Dark Star

It turned his hands and forearms crimson, and he earned almost nothing, but she was a provident feeder-he lived on lamb and pine nuts and groats, dried figs and apricots-and she had an unused room in the cellar with a dusty straw mattress on an old door that he could sleep on. There was even a table, the edges marked by forgotten cigarettes, and a kerosene lamp. Through a half window at sidewalk level he could see Kadifekele, the Velvet Fortress, perched on top of its hill. He had a strong, intuitive feeling about the room: a writer had worked there. The old lady’s son was something or other in the administrative section of the Izmir police, and for the first time in his travels Jean Bonotte had an actual work permit, though not under that name. “Write down,” she’d said. And he’d laboriously scrawled some concoction on a scrap of paper. A week later, a permit. “My son!” she explained of the miracle. Fortune smiled. Izmir wasn’t a bad place: a sharp wind blew across the docks off the Aegean, the harbor was full of tramp freighters. The people were reserved, slightly inward, perhaps because, not so many years earlier, the blood had literally run in the streets here, Turks slaughtering Greeks, and the town couldn’t quite put it in the past.

From his meager wages Szara bought a notebook and pencils and, once the huge iron pots were dried and put away for the evening, began to write. This was night writing, writing for himself, with no audience in mind. It was March, a good writer’s month, Szara felt, because writers like abundant weather-thunder and lightning, wind and rain, surging spring skies-not particularly caring if it’s good or bad just so there’s a lot going on. He wrote about his life, his recent life. It was hard, he was surprised at the emotional aches and pains it cost him, but evidently he wanted to do it because he didn’t stop. On the near horizon was what Von Polanyi had said about the executions of the 1936 purge and the secret courtship of Hitler and Stalin. But it was life he wrote about, not so much politics. Izmir, he sensed, was not a place where you would want to write about politics. It was almost too old for that, had seen too much, lived somewhere beyond those kinds of explanations-here and there the marble corner of a tumbled-down ruin had been worn to a curve by the incessant brush of clothing as people walked by for centuries. In such a place, the right thing to do was archaeology: archaeology didn’t have to be about the ancient world, he discovered; you could scrape the dirt away and sift the sand of more recent times. The point was to preserve, not to lose what had happened.

Working down through his life, beneath the common anarchy of existence, the misadventures, dreams, and passions, he found pattern. Rather, two patterns. If every life is a novel, his had two plots. He discovered he had, often at the same moment, both served and resisted the Hitler/Stalin affaire, had worked for two masters, both in the Soviet special services. Bloch and Abramov.

What General Bloch had done was both daring and ingenious and, Szara came to believe, driven by desperation. He knew what was going on, he fought against it. And in this war Andre Szara had been one of his soldiers. To Szara, the depth of the operation and his part in it became clear only when he applied the doctrine of chronology-the exercise in a cellar in Izmir no different than the one he’d undertaken in a hotel room in Prague, when he’d worked through DUBOK‘s, Stalin’s, history of betrayal.

Bloch had become aware of Stalin’s move toward Hitler sometime before 1937 and had determined to prevent the alliance by naming Stalin as an Okhrana agent. He had somehow broken into Abramov’s communication system and ordered Szara aboard the steamship taking Grigory Khelidze from Piraeus to Ostend. Khelidze was on his way to Czechoslovakia to collect the Okhrana file hidden sometime earlier in a left-luggage room in a Prague railway station. Szara had induced Khelidze to reveal his whereabouts in Ostend, then Bloch had ordered the courier’s assassination. Then he’d used Szara as a substitute courier, used him to uncover Stalin’s crimes in the Bolshevik underground, used him to publish the history of that treason in an American magazine. It had almost worked. The Georgian khvost, however, had somehow learned of the operation and prevented publication from taking place.

Here the chronology was productive: it revealed a mirror image of this event.

Szara, while in Prague, had written a story for Pravda about the agony of the Czech people as Hitler closed in for the kill. That story was suppressed. It was not in Hitler’s interest for it to appear- evidently it was not in Stalin’s interest, either. Ultimately, Britain and France were blamed for the loss of Czechoslovakia at Munich but, in the very same instant, Stalin and the Red Army stood quietly aside and permitted it to happen.

