by Alan Furst
“Tell me,” the general said, “is it true you’ve been away from Moscow for a time? Several months?”
“Since late August,” Szara said.
“No easy life-trains and hotel rooms. Slow steamships. But foreign capitals are certainly more amusing than Moscow, so there are compensations. No? “
This was a trap. There was a doctrinal answer, something to do with building socialism, but Bloch was no fool and Szara suspected a pious response would embarrass them both. “It’s true,” he said, adding, “though one gets tired of being the eternal stranger,” just in case.
“Do you hear the Moscow gossip? “
“Very little,” Szara said. A loner, he tended to avoid the Tass and Pravda crowd on the circuit of European capitals.
Bloch’s face darkened. “This has been a troubled autumn for the services, surely you’ve heard that much.”
“Of course I see the newspapers.”
“There is more, much more. We’ve had defections, serious ones. In the last few weeks, Colonel Alexander Orlov and Colonel Walter Krivitsky, who is called general in the European press, have left the service and sought refuge in the West. The Krivitsky matter has been made public, also the flight of the operative Reiss. As for Orlov, we’ll keep that to ourselves.”
Szara nodded obediently. This had quickly become a very sensitive conversation. Orlov-a cover name within the service, he was in fact Leon Lazarevich Feldbin-and Krivitsky-Samuel Ginsberg- were important men, respectively NKVD and GRU officials of senior status. The Ignace Reiss affair had shocked him when he read about it. Reiss, murdered in Switzerland as he attempted to flee, had been a fervent idealist, a Marxist/Leninist in his bones.
“Friends?” Bloch raised an eyebrow.
“I knew Reiss to say hello to. No more than that.”
“And you? How does it go with you? ” Bloch was concerned, almost fatherly. Szara wanted to laugh, had the services been panicked into kindness?
“My work is difficult, comrade General, but less difficult than that of many others, and I am content to be what I am.”
Bloch absorbed his answer and nodded to himself. “So you march along,” he said. “There are some,” he continued pensively, “who find themselves deeply disturbed by the arrests, the trials. We cannot deny it.”
Oh cannot we? “We’ve always had enemies, within and without. I served in the civil war, from 1918 to 1920, and fought against the Poles. It isn’t for me to judge the operations of state security forces.”
Bloch sat back in his seat. “Very well put,” he said after a time. Then his voice softened, just barely audible above the steady rumble of the train. “And should it come your turn? Then what?”
Szara could not quite see Bloch’s face in the shadow of the seat across from him, the countryside was dark, the light from the corridor dim. “Then that is how it will be,” Szara said.
“You are a fatalist.”
“What else?” They lingered there a moment too long for Szara. “I have no family,” he added.
Bloch seemed to nod at that, a gesture of agreement with a point made or a confirmation of something he believed. “Not married,” he mused. “I would have guessed otherwise.”
“I am a widower, comrade General. My wife died in the civil war. She was a nurse, in Berdichev.”
“So you are alone,” Bloch said. “Some men, in such circumstances, might be careless of their lives, since nothing holds them to the world. Unconcerned with consequence, such men rise to an opportunity, sacrifice themselves, perhaps to cure their nation of a great evil. And then we have-why not say it? A hero! Do I have it right? Is this your view?”
A man and a woman-she had just said something that made him laugh-went by in the corridor. Szara waited until they passed. “I am like everybody else,” he said.
“No,” Bloch said. “You are not.” He leaned forward, his face taut, concentrated. “To be a writer, that requires work. Work and sacrifice. And the determination to follow a certain road, wherever it may lead. Remember that, comrade journalist, whatever might happen in the days ahead.”
Szara started to reply, to fend off a version of himself he found grandiose, but Bloch raised a hand for silence. The gesture was casual enough, but it struck Szara dumb. The general stood and unlatched the door, stared at Szara a moment, a look that openly weighed and calculated, then left the compartment abruptly, closing the door firmly behind him and disappearing down the passageway.
