reassure him that they had just left. She said anything that came to mind, anything to calm him, because his terror broke her heart. She wept in the bathroom, washed her face, went back to the bed, and held his hands until dawn.
In times of clarity, he told her the truth about himself in great detail—where he had been, what he had done. His only regret, he said, was that the one thing in his life he had cared for, the Communist party, had turned on him. She argued with him about it—one could always care for humankind, could work for the oppressed. It had nothing to do with a printed card. But this line enraged him—she did not understand, he claimed—so she dropped it.
He became sly and strange. Would hide his medicine spoon among the covers so she couldn't find it and accuse her of telling the concierge his secrets. When she cleaned the apartment in the morning, he would not permit her to leave his sight. On his good days, he spoke of marriage. Passionately. They must have a child, he said, to continue his work. He begged her to bring a priest, a rabbi, whatever she wished. She told him it would be wiser to wait until he felt better and was his old self again. Her hesitancy angered him, and he accused her of infidelity.
Then, with the coming of spring, he seemed to grow stronger. She took him on outings to the Parc Monceau, where he would walk with a jacket over his shoulders and lecture her on a range of political matters. He read the newspapers avidly and explained to her the historical implications of every event. Now, instead of hostility and suspicion toward her, he began to plot revenge against certain individuals in the Comintern who he believed had betrayed him. He became obsessed with the Russian poet Ilya Ehrenburg, claimed he was under strict NKVD supervision, and planned to write an article for a Parisian quarterly—the Nouvelle Revue Française—exposing Ehrenburg for what he was.
But then, suddenly, on a day when he'd planned a visit to a museum, on a day when he'd made a telephone call, eaten an omelette, laughed at one of her jokes, he died. She returned from shopping and found him sitting on the couch with an open book in his hand.
The tears came when she finished the story, and she was hunting through her purse when a waiter appeared with a clean white handkerchief, handed to her silently. “My God,” she said, “I will miss this city.”
“I am sorry,” Khristo said, “for Andres. And for you. For what happened. If my English was better …”
“Oh please,” she said, “I understand. And I didn't mean to cry in front of you. It's just … When I was sixteen, I used to daydream about a lover dying, to make myself feel sad, I think. But then it happened. It actually happened.” She looked around for the waiter, in order to return the handkerchief, but he was busy at another table.
“I think he wants that you keep it,” Khristo said, searching for a word. “It is his …”
“Gift?”
“Yes, a gift.”
She nodded that she understood and blew her nose. “Tell me about yourself,” she said.
He shrugged. “Some bad things, some good.”
“Andres explained to me about not telling people about yourself, how important that was, so I understand.”
“Yes,” he sighed. He wanted to tell her everything, resisted a desire to go on and on in riddles, telling but not telling, like Sascha. “What for you now?” he asked instead.
“I am going home,” she said. “To America.”
“Ah. For the best, no?”
“I don't know,” she said, uncertain. “Maybe. But the tickets are all bought and there's no turning back now. I was in the bookstore looking for something to read on the boat—I really don't want to listen to a bunch of Americans gossiping about their adventures in wicked old Europe.” She made a face at the thought. “Anyhow, I go up to Le Havre today on the train, I'm there overnight, board the Normandie tomorrow, seven days at sea, then it's New York.”
“What train do you take?”
“Five-twenty from the Gare du Nord.” She was silent for a moment, not happy at the prospect of traveling. For a moment it seemed like she might cry again, a shadow crossed her, then, instead, she managed a gloomy smile. “How like Paris this is—to meet an old friend a few hours before going away forever.”
“Some day you will come back here.”
“Do you think so?” There was a real ache in her voice when she said it.
“I do,” he said.
“Funny, I don't even know your name. I don't suppose it's actually Captain Markov.”
“Khristo is my name. Then Stoianev—like your ‘Stephens.' ”
“Khristo,” she said.
“Yes. I have not heard it said for a long time. I use another name now.”
Her eyes suddenly lit up and she smiled to herself.
“Is funny?” he asked.
“No. It's just that my name isn't Faye Berns, not really.”
“Ah,” he said, “you have a cover.”
“My name is Frances Bernstein,” she said. “But that sounded too much like just another girl from Brooklyn, so I changed it to Faye Berns.”
He waggled a finger at her in mock reproof. “ Too much like true name,” he said. “Very bad espionage.”
