by Alan Furst
That my blessings find you in good health,
He had signed it “Nicolai Stoianev” with ceremony, a man who had written very few letters in his life. To Khristo, the message between the lines was quite thoroughly clear. Nikko’s affront to authority and his own flight eastward had placed his remaining family in grave danger, and Helena had determined to sacrifice her happiness on behalf of her parents’ lives. No Vidin child of his acquaintance would have done any less. He knew of Teodor Veiko, an older man, child of Veiko’s youth. A drunkard, a violent man. But Helena was clever, would wind him around her thumb. The rest of the message was this: you cannot come home. That it should arrive on the day when his thoughts might well be expected to turn in that direction was no coincidence and he knew it.
“The news is good?” Akhimova asked.
“Yes, comrade Lieutenant, as good as can be expected.”
She leaned over his shoulder, he felt her bulk near him, and pretended to read the letter for the first time. She squeezed the tender place between his shoulder and his neck. “Be brave, Khristo Nicolaievich,” she said softly. “Be a good soldier.”
They had him.
The first step was to comprehend it. The second was to form, in the privacy of his mind, the words themselves—a reading of the sentence. He was held by a system based on the portcullis, a medieval security tactic no less effective for its age. A system of two gates. A visitor entered through the first gate—no questions asked. It locked behind him. He was now confronted by a second gate, held a virtual prisoner in a small space. Above his head, the walls were honeycombed with arrow slits and fighting ports. For the moment, only questions came from above. If the answers were found to be good, they opened the second gate. If the answers—or the stars, or the cast of the dice—were found to be not good, they did not open the second gate. After that, the disposition of the prisoner was more a matter of whim than tactics. The portcullis was a system based on the medieval assumption of evil in all men—again, a notion no less effective for its age—and the certain knowledge that any visitor carried your destruction in his hand, intentionally or not, a spy’s gold or the Black Death.
Thus they had him and he knew it.
He could not go home. He could only move in the direction they pointed out—pray God you understood where they were pointing, pray God you did not make a misstep along the path. The lesson of The Mistake had been sharply staged for him in the departure of Ozunov. The major had permitted a spy to flourish in his house. Perhaps he was a witting accomplice, perhaps not. But, they said, we have no time to find out. No wish, either. The New Science is ingenious in that way: motive is unimportant. Why does not matter, only that. And the New Science is economical. An arrest, if properly managed, is also a lesson. Thus we make what we have go further, thus we spend wisely.
But they—the masters, the unseen—had incorporated a tiny flaw in their structure. It was endemic, they could do nothing about it. As Oriental rugs are woven with a single imperfect strand—that the weaver not be seen to compete with Allah, who is the only perfection—their system had one defect. It was not perfectly dark. Some light got in. For the more they trained Khristo in their methods, the more he understood their logic. It was a problem they couldn’t overcome, but they knew it existed and they watched closely, and watching was their greatest skill.
Thus they had him but he knew it.
The way home was closed. They had let him know that with the letter. He realized also that Antipin had operated openly in Vidin on purpose, that secrecy had not been his intention. If the fascists were after you, to whom could you turn? To the East, of course. Now, let us provoke the fascists: they will drive the sheep, we shall have the wool.
That winter, Khristo Stoianev learned to bear weight.
He understood the system in that way: a great heavy mass that pressed down upon you, that kept you struggling and gasping to remain, in any sense at all, upright. It crushed the mind because it demanded every resource, every tag end of memory and cognition, simply to stay afloat. Imagination withered, fantasy collapsed; only some of the strong would survive. There were special rules, special interpretations of the rules, regulations to be adamantly obeyed, regulations to be adamantly ignored, tests—obvious tests and subtle tests and obvious tests that hid subtle tests—provocations to be silently withstood, provocations to be instantly reported, papers to be kept on the person, papers to be written and handed in, papers to be punched at regular intervals, papers to be returned by a certain date, special passes, special permissions, “open” conversations, guided conversations. If there were a way to hammer a nail into a thought, they would have found it and done it.
