Dark Star

a child of the slum who soaks cats’ tails in paraffin and sets them alight.”

Dershani stopped dead, tapping four fingers on the kitchen table. A glance at Agayan’s wife, standing at the stove in the far part of the kitchen, brought her swiftly with a fresh little cup of coffee.

“Tell us, Efim Aleksandrovich, what will happen next? ” Ismailov thus declared himself suitably chastened, symbolically sought Dershani’s pardon for his momentary flippancy.

Dershani closed his eyes politely as he drank off his coffee, smacked his lips politely in appreciation. “Stasia Marievna, you are a jewel,” he said. She nodded silently to acknowledge the compliment.

“It evolves, it evolves,” Dershani said. “It is beautiful history, after all, and guided now by genius. But he must move at the proper speed, certain matters must be allowed to play themselves out. And, I tell you in confidence, there are many considerations that may elude our vision. These yidzh from Poland cannot just be swept away wholesale. Such cleaning, no matter how appropriate, would draw unwelcome attention, might alienate the Jews of America, for instance, who are great idealists and do our special work in their country. Thus Russians and Ukrainians, yes, and even Georgians and Armenians must leave the stage along with the others. This is necessity, historical necessity, a stratagem worthy of Lenin.”

“Then tell us, Efim Aleksandrovich,” said Agayan, not unconsciously echoing Ismailov’s phrasing, “if today we are not in fact privileged to hear the views of our comrade in Tbilisi? ” He referred to Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, presently first secretary of the Georgian Communist party and previously head of the Georgian NKVD. The modest bite in the question suggested that Dershani should perhaps not call his wife a jewel in front of his colleagues.

Dershani took only the smallest step backward. “Lavrenty Pavlovich might not disagree with the drift of what I am saying. We both believe, I can say, that we will win this battle-though there are actions which must be taken if we intend to do so. Most important, however, to perceive his, his, wishes and to act upon them with all possible measures.”

This opened a door. Agayan tapped his cup on the saucer and his wife brought him a fresh coffee. Dershani had cited all possible measures, and form now decreed that Agayan seek to discover what they were. Once described, they had to be undertaken.

Dershani glanced at his watch. Agayan leapt at the possibility. “Please, Efim Aleksandrovich, do not permit us to detain you if duty calls elsewhere.”

“No, no,” Dershani said dismissively, “I’m simply wondering what’s become of Grigory Petrovich-he was specifically to join us this morning.”

“You refer to Khelidze?” Ismailov asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ll call his apartment,” Agayan said, rising quickly, delighted with the interruption. “His wife will know where he’s gotten to.”

Dzakhalev snickered briefly. “Not likely,” he said.

Monday morning, striding through a fine, wet mist that made the streets of Prague even grayer than usual, Szara went early to the SovPressBuro, which handled all Soviet dispatches, and filed the story he’d written on Saturday night. It had taken him some twenty-eight tries to get a title that settled properly on the piece. His initial instinct led down a path marked “Prague, City in — .” He tried “Peril,” “Sorrow,” “Waiting,” “Despair,” and, at last, in fury that it wouldn’t work, “Czechoslovakia.”

At the end of patience the rather literal “Silence in Prague” took the prize, a title, on reflection, that turned out to be a message from the deep interior where all the work really went on. For those who read with both eyes, the melodramatic heading would imply a subtle alteration of preposition, so that the sharper and truer message would concern silence about Prague-not the anguished silence of a city under political siege but the cowardly silence of European statesmen, a silence filled with diplomatic bluster that nobody took seriously, a silence that could be broken only by the sputter of tank ignitions as armored columns moved to reposition themselves on the borders of Germany.

There was, in fact, another zone of silence on the subject of Prague, to the east of Czechoslovakia, where Stalin’s Franco-Russian alliance specified that the USSR would come to the aid of the Czechs if Hitler attacked them, but only after the French did. Thus the USSR had positioned itself to hide behind the promises of a regime in Paris that compromised on every issue and staggered from scandal to catastrophe and back again. Yes, Stalin’s Red Army was in bloody disarray from the purges of June ‘37, but it was sorrowful, Szara thought, that the Czechs would get the bill for that.

