by Alan Furst
“Any luck?” Khristo asked.
“No,” the old man said, “not much.”
“Too bad.”
“Yes. There used to be pike here.”
“The markings on this barge-I used to have a friend whose boat had the same numerals. Quite a coincidence, no?”
The old man nodded that it was.
“I’d like to see him again, this friend,” Khristo said.
“Then I’ll take you there,” the old man said. He stood slowly, taking the line from the river and wiping the muck from it with thumb and forefinger, then kicked an old piece of canvas aside and, with his other hand, retrieved a Browning Automatic Rifle, the American BAR, much battered and obviously well used. “Your friend is my son,” he said, shouldering the heavy weapon, gripping it so that his finger was within the trigger guard. “You carry the lantern,” he said, “and go on ahead of me, so that he may have the pleasure of seeing his old friend arrive.”
They walked for a long time, climbing into an evergreen forest where the sharp smell of pine pitch hung in the evening air. This was the land called Syrmia, lying between the rivers Danube and Sava, the edge of the Slavonian mountain range that ran north into the Carpathians. The trail reminded Khristo of Cambras-a steep, winding approach with potential for ambush at every blind turn. His lantern sometimes showed him a gleam of reflected light at the edges of the path. Weapons, he thought. But these sentries did not challenge him or show themselves, simply passed him on silently, one to the next.
After an hour of hard climbing, the old man melted away and Khristo was alone in a clearing. He stood there patiently while, somewhere, a decision was made. Above him, an ancient fortress of weathered stone was built directly into the face of the mountain. There were hill forts scattered all across northern Yugoslavia, he knew, some of the sites already in use at the time of the Greeks and Romans and, the story went, never vacant for one day in all those centuries. From the top of the hill, the river would be visible for miles in both directions once daylight came.
At last, a silhouette moved toward him from the darkness, a man who walked with great difficulty, his weight shifting violently with every step. Khristo raised his lantern so that his face could be seen and the man advanced into the circle of its light. Perhaps it was Drazen Kulic, he thought, or perhaps not. This man wore the blue jacket of a Yugoslavian army officer over a torn black sweater. He walked with the aid of a stick in his right hand, his left arm dangling useless by his side, the hand cupped and dead. A black patch covered his left eye, and the skin on that side of his face was ridged and puckered all the way to the jawline, pulling the corner of his mouth into an ironic half smile. The man stared at him for a time, searching his face, then said, “Welcome to my house.”
“Drazen Kulic,” he answered formally, “I am honored to be your guest.”
They walked together through a pair of massive doors made of logs cross-braced with iron forgings, into a cavelike room with a fire that vented through a blackened hole in the ceiling. There were some thirty people in the room, half of them sprawled asleep in the shadows, the other half occupied with a variety of chores: loading belts and magazines, cleaning weapons, repairing kit and uniform. They spoke in low voices, merely glanced at him, and ignored him after that. The women had bound their hair in scarves and wore sweaters and heavy skirts, while the men were dressed in remnants of army uniforms. The room smelled of unwashed bodies and charred wood and the fragrant odor of gun oil. The sound of working bolts, metal on metal, formed a rhythmic undertone as the guns were reassembled after cleaning.
Kulic took him to a trestle table set against one wall, and an old woman appeared with two tin cans made over into cups and filled with home-brewed beer, a bowl of salt cabbage and a slab of corn-meal bread. Khristo used his knife to put pieces of cabbage on the bread.
Kulic raised his beer. “Long life,” he said.
Khristo drank. The taste was bitter and very good. “Long life,” he repeated. “And thanks to God for letting me see the signal on the barge. I could have missed it.”
The right side of Kulic’s mouth twisted up in a brief smile. “You have not changed, I see,” he said, “forever fretting over details.” He paused to drink. “At that bend in the river there is a cross-current, and if you do not see the barge you will hit it-though I take nothing away from God, as you can see.”
“How did it happen?”
