Dark Star

motion to his right, the side of his head exploded, then he found himself sprawled on the filthy tiles of the restaurant floor. Looking up, he saw a man with a twisted mouth, his upper body coiled like a spring, his right fist drawn back over his left shoulder in order to hit a second time. The man spoke German. “Jew shit,” he said.

Szara started to get up, but the man took a step toward him so he stayed where he was, on hands and knees. He looked around the restaurant; people were eating soup, blowing on their spoons before sipping it up. On the radio, a commentator’s voice sounded measured and serious. The other men around the radio did not look at him, only the man with his fist drawn back-young, ordinary, broad, in a cheap suit and a loud tie. Szara’s position seemed to mollify the man, who pulled a chair toward him and sat back down with his friends. He placed a metal salt shaker next to the pepper.

Slowly, Szara climbed to his feet. His ear was on fire, it throbbed and buzzed and he could hear nothing on that side. His vision was a little fuzzy and he blinked to clear it. As he walked away he realized that there were tears in his eyes-physical, physical, he told himself-but he was in many kinds of pain and he couldn’t sort it out at all.

The Prague-Berlin night express left the central station at 9:03 P.M., due in at Berlin’s Bahnhof am Zoo station at 11:51, stopping only at the Aussig border control post on the east bank of the Elba. Szara now traveled with two bags, his own and the leather satchel. The train was cold and crowded and smoky. Szara shared a compartment with two middle-age women he took to be sisters and two teenage boys whose windburned faces and khaki shorts suggested they’d been on a weekend mountain-climbing holiday in Czechoslovakia and had stayed on until Tuesday before returning to school in Germany.

Szara had some anxiety about the German customs inspection, but the officer’s revolver now lay at the bottom of the Vltava and he doubted that a file written in Russian-something it would be normal for him to have- would cause any difficulty. Border inspections concentrated on guns, explosives, large amounts of currency, and seditious literature-the revolutionary toolkit. Beyond that, the inspectors were not very interested. He was taking, perhaps, a small chance, that a Gestapo officer would be in attendance (not unlikely) and that he would know enough Russian to recognize what he was looking at (very unlikely). In fact, Szara realized he didn’t have much of a choice: the file was “his,” but not his to dispose of. Sooner or later, they would want to know what had become of it.

As the train wound through the pine forests of northern Czechoslovakia, Szara’s hand rose continually to his ear, slightly red and swollen and warm to the touch. He’d been hit, apparently, with the end of a metal salt shaker enclosed in a fist. As for other damage- heart, spirit, dignity; it had a lot of names-he finally managed to stand off from it and bring himself under control. No, he told himself again and again, you shouldn’t have fought back. The men listening to the radio would’ve done far worse.

The border control at Aussig was uneventful. The train slowly gained speed, ran briefly beside the Elba, shallow and still in the late autumn, and soon after passed the brown brick porcelain factories of Dresden, red shadows from the heating kilns flickering on the train windows. The track descended gradually from the high plain of Czechoslovakia to sea-level Germany, to flat fields and small, orderly towns, a stationmaster with a lantern standing on the platform at every village.

The train slowed to a crawl-Szara glanced at his watch, it was a few minutes after ten-then stopped with a loud hiss of decompression. The passengers in his compartment stirred about irritably, said “Wuss?” and peered out the windows, but there was nothing to see, only farm fields edged by woodland. Presently, a conductor appeared at the door to the compartment. An old gentleman with a hat a size too large for him, he licked his lips nervously and said, “Herr Szara?” His eye roamed among the passengers, but there was really only one possible candidate.

“Well?” Szara said. Now what?

“Would you be so kind as to accompany me, it’s just …”

Entirely without menace. Szara considered outrage, then sensed the weight of Teutonic railroad bureaucracy standing behind this request, sighed with irritation, and stood up.

“Please, your baggage,” the conductor said.

Szara snatched the handles and followed the man down the corridor to the end of the car. A chief conductor awaited him there. “I am sorry, Herr Szara, but you must leave the train here.”

Szara stiffened. “I will not,” he said.

“Please,” said the man nervously.

Szara stared at him for a moment, utterly confounded. There was nothing outside the open door but dark fields. “I demand an explanation,” he said.

The man peered over Szara’s shoulder and Szara turned his head. Two men in suits stood at the end of the corridor. Szara said, “Am I to walk to Berlin? ” He laughed, inviting them to consider the absurdity of the situation, but it sounded false and shrill. The supervisor placed a tentative hand above his elbow; Szara jerked away from him. “Take your hands off me,” he said.

The conductor was now very formal. “You must leave.”

He realized he was going to be thrown off if he didn’t move, so he took his baggage and descended the iron stairway to the cinderbed on which the rails lay. The conductor leaned out, was handed a red lantern from within, and swung it twice toward the engine. Szara stepped away from the train as it jerked into motion. He watched it gather momentum as it rolled past him-a series of white faces framed by windows-then saw it off into the distance, two red lamps at the back of the caboose fading slowly, then blackness.

The change was sudden, and complete. Civilization had simply vanished. He felt a light wind against his face, the faint rime of frost on a furrowed field sparkled in the light of the quarter moon, and the silence was punctuated by the sound of a night bird, a high-low call that seemed very far away. He stood quietly for a time, watched the slice of moon that dimmed and sharpened as haze banks drifted across it in a starless sky. Then, from the woodland at the near horizon, a pair of headlights moved very slowly toward a point some fifty yards up the track. He could see strands of ground mist rising into the illumination of the beams.

Ah. With a sigh Szara hefted the two bags and trudged toward the lights, discovering, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, a narrow country lane that crossed the railroad tracks. General Bloch, he thought. Doing tricks with the German rail system.

The car reached the crossing before he did and rolled gently to a stop. Somehow, he’d missed a signal-this meeting had the distinct feel of an improvised fallback. He was, on balance, relieved. The heart of the apparat had skipped a beat but now returned to form and required the parcel from Prague. Well, thank God he had it. As he approached the car, its outline took shape in the ambient glow of the headlamps. It was not the same Grosser Mercedes that had carried General Bloch away from the station at Ulm, but the monarchs of the apparat changed cars about as casually as they changed mistresses and tonight had selected something small and anonymous for the treff, clandestine meeting, in a German beet field.

The middle-age sisters in the train compartment that Szara had recently occupied were amused, rather sentimentally amused, at the argument that now began between the two students returning from their mountain- climbing exertions in the Tatra. Sentiment was inspired by the recollection of their own sons; wholesome, Nordic youths quite like these who had, from time to time, gone absolutely mulish over some foolery or other, as boys will, and come nearly to blows over it. The sisters could barely keep from smiling. The dispute began genially enough-a discussion of the quality of Czech matches made for woodcutters and others who needed to make outdoor fires. One of the lads was quite delighted with the brand they’d purchased, the other had reservations. Yes, he’d agree that they struck consistently, even when wet, but they burned for only a few seconds and then went out: with damp kindling, clearly a liability. The other boy was robust in defense. Was his friend blind and senseless? The matches burned for a long time. No, they didn’t. Yes, they did. Just like miniature versions of their papas, weren’t they, disputing some point in politics or machinery or dogs.

As the train approached the tiny station at Feldhausen, where the track crosses a bridge and then swings away from the river Elster, a bet of a few groschen was struck and an experiment undertaken. The defender of the matches lit one and held it high while the other boy counted out the seconds. The sisters pretended not to notice, but they’d been drawn inexorably into the argument and silently counted right along.

The first boy was an easy winner and the groschen were duly handed over-offered cheerfully and accepted humbly, the sisters noted with approval. The match had burned for more than thirty-eight seconds, from a point just