Dark Star

'They want to know something of the dailyUfeof national minorities in eastern Poland: Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Jews, Lithuanians.'

'Persecutednational minorities, you mean. In a former Russian province.'

'The assignment, Colonel Vyborg, is not that. I'd like to point out that I was asked to make this journey some weeks before any pact was announced between the USSR and Germany. They did not, in other words, send me into the middle of a war to write a story about the lives of tailors and farmers. I don't really know what my editors had in mind-they send me somewhere and I do what I'm told to do. Maybe they didn't have very much in mind at all.'

'Jolly anarchic old Russia-the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. Something like that?'

'What can't be said about Russia? Everything is true, eventually.'

'You are, in fact, a Pole.'

'A Jewish family from Poland, in Russia since I was a teenager.'

"Then I'll revise my statement-a typical Pole.'

'Some would say not.'

'Some certainly would. But others would answer them by saying horseshit.'

Vyborg drummed his fingers on the table. A studious-looking man in an exceptionally rumpled uniform, a sort of shambling professor with spectacles, appeared in the doorway and stood there hesitantly, eventually clearing his throat. 'Anton, excuse me, but they are in Obidza.'

'So I'm told,' Vyborg said.

'Well then, shall we. . .'

'Pack up our cipher machines and go? Yes, I suppose.I've asked Olensko to organize it. Tell him to begin, will you?'

'With you commanding?'

'I'll find you in Cracow. First I'm going to take our Russian war correspondent to see the front.'

'Russian war correspondent?' The man was amazed. 'So soon?' He stared at Szara without comprehension. 'Will they print a dispatch from this war?' the man finally asked, disbelief in his voice. 'Fifty German divisions attack Poland? My, my, no. Perhaps "Some German units bravely defend their borders thirty miles inside Poland."'

Vyborg laughed bitterly by way of agreement. 'Who knows,' he said with resignation, 'it may give old Kinto something to think about.' The word he used for Stalin meant a kind of singing bandit, a merry figure from Georgian folklore. Szara grinned at the remark. 'You see?' Vyborg said triumphantly. 'He's on our side.'

Speeding southwest in an open military command car, Szara and Vyborg sat grimly in the back seat. Vyborg's driver was a big sergeant with close-cropped hair, a lion tamer's moustache, and a veinous, lumpy nose that was almost purple. He swore under his breath without pause, swinging the big car around obstacles, bouncing through the fields when necessary, hewing a path through the wheat stalks. The road was a nightmare. Refugees walked north, their possessions on their backs or in little carts. Some drove their farm animals before them or led them on a rope halter. Four people carried a sick man in a bed. Meanwhile, Polish military units-marching infantry, horse-drawn artillery and ammunition wagons-attempted to move south. The car passed a burnt-out wagon with two horses dead in the traces.'Stukas,'Vyborg said coldly. 'A terror weapon.' 'I know,' Szara said.

They were climbing steadily on the rutted dirt road that worked its way through the hills that led to the Polish side of the Carpathian mountains. The air was cooler, the rolling countryside softening as the daylight began to fade. Szara's head ached horribly; the bouncing of the hard-sprung car was torture. He'd not survived the bomb attack as well as he'd thought. His mouth tasted like brass, and he felt as though a path of tiny pins had been pushed into the skin along one side of his face. The car turned west, into a sunset coloured blood red by smoke and haze, the sort of sky seen in late summer when the forests burn. Their road followed the path of a river, the Dunajec, according to Colonel Vyborg.

'We still hold the west bank,' he said. 'Or we did when we left Nowy Sacz.' He produced a large pocket watch and gazed at it. 'Perhaps no longer,' he mused. 'We haven't much hope militarily. Perhaps diplomatically something can be done, even now. We face a million and a half Germans, and tanks and planes, with perhaps two thirds that number-and we haven't any air force to speak of. Brave pilots, yes, but the planes. . .'

'Can you hold?'

'We must. The French and the British may come to help-they've at least declared war. Time is what we need. And, whatever else happens, the story must be told. When people are ground into the dirt that is always what they say, isn't it, that "the story must be told.'"

'I'll do what I can,' Szara said softly. In the people on the road he saw sometimes sorrow, or fear, or anger, but mainly they seemed to him numb, lost, and in their eyes he could find only perplexity and exhaustion beyond feeling. He had no immunity to these refugees. His eyes held each one as the car wove among them, then went on to the next, and then the next.

'An effort,' Vyborg said. 'It's all I ask of you.' He wassilent while they passed a priest giving last rites by the side of the road. 'More likely, though, it will wind up with my getting us both killed. And for what. Russia will not be sorry to see the last of Poland.'

'Was a treaty possible?'

'Not really. As one of our leaders put it, "With the Germans we risk losing our freedom, with the Russians we shall lose our soul." Still, it may be in the Politburo's interest for attention to be called to what the Germans are doing. It's not impossible.'

When Szara heard the drone of the aeroplane he clenched his fists. Vyborg's eyes searched the sky and he leaned forward and put a hand on the sergeant's shoulder. 'Slow down, Sergeant,' he said. 'If he sees a staff car he'll attack.'

The Stuka came out of a sun-broken cloud, and Szara's heart began to beat hard as he heard the accelerating whine of the engine. 'Stop,' Vyborg said. The driver jammed on the brakes. They leaped out of the car and ran for the ditch by the side of the road. Szara pressed himself into the earth as the plane closed.God save me, he thought. The noise of the dive swelled to a scream, he heard horses neighing with terror, shouts, screams, chattering machine guns, a whipcrack above his head, then the ground rocked as the bomb went off. When the sound of the engine had disappeared into the distance he sat up. There were red ridges across his palms where his fingernails had pressed into his hands. Vyborg swore. He was picking broken cigars out of his breast pocket. On the road a woman had gone mad; people were running after her into a field, yelling for her to stop.

At dusk the column of refugees thinned, then stopped altogether. The land was deserted. They sped through a village. Some of the houses had been burned; others stood with doors wide open. A dog barked at them frantically asthey drove by. Szara opened the valise, took out a small notebook, and began to write things down. The driver swung around a bomb crater and cursed it loudly. 'Quiet!' Vyborg commanded. Szara appreciated the gesture, but it didn't really matter.Germans bomb civilians, he wrote. No, they would not publish that.Poles suffer after government refuses compromise. He scribbled over the words quickly, afraid Vyborg could see what he was writing.A new kind of war in Poland as Luftwaffe attacks nonmlitary targets.

No.

It was hopeless. The futility of the journey made him sad. Typical, somehow. Killed on Polish soil while making a useless gesture-an obituary that told the truth. Suddenly he knew exactly who Vyborg was: a Polish character from the pages of Balzac. Szara stole a glance at him. He'd lit the broken stump of a cigar and was pretending to be lost in thought as his writer wrote and they travelled to the lines. Yes, the defiant romantic. Pure courage, cold to the dangers of whatever passion took the present moment for its own. Such men-and the women were worse-had destroyed Poland often enough. And saved it. Either could be true, depending on the year you chose. And the great secret, Szara thought, and Balzac had never tumbled to it, was that the Polish Jews were just as bad-in their faith they were unmovable, no matter what form faith took: Hasidism, Zionism, communism. They were all on fire, and that they shared with the Poles, that they had in common.

And you?

Not me, Szara answered himself.

The driver braked suddenly and squeezed to the right on the narrow road. A convoy of three horse-drawn ambulances was making slow progress in the other direction. 'Getting close to it now,' Vyborg said.

The car made its way up a wooded mountainside. Szara could smell the sap, the aroma sharp and sweet after the long heat of the day. The night air was cooling quickly, a wall of dark pines rose on either side of the road. They had very little light to drive by, the headlamps of the car had been taped down to slits. The sergeant squinted into the darkness and braked hard when, with a sudden twist or turn, the road simply disappeared. Nonetheless, their progress was observed. On two occasionsaWehrmachtartillery observer spotted the light moving on a mountain road and tried his luck: a low, sighing buzz, a flash in the forest, a mutedcrump sound, then the muffled boom of the German gun bouncing among the hills. 'Missed/ Vyborg said tartly as the echo faded away.

Once again, he was awake at dawn.

Wrapped in a blanket on the dirt floor of a ruined shepherd's hut, kerosene splashed on his neck, wrists, and ankles against the lice. From the hut, an artillery observer's position in support of the battalion holding the west bank of the Dunajec, they could see a narrow valley between the water and the wooded hillside, a village broken and burned by German shelling, a section of the river, the wooden pilings that had served as stanchions for a blown bridge, and two concrete pillboxes built to defend the crossing. The observer was no more than eighteen, a junior lieutenant who'd been mobilized only three days earlier and still wore the suit he'd had on in an insurance office in Cracow. He'd managed to scrounge an officer's cap and wore officer's insignia on the shoulders of a very dirty white shirt-his jacket neatly folded in a corner of the little room.

The lieutenant was called Mierczek. Tall and fair and serious, he was somebody's good son, an altar boy no doubt, and now a soldier. A little overawed at first bythe presence of a colonel and a war correspondent, he'd made them as comfortable as he could. A harassed infantry major had greeted them the night before and brought them up to the post. Szara had described him in his notebookas1914war vintage or earlier; ferocious, bright red face; complaining he hasn't sufficient ammunition, field guns, etc. He gave us bread and lard and tea and apiece of a dense kind of currant cake his wife had baked for him before he left for the front. He wears a complicated- Masonic? noble?-ring. Not happy to see us. 'There's no knowing what will happen. You will have to take your chances as best you can.' They are facing elements of the XVlll Corps of theWehrmachtFourteenth Army underGeneraloberstList. Advances from northern Slovakia have already been made through the Jablunkov and Dukla passes. Some German units advanced more than fifteen miles the first day. We may, no matter what happens here, be cut off A delightful prospect. Polish air force bombed on the ground in the first hours of the war, according to Colonel V.

The tiny river valley in the Carpathians was exquisite at dawn. Streaky red sky, mist banks drifting against the mountainside, son light on the slate blue river. But no birds. The birds had gone. Instead, a deep silence and the low, steady rumble of distant gunnery. Mierczek stared for a long time through a missing section of roof at the back of the hut, searching the sky for clouds, praying silently for rain. But Hitler's timing had been perfect: the German harvest was in-the population would not suffer deprivation because farmhands were suddenly called to serve in the army. The infamous Polish roads, which would turn to mud of a diabolical consistency once the autumn rains began, were dry; and the rivers, the nation's only natural defence positions, were low and sluggish.

The German attack started at05:00.Szara and Vyborg both looked at their watches as the first shells landedin the village. Mierczek cranked his field telephone and made contact with the Polish counterbattery at the edge of the forest above the town. Gazing through binoculars, he located the muzzle flashes at a point in the wood on the other side of the river, then consulted a hand-drawn map with coordinates pencilled on it. 'Good morning, Captain, sir,' Mierczek said stiffly into the telephone. Szara heard the earpiece crackle with static as a voice shouted into it. "They're in L for Lodz twenty-four, sir,' Mierczek responded. He continued to stare through the binoculars, then consulted his map again. 'To the southeast of the grid, I think. Sir.' Vyborg passed his binoculars to Szara. Now he could see the village in sharp focus. A fountain of dirt rose into the air. Then a housefront fell into the little street, a cloud of dust and smoke rolling out behind it. A few small flames danced along a broken beam. He swung the binoculars to the river, then to the German side. But he could see very little happening there.

The Polish field guns began to fire, the explosions leaving dirty brown smoke drifting through the treetops. Now Szara saw an orange tongue of flame in the German-occupied woods. 'Two points left,' Mierczek said into the phone. They waited but nothing happened. Mierczek repeated his instructions. Szara could hear an angry voice amid the static. Mierczek held the phone against his chest for a moment and said confidentially, 'Some of our shells do not explode.' As the Polish guns resumed firing, Szara saw the orange flash again, but this time in a different place. Mierczek reported this. Two men in dark shirts with their sleeves rolled up went running from house to house in the village. They disappeared for a time, then emerged from a back door with a grey shape on a stretcher.

It was getting harder and harder for Szara to see anything; the pall of smoke thickened until solid objects faded into shapes and shadows. The flashes from the Germanartillery seemed to change position-there simply, he decided, couldn't be that many of them in the forest. Then a Polish machine gun opened up from one of the pillboxes. Szara moved the binoculars towards the far bank of the river and saw hundreds of grey shapes, men running low, come out of the woods and dive flat on the ground. Polish rifle fire began to rattle from the houses in the village. A Polish ammunition dump was hit by a shell; the sound of the blast was ragged, a huge billowing cloud swirled upward, brilliant white stars trailing smoke arched over the river. Mierczek never stopped reporting, but the Polish counterfire seemed ineffective. Finally Colonel Vyborg spoke up. 'I believe, Lieutenant, you're trying to pinpoint a tank battery. It seems they've cut passages into the woods for the tanks to move around.'

'I think you're right, sir,' Mierczek said. In the midst of communicating this information his face tensed, but he carried his report through to the end. Then he unconsciously held his lower lip between his teeth and closed his eyes for an instant. 'The battery's been hit,' he said. Szara traversed the Polish woods but could see little through the smoke. Vyborg was staring out the low, uneven rectangle cut into the logs that served as a window. 'Give me the binoculars,' he said to Szara. He watched for a few seconds, then said, 'Pioneers,' and handed the binoculars back to Szara. German troops were in the river, shielded by the wooden stanchions where the bridge had stood, firing machine pistols at the portals of the pillboxes. The German Pioneer closest to the Polish side was shirtless, his body pink against the grey water. He swam suddenly from behind a stanchion with a rope held in his teeth. He took long, powerful strokes, then he let go of the rope, which floated away from him when he turned on his back and moved downstream with the current. Behind him, soldiers hauled themselves along the rope as far as the stanchionhe'd just left. Some of them floated away also but were replaced by others.

'Hello? Captain? Hello?' Mierczek called into the phone. He cranked the handle and tried again. Szara could no longer hear the static. 'I think the line has been severed,' Mierczek said. He took a pair of electrician's pliers from a khaki bag, moved quickly to the low doorway, and disappeared. His job was, Szara knew, to follow the line until he found the break, repair it, and return. Szara saw a flash of the white shirt to his left, toward the battery, then it vanished into the dense smoke hanging amid the trees.

