Kingdom of Shadows

Morath gave him the numbers-lean, shorter than average.

“Eyes?”

“Gray. The hair is blond.”

“Identifying marks?”

“None.”

“Profession?”

“Student.”

The photograph was put away. The art dealer turned a page of the newspaper to reveal an envelope. “Take this to the washroom down the hall. Put seventeen hundred and fifty francs in here, tuck the newspaper under your arm, and leave the museum. Use the exit on the rue Coligny. Stand on the top step and wait for a few minutes. Then, tomorrow at noon, go back there. You’ll see somebody you recognize, follow that person, and the exchange will be made someplace where you can have a good look at what you’re buying.”

Morath did as he was told-counted hundred-franc notes into the envelope, then waited at the entrance. Ten minutes later, a woman waved and came toward him, smiling, trotting up the museum steps. She was well dressed, wore pearl earrings and white gloves. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, slid the newspaper from beneath his arm, and left in a waiting taxi.

The night before the train.

It had become something of a tradition for Nicky and Cara, a Kama Sutra evening- farewell my love, something to remember. They sat around the bedroom in candlelight and drank a bottle of wine. Cara wore black underwear, Morath a dressing gown. Sometimes they played records-Morath owned two kinds, Ellington and Lee Wiley-or listened to “les beeg bands” on the radio. One night they’d journeyed up to Pigalle, where Cara waited in a taxi while Morath bought picture books. Then they’d hurried back to the avenue Bourdonnais and looked at the pictures. Sepia couples, trios, quartets, heavy women with wide hips and sweet smiles, the book printed in Sofia.

Cara teased him, sometimes, with Tales of the Convent School. She’d spent three years in such a place, on a grand estate outside Buenos Aires. “It was just as you would suppose, Nicky,” she’d say, a little breathless and wide-eyed. “All these girls, beauty of every type. Dark. Fair. Passionate, shy, some of them so naive they knew, nothing, not even what to touch. And all of them locked up together at night. Imagine!”

He did.

But, closer to the truth, he suspected, were the daylight recollections of “cold hands and smelly feet” and the diabolical nuns who forced them to learn, among other things, French. It was the only language she and Morath had in common, but Cara couldn’t forgive. “God, how they terrified us,” she’d say. Would clap her hands-as the teaching nun apparently did-and sing out, “Traduction, les jeunes filles!” Next they would be confronted by some unfathomable horror, a grammar monster, and allowed only five minutes for translation.

“I remember once,” Cara told him, “who was it? Sister Modeste. She wrote on the board: What if they should never have united themselves in that, over there?” Cara had started to laugh, remembering the moment. “Panic! Se joindre, a homicidal verb. It’s much simpler in Spanish. And then my friend Francesca, after the sister wrote out the answer, leaned across the aisle and whispered, ‘Well, I’m certainly glad I know how to say that!’ “

Morath poured out the last of the wine, Cara finished hers, put the glass on the floor and wound herself around him. He kissed her, reached over and undid her bra, she shrugged her shoulders, he tossed it on a chair. Some time later, he hooked a finger in the waistband of her panties and slid them down her legs, slow and easy, until she pointed her feet so he could get them off. He could feel her breath on the side of his face, it always changed at that moment.

Then, for a time, they lay still. She took his hand and held it against her breast-she wouldn’t let him move-as though this was sufficient, no need to go further. He wondered what might be nice to do, his mind wandering idly through the repertoire. Was she thinking about that? Or something else? He loves me? Morath opened his eyes and saw that she was smiling.

All very good to think about, in the morning, cast adrift in the cold world. She didn’t wake up when he left, sleeping with her mouth open, a hand trapped under the pillow. Somehow he could look at her and know she’d made love the night before. He almost dozed, as the train left the empty streets and moved through the countryside. Her tits, her ass, looking up at her, looking down, fucking. She whispered sometimes, talking to herself. He could never actually hear what she was saying.

It was a very slow train, that left at dawn. Going east, it crawled, as if it really didn’t want to get there. It would go through Metz and Saarbrucken, then on to Wurzburg, where passengers could change for the train to Prague, with connections to Brno, to Kosice, and to Uzhorod.

Eastern France, a lost season, not winter, not spring. The sky low and heavy, the wind colder than it should have been, the train crawling through dead, weedy fields.

A pleasant countryside, once upon a time, small farms and villages. Then 1914 came along and war turned it into gray mud. It would never really heal, people said. A few years earlier, when the snow melted, a farmer had come upon what had, evidently, once been a trench, where a squad of French soldiers, heading into battle, had been suddenly buried by the explosion of an enormous artillery shell. Then, with that spring’s thaw, the farmer saw a dozen bayonet points thrust out of the earth, still in marching order.

Morath lit a cigarette and went back to reading-Nicholas Bartha’s Land of the Kazars, published in Hungarian in 1901.

The sovereign stag should not be disturbed in its family affairs. What is a Ruthenian compared with it? Only a peasant. The hunting period lasts two weeks. For this pastime, 70,000 Ruthenians must be doomed to starvation by the army of the officials. The deer and the wild boar destroy the corn, the potatoes and the clover of the Ruthenians (the whole harvest of his tiny lot of half an acre). Their whole yearly work is destroyed. The people sow and the deer of the estate harvest. It is easy to say the peasant should complain. But where and to whom? Those who have the power he sees always together. The village chief, the deputy sheriff, the sheriff, the district judge, the tax- officer, the forester, the steward and the manager, all are men of the same education, of the same social pleasures, and of the same standard. From whom could he hope for justice?

When he’d learned he’d be going up into Ruthenia, he’d borrowed the book from the baroness Frei’s enormous library-purchased by the Baron from universities that fell, after 1918, within the borders of other nations. “Saved from the fire,” he’d say. Morath smiled at the memory of him. A short, fat man with muttonchops who never knew himself just how much money he made with his “schemes.” For Morath’s sixteenth birthday, the Baron had taken him on an “educational ramble” to the casino at Monte Carlo, bought him a pair of diamond cuff links and a cadaverous blonde.

He’d sat by the baron’s side at the chemin de fer table and watched him write, at four in the morning, a check with an alarming number of zeros. Pale but smiling, the baron stood, lit a cigar, winked at Morath, and headed off toward the marble staircase. Ten minutes later, a black-suited fonctionnaire floated to his side, cleared his throat, and said, “The baron Frei has gone into the garden.” Morath hesitated, then stood and went quickly into the casino garden, where the baron was discovered urinating on a rosebush. He would die, ten years later, of a tropical disease contracted in the jungles of Brazil, where he’d gone to buy industrial diamonds.

Morath glanced up at the luggage rack above the seat, making sure of his leather satchel. Inside, a passport he’d received at the Louvre, now sewn into the lining of a wool jacket. Pavlo, Polanyi called the man, a man he said he’d never met. The student. Who had gotten himself into the town of Uzhorod and couldn’t get out. “A favor for a friend,” Polanyi said.

In midafternoon, the train slowed for the Moselle bridges and the station at Metz, the buildings dark with soot from the mills. Most of Morath’s fellow passengers got off-not many people traveling into Germany just then. Morath took a walk on the platform and bought a newspaper. At twilight, the train halted for the French border control. No problem for Morath, officially a resident of France.

Two hours later, the train crossed the frontier at Saarbrucken. No problem there either. The officer who knocked on the door of Morath’s compartment was pleased to see the Hungarian passport. “Welcome to the Reich,” he said. “I know you will enjoy your stay.”

Morath thanked him graciously and tried to settle down for the night. The border station was floodlit a