Legends

by Robert Littell

  “Turnoff for Prigorodnaia very shortly now,” Katovsky said. “I was one of Boris Spassky’s advisors when he lost to Fischer in 1972. If only he would have followed my advice he could have vacuumed the carpet with Fischer, who made blunder after blunder. Ha! They say the winner in any game of chess is the one who makes the next to last blunder. Here—here is the Prigorodnaia turnoff. Oh, how time seeps through your fingers when you are not closing your hand into a fist—I remember this road before it was paved. In 1952 and part of 1953, I was driven by a chauffeur to Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’s dacha in Prigorodnaia every Sunday to teach chess to his wife. The lessons came to an end when Comrade Stalin died and Beria, who behind Stalin’s back created the gulags and purged the most loyal comrades, became executed.”

  As Katovsky headed down the spur, past a sign that read “Prigorodnaia 7 kilometers,” the cracked rib in Martin’s chest began to ache again. Curiously, the pain seemed … familiar.

  But how in the name of God could pain be familiar?

  A pulse, the harbinger of a splitting headache, began to beat in Martin’s temples and he brought his fingers up to knead his brow. He found himself slipping into and out of roles. He could hear Lincoln Dittmann lazily murmuring a verse of poetry.

  … the silent cannons bright as gold rumble

  lightly over the stones. Silent cannons, soon

  to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin

  the red business.

  And the voice of the poet wearing the soiled white shirt open at the throat.

  Sight at daybreak,—in camp in front of the

  hospital tent on a stretcher (three dead men lying,)

  each with a blanket spread over him

  Other voices, barely audible, played in the lobe of his brain where memory resided. Gradually he began to distinguish fragments of dialogue.

  Gentlemen and ladies … overlooked Martin Odum’s original biography.

  His mother was—

  … was Polish … Immigrated … after the Second …

  Maggie’s on to …

  … staring us in the face …

  The driver of the Zil glanced at his passenger. “Look at those chimneys spewing filthy white smoke,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s a paper factory—built after Beria’s time, unnecessary to say—he never would have permitted it. Now you are knowing why only little shots live here nowadays—the stench of sulfur fills the air every hour of every day of every year. The local peasants swear you get used to it—that in time you only feel discomfortable when you breathe air that is not putrid.”

  Even the reek of sulfur stinging Martin’s nostrils seemed familiar.

  “Comrade Beria played chess,” the driver remembered. “Badly. So badly that it required all my cleverness to lose to him.”

  … Lincoln Dittmann was in Triple … overheard an old lottery vender talking Polish to a hooker… catch the drift …

  … his mother used to read him bedtime stories in Polish …

  Martin found himself breathing with difficulty—he felt as if he were gagging on memories that needed to be disgorged before he could get on with his life.

  Ahead, an abandoned custom’s station with a faded red star painted above the door loomed at the side of the road. Across from it and down a shallow slope, a river rippled through its bed. It must have been in flood because there appeared to be a margin of shallow marshes on either side; grass could be seen undulating in the current.

  Martin heard a voice he recognized as his own say aloud, “The river is called the Lesnia, which is the name of the woods it meanders through as it skirts Prigorodnaia.”

  Katovsky slowed the Zil. “I thought you said me you never been to Prigorodnaia.”

  “Never. No.”

  “Explain, then, how you come to know the name of the river?”

  Martin, concentrating on the voices in his head, didn’t reply.

  He aced Russian at college … speaking it with a Polish accent.

  … bringing his Polish up to snuff, they could also work on his Russian.

  “Pull over,” Martin ordered.

  Katovsky braked the car to a stop, two wheels on the tarmac, two wheels on the soft shoulder. Martin jumped from the car and started walking down the middle of the paved road toward Prigorodnaia. Off to his left, high on the slope near a copse of stunted apple trees, he could see a line of whitewashed beehives. His game leg and broken ribs ached, the migraine lurking behind his brow throbbed as he made his way across a landscape that seemed painfully familiar even though he had never set eyes on it.

