At the Potsdam terminal a fleet of buses waited to transport the returningVolksdeutschto the Olympic Stadium, where a crowd of seventy-five thousand people awaited theirarrival. A special section toward the front was reserved for the Baltic emigrants, and Adolf Hitler would address them later in the evening. Szara had no intention of going anywhere near the place; security measures would be intensive wherever a national leader was expected and in this instance would include the Gestapo, Berlin plainclothes detectives, identity checks-animposter'snightmare. Though his thin cover had worked on the docks of Latvia, it would never stand up under that level of scrutiny.


But there was an accursed absence of confusion as the buses were boarded; theVolksdeutschwere infuriatingly patient and malleable, organizing themselves into neat lines-who, Szara tried to remember, had called the Germanscarnivorous sheep?-and when he tried to disappear between two buses a young woman wearing an armband chased him down and courteously headed him back in the proper direction. In desperation he doubled over, his free hand clutching his belly, and ran groaning back into the station.That they understood and they let him go. He found a different exit, now simply a traveller with a valise. He spotted a sign for the number24tram, theDahlemline, that would take him toLehrter Bahnhof,where he could catch the late train to Hamburg. Things were looking up.


But it was not to be. He walked about on the streets near the station for a half-hour or so, giving the busloads ofVolksdeutschtime to depart, then reentered Potsdam station. But he saw a uniformed policeman and a Gestapo functionary checking identification at every gate that led to the tramways and realized that without the protective coloration of the emigrants he was in some difficulty. He stood out, he could sense it. Who was this rather aristocratic looking man in soiled clothing and a soft felt hat worn low over the eyes? Why did he carry a fine leather valise?


Resisting the urge to panic, he walked away from the station and found himself in even worse trouble. Now he was alone, on deserted streets.


The Berlin he'd known a year earlier still had its people of the night, those who liked darkness and the pleasures it implied. But no longer. The city was desolate, people stayed home, went to bed early; Hitler had chased decadence indoors. Szara knew he had to get off the streets. He felt it was a matter of minutes.


He walked quickly west, to theLeipzigerplatz,where he knew there was a public telephone. He'd memorized several telephone numbers, in case he lost the valise, and the receiver was in his hand before he realized he had no German coins. He'd obtained reichsmarks from Poles who'd fled into Lithuania, enough to buy a ticket on the Copenhagen steamer, but he'd not foreseen the need to use a telephone.Not like this, not for such a stupid miscalculation, he pleaded silently. He saw a taxicab and waved it down. The driver was offended, declared himself 'no travelling change purse,' but Szara bought two ten-reichsmark coins for fifty reichsmarks and the driver's attitude turned instantly to grave decency. 'Can you wait?' Szara asked him, thumbing through his remaining bills. The driver nodded politely. Anything for a gentleman.


The telephone rang for what seemed like a long time, then, unexpectedly, a man answered. Szara mentioned a name. The man's voice was terribly languid and world-weary. 'Oh, she's nothere,' he said. Then: 'I suppose you'll want the number.' Szara said he did, fumbling in his pocket for a pencil and a matchbox. The man gave him the number and Szara hung up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the driver scowling at his watch. There was a police car on the other side of theLeipzigerplatz.'Another minute,' he called out. The driver noticed his odd German and stared.


Szara dialled the new number and a maid answered. Szara asked for'Madame Nadia Tscherova.'Relief flooded over him when he heard her voice.


'I find myself in Berlin,' he said. 'Would it be terribly inconvenient. . .?'


'What? Who is it?'


'A backstage friend. Remember? The terrible play? I brought you...a present.'


'My God.'


'May I come and see you?'


'Well,' she said.


'Please.'


'I suppose.'


'Perhaps you'U tell me where.'


'How can you not know?'


'The fact is I don't.'


'Oh. Well, it's a villa. Facing theTiergarten,just at the edge ofCharlottenburg,onSchillerstrasse.The third from the end of the street. There's a...I'll have the coach lamps put on. When will you come?'


'I have a taxi waiting for me.'


'Soon then,' she said and hung up.


He got into the cab and gave the driver directions. 'What part of Germany do you come from?' asked the driver.


'From Italy,' Szara said. 'From the Tyrol. Actually, we rarely speak German.'


'So you're Italian.'


'Yes.'


'For an Italian you don't speak so badly.'


'Grazie.'


The driver laughed and pulled away as the police car began to circle slowly around theLeipzigerplatz.


'Dearest!' She cried out in Russian. This was a differentNadia-affected, brittle. She threw an arm around hisshoulders-her other hand held a glass-drew him close, and kissed him full on the lips. The kiss tasted like wine. '"What ingenious devil has cast you on my doorstep?"' she said. The maid who'd shown him in curtseyed, her starched uniform rustling, and left the room.


'And go iron yourself,' Tscherova muttered to her back as she drew the tall door closed.


'What sort of devil?' Szara asked.


'It's from Kostennikov.The Merchant's Bride. Act Three.'


Szara raised an eyebrow.


'Come upstairs,' she said.


He followed her through rooms of oiled walnut furniture and towering emerald draperies, then up a curving marble staircase with gilded banisters. 'Well you've certainly-'


'Shut up,' she whispered urgently. "They listen.'


'The servants?'


'Yes.'


Sweeping up the stairs in ice-coloured silk shirt and pants, voluminous lounging pyjamas, she called out, 'Last one up is a monkey!'


'Aren't you making it awfully obvious?' he said quietly.


She snorted and danced up the last few steps. Her gold slippers had pompoms on them and the soles slapped against the marble. She paused for a sip of wine, then took his hand and towed him into a bedroom, kicking the door shut behind them. A fire burned in a marble fireplace, the wallpaper was deep blue with white snowdrops, the cover on the huge bed was the same blue and white, and the carpet was thick, pale blue wool.


'Oh, Seryozha,' she said, her voice full of woe. A borzoi crept guiltily off a blue and white settee and slunk over to the fireplace, settling down on his side with the mournful sigh of the dispossessed and a single swish of his feathery tail. Then he yawned, opened his long, graceful jaws tothe limit, and snapped them shut with a brief whine.What settee?


'Won't they suspect I'm your lover?' Szara asked.


'Let them.'


Szara looked confused.


'I can have all the lovers, and generally strange guests, that I want. What I can't have is spies.'


'They know Russian?'


'Who knows what they know? From myémigréfriends they expect Russian, shouting and laughter. Anything political or confidential, keep your voice down or play the Victrola.'


'All this. It's yours?'


'I will tell you everything, my dear, but first things first. Forgive me, but I do not know your name. That's going to become awkward. Would you like me to make something up?'


'André,'he said. 'In the French spelling.'


'Good. Now I must ask you,Andréin the French spelling, if you have any idea what you smell like.'


'I'm sorry.'


'I've been through hard times in Russia: little rooms, long winters, everybody terrified, and no privacy. I'm no shrinking violet, believe me, but. . .'


She-opened a door with a full mirror on it and gestured toward the clawfoot tub within. 'I lack nothing. You will find a sponge, bath salts, lavender soap or almond, facecloth, back-brush, shampoo from Paris. You may give yourself a facial, if you like, or powder yourself like a cruller from the Viennese bakery. Yes? You're not insulted?'


'A long journey,' he said, walking into the bathroom.


He undressed, horrified at the condition of his clothing. In the scented air of the bathroom his own condition became, by contrast, all too evident. Still, when he looked in the mirror, he could see that he'd survived. A day'sgrowth of beard-was one side of his face still slightly swollen from the dive-bombing?-hair quite long, newly grey here, and here, and here, eyes yellowish with fatigue. Not old. Yet. And very lean and sharp, determined.


He ran the steaming water into the tub and climbed in. The heat woke up various nicks and scrapes and bruises he'd acquired in his travels and he grimaced. It felt as though he had a hundred places that hurt, each in a different way. He watched the water darken, added a handful of crystals from a jar and stirred them about. 'That's the spirit!' she called through the open door, smelling the bath salts. She hummed to herself, opened a bottle of wine-he heard the squeak of the cork being drawn-and put a record on the Victrola. Italian opera, sunny and sweet:on market day, peasants gather in the village square.


'I like this for a bath, don't you?' she said from the bedroom.


'Yes. Just right.'


She sang along for a few bars, her voice, lightly hoarse, hunting shamelessly for the proper notes.


'May I have a cigarette?'


A moment later her hand snaked around the door with a lit cigarette. He took it gratefully. 'Smoking in the bath,' she said. 'You are truly Russian.'


The borzoi came padding in and lapped enthusiastically at the bathwater.


'Seryozha!' she said.


With his index finger Szara rubbed the dog between the eyes. The borzoi raised its head and stared at him, soapy water running from its wet muzzle. 'Go away, Seryozha,' he said. Surprisingly, the dog actually turned and left.


'Yes, good dog,' he heard her say.


'When I'm done...I don't have anything clean, I'm afraid.'


'I'll get you one of the general's bathrobes. Not the oldrag he actually wears. His daughter gave him one for his birthday-it's still in the box. Red satin. You'll look like Cary Grant.'


'Is he your lover?'


'Cary Grant? I thought we'd been discreet.'


He waited.


'No. Not really. Nobody is my lover. When the general and I are together the world thinks otherwise, but we don't fool ourselves or each other. It takes some explaining, but I can't imagine you're going anywhere else tonight, so there's time. But for one thing I can't wait. You really have to tell me why you came here. If you are going to ask me to do all sorts of wretched things, I might as well hear about it and have it done with.' She turned the record over. There was a certain resignation in her voice, he thought, like a woman who dreads a squabble with the butcher but knows it can't be avoided.


'The truth?'


'Yes. Why not?'


'I've. . .Well, what have I done? I haven't defected. I guess I've run away.'


'Not really. You have?'


'Yes.'


She was silent for a moment, thinking it over. 'Run away to Berlin? Is,uh,that where one generally goes?'


'It was a rat's maze. I ran down the open passage.'


'Well, if you say so.' She sounded dubious.


He put bis cigarette out in the bathwater, rested the butt on the edge of the tub, then pulled the plug and watched the grey water swirl above the drain. 'I'm going to have to fill up the tub again,' he said.


'I'11bring you a glass of wine if you like. And you can tell me about your travels. If it's allowed, that is.'


'Anything's allowed now,' he said. He burst out laughing.


'What?'


'Really nothing.' He laughed again. It was as though a genie had escaped.


It was well past midnight when they tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen, a narrow room with a lofty ceiling and porcelain worn dark on its curves by years of scrubbing. They made absurdly tall sandwiches of cheese and pickles and butter and stole back across the Baluchi carpets like thieves. Szara caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror: shaved, hair combed, wearing a red satin bathrobe with a shawl collar, a giant sandwich teetering on a plate-it was as though in headlong flight he'd stumbled through a secret door and landed in heaven.


