Dark Star

Gide’s place on the rue Vaneau, occasionally at Ehrenburg’s apartment on the rue Cotentin.

He was jealous of Ehrenburg, who occupied a position above him in the literary and social order of things, and when they did meet, Ehrenburg’s kindness and courtesy toward him only made it worse. Not the least of the problem was Ehrenburg’s writing itself-not so much the diction, but the sharp eye for a detail that told a story. Reporting from the civil war in Spain, Ehrenburg had described the different reactions of dogs and cats to bombing attacks: dogs sought safety by getting as close to their masters as they could, while cats went out the window and as far from humans as possible. Ehrenburg knew how to capture the reader’s emotions better than he did, and now that he’d effectively left the competition, such good Ehrenburg stuff as he saw in print depressed him. There were rumors that Ehrenburg did favors for the apparat, but if he did, Szara had no evidence of it; and suspected that Ehrenburg’s contacts were up in the Central Committee, well beyond his own reach.

One Thursday night in May, Szara dropped around to Ehrenburg’s apartment to discover Andre Gide, under full throttle in a lengthy discourse on some point of literary philosophy. To drive home his point, Gide picked up a dog biscuit from a plate on the kitchen table and used it to draw lines in the air. Ehrenburg’s dog, a terrier-spaniel mix called Bouzou, studied the progress of the biscuit for a time, then rose in the air and snapped it neatly out of Gide’s fingers. Unperturbed, Gide picked up another biscuit and continued the lecture. Bouzou, equally unperturbed, did it again. A girl sitting near Szara leaned over and whispered, “C’est drole, n’est-ce pas?”

Oh yes. Very funny.

Upstaged by Ehrenburg’s dog, he thought, and immediately hated himself for thinking such things. Ingrate! Listen to what Gide is saying, how mankind thrashes amid life’s futility; how his tragicomic destiny is, may be described as, has always been, will always be … some French word I don’t know. Ah, but everybody is smiling wisely and nodding, so it’s evidently a stunning insight.

Such evenings. Wine and oysters. Frosted cakes. Aromatic women who leaned close to say some almost intimate little thing and brushed one’s shoulder. The old Szara would have been lighthearted with ecstasy. Not all was roses, of course. The city was famous for its artful, petty humiliations-had not Balzac fashioned a career from such social warfare? — and Szara knew himself to be the sort of individual who took it to heart, who let it get into his bloodstream where it created malicious antibodies. Nonetheless, he told himself, he was lucky. Two thirds of the Russian writers were gone in the purges, yet here he was in Paris. That all the world should have no more problems than the envy of a fellow journalist and the obligation to do a bit of nightwork!

He looked at his watch. Stood, smiled genially, and turned to go. “The witching hour, and the mysterious Szara leaves us,” said a voice.

He turned and made a helpless gesture. “An early day tomorrow,” he said. “A scene observed at dawn.”

A chorus of good nights and at least one disbelieving snicker accompanied him out the door.

He strolled a few blocks toward the edge of the seventh arrondissement, idling, crossing and recrossing a boulevard, then flagged a cab from the line at the Duroc Metro and sped to the Gare Saint-Lazare. Here he rushed through the station-late for a train- then found another taxi at the rue de Rome exit and gave his destination as the Gare d’Austerlitz. “No hurry,” he said to the driver. “There’s something extra for you if we just wander a bit.” A novel instruction, but heeded, and as the cab meandered eastward Szara slumped lazily in the back seat, a posture that allowed him to watch the street behind him in the driver’s rearview mirror. He changed cabs again at the Austerlitz station, then paid off the new driver on the boulevard de la Gare and crossed the Seine, now at the eastern edge of Paris where the railroad tracks ran southeast between the Gare de Lyon and the wine commercants’ warehouses in the Bercy district. He had become, in the course of these clandestine exercises, what he thought of as the other Szara, a midnight self, a figure in a raincoat on a bridge above the Bercy marshaling yards, avoiding the yellow flare of a street lamp. And here, he thought, Monsieur Gide, Monsieur Ehrenburg, Master Bouzou, we have quite another sort of antidote to the futility of existence. A freight train chugged slowly under the bridge, the white steam from its locomotive spilling over the rampart as it passed beneath him. He liked the burned smell of the railroad yards, the distant crash of couplings, the bright steel maze of rails that merged and parted and merged again, the hiss of decompression from an idling locomotive. He glanced at his watch, one- twenty, strolled casually-a reflective man thinking things over-to the end of the bridge. Reached the street just as a boxy Renault puttered to a stop. The passenger door opened and he swung smoothly into the front seat, the car accelerating onto the empty boulevard as he closed the door. It was well timed, he thought, quite artistic in its own way.

