Dark Star

onto the ship-obviously he had been drugged senseless. He was not the only passenger going home to die. They were a strange brotherhood, silent, self-contained, having abandoned themselves to a fate they deemed inevitable; the man who’d been dragged on board proved the futility of flight. They rarely slept, greedy for their remaining hours of introspection, pacing about the deck when they could stand the cold, their lips moving as they rehearsed imagined conversations with their interrogators.

Mostly they avoided one another. A conversation with a tainted diplomat or scientist would be reported by the attentive security men and, how was one to know, might be made evidence in the cases against them, telling evidence, uncovered only in the last hours of the journey home-we thought you were clean until we saw you talking to Petrov-and dangerously sweet to the NKVD appetite for the fatal irony.

Szara spoke to one of them, Kuscinas, in younger days an officer in the Lettish rifle brigades that supported Lenin when he overthrew the Kerensky government, now an old man with a shaved head and a face like a skull. Yet there was still great strength in Kuscinas; his eyes glittered from deep in their sockets, and his voice was strong enough to hear above the gale. As the Kolstroi rose and crashed into the heavy seas off the Gulf of Riga, on the second day of the voyage, Szara found shelter under a stairway where they could smoke cigarettes and shield themselves from the bitter wind. Kuscinas never said exactly what he did, simply waved his hand when Szara asked, meaning that such things didn’t matter. As for what was about to happen to him, he seemed to be beyond caring. “For my wife I’m sorry, but that’s all. Foolish woman, and stubborn. Unfortunately she loves me and this will break her heart, but there’s nothing to be done about it. My sons they’ve turned into snakes, all the better for them now, I think, and my daughter married some idiot who pretends to run a factory in Kursk. They’ll find a way to disown me, if they haven’t started already. I’m sure they will sign anything put before them. My wife, though …”

“She’ll have to go to friends,” Szara said.

The old man grimaced. “Friends,” he said.

The Kolstro’s steel plates creaked as the ship pitched particularly high, then slammed down into the trough, sending aloft a huge explosion of white spray. “And fuck you too,” Kuscinas said to the Baltic.

Szara steadied himself against the iron wall and closed his eyes for a moment.

“You’re not going to give it up, are you? “

He flicked his cigarette away. “No,” he said, “I’m a sailor.”

“Will they arrest you?”

“Perhaps. I don’t think so.”

“You have the right friends, then.”

Szara nodded that he did.

“Lucky. Or maybe not,” Kuscinas said. “By the time you get to Moscow they may be the wrong friends. These days you can’t predict.” For a time he was silent, eyes inward, seeing some part of his life. “You’re like me, I suppose. One of the faithful ones, do what has to be done, don’t ask to see the sense of it. Discipline above all.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “And in the end, when it’s our turn, and somebody else is doing what has to be done, somebody else who doesn’t ask to see the sense of it, the discipline of the executioner, then all we can say is za cbtoi-why? What for? ” Kuscinas laughed. “A sorry little question,” he said. “For myself, I don’t mean to ask it.”

That night, Szara couldn’t sleep. He lay in his bunk and smoked, the man across from him mumbling restlessly in his dreams. Szara knew the history of that question, Za cbtoi Rumor attributed its initial use to the Old Bolshevik Yacov Lifschutz, a deputy people’s commissar. His final word. Szara remembered him as a little man with wild eyebrows, the obligatory goatee, and a twinkling glance. Shuffling down the tile corridor in the basement of the Lubyanka-you got it on the way, nobody ever reached the end of that corridor-he stopped for a moment and turned to his executioner, an officer he happened to have known in childhood, and said, “Za chto?”

Along with the purge, the phrase spread everywhere; it was scrawled on the walls of cells, carved in the wooden benches of the Stolypin wagons that hauled prisoners away, scratched into planks in transit camps. Almost always the first words spoken to the police who came in the night, then again the first words of a man or a woman entering a crowded cell. “But why? Why?”

We are all alike, Szara thought. We don’t offer excuses or alibis, we don’t fight with the police, we don’t look for compassion, we don’t even plead. We are the people who called ourselves “dead men on furlough;” we always expected to die-in the revolution, the civil war. All we ask, rational men that we are, is to see the sense of the thing, its meaning. Then we’ll go. Just an explanation. Too much to ask?

Yes.

The savagery of the purge, Szara knew, gave them every reason to believe there was, must be, a reason. When a certain NKVD officer was taken away, his wife wept. So she was accused of resisting arrest. Such events, common, daily, implied a scheme, an underlying plan. They wanted only to be let in on it-certainly their own deaths bought them the right to an answer-and then they’d simply let the rest of it happen. What was one more trickle of blood on a stone floor to those who’d seen it flow in streams across the dusty streets of a nation? The only insult was ignorance, a thing they’d never tolerated, a thing they couldn’t bear now.

In time, the cult of Za chto began to evolve a theory. Particularly with the events of June 1937, when the only remaining alternative to the rule of the dictator was ripped to shreds. That June came the turn of the Red Army and, when the smoke cleared, it was seen to be headless, though still walking around. Marshal Tukachevsky, acknowledged as Russia’s greatest soldier, was joined in his disappearance by two of four remaining marshals, fourteen of sixteen military commanders, eight of eight admirals, sixty of sixty-seven corps commanders, on and on and on. All eleven vice-commissars of defense, seventy-five of the eighty members of the Supreme Military Soviet. All of this, they reasoned; the shootings, the icebound mining camps, an army virtually destroyed by its own country- could have only one intention: Stalin simply sought to remove any potential opposition to his own rule. That was the way of tyrants: first eliminate enemies, then friends. This was an exercise in consolidation. On a rather grand scale, ultimately counted in millions- but what was Russia if not a grand scale?

What was Russia, if not a place where one could say, down through the centuries, times and men are evil, and so we bleed. This, for some, concluded the matter. The Old Bolsheviks, the Chekists, the officer corps of the Red Army-these people were the revolution but now had to be sacrificed so that the Great Leader could stand unthreatened and supreme. Russia’s back was broken, her spirit drained, but at least for most the question had been answered and they could get on with the trivial business of execution with acceptance and understanding. A final gesture on behalf of the party.

But they were wrong, it wasn’t quite that simple.

There were some who understood that, not many, only a few, and soon enough they died and, in time, so did their executioners, and, later, theirs.

The following day, Szara did not see Kuscinas. Then, when the Kolstroi steamed up the Gulf of Finland, the first ice of the season pinging against the hull, the lights of the fortress at Kronstadt twinkling in the darkness, the security men and sailors began a frantic search, combing the ship, but Kuscinas had gone, and they could not find him.

8,Rue Delesseux

“Andre Aronovich! Over here!”

An urgent female voice, cutting through the uproar of a densely packed crowd in the living room of an apartment in the Mochovaya district. Szara peered through the smoke and saw a hand waving at him. “Pardon,” he said. “So sorry. Excuse me.” He chose an indirect route toward the hand and voice, swinging wide to avoid the dangerous elbows of those who had managed to break through to the buffet. Moscow was ravaged by shortages of nearly everything, but here there was black Servuga, grilled lamb, pirozhki, salted peas, stacks of warm blini, and