Dark Star

'Ah,' said the fat man sorrowfully, 'we're not in Russia.' He armed the automatic with a practised hand, the wind gusted suddenly and raised a few strands of stiff hair so that they stood up straight. Carefully, he smoothed them back into place. 'So. ..'he said.

The whine of the motorcycle reached them again, growing quickly in volume. The fat man swore softly in a language Szara didn't know and lowered the pistol by the side of his leg so that it was hidden from the road. Almost on top of them, the cyclist executed a grinding speed shift and swung onto the farm track in a shower of dirt, the light sweeping across Szara and the fat man, whose mouth opened in surprise. From somewhere near the car an urgent voice called out, 'Ismailov?'

The fat man was astonished, for a moment speechless. Then he said, 'What is it? Who are you?'

The muzzle flare was like orange lightning-it turned the fat man into a photographic negative, arms spread like the wings of a bird as a wind swept him into the air while down below a shoe flew away. He landed like a sack and hummed as though he'd hit his thumb with a hammer. Szara threw himself onto the ground. From the car, the young driver cried out for his father amid the flat reports of a pistol fired in the open air.

'Are you hurt?'

Szara looked up. The little gnome called Heshel stood over him, eyes glittering in the moonlight above his hooked nose and knowing smile. His cap was pulled down ridiculously over his ears and a great shawl was wound around his neck and stuffed into his buttoned jacket. Three shotgun shells were thrust between the fingers of his right hand. He broke the barrel and loaded both sides. A voice from near the car said, 'Who's humming?'

'Ismailov.'

'Heshie, please.'

Heshel snapped the shotgun back together and walked towards the fat man. He fired both barrels simultaneously and the humming stopped. He returned to Szara, reached down, thrust a small hand into Szara's armpit, and tugged. 'Come on,' he said, 'you got to get up.'

Szara managed to scramble to his feet. At the car, the second man was hauling the driver out by his ankles. He flopped onto the ground. 'Look,' said the man who had pulled him out. 'It's the son.'

'Ismailov's son?' Heshel asked.

'I think so.'

Heshel walked over and stared down. 'From this you can tell?'

The other man didn't answer.

'Maybe you better start the machine.'

While Heshel retrieved the key and unlocked the handcuffs, the other man took a crank that clamped behind the rider's seat and locked it onto a nut on the side of the engine. He turned it hard a few times and the motorcycle coughed, then sputtered to life. Heshel made a hurry-up motion with his hand, the man climbed on the motorcycle and rode away. As the noise faded, they could hear dogs barking.

Heshel stood silently for a moment and stared at the front seat of the car. 'Look in the trunk,' he told Szara. 'Maybe there's a rag.'

In Berlin, it was raining and it was going to rain-a slow, sad, persistent business shining black on the bare trees and polishing the soot-coloured roof tiles. Szara stared out a high window, watching umbrellas moving down the street like phantoms. It seemed to him the city's very own, private weather, forBerlinerslived deep inside themselves-it could be felt-where they nourished old insults andhumiliated ambitions of every sort,all of it locked up within a courtesy like forged metal and an acid wit that never seemed meant to hurt-it just, apparently by accident, left a little bruise.

Late Tuesday night, Heshel had driven Szara to the terminus of a suburban branch line where he'd caught a morning train into Berlin. Once aboard, he'd trudged to the WC and, numb with resignation, forced himself to look in the mirror. But his hair was as it had always been and he'd barked a humourless laugh at his own image.Still vanity, always, forever, despite everything. What he'd feared was something he had seen, and more than once, during the civil war and the campaign against Poland: men of all ages, even in their teens, sentenced to die at night, then, the next morning, marched to the wall of a school or post office with hair turned, in the course of one night, a greyish white.

He took a taxi to an address Heshel had given him, a tall, narrow private house on the Nollendorfplatz in the western part of Berlin, not far from theHolländische Taverne,where he'd been told he could take his meals. A silent woman in black silks had answered his knock, shown him to a cot in a gabled attic, and left him alone. He supposed it to be a safe house used by theRenate Braunfaction, but the ride in Ismailov's car and a few, apparently final moments in a stubbled wheat field had dislocated him from a normal sense of the world and he was no longer sure precisely what he knew.

Heshel, driving fast and peering through the steering wheel-there were bullet holes in the driver's side of the window and the glass had fractured into frosted lace around each of them-had signalled with his headlights to two cars and another motorcycle racing down the narrow road. So Szara gained at least a notion of the sheer breadth of the operation. Yet Heshel seemed not to know, or care,why Szara was headed into Berlin, and when Szara offered him the satchel he simply laughed. 'Me?' he'd said, heeling the car through a double-S curve in the road, 'I don't take nothing. What's yours is yours.'

What did they want?

To use the material in the satchel that rested between his feet. To discredit the Georgians-Ismailov and Khelidze had only that connection, as far as he knew. Andthey were? Not his friends in the Foreign Department. Who then? He did not know. He only knew they'd stuck him with the hot potato.

The kids in the Jewish towns of Poland and Russia played the game with a stone. If the count reached fifty and you had it, well, too bad. You might have to eat a morsel of dirt, or horse pie. The forfeit varied but the principle never did. And there was always some tough little bastard like Heshel around to play enforcer.

Heshel was a type he'd always known, what they called in YiddishaLuftmensch.TheseLuftmenschen,it meant men of the air or men without substance, could be seen every morning but the Sabbath, standing around in front of the local synagogue, hands in pockets, waiting for a day's work, an errand, whatever might come their way. They were men who seemed to have no family or village, a restless population of day labourers that moved through eastern Poland, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, all over the Jewish districts, available to whoever had a few kopecks to pay them. The word had a second, ironic, meaning that, like many Yiddish expressions, embellished its literal translation.Luftmenschenwere also eternal students, lost souls, young people who spent their lives arguing politics incafésand drifting through the student communities of Europe-gifted, bright, but never truly finding themselves.

Yet Szara knew that he and Heshel were perhaps more similar than he wanted to admit. They were both citizens ofa mythical country, a place not here and not there, where national borders expanded and contracted but changed nothing. A world whereeveryone wasaLuftmenschof one kind or another. The Pale of Settlement, fifteen provinces in southwest Russia (until1918,when Poland sprang back into national existence) ran from Kovno in the north, almost on the shores of the Baltic, to Odessa and Simferopol in the south, on the Black Sea; from Poltava in the east-historic Russia-to Czestochowa and Warsaw in the west-historic Poland. One had also to include Cracow, Lvov, Ternopol, and such places, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until1918.Add to this the towns of other off-and-on countries-Vilna in Lithuania and Jelgava in Latvia-throw in the fact that people thought of themselves as having regional affiliations, believing they lived in Bessarabia,Galicia(named for theGaliciain Spain from which the Jews were expelled in1492),Kurland,or Volhynia, and what did you have?

You had a political landscape best understood by intelligence services and revolutionary cadres-fertile recruiting either way it went and often enough both and why not?

What can be so bad about a cover name oranom de révolutionif your own name never particularly meant anything? The Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century gave the Jews the right to call themselves whatever they liked. Most chose German names, thinking to endear themselves to their German-speaking neighbours. These names were often transliterated back into, for example, Polish. Thus some version of the German forsharer (and why that? nobody knew) became Szara, the Polishsz standing in for the Germans, which was soundedsch. Eventually, with time and politics and migration, it changed again, this time to the Russian?.And, when Szara was born, his mother wanted to emphasize some quietly cherished claim to a distant relation in France, sonamed him not the PolishAndrejor the Russian Andrei, butAndré.

A man invented. A man of the air. Just how would such a man's allegiance be determined? In a land of, at best, shining political loyalties often well leavened with fumes of Hasidic mysticism, a land where the name Poland was believed by many to be a version of the Hebrew expressionpolen,which meantHere ye shall remain!, and was thus taken to be good news direct from heaven.

The czar's Okhrana was recruiting in the Pale as early as1878,seeking infiltrators-Jewsdid wander, turning up as pedlars, merchants, auction buyers, and what have you, just about anywhere-for their war against Turkey. Thus, when the operatives of the Okhrana and the Bolshevik faction went at each other, after1903,there were often Jews on both sides: men of both worlds and none-always alien, therefore never suspected of being so.

They tended to show up somewhere with a business in one pocket. Szara's father grew up in Austro-Hungarian Ternopol, where he learned the trade of watchmaker, eventually becoming nearly blind from close work in bad light. As a young man, seeking a better economic climate in which to raise his family, he moved to the town of Kishinev, where he survived the pogrom of1903,then fled to the city of Odessa, just in time for the pogrom of1905,which he did not survive. By then, all he could see were grey shadows and was perhaps briefly surprised at just how hard shadows punched and kicked.

His death left Szara and his mother, and an older brother and sister, to get along as best they could. Szara was, in1905,eight years old. He learned to sew, after a fashion, as did his brother and sister, and they survived. Sewing was a Jewish tradition. It took patience, discipline, and a kind of self-hypnosis, and it provided money sufficient to eat once a day and to heat a house for some of the winter.

Later, Szara learned to steal, then, soon after, to sell stolen goods, first in Odessa's Moldavanka market, then on the docks where foreign ships berthed. Odessa was famous for its Jewish thieves-and its visiting sailors. Szara learned to sell stolen goods to sailors, who told him stories, and he grew to like stories more than almost anything else. By1917,when he was twenty years old and had attended three years of university in Cracow, he was a confirmed writer of stories, one of many who came from Odessa-it had something to do with seaports: strange languages, exotic travellers, night bells in the harbour, waves pounding into foam on the rocks, and always distance, horizon, the line where sky met water, and just beyond your vision people were doing things you couldn't imagine.

By the time he left Cracow he'd been a socialist, a radical socialist, a communist, a Bolshevik, and a revolutionary in all things-whatever one might become to oppose the czar, for that mattered above all else.

After Kishinev, where, as a six-year-old, he'd heard the local citizens beating their whip handles on the cobblestones, preparing their victims for a pogrom, after Odessa, where he'd found his father half buried in a mud street, a pig's tail stuffed in his mouth-thus we deal with Jews too good to eat pork-what else?

For the pogroms were the czar's gift to his peasants. There was little else he could give them, so, when they were pressed too hard by misery, when they could no longer bear their fate in the muddy villages and towns at the tattered edges of the empire, they were encouraged to seek out the Christ-killers and kill a few in return. Pogroms were announced by posters, the police paid the printing bills, and the money came from the Interior Ministry, which acted at the czar's direction. A pogrom released tension and, in general, evened things up: a redistribution of wealth, a primitive exercise in population control.

Thus the Pale of Settlement produced a great number of Szaras. Intellectuals, they knew the capitals of Europe and spoke their languages, wrote fiercely and well, and had a great taste and talent for clandestine life. To survive as Jews in a hostile world they'd learned duplicity and disguise: not to show anger, for it made the Jew-baiters angry, even less to show joy, for it made the Jew-baiters even angrier. They concealed success, so they would not be seen to succeed, and learned soon enough how not to be seen at all: how to walk down a street, the wrong street, in the wrong part of town, in broad daylight-invisible. The czar was in much more trouble than he ever understood. And when his time came, the man in charge was one Yakov Yurovsky, a Jew from Tomsk, at the head of a Cheka squad. Yurovsky who, while anémigréin Berlin, had declared himself a Lutheran, though the czar was in no position to appreciate such ironies.

Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped to create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets-workers' councils-ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szara and the rest it didn't matter. He'd put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years-until1929,when Stalin finally took over-he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.

It could not last. Whowere these people, these Poles and Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians, these people withlittle beards and eyeglasses who spoke French down their big noses and read books? asked Stalin. And all the littleStalinsanswered. Wewere wondering that very thing, only nobody wanted to say it out loud.

The steady rain beat down on Berlin; somewhere in the house the landlady's radio played German opera, the curtains hung limp by the window and smelled of the dead air in a disused attic room. Szara put on his belted raincoat and walked through the wet streets until he found a telephone box. He calledDrJuliusBaumannand managed to get himself invited to dinner.Baumannsounded suspicious and distant, but Nezhenko's telegram had been specific: the information was wanted by25November. There was no Soviet press bureau in Berlin, he'd have to file through the press office at the embassy, and25November was the next day. So he'd givenBaumanna bit of a push-sometimes finesse was a luxury.

He walked slowly back to the tall house and spent the afternoon with the Okhrana,dubok, the Caspian Oil Company, and thirty-year-oldtreffs in the back streets of Tbilisi, Baku, andBatum.They wanted him to be an intelligence officer and so he was. Fearless, heroic, jaw set with determination, he read reports for five hours in an anonymous room while the rain drummed down and he never once dozed off.

The VillaBaumannstood behind a high wall at the edge of the western suburbs, in a neighbourhood where gardeners pruned the shrubbery to sheer walls and flat tabletops and architects dazzled their clients with turrets and gables and gingerbread that made mansions seem colossal dollhouses. A yank at the rope of a ship's bell by the gate produced a servant, a stubby man with immense red hands and sloping shoulders who wore an emerald green velvet smokingjacket. Mumbling in a dialect Szara could barely understand, he led the way down a path $hat skirted the VillaBaumannand ended at a servant's cottage at the rear of the property, then tramped off, leaving Szara to knock at the door.

'I take it Manfred showed you the way,'Baumannsaid dryly. 'Of course this used to be his'-the cottage was small and plain, quite pleasant for a servant-'but the new regime has effected a more, ah, even-handed approach to domicile, who shall live where.'

Baumann wastall and spare, with thin, colourless lips and the face, ascetic, humourless, of a medieval prince or monastic scholar. His skin was white, as though wind or sun had never touched it. Perhaps fifty, he was hairless from forehead to crown, which drew attention to his eyes, cold and green, the eyes of a man who saw what others did not, yet did not choose to say what he saw. Whatever it was, however, faintly displeased him, that much he showed. To Szara, German Jew meant mostly German, a position of sigmficant hauteur in the Central European scheme of things, a culture wherein precise courtesies, intellectual sophistication, and quiet wealth all blended to create a great distance from Russian Jews and, it was never exactly expressed, most Christians.

Yet Szara liked him. Even as the object of that jellyfish stare down a long, fine, princely nose-who are you?-even so.

They were four for dinner:Herr DoktorandFrau Baumann,a young woman introduced asFräulein Haecht,and Szara. They ate in the kitchen-there was no dining room-at a rickety table covered by a dazzling white damask cloth embroidered with blue and silver thread. The porcelain service showed Indian princes and thick-lipped, gold-earringed princesses boating on a mountain lake, coloured tomato red and glossy black with gold filigree on therims. At one point, the tines of Szara's fork scraped across the scene andFrau Baumannclosed her eyes to shut out the sound. She was a busy little pudding of a woman. A princess with a dowry? Szara thought so.

They ate poached salmon fillets and a rice and mushroom mixture in a jellied ring. 'My old shop still serves me,'Frau Baumannexplained, the unspokenof course perfectly audible. 'During the hours of closing, you understand,HerrSzara, at the door in the alley. But they still do it. And they do cook the most lovely things and I am enough the domestic to reheat them.'

'A small premium is entailed,'Baumannadded. He had a deep, hollow voice that would have been appropriate for the delivery of sermons.

'Naturally,'Frau Baumannadmitted, 'but our cook. . .'

'A rare patriot,' saidBaumann.'And a memorable exit. One would never have supposed thatHertha wascapable of giving a speech.'

'We were so good to her,' saidFrau Baumann.

Szara sensed the onset of an emotional flood and rushed to cut it off. 'But you are doing so very well, I haven't eaten like this. . .'

'You are not wrong,' saidBaumannquietly. 'There are bad moments, too many, and one misses friends. That more than anything. But we, my family, came to Germany over three hundred years ago, before there was even such a thing as Germany, and we have lived here, in good times and bad, ever since. We are German, is what it amounts to, and proud to be. That we proved in peace and war. So,these people can make life difficult for us, Jews and others also, but they cannot break our spirit.'

'Just so,' Szara said. Did they believe it? PerhapsFrau Doktordid. Had they ever seen a spirit broken? 'Your decision to stay on is, if I may say it, courageous.'

Baumannlaughed by blowing air through his nose, hismouth deformed by irony. 'Actually, we haven't the choice. You see before you theGesellschaft Baumann,declared a strategically necessary enterprise.'

Szara's interest showed.Baumannwaved off dinnertime discussion of such matters. 'You shall come and see us tomorrow. The grand tour.'

'Thank you,' Szara said. There went filing on time. 'The editors atPravda have asked for material that could become a story. Would it be wise for a Jew to have attention called to him in that way? In a Soviet publication?'

Baumannthought for a moment. 'You are frank,HerrSzara, and it is appreciated. Perhaps you'll allow me to postpone my answer until tomorrow.'

Why am I here?'Of course, I understand perfectly.'

Frau Baumann wasbreathless. 'We must stay, you see,HerrSzara. And our position is difficult enough as it is. One hears frightful things, one sees things, on the street-'

Baumanncut his wife off.'HerrSzara has kindly consented to do as we wish.'

Szara realized why he likedBaumann-he was drawn to bravery.

'Surely,HerrSzara, a little more rice and mushroom ring.'

This from his left,Fräulein Haecht,obviously invited to balance the table. At first, in the little whirlpool of turmoil that surrounds the entry of a guest, her presence had floated by him; a handshake, a polite greeting. Obviously she was nobody to be interested in, a young woman with downcast eyes whose role it was to sit in the fourth chair and offer him rice and mushroom ring. Hair drawn back in a maiden's bun, wearing a horrid sort of blue wool dress with long sleeves-somehow shapeless and stiff at once-with a tiny lace collar tight at the throat, she was the perennial niece or cousin, invisible.

But now he saw that she had eyes, large and soft andbrown, liquid, and intense. He knew her inquiring look to be a device, worked out, practised at length in front of a dressing table mirror and meant to be the single instant of the evening she would claim for herself.

SaidFrau Baumarm:'Oh yes, please do.'

He reached for the platter, held delicately in a small hand with bitten nails, set it beside him, and served himself food he didn't want. When he looked up she was gone, back into cover. It was the sort of skin, olive toned, that didn't exactly colour, yet he thought he saw a shadow darken above the lace collar.

'. . .just the other day...the British newspapers. . .simply cannot continue. . .friends in Holland.'Frau Baumann waswell launched into an emotional appraisal of the German political situation. Meanwhile, Szara thought,How old are you? Twenty-five? He couldn't remember her name.

'Mmm!' he said, nodding vigorously at his hostess. How true that was.

'And one does hear such excellent news of Russia, of how it is being built by the workers. War would be such a waste.'

'Mm.' He smiled with enthusiasm. "The workers. . .'

Finished eating, theFräuleinfolded her little hands in her lap and stared at her plate.

'It cannot be permitted to happen, not again,' said theHerr Doktor.'I believe that support for the present regime in the senior civil service and the army is not at all firm,that man does not necessarily speak for all of Germany, yet the European press seems blind to the possibility that-'

'And now,' theFrau Doktorcried out and clapped her hands, 'there iscrčme Bavarienne!'

The girl stood up quickly and assisted in clearing the table and making coffee while theHerr Doktorrumbled on. The blue dress descended to midcalf; white ribbedstockings rose to meet it. Szara could see her lace-up shoes had got wet in the evening rain.

'The situation in Austria is also difficult, very complex. If not handled with delicacy, there could be instability

By a cupboard in the far corner of the kitchen,Frau Baumannlaughed theatrically to cover embarrassment. 'Why no, my dearestMarta,the willow pattern for our guest!'

Marta.

'. . .there must be rapprochement and there must be peace. We are neighbours, all of us here, there is no denying it. The Poles, the Czechs, the Serbs, they wish only peace. Can the Western democracies be blind to this? Yet they give in at every opportunity.' He shook his head in sorrow. 'Hitler marched into the Rhineland in1936,and the French sat behind their Maginot Line and did nothing. Why? We cannot understand it. A single, determined advance by a French company of infantry-that's all it would have taken. Yet it didn't happen. I believe-no, frankly, I know-that our generals were astounded. Hitler told them how it would be, and then it was as he said, and then suddenly they began to believe in miracles.'

'And now this terrible politics must be put aside,HerrSzara,' saidFrau Baumann,'for it is time to be naughty.' The Bavarian cream, a velvety mocha pond quivering in a soup plate, appeared before him.

As the evening wore on, with cognac served in the cramped parlour,DrJuliusBaumannbecame reflective and nostalgic. Recalled his student days atTübingen,where the Jewish student societies had taken enthusiastically to beer drinking and fencing, in the fashion of the times. 'I became a fine swordsman. Can you imagine such a thing,HerrSzara? But we were obsessed with honour, and so we practised until we could barely stand up, but at least onecould then answer an insult by challenging the offender to a match, as all the other students did. I was tall, so our president-he is now in Argentina, living God only knows how-prevailed on me to take up the sabre. This I declined. I most certainly did not want one of these!' He drew the traditional sabre scar down his cheek. 'No, I wore the padded vest and the full mask-not the one that bares the cheek-and practised the art of theépée.Lunge! Guard. Lunge! Guard. One winter's day I scored two touches on the mighty KikoBettendorfhimself, who went to the Olympic games the following year!Ach,those were wonderful days.'

Baumanntold also of how he'd studied, often from midnight to dawn, to maintain the family honour and to prepare himself to accept the responsibility that would be passed down to him by his father, who owned theBaumannIronworks. Graduating with a degree in metallurgical engineering, he'd gone on to convert the family business, once his father retired, to a wire mill. 'I believed that German industry had to specialize in order to compete, and so I took up that challenge.'

