Dark Star

you.

Still, they agreed, one had to hope. Humans survived the most awful catastrophes: walked away from the inferno with singed hair, missed the train that went over the cliff. Both felt they might just be owed a little luck from whatever divine agency kept those books. There were still places on earth where one could get irredeemably lost, it only took finding one. And how exactly did one go about herding sheep? Could it be all that difficult?

In the end, they refused to let the future ruin their day, which made them heroes of a low order but heroes nonetheless. And they had the past to fall back on, realizing almost immediately that the sorts of lives they’d led created, if they did nothing else, long and luxuriant anecdotes. They discovered that they had, on several occasions, been within minutes of meeting each other, in Moscow, in Leningrad. Had been in the same apartments, known some of the same people; their trails through the snowy forest crossed and re-crossed. What would have happened had they met? Everything? Nothing? Certainly something, they decided.

They weren’t very hungry, as the day wore on toward evening, and just after dark they toyed with a light supper. Their conversation was somewhat forced, slightly tense, in the dining room with a ticking grandfather clock that made every silence ring with melodrama. Nadia said, “If it weren’t for the general’s feelings, I’d have poured soup in that monster long ago.”

They retired early. He, for form’s sake, to a guest room, she to her blue and white sanctuary. When the noise in the kitchen subsided and the house grew quiet, Szara climbed the marble staircase.

They lit a fire, turned out the lights, played the Victrola, drank wine.

She surprised him. The way she moved through the daily world, fine boned, on air, made her seem insubstantial-one could hold her only cautiously. But it wasn’t so. With a dancer’s pointed toe she kicked the bottoms of her silk pajamas fully across the room, then melted out of the top and posed for him. She was full and lovely and curved, with smooth, taut skin colored by firelight. For a moment, he simply looked at her. He’d supposed their joined spirits might float to some unimagined romantic height, but now he fell on her like a wolf and she yelped like a teenager.

And what a good time they had.

Much later, when they simply hadn’t the strength to go on any longer, they fell sound asleep, still pressed together, the sheets tangled around their legs, drifting away in the midst of the most charming and vile conversation.

It was not yet dawn when they woke up. He touched her, she flexed with pleasure and sighed, a pale shape in the darkness, eyes closed, mouth open, breasts rising and falling. Suddenly he understood that sometimes there was no reaching the end of desire, no satisfying it. They simply would not, he realized, ever quite get enough of each other. Nonetheless, he thought, they could hope for the best. They could try. They could make a beginning.

He could have crawled out of bed at dawn and set out into the cold world, but he didn’t. They stole another day, and this time they didn’t wait for nightfall. They disappeared in the middle of the afternoon. At eight in the evening a servant set out a tureen of soup at the long table in the dining room with the ticking grandfather clock. But nobody showed up. And at eight-thirty she took it away.

He left in the middle of the following day. A taxi was called. They stood in the vestibule together until it came. “Please don’t cry,” he said.

“I won’t,” she promised, tears running everywhere.

The taxi honked twice and he left.

The Gestapo had him an hour later. He never even got out of Berlin. To his credit, he sensed it. He did not enter the Lehrter Bahnhof immediately but walked the streets for a while, trying to calm himself down-simply another traveler, a little bored, a little harassed, a man who had to take the train up to Hamburg on some prosaic and vastly uninteresting errand.

But the passport control people at the staircase that led down to the platform didn’t care what he looked like. A Berlin policeman took the Kringen identity papers and compared them to a typewritten list, looked over Szara’s shoulder, made a gesture of the eyes and a motion of the head, and two men in suits closed in on either side of him. Very correct they were: “Can you come with us for a moment, please? ” Only will power and raw pride kept him from collapsing to his knees, and he felt the sweat break out at the roots of his hair. One of the men relieved him of his valise, the other frisked him, then they marched him, to the great interest of the passing crowd, toward the station police post. He wobbled once and one of the detectives caught him by the arm. They took him down a long corridor and through an unmarked door where a uniformed SS officer was sitting behind a desk, a file open in front of him. Reading upside down, Szara could see a long list of names and descriptive paragraphs on a yellow sheet of teletype paper. “Stand at attention,” the man said coldly.

Szara did as he was told. The officer concentrated on the Kringen identity documents and left him to stew, the standard procedure. “Herr Kringen?” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you use to obliterate the birthdate? Lemon? Oxalic acid? Not urine-I hope for your sake I haven’t touched your piss.”

“Lemon, sir,” Szara said.

The officer nodded. He tapped the Kringen name with the eraser at the end of a pencil. “The actual Herr Kringen went into the Lutheran hospital to have a bunion removed from his foot. And while this poor man lay in a hospital bed, some little sneak made off with his papers. Was that you?”

“No, sir. It wasn’t me. I bought the passport from an orderly at the hospital.”

The officer nodded. “And you are?”

“My name is Bonotte, Jean Bonotte. I am of French nationality. My passport is hidden in the flap of my jacket.”

“Give it to me.”

Szara got his jacket off and with shaking hands tried to rip the seam open. It took a long time but the heavy thread finally gave. He placed the passport on the desk and put his jacket back on, the torn flap of lining hanging ludicrously down the back of his leg. Behind him, one of the detectives snickered. The officer picked up the telephone and requested a number. He turned the pages of the Bonotte passport with the pencil eraser. While he waited for his call to go through he said, “What reason have you for your visit to Germany? A mad impulse?” The detective laughed.

“I fled Poland, but could not find a way out of Lithuania.”

“So you obtained Kringen’s passport and came out with the Volksdeutsch from Riga?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well aren’t you clever,” said the officer, looking at Szara carefully for the first time and meaning what he said.

They drove him to Columbia House, Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, and locked him in an isolation cell. Small but clean, a cot and a bucket, a heavily grilled window nine feet up and a light bulb in the ceiling. They weren’t entirely sure what they had, he guessed, not the sort of poor fish at whom they screamed, Spy! You will be executed! but, just maybe, the real thing, and that had to be handled at length and in a very different way. Perhaps with delicacy, perhaps not. If the decision was “not,” the next step was no secret. Szara could hear the screaming from distant parts of the building, and it sickened him and weakened his will to resist, as it was intended to.

Abramov, with evident distaste, had covered this possibility during the time of his training: nobody resists torture, don’t try. Tell them what you have to, it’s our job to keep you from knowing too much. There are two goals you must try to accomplish: one, the less you say in the first forty-eight hours the better-that gives us time-but in any event, feed them the least important material you can. You are just a low-level opportunist forced to work for the government-contemptible, but not important. And two, try to signal us that you’ve been caught. That’s crucial. We can protect a network from damage, close down everything you touched, and rescue your associates while we work through channels to get you free or at least to keep you from harm. The signals will change based on circumstance: a technical variation in wireless/telegraphy or simply vanishing from our sight while working in hostile territory. But there will certainly be a signal established and an appropriate way to deliver it. Remember, in this