Some time later, the train halted at Ulm. The station platform was a lacework of shadows, and raindrops refracted trails of light as they rolled down the compartment window. A figure with a hat and an underarm briefcase hurried across the platform and entered the passenger door of a black Grosser Mercedes-an automobile often used by Reich officials-which sped away from the railroad station and was soon lost in the darkness.
A hero?
No, Szara thought. He knew better. He’d learned that lesson in war.
At the age of twenty-three, in 1920, he had campaigned with Marshal Tukachevsky, writing dispatches and inspirational stories for the home front, much as the writer Babel-a Jew who rode with Cossack cavalry-had served General Budenny. In the midst of the war against Poland, the Soviet forces had been driven back from Warsaw, from the banks of the Vistula, by an army commanded by General Pilsudski and his adviser, the French general Weygand. Szara’s squadron, during the retreat, had been set upon by Ukrainian bandits, a remnant of the Petlyura army that had occupied Kiev. Attacked from the ridge of a hillside, and outnumbered, they had fought like men possessed, all of them-cooks, clerks, wagon-masters, and military correspondents. For the previous day they’d come upon the body of a Polish colonel, stripped bare, tied by one foot to a high tree branch, the impaling stake protruding from between his legs. The Ukrainian bands fought both sides, Poles and Russians, and God help anyone they took alive.
From horseback, Szara had ridden down one man, slashed at another with his saber. In the next instant he and his horse were down in the dust, the horse whinnying in pain and terror, its legs thrashing. Szara rolled frantically away from the animal, then a smiling man walked toward him, a small dagger in his hand. Horses galloped past them, there were shots and screams and pointless shouted commands, but this man, in cap and overcoat, never stopped smiling. Szara crawled on all fours, a horse leapt over him and its rider cursed, but he could gain no ground. The battle that raged around them mattered not to Szara nor, apparently, to his good-humored pursuer. The smile was meant, he understood, to be reassuring, as though he were a pig in a sty. As the man closed on him he made a cooing sound and Szara came suddenly to his senses, fumbled his revolver loose of its holster, and fired wildly. Nothing happened. The smile broadened. Then Szara took hold of his fear, as though he could squeeze it in his fist, aimed like a marksman on a target range, and shot the man in the eye.
What he remembered later was not that he had fought bravely, he had simply decided that life mattered more than anything else in the world and had contrived to cling to it. In those years he had seen heroes, and how they went about their work, how they did what had to be done, and he knew he was not one of them.
The train was late getting into Prague. A Jewish family had attempted to board at Nurnberg, the last stop on German soil. Jews had been strongly “encouraged” to emigrate from Germany-not least by a hundred and thirty-five racial decrees, together entitled “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor”-to whatever country would accept them. But the situation, Szara knew, was not unlike that under the czar: a bureaucratic spider web. While you could get Paper A stamped at the local police station, the stamp on Paper B, received from the Economic Ministry, was now out of date and would have to be applied for all over again. Meanwhile, Paper A ran its term and automatically revoked itself.
The Jewish family at Nurnberg simply attempted to board the train, a pointless act of desperation. Thus young children, grandparents, mother and father, scampered in terror all around the s
tation while policemen in leather coats chased them down, shouting and blowing whistles. Meanwhile, the passengers peered curiously from the train windows. Some, excited by the chase, tried to help, calling out, “There, under the baggage cart!” or “She’s crossed the tracks!”
Just after midnight it was cold in Prague, there were frost flowers on the paving stones, but the hotel was not far from the station, and Szara was soon settled in his room. He stayed up for hours, smoking, writing notes on the margin of Le Temps, studying the baggage ticket he’d been given. He was being drawn into something he did not understand, but he had a strong intuition about what awaited him at the end of it.
This extramarital affair with the services had been simple in the beginning, five or six years earlier, for they’d used him as an intellectual, an agent of influence, and he’d liked it, found it flattering to be trusted. Now he had gotten in over his head, and he had no doubt it would kill him. They were using him for something important, an official operation of the apparat or, and here was the death sentence, the plotting of a cabal within it. He only knew it was very dark and very serious. Soviet generals of military intelligence did not board German trains to chat with writers.
