Night Soldiers

him at all hours of the day and night.

Lubin, whining incessantly of his family connection, was nonetheless dispatched to a nearby apartment building where a junior officers’ dormitory occupied the upper floors. His days were filled with researches through Madrid’s birth and marriage records, land-ownership deeds and tax rolls, as he built up dossiers on a long list of Spanish citizens compiled for him by Khristo and Andres. “These individuals represent the gravest threat to world socialism,” Khristo told him, “you must get me everything you can. And tell nobody what you are doing.” The names had been picked at random from Madrid telephone directories. Lubin, naturally, wanted to tail them from home to office and wherever else they went, but Khristo warned him that these dangerous persons must not be alerted to NKVD interest.

At the consulate, Khristo had a day-by-day view of the war, and visitors represented a cross section of the Soviet intelligence and military elite. Walter Ulbricht, head of the German division of the NKVD, passed through, as did no less than three Russian marshals-Konev, Malinovsky, and Rokossovsky-who had come to Spain to learn all they could of German tactics and, most especially, the capabilities of German aircraft and weapons. People at the consulate also kept track of the other side. Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr was known to be based near Madrid, sent to Spain by Hitler to study the effects of aerial bombing on a civilian population. This had never before been tried in Europe-Mussolini had used the tactic in Abyssinia but that proved nothing-and the Germans urgently wanted good intelligence on the subject. Thus, beginning in late October, the bombing of Madrid began in earnest. What happened when you bombed a hospital? A school? A column of refugees on a road? With the aid of the Condor Legion pilots, flying Junkers-52 and Heinkel-51 bombers, these questions were soon answered.

By October 20, in an attempt to relieve the pressure being applied by Mola’s four columns, Republican forces attacked the town of Illescas, west of Madrid. Singing and chanting slogans, some fifteen thousand fighters rode out from staging areas on double-decker city buses to attack Moroccan and Spanish Legion forces under Barron. The Republican forces fought bravely for three days and gave not one inch until, on October 23, they were outflanked by a relief column of cavalry under Tella that came north from Toledo, and they had to retreat back to the city. Seeing the bloody, exhausted fighters returning, the city’s population began to feel that the end might be nearer than anyone would admit.

This same Nationalist cavalry column was then confronted, in the streets of Esquivias, by Russian tanks under Pavlov. A Republican victory was sorely needed, and this was one way to get it. But the tanks-impossible to maneuver in the narrow streets-could not hurt the cavalry, and the horsemen could not hurt the tanks, so the confrontation was at best a draw.

But for those who could read the signs, two particular events signaled the beginning of the end: the national gold went out, and the refugees began to flow in.

The gold, some sixty-three million British pounds in value, was taken first by rail to Alicante, then on to Odessa by Russian freighter. Those who were responsible for guarding and counting the gold soon disappeared. Some time later, the Soviet Union announced major gold strikes in the Urals and, for the first time, began to sell gold on the world markets.

The refugees from outlying towns fled to the streets of Madrid and there set up housekeeping, amid pigs and goats and dressers and mirrors, building small fires to cook whatever food they could lay their hands on. There was, it seemed, less available every day.

The battle at Illescas was plainly audible on the streets of the city and, on October 23, Azana, the prime minister of Republican Spain, fled the city in secret-his cabinet was not told he was leaving. He made his way to Barcelona, as close to the safety of the French border as possible, and declared the government of the country officially relocated. The exit of Castello, the minister of war, was even less illustrious. He went mad and had to be carried, foaming at the mouth, from his office. The rest of the government would stick it out for two weeks, then they too would head east. They left the city in a caravan of cars, loaded down with state ministers, bureaucrats, government records, wives and children and pets. A little way outside Madrid, the caravan was halted by a group of hooded men carrying rifles. Go back, they were told, and lead the people of Madrid in their hour of crisis. The caravan turned around, went west a few miles, turned again, and, achieving maximum speed, went barreling through the roadblock.