He had always seen hisUfein terms of challenge, Szara realized. First atTübingen,then as an artillery lieutenant fighting on the western front, wounded near Ypres and decorated for bravery, next in the conversion of theBaumannbusiness, then survival during the frightful inflations of the Weimar period-'We paid our workers with potatoes; my chief engineer and I drove trucks to Holland to buy them!'-and now he found himself meeting the challenge of remaining in Germany when so many,150,000of the Jewish population of500,000,had abandoned everything and started all over as immigrants in distant lands. 'So many of our friends gone away,' he said sorrowfully. 'We are so isolated now.'

Frau Baumannsat attentively silent during the discourse, her smile, in time, becoming a bit frozen-Julius, my dearest husband, how I love and honour you but how you do go on.

But Szara heard what she did not. He listened with great care and studied every gesture, every tone of voice. And a certain profile emerged, like secret writing when blank paper is treated with chemicals:

A courageous and independent man, a man of position and influence, and a patriot, suddenly finds himself bitterly opposed to his government in a time of political crisis; a man whose business, whatever it really was, has been officially designateda strategically necessary enterprise, who now declares himself, to a semiofficial representative of his nation's avowed enemy, to beso isolated.

This added up to only one thing, Szara knew, and the rather dubious assignment telegram from Nezhenko began to make sense. What he'd written off as a manifestation of some new, hopelessly convoluted political line being pursued in Moscow now told another story. The moment of revelation would come, he was virtually certain, during his 'grand tour' of theBaumannwire mill.

The dance of departure began at ten o'clock precisely, asFrau Baumannaccepted with courteous despair the inevitability of Szara's return to his lodgings and instructed her husband to walkFräulein Haechtback to her family's house. Ah but no-Szara fought back-Herr Doktormust in no way discommode himself, this was an obligation he insisted on assuming. What? No, it was unthinkable, they could not let him do that. Why not? Of course they must allow him to do that very thing. No, yes, no, yes, it went on while the girl sat quietly and stared at her knees as they fought over her. Szara finally prevailed-becoming emotional and Russian in the process. To dine so splendidly, then drive one's host out into the night? Never! What heneeded was a good long walk to punctuate the pleasure of the meal. This proved to be an unanswerable attack and carried the day. Arrangements to meet the following morning were duly made, and Szara andFräuleinHaecht were ceremoniously walked to the gate and waved out into the night.

The night made over into something very different.

Sometime after dusk the rain of the afternoon had turned to snow-soft, feathery stuff, nighttime snow, that floated down slowly from a low, windless sky. They were startled, it simply wasn't the same city, they laughed in amazement. The snow crunched beneath their shoes, covered tree branches and roof-tops and hedges, changed the streets into white meadows or into silvered crystal where street lamps broke the shadow. Suddenly the night was immensely silent, immensely private; the snow clung to their hair and made their breaths into mist, surrounded them, muffled the world, cleaned it, buried it.

He had no idea where she lived and she never suggested one street or another, so they simply wandered. Walking together made it easy to talk, easy to confide, easy to say whatever came to you, because the silence and the snow made careful words seem empty. In such a moment one couldn't be hurt, the storm promised that among other things.

Some of what she said surprised him. For instance, she was not, as he'd thought, a cousin or a niece. She was the daughter of Baumann's chief engineer and longtime friend. Szara had wondered why she'd remained in Germany but this was simply answered: she was not Jewish. Thus her father would, she explained, almost certainly become the Aryan owner of the business-new laws decreed that-but he had already arranged for Baumann's interest to be secretly protected until such time as events restoredthem all to sanity. Was her father, then, a progressive? A man of the left? No, not at all. Simply a man of great decency. And her mother? Distant and dreamy, lived in her own world, who could blame her these days? She was Austrian, Catholic, from the South Tyrol down near Italy; perhaps the family on that side had been, some time in the past, Italian. She looked, she thought, a little Italian. What did he think?

Yes, he thought so. That pleased her; she liked being so black-haired and olive-skinned in a nation that fancied itself frightfully Nordic and blond. She belonged to the Italian side of Germany, perhaps, where romance had more to do with Puccini than Wagner, where romance meant sentiment and delicacy, not fiery Valhalla. Such private thoughts-she hoped he didn't mind her rambling.

No, no he didn't.

She knew who he was, of course. WhenFrau Baumannhad asked her to make a fourth for dinner she hadn't let on, but she'd read some of his stories when they were translated into German. She very much wanted to meet the person who wrote those words, yet she'd been certain that she never would, that the dinner would be called off, that something would go wrong at the last minute. Generally she wasn't lucky that way. It was people who didn't care much who were lucky, she thought.

She was twenty-eight, though she knew she seemed younger. TheBaumannshad known her as a little girl and for them she had never grown up, but she had, after all, one did. One wound up working for pfennigs helping the art director of a little magazine. Wretched things they printed now, but it was that or shut the doors. Not like him. Yes, she had a little envy, how he went the world over and wrote of the people he found and told their stories.

She took his hand-leather glove in leather glove down some deserted street where a crust of snow glittered on awall. He wanted, now and then, to cry out that he was forty years old and scarred so badly he could not feel and that snow melted or changed back to rain, but of course he didn't. He knew every bad thing about the Szaras of the world, their belted raincoats and reputations, and their need to plunder innocence in girls like this. For, twenty-eight or lying, she was innocent.

They walked endlessly, miles in the snow, and when he thought he recognized the name of a street near the house where he was staying, he told her. She looked at him for the first time in a long while, her face lit up by walking in the night, wisps of hair escaped from the dreadful bun, and took off her glove, so he took his off, and they froze in order to touch. She told him he mustn't worry, her parents thought that she was staying with a girlfriend. Later they kissed, dry and cold, and he felt a taut back beneath the damp wool of her coat.

In his room, she was suddenly subdued, almost shy. Perhaps it was the room itself, he thought. Perhaps to her it seemed mean and anonymous, not the surroundings she would have imagined for him. Understanding, he smiled and shrugged-yes,it's how my life is lived, I don't apologize-hung up their coats, put the wet shoes by the hissing radiator. The room was dark, lit only by a small lamp, and they sat on the edge of the bed and talked in low voices and,in time, recaptured some part of the nameless grace they had discovered in the falling snow. He took her hands and said that their lives were different, very different. He'd be leaving Berlin almost immediately, was never in one place for very long, might not come back for a long time. Soon, even writing to someone in Germany might be difficult for somebody like him. Itwas a magic night, yes, he would never forget it, but they'd stolen it from a twilight world, and soon it would be dark. He meant...He would walkher home now. It might be better. She shook her head stubbornly, not meeting his eyes, and held his hands tightly. In the silence they could hear the snow falling outside. She said, 'Is there a place I may undress?'

'Only down the hall.'

She nodded, let go of his hands, and walked a little way off from the bed. He turned away. He heard her undoing buttons, the sliding of wool over silk as she pulled her dress over her head, and silk on silk as she took off her slip. He heard her roll down her white stockings, the shift of weight from foot to foot, the sound of her unhooking her brassiere, the sound of her lowering her underpants and stepping out of them. Then he couldn't keep his eyes away. She undid her hair and it hung loose about her face, crimped where she'd pinned it up. She was narrow-waisted, with pale, full breasts that rose and fell as she breathed, broad hips, and strong legs. Unconsciously, he sighed. She stood awkwardly in the centre of the room, olive skin half-toned in the low light, the tilt of her head uncertain, almost challenging. Was she desirable?

He stood and turned back the covers and she padded past him, heavy-footed on the bare wooden boards, and slid herself in carefully, staring at the ceiling as he undressed. He got in next to her, lying on his side, head propped on his hand. She turned toward him and started to tell him something, but he had guessed and stopped her from saying it. When, almost speculatively, he touched her nipples with his flattened palm, she drew a sharp breath through closed teeth and squeezed her eyes shut, and if he'd not been who he was, had not done everything he'd done, he would have been stupid and asked her if it hurt.

He was too excited to be as clever as he wanted to be; it was the nature of her, generosity and hunger mixed, heat and warmth at once, the swollen and smooth places, pale colours and dark, the catch of discovery in her breathing,and the way she abandoned not innocence-he'd been wrong; she had never been innocent-but modesty, the way she crossed her barriers.

'Lift up a little,' he said.

For a time he was afraid to move, her hands trembling against his back, then, when he did, he was in anguish when it ended. A little later she got out of bed to go down the hall, not bothering to put anything on, a pretty wobble in the way she walked,/know you're watching.

When she returned, she took the cigarette away from him and stubbed it out in the ashtray. So many things she had thought about for such a long time.

Thursday morning was cold and windy under dirty skies of shattered grey cloud. The streets to the factory district, at the northern reaches of the city, were banked by soot-stained hills of snow. Szara's taxi was driven by a meat-coloured giant with crossed swastika flags bound to his sunvisor with ribbon, and, as they drove through theNeuköllndistrict, where miles of factories mixed with workers' flats, he hummed beer songs and chattered on about the virtues of the New Germany.

TheBaumannwire mill proved hard to find. High, brown brick walls, name announced by a small, faded sign, as though anybody who mattered should know where it was. Szara was amused by the driver, whose face twisted with near-sighted effort as he looked for the entry gate.

A business-dayBaumannawaited him in a cluttered office that looked out on the production lines. Szara found him edgy, over-active, eyes everywhere at once, and not at all stylish in a green V-neck sweater worn beneath a sober suit to keep out the chill of the factory. The narrative of the tour was delivered in a shout that was barely audible above the noise of the machinery.

Szara was a little dazed by it all. He'd arrived still in a lover's state of being, sensual, high strong, and the roaring hearth fires and clattering belt drives pounded at his temples. Steel was really the last thing in the world he wanted to think about.

One bad moment: he was introduced toHerr Haecht,a dour man in a smock, distracted from tally sheets on a clipboard whenBaumannyelled an introduction. Szara managed a smile and a limp handshake.

Chicken sandwiches and scalding coffee were served in the office. WhenBaumannslammed the glass-panelled door, the racket of the place diminished sufficiently that a conversation could be held in almost normal tones.i'What do you think of it?' saidBaumann,eager for his visitor to be impressed.

Szara did his best. 'So many workers. . .'

'One hundred and eight.'

'And truly on a grand scale.'

'In my father's day, may he rest in peace, no more than a workshop. What he didn't make wasn't worth mentioning-ornamental fence palings, frying pans, toy soldiers.' Szara followed Baumann's eyes to a portrait on the wall, a stern man with a tiny moustache. 'And everything by hand, work you don't see anymore.'

'I can only imagine.'

'One naturally cannot compare systems,'Baumannsaid diplomatically. 'Even our largest mills are not so grand as the Soviet steel works at Magnitogorsk. Ten thousand men, it's said. Extraordinary.'

'Each nation has its own approach,' Szara said.

'Of course here we specialize. We are allnichtrostend?

'Pardon?'

'One says it best in English-austenitic. What is known as stainless steel.'

'Ah.'

'When you finish your sandwich, the best is yet to come.'Baumannsmiled conspiratorially.

The best was reached by way of two massive doors guarded by an elderly man seated on a kitchen chair.

'Ernest is our most senior man,'Baumannsaid. 'From my father's time.' Ernest nodded respectfully.

