Night Soldiers

Admitted: 20 December 1936

Labor Classification: Clerk

Present Function: Office of Task Assignment

Security Notation: Reliable

Charge: Articles 40, 42, 42 A, 45 and 70 of the Judicial Code

Release Date: 20 December 1966

There was no name on the file, no age, nothing of 503775’s life before admission to the camp system. Such information was classified and held elsewhere, no doubt in the files of the resident NKVD officer. But Ilya could tell by a glance down the page that this had, at one time, been somebody, somebody snaffled up in the purges of 1936, too important or favored to kill, thus consigned to the Utiny, a nonperson. The man was a trustee, with a good deal of power-clerk’s power, but power nonetheless-so had apparently contrived to ingratiate himself with the camp administration. When he entered the room, Ilya felt a slight prickle of recognition.

To look at, he was no different from the others-hesitant, nervous, with humility suggested in every motion. He dragged a foot as he walked-a soft scrape on the floorboards-his head was shaven against the lice, camp rations had shrunken his features, and his eyes were slitted from years of the Kolyma weather, sun glaring off the ice fields. His shoulders were stooped, his beard long and lank-a man perhaps in his late fifties, though one could never be sure about age in a camp.

Ilya nodded him to the chair; he sat down, then launched himself into a speech of such patriotic frenzy that it became clear to Ilya why the commandant had placed him last on the day’s schedule-a theatrical flourish to send the inspector general’s little man off happy to his next camp. The phrases flowed like oil. “Let it be remembered” and “hour of the nation’s need” and “strayed from the true course” and “dedicated more than ever to sacrifice.” All that year’s favorites-the man was something of a poet, working in the genre of political cliche.

My God, Ilya thought, I’m talking to Sascha Vonets.

He lurched forward, face lit by recognition. Opened his mouth to speak. Sascha’s hand shot across the table and Ilya felt a rough finger pressed briefly against his lips in a plea for silence. Ilya was caught with admiration. Sascha didn’t miss a beat-“inspired by the Great Leader”-as he pointed back and forth to the far wall and his right ear. Ilya nodded his complicity. The camp commandant was evidently making sure that nobody said the wrong thing. The interrogation room had been cleverly constructed within a maze of administrative offices, essentially three partitions built against an exterior wall. It was windowless, as all interrogation facilities were supposed to be; one wanted to avoid even the implicit suggestion that the prisoner had any way out of the difficulties in which he found himself. The camp commandant, Ilya realized, would likely have some flunky sitting next to one of the walls and taking verbatim notes in shorthand.

Sascha, having wound up his introductory remarks, now began the recitation of a poem entitled “Red Banners,” a reference to the NKVD medal of honor that could never be worn in public. This poem was, apparently, a personal contribution to the war effort. From the first stanza it became clear to Ilya that it was to be a kind of modern epic, an inspirational hymn of praise to the security services:

Arise!

O patriots of the shadows-

who do not see the flight of cranes,

whose red banners fly in darkness only-

we salute you!

It went on for quite some time, stern images of struggle and heroism marching forward in a grand parade. Then, as he ended the recitation, Sascha came around the table and thrust two slips of paper into the front of Ilya’s uniform jacket. When he moved away and sat down again, Ilya slowly exhaled the breath he’d been holding. Up close, the smell of mildew and stale sweat had nearly gagged him.

“Might one ask, comrade Captain, your opinion of my humble poem?”

“Laudable,” Ilya said. “I will certainly inform the appropriate agencies of the existence of this work, you may depend on it.”

“Thank you, comrade Major.”

“Thank you, 503775. You are dismissed.”

Sascha stood. For one instant his eyes were naked, and Ilya saw the truth of the eight years he had spent in the camps. Then the man drew back inside himself, his eyes dulled, and he became again a clerk in a Kolyma gold-mining facility.

Ilya found himself wanting desperately to reassure him, to offer at least a gesture of human fellowship, and so patted the place where the slips of paper rested over his heart. Sascha closed his eyes in a silent gesture of gratitude and bowed his head, then turned and left the room, his dragged leg scraping softly over the floorboards.

