Dark Star

psychologically. His physical condition is another matter. If the interrogation is extreme, he may die on them.”

Goldman nodded at the answer. “At your meeting in Berlin, was anything said that can help explain either his message, the ‘members of the diplomatic and military classes’ business, or his wife’s reference to ‘friends.’ Are those, perhaps, the same people?”

“They could be,” Szara lied. “I can’t say.”

“Is that your answer?” the man in the glasses asked.

Szara faced him. The eyes behind the thick lenses were watery and lifeless. “My answer is no. Nothing was said that would explain either of those statements.”

Traveling back to Paris on a succession of local trains they had to sit in separate compartments. That gave Szara time to think while the somber towns of northeastern France rolled past the window.

He felt old. It was the business with Nadia Tscherova again, only worse. He was tormented by what had happened to Baumann, and by his own part in the man’s destruction, yet what he had seen on Kristallnacht went a long way toward justifying what they had done together. A sacrifice of war. A machine gun position left to delay an enemy’s progress down a road while the rear guard retreats. All very well, he thought, until you’re the machine gunner. In his not so secret heart he thought it might be for the best if Baumann were to die. Peacefully. A death of mercy. But his instinct told him that would not happen. Baumann was frightened, exhausted, beaten down and humiliated, but also strong. A hard soul lived in that old gray man.

Of course the Russian-German treaty explained it all. From the beginning, Von Polanyi’s intelligence unit in the German Foreign Office had fathered Baumann’s approach to the Soviet apparat: a communications channel had been opened up. Baumann’s production figures were probably being traded for information coming back the other way, but moving along an entirely different path. At this very moment, he speculated, some Russian in Leningrad was being told to have no further contact with a certain Finnish ferry captain. That’s how things were done, agreements made and kept. We will keep you informed, they’d said to somebody in 1937, of our bomber production. Secretly, by intelligence means, because neither our countries, nor our leaders, Hitler and Stalin, may be seen by the world to accept each other’s existence. We are officially mortal enemies, yet it is to our mutual advantage to have certain understandings. Thus, Szara realized, Baumann’s numbers were confirmed by the British because he was not being run by Nazi counterintelligence, Schellenberg’s office in the Referat VI C.

In another month the pact between Hitler and Stalin would be revealed to the world. Thus they’d shut down the Baumann operation because they no longer needed to communicate in this way. Henceforth such figures would travel by telex from foreign office to foreign office. Meanwhile somebody-not Von Polanyi, based on what Frau Baumann had said to Odile-had decided to throw Baumann into Sachsenhausen. Their way of saying thank you, evidently.

No, Szara told himself, you may not think that way. Germans do things for reasons. It was more likely their way of saying now get out of Germany, Jew. And here’s a little taste of something unpleasant to help you remember to keep your mouth shut.

Maybe, Szara told himself. Just maybe. Something in Goldman’s statement about Sachsenhausen had been hopeful, as though Baumann’s extrication could be achieved and he knew it.

Oh, but that clever little bastard was smart! He’d sniffed all around the truth. Which was that the “friends” and the “diplomats” were one and the same and that “you” meant Szara and nobody else. What had Baumann actually intended? That would bear thinking about, but there was a nugget to be mined somewhere in those formal words, something he wanted to give to Szara-a present to his case officer. Why? Because he knew Szara, and, despite endless orders and urgent requests for more information- requests unheeded, orders ignored-Szara had not abandoned him or threatened him. Now he said: Please help me, and I’ll help you.

Meanwhile that other one, with the glasses, who was he?

Oh Russia, he said to himself, what strange humans you grow.

And now he had to follow Goldman’s orders, given a month ago in Brussels and repeated as he left Arion: write something. Now he had to go home and do it. Of all the things in the world he didn’t want to do, that was near the top of the list. In these turbulent days, people of good will ought to be asking themselves certain difficult questions. Close the window, shut out the noise of the crowds marching in the streets, and face the issue squarely and without emotion: What can be the future of socialism in today’s world? How shall it best survive?

