by Alan Furst
Thus, in bureaucratic terms, he had been buried alive.
Since the inception of his service in Spain, Ilya Goldman had moved exclusively in the upper echelons of the NKVD—First Chief Directorate, Fifth Department—the prized Western Europe posting. Ideologically, he was trusted. Professionally, he was considered clever and sharp-witted, a man who played the game and avoided the pitfalls: protecting his friends and protected by them, gaining influence, banking favors every day. Words of thanks were, casually, waved away. Some day, he would tell his newfound friends, you can help me out.
But when the great day came—a punitive transfer to the office responsible for the labor camps—his friends did not answer their telephones, and down he went. Into an abyss where grace and wit counted for nothing. Here you needed only a steel fist and an iron stomach, though it helped to be blind and deaf. He despised himself for allowing such a thing to happen, for not comprehending that it could happen. He had stood so high in his own opinion: brilliant, deft, an intelligence officer who belonged in Madrid, in Paris, in Geneva. A smart little Jewboy from Bucharest—he mocked himself—sophisticated and urbane, in NKVD argot a cosmopolite, deserved no less. The service would never send such a fine fellow off to the Gulag, to listen to memorized speeches from a parade of exhausted skeletons. Oh no, they’d never do that.
But he had failed them, had tried to deceive them, and they’d found out and punished him.
His downfall had come about in Romania, of all places, the homeland he had not seen for ten years. Sad, wretched place, backwater of southeastern Europe with its ridiculous decayed nobility and peasants who had believed, truly believed, Iron Guard leader Codreanu to be the reincarnation of Christ. Their leaders had sided with Hitler, and the Romanian divisions had fought bravely enough, in the Crimean peninsula and elsewhere, before the massive Russian counterattacks had inevitably rolled them back.
The country had surrendered early in September. To the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR, theoretically, but the Russians were little interested in the diplomatic niceties of shared power and, within days, had presented their bill to the Romanians. Then sent NKVD personnel, Ilya Goldman among them, to make sure it was paid. In full. And on time.
It was, for a country that had just finished fighting four years of war, a bill of some considerable magnitude. Seven hundred million lei—about fifty million U.S. dollars—easily exceeding the contents of the Romanian treasury. But this was merely the first item on the bill. The government had to provide, in addition, the following: all privately owned radios, 2,500,000 tons of grain, 1,700,000 head of cattle, 13,000 horses, and vast tonnages of vegetables, potatoes, and cigarettes. All telephone and telegraph lines were to be torn down and shipped east in boxcars—once the latter had been refitted to accept the Russian rail gauge. Twelve divisions to be formed immediately to fight the Germans and the Hungarians. The list went on: ambulances, doctors, gold, silver, watches, timber—whatever they had, the entire national wealth. Further, the USSR would now control all means of communication, the merchant marine, all utilities and industries, all factories and storage depots, and all radio stations. If the Romanian population couldn’t listen to them, with all the radios shipped east, foreign monitors could.
The directives went out and the peasants, by and large, obeyed. Ilya saw them shuffling into the villages and market towns with their livestock and the contents of their granaries and root cellars—even next spring’s seed grain. God had directed their leaders, they seemed to feel, now God had forsaken them. Ilya watched their faces, and the sight broke his heart. To his superiors, of course, he was not a Romanian, he was a Jew—that was a nationality, a race—and they saw no reason he should feel allegiance to a country adopted in the distant past by some wandering peddler and his family. He was supposed to know these people, their little tricks and deceits, and he was supposed to squeeze them.
Not that his bosses meant him to do any of the rough stuff himself. No, they had special personnel for that, many of them former Iron Guardsmen who had now “seen the light” of progressive socialism. No more than thugs in uniforms, but they served a purpose. When there was shooting to be done, they did it. But Ilya heard it, and saw the bodies sagged lifeless on the posts behind the barracks. Sometimes one didn’t have to shoot, a simple beating would suffice. When the peasants were beaten, they cried out for mercy from the lord of the manor—an old tradition. Clearly, they did not understand what was happening to them, protested their innocence, swore it before God.
