The Quest for Anna Klein

usurped, no possession so justly earned it cannot be expropriated, no part of the body so private it cannot be violated, no particle of one’s identity so established that it cannot be erased.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“That, Paul,” Danforth said, “was Stalinism.”

It was a dramatic litany and Danforth had delivered it dramatically, clearly determined that I should feel the fist that had closed around the many millions, and which I surely did. Then he suddenly said, “But freedom is nothing, Paul. Or at least, it can come to feel like nothing when all you want is to survive.” He watched me a moment, letting what he’d just said sink in. Then, with a glance toward the other people in the bar to assure himself they were no longer listening, he added, “Cutlets. I will always remember that it was written in Russian, English, French, and German.”

“Written where?” I asked.

“On the side of the chernyi voron,” Danforth answered. “How would I translate that? The ... black raven. It was black, that’s for sure. A black delivery van. They ran back and forth from Lubyanka to the railway station. Sometimes they ‘delivered’ bread, sometimes meat, sometimes fruit and vegetables. The one they shoved me into had Moscow Cutlets painted on the sides.” He laughed. “Not much of a disguise, but in Moscow it didn’t matter if people knew what was in those vans. Nothing could be done about it anyway.”

“Did you have any idea where you were going?” I asked.

“No,” Danforth answered. “For all I knew I was being taken to some other prison in the area. Then the door opened, and there it was. The train.”

They were rushed out of the stifling van, lined up, counted, and then herded into the waiting railway cars, Danforth told me. Though he had not known it then, he was now one of millions of zeks, slang he’d later learned meant “prison laborers.” Once in the car, he’d elbowed his way toward the far side where he could look through one of the slats as the train pulled away. Railroad workers stood on the side of the tracks, giving signals, waving the train forward. From the cast of their shadows as the train steamed past them, he knew that he was headed east.

Over the next hours, long miles of greenery swept by, punctuated only by glimpses, first of cities, then of towns, the towns becoming smaller and shuttling by more quickly as the train surged on. The men huddled in the darkness around him wept like small children, which Danforth found surprising until he realized that they were bereft because they’d been snatched from wives and children, mothers and fathers, deeper attachments than he had or, he feared, would ever have.

Within hours the first cries for water began, and once begun they continued without letup until at last the train stopped and buckets of water were passed; a few hours later, there were cries of agony as these same men now needed to pass the water they’d drunk. He would hear of trains that had holes in the floor for such relief, but this train had had no such accommodation, and so the men had finally wet themselves, and the floor of the car was soon soaked and slippery, the air smelling — at last overwhelmingly — of urine.

He guessed that the journey to the first transit camp had taken a little over twenty-four hours, and once out of the train, he and the zeks had been marched to a small provincial prison, where he’d stayed for nearly a week. There he’d been interrogated again and again, almost always being asked the same questions, and he came to realize that the powers that be believed that his search for Anna Klein was a ruse, that he was actually searching for something else, either a man or some government secret they were careful not to reveal. This wasn’t true, of course, as Danforth labored to assure them, but each time he denied that he was an American agent involved in anti-Soviet activities, there were shouted threats, blows, endless hours of enforced sleeplessness. Then, without warning, another train, another prison, another series of interrogations, more threats, blows, sleeplessness.

Again and again, he repeated the same cycle: a train, a journey, a different prison, the same interrogation, the same threats, blows, sleeplessness. There were so many prisons the exact number of them began to blur in Danforth’s mind, though the implication of that number never had. For this was but one rail line, as he knew, and if it was like the others that stretched into the wastes, then Russia’s eastern landscape sprouted prisons like the American midlands sprouted farms.

The greenery of the country entirely disappeared, first into the graying rain, then into a grayer sleet, and finally into a white so bright it throbbed from the fields it covered. The cold of these last days in transit was like nothing Danforth had ever felt. By then the ragged ranks had thinned, and so there was less body heat, making him somehow resent the ones who’d died and been pulled off the train, as if their weakness had been a betrayal to those who lived on.

But on each leg of this long journey, his Russian improved. He gathered idioms and slang and the innumerable vulgarities to describe sex and bodily functions that the Russian language possessed, as well as the bitter cynicisms to which the Russian mind seemed prone. He met priests, Orthodox Jews, atheists. He met men who believed in nothing and men who still believed in the very cause that had enslaved them, and in every transit camp he found some new, rebellious feature of a people he’d thought utterly flattened by oppression. He saw it in the way a loaf of bread or slab of smoked bacon would sail from a window into the prisoners’ ranks. He saw it in the efforts of local doctors to attend to their wounds with what few medical supplies they had. He saw it in a thousand sympathetic glances, soft nods, and, in one case, in the way an old man from the Great War had taken off his frayed cap as another round of zeks were driven past him, taken off his cap and held it over his breast as if these dazed, bedraggled men were the heroes of Mother Russia.

With his improving Russian, Danforth began to make inquiries in the various camps and prisons in which he found himself, always in the hope of uncovering some little thread of information about an American woman whom he described as being in her midthirties, a dark woman who was still or might once have been quite pretty, a woman who spoke many languages.

In response to these inquiries, a thousand sparks flew from what Danforth called “the great rumor mill of the Gulag.” He heard of a cruel interrogator who’d worked at an American camp somewhere near Dzhezkazgan, a lead he followed assiduously over the years, only to learn that no such camp had ever existed. He heard of a “very pretty woman” who’d served as a translator at Butyka, a woman known for her ruthlessness who he later learned was tall and blond. Neither of these had been Anna, of course, but even though they were false rumors, they engraved an image of her on Danforth’s mind as a woman who had survived and now served the enemy she had once despised, who carried out their interrogations and roamed their prison corridors, laughed with Stalin’s other minions, and smoked cigarettes with them in their communal dining rooms, and perhaps even from time to time chose some fat, drunken official who might be useful to her, went to his room, and gave herself to him as she had once given herself to Danforth.