They stood in a large room where a few workers were busy at two production lines. It was much quieter and colder than the other part of the factory. 'No forging here,'Baumannexplained, grinning at the chill overtaking Szara. 'Here we make swage wire only.'

Szara nodded, drew a pencil and a notebook from his pocket.Baumannspelled the word for him. 'It's a die process, steel bars forced through a swage, a grooved block, under enormous pressure, which produces a cold-worked wire.'

Baumanntook him closer to one of the production lines. From a table he selected a brief length of wire. 'See? Go ahead, take it.' Szara held it in his hand. "That's302you've got there-just about the best there is. Resists atmosphere, doesn't corrode, much stronger than wire made from molten steel, this is. Won't melt until around twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and its tensile strength is greater than that of annealed wire by a factor of approximately one third. Hardness can be figured at two hundred and forty on the Brinnell scale as opposed to eighty-five. Quite a difference all round, you'll agree.'

'Oh yes.'

'And it won't stretch-that's the really crucial thing.'

'What is it for?'

'We ship it to theRheinmetallcompany as multiple strands twisted into cable, which increases its strength by a considerable factor but it remains flexible, to pass under or around various barriers, yet extremely responsive, even at great length. That's what you need in control cable.'

'Control cable?'

'Yes, for aircraft. For instance, the pilot sets his flaps by controls in his cockpit, but it'sBaumannswage wire that actually makes the flaps go down. Also the high-speed rudder on the tail, and the ailerons on the wings. These arewarplanes!They must bank and dip, dive suddenly. Response is everything, and response depends on the finest control cables.'

'So you are very much a factor in Luftwaffe rearmament.'

'In our own specialty, one could say preeminent. Our contract withRheinmetall,which installs control cable on all heavy bombers, the Dormer17,the Heinkel 111, and the Junkers86,is exclusive.'

'All the swage wire.'

'That's true. A third production line is contemplated here. Something around four hundred and eighty feet per aircraft-well, it's quite a heavy demand.'

Szara hesitated. They were on the brink now; it was like sensing the tension of a diver at the instant preceding a leap into empty air.Baumannremained supremely energetic, expansive, a businessman proud of what he'd accomplished. Did he understand what was about to happen? He had to. He had almost certainly contrived this meeting, so he knew what he was doing. 'It's quite a story,' Szara said, stepping back from the edge. 'Any journalist would be delighted, of course. But can it be told?'A door, he thought.Will you walk through it?

'In the newspaper?'Baumann waspuzzled.

'Yes.'

'I hardly think so.' He laughed good-naturedly.

Amen.'My editor in Moscow misinformed me. I'm normally not so dense.'

Baumannclucked. 'Not so,HerrSzara, you are not anything like dense. Of Soviet citizens who might turn upin Germany, outside diplomatic staffs or trade missions, your presence is quite unremarkable. Surely not liked by the Nazis, but not unusual.'

Szara was a little stung at this.So you know about clandestine life, do you? 'Well, one could hardly expect your monthly production figures to be published in trade magazines.'

'Unlikely.'

'It would be considerable.'

'Yes it would. In October, for example, we shipped toRheinmetallapproximately sixteen thousand eight hundred feet of302swage wire.'

Divide by four hundred and eighty, Szara calculated, and you have the monthly bomber production of the Reich. Though tanks would be of great interest, no number could so well inform Soviet military planners of German strategic intentions and capabilities.

Szara jotted down the number as though he were making notes for a feature story-our motto has always been excellence,Baumannclaims.'Substantial,' he said, tapping his pencil against the number on the page. 'Your efforts must surely be appreciated.'

'In certain ministries, that's true.'

But not in others.Szara put the notebook and pencil in his pocket. 'We journalists don't often meet with such candour.'

'There are times when candour is called for.'

'Perhaps we'll be meeting again,' Szara said.

Baumannnodded his assent, a stiff little bow: a man of dignity and culture had made a decision, taken honour into account, determined that greater considerations prevailed.

They went back to the office and chatted for a time. Szara restated his gratitude for a delightful evening.Baumann wasgracious, saw him to his taxi when itarrived, smiled, shook hands, wished him safe journey home.

The taxi rattled along past brown factory walls. Szara closed his eyes. She stood at the centre of the room, olive skin in half tones, pale breasts that rose and fell as she breathed.MartaHaecht,he thought.

Fate rules our lives. So the Slavs seemed to believe, and Szara had lived among them long enough to see the sense of the way they thought. One simply had to admire the fine hand of destiny, how it wove a life, tied desire to betrayal, ambition to envy, added idealism, love, false gods, missed trains, then pulled sharply on the threads, and behold!-there a human danced and struggled.

Here, he thought, was that exquisite deployment of fate known asthe coincidence.

A man goes to Germany and is offered, simultaneously, both salvation for his aching soul and a guarantee of life itself. Amazing. What should such a man believe? For he can see that a clandestine affiliation withDrBaumannand his magic wire will make him so appetizing a fellow to the special services that they will keep him alive if the devil himself tries to snatch his ankle. As for his soul, well, he'd been having rather a bad time with it lately. A man whose friends are vanishing every day must learn to nuzzle death in order to keep his sanity-didn't a kind of affection always take root in proximity? This is a man in trouble. A man who sits in a park in Ostend, offered, at least, a possibility of salvation, then stands and walks away in order to keep a timely appointment with those he has every reason to believe mean to abduct him-this man must need a reason to live. And if the reason to live is in Berlin? Tightly locked to the very means that will ensure survival?

Oh, a glorious coincidence.

In a vast and shifting universe, where stars glitter and die

in endless night, one may choose to accept coincidence of every sort. Szara did.

There remained, amid such speculation, one gravely material difficulty, the Okhrana document, and the need to satisfy what he now believed to be a second group of masters-Renate Braun,General Bloch-within the intelligenceapparat.For theBaumannassignment came, he was almost positive, from his traditional, longtime friends in the NKVD-the Foreign Department crowd, Abramov and others, some known, some forever in shadow.

Now, to stay alive, he would have to become an intelligence officer: an NKVD of one.

On the morning of26November, Szara filed as instructed at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Not a dispatch, but the development of information that Nezhenko's telegram had specified: Baumann's age and demeanour, his wife, how they lived, the factory, the proud history. Not a word about swage wire, only 'plays a crucial part in German rearmament production.'

And there had been only three for dinner.MartaHaecht he would not give them.

Had theapparatknown what it was getting, Szara reasoned, they'd have sent real officers. No, this was somebody who'd been informed of a potential opportunity in Berlin, somebody who'd told his assistant,Oh send Szara up there, figuring he'd let them know if he came across something useful. That was the nature of the intelligence landscape as he understood it: in a world of perpetual night, a thousand signals flickered in the darkness, some would change the world, others were meaningless, or even dangerous. Not even an organization the size of the NKVD could examine them all, so now and then it called on a knowledgeable friend.

The people at the embassy had been told to expect him, they took his report without comment. Then they informedhim he was to return to Moscow. On the Soviet merchant vesselKolstroi, departing Rostock, on the Bay of Pomerania, at five in the afternoon on30November. That was four days away.Recall to Moscow. Szara had to fight for equilibrium. The phrase sometimes meant arrest; the request to return was polite enough, but once they had you back in the country. . .No.Not him, and not now. He could anticipate some fairly uncomfortable interrogations. By 'friends' who would show up at his apartment bringing vodka and food-that was, at least, the usual method:so glad to have you back, you must tell us everything about your trip.

You really must.

He calmed himself down, decided not to think about it, and left the embassy with a pocket full of money and a determined heart, the twin pillars of espionage.

Were they watching him? The Foreign Department group? TheRenate Braungroup? He assumed they were-they'd certainly, thank God, been with him on the journey from Prague to Berlin. A lot of them.

He knew just enough, he thought, to lose a surveillance. Three hours it took-museums, train stations, department stores, taxis, trams, and restaurants with back doors. At last arriving, alone as far as he could tell, at an antique shop. Here he bought a painting, oil on canvas, dated1909,in a heavy gilt frame. By one Professor Ebendorfer, the proprietor rather haughtily informed him, of the University of Heidelberg. A four-by-three-foot rectangle, the painting was executed in the Romantic style: a Greek youth, a shepherd, sat cross-legged at the foot of a broken column and played his pipe whilst his flock grazed nearby, a rich blue sky was studded with fleecy clouds, snow-capped mountains rose in the distance.Huldigung derNaxos,it was called-Homageto Naxos-and Professor Ebendorfer had signed it artfully in the lower right corner, on a laurel bush beset by a nibbling ram.

Back in the room at the narrow house, Szara went seriously to work, as he should have done all along.

?ndsince he was not looking for anything in particular, simply performing a mechanical task that left his mind in a rather listless, neutral state, he eventually found everything. He immediately wished he hadn't. It was poison he found: the knowledge that kills. But there it was. He'd meant only to leave the original dossier, which would not pass a Russian border inspection, in Berlin, and carry with him to Moscow a condensed document, in a personal shorthand, of facts and circumstances. Using a cipher of contemporary dates and meaningless cities for the ones in the dossier, he believed he could get it past the NKVD border guards as 'journalist's notes.' These guards were not at all the NKVD types who worked in foreign political affairs-they were thorough, uncorruptible, and dull. He could handle them.

The job he set himself was like adding columns of figures-but it was this very exercise in brainless transposition that raised the answer above the horizon. Szara was accustomed to writer's thinking: the flash of insight or the revealing perspective produced by the persistent mind. Copying, he'd thought, was idiot's work. So now he learned a lesson.

To organize the effort he began at the beginning and proceeded, in a table of events, week by week, month by month. Without really meaning to, he'd fashioned what intelligence officers called a chron, short for chronology. For in that disciplinewhat andwho were of great interest, but it was oftenwhen that produced usable information.

Before the revolution, Bolshevik contact with the Okhranawas common enough. Between revolutionaries and government special services there is almost always a relationship, sometimes covert, sometimes not. It might be said that they spend so very much time thinking and scheming about each other that it becomes their inevitable destiny to meet, and both write such connections off to intelligence gathering. The illusion of virginity is thereby maintained.

But DUBOK far exceeded the bounds of normalcy in this relationship, bought his safety with his comrades' lives, and was nurtured by the Okhrana like the most tender sprout imaginable. For him they duplicated the grim reality of the revolutionary experience but took care to buffer it, to draw its teeth. He went, like all the underground operatives, to jail and, like many others, escaped. But duration told the tale. They put him in Bailov prison, in Baku (he spent his time learning German), but had him out four months later. Exile, too, he had to experience, but it was to Solvychegodsk they sent him, in the north of European Russia, and not to Siberia. And he 'escaped' after only four months. Lucky, thisdubok. Two years later he was 'caught' again, then sent back to finish his term in Solvychegodsk but tired of it after six months: long enough to hear what other exiles had to say, long enough to maintain his credibility as a Bolshevik operative, then, a man on a string, home again.

dubok,it became clear, was a criminal, was possessed of a criminal mind. His method never varied: he softened those around him by saying what they wanted to hear-he had a superb instinct for what that might be-then sacrificed them as necessary. He exploited weakness, emasculated strength, and never hesitated to indulge his own substantial cowardice. The Okhrana officer, Szara came to realize, manipulateddubok effortlessly because of a lifetime spent in the company of criminals. He understood them, understood them so well that he'd come tofeel a sort of sorrowful affection for them. With time he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines.