Most of them, however, did as they were told. Brought in everything they had, garlanded their beasts before they were led away so that they might make a good impression on their new masters and be treated with kindness. One old man, parting with his plowhorse, slipped a carrot in Ilya’s pocket. “He’s a stubborn old thing,” he’d whispered, believing Ilya to be the new owner, “but he’ll work like the devil for a treat.”
For the first few weeks, as the Carpathians turned gold in early autumn, he had steeled himself to it, took it as a test of courage, inner strength. But his superiors had not been entirely wrong about him; he did know these people, their little tricks and deceits. In fact, he knew them much too well. He knew the look in the eyes of a man who sees a lifetime’s labor flicked away in an instant.
So he cheated.
Just a little, here and there, principally sins of omission, a matter of not reporting what he saw. But, as the weeks went by, the accounting was turned in and the numbers rose up through the apparatus to those whose job it was to compare, to set unit beside unit in order to judge production. And the showing of his group grew poorer and poorer until somebody caught on and sent somebody else down there to see what the hell was going on and it only took a little while before they got onto him.
The transfer followed immediately. He tried making certain telephone calls. But they’d marked him, and his friends knew enough to leave him alone lest the virus touch them as well.
At Camp 782, the procession of inmates continued all through the winter afternoon as the wind sang in the eaves. One left, another entered. Each prisoner had been judiciously selected by the camp commandant, so their statements were well rehearsed. It was all to do with self-sacrifice, patriotism, hard work, shock brigades that labored through the night to meet a production norm. And, of course, undying faith in the Great Leader. Ilya Goldman wrote it all down and signed it, an automaton, playing his assigned role in the ritual. The mute agony of these places—themselves lost in the silence of the endless, frozen land—would finish him if he permitted himself to feel it, so he had, by self-direction, grown numb, and now felt nothing about anything. There was no other defense. By early evening, only one file remained to be processed.
503775.
Admitted: 20 December 1936
Labor Classification: Clerk
Present Function: Office of Task Assignment
Security Notation: Reliable
Charge: Articles 40, 42, 42 A, 45 and 70 of the Judicial Code
Release Date: 20 December 1966
There was no name on the file, no age, nothing of 503775’s life before admission to the camp system. Such information was classified and held elsewhere, no doubt in the files of the resident NKVD officer. But Ilya could tell by a glance down the page that this had, at one time, been somebody, somebody snaffled up in the purges of 1936, too important or favored to kill, thus consigned to the Utiny, a nonperson. The man was a trustee, with a good deal of power—clerk’s power, but power nonetheless—so had apparently contrived to ingratiate himself with the camp administration. When he entered the room, Ilya felt a slight prickle of recognition.
To look at, he was no different from the others—hesitant, nervous, with humility suggested in every motion. He dragged a foot as he walked—a soft scrape on the floorboards—his head was shaven against the lice, camp rations had shrunken his features, and his eyes were slitted from years of the Kolyma weather, sun glaring off the ice fields. His shoulders were stooped,
his beard long and lank—a man perhaps in his late fifties, though one could never be sure about age in a camp.
Ilya nodded him to the chair; he sat down, then launched himself into a speech of such patriotic frenzy that it became clear to Ilya why the commandant had placed him last on the day’s schedule—a theatrical flourish to send the inspector general’s little man off happy to his next camp. The phrases flowed like oil. “Let it be remembered” and “hour of the nation’s need” and “strayed from the true course” and “dedicated more than ever to sacrifice.” All that year’s favorites—the man was something of a poet, working in the genre of political cliché.
My God, Ilya thought, I’m talking to Sascha Vonets.
