The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

  Her footsteps again echoed off the Arkhiv’s wood floor as she hurried over to the section marked “Nuremberg.” Here were stored the official transcripts taken down by Allied stenographers, translated, printed on color-coded onionskin, and distributed to the non-German-speaking judges and prosecutors of the four countries that defeated Germany: light blue for the Americans and British, yellow for the French, light green for the Russians.

  Luckily, the box marked “Albert Speer 4” was on a low shelf. Speer was a special case: sentenced to twenty years in Spandau prison, he freely discussed his case with his captors and admitted his complicity in Nazi war crimes. Yashchiks 2–5 contained conversations held after the trial was over; in the case of number four, long after—the conversations recorded by hidden microphones.

  She had read something in this box when she was researching an earlier book, something that hadn’t computed at the time. The green-colored flimsies flew under her fingers until she found the one she wanted.

  None of you believe me when I say it, but the Führer had a wonderful sense of humor, even in times of great moment.

  I remember being summoned in the middle of the night to his office in the Old Reichschancellory. He hated the place; called it “Bismarck’s soap factory.” So I had four thousand men working around the clock, building him a new one. The clanging of the ironworkers sent the others, the light sleepers, off to get their earplugs. But not Hitler. He worked right through the din. And then slept the sleep of the just.

  I found him looking out the window toward the east. He didn’t turn around when he heard me come in. “Speer,” he said, “what if you know for certain something is going to happen? You know it for a fact, the way you know the sun will come up tomorrow? And what if, at the same time, you know equally well that it is impossible, that it can never be? What would you do? Would you go crazy?”

  “Yes, mein Führer,” I answered. “I probably would.”

  He kept staring out the window. His voice was very low. “You see? A lesser man can’t deal with contradiction. Only the great are able to believe two entirely opposed ideas at the same time. It isn’t a question of intelligence, but of the will.”

  “I can see that.”

  He turned back from the window and fingered the little brass paperweight on the writing desk, the one I’d given him after the rally in ’37, engraved with, EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FÜHRER. He sighed. “Ah well, someone has to be in charge.”

  There were two invasion plans on his desk. The latest from the Luftwaffe had the 11th Corps capturing airfields twenty-five to thirty-five miles from the English coast and then landing infantry divisions on them, avoiding the beaches altogether. The other was Unternehmen Grün, Field Marshal Bock’s Plan Green, a full-scale invasion of Ireland in support of Sea Lion.

  But it was a third paper that he picked up now. He read it aloud, some sort of scientific report. Earlier the previous week—oh, this was in September of 1940, didn’t I say?—Himmler had given him a book, which he then turned over to the Kunsthistorisches to authenticate.

  It was a Christian Bible, very old, and they were going on about when it was printed and where, with these absurd probabilities: seventy percent that it was from the Rhineland and thirty percent from eastern France. Crazy, minute details like that. The kind of ink, the kind of pen that was dipped in the ink. I remember dust samples had been put under an electron microscope. I’d never even heard of an electron microscope.

  It was the wormhole that I remember. The report described this hole that went from the binding through the flyleaf and several pages of the Book of Genesis, partially obliterating some of the text, both handwritten and printed.

  The Führer showed me the last line of the report: “The object thus analyzed is genuine in all respects. Heil Hitler!”

  Then he turned on his heel to the massive map of Europe he was always studying. “There are exactly twenty rivers from that very window,” he nodded toward the one he’d been staring out of when I came in, “to Moscow. Twenty from the Wuhle to the Alte Oder all the way to the Moskva.” He ran his fingers over the map south to Italy. “Right there is Liguria. Duce was born in Liguria, and I myself on the Danube. I will tell you something, Speer, something I’ve never told anyone. My mother said that, on the morning I was born, a cow on my uncle’s farm gave birth to a two-headed calf.