Back in Nadia's sanctuary, they settled on the carpet close to the dying fire while Seryozha rested on crossed forepaws and waited alertly for his share of the kill. Szara watched her tear into the sandwich, a serious Russian eater, her hair falling around her face as she leaned over the plate. He simply could not stop looking at her. She apparently ignored it, was perhaps used to it-after all, the job of an actress was to be looked at-still, he did not want to seem a goggling, teenage dolt and tried to be subtle, but that was a hopeless tactic and he knew it.This is God's work, he thought: drifting hair the colour of an almond shell and the fragile blue of her eyes, theUnesand planes and light in her. There weren't words, he realized. Only the feeling inside him and the impulse to make sure, again and again, that he saw what he saw. Suddenly, she looked up and stared back at him, blank-eyed, jaw muscles working away as she chewed, until he sensed that she'd composed her expression into a reasonable imitation of his own. He turned away. 'Yes?' she said, raising an eyebrow.


'It's nothing.'


She poured wine into his glass.


'Do we expect the general home at any moment?' he asked. 'Do I hide in a closet?'


'The general is in Poland,' she said. 'And if he were here you would not have to hide. Krafic comes to see me with his boyfriends. Lara Brozina and her brother. You know them, in what we'll call a different setting. Others also. A little Russian colony, you see:émigréintellectuals, free thinkers, batty painters, and what-have-you. The general refers to us as "an antidote toFrau Lumplich.'"


'Who is she?'


'A character he made up. "Madame Lump," one would say in Russian.'


'An enlightened general. An enlightened German general.'


'They exist,' she said. She brushed crumbs from her hands and held a bite of sandwich out to Seryozha, who arched his neck forward and took it daintily between his small front teeth for a moment, then inhaled it. She rose and brought over a framed photograph from the night table next to her bed. 'General WalterBoden,'she said.


A man in his late sixties, Szara thought. Fleshless, ascetic face below a bald head, deep careUnes,mouth a single briefUne.Yet the look in his eyes told a slightly different story. At some point, ina Ufethat left his face Uke stone, something had amused him. Permanently.


'Extraordinary,' Szara said.


'It pleases me you see that,' she said with feeling.


'When I put this picture together with what you've told me, I would have to guess that this is not a man well loved by the Nazis.'


'No. They know how he feels about them; in the general's world, the notion ofbeneath contempt is taken quite Uterally. He is rich, however. Very, very rich. They do respect that. And his position with the General Staff is not unimportant, though he speaks of it as "the maid's room inthe lion'sden."His friends include the old aristocracy, the Metternichs andBismarcks,princes and counts, the Prussian landholders. Hitler hates them, foams at the mouth because he can't get at them; they occupy two powerful fortresses in Germany, the army and the foreign ministry.'


'Fortresses. Will they hold under siege?'


'We shall see.'


You don't,Szara reminded himself,have to think about such things anymore. 'Is there another log for the fire?' he asked. The embers were dark red.


'No. Not until the morning. One is a prisoner of servants, in some ways.'


'A long way fromRosenhainPassage, though, and that awful theatre.'


She nodded that it was. He stared at her, forced himself to look away. She yawned, took a foot out of her slipper, and propped it inside her opposite knee. 'How did you meet?' Szara said.


'At a reception. We went to dinner a few times. Talked into the night-he speaks passable Russian, you yourself know what that feels like, especially when you have no country to go home to. A strange romance. I waited for the inevitable offer,a relaxing weekend in the country, but it never came. One night at a restaurant he simply said"Nadia,my girl, generals and actresses are nothing new in Berlin.A clichéof the nightclubs. But come along to my house, even so, and see how you like it." I did. And in this room I asked, "Whose bedroom is this?" for I'd already seen his, and everything was obviously new. "I believe it is yours, if you like," he said. I had expected anything but this, and I was speechless. That strip of Persian carpet, the one by your hand? He'd meant it for Seryozha. Suddenly I started to cry-inside, I didn't want him to see. And that was the end of the discussion. I came to live here and it was a kind of salvation; I stopped doing all thoseother things, seeing those vile people. Now this is my life. When he wants to see me, I'm here. I sit across from him at dinner, we converse, my job is to be exactly who I am. Any affectation, to become what I imagine he might want, would break his heart. We have a life together, we go-what is the phrase?-we go out in society. To his friends. Sometimes to the country, to grand estates. In Germany, civilized life continues in such places, much as it does in the basements of Moscow. But no matter where we go, I am always at his shoulder. I take his arm. Now I could-and of course I would, nothing would be easier-make the world believe that he was a sublime lover. A few small signals and the tongues begin to wag. If he desired that, it would be little enough to ask. But he does not. He does not care what people think of him. I'm not here for his vanity, for his reputation. I'm here because it gives him pleasure to have me here.'


Her face was flushed; she drank the last of the wine in her glass. When she met his eyes he saw anger and sorrow, and all the courage and defiance she could possibly summon. Not that it was overwhelming, it wasn't, but for her it was everything she possessed. 'And God damn you if you've come here to make me work again. No matterwhat you've said. For I won't. Won't betray this man in the way you want. I'll go where even your power does not reach. And we both know where that is.'


Szara took a deep breath and let the air between them cool a little. Then he said, 'I've told only the truth'-he looked at his watch-'since ten-thirty last night. Almost six hours. The way things are for me lately, I have a right to be proud of even that.'


She lowered her eyes. He stood, the carpet soft beneath his bare feet, and walked to a mirrored cabinet with glasses and a silver ice bucket on it. He opened the door and found a bottle ofSaint-Estčphe,took a corkscrew and workedit open, then filled both their glasses. She had meanwhile found a newspaper, was bunching up wads of it and feeding it to the fire. 'It looks warm, anyhow,' she said.


'I was wondering,' he said, 'what had become of the people in Paris in all this. Because if you'd let them know about an intimacy with a senior staff officer they would have been-inquisitive. To say the least.'


'And something terrible would have happened. Because even if I 'd tried to conceal everything, I don't trust my little friends in Berlin. They've had to improvise their lives for too long-not all humans are made stronger by that.'


'Very few.'


'Well, for me there is only one escape, and I was prepared to take it. I'd made my peace with the idea. In the beginning, when I stole away from Russia and came to live in Berlin, these people approached me. Threatened me. But I gave them very little, only bits of gossip and what they could read in the newspapers if they wanted. Then they played a second card. Your brotherSaschais in a camp, they said, where he deserves to be. But he's as comfortable as he can be under the circumstances; he works as a clerk in a heated room. If you want his situation to continue, you must be productive. It's up to you.'


'And you did what you had to do.'


'Yes. I did. In exile, I cared very little what I made of my life because I discovered I wasn't touched by it. Perhaps Russia has something to do with that-to be sensitive yet not at all delicate, a curious strength, or weakness, or whatever you want to call it. But then I met this man, and suddenly it was as though I 'd woken from a long sleep. Every small thing now mattered-the weather, the way a vase stood on a table, meeting someone and wanting them to like me. I had built walls-now they crumbled. And this I knew I could not survive. Not for long. I could no longer do what I'd done for the people who came around withmoney, and once they began to press I knew there would be only one way out. So I hadn't, as I saw it then, very long to live. Yet each day was vivid, and I trembled with life. They say it is the only gift, and now I came to understand that with all my heart. I never cried so hard, and never laughed so much, as I did in those weeks. Perhaps it was a form of prayer, because what came next was a miracle, I know of no other word to describe it.


'It was in early August. A man came to see me. Not here. At the theatre, in the same way you did. Clearly he knew nothing of the general. A dreadful man, this one. Fair, wavy hair, thick glasses, a vile little chunk of a thing with no mercy anywhere in him. None. And what he mostly wanted to talk about was you. Something had gone wrong, something extremely serious, for nothing has happened since. No money, no demands, no couriers, nothing.'


She twisted the glass about in her hands, watching the light of the burning newspaper reflected in the red surface of the wine. 'I've no idea what happened,' she said. 'I only know it saved myUfe.And that you seemed to be the cause of it.'


He woke up in a kind of heaven. He had no idea how he'd happened to wind up on her bed but there he was, his face against the soft coverlet, his side a little sore from sleeping on the knot in the twisted belt of the bathrobe. He was in heaven, he decided, because it smelled exactly the way heaven, or his heaven at any rate, ought to smell: the perfume she wore-which reminded him of cinnamon-and scented soap, as well as wine, cigarette smoke, the ashes of a dead fire, and the sweetish odour of a well-washed borzoi. He could, he thought, detectNadiaherself, sweet in a different, a human way. For a time he simply lay there, suspended in a perfect darkness, and inhaled. When he felthimself slipping back into unconsciousness, he forced his eyes open. A knitted quilt was tossed carelessly on the settee-so that's where she'd slept. His suit-apparently the maids had cleaned it-hung from a hanger on the knob of the bathroom door, and the rest of his clothing was piled neatly on a dresser. Miraculously clean and dry.


He struggled to sit up. Returning from the dead, it felt like. All those nights in Poland, lying on the ground on a blanket; followed by restless hours on a thin mattress in the Kovno apartment, people around him awake, coughing, talking in low voices. Now he hurt for every minute of it. He unhooked the white shutter that covered the lower half of the window and pushed it aside. An autumn garden. Surrounded by high walls. Dead leaves had drifted across the paths and mounded at the foot of a hedge.Nadiasat at a weathered iron table-she was reading, he could not see her face-one hand dangling above the wolfhound stretched out at her side.Am I in Russia? Wrapped in a long black coat and a red wool scarf she was lost in her book. The wind lifted her autumn-coloured hair, leaves spun down from the trees and rattled along the garden paths; the sky was at war, broken towers of grey cloud, blown and battered, swept past a pale sun. Certainly it would rain. His heart ached for her.


Later he sat in a garden chair across from her and saw that she was reading Babel'sRed Cavalry. The wind was cool and damp and he pulled his jacket tightly about him.


For a long time they did not say anything.


And she did not look away, did not deny him her eyes:if this is what you wish, she seemed to say,/will pose for you.She touched nothing, changed nothing, and did not defend herself. The wind blew her hair across her face, Seryozha sighed, the light shifted as the clouds crossed the sun, she never moved. Then he began to understandthat he'd misread her. This stillness was not simply poise-what he saw in her eyes was precisely what was in his own. Could she be that deluded? To want somebody so lost and useless? Was she blind?


No.


From the moment he'd walked through the door of the dressing room he had been in love with her. That it might be the same for her had never occurred to him, simply had not crossed his mind. But maybe it worked that way-women always knew, men never did. Or maybe not, maybe it all worked some other way. He didn't really care. Now he understood that everything had changed. And now he understood what, just exactly what, he had been offered.


