Dark Star

sneaks off to eat blini when he thinks no one’s looking. You have a French passport, according to the Gestapo teletype. They describe it as ‘valid.’ Use it. Be that Frenchman. But you must alter your appearance as best you can and live the life of a Frenchman-a Frenchman who best not return to France, a Jew from Marseille, mixed up in who knows what unsavory affair. Grow yourself a vulgar little mustache, grease your hair, gain weight. You won’t fool the French; they’ll know you’re a fraud the minute you speak a word. But with luck they’ll take you for nothing more than a creature of the gutter-just not their gutter. Put it about that you lived in Cairo and sold the wrong stocks to the chief of police. There is a bustling world at the margins of society; I’m sure you know it. It hides all sorts of people, it may possibly hide you. Well, what do you think? “

Szara didn’t answer right away. He stared at his hands and finally said, “Maybe.”

“The best deception is the one we ourselves believe in, and that is always the sort of deception that saves our lives,” Von Polanyi said, a bit of the philosopher’s gleam in his eye. “Survive, Herr Szara. I think it’s your gift in this life. Trust in the fact that most people are never very sure of themselves-‘Oh but you do remind me of him,’ they’ll say. You must, however, become the legend you create for yourself, and you may not take vacations from it. For you, perhaps a little job of some sort might make all the difference-something not quite legitimate.”

Szara turned and looked out the window, but nothing had changed; a starless night, the steady rhythm of rain in a forest. Finally he said, “How would we communicate?”

Von Polanyi let the silence rest for a moment; it meant they had reached an understanding, the sort that does not require words. Then he went through the procedures: a postal card to a certain drapery shop, a poste restante return address, then contact. His tone was casual, almost dismissive, implying it was the sort of thing that Szara had done a thousand times before. When he’d finished, Szara said, “And if I simply vanish? “

“We are equals in this affair,” Von Polanyi said easily. “If you don’t want us, Herr Szara, then we don’t want you. It’s just that simple.”

They took him out of Germany in grand style, in a dark green Mercedes driven by a young man barely out of his teens, a naval officer, pink-cheeked, gangling, and endlessly solicitous. Every hour or so he would pull over, wait until the road was clear, then knock delicately on the lid of the trunk and whisper loudly, “All is well?” or some such thing.

All was well enough. Szara lay on a saddle blanket, his valise beside him, surrounded by assorted tack that smelled richly of old leather and horse. They had fed him sumptuously at the inn, a tray left in front of the door bearing poached eggs and buttered bread and jam tarts. And the naval officer-somewhere outside Vienna, he guessed-slipped him half a cold roast duck in a napkin and a bottle of beer. In the horsey-smelling darkness Szara felt a little seasick from the curves but picked at it for form’s sake and drank the beer. There were three stops. Each time he imagined papers being presented to the accompaniment of Hitler salutes and a rough joke and a laugh. By nightfall they were rumbling up the avenues of a city and Szara was let out on a dark street in a pleasant neighborhood. “Welcome to Budapest,” said the young officer. “The stamp is already in your passport. Good luck.” Then he drove away.

He was, in some sense, free.

Jean Bonotte was abroad in the world and lived much as Von Polanyi had suggested he might-in shabby hotels near railroad stations or in the narrow streets by the harbor, where the air smelled like dead fish and diesel oil. He stayed nowhere very long. Joined a restless army of lost souls, men and women without countries, not so very different from his days in Kovno. He stood with them on the long lines for registration at the police stations-“One more week, sir, then out you go”-ate at the same cheap restaurants, sat with them in the parks when the pale winter sun lit up the statue of the national hero. He changed. The cracked mirrors in the numberless hotel rooms told the story. He did not, as Von Polanyi had suggested, gain weight. He lost it, his face lean and haunted beneath his awkward, refugee haircut. He grew a natty mustache and trimmed it to perfection, the last vestige of self-respect in a world that had taken everything else away. A pair of faintly tinted eyeglasses gave him the look of a man who would be sinister if he dared, a weak, frightened man making a miserable pretense of strength. This message was not lost on the predators. Again and again the police of various cities took the little money he had in his pocket, and on two occasions he was beaten up.

