Night Soldiers

“Who’d your sister marry?”

Ivo shook his head. “Do not ask,” he said, voice filled with mock sorrow. They laughed together.

The captain stamped his papers. “Good luck to you,” he said, using an old-fashioned Bulgarian idiom. Khristo smiled uncertainly and nodded his way out of the crew cabin.

Under way once more, they drew close to Vidin, and when the river turned south at the chalk cliff hollowed out by curving water, he was home. They chugged past the shacks by the river with grapevines that looped over the reed roofs, the pole-built docks, the minarets, and the Turkish fortress on the beach. He stood like a sailor, leaning on his elbows, one foot hooked in the lowest rail, and a woman in black waved from the shore. He waved back. Then the town receded in the distance, a small place lit by a weak April sun, the river turned east again, and it was gone.

The days and nights blended together on the river, it was as though the rules of ordinary life were suspended and hours no longer mattered. There were high guard towers on the Romanian shore-sometimes the glint of binoculars-and twice they were boarded from patrol boats and searched. But there was nothing to be discovered, only some Yugoslav river sailors and a load of iron pipe on a barge. Europe was lost behind them-after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea. At Silistra, the Brovno left Bulgarian territory and moved north toward the Romanian delta. A day later, they crossed the southern boundary of the strange land known as Bessarabia. Officially it was Romanian territory, called Moldavian Romania, lying south of the Ukrainian SSR, which was part of Russia. But the name Bessarabia was older than the official borders, and it had always been a lost place, home to ancient Russian religious sects expelled from the interior, home to Jews and Turks and Gypsies and Tatars and tribes so lost they no longer had any name at all. It was a place for people that nobody else wanted.

The spring wind blew hard from the west and the sky shifted gray and white and blue above them. Along the shore, birch and poplar groves were leafing out, softening the empty fields that ran to the horizon and vanished in the distant hills. At dawn, herons worked at fishing in the shallows. Khristo felt he was sailing on the edge of the world, east of the Balkans. At dusk, the mountains of Transylvania were silhouettes, backlit by the setting sun, and where the land fell away from the river he could see lakes that turned violet as night came on and great clouds of birds that rose from the shore and wheeled across the evening sky. The nights were black, with not a single light to be seen. Late one night they saw a bonfire on an island, with human shapes dancing slowly before it. Ivo shut the engines down but there was no music to be heard, only the sounds of insects and water sweeping by the hull and a deep silence.

In April of 1945, in Palestine, Jewish refugees arriving by freighter from Cyprus came first to the northern port of Haifa, where they sat on benches in a large shed and waited to be processed. They were called by number, and each held tightly to a worn scrap of paper and waited, patiently or impatiently, to see one of several men and women who sat at old school desks facing the benches. They came from everywhere-from Jelgava in Latvia, from Wilno in Poland, from Strasbourg in France-everywhere. They had survived Hitler in a number of ways. Some had spent years in an attic or a cellar-having never seen the sun for all that time. Others had lived in the forests like animals. Still others had hidden themselves by the use of deception-assuming non-Jewish identities, sometimes resorting to blackmail or bribery of officials to ensure that identity checks confirmed their false papers.

It was hot under the metal roof of the shed and there were flies, and the people waiting on the benches were exhausted. Heshel Zavi tried to be kind, to be patient, but he was not young anymore and these were difficult people, suspicious, often hostile. They had saved their lives, a miracle. They had reached Palestine, another miracle. They had dreamed of oranges and joyous rabbis. Now they were confronted with Heshel Zavi, an old man with a short temper who had to ask them questions and write things down on paper. To the people on the benches, those who sat behind desks and wrote things on paper were enemies.

Heshel Zavi didn’t look much like an enemy-he was a burly old man in an open-neck shirt with a yarmulke set precariously atop stiff, wooly curls-but some of their other enemies had not looked like enemies either. Well, he thought, it’s to be expected. He glanced at the chalkboard in the corner and saw that the next number was 183. He called it out in Hebrew. There was no answer. Too much to hope for, he thought. He grumbled to himself and tried it in Yiddish. Again, no answer. What next, Polish? Russian? He tried Russian. Ah-hah, he said to himself.

This one was youngish, with a week’s growth of stubble on his face. He wore the long overcoat and the traditional hat and shuffled to the desk, shoulders stooped, eyes lowered, much the usual thing, yet Heshel Zavi was not so sure. This one looked like a yeshiva bucher, a dedicated student of the Torah, yet there was more to him than that. He had small, clever features, there was something of the rat in him. Not quite a bad rat-Heshel Zavi amended his impression-a good rat, a wise rat, a rat in a children’s story. But not a mouse. Definitely not a mouse.

“Sit down,” he said brusquely. “Welcome to Palestine. You will see me, then a doctor if you need one, representatives of the kibbutzim, and so forth. We are here to help you, please be patient with us. Do you understand?”

The man nodded that he understood.

“Very well. Your name?”

“Itzhak Gold.”

“Your name truly?”

“Not really.”

“Never mind. We don’t care. Itzhak Gold it is. From where?”

“Kurland.”

“I’ll write Lithuania.”

“If you like.”

“From a village?”

“The city of Kaunas.”

“Very well. I’ll write Kaunas. Next, occupation.”

“Clerk.”

Heshel Zavi wrote the word in Hebrew. Another clerk, he thought, just what they needed. He glanced at the man’s hands, un-callused and soft. Well, they would fix that. “You would, no doubt, like to be a clerk in Palestine.”

The man shrugged, as though to say he knew nothing else.

“It’s farmers we need,” Heshel Zavi said. “Someone who can fix a tractor. Clerks we have.”

Again the man shrugged. “Perhaps there is a civil service.”

“Like me, you mean?” Amazing how many of them wanted his job-two hours in the country and they were ready to shove him aside.

“No, not exactly like you. You have a small defense force, I believe.”

“There are several, all with grand names. Night watchmen is what they are.”

“Ah,” said the man, his small, ratlike face lighting up with a smile, “the very thing for me.”

“You’re sure? You can always change your mind. You will change your mind-that’s mostly what we do here, we are preoccupied with it. People who have not been able to change their minds for two thousand years tend to make up for lost time once they have the opportunity. As for being a night watchman, well, there’s not much future in that, is there.”

“A little, maybe. Where there are night watchmen, there will soon be someone to suggest what they should watch at night.”

Nimble, Heshel Zavi thought, and ambitious. He found himself liking the man, soft hands or not. He leaned forward across the desk. “Look,” he said, “if you can bear waiting a little longer, maybe I have a friend who might help you. But it will take time. I have you to finish, and many others.”

“I don’t mind at all,” the man said. “I’ll wait.”

The people of Sfintu Gheorghe would never forget the events of April 1945. The stories were told again and again-never the same way twice, of course, everybody had their own version of it, depending on where they’d been and what they’d seen and what they wished they’d seen. They weren’t liars, exactly, they just liked to make a good story better. Who can blame them? After all, Sfintu Gheorghe wasn’t much of a place. In the old days, five centuries earlier, it had been a port of call for Genoese traders, but now it was just a fishing village, a few hundred souls perched out on an arm of the Dunarea that reached to the sea. They were of Greek origin, descendants of the