Sad, he thought, that he couldn't take it. They were castaways, both of them, marooned together on an exotic island-as it happened, the garden of a Florentine villa on theSchillerstrasse.But somewhere beyond the high walls a military band was playing a march and, he thought, the general will soon return from the wars. Only for a moment did he imagine a love affair in flight: the unspeakable hotel rooms, the secret police, the predators. No. She belonged in his imagination, not in his life. A memory. Met in the wrong way, in the wrong place, in the wrong year, in times when love wasn't possible. One remembers, and that's all. Something else that didn't happen in those days.


'When will you leave?' she said. 'Today?'


'Tomorrow.'


Just for an instant he was clairvoyant: he could watch the question as it took shape in her mind. She leaned across the table until she was very close, he could see that her lips were dry from the wind, a red mark on the line of her jaw-suddenly she was out of perspective, too near to be beautiful. And when she spoke it was a voice he didn't know, so soft he could barely hear what she said. 'Why did this happen?'


'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't.'


She pressed her lips together and nodded a little. She agreed. There was no answer.


'There isn't anything we have to do, you know,' he said.


Her face changed, gracefully but completely, until he was confronted by the single great inquisitive look of hisUfe.'No?'


He had never in his life been the lover he was with her.


They waited for nightfall-only the first in a series of common consents that flowed to meet the occasion. Szara could not safely go out in the street, andNadiaknew it, so there was no point in raising the issue. They simply passed a rather nineteenth-century sort of day; they read, they talked, they cut clusters of autumn berries from a shrub to make a table decoration, avoided the servants, played with the dog, touched only accidentally and only now and then, and neither of them let on how it affected them. If living in the days of war demanded a love affair measured in hours and not in months, they discovered that a love affair was something that could be compressed in just that way.


They could have looked, from any of the windows in the front of the three-storey villa, out on theTiergartenand observed that day's life in Berlin: strollers and idlers, officers and couples, old men reading newspapers on a park bench. But they declined to do so. The private world suited them. They did not, however, build sand castles, did not pretend the present was anything other than what it was, and they tried to talk about the future. Difficult, though. Szara's plans focused vaguely on Denmark; from there he would extemporize. He had no idea how he might be able to earn a living; his writing languages, Russian and Polish, would not serve him very well anywhere he could think of.Émigréintellectuals lived in penury-sometimes the little journal paid, sometimes it didn't. The former aristocratsgave parties, everyone ate as much as they could. But even that tenuous existence was denied him-he was a fugitive, and theémigrécommunities were the first places they would look for him. Of course he could not go back to Paris, much too dangerous. Sad, because to be there with her. . .


Sad, because even to know him put her in danger. This he did not say. But she knew it anyhow. She'd seen enough of Soviet life to apprehend vulnerability in every one of its known forms. So she understood that one did what one had to do. This real politik was very alchemical stuff. It started with politicians and their intellectuals, all this doing what had to be done, but it had a tendency to migrate, and the next time you looked it was in bed with you.


Still, they agreed, one had to hope. Humans survived the most awful catastrophes: walked away from the inferno with singed hair, missed the train that went over the cliff. Both felt they might just be owed a little luck from whatever divine agency kept those books. There were still places on earth where one could get irredeemably lost, it only took finding one. And how exactly did one go about herding sheep? Could it be all that difficult?


In the end, they refused to let the future ruin their day, which made them heroes of a low order but heroes nonetheless. And they had the past to fall back on, realizing almost immediately that the sorts of lives they'd led created, if they did nothing else, long and luxuriant anecdotes. They discovered that they had, on several occasions, been within minutes of meeting each other, in Moscow, in Leningrad. Had been in the same apartments, known some of the same people; their trails through the snowy forest crossed and recrossed. What would have happened had they met? Everything? Nothing? Certainly something, they decided.


They weren't very hungry, as the day wore on towardevening, and just after dark they toyed with a light supper. Their conversation was somewhat forced, slightly tense, in the dining room with a ticking grandfather clock that made every silence ring with melodrama.Nadiasaid, 'If it weren't for the general's feelings, I'd have poured soup in that monster long ago.'


They retired early. He, for form's sake, to a guest room, she to her blue and white sanctuary. When the noise in the kitchen subsided and the house grew quiet, Szara climbed the marble staircase.


They lit a fire, turned out the lights, played the Victrola, drank wine.


She surprised him. The way she moved through the daily world, fine boned, on air, made her seem insubstantial-one could hold her only cautiously. But it wasn't so. With a dancer's pointed toe she kicked the bottoms of her silk pyjamas fully across the room, then melted out of the top and posed for him. She was full and lovely and curved, with smooth, taut skin coloured by firelight. For a moment, he simply looked at her. He'd supposed their joined spirits might float to some unimagined romantic height, but now he fell on her like a wolf and she yelped like a teenager.


And what a good time they had.


Much later, when they simply hadn't the strength to go on any longer, they fell sound asleep, still pressed together, the sheets tangled around their legs, drifting away in the midst of the most charming and vile conversation.


It was not yet dawn when they woke up. He reached for her, she flexed with pleasure, slowly, like stretching, and sighed. He watched her from cover, a pale shape in the darkness, eyes closed, mouth open, breasts rising and falling. Suddenly he understood that sometimes there was no reaching the end of desire, no satisfying it. They simply would not, he realized, ever quite get enough ofeach other. Nonetheless, he thought, they could hope for the best. They could try. They could make a beginning.


He could have crawled out of bed at dawn and set out into the cold world, but he didn't. They stole another day, and this time they didn't wait for nightfall. They disappeared in the middle of the afternoon. At eight in the evening a servant set out a tureen of soup at the long table in the dining room with the ticking grandfather clock. But nobody showed up. And at eight-thirty she took it away.


He left in the middle of the following day. A taxi was called. They stood in the vestibule together until it came. 'Please don't cry,' he said.


'I won't,' she promised, tears running everywhere.


The taxi honked twice and he left.


The Gestapo had him an hour later. He never even got out of Berlin.


To his credit, he sensed it. He did not enter theLehrter Bahnhofimmediately but walked the streets for a while, trying to calm himself down-simply another traveller, a little bored, a little harassed, a man who had to take the train up to Hamburg on some prosaic and vastly uninteresting errand.


But the passport control people at the staircase that led down to the platform didn't care what he looked like. A Berlin policeman took the Kringen identity papers and compared them to a typewritten list, looked over Szara's shoulder, made a gesture of the eyes and a motion of the head, and two men in suits closed in on either side of him. Very correct they were: 'Can you come with us for a moment, please?' Only willpower and raw pride kept him from collapsing to his knees, and he felt the sweat break out at the roots of his hair. One of the men relieved him of his valise, the other frisked him, then they marched him, tothe great interest of the passing crowd, toward the station police post. He wobbled once and one of the detectives caught him by the arm. They took him down a long corridor and through an unmarked door where a uniformedSSofficer was sitting behind a desk,a ńleopen in front of him. Reading upside down, Szara could see a long list of names and descriptive paragraphs on a yellow sheet of teletype paper. 'Stand at attention,' the man said coldly.


Szara did as he was told. The officer concentrated on the Kringen identity documents and left him to stew, the standard procedure.'Herr Klingen?'he said at last.


'Yes.'


'Yes,sir.'


'Yes, sir.'


'What did you use to obliterate the birthdate? Lemon? Oxalic acid? Noturine-I hope for your sake I haven't touched your piss.'


'Lemon, sir,' Szara said.


The officer nodded. He tapped the Kringen name with the eraser at the end of a pencil. "The actualHerrKringen went into the Lutheran hospital to have a bunion removed from his foot. And while this poor man lay in a hospital bed, some little sneak made off with his papers. Was that you?'


'No, sir. It wasn't me. I bought the passport from an orderly at the hospital.'


The officer nodded. 'And you are?'


'My name is Bonotte, Jean Bonotte. I am of French nationality. My passport is hidden in the flap of my jacket.'


'Give it to me.'


Szara got his jacket off and with shaking hands tried to rip the seam open. It took a long time but the heavy thread finally gave. He placed the passport on the desk and put his jacket back on, the torn flap of lining hanging ludicrouslydown the back of his leg. Behind him, one of the detectives snickered. The officer picked up the telephone and requested a number. He turned the pages of the Bonotte passport with the pencil eraser. While he waited for his call to go through he said, 'What reason have you for your visit to Germany? A mad impulse?' The detective laughed.


'I fled Poland, but could not find a way out of Lithuania.'


'So you obtained Kringen's passport and came out with theVolksdeutschfrom Riga?'


'Yes, sir.'


'Well, aren't you clever?' said the officer, looking at Szara carefully for the first time and meaning what he said.


They drove him to Columbia House, Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, and locked him in an isolation cell. Small but clean, a cot and a bucket, a heavily grilled window nine feet up and a light bulb in the ceiling. They weren't entirely sure what they had, he guessed, not the sort of poor fish at whom they screamed,Spy! You will be executed! but, just maybe, the real thing, and that had to be handled at length and in a very different way. Perhaps with delicacy, perhaps not. If the decision was 'not,' the next step was no secret. Szara could hear the screaming from distant parts of the building, and it sickened him and weakened his will to resist, as it was intended to.


Abramov, with evident distaste, had covered this possibility during the time of his training: nobody resists torture, don't try. Tell them what you have to, it's our job to keep you from knowing too much. There are two goals you must try to accomplish: one, the less you say in the first forty-eight hours the better-that gives us time-but in any event, feed them the least important material you can. You are just a low-level opportunist forced to workfor the government-contemptible, but not important. And two, try to signal us that you've been caught. That's crucial. We can protect a network from damage, close down everything you touched, and rescue your associates while we work through channels to get you free or at least to keep you from harm. The signals will change based on circumstance: a technical variation in wireless telegraphy or simply vanishing from our sight while working in hostile territory. But there will certainly be a signal established and an appropriate way to deliver it. Remember, in this organization there is always a chance, we can do almost anything. 'If you are taken,' Abramov had said, 'you must cling to hope as a sailor cast into the sea clings to a spar.'


Szara closed his eyes and rested his head against the cold cement wall.No, Sergei Jakobovich-he addressed Abramov's departed soul-not this time.Hope, despair-all such fancies were now entirely beside the point. He'd at last made the error that could not be overcome. Had not sufficiently understood the capability, the magnitude, of the German security machine-not until he'd seen the long sheet of yellow teletype paper with the name KRiNGEN in the left-hand column. The identity that had been purchased in Paris would not hold up, not once they went to work on it, it wouldn't. When he worked his way back through the last two years of his life-Khelidze,Renate Braun, Bloch,Abramov, theopal network, thende Montfriedand the British, finally the assignment in eastern Poland-he saw himself as a man willing to do almost anything in order to stay alive. He'd not done badly, had lasted a long time compared to the others-the intellectuals, Old Bolsheviks, Jews, foreign communists. Had outlived almost all of them, twisted and turned, lied and schemed, survived.


But it was not meant to be, and this he faced.