Before Ilya could be alone to read the letters, there was a great deal to be gotten through: a formal meeting with the camp NKVD officer, followed by a painfully formal exchange of “confidences” with the camp commandant’s principal assistant, during which Ilya made sure to communicate his great satisfaction with all he’d found. Followed in turn by an endless, vodka-sodden dinner given in his honor by the commandant and attended by senior staff and their wives. He was seated next to a fat, red-faced woman with merry eyes, stuffed into a gown from the 1920 s, who rested a hand on his thigh beneath the table and leaned against his shoulder. “You are eating breast of wolf,” she giggled in his ear, “is it not delectable?”

At long last, late at night, he was returned to the two-car train that sat chuffing idly on the rail spur that serviced Camp 782 and took its gold away. He entered his private compartment-in an old boxcar that rode high over its cast-iron wheels-and told his adjutant he did not wish to be disturbed, then turned up the flame on an oil lamp that lit the rough wooden interior of the car.

He felt the first shudder of motion a few minutes later when, as the couplings clanged, the train slowly began to make way. Outside, the endless snowfields shone white and empty in the darkness, and the slow, steam-driven rhythm of the engine sharpened the sense of being lost in vastness.

The first letter was scrawled-apparently written in great haste: Ilya Goldman: I observed you entering the camp this morning and realized that we have known one another. If I have not been able to approach you, I will identify myself as Colonel A. Y. Vonets-Sascha. We met briefly while serving in Spain in 1936.In March of 1943, a man named Semmers came to this camp, sentenced under Article 38(Anti-Soviet Statement). He told me of a conspiracy known as BF 825 that existed among the Brotherhood Front of 1934 in the training facility on Arbat Street. He claimed to have been approached by Drazen Kulic, and that others were involved, including Josef Voluta, Khristo Stoianev and yourself. Semmers attempted to escape in March of this year, was discovered, and shot.I will inform no one of your complicity in this conspiracy as long as you undertake two actions on my behalf: (1) The accompanying letter is for Josef Voluta, I believe that you are able to transmit it to him. (2) Within the next sixty days, I must be transferred to Camp 209, in Belgorod-Dnestrovskij at the mouth of the Dniester on the Black Sea. I know you have the ability to do this within the labor camp administration. If you choose not to do it, or to reveal these communications, I will inform local NKVD of the existence of BF 825, and your participation within it. Forgive me, Ilya. I will not live out another year in this place.

The second letter did not have a heading and was printed in tiny letters crammed together on a small slip of brown paper: On 12 April I will be in the Romanian village at Sfintu Gheorghe, on the southern arm of the Dunaarea, where it empties into the Black Sea. I have extraordinarily valuable information for Western intelligence services. The information is recorded in a document I will carry, but it is usable only with my personal assistance. For example, the agent known as ANDRES (Avram Roubenis) was murdered in Paris in 1937 with a slow-acting poison clandestinely administered in a cafe at the direction of Col. V I. Kolodny, of the Paris rezidentura. The above is one item among many hundred. I will remain in Sfintu Gheorghe from April 12 on-until I am discovered or betrayed. I will then confess to the BF 825 plot and all else I know. Signed: An NKVD Colonel. Ilya sat back and stared at his reflection in the dark window. He saw a taut, colorless face above the green NKVD uniform. By inference, he pieced together what he took to be Sascha’s intentions. The mouth of the Dniester was less than a hundred miles from the Romanian delta of the Dunaarea-the Danube. Since the surrender, converted ore steamers moved constantly back and forth between the two areas, sailing empty into Romania, returning with wheat, vegetables, horses, and God knew what else. Sascha intended to escape from the camp, then he meant to stow away on a Black Sea steamer that left from Odessa and called at Belgorod, where a chemical works was being built by Gulag labor. He would hide aboard the ship at Belgorod, then disembark secretly at Izmail,