Dark Star

empty street coated with gray ice, Szara laughed out loud. Bloch had said something about Szara’s attitude toward himself after pointing out, dexterously enough, that he had neither wife nor children. What else? Oh yes. “To be a writer requires work and sacrifice, to follow any road wherever it may lead.”

Yes. Well. Now one knew where it led. Just as one knew in 1917 when one was twenty and what did death matter. From the beginning, in the park in Ostend, Szara had sensed his fate. He’d dodged a time or two, yet here it was, back again. The Szara that Bloch found on the train was, like his revolutionary brethren, a dead man on furlough, a furlough now coming to its inevitable conclusion, as all furloughs must.

Suddenly, the walls of his irony collapsed and real anguish struck his heart. He stopped cold, his face twisted with pain and anger; a sob rose to the base of his throat and stuck there-he had to bite his lip to keep from howling the dreaded question directly at God and the streets of Moscow:

Why now?

Because now everything was different. Bloch had met a certain kind of man on the train to Prague but now he was not that man. He was instead that man who presses his face against the skin of a woman to inhale such fragrance as makes him want to cry out with joy. He was that man who spins between tenderness and raging lust like a helpless top, who wakes up on fire every morning, who spends his hours thinking of only one thing-yet how brilliantly he thinks of it!

He recovered. Regained himself, breathed deeply, resumed walking. The wall inside him must not be breached: it kept in, it kept out. He had to have it to survive.

He realized that the frost had stolen the feeling from his face and he turned toward home, walking quickly. Later he scalded his mouth with tea while sitting in his overcoat and fur hat at the table his wife, only a few months before she died, had insisted he put by the kitchen window. It had been a lovely table, an absurdly ornamental cherrywood thing with heavy, scrollworked legs. Using it in the kitchen they’d ruined it, of course. Now it was a place to watch the white dawn come up over the chimneys of Moscow, thin smoke standing motionless in the dead, frozen air.

Szara’s interrogation-a form of debriefing for those cooperating with the special services-was the province of his official “friend” in Moscow, Abramov. Nonetheless, an interrogation. And the fact that it was supervised by a friend made it, as the apparat intended, worse not better-a system that turned friends into hostages held against the subject’s honesty. If you lied, and your interrogator believed it, and then they caught you lying, you were both finished: de facto conspirators. Maybe you didn’t care to save your own miserable life, but perhaps you’d think twice about murdering a friend.

Szara lied.

Sergei Abramov lived in the higher reaches of the NKVD Foreign Department, a confidant of the godlings Shpigelglas and Sloutsky if not officially their equal. He would arrive at Szara’s apartment every day at about eleven with egg sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, a paper sack of tea, sometimes vodka, occasionally little almond cakes with a sticky coating of honey that had you licking your fingers while you answered questions. He was a thickset, bulky man, handsome in his bulk, in a much-worn blue pinstripe suit, the jacket buttoned across his belly over a rippling vest with a gold watch chain stretched from pocket to pocket. Abramov had sharp eyes that caught the light, a broken nose, a black homburg that he never removed, and a full black beard that gave him the air of a successful operatic baritone-an artist used to getting his own way and certain to create havoc if he didn’t. He would sit on a kitchen chair with his knees apart, place a cigarette between his lips, light it with a long, wooden match, then half close his eyes as he listened to you, apparently on the verge of sleep. Often he made a small noise, a grunt that might mean all sorts of things: sympathy- what a time you’ve had of it-or disbelief, perhaps an acknowledgment that what you said was true, perhaps the groan of a man too often deceived. It was in fact a stratagem, meant nothing, and Szara knew it.

Abramov spoke in a low, hoarse rumble, a voice rich with sorrow at having found all humankind to be the most absurd collection of liars and rogues. Posing a question, his face was filled with gloom. Like a teacher who knows his hopeless pupils will offer only wrong answers, Abramov was an interrogator whose subjects never told the truth. The method was ingenious. Szara understood and admired it but nevertheless felt the powerful undertow it created: he found himself wanting to please Abramov, to offer such resoundingly honest statements that the man’s sour view of the world would be swept away by idealism reborn.

