Dark Star

Next year in Birobidzhan!’ “

Szara raised his glass in a mock Seder toast and drank off the vodka. Bloch folded his paper back up and put it in his pocket. “It would be funnier if people didn’t believe it,” Bloch said.

Szara shrugged. “Bundists, communists, socialists left and right, three kinds of Zionists, and mostly, when all is said and done, people in the shtetls of the Pale who say do nothing, wait for the Messiah. We may not own anything to speak of, but we are wealthy when it comes to opinions.”

“So, you must have one too.”

Szara thought for a moment. “For centuries we have run around Europe like scared mice, maybe it’s time to at least consider a hole in the wall, especially lately, as the cat population seems to be on the rise.”

Bloch seemed satisfied. “I see. Now, to a tender subject. You have, one is told, a splendid opportunity to write something for an American magazine, but nothing appears. Perhaps others counsel you not to do it. Maybe somebody like Abramov, a man you admire-a man I admire, come to that-convinces you that it’s not really worth it. He takes you under his protection, he solves your problems with the Georgians, he makes life possible. If it’s that, well, you’ve made a decision and, really, what can I do about it. On the other hand, maybe there’s something you need, maybe I can be of assistance. Or not. It’s for you to say. At worst, a little play from the synagogue youth group and a plate of nice tschav-not a wasted evening at any rate.”

“Comrade General, may one ask a frank question?”

“Of course.”

“What, actually, is the nature of your business?”

“That’s a good question, I’ll try to answer it. The truth is I’m in several businesses. Like you, like all of us, I was in the paradise business. We got rid of the czar and his pogroms to make a place where Jews, where everyone, could live like human beings and not like slaves and beasts-that’s one definition of paradise and not a bad one. This paradise, we soon saw, needed a few willing souls to serve as guardians. Isn’t that always the way with paradise? So I offered my humble services. Thus my second business, one could say, became the GRU, the military intelligence business. In this choice I was guided by the example of Trotsky, who became a soldier when he had to and did pretty well at it. And yet, even so, paradise slipped away. Because now we have a new pogrom, run, like so many in history, by a shrewd peasant who understands hatred, who knows its true value and how to use it.

“There is a trick, Andre Aronovich, played on us through the centuries and now played again: the Jew is accused of being cunning, by someone a thousand times more cunning than any Jew has ever been. So, sorrowfully, this problem has become my third business, and now I’m taking you out to theater and dinner in a businesslike sort of way and trying to interest you in becoming an associate. What do I offer my associates? A chance to save a few Jewish lives, never a commodity with much value, but then Jews have always found their way to such enterprises- they deal in cheap stuff: old rags, scrap metal, bones and gristle, whatever, like themselves, people don’t really want. And that’s all, frankly, that I can offer you. Is it dangerous? Oh yes. Could you die? It’s likely. Will your heroism be known to history? Very doubtful. Now, have I successfully persuaded you to throw everything you value in life away and follow this peculiar, ugly man over the nearest horizon to some dreadful fate? “

General Bloch threw his head back and laughed-it was unfettered, infectious. Szara joined in, was then unable to stop. People at other tables turned to look at them, smiling nervously, a little frightened to be trapped in a tiny Polish restaurant with a pair of madmen. Neither of them could have explained it. They had, somehow, in this strange, hidden, broken building, caught the tail of absurdity, and the thrash of it made them laugh. “God forgive me,” Bloch said, wiping his eyes with his hand, “for enjoying such a life as much as I do.”

A good laugh. A successful laugh. For it prevented Szara from actually having to answer Bloch’s question, from saying no immediately. Later they walked to the Metro together. Bloch kept coming back to the play. Oh the little girl who played the part of Hannah, what was her name? Perlemere? Yes, he was sure Szara had it right, a few months on the front lines and already he had the operative’s trained memory. Perlemere, mother-of-pearl, like Perlmutter in German. Where did Jews get these names? But, under any name at all, wasn’t she a treasure.

Weren’t they all.