  … Jozef as a first name?

  Half of Poland is named Jozef.

  … precisely the point …

  I happen to be rereading Kafka …

  … suggest a Polish-sounding variation. Kafkor.

  Martin detected an unevenness in the tarmac under his feet and, looking down, saw that a section of roadway, roughly the size of a large tractor tire, had been crudely repaved. It had been smoothed over, but the surface was lumpy and the seam was clearly visible. Gaping at the round section of road, he suddenly felt dizzy—he sank onto his knees and looked over his shoulder at the Zil drawing closer to him. His eyes widened in terror as he felt himself being transported back in time through a mustard-thick haze of memory. He saw things he recognized but his brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, could no longer locate the words to describe them: the twin stacks spewing plumes of dirty white smoke, the abandoned custom’s station with a faded red star painted above the door, the line of whitewashed bee-hives on a slope near a copse of stunted apple trees. And then, vanquishing terror only to confront a new enemy, madness, he could have sworn he saw an elephant striding over the brow of the hill.

  The old man driving the Zil was standing alongside the car, one hand on the open door, calling plaintively to his passenger. “I could have crushed Beria every time,” he explained, “but I thought I would live longer if I came in second.”

  The voices in Martin’s skull grew louder.

  … studied Kafka at the Janiellonian University in Kraków.

  … worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz.

  … job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow … contact with the DDO target without too much difficulty.

  Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out …

  Martin, his facial muscles contorting, heard himself whisper, “Poshol ty na khuy.” He articulated each of the O’s in “Poshol.” “Go impale yourself on a prick.”

  Pushing himself to his feet, feeling as if he were trapped in a terrible dream, Martin stumbled down the paved spur toward Prigorodnaia. Could he have met Samat before? He had a vision of himself leaning on the bar of a posh watering hole on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya called the Commercial Club. In his mind’s eye he could make out the thin figure of a man settling onto the stool next to him. Of medium height with a pinched, mournful face, he wore suspenders that kept his trousers hiked high on his waist, and a midnight blue Italian suit jacket draped cape-like over a starched white shirt, which was tieless and buttoned up to a very prominent Adam’s apple. The initials “S” and “U-Z” were embroidered on the pocket of the shirt. Martin saw himself placing on the burnished mahogany of the bar a Bolshoi ticket that had been torn in half. From a jacket pocket the thin man produced another torn ticket. The two halves matched perfectly.

  Moving his lips like a ventriloquist, Samat could be heard mumbling, What took you so long? I was told to expect the cutout to make contact with me here last week.

  It takes time to establish a cover, to rent an apartment, to make it seem as if we are meeting by chance.

  My uncle Tzvetan wants to see you as soon as possible. He has urgent messages he must send to Langley. He wants assurances he will be exfiltrated if things turn bad. He wants to be sure the people you work for lay in the plumbing for the exfiltration before it is needed.

  How do I meet him?

  He l
ives in a village not far from Moscow. It’s called Prigorodnaia. I invite you to his dacha for the weekend. We will tell everyone we were roommates at the Forestry Institute. We studied computer science together, in case anyone should ask.

  I don’t know anything about computers.

  Except for me, neither does anyone else at Prigorodnaia.

  Martin caught sight of the low wooden houses on the edge of the village ahead, each with its small fenced vegetable garden, several with a cow or a pig tethered to a tree. A burly peasant splitting logs on a stump looked up and appeared to freeze. The large axe slipped from his fingers as he gaped at the visitor. He backed away from Martin, as he would from a ghost, then turned and scampered along the path that ended at the small church with paint peeling from its onion domes. Nearing the church, Martin noticed a patch of terrain behind the cemetery that had been leveled and cemented over—a great circle had been whitewashed onto the surface blackened by engine exhaust. An Orthodox priest wearing a washed-out black robe so short it left his bare matchstick-thin ankles and Nike running shoes exposed stood before the doors of the church. He held a minuscule wooden cross high over his head as men and women, alerted by the log splitter, drifted through the village lanes toward the church.