The officer, if one read between the lines, was profoundly interested indubok's effect on Bolshevik intellectuals. These men and women were often brilliant, knew science, languages, poetry, philosophy,dubok, for them, was a kind of symbol, a beloved creature from the lower depths, an enlightened thug, and their comradeship with him confirmed them as members of a newly reordered society. A political scientist, a philosopher, an economist, a poet, could only make revolution if they shared their destiny with a criminal. He was the official representative ofthe real world. Thus they advanced his standing at every opportunity. Anddubok knew it. Anddubok loathed them for it. Understanding condescension with every bone in his body, taking revenge at his leisure, proving that equality was in their minds, not his, as he obliterated them.

Now Szara had known from the beginning he had in his hands a Georgian and, when his perfectly capable mind finally bothered to do arithmetic, a Georgian at least fifty-five years old with a history of revolutionary work in Tbilisi and Baku. It could have been any one of a number of candidates, including the leaders of the Georgiankhvost, but, as Szara worked laboriously through the dossier, these were eliminated bydubok himself. For the benefit of the Okhrana,dubok had written out a description of his friendOrdjonikidze.Eighteen months later he mentioned the Armenian terroristTerPetrossian, seen taking part in a bank 'expropriation' in Baku; referred, a few pages later, to the good-natured Abel Yenukidze; and spoke harshly against his hated enemy, Mdivani. In May of1913,he was pressed to organize a situation in which the revolutionary Beria mightbe compromised, butdubok never quite managed to do more than talk about that.

After a day and a half,André Szaracould no longer avoid the truth: this was Koba himself, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, son of a savage, drunken cobbler from Gori, the sublime leader Stalin. For eleven years, from1906to1917,he had been the Okhrana's pet pig, snouting up the most rare and delicious truffles that the underground so thoughtlessly hid from its enemies.

This room,Szara thought, staring out at the grey sky over Berlin,too much happens in it. He rose from the desk, stretched to ease his back, lit a cigarette, walked to the window. The lady in silks was rustling about downstairs, doing whatever mysterious things she did all day. Below, on the pavement, an old man was holding the leash of a grizzled Alsatian dog while it sprayed the base of a street lamp.

Szara spent part of Sunday morning removing a soiled sheet of cotton cloth that sealed the back ofHuldigung derNaxos,then distributing the sheets of the Okhrana dossier across the back of the painting itself, securing them with brown cord tied off to the heads of tiny nails he pounded in with a tack hammer. The cotton cloth he refitted with great care, the bent nails installed by the original framer repositioned in the dents and rust tracks they'd formed over the years. The weight of the heavy gilded frame concealed the presence of the paper, he thought, anda hundred years from now, some art restorer. . .

On Monday he was, for the first time, on stage as a German, speaking with slow deliberation, purging the Yiddish lilt from his accent, hoping to pass for a mildly unusual individual born somewhere far away from Berlin. He found that if he combed his hair straight back off his forehead, tied his tie very tight, and carried his chin in a position that, to him, felt particularly high, the disguisewas credible. He took the name Grawenske, suggesting distant Slavic or Wendish origins, not at all uncommon in Germany.

He telephoned the office of an auctioneer and was given the name of a warehouse that specialized in the storage of fine art ('Humidity is your enemy!' the man told him).HerrGrawenske appeared there at eleven promptly, explained that he was joining the accounting staff of a small Austrian chemical company in Chile, muttered about his wife's sister who would be occupying his residence, and left Professor Ebendorfer's masterpiece in their care, to be crated, then stored. He paid for two years, a surprisingly reasonable amount of money, gave a fictitious address in Berlin, and was handed a receipt. The remainder of the officer's effects, and the fine satchel, were distributed to shops that supported charity missions.

Marta Haechthad given him the phone number at the little magazine where she 'helped out the art director.' Szara tried to call several times, chilled to the bone as the flat Berlin dusk settled down on the city. The first time, she'd gone on an errand to the printers. The second time, somebody giggled and said they didn't know where she'd got to. On the third try, close to quitting time, she came to the phone.

'I'm leaving tomorrow,' he said. 'May I see you tonight?'

'There is a dinner. My parents' wedding anniversary.'

'Then late.'

She hesitated. 'I'll be returning home. . .'

What?Then he understood there were people near the telephone. 'Home from a restaurant?'

'No, it isn't that.'

'Home to sleep.'

'It would be better.'

'What time is the dinner over?'

'One can't rush away. I hope you'll understand. It is a, it is an occasion, festive. . .'

'Oh.'

'Do you have to go away tomorrow?'

'It can't be helped.'

'Then I don't see how

'I'll wait for you. Maybe there's a way.'

'I'll try.'

Just after eleven the doorbell rang. Szara raced downstairs, hurried past the landlady's door-opened the width of an eye-and let her in. In the little room, she took off her coat. An aura of the cold night clung to her skin, he could feel it. She was wearing a midnight blue party dress, taffeta, with ruffles. The back was all tiny hooks and eyes. 'Be careful,' she said as he fumbled. 'I mustn't stay too long. Here it is not done to leave a party.'

'What did you tell them?'

'That a friend was going away.'

It was not a magic night. They made love, but the tension in her did not break. Afterwards she was sad. 'Maybe I shouldn't have come. Sweeter to have a memory of the snow.' With the tips of his fingers he pushed the hair back off her forehead. 'I'11never see you again,' she said. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

He walked her home, almost to the door. They kissed good-bye, dry and cold, and there was nothing to say.

In the late November of1937,the Soviet merchant vesselKolstroi shipped anchor in the port of Rostock, moved slowly up theWarnemündeinlet intoLübeckbay and, swinging north into the Baltic and setting a north-by-easterly course to skirt the Sasenitz peninsula and pass south of the Danish isle ofBornholm,made for Leningrad harbour, some eight hundred and forty nautical miles away.

TheKolstroi, heavily laden with machine tools, truck tyres, and bar aluminium loaded at the French port of Boulogne, docked at Rostock only to complete its complement of eleven passengers bound for Leningrad. Moving up theWarnemündein gathering darkness, theKolstroi sounded its foghorn continually, joining a chorus of in- and outbound freighters as it reachedLübeckbay, where the Baltic fogbanks rolled in toward shore in the stiff northerly winds.André Szaraand the other passengers were not allowed the freedom of the deck until the ship was beyond the German territorial limit. When Szara did seek the air, after the close quarters of the ship's lounge where they were fed supper, there was little visibility, nothing of the lights on the German coast, only black water heaving in November swells and a building gale that drove iced salt spray onto the metal plates of the deck, where it froze into a lead-coloured glaze. He bore it as long as he could, staring into the fog whipping past the ship's lights, unable to see land.

TheKolstroi was Soviet territory; he'd bowed under the vast weight of it before they ever sailed, his possessions spread out on a table under the cold eyes of a security officer.The journalist Szara meant nothing to this one,Homo Staliens, a clock disguised as a human. He was thankful he had disposed of the Okhrana dossier before he left Berlin-memory itself was frightening in the atmosphere aboard the freighter.

The passengers were a mixed group. There were three English university students, with creamy skins and bright eyes, terribly earnest young men on a dream voyage to what they believed to be their spiritual homeland. There was one middle-aged trade representative, suffering from an illness-attempted escape, Szara thought-who was dragged on board by NKVD operatives. The tips of hisshoes scraped the wooden gangplank as they carried him onto the ship-obviously he had been drugged senseless. He was not the only passenger going home to die. They were a strange brotherhood, silent, self-contained, having abandoned themselves to a fate they deemed inevitable; the man who'd been dragged on board proved the futility of night. They rarely slept, greedy for their remaining hours of introspection, pacing about the deck when they could stand the cold, their lips moving as they rehearsed imagined conversations with their interrogators.

Mostly they avoided one another. A conversation with a tainted diplomat or scientist would be reported by the attentive security men and, how was one to know, might be made evidence in the cases against them, telling evidence, uncovered only in the last hours of the journey home-we thought you were clean until we saw you talking to Petrov ~and dangerously sweet to the NKVD appetite for the fatal irony.

Szara spoke to one of them, Kuscinas, in younger days an officer in the Lettish rifle brigades that supported Lenin when he overthrew the Kerensky government, now an old man with a shaved head and a face like a skull. Yet there was still great strength in Kuscinas; his eyes glittered from deep in their sockets, and his voice was strong enough to hear above the gale. As theKolstroi rose and crashed into the heavy seas off the Gulf of Riga, on the second day of the voyage, Szara found shelter under a stairway where they could smoke cigarettes and shield themselves from the bitter wind. Kuscinas never said exactly what he did, simply waved his hand when Szara asked, meaning that such things didn't matter. As for what was about to happen to him, he seemed to be beyond caring. 'For my wife I 'm sorry, but that's all. Foolish woman, and stubborn.Unfortunately she loves me and this will break her heart, but there's nothing to be done about it. My sons they'veturned into snakes, all the better for them now, I think, and my daughter married some idiot who pretends to ran a factory in Kursk. They'll find a way to disown me, if they haven't done it already. I'm sure they will sign anything put before them. My wife, though. . .'

'She'll have to go to friends,' Szara said.

The old man grimaced. 'Friends,' he said.

TheKolstroi's steel plates creaked as the ship pitched particularly high, then slammed down into the trough, sending aloft a huge explosion of white spray. 'And fuck you too,' Kuscinas said to the Baltic.

Szara steadied himself against the iron wall and closed his eyes for a moment.

'You're not going to give it up, are you?'

He flicked his cigarette away. 'No,' he said, 'I'm a sailor.'

'Will they arrest you?'

'Perhaps. I don't think so.'

'You have the right friends, then.'

Szara nodded that he did.

'Lucky. Or maybe not,' Kuscinas said. 'By the time you get to Moscow they may be the wrong friends. These days you can't predict.' For a time he was silent, eyes inward, seeing some part of his life. 'You're like me, I suppose. One of the faithful ones, do what has to be done, don't ask to see the sense of it. Discipline above all.' He shook his head sorrowfully. 'And in the end, when it's our turn, and somebody else is doing what has to be done, somebody else who doesn't ask to see the sense of it, the discipline of the executioner, then all we can say isza chto?-why? What for?' Kuscinas laughed. 'A sorry little question,' he said. 'For myself, I don't mean to ask it.'

That night, Szara couldn't sleep. He lay in his bunk and smoked, the man across from him mumbling restlessly inhis dreams. Szara knew the history of that question,Zachto?Rumour attributed its initial use to the Old Bolshevik Yacov Lifschütz,a deputy people's commissar. His final word. Szara remembered him as a little man with wild eyebrows, the obligatory goatee, and a twinkling glance. Shuffling down the tile corridor in the basement of the Lubyanka-you got it on the way, nobody ever reached the end of that corridor-he stopped for a moment and turned to his executioner, an officer he happened to have known in childhood, and said,'Za chto?'