She fell silent in wonder at all that had happened to her, her eyes sought his and he realized suddenly that he was the last link to a life she'd lived in Madrid and Paris, that saying good-bye to him was saying good-bye to that. “I don't think,” she said sadly, “that I can ever tell anybody what happened to me here. I don't think they would believe it. And I know they wouldn't understand it. Most people pretend that exciting things happened to them—I'll have to pretend they didn't. That's what I should do, isn't it?”
He nodded in sympathy, it was a trap they shared. “Better that way,” he said.
They ate lunch together. And he followed her around Paris for most of the afternoon while she worked her way through an extraordinary list of last-minute errands. He kept an eye out, from time to time, for surveillance, but none appeared, and they were going to places where he'd never been before.
When all the items on her list were crossed off he helped her load a large, battered trunk into a taxi, then into a compartment on the train. He went down to the platform when the conductor blew his whistle, and she leaned out the top of the open window. “Can I write you a letter sometime?” she asked, her voice rising above the echoing noise of the vast, glass-domed station.
He thought for a moment. “I don't know where you could send it,” he said.
“You may write to me, then. If you like.” She produced a fountain pen, shook it, and scratched a name and address on a scrap of paper.
He took it from her and put it in his pocket. The conductor sounded two short blasts on his whistle and swung himself on board. There was a loud hiss of decompression and a cloud of steam billowed onto the platform. Khristo reached up with both hands and she took them in her own. They remained like this for a moment, then the train lurched forward and they let go.
The twenty-fourth of June was the first warm summer night of 1937—the sort of night when everything was possible, when any dream could come true. Dusk was hazy and soft, as always, but the usual evening chill never appeared. Everyone in the city came out of their apartments, music spilled from the open doors of cafés, and the strollers, excited by the gentle air, made animated conversation and filled the streets with a music of their own. The clouds were low and dense that night, shutting out the stars, and the city felt like a lovely private room where a party would soon begin.
When Khristo arrived at the brasserie, it was a madhouse. Papa Heininger, glasses askew, was glued to the telephone as reservations poured in. As he spoke, he made soothing gestures with his unoccupied hand, as though to placate the invisible caller. “I am desolated, but I must tell you that His Excellency's usual table is simply not available at midnight. He may have it at one, or there is table fourteen—a quite estimable location in my opinion.” He nodded and soothed, nodded and soothed, as the caller spoke. “Yes, I agree … Yes, most unusual … Just for tonight, of course … Please thank His Excellency for his understanding … Thank you, goodbye.” He hung up and patted his brow with a folded napkin. “Djadja!” he called out to Omaraeff, standing over the reservation book with pencil at the ready, “Count Iava will take number fourteen tonight. Move the Germans!” Omaraeff asked where, for they hadn't a spare inch of space in the entire establishment. Papa Heininger waved his napkin in the air. “Must I do the thinking for the entire world? I don't care where you put them. You may seat them in the toilet for all I care. Tell them it is more efficient so.”
So the night progressed.
The florist arrived with sprays of Bourbon roses, fat, decadent-looking things in shades of maroon and lavender. The baker arrived with baskets of loaves. A party of Americans arrived too early, expecting to be fed. They were, despite some shouting in the kitchen, accommodated. The Beale party of six came up the marble staircase at 10:30—early for them—but the magical night had excited them beyond fashion. Slowly, the sound level grew to a magnificent bedlam—the music of forks and plates, the ring of crystal glasses touched in toast, manic conversation, unbridled laughter, shouted greetings to friends at far tables. The huge mirrors glittered red and gold, the waiters ran to and fro with trays of langoustines and bottles of champagne.
And everyone was there.
Kiko Bettendorf, the racing driver. The Duchess of Trent, accompanied by Harry and Hazel, her deerhounds. Dr. Matthew O'Connor and his “niece,” Miss Robin Vote, charming and melancholy as always in her tuxedo and bow tie. The mysterious Mlle. M.—tonight with both her lovers. There was Voyschinkowsky—“The Lion of the Bourse”—with a party of twelve. Fum, the beloved clown of the Circus Dujardin. Ginger Pudakis, Jimmy Grey, Mario Thoeni—the tenor, and Adelstein—the impresario—guests of Winnie and Dicky Beale. The Prince of Bahadur was accompanied by his Austrian nurse, who showed to advantage in a million dollars' worth of the Bahadur royal emeralds. There was Kreml, the ammunition king, squiring the immense Frau Kreml, her mother, her sister, her cousin, and that nice woman from the hotel who was teaching them bridge. Count Iava. The Baroness de Ropp. Miss Catherine Fetwick-Mill. Mr. Antonio Dzur.
