Dark Star

A curious painting. Quite literal, in the style of the 1880s yet touched by an incongruity, something askew, that suggested the surrealism of a later period. The subject was a long, empty beach near the Danish city of Aarhus on the coast of Jutland; the time was late afternoon, beneath the mackerel sky of the Scandinavian autumn, rows of white scud shifting slowly toward a pale wash horizon. To the east lay an expanse of flat, dark water, then a cloud bank obscuring the island of Samso. Small waves lapped at the shore; pebbly, dark sand with a meandering tideline marked by a refuse of broken shells. Gulls fed at the water’s edge, and on the dunes that rose behind the beach the stiff grass swayed in the offshore breeze. A common, timeless seascape caught at a common, timeless moment.

But the figures in the scene were alien to it. Sergei Abramov, in his dark blue suit and vest with watch chain, his black homburg and black beard and black umbrella-just there the painting had gone wrong. This was a city man who belonged to city places- restaurants, theaters-and his presence on the beach somehow denied nature. No less his companion, the journalist A. A. Szara, in a rumpled raincoat with a French newspaper rolled up in one pocket.

The final touch, which perfected the incongruity, was the stack of eleven photographs that Abramov held, studying them as people do, placing the topmost at the back when he was done with it, proceeding in turn until it reappeared, then starting over.

Could the artist have caught Abramov’s mood? Only a very good artist, Szara felt, could have managed it. There was too much there. Drawn deep inside himself, impervious to the screaming gulls, to the gust of wind that toyed with his beard, Abramov wore the expression of a man whose brutal opinion of humankind has, once again, been confirmed. But, in the cocked eyebrow, in the tug of a smile at one corner of the mouth, there was evidence that he expected no less, that he was a man so often betrayed that such events now seemed to him little more than an inconvenience. Very deliberately he squared the stack of photographs, resettled them in an envelope, and slid them into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Of course,” he said to Szara.

Szara’s expression showed that he didn’t understand.

“Of course it happened, of course it was Dershani who made it happen, of course the proof comes too late.” He smiled grimly and shrugged, his way of saying udari sudbi, the blows of fate, wasn’t this exactly the way of the world. “And the negatives?”

“Burned.”

“Sensible.”

“Will you burn these as well?”

Abramov thought a moment. “No,” he said. “No, I shall confront him.”

“What will he do? “

“Dershani? Smile. We will smile at each other: brothers, enemies, conspirators, fellow wolves. When we’ve got that over with, he’ll inquire how I came to have such photographs.”

“And you’ll tell him? “

Abramov shook his head. “I will tell him some rich, transparent lie. Which he will acknowledge with one of his predatory stares. I’ll stare back, though he’ll know that’s a bluff, and that will be that. Then, later, as if from nowhere, something may happen to me. Or it may not. Something may happen to Dershani instead-political fortune is a tide like any other. In any event, the photographs prove he was clumsy enough to get caught, perhaps a margin of vulnerability that will keep me alive a little longer. Or, perhaps, not.”

“I didn’t know,” Szara apologized. “I thought we’d caught him at it.”

“At what? “

“Collaboration.”

Abramov smiled gently at Szara’s innocence. “Such a meeting can be explained a thousand ways. For instance, one could say that Herr Joseph Uhlrich has now been brought under Soviet control.”

“You know him.”

“Oh yes, it’s a small world. The SS Obersturmbannfuhrer, to give him his proper rank, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in Russia, is an old friend. A brave, fighting street communist in his youth, then a Brown Shirt thug, eventually a spy for Hitler’s faction, the Black Shirts, against Ernst Rohm. He took part in the Brown Shirt executions of 1934 and is now one of Heydrich’s assistants in the Sicherheitsdienst, SD, Gestapo foreign intelligence. He works in the Unterabteilung subdivision that concerns itself with Soviet intelligence services. Perhaps Dershani has been brought under the control of the SD rather than the other way around.”