Along with the purge, the word spread everywhere; it was scrawled on the walls of cells, carved in the wooden benches of the Stolypin wagons that hauled prisoners away, scratched into planks in transit camps. Almost always the first words spoken to the police who came in the night, then again the first words of a man or a woman entering a crowded cell. 'But why? Why?'

We are all alike,Szara thought. We don't offer excuses or alibis, we don't fight with the police, we don't look for compassion, we don't even plead. We don't fear death; we always counted on it-in the revolution, the civil war. All we ask, rational men that we are, is to see the sense of the thing, its meaning. Then we'll go. Just an explanation. Too much to ask?

Yes.

The savagery of the purge, Szara knew, gave them every reason to believe there was, must be, a reason. When a certain NKVD officer was taken away, his wife wept. So she was accused of resisting arrest. Such events, common, daily, implied a scheme, an underlying plan. They wanted only to be let in on it-certainly their own deaths bought them the right to an answer-and then they'd simply let the rest of it happen. What was one more trickle of blood on a stone floor to those who'd seen it flow in streams across the dusty streets of a nation? The only insult wasignorance, a thing they'd never tolerated, a thing they couldn't bear now.

In time, the cult ofZa chtobegan to evolve a theory. Particularly with the events of June1937,when the only remaining alternative to the rule of the dictator was ripped to shreds. That June came the turn of the Red Army and, when the smoke cleared, it was seen to be headless, though still walking around. Marshal Tukachevsky, acknowledged as Russia's greatest soldier, was joined in his disappearance by two of four remaining marshals, fourteen of sixteen military commanders, eight of eight admirals, sixty of sixty-seven corps commanders, on and on and on. All eleven vice-commissars of defence, seventy-five of the eighty members of the Supreme Military Soviet. All of this, they reasoned-the shootings, the icebound mining camps, an army virtually destroyed by its own country-could have only one intention: Stalin simply sought to remove any potential opposition to his own rule. That was the way of tyrants: first eliminate enemies, then friends. This was an exercise in consolidation. On a rather grand scale, ultimately counted in millions-but what was Russia if not a grand scale?

What was Russia, if not a place where one could say, down through the centuries, times and men are evil, and so we bleed. This, for some, concluded the matter. The Old Bolsheviks, the Chekists, the officer corps of the Red Army-these peoplewere the revolution but now had to be sacrificed so that the Great leader could stand unthreatened and supreme. Russia's back was broken, her spirit drained, but at least for most the question had been answered and they could get on with the trivial business of execution with acceptance and understanding. A final gesture on behalf of the party.

But they were wrong, it wasn't quite that simple.

There were some who understood that, not many, only

108

Silence in Prague

a few, and soon enough they died and, in time, so did their executioners, and, later, theirs.

The following day, Szara did not see Kuscinas. Then, when theKolstroi steamed up the Gulf of Finland, the first ice of the season pinging against the hull, the lights of the fortress atKronstadttwinkling in the darkness, the security men and sailors began a frantic search, combing the ship, but Kuscinas had gone, and they could not find him.

8,rue Delesseux

'AndréAronovich!Over here!'

An urgent female voice, cutting through the uproar of a densely packed crowd in the living room of an apartment in the Mochovaya district. Szara peered through the smoke and saw a hand waving at him. 'Pardon,' he said. 'So sorry. Excuse me.' He chose an indirect route toward the hand and voice, swinging wide to avoid the dangerous elbows of those who had managed to break through to the buffet. Moscow was ravaged by shortages of nearly everything, but here there was black Servuga, grilled lamb, pirozhki, salted peas, stacks of warm blini, and platters of smoked salmon. What you had, then, was desperation: a roomful ofapparatchiks, mandarins of agriculture and road planning, timber and foreign policy, as well as the security services, trying to feed themselves for the week to come. More than one pocket was stuffed with meat, smoked fish, even butter-whatever one could swipe.

For an instant, Szara caught sight of a vaguely familiar face that appeared over the shoulder of a naval officer, then vanished in the crowd. A sophisticated woman, lightly made up, with simple but stylishly managed hair and dangling silver earrings.

He figured it out just about the time they found each other: a curiously alteredRenate Braun,wearing a full blouse of lime-coloured silk and the modestly coquettish smile one saw in films of cocktail parties. 'Heavens, what a crowd!' she said, brushing his cheek with hers-a dear friend one simply doesn't see often enough. Last seen slicing up a dead man's trouser cuffs with a razor bladein an Ostend whorehouse, here was an entirely different version of the woman.

'You must meet Mr Herbert Hull,' she gushed, speaking in German-accented English.

Now Szara noticed that she had in tow a tall, sandy-haired man with a weather-beaten face and wildly overgrown eyebrows. He was perhaps in his late forties and, from his casual, loose-jointed posture, evidently American. He was smoking, with difficulty, a poorly rolledmakhorka cigarette, a self-conscious attempt to be part of the local scenery, Szara thought. 'Herb Hull,' he said. He had a powerful grip and sought something in Szara's eyes when they shook hands.

'Herb has been so anxious to meet you,'Renate Braunsaid.

'We all knowAndréSzara,' Hull said. 'I'm a great fan of your work, Mr Szara.'

'Oh but you must call himAndré.'

'Yes. Please.'

Szara's English was at best uncertain. He was going to sound awful, hesitant and somehow importunate-an impression often created when Slavs spoke English. He already felt a hatefully ingratiating smile creeping over his face.

'Herb's an editor with a new American magazine. A very important undertaking. You'll know him, of course, from when he was with theNation and theNew Republic'

'Ah yes.' Szara knew the names, prayed he wouldn't be questioned about specific articles. The anxious smile grew. 'Of course. Importantly.'

Szara sawRenate Braunwince, but plunged ahead. 'You are liking Russia?'

'Never the same place two days in a row, things go wrong, but there's a strength in the people that's irresistible.'

'Ach!'-mock horror fromRenate Braun-'he knows us too well.'

Hull smiled and shrugged. 'Trying to learn, at any rate. That's what we need. Firsthand knowledge, a feel for the real Russia.'

'I am certain thatAndrécan help you with that, Herb. Positive.'

'Yes?' Szara said.

'Why not?' Hull's eyebrows rose. 'After all, I'm an editor, you're a writer. For a new magazine, well, a Russian writer speaking about the USSR would be a change, change for the better I'm inclined to think. No?'

'Ah, but my English.'

'No problem,André.We'd be happy to do the translation, or it could be done here. Won't be perfect, but we'll guarantee to preserve the sense of it.'

'I am honoured,' Szara said. He was. The thought of appearing in a respected journal before an American audience, not the usualDaily Worker crowd, was immensely pleasing. IlyaEhrenburg,Pravda'snumber one correspondent, had done it, occupying the journalistic territory in the Spanish Civil War so effectively that Szara was virtually restricted to other parts of Europe.

Hull let the offer sink in, then went on.'Renatetells me you're working on a historical piece that might be right up our alley. I won't kid you, running something like that would get us the attention we need. And we'll pay for it. Won't be Hollywood, of course, but I think you'll find us competitive in the New York market.'

RenateBraunseemed quite excited by the prospect. 'We've even discussed a title,AndréAronovich.'

Szara stared at her. What was she talking about?

'Just discussed,' Hull broke in. He knew what a certain look on a writer's face meant. 'Working title is all it is, but I can tell you it caught my attention.'

'Title?'

Renate Braunsaid, 'The piece must be exciting-our plan fulfilment norms won't do, I suspect. It must have. . .'She looked at Hull for the word.

'Intrigue?'

'Yes. That's it. Intrigue! A story of Russia's revolutionary past, its secret history. We aren't completely sure what it is you're working on-you writers keep close with ideas-but we thought perhaps something on the order of "The Okhrana's Mysterious Man.'" She turned to Hull. 'Yes? It's good English?'

'Yes indeed. Good enough to put on the cover, I'd say.'

Szara repeated the title in Russian.Renate Braunnodded vigorously. 'Your English is better than you think,AndréAronovich.'

'Of course,' Hull said, 'you can always use a pen name if you like, I'm not unaware how easy it is to get into trouble these days. We'd rather have your name, of course, but we'll protect your identity if that makes you more comfortable.'

Szara just stared. How much did this man know? Did he have any idea what happened to people who played such games? Was he brave? Stupid? Both?

'Well,André,would you consider it?' Hull asked, eyes keen, head tilted inquiringly to one side, gauging his quarry.

'How could he not?'Renate Braunsaid. 'Such an opportunity!'

Szara walked for a long time that night. His tiny apartment in Volnitzky Alley wasn't far from the house where the party had been given, so he circled the centre of the city, crossing the icebound river, a lone, January figure in fur hat and overcoat. He kept an eye out forbezprizorniye, bands of children orphaned by the purge who attacked androbbed solitary walkers of their money and clothing-you might just as easily freeze to death if your head wasn't bashed in-but it was evidently too cold for hunting.

Sooner or later,he thought,things fall into place and, often as not, you'd rather they hadn't. Now the long leash in Prague and Berlin made sense. They were letting him have his time with the dossier, counting on the fact that he'd stick his curious writer's nose into the business. Seen externally, a well-known journalist had sniffed out a big story which, in the normal way of things, he'd tell the world. They'd protected him when the Georgiankhvost operatives had him taken off the train, then left him free to work.

And now they were rather casually asking him to commit suicide.

Was it too much to ask? That one life should be sacrificed so that hundreds, perhaps thousands, might survive? All he need do was practise his natural trade. Who was the Okhrana's mysterious man? Well, we know a few small details. A, B, C, and D. A new and provocative enigma from enigmatic Russia. Perhaps, someday, we'll learn his real identity. Yours truly,André Szara.(Please omit flowers.)

Or, oh yes, the pen name.Boris lvanov has served in the Soviet diplomatic corps. That would surely throw the NKVD off the scent. For perhaps a month. Or maybe a year. Not much longer.

Still, it would certainly communicate a point of view:

We know what you did and we can prove it, now stop killing us or we'll finish you. Blackmail. Plain old-fashioned politics. Ancient as time.

He admired the plan, though he felt more than a little chagrin over his apparently boundless capacity for self-deception. Certain things now made sense. On the train to Prague, General Bloch had told him, albeit obliquely, just what they had in mind for him. Szara had triumphantlymisunderstood him, of course, taking delicately phrased information to be some sort of pompous philosophy, a homily.

With some difficulty Szara won back from his memory the general's statements: 'Some men, in such circumstances, might be careless of their lives. Such men rise to an opportunity. And then we have a hero!' In an empty street coated with grey ice, Szara laughed out loud. Bloch had said something about Szara's attitude toward himself after pointing out, dextrously enough, that he had neither wife nor children. What else? Oh yes. 'To be a writer requires work and sacrifice, to follow any road wherever it may lead.'

