The Polish Officer

rubbed it into de Milja’s face and hands.

Then they gave him a shovel to carry and walked him through the wire gates to the dock area. A German customs official, glancing at de Milja’s pass to the port, held himself as far away as possible, his lip curled with distaste.

They joined other Polish stevedores working at two cranes loading coal into the hold of the Enkoping. The Swedish seamen ignored them, smoking pipes and leaning on the rail. De Milja had a bag on a leather string around his neck, it held microfilm, a watch, some chocolate, and a small bottle of water. Casually, one of the workers climbed down a rope ladder into the hold. De Milja followed him. “We’re not going to fill this all the way up—we’ll leave you a little space,” said the man. “Just be sure you stay well to one side. All right?”

“Yes.”

Above them, a crane engine chugged and whined. “Good luck,” the man said. “Give the Swedish girls a kiss for me.” They shook hands and the man climbed back up the rope ladder. An avalanche of coal followed. De Milja pressed his back against the iron plates of the hold as it cascaded through the hatch and grew into a mountain. When it stopped, there were only three feet between de Milja and the decking above him as he lay on the lumpy coal. The hatch cover was fitted on, the screws squeaked as it was tightened down. Darkness was complete. Later in the morning he heard commands shouted in German and the barking of dogs as the ship was searched. Then the engines rumbled to life, and the freighter wallowed out into the Baltic.

It was seventy hours to Stockholm.

The deck plates sweated with condensation and acid coal-water dripped steadily and soaked him to the skin. At first, discomfort kept him alert—he turned and twisted, wet, miserable, and mad. But that didn’t last. With the steady motion of the ship and the beat of the engines, the black darkness and the cold, dead air, de Milja fell into a kind of stupor. It was not unpleasant. Rather the reverse. He drifted down through his life, watched certain moments as they floated by. He saw dead leaves on a path in the forest in the Volhynia, his feet kicking them as he walked along, a little girl who’d come to stay with a neighbor that summer, a kiss, more than that. It made them giggle.

This silly stuff—what did adults see in it? He had no idea he was dying, not for the longest time. Heavy snow fell past a window in Warsaw, Madame Kuester looked over her shoulder into a mirror, a red mark where he’d held her too tightly. He said he was sorry, she shrugged, her expression reflective, bittersweet. It must be time to sleep, he thought, because at last he did not feel the cold. He was relieved. His wife jammed her hands in the pockets of her coat, stood at the shore of the lake as evening came on. She looked a little rueful, that was all. If you stood far enough back, the world wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t anything. In the end, you were a little sad at what went on. Really, it ought to be better. Casement window at the manor house, the first gleam of the sun at the rim of a hill, two dogs trotting out of the forest onto the wet grass of the lawn. Finally, he became aware, for a moment, of what was happening. He did what he could—took long, deep breaths. Coal, he thought. Sulfur, carbon monoxide, confined space, red blood cells. It was all very confusing. One painful stab of regret: a crumpled body, Polish stowaway found on a mound of coal in a Swedish freighter. Captain Alexander de Milja hated that idea, simply one more senseless, muted death in time of war. He lay on his back at the foot of a poplar tree and looked up as the wind rattled the little leaves.

Every summer had one perfect day.

The green sea rose under the ship, held a moment, then fell away. Sometime later, the engines slowed, the iron walls shuddered, a tug tied on and nudged the Enkoping against its pier. The rusty bolts squeaked as they were backed off, the hatch cover swung into the air, and a crane began to scoop the coal away. Later, under the dock lights, too bright against the pale evening sky of Sweden, a booming voice shouted recognition signals down into the echoing hold.

Was the third of June, 1940.

A springtime day in Paris and, last days being tricky this way, especially breezy and soft. No, Lezhev told himself, don’t be seduced. Le printemps, like every other spectacle of the French theater of life, was an illusion, a fraud. That was absurd, of course, and Lezhev knew it; spring was spring. But he chose to indulge himself in a little unjust spite, then smiled acidly at his intransigence. On this day above all he could say whatever he wanted—nobody contradicts a man writing a suicide note.