Alert to Abramov’s dangerous gift, the ability to stimulate the essential human desire to please, Szara laid out his defenses with care. To begin with, resistance. Later, a strategic submission, giving up everything but that which mattered most: Marta Haecht and all the signposts that pointed to her existence. Thus Szara’s description of dinner at the Villa Baumann was laden with detail while the cast of characters was decreased by one. On visiting the wire mill he encountered the chief engineer, called Haecht, the man who might become the nominal owner of the company. A technician, Szara said, not anybody they could work with. Abramov grunted at that but did not pursue it.

Bloch and Renate Braun he assigned to the second, the confessional, stage, thus restricting the initial part of the interrogation to writing the dockworkers story in Antwerp, an uneventful journey to Prague, conditions in that city, and his rejected dispatch on the potential abandonment of Czechoslovakia. Baumann’s revelation on the manufacture of swage wire he reported in perfect detail and was rewarded by a series of appreciative grunts. This ground was then covered a second time-Abramov’s probing was artful, ingenious, a series of mirrors revealing every possible surface of the exchange. As for Khelidze, Szara described the conversations aboard the Nicaea, omitting their final confrontation in Ostend.

Until Monday of the second week, when Abramov began to show signs of restlessness. Interrogations always revealed something, something even better than a little orgy with a nightclub animateur. So? Where was it? Had he at last met a true saint? Szara caved in, warned elliptically that he now needed to say things that could not be said in a Moscow apartment. Abramov nodded sorrowfully, a physician coming at last upon the feared diagnosis, and touched his lips with his index finger. “You’ve done well today, Andre Aronovich,” he said for the benefit of the listeners. “Let us adjourn to the Metropol for a change of scenery.”

But, crunching through the fresh snow on Kusnetzki Most, they passed the Hotel Metropol and its popular cafe-where apparat operatives were in abundance-and entered instead a grimy hole-in- the-wall on a side street. Abramov ordered viesni, parfaits, which were served in chipped, grayish coffee cups but swam in fresh cream.

Szara told stage two: the corpse in the hotel, the receipt, the satchel, General Bloch, the dossier, and the American magazine editor. Abramov was a study in acute discomfort. Every word of Szara’s took him deeper into the affair and he knew it-his face knotted with pain, the encouraging grunts became groans of horror, he signaled for more viesni, swore in Yiddish, drummed his thick fingers on the tabletop. When Szara finally wound down he sighed. “Andre Aronovich, what have you done.”

Szara shrugged. How was he to have known that his orders did not come from Abramov or his associates? The second group based their play on that very assumption.

“I absolve you,” Abramov rumbled. “But I am the least of your problems. I doubt the Georgians will shoot you in Moscow, but it would be wise to watch what you eat here, and stay away from high windows. It’s a commonplace of ours; anyone can commit a murder, but suicide requires an artist. They have such artists. However, the fact that they’ve left you alone this long means they’re scheming. This too they do very expertly. After all, they are our Sicilians, these southerners, and their feuds end only one way. Apparently, they have their own plans for the Okhrana material, and have not informed the Great Leader or his official toads; thus you remain alive. Of course, if you were to publish such an article …”

“Then what shall be done?”

Abramov rumbled.

“Nothing?”

Abramov thought for a moment, spooned the last of his viesni from the coffee cup. “This khvost business is a little more complicated than meets the eye. Yes, things have happened, but. Instance: two years ago, at the trial of Lev Rosenfeld and Grigory Radomilsky- ‘Kamenev’ and ‘Zinoviev’-the prosecutor Vyshinsky, in his summation to the judges, said an odd thing, something that sticks in the mind. He called them ‘men without a fatherland.’ He would claim that he meant they’d betrayed, as Trotskyites, their country. But we’ve heard that kind of thing before, and we know what it means, just as it’s said very openly in Germany, not so quietly in Poland, and has been said in all sorts of places for a very long time.