Night Soldiers

“Praise God, Father,” he said, using very slow French.

“My son,” the man acknowledged.

He was flooded with relief. He could not speak Romanian, but he knew that most educated people in the country had a second language-German or French. “A feast,” he said. “Is there a wedding?”

“No, my son,” the priest said. “The village has been blessed today. A good deed has returned to us.”

“And you have guests,” he said. The men with the pistols, sweating in the night air, moved with slow dignity as the violin encountered a brief period of melancholy.

“We are all countrymen,” the priest said. “Praise God.”

Khristo heard clearly the relief in the latter statement. “Is there one guest missing?” he asked gently. “A man with dark hair? A man who has seen the world?” Now he had put himself at the priest’s mercy and feared what he would do next. One shout would be sufficient, he thought, yet who would shout at a feast?

The priest’s eyes sharpened in the firelight and Khristo knew that Sascha was somewhere in the village. His fingers dawdled for a moment by the pocket where the money nested, but instinct told him that such an offer would not be well received. The music picked up and he shouted “Hey!” and clapped his hands.

“Are you a believer?” the priest said.

“I am, Father,” he answered matter-of-factly, “though I have strayed more than I should these last few years.”

The priest nodded to himself. He had been forced to make a decision and he had made it. “You should attend church, my son,” he said, and pointedly broke off the conversation, walking forward a pace or two to be nearer the dancers.

Khristo could see the church; its silver-painted dome reflected light from the bonfire. He moved slowly away from the crowd in the opposite direction, then circled around behind a row of little houses, climbing over garden fences and groping ahead of him for beanpoles and twine. The local dogs loved a feast as well as the villagers, for which he was thankful-the last thing he needed was a dog to wear on his ankle and these yards, he knew, were their sacred territories.

The church was dark and silent. He watched it for a time but it told him nothing-an old mosque, built under Turkish rule, with a cross mounted atop the dome when Christianity returned. He opened the door a few inches, then stepped inside and let it close behind him. It smelled musty, like old straw, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard. “Sascha,” he whispered.

There was no answer.

He regretted, now, leaving his little automatic on the Brovno, but his cover would not allow for it. A Yugoslav river sailor just might turn up in Sfintu Gheorghe-an armed Yugoslav river sailor had better not. There was the faintest trace of light in the church, filtering in from a high window. He moved slowly down an aisle between wooden benches until he reached the altar. “Sascha?”

There was no answer.

To the left of the altar, out of the sightline of the benches, was a pole ladder. He walked to the base of it, slowly, and looked up to see the edge of a loft. “Sascha, it’s Khristo. Stoianev. I’ve come to take you away, to take you to freedom,” he said in Russian.

There was no answer.

Had he left the church? Perhaps the meaning of the priest’s statement had been innocent, the man simply telling him to go to church more often for the good of his soul. He took a step back from the ladder, his thoughts settling on the taxi that waited for him at the edge of the village.

“Sascha Vonets.” He said it in a normal voice. “Are you in this church?”

There was only silence, the muffled sound of the violin, a shout of laughter, barking dogs. He was going to have to climb the ladder. He put one foot on the bottom rung and bounced to make sure it would take his weight, then moved up a rung at a time. “I’m coming up to talk to you,” he whispered into the darkness. A fool’s errand, he thought. The man was likely a thousand miles away while he whispered nonsense into an empty church loft. Still, he kept climbing. He reached the point where he could see over the edge of the loft, but it was very dark, walled off from the high window. He went up another rung and swung one foot onto the boards of the loft. He kicked something, a plate by the sound of it, which went skittering away across the floor. There was an orange flame and a pop and he fell backward, landing on his back and taking the ladder down with him. “Oh no,” he said. He got to his hands and knees and crawled past the altar, down the aisle between the benches, shouldered the door open and rolled himself down the three steps to the dirt street, then wedged himself between the steps and the wall of the church.

He tore at his clothes until he found it. He couldn’t see very well, but it was midway up his left side, just below the ribs, a small hole like a nail puncture, with blood just beginning to well from the center. As he watched, the blood made a droplet that swelled until it broke loose and ran slowly down his skin. He covered the wound gently with a cupped hand, as though it embarrassed him. It hurt a little, like a cut, but there was a frightening pain on the left side of his chest and he realized that he was gasping for air.

From within the church there was a crash, then the sound of running footsteps. Here they come, he thought. But there should have been more of them-in the houses, among the crowd, everywhere-the NKVD used scores of people to set a trap. A man threw open the door and ran down the steps into the street, a pistol in his hand. His hair and beard were wildly disarrayed, his motions frantic and abrupt. “Satans! Where are you? Murderers!” he mumbled, as though to himself. Suddenly he discovered Khristo, ran toward him and peered into his face. “Is it Khristo?” he said, seemingly stunned at finding him crumpled between the steps and the wall of a church.

“You killed me,” Khristo said, voice sorrowful and tired. The pain in his chest was fierce and there was no air to breathe. In the distance, the violin began to play a new kind of song. It was a jazz song, one he’d heard before, but he could not remember its name.

The man knelt above him. “Oh God,” he said. “It is you.”

He shrugged. He no longer cared about anything.

“Why did you speak Russian? You frightened me.”

He coughed, spit something on the ground. “Sascha?”

“Yes?”

“Look what you did.”

From his kneeling position, Sascha fell backward and sat on the ground and began to sob, clutching his face in his hands.

He began to have a dream, and in this dream Lake Murigheol was violet, like the lakes he had seen from the deck of the Brovno. Such a place seemed to him remote, difficult to approach. The driver of the taxi would argue and say there was no road and the rest of the money would have to be given to him and still he would not go and finally Sascha would put the gun against the back of his neck-the old place-and call him names in Russian until he turned the key in the ignition. Then later Sascha would remember that the “Red Banners” poem had been left in the church and they would have to go back and then start all over again. Then they would drive across fields on flat tires with the driver howling and swearing and Khristo bleeding and Sascha crying and waving the gun around and finally they would reach Lake Murigheol. There would be a seaplane, of course, with the usual freckle-face American pilot and some gangly fellow in a blue suit and vest and tie, and eyeglasses that made him look like an owl, standing there like a diplomat and holding a submachine gun away from his side so the grease wouldn’t get on his suit, and he would be tense as the pilot fired up the engines and they began to move across the darkness of the violet lake, and he would ask if the villagers of Sfintu Gheorghe had enjoyed the party which he- fortunate one indeed-had given them. And he would see that Khristo was shot and he would be concerned and Khristo would pass out and come to and pass out again and wake to a moment when the plane quivered and roared and made white plumes of the violet surface until they lifted up and just barely over the tops of the trees and he realized that he was going home now on a new river and that only when he got there would he find out where home was and what it was like and how that river ran and the last thing he thought was that he hoped he would like it there.

In late September of 1945, in Manhattan, Muriel Friedman walked from her apartment building on West End Avenue up to Cake Masters bakery on Broadway, where she purchased two dozen jelly doughnuts, then hailed a cab and returned to West End Avenue, where Estelle Kleinman was waiting in front of her building on the corner of Eighty-third Street. The cab was then directed south, to Forty-sixth Street and Twelfth Avenue, the area of the