  “Then, when I was in the Army, in the trenches on the Somme, men on both sides of me were killed in the same instant and I was spared. Spared by the Almighty, so I might achieve …” he waved his hand in the air over the map of conquered Europe “… all this. Don’t you see? Triumph in the East is ordained!”

  Of course I didn’t see. When he was going on like that I found it best to say nothing and wait for an explanation. But he didn’t explain.

  Instead, he started in on this character in Die Walkure, Hunding, the husband cuckolded by his brother; Hunding and his helmet of ox horns. It was the horns he was thinking of, I suppose, the horns of a dilemma no less painful than those stage props.

  “It is impossible.” He was leaning with both elbows on the map table. I thought he might actually put his head in his hands. “Here it is already September. Even if I postpone Sea Lion tonight, even if we mobilize tomorrow, we cannot invade the Soviet Union now, not with the Russian winter coming on. And yet, it is preordained.”

  That’s when he handed me a sheet of paper that was lying on the map. I ran my eyes down the page, thinking it must be a battle order. It was poetry, of the strangest kind.

  “I don’t quite see, mein Führer …”

  Impatiently, he stabbed at it with his index finger. “There, there, in the third verse. At decade’s dawn. The prophecy specifies victory now. But we’re not ready.”

  So, it was a prophecy. I read it again, this time noticing the part about the child of Germany picking up Barbarossa’s sword. I had to be honest. “I do not see the problem, mein Führer.”

  “1940! The dawn of the decade! The year of my destiny, this very year, 1-9-4-0, is all but over!”

  Then I understood. “Here, mein Führer, look at my fingers.” I spread my hands, palms outward. “If I count them, I go one, two, three, and so on, up to ten.”

  “Natürlich.”

  I’d learned to remain calm when he was agitated. “A decade has ten years, as I have ten fingers. One, two, three … so, the first year of a decade isn’t zero. It’s one.”

  “You’re saying … the decade begins, not in 1940 …”

  “But in 1941. Exactly. You are, if this message from the past is to be believed, predestined to master the Slavic race next year, in 1941.”

  Hitler sat down a little heavily in his chair, drained by all the excitement. “Very good, Speer. You can go.”

  I clicked my heels and headed toward the door.

  Hitler stopped me. “Speer.”

  I turned back. “Yes, mein Führer?”

  He smiled. “If you were anyone else and had played that game with me, by now you’d have only nine fingers.”

  You see what I mean? What a sense of humor!

  The joke was lost on Lara, but not the story’s significance: it was one more piece in the jigsaw proving that Noël Coward’s story really happened.

  Chapter 30

  Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten all day, when her phone rumbled too. Caller ID said “Grigoriy Gerasimov.” She’d forgotten to call.

  “Glad I caught you, Lara. Look, I’m in the car … how about I pick you up for that practice session with the prompter?”

  “I’m at the Osobyi Arkhiv for another quarter hour. Do you know where it is?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Gerasimov was waiting for her at closing time not in a Mercedes—the standard choice of the Russian privileged class—but in a restored Alfa Romeo. She got in the little sports car and he drove her out of Moscow past the big War Memorial up there on the hill at Poklonnaya Gora. It wasn’t long before the thought came to her that she
was living the dream, at least for the moment, of every unmarried woman in the faculty lounge, and not a few of the married ones—being whisked away in a convertible by a tall, dark Prince Charming.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “Starving.”

  “Me too. We’ll eat before I take you back home.”

  They took Vozdvizhenka Street westbound across the river to the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, joining the fleets of buses, trucks, taxis, private cars, and, everywhere, motorcycles heading for the M-1. Storm clouds were gathering overhead, big, dark thunderheads, and Gerasimov was worried that they would have to pull over and put up the top if it started to pour. He was going on about his car, how the Italians were great at bodywork but terrible with electronics. “Take the turn signals. No matter how much I spend, they never seem to work in the rain.”

  When Lara tried to talk instead about the problems his change in her teaching schedule had caused, of what the superintendant was trying to pull with a vote of the Faculty Senate, he used a break in the traffic to speed up and pass a number of cars, increasing the wind noise and making conversation impossible.