And there was, unknown to Szara, some further silence to come.

The dispatch clerk at the bureau near the Jiraskuv bridge, a stern, full-breasted matron with mounds of pinned-up gray hair, read “Silence in Prague” sitting in front of her typewriter. “Yes, comrade Szara,” she breathed, “you have told the truth here, this is just the way this city feels.” He accepted the compliment, and more than a little adoration in her eyes, with a deflective mumble. It wouldn’t do to let her know just how much such praise meant to him. He saw the story off, then wandered along the streets that ran next to the Vltava and watched the barges moving slowly up the steel-colored November river.

Szara returned to the press bureau on Tuesday morning, meaning to wire Moscow his intention to travel up to Paris. There was always a story to be found in Paris, and he badly needed to breathe the unhealthy, healing air of that city. What he got instead, as he came through the door, was a pitying stare from the maternal transmission clerk. “A message for the comrade,” she said, shaking her head in sympathy. She handed him a telegram, in from Moscow an hour earlier:

CANNOT ACCEPT SILENCE/PRAGUE IN PRESENT FORM STOP BY 25 NOVEMBER DEVELOP INFORMATION FOR PROFILE OF DR JULIUS BAUMANN, SALZBRUNNER 8, BERLIN, SUCCESSFUL INDUSTRIALIST STOP SUBMIT ALL MATERIAL DIRECTLY TO SOVPRESS SUPERVISOR BERLIN STOP SIGNED NEZHENKO.

He saw that the clerk was waiting for him to explode but he shut his emotions down at once. He was, he told himself, a big boy, and shifts of party line were nothing new. His success as a correspondent, and the considerable freedom he enjoyed, were based equally on ability and a sensitivity to what could and could not be written at any given moment. He was annoyed with himself for getting it wrong, but something was brewing in Moscow, and it was not the moment for indignation, it was the moment for understanding that political developments excluded stories on Prague. For the clerk’s benefit, he nodded in acceptance: Soviet journalism worker accepts criticism and forges ahead to build socialism. Yes, there was an overflowing wastebasket at his feet, and yes, he yearned to give it a mighty kick that would send it skittering into the wall, but no, he could not do it. “Then it’s to be Berlin,” he said calmly. He folded the telegram and slid it into the pocket of his jacket, said good-bye to the clerk, smiled brightly, and left, closing the door behind him so softly it made not a sound.

That night he was early for the Berlin express and decided to have a sandwich and coffee at the railway station buffet. He noticed a group of men gathered around a radio in one corner of the room and wandered over to see what was so interesting. It was, as he’d supposed, a political speech, but not in Czech, in German. Szara recognized the voice immediately-Adolf Hitler was born to speak on the radio. He was a brilliant orator to begin with, and somehow the dynamics of wireless transmission-static, the light hiss of silence-added power to his voice. Hitler teased his audience, tiptoeing up to a dramatic point, then hammering it home. The audience, tens of thousands by the sound of it, cheered itself hoarse, swept by political ecstasy, ready to die then and there for German honor.

Szara stood at the outer fringe of the group and listened without expression or reaction, pointedly ignoring an unpleasant glance of warning from one of the Czechs-Slovakians? Sudeten Germans? — gathered around the radio. The voice, working toward a conclusion, was level and sensible to begin with:

Then the final aim of our whole party is quite clear for all of us. Always I am concerned only that I do not take any step from which I will have to retreat, and not to take any step that will harm us.

I tell you that I always go to the outermost limits of risk, but never beyond. For this you need to have a nose [laughter; Szara could imagine the gesture], a nose to smell out, more or less, “What can I still do?” Also, in a struggle against an enemy, I do not summon an enemy backed by a fighting force, I do not say “Fight!” because I want to fight. Instead I say “I will destroy you” [a swell of voices here, but Hitler spoke through it]. And now, Wisdom, help me. Help me to maneuver you into a corner where you cannot fight back. And then you get the blow, right in the heart. That’s it!

The crowd roared in triumph and Szara felt his blood chill. As he turned to walk away there was a blur of