He suspected that what he'd almost done to himself inthe Pripet marsh, the day he'd crossed into Lithuania, had been a shadow of the future-somehow he'd sensed that he was living out his last few days. But he had slightly misread the omen; he wasn't done withUfe,that wasn't it. Life was done with him. And in his deepest heart, he wondered if he hadn't come to Berlin knowing that he would find a way to Tscherova, an unconscious appeal to fate to let him passionately love a woman once more before heleńthe earth. If so, his wish had been granted, and now it was time to accept the inevitable cost of the bargain. He marvelled at the coldness of his heart. The time of dreams and delusions was ended; he saw the world, and himself, in perfect clarity. Certain obligations remained-to protect Tscherova, principally-but there were others, and he would now plan how to sacrifice himself in the most effective way. How late, he thought, strength comes to some people.


The interrogator was calledHartmann.AnSS Obersturmbannführer,a major, a well-fed man with a placid face and small, carefully groomed hands, who addressed him politely.Hartmann wasnothing more, Szara realized, than the intake valve of an information machine. He existed to acquire facts-perhaps a lawyer, or some functionary in a judicial system, before being called to his present duty by the Nazi party. He did not process the information. That happened elsewhere, far above him in the hierarchy, where an administrative panel, a directorate, made decisions.


To begin with,Hartmannpointed out that if they were straightforward with each other, all would turn out for the best. He implied, without actually saying it, that his job was best done if Szara did not have to be taken to the cellars; they were, together, men who could proceed with their obligations-Szara's to confess, Hartmann's to certify the quality of that confession-while remaining innocent ofsuch measures. That sort of thing was for another sort of person.


Szara did not resist. He cooperated. By the afternoon of the first day he had to admit he was not Jean Bonotte.Hartmannhad provided paper and pencil and asked him to write a biography, beginning with his childhood in Marseille-names and places, schools and teachers. 'I cannot write such a biography because I did not grow up there,' Szara said. 'And I am not named Jean Bonotte.'


'This passport is a forgery, then,'Hartmannsaid.


'Yes,Herr Obersturmbannführer,it is.'


'Then will you tell me your true name? And your nationality, if it is not French?'


'I will,' Szara said. 'My real name isAndréAronovichSzara. As for my nationality, I was born a Polish Jew when Poland was a province of Russia. By1918I was living in Odessa, and so remained a citizen of the Soviet Union, eventually becoming a journalist for the newspaperPravda:


Hartmann waspuzzled. 'Is it a newspaper that sent you to Berlin? With false identity? I wonder if you could clarify this.'


'I can. I obtained the false identity myself, and the newspaper has known nothing of me since I left Poland.'


Hartmannpaused. Szara sensed discomfort. The interrogator took refuge in the notes he'd made to himself to guide him in the interview, but they were all wrong now. His Frenchman, trapped on the wrong side of the lines, had disappeared. In his place stood a Russian, a rather prominent one he suspected, captured while in flight from the USSR, Germany's nominal ally.Hartmanncleared his throat, for him a gesture of irritation. He had to question his competence to work in such areas. All sorts of intimidating issues suddenly made themselves felt; theprisoner's culpability under German law, possible extradition, others he could not even imagine. All of them grave, difficult, complex, and ultimately to be resolved in a political, not a legal, context. This was obviously not going to be a case he would be allowed to pursue; he could put himself in a good light only by presenting to his superiors the most precise information.Hartmanntook up his pen and turned to a fresh page in his writing tablet. 'Slowly and clearly,' he said, 'and beginning with your surname, you will please spell.'


It rained hard that night, for Szara a blessing. It reminded him that there was a world outside his cell, and the steady splash on the high, grilled window muted, if it could not quite obliterate, the sounds of a Gestapo prison. His plan was successfully launched;Hartmannhad ended the interview with the utmost correctness. Szara suspected they would not see each other again, and in the event this turned out to be the case.


Szara's strategy of revelation without defiance had proceeded from one basic assumption: he could not be sure he would withstand what was euphemistically known as intensive interrogation. He feared he would first give up the existence of theopal network, and that would lead inexorably to the exposure ofNadia Tscherova.He had to avoid the cellars in Berlin and then, if it came to that, the cellars in Moscow.


The conventions of the German character first specified efficiency-thus they'd arrested him. A crucial component of that efficiency, however, was thoroughness, and this he perceived to be his possible ally. Now that they knew who he was, he expected they would want from him all they could get, essentially political intelligence. Who did he know? What were they like? How, precisely, was the political line ofPravda determined? What personalitieswere at play? For his part, he meant to make use of what he called the Scheherazade defence: as long as he intrigued them with stories, they would not execute him or send him back to Russia. In the normal interrogation process, where every statement raised questions, a cooperative subject might continue the discussion for a period of months. Szara's hope lay in the fact that Germany was at war, and in war it was a given that unpredictable things happened, including catastrophes of all sorts-invasions, raids, bombings, mass escapes, even negotiations and peace. Any or all of it might be to his advantage. And if they should reach the end of the line with him and determine to ship him back to Russia, he then had one last move to make: he could contrive to take his life by attempted escape, from the Germans or the Russians, whoever gave him the barest edge of an opportunity.


It wasn't much of a plan, he knew, but in his circumstances it was all he had. It might have worked. He was never to find out, because there was one convention of the German character he'd neglected to include in the equation.


They came for him after midnight, when the sounds of the Gestapo interrogations were impossible not to hear and sleep was out of the question. First there was the clang of a gate, then approaching footsteps in the corridor. Szara gripped the frame of the cot with all the strength in his hands, but the footsteps halted outside his cell and the door burst open. TwoSStroopers stood in the spill of strong light, recruiting posterSS, taliand fair and sallow in their black uniforms. Then it was'RausP and all that, toothy grins, the silent sharing of the great joke that only they understood. Holding his beltless trousers up with his hands, he hurried along the corridor as best he could, shuffling because they'd taken his shoelaces as well. Hismind had gone numb, yet his senses seemed to operate independently: the troopers smelled like a gymnasium, a man in an isolation cell moaned as though in a dream. They went down several flights of stairs, at last arriving in a brightly lit office filled with desks, the walls covered with beautifully drawn charts and lists.


A little gnome of a man waited for him at a railing; in his hands a wet hat dripped onto the linoleum. Eyes down, Szara thought he saw an edge ofpyjamabottom peeking out from one leg of the man's trousers. 'Ah,' said the man in a soft voice. 'It'sHerrSzara.'


'You'll have to sign for him,' said the taller of the twoSS.


'It's what I do,' said the man, almost to himself.


Papers were produced and laid on a desk. The gnome carefully unscrewed the cap of a silver fountain pen. He began to scratch a well-flourished signature at the bottom of each page. 'Have we all his things?' he asked as he wrote.


TheSS manpointed to the door, where Szara's valise stood to one side with several envelopes stacked on top of it. When the last signature was executed, the gnome said, 'Come along, then.' Szara held the envelopes under one arm, picked up the valise, and used his free hand to hold his trousers up. 'Do you have an umbrella we can use?' the gnome asked theSStrooper.


'A thousand apologies,mein Herr,it's something we don't have.'


The gnome sighed with resignation. 'Good night, then.HeilHitler. Thank you for your kind assistance.'


In the floodlit courtyard stood a small green Opel, its bonnet steaming in the rain. The man opened the door and Szara climbed in and leaned back against the leather seat. Water sluiced down the windscreen and blurred the floodlights to golden rivers. The little man slid behind thewheel, turned on the ignition, said, 'Excuse me,' and, leaning across Szara, retrieved a Luger automatic pistol from the glove compartment. 'Your forbearance,' he said formally, 'in not punching me will be appreciated. And please don't jump out of the car-I haven't run since childhood. Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't run then either.'


'May I ask where we're going?' Szara opened the envelopes, put his belt on and laced up his shoes.


'You certainly may,' said the gnome, peering through the rain, 'but it wouldn't mean anything even if I told you.' Uncertainly, he steered the Opel across the broad courtyard, flipped a leather card case open and showed it to a guard, then drove ahead when the iron gate swung open. There was a sudden shout behind them.


'What are they yelling about?'


'To turn on the windscreen wipers.'


'Yes, well,' the gnome grumbled, turning on the wipers, 'wake a man up at midnight and what do you expect.' The Opel turned the corner from Prinz-Albrecht-strasse to Saarland-strasse. 'So,' he said. 'You're the man who worked in Paris. You know what we Germans say, don't you. "God lives in France." Someday I would like to go.'


'I'm sure you will,' Szara said. 'I really must insist on asking you where we are going.' He didn't care if the man shot him. His fingers rested lightly on the door handle.


'We're going to a place nearAltenburg.There. Now the secret's out.'


'What's there?'


'You ask entirely too many questions, if you'll permit me. Perhaps it's done in France-it isn't here. I can only say that I'm sure everything will be explained. It always is. After all, you're not handcuffed, and you've just left the worst place you could possibly be-now doesn't that tell you something? You're being rescued, so be a gentleman,sit quietly, and think up some entertaining stones about Paris. We'll be driving for a few hours.'


They drove, according to the road signs, south, through Leipzig, in the general direction of Prague. Eventually the car entered a network of small roads, the engine whining as they climbed. At the top of a hill, the Opel entered the courtyard of a small inn surrounded by woods. A single light could be seen, illuminating a yellow room at the apex of the steeply slanted roof.


The man who opened the door of the yellow room was not someone he'd met before, of that Szara was certain. Yet there was something strangely familiar about him. He was a tall, reedy fellow in his late thirties, balding, a few wisps of fragile blond hair combed neatly to one side. He was chinless, unfortunately so, with a hesitant, almost apologetic little smile that suggested ancient family and rigid breeding-as though a guest had just broken a terribly valuable vase while the host, fearing only that he would be seen to be discourteously brokenhearted, smiled anxiously and swore it was nothing. 'Please come in,' the man said. The voice was intelligent and strong, entirely at odds with his physical presence. He extended his hand to Szara and said, 'I am Herbert Von Polanyi.'


Now Szara understood, at least, his curious sense of recognition:MartaHaecht, describingDrJulius Baumann's luncheon companion at the HotelKaiserhof,had drawn a perfect verbal portrait of him. Szara evidently stared. Von Polanyi canted his head a little to one side and said, 'You don't know who I am, of course.' The statement was not entirely sure of itself-a tribute, Szara guessed, to the NKVD's reputation for omniscience.


'No,' Szara said. 'I don't. But I am greatly in your debt, whoever you are, for getting me out of that very bad place. Apparently, you must know who I am.'


'Wellyes,I do know who you are. You are the Soviet journalist Szara,André Szara.Connected, formerly connected I think, with a certain Soviet organization in Paris.' Von Polanyi gazed at him for a moment. 'Strange to meet you in person. You can't imagine how I studied you, trying to learn your character, trying to predict what you, and your directors, would do in certain situations. Sometimes I worried you would succeed, other times I was terrified you might fail. The time one spends! But of course you know that. We were connected throughDrJuliusBaumann;I was his case officer, as were you. Two sides of the same game.'


