Thus did Danforth pass his many seasons in the Gulag.
“You don’t expect ever to climb out of that pit,” Danforth said. “You work and sleep, then work and sleep. You eat the soup that Solzhenitsyn described, with the eye floating in it. You watch life and death from the shelf-bed of your barracks, just in that way Shalamov recounts it.” He smiled. “Shalamov’s stories are much better in Russian, by the way.”
His smile held briefly, then slowly faded into a more solemn expression than any I had yet seen.
“You see honesty perish and honesty survive,” he said. “You see startling acts of kindness and unspeakable acts of depravity, just in the way Bardach writes about them in Man Is Wolf to Man. In later years, you read these accounts from your warm little apartment and remember that you didn’t have to work when the temperature fell below negative forty-one degrees and how while you were shivering in your bunk you hoped for the temperature to drop just enough so that you could stay in that frigid room a little longer. You expect this to go on forever, Paul. You expect to die and be buried in that frozen tundra. You stop believing there’s a world beyond the camp because that world no longer exists for you. You watch the Kolyma River freeze and briefly thaw. You notice the return of the mosquitoes, and you hate them so much you look forward to winter. Every blessing brings a curse, even the gift of another day of life. Because you are already dead, Paul.”
He stopped suddenly, and his face took on the expression of one abruptly touched by a miracle.
“Then, one afternoon, just as you’ve gotten back from the woods, barely able to peel those wretched mittens from your fingers,” he said, “you are summoned to the camp commander’s office, and there, to your amazement, you see what you think must be a ghost, because it could only have come from the life you had before you died. You stare at it, speechless, blinking. You cannot believe this ghost will speak. And then it does.”
“A ghost?” I asked, with a caught breath. “Anna?”
Danforth appeared to see that very ghost, though whether in the guise of a disordered young woman in a Greenwich Village bar, an art dealer’s assistant speaking perfect German, an assassin, or a spy, I couldn’t guess.
“Anna?” Danforth asked softly. “Ah, Paul, how different my little parable would be if that had truly been her name.”
~ * ~
PART VII
Traitor’s Gate
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Danforth looked at his watch. “Do you mind if we catch a cab?” he asked. “I should be getting home.”
“Home?” I asked. “Now?”
I was certain that Danforth’s story was drawing to an end and saw no need to interrupt it.
“One should know how another person lives, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said quite firmly “It helps the moral understanding.”
Moral understanding?
I immediately felt the approach of a didactic remark, but before I could voice this queasy supposition or even protest the abrupt breaking off of his tale, Danforth was on his feet, pulling on his coat and twining his scarf around his neck with the determination of a man whose methods could not be questioned or his final aim deterred.
“Come, Paul,” he said. “It’s not far.”
This turned out to be true, though it was farther than I’d expected, since I’d reasonably supposed that Danforth lived near the Century Club. But our cab turned south onto Fifth Avenue, rather than north toward the swankier regions surrounding Central Park, and a few minutes later we arrived at a rather commonplace apartment building at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street.
“It would be a long walk to your club,” I said as we approached the building’s inelegant entrance.
“Oh, I’m not a member of the club,” Danforth said casually. “Clayton was a member and his wife still is, so she very kindly allowed me use it as a meeting place today.”
“I see,” I muttered.
The lobby of Danforth’s building was entirely beige with a few plastic plants sprouting from plaster vases.
“Not what you expected, Paul?” Danforth asked.
“I guess not,” I admitted.
A small elevator lifted us to the fourteenth floor, and Danforth led me through an unrelentingly charmless corridor and into a cramped apartment whose one luxury was a wide southern view of Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan twinkling brightly in the distance, a horrible gap separating them.
“It must be a painful view now,” I said.
“And enraging,” Danforth said. “Sometimes I want to kill them all.” He peered out the window for a moment, then said, “But as you noted before, if we’d done that to the Germans, you wouldn’t be here, would you, Paul?”
“No,” I said.
“Because we would have killed that grandfather of yours,” Danforth added. “Where was he from, by the way?”
“Augsburg.”
“Hmm,” Danforth said. “There was a subcamp of Dachau near there.”
I could not deny that this mention of the Dachau concentration camp chilled me.
Danforth’s smile seemed only to add a layer of deeper cold. “So how do you want it, Paul?” he asked.
“Want what?” I asked.
“Your coffee,” Danforth said.
“Oh, uh, w-with cream,” I stammered.
“But milk will do, I hope?”
“Yes, of course.”