To this weight add the weight of the winter. Which bore them all down, Bolshevist and cellar priest alike. A sky that turned black, then gray, then brown, then white, then black again. “The sun?” Goldman said in an unguarded moment. “I hear they’ve shot it.” If they had, it bled snow. The unrelieved whiteness became blinding over time, made a world without feature, a terrible empty blankness where, at last, the concept of nothingness—ПOΛHAЯПYOTOTA—became brutally real. And, finally, at the center of it all, was the cold. A cold that shrank you up inside yourself, a cold that collapsed every face to a frown or a snarl, a cold that blew in the wind like a whip or hung motionless in the air like dead smoke. Even to wash was agony, and all stank together. The sex shriveled back into the body, only alcohol could move the blood, and, with enough alcohol, the cold found new ways to feed itself. An old woman sat on a bench to rest for a moment. You came upon her, thinly glazed with ice, the following morning.
Khristo bore the winter cold as best he could and found ways to bear the other kind of chill as well. Would they, he reasoned, teach you French and English unless they intended to send you someplace where such languages were spoken? They would not. So he bent his back to it. It did not come easily, it did not come quickly, but he simply would not let go until he had a deathgrip understanding of it.
“Good morning, Mr. Stoianev. How is the weather today?”
“Good is the weather. Maybe snows little.”
“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”
“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”
“Not leetle, little, lit-tul.”
“Lit-tul.”
“Faster!”
“Little.”
By the hour, by the day, by the week. In February he was twenty years old. Goldman and Voluta and Semmers chipped in and bought him a cream cake. The cream was off. He ate it anyway and showed pleasure, licking his lips enthusiastically and humming with pleasure. Later, in bed, he curled around his stomach and fell into a sleep of exhaustion despite the cramps.
It was comradeship, he came to realize, that brought them through the winter agonies of 1934 and 1935. While the blizzards and the system swirled around them and the purges beat like a drum in the background, they held on to each other and rode out the storms. Perhaps, Khristo thought privately, we are the truest communists in Moscow this winter. We share our pain. We share our food.
The idea had been simple enough: send out an army of Antipins across the mountains and river valleys of Eastern Europe, recruit—never mind how—the young and vigorous. Look for stealth, raw courage, a gift for lies or seduction—you know what we want. Bring them back here. Teach them what they need to know. Make them—one way will work as well as the next—our own. Marxists, patriots, criminals, outcasts, adventurers. Mix it up, boys, you never know what you’ll need. They will be ours. Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Croats—our brothers and sisters to the west. War is surely coming, and these seeds will make a harvest in future famines.
It was equally logical to run them through in batches, keep them in a group, for one always wanted to be sure where everyone was. In a country of two hundred million souls that covered eleven time zones, you could misplace the damnedest things: entire trains, whole battalions. Sometimes you never did find them. The country ha
d a way of swallowing up what most normal persons would hold to be entirely indigestible objects, it drove some technicians quite literally mad.
Thus convenience for the accountants of the system made for the salvation of its inventory—survival could only be managed if they took care of each other. They learned that everyone in the group had something to offer. They learned who the stool pigeons were and fed them on small sins to maintain their credibility so that new, and unknown, informers would not be introduced. Thus together they learned their lessons.
March, no sign of a thaw, winter giving every sign of an encore, it was their turn to occupy the village of Belov on the river Oka.