Szara nodded, taking it all in as though for the first time.


'You didn't know?'


'No.'


Von Polanyi's face glowed with triumph. 'It is nothing.' He brushed victory away with a sweep of his hand. 'Come in, for God's sake. Let's be comfortable-there's coffee waiting.'


It was a spacious room with a few pieces of sturdy old furniture. Two small couches stood perpendicular to the window, facing each other over a coffee table. Von Polanyi, slightly awkward and storkhke; arranged himself on one of the couches. He was dressed for the country, in wool pants and flannel blazer with a broad, quiet tie. A coffee service was laid out on the table, and Von Polanyi performed the various rituals with pleasure, fussing with sugar lumps and warm milk. 'This is something of an occasion,' he said. 'It's rare for two people like us to meet. But, here we are. You are physically well, I hope.' His face showed real concern. 'They didn't-do anything to you, did they?'


'No. They were very correct.'


'It isn't always so.' Von Polanyi looked away, a man who knew more than was good for him.


'May I ask,' Szara said, 'what has become ofDrBaumannand his wife?'


Von Polanyi nodded his approval of the question; that had to be cleared up immediately.'DrBaumann was,against the wishes of the Foreign Ministry which, ah, sponsored his relationship with the USSR, imprisoned inSachsenhausen camp.Certain individuals insisted on this and we were unable to stop it. There he spent two months before we found a way to intercede. He was mistreated, but he survived. Physically and, I am certain, psychologically. You would find him today much the same as he was. He and his wife were expelled from Germany, having forfeited their possessions, including theBaumann Mülingworks, now owned by his former chief engineer. TheBaumannsare at least safe and have established themselves in Amsterdam. As by now you are aware, all the informationDrBaumannpassed on to you was controlled by an office in the Foreign Ministry. It was, however, and I will discuss this further in a moment, correct information. To the centimetre. So, in the end, you were not fooled. Did you suspect?'


Szara answered thoughtfully: 'Russians,Herr VonPolanyi, suspect everyone, always, doubly so in the espionage business. I can say Baumann'sbonafides were permanently in question, but never seriously challenged.'


'Well then, it only means we did our job properly. Of course, he had no choice but to cooperate. Originally, we were able to offer him continued ownership of the business. Later, after Czechoslovakia was taken, the Nazi party gained confidence-the world's armies did not march, the American Neutrality Act was an inspiration-and the issue became life itself. I am not a sentimentalist,HerrSzara, but coercion on that level is disagreeable and in the end, I suspect, leads to betrayal, thoughBaumann,according to you, did keep his end of the bargain.'


'He did,' Szara said.Unless, he thought,you count his hint in the final transmission andFrauBaumann's approach toOdile.


'An honourable man. On the subject of Jews the Nazis are like mad dogs. They will not be reasonable, and such blindness may ultimately destroy us all. I believe that could actually happen.'


This was treason, pure and simple. Szara felt his guard drop a notch.


'On the same subject, I must say it's fortunate for you that you admitted your real identity-though not, I imagine, your vocation. When the information was disseminated to the various intelligence bureaux we took immediate steps to secure your release. We're a small office at the Foreign Ministry, simply a group of educated German gentlemen, but we have the right to read everything. I believed that the Gestapo might use you against us, and that is the reason we agreed to spend various favours and obligations in order to have you released. In bureaucratic currency, it was quite costly.'


'But there's more to it than that,' Szara said.


'Yes. There is. A great deal more. I hope you'll indulge me and let me come at this in my own particular way.' Von Polanyi glanced at his watch. 'You're to be taken across the border, but we have some few hours to ourselves. I've wanted to tell a certain story for a very long time, and what remains of this night may well be the only chance I'll ever have to tell it. So, do I have your permission to continue?'


'Yes, of course,' Szara said. 'I want to hear it.'


'While the coffee's still warm. . .'Von Polanyi said, filling Szara's cup, then his own. He settled back and made himself comfortable on the couch. The room, Szara realized, was very nearly a stage set, and not by accident. The light was low and confidential; in the woods outside the window there was only darkness and silence and thesteady drip of the rain. The man in the green Opel had driven away; the sense of privacy was complete.


"This is,' Von Polanyi said, 'the story of a love affair. A love affair carried on at a distance, over a long period of time-six years, to date, and it continues-a love affair with roots in the personalities of two very different nations, a love affair in which you and I have both been intimately involved, a love affair, as it happens, between two powerful men. The reference is clear?'


'I would think so.'


'Love affair is a dramatic term, isn't it, but what else could one call a relationship based on a deep and sympathetic understanding, a shared passion for certain ideals, a common view of the human race? Love affair describes it. Especially when you include such elements as secrecy. There's always that in a love affair. Maybe one of the lovers is promised to somebody else, or it could be that the family doesn't approve. Or maybe it doesn't matterwhy-the twa lovers want to meet but everything is in their way; they're misunderstood, even hated, and all they want to do is unite, to become as one. It's all so unfair.'


Von Polanyi paused, took a pack ofGitanesfrom a wooden box on the coffee table, and offered one to Szara. The same kind he'd smoked when he'd visitedDrBaumann,naturally. After he'd lit Szara's cigarette with a silver lighter, Von Polanyi continued. 'Now if we are writing a play, the logical ending for such a love affair is doom. But, if we leave the theatre and enter the world of politics, the doom may be for the world and not the lovers. Imagine that Shakespeare rewrote the final act ofRomeo and Juliet: now the lovers poison the wells of Verona and, in the final scene, they're all alone and living happily ever after.


'Well,' Von Polanyi said, 'I suppose that's the end of my literary career. Because the reality, I'm afraid, is notso amusing. The lovers, of course, are Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. In August, their secret love affair ended with the announcement of an engagement-the Non-Aggression Pact-and a lavish engagement present: Poland. And this is merely the engagement. One may well ask what splendours are planned for the wedding itself!


'But that's the future. For tonight, in the few hours we have, I want to talk about the past. But where to begin? Because this passion, this romance, does not confine itself to the lovers, it starts in the villages where they live and it starts a long time ago. Germany has always needed what Russia has: her oil, iron ore, rare metals and grain. And Russia has always needed what Germany has: our science and technology, our skills, the simple ability to get something done. A German sees a job that needs doing, he thinks a minute, rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and-it's done! When we try to go it alone, alas, when we exclude the world outside our borders, things don't go so well. An example: our latest campaign is to get our people to eat rye bread, from grain we can grow ourselves, and to that end the Ministry of Propaganda is claiming that white bread weakened our soldiers in the1914war. Of course no one believes it.


'Now two countries like this, and practically next-door neighbours to boot-is it not a match that cries out to be made? It's been tried before, but somehow it never seems to take. Catherine the Great imported Germans by the wagonload; they helped, but nothing really changed. A more recent example: in1917,the German General Staff put old Lenin on an armoured train and thus destroyed imperial Russia. Yet even so, the minute the world settled down, in1922,they were at it again with the Treaty of Rapallo. Now we had the two most despised states in Europe rushing into each other's arms-if nobody else will love me, surely this ugly old thing will!


'Poor Rapallo. Anothertreaty, another date to torment the student suffering over his history text. But this marriage is a little more interesting if you look under the covers. The German War Ministry forms a development company called GEFO and funds it with seventy-five million gold reichsmarks. This allows the Junkers company to build three hundred fighter aircraft at a Russian town calledFili,just outside Moscow. Germany receives two hundred and forty of them, the USSR gets sixty and the technology. Next comes a joint stock company called Bersol-by now our poor, suffering student is surely reeling. Perhaps reeling in fact, since Bersol undertakes the manufacture of poison gas at Trotsk, in the province of Samara. In1925,in Tambov province, near the town of Lipetsk, the Lipetsk Private Flying School comes into existence. Rather nebulous, though known today as the Luftwaffe. By September of1926,Russian freighters deliver three hundred thousand shells plus gunpowder and fuses to Germany, disguised as pig iron and aluminium. Can the poor student stand any more of this? Once you add the fact that the Heavy Vehicle Experimental and Test Station near the town of Kazan is in fact a site forKruppand Daimler andRheinmetallto build light tractors-tanks is a better description-probably not. It's all so tiresome, unless of course the student goes to school in Prague. This goes on for twelve years. Germany rebuilds its forces; the two armies participate in exchanges of military officers, establishing facilities in both Berlin and Moscow. And that's just the secret part of Rapallo. In full view of the world, the Russian wheat and ore boats travel west, the German technicians pack their little black bags and head east.


'When Hitler came to power, though, in1933,all had to end. Here was Germany's evil face, and the idealistic Soviet Union and its friends the wide world over had tobe seen to turn away from it. Pity, because everything had been going so well.


'Any diplomat would say that such a moment, if nothing else can be done, is a time to keep a dialogue alive, but Hitler and Stalin shared a special and characteristic trait: they both believed that language was God's gift to liars, words existed only to manipulate those who thought otherwise. Both these men had risen from the gutters of Europe-here I am partial to a Russian saying: power is like a high, steep cliff, only eagles and reptiles may ascend to it-and they believed diplomacy to be the tool of those who had historically kept them down, the intelligentsia, professors, Jews, all such people. But then, a problem: how could any sort of communication be achieved? Solution: only by deeds, by gestures, by irrevocable actions that made one's intentions plain and clear. They certainly didn't invent this method. Since the first days of the newspaper, nations have communicated in this way-on the third page, on the second page, on the first page. We must admit, though, that Hitler and Stalin used the method with some particular flair.


'In1933,Stalin wasn't quite sure what he was dealing with in Berlin. He'd read translations of Hitler's speeches, maybe even his book, but, as I've said, what did that mean? Then, in1934,something even Stalin could understand. The Night of the Long Knives. Hitler had a rival, ErnstRöhm,who led the Brown Shirts. What did he do about it? Murdered them. All the important ones, and all in one night. And so much for rivals. Well, Stalin felt, apparently, the first stirrings of romantic passion, because by December of that year he answered in kind. The assassination of Kirov was organized, and Stalin's political rivals were eliminated in a purge that continued into1936.


"Then it was Hitler's turn. In1936he marched into the Rhineland. He tookterritory. Once again, Stalin sat up andtook notice. Found a way to express a kind of approval: the show trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev. That they were Jews is less important than Vyshinsky'sstatement, at the trial, that they were Jews. Here we see Stalin beginning to come to grips with his real problem, which was very simply this: the twelve years of Rapallo had taught both countries that they could cooperate; now, how was that cooperation to be reinstated? Because, with Hitler in power, those two countries could rule the world if they worked together. They were, like lovers, made whole each by the other, and thus invincibly strong.


