World in Flames

crackling on the frozen sheet, the heavily coated KGB guards coming snappily to attention, rifles at the “present.”

* * *

“You are as foolish as your grandfather, Alexsandra,” Nefski told her. “You see, no matter what the official records show, we have always known your little secret. Oh yes, your grandfather paid his fifteen rubles like a good little boy to change the family name to Russian and thought he’d bought the family protection. I admit, for some, it worked. But you see, we—” he meant the KGB “—here at the local level have always known that you were Jews. And—” said Nefski, his tone magnanimous, “we told no one outside because we wanted to give you a chance. In return, this is how you repay—”

“You told no one outside,” she said, sitting forward, Nefski’s assistant grabbing her hair, pulling her back hard against the wooden chair, “because,” she shouted, undaunted, “you were being bribed not to tell!”

Nefski pouted like a disappointed grandfather. “You see?” He turned to his assistant. “The old man’s grandchildren are not grateful for his sacrifice. The poor old fool changes his name — he knows he can’t change the noses — but the name will help. To make sure, he does not go to synagogue — for seventeen years — to show us he’s sincere.” Nefski walked over, lifting up her chin. “He does this for you. And you despise him.” Nefski let her head drop. “He surrenders his faith and you spit on him.”

“I didn’t spit on him.”

Nefski glanced at his assistant as if he could no longer be bothered with her. “She spits on him. She and her brothers.” As Nefski stood by the window, the sunbeam caught his flat shoulder boards, and Alexsandra could see his red stars vibrant, like spots of blood, the sunbeam slicing the room in two, dust particles dancing madly in the beam, their randomness terrifying her. She didn’t know how much longer she could be strong. She thought of her grandfather, a good man but a compromiser, deluded into thinking he could buy respectability and safety, believing that even if the secret of the family’s origin got out, the very act of changing their name to Russian and not going to the synagogue would speak for itself. She despised Nefski and all those like him. In them, hatred of Jews ran as deep as it had in the Nazis. Gorbachev had not changed that. She remembered the resurgence of nationalism in the republics, all crying for more independence and, along with it, the wildfire of anti-Semitism. Even before that, she remembered the reports coming out of Hungary in the great days of the 1990 liberation, when at the beginning of the first big soccer game in free Hungary, the cry had gone up from the fans: “Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!”

“You and your three brothers,” said Nefski. “You worked in the Khabarovsk munition factory. Dispatch. Correct?”

“Yes,” she said.

“The munitions are checked on the production line — so the logical place for sabotage is in dispatch. You agree?” She didn’t answer.

“Your family worked the night shift. Correct?”

“Everyone worked night shift — sometimes.”

“The midnight-to-dawn shift,” said Nefski. “Before the transport trucks arrive.”

“There are truck pickups all night,” she retorted. “Can you loosen these handcuffs?”

He had gone to the window, where he had been distracted for a moment by watching a driver from one of the red-and-cream-colored trolley cars trying to realign its poles after they had been deflected by a glistening scab of ice. “He’ll need his gloves on for that, Ilya,” Nefski told his assistant, who was still watching Alexsandra. It was a ploy for the colonel to appear unconcerned, his confidence that he would break the prisoner transferring itself to the prisoner.

Nefski lit a cigarette, and soon Alexsandra could smell the strong, pungent Turkish tobacco, the interrogation room filling with swirling brownish smoke. She inhaled as much of it as she could.

“Don’t think the fact that you’ve been fraternizing with our pilots will help you,” Nefski told her, still ostensibly watching the trolley car. Before she could stop herself, Alexsandra had suddenly looked up, and Ilya knew the information was correct, and it all slid into place for him. She had been buying protection from officialdom through her pilots. Or so she had thought.

“Well, well,” said Ilya. “And who would your pilot be, Alexsandra?”

She fell silent again.

“Maj. Sergei Marchenko,” said Nefski, without turning around.

Nefski told Ilya to inform the guards it was time for her meal. Ilya lifted the phone and advised the guardhouse. As he put the phone back down, he had new respect for Nefski. Marchenko had obviously come all this way on a twofold mission: as Moscow’s heavy — to “urge” the locals to get to the bottom of the sabotage — but also to show for the record that he himself had interrogated the girl. It had been so brief that in Ilya’s eyes, it could hardly be called an interrogation at all, but it would allow the general to say he’d personally questioned her, showing no favoritism, even though his son had been seen in her company.

What his assistant admired most about Nefski was that while it would have been so easy for Nefski to do a deal, to protect the Marchenko name, he had stood firm. If the Jew had thought she’d compromised the KGB by making it with the son of one of the Supreme Soviet commanders, then she had made a serious mistake.

The phone jangled. Ilya answered it and, cupping the mouthpiece, told Nefski that the kitchen said her meal was ready. Should they bring it up to the office?

Alexsandra looked surprised. Since when did the KGB provide room service?

“It depends,” answered Nefski. He beckoned to her, as a father to a child. “Come,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” And she walked slowly toward the window.

Down below in the high-wall quadrangle of the prison’s exercise yard, she saw her three brothers: Ivan, Alexander, and Myshka—”little Michael”—who had just turned twelve. “Little Mike” because he so loved bears and, like the Yakuts, had always believed that if you shot one of the great beasts, save in self-defense, God would punish you. He looked so tiny, the drab khaki prison jacket and bulky trousers making him look even more diminutive. A guard stood near them, an officer, from his shoulder boards. A moment later she saw a squad of nine men in gray infantry caps, their earflaps down, which somehow made it even more ominous, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, their boots crackling on the frozen snow, and the banana-shaped magazines of the rifles painted in winter-white camouflage pattern. Her attention to such details was an escape from what she knew was happening. Either the three brothers had not seen her or had been told not to look up, trudging out in the foot-deep snow, looking straight ahead, hands behind their backs, making them look strangely like holy men. It was only when they stopped and were told to face the wall that she saw they were handcuffed. Ivan, the oldest, and Alexander, the next oldest, had marched out together but not in unison, their footprints scattered. Myshka, on the other hand, had taken pains not to disturb the snow but to walk as precisely as he could in his older brothers’ footsteps. He had always believed it was bad luck to be the first to disturb virgin snow.

“Who told you to do it?” Nefski asked calmly, his arm about her rigid shoulders. He could feel her trembling; her arms and neck muscles were going into spasm, her skin covered in goose pimples. Nefski shifted his arm down about her, gently rubbing her buttock. “There’s no need for all this, eh, Alexsandra? It only causes trouble for everyone.”

She lowered her gaze to the windowsill. Nefski told her brusquely to look up, ordered her to look out through the frost-edged glass, down at the prison yard, at her three brothers, and she knew Nefski had done such things many times before. The officer was now pushing the brothers against the wall, his boots kicking theirs as far apart as possible.

“Well?” Nefski asked her. “Tell me a story, Alexsandra. A true story.” Her face was white as the snow, and taut, the blood draining from her cheeks.

“You look kosher,” he laughed. “Well—?” The officer down in the quad looked up at Nefski, and the colonel lifted his finger. The officer roughly jerked Michael away from the wall, turned him about, and ordered him to look up. He seemed confused.

“Well, I’m waiting,” Nefski told her.

Tears were streaming down her face.

“The oldest one,” Nefski said. “Ivan. Did he—?” She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t.

“You see,” he told her, “you have brought it to this. You. You and your brothers. Traitorous Jews. All of you. But I will spare them, Alexsandra — if you tell me what I wish to know.”

“Neskazhi im!”—”Don’t tell them!” It was Ivan screaming up at her, his voice barely audible from behind the high, closed windows. The officer shouted, his voice echoing from the stone walls. A