An outing! A half-day ride in a rattly wooden railcar, chugging past bare birch groves and black-green forests of fir with snow-weighted boughs. Real countryside: woodcutters’ huts, the occasional farm field in a peculiar shape. The Russians, to everyone’s amazement, farmed in oddly configured patches of land, nothing square, perhaps the result of endless divisions of the versts among sons over the centuries. But all they saw was new, and that was what mattered. It made their blood run fast after the shut-in winter months in claustrophobic Moscow. They yelled and capered and carried on like kids. Kerenyi managed to free the upper half of one of the windows. Painted—a horrid Soviet institutional green—shut for years, it shrieked as it opened, borne down by Kerenyi’s great strength. At last, delicious cold air seasoned with railroad soot came rushing into the car. Hooray! Reaching up through the window, Kerenyi returned with a handful of snow from the roof. A rapid shaping in red hands, then a fat snowball sailed out the open window toward a hut. A near miss! They threw themselves on the other windows, and soon enough they were shelling the scenery amid shouts of triumph and exasperation. Well, you know how it is. It would have to be Iovescu, that appalling snitch, who would get it in the back of the head. Fat-faced goody-goody from the Banat. With vengeful eye he searched the crowd who, as one, raised their shoulders in shrugs of angelic innocence. Finally—wouldn’t you know it—he picked on Ilya Goldman, one of the smallest, and chucked a fistful of loose snow at him. There was only one answer to that. The ensuing volley hit Iovescu and everybody else, producing squeals of fury as snow worked under the odd collar. Mayhem followed. In the melee, Karina Olowa, a little blond thing from Wilno, journeyed stealthily to the platform between cars and returned with a colossal snowbomb which, launched upward, splattered against the ceiling and rained down on various heads. A huge cry arose and that, at last, brought Lieutenant Akhimova and the other officers on the run. Order was restored. They’d used up most of the roof snow anyhow.
In the little village of Belov they took over various thatch-roofed huts—where the Belovians themselves had got to, nobody could say—with wood bunks covered by mothholed blankets. They built coal fires in the stoves, trooped down to the church for dinner, where iron pots of soup were boiling and misshapen loaves of rye-flour bread were set out on long tables. After a winter of potatoes and cabbage and fish-bone soup, the smell of food was thrilling. There may even have been a few private thoughts of home. They built a bonfire that night and sang songs, then trooped off to their respective houses—just like real townspeople—and slept the sleep of city dwellers on their first night in the country.
The next morning, after tea and bread, they went to work.
They were divided into fourteen teams of four—each team designated by a number and given numbered strips of material to pin to their collars. Khristo, Goldman and Voluta were a team, joined by a tall Yugoslavian named Drazen Kulic who, in his late twenties, was rather older than most of the others. Kulic seemed to have lived his life away from the sun—his hair, eyes and skin were almost without color. Yet he did not fade into the background; his presence was physical, hard, and there was something in the set of his face that was watchful and unforgiving.
The four were designated Unit Eight.
In the first exercise of the day, half the units entered Belov as security police, the other half were given blank-loaded Tokarev pistols, wooden boxes supposedly containing explosives, a notebook labeled List of Partisan Units, and signaling flares—contraband to hide in their huts. As counterinsurgency officers, Unit Eight was assigned to search houses at the southern end of the village.
On the edge of town, waiting for the whistle that would begin the exercise, Unit Eight held a meeting. Khristo would be the captain, would have final say in all things, though all would participate in planning and executing operations. Ilya Goldman was appointed intelligence officer and freed from all other obligations. He immediately undertook to make lists of the units they would oppose and cooperate with during the exercises. Goldman, a lover of detail, set himself to annotate these lists—in his own code—with observations on personalities, strengths and weaknesses in each unit.
The first argument began right there. Now that Goldman was intelligence officer, he wanted a staff. Typical! Give him an inch and he took a mile! Goldman waited for the other three to calm down, then explained patiently. Lists took time, and observation. Operational efficiency could be sacrificed, for a day or two, in favor of acquiring data that (A) would be useful in defeating opposing units and (B) could be marketed to other units in exchange for cooperation—thereby increasing the data files and making the potential for trading even more productive.
Khristo was impressed and promptly ordered Goldman to choose a staff. He selected Kulic. Khristo calmly pointed out that Kulic was physically strong, and if there were to be only two of them operating as security police that quality was important, principally for purposes of intimidation but who knew what it might come to—future assignments could well be affected by the outcome of the Belov games, and everybody wanted to do well. Fistfights were not out of the question. Goldman accepted Voluta as his assistant, and the two of them immediately went off and whispered in a corner.