'But Stalin had a difficult problem, the fact that communism had traditionally been a religion of idealists. On one side of him was Tukhachevsky, Trotsky'sprotégé,and the most powerful figure in the Red Army. Tukhachevsky was young, handsome, brilliant, and courageous, proven in battle, beloved by his officers. At a show trial, he would have made mincemeat of an oily little opportunist like Vyshinsky and Stalin knew it. Now he needed help, and help was at hand. You'll recall the officer exchanges that went on during the Rapallo period? Letters, orders, communications of various sorts, still existed in German files. At Stalin's behest, certainly through NKVD intermediaries of the most trusted sort,Reinhard Heydrichand the Gestapo SD intelligence service found Tukhachevsky's communications and remade them into forgeries proving that Tukhachevsky and four other Soviet marshals-two of them Jews!-had conspired with Hitler to overthrow the government of the USSR ina coup d'état.Exit the marshals and most of the leadership of the Red Army. What "did the world, theknowledgeable world, civil servants and journalists, think of this? That the conspiracy was born in Germany, a brilliant manoeuvre by the intelligence services to weaken the military leadership of the USSR. Certainly, except for Stalin at the bottom of it, it could seem that way.


'That left Stalin with one final, but very grave, difficulty: the intelligence services themselves, the real levers of his power. The NKVD and theGRUwere staffed by thousands of Old Bolsheviks and foreign communists, many of them Jews, every last one of them an ideologue. These people were concentrated in crucial positions-including the Foreign Departments of both services-and handled the most secret and sophisticated tasks. These were the people who'd bled in the revolution, these were the people who believed that whatever else might be wrong with the Soviet Union, at least it stood against Hitler's bullyboys and Jew baiters. Rapprochement with Germany under Nazi rule? Unthinkable.


'But, as I suspect you know, a man in love will do almost anything, and Stalin craved Hitler as ally, accomplice, and friend. Perhaps he thought,There is one man in the world, and only one, with whom I could have a complete understanding, but here are all these stiff-necked romantics in my way. Will no one rid me of these meddlesome-well, one can't saypriests, but it isn't so far from true. And there was, there almost always is, someone at hand to take him up on it. On one level, the purge of1936to1938was seen as an elimination of those who knew too much, those who knew where the bodies were buried, the final act of a criminal securing his crime. To those with an inside view, however, it seemed principally a war for power in the intelligence services: the so-called Ukrainiankhvost; Jews and Poles and Latvians versus the Georgiankhvost, mostly those from Transcaucasia; Georgians, Armenians, Turks, with a few Jewish allies thrown in to muddy the issue. In fact, it was an extended pogrom, led by Beria, and when it was done the stage was set for a public consummation of the love affair.


'Hitler certainly knew what was going on, becauseKristallnacht,the world's first real taste of what Germany had in mind for the Jews of Europe, was thenallowed to take place, in late1938.The former operatives of the NKVD would have assassinated him then and there, but they were either dead or working at the bottom of some gold mine in Siberia and soon to be. Stalin, eternally shrewd, left a few show pieces alive, to forestall the accusation that he'd done exactly what he did do- LazarKaganovich for instance, Maxim Litvinov for instance, some of the operatives in the European networks for instance, and a few prominent journalists, for instance Ilya Ehrenburg, for instanceAndré Szara.'


Von Polanyi paused-perhaps he expected Szara to sputter and curse-and in a rather studied way chose that moment to discover that he wanted more coffee. Szara found himself dispassionate, nodding in polite affirmation,yes, it could have been like that, but he'd learned more about his own situation in that moment than he had about Joseph Stalin. He felt no anger at all. His mind was now ruled, he saw, by the suspended judgment of the intelligence officer. What he'd once pretended to be he had, by necessity, become, for his principal reaction to Von Polanyi's revelation wasperhaps. It could be true. But, more to the point, why was he being told this? What role was Von Polanyi assigning him?


There had to be one. Von Polanyi had known about him for a long time, as far back as1937,when he'd come to Berlin to recruitDrBaumann-when the NKVD had agreed, far above his head, to receive strategic information by means of a clandestine network. Unwittingly, Szara had been an operative of the Reich Foreign Ministry's intelligence service-'a small office. . .simply a group of educated German gentlemen'-and he had no very good reason to believe that Von Polanyi wanted the relationship to end. 'As far as I can tell,' Szara said carefully, 'everything you say is true. Can anything be done about it?'


'Not immediately,' Von Polanyi said. 'Tonight, thecentreof Europe runs on a line down the middle of Poland, and I believe the intention is to forge a Russo-German empire on either side of it. For Germany there is Western Europe: France, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Great Britain; Spain and Portugal will come along when they see how things are, Italy remains a junior partner. Stalin will expect to acquire a substantial part of the Balkans, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,Türkey,Iran, and India-eventually a common border with a Japanese empire in the Pacific. The United States is to be isolated, slowly squeezed to death or invaded by a thousand divisions. Both Hitler and Stalin prefer political conquest to actual war, so the former alternative is the more likely.'


'For me,' Szara said, 'a world in which I could not live. But you are a German,HerrVon Polanyi, a German patriot. Is it possible you dislike the present leader so deeply that you would damage your country in order to destroy him?'


'I am a German, most certainly a German patriot. From that perspective, I will tell you that the damage has already been done, and a world has been created in which I refuse to live. If Germany loses this war it will be devastating, almost the worst thing that could happen but not the very worst. The very worst would be for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and the people around them, to win such a war. That I cannot permit.'


Von Polanyi's arrogance was stunning; Szara forced himself to look puzzled and a little lost. 'You have something particular in mind, then.'


'At this moment, I frankly don't know what to do, not specifically. I do know, however, that a structure needs to be established, a structure with which Hitler's power may be damaged, perhaps destroyed, when the opportunity presents itself. Why would I want to create such astructure? I can only say: who will if I won't? I don't want to bore you with a history of the Von Polanyi family-in a sense you already know it. An old family, hundreds of years old. Never peaceful. A war family, if you like, but always honourable. Obsessed with honour. So, always, we die young. We also breed young, however, so the line continues despite the inevitabilities of such a heritage. For me, honour lies in the sort of action I am proposing. I am not unaware that this thorn in the German character is despised by some, but I think you can find a way to see the use of it.'


'Of course,' Szara said. 'But my own situation. . .'He didn't know where to begin.


Von Polanyi leaned forward. 'To do what I have in mind,HerrSzara, I need a man outside Germany, a man not only in a neutral country but in a neutral state of being. A man without affiliation, a man not obligated to any particular state or political creed, a man who understands the value of information, a man who can direct this information where it will do the most good-which is to say the most harm-and a man who can achieve that sort of liaison skilfully, in such a way that the source remains protected. Thus a man with the technical ability to support an act inspired by ethics, honour, call it by any name you like. Briefly put, I need a man who can do good and not get caught at it.'


So I am described,Szara thought, and a strange conspiracy is proposed: a Polish Jew and a German aristocrat shall work together to push Adolf Hitler over the edge of some yet unseen cliff. The presumption of the idea! That two rather ordinary men in an inn nearAltenburgwould even dare to dream of opposing a state of the magnitude of Nazi Germany, with its Gestapo, itsAbwehr,SSdivisions, Panzer tanks and Luftwaffe. Yet it was possible and Szara knew it-the power of intelligence was such that two ordinary men in an innnearAltenburgcould destroy a nation if they used it properly.


'You are attracted to the idea,' Von Polanyi said, an edge of excitement in his voice.


'Yes,' Szara said. 'Perhaps it could be done. But I am officially a traitor to the Soviet Union, a network operative in flight, so my time on earth is very limited. Weeks, probably. Nothing can change that.'


'HerrSzara.' Von Polanyi's feelings were clearly hurt. 'Please try to think better of me than that. We have a friend in the SD who is, covertly, a friend of the NKVD. With your permission, we are going to have you leave this troubled world tonight, one of the many who did not survive Gestapo interrogation. You may, if all goes smoothly, read your own obituary should the Russians choose to proceed in that way. But you must not betray us, must not spring alive with your name at the foot of a newspaper column. Can you give me your word that it will be so-forever?'


'You have my word,' Szara said. 'But it cannot be that simple.'


'Auf?Von Polanyi said in despair. 'Of course it isn't. Nothing is. You will live in mortal fear of chance recognition. But I do believe that a certain inertia will help to keep you safe. A Soviet officer will think a long time before insisting that an enemy declared dead by the NKVD is in fact still with us. To discredit the leadership of his own organization is something he will not do easily. Better to convince himself that he's seen a ghost, and that Moscow remains infallible.'


'They'll want proof.'


"The proof is that they've discovered the event by clandestine means, and that when a feeler is extended at some remote level-"Seen our man Szara anywhere?"-we'll deny we ever heard of you. Then they'll believe it. The real danger to you is gossip-a group ofémigrés,forexample, chattering about a Russian-speaking Frenchman who sneaks off to eat blini when he thinks no one's looking. You have a French passport, according to the Gestapo teletype. They describe it as "valid." Use it. Be that Frenchman. But you must alter your appearance as best you can and live the life of a Frenchman-a Frenchman who best not return to France, a Jew from Marseille, mixed up in who knows what unsavoury affair. Grow yourself a vulgar little moustache, grease your hair, gain weight. You won't fool the French; they'll know you're a fraud the minute you speak a word. But with luck they'll take you for nothing more than a creature of the gutter-just not their gutter. Put it about that you lived in Cairo and sold the wrong stocks to the chief of police. There is a bustling world at the margins of society; I'm sure you know it. It hides all sorts of people, it may possibly hide you. Well, what do you think?'


Szara didn't answer right away. He stared at his hands and finally said, 'Maybe.'


'The best deception is the one we ourselves believe in, and that is always the sort of deception that saves our lives,' Von Polanyi said, a bit of the philosopher's gleam in his eye. 'Survive,HerrSzara. I think it's your gift in this life. Trust in the fact that most people are never very sure of themselves-"Oh but you do remind me of him," they'll say. You must, however, become the legend you create for yourself, and you may not take vacations from it. For you, perhaps a little job of some sort might make all the difference-something not quite legitimate.'


Szara turned and looked out the window, but nothing had changed; a starless night, the steady rhythm of rain in a forest. Finally he said, 'How would we communicate?'


Von Polanyi let the silence rest for a moment; it meant they had reached an understanding, the sort that does notrequire words. Then he went through the procedures: a postal card to a certain drapery shop,aposte restantereturn address, then contact. His tone was casual, almost dismissive, implying it was the sort of thing that Szara had done a thousand times before. When he'd finished, Szara said, 'And if I simply vanish?'


'We are equals in this affair,' Von Polanyi said easily. 'If you don't want us,HerrSzara, then we don't want you. It's just that simple.'


They took him out of Germany in grand style, in a dark green Mercedes driven by a young man barely out of his teens, a naval officer, pink-cheeked, gangling, and endlessly solicitous. Every hour or so he would pull over, wait until the road was clear, then knock delicately on the lid of the boot and whisper loudly, 'All is well?' or some such thing.