Szara swept his binoculars to the village. Most of the houses were now on fire. He saw a man run from one of them toward the woods, but the man fell on his knees and pitched forward after a few steps. Back on the river, the Pioneers had gained two more stanchions, and crowds of Germans were firing from the ones they held. The fire was returned. White chip marks appeared magically in the old, tarred wood and sometimes a German trooper fell backwards, but he was immediately replaced by another man working his way along the line. A little way down the river there were flashes from the front rank of trees and, concentrating hard, Szara could see a long barrel silhouetted against the trunk of a shattered pine tree. He could just make out a curved bulk below the barrel. Yes, he thought, Vyborg had been right, it was a tank. A group of Polish infantrymen moved out of the forest below him, three of them carrying a machine gun and ammunition belts. They were trying to take up a position with a field of fire that would enfilade the stanchions. They ran bent over, rushing forward, one of them lost his helmet, but then all three made it to a depression in the sand between the edge of the water and a grove of alder trees. He could see the muzzle flash of the machine gun. Swept the binoculars tothe stanchion and saw panic as several of the Germans fell away from the pilings. He felt a rush of elation, wanted to shout encouragement to the Polish machine gunners. But by the time he had again located their position, only one man was firing the gun and, as Szara watched, he let it go, covered his face with his hands, and slumped backwards. Slowly, he got himself turned over and began to crawl for the edge of the woods.

The field telephone came suddenly to life, static popping from the earpiece. Vyborg grabbed it and said, 'This is your observer position.' A voice could be heard yelling on the other end. Then Vyborg said, 'I don't know where he is. But he repaired theUneand until he returns I will direct your fire. Is there an officer there?' Szara heard the negative. 'Very well, Corporal, you're in charge then. There are tanks in the woods to your north, at the edge of the forest. Can you fire a single round, short? Even in the river will work.' There was a reply, then Vyborg stared at the map Mierczek had left behind. 'Very well, Corporal,' he said. 'My advice is quadrant M28.' Szara moved the binoculars to see the impact of the ranging fire Vyborg had directed but was distracted by a group of Germans who had reached the west bank of the river and were running into the woods. "They're across,' he said to Vyborg. Vyborg said, 'You're too short, come up a couple of degrees.'

Szara glanced at the doorway, wondering where Mierczek was, then realized he was not going to return. Szara could now see muzzle flashes from positions in and above the village as Polish troopers fired at the Germans who had established a flank attack in the woods. Five Panzer tanks moved out of the woods onto the sandy shore of the river, rumbling forward to the edge of the water and forming an angle that allowed them to fire directly into the Polish forces in the village. Szara's binoculars found the Polish machine gunner who'd tried to crawl away from the bsach.

He lay still in the sand. 'Corporal?' Vyborg said into the phone.

By late afternoon, they were near the town of Laskowa, not far from the river Tososina-uncertain where to go next, possibly cut off byWehrmachtencirclement, but, narrowly, alive.

They had escaped from the scene of the German bridgehead over the Dunajec-a matter of minutes. Colonel Vyborg had taken the precaution of leaving the staff car, with the sergeant to guard it, up the road from the village. Had it been in the village itself they would now be captured or, more likely, dead. As Polish resistance had worn down, the German infantry had negotiated the river on wooden rafts, isolated the remaining Poles in a few positions at the far end of the village, and demanded surrender. The Poles, from the look of it, had refused. Vyborg had watched the beginning of the final attack through his binoculars, then, unwilling to witness the end, had carefully restored them to their leather case and deliberately pressed both snaps shut. Working their way through the hillside brush they had come under fire several times, German rounds singing away through the branches, but the forest itself had protected them from the German marksmen.

For a time, the road crossing the Carpathian foothills was clear, then they came upon the remnants of a retreating Polish regiment driven back from the border: exhausted soldiers, faces and uniforms grey with dust, wagonloads of bandaged, silent men, walking wounded leaning on their rifles or helped by friends, officers who gave no orders. It was, for Szara and evidently for Vyborg as well, worse than the battle at the Dunajec. There they had seen courage in the face of superior force; this was the defeat of a nation's army. A group of peasants harvesting wheat in a field stopped working,took their caps off, and watched silently as the troops walked past.

For a time, the sergeant drove slowly, at the pace of the regiment. Then, around noon, the forward units were engaged. According to a lieutenant questioned by Vyborg, a German corps that had fought its way across one of the Carpathian passes from northern Slovakia had now turned east-with extraordinary, unheard-of speed; a completely motorized force that moved in trucks and tanks-to close the pocket and cut off Polish forces attempting to retreat along the road. When the mortar and machine gun exchanges started up and the regiment began to organize its resistance, Vyborg directed the sergeant to take a tiny cart track-two wagon ruts in the dirt-that cut through a wheat field.

Thus they spent the day. 'We will get you to a telegraph or a telephone somewhere,' Vyborg said, his mind very much on Szara's presumptive dispatch toPravda. But the tiny path wound its way among the hills, in no hurry to get anywhere, over numberless little'streams that watered farm cattle, past the occasional peasant settlement deep in the Polish countryside, far, far away from telegraph wires or much of anything. Deeper and deeper, Szara thought, into the fourteenth century-a land of high-sided hay carts with enormous wooden wheels hewed by axes, farm women in aprons, the rooty smells of dry September earth flavoured with pig manure, sweet hay, and woodsmoke. 'See what we have lost,' Vyborg said.

They stopped in midafternoon at a dusty farmyard and bought bread and sausage and freshly brewed beer from a frightened peasant who called them'pan,' sir, with every other breath. A man with the fear of armies running in his very blood-getting him to take money almost required force.Just go, said his eyes while he smiled obsequiously.Just go. Leave me my wife and daughters-you alreadyhave my sons-spare my life, we've always given you whatever you asked. Take it. Note that I'm a humble, stupid man of no interest. Then go away.

They stopped in a wood to eat. The sergeant drove the car far enough in so that German spotter aircraft would not see it. When the engine was turnedoff adeep silence descended, broken only by the low, three-note song of a single bird. The forest reminded Szara of a cathedral; they sat beneath tall oak trees that filtered and darkened the light until it was like the cool shadow of a church. One worshipped simply by being there. But it seemed to do Vyborg more harm than good; his mood grew darker by the moment, and the sergeant finished his bread and sausage and took his canteen of beer over to the car, folded the bonnet back, and began to tinker with the engine. 'He disapproves,' Vyborg said. 'And shows it in his own way.' But for courtesy, Szara would have joined him. He knew this black depth that lived in the Polish soul and feared it-the descent to a private hell where nothing could ever be fixed, or better, of made right often ended badly. He'd seen it. He noticed that the flap on Vyborg's holster was unbuttoned. An innocuous detail, but this was not the sort of officer who would be casual about such things. He knew that if Vyborg determined his honour lay in the single shot fired in a forest there was nothing he could say or do to stop it. 'You cannot take this on yourself, Colonel,' Szara finally said to break the silence.

Vyborg was slow to answer. Considered not bothering to say anything at all, finally said, 'Who else, then?'

'Politicians. Not least, Adolf Hitler.'

Vyborg stared at him in disbelief, wondering if perhaps he'd adopted the most hopeless fool in the world to tell his nation's story. 'Sir,' he said, 'do you believe that what you saw forcing the Dunajec was the Nazi party? What have I missed? If there was a lot of drunken singing andpissing on lampposts I somehow didn't see it. What I saw wasDeutschland,Poland's eternal enemy. I saw Germans. "C'mon fellows, there's a job to be done here and we're the ones to do it, so let's get busy." I saw theWehrmacht,and I would have been, any officer worth his salt would have been, proud to command it. Do you believe that a bunch of shitbag little grocers and naughty schoolboys, led byHimmlerthe chicken farmer and Ribbentrop the wine salesman, would have overcome a Polish battalion? Do you?'

'No. Of course not.'

'Well then.'

Vyborg had raised his voice. The sergeant, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, working at the engine of the car, began whistling. 'And,' Vyborg went on, now in control of himself, 'I do take this on myself. Is there somewhere, in some filing cabinet in Warsaw, a report signed A. S. Vyborg, lieutenant colonel, that says the Stuka divebomber may be expected to do such and such? That says theWehrmachtis able to cover fifteen miles of countryside a day, using tanks and motorized infantry? There is not. We are going to lose this war, we are going to be subjugated, and the fault lies with diplomacy-you're not entirely wrong-but it also lies with me and my colleagues. When a country is conquered, or subdued by political means, the secret services are always to blame-they, who are supposedly allowed to doanything, should have donesomething. In political life it is the cruellest equation there is, but we accept it. If we do not accept it we cannot continue with the work.'

He paused, drank the remaining beer in his canteen, and wiped his lips delicately with his fingers. The sergeant had stopped whistling, and the three-note bird had started to sing again, low and mournful. Vyborg settled his back against a tree trunk and closed his eyes. He was very pale, Szara realized, tired, perhaps exhausted. The strength ofhis personality was deceptive. The lost light of the forest muted the colour of his uniform-now it seemed heavy wool fabric, cut by a tailor, not a uniform at all, and his sidearm became a bulky nuisance on a belt. The colonel forced himself to return from wherever he'd been, leaned forward, searched his breast pocket for a cigar, and showed a brief anger when he couldn't find any. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and resolved. 'Every profession defines its own failures, my friend. The doctor's patient does not recover, the merchant closes his shop, the politician leaves office, the intelligence officer sees his country dominated. Surely, on the level you've lived in Russia, you know that. You've had, so to speak, at least contacts with your own services.'

'Rarely,' Szara said. 'To my knowledge, at any rate. You're referring not to the secret police-of course one sees them every day in some form or another-but to those who concern themselves with international issues.'

'Exactly. Well, I'll tell you something, you've missed a historic era, a phenomenon. We know the Soviet services, we oppose them after all so we had better know them, and what most of us feel, alongside the appropriate patriotic wrath, is perhaps just a little bit of envy. Seen together it is a curious group:Theodor Maly-the former Hungarian army chaplain, Eitingon, Slutsky, Artuzov, Trilisser, General Shtern, Abramov, General Berzin, Ursula Kuczynski-called Sonya, that bastard?loch, all the Latvians and Poles and Jews and what have you-they are; or perhaps one ought to say, in most cases,were, the very best that ever did this work. I don't speak to their morals, their personal lives, or their devotion to a cause in which I do not believe, no, one really can't see them in that light. But in the business of espionage there have never been any better, possibly won't ever be. I suppose it could be considered a pity; all of them slaughtered to some strange,enigmatic purpose known only to Stalin, at least a pity you never came to experience their particular personalities.'

'You've met them?'

'Not in the flesh, no. They are paper men who live in file folders, but perhaps it is, for them, their truest manifestation. What, after all, is there to see? A little fellow with glasses reading a newspaper ina café. Anoverweight Jewish gentleman choosing a tie, charming the sales clerk. A man in shirtsleeves and suspenders, berated by his wife for some small domestic stupidity.' Vyborg laughed at the thought of it, his gallery of rogues muddling through their daily lives. 'Ah, but on paper, well, that's another story. Here an ambassador is compromised, there a powerfulémigrégroup simply disintegrates, plans for an ingenious ciphering machine are copied and no one knows it has happened. An incident in Brussels, a disappearance in Prague-one must surmise that a fine hand is at work. As the stage magician says: now you see it, now you don't. Ah, but dear ladies and gentlemen you must forgive me, I cannot tell you how the trick is done.'

The sound of an approaching aircraft made Vyborg glance up through the trees. For a time, while the plane wandered invisible somewhere in the clouds above the forest, neither of them spoke. At last, it faded away into the distance. Vyborg stood and brushed himself off. 'One thing we certainly do know: it isn't one of ours.'Szara stood up. Vyborg glanced back up at the sky. 'We'd better be moving,' he said, 'or one of these cleverWehrmachtpincermanoeuvres is going to close around us and we'll wind up as prisoners. In the last war the officer class respected the gentleman's code, but this time around I'm not so certain.'

They drove on, the countryside shimmering a thousand shades of green and gold in the haze of the waning afternoon. Three wagons came towards them and the sergeant,at Vyborg's direction, pulled over to let them use the twin ruts of the path. Polish Jews, men, women, and children, eyes downcast for the occasion of passing army officers, headed east, away from the advancing Germans. When the car was again in motion, Szara said to Vyborg, 'No gentleman's code for them, evidently.'

'I fear not. If we are to be occupied by German forces, I am afraid our Jews will suffer. Those who just passed us believe that, and I have to agree. They, however, are headed east. Will Russia have them?'

'Russia does what it has to do,' Szara said. 'Life won't be good for them there, but most of them will survive. Stalin will find some use for them in the end.'

'In the camps?'

'Perhaps in labour battalions. They won't be allowed to settle down and live their lives.'

'Don't you love your adopted land, Mr Szara?'

'It doesn't love me, Colonel, and in an affair of any sort that tends to make life uncomfortable.'

'But you could go away, yet you don't.'

'Who hasn't thought of it? And I'm just as human as the rest of them. But something about this part of the world makes it hard to leave. It's not to be explained in the ordinary ways, and poetic yearnings for the sky and the earth seem awfully meagre when the Chekists come around. Yet one stays. One decides to leave, puts it off a week, then something happens, so then it's Thursday for certain, but on Thursday it can't be done, then suddenly it's Monday but the trains aren't running. So you wait for March, and some new decree gives you hope, then spring comes in April and your heart is suddenly strong enough for anything. Or so you think.' He shrugged, then said, 'You wake up one morning; you're too old to change, too old to start again. Then the woman in your bed snuggles up because her feet are cold and you realize you're not thatold, and after that you start to wonder what shattering horror or peculiar pleasure the rest of the day might bring, and by God your heart has grown Russian and you didn't even notice.'

Vyborg smiled. 'I should read your writing,' he said. 'But what kind of a Russian speaks this way yet lives in Paris? Or do I have it wrong?'

'No. You have it right. And all I can say in my defence is, what poet doesn't praise the love that loves from afar?'

Vyborg laughed, first politely, then for real as the notion tickled him. 'What a shame,' he said, 'that we're about to lose this beautiful, heartbreaking country of ours. If that weren't the case, Mr Szara, I assure you I would recruit you to the very corner of hell simply for the pleasure of your company.'

That night he lay on a blanket beside the car and tried to will himself to sleep. That was the medicine he needed-for exhaustion, sore spirit, for survival-but when it came, for a few minutes at a time, it wasn't the kind that healed. An area around his right temple throbbed insistently, seemed swollen and tender, and he feared something far worse than he'd imagined had gone wrong inside him. The night was starless and cool. They'd driven and driven, managing only a few miles an hour over the wagon ruts, then given it up just at the last moment of dusk.

