about anywhere- for their war against Turkey. Thus, when the operatives of the Okhrana and the Bolshevik faction went at each other, after 1903, there were often Jews on both sides: men of both worlds and none-always alien, therefore never suspected of being so.
They tended to show up somewhere with a business in one pocket. Szara’s father grew up in Austro- Hungarian Ternopol, where he learned the trade of watchmaker, eventually becoming nearly blind from close work in bad light. As a young man, seeking a better economic climate in which to raise his family, he moved to the town of Kishinev, where he survived the pogrom of 1903, then fled to the city of Odessa, just in time for the pogrom of 1905, which he did not survive. By then, all he could see were gray shadows and was perhaps briefly surprised at just how hard shadows punched and kicked.
His death left Szara and his mother, and an older brother and sister, to get along as best they could. Szara was, in 1905, eight years old. He learned to sew, after a fashion, as did his brother and sister, and they survived. Sewing was a Jewish tradition. It took patience, discipline, and a kind of self-hypnosis, and it provided money sufficient to eat once a day and to heat a house for some of the winter. Later, Szara learned to steal, then, soon after, to sell stolen goods, first in Odessa’s Moldavanka market, then on the docks where foreign ships berthed. Odessa was famous for its Jewish thieves-and its visiting sailors. Szara learned to sell stolen goods to sailors, who told him stories, and he grew to like stories more than almost anything else. By 1917, when he was twenty years old and had attended three years of university in Cracow, he was a confirmed writer of stories, one of many who came from Odessa-it had something to do with seaports: strange languages, exotic travelers, night bells in the harbor, waves pounding into foam on the rocks, and always distance, horizon, the line where sky met water, and just beyond your vision people were doing things you couldn’t imagine.
By the time he left Cracow he’d been a socialist, a radical socialist, a communist, a Bolshevik, and a revolutionary in all things- whatever one might become to oppose the czar, for that mattered above all else.
After Kishinev, where, as a six-year-old, he’d heard the local citizens beating their whip handles on the cobblestones, preparing their victims for a pogrom, after Odessa, where he’d found his father half buried in a mud street, a pig’s tail stuffed in his mouth-
For the pogroms were the czar’s gift to his peasants. There was little else he could give them, so, when they were pressed too hard by misery, when they could no longer bear their fate in the muddy villages and towns at the tattered edges of the empire, they were encouraged to seek out the Christ-killers and kill a few in return. Pogroms were announced by posters, the police paid the printing bills, and the money came from the Interior Ministry, which acted at the czar’s direction. A pogrom released tension and, in general, evened things up: a redistribution of wealth, a primitive exercise in population control.
Thus the Pale of Settlement produced a great number of Szaras. Intellectuals, they knew the capitals of Europe and spoke their languages, wrote fiercely and well, and had a great taste and talent for clandestine life. To survive as Jews in a hostile world they’d learned duplicity and disguise: not to show anger, for it made the Jew- baiters angry, even less to show joy, for it made the Jew-baiters even angrier. They concealed success, so they would not be seen to succeed, and learned soon enough how not to be seen at all: how to walk down a street, the wrong street, in the wrong part of town, in broad daylight-invisible. The czar was in much more trouble than he ever understood. And when his time came, the man in charge was one Yakov Yurovsky, a Jew from Tomsk, at the head of a Cheka squad. Yurovsky who, while an emigre in Berlin, had declared himself a Lutheran, though the czar was in no position to appreciate such ironies.
Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped to create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets-workers’ councils- ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szara and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years- until 1929, when Stalin finally took over-he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.
It could not last. Who
The steady rain beat down on Berlin; somewhere in the house the landlady’s radio played German opera, the curtains hung limp by the window and smelled of the dead air in a disused attic room. Szara put on his belted raincoat and walked through the wet streets until he found a telephone box. He called Dr. Julius Baumann and managed to get himself invited to dinner. Baumann sounded suspicious and distant, but Nezhenko’s telegram had been specific: the information was wanted by 25 November. There was no Soviet press bureau in Berlin, he’d have to file through the press office at the embassy, and 25 November was the next day. So he’d given Baumann a bit of a push-sometimes finesse was a luxury.
He walked slowly back to the tall house and spent the afternoon with the Okhrana, DUBOK, the Caspian Oil Company, and thirty-year-old
The Villa Baumann stood behind a high wall at the edge of the western suburbs, in a neighborhood where gardeners pruned the shrubbery to sheer walls and flat tabletops and architects dazzled their clients with turrets and gables and gingerbread that made mansions seem colossal dollhouses. A yank at the rope of a ship’s bell by the gate produced a servant, a stubby man with immense red hands and sloping shoulders who wore an emerald green velvet smoking jacket. Mumbling in a dialect Szara could barely understand, he led the way down a path that skirted the Villa Baumann and ended at a servant’s cottage at the rear of the property, then tramped off, leaving Szara to knock at the door.
“I take it Manfred showed you the way,” Baumann said dryly. “Of course this used to be his”-the cottage was small and plain, quite pleasant for a servant-“but the new regime has effected a more, ah, even-handed approach to domicile, who shall live where.”
Baumann was tall and spare, with thin, colorless lips and the face, ascetic, humorless, of a medieval prince or monastic scholar. His skin was white, as though wind or sun had never touched it. Perhaps fifty, he was hairless from forehead to crown, which drew attention to his eyes, cold and green, the eyes of a man who saw what others did not, yet did not choose to say what he saw. Whatever it was, however, faintly displeased him, that much he showed. To Szara, German Jew meant mostly German, a position of significant hauteur in the Central European scheme of things, a culture wherein precise courtesies, intellectual sophistication, and quiet wealth all blended to create a great distance from Russian Jews and, it was never exactly expressed, most Christians.
Yet Szara liked him. Even as the object of that jellyfish stare down a long, fine, princely nose-
They were four for dinner: Herr Doktor and Frau Baumann, a young woman introduced as Fraulein Haecht, and Szara. They ate in the kitchen-there was no dining room-at a rickety table covered by a dazzling white damask cloth embroidered with blue and silver thread. The porcelain service showed Indian princes and thick-lipped, gold- earringed princesses boating on a mountain lake, colored tomato red and glossy black with gold filigree on the rims. At one point, the tines of Szara’s fork scraped across the scene and Frau Baumann closed her eyes to shut out the sound. She was a busy little pudding of a woman. A princess with a dowry? Szara thought so.
They ate poached salmon fillets and a rice and mushroom mixture in a jellied ring. “My old shop still serves me,” Frau Baumann explained, the unspoken
“A small premium is entailed,” Baumann added. He had a deep, hollow voice that would have been appropriate for the delivery of sermons.
“Naturally,” Frau Baumann admitted, “but our cook …”
“A rare patriot,” said Baumann. “And a memorable exit. One would never have supposed that Hertha was capable of giving a speech.”
“We were so good to her,” said Frau Baumann.