Danforth made his way to the tiny kitchen that adjoined the almost equally tiny living area. While he made the coffee, I sat down and took in my surroundings. They were very humble, with little to lift their ordinariness but the large bookshelves that lined the room’s four walls, which, I noticed, mainly held books about spying, the tricks of that trade, along with a surprising number of titles about Germany, though not that country in the 1930s and 1940s, when Danforth was there, but during the Cold War, from its beginnings to the bringing down of the Wall. Some volumes contained an unexpected focus on the activities of the infamous Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Could it be, I wondered, that Anna had somehow used her charms and her linguistic talents to make her way up the pecking order of that evil force and then become the perfect servant of East Germany’s version of the KGB? And if so, what had she been? A Nazi agent? A Soviet agent? Both?
“There you are, Paul,” Danforth said as he handed me a cup of coffee, sat down in the chair opposite me with his own cup, and took a sip. “This should return me to sobriety.”
“I doubt you ever left it,” I said to him. “Despite your youthful adventure, you strike me as a cautious man.”
“Not always,” Danforth said with a telling glance at the bookshelf to his right, all those volumes of an East Germany firmly in the grip of a now-displaced Communism. “No, not always,” he repeated, then sank back deeply into his chair. “Especially when it comes to revenge.”
Revenge, I thought, the emotion that seemed still to inflame him and with which he returned us to his tale.
~ * ~
Kolyma, Soviet Union, 1964
“Robert?” Danforth asked tentatively. Many years had passed, and Clayton’s face, if indeed it was Clayton’s, was now webbed with wrinkles, his hair sprinkled with silver.
“Yes,” Clayton said. He was clearly stricken by the figure before him, Danforth’s ragged clothes and matted beard, his body so emaciated it was all but skeletal. “The commandant doesn’t speak English so ask him when we can leave,” he said.
“Leave.” Danforth couldn’t be sure he’d heard this.
“Yes, leave,” Clayton said. “Go ahead, Tom, ask him.”
Danforth turned to the commandant and asked the question in Russian.
“There is a supply truck to Magadan in an hour,” the commandant answered. He did not seem pleased by the paper in his hand. “It says you are to be released immediately, so be on your way.”
The commandant did not leave them alone and would not allow them to talk to ea
ch other, and so Danforth simply stared at his old friend until the truck arrived.
“Go,” the commandant said. He looked at Danforth sternly, and then something broke in his face, something that softened him and made him look almost wistful. “Give regard Broadway,” he said.
Later, as they sat on mounds of empty sacks in the back of the truck, Clayton said, “I’ve been looking for you for twelve years.”
“Twelve years,” Danforth repeated in English, a language that now seemed foreign to him. He made a quick calculation, the result of which astonished him. “I am . . . fifty-four years old.”
“Yes,” Clayton said softly.
Danforth realized that he had yet to ask Clayton a single question, and so he asked his first.
“Why did they release me?”
Clayton placed his finger to his lips and softly shook his head.
The failure of Danforth’s final mission suddenly pierced him. “Anna got away with it,” he said.
“Maybe not,” Clayton said.
Clayton told him that he’d invented the story of Anna’s execution, but that he’d done so with the best of intentions. He’d never suspected that Danforth would return to Europe and certainly not that he would stumble upon what he called “the truth about Anna Klein.”
“But we’ll talk about all that in a few days,” he added, bringing the subject to a close. “After you’ve gotten your strength back. We can’t get transport out of Magadan right away, so just relax, walk around, enjoy the weather.” He smiled. “It’s summer in Siberia.”
And so it was, with temperate days and chilly nights that reminded Danforth of the country house he’d not seen for over twenty years and whose memory now filled him with a tragic nostalgia. “Winterset,” he said, as if it were a place he had only dreamed.
“Which you will see again very soon,” Clayton told him.
Clayton had booked them into a crumbling hotel in Magadan, and once there, Danforth shaved and bathed; these were luxuries whose pleasure astonished him. Simply to be clean. How few people knew such joy.
During the daylight hours, he took leisurely walks through the town streets, always followed, as he noticed and reported to Clayton.
“Me too,” Clayton said. “But we’re used to spies, aren’t we?”
They were short, Danforth’s first walks, and followed by hours of rest. He ate in the hotel’s spare dining room, always with Clayton, who carefully eased him away from any further discussion of his abrupt release.