Therefore, when the whistle blew and the designated counterinsurgency units fanned out across the village, Unit Eight was represented only by Khristo and Kulic. Belov had been a reasonably prosperous little place: a small church with a dome, a town hall—police station, and a few small shops—really open market stalls—on the main street, which was surfaced in frozen mud. The sun had come out, beads of morning frost glistened in the roof thatch. Khristo, blank-loaded holstered pistol riding his waist, strode along the main street and saw life anew from a policeman’s perspective. A curious sensation, to go anywhere he wanted, to say what he liked to whomever he pleased. There was, he hated to admit it, some distinct comfort in such power.
As other units commenced the exercise, Khristo and Kulic could see that they had adopted the time-honored forms. The hard-handed banging on the door. Shouts of “Open up! Security search!” When the doors were opened, they could see people who had recently been self-confident students transformed by circumstance into groups of huddled peasants.
They found their assigned target, the hut of Unit Five, and briefly discussed their strategy. Kulic disappeared around the back, Khristo tapped lightly on a board below the window. The unit captain appeared at the window and gestured toward the door.
“I needn’t come in,” Khristo said.
The captain looked puzzled.
“They sent me to tell you that you’re in the wrong hut. This one here is supposed to be storage—Unit Five belongs next door.”
The captain nodded and disappeared from the window. Khristo waited, pleased to have the warming sun on his back. It stood to reason that when they moved, their contraband would have to move with them. The captain reappeared at the window and chopped the edge of his right hand into the bent elbow of his left arm, adding, for emphasis, an extended middle finger on the left hand. The universal sign language informed Khristo that his suggestion had been staunchly rejected, so he went and knocked on the door.
The captain opened the door. “Nice try,” he said acidly.
“Keep a civil tongue when you talk to us,” Khristo said, “or you’re in the stockade for the day.”
No stockade had been mentioned in the rules, but one could never be certain. The man stared at him for a moment, then grunted and stood back. Khristo let Kulic in the back door.
“Lieutenant Kulic will conduct the search,” Khristo announced, folding his arms and leaning back against a wall.
“Where are the rest of you?” one of the “peasants” asked.
“You’ll find out,” Khristo answered, putting as much menace in his voice as he dared.
“All stand up!” Kulic shouted as loud as he could. Unit Five stood, slightly sullen at being addressed so harshly.
“All strip!”
They stood with their mouths open.
“Hurry up. Down to the skin,” he yelled.
“Against the rules.” Her name was Malya. She was tall and sallow and won all the prizes for codes and ciphers. She stood with her arms folded and glowered at them. “You are state security,” she added, “not dirty-minded boys.” Her eyes glittered with contempt.
As Kulic took a fast step toward her, Khristo’s hand shot out and grabbed his elbow. Kulic shook him off but stayed where he was.
“I’ll be back,” Khristo said. He ran out the door and down the street to the town hall, where the officers had constituted themselves a committee of the rules.
He addressed Irina Akhimova. “Comrade Lieutenant!” He stood at attention.
“Yes, comrade student?”
“We require the search of a female person.”
The officers, five or six of them smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, passed an eyes-to-heaven look among themselves. Here we go again, it said. Another year at Belov and already they are at it.
Akhimova climbed to her feet, affecting weariness, brushed Khristo ahead of her with hand motions. “Yes, yes, comrade Security Officer. Lead the way.”
They arrived at the hut to find Kulic and Unit Five locked in a staring contest. Kulic’s hand rested on the butt of his holstered gun. Akhimova took Malya out the back door toward the privy behind the hut. In a moment they reappeared. Malya’s face was angry, her cheeks well colored. “Donkey,” she said to the unit captain. Akhimova handed Khristo a thickly folded wad of paper.
