Dark Star

“The wind and the stars.” Strange how he couldn’t stop thinking it. He wondered how long he might live. Probably only a little while longer. Just after dark a car had rumbled down the road he’d left. Then, an hour later, another. Was it them? They would certainly be looking for him. And they’d never stop until they found him; that was the rule of the game and everybody understood it. Ah but if this were to be his last night on earth how he would treasure it. A little breeze blowing steady across the Polish farmland, the grand sky- that immense and perfect and glittering mystery. There were frogs croaking in the darkness, life all around him. He didn’t have much of a plan, only to try and get across the Lithuanian border to the north. After that he’d see. Possibly Sweden, or Denmark. So far he’d stolen seven hours of existence; every hour was a victory, and he had no intention of going to sleep.

Szara was later to put it this way:

“If ever the hand of God guided my path it was when, from the twentieth to the twenty-third of September, 1939, I drove from southern Poland to Kovno, Lithuania, in a stolen NKVD automobile. Clearly there was a tragedy taking place in Poland; I saw the signs of it, I walked in its tracks, and I fear that it may have contributed to my escape, for it absorbed the energies of all Soviet security forces. Finally I do not know for certain, and I can only say that I survived. This was, equally, an accident of geography. Had I been thirty miles to the west, NKVD officers or political commissars serving on the front line surely would have arrested me. I believe they knew who I was, what I had done, and had a description of the car I was driving. In the same way, had I been thirty miles to the east, I would have been arrested by the NKVD of the Soviet Ukraine or murdered by the Ukrainian bands, who were then very active. But I was in the middle, in an area behind the lines but not yet secured by the apparat. Those who may have experience of a zone in which Soviet troops are maneuvering, not fighting, will know what I mean. I moved among lost units hampered by poor communications, amidst confusion and error and inefficiency, and it was as though I were invisible.”

Well yes, true as far as it went, but not the whole story by any means. He was able, for instance, to choose an identity suitable to the moment. Confronted by a Soviet patrol at dawn on the twenty-second, he produced Maltsaev’s NKVD badge, and the officer waved him ahead and cursed his troopers when they didn’t get out of the road quickly enough. But in a shtetl village in the middle of nowhere, he became Szara the Polish Jew, was given a bench in the study house to sleep on, and fed by the rabbi’s wife. Meanwhile, the remarkable fact of the Pobeda was ignored by the villagers. He drove it into a muddy, unfenced yard full of chickens and there it sat, safe, and invisible from the road, while he slept. Later, when it suited his purpose, he presented himself as Andre Szara, Soviet journalist, and, later still, Jean Bonotte of Marseille, a French citizen.

It took him some twenty hours to negotiate almost three hundred miles to a point just short of the border with Lithuania. The first night, moved by some obscure but very powerful instinct- “the hand of God”?-he drove away from his refuge at midnight and continued on the same road, north he hoped, for some six hours. He feared he would be unable to cross the many rivers that lay across his path but, as it turned out, the Poles had not blown the bridges. So the Pobeda rattled over the loose boards of the narrow structures spanning first the Berezina, then the Belaja. Just beyond the former he came to a cobbled road, heading east and west, flanked by birch trees. He knew, just for that moment, precisely where he was, for those cobblestones had been laid by the Emperor Napoleon’s Corsicans in 1812, a solid foundation for wheeled guns and ammunition carts, and it led off in the direction of Moscow. Szara drove across it, heading due north.

Somewhere near Chelm, just before dawn, his path was blocked by a train of cattle cars standing idle at a crossing. Uniformed NKVD soldiers were guarding the train, and in the darkness he could just make out the barrel of a machine gun, mounted on top of a freight car, as it swung to cover the Pobeda. One of the sentries unslung his rifle and walked over to ask him who he was and what he was doing there. Szara was about to reach for the badge, then didn’t. Something told him to leave it where it was. Just a Pole, he said. His wife had gone into labor and he was off to fetch the midwife. The soldier stared. Szara could hear voices inside the cattle cars, speaking Polish, pleading for water. Without further conversation, Szara put the car in reverse and backed up, his heart pounding, while the soldier watched him but did nothing-a potential problem was simply removing itself. When he was out of sight of the train, he rested his head on the steering wheel for a time, then turned the car around, backtracked a few miles, picked a road at random, and, an hour later, after several turnings, drove over the tracks at a deserted crossing.