Leaving the oak forest, they'd suddenly entered a seemingly endless wheat field that ran uninterrupted for miles. There were no villages, no people at all, only ripe wheat that rustled and whispered in the steady evening wind. The last jerry can of fuel had been poured in the gas tank; somehow they would have to find more. Szara had frightening dreams-the genial irony that had sustained their morale during the day disappeared in darkness-and when he did manage to sleep he was pursued and couldnot run. The ground beneath him was hard as stone, but turning on his other side made his head swim with pain and forced him back to his original position. Long before dawn he awakened to the roll of thunder, then saw on the horizon that it was not thunder: a pulsing, orange glow stained the eastern edge of the night sky. For a few minutes he was the only one awake; rested his head on his arm and watched what he knew to be a burning city under artillery barrage.

When the sergeant and the colonel awoke, they too watched the horizon. For a long time nobody spoke, then the sergeant took both canteens and went off to try and find water. They'd had nothing to eat or drink since afternoon of the previous day, and thirst was becoming something it was hard not to think about. Vyborg lit a match and tried to study the map, not at all sure where they were.

'Could it be that Cracow is on fire?' Szara asked.

Vyborg shook his head that he didn't know and lit another match. 'Our little wagon track is not on the map,' he said. 'But I've estimated we'll hit the north-south rail line at a switching station somewhere north and east of here.'

Szara took the last crushedGitanefrom a battered pack. He had two more in his valise, rolled up in a clean shirt. He thought about changing clothes. He had sweated and dried out many times and was everywhere coated with a fine, powdery dust that made him feel itchy and grimy. Too much Parisian luxury, he thought. Baths and cigarettes and coffee and cold, sweet water when you turned on the tap. From his perspective of the moment it seemed a dream of a lost world. France had declared war, according to the colonel, and so had England. Were the German bombers flying over their cities? Perhaps Paris was an orange glow in the sky. Vyborg looked at his watch. 'There must not be water anywhere near,' he said.

Szara sat against the tyre of the staff car and smoked his cigarette.

An hour later the sergeant had not returned, and dawn was well advanced. Colonel Vyborg had twice walked a little way up the path-with no results. Finally he seemed to make a decision, opened the trunk and took out an automatic rifle. He detached the magazine from its housing forward of the trigger guard and inspected the cartridges, then snapped it back into place and handed the weapon to Szara. From the markings it was a Model ZH29made in Brno, Czechoslovakia, a long, heavy weapon, not quite clumsy; the hand grip just behind the barrel was protected by a ribbed metal alloy so the shooter didn't blister his fingers when the gun fired automatically. Vyborg said, 'There are twenty-five rounds, and one in the chamber. The setting is for single shots, but you can move the lever behind the magazine to automatic' He reached over and worked the bolt. 'I've armed it,' he said. He drew his weapon, a short-barrelled automatic, from its holster, and inspected it as he had the Czech rifle. 'Best we stay a few yards apart but side by side-a field is a bad place for walking about with armed weapons.'

For a time they moved along the path, the colonel stopping every now and then and calling out softly. But there was no answer. The track curved upwards around a low hill and, as the sun came above the horizon, they found the sergeant on the other side, some three hundred yards away from the car, at a place where the wheat stalks had been crushed and broken. His throat had been cut. He lay stretched on his stomach, eyes wide open, a look of fierce worry settled on his face. A handful of dirt was frozen in each fist. Vyborg knelt and brushed the flies away. The sergeant's boots were gone, his pockets were turned out, and, when Vyborg reached inside his uniform jacket, a shoulder holster worn just below the armpit was empty. There wasno sign of the canteens. For a time, Szara and Vyborg remained as they were: Szara standing, the rifle heavy in his hands, Vyborg kneeling by the body, which had bled out into the earth. The silence was unbroken-only the distant ramble and the sound of the wheat stalks brashing against each other. Vyborg muttered an obscenity under his breath and went to take a religious medal from around the sergeant's neck, but if he'd worn one it had also been stolen. At last the colonel rose, the pistol held loosely in his hand. He kicked at the ground experimentally with the toe of his boot, but it was hard and dry as rock. 'We have no shovel,' he said at last. He turned and walked away. When Szara caught up with him he said, 'This always starts here when there's war.' His voice was bitter, disgusted and cold. 'It's the peasants,' he said. 'They've decided to look out for themselves.'

'How did they know we were here?'

"They know,' Vyborg said.

By full daylight they could see columns of black smoke where the city was burning and the sound of the barrage had grown more distinct, could be heard to crackle like wet wood in a fire. Vyborg drove, Szara sat beside him. They did not speak for a long time. Szara watched the needle on the petrol gauge, quivering just below the midpoint on the dial. Now, when they encountered a rise or a low hill, Vyborg stopped the car just below the top, took his binoculars, and climbed the rest of the way. Szara stood guard, rifle in hand, back protected by the metal side of the car. On the fourth or fifth scouting expedition, Vyborg appeared just below the brow of a hill and waved for Szara to join him. When he got there Vyborg said, 'They're on the other side. Go slowly, stay as close to the ground as you can, and do not speak; make gestures if you have to. People notice motion, and they hear human sounds.'

The sun was blazing. Szara crawled on his elbows and his knees, breathing dust, the rifle cradled across his arms. Sweat beaded in droplets at his hairline and ran down the sides of his face.

When they crested the hill, Vyborg handed him the binoculars, though he could see the valley very well without them. They'd reached the railway switching station-as Vyborg had predicted-which lay by a dirt road at the foot of a long gentle grade. A single set of rails curved to the west, coming together by the switching station with a double-track north-south axis. A switchman's hut and a set of long iron levers housed in a wooden framework stood to one side of two laybys, lengths of track where one train could be held while another used the right-of-way.

The little valley, mostly weeds and scrub trees, was alive withWehrmachtgrey. The hut and the switching apparatus had been protected by a sandbagged machine gun position; a number ofWehrmachtrailway officers, identifiable by shoulder patches when he used the binoculars, were milling about with green flags in hand. From the position of the long row of goods wagons parked on the western track, Szara inferred that the troop train had arrived directly from the German side of the border. There was further evidence of this. Across the wooden boards of one of the wagons was a legend printed with chalk:Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu versohlen,We are riding to Poland to beat up the Jews. Insignia indicated that he was witnessing the arrival of elements of the Seventeenth Infantry Division; about a thousand of them had already formed up while hundreds more continued to jump down from the open doors of the goods wagons.

With the binoculars, details of faces were very clear to Szara. He saw them through a smoky haze that lay over the valley, with foreground weeds cutting across his field of vision and with the eerie detachment of observation atlong range-mouths move yet no sound is heard-but he could see who they were. Farm-boys and idlers and mechanics, street toughs and clerks, factory workers and students-an army of young faces, dark and fair, some laughing, some anxious, some full of bravado, some silent and withdrawn, some handsome and some ugly, others entirely unremarkable-an army like all others. A group of officers, generally in their thirties and forties (as the troopers were in their teens and twenties), stood to one side and smoked and talked quietly in little groups while the inevitable confusion of a military force on the move was sorted out by the NCOs, the sergeants and corporals.

Szara observed this particular group with interest. They were all of a type: big, strong, competent, full of easy authority but without swagger. They were, he knew, the soul of an army, supervisors and foremen rather than executives, and upon their abilities would ultimately rest defeat or victory. They worked with their units almost casually, sometimes taking a stray by a handful of uniform and heading it where it belonged, usually without any comment at all, simply pointing it in the direction it ought to go and giving it a bit of a shove to get it moving.

From a group of cattle trucks farther down the track, the division's horses were being led to the staging area. They were great, muscular beasts, bred for army life on the horse farms of East Prussia. They would pull the divisional artillery, the provisioning and ammunition wagons, and some of the better ones would be ridden by officers: the German army, like most other European armies, moved by horsepower. There would be a few open staff cars, like the one Szara and the colonel were using, for senior officers and the medical staff, but it was horses who did all the heavy work, four thousand of them for each division of ten thousand soldiers. The spearhead of the German offensive was armoured-divisions of tanks and trucks, and their speedhad so far entirely outmanoeuvred the Polish defence-but the units moving up now would hold the territory that the fast-moving armoured groups had captured.

Szara shifted his binoculars up the road that led north, where several companies were already on the move. It was no parade, they were walking not marching, weapons casually slung-as always the giants carried rifles while small, lean men lugged tripod machine guns and mortar tubes-in a formation that was ragged but functional. The machine was, for the moment, running in low gear. Szara saw that a field gun had tipped over into a ditch, the horses tangled up in their reins and skittering about to get their balance-the accident had evidently just happened. The situation was quickly put right: a sergeant shouted orders, several troopers soothed the horses, others freed the reins, a group organized itself to lift the gun back onto the road. It took only a moment, many willing hands-heave!-and the job was done, the advance continued.

Vyborg touched him on the shoulder to get his attention and made a hand motion indicating they'd spied long enough. Szara slithered backwards for a time, then they rose and walked toward the car. Vyborg spoke in an undertone-even though they were well away from the Germans, something of their presence remained. 'That,' he said, 'was the road to Cracow. Our reckoning was, after all, correct. But, as you can see, the road is presently in use.'

'What can we do?'

'Swing around behind or try to sneak through at night.'

'Are we cut off, then?'

'Yes. For the time being. What was your impression of theWehrmacht?'

They reached the car; Vyborg started the engine and slowly backed down the track until a curve took them out of the direct sightline of the hill they'd climbed. 'My impression,' Szara said after Vyborg had backed the carinto the wheat and turned it off, 'is that I do not want to go to war with Germany.'

'You may have no choice,' Vyborg said.

'You believe Hitler will attack Russia?'

'Eventually, yes. He won't be able to resist. Farmlands, oil, iron ore; everything a German loves. By the way, did you take note of the horses?'

'Handsome,' Szara said.

'Useless.'

'I'm no judge, but they seemed healthy. Big and strong.'

'Too big. The Russians have tough little horses calledpanje, they can live on weeds. These big German beasts will disappear in the Russian mud-that's what happened to Napoleon, among other things. They're strong enough, powerful, but too heavy. And just try and feed them.'

'Hitler knows all about Napoleon, I'd imagine.'

'He'll think he's better. Napoleon came out of Russia with a few hundred men. The rest remained as fertilizer. Hundreds of thousands of them.'

'Yes, I know. What the Russians call General Winter finally got them.'

'Not really. Mostly it just wore them down, then finished the job. What got them was spotted fever. Which is to say, lice. Russia defends herself in ways that nobody else really thinks about. The peasant has lived with these lice all his life, he's immune. The Central European, that is the German, is not. Far be it from me to intrude on old Kinto's informationapparat,butif Hitler starts making hostile noises, somebody ought to go and have a look at what sort of salves and preventatives the German pharmaceutical houses are turning out. That could, in the long run, matter a great deal. Of course, why on earth would I be telling you such things? It will hardly do forPravda. Still, if you do get out of here alive, and should you chance to meet one of the operativesyou've never known, there's a little something to whisper in his ear.'

The night was exquisite, starlight a luminous silver wash across the black of the heavens. Szara lay on his back and watched it, hands clasped to make a pillow beneath his head, simultaneously dazzled by the universe and desperate for water. It was now almost too painful to talk; his voice had gone thick and hoarse. Just after dark they had crept once more to their point of vantage, sensing, like thirsty animals, that somewhere near the switchman's hut there was a stream or a well. But a new train idled on the western track and, by the light of several roaring bonfires, units organized themselves and moved off north on the road to Cracow.

At midnight they made a decision: abandoned the car and worked their way south through the countryside, carrying weapons, canteens, and hand baggage. The first two hours were agony, groping and stumbling through thick brush that bordered the wheat field, halting dead still at every miscellaneous sound of the night. What helped them, finally, was a German railway patrol; a locomotive, its light a sharp, yellow cone that illuminated the track, moved cautiously south pushing a flatcar manned by soldiers with machine pistols. Following the light, they walked for another hour, saw the silhouette they wanted, then simply waited until the engine disappeared over the horizon.

The tiny railway station had a water tower. They twisted open a valve at the bottom and took turns drinking greedily from the stream sluicing onto the ground. It was foul water, bad-smelling and stale, and Szara could taste dirt and rotting wood and God knew what else, but he lapped at it avidly, drinking from cupped hands, not caring that the stream soaked his shirt and trousers. A man and a woman came out of a little cottage that backed up to the station;he was likely a sort ofStationmaster,flagman, switchman, or whatever else might be required.

Vyborg greeted the couple politely and told the man he would require new clothing, whatever might be available. The woman went off and returned with a faded shirt and pants, broken-down shoes, a thin jacket, and a cap. Vyborg took a wallet from his jacket and offered the man a sheaf ofzlotynotes. The man looked stubbornly at his feet, but the woman stepped forward and accepted the money silently. 'What will become of us now?' the man asked.

'One can only wait and see,' Vyborg said. He bundled up the clothing, took charge of the rifle and the canteens, and said, 'I will take these off and bury them.' The man found him a coal shovel, and Vyborg vanished into the dark fields away from the track.

'To bury fine boots like those. . .'said the woman.

'Best forget them,' Szara told her. 'The Germans know what they are and who wears them.'

'Yes, but still,' said the woman.

'It's bad to see such a thing,' the man said sharply, angry that the woman saw only fine boots. To see a Polish officer bury his uniform.'

'Is there a train?' Szara asked.

'Perhaps in a few days,' the man said. 'From here one goes toÇracow,or south to Zakopane, in the mountains. In normal times every Tuesday, just at four in the afternoon.'

They stood together awkwardly for a time, then a workman came out of the field and stepped across the track. 'It's done,' Vyborg said.

There was no train. Szara and Vyborg determined to go east, on a road that ran well to the south of the railway station, skirting the Slovakian border, winding its way through the river valleys of the Carpathians. They joined an endlesscolumn of refugees, on foot, in carts drawn by farm horses, in the occasional automobile. German units were posted at the crossroads, but the soldiers did not interfere with the migration; they seemed bored, disinterested, slouching against stone walls or bridge abutments, smoking, watching without expression as the river of humanity flowed past their eyes. No papers were demanded, no one was called out of line or searched. Szara noticed what he took to be other soldiers in the column who, like Vyborg, had shed their uniforms and obtained civilian clothing. Among the refugees there were various points of view about the German attitude, ranging from attributions of benevolence

-"The Fritzes want to win our confidence'-to pragmatism

-'The less Poles in Poland, the happier for them. Now we'll be Russia's problem.' The road east became a city: babies were born and old people died, friends were made and lost, money was earned, spent, stolen. An old Jew with a white beard down to his waist and a sack of pots and pans clanking on his back confided to Szara, 'This is my fourth time along this road. In1905we went west to escape the pogroms, in1916east, running away from the Germans, then in1920,west, with the Bolsheviks chasing us. So, here we are again. I don't worry no more-it'll sort itself out.'