“A mortar shell, in a graveyard in the Guadarrama, the mountains west of Madrid. I’d been a bad boy, and the NKVD ‘arranged’ for it to happen. They meant for me to die, but I was only-well, you can see for yourself.”
“I’d heard that you were captured. Also that the Russians got you out.”
“Who told you that?” Kulic asked.
“Ilya Goldman.”
“Ilya!”
“Yes. Years ago, you understand. In Paris, before the war.”
Kulic took two cigarettes from the pocket of his uniform jacket, gave one to Khristo, struck a wooden match on the table, and lit them both. “In Paris, before the war,” he repeated, a sigh in his voice. He did not speak for a time, then said, “It’s true. They did get me out. If I’d died they wouldn’t have cared, but I was alive and I knew too much, so they couldn’t leave me where I was. Then, after they’d sprung me, they tried to send me back to Moscow, but I vanished.”
“Have you made it right with them?”
Kulic shook his head no, exhaling smoke from his nostrils. “Bastards,” he said briefly. “Do you know what went on here, in Yugoslavia?”
“Some,” Khristo said.
“Communists fighting Chetnik fascists, centrists, monarchists, the Mihailovich units, and all of us, excepting the Chetniks, fighting the Germans. Some groups with OSS support, some with the British MI6, some with the Russians. Believe me, it is beyond imagining. We shot our wounded, Khristo, to keep them from the Gestapo. I did that, with my own hand, sometimes to friends I’d played with as a child.”
“This war …” Khristo said.
“This war was worth what was done only if we come out of it a nation. Forgive the speech, but it’s true. When the Russians got here in force we’d already taken control-they could not do to us what they did to the Poles. But for that we paid a price.”
“I know,” Khristo said. “I saw it in France.”
“This was worse,” Kulic said simply.
They were silent for a time. The sounds of the great room-the hiss of damp wood on fire, the cleaning of weapons, subdued conversation-flowed around them.
“And now,” Kulic said finally, “it begins again. Only this time we are alone, or soon will be, and the NKVD begins to nibble. Assassinations, kidnappings, false rumors, the press manipulated, officials bribed, the destruction of reputations-you know their methods, I’ll spare you the bedtime stories-but there is no misreading their intentions. They want Tito for a puppet. If they can’t have him, they’ll throw him out a window and try someone else. Meanwhile, our American friends are still here, and they help if they can, but they are about to fold up their tents and steal away into the night.”
“I doubt that,” Khristo said.
“You’ll see.”
“Drazen,” Khristo said after a moment, “the numbers on the barge.”
“Still a mystery?” Kulic smiled with the right side of his mouth.
Khristo waited.
“I believe you sent a radio message to the Bari station. Some strange ravings about an NKVD colonel who is supposed to materialize in Sfintu Gheorghe on the twelfth of April. Well, you wanted a contact, now you have it.”
“You are to help?” Khristo leaned forward, a little amazed.
“Help.” Kulic repeated the word to himself and laughed. “How is your English?”
“Good enough.”
“I believe it went: ‘Find out what that crazy son-of-bitch does.’ You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Well.”
Khristo took a moment to assemb
le his thoughts. “What he does is bring Sascha Vonets out of Romania, with information, probably very good information. Ilya got Sascha’s message out-from the camps. Voluta delivered it to me. It cost him his life. In Spain, Sascha told me what was coming-in the Yezhovschina purge of the security services-and Ilya warned me when I had to get out. Then, in Paris, I was trapped by the British, in an emigre operation against the Soviets, and sent to prison. For life. Voluta’s organization set me free, just before the Germans took Paris. So, because of these people, because they endangered themselves on my behalf, I sit here drinking beer with you. One could simply walk away from such responsibilities. Is that your suggestion?”
“These friends … are all NKVD friends.”
“And you, Drazen.”
“Perhaps someone wonders just what really goes on with you, where your heart is. You walked away from the Russians in 1936. Or maybe not.”
“Horseshit,” Khristo said.