As he gained strength, Danforth walked farther from the hotel, and eventually as far as the docks, where he watched fishermen at their nets and followed the slow drift of the barges and steamers as they came into port. More than once, he saw a shuffling cargo of newly arrived zeks tramp down the gangway and into waiting trucks, and it struck him that if this steady stream had continued uninterrupted since his own journey here, then hundreds of thousands had passed this way, a number he found impossible to imagine or forget.
Thus the days passed, and as they passed, Danforth grew stronger, though he remained thin and would often be overcome by sudden bouts of exhaustion. From out of nowhere, a great weight would fall upon him, heavy as the logs he’d carried on his shoulders, and he would drop into a chair or onto the bed and feel this same weight press him down and down until he flattened into sleep.
Nearly two weeks passed and Danforth made no further inquiry into why he’d been released. Captivity, it seemed, had taught him patience. And so he simply listened as Clayton brought him up to date on the events of his missing years. During these talks, he was surprised to learn of a young president’s assassination but even more surprised to learn that he had been a Catholic.
Then one evening, Clayton appeared at Danforth’s door. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
They left the hotel, walked several blocks, then turned toward the bay and continued on.
“Tom, you’ve been released because the Soviets want to find out about Rache,” Clayton said quite suddenly.
“I don’t know anything about Rache,” Danforth said.
“They believe you were looking for him,” Clayton told him. He drew in a breath that was short and struck Danforth as somewhat labored. “They don’t believe it was ever Anna.”
“But it was always Anna,” Danforth told him. “Because I believe she betrayed me.”
“And was in league with Rache all along,” Clayton said.
“In league with Rache,” Danforth repeated softly.
He felt it rise again, rise then hang like a foul odor in the air around him, Anna’s treachery. He thought of her veiled past, the Gray Wolf Society of Ankara, her inexplicable familiarity with the environs of Baku and the German settlements of Azerbaijan, along with other less fully elaborated clues to a life whose coordinates he still could not determine.
Clayton seemed aware that Danforth’s mind was swirling with memories of Anna, and for a time he allowed his old friend to lose himself in that swirl, then said, “The Russians have long memories,” he said. “They’re still looking for Rache because they want to kill him. They think you can help them.”
“How?”
“By interrogating Anna,” Clayton said.
“Anna?” Danforth whispered.
They had reached the banks of the Sea of Okhotsk, its docks inexpressibly dreary, and which Danforth now recalled was the place he’d disembarked from a steamship all those many years before. It had been a late-night arrival and an immediate departure, and so he’d seen only a few lights as he’d been led down the boat’s snow-covered gangplank and into the back of the truck that had taken him up the Road of Skulls.
“Anna’s here, Tom,” Clayton said. He peered into Danforth’s emaciated face. “Here in Magadan,” he added. “They brought her to the hotel last night. She’s in room three-oh-four.”
Danforth realized that his mind had been so long numbed and disengaged it now had to struggle for pathways by which it might absorb so profound a revelation.
“It’s the price for letting you go,” Clayton added.
Danforth stared at him unbelievingly. “I thought I was already let go.”
Clayton shook his head. “They wanted you to have a taste of freedom,” he said. “So you’d know what you’re missing.”
“What will they do with Anna?” Danforth asked.
“Nothing they haven’t already done,” Clayton answered. He let this settle into Danforth’s brain before he spoke again. “But who cares, Tom? She was nothing but a little Nazi.”
Danforth would many times recall these words of Clayton’s, the bitter tone that entered his voice as he’d said them, how they’d filled him with so much of his own remembered ire.
“Yes, all right,” he said stonily.
With that, they headed back to the hotel, then down the corridor to room 304.
In years to come, he would recall the dry shuffle of his feet along the faded carpet, the jumpy movement of his eyes as he’d approached the two men who stood on either side of the door, one of them clearly in command of the other.
They had been expecting him, had immediately recognized him, and in a way that was very nearly warm, the first had nodded to him as the second turned and, with a gentle motion, like a father fearing to wake a child, opened the door, then stepped back to let him in.
Danforth said nothing to either man, nor did they speak to him; he simply moved past them and into a room where a single small lamp cast a faded yellow light, and in that light he saw her, sitting at the window just as she had sat in Paris so many years before, saw her in full, dressed in a zek’s gray smock, her hair cut very short and salted with gray. As he drew nearer, he saw the ravages of her long detention, the deep creases along her cheeks and her cold-cracked lips, saw all the features of premature old age that mocked her middle years, and he cared for none of her sufferings because he knew what she was and what she had done, and he recalled in a single, blistering memory the deception she had carried out in Munich, Rache
perhaps more her lover than he had ever been.
The Quest for Anna Klein Page 29