  So Lara didn’t get to complain that, on a call she’d just made from the Arkhiv, Nazimova had threatened her newest full professor if she made a stink in front of the Department. “Last in, first out,” she’d repeated, as if it were a commandment handed down by Moses. Then, to compound matters, Lara had told her in memorable language exactly how she’d felt. So now she’d probably have to write an apology. Ugh.

  The traffic jam was a new, post-Soviet phenomenon, the inevitable consequence of Western consumerism coming late to an oil-glutted country. Try as she might to hold on to it, Lara felt her anger starting to seep away in the gathering gloom. Poking along, there was plenty of time to notice the enormous blue banners depicting the smiling world leaders of the G20 countries, two to a flag. Each of the dozens lining the fifty-meter-wide boulevard for more than a mile bore the single word, Vmeste!, and its English translation, Together!, at the bottom, as if the owners of the world’s twenty biggest economies—so often rattling sabers at each other—were in Moscow for a series of nice tête-à-têtes. Now that the motorcade had come and gone, dozens of workers were stacking the pedestrian barricades back on the trucks.

  Gerasimov broke his silence by pointing to one of the banners, showing the new American president and his Russian opposite number. “So, my Russian-American friend, how do you feel about your two peoples getting together?”

  She thought about it. “Talking is better than shooting, I suppose.” She looked at him in the rearview mirror. “And you?”

  “Wasn’t it an American who said, ‘My country, right or wrong’? I’m with him.”

  Gerasimov steered the car toward the exit that led out of town toward St. Petersburg and points west. The surprise of it made Lara blurt out, “Where is this prompter of yours, Grisha? Poland?”

  He smiled. “I have a media room upstairs at the dacha.”

  “Wait a minute. Your dacha?”

  “We do remotes from there sometimes.” He looked over at her. “Don’t worry, everything’s on the up and up. My son will be joining us.”

  But she was worried; she barely knew this guy. What was she getting herself into? Leaving the Arkhiv, she’d called her roommate to say she’d be late getting back from practicing for her telecast and Katrina, predictably, had said, “With your man … of mystery?”

  Still, Lara had never seen a dacha. Not a nice one, anyway. Oh, they’d tried. A long time ago, under Brezhnev, her father piled the family into the Zhiguli and drove the twenty miles from Moscow to Uspenskoye. The woods, when they could see them, were dark and beautiful, with little clearings that would have been perfect for the picnic lunch they’d brought. But a NO STOPPING line was painted on the edge of the road, all the villages had TRANSIT ONLY markers and, just to be sure, a ten-foot-high green fence set back from the road ran for miles in both directions with NO ENTRY signs on every side street. The workers, who theoretically owned everything in the Soviet state, were as unwanted as capitalist spies.

  When she looked up, Gerasimov was pulling off the main road and heading the Alfa across a little wooden bridge and up a lane dotted with the comfortable cottages of which every Russian dreamed. He was saying, “Can you believe it, ours was once Nikolai Bulganin’s place. The official retreat of the Soviet premier and just one bathroom! As the Americans say, it needed an extreme makeover.”

  Lara thought back to the picnic. By the time they’d driven past the forbidden district, the children were hungry and complaining, and Father pulled over in the yard behind a closed gas station. They ate their pirogis on the rough wooden table where the workers had lunch. Some picnic.

  The worst of it was, her parents had acted as if it was what they had intended all along. Two beaten-down victims of the Soviet state, grateful for the crumbs they were thrown. No wonder she’d jumped at the chance to go to university in the States.

  His place, as they approached it, was originally one of those Grimm’s fairy tale cottages in the Russian style, with eaves that came down practically to the ground. Put up in the 1920s or ’30s, it had recently doubled in size, and there were all manner of satellite dishes on the roof. “You can use the room to the right at the top of the stairs to freshen up, the one with its own bathroom. Then come back down and make yourself comfortable. When I return, we’ll begin.”

