smug, well-fed faces. They’d been interrogated, all right, but they’d put that nightmare behind them in the transit camps, on the cattle cars, and they came into the camp expecting to be treated, well, at least decently. They were, after all, party members.
Then it was the gravel. Or pulling a sledge piled with rocks by means of ropes around their shoulders, like beasts. And that’s when Sascha would come around. Could they, perhaps, use a bit of help? A friendly hand? They could? Well, he’d see what he could do. They should hang on, meanwhile, drive that shovel into the wet gravel, take the weight on their forearms, grunt with the effort of it a thousand times a day. He was working on it. The old man responsible for counting the shoes was fading fast, on his last legs-how would they feel about doing such a job? Not too demeaning, counting shoes? He watched their eyes warm with anticipation, their tongues hang out like dogs’.
And by the way, stop at my room sometime for a little chat.
He didn’t really have to ask them. So grateful were they for even the chance to hope that they spewed it all out-if for no other reason than to make themselves of sufficient importance in his eyes to be allowed to count the shoes.
One more new memory word. Entered, in case his mind should fail him, in an account book nobody ever looked at. As the months went by, the facts piled up.
The collection grew and grew. It would make quite a thick book when he finally got around to writing it all out. Perhaps he would make it into a poem, he thought, a patriotic poem or, even better, a patriotic poem dedicated to the NKVD itself. There it was. With each word keyed to the names and places that should have remained forever secret.
But it wasn’t time for that yet. He would content himself with research until a certain opportunity presented itself. Then, when the moment came, he was going out. His NKVD encyclopedia would buy him out. And then, whoever got the lists-the names, the places, the money, the deeds-whichever intelligence service that turned out to be, they would be the sword. His sword.
And he would sit back and watch them cut.
On the twenty-third of July, at 3:25 in the morning, Khristo Stoianev was arrested by personnel of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire-the DST The apprehension was smoothly accomplished. As he headed toward the Marais on foot, going home from work, he was stopped at the foot of the Pont de Sully. Two well- dressed men came from nowhere, flowed to either side of him and took him gently by the upper arms. He did not resist. At the other end of the bridge he could see two men leaning against either side of the parapet wall. Some distance away, up and down the Quai de la Tournelle, were two idling Citroens. As he was led to a third automobile, one of the detectives informed him that he was under detention for violation of Subsections 104, 316, 317, and 318 of Article 9 B of the Criminal Code of 1894, revised, Part XII. He had no idea what all that meant. Later on, a ferret-eyed man who claimed to be his
The DST Citroen did not turn across the Seine toward the Palais de Justice but stayed on the Rive Gauche, headed, he speculated, for the Ecole Militaire district. The detectives ignored him; they spoke quietly among themselves about the new rules regarding compensation received for working on holidays and Sundays. They were preceded and followed by other cars, and they drove cautiously along the empty boulevards.
Khristo used his last twenty minutes of freedom to watch the nighttime city slide past the car window. The air was warmish and still, and the summer heat made the aroma of the streets sharp-edged and uncomfortably sweet. It was the hour-appropriate for arrest, he thought-when the city cleaned itself. Large trucks hauled away the garbage, the market squares were hosed down, and old women scraped at the cobblestones with brooms made of twigs.
He said goodbye, in his mind, to Aleksandra. Since the night of the brasserie shooting he had telephoned the contact number for Ilya many times, but the call was never answered. It was not disconnected, it simply rang, in some empty place somewhere-he imagined an anonymous trading company-and there was no one present to pick up the receiver. But he was wrong about this, for he had tried the number
He was tired of his own. His stomach twisted in knots over what lay ahead of him in a French prison, but somehow he could not bring himself to feel “trapped” or “captured.” He was already in prison-a prison of borders, passports, false names, and de facto nonexistence-a citizen of nowhere. He remembered the train ride back to Moscow from Belov, the dark realization of a homeless, wandering future. So it had been written, so it had turned out to be. Cruel of the fates, he thought, to let me taste this place, to know it, and then to take it away.
They moved slowly past the grand buildings of the Ecole Militaire and drew up to a gate with a bored
A chain was removed, the detective maneuvered the car past concrete bollards and parked in a courtyard with shrubs and flowers around three sides. In the building above him, almost all the windows were dark. He got out of the car and asked if he could smoke a cigarette before going inside and they allowed him to do that, lighting up with him and smoking in silence.
When he could see the first edge of dawn, a fading darkness in the eastern sky, he put the cigarette out and took a last breath of free air before they led him across the gravel courtyard into the building.
In the fall of 1937, in Cell 28 of the 16 th Division, at the Sante prison, Prisoner 16–28 received two letters.
The first was signed by his “Aunt Iliane”-Ilya, clearly enough-who informed him that she was healthy, in general, though suffering the usual complaints of age. The farm was running well enough. Rain had split the tomatoes, but what could you do about the weather? They had been shorthanded throughout the grape harvest, since his cousin Alexandre had left. She had personally taken Alexandre to the station, Iliane reported, her health seemed fairly good-considering all she’d been through-and she was now traveling abroad. Of course, nothing had been mentioned to cousin Alexandre about his present circumstances-Aunt Iliane knew she would find that painful. As for him, she hoped he had seen the error of his ways, and she prayed daily that he would be spiritually reborn. Her arthritis made writing painful-he should not expect another letter anytime soon. She closed by imploring him to have courage. At first, she said, the family had been very angry with him. Now, when they saw what had become of him, while they did not exactly forgive him, they felt that justice had been served.
The second letter was from Faye Berns, in response to a letter he had sent her. She was heartsick that he was in prison-could anything be done? Could he receive money, or clothing, or books? He must write and tell her.
As for her, in some ways it was wonderful to be back in America. In others, not so wonderful. She felt dislocated, a little at sea. Her house looking out over Prospect Park seemed to have shrunk, her parents had gotten old. They had three Jewish refugees from Germany staying with them. A chemist from Berlin and his wife, who suffered from a nervous condition brought on by experiences with Nazi police officials. She paced the living room all night long, but what could anybody say to her? And an architect from Dresden who had been awarded the Iron Cross in the Great War. Even so, the Nazis had closed up his office. All the German Jews were in a very difficult situation-only the lucky and clever ones could leave the country now. A most curious thing had occurred when the three refugees docked at Ellis Island for immigration processing. A well-dressed man had appeared and offered to