Monsieur Escaldo, of Clichy.
His silent associate, Monsieur Sarda.
And their mentor, the handsomely attired Barbette.
Escaldo and Sarda, in their long gangster coats, fedoras pulled down on their foreheads, Thompson guns held at the hip, caused great stir with their arrival. First of all, they did not have a reservation. Simply swept past Papa Heininger, Mireille the hat-check girl, and Omaraeff the headwaiter without a word. When they entered the dining room, they provoked an instant burst of excitement. Was life not sufficiently fantastique on this magical night? No, apparently not. For here were real “American” gangsters, a spicy addition to an evening that had already established itself as thrilling and glamorous. Vive le grand Capone! someone shouted, and glasses rang as other voices joined in the toast.
With a cinematic flourish, Escaldo and Sarda raised their weapons and pulled the triggers. Muzzle flashes danced and glittered at the ends of the barrels and the great room dissolved into splinters, a confusion of color and motion, screams and raw panic.
Khristo was on the floor before he knew what was happening. A man in a cape jumped to his feet and sprinted for the exit, knocking him backward, first into a table of four, then onto the carpet. He heard the rounds buzzing over his head and burrowed down as the mirrors lining the walls dissolved in silvery showers of glass. These were sub machine guns—in effect, rapid-fire pistols using the same. 45-caliber bullet as the American military sidearm—so, even though they were fired into the ceiling and upper walls, whatever they touched virtually exploded, and diners groveling below the volleys were covered with plaster and mirror shards.
It was a miracle that nobody was actually killed. Count Iava, having secured table fourteen for the evening, found himself pinned to the carpet by its weight, and nearly choked to death on a mouthful of baby lamb. Kiko Bettendorf, survivor of the Death Curve at Frelingheissen Raceway, would require fourteen stitches to repair the gash in his scalp. Frau Kreml, hiding beneath a table cloth and believing herself the object of a robbery, dislocated two fingers in a fruitless attempt to remove her rings. Ginger Pudakis stood up, a foolish thing to do, and had her forehead creased by a spent round that ricocheted from the ceiling. She then fell backward against a chair, blood trickling down her face. From where he lay, Khristo saw what happened next, though he was not able to think about it until later. Of all the people in the room, amid the shrieking and the gunfire, it was Winnie Beale who acted with courage. Seeing her friend hit, she leaped forward, from a position of relative safety on a banquette, and covered her friend's body with her own.
Barbette had disappeared, having elected to wander in search of Omaraeff, who had vanished from his usual position at the front of the room. Since he was the true object of this operation, Barbette was anxious to find him. He had not left the restaurant—Barbette had made sure of that. Nor was he in the Men's Room. He was, however, in the Ladies'. In the last stall where he'd gone to hide, his legs bare, a red waiter's jacket gathered around his ankles in imitation of a skirt.
Barbette stood at the entry to the stall, the door held open by his left hand, a 9 mm device of no particular distinction held loosely at his side, and contemplated the seated Omaraeff, who was bent well forward, his face hidden in his hands. Barbette's mouth twisted in sorrowful irony.
“Oh Djadja,” he said, not unkindly, “women do not take their skirts down to use the toilet, they pull them up. Is that possibly something you would not know? Yes? No? Or is it just the strain of the moment that's confused you? Yes? Tell me, my friend, you must say something.”
Omaraeff just shook his head, refused to uncover his face.
“Poor Djadja,” Barbette said. From where he stood, the top of Omaraeff's shaven skull offered a particularly tempting aspect and, without further discussion, he raised his hand and completed his mission. Omaraeff rocked back, then collapsed forward, still seated, his upturned hands resting motionless on the tile floor. It was a small facility, the ladies' W.C. at the Brasserie Heininger, with marble walls and ceiling, and Barbette's ears rang for hours thereafter.
Roddy Fitzware's favorite place in Paris was the center window table at the Tour d' Argent. He loved the view of the Seine, best appreciated from the sixth-floor restaurant, well above the heads of the tourists. He loved the serious atmosphere—one came here to dine beautifully, period—which stimulated a deep, formal serenity in him, made him, he felt, his best self. Here he could do without the absurd eye makeup and stylish effeminacy that cloaked his persona in the café society in which, by direction, he'd taken up residence. He loved the caneton, and he loved the turbot. When it came time to spend some of His Majesty's Secret Impres't Funds, the Tour d' Argent was where he liked to go. One had to scribble the odd voucher, of course, so he couldn't just simply dine. He had to do His Majesty's business.