Passing a farm early in the morning, he heard the drawn-out lowing of unmilked cattle and the frantic barking of deserted dogs left at the end of their chains. At another railroad crossing there was a wooden cattlegate blocking the road and when he got out to open it he saw something yellow on the ground and bent down to see what it was: it turned out to be a scrap of paper bound to a small stone with yellow wool, perhaps unraveled from a shawl. Unwinding the wool, he found a note: Please tell Franciszka Kodowicz that Krysia and Wladzia have been taken away in a train. Thank you. The wind blew at the piece of paper in his hand. He stood by the car for a long time, then carefully wrapped the paper around the stone and rebound it with the yellow wool, placing it back on the ground where it had landed when the girls had thrown it from the moving train. He was, he noted dispassionately, now beyond vows or resolutions. He slid into the front seat of the car, holding his breath as the musky scent of pomade and sweat assaulted him, forced the gearshift lever down, and drove north. That was his resolution, that was his vow: to exist.

On the third night, having swung west to avoid the market town of Grodno, he saw from the map that he’d entered the country of the Pripet marshes. He suspected the Russian line of advance had not yet reached the area, its northern flank held up for some reason, for he could find no evidence of an occupying force. He stopped the car and waited for morning, telling himself to remain awake and alert. He woke, again and again, when his chin hit his chest, finally fading away altogether into the blank sleep of exhaustion. The next time he came to it was daybreak, and he saw that he was surrounded by marshland that ran to the low horizon, a plain of swaying reeds and long reaches of flat water colored by a gray, wind-swept sky. The land was ancient, desolate, its vast silence punctuated by the distant cries of waterfowl.

He walked around for a time, trying to get his bearings, washing his face and hands in the chill, dark water of the marsh. He searched the sky but there was no sun-he had no idea where he was, or which way was north. And he didn’t care. That was the worst part, he truly did not care. His resolve had flowed away like sand on the outgoing tide. He sat on the running board of the Pobeda, slumped against the door, and stared out over the gray ponds and blowing reeds. He had somehow come to the end of his journey, the future he’d held out to himself no more than a trick of the illusionist, the self-deluded survivor. Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly-a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud. Why should such a man remain alive? Get in the car, he told himself. But the willful interior voice sickened him-all it knew was greed, all it did was want. Even here, at the end of the world, it sang its little song, and any gesture, no matter how absurd, would satisfy it. But the only act he could imagine called for removing the Steyr from beneath the driver’s seat of the automobile and relieving the earth of an unneeded presence-at least an act of grace. Did he have the courage to do it? Surprisingly, he did. What had he done with his life-other than seek a transient peace between the legs of women. He had, in order to live another day, and then another, served the people who now did what they did and who would, he knew for a certainty, do what they would do. And to put a good finish on the history of his particular life, the time and place were perfect: ironically, he was only a few miles from the safety of the Lithuanian border. He looked at his watch, it was sixteen minutes after nine. The sky shifted across his vision, a hundred shades of gray, drifting and rolling like battlesmoke blown by a wind off the sea.

What saved him-for he was very, very close to it-was a vision. Of this he was not to write; it was not germane, and there may have been other reasons. Well down the long, straight road ahead of him appeared the silhouette of a hunter; a man stepped out of the reeds, a shotgun, the barrel broken safely from the stock, riding his forearm. A spaniel followed, stood at the side of the hunter and shook a fine spray of marshwater from its coat. Then the man walked across the road, the dog trotting ahead, and both vanished.

Then, almost the next thing he knew, he was driving. Through a great labyrinth of roads and paths that could have led anywhere or nowhere. Sometimes, with tears in his eyes, he drove into a blur, but never lifted his foot from the gas pedal. He drove, fiercely, angrily, toward the wind. Took any road on which the churning skies hurried toward him, their speed heightened by the rush of the car in the opposite direction. He passed, and barely noticed, an empty guard tower, barbed wire strung away in both directions, a wire gate hanging crazily on one hinge as though brushed aside by a giant. At last he saw an old man by the side of the road, poking listlessly at a garden path with a primitive hoe. Szara stomped on the brake. “Where in God’s name am I?” he called out.

“Vasi” said the man.