“Yes? Could be. All apologies, and so forth, but explain to me why you are not the bait in an NKVD trap? You go up into that godforsaken Bessarabia-some little fishing village, a place beyond the end of the world. Romania now belongs to the Russians, so what you are trying to do is draw OSS operatives onto Sovietoccupied soil. Where they will be gobbled up and put on show. Somehow, heaven only knows how, American newspapers learn of this. ‘Oh-ho!’ they say. ‘This bunch of wild asses in the OSS now spies on our great ally in the war. Off with their heads!’ “
Khristo stood up. There was silence in the room.
“Sit down, sit down,” Kulic said, making calming motions with his hand. The old woman returned and poured beer into his tin can from a pitcher. “Very well,” he went on, “you are a virgin.”
Khristo sat down on the bench. His hands were shaking so he put them between his knees.
Kulic leaned forward and spoke very quietly. “It is politics. The American government is going to shut down the OSS. The minute the Axis surrender is final-that’s the end of it. Some sections will be moved around to other departments, some of the networks will be salvaged, but …”
“And so?”
“So there is no guarantee, even if you should manage to slip through the Russian nets on this river, that there will be anybody to help you in Romania.”
“Even if you tell them that I am not a traitor?”
“Even then. You could be unknowing, no sort of traitor at all, yet still bait. You’ve seen such operations.”
Khristo was silent. It had happened in Paris: he had been drawn into a scheme to stir up the Soviet intelligence apparat in Western Europe, and he had never known about it until too late, until Aleksandra was gone.
Kulic’s expression changed. There was suddenly discomfort in his face, regret, as though he had determined to do something that he did not want to do, but that he knew he had to do. “Khristo Nicolaievich,” he said quietly, “you are my old friend. I know your heart. But we are both part of something that is larger than two individuals and sometimes, in war, individuals cannot matter. There are times when a sacrifice has to be made. But, for one time, maybe we should try to let friendship win. Let us take you south, through the mountains. We’ll put you on a boat, give you a passport of some kind, and leave you in Trieste. It’s not a bad place, you can live there if you like. Or go to Paris and drive a cab. Live your life, stop fighting, have your politics over a coffee if you must have them, but for God’s sake do not delude yourself about Americans. They change, Khristo. One minute they are excited, the next cool. What point is there in having two useless corpses in Sfintu Gheorghe instead of one? They may decide to leave you sitting there like a fool, untrusted, a provocateur for the Soviets, and such a thing would be too sad for an old friend to see. I will get you down the river, if you feel you must go, but my heart tells me that tragedy is waiting for you there.”
Khristo lay on a blanket in the corner of the room but he was too cold to sleep. From time to time someone got up and fed the fire and he stared into the flames and wondered what to do. Lying next to him was a girl, perhaps seventeen, with a blanket pulled over her head like a shawl. Awake, she would be soft and pretty, he knew, but in sleep her face was aged and frightened. Her eyelids flickered, then her lips moved as though she were speaking in a dream.
He was so cold. He had lived a cold, wasted life, he thought. Blown about in storms from Vidin to Moscow to Spain and then Paris. Sante prison had put an end to that, a white blank in his life. And what was the point? To end up dead in some little Bessarabian village? Was that why he had been put on this earth?
The end of the war was coming; it would be like a dawn, the living would sigh with relief and set about to change the world. He wanted to see it. He wanted to live. It would be the best of times to start a new life. Trieste. A part of Aleksandra’s fantasy. Something about the place had always intrigued her. Perhaps she had been right. In Trieste, he knew, there were Slavs and Italians living side by side-he would not have to be an emigre, an alien, he could just be a man.
Looking into the fire, he could see it. Little streets with radios playing behind shuttered windows, bakeries, dogs napping in the sun. He could walk beside the Adriatic with a newspaper folded beneath his arm. He could stop at a cafe and read the news. About the mayor and his deputies and the scandal over the contract for the repair of the local streets. Out at sea, a freighter would move slowly across the horizon.
The girl sleeping beside him mumbled some words and, for a moment, her face was touched by sorrow.