His Majesty's business arrived on the stroke of 1:15. Fabien Théaud, a stiff-necked young Frenchman, surely somebody's nephew, who moved in the upper circles of the DST—the French equivalent of MI5. In other words, a cop. But, Fitzware thought, a cop in a very good suit. He watched him march resolutely toward the table, chin raised, nostrils pinched, mouth slightly drawn down, as though the world disgusted him.
Fitzware stood, they shook hands formally, in the French manner—a single, firm pump—and Théaud seated himself with ceremony. To the left of the elaborate luncheon setting on Théaud's side of the table lay a brown paper parcel neatly tied with string. The Frenchman politely ignored the package. He had been treated to these lunches for more than a year and had learned to accept Fitzware's sense of theater. Revelations were not to be made in the first act.
Once ritual courtesies were done with and after the service of the wine, Fitzware came to the point. “Your people,” he said, “must be in a frightful uproar this morning.”
“Oh?” Théaud seemed legitimately surprised.
“Last night's madness—the little war at Heininger.”
“Hardly a war. No one shot back and only the headwaiter was killed. In any case, nothing very interesting for us.” Théaud waved it away.
“Really?”
“Les gangsters. Some sort of stupid criminal nonsense. Perhaps an extortion, perhaps a war between butchers for the beef concession, one can only imagine the truth of it. The préfecture already has the two machine-gunners. Trash. Low-grade pimps from Clichy. As for the headwaiter, shot in the toilet, I think that was what the Americans call a rub-out.”
“Nothing much for you, then.”
“No. The police and the justice ministry will see to it.”
“Some prominent people injured, one reads.”
Théaud indulged himself in a mighty Gallic shrug accompanied by an explosive “Pach!” Then smiled grimly. “The American socialite? The German racing driver? These people. They come to Paris to be decadent, by accident they come upon the real thing, and then they howl. Good stuff for the newspapers is all it is. As for Heininger's, I wouldn't try to go there for a week or two if I were you.”
“They will close down, then?”
“Close! Heavens no. You won't be able to get in the door.”
Fitzware smiled ruefully. “In any case, your efficiency is admirable, to have the assassins so quickly.”
Théaud brightened visibly at being complimented for efficiency. “Nothing to it, mon vieux. In the British phrase, ‘information received.' The criminals were sold out almost immediately. They won't talk, of course—that would be to violate the code of the underworld. So what they'll get is a nice quick little trial and, if they don't give us the murderer of the headwaiter, the services of Dr. Guillotin. Truly, I don't believe they'll mind all that much. There is some honor to it in their society.”
“In some countries they would be considered merely accessories.”
“Perhaps. But this is France, and here they are murderers.”
For a time they turned their attention to the food and the wine, then Fitzware asked, “May I ask the state of your progress in the matter of the Russian courier?”
“Ach, you'll ruin my lunch. A nest of snakes is what that is. Informants and counterinformants, power struggles in the émigré community, lies and wishful thinking and false confessions and rumors and every sort of unimaginable nonsense. I fear that one may be forever lost to us.”
“You have found it,” Fitzware said simply.
Théaud looked at him suspiciously. “Yes? I cannot believe my luck would be that good.”
“But it is. Just to the left of your plat de salade.”
“This package?”
“Indeed. It is a Radom.”
“Oh. A Radom. And that is … ?”
“An automatic pistol of Polish manufacture, a very serviceable weapon, greatly prized east of the Oder. You'll find that it killed Myagin and, by accident, Ivan Donchev, the old man in the movie theater.”
Théaud raised a hand and halted him right there. Called for the wine waiter and ordered the best Montrachet they could bring up. “Thus,” he said dramatically, “to those who serve France.”
Fitzware inclined his head in a seated bow. He was clearly enjoying himself. “There's a bit more,” he said. “The gun was obtained from a Turk, called Yasin, in the quarter out by Boulevard Raspail. The man who bought it is called Nikko Petrov, a Bulgarian, presently employed as a waiter at the Brasserie Heininger. There. Now I feel I have served France.”
