Dark Star

beginner operative who’d been instructed to either burn his papers or tear them into bits and flush them down the toilet. An anxious sort, he’d become confused, crumpled up a large wad of paper and dropped it in the toilet, then put a match to it and watched, aghast, as the flames set the toilet seat on fire.

Back in the W/T office, the big alarm clock by Kranov’s work area said it was four-fifteen in the morning. Szara sat at the table and lit a cigarette; the darkened window hid any change of light, but he could hear a bird start up outside. He thought of the hundreds of operatives all across Europe who had finished with their nightwork, as he had, and now fell prey to the same pre-dawn malaise: useless white energy, a nagging sense of some nameless thing left undone, a mind that refused to disengage. Sleep was out of the question.

He squared up the pad of flimsy paper and began to doodle. The memory of Dolek’s handwriting, the enormous letters painfully carved into the paper with successive jerks of the pencil, would not leave his mind. Nor would the substance of the letter, especially the Strength through Joy cruise. His imagination wandered, picturing the sort of German worker who would sail off for Lisbon.

Dearest Schatzchen-Little Treasure-he wrote. I wish to invite you on a special outing arranged by my Kraft durch Freude club.

He went on a bit with it, mawkish, blustering, then signed it Hans. Changed that to Hansi. Then tried Your Sweet Hansi. No, too much. Just Hansi would do.

What would Marta do if she got such a letter? At first she’d think it was a practical joke, tasteless, upsetting. But what if he crafted it in such a way that he made it clear, to her, who was writing? Odile could drop it in a letter box in Hamburg, that would bypass the postal inspectors who processed all foreign mail. He could address it to her personally and sign with a meaningful alias. She could sail to Lisbon on such a cruise. He had to consider it carefully, a lot could go wrong.

But, in principle, why not?

The evening of 18 May was cool and cloudy, but the basement of the Rue Muret Synagogue was warm enough for the women in the audience to produce scented handkerchiefs from their shiny leather handbags. It was not, Szara discovered, an extremely Orthodox synagogue, nor was it quite as poor as it first seemed. Buried deep in the gloom of a twisting little street in the Marais, the building seemed to sag in every possible direction, its roofline jagged as though scribbled on paper. But the basement was packed with well-dressed men and women, probably parents of the children in the play, their relatives and friends. The women seemed more French than Jewish, and though Szara had taken the precaution of buying a yarmulke (let the Moscow Directorate reimburse him for that), there were one or two men in the audience with uncovered heads. Certain cars parked outside, half on the narrow pavement, indicated to Szara by their license plates that some members of the congregation were now doing well enough to live just outside Paris, but retained a loyalty to the old synagogue on the rue Muret, a street that retained a distinct flavor, and aroma, of its medieval origins.

Szara expected to recognize the occupant of Seat 47 or 45, but the place to his right was more than filled by a bulky matron in diamond rings while to his left, on the aisle, sat a dark, teenage girl in a print dress. He had arrived early, been handed a playbill, and waited patiently for contact. But nobody showed up. Eventually, two droopy curtains creaked apart to reveal ten-year-old Pierre Berger, in cardboard armor, as Bar Kochba, the Jewish rebel of Judea in A.D. 132, in the act of recruiting his friend Lazar for service against the legions of the Emperor Hadrian.

BAR KOCHBA (pointing at the roof): Look, Lazar! There, in the east. There it is!

LAZAR: What do you see, Simon Bar Kochba?

BAR KOCHBA: I see a star. Brighter than all others. A star out of Jacob.

LAZAR: As in the Torah? “A star out of Jacob, a scepter out of Israel”?

BAR KOCHBA: Yes, Lazar. Can you see it? It means we shall free ourselves from the tyrant, Hadrian.

LAZAR: Always you dream! How can we do this?

BAR KOCHBA: By our faith, by our wisdom, and by the strength of our right hand. And you, Lazar, shall be my first recruit, but you must pass a test of strength.

LAZAR: A test?

BAR KOCHBA: Yes. Do you see that cedar tree over there? You must tear it from the earth to prove you are strong enough to join our rebellion.