It took them six days to reach the small city of Krosno, some eighty miles east of the Cracow-Zakopane line. There, Szara saw with amazement that the Polish flag still hung proudly above the entrance to the railway station. Somehow, they'd managed to outdistance the German advance. Had theWehrmachtpermitted the column of refugees to enter Polish-held territory in order to overload supply and transport systems? He could think of no other reason, but that seemed to him dubious at best. Vyborg left Szara at the station and went off to look for an intelligence unit and a wireless telegraph among the forces manning the Krosno defences. Szara thought he'd seen him for the lasttime, but two hours later he reappeared, still looking like a dignified, rather finely made workman in his cap and jacket. They stood together by a beam supporting the wooden roof of the terminal, restless crowds of exhausted and desperate people shifting endlessly around them. The noise was overwhelming: people shouting and arguing, children screaming, a public address system babbling indecipherable nonsense. They had to raise their voices in order to make themselves heard. 'At last,' Vyborg said, 'I was able to reach my superiors.'

'Do they know what's going on?'

'To a point. As far as you're concerned, Lvov is not currently under attack, but that is a situation which may change quickly. As for me, my unit was known to have reached Cracow, but there they vanished. Communication is very bad-several Polish divisions are cut off, mostly trying to break out and fight their way to Warsaw. The capital will be defended and is expected to hold. Personally I give it a month at most, probably less. I'm afraid there isn't much hope for us. We do have miracles in this country, even military ones from time to time, but the feeling is that there's not much that can be done. We've appealed to the world for help, naturally. As for me, I have a new assignment.'

'Outside the country?'

Vyborg's thin-lipped mouth smiled tightly for a moment. 'I can tell you nothing. You may wish me well, though, if you like.'

'I do, Colonel.'

'I would ask you, Mr Szara, to write about what you've seen, if you can find a way to do that. That we were brave, that we stood up to them, that we did not surrender. And I would say that the next best thing, for us, if you can't do that, is silence. I refer to your assignment fromPravda. Stories about our national minorities have alreadyappeared in London and Paris, even in America. Perhaps you will decline to add your voice to the baying chorus.'

'I'll find a way.'

'I can only ask. That's all that officers of defeated armies can do, appeal to conscience, but I ask you anyhow. Perhaps you still feel yourself, at heart, a Pole. People of this nation are far-flung, but they often think of us, it would not be inappropriate for you to join them. Meanwhile, as to practical matters, I'm told that a train for Lvov will be pulling in here within the hour. I'd like to think that you'll be on it-you have your work cut out for you, I can see-but at least that way I'll have kept my part of the bargain, albeit by an unexpected route.'

'Journalists are very good at forcing their way onto trains, Colonel.'

'Perhaps we'll meet again,' Vyborg said.

'I would hope so.'

Vyborg's handshake was strong. 'Good luck,' he said, and slipped away into the milling crowd of refugees.

Szara did get on the train, though not actually inside it. He worked his way to the side of a coach, then moved laterally until he came to the extended iron stair. There was a passenger already in residence on the lowest step, but Szara waited until the train jerked into motion, then forced his way up and squeezed in beside him. His fellow traveller was a dark, angry man clutching a wicker hamper in both arms and, using his shoulder, he attempted to push Szara off the train-the step belonged to him, it was his place in the scheme of things.

But Szara availed himself of a time-honoured method and took a firm grip on the man's lapel with his free hand so that the harder the man pushed, the more likely he was to leave the train if Szara fell off. The train never managed to pick up any speed; there were people hanging out the windows, lying.flat on the roof, and balancing onthe couplings between cars, and the engine seemed barely capable of moving the weight forward. For a long time the two of them glared at each other, the man pushing, Szara hanging on to him, their faces separated only by inches. Then, at last, the pushing and pulling stopped and both men leaned against the bodies occupying the step above theirs. The train made the eighty miles to Lvov in six agonizing hours, and if the station at Krosno had been a hell of struggling crowds, Lvov was worse.

Attempting to cross the platform, Szara literally had to fight. The heat of the crowd was suffocating, and he shoved bodies out of his way, tripped over a crate of chickens and fell fiat on the cement floor, then struggled desperately among a forest of legs in order to rise before he was trampled to death. Someone punched him in the back, hard-he never saw who did it, he simply felt the blow. Once he got to the waiting room, he fell in with a determined phalanx using their combined weight to move toward the doors. They'd almost got there when a crowd of frantic, terrified people came sweeping back against them. Szara's feet left the ground, and he was afraid his ribs might break from the pressure; he flailed out with one hand, hit something wet that produced an angry yelp, and with enormous effort got his feet back on the floor.

Somewhere, only barely touching the edge of his consciousness, was a drone, but he made no attempt to connect it with anything in the real world, it was simply there. He moved sideways for a few seconds, then some mysterious countercurrent picked him up and sent him sprawling through the doors of the station-he kept his balance only by jamming one hand against the cement beneath him, gasping at the air as he came free of the crowd.

He found himself not in the main square of Lvov, but at a side street entrance to the railway station. Peoplewere running and shouting, he had no idea why. Several carts had been abandoned by their drivers, and the horses were galloping wildly up the cobbled street to get away from whatever it was, loose vegetables and burlap sacks flying off the wagons behind them. The air was full of tiny, white feathers, from where he did not know, but they filled the street like a blizzard. The drone grew insistent and he looked up. For a moment he was hypnotized. Somewhere, in some file in the house on the rue Delesseux, was a silhouette, as seen from below, identified in a careful Cyrillic script as the Heinkel-111; and what he saw above him was a perfect match of the darkened outline among the pages of what he now realized was theBaumannfile. This was one of the bombers controlled by the swage wire manufactured on the outskirts of Berlin. There was a second flight approaching, at least a half-dozen of them in the clouds above the city, and he remembered, if not precise facts and figures, at least the certain conclusion: they were known to produce the virtual annihilation of every stick and stone and living thing once they released their bombs. As the planes flew in slow formation, a series of black, oblong cylinders floated away beneath them and tumbled, in a crookedUne,toward the earth.

The first explosion-he felt it in his feet and heard it in the distance-startled him, then several more followed, each time growing louder. He ran. Blindly and without purpose, in panic, then tripped and fell at the base of a doorway. He lashed out at the door, which swung open, and he crawled frantically into a room. He smelted sawdust and shellac, spotted a large, rough-hewn work table, and rolled beneath it. Only then did he discover he was not alone-there was a face close to his, a man with a scraggly beard, half glasses, and a stub of pencil wedged between his temple and the hem of his cap. The man's eyes were enormous and white, blind with terror. Szara squeezedhimself into a ball as a shattering roar rocked the table above him, perhaps he howled, perhaps the man curled up next to him did-he no longer had any idea who he was or where he was, the world exploded inside his head and he forced his eyes shut until he saw brilliant colours in the darkness. The floor bucked and sang with the next explosion and Szara tried to claw his way through it into the safe earth below. Then there was another, and then another, receding, and, finally, a silence that rang in his ears before he realized what it meant.

'Is it over?' the man said in Yiddish.

The air was thick with smoke and dust; they both coughed. Szara's throat felt as though it had caught fire. 'Yes,' Szara said. 'They've gone.' Together, and very slowly, they crawled from beneath the table. Szara saw that he was in a carpentry shop, and the man with the half glasses was apparently the carpenter. The windows were gone, Szara had to look for a long time before he discovered tiny sparkles of glass embedded in the back wall. But he could find no other damage. What had dissolved the windows had also slammed the door, and the carpenter had to pull hard before it sprang open.

Cautiously, they looked out into the street. To their left was a gap where a house had been-only a pile of board and brick remained-and the house next to it was on fire, black smoke boiling out of the upper windows. Somebody nearby shouted, 'Help'-perhaps a woman's voice. The carpenter said'Mein Gotfand pressed his face between his hands.

At the opposite end of the street from the burning house a vast crater had been torn open. They walked over to it and peered down; a broken pipe gushed water from a ragged end. 'Help,' said the voice again. It came from a shop directly across from the hole in the street. 'It's Madame Kulska,' said the carpenter. The door of theshop had disappeared and the interior, a dressmaker's workroom, had been swirled by a typhoon, bits and pieces of material were everywhere. 'Who's there?' said the voice. 'Nachman,' said the carpenter. 'I'm under here,' said the voice.Under here was covered by a jumbled layer of fallen bricks. Szara and the carpenter quickly cleared the rabble away, revealing the dusty back of a hugearmoireand a small woman pinned beneath it. Szara took one corner, the carpenter the other.lEin,zwei, drei,'said the man, and together they raised the cabinet until it fell back into the smashed brick wall, the door swinging open to reveal a row of dresses, of various shapes and colours, suspended from wooden hangers.

'Give me your hand, Mr Nachman,' said the woman. They both helped her to sit upright. Szara could see no blood. The woman looked curiously at her hand, then wiggled the fingers. 'Are you hurt?' the carpenter said. 'No,' said the woman, her voice faint and giddy with astonishment. 'No. I don't think so. What happened?'

He heard the sound of a bell clanging. Leaving the carpenter with the woman, Szara went to the door. A fire engine had driven up to the burning building, and firemen were uncoiling a hose connected to a tank of water on the back. Szara wandered out of the shop and down the street. Two men hurried by, carrying an injured boy on a stretcher improvised from a quilt. Szara's heart sickened. What was the point of dropping bombs on this neighbourhood? To murder? Simply that? A man on a ladder was helping a young woman out of a window from which smoke drifted in a pale mist. She was weeping, hysterical. A crowd of neighbours, gathered at the foot of the ladder, tried to call out soothing words.

The next street was intact. So was the one after that. A man ran up to him and said, "There are eight people dead at the railway station.' Szara said, 'It's terrible. Terrible.'

Then the man ran off to tell somebody else. Another fire engine drove past. The driver was a rabbi with a bloody handkerchief tied around his forehead; sitting next to him a small boy conscientiously rang a bell by pulling on a rope. Szara sank to the cobble stones. Looking down, he saw that his hand still clutched the valise. He had to use his free hand to pry the fingers open. People wandered by, dazed, in shock. Szara put the valise between his feet and held his head in his hands.This is not human, he thought,to do this is not human.

But there was something else in his mind, a ghost of a thought caught up among everything he felt. The city of Lvov had been bombed by a flight of Heinkel-llls. People had been killed, houses blown up, and there were fires that had to be put out and wounded who had to be treated.

But the city was still there. It had not been reduced to a mound of smoking ashes, not at all. He suddenly understood that a dark shape he'd seen half buried in a neighbouring alley was a bomb that had failed to explode. Others had fallen in the streets, between houses, in courtyards and parks, while some had destroyed rooftops but left the occupants of the building miraculously unharmed. Slowly, a realization worked its way into his consciousness. He could not believe it, at first, so he spoke the words out loud. 'My God,' he said. "They were wrong.'

Poste Restante

In the dappled, aqueous dusk of the hydrotherapy room, the journalist Vainshtok cleaned his spectacles with a soiled handkerchief. He screwed up his eyes and wrinkled the bridge of his nose, producing the ferocious scowl of the intellectual momentarily separated from his glasses.'Chomaya grayaz,' he said with contempt, squinting through each lens in turn. "That's all it was.' The slang phrase was peculiar to journalists-literally it meant grey mud-and described a form of propaganda intended to obscure an issue and cover up reality. '"Thepathetic state of Poland's national minorities,'" Vainshtok quoted himself with a sneer. 'Boo-hoo.'

'Why?' Szara asked.

Vainshtok settled the spectacles back on his nose and thought a moment. 'Well, whatever the reason, they certainly did want it-they gave me the front page, and a fat byline.'

They were six miles from Lvov, at the Krynica-Zdroj, one of the more elegant spas in Poland, where the privileged had gathered to have their exhausted livers, their pernicious lumbago, and their chronic melancholia cured by immersions and spritzes, dousings andingestions,of the smelly sulphurous waters that bubbled up from deep within the earth. And if simultaneously they chanced to do a little business, to find a husband or a wife, to consummate a love affair, well so much the better. Currently the spa's clientele was limited to a handful of Soviet journalists and a horde of foreign diplomats and their families who'd fled east from the fighting in Warsaw. 'As to why they wanted it,really why,' Vainshtok went on, 'that seems fairly obvious.' He inclined his head and gave one of his wild eyebrows a conspiratorial twitch.

Szara almost laughed. Vainshtok was one of those people who are forever impervious to their physical presence, but he looked, at that moment, extraordinarily strange. His skin shaded green by the rainy-day gloom of the basement pool, he wriggled in discomfort on the skeleton of a garden chair-the cushions had disappeared, along with the white-smocked attendants who'd laid them out every morning-and wore, the strap crushing a hand-painted tie, a shoulder holster with the grip of an automatic protruding from it. On the wall behind him, the foam green tile gave way to a Neptune riding a sea horse in ultramarine and ochre. 'It is certainly not the truth,' he said. 'Those starving Ukrainians and sorely persecuted Byelorussians groaning under the heel of Polish tyranny are, in fact, as we sit in this godforsaken grotto, attacking army units as they try to set up defensive positions in the marshland. What you have are the same old Ukrainian outlaw bands behaving in the same old ways, yet Moscow requires a sympathetic view. So, what do they want with it? You tell me.'

'They're preparing an action against the Poles.'

'What else?'

Szara stared into the pool. It was green and still. At either end stood imposing water machines, nickel-plated monsters with circular gauges and ceramic control knobs, their rubber hose-works strung limply from iron wheels. He imagined a longUneof naked, bearded aristocrats awaiting treatment-there was something nineteenth century, and slightly sinister, about the apparatus, as though it were meant to frighten madmen back to sanity.

'Meanwhile,' Vainshtok said, 'the highly regardedAndréSzara goes off on a tour of the battlefields of southern Poland, misses his chance to write the big nationalminorities story, and in general causes great consternation.'

Szara grinned at Vainshtok's needling. 'Consternation, you say. Such a word. Why notalarms and excursions, as the English put it. In fact, with all this chaos, I doubt anybody even noticed.'

'They noticed.'

A certain tone in Vainshtok's voice caught Szara's attention. 'Did they?'

'Yes.'

Again the note, this time a monosyllable. Not at all typical of Vainshtok. Szara hesitated, then leaned forward, a man about to ask frank and difficult, possibly dangerous, questions.

'Oh, you know how they are,' Vainshtok said hurriedly. 'Just any little thing and they turn bright red and throw a few somersaults, like the king's ministers in a children's book.' He laughed a little.