Théaud's face collapsed. “Oh no,” he said, “you must not do this to me.”
Fitzware was stunned.
“You are telling me—if I were not deaf as a post and entirely unable to hear you—that some connection exists between the Myagin murder and last night's frolic at the brasserie. Tit for tat. A plot in the restaurant results in the murder of a Soviet diplomat, thus the NKVD returns the favor by shooting the headwaiter and causing general consternation in the brasserie. They would assume, of course, that Heininger would not survive such an incident, being insensitive, for the moment, to café society's appetite for scandal. If that is, indeed, what you are telling me, I do not hear it. You did not say it.”
“In God's name why?”
“Politiques. Four days ago, as I am sure you are aware, Camille Chautemps, a radical socialist, succeeded Léon Blum, a plain old un-radical socialist, as the premier of France. This is, therefore, no time to anger our most formidable ally, the USSR, by accusing them of upsetting a bunch of rich foreigners in a restaurant. Not with Chancellor Hitler sharpening his teeth on our doorstep, it isn't. My dear Fitzware, I think I am going to weep. With frustration. Right in front of God in the Tour d' Argent. You have solved our most pressing case and taken it away from us in the same breath.”
Fitzware bit the end of his thumb and thought for a time. “Well, then, may I suggest you don't solve it? You may come part of the way, surely. Pick up this Petrov character, drop a curtain around him—matters of national security, trial in camera—and let it stand there. The Heininger connection need not come up, as long as you keep him well away from the newspapers. And, in the case of the brasserie, at least you know what happened. That might mean something or other later on.”
Théaud drummed his fingers on the table. “Perhaps. It becomes complicated, one has to find a way through, but it's possible. There are those in the Ministry of Justice who would unravel the whole affaire, and they will have to be deceived. But it would not be the first time, and we could at least clear the internal accounting. One might ask, however, what this Petrov is to you, that such a fine lunch is served on the occasion of his, ah, delivery.”
“Well, there one has to proceed by indirection—too much information will only confuse the issue. Let us say we are always anxious to be in your good books, and we know that he damaged one of our operations. For his own purposes, he traded one of our people to the Russians for someone he wanted back. Our operative had been of significant value, helping us to acquire information about the NKVD in Paris and elsewhere, a surprising amount of information. This Petrov found a way to ruin him, shall we say. You're not going to feed him to Dr. Guillotin, are you?”
“We might. If the Russians found out he was involved in the Myagin business we'd almost have to. But, on the other hand, execution always turns out to be a noisy business—the official sort of execution, at any rate. Still, if there's a way …”
Fitzware thought for a moment. “Oh well, serve him right if you did.” The Montrachet arrived.
The cranes fly like summer nights,
their shadows on the sun.
No, not quite.
The cranes fly like summer girls,
here but an instant, then …
No. One saw girls in the sky. Ridiculous.
The cranes fly, like cranes.
No. Now his mind was tormenting itself.
The cranes fly like … How, in fact, did the fucking cranes fly? That was his problem. He'd never seen a crane or, if he had seen one, he didn't know it was a crane. Someone had surely seen the cranes flying, for the accursed image had worked its way into the Russian mythos and stuck there like a dagger.
He leaned back in the hard wooden chair and sighed, looking out through the wire at a flat field of weedy grass. Above the guard towers, the sky seemed to stretch to the end of the world. Sascha Vonets was not meant to be a poet, that's all one could say. It was just that his stubborn soul had, somehow, got into the habit of making soulful noises, and one had to do something or other about that, so his instinct had always been to chop up the thoughts so that they trickled down the page instead of marching, margin to margin, like a shock battalion.
He put the mutilated poem in a desk drawer and went back to his account ledger. The question was: what should the numbers say? This was harder, even, than cranes. One lived or died with this. So one had better get it right. Problem was, what did Brasovy want? To lie, the better part of the time, to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear just as he told Brasovy what he wanted to hear. Yet there had to be variation, otherwise the whole enterprise was simply too obvious, even for those straw-headed statues back in the Central Administration Office. Some days, one had to tell the truth so that, most days, one could tell the necessary lies. The analysis was correct, all right, but which day was today?
