Night Soldiers

He paused a moment, cleared his throat. “Forgive me, there is a demon in me that demands to make speeches. Let me tell you, instead, what will happen here. Your brother died at the hands of swine, and nothing was done. Nothing will be done.”

Khristo’s heart sank. A thousand times he had wished that that night could be lived over again, that he could take Nikko by the scruff of the neck, as a wise older brother should have, and haul him away from the ridiculous parade. He had loved his brother well enough, his death was a piece torn away from his own life, but there was more than that. The sorrow of the family had lodged in his father, and he suspected, no, he knew, that his father blamed him for it.

“Do not feel shame,” Antipin said quietly, reading his mood. “It was not your fault, no matter what you think. You should not blame yourself. I do not grant absolution, I am not a priest. But it is history that I understand, and this thing had to happen. It was meant to happen. That it happened to you, to your brother, is sorrowful but you will someday see that it was inevitable. The important thing is this: what will you do now?”

“I don’t know.” His voice sounded small. They had reached the end of the beach and stood for a time, the Turkish fortress looming above them, the river running quietly along the sand, white foam visible in the darkness.

“I will presume,” Antipin said, “to jump history a pace and I will tell you what to do. Do not waste your time with grief. It is a great flaw in our character, our Slavic nature, to do that. We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain.”

“What then?”

“Come with me. East.” Antipin nodded his head downriver.

His eyes followed Antipin’s gesture into the darkness, toward the East. His stomach fluttered at the idea of such a journey, as though he had been invited to step off the edge of the world.

“Me?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why?” In wonder.

“Here, in this town, it will go on. You will not survive it. They murdered your brother; they must now presume you to be their mortal enemy, very troubling to keep an eye on. As the eldest brother, responsibility to even the score rests with you. With me or without me, Khristo Nicolaievich, you must go away. You may very well save your family’s life, you will certainly save your own.”

Khristo had not meant why go. He had meant why me. But Antipin had answered the wrong question the right way. It would happen like the old feuds-one of mine, one of yours, until only one stood. Since Nikko’s death he had hidden this from himself but it festered within him. Now it had been said aloud and a weight fell away.

“Come with me,” Antipin said, “and I will teach you something. I will teach you how to hurt them. Hurt them in ways that they do not begin to understand, hurt them so that they cry for mercy, which, by then, I think you will not grant. Your country has a sickness. We know the sickness well because we were once its victims, and we know how to cure it. We have taught others, we can teach you. You yearn to see the world, to move among men, to do things that matter. I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse’s backside. Come with me, my friend, it is a chance at life. This river goes many places, it does not stop in Vidin.”

Khristo’s heart rose like the sun. These were words he had waited all his life to hear without realizing, until now, that he waited. The river, he knew from hours of droning in the dusty schoolhouse, did not stop in Vidin. It rose in Germany, its legendary source a stone basin in the courtyard of a castle of the Furstenberg princes in the Black Forest. Called the Donau by all German-speaking peoples, it moved through the Bohemian forests to Vienna, crossed into Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where they named it the Dunaj, turned south through the Carpathians into northern Hungary, divided the twin cities of Buda and Pesth, flowed south into Yugoslavian Serbia, passed Belgrade at the confluence of the river Sava, known now as the Duna, roared through the Iron Gate-a narrow gorge in the Transylvanian Alps-and headed east, serving as a border between Romania and Bulgaria, where it was called Dunarea to the north and Dunav to the south. Then, at last, it turned north for a time and split into three streams entering the Romanian delta, snaking through the marshes to Izmail, Sulina, and Sfintu Gheorghe, where it emptied into the Black Sea, bordered by the Russian Crimea and Turkey, where the Caucasus mountains ran down to the sea, where Europe ended and Asia began.

“Well,” Antipin said, “how shall it be?”

“I …” He was not sure how to say it. “I do not think I am a communist.”

Antipin dismissed that wordlessly, throwing it away on the wind with a broad flip of the hand.

“Does it not matter?”

“You are a patriot. That matters. You are not our enemy. That too matters. Some day, we may convince you to be our true friend. All we ask is opportunity.”

They turned and walked back along the sand toward the town, where it was quiet and dark. So there will be cities, Khristo said silently, talking to his destiny. He had argued with it, prayed to it-to him it was a live presence, which might or might not heed petitions and curses, but one had to try-damned or praised it depending on what it did with him. Oh but what a trickster it was, this sly eel of a fate that wiggled his life about. He had yearned for Vienna or-someone had to find treasure, else why ever look-Paris. Now he rather thought it would be Moscow. Turn around then, and face east. Nothing new in this country. Still, a city. Golden onion domes, elegant buildings, people who read books and talked into the night of important things. Like Antipin, they would understand and appreciate him, encourage him. His imagination dined on caviar and inhaled the perfume of the one who sat across the table yet leaned so close.

“When?” he said.

“Tomorrow,” Antipin said. “They are done for tonight, except for the drinking and the singing. Tomorrow is soon enough.”

What few things he had, Khristo tossed onto a blanket in a small pile, then he tied the corners together in a thick knot. At dawn, it started to rain hard, little streamlets poured off the roof and dripped from the grapevine that grew above the kitchen window. They drank tea and ate what remained of yesterday’s bread. His mother embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, gave him a smile of love to travel on. His father looked at him for a long moment, from another world, then patted his shoulder-as though he would be back in a few hours-and plodded off toward the docks, walking head down in the rain. His sister, Helena, whose black hair and fierce blue eyes made her nearly his twin, reached across the table and touched his face. He went out into the yard and looked around for the last time. Helena ran out of the house and took him hard by the arms. “This is for the best,” she said, the rain running down her face, “but you must not forget we are here.” He could see she was afraid. “Promise,” she said. He promised. She went back into the house and he left.

At the squatty police station, a yellow building no higher than a Turk on horseback, the old fisherman showed up early and stood solemnly in a corner-one did not sit down and wait for the captain. He had lain awake all night, alternately cursing his luck and praying for deliverance. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. He had determined to make a clean breast of it, the authorities would have no question about where he stood. At last he was ushered into the captain’s office. A hangdog Khosov sat open- mouthed on a chair in the corner, like a bad boy at school. The remains of his pistol were gathered on the edge of the captain’s desk. There was, the old man announced, treason afoot, and he would have no more of it. There was a Russian loose in Vidin, spouting revolution and atheism in the cafes. He was prepared to tell them all he knew.

His understanding of the official methodology in such instances was woefully inadequate-“all he knew” wasn’t enough. They’d known of the Russian for a week-such heresies came quickly to the attention of the local gods-and had wired Sofia to find out what to do about him. Though the country was ruled by Czar Boris and his army officers and the future was clear to those with the stomach to see it, foreign policy was ephemeral, and it was hard to know where to put your foot. Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail. Thus, to date, the central administration in Sofia had been silent. As for the old fisherman with the yellowed mustache, him they took down to the basement, to see whether such things as were done there might not stimulate his memory. Their efforts proved fertile and a few hours of it had him, in whatever remained of his voice, making every sort of denunciation. All of it was copied down. Later it was widely believed