Abramov had then protected Szara, his old friend and sometime operative, by absorbing him directly into the intelligence apparat- what better place to hide from the devil than in a remote corner of hell? In Paris, Szara had become Baumann’s case officer, in fact no more than one end of a secret communication system between Hitler and Stalin.

Then, a chance event that neither the Gestapo nor the NKVD could have foreseen.

The Paris OPAL network had broken through the screen of secrecy hiding their ongoing cooperation. Through Seneschal’s unwitting agent, the secretary Lotte Huber, Szara had discovered a meeting between Dershani, Khelidze’s superior in the Georgian khvost, and Uhlrich, a known SD officer, and photographed it. Seneschal had been murdered almost immediately because of this and Abramov had died for it a year or so later. Abramov, Szara now believed, had changed sides, attempted to use the photographs as leverage, and they had eliminated him as he attempted to escape.

There was more: Molotov’s replacing Litvinov as the Hitler/ Stalin courtship approached its moment of revelation, and Hitler’s public approval of the change. Even Alexander Blok’s poem “The Scythians” seemed to have played a part in the operation. Here, the analysis depended on audience. If, on the night of the actor Poziny’s recitation, the message was to the British and French diplomats in attendance, the poem served as a plea and a warning, which was how Blok had meant it: “We ourselves henceforth shall be no shield of yours we ourselves henceforth will enter no battle … Nor shall we stir when the ferocious Hun rifles the pockets of the dead / Burns down cities …” To a German ear, however, at that particular moment in history, it might have meant something very different, something not unlike an invitation, from Stalin to Hitler, to do those very things. To bend Blok’s poem to such a purpose was, to Szara, a particularly evil act, and it touched him with horror as nothing else had. He himself knew better, that compared to other evils the abuse of a poet’s words oughtn’t to have meant that much, yet somehow it did. Somehow it opened a door to what now happened in Europe, where, with Stalin’s concurrence, the words became reality. The horror took place.

Late at night in Izmir, the spring wind blowing hard off the Aegean Sea, Andre Szara stared sightlessly out the window above his writing table. He would never understand the mysteries that these two peoples, the Russian and the German, shared between them. Blok had tried as only a poet could, applying images, the inexplicable chemistry at the borders of language. Szara would not presume to go deeper. He could see where answers might be hidden-somewhere in what happened between him and Marta Haecht, somewhere in what happened between Nadia Tscherova and her German general, somewhere in what happened between Hitler and Stalin, somewhere in what happened, even, between himself and Von Polanyi. Trust and suspicion, love and hate, magnetism and repulsion. Was there a magic formula that drew all this together? He could not find it, not that night in Izmir he couldn’t. Perhaps he never would.

He could think only of Bloch’s final act in the drama, in which he had maneuvered Szara into the reach of de Montfried. It was as though Bloch, confronted by the certainty of failure-Beria ascendant, the murderers securely in power, a pact made with the devil- had sent one last message: save lives. Szara had done the best he could. And then the reality of circumstance had intervened.

And, soon enough, the reality of circumstance was that choices had to be made.

Szara filled a score of notebooks before he was done: messy, swollen things, pages front and back covered- entirely in disregard of the ruled lines-in penciled Russian scrawl, erasures, scribbled-out words from moments when the great impatience was on him. In time, he began to live for the night, for the hours when the people of his life would come alive and speak. His memory astonished him: what Abramov said, the way Marta would put things, Vainshtok’s sarcasms-and what may have been the final gesture of his life, which Szara never really did come to understand.

The potwasher’s job took its toll. The skin of his hands dried out, cracked, and sometimes bled-occasionally he left a blood-spore at the margin where his hand rested as he wrote. Let them figure that out! he thought. Them? He didn’t know who that was. Russians had become secret writers, in camps and basements and cells and a thousand forms of exile, and they could only imagine secret readers. He was no different.

Otherwise, the world was unreasonably kind to him. The old lady developed a theory that his aptitude lay beyond scouring burned buckwheat crusts from the sides of pots and insisted, in the primitive one-word-at-a-time