The Quest for Anna Klein

“You do remember, don’t you?” Danforth asked.

It had been a hot summer day, I recalled. I’d been tired of the heat, eager to throw myself beneath the fan that turned so languidly in my grandfather’s house. My mother had stopped a block behind to chat with a neighbor, certain that I was safe once I’d gone through my grandfather’s gate.

“That was you?” I asked, now quite vividly remembering the old man I’d found sitting opposite my grandfather, the way he’d turned and looked at me brokenly like a man who’d just been told that the last small thing he’d hoped for never would be his. “You just got up and left,” I said.

Danforth’s hand crawled over to the pistol. “You were just a little boy, Paul,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed softly.

“A child,” Danforth said. He picked up the pistol with a hand that had begun to tremble and returned it to the drawer. “And so you were completely innocent.”

“I don’t have to believe that what you say is true,” I said, with a bit of feigned bravado that I suddenly realized I must have gotten from my grandfather.

“That’s true, you don’t,” Danforth said. He glanced at the clock to his right. “You only have to believe that it might be true.” He watched me a moment, then added, “We know what to do with evil, Paul. It’s innocence that perplexes us.” His smile was a reed struggling to hold its own against a stormy sea. “And so I thought it was over at last,” he whispered, and with those words stepped back into the past. “But I was wrong.”

He had retired from teaching his classes not long after returning from Buenos Aires, he said, but had continued to tutor on the side in order to afford the few luxuries he enjoyed, mainly books and an occasional visit to the theater, what he rightly called “the semiretirement of a simple life.” Several of these students were part of the influx of Russians to New York City, a very ambitious group, according to Danforth, hell-bent on learning English. One of them had been a young woman from Vladivostok who wore thick glasses and spoke very rapidly and who greatly enjoyed lambasting the old Communist regime as the crooks and thugs they were. These had been replaced by an equally repellent cadre of Party hacks, she said, men who enjoyed the fruits of the old system’s vast corruption even as Russia attempted to reform itself. Still, there were good changes, she’d told Danforth, lots of entrepreneurs creating lots of wealth. In fact, she said, quite a few entirely new professions had sprouted from the soil of Communism’s rot. She listed them in Russian and asked Danforth to give her the words for them in English.

 she said.

“Accountant,” Danforth told her.

“Investment banker.”

It was this third one that caused Danforth to feel what I had felt only moments before, the silent stricture of a suddenly stopped heart.

“Private investigator,” he said.

Could it be, he wondered, with all the recent opening up of files from various Russian agencies — a few even from the black maw of the KGB — could it be that it was not too late for one last quest?

“With the last of my little savings, I hired a Russian gumshoe,” Danforth said with a small, sad laugh.

He had gone to Little Odessa, he said, where the immigrant Russians thrived, and there inquired at various social clubs of anyone who might know a who would take his case. A name at last surfaced, one Fydor Slezak, and Danforth wrote to him in his quite exquisite Russian. The case was taken, and for weeks it continued. Bills came, and a little doubtful information that reminded Danforth of the rumors that had plagued him so many years before, tales of this woman hewing wood, that one in a quarry

Then, on a fine April day, an envelope arrived, bearing its brief report on a piece of paper that would forever after seem to Danforth as slender as her bones.

 the note said.

Found.

~ * ~

Magadan, Russia, 1986

He flew out of Kennedy to Moscow, and from there to Vladivostok, where he waited as one flight after another was delayed and the terminal filled with people who reminded him of the peasants of old. There was something in their patient waiting, their anticipation of delay, the way they absorbed hardship and inconvenience into their very blood that recalled his first journeys to the east, the frigid towns where the forebears of these same indomitable people had congregated beside the rails in hopes of gathering up a little coal or some miraculously tumbled sack of grain. He’d heard of trains that used frozen fish as fuel, and along the rail lines where they ran, vast crowds of the starving waited for the blackened fish heads that were sometimes belched from these trains’ explosive funnels. He’d never known if this was true, but the curious thing was that at the time, it had seemed to him entirely believable.

The plane to Magadan at last took off a full three days after his arrival in Vladivostok, and by that time his old bones had seemed almost to pierce his skin.

Once in Magadan, he’d gone to the same hotel where he’d stayed after being released years before; he’d even, with the manager’s permission, been admitted once again to room 304, where he sat by the window and recalled as best he could that one last time with Anna.

He’d hired Slezak to take him up the Road of Skulls, but he’d been held up for a reason he had not made clear, and so Danforth had remained in Magadan a little longer than planned. While there, he often walked down to the sea, where he sat on the once-hellish docks and watched the workers loading and unloading supplies. Zeks no longer emerged from the black depths of these boats, but from time to time, Danforth would see some old man or woman who had doubtless once suffered that debased condition. He could sense their long serfdom in the slope of their shoulders, the heaviness of their weary gait. The camps had closed long ago, but where could such people have gone with their closing? They had no family left, no one to whom they might return, and so, as he could see, they had become the Gulag ghosts of Magadan.