Nonetheless, he refused to blind himself to the possibility of exits. He would die, he thought, but did not want to discover as he died that there had been, after all, a way out. That is the difference, comrade General, between the hero and the survivor. The hours of reflection revealed nothing, but did serve to dissipate tension and tire him out. He crawled into bed and slept without dreams.
He woke to a day of light snow and subtle terror in Prague. He saw nothing, felt everything. On the fifth of November, Hitler had made a speech once again declaring the urgency, for Germany, of Lebensraum, the acquisition of new territory for German growth and expansion, literally “room to live.” Like an operatic tenor, singing counterpoint to Hitler’s bass, Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, pleaded publicly in an open letter carried by Czech newspapers the following day for a halt to Czech “persecution” of German minorities in the Sudetenland, the area bordering southern Germany. On 12 November the countertenor, Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, said on the radio: “Race and nationality, blood and soil, are the principles of National Socialist thought, we would be acting in contradiction if we attempted to assimilate a foreign nationality by force.”
This may have sounded warm and comforting in France, but the Sudeten Germans were not a foreign nationality, and neither were the Austrians-not according to German diplomatic definitions. Sudeten German representatives next staged a mass exodus from parliament, informing reporters waiting outside that they had been physically abused by Czech police.
Everybody in Prague knew this game-incidents, provocations, speeches-it meant that the German tank divisions sitting up on the border were coming down. Today? Tomorrow? When?
Soon.
On the surface, there was nothing to see. But what they felt here made itself known in subtle ways: the way people looked at each other, a note in a voice, the unfinished sentence. Szara took the receipt he’d been given in Ostend to the central railroad station. The baggagemaster shook his head, this was from a smaller station, and gestured toward the edge of the city.
He took a taxi, but by the time he arrived, the baggage room of the outlying station was closed for lunch. He found himself in a strange, silent neighborhood with signs in Polish and Ukrainian, boarded windows, groups of tieless men with buttoned collars gathered on street corners. He walked along empty streets swept by wind-driven swirls of dust. The women were hidden in black shawls, children held hands and kept close to the buildings. He heard a bell, looked down a steep lane, and saw a Jewish peddler with a slumped, starved horse, plumes of breath streaming from its nostrils as it attempted to pull a cart up a hill.
Szara found a tiny cafe; conversation stopped when he walked in. He drank a cup of tea. There was no sugar. He could hear a clock ticking behind a curtained doorway. What was it in this place? A demon lived here. Szara struggled to breathe, his persona flowed away like mist and left a dull and anxious man sitting at a table. The clock behind the curtain chimed three and he walked quickly to the station. The baggagemaster limped painfully and wore a blue railroad uniform with a war medal pinned on the lapel. He took the receipt silently and, after a moment of study, nodded to himself. He disappeared for a long time, then returned with a leather satchel. Szara asked if a taxi could be called. “No,” the man said. Szara waited for more, for an explanation, something, but that was it. No.
So he walked. For miles, through zigzag streets clogged with Saturday life, where every ancient stone leaned or sagged; past crowds of Orthodox Jews in caftans and curling sidelocks, gossiping in front of tiny synagogues; past Czech housewives in their print dresses, carrying home black breads and garlic sausages from the street markets; past children and dogs playing soccer on the cobblestones and old men who leaned their elbows on the windowsills and smoked their pipes and stared at the life in the street below. It was every quarter in every city in Europe in the cold, smoky days of November, but to Szara it was like being trapped in the dream where some terrifying thing was happening but the world ignored it and went blindly about its business.
