Szara tried again and got the same answer. They stared at each other, deadlocked, Szara angry, the old man more confused than frightened and saying finally, with politely controlled irritation, “What is the matter with you, sir, that you shout so? ” The man was speaking German, Szara finally realized, the common second language in that country. He let out a single cry of absurd laughter, slammed the shift lever into gear, and roared on into Lithuania.
He arrived in Kovno a fugitive. And stayed to become a refugee. Two cities anchored the northern and southern extremes of the Pale of Settlement, Kovno and Odessa. Szara, who had grown up in the latter, soon came to understand the former. These were border cities, Odessa on the Black Sea across from Istanbul, Kovno at the conjunction of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, and border cities lived by a particular set of instincts: they knew, for instance, when war was coming, because when there was war they were not spared. They knew the people who showed up before the wars. Immigrants, refugees, whatever you called them, they had a way of arriving just ahead of the armies and were taken to be an omen of difficult times, as migrating birds portend winter.
But Kovno’s long and complicated history had marked its citizens with the very characteristics that enabled them to survive it. Actually, by the time Szara arrived in the city known in his childhood as Kovno, it was called by the Lithuanian name Kaunas. Its nearby neighbor, however, remained Wilno, since it had been declared Polish territory, rather than Vilna, the Russian name before 1917. The Lithuanians themselves preferred Vilnius, but at that particular moment this alternative was running a poor third.
The people of Kovno, now Kaunas, were obviously multilingual. Szara had spoken German, Polish, and Yiddish in the city before he ever slept there. They were also virtually immune to politics, not strange for a city that has known Teutonic Knights and Bolshevik lawyers and everything in between. And they were, in their own quiet way, deeply obstinate. In all things but particularly in matters of nationality. The Lithuanians knew they were home, the Poles knew what they stood on was Polish soil no matter what anybody said, the Jews had been there for hundreds of years, faring about as well as they did anywhere, while the better part of the German population looked west, with longing hearts and the occasional song, to the Fatherland.
Nonetheless, obstinate though the citizens of Kovno might have been, it seemed, in the fall of 1939, that quite a considerable number of them were intent on being somewhere else.
Szara rented a third of a room in a boardinghouse, actually a boarding apartment, at the top of seven flights of stairs, sharing with two Polish Jews, cameramen in the Polish film industry who’d fled Warsaw by riding cross country on a motorcycle. One of the men worked nights as a sweeper at the railroad station, and Szara had his bed until he arrived home at six-thirty in the morning. That got Szara up early. After breakfast he haunted the steamship offices, willing to leave from any of the Baltic ports-Liepaja, Riga, Tallinn-but there were simply too many people with the same idea. Ships and ferries to Denmark-his first choice-in fact to anywhere on earth, were booked well into 1940. Cabins, deck space, every available inch. Undaunted, he took a train up to Liepaja and tried to bribe his way onto a Norwegian timber freighter, but only a precipitate exit from a waterfront cafe saved him from arrest. And the incident was witnessed-there were two vaguely familiar faces at the same cafe, seen perhaps at the steamship offices. No matter where he went or what he tried it was the same story.
Even at the thieves’ market, where the Pobeda caused low whistles of appreciation but very little financial interest. Sublime realists, Kovno’s thieves-where could one drive? South was occupied Poland, north the Baltic, east the USSR. To the west, the port of Memel had been snaffled up by the Reich in March, Konigsberg was German, now Danzig as well. Szara took what was offered for the Pobeda and fled. Trust the NKVD, he thought, to have eyes and ears at the Kovno thieves’ market.
Attempts at currency conversion got him precisely nowhere. He couldn’t sell his zlotys; German marks were being introduced in Poland and nobody was going there anyhow. The roubles weren’t even supposed to be outside the USSR-those he burned. The French francs, by far the greatest part of his little treasury, would have moved very briskly on the curbside foreign exchange markets, but he refused to part with them; they could be used anywhere and everybody else wanted them for the same reason he did.