'Someone here?'

The question was dismissed with a shrug and a frown. "Three Jews meet in heaven, the first one says-'

'Vainshtok. . .'

'"The day I died, the whole city of Pinsk-"'

'Who asked?'

Vainshtok sighed and nodded to himself. 'Who. The usual who.'

Szara waited.

'I didn't ask him his name. He already knew mine, as he no doubt also knew the length of myschvontz and the midwife who took me from my mother. Who indeed! A Cossack in a topcoat. With the eyes of a dead carp. Look,AndréAronovich,you're supposed to show up in Lvov. Then you don't. You think nobody's going to notice? So they come around looking for you. What am I supposed to say? Szara? He's my best pal, tells meeverything, he juststopped off in Cracow to buy rolls, don't worry about him. I mean, it was almost funny-if it wasn't like it was it would be funny. Mind you, it was the same day the Germans finally broke into Lvov: buildings on fire, people weeping in the streets, tanks, in the marketplace, that fucking swastika flying over the town hall, a few diehards sniping from the windows. And suddenly some, someapparattypeappears from nowhere and all he wants to know is where's Szara. I almost said, "Pardon me, you're standing in my war," but I didn't, you know I didn't. I crawled on my belly until he went away. What do you want? Remorse? Tears? I don't really know anything about you, not really. So I told him nothing. It just took some time to get it said.'

Szara sat back in the garden chair. 'Don't worry about it,' he said. 'And I was in the city that day. I saw the same things you did.'

'Then you know,' Vainshtok said. He took off his glasses and looked at them, then put them back on. 'All I want is to stay alive. So I'm a coward, so now what.'

He could see that Vainshtok's hands were shaking. He took out a cigarette and silently offered it, then lit a match and held it while Vainshtok inhaled. 'Have the Germans been out here?' he asked.

Vainshtok blew smoke through his nose. 'Only a captain. The day after they took the city he came around. A couple of the ambassadors went out to meet him, they all put their heads together, then he came in and drank a cup of tea in the lobby. A diplomatic crisis was averted, as the old saying goes, and theSSnever showed up. Myself, I didn't take any chances.' He patted the automatic affectionately. 'Somehow I get the feeling that in certain situations theNon-Aggression Pact doesn't quite cover somebody who looks like me. "Oops! Sorry. Was that aRussian Jew? Oh, too bad."'

'Where'd you get it?'

'You met Tomasz? The caretaker? Big white eyebrows, big belly, big smile-like a Polish SantaClaus?'

'When I arrived. He told me where you were.'

'Tomasz will get you, for a small fee, whatever you want.' Vainshtok took the pistol out of the holster and handed it to Szara. It was a blued-steel Steyr automatic, an Austrian weapon, compact and heavy in his hand.

'You get to play with it for three minutes,' Vainshtok said. 'But you have to give me five marbles and a piece of candy.'

Szara handed it back. 'Is there anything to eat in this place?'

Vainshtok looked at his watch. 'In an hour or so they serve boiled beets. Then, at dinnertime, they serve them again. On the other hand, the china is extremely beautiful, and they're actually very good beets.'

Szara slept on a wicker couch on the sunporch. The hotel was jammed with people and he was lucky to find anything at all to sleep on. At a right angle to the couch, a Spanish consular official had claimed the porch swing for a bed, while a Danish commercialattaché,one of the last to arrive from Warsaw, curled up on the floor next to a rack of croquet sets. The three of them had managed a conversation in French, talking in low voices after midnight, cigarettes glowing in the dark, in general trying to sort out rumours-the prime topic of conversation at the spa. Elements of the Polish army were said to have withdrawn to the Pripet marshes with the idea of holding out for six months while French and British expeditionary forces were organized to come to Poland's defence. A Norwegian diplomat was believed to have been interned. This was curious because Norway had declared neutrality, but perhaps the Germans intended the 'mistake' as a warning. Or perhaps it hadn't happened at all. The UnitedStates, the Dane was certain, had declared neutrality. A special train would be organized to remove diplomats from Poland. But many diplomats from Warsaw, having taken refuge in the town of Krzemieniec, in western Poland, had been casualties of a heavy bombing attack by the Luftwaffe. The Polish government had fled to Romania. Warsaw had surrendered; Warsaw still held; Warsaw had been so obliterated by bombing that there was nothing leftto surrender. The League of Nations would intervene. Szara faded away without realizing it; the quiet voices on the porch and a light patter of rain lulled him to sleep.

It was a particularly golden dawn that woke him. The distant forest was alive with light. How hard summer died here, he thought. It made him wonder what day it was. The seventeenth of September, he guessed, making what sense he could of the jumble of days and nights he'd wandered through. The lawns and gravelled paths sparkled with last night's raindrops as the sun came up and it was, but for a faint buzz of static somewhere in the hotel, immensely quiet. A rooster began to crow; perhaps a village lay on the other side of the forest. He looked at his watch-a few minutes after five. The Spaniard on the porch swing was lying on his back, coat spread over him like a blanket and pulled decorously up to his chin. Beneath a lavish moustache his mouth was slightly open, and his breath hissed in and out daintily as he slept. Szara caught, for just a moment, the barest hint of coffee in the air. Was it possible? Just wishful thinking. No, he did smell it. He wrestled free of the jacket tangled about him and sat upright-oh, bones-checking to make sure the valise was under the couch where he'd put it the night before. His beard itched. Today he would find some way to heat up a pot of water and have a shave.

Some campaigner he'd turned out to be. Not anymore. He was a creature of hotels now. Someone was makingcoffee-he was sure of it. He stood and stretched, then walked into the lobby. Anarchy. Bodies everywhere. A woman with two chins was snoring in a chair, a Vuitton suitcase tied securely to herfěngerwith a shoelace. What did she have in there? he wondered. The silver service from some embassy? Polish hams? Wads ofzlotys?Little good they'd do her now; the Germans no doubt had occupation scrip already printed and ready to spend. He moved toward the staircase and lost the scent, then backtracked into the dining room. Cautiously, he pushed open one of the swinging doors to the kitchen. Only a cat sleeping on a stove. The static was louder, however, and the coffee was close. At one end of the kitchen, another swinging door opened onto a small pantry and two women looked up quickly, startled at his sudden appearance. They were hotel maids, he guessed, pretty girls with tilted noses and cleft chins, one dark, the other fair, both wearing heavy cotton skirts and blouses, their hands red from scrubbing floors. A zinc coffeepot stood on a small parlour stove wedged into one corner, and an old-fashioned radio with a curved body sat on a shelf and played symphonic music amid the static. The maids were drinking coffee from the hotel's demi-tasse cups. After Szara said good morning he pleaded for coffee. 'Just tell me how much,' he said. 'I would be happy to pay.'

The blond girl coloured and looked down at her shoes. The dark one found him a tiny cup and filled it with coffee, adding a shapeless chunk of sugar from a paper sack. She offered him a piece of twig to use as a stirrer, explaining, 'They have locked up the spoons somewhere. And of course there is nothing to pay. We share with you.'

'You are kind,' he said. The coffee was sharp and hot and strong.

"There is only a little left,' the dark girl said. 'You won't tell, will you?'

'Never. It's our secret.' He drew anX over his heart with one finger and she smiled.

The symphonic music faded away, replaced by a voice speaking Russian: 'Good morning, this is the world news service of Radio Moscow.'

Szara looked at his watch. It was exactly five-thirty, that made it seven-thirty Moscow time. The announcer's voice was low and smooth and reasonable-one need not concern oneself too much with the news it broadcast; somewhere in the Kremlin all was being carefully seen to. There was a reference toa communiqué,to a meeting of the Central Committee, then the news that some forty divisions of the Red Army had entered Poland along a five-hundred-mile front. In general they had been welcomed, there was no fighting to speak of, little resistance was expected. Foreign MinisterMolotovhad announced that 'events rising from the Polish-German war have revealed the internal insolvency and obvious impotence of the Polish state.' There was great concern that some 'unexpected contingency' could 'create a menace to the Soviet Union.'Molotovhad gone on to say that the Soviet government 'could not remain indifferent to the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Byelorussians inhabiting Poland.' The announcer continued for some time; the phrasing was careful, precise. All had been thought out. War and instability in a neighbouring state posed certain dangers; the army was simply moving up to a point where the occupation of contested territory would insulate Soviet citizens from fighting and civil disorders. The announcer went on to give other foreign news, local news, and the temperature-forty-eight degrees-in Moscow.

Later that morning word came from Lvov that the Germans were preparing to leave the city. A great wave of excitement and relief swept over the population of theKrynica-Zdroj,and it was determined that a column would be formed-Ukrainian bands continued their offensive; several travellers were known to have disappeared-to make the journey into town. A light but steady rain was deemed to be of no importance; the spa had an ample supply of black umbrellas and these were distributed by the smiling caretaker, Tomasz. The diplomatic corps made every effort to appear at its best-men shaved and powdered, women pinned up their hair, formal suits were dug out of trunks and suitcases. The procession was led by Tomasz, wearing an elegant little hat with an Alpine brush in the band, and the commercial counsellor of the Belgian embassy in Warsaw, carrying a broomstick with a whiteUnentable napkin mounted at one end, a flag of neutrality.

It was a longUneof men and women beneath bobbing black umbrellas that advanced down the sandy road to Lvov. The fields were bright green and the smell of black earth and mown hay was sharp and sweet in the rainy air. The spirit of the group was supremely optimistic. Prevailing views were concentrated on the possibility of a diplomatic resolution of the PoUsh crisis as weU as on cigarettes, coffee, soap, perhaps even roast chicken or cream cake; whatever might be had in newly liberated Lvov.

Szara marched near the end of the column. The people around him were of various opinions about the Soviet advance, news of which had spread Uke wildfire. Most thought it good news: Stalin informing Hitler that, despite their expedient pact, enough was enough. It was felt that a period of intense diplomacy would now take place and, no matter the final result of the German invasion, they could go home. To Szara there was something infinitely Polish about the scene, these people in their dark and formal clothing marching along a narrow road in the rain beneath a forest of umbrellas. Towards the end of the six-mile walk,some of the diplomats were tiring, and it was determined that everybody should sing-'The Marseillaise' as it turned out, the one song they all knew. True, it was the national anthem of a recently declared belligerent, but they were advancing under a white flag, and for raising the spirits on a rainy day there simply wasn't anything better. Vainshtok and Szara marched together; the former, his shoulder holster abandoned for the journey, thrust his clenched fist into the air and sang like a little fury in a high, wavering voice.

Szara didn't sing. He was too busy thinking. Trying to sort a series of images in his mind that might, if he found the organizing principle, come together to form a single, sharp picture. Beria's ascension, Abramov's murder, the suicide of Kuscinas, the Okhrana dossier, Baumann's arrest: it all ended with forty Russian divisions marching into Poland.Stalin did this, he thought. Stalin did what? Szara had no name for it. And that made him angry. Wasn't he smart enough to understand what had been done?Maybe not.

What he did know was that he had been part of it, witness to it, though mostly by accident. He didn't like coincidence,Ufehad taught him to be suspicious of it, but he was able to recall moment after moment when he'd seen and heard, when he'd known-often from the periphery but known nonetheless-what was going on.Why me, then? he demanded of himself. The answer hurt:because nobody took you very seriously. Because you were seen to be a kind of educated fool. Because you were useful in a minor but not very important way, you were permitted to see things and to find out about things in the same way a lady's maid is permitted to know about a love affair: whatever she may think about it doesn't matter.

What he needed, Szara thought, was to talk it out. To say the words out loud. But the one person he could trust,GeneralBloch, had disappeared from his life. Dead? In flight? He didn't know.

'"Aux armes, citoyens?"Beside him, Vainshtok sang passionately to the cloudy Polish heavens.

No, Szara thought.Let him be.

In the city, people stood soberly in the square that faced the ruined station and watched in silence as theWehrmachtmarched west, back toward Germany. It was so quiet that the sound of boots and horses' hooves on the cobblestones, the creak of leather and the jangle of equipment, sounded unnaturally loud as the companies moved past. Some of the infantrymen glanced at the crowd as they went by, their faces showing little more than impersonal curiosity. The diplomats stood under their umbrellas alongside the Poles and watched the procession. To Szara they seemed a little lost. There was nobody to call on, nobody to whom a note could be handed; for the moment they had been deprived of their natural element.

The normal progress of the withdrawal was broken only by a single, strange interlude in the grey order of march: the Germans had stolen a circus. They were taking it away with them. Its wagons, decorated with curlicues and flourishes in brilliant gold on a dark red field, bore the legend CircusGoldenstein,and the reins were held by unsmilingWehrmachtdrivers, who looked slightly absurd managing the plumed and feathered horses. Szara wondered what had become of the clowns and the acrobats. They were nowhere to be seen, only the animals were in evidence. Behind the bars of a horse-drawn cage Szara saw a sleepy tiger, its chin sunk on its forepaws, its green-slit eyes half closed as it rolled past the crowd lining the street.

Toward evening, the diplomats walked back down the sandy road to the spa. Two days later, a Russian tank column rolled into the city.

* * *

Behind the tanks came the civil administration: the NKVD, the political commissars, and their clerks. The clerks had lists. They included the membership of all political parties, especially the socialists-Polish, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Jewish. The clerks also had the names of trade union members, civil servants, policemen, forestry workers, engineers, lawyers, university students, peasants with more than a few animals, refugees from other countries, landowners, teachers, commercial traders, and scores of other categories, particularly those, like stamp dealers and collectors, who habitually had correspondence with people outside the country. So the clerks knew who they wanted the day they arrived and immediately set to work to find the rest, seizing all civil, tax, educational, and commercial records. Individuals whose names appeared on the lists, and their families, were to be deported to the Soviet Union in trains, eventually to be put to work in forced labour battalions. Factories were to be disassembled and sent east to the industrial centres of the USSR, stores stripped of their inventories, farms of their livestock.

Special units of the NKVD Foreign Department arrived as well, some of them turning up at the spa, their blackPobedasspattered with mud up to the door handles. The diplomats were to be sorted out and sent on their way home as soon as the western half of Poland conceded victory to Germany. 'Becarni,'the operatives said. 'Warsaw will surrender any day now, the Poles can't hold out much longer.' The Russians were soft-spoken and reassuring. Most of the diplomats were relieved. A registration table was set up in the dining room with two polite men in civilian clothes sitting behind it.

Szara and Vainshtok waited until five o'clock before they joined the line. Vainshtok was philosophical. 'Back to dear old Berlin.' He sighed. 'And dear oldDr Goebbels'spress conferences. How I've lived without them I don't know. But, at least, there'll be something for dinner besides beets.'

