The Quest for Anna Klein

She would not be among them, Danforth had been told, and so he no longer searched for her as he’d once searched, his needful eyes trained on each new shuffling group of zeks, forever hopeful that she would suddenly appear within their ranks, small and brown, with such large black eyes.

Slezak at last arrived. He stopped his mud-caked truck in front of the hotel, and its engine gurgled fitfully, like an old man with fluid in his lungs.

“Long trip,” Slezak warned him in Russian.

Danforth could see that he’d expected to find a younger man and now feared that the one before him would not be up to so arduous a journey.

“Six hundred kilometers to Susuman,” he added. “Bad road.”

Bad, yes, Danforth thought later, but nothing compared to his earlier journey up the Road of Skulls. There was mud, and the region’s gigantic mosquitoes attacked with the same aggressiveness of old.

He was not sure he had ever been in Susuman. Certainly he recalled nothing of the buildings that greeted him, though their ramshackle appearance, along with a few surviving relics of that earlier time, mostly faded murals exhorting the exhausted zeks to work harder for the motherland, reminded him of other villages through which he’d passed. Whole towns had been lost in snowdrifts, he now recalled, a vast world locked in frigid darkness.

He had been told where she lay and went directly there, a small cemetery that rested among a grove of trees not far from town. Slezak had told Danforth that a woman would meet them at the entrance to the cemetery, and there she was, standing between two concrete pylons that had once served as a gate.

Danforth greeted her in Russian, then deposited the money into the rough palm of her hand.

“She is just through there,” the woman said.

“Did you know her?” Danforth asked.

The woman shook her head, then nodded toward Slezak as if to tell him that answering questions had not been part of the deal.

“She worked at the power station in Kadykchan,” Slezak said. “When the town was abandoned, some camp records ended up there. I gave her the name, and she looked through them. That’s what the money’s for.” He grinned. “Research.”

“It took much time,” the woman said gruffly.

“But you’re sure it’s her?” Danforth asked.

“It’s her,” the woman said, then turned and headed down the narrow path and into an open field, muddy and overgrown but dotted with a few squat stone slabs etched with Cyrillic letters.

“How do you know?” Danforth asked.

The woman once again nodded to Slezak, clearly refusing to give any unpaid-for information.

“It’s the woman you are seeking,” Slezak said with a certainty that seemed uncertain.

As if given a signal to back Slezak up, the woman said, “It is her. I have proof.”

She had spoken defensively, like one accused of a crime she had not committed, and Danforth glimpsed the terrible sense of both distrust and being distrusted that was another of Stalin’s grotesque legacies.

“It’s her,” the woman repeated firmly, this time in a tone that was almost surly. “I don’t cheat you.”

They moved farther into the field of stones until they reached its far border, and there they came to a halt. The stone had toppled over, and time and the elements had weathered it badly, but Danforth could make out its faded lettering: Ana Khalisah. Another stone rose hard by it; its inscription indicated that it was the grave of the woman’s daughter.

He felt a desolate heaviness press down on him. It was not simply that he had made a long and arduous journey only to find the grave of some unknown woman but also that he now knew he would never find Anna Klein. He had not succeeded in avenging her; he had not even managed to find her and, in one last gesture of his knight- errantry, bring her home. He had grown old in his long effort, and he suddenly felt the full weight of those many years.

“This is not the woman I was looking for,” he said.

The old woman stared at him sternly. “I don’t cheat you,” she said. She looked at Slezak. “I have proof.”

But Danforth knew that there could be no proof, that anything the old woman might produce — a death certificate, a tattered document, even some physical artifact — would be either erroneous or falsified.

“I’m tired,” he said with a slight smile by which he wished to communicate to the old woman that he would not call her honesty into question, that she had done her best, that we are all, in the end, the final products of our errors.

He turned to Slezak. “We’ll head back to Magadan in the morning.”

Slezak nodded, and they both turned to leave the grave, but the old woman grabbed Danforth’s coat and fiercely turned him to face her. “Wait, you see,” she said.

Slezak looked to Danforth for instructions.

“All right,” Danforth said to the old woman. “Show me your proof.”

They walked back to Slezak’s car in silence, and then the old woman motioned that they should head down the barely passable road. “Twenty minutes,” she said.

It took a bit more than twenty minutes, but at last they arrived at one of Susuman’s larger public buildings, though it was hardly imposing. Inside, the old woman led Danforth up a flight of creaking stairs and to what appeared to be some sort of library, though the walls were lined with stacks of files, rather than books. If the proof was here, Danforth thought, who could find it?