The first few days in Kovno Szara was extremely cautious; he knew the Soviet intelligence
He made one friend, an unlikely one, a gentleman known as Mr. Wiggins, who was to be found at the Thomas Cook steamship and travel office. Mr. Wiggins came from the pages of Kipling; he had a waxed mustache, parted his hair in the middle, and wore an old-fashioned collar, formal, uncomfortable, and reassuring. He was, in his way, a terribly decent man who served the Thomas Cook company with conviction and chose to see, in the refugee flood that swept through his office from dawn to dusk, not the flotsam of Europe but a stream of clients. Szara seemed to be one of his favorites. “I am so sorry,” he’d say, very real regret in his voice. “No cancellations today. But you will try tomorrow, I hope. One can’t ever tell. People do change their minds, that’s one thing I have learned in this business.”
Mr. Wiggins, and everyone else, knew that war was coming to Lithuania-or, if not war, at least occupation. The country had been freed of Russian rule in 1918-of Lenin’s dictum “Two steps forward and one step back,” this had been a step back-and had gotten rather to enjoy being a free nation. But its days were numbered and nothing could be done about it. Szara, as always encountering familiar faces, bought the local and foreign newspapers early in the morning and took them back to his lair, in the common kitchen of the apartment, for intensive study, sharing the bad news with his fellow boarders as they drank thin, warmed-up coffee and tried not to say anything compromising.
The future became clearer as the days passed: a great shifting of population was to take place in Estonia and Latvia and simultaneously in Germany. Slavs east, Germans west, it was just about that simple. The Germans, more than a hundred thousand of them, were to be taken aboard Baltic passenger steamers and shipped back to Germany, whence their great-great-grandfathers had migrated hundreds of years earlier. Meanwhile, various Slavic nationalities resident in Germany were headed east to join their long-lost brothers in the Soviet Union. This shuffling of populations was intended to reestablish the racial purity of Germany and to relieve the pressure on German settlers in Eastern Europe. They suffered horribly, according to Goebbels, because they retained their language and customs and dress in the midst of alien cultures and nobody liked them, being principally envious of their success.
But the fact of the migration hung over the breakfast table like a pall: if the Germans were leaving the Baltic states, who was coming?
There was only one candidate nation, and it wasn’t France. To Szara, schooled in a certain way of thinking since 1937, it had even a deeper resonance: if the division of Poland was one of the secret protocols in the Hitler/Stalin pact, what were the others? “Terribly sorry,” said Mr. Wiggins. “There simply isn’t a thing.”
Like all refugees, Szara had too much time to think. He sat on a park bench and smoked a cigarette while the leaves drifted down. He had supposed, in escaping from Poland, that either death or glory awaited him, and so he’d taken his chances. With Maltsaev murdered he really had nothing to lose. But he had never for a moment imagined it might end up as a penurious life spent in dim cafes and shabby apartments, waiting for the Red Army to reach the gates of the city. He thought of trying to put a call through to de Montfried, to ask for help, but what kind of help could he offer? Money? More money that wouldn’t buy what Szara needed? Some of the prosperous Jews in Kovno were spending literally fortunes to buy their way out before the Russians arrived, and there were stories going around that some of them wound up losing everything, forbidden to board steamers by cold-eyed pursers with armed seamen at their side. Other rumors-and Szara knew at least one of them to be true-told of desperate refugees putting to sea in row-boats, sometimes guided by self-proclaimed smugglers, never to be seen again. Drowned? Murdered? Who knew. But the confirming postal card never arrived in Kovno and friends and accomplices could draw only one conclusion from that.
In the end, Szara realized that the trap opened in only one direction and he determined to try it.
“From Hamburg? Copenhagen from Hamburg, you say?” Mr. Wiggins, for just an instant, permitted himself to be startled. Then he cleared his throat, once again the traveler’s perfect servant. “No trouble at all, I’d think. Plenty of room. First-class cabin, if you like. Shall I book?”
It should have worked.
There were, of course, improvisations, as there had to be, but he managed those well enough and, in the