Yes. Well. Now one knew where it led. Just as one knew in1917when one was twenty and what did death matter. From the beginning, in the park in Ostend, Szara had sensed his fate. He'd dodged a time or two, yet here it was, back again. The Szara that Bloch found on the train was, like his revolutionary brethren, a man who had no business being alive, a man who had evaded the inevitable just long enough.

Suddenly, the walls of his irony collapsed and real anguish struck his heart. He stopped cold, his face twisted with pain and anger; a sob rose to the base of his throat and stuck there-he had to bite his lip to keep from howling the dreaded question directly at God and the streets of Moscow:

Why now?

Becausenow everything was different. Bloch had met a certain kind of man on the train to Prague butnow he was not that man. He was instead that man who presses his face against the skin of a woman to inhale such fragrance as makes him want to cry out with joy. He was that man who spins between tenderness and raging lust like a helpless top, who wakes up on fire every morning, who spendshis hours thinking of only one thing-yet how brilliantly he thinks of it!

He recovered. Regained himself, breathed deeply, resumed walking. The wall inside him must not be breached: it kept in, it kept out. He had to have it to survive.

He realized that the frost had stolen the feeling from his face and he turned towards home, walking quickly. Later he scalded his mouth with tea while sitting in his overcoat and fur hat at the table his wife, only a few months before she died, had insisted he put by the kitchen window. It had been a lovely table, an absurdly ornamental cherrywood thing with heavy, scrollworked legs. Using it in the kitchen they'd ruined it, of course. Now it was a place to watch the white dawn come up over the chimneys of Moscow, thin smoke standing motionless in the dead, frozen air.

Szara's interrogation-a form of debriefing for those cooperating with the special services-was the province of his official 'friend' in Moscow, Abramov. Nonetheless, an interrogation. And the fact that it was supervised by a friend made it, as theapparatintended, worse not better-a system that turned friends into hostages held against the subject's honesty. If you lied, and your interrogator believed it, and then they caught you lying, you were both finished:defacto conspirators. Maybe you didn't care to save your own miserable life, but perhaps you'd think twice about murdering a friend.

Szara lied.

Sergei Abramov lived in the higher reaches of the NKVD Foreign Department, a confidant of the godlings Shpigelglas and Sloutsky if not officially their equal. He would arrive at Szara's apartment every day at about eleven with egg sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, a paper sack of tea, sometimes vodka, occasionally little almond cakes with a sticky coating of honey that hadyou licking your fingers while you answered questions. He was a thickset, bulky man, handsome in his bulk, in a much-worn blue pinstripe suit, the jacket buttoned across his belly over a rippling vest with a gold watch chain stretched from pocket to pocket. Abramov had sharp eyes that caught the light, a broken nose, a black homburg that he never removed, and a full black beard that gave him the air of a successful operatic baritone-an artist used to getting his own way and certain to create havoc if he didn't. He would sit on a kitchen chair with his knees apart, place a cigarette between his lips, light it with a long, wooden match, then half close his eyes as he listened to you, apparently on the verge of sleep. Often he made a small noise, a grunt that might mean all sorts of things: sympathy-what a time you've had of it-or disbelief, perhaps an acknowledgment that what you said was true, perhaps the groan of a man too often deceived. It was in fact a stratagem, meant nothing, and Szara knew it.

Abramov spoke in a low, hoarse rumble, a voice rich with sorrow at having found all humankind to be the most absurd collection of liars and rogues. Posing a question, his face was filled with gloom. Like a teacher who knows his hopeless pupils will offer only wrong answers, Abramov was an interrogator whose subjects never told the truth. The method was ingenious. Szara understood and admired it but nevertheless felt the powerful undertow it created: he found himself wanting to please Abramov, to offer such resoundingly honest statements that the man's sour view of the world would be swept away by idealism reborn.

Alert to Abramov's dangerous gift, the ability to stimulate the essential human desire to please, Szara laid out his defences with care. To begin with, resistance. Later, a strategic submission, giving up everything but that which mattered most:Marta Haechtand all the signposts that pointed to her existence. Thus Szara's description of dinnerat the VillaBaumann wasladen with detail while the cast of characters was decreased by one. On visiting the wire mill he encountered the chief engineer, called Haecht, the man who might become the nominal owner of the company. A technician, Szara said, not anybody they could work with. Abramov grunted at that but did not pursue it.

Bloch andRenate Braunhe assigned to the second, the confessional, stage, thus restricting the initial part of the interrogation to writing the dockworkers' story in Antwerp, an uneventful journey to Prague, conditions in that city, and his rejected dispatch on the potential abandonment of Czechoslovakia. Baumann's revelation on the manufacture of swage wire he reported in perfect detail and was rewarded by a series of appreciative grunts. This ground was then covered a second time-Abramov's probing was artful, ingenious, a series of mirrors revealing every possible surface of the exchange. As for Khelidze, Szara described the conversations aboard theNicaea, omitting their final confrontation in Ostend.

Until Monday of the second week, when Abramov began to show signs of restlessness. Interrogations always revealed something, something even better than a little orgy with a nightclubanimateur.So? Where was it? Had he at last met a true saint? Szara caved in, warned elliptically that he now needed to say things that could not be said in a Moscow apartment. Abramov nodded sorrowfully, a physician coming at last upon the feared diagnosis, and touched his lips with his index finger. 'You've done well today,AndréAronovich,'he said for the benefit of the listeners. 'Let us adjourn to the Metropol for a change of scenery.'

But, crunching through the fresh snow on Kusnetzki Most, they passed the Hotel Metropol and its popularcafé -whereapparatoperatives were in abundance-and entered instead a grimy hole-in-the-wall on a side street.

Abramov orderedviesni,parfaits,which were served in chipped, greyish coffee cups but swam in fresh cream.

Szara told stage two: the corpse in the hotel, the receipt, the satchel, General Bloch, the dossier, and the American magazine editor. Abramov was a study in acute discomfort. Every word of Szara's took him deeper into the affair and he knew it-his face knotted with pain, the encouraging grunts became groans of horror, he signalled for moreviesni, swore in Yiddish, drummed his thick fingers on the tabletop. When Szara finally wound down he sighed.'AndréAronovich,what have you done.'

Szara shrugged. How was he to have known that his orders did not come from Abramov or his associates? The second group based their play on that very assumption.

'I absolve you,' Abramov rumbled. 'But I am the least of your problems. I doubt the Georgians will shoot you in Moscow, but it would be wise to watch what you eat here, and stay away from high windows. It's a commonplace of ours; anyone can commit a murder, but suicide requires an artist. They have such artists. However, the fact that they've left you alone this long means they're scheming. This too they do very expertly. After all, they are our Sicilians, these southerners, and their feuds end only one way. Apparently, they have their own plans for the Okhrana material, and have not informed the Great Leader or his official toads; thus you remain alive. Of course, if you were to publish such an article. . .'

'Then what shall be done?'

Abramov rumbled.

'Nothing?'

Abramov thought for a moment, spooned the last of hisviesni from the coffee cup. 'Thiskhvost business is a little more complicated than meets the eye. Yes, thingshave happened, but. Instance: two years ago, at the trial of LevRosenfeldand Grigory Radomilsky-"Kamenev" and"Zinoviev"-the prosecutor Vyshinsky, in his summation to the judges, said an odd thing, something that sticks in the mind. He called them "men without a fatherland." He would claim that he meant they'd betrayed, as Trotskyites, their country. But we've heard that kind of thing before, and we know what it means, just as it's said very openly in Germany, not so quietly in Poland, and has been said in all sorts of places for a very long time.

'Still, if somebody simply yearned to believe Vyshinsky, and such people exist, let them consider the case of the diplomat Rosengolts. They played with him like a cat with a mouse: released him from all official positions and let him stew for many weeks. He knew what was coming, for a certainty, but theapparatlet it fester so that every day became a hundred hours long. This was hardest on his wife, a happy sort of person, not worldly, not so educated, from a typicalshtetl somewhere in the Pale. Over a period of months, the waiting destroyed her, and when the NKVD searched Rosengolts after they finally got around to arresting him, they found she'd written out a charm against misfortune, the Sixty-eighth and Ninety-first psalms, secreted it within a piece of dry bread, wrapped it in a cloth, then sewed it into his pocket.

'At the trial, Vyshinsky made much humour of this pathetic little piece of paper. He read the psalms, such as, "For He shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence. He shall defend thee under his wings and thou shalt be safe under His feathers: His faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day." You see what she'd done. Vyshinsky spoke these words in a tone of savage contempt, then asked Rosengolts how the paper had got into his pocket. He admitted his wife put it there and told him it was for good luck. Vyshinsky pressed him on thepoint, mentioning "good luck" again and again, until the spectators in the court-room were roaring with laughter and Vyshinsky turned and winked at them.

'Very well, you'll say, the case is made. The purge is really a pogrom. But is it? Is this really true? Maybe not. The Section for Extraordinary Matters is headed by I. I. Shapiro-so if Jews are being purged, the purge is, often, guided by Jews. Now we come to the people who've involved you in their operation. General Bloch is a Jew, granted, though I should mention he is in military intelligence, theGRU,and not the NKVD-a fact you might keep in mind.RenateBraunis a German, likely from one of the Protestant sects, and she has nothing to do with the NKVD. She is aspez-a foreign specialist-employed by Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga, the State Publishing House, where she works on the publication of German texts to be smuggled into Germany. That clearly associates her with the Comintern.

'What I'm saying is this: consider the intelligence services as an ocean. Now consider the currents that might be found in it, some running one way, some another, side by side for a time, then diverging. So new? Nothing's new. It would be so at US Steel or the British telephone company. In work there is competition, alliance, betrayal. Unhappily, when an intelligenceapparatplays these games, they are equipped with very sharp tools, vast and practical experience, and the level of play can be frightful. A journalist, any normal citizen, will simply be eaten alive. What do we have here? A political battle between nationalist interests? Or a pogrom? They're not the same thing.

'If a pogrom, a very quiet one. Of course Stalin cannot afford, politically, to estrange the Jews of the world because we have many friends among them. You know the old saying:they join the ideology. And now, with the birthof a hideous monster in Germany, they are mad to take action, any action, against fascism. This is, you understand, a useful circumstance for people in my profession. One can ask favours. Is Stalin capable of running a secret pogrom? Yes. And he would have to do it that way in the present political climate. Therefore, it's not so easy to pin down.

'Meanwhile, you. Drawn into an operation you cannot survive, yet I take it you wish to do so. You seem different, I might add. Changed. Not quite the cynical bastard I've known all these years. Why is that? All right, you had a close call; the Turk, Ismailov, almost did your business. Is that it? You looked death in the face and became a new man? Can happen,AndréAronovich,but one sees that rarely, sometimes in a grave illness, where a man may ask a favour of his God, but less often in wet affairs. Still, it happened. I'm your friend. I don't ask why. I say what's to be done for poorAndréAronovich?