“Uhlrich had the security, the Germans planned the meeting, Dershani was essentially alone and unguarded. To me, it seemed a courteous welcome for a traitor.”

Abramov shrugged. “I will find out.” He put his back to the wind, lit a cigarette, and put the extinguished match in his pocket. “But, even so, doing something about it may be impossible. Dershani is now chairman of the OPAL Directorate. Abramov is demoted to simple membership. He may be demoted further, even much further-you understand-and Yezhov is no longer Dershani’s superior. That position now belongs to the Georgian Beria, so the Georgian khvost is victorious. And they are cleaning house. A writers’ conspiracy has been uncovered; Babel, too friendly with Yezhov’s wife, has disappeared, and so has Kol’tsev. Pravda will soon have a new editor. Then there were others, many others: writers, poets, dramatists, as well as Yezhov’s associates, every single one of them, seventy at last count.”

“And Yezhov?”

Abramov nodded. “Ah yes, Yezhov himself. Well, I may inform you that Comrade Yezhov turned out to be a British spy. Imagine that! But, poor man, perhaps he was not fully aware of what he was doing.” Abramov closed one eye and tapped his temple with an index finger.

“Nicolai Ivanovich evidently went mad. For late one night an ambulance appeared at his apartment block, then two attendants, sturdy fellows, were seen to remove him in a straitjacket. He was taken to the Serbsy Psychiatric Institute and, regrettably, left alone in a cell, where he contrived to hang himself from the barred window by ingeniously fashioning his underpants into a noose. This would have required an extraordinary feat of acrobatics, and ‘the bloody dwarf was never known as much of an athlete, but, who knows, perhaps madness lent him unimagined physical prowess. We all like to think so, at any rate.”

“I was told that Yezhov was in decline,” Szara said, “but not this.”

“Decline could describe it, I suppose. Meanwhile, bratets”-the affectionate term meant “little brother”-“now more than ever, you better keep your nose clean. I don’t know what actually happened to your agent SILO in Paris, but here I see these photographs and they tell me you’ve been meddling with Germans, and so to put two and two together doesn’t take a genius.”

“But it was-”

“Don’t tell me,” Abramov interrupted. “I don’t want to know. Just understand that, once again, it’s a good time for Jews to be invisible, even in Paris. Beria is no shabbos goy-you know, a friend of the Orthodox Jews who turns the lights on and off on the sabbath so the prohibition against work is observed. Far from it. His most recent experience involved a man you may have known, Grisha Kaminsky, formerly people’s commissar for health. He came forward at the February Plenum and made a most interesting speech, claiming that Beria once worked for the Transcaucasian Muslims, the Mussavat nationalists, at a time when the British controlled them during the intervention at Baku, just after the revolution. According to Kaminsky’s speech, Beria was operating a Mussavatist counterintelligence network, and that made him a British spy. Needless to say, Kaminsky disappeared into thin air after the Plenum. So, you’ll understand I’m in no hurry to run to Beria with a story, even an illustrated story, that his khvost pal Dershani is in contact with the fascist enemy.”

Abramov paused to let it all sink in, and the two men stood silently on the beach for a time.

In Szara’s understanding, the ascendancy of Beria, despite Kaminsky’s near suicidal attack, confirmed what Bloch had said five months earlier: the purge, grinding, deliberate, somehow both efficient and random at once, was in effect a pogrom. He doubted that Abramov, as strong and as smart as he was, would survive it. And if Yezhov’s allies were murdered, Abramov’s friends would be treated no differently when the time came. “Perhaps, Sergei Jakobo-vich,” he said hesitantly, “you ought to consider your personal safety. From Denmark, for instance, one can go virtually anywhere.”

“Me? Run? No, never. So far I’m just demoted, and I’ve absorbed that like a good ghetto zhid-eyes cast down, quiet as a mouse, no trouble from me, Gospodin, sir. No, what