Reaching the hotel, he trudged upstairs and hurled the satchel onto the bed. Then he collapsed in a chair and closed his eyes in order to concentrate. Certain instincts flared to life: he must write about what he’d felt, must describe the haunting of this place. Done well, he knew, such stories spread, took on a life of their own. The politicians would do what they did, but the readers, the people, would understand, care, be animated by pity to speak out for the Czech republic. How to do it? What to select? Which fact really spoke, so that the writer could step aside and allow the story to tell itself. And if his own dispatch did not appear in other countries, it most certainly would run in the Communist party press, in many languages, and more foreign journalists than cared to admit it had a glance at such newspapers. Editorial policy said anything to keep the peace, but let the correspondents come here and see it for themselves.
Then the satchel reminded him of its presence. He examined it and realized he’d never seen one like it: the leather was dense, pebbled, the hide of a powerful, unknown animal. It was covered with a thick, fine dust, so he wet his index finger and drew a line through it, revealing a color that had once been that of bitter chocolate but was now faded by sun and time. Next he saw that the seams were hand-sewn; fine, sturdy work using a thread he suspected was also handmade. The satchel was of the portmanteau style-like a doctor’s bag, the two sides opened evenly and were held together by a brass lock. Using a damp towel, he cleaned the lock and found a reddish tracery etched into the metal surface. This was vaguely familiar. Where had he seen it? In a moment it came to him: such work adorned brass bowls and vases made in western and central Asia-India, Afghanistan, Turkestan. He tried to depress the lever on the underside of the device, but it was locked.
The handgrip bore half a tag, tied on with string. Peering closely, he was able to make out the date the satchel had been deposited as left luggage: 8 February 1935. He swore softly with amazement. Almost three years.
He put one finger on the lock. It was ingenious, a perfectly circular opening that did not suggest the shape of its key. He probed gently with a match, it seemed to want a round shaft with squared ridges at the very end. Hopefully, he jiggled the match about but of course nothing happened. From another time the locksmith, perhaps an artisan who sat cross-legged in a market stall in some souk, laughed at him. The device he’d fashioned would not yield to a wooden match.
Szara went downstairs to the hotel desk and explained to the young clerk on duty: a lost key, a satchel that couldn’t be opened, important papers for a meeting on Monday, what could be done? The clerk nodded sympathetically and spoke soothingly. Not to worry. This happens here every day. A boy was sent off and returned an hour later with a locksmith in tow. In the room the locksmith, a serious man w
ho spoke German and wore a stiff, formal suit, cleared his throat politely. One didn’t see this sort of mechanism. But Szara was too impatient to make up answers to unasked questions and simply urged the man to proceed. After a few minutes of meditation, the locksmith reluctantly folded up his leather tool case, put it away, and, reddening slightly, drew a set of finely made burglar’s picks from the interior pocket of his jacket. Now the battle between the two technicians commenced.
Not that the Tadzik, the Kirghiz, the craftsman of the Bokhara market-whoever he’d been-didn’t resist, he did, but in the event he was no match for the modern Czech and his shining steel picks. With the emphatic snick of the truly well made device the lock opened, and the locksmith stood back and applied an immaculate gray cloth to his sweaty forehead. “So beautiful a work,” he said, mostly to himself.
So beautiful a bill, as well, but Szara paid it and tipped handsomely besides, for he knew the apparat could eventually find out anything, and he might have signed this man’s death warrant.
At dusk, Andre Szara sat in his unlit room with the remnants of a man’s life spread out around him.
There wasn’t a writer in the world who could resist attributing a melancholy romance to these artifacts, but, he argued to his critical self, that did not diminish their eloquence. For if the satchel itself spoke of Bokhara, Samarkand, or the oasis towns of the Kara Kum desert, its contents said something very different, about a European, a European Russian, who had traveled-served? hidden? died? — in those regions, about the sort of man he was, about pride itself.
The objects laid out on the hotel desk and bureau made up an estate. Some clothing, a few books, a revolver, and the humble tools-thread and needle, digestive tea, well-creased maps-of a man on the run. On the run, for there was equal clarity, equal eloquence, in the items not found. There were no photographs, no letters. No address book, no traveler’s journal. This had been a man who understood the people he fled from and protected the vulnerability of those who may have loved him.
