Dark Star

light sweeping across Szara and the fat man, whose mouth opened in surprise. From somewhere near the car an urgent voice called out, “Ismailov?”

The fat man was astonished, for a moment speechless. Then he said, “What is it? Who are you?”

The muzzle flare was like orange lightning-it turned the fat man into a photographic negative, arms spread like the wings of a bird as a wind swept him into the air while down below a shoe flew away. He landed like a sack and hummed as though he’d hit his thumb with a hammer. Szara threw himself onto the ground. From the car, the young driver cried out for his father amid the flat reports of a pistol fired in the open air.

“Are you hurt? “

Szara looked up. The little gnome called Heshel stood over him, eyes glittering in the moonlight above his hooked nose and knowing smile. His cap was pulled down ridiculously over his ears and a great shawl was wound around his neck and stuffed into his buttoned jacket. Three shotgun shells were thrust between the fingers of his right hand. He broke the barrel and loaded both sides. A voice from near the car said, “Who’s humming?”

“Ismailov.”

“Heshie, please.”

Heshel snapped the shotgun back together and walked toward the fat man. He fired both barrels simultaneously and the humming stopped. He returned to Szara, reached down, thrust a small hand into Szara’s armpit, and tugged. “Come on,” he said, “you got to get up.”

Szara managed to scramble to his feet. At the car, the second man was hauling the driver out by his ankles. He flopped onto the ground. “Look,” said the man who had pulled him out. “It’s the son.”

“Ismailov’s son?” Heshel asked.

“I think so.”

Heshel walked over and stared down. “From this you can tell?”

The other man didn’t answer.

“Maybe you better start the machine.”

While Heshel retrieved the key and unlocked the handcuffs, the other man took a crank that clamped behind the rider’s seat and locked it onto a nut on the side of the engine. He turned it hard a few times and the motorcycle coughed, then sputtered to life. Heshel made a hurry-up motion with his hand, the man climbed on the motorcycle and rode away. As the noise faded, they could hear dogs barking.

Heshel stood silently for a moment and stared at the front seat of the car. “Look in the trunk,” he told Szara. “Maybe there’s a rag.”

In Berlin, it was raining and it was going to rain-a slow, sad, persistent business shining black on the bare trees and polishing the soot-colored roof tiles. Szara stared out a high window, watching umbrellas moving down the street like phantoms. It seemed to him the city’s very own, private weather, for Berliners lived deep inside themselves-it could be felt-where they nourished old insults and humiliated ambitions of every sort, all of it locked up within a courtesy like forged metal and an acid wit that never seemed meant to hurt-it just, apparently by accident, left a little bruise.

Late Tuesday night, Heshel had driven Szara to the terminus of a suburban feeder line where he’d caught a morning train into Berlin. Once aboard, he’d trudged to the WC and, numb with resignation, forced himself to look in the mirror. But his hair was as it had always been and he’d barked a humorless laugh at his own image. Still vanity, always, forever, despite anything. What he’d feared was something he had seen, and more than once, during the civil war and the campaign against Poland: men of all ages, even in their teens, sentenced to die at night, then, the next morning, marched to the wall of a school or post office with hair turned, in the course of one night, a grayish white.

He took a taxi to an address Heshel had given him, a tall, narrow private house on the Nollendorfplatz in the western part of Berlin, not far from the Hollandische Taverne, where he’d been told he could take his meals. A silent woman in black silks had answered his knock, shown him to a cot in a gabled attic, and left him alone. He supposed it to be a safe house used by the Renate Braun faction, but the ride in Ismailov’s car and a few, apparently final moments in a stubbled wheat field had dislocated him from a normal sense of the world and he was no longer sure precisely what he knew.

Heshel, driving fast and peering through the steering wheel- there were bullet holes in the driver’s side of the window and the glass had fractured into frosted lace around each of them-had signaled with his headlights to two cars and another motorcycle racing down the narrow road. So Szara gained at least a notion of the sheer breadth of the operation. Yet Heshel seemed not to know, or care, why Szara was headed into Berlin, and when Szara offered him the satchel he simply laughed. “Me?” he’d said, heeling the car through a double-S curve in the road, “I don’t take nothing. What’s yours is yours.”

What did they want?

To use the material in the satchel that rested between his feet. To discredit the Georgians-Ismailov and Khelidze had only that connection, as far as he knew. And they were? Not his friends in the Foreign Department. Who then? He did not know. He only knew they’d stuck him with the hot potato.

The kids in the Jewish towns of Poland and Russia played the game with a stone. If the count reached fifty and you had it, well, too bad. You might have to eat a morsel of dirt, or horse pie. The forfeit varied but the principle never did. And there was always some tough little bastard like Heshel around to play enforcer.

Heshel was a type he’d always known, what they called in Yiddish a Luftmensch. These Luftmenschen, it meant men of the air or men without substance, could be seen every morning but the Sabbath, standing around in front of the local synagogue, hands in pockets, waiting for a day’s work, an errand, whatever might come their way. They were men who seemed to have no family or village, a restless population of day laborers that moved through eastern Poland, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, all over the Jewish districts, available to whoever had a few kopecks to pay them. The word had a second, ironic, meaning that, like many Yiddish expressions, embellished its literal translation. Luftmenschen were also eternal students, lost souls, young people who spent their lives arguing politics in cafes and drifting through the student communities of Europe- gifted, bright, but never truly finding themselves.

Yet Szara knew that he and Heshel were perhaps more similar than he wanted to admit. They were both citizens of a mythical country, a place not here and not there, where national borders expanded and contracted but changed nothing. A world where everyone was a Luftmensch of one kind or another. The Pale of Settlement, fifteen provinces in southwest Russia (until 1918, when Poland sprang back into national existence) ran from Kovno in the north, almost on the shores of the Baltic, to Odessa and Simferopol in the south, on the Black Sea; from Poltava in the east-historic Russia-to Czestchowa and Warsaw in the west-historic Poland. One had also to include Cracow, Lvov, Ternopol, and such places, part of the Austro- Hungarian empire until 1918. Add to this the towns of other off-and-on countries-Vilna in Lithuania and Jelgava in Latvia-throw in the fact that people thought of themselves as having regional affiliations, believing they lived in Bessarabia, Galicia (named for the Galicia in Spain from which the Jews were expelled in 1492), Kurland, or Volhynia, and what did you have?

You had a political landscape best understood by intelligence services and revolutionary cadres-fertile recruiting either way it went and often enough both and why not?

What can be so bad about a cover name or a nom de revolution if your own name never particularly meant anything? The Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century gave the Jews the right to call themselves whatever they liked. Most chose German names, thinking to endear themselves to their German-speaking neighbors. These names were often transliterated back into, for example, Polish. Thus some version of the German for sharer (and why that? nobody knew) became Szara, the Polish sz standing in for the German s, which was sounded sch. Eventually, with time and politics and migration, it changed again, this time to the Russian. And, when Szara was born, his mother wanted to emphasize some quietly cherished claim to a distant relation in France, so named him not the Polish Andrej or the Russian Andrei, but Andre.

A man invented. A man of the air. Just how would such a man’s allegiance be determined? In a land of, at best, shifting political loyalties often well leavened with fumes of Hasidic mysticism, a land where the name Poland was believed by many to be a version of the Hebrew expression polen, which meant Here ye shall remain! and was thus taken to be good news direct from heaven.

The czar’s Okhrana was recruiting in the Pale as early as 1878, seeking infiltrators-Jews did wander, turning up as peddlers, merchants, auction buyers, and what have you, just