All was well enough. Szara lay on a saddle blanket, his valise beside him, surrounded by assorted tack that smelted richly of old leather and horse. They had fed him sumptuously at the inn, a tray left in front of the door bearing poached eggs and buttered bread and jam tarts. And the naval officer-somewhere outside Vienna, he guessed-slipped him half a cold roast duck in a napkin and a bottle of beer. In the horsey-smelling darkness Szara felt a little seasick from the curves but picked at it for form's sake and drank the beer. There were three stops. Each time he imagined papers being presented to the accompaniment of Hitler salutes and a rough joke and a laugh. By nightfall they were rumbling up the avenues of a city and Szara was let out on a dark street in a pleasant neighbourhood. 'Welcome to Budapest,' said the young officer. 'The stamp is already in your passport. Good luck.' Then he drove away.


He was, in some sense, free.


Jean Bonotte was abroad in the world and lived much as Von Polanyi had suggested he might-in shabby hotels near railway stations or in the narrow streets by the harbour, where the air smelled like dead fish anddieseloil. He stayed nowhere very long. Joined a restless army of lost souls, men and women without countries, not so very different from his days in Kovno. He stood with them on the longUnesfor registration at the police stations-'One more week, sir, then out you go'-ate at the same cheap restaurants, sat with them in the parks when the pale winter sun lit up the statue of the national hero. He changed. The cracked mirrors in the numberless hotel rooms told the story. He did not, as Von Polanyi had suggested, gain weight. He lost it, his face lean and haunted beneath his awkward, refugee haircut. He grew a natty moustache and trimmed it to perfection, the last vestige of self-respect in a world that had taken everything else away. A pair of faintly tinted eyeglasses gave him the look of a man who would be sinister if he dared, a weak, frightened man making a miserable pretence of strength. This message was not lost on the predators. Again and again the police of various cities took the little money he had in his pocket, and on two occasions he was beaten up.


The second day in Budapest, when he hadn't quite got the hang ofUfein the alleys, a little feUow with a cap down over his eyes and a stub of cigarette stuck to his Up demanded money for entry into a certain neighbourhood-or so Szara guessed from his gestures, for he understood not a word of Hungarian. Szara angrily brushed the impeding hand away and the next thing he knew he'd been hit harder than ever before inbis Ufe.He barely saw it happen, this dog didn't growl before it bit. Szara simply found himself lying in the street, ears ringing, blood running in his mouth, as he fumbled for money to offer. Fortunatelyhe'd left his valise in a hotel or it would have been gone forever. The damage, when he saw it, was horrific. Both lips had been split to one side of his mouth, as well as the skin above and below. It healed poorly. A dark red scar remained. In his mismatched jacket and trousers, wearing a shirt bought purposely a size too large so that it stood out around his neck, he already looked like a man whose luck, if he ever had any, had run out a long time ago. The scar drew the eye, confirmed the image. If the NKVD was still hunting forAndré Szara,and he had to assume that they might be, they wouldn't look for him hiding inside this sad, battered fellow.


Budapest. Belgrade. The Romanian port of Constanta. Salonika, where he sold lottery tickets in the streets of the large, prosperous Jewish community. Athens. Istanbul. The new year of1940he welcomed in Sofia, staring at a light bulb on a cord that dangled from the ceiling and thinking ofNadia Tscherova.


As he did every day, sometimes every hour. To the address inSchillerstrassehe sent postcards. Signed?.?would have been forAndré,?was what he was now. She would understand this immediately, he knew. This?was a wealthy sort of cad, travelling about southern Europe on business, who now and then gave a thought to his old girlfriendNadiawho lived in Germany. "The sea is quite lovely,' said?from a town on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. In Bucharest he'd 'finally got over a beastly cold.' In Zagreb, where he worked for two old Jewish brothers who had a market stall where they sold used pots and pans,?detected 'signs of spring in the air.' /am alive,he told her in this way./am not in Germany, not in Russia, I am free.But living a life-in Varna, Corfu, Debrecen-that she could not possibly share. 'Love always,' saidB, mailing his card an hour before he left a city. Whatlove always really meant, the ten thousand words of it, he could only hope sheunderstood. In the ruined beds of a hundred rooms spread across the lost quarters of Europe, her ghost lay with him every night.


When he worked, it was almost always in Yiddish. Even in the Sephardic communities where they spokeLadino,somebody was sure to know it. In the outdoor markets, in the back streets of almost any city, he found Jews, and they almost always needed something done. He didn't ask very much, and they'd nod yes with a tight mouth,probably you'll rob me.It wasn't exactly charity, just something in the way they were that didn't like to say no. Maybe he was hungry. He didn't look strong enough to load or unload wagons but he did it once or twice. Mostly he cleaned up, or ran errands, or sold things. The dented, blackened pots and pans in Zagreb. Secondhand suits in Bucharest. Used dishes, sheets, tools, books-even eyeglasses. 'No?' he'd say. 'Then try these. Can you see that girl over there? Perfect! That's silver in those frames-you look ten years younger.' It was easy to pick up-he had to wonder if it hadn't been there all the time-and it had to be done, a premium for the customer. Who wanted to buy from a stone? In these streets, money was earned and spent in the cheapest coin there was, a whole dinar,a lek or alev, that you never saw. But life was cheap. He lived on bread and tea, potatoes and onions, cabbage and garlic. A little piece of dried-up meat was a banquet. If it had a rim of fat at the edge, a feast. His skin grew red and rough from being outdoors in the winter, his hands hard as leather. He'd beckon a customer to him confidentially, look both ways to make sure no one was listening, slip a subtle finger beneath a lapel and say, 'Listen, you got to buy from me today, you're not going to anybody else. So make a price, I don't care, I'm a desperate man.' The owner of a stall that sold buttons and thread said to himinConstanza, 'David' -for so he called himself that week-'you're the bestluftmensch I ever had. Maybe you'll stay awhile.'


He became, that spring, the other kind ofluftmensch as well, the man as inconspicuous as air, the operative. Privately, at first, in the way he began to remember his past. It came back like an old love affair, the ashes of his former life a little warmer than he'd thought.


He found himself in Izmir, the old Greek city of Smyrna, now Turkish. Just by the old bazaar, on Kutuphane street, was a restaurant owned by a swarthy little Sephardic lady with shining black eyes. For her he scrubbed pots. It turned his hands and forearms crimson, and he earned almost nothing, but she was a provident feeder-he lived on lamb and pine nuts and groats, dried figs and apricots-and she had an unused room in the cellar with a dusty straw mattress on an old door that he could sleep on. There was even a table, the edges marked by forgotten cigarettes, and a paraffin lamp. Through a half window at pavement level he could see Kadifekele,the Velvet Fortress, perched on top of its hill. He had a strong, intuitive feeling about the room: a writer had worked there. The old lady's son was something or other in the administrative section of the Izmir police, and for the first time in his travels Jean Bonotte had an actual work permit, though not under that name. 'Write down,' she'd said. And he'd laboriously scrawled some concoction on a scrap of paper. A week later, a permit. 'My son!' she explained of the miracle. Fortune smiled. Izmir wasn't a bad place: a sharp wind blew across the docks off the Aegean, the harbour was full of tramp freighters. The people were reserved, slightly inward, perhaps because, not so many years earlier, the blood had literally run in the streets here, Turks slaughtering Greeks, and the town couldn't quite put it in the past.


From his meagre wages Szara bought a notebook and pencils and, once the huge iron pots were dried and put away for the evening, began to write. This was night writing, writing for himself, with no audience in mind. It was March, a good writer's month, Szara felt, because writers like abundant weather-thunder and lightning, wind and rain, surging spring skies-not particularly caring if it's good or bad just so there's a lot going on. He wrote about his life, his recent life. It was hard, he was surprised at the emotional aches and pains it cost him, but evidently he wanted to do it because he didn't stop. On the near horizon was what Von Polanyi had said about the executions of the1936purge and the secret courtship of Hitler and Stalin. But it was life he wrote about, not so much politics. Izmir, he sensed, was not a place where you would want to write about politics. It was almost too old for that, had seen too much, lived somewhere beyond those kinds of explanations-here and there the marble corner of a tumbled-down ruin had been worn to a curve by the incessant brush of clothing as people walked by for centuries. In such a place, the right thing to do was archaeology: archaeology didn't have to be about the ancient world, he discovered; you could scrape the dirt away and sift the sand of more recent times. The point was to preserve, not to lose what had happened.


Working down through his life, beneath the common anarchy of existence, the misadventures, dreams, and passions, he found pattern. Rather, two patterns. If every life is a novel, his had two plots. He discovered he had, often at the same moment, both served and resisted the Hitler-Stalinaffaire, had worked for two masters, both in the Soviet special services. Bloch and Abramov.


What General Bloch had done was both daring and ingenious and, Szara came to believe, driven by desperation. He knew what was going on, he fought against it. And in this warAndréSzara had been one of his soldiers. ToSzara,the depth of the operation and his part in it became clear only when he applied the doctrine of chronology-the exercise in a cellar in Izmir no different than the one he'd undertaken in a hotel room in Prague, when he'd worked throughdubok's, Stalin's, history of betrayal.


Bloch had become aware of Stalin's move toward Hitler sometime before1937and had determined to prevent the alliance by naming Stalin as an Okhrana agent. He had somehow broken into Abramov's communication system and ordered Szara aboard the steamship taking Grigory Khelidze from Piraeus to Ostend. Khelidze was on his way to Czechoslovakia to collect the Okhrana file hidden sometime earlier in a left-luggage room in a Prague railway station. Szara had induced Khelidze to reveal his whereabouts in Ostend, then Bloch had ordered the courier's assassination. Then he'd used Szara as a substitute courier, used him to uncover Stalin's crimes in the Bolshevik underground, used him to publish the history of that treason in an American magazine. It had almost worked. The Georgiankhvost, however, had somehow learned of the operation and prevented publication from taking place.


Here the chronology was productive: it revealed a mirror image of this event.


Szara, while in Prague, had written a story forPravda about the agony of the Czech people as Hitler closed in for the kill. That story was suppressed. It was not in Hitler's interest for it to appear-evidently it was not in Stalin's interest, either. Ultimately, Britain and France were blamed for the loss of Czechoslovakia at Munich but, in the very same instant, Stalin and the Red Army stood quietly aside and permitted it to happen.


Abramov had then protected Szara, his old friend and sometime operative, by absorbing him directly into the intelligenceapparat-what better place to hide from the devil than in a remote corner of hell? In Paris, Szara hadbecome Baumann's case officer, in fact no more than one end of a secret communication system between Hitler and Stalin.


Then, a chance event that neither the Gestapo nor the NKVD could have foreseen.