He lurched forward, face lit by recognition. Opened his mouth to speak. Sascha’s hand shot across the table and Ilya felt a rough finger pressed briefly against his lips in a plea for silence. Ilya was caught with admiration. Sascha didn’t miss a beat—“inspired by the Great Leader”—as he pointed back and forth to the far wall and his right ear. Ilya nodded his complicity. The camp commandant was evidently making sure that nobody said the wrong thing. The interrogation room had been cleverly constructed within a maze of administrative offices, essentially three partitions built against an exterior wall. It was windowless, as all interrogation facilities were supposed to be; one wanted to avoid even the implicit suggestion that the prisoner had any way out of the difficulties in which he found himself. The camp commandant, Ilya realized, would likely have some flunky sitting next to one of the walls and taking verbatim notes in shorthand.
Sascha, having wound up his introductory remarks, now began the recitation of a poem entitled “Red Banners,” a reference to the NKVD medal of honor that could never be worn in public. This poem was, apparently, a personal contribution to the war effort. From the first stanza it became clear to Ilya that it was to be a kind of modern epic, an inspirational hymn of praise to the security services:
Arise!
O patriots of the shadows—
who do not see the flight of cranes,
whose red banners fly in darkness only—
we salute you!
It went on for quite some time, stern images of struggle and heroism marching forward in a grand parade. Then, as he ended the recitation, Sascha came around the table and thrust two slips of paper into the front of Ilya’s uniform jacket. When he moved away and sat down again, Ilya slowly exhaled the breath he’d been holding. Up close, the smell of mildew and stale sweat had nearly gagged him.
“Might one ask, comrade Captain, your opinion of my humble poem?”
“Laudable,” Ilya said. “I will certainly inform the appropriate agencies of the existence of this work, you may depend on it.”
“Thank you, comrade Major.”
“Thank you, 503775. You are dismissed.”
Sascha stood. For one instant his eyes were naked, and Ilya saw the truth of the eight years he had spent in the camps. Then the man drew back inside himself, his eyes dulled, and he became again a clerk in a Kolyma gold-mining facility.
Ilya found himself wanting desperately to reassure him, to offer at least a gesture of human fellowship, and so patted the place where the slips of paper rested over his heart. Sascha closed his eyes in a silent gesture of gratitude and bowed his head, then turned and left the room, his dragged leg scraping softly over the floorboards.
Before Ilya could be alone to read the letters, there was a great deal to be gotten through: a formal meeting with the camp NKVD officer, followed by a painfully formal exchange of “confidences” with the camp commandant’s principal assistant, during which Ilya made sure to communicate his great satisfaction with all he’d found. Followed in turn by an endless, vodka-sodden dinner given in his honor by the commandant and attended by senior staff and their wives. He was seated next to a fat, red-faced woman with merry eyes, stuffed into a gown from the 1920 s, who rested a hand on his thigh beneath the table and leaned against his shoulder. “You are eating breast of wolf,” she giggled in his ear, “is it not delectable?”
At long last, late at night, he was returned to the two-car train that sat chuffing idly on the rail spur that serviced Camp 782 and took its gold away. He entered his private compartment—in an old boxcar that rode high over its cast-iron wheels—and told his adjutant he did not wish to be disturbed, then turned up the flame on an oil lamp that lit the rough wooden interior of the car.
He felt the first shudder of motion a few minutes later when, as the couplings clanged, the train slowly began to make way. Outside, the endless snowfields shone white and empty in the darkness, and the slow, steam-driven rhythm of the engine sharpened the sense of being lost in vastness.
The first letter was scrawled—apparently written in great haste:
Ilya Goldman: I observed you entering the camp this morning and realized that we have known one another. If I have not been able to approach you, I will identify myself as Colonel A. Y. Vonets—Sascha. We met briefly while serving in Spain in 1936.