'Now it would be normal to handBaumannon to one of our operators in Germany-a thousand ways he can be ran, even under present Jewish restrictions. He has a love affair, sees a dentist, goes toshul, takes a walk in the country and fills a dead-drop or visits his father's grave. Believe me, we can service him.

'On the other hand, we might make a case that he's skittish, nervous, not really committed, which in turn implies special needs in the selection of a case officer. What, in fact, are his motives? I might make a point of asking that question. Is he out to hurt Hitler? Or does he wish to feather a nest if things get worse in Germany? To aid the working classes? To get rich?Mice, we say of spies; themstands for money, theifor ideology, the?for coercion, and theefor egotism. Which is it withBaumann?Or is there, we must ask, a fifth letter?

'Prove to me he's not the toy of theAbwehr,or worse, theReferatVI Cof theReichsicherheitshauptamt,the Main Security Office under that insufferable prick Heydrich.ReferatVI?is Gestapo counterespionage both within and outside German borders, Walter Schellenberg's little shop, andSchellenbergis perfectly capable of this sort of dangle-he'll get hold of one end of the thread and pull so slowly and sweetly that you'll see an entire network unravel. Years of work wasted! And, in Moscow, careers destroyed. So I'm suspicious. My job depends on it. I'll surely point out that Szara can't be expected to know whether this is any good or it's the RSHA offering a temptation. What do we know? That a third secretary had a piece of paper slipped in his overcoat pocket while it was in the cloakroom of the opera house and he was suffering through three hours of Wagner. That a journalist had a dinner and heard a proposal and saw a piece of wire. What's that? That's nothing. We Russians have always favoured theagent provocateur, our intelligence history is crowded with them, and the Cheka learned the trick the hard way-from the Okhrana. Azeff,Malinovsky, maybe you-know-who himself. So, naturally, we fear it above all things for we know how well it works, how well it tickles our great vulnerability-intelligence officers are like men in love, they want to believe.

'What's the answer? What to do? Abramov is brilliant!Let Szara do the work, he says. Make him trulynash, our very own. He's been a journalist who does his patriotic duty and, from time to time, undertakes special work; now he'll be one of us, and now and then he'll write something. Kolt'sev, the editor ofPravda, is finished-sorry to tell you that,AndréAronovich-and Nezhenko, the foreign editor, is no problem. We'll hook Szara up with one of the networks in Western Europe and let him play spymaster.'

Abramov settled back in his chair, put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it with a long wooden match.

'Do you mean they won't find me in Europe?'

'They'll find you inhell. No, that's not what I mean.We become your protection, not thiskhvost and not that, the service itself. Your status will be adjusted and narrowly made known. I see Dershani every day, his office is down the hall from mine; we're both citizens of the USSR, we work in the same profession, and we don't shoot each other. I'll let him know, obliquely, that you're doing important work for us. So, hands off. That's an implicit promise from me, by the way, that you're going to be a good boy and not go off involving yourself in conspiracies and pranks. Understood?'

He did understand. Suddenly he stood on the threshold of a new life. One where he'd have to follow orders, trade freedom for survival, and live in a completely different way. Yes, he'd seen this opening after receiving information fromBaumann,and quite smug he'd been about it. But the reality tasted awful, and Abramov laughed at his evident discomfort.

'This is a web you climbed into all by yourself, my friend; now don't go cursing the spider.'

'And shall I write for the American magazine?'

'After/have protected you? Well, that would be gratitude, wouldn't it. No good deed goes unpunished, Abramov, so here's a knife in the back for you.AndréAronovich, you are forty years of age, perhaps it's time you grew up. Ask yourself: why have these people chosen me to do their dirty work? What will it accomplish? If the game is entirely successful andSoso -Joe-hurls himself out a Kremlin window, what is gained? Who takes over? Are you expecting some sort of Russian George Washington to appear? Are you? Look in your heart. No, forget your heart, look in your mind! Do you want to make Adolf Hitler happy? Why do you think anything will happen?Molotovwill say "more imperialist lies" and the world will yawn, all except for one journalist, floating face down ina swamp somewhere so that nobody can see what a noble and superior smile he wore when he died.'

Szara felt miserable.

Abramov sighed. 'For the moment,' he said kindly, 'why not just do what everybody else in the world does. Try to get along, do the best you can, hope for a little happiness.' Abramov leaned across the table and patted him reassuringly on the cheek. 'Go to work,AndréAronovich.Be amensch.'

March1938.

Winter would not go. At night the air froze and the stars did not shimmer, but stood as cold, steady lights in the distance. In the wind, the eyes ran, then tears turned to ice. Indoors it was not much better-when Szara woke in the morning his breath was a white plume against the dark blanket.

It was warmer in Central Europe: Hitler marched into Austria, France and Britain protested, crowds cheered in the Vienna streets, Jews were dragged from hiding, humiliated, and beaten. Sometimes they died from the beatings, sometimes from the humiliation. In Moscow, a new trial: Piatakov, Radek (Sobelsohn), Krestinsky, Yagoda, and Bukharin. Accused of conspiring with Nazi intelligence agents, accused of entering into secret agreements with the German government. The final sentence of Vyshinsky's summation had remained constant for three years: 'Shoot the mad dogs!' And they did.

Szara dragged himself through his days and drank all the vodka he could find, craving anaesthesia that eluded him; only the body went numb. He wanted to call Berlin but it was impossible-no words could leave Moscow. Slowly, the images of the attic room in the narrow house, too often summoned, lost reality. They were now too perfect, like mirages of water in the desert. Angry, lonely, he decidedto make love to any woman who came along, but when he met women the signal system went awry and nothing happened.

At Abramov's direction, he attended a series of training schools-an endless repetition of dead-drops, codes and ciphers, forgery, and the construction of false identities. It was all about paper, he realized, a world of paper. Identity cards, passports, embassy cables, maps of defensive positions, order-of-battle reports. A mirror image of a former life, when he'd also lived amid paper.

Sometimes he wrote for Nezhenko; Abramov insisted on that. Stories about progress, always progress; life was getting better and better. What did such drudgery do to the secret spirit that he imagined lived deep within him? Curiously, nothing. For an hour or two it did what it had to do, then returned to its hiding place. He tried a version of "The Okhrana's Mystery Man' and surprised himself, it positivelyblazed. He burned it.

He did see friends from time to time, those who remained, but no honest thing could be said and the accumulated caution and reserve strangled affection. Still, they met. Sometimes, finding themselves alone and unobserved, they spoke of what they'd seen and heard. Horror stories; separations, disappearances, failures of nerve. The light had gone out, it seemed, the very notion of heroism excised, the world now filled with soft, bruised, frightened people scheming over a few lumps of coal or a spoonful of sugar. You caught fear from friends, like a malady, and they caught it from you, and nobody suggested a cure.

Abramov was a rock, and Szara clung to him like a drowning man. They would sit in a warm office in Dzerzhinsky Square and the officer would teach him what he had to know. The principles of the work couldn't be spelled out precisely, you had to listen to anecdotes until you had an intuitive feel for what was effective andwhat wasn't. They discussed cities-some operations in Germany were run from neighbouring countries, which meant cities like Geneva, Paris, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Brussels. Prague was no longer a possibility. Warsaw was extremely dangerous; the Polish services were powerful and deft, had an astute understanding of Soviet operational habits. Brussels was best-espionage, as long as it wasn't aimed at the Belgian government, wasn't even illegal.

Sometimes Abramov took him to meet people; these were momentary, casual occasions, a handshake, a few minutes of conversation. He had the impression of individuals who instantly knew who you were, what you were. He met Dershani in his office: a plain desk, filing cabinets, a dead flower in a glass. The man himself was exceptionally polite; the thin lips smiled. 'I'm very pleased to meet you,' he said. Szara thought about that later. The face was memorable-like looking at a hawk, it was the quality of the eyes that held your attention, suggested a world where they had seen things you hadn't.

He kept busy in the daytime, but the nights were not good. When the icy March snow rattled on the window he'd bury himself in blankets and clothing and sometimes his dead wife would visit him, and he would talk to her. Out loud. Talk to an empty room, in a certain quiet, definite language they had devised, a language meant to exclude the world from the fortress of sanity they had built to protect themselves.

They had been married-some might say 'married'-by a Red Army major in1918.'Be as one with the new order' was the way he'd blessed the union. Three years later she was dead, and they'd often been separated during that period by the exigencies of civil war. Working as a nurse in the Byelorussian town of Berdichev, she'd written him every day-notes scrawled on newsprint or scraps of paper-then sent a packet through when the postal systemfunctioned. Byelorussia and the Ukraine were then, as always, the storm centres of madness. During the civil war, Berdichev was taken fourteen times, by Petlyura's army, by Denikin's, by Bolshevik units, by Galician irregulars, Polish infantry, Tutnik's bands, Maroussia's rebels, the anarchists under the insane Nestor Makhno-whose cavalry favoured Jewish prayer shawls as saddlecloths-and by what the writer Grossman referred to as 'nobody's Ninth Regiment.' Eventually, somebody had killed her, exactly who or where or under what circumstance he'd never learned.

Despite the long separations, there had been an iron bond between them, as though they were twins. There was nothing he feared to tell her, and nothing she did not understand. In the Moscow nights that March he needed her desperately. It was insane to speak out loud in the empty little apartment-he feared the neighbours, denunciation, so he used his softest voice-but he could not stop doing it. He asked her what to do. She told him to live a day at a time, and to be kind. Somehow this eased his heart and he could fall asleep.

There was one event that month which was to mean a great deal to him later, though at the time it had no special significance. It seemed just one more manifestation of the Great Inexplicable that lay at the heart of Russia, something you had to get used to if you meant to hang on to your sanity in that place. Nezhenko invited him to a semiofficial evening at theCaféSport on Tverskaya street. This was principally a gathering of Moscow's foreign community, so there was plenty of food and plenty to drink. At the height of the evening, conversation was quieted by somebody banging a spoon on a glass, then a well-known actor rose to present a recitation. Szara knew him slightly, Poziny, a barrel-chested man with a deeply lined face who played character roles in the Moscow Art Theatre-Szarahad seen him do a splendid Uncle Vanya that had brought the audience to its feet for the curtain call.

To cries of Oop-la! a grinning Poziny was hoisted atop a table by the wall. He cleared his throat, gathered the audience to him, then announced he would recite a work by Aleksandr Blok, written in the early days of the Revolution, calledThe Scythians. The Scythians, he explained for the benefit of foreign guests, were the earliest Russian tribe, one of the world's most ancient peoples, known for intricate goldworking and exemplary horsemanship, who inhabited a region north of the Black Sea. While Poziny introduced the poem, several young men and women distributed translations in French, English, and German so that the guests could read along.

Poziny held nothing back. From the first line on, his powerful voice burned with conviction:

There are millions of you; of us, swarms and swarms and swarms.

Try and battle against us.

Yes, we are Scythians; yes, Asiatics,

With slanting, greedy eyes.

. . .Oh, old world

Russia is a Sphinx.

In joy and grief,

And pouring with black blood,

She peers, peers, peers at thee,