The city would fight on, under siege, until March of 1939, when Madrid fell and the Spanish war ended. Sascha arrived in Moscow on the ninth of November. Mitya was waiting for him, in a light snow, at Paveletski station. On the train ride north from Odessa he had in essence said good-bye to himself, a teary, miserable business as the train crawled across the southern steppe. In his colonel’s uniform, he stood in the doorway of the passenger car as it crawled into the station, floating past a sea of anxious white faces in the waiting crowd. Then the train ground to a halt with a great hiss of steam, and the people behind him began to press-politely; one did not shove a uniform-to get off. He braced himself to attention, then stepped onto the platform. Somewhere in his imagination he had expected to be shot then and there, before his foot touched the earth of Moscow. But the reality was a sudden bear hug from Mitya and affectionate obscenities shouted in a blast of garlicky breath.

Mitya drove him home. His apartment, in a quiet little street behind Kutuzov Prospekt, was untouched. In the car, he had obliquely referred to Yezhov and the new purge, but Mitya had waved him off. Gossip, gossip, old women’s tales. Yes, there had been changes, a few fools had managed to get themselves shot or sent off to the Siberian camps, but they stole too much, conspired for advancement beyond what was good for them, or screwed the wrong people’s wives. Not to worry. They had put Sascha up for an Order of Lenin, Second Class, for his service in Spain, and he was certain to get it. Everybody knew Yaschyeritsa was a bastard. He would stay in Spain forever-nobody wanted him back. Not to worry, not to worry.

On Monday, he went to work at the NKVD complex on Dzherzhinsky Square. All were delighted to see him. There were six daisies in a water glass on his desk. His boss, General Grechko-a ham-fisted peasant with a sprouting mole on his nose-pounded him on the shoulders and called him all the old affectionate names: Sascha my poet! My dreamer! My Chekhov! Took him into his cluttered office and closed the door, knocked back a few shots accompanied by heartfelt toasts and told him yes, the medal would gothrough, even those pansies in Section Nine wouldn’t dare stop it! Sascha must learn to squeeze himself small so that Yezhov, all four feet ten inches of him, could give him the requisite hug and kiss when it was presented.

So for a week.

And he relaxed.

And then they took him.

According to the rules, it was to be done a certain way; each step in the process had been worked out, laboriously, over time, and thousands and thousands of arrests had fined the system down to a jewellike perfection. Instance: at the moment of arrest, the criminal must be beaten. From the moment. He opened the door to his apartment and they were waiting on the other side, and they hit him in the kidneys so hard he saw a black sun haloed by white lights, came to his senses on the parquet floor of his living room and threw up and for that they kicked him behind the knees. They showed him a fury he had not believed possible, and they knew all the places to hit, wasting not a single punch. It was the ferocity of Russia itself, for that was who he had betrayed, and it had a thousand fists. The intention was that he understand this lesson from the beginning. They threw him into the car like a weightless doll, and there they started on him again. The car was an old GAZ M-i and the back seat smelled of what they had, these past several months, been using it for. Pushed face down on the seat, he offered to confess then and there. Confess what? a voice asked. We already know. And they beat him all the way to the Lubianka. According to the rules. They wished him to understand that he had crossed a line, that he was a nonperson; all his special friends, relatives, bosses, no matter who had protected him all through his life and career-they no longer mattered. He was no longer somebody. Now he was nobody. Crossing into an endless darkness peopled by other nobodies that nobody could help.

They beat him with fury because the German ideal, the slow, nasty, pants-down business so dear to the hearts of the Gestapo on their western border, was repugnant to them. Sadism was despised as an integral aspect of fascism. This was righteous workers’ anger, justified. Thus, after some endless, numberless group of nights in a wet cell, when the interrogator beat him up, he did it with a leg torn off a chair. The book of instruction said to do that very thing.

So, on the day when they would finally permit him to talk, when it was convenient for them to listen to him,