  “You’re going?”

  “I have to get a few things. I promised you food, remember? I won’t be long; why not listen to some music here ’til I get back? We have iTunes.”

  Lara must have dozed off for a while in the overstuffed chair that sat in front of the unlit fireplace, because she awoke with a start, nearly pulling the headphones off her head. Someone else was in the house, she could feel it. She called out Gerasimov’s name. No answer. She could hear water running. Was it the rain? She looked out the window. Nothing yet.

  Lara crossed the hall and opened a door that led to the vast, updated kitchen. A young man of not more than twenty-five, with longer hair than was stylish, was washing something in the utility sink. He was shirtless, with blue and black tattoos covering his well-muscled body. Just as Lara saw that whatever was in the sink was making the water turn red, the young man looked around.

  He smiled. “I’m the son … Nikki. Like what you see?”

  Lara blushed and turned away from the door. The young man continued his washing and added a little whistling for good measure.

  Chapter 31

  Uspenskoye

  Lara would eventually discover the no-longer-bloody shirt outside on a line, the stains still visible on the cuffs and under the buttons. But that would be later. Right now, she was sitting with her legs drawn up under her on the cushioned built-in piece that ran the length of the big front window, her brain in disarray, watching the first drops come down outside while going through the motions of working on a chess problem. Trying not to run into Nikki again before his father came back.

  The little folding wooden chessboard her father had hewn for her, with the tiny holes in each space for the pieces to fit in, was the one good thing to have come out of Perm. She was staring at a discovered check Tal had sprung on Smyslov in their championship match. Should he have seen it coming? A dirty American pickup truck was parked where the little Alfa had been. The rain was starting to clean it off. She knew her mind was wandering and she let it.

  When, at the Radisson, Lara had said all the best historians were in the camps, she’d meant it. She still thought of her father and his colleagues as prisoners behind the Urals. Perm was a true Soviet city, with rutted streets, numbered “dormitory” blocks and architecture so ugly it must have been a deliberate choice. A closed city which opened periodically to swallow “deviationists” like Lara’s parents and the other faculty members in the years right before Stalin died, when the terror was building once more. And then, miraculously, Perm spit them out again in the “thaw” under Khrushchev.


  Lara’s mother died there. Not in body, but in spirit. Once they were returned to Moscow, there was no work for which they were trained, not for a pardoned kosmopolit, a cosmopolitan (okay, Jew), and his Muslim wife. So the man who understood the history of the West better than most Britons and Americans plastered crumbling ceilings and fixed leaky pipes and began his own long descent into uselessness.

  She took the picture out of her handbag and studied it, as she had a thousand times. Two young, fresh-faced university graduates on their wedding day: the son of the Old Bolshevik, a brilliant career ahead of him, and his just-as-brilliant bride, the scholarship student from Tajikistan, two thousand miles and who knows how many centuries away to the East. Decades too late, they tried to make their world more normal, more “Russian,” by making a family when they were almost old enough to be grandparents. So Lara—named for the heroine of the Pasternak novel, naturally—and her brother Lev had been Brezhnev babies, the youngest children by far of all her parents’ Moscow friends.

  The tattoos made it all come flooding back. The inky, unearned prison insignia she’d seen on Nikki’s back and chest meant he was in Nashi, the marauding band of young nationalists Lev called “our own Hitler Youth.” While the father professed democratic ideals. And here she was, under the same roof. Crazy.

  In the quiet of the country, the sudden ringing of her mobile phone made a terrible racket. “Yes?”

  “Larashka, are you all right?”

  “Oh, it’s you, Viktor. Of course I’m—”

  “I called the house. Katrina said your classes have been cancelled.”

  “Postponed. It’s a … a short sabbatical. I’m doing research outside the city.”

  “Your voice sounds strange. Can I come see you? I can get a two-day pass, more if I want.”

  “Viktor, I can’t talk right now. Let me call you back.”