The second day in Budapest, when he hadn’t quite got the hang of life in the alleys, a little fellow with a cap down over his eyes and a stub of cigarette stuck to his lip demanded money for entry into a certain neighborhood-or so Szara guessed from his gestures, for he understood not a word of Hungarian. Szara angrily brushed the impeding hand away and the next thing he knew he’d been hit harder than ever before in his life. He barely saw it happen, this dog didn’t growl before it bit. Szara simply found himself lying in the street, ears ringing, blood running in his mouth, as he fumbled for money to offer. Fortunately he’d left his valise in a hotel or it would have been gone forever. The damage, when he saw it, was horrific. Both lips had been split to one side of his mouth, as well as the skin above and below. It healed poorly. A dark red scar remained. In his mismatched jacket and trousers, wearing a shirt bought purposely a size too large so that it stood out around his neck, he already looked like a man whose luck, if he ever had any, had run out a long time ago. The scar drew the eye, confirmed the image. If the NKVD was still hunting for Andre Szara, and he had to assume that they might be, they wouldn’t look for him hiding inside this sad, battered fellow.

Budapest. Belgrade. The Romanian port of Constanta. Salonika, where he sold lottery tickets in the streets of the large, prosperous Jewish community. Athens. Istanbul. The new year of 1940 he welcomed in Sofia, staring at a light bulb on a cord that dangled from the ceiling and thinking of Nadia Tscherova.

As he did every day, sometimes every hour. To the address in Schillerstrasse he sent postcards. Signed B. A would have been for Andre, B was what he was now. She would understand this immediately, he knew. This B was a wealthy sort of cad, traveling about southern Europe on business, who now and then gave a thought to his old girlfriend Nadia who lived in Germany. “The sea is quite lovely,” said B from a town on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. In Bucharest he’d “finally got over a beastly cold.” In Zagreb, where he worked for two old Jewish brothers who had a market stall where they sold used pots and pans, B detected “signs of spring in the air.” I am alive, he told her in this way. I am not in Germany, not in Russia, I am free. But living a life-in Varna, Corfu, Debrecen-that she could not possibly share. “Love always,” said B, mailing his card an hour before he left a city. What love always really meant, the ten thousand words of it, he could only hope she understood. In the ruined beds of a hundred rooms spread across the lost quarters of Europe, her ghost lay with him every night.

When he worked, it was almost always in Yiddish. Even in the Sephardic communities where they spoke Ladino, somebody was sure to know it. In the outdoor markets, in the back streets of almost any city, he found Jews, and they almost always needed something done. He didn’t ask very much, and they’d nod yes with a tight mouth, probably you’ll rob me. It wasn’t exactly charity, just something in the way they were that didn’t like to say no. Maybe he was hungry. He didn’t look strong enough to load or unload wagons but he did it once or twice. Mostly he cleaned up, or ran errands, or sold things. The dented, blackened pots and pans in Zagreb. Secondhand suits in Bucharest. Used dishes, sheets, tools, books-even eyeglasses. “No?” he’d say. “Then try these. Can you see that girl over there? Perfect! That’s silver in those frames-you look ten years younger.” It was easy to pick up-he had to wonder if it hadn’t been there all the time-and it had to be done, a premium for the customer. Who wanted to buy from a stone? In these streets, money was earned and spent in the cheapest coin there was, a whole dinar, a lek or a lev, that you never saw. But life was cheap. He lived on bread and tea, potatoes and onions, cabbage and garlic. A little piece of dried-up meat was a banquet. If it had a rim of fat at the edge, a feast. His skin grew red and rough from being outdoors in the winter, his hands hard as leather. He’d beckon a customer to him confidentially, look both ways to make sure no one was listening, slip a subtle finger beneath a lapel and say, “Listen, you got to buy from me today, you’re not going to anybody else. So make a price, I don’t care, I’m a desperate man.” The owner of a stall that sold buttons and thread said to him in Constanta, “David”-for so he called himself that week-“you’re the best luftmensch I ever had. Maybe you’ll stay awhile.”

He became, that spring, the other kind of luftmensch as well, the man as inconspicuous as air, the operative. Privately, at first, in the way he began to remember his past. It came back like an old love affair, the ashes of his former life a little warmer than he’d thought.

He found himself in Izmir, the old Greek city of Smyrna, now Turkish. Just by the old bazaar, on Kutuphane street, was a restaurant owned by a swarthy little Sephardic lady with shining black eyes. For her he scrubbed pots.