Vainshtok was skinny and hollow-chested, with thin, hairy arms and legs. He reminded Szara of a spider. 'Do you really care so much what you eat?' Szara asked. The line moved forward a pace. 'You certainly don't get fat.'

'Terror,' Vainshtok explained. "That's what keeps me thin. I eat plenty, but I burn it up.'

The man in front of them, a minor Hungarian noble of some sort, stepped up to the table, stood at rigid attention, and, announcing his name and title, presented his diplomatic credentials. Szara got a good look at the two operatives at the table. One was young and alert and very efficient. He had a ledger open in front of him and copied out the information from documents and passports. The other seemed rather more an observer, in attendance only in case of some special circumstance beyond the expertise of Ms partner. The observer was a short, heavy man, middle-aged, with wavy fair hair and extremely thick glasses. As his junior questioned the Hungarian in diplomatic French-'May I ask, sir, how you managed to find your way to this area?'-he put an oval cigarette in the centre of his lips, creased the head of a wooden match with his thumbnail, and lit the cigarette from the flare.

Where?Szara asked himself.

The Hungarian's French was primitive. 'Left Warsaw on late train. Night in eight September. . .'

Where?

The observer glanced at Szara, but seemed to take no special notice of him.

'Stopping in Lublin. . .'said the Hungarian.

'I don't feel well,' Szara said confidentially. 'You go ahead.' He turned and walked out of the dining room. Manoeuvred his way through the crowded lobby, excusinghimself as he bumped into people, and took the passageway that led to the hydrotherapy pool and the treatment areas in the basement. The spiral staircase was made of thin metal, and his footsteps clattered and echoed in the stairwell as he descended. He took the first exit, walking quickly through a maze of long tile halls, trying doors as he went. At last one opened. This was a water room of some sort; the ceiling, floor, and walls were set with pale green tiles, hoses hung from brass fittings, and a canvas screen shielded a row of metal tables. The screen had a series of rubber-rimmed apertures in it-for arthritic ankles to be sprayed with sulphurous water? He hiked himself up onto a metal table, took a deep breath, tried to calm down.

Where,he now realized, was in some lost Belgian mining town the night thatOdile wasdebriefed after she got off the train from Germany. The observer was the man with the gold watch; Szara remembered him lighting a cigarette off a match flare, remembered him asking a single question: 'Is that your answer?' Some such thing. Intimidation. A cold, watery stare.

And so? So he'd turned up at the Krynica-Zdroj,sitting behind a table with a ledger on it. So? That's probably what he did with hisüfe.Szara resisted a shiver. The little room was clammy, its air much too still, a cavern buried in the earth. What was wrong with him, running away like a frightened child? Was that all it took to panic him, two operatives sitting at a table? Now he'd have to go back upstairs and join the line; they'd seen him leave, perhaps it would make them suspicious.See how you incriminate yourself! No, there was nothing to fear. What could they do, surrounded by a crowd of diplomats. He hopped off the table and left the room. Now, which hallway led where?

He wandered a little distance toward where he thought the exit was, stopped dead when he heard footsteps onthe staircase. Who was this? A normal, deliberate descent. Then Vainshtok, nasal and querulous:'AndréAronovich?AndréAronovich!'

Vainshtok,from the sound of it, was walking down the corridor at right angles to where he stood. 'I'm over here,' Szara said.

Coming around the corner, Vainshtok signalled with his eyes and a nod of the head that someone was behind him, but Szara could see no one. 'I've come to say good-bye,' he said, then reached out suddenly and took Szara in his arms, a powerful hug in the Russian style. Szara was startled, found himself pulled hard against Vainshtok's chest, then tried to return the embrace, but Vainshtok backed away. Two men turned the corner into the hallway, then waited politely for farewells to be said. 'So,' Vainshtok said, 'let those who can, do what they must, eh?' He winked. Szara felt the bulging weight between his side and the waistband of his trousers and understood everything. Vainshtok saw the expression on his face and raised his eyebrows like a comedian. 'You know, Szara, you're not such a snob after all. You'll come and see me when you get to Moscow?'

'Not Berlin?'

'Nah.Enough!'

'Lucky for you.'

'That's it.' His eyes glistened.

He turned abruptly and walked away. When he reached the end of the corridor, he turned towards the staircase, followed by one of the men. A moment later Szara heard them climbing the stairs. As the other man came to join him, Szara saw that it was Maltsaev, dark and balding, wearing tinted eyeglasses and the same voluminous overcoat wrapped about him, his hands thrust deep in the pockets. He nodded at Szara with evident satisfaction. 'The wandering troubadour-at last!' he said merrily.

Szara looked puzzled.

'You've given Moscow fits,' Maltsaev explained. 'One moment you're landing at Warsaw airfield, the next, nothing, air.'

'A detour,' Szara said. 'I was, how shall I put it,escorted by Polish military intelligence. They picked me up at a hospital in Tarnow, after a bombing on the rail line, and drove me to Nowy Sacz. Then we couldn't get through the German lines. Eventually, I managed to cling to the platform of a train that was going to Lvov. Once I got there, a policeman sent me out here to the spa, with the diplomats.'

Maltsaev nodded sympathetically. 'Well, everything's going to be fine now. I'm up here on some liaison assignment with the Ukrainianapparat,butthey wired me in Belgrade to keep an eye out for the missing Szara. I'm afraid you'll have to go into the city and tell some idiot colonel the whole saga, but that shouldn't trouble you too much.'

'No, I don't mind,' he said.

'Your friend Vainshtok's going back to Moscow. Probably you won't have to. I would imagine you'd prefer to stay in Paris.'

'If I can, I'd like to, yes.'

'Lucky. Or favoured. Someday you'll tell me your secret.'

Szara laughed.

Maltsaev's mood changed, he lowered his voice. 'Look, you didn't mind, I hope, the last time we spoke, at the station in Geneva. . .'

Szara remembered perfectly, a remark about Abramov:his parents should have made him study the violin like all the rest of them. 'I understand completely,' he said. 'A difficult time.'

'We're none of us made of iron. What happened with Abramov, well, we only wanted to talk with him. Wewere certainly prepared to do more, but it would never have come to that if he hadn't tried to run. We couldn't, you understand these things, we couldn't let him disappear. As it was, I got a thorough roasting for the whole business. Any hope of getting out of the embassy in Belgrade-there it went. Anyhow, what I said at the station...I hadn't slept, and I knew I was in trouble, maybe a lot of trouble. But I shouldn't have taken it out on you.'

Szara held up a hand. 'Please. I don't hold a grudge.'

Maltsaev seemed relieved. 'Can we go back upstairs? Maybe get you a decent dinner in Lvov before you have to see the colonel? I'd rather not try the Polish roads in the dark if I don't have to. Driving through the Ukraine was bad enough, especially with Soviet armour on the roads.'

'Let's go.'

'It smells awful down here.' Maltsaev wrinkled his nose like a kid.

'Sulphur. Just like in hell.'

Maltsaev snorted with amusement. 'Isthat how they cure you! Sinner, cease your drinking and depravity or here's how it will be.'

They walked together along the corridor toward the stairway. 'Your friends are waiting for us?' Szara asked.

'Fortunately, no. Those guys make me nervous.'

They came to the spiral staircase. 'Is there a subbase-ment?' Maltsaev asked, peering down.

'Yes. There's a pool in it, and the springs are there somewhere.'

'Just every little thing you'd want. Ah, the life of the idle rich.' He gestured for Szara to precede him up the steps.

'Please,' said Szara, standing back.

'I insist,' Maltsaev said, a parody of aristocratic courtesy.

They both hesitated. To Szara, a long moment. He waited for Maltsaev to climb the stairs but the man stood there, smiling politely; apparently he had all thetime in the world. Szara took the gun out and shot him.

He expected a huge, ringing explosion in the confined space of the stairwell but it did not happen that way. The weapon snapped, something fizzed-it was as though he sensed the path of the bullet-and he could smell burned air.

Maltsaev was furious. 'Oh you didn't,' he said. He started to take one hand out of his pocket but Szara reached over and grasped him by the wrist. He was curiously weak; Szara held him easily. Maltsaev bit his lip and scowled with discomfort. Szara shot him again and he sat down abruptly, his weight falling back against an iron rung of the stairway. He died a few seconds later. By then he just looked melancholy.

Szara stared at the weapon. It was the blued-steel Steyr that Vainshtok had carried. Why had he given it up? Why had he not defended himself? Szara found the safety device, then put the automatic in the side pocket of his jacket. He listened hard, but there was no running, no commotion above him. The shots had not been heard. Perhaps the powder load in the bullet was minimal; he really didn't understand. He pulled Maltsaev's hand free of his pocket and went looking for the weapon he knew was there, but he didn't find it. Nor could he find it anywhere else. That meant Maltsaev's crew, perhaps the same one that had finished Abramov, was nearby. Maltsaev wasn't a murderer, Szara reminded himself, he was an arranger of murders. Szara found a car key in an inside pocket and a set of identity papers. Running his hands down the overcoat, he discovered a flap sewn into the sleeve that held a sword and shield NKVD pin in a soft pigskin bag with a drawstring. There was also a wallet packed with roubles,zlotys,and reichsmarks. Szara put everything in his own pockets. Next he grabbed Maltsaev's ankles andpulled. It was difficult, he had to use all his strength, but once he got the body moving, the smooth wool overcoat slid easily across the floor. It took at least two minutes to drag Maltsaev down the hall and into the unlocked room, and the trip left a long maroon streak on the tile. The lock on the door was simple enough, it worked on a lever. Szara thumbed it down and pulled the door closed until he heard it click.

At the foot of the iron stairway he paused, retrieved both ejected cartridges, then climbed, shoes in one hand, gun in the other; but there was no one waiting for him on the landing and he dropped the weapon into his pocket and hopped on one foot to put his shoes back on. The lobby was as he'd left it; people milling about, affable confusion, aUneworking its way up to the table. 'Well,' said the Spanish official who'd shared the sunporch with him, 'your friend has finally made it out of here. It's given us all hope.'

'He's known to be clever-and lucky,' Szara said, clearly a bit envious.

The Spaniard sighed. 'I'll be going back to Warsaw eventually. As you know, Germany is exceptionally sympathetic to our neutrality. Perhaps it won't be too long.'

'I hope not,' Szara said. 'Such disorder helps nothing.'

'How true.'

'Perhaps we'll dine together this evening.'

The Spaniard inclined his head, an informal bow of acceptance.

Szara used a wall mirror to assure himself that the observer was still at the table, then avoided hisUneof vision by taking a back door, walking behind the kitchen area where the two young Polish women were preparing beets over a wooden tub, saving every last peeUng in a metal pan. They both smiled at him as he went past, even the shy one. He entered the sunporch by a side door and looked out through the screen. There weretwo blackPobedasparked in the gravel semicircle. One was coated with road dust and grime, the other spattered with mud and clay. Recalling what Maltsaev had said about Soviet armour on the roads, he decided to try the latter. He picked up his valise, took a deep breath, and walked off the sunporch onto the lawn. He nodded to a few diplomats strolling along the paths, then slid into the front seat of the muddyPobedaas though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do.

The car's interior smelted strongly: of pomade, sweat, cigarettes, vodka, mildewed upholstery, and petrol. He put Maltsaev's key into the ignition and turned it, the starter motor whined, died, whined on a higher note, produced a single firing of the engine, sank to a whisper, suddenly fired twice, and at last brought the engine to sputteringUfe.He wrestled with the gear-lever-mounted on the steering column-until it went into one of the gears. Through the streaked panel window on his left he could see the diplomats staring at him: who was he to simply climb into a car, valise in hand, and drive away? One of them started to walk toward him. Szara lifted the clutch pedal-the car lurched forward a foot and stalled. The diplomat, a handsome, dignified man with grey wings of hair that rested on his ears, had raised an interrogatory index finger-oh, just a moment.Szara turned the ignition key again and the starter motor whined up and down the musical scale as it had before. When the engine at last fired he blinked the sweat out of his eyes.lUn moment,s'il vous plaît,'the diplomat called out, only a few feet away. Szara gave him a tight smile and a shrug. The gears meshed and the car rolled forward, crunching over the gravel. Szara looked in the rearview mirror. The diplomat was standing with hands on hips, the caricature of a man offended by simply unspeakable rudeness.

There wasn't a road sign left in Poland-Vyborg's colleagues had seen to that-only a maze of dirt tracks that ran off every which way. But he had walked the route to Lvov and that was the one direction he knew he had to avoid. Maltsaev's assistants could well be waiting for him there, by the side of the road, just conveniently out of sight of the diplomatic corps at the spa.

There was a much-used map of eastern Poland on the floor of the car, and the sun, at six-twenty on an afternoon in late September, was low in the sky. That was west. Szara kept the sun on his left side and headed north, managing some ten miles before dusk overtook him. Then he backed off what he believed to be a main road onto a smaller road and turned off the engine. Next he took a careful inventory: he had plenty of money, no water, no food, the best part of a tank of petrol, six rounds in the Steyr. It was, he now saw, an M12, thus a Steyr-Hahn-Steyr-with-hammer-stamped08on the left-hand surface of the slide, which had something to do with the absorption of the Austrian army into the German army after1938,a mechanical retooling. Exactly what this was he could not remember; a rue Delesseux circular unread, who cared about guns? He also had three sets of identity papers: his own, Maltsaev's, and the Jean Bonotte passport in the false bottom of the valise, bound with a rubber band to a packet of French francs and a card with telephone numbers written on it. In the trunk of thePobedawas a full can of petrol and a blanket.

Enough to start a new life. Many had started with less.

'The wind and the stars.' WhoseUnewas that? He didn't remember. But it perfectly described the night. He sat on the blanket at the foot of an ancient linden tree-the road was lined with them, creating an avenue that no doubt wound its way to some grand Polish estate up the road.

The night grew chilly, but if he pulled his jacket tight he stayed warm enough.

He had thought he'd sleep in the car, but the smell of it sickened him. Not that he wasn't used to what he took to be its various elements. Nothing new about vodka or cigarettes, his own sweat was no better than anyone else's, and all Russian cars reeked of petrol and damp upholstery. Something else. To do with what they'd used thePobedafor, perhapsaUngeringscent of the taken, the captured. Or maybe it was the smell of executioners. Russian folklore had it that murder left its trace: the verticalUneat the side of the mouth, the mark of the killer. Might it not change the way a man smelled?

A former Szara would have turned such Ught on himself, but not now. He had done what he had to do. 'Let those who can, do what they must.' Thus Vainshtok had saved hisUfe.Because he would not, or could not, use the weapon himself? No, that was absurd. Szara refused to believe it. There was some other reason, and he had to face the possibility that he might never find out what it was.

