Dark Star

and had a savage temper; he could, if he chose, make life miserable for his staff.

Szara booked his call from a hotel room, it went through an hour later. Nezhenko’s wife answered the phone, her voice bright and shrill with feigned insouciance.

When Nezhenko came to the phone, he offered no patronymic and no greeting, just, “Where have you been?”

“I’m in Antwerp.”

“Where?”

Szara repeated himself. Something had gone wrong-Nezhenko had not been “advised” of his assignment.

“So good of you to call,” Nezhenko said.

Szara hunted desperately for water to put out the fire. “I’m doing a piece on dockworkers up here.”

“Yes? That will be interesting.”

“I’ll wire it tomorrow.”

“Send it by mail if you like. Third class.”

“Did Pavel Mikhailovich cover for me? “

“Pavel Mikhailovich isn’t here anymore.”

Szara was stunned. He isn’t here anymore was code. When heard from friends, family, landladies, it meant that the person had been taken away. And Pavel Mikhailovich was-had been-a decent little man without enemies. But none of Szara’s reactions, to ask questions, to show even the most civilized grief, was permissible on a telephone line.

“And people have been asking for you,” Nezhenko added. This too was code, it meant the apparat was looking for him.

Szara felt as though he’d walked into a wall. Why were they looking for him? They knew very well where he was and what he was doing-the world’s plainest man had not been a mirage, and Renate Braun and her helper were realer yet. “It’s all a misunderstanding,” he said after a moment. “The right hand doesn’t tell the left hand …”

“No doubt,” Nezhenko said. Szara could hear him lighting a cigarette.

“I want to go down to Prague after I finish the piece on the dockworkers. There’s the reaction to the Anti- Comintern Pact, views on the Sudetenland, all sorts of things. What do you think? “

“What do I think? “

“Yes.”

“Do as you like, Andre Aronovich. You must please yourself in all things.”

“I’ll file on the dockworkers tomorrow,” Szara said. Nezhenko hung up.

Writing the story of the Belgian dockworkers was like eating sand.

Once upon a time he’d persuaded himself that technical facility was its own reward: a sentence singing hymns to the attainment of coal production norms in the Donets Basin was, nonetheless, a sentence, and could be well rendered. It was the writer’s responsibility in a progressive society to inform and uplift the toiling masses- word had, in fact, reached him that the number one toiler himself had an eye for his byline-so when some demon within wanted to write dark fables of an absurd universe, he knew enough to keep that imp well bottled up. To stay alive, Szara had taught himself discretion before the apparat had a chance to do the job for him. And if, by chance, an intransigent pen stubbornly produced commissar wolves guarding flocks of worker sheep or Parisian girls in silk underwear, well, then the great characteristic of paper was the ease with which it burned.

And these were, had to be, private fires. The world didn’t want to know about your soul, it took you for who you said you were. The workers in the dark little hiring hall by the Antwerp docks were impressed that anybody cared enough to come around and ask them how they felt. “Stalin is our great hope,” one of them said, and Szara sent his voice around the world.

He sat in yet one more hotel room as the Atlantic fog came curling up the streets and wrote these men into the brutal drama being played out in Europe. He caught the strength in their rounded shoulders and brawlers’ hands, the way they quietly took care of one another, the granite decency of them. But for the wives and children who depended on them they would fight in Spain-some of the younger ones in fact were there-would fight in the worker suburbs of Berlin, would yet, families or not, fight from behind the cranes and sheds of their own docks. It was true, and Szara found a way to make it true on the page.

Stalin was their great hope. And if Khelidze mocked this with the yawn on his yellow-stained face, that was Szara’s private problem. And if the “small favor” was now a large favor, that, too, was Szara’s private problem. And if all that made it hard to write, made writing the story like eating sand, who really could he blame? He could always say no and take the consequences. The Russian proverb had it just right: You said you were a mushroom, now jump into the basket.

And people have been asking for you.

Nezhenko’s phrase rode the cadence of the train over the rails from Antwerp all the way to Paris. Much for the best, he calculated, to rush into their arms and find out what they wanted. He hadn’t the courage to stand coolly apart from it all, whatever it was, so he did the next best thing. Checked in with the large Pravda bureau in Paris and asked the secretary to book him on the Paris-Prague express for the following day. He looked into her eyes, saw ball bearings, swore he could hear her lift the phone before the door was properly latched.

He stopped back that evening, picked up the ticket and drew both salary and expense funds, then went early to the Gare d’Austerlitz the following day in case they wanted to talk to him there. He did not precisely fear abduction, he was simply more comfortable in an open, public space with crowds of people about. He dawdled over coffee at a cafe by the departure platform, gazed mindlessly at the sullen Parisian sky above the glass roof on its vast iron fretwork, read Le Temps, found himself quoted in the Communist daily, L’Humanite-“as Pravda correspondent Andre Szara has pointed out, bilateral relations between France and the USSR can only proceed once the Czechoslovakian question has been …”-and watched the appetizing French women sweep past, their heels clattering on the cement, their animation seemingly inspired by a grave sense of mission.

He had made himself available, but no contact was made. When his train was announced and the engine vented plumes of white steam on the platform, he climbed aboard and found himself alone in a first-class compartment. Pravda did not buy whole compartments- only the apparat did that. Clearly, something was planned. Perhaps in Nancy, he thought.

He was wrong. Spent the afternoon staring through the rain at the low hills of eastern France and watching the names of battlefields glide past on the railroad stations. At the Strasbourg border control, just on the other side of the Rhine, a trio of German passport officials, two soldiers and a civilian in streaming black rubber raincoats, entered the compartment. They were cold-eyed and courteous, and his Soviet passport produced no evident reaction. They asked him a question or two, apparently just to hear his voice. Szara’s German was that of someone who’d spoken Yiddish as a child, and the civilian, a security type, made clear that he knew Szara was a Jew, a Polish Jew, a Soviet Bolshevik Jew of Polish origin. He probed efficiently through Szara’s traveling bag without removing his black gloves, then examined press and travel documents and, when he was done, stamped the passport with a fat swastika in a circle and handed it back politely. Their eyes met for just a moment: this business they had with each other would be seen to in the future, that far they could agree.

But Szara traveled too much to take the hostility of border police to heart and, as they gained speed leaving Stuttgart station, he fell into the rhythm of the tracks and the dense twilight of Germany: smoking factories on the horizon, fields left to the November frost.

He touched the baggage receipt in the inside pocket of his jacket for the tenth time that day; he might have taken yet one more look at the thing, but the sound of the train was suddenly amplified as the door to his compartment swung open.

On first glance, an ordinary businessman of Central Europe in dark overcoat and soft-brimmed hat, carrying a buckled briefcase of the kind that is held under one arm. Then, recognition. This was a man to whom he had been briefly introduced, perhaps a year earlier, at some Moscow function he couldn’t recall. His name was Bloch, a lieutenant general of the GRU, military intelligence, and recently, according to rumor, the illegal-clandestine-