  “Is it really you, Jozef?” the priest demanded.

  As Martin drew nearer many of the women, whispering to each other, crossed themselves feverishly.

  Martin approached the priest. “Has Samat come back to Prigorodnaia?” he asked.

  “Come and departed in his helicopter. Donated this cross, fabricated from the wood of the True Cross of Zuzovka, to our church here in Prigorodnaia, where his sainted mother prays daily for his soul. For yours, too.”

  “Is he in danger?”

  “No more, no less than we were after it was discovered that the planks over the crater in the spur had been removed and the man buried alive had gone missing.”

  Martin understood that he was supposed to know what the priest was talking about. “Who protected Samat?” he asked.

  “His uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the one we call the Oligarkh, protected Samat.”

  “And who protected his uncle?”

  The priest shook his head. “Organizations too powerful to have their names spoken aloud.”

  “And who protected you when you removed the planks over the crater and freed the man buried alive?”

  “Almighty God protected us,” said the priest, and he crossed himself in the Orthodox style with his free hand.

  Martin looked up at the onion domes, then back at the priest. “I want to talk to Samat’s mother,” he announced, thinking she might be among the women watching from the path.

  “She lives alone in the Oligarkh’s dacha,” the priest said.

  “Kristyna is a raving lunatic,” said the peasant who had been splitting logs. Crossing themselves again, the other peasants nodded in agreement.

  “And where is the Oligarkh, then?” Martin thought to ask.

  “Why, none of us can say where the Oligarkh went to when he quit Prigorodnaia.”

  “And when did the Oligarkh leave Prigorodnaia?”

  “No one knows for sure. One day he was here, struggling down the path near the river on aluminum crutches, his bodyguards following behind, his Borzois dancing ahead, the next the dacha was stripped of its furnishings and echoed with emptiness, and only a single candle burned in a downstairs window during the long winter night.”

  Martin started toward the sprawling dacha with the wooden crow’s-nest rising above the white birches that surrounded the house. The peasants blocking the path gave way to let him through; several reached out to touch an arm and a toothless old woman cackled, “Back from the dead and the buried, then.” Gaunt chickens and a rooster with resplendent plumes scrambled out from under Martin’s feet, stirring up fine dust from the path. Drawn by curiosity, the villagers and the priest, still holding aloft the sliver of a cross, trailed after him, careful to keep a respectful distance.

  When Martin reached the wooden fence surrounding the Oligarkh’s dacha, he thought he could make out a woman singing to herself. Unlatching the gate and circling around toward the back of the dacha, he stepped carefully through a neatly tended garden, with alternating furrows of vegetables and sunflowers, until he spotted the source of the singing. An old and frail crone, wearing a threadbare shift and walking barefoot, was filling a plastic can with rainwater from a barrel set under a gutter of the dacha. Long scraggly white hair plunged across her pale skin, which was stretched tightly over her facial bones, and she had to stab it away from her eyes when she caught sight of Martin to get a better look at him. “Tzvetan, as always, was correct,” she said. “You will have been better able to survive the winter once the hole was covered with snow, though I was dead set against their burying you before you had eaten your lunch.”

  “You know who I am?” Martin asked.

  “You didn’t used to ask me silly questions, Jozef. I know you as well as I know my own son, Samat; as well as I knew his father, who hibernated to Siberia during the time of Stalin and never returned. Curious, isn’t it, how our lives were utterly and eternally defined by Stalin’s whimsical brutality. I knew you would come back, dear Jozef. But what on earth took you so long? I expected you would surely return to Prigorodnaia after the first thaw of the first winter.” The old woman set down her watering can and, taking Martin’s hand in hers, led him across the garden to the back door of the dacha. “You always liked your tea and jam at this hour. You will need a steaming cup to see you through the morning.”