In the morning it was raining and wisps of fog hung in the tops of the pine trees. Someone gave him a cup of hot water flavored with tea and he felt much better after he’d drunk it. Then Kulic took him some way up the mountain-they had to walk very slowly, and Khristo helped him in the difficult places-to an open meadow, a sloping field with mist lying above the long grass and a row of wooden boards set in the ground. One of them was marked Aleksandra-1943
Khristo stood with his hands in his pockets, his face wet in the rain. “She came down here in ‘37,” Kulic said. “When Ilya got her released, he bought her a ticket and put her on a train. He sent along a letter. ‘Keep her out of sight,’ he said. ‘Encourage her to live quietly.’ She did just that. Stayed in a village and worked in a shop, kept to herself. She was someone whose fire had gone out, though you could see, every now and then, how she’d been. But she seemed to have promised herself to be that way no more, to make the world pay for what it had done to her by withholding her light from it. Then we were invaded and went to war. In the strange way of things, it brought her back to life. She fought with us, first as a courier, then with a rifle. We took a German supply column in October of 1943-mules with mortar rounds strapped to them. And when the thing was finished we found her curled up behind a tree and she was gone. The magazine of her rifle was empty, Khristo, she bore her share of it and more.
“While she was with us, she used the cover identity that Goldman had provided for her. But then, as the war went on, she began to call herself Aleksandra. So, when we brought her up here, we marked her grave with that name only, as we believed she would have wished. From Ilya, I knew her story, but she never spoke of you, or of Paris, but neither did she take a lover.”
“Thank you for bringing me here,” Khristo said.
“I spoke to you from the heart last night, about Trieste, but I could not let you go away without seeing this. It is another side of things, something between you and me, only that.”
“It’s better for me that I found out,” he said.
“There are meadow flowers this time of year,” Kulic said. “I’ll wait for you if you like.”
Three days later, he went east on the river.
Kulic found him a berth on a tug called the Brovno, bound for Belgrade to pick up a bargeload of iron pipe destined for the rebuilding of the transfer station at Galati, in Romania, the final staging point for oil going to Soviet Black Sea ports. Obtaining export stamps for the pipe had been, according to the pilo
t of the Brovno, “like a fire in a whorehouse-everybody running around in circles and screaming at everybody else.” The city of Belgrade had been virtually leveled by the Wehrmacht, and whatever pipe they did manage to fabricate was, they felt, better used to supply water for Yugoslavian toilets rather than fuel for Soviet tanks. And as for the Romanian state trading company, which had to be pounded on the back until it coughed up the import papers, well, that was even worse. A fire in a whorehouse on a Friday night. “All spies up there,” the pilot said. “Romanians.”
For Khristo, there was little to do aboard the Brovno. Ivo, the pilot, stayed in the wheelhouse while his brother-in-law, Josip, ran the engine down below and his son, called Marek, served as second engineer. The Brovno was a big, powerful river tug, built just before the war. They’d run her up an inlet in 1940, built a shack around her, dismantled the diesel engine and hidden the parts in three separate attics, then gone off to the hills to fight the Germans.
Khristo spent most of his time leaning on a railing and watching the land go by. Kulic had taken him off to the Osijek town hall and obtained, using forged identification papers, a Yugoslav work permit as a deckhand. So he was officially part of the Brovno’s crew, but the captain wanted no part of him as a worker. “What do you want me to do?” he asked as they got under way at dawn.
Ivo thought for a time. “Coil a rope,” he said.
“And then?”
Ivo shrugged. “Put it in the rope locker, if you like.”
He did neither. The river was taking him home, and he wanted to stand at the railing and gaze at the countryside. The hundred and twenty miles from Osijek down to Belgrade passed quickly, and by nightfall they’d pulled into the river Sava and tied up while Ivo went off to the dockside office of the harbormaster. He was gone for a long time. When he returned, he rang for three-quarter power and nosed the Brovno through a forest of tugs and barges with such speed that their wake drew curses all across the harbor. “What did they say?” Khristo asked.
“He said he’d throw me in the river. I said I’d throw him in the river. Then he signed over the barge.”