The Parisopal network had broken through the screen of secrecy hiding their ongoing cooperation. Through Seneschal's unwitting agent, the secretaryLotte Huber, Szarahad discovered a meeting between Dershani, Khelidze's superior in the Georgiankhvost, and Uhlrich, a known SD officer, and photographed it. Seneschal had been murdered almost immediately because of this and Abramov had died for it a year or so later. Abramov, Szara now believed, had changed sides, attempted to use the photographs as leverage, and they had eliminated him as he attempted to escape.


There was more: Molotov's replacing Litvinov as the Hitler-Stalin courtship approached its moment of revelation, and Hitler's public approval of the change. Even Alexander Blok's poem "The Scythians' seemed to have played a part in the operation. Here, the analysis depended on audience. If, on the night of the actor Poziny's recitation, the message was to the British and French diplomats in attendance, the poem served as a plea and a warning, which was how Blok had meant it: 'We ourselves henceforth shall be no shield of yours/we ourselves henceforth will enter no battle. . .Nor shall we stir when the ferocious Hun/rifles the pockets of the dead/Burns down cities. ..'To a German ear, however, at that particular moment in history, it might have meant something very different, something not unlike an invitation, from Stalin to Hitler, to do those very things. To bend Blok's poem to such a purpose was, to Szara, a particularly evil act, and it touched him with horror as nothing else had. He himself knew better, that compared to other evils the abuse ofa poet's words oughtn't to have meant that much, yet somehow it did. Somehow it opened a door to what now happened in Europe, where, with Stalin's concurrence, the words became reality. The horror took place.


Late at night in Izmir, the spring wind blowing hard off the Aegean Sea,André Szarastared sightlessly out the window above his writing table. He would never understand the mysteries that these two peoples, the Russian and the German, shared between them. Blok had tried as only a poet could, applying images, the inexplicable chemistry at the borders of language. Szara would not presume to go deeper. He could see where answers might be hidden-somewhere in what happened between him andMartaHaecht, somewhere in what happened betweenNadiaTscherova and her German general, somewhere in what happened between Hitler and Stalin, somewhere in what happened, even, between himself and Von Polanyi. Trust and suspicion, love and hate, magnetism and repulsion. Was there a magic formula that drew all this together? He could not find it, not that night in Izmir he couldn't. Perhaps he never would.


He could think only of Bloch's final act in the drama, in which he had manoeuvred Szara into the reach ofdeMontfried. It was as though?loch, confronted by the certainty of failure-Beria ascendant, the murderers securely in power, a pact made with the devil-had sent one last message:save lives. Szara had done the best he could. And then the reality of circumstance had intervened.


And, soon enough, the reality of circumstance was that choices had to be made.


Szara filled a score of notebooks before he was done: messy, swollen things, pages front and back covered-entirely in disregard of the ruled lines- in pencilled Russian scrawl, erasures, scribbled-out words from moments whenthe great impatience was on him. In time, he began to live for the night, for the hours when the people of his life would come alive and speak. His memory astonished him: what Abramov said, the wayMartawould put things, Vainshtok's sarcasms-and what may have been the final gesture of his life, which Szara never really did come to understand.


The potwasher's job took its toll. The skin of his hands dried out, cracked, and sometimes bled-occasionally he left a bloodspoor at the margin where his hand rested as he wrote.Let them figure that out! he thought. Them? He didn't know who that was. Russians had become secret writers, in camps and basements and cells and a thousand forms of exile, and they could only imagine secret readers. He was no different.


Otherwise, the world was unreasonably kind to him. The old lady developed a theory that his aptitude lay beyond scouring burned buckwheat crusts from the sides of pots and insisted, in the primitive one-word-at-a-time Yiddish they used between them, that he accompany her on the daily shopping expeditions-here she performed a fluent pantomime, lugging an invisible weight and blowing, with fatigue-and when they attacked the markets, she took him to school. Onions were to be oblong and hard. You sniffed a melon here. With that thief you counted change twice. She had plans for him. He sensed a change of fortune, an improvement, a possible solution.


He was not the only one, that spring, who sought solutions. Far to the north of him, on Germany's western border, military intelligence officers were wondering exactly how they might penetrate France's Maginot Line or, if it could not be overrun, how to turn its flank. At first this seemed impossible. Even if theWehrmachtwere to violate Belgian neutrality, how were the Panzer tanks, so critical to the German attack scenario, to break throughthedenseArdennes forest? To answer this question, the officers fixed lengths of pipe to the bonnets of their cars, making them the width of a tank, and drove through the forest. You had to go slow, they found, you had to weave in and out among the trees, you might have to knock down a few of them here and there, but it could be done.


It was done on10May. Along with glider and paratroop attacks to hold the Belgian bridges and subdue the Belgian forts. In the soft evening light on Izmir's seaside promenade Szara came upon a group of French people-perhaps commercial travellers or employees of French companies-gathered around a single copy ofLeTemps.The Aeolus blew hard at that hour, and the men were holding their hats with one hand and the pages of the wind-whipped newspaper with the other. One of the women had tears on her face. Szara stood at the edge of the group and read over their shoulders. He understood immediately what had happened-he had seen Poland. One of the men was wearing a flat-brimmed straw boater. He let it go in order to flatten a recalcitrant page, the wind immediately blew it off and it rolled and skipped along the promenade.


Szara packed the notebooks that night, wrapping them carefully in brown paper and tying the package with string. An old sweater, a few novels-Balzac, Stendhal, Conrad in French-extra shirt and socks, a photograph of a Paris bistro torn from a magazine, a street map of Sofia; all of that went on top. It was time for the refugee to disappear, and a false-bottomed suitcase no longer served his purposes.


Early the following morning, sleepless and pale, he stood in a long line at the central post office. When he reached the grilled window he handed over a cable to be wired todeMontfried's office in Paris. He had an answer twenty-four hours later, was directed to a street of private banks where, beneath a vast, domed ceiling that assured a cool and perpetual dusk, a group of men in striped pants countedout thousands of French francs. Outside, Szara blinked in the hard sunlight and made his way to the office of the Denizcilik Bankasi, the Turkish Maritime Lines, a venerable institution that had been calling at the ports of the Mediterranean for over a century. The clerks were deeply understanding. This French patriot would return to his homeland, sailing in a first-class stateroom to face his destiny in war. Each in turn, they shook his hand and looked into his eyes, then pointed out a hallway that led to the baggage room. Here too he found sympathy. A supervisor stood with hands clasped behind his back and watched as his young assistant wrote out a claim ticket. With ritual care, a tag was tied to the handle, then the supervisor tapped a bell and a man in a blue uniform appeared and carried the valise away. Szara got a glimpse of the baggage room when he opened the door; sturdy, wooden shelves climbed to the ceiling. He saw old-fashioned Gladstones, steamer trunks, portmanteaus, wooden crates, even a few metal dispatch boxes with stencilled printing. The supervisor cleared his throat. 'Do not trouble yourself,' he said. 'The trust of our clients is sacred, and this we maintain, even in the most difficult times.' Then he added, 'Good luck. Godspeed.' News of the German attack on France had flowed through the city like a current; war was now certain, it would surely be worse than1914.All the citizens of Izmir Szara encountered that day were very formal and dignified; it was their particular way with tragedy.


He sailed on14May and reached Marseille five days later. On the voyage he kept to his cabin and had his meals brought up by the steward. Even though future sailings had been suspended, there were few travellers on the ship, only those who felt they had to return to a country at war. By the time they docked, Antwerp had been captured and theWehrmachthad taken Amiens. Szara's steward told him confidentially that some of the passengers felt it wasalready too late, and they had decided not to disembark in France. The customs and passport officials took care of theńrst-classpassengers in their staterooms. They asked no questions of Jean Bonotte-there could be only one reason he was returning to France.


He was in Geneva a day later, travelling by hired car because the trains had become impossible, many of the locomotives andwagons-iits shifted north under French military control. Jean Bonotte was admitted to Switzerland on a five-day visa, in order to take care of banking business that had to be seen to in person. Again he wiredde Montfned,againde Montfriedresponded immediately, and once again he was directed to a street of private banks. In this instance, the bankers were replaced, in an elaborately furnished sitting room, by lawyers. There were muted introductions, the fine weather was acknowledged, then the concept ofintervention-a soft, subtle, even a graceful expression when purred a syllable at a time in French-was permitted to enter the conversation. Evidently it meant that certain officials would decide to intervene in Jean Bonotte's favour, for there could be no question but that he was the very sort of gentleman who should be resident in Switzerland. Szara said almost nothing; the Bonotte who sat at the table was virtually ignored, it was Bonotte the legal entity with whom they concerned themselves. These were gifted lawyers, with voices like cellos, who did not exactly ask questions; instead they provided answers, phrasing them for courtesy's sake in the interrogatory mood: 'Wouldn't it be much the best idea to inform the Prefecture that. . .'Szara followed along as best he could. Soothed by the distant clacking of typewriters, warmed by the sun pouring in a leaded-glass window, he might have fallen asleep if, every now and again, someone hadn't flourished a paper that needed signing. This is how,he thought,you climb over barbed wire without cutting your hands.


And so, it began again.


An eternalcrań,Szara realized, in this warm and grey and placid city where theRhônesurged gently beneath stone bridges. Concessions were granted, money was earned, interest compounded, statements mailed in hand-addressed envelopes, and intelligence acquired, sold, traded, or simply locked away for later use. The city wasn't about secrecy, it was about privacy. Coat collars were worn flat. Szara found the usual small villa in the usual bland neighbourhood, on thechemin de Saussac,south of the city, and set aggressively about minding his own business, soon enough disappearing into the shadows of the daily and the expected. With his neighbours, he practised the single, stiff nod-no more, no less. He bought three brown suits, just barely different enough so the world might know he had more than one. Established a bank account, paid his bills, vanished. 'A most orderly and dignified city,' wrote the phantom?from Zurich. Something not unlike nostalgia attended Szara's hours on the train-all that effort to avoid a Geneva postmark while letting her know he was safe in Switzerland.


Safewas, of course, a relative term. He remained a fugitive. But somewhere, in his longOdysseythrough the back streets of southern Europe, Szara had learned to put aside his fear of inevitable retribution. Now he only hoped that if the NKVD discovered him he would not be kidnapped and interrogated. If they were going to kill him, let them get it over with quickly. He maintained some features of his previous disguise, in defence of chance recognition more than anything else. A woman journalist he knew, a Belgian, stared at him on a street one day. Szara acted likea man receiving an unexpected, though not at all unwelcome, sexual advance, and she hurried off. On another occasion an unknown man spoke to him, hesitantly, in Russian. Szara looked puzzled and asked, in French, if he needed assistance. The man apologized with a little bow and turned away.


What helped to protect him, Szara felt, was the attitude of the Swiss government toward the NKVD; the Soviet defectorIgnace Reisshad been gunned down, quite openly, by NKVD operatives in Switzerland in1937.The Swiss didn't like that sort of thing at all. What the