  Kristyna pushed through a screen door hanging half off of its hinges and, slipping her soiled feet into a pair of felt slippers, shuffled through a series of deserted rooms to the kitchen, all the while glancing over her shoulder to be sure Martin was still behind her. Using both thin arms, she worked the hand pump until water gushed from the spigot. She filled a blackened kettle and put it to boil on one of the rusting electric plaques set on the gas stove that no longer functioned. “I will fetch your favorite jam from the preserves in the larder of the cellar,” she announced. “Dearest Jozef, don’t disappear again. Promise me?” Almost as if she couldn’t bear to hear him refuse, she pulled up a trap door and, securing it with a dog’s leash, disappeared down a flight of steps.

  Martin wandered through the ground floor of the dacha, his footfalls echoing from the bare walls of the empty rooms. Through the sulfur-stained panes of the windows he could make out the priest and his flock of faithful gathered at the fence, talking earnestly among themselves. The double living room with an enormous stone chimney on either end gave onto a study filled with wall-to-wall shelves devoid of books, and beyond that a small room with a low metal field-hospital cot set next to a small chimney filled with scraps of paper and dried twigs waiting to be burned. Half a dozen empty perfume bottles were set out on the mantle. A small pile of women’s clothing was folded neatly on an upside down wooden crate with the words “Ugor-Zhilov” and “Prigorodnaia” stenciled on several of its sides. A dozen or so picture postcards were tacked to the door that led to a toilet. Martin drew closer to the door and examined them. They’d been sent from all over the world. One showed the duty-free shop at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, another the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a third a bridge spanning the Vltava River in Prague, still another Buckingham Palace in London. The topmost postcard on the door was a photograph of a family walking down a paved country road past two identical clapboard farm houses built very close to each other. Across the road, a weathered barn stood on a small rise, an American eagle crafted out of metal sitting atop the ornate weather vane jutting from the mansard roof. The people pictured on the postcard were dressed in clothing farmers might have worn going to church two hundred years before—the men and boys were attired in black trousers and black suit jackets and straw hats, the women and girls were wearing ankle length gingham dresses and laced-up high shoes and bonnets tied under the chin.

  Martin pried out the
tack with his fingernails and turned over the postcard. There was no date on it; the printed caption identifying the picture on the postcard had been scuffed off with a knife blade, the post office cancellation across the stamp read “fast New York.” “Mama dearest,” someone had written in Russian, “I am alive and well in America the Beautiful do not worry your head for me only keep singing when you weed the vegetable garden which is how I see you in my mind’s eye.” It was signed, “Your devoted S.”

  The old woman could be heard calling from the kitchen. “Jozef, my child, where have you gone off to? Come take tea.”

  Pocketing the postcard, Martin retraced his steps. In the kitchen the old woman, using a torn apron as a potholder, was filling two cups with an infusion that turned out to have been brewed from carrot peelings because, for her, tea had become too expensive. She settled onto a three-legged milking stool, leaving the only chair in the room for her visitor. Martin pulled it up to the table covered with formica and sat across from her. The woman kept both of her hands clasped around the cracked mug as she summoned memories and gently rocked her head from side to side at the thought of them. Her lidded eyes flitted from one object to another, like a butterfly looking for a leaf on which to settle. “I recall the day Samat brought you back from Moscow, Jozef. It was a Tuesday. Ah, you are surprised. The reason I remember it was a Tuesday is because that was the day the woman from the village came to do laundry—she was too terrified to use the electric washing machine Samat brought from GUM and scrubbed everything in a shallow reach of the river. You and Samat had been roommates in a school somewhere, so he said when he introduced you to his uncle’s entourage. Later, Tzvetan took you aside and asked you question after question about things I did not comprehend—what in the world is an exfiltration? You do remember the Oligarkh, Jozef? He was a very angry man.”