somewhere in the Kremlin all was being carefully seen to. There was a reference to a communique, to a meeting of the Central Committee, then the news that some forty divisions of the Red Army had entered Poland along a five- hundred-mile front. In general they had been welcomed, there was no fighting to speak of, little resistance was expected. Foreign Minister Molotov had announced that “events rising from the Polish-German war have revealed the internal insolvency and obvious impotence of the Polish state.” There was great concern that some “unexpected contingency” could “create a menace to the Soviet Union.” Molotov had gone on to say that the Soviet government “could not remain indifferent to the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Byelorussians inhabiting Poland.” The announcer continued for some time; the phrasing was careful, precise. All had been thought out. War and instability in a neighboring state posed certain dangers; the army was simply moving up to a point where the occupation of contested territory would insulate Soviet citizens from fighting and civil disorders. The announcer went on to give other foreign news, local news, and the temperature-forty-eight degrees-in Moscow.
Later that morning news came from Lvov that the Germans were preparing to leave the city. A great wave of excitement and relief swept over the population of the Krynica-Zdroj, and it was determined that a column would be formed-Ukrainian bands continued their offensive; several travelers were known to have disappeared-to make the journey into town. A light but steady rain was deemed to be of no importance; the spa had an ample supply of black umbrellas and these were distributed by the smiling caretaker, Tomasz. The diplomatic corps made every effort to appear at its best-men shaved and powdered, women pinned up their hair, formal suits were dug out of trunks and suitcases. The procession was led by Tomasz, wearing an elegant little hat with an Alpine brush in the band, and the commercial counselor of the Belgian embassy in Warsaw, carrying a broomstick with a white linen table napkin mounted at one end, a flag of neutrality.
It was a long line of men and women beneath bobbing black umbrellas that advanced down the sandy road to Lvov. The fields were bright green and the smell of black earth and mown hay was sharp and sweet in the rainy air. The spirit of the group was supremely optimistic. Prevailing views were concentrated on the possibility of a diplomatic resolution of the Polish crisis as well as on cigarettes, coffee, soap, perhaps even roast chicken or cream cake; whatever might be had in newly liberated Lvov.
Szara marched near the end of the column. The people around him were of various opinions about the Soviet advance, news of which had spread like wildfire. Most thought it good news: Stalin informing Hitler that, despite their expedient pact, enough was enough. It was felt that a period of intense diplomacy would now take place and, no matter the final result of the German invasion, they could go home. To Szara there was something infinitely Polish about the scene, these people in their dark and formal clothing marching along a narrow road in the rain beneath a forest of umbrellas. Toward the end of the six-mile walk, some of the diplomats were tiring, and it was determined that everybody should sing- “The Marseillaise” as it turned out, the one song they all knew. True, it was the national anthem of a recently declared belligerent, but they were advancing under a white flag, and for raising the spirits on a rainy day there simply wasn’t anything better. Vainshtok and Szara marched together; the former, his shoulder holster abandoned for the journey, thrust his clenched fist into the air and sang like a little fury in a high, wavering voice.
Szara didn’t sing. He was too busy thinking. Trying to sort a series of images in his mind that might, if he found the organizing principle, come together to form a single, sharp picture. Beria’s ascension, Abramov’s murder, the suicide of Kuscinas, the Okhrana dossier, Baumann’s arrest: it all ended with forty Russian divisions marching into Poland.
What he did know was that he had been part of it, witness to it, though mostly by accident. He didn’t like coincidence, life had taught him to be suspicious of it, but he was able to recall moment after moment when he’d seen and heard, when he’d known-often from the periphery but known nonetheless-what was going on.
What he needed, Szara thought, was to talk it out. To say the words out loud. But the one person he could trust, General Bloch, had disappeared from his life. Dead? In flight? He didn’t know.
In the city, people stood soberly in the square that faced the ruined railroad station and watched in silence as the Wehrmacht marched west, back toward Germany. It was so quiet that the sound of boots and horses’ hooves on the cobblestones, the creak of leather and the jangle of equipment, sounded unnaturally loud as the companies moved past. Some of the infantrymen glanced at the crowd as they went by, their faces showing little more than impersonal curiosity. The diplomats stood under their umbrellas alongside the Poles and watched the procession. To Szara they seemed a little lost. There was nobody to call on, nobody to whom a note could be handed; for the moment they had been deprived of their natural element.
The normal progress of the withdrawal was broken only by a single, strange interlude in the gray order of march: the Germans had stolen a circus. They were taking it away with them. Its wagons, decorated with curlicues and flourishes in brilliant gold on a dark red field, bore the legend Circus Goldenstein, and the reins were held by unsmiling Wehrmacht drivers, who looked slightly absurd managing the plumed and feathered horses. Szara wondered what had become of the clowns and the acrobats. They were nowhere to be seen, only the animals were in evidence. Behind the bars of a horse-drawn cage Szara saw a sleepy tiger, its chin sunk on its forepaws, its green-slit eyes half closed as it rolled past the crowd lining the street.
Toward evening, the diplomats walked back down the sandy road to the spa. Two days later, a Russian tank column rolled into the city.
Behind the tanks came the civil administration: the NKVD, the political commissars, and their clerks. The clerks had lists. They included the membership of all political parties, especially the socialists-Polish, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Jewish. The clerks also had the names of trade union members, civil servants, policemen, forestry workers, engineers, lawyers, university students, peasants with more than a few animals, refugees from other countries, landowners, teachers, commercial traders, and scores of other categories, particularly those, like stamp dealers and collectors, who habitually had correspondence with people outside the country. So the clerks knew who they wanted the day they arrived and immediately set to work to find the rest, seizing all civil, tax, educational, and commercial records. Individuals whose names appeared on the lists, and their families, were to be deported to the Soviet Union in freight trains, eventually to be put to work in forced labor battalions. Factories were to be disassembled and sent east to the industrial centers of the USSR, stores stripped of their inventories, farms of their livestock.
Special units of the NKVD Foreign Department arrived as well, some of them turning up at the spa, their black Pobedas spattered with mud up to the door handles. The diplomats were to be sorted out and sent on their way home as soon as the western half of Poland conceded victory to Germany. “Be calm,” the operatives said. “Warsaw will surrender any day now, the Poles can’t hold out much longer.” The Russians were soft-spoken and reassuring. Most of the diplomats were relieved. A registration table was set up in the dining room with two polite men in civilian clothes sitting behind it.
Szara and Vainshtok waited until five o’clock before they joined the line. Vainshtok was philosophical. “Back to dear old Berlin.” He sighed. “And dear old Dr. Goebbels’s press conferences. How I’ve lived without them I don’t know. But, at least, there’ll be something for dinner besides beets.”
Vainshtok was skinny and hollow-chested, with thin, hairy arms and legs. He reminded Szara of a spider. “Do you really care so much what you eat? ” Szara asked. The line moved forward a pace. “You certainly don’t get fat.”
“Terror,” Vainshtok explained. “That’s what keeps me thin. I eat plenty, but I burn it up.”
The man in front of them, a minor Hungarian noble of some sort, stepped up to the table, stood at rigid attention, and, announcing his name and title, presented his diplomatic credentials. Szara got a good look at the two operatives at the table. One was young and alert and very efficient. He had a ledger open in front of him and copied out the information from documents and passports. The other seemed rather more an observer, in attendance only in case of some special circumstance beyond the expertise of his partner. The observer was a