Stationed at the window of the smelly little garret room, he had watched spring come to the Parisian slums: to the tiny, dark street covered in horseshit and dire juices, to the fat women who stood with folded arms in doorways waiting to be insulted, and to the girls. Such girls. It would take the words of a Blok, a Bely, a Lezhev, to do them justice. “In Lights of a Lost Evening, the tenth volume from Boris Lezhev, this fierce apostle of Yesenin reveals a more tender, more lyric voice than usual. In the title work, for instance, Lezhev . . .”

Now, there you had girls. Lithe, momentary, a flash in the corner of your eye, then gone. Nothing good lasted in the world, Lezhev thought, that’s why you needed poets to grab it as it went flying by.

Well, now and then there was something good. For example, Genya Beilis. Genya. Yes, he thought, Genya. Lithe and momentary? Hah! You could never call her a girl. Girls had no such secret valleys and mysterious creases, girls did not contrive to occupy the nether mind quite as Genya did. He would miss her, up on his cloud or wherever he was going. Miss her terribly. She’d been his salvation—good thing in a bad life—the last few years of exile. Sometimes his lover, sometimes not, indomitable friend always, his brilliant bitch of a hundred breeds.

It was true, she was an extraordinary mixture. Her father, the publisher Max Beilis, was Russian, Jewish, and French. Her mother was Spanish, with some ancient Arab blood from Cordoba. Also an Irish grandmother on the maternal side. Lord, he thought, what wasn’t she? You could feel the racial rivers that flowed through her. She had strange skin; sallow, olive, smooth and taut. Hair thick, dark, with reddish tints in full sunlight, and long enough so that she twined and wound it in complicated ways. Strong eyebrows, supple waist, sexy hands, eyes sharp with intelligence, eyes that saw through people. —You were right to be a little afraid of Genya Beilis. The idea of some great, naked, flabby whale of a German hovering above her made Lezhev sick with rage, he would rise up and—

No, he wouldn’t. The German panzer divisions were racing south from Belgium, French troops surrendering or running away as they advanced, the police were on the verge of arresting him—the closer the Germans got, the worse for all the Lezhevs of Paris. So he wasn’t going to be anybody’s protector, not even his own.

Fact was, they had finally hounded him to the edge of the grave. The Bolsheviks had chased him out of St. Petersburg in 1922. He fled to Odessa. They ran him out of there in 1925. So he’d gone to Germany. Written for the emigre magazines, played some emigre politics. 1933, in came Hitler, out went Lezhev. So, off to sad Brussels; earnest, neutral Belgium. He hadn’t much left by then—every time he ran, things flew away: clothes, money, poems, friends. 1936, off to fight in Spain—the NKVD almost got him there, he had to walk over the Pyrenees at night, in snow up to his knees. He barely made it into LiberteEgalite-and-Fraternite, where they threw him in prison.

Amazing, Lezhev thought, the things he’d done. As a St. Petersburg teenager in 1917, he’d torn a czarist policeman’s club from his hands and cracked him on the nose. Stayed up all night, haunting the dark alleyways of the city and its women: talking to the whores, screwing the intellectuals. He saw a man executed with a leather cord as he sat in a kitchen chair at a busy intersection. He was a worker of the world. For a year or two, anyhow. Worked with a pen, which was mightier than the sword, he discovered, only when approximately the same size. He’d run from raging fires, crazed mobs, brawling Nazis, rumbling tanks, and the security police of at least six nations.

My valise, dark-eyes. Quick. It’s under your bed. There’s nothing in there, and nothing to pack, but I take it along.

So, at last, after all that, who got him? The ronds-de-cuir. French bureaucrats, laboring all day on wooden chairs, were prone to a shine on the seat of the pants. The antidote was a chair-sized round of leather—rond de cuir—carried daily to work, placed ever so precisely beneath the clerical behind. The makers of Parisian slang were not slow to see the possibilities in this. To Lezhev, the ronds-de-cuir seemed, at first, a doleful but inevitable feature of French life but, in time, he came to understand them in a different way. Fussy, niggling, insatiable, they had some kinship with the infamous