In March of 1943, a man named Semmers came to this camp, sentenced under Article 38(Anti-Soviet Statement). He told me of a conspiracy known as BF 825 that existed among the Brotherhood Front of 1934 in the training facility on Arbat Street. He claimed to have been approached by Drazen Kulic, and that others were involved, including Josef Voluta, Khristo Stoianev and yourself. Semmers attempted to escape in March of this year, was discovered, and shot.
I will inform no one of your complicity in this conspiracy as long as you undertake two actions on my behalf: (1) The accompanying letter is for Josef Voluta, I believe that you are able to transmit it to him. (2) Within the next sixty days, I must be transferred to Camp 209, in Belgorod-Dnestrovskij at the mouth of the Dniester on the Black Sea. I know you have the ability to do this within the labor camp administration. If you choose not to do it, or to reveal these communications, I will inform local NKVD of the existence of BF 825, and your participation within it. Forgive me, Ilya. I will not live out another year in this place.
The second letter did not have a heading and was printed in tiny letters crammed together on a small slip of brown paper:
On 12 April I will be in the Romanian village at Sfintu Gheorghe, on the southern arm of the Dunaărea, where it empties into the Black Sea. I have extraordinarily valuable information for Western intelligence services. The information is recorded in a document I will carry, but it is usable only with my personal assistance. For example, the agent known as ANDRES (Avram Roubenis) was murdered in Paris in 1937 with a slow-acting poison clandestinely administered in a café at the direction of Col. V I. Kolodny, of the Paris rezidentura. The above is one item among many hundred. I will remain in Sfintu Gheorghe from April 12 on—until I am discovered or betrayed. I will then confess to the BF 825 plot and all else I know. Signed: An NKVD Colonel.
Ilya sat back and stared at his reflection in the dark window. He saw a taut, colorless face above the green NKVD uniform. By inference, he pieced together what he took to be Sascha’s intentions. The mouth of the Dniester was less than a hundred miles from the Romanian delta of the Dunaărea—the Danube. Since the surrender, converted ore steamers moved constantly back and forth between the two areas, sailing empty into Romania, returning with wheat, vegetables, horses, and God knew what else. Sascha intended to escape from the camp, then he meant to stow away on a Black Sea steamer that left from Odessa and called at Belgorod, where a chemical works was being built by Gulag labor. He would hide aboard the ship at Belgorod, then disembark secretly at Izmail, the Soviet port on the Danube, after which he would make his way to Sfintu Gheorghe—nominally in the nation of Romania, but in fact a part of the ancient region known as Bessarabia, a remote corner of the world, so lost as to be nearly unknown.
If the letter were delivered to Voluta, he would use the NOV apparatus to move the letter to a Western intelligence service, and Sascha believed he would be exfiltrated from the little fishing village of Sfintu Gheorghe. The letter had to go to V
oluta because Sascha was aware that Voluta knew him personally and that he, as well as other members of the BF 825 conspiracy, were in a position to confirm his value to the Western services.
It was, in its own way, a reasonably clever plan. Escape from a camp in the Kolyma was nearly impossible—the land itself was a prison. And no Allied intelligence service would want to attempt this sort of covert action in the country of a nominal ally, thus Sascha had placed responsibility on himself for leaving Russian soil. Romania, on the other hand, was in a condition of political flux that might facilitate an operation to remove a desirable asset.
But, Ilya realized, years of training and practical experience said no. The scheme had virtually no chance of success: too many steps, too many assumptions, a blind thrust from a doomed man. In effect, it sentenced Sascha to death and, once he escaped from Belgorod and someone checked on how he came to be transferred there in the first place, sentenced Ilya Goldman to death as well.
Unless by April 12, Ilya thought, listening to the slow beat of the wheels, I am somewhere else.
But if the exfiltration scheme was wishful thinking, the part of the plot that touched him was close to perfect. Considered objectively, Sascha Vonets had built a fine trap. In it, Ilya realized, he could move in only one direction; there were no exits along the way and, at the end, it sent him where he wanted to go. The white face in the window smiled ruefully. Truly, you couldn’t ask for a better trap than that.