“Et bon soir, mon cher,” said the driver cheerfully. He was the SILO group leader, Robert Seneschal, the very perfection of the young, French, communist lawyer. Like so many French men, he seemed theatrically suited to his role in life-the spiky hair, acerbic smile, pigskin gloves, and upturned raincoat collar would have quite pleased a film director. Szara was drawn to him. Seneschal’s charm, his throwaway courage, reminded him of his own style ten years earlier: committed, self-assured, amused by the melodrama of clandestine life yet scrupulously meeting its demands.

Szara reached into the glove compartment and withdrew a thick manila envelope. He unwound the string and riffled through a sheaf of paper, squinting in order to make out the writing in the glow of the boulevard street lamps. He held up a page with twelve words on it, enormous letters fashioned in a torturous scrawl. Slowly, he tried to decipher the German. “Can you make any sense of this? “

“A letter from the sister, it seems.”

“He steals a bit of everything.”

“Yes. Poor ALTO. He takes whatever feels important to him.”

“What is Kra … Krai …”

“Kraft, I think. Kraft durch Freude. ‘Strength through Joy,’ the Nazi recreation clubs for workers.”

“What’s it to do with anything?”

“I managed to work my way through all of it. The sister in Lubeck is taking a cruise to Lisbon on one of the chartered liners they have, it’s only costing a few reichsmarks, how she looks forward to it after the demands of her job. ALTO offers as well the telephone numbers of procurement specialists in the attache’s office.”

“That they’ll like. As for the letter …”

“I’m just the postman,” Seneschal said. He turned into the traffic ronde-point at the place Nation. Even though the May night was chilly, the terraces of the brasseries were crowded, people drinking and eating and talking, a white blur of faces and amber lights as the Renault swept past. Seneschal moved up on the bumper of a rattletrap market truck in front of him, preventing an aggressive Citroen from cutting in. “So much for you,” he said triumphantly.

ALTO was a sixteen-year-old boy known as Dolek, a Slovak nickname. His mother, whom Seneschal had secretly observed and termed “ravishing,” lived with a German major who worked in the office of the military attache. They’d begun their love affair when the major was stationed in Bratislava and stayed together when he was transferred to Paris. The child of a previous love affair, Dolek suffered from a disease of the nervous system: his speech was slurred and difficult to understand, and he hobbled along with one arm folded against his chest while his head rested on his collarbone.

His mother and her lover, intoxicated by the physical perfection of their own bodies, were sickened by his condition and ashamed of him, and kept him out of sight as much as they could. They treated him as though he were retarded and did not understand what they said about him. But he was not retarded, he understood everything, and eventually a desperate anger drove him to seek revenge. Left alone in the apartment, he copied out, as best he could and with immense effort, the papers the major brought home and left in a desk drawer. He made no distinctions-thus the letter from the sister-if the major treated the paper as private, Dolek copied it. Some months after the move to Paris he’d been locked in the apartment while his mother and the major spent a weekend at a country house. He’d gotten the door open and dragged himself to Communist party headquarters, where a young nurse, busy making banners for a workers’ march, had listened sympathetically to his story. Word of the situation had then reached Seneschal, who’d visited the boy while the mother and her lover were at work.

Szara sighed and stuffed the paper back in the envelope. The Renault turned up a dark side street and he could see into an apartment with open drapes, lit in such a way as to make the room seem suffused with golden light. “Are you still taking Huber to Normandy?” he asked.

“That’s the plan,” Seneschal said. “To make love, and eat apples in cream.”