There was a great deal he didn't understand. Why, for instance, had they sent Maltsaev after him? Because he'd disappeared from view for several days? Had they found out what he'd done in Paris with the British? No, that was impossible. Of all the world's secret services it was the British the Soviets truly feared. Their counterintelligence array-Scotland Yard,N05 -was extremely efficient; Comintern agents trying to enter Great Britain under false identities were time and again discovered, for the British maintained and used their files to great effect. As for MI6, it was, in its way, a particularly cold-blooded and predatory organization. A consequence of the British national character, with its appetite for both education and adventure, a nasty combination when manifested in an intelligence service. Szara could not imagine the problem lay in thatdirection.Fitzware,for all his peculiarities of style, was a serious, a scrupulous officer. The courier, then, Evans. No. It was something else, something in Russia, something to do with Abramov, Bloch, the Jewishkhvost. Perhaps Beria or his friends just decided one morning that he'd lived long enough. ButAndré Szarahad made his own decision, at some point, that he would not be one of those who went meekly into captivity, carvingza chtointo the stone of a cellar wall. Now a single act, the pulling of a trigger, had freed him. Now-a Jew, a Pole, a Russian-he had no country at all.

'The wind and the stars.' Strange how he couldn't stop thinking it. He wondered how long he might live. Probably only a little while longer. Just after dark a car had rumbled down the road he'd left. Then, an hour later, another. Was it them? They would certainly be looking for him. And they'd never stop until they found him; that was the rule of the game and everybody understood it. Ah but if this were to be his last night on earth how he would treasure it. A little breeze blowing steady across the Polish farmland, the grand sky-that immense and perfect and glittering mystery. There were frogs croaking in the darkness, life all around him. He didn't have much of a plan, only to try and get across the Lithuanian border to the north. After that he'd see. Possibly Sweden, or Denmark. So far he'd stolen seven hours of existence; every hour was a victory, and he had no intention of going to sleep.

Szara was later to put it this way:

'If ever the hand of God guided my path it was when, from the twentieth to the twenty-third of September,1939,I drove from southern Poland to Kovno, Lithuania, in a stolen NKVD car. Clearly there was a tragedy taking place in Poland; I saw the signs of it, I walked in its tracks, and I fear that it may have contributed to myescape, for it absorbed the energies of all Soviet security forces. Finally I do not know for certain, and I can only say that I survived. This was, equally, an accident of geography. Had I been thirty miles to the west, NKVD officers or political commissars serving on the frontUnesurely would have arrested me. I believe they knew who I was, what I had done, and had a description of the car I was driving. In the same way, had I been thirty miles to the east, I would have been arrested by the NKVD of the Soviet Ukraine or murdered by the Ukrainian bands, who were then very active. But I was in the middle, in an area behind the lines but not yet secured by theapparat.Those who may have experience of a zone in which Soviet troops are manoeuvring, not fighting, will know what I mean. I moved among lost units hampered by poor communications, amidst confusion and error and inefficiency, and it was as though I were invisible.'

Well yes, true as far as it went, but not the whole story by any means. He was able, for instance, to choose an identity suitable to the moment. Confronted by a Soviet patrol at dawn on the twenty-second, he produced Maltsaev's NKVD badge, and the officer waved him ahead and cursed his troopers when they didn't get out of the road quickly enough. But in ashtetl village in the middle of nowhere, he became Szara the Polish Jew, was given a bench in the study house to sleep on, and fed by the rabbi's wife. Meanwhile, the remarkable fact of thePobedawas ignored by the villagers. He drove it into a muddy, unfenced yard full of chickens and there it sat, safe and invisible from the road, while he slept. Later, when it suited his purpose, he presented himself asAndréSzara, Soviet journalist, and, later still, Jean Bonotte of Marseille, a French citizen.

It took him some twenty hours to negotiate almost three hundred miles to a point just short of the border with Lithuania. The first night, moved by some obscure butvery powerful instinct-'the hand of God'?-he drove away from his refuge at midnight and continued on the same road, north he hoped, for some six hours. He feared he would be unable to cross the many rivers that lay across his path but, as it turned out, the Poles had not blown the bridges. So thePobedarattled over the loose boards of the narrow structures spanning first the Berezina, then the Belaja. Just beyond the former he came to a cobbled road, heading east and west, flanked by birch trees. He knew, just for that moment, precisely where he was, for those cobblestones had been laid by the Emperor Napoleon's Corsicans in1812,a solid foundation for wheeled guns and ammunition carts, and it led off in the direction of Moscow. Szara drove across it, heading due north.

Somewhere near Chelm, just before dawn, his path was blocked by a train of cattle trucks standing idle at a crossing. Uniformed NKVD soldiers were guarding the train, and in the darkness he could just make out the barrel of a machine gun, mounted on top of a goods wagon, as it swung to cover thePobeda.One of the sentries unslung his rifle and walked over to ask him who he was and what he was doing there. Szara was about to reach for the badge, then didn't. Something told him to leave it where it was. Just a Pole, he said. His wife had gone into labour and he was off to fetch the midwife. The soldier stared. Szara could hear voices inside the cattle trucks, speaking Polish, pleading for water. Without further conversation, Szara put the car in reverse and backed up, his heart pounding, while the soldier watched him but did nothing-a potential problem was simply removing itself. When he was out of sight of the train, he rested his head on the steering wheel for a time, then turned the car around, backtracked a few miles, picked a road at random, and, an hour later, after several turnings, drove over the tracks at a deserted crossing.

Passing a farm early in the morning, he heard the drawn-out lowing of unmilked cattle and the frantic barking of deserted dogs left at the end of their chains. At another level crossing there was a wooden cattlegate blocking the road and when he got out to open it he saw something yellow on the ground and bent down to see what it was: it turned out to be a scrap of paper bound to a small stone with yellow wool, perhaps unravelled from a shawl. Unwinding the wool, he found a note:Please tell Franciszka Kodowicz that Krysia and Wladzia have been taken away in a train. Thank you. The wind blew at the piece of paper in his hand. He stood by the car for a long time, then carefully wrapped the paper around the stone and rebound it with the yellow wool, placing it back on the ground where it had landed when the girls had thrown it from the moving train. He was, he noted dispassionately, now beyond vows or resolutions. He slid into the front seat of the car, holding his breath as the musky scent of pomade and sweat assaulted him, forced the gear lever down, and drove north. That was his resolution, that was his vow: to exist.

On the third night, having swung west to avoid the market town of Grodno, he saw from the map that he'd entered the country of the Pripet marshes. He suspected the Russian line of advance had not yet reached the area, its northern flank held up for some reason, for he could find no evidence of an occupying force. He stopped the car and waited for morning, telling himself to remain awake and alert. He woke, again and again, when his chin hit his chest, finally fading away altogether into the blank sleep of exhaustion. The next time he came to it was daybreak, and he saw that he was surrounded by marshland that ran to the low horizon, a plain of swaying reeds and long reaches of flat water coloured by a grey, wind-swept sky. The land wasancient, desolate, its vast silence punctuated by the distant cries of waterfowl.

He walked around for a time, trying to get his bearings, washing his face and hands in the chill, dark water of the marsh. He searched the sky but there was no sun-he had no idea where he was, or which way was north. And he didn't care. That was the worst part, he truly did not care. His resolve hadńowedaway like sand on the outgoing tide. He sat on the running board of thePobeda,slumped against the door, and stared out over the grey ponds and blowing reeds. He had somehow come to the end of his journey, the future he'd held out to himself no more than a trick of the illusionist, the self-deluded survivor. Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly-a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud. Why should such a man remain alive?Get in the car, he told himself. But the wilful interior voice sickened him-all it knew was greed, all it did was want. Even here, at the end of the world, it sang its little song, and any gesture, no matter how absurd, would satisfy it. But the only act he could imagine called for removing the Steyr from beneath the driver's seat of the car and relieving the earth of an unneeded presence-at least an act of grace. Did he have the courage to do it? Surprisingly, he did. What had he done with his life-other than seek a transient peace between the legs of women. He had, in order to live another day, and then another, served the people who now did what they did and who would, he knew for a certainty, do what they would do. And to put a good finish on the history of his particular life, the time and place were perfect:ironically, he was only a few miles from the safety of the Lithuanian border. He looked at his watch, it was sixteen minutes after nine. The sky shifted across his vision, a hundred shades of grey, drifting and rolling like battlesmoke blown by a wind off the sea.

• * *

What saved him-for he was very, very close to it-was a vision. Of this he was not to write; it was not germane, and there may have been other reasons. Well down the long, straight road ahead of him appeared the silhouette of a hunter; a man stepped out of the reeds, a shotgun, the barrel broken safely from the stock, riding his forearm. A spaniel followed, stood at the side of the hunter and shook a fine spray of marshwater from its coat. Then the man walked across the road, the dog trotting ahead, and both vanished.

Then, almost the next thing he knew, he was driving. Through a great labyrinth of roads and paths that could have led anywhere or nowhere. Sometimes, with tears in his eyes, he drove into a blur, but never lifted his foot from the accelerator. He drove, fiercely, angrily, toward the wind. Took any road on which the churning skies hurried toward him, their speed heightened by the rush of the car in the opposite direction. He passed, and barely noticed, an empty guard tower, barbed wire strung away in both directions, a wire gate hanging crazily on one hinge as though brushed aside by a giant. At last he saw an old man by the side of the road, poking listlessly at a garden patch with a primitive hoe. Szara stamped on the brake. 'Where in God's name am I?' he called out.

'Vas?'said the man.

Szara tried again and got the same answer. They stared at each other, deadlocked, Szara angry, the old man more confused than frightened and saying finally, with politely controlled irritation, 'What is the matter with you, sir, that you shout so?' The man was speaking German, Szara finally realized, the common second language in that country. He let out a single cry of absurd laughter, slammed the car into gear, and roared on into Lithuania.

He arrived inKovnoa fugitive. And stayed to become a refugee.

Two cities anchored the northern and southern extremes of the Pale of Settlement, Kovno and Odessa. Szara, who had grown up in the latter, soon came to understand the former. These were border cities, Odessa on the Black Sea across from Istanbul, Kovno at the conjunction of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, and border cities lived by a particular set of instincts: they knew, for instance, when war was coming, because when there was war they were not spared. They knew the people who showed up before the wars. Immigrants, refugees, whatever you called them, they had a way of arriving just ahead of the armies and were taken to be an omen of difficult times, as migrating birds portend winter.

But Kovno's long and complicated history had marked its citizens with the very characteristics that enabled them to survive it. Actually, by the time Szara arrived in the city known in his childhood as Kovno, it was called by the Lithuanian name Kaunas. Its nearby neighbour, however, remained Wilno, since it had been declared Polish territory, rather than Vilna, the Russian name before1917.The Lithuanians themselves preferred Vilnius, but at that particular moment this alternative was running a poor third.

The people of Kovno, now Kaunas, were obviously multilingual. Szara had spoken German, Polish, and Yiddish in the city before he ever slept there. They were also virtually immune to politics, not strange for a city that has known Teutonic Knights and Bolshevik lawyers and everything in between. And they were, in their own quiet way, deeply obstinate. In all things but particularly in matters of nationality. The Lithuanians knew they were home, the Poles knew what they stood on was Polish soil no matter what anybody said, the Jews had been there for hundreds of years, faring about as well as they did anywhere, whilethe better part of the German population looked west, with longing hearts and the occasional song, to the Fatherland.

Nonetheless, obstinate though the citizens of Kovno might have been, it seemed, in the autumn of1939,that quite a considerable number of them were intent on being somewhere else.

Szara rented a third of a room in a boardinghouse, actually a boarding apartment, at the top of seven flights of stairs, sharing with two Polish Jews, cameramen in the Polish film industry who'd fled Warsaw by nding cross country on a motorcycle. One of the men worked nights as a sweeper at the railway station, and Szara had his bed until he arrived home at six-thirty in the morning. That got Szara up early. After breakfast he haunted the steamship offices, willing to leave from any of the Baltic ports-Liepäja, Riga,Tallinn-but there were simply too many people with the same idea. Ships and ferries to Denmark-his first choice-in fact to anywhere on earth, were booked well into1940.Cabins, deck space, every available inch. Undaunted, he took a train up toLiepäjaand tried to bribe his way onto a Norwegian timber freighter, but only a precipitate exit from a waterfrontcafésaved him from arrest. And the incident was witnessed-there were two vaguely familiar faces at the samecafé,seen perhaps at the steamship offices. No matter where he went or what he tried it was the same story.

Even at the thieves' market, where thePobedacaused low whistles of appreciation but very little financial interest. Sublime realists, Kovno's thieves-where could one drive? South was occupied Poland, north the Baltic, east the USSR. To the west, the port of Memel had been snaffled up by the Reich in March,Königsberg wasGerman, now Danzig as well. Szara took what was offered for thePobedaand fled. Trust the NKVD, he thought, to have eyes and ears at the Kovno thieves' market.

Attempts at currency conversion got him precisely nowhere. He couldn't sell hiszlotys;German marks were being introduced in Poland and nobody was going there anyhow. The roubles weren't even supposed to be outside the USSR-those he burned. The French francs, by far the greatest part of his little treasury, would have moved very briskly on the kerbside foreign exchange markets, but he refused to part with them; they could be used anywhere and everybody else wanted them for the same reason he did.

The first few days in Kovno Szara was extremely cautious; he knew the Soviet intelligenceapparatin Lithuania to be well established and aggressive. But, in time, he abandoned the principles of clandestine practice and became one more nameless soul whose principal occupation was waiting. He sat in the parks and watched the chess games with all the other refugees as the leaves turned gold in the slow onset of autumn. He frequented the cheapestcafés,dawdled endlessly over coffees, and soon people began to nod good morning: he was part of their day, always at the table in the corner.

He made one friend, an unlikely one, a gentleman known as Mr Wiggins, who was to be found at the Thomas Cook steamship and travel office. Mr Wiggins came from the pages of Kipling; he had a waxed moustache, parted his hair in the middle, and wore an old-fashioned collar, formal, uncomfortable, and reassuring. He was, in his way, a terribly decent man who served the Thomas Cook company with conviction and chose to see, in the refugee flood that swept through his office from dawn to dusk, not the flotsam of Europe but a stream of clients. Szara seemed to be one of his favourites. 'I am so sorry,' he'd say, very real regret in his voice. 'No cancellations today. But you will try tomorrow, I hope. One can't ever tell. People do change their minds, that's one thing I have learned in this business.'

