The Quest for Anna Klein

The last transport took him through villages with names that were no longer Russian, though whether he’d entered the lands of the Kazakhs, Tajik, or Uzbeks remained unclear. But even the Eurasian steppes were not far enough; other trains and finally a steamboat took him farther and farther to the east until it seemed he had been transported, one camp at a time, to the end of the earth.

“Then my final convoy stopped,” Danforth said, “and I was taken off a truck loaded with forty or so other zeks and marched through some thick woods to a place — according to my own grim fatalism — that surely had been determined long ago.”

Though he could not have known it, he was now a hundred miles up what would later be known as the Road of Skulls, a frozen labor camp that had been cut out of a forest whose trees he would fell and chop and load onto creaking lorries, cord after endless cord of wood hauled away on trucks that groaned like weary cattle as they made their way into the Arctic night. He would hew with axes that seemed little improved since the Stone Age, and his beard would grow and his body would thin and his eyes would shrink back into his skull; with each glimpse of himself in the frosty window he saw less and less of the man he had once been, and at last that man became little more than a shadow in the snow.

Thus did Danforth pass his many seasons in the Gulag.

“You don’t expect ever to climb out of that pit,” Danforth said. “You work and sleep, then work and sleep. You eat the soup that Solzhenitsyn described, with the eye floating in it. You watch life and death from the shelf- bed of your barracks, just in that way Shalamov recounts it.” He smiled. “Shalamov’s stories are much better in Russian, by the way.”

His smile held briefly, then slowly faded into a more solemn expression than any I had yet seen.

“You see honesty perish and honesty survive,” he said. “You see startling acts of kindness and unspeakable acts of depravity, just in the way Bardach writes about them in Man Is Wolf to Man. In later years, you read these accounts from your warm little apartment and remember that you didn’t have to work when the temperature fell below negative forty-one degrees and how while you were shivering in your bunk you hoped for the temperature to drop just enough so that you could stay in that frigid room a little longer. You expect this to go on forever, Paul. You expect to die and be buried in that frozen tundra. You stop believing there’s a world beyond the camp because that world no longer exists for you. You watch the Kolyma River freeze and briefly thaw. You notice the return of the mosquitoes, and you hate them so much you look forward to winter. Every blessing brings a curse, even the gift of another day of life. Because you are already dead, Paul.”

He stopped suddenly, and his face took on the expression of one abruptly touched by a miracle.

“Then, one afternoon, just as you’ve gotten back from the woods, barely able to peel those wretched mittens from your fingers,” he said, “you are summoned to the camp commander’s office, and there, to your amazement, you see what you think must be a ghost, because it could only have come from the life you had before you died. You stare at it, speechless, blinking. You cannot believe this ghost will speak. And then it does.”

“A ghost?” I asked, with a caught breath. “Anna?”

Danforth appeared to see that very ghost, though whether in the guise of a disordered young woman in a Greenwich Village bar, an art dealer’s assistant speaking perfect German, an assassin, or a spy, I couldn’t guess.

“Anna?” Danforth asked softly. “Ah, Paul, how different my little parable would be if that had truly been her name.”

~ * ~

PART VII

Traitor’s Gate

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

Danforth looked at his watch. “Do you mind if we catch a cab?” he asked. “I should be getting home.”

“Home?” I asked. “Now?”

I was certain that Danforth’s story was drawing to an end and saw no need to interrupt it.

“One should know how another person lives, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said quite firmly “It helps the moral understanding.”

Moral understanding?

I immediately felt the approach of a didactic remark, but before I could voice this queasy supposition or even protest the abrupt breaking off of his tale, Danforth was on his feet, pulling on his coat and twining his scarf around his neck with the determination of a man whose methods could not be questioned or his final aim deterred.

“Come, Paul,” he said. “It’s not far.”

This turned out to be true, though it was farther than I’d expected, since I’d reasonably supposed that Danforth lived near the Century Club. But our cab turned south onto Fifth Avenue, rather than north toward the swankier regions surrounding Central Park, and a few minutes later we arrived at a rather commonplace apartment building at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street.

“It would be a long walk to your club,” I said as we approached the building’s inelegant entrance.

“Oh, I’m not a member of the club,” Danforth said casually. “Clayton was a member and his wife still is, so she very kindly allowed me use it as a meeting place today.”

“I see,” I muttered.

The lobby of Danforth’s building was entirely beige with a few plastic plants sprouting from plaster vases.

“Not what you expected, Paul?” Danforth asked.

“I guess not,” I admitted.