The production norms for the Utiny gold fields, in the Kolyma River region midway between the East Siberian Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, were in no way possible to fulfill. In winter, the temperature fell to sixty degrees below zero and the wind blew like a demon's rage. The workers lived on translucent soup and a few ounces of gritty bread and died like flies. The work sucked their first strength out of them in a matter of weeks. After that, they began dying—not too fast, not too slow—and their ability to shift rock and sand declined rapidly. The previous spring they'd eaten a dead horse. The horse had been dead for a while, when they found it, and they ate the maggots as well. Others had received a barrel of axle grease for their wheelbarrows, and they'd eaten that down to the wood. Some ate Iceland moss, just to put something in their bellies. When they failed to meet the scheduled production norms, dictated by Moscow, they were stripped and watered down and left to freeze in the cold—though not quite to death. In summer they were tied naked to a pole so that the mosquito swarms could eat on them for hours. But what drove them crazy, they said, was the sound of it. The falsetto whirr in the ears.
He had learned, somehow, not to know of such things.
He had built a wall and lived behind it.
He had survived. It was his grandmother who'd kept him out of the execution cellars in the Lubianka. There went the jewelry, the candlesticks, the silver, everything she had put by to survive in bad times. They had sent him east—to the northeast corner of hell, to be precise—with a thirty-year sentence. But he was alive. And he had a debt to pay, a debt to them, and by God's grace he would stay alive long enough to pay it. To make them cry out in anguish, as they had made others cry out. To make them burn, as they had made others burn. To cut their hamstrings, as they had cut millions, and watch them come tumbling down.
The cruelest thing he had to admit to himself was that, in some strange way, he had never been happier. Suddenly, in this necropolis of ice and flatness and dead gray light, he had a reason to live, for the first time in his life. At last, there was something he wanted. He wanted to hurt them as they had hurt him. How simple and childlike life turned out to be once it was pared down to the basic elements.
And the funniest part of it—if anything could ever be funny again—was that they had been right!
There they were, killing left and right on pretext. On the phantom basis of a hostile glance, an indiscreet word, a beard drawn on a poster, anything, and, the greedy swine, leaving him alive. The one who had truly spied on them and, better yet, continued to do so. Drunken old crazy poet Sascha wandering about in a daze with his absurd heart dragging behind him on a chain, this posturing fool, this poseur, was digging up their buried secrets every chance he got.
First he had done it in Moscow, long before he'd gone to Spain, in Dzerzhinsky Square itself. Little nighttime trips to the files. What's old what's-his-face doing lately? This? Hmm. That? My, my. The other thing? Dear me. We'll just write that down, in a private little code of our own, and make it into a word, and remember that word.
And one could remember, once they were set into meter and rhyme, a thousand words.
When he had first arrived at the camp, they had assigned him the job of general laborer. He was supposed to shift seven cubic yards of gravel a day. Wet gravel. He spit on his hands and set to it; it meant survival, a man was capable of anything when pressed. He shoveled till his muscles rang, till his heart squeezed like a fist. Worked as the mucus ran from his nose and his breath rasped and whistled. The trustee came around just before they were marched back to the camp. Vonets, he wrote, 503775, two yards.
No!
Yes. Truth was, perhaps a little over three, but one's production had to be shared, with “others”—he'd get used to it, they had a system. What was he worried about? At that rate, he wasn't going to last anyhow.
He had managed to become a trustee before death got him, but it had been a close thing. One by one, he'd worked his way through the camp NKVD, looking for the right one, the one in whom a spark of ambition still glowed. And, at last, found him. I am, he'd said, a writer of reports. The old trick had worked again, just as it had back in Moscow. He couldn't fly a damned crane to save his soul but when they needed drivel, and they needed drivel, he was their boy. Fair-haired.
Transportational facilities on the above date were diminished by the reduction of one unit necessitating a restructuring of production goals on said date.
Which meant the horse had died.
They made him a clerk.
That meant he lived in a room with four beds and a stove, that meant he worked in an office where they stoked logs into the stove as though tomorrow would never come, that meant he got a fishhead in his soup every night and twelve extra ounces of bread a day, which meant he could stay alive, and, in turn, that meant he could plunge the knife into their hearts and twist with all his might. In time.
It meant, most important, that he had something to trade, because the little diary he had kept for so long had to grow, had to stay current, or it would be worth nothing. In the Kolyma it was as though time had stopped. The wind moaned in the fir trees and the world was white. Blank. Yet, somewhere, life went on, operations co
ntinued, changed, assumed new shapes, involved new people. All the little details kept piling up and he had to have them, he fed on them, and they kept him on fire and alive.