Even those in Russia. Not so quick and clever as these children, perhaps, but bright and eager, little optimists, knock them down and they bounce. Szara surely knew them: the sons and daughters of the Jews in the universities, in the state bureaus and the diplomatic corps, yes, even in the security services.

Those children. The ones who no longer had homes or parents. The ones who ate from garbage cans in the darkness.

Long after Bloch left him, Szara continued the conversation with himself.

A writer once again, Szara sat at his kitchen table at noon; through the open window he could smell lunch being cooked in the other apartments on the courtyard. When it was served, he could hear the sounds of knives and forks on porcelain and the solemn lilt of conversation that always accompanied the midday meal.

He would write the story.

Then he would have to disappear. For, under NKVD scrutiny, a nom de plume would not protect him for long.

So, where did one disappear to these days? America. Shanghai? Zanzibar? Mexico?

No, America.

You met people in Moscow now and then who’d gone off to America-the ones who had come back to Russia. That little fellow who’d worked in a tie factory. What was his name? At some party somewhere they’d been introduced. Szara remembered a face soured by despair. “Hat in hand,” he’d said. “Always hat in hand.”

Szara was haunted by that image, and now it colored his vision of the future. He saw himself with Marta Haecht, they were hand in hand like fugitives in a storybook. The mad run from Paris at midnight, the steamship boarded at Le Havre. Ten days in steerage, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island. New York! Vast confusion, adrift in a sea of hopes and dreams, the sidewalks jammed with his fellow adventurers, everybody could be a millionaire if they tried. The pennies scraped together for the new suit, the offices, editors, lunches, encouragements, high hopes, then, ultimately … a janitor.

A janitor with an alias. A nom de mop. A cartoon capitalist with a cigar loomed up before him: “You, Cohen, you call this floor clean? Lookit here! And here!” Hat in hand, always hat in hand. The obsequious immigrant, smiling and smiling, the sweat running from his armpits.

But what would he do in Shanghai? Or Zanzibar? Where, in fact, was Zanzibar? Or did it exist only in pirate movies?

On the table before him sat a secondhand Underwood, bought at a junk store, some vanished novelist’s golden calf, no doubt. Poor thing, it would have to be left on a street corner somewhere; it too would have to run away once it wrote forbidden words in its own, very identifiable handwriting. Szara stabbed idly at the keyboard with his index fingers, writing in Polish, putting in accents with a sharp pencil.

To the musical clatter of lunchtime in the courtyard, Andre Szara wrote a magazine story. Who was the Okhrana’s mysterious man? Certain documents are said to exist … revolutionary times in Baku … intrigue … rumors that won’t die … perhaps high in the Soviet government today … tradition of the agent provocateur, Roman Malinovsky who rose to be head of the Bolshevik party in the Russian Duma was known to have been an Okhrana agent and so was the engineer Azeff who actually led the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary party and personally organized the bomb assassination of the minister of the interior, Plehve, in 1904 … banished to Siberia … records said to have been burned in 1917, but did they get them all? Will we ever know for certain … secrets have a way … once the identity is known … that the course of history will once again be altered, perhaps violently, by the Okhrana’s mysterious man.

In personal code, Szara had the address in a little book. He found an envelope and typed across the front Mr. Herbert Hull, Editor, and the rest of it. The following morning would be time enough to put it in the mail. One always liked to let these articles settle a bit, to see later on, with fresh eyes, what might need changing.

That evening he took a long walk. If nothing else, he owed himself some serious thinking. Perhaps he was letting fate decide, but, if he was, it did. Paris chose that night to be rather a movie of itself. An old man was playing a concertina and a few aristocrats were dancing in the street-the French were tight as fiddle strings until they decided to let loose, and then they could be delightfully mad. Or, perhaps, it was a day for some special little ritual-they arrived frequently and Szara never knew exactly what was going on- when everybody was expected to do the same thing: eat a particular cake, buy a prescribed bouquet, join open-air dancing on the boulevards. Some street corner toughs; wide jackets, black shirts, white ties, their shoulders hunched a certain way, beckoned him