As Lazar strode across the stage to a paper cedar pinned to a clothes tree, a grandmother’s aside was stilled by a loud “Shhh!” Lazar, a stocky, red-cheeked-the makeup artist had been a little overenthusiastic with the rouge- child in a dark blue tunic, huffed and puffed as he struggled with the clothes tree. Finally, he lifted it high, shook it at Bar Kochba, and laid it carefully on its side.

The play, A Star out of Jacob, proceeded as Szara, from his own days at the cheders in Kishinev and Odessa, knew it had to. A curious holiday, Lag b’Omer, commemorating a host of events all across the span of Jewish tradition and celebrated in a variety of ways. It was sometimes the Scholars’ Festival, recalling the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students in an epidemic, or the celebration of the first day of the fall of Manna as described in the Book of Exodus. It was a day when the three-year-old children of Orthodox Jews got their first haircuts or a day of weddings. But in Szara’s memory of eastern Poland, it was particularly the day that Jewish children played with weapons. Toy bows and arrows long ago, then, during his own childhood, wooden guns. Szara perfectly remembered the Lag b’Omer rifle that he and his father had carved from the fallen branch of an elm tree. Szara and his friends had chased each other through the mud alleys of their neighborhoods, street fighting, peering around corners and going “Krah, krah” as they fired, a fairly accurate approximation by kids who had heard the real thing.

These children were different, he mused, more sophisticated, miniature Parisians with Parisian names: Pierre Berger, Moise Franckel, Yves Nachmann, and, standing out sharply from all the others, the stunning Nina Perlemere, as Hannah, inspiring the Bar Kochba rebels when they are reluctant to creep through the underground passages of Jerusalem to attack the legionnaires, sweeping her cardboard sword into the sky and slaying Szara entirely with her courage.

HANNAH: Let there be no despair. First we will pray, then we will do what we must.

This one, pretty as she was, was the warrior: her lines rang out and produced a scattering of spontaneous applause, causing a Roman centurion in the wings to peer around the curtain through blue-framed eyeglasses. There was a slight disturbance to Szara’s left as the dark girl in the print dress moved up the aisle and was replaced by General Yadomir Bloch. He reached over and took Szara’s left hand in his right for a moment, then whispered, “Sorry I’m late, we’ll talk after the play.” This produced a loud “Shh!” from the row behind them.

Through the dark streets of the Marais, Bloch led him to a Polish restaurant on the second floor of a building propped up by ancient wooden beams braced against the sidewalk. The tiny room was lit by candles, not for atmosphere but-Szara could smell the kerosene they were using for the stove-because there was no electricity in the building. Squinting at the menu written in chalk on the wall, they ordered a half bottle of Polish vodka, bowls of tschav-sorrel soup-a plate of radishes, bread, butter, and coffee.

“The little girl who played Hannah,” Bloch said, shaking his head in admiration. “There was one like that in Vilna when I was a boy, eleven years old and she drew every eye. You didn’t mind coming to the play? “

“Oh no. It brought back the past. Lag b’Omer, playing guns.”

“Perfect, yes, I intended it so. Soviet Man this, Soviet Man that, but we mustn’t forget who we are.”

“I don’t think I ever forget, comrade General.”

Bloch tore a strip of crust from the brown loaf, trailed it through his soup, leaned over his bowl to eat it. “No? Good,” he said. “Too many do. A little hint of pride in one’s heritage and somebody screams bourgeois nationalism! Take the Zionist away!” Having finished the bread, he wiped his mouth with a small cloth napkin, then began an expedition through his pockets, finally retrieving a folded page torn from a journal, which he opened carefully. “You know Birobidzhan?”

“Yes.” Szara smiled grimly. “The Jewish homeland in Siberia- or so they insisted. Lenin’s version of Palestine, to keep the Zionists in Russia. I believe some thousands of people actually went there, poor souls.”

“They did. A sad place, surely, but effective propaganda. Here, for instance, is a German Jew writing on the subject: ‘The Jews have gone into the Siberian forests. If you ask them about Palestine, they laugh. The Palestine dream will have long receded into history when in Birobidzhan there will be motorcars, railways and steamers, huge factories belching forth their smoke…. These settlers are founding a home in the taigas of Siberia not only for themselves but for millions of their people…. Next year in Jerusalem? What is Jerusalem to the Jewish proletarian?