Mr Wiggins, and everyone else, knew that war was coming to Lithuania-or, if not war, at least occupation. The country had been freed of Russian rule in1918 -of Lenin's dictum 'Two steps forward and one step back,' this had been a step back-and had got rather to enjoy being a free nation. But its days were numbered and nothing could be done about it. Szara, as always encountering familiar faces, bought the local and foreign newspapers early in the morning and took them back to his lair, in the common kitchen of the apartment, for intensive study, sharing the bad news with his fellow boarders as they drank thin, warmed-up coffee and tried not to say anything compromising.

The future became clearer as the days passed: a great shifting of population was to take place in Estonia and Latvia and simultaneously in Germany. Slavs east, Germans west, it was just about that simple. The Germans, more than a hundred thousand of them, were to be taken aboard Baltic passenger steamers and shipped back to Germany, whence their great-great-grandfathers had migrated hundreds of years earlier. Meanwhile, various Slavic nationalities resident in Germany were headed east to join their long-lost brothers in the Soviet Union. This shuffling of populations was intended to reestablish the racial purity of Germany and to relieve the pressure on German settlers in Eastern Europe. They suffered horribly, according toGoebbels,because they retained their language and customs and dress in the midst of alien cultures and nobody liked them, being principally envious of their success.One could call them blond Jews, Szara thought.

But the fact of the migration hung over the breakfast table like a pall: if the Germans were leaving the Baltic states, who was coming?

There was only one candidate nation, and it wasn't France. To Szara, schooled in a certain way of thinkingsince1937,it had even a deeper resonance: if the division of Poland was one of the secret protocols in the Hitler-Stalin pact, what were the others? 'Terribly sorry,' said Mr Wiggins. "There simply isn't a thing.'

Like all refugees, Szara had too much time to think. He sat on a park bench and smoked a cigarette while the leaves drifted down. He had supposed, in escaping from Poland, that either death or glory awaited him, and so he'd taken his chances. With Maltsaev murdered he really had nothing to lose. But he had never for a moment imagined it might end up as a penurious life spent in dimcafésand shabby apartments, waiting for the Red Army to reach the gates of the city. He thought of trying to put a call through todeMontfried, to ask for help, but what kind of help could he offer? Money? More money that wouldn't buy what Szara needed? Some of the prosperous Jews in Kovno were spending literally fortunes to buy their way out before the Russians arrived, and there were stories going around that some of them wound up losing everything, forbidden to board steamers by cold-eyed pursers with armed seamen at their side. Other rumours-and Szara knew at least one of them to be true-told of desperate refugees putting to sea in rowboats, sometimes guided by self-proclaimed smugglers, never to be seen again. Drowned? Murdered? Who knew. But the confirming postal card never arrived in Kovno and friends and accomplices could draw only one conclusion from that.

In the end, Szara realized that the trap opened in only one direction and he determined to try it.

'From Hamburg? Copenhagen from Hamburg, you say?' Mr Wiggins, for just an instant, permitted himself to be startled. Then he cleared his throat, once again the traveller's perfect servant. 'No trouble at all, I'd think. Plenty of room. First-class cabin, if you like. Shall I book?'

It should have worked.

There were, of course, improvisations, as there had to be, but he managed those well enough and, in the end, it wasn't his fault that it didn't work. Fortunes of war, one might say.

He began with the hospitals. Wiggins helped him-the wealthy members of the German community went here, those of lesser means went there. Szara went there. A sad, brown brick structure, according to the name a Lutheran institution, in an innocuous neighbourhood away from the centre of the city. In a day or two of watching he'd determined how the hospital worked. In need of coffee or something stronger, the doctors, in accordance with their standing, patronized the Vienna, a dignified restaurant and pastry shop. The orderlies, janitors, clerks, and the occasional nurse used a nearby rathskeller for the same purposes. Szara chose the rathskeller. The hospital's day shift ended at four in the afternoon, so the productive time at the rathskeller ran for an hour or two after that. He spent three days there during the busy hours, just watching, and he spotted the loners. On day four he picked his man: sulky, homely, no longer young, with large ears and slicked-back hair, always one of the last to leave, not in a hurry to go home to a family. Szara bought him a beer and struck up a conversation. The man was a native Lithuanian, but he could speak German. Szara found out quickly why he drank alone: there was something a little evil about this man, something he covered up by use of a sneering, suggestive tone that implied there was something a little evil about everybody. Asked just what it was thathe did, Szara admitted he was a dealer in paper. He bought and sold paper, he said, adding a sly glance to show the man what a smart fellow he thought he was.

The orderly, as he turned out to be, understood immediately. He knew about such matters. He even winked. Thisone, Szara guessed, had seen the inside of a jail, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for something very unpleasant.

And what kind of paper was the gentleman buying these days?

German paper.

Why?

Who could say. A client wanted German paper. Not from Germany, mind you, and not from Lithuania. Paper from Poland or Hungary would do. Yugoslavia was even better.

The orderly knew just the man. Old Kringen.

Szara ordered another round, the best they had, and a discussion of money ensued. A bit of bargaining. Szara pretended to be shocked, leaned on the price, didn't gain an inch, looked grumpy, and gave in. Would old Kringen, he wanted to know, get much older?

No. He was finished, but he was taking his time about it, didn't seem to be in much of a hurry.

Szara could understand, but his client couldn't afford any, ah, embarrassment.

The orderly snickered, a horrible sound. Old Kringen wasn't going anywhere. And lying where he was he didn't need his passport, which was kept in the hospital records office. The orderly had a friend, however, and the friend would see him right. It was going to cost a little more, though.

Szara gave in on the price a second time.

And a third, visiting the rathskeller two days later. But he had what he needed. Old Kringen wasaSiebenbürger,from theSiebenbürgen-Seven Hills-district of Romania, an area long colonized by German settlers. Szara had no idea why he'd come to Kovno, perhaps to take advantage of the emigration offer in neighbouring Latvia, perhaps for other reasons. He was much older than Szara, from his photo a grumpy, hard-headed fellow, his occupationlisted as swine breeder. Szara bought what he needed and, in search of privacy, found a hotel room in the tenement district that could be rented by the hour. He eradicated the birth date with lemon juice, wrote in an appropriate year for himself, smeared the page with fine dust to coat the damage to the paper, and changed the photograph, signing something illegible across the corner. Then he held it up to the light. The new Kringen.

He had disposed of the Maltsaev papers while still in Poland; now it was the turn of the Szara papers. The walls of the tiny room were thin, and various groans and shouts to either side of him indicated that Friday night was in Kovno much as it was everywhere else. There was a woman-he imagined her as an immensely fat woman-with an enormous laugh on the other side of the wall. Something went thud and she shrieked with mirth, making whooping noises and pausing, he guessed, only to wipe her eyes. To such accompaniment,AndréSzara died. He sat on a straw mattress with a soiled sheet spread over it, his only light a candle, and scratched at whatever was biting his ankle. He'd borrowed a coffee cup from his afternooncaféand used it as a fireplace, ripping a page at a time from his passport, setting the corner aflame, and watching the entry and exit stamps disappear as the paper curled and blackened. The red cover resisted-he had to tear it into strips and light match after match-but finally it too was dropped, its flame blue and yellow, into the cup of ashes. Farewell. He wondered at such soreness of heart, but there was no denying what he felt. It was as thoughAndréSzara, his raincoat and smile and a clever thing to say, had ceased to exist.Troublesome bastard just the same, Szara thought, stirred the ashes with his finger and poured them out the window into a courtyard full of cats.

A smallcanalran through that part of Kovno. The NKVD badge sank like a stone. So did the Steyr.

The dock in Riga was packed with Germans-their baggage, their clocks, their dogs, and a band to play while it all marched up the gangplank. German newsreel cameramen were much in evidence, Szara kept his face averted. By a curious tribal magic he could not divine, the crowds had organized themselves into castes-the prominent and the wealthy in front, pipe-smoking fanners next, and workmen and other assorted types to the rear. Everybody seemed content with the arrangement.

His papers had received only the most cursory check-who in God's name would want to sneak under the tent of this circus? In fact, though it did not occur to Szara, the NKVD took full advantage of the Baltic migration to infiltrate agents into Germany: such returns to the homeland had always suggested interesting possibilities to intelligence services.

Szara was fully prepared for exposure. Any determined Gestapo officer would spot the crudely altered passport, and five minutes of interrogation was all it would require for the certain knowledge that he was animposter. Heplanned to admit it, long before they ever went to work on him. The Jean Bonotte passport was sewn into his jacket, the French francs hidden in the false bottom of the valise, just where a type like Bonotte, a man from Marseille, no doubt a Corsican, no doubt a criminal type, would hide them. Germany and France were legally at war, though it had not yet come to any serious fighting. Mostly talk. German diplomacy was continuing, an attempt to smooth things over with the British and the French-why should the world be set on fire over a bunch of Poles? Szara expected he would, if discovered, be interned as a citizen of France. At worst a war spent in excruciating boredom ina camp somewhere, at best exchanged for a German citizen who happened to be on the wrong side of theUnewhen the first cannon was fired. On the bright side, a German internment camp was probably the last place in the world the NKVD would think to look forAndré Szara.

Still, he did not wish to be caught. He was no German, not even a Romanian swine-breeding German from the Seven Hills, and he did not wish to be beaten up by this crowd. There was a deep and patient anger in them. For the newsreel cameras they were glad to be 'going home,' but among themselves they promised that they would soon enough be 'going back.' At which time, evidently, certain scores would be definitively settled. And worst of all, he knew, if they had cause to single him out and concentrate on his features, they were not above having a look to see if he were a Jew. No, he did not wish to be caught, and he had determined to avoid direct contact in every possible way.

To this end he played the part of a man ruined by sorrow, a victim of anti-German hostility. Practised saying a single sentence in the sort ofVolksdeutschaccent common to a man likeKlingen:'They took. . .everything.' He had to use it almost immediately. A burly fellow, standing next to him on the dock, wanted to strike up a conversation and offered a greeting. Szara stared at him, as though he were intruding on a world of private anguish, and delivered his line. Itworked. As Szara watched, the man's expression went from surprise to pained sympathy, then tightened with anger. Szara bit his lip; he could not say any more without losing control. He turned his face away, and the man laid a great paw of a hand on his shoulder, the honest human warmth of the gesture very nearly shaming him into real tears.

A bright day. A calm sea.

Life aboard the passenger steamer was tightly organized. There were numerous officials in attendance but theyseemed to Szara benign, meant to ease the transition of the emigrants into German life. He was processed-a matter of saying yes and no-given a temporary identity card, and told to report to the proper authonties wherever he settled and permanent residence documents would be provided at that time. Had he any notion of where he wished to live? Family in Germany? Friends? Szara hid behind his catastrophe. 'Don't worry, old fellow, you're in good hands now,' said one official.

The public address system was constantly at work: aschnauzerdiscovered in the crew quarters, an uplifting message of welcome fromDrGoebbels,theWinterhilfechanty was stationed at a table on theafterdeck,those with last names beginning A toMshould report to the dining room for mid-day dinner promptly at onep.m.,Nto Z at two-thirty. To promote the appetite,asongfestwould begin in fifteen minutes on the foredeck, led by the well-known contralto Irmtrud Von something from the Munich State Opera Company and the well-known countertenorSS UntersturmführerGerhard something else of the Bavarian Soldiers' Chorus, two inspirational artists who had volunteered to accompany the voyage and join their fellowVolkinsinging some of the grand old songs.

For one ghastly moment Szara thought he might have to sing, but saw to his relief that a sufficient number of people remained at the perimeter so that he could safely avoid it. He stood for the rousing performance of'Deutschland über Alles'that began the programme, watched the breasts of the contralto swell mightily with patriotism, then moved to the railing and became part of the small audience.

Almost all the passengers took part, and they were deeply affected by the singing; there were unashamed tears on the cheeks of both the men and the women and a kindof joyous agony on their faces as they raised their voices together. The mass rendition of 'Silent Night'-Christmas carols were familiar to all-was extraordinary, sung with great and tender feeling as the ship rumbled through the flat Baltic waters.

Szara maintained his cover, nodding in time and seeming to mumble the old words to himself, but his internal reaction to the performance was something very nearly approaching terror. It was the instinctive and passionate unity of the singers that frightened him; the sheer depth of it was overwhelming. You couldn't, he thought, find three Jews in the world who would agree on what it meant to be Jewish, yet there were apparently fifty million of these people who knew exactly what it meant to be German, though many of those on deck had never set foot in Germany.

Something was wrong, what was it? Obviously they suffered injustice without end-that certain look was plain on their faces. They swayed and sang, seemingly hypnotized, held hands-many wept-and together formed a wall of common emotion, a wall of nostalgia, regret, self-pity, sentimentality, resentment, hatred, ferocity. The words bounced around inside him, none of them right, none of them wrong, none of them mattered. What he did know for certain at that moment was that they were poisoned with themselves. And it was the rest of the world that would suffer for it.

He avoided lunch, knowing it would be impossible to escape conversation over a table laden with food. A short, fleshy woman, with the tiny eyes of pure malice, sought him out-he could tell she'd been watching him-and silently presented a generous wedge ofBundt cake in a napkin. The group had understood him, accepted him; he was damaged goods, to be left alone yet not neglected. She turned and walked away, leaving himto eat his cake in peace, while he suppressed a violent shiver that seemed to come from the very centre of his being.

As the sun set, the voice on the public address system grew suddenly whispery with reverence and awe. A fortuitous change of plans: the ship would be met at Hamburg by a train of first-class coaches, all passengers would proceed to Berlin, there to be addressed by theFührerhimself. Please do not be concerned for the friends and family who will come to the dock to meet you, there will be plenty of room for everybody.HeilHitler!

And if Szara had a passing notion that he could slip away in the confusion of landing and find his way to the Copenhagen ferry, the reality of the arrival, two days later, put a firm lid on such nonsense. A wall of cheering Germans stood to either side of the disembarking passengers, an aisle of welcome, as effective as barbed wire, that lined the way to the railway station.

So he went to Berlin.

To Szara, the city seemed dark and solemn. Stiff. Brooding. Whatever he scented in the streets was worse, much worse, thanKristallnacht inNovember of'38.Now the nation was at risk; this business was no longer some political manoeuvre of the Nazi party. France and England had declared war-the gall, the presumption of them!-and the people had coalesced in the face of such an astonishing development. That civilized nations-the British at any rate, not the unbathed French-would side with the Poles and the Jews and the other Slavic trash was simply beyond comprehension, but it was a fact of life and it had to be faced. They were equal to it.