At somebody’s intellectual soiree he’d met an editor. What was his name? A proud little rooster crowing atop his own little dunghill of a magazine. “Come and see me, Andre Aronovich,” the man had crooned. Now aren’t you, Szara thought at the time, just the most clever fellow to address me by my patronymic, you oily little bore. Ah, but look here, here’s fate with a swift kick in the backside-the rooster was going to get what he wanted, a fat scoop of corn tossed into his yard. Would Szara perhaps get paid? Hah! A meager lunch maybe-“I always order the daily special here, Andre Aronovich, I recommend it.” Do you? Well, myself I think I’ll have the peacock in gold sauce.

He’d better get it done, he thought. He’d collected his portmanteau from the Hungarian in the seventh arrondissement and expected to get his travel orders any day. Where, he wondered, would they send him.

He woke as in a dream. For a moment he wasn’t anywhere at all, adrift in no place he knew but, as in a dream, it did not matter, there was nothing to fear. He lay on top of his raincoat in the loft of a barn, the smell of the hay beneath him sweet, freshly cut. High above him was a barn roof, silvery and soft with age, early light just barely glowing between the cracks where the boards had separated. Sitting up, he faced a broad, open window-it was what they used, standing on their wagons, to pitch forkfuls of hay into the loft. He crawled across the hay in order to look out and saw that it was just after dawn: a shaft of sunlight lay across a cut field, strands of ground mist rising through it. Beside a narrow road of packed, sandy soil stood a great oak; its leaves rattled softly in the little wind that always comes with first light.

There were three men on the road. Men from a dream. They wore black shoes and black leggings and long black coats and black hats with broad brims. They were bearded, and long sidelocks curled from beneath the brims of their hats. Hasidim, he thought, on their way to shul. Their faces were white as chalk. One of them turned and looked at him, a look without curiosity or challenge; it took note of a man watching from the window of a barn, then it turned away, back toward the road. They made no sound as they walked, and then, like black and white ghosts in a dream, they vanished.

Poland.

His mind came to life very slowly. The previous day, when he tried to recall it, had broken into fragments, blurred images of travel. He had flown to an airfield near Warsaw on an eight-seater plane that bumped across a ridged tar surface after it landed. There was deep forest on three sides of the airfield, and he’d wondered if this were the main field that served the city. All day he’d never really known exactly where he was. There was a taxi. A train. No, two trains. A ride in a wagon on a hot day. A dog who growled deep in his throat yet wagged his tail at the same moment. A peddler met on a road. The slow apprehension that he would not arrive anywhere in particular any time soon, that he was where he was, that travelers slept in barns. An old woman, a kerchief tied around her seamed face, said that he was welcome. Then there was a mouse, a moon, the slow, swimming dreams of sleep in an unknown place.

He leaned against the worn barnwood and watched the day break. There was still a quarter moon, white against the blue-black morning sky. A band of storm clouds moved east, edges stained red by the rising sun. Here and there light broke through the clouds, a pine wood appeared on the horizon, a rye field took color, a sharp green, as he watched. This ghostly, shifting light, wet smell of morning earth, crows calling as they flew low along the curve of a field, he could remember. He had once lived in this part of the world, a long time ago, and sometimes they had ventured beyond the winding streets of Kishinev and he’d witnessed such mornings, when he was a little boy who woke up long before anyone else did in order not to miss any of the miracles. He could see himself, kneeling on a bed in front of a window, a blanket around his shoulders. He could see the sun climbing a hill on a morning in late summer.

“Hey up there, pan, are you asleep still?”

He leaned out the window and peered down to find the old woman looking up at him from the yard. She stood, with the aid of a stick, like a small, sturdy pyramid, wearing sweaters and jackets on top, broad skirts below. Her dogs, a big brown one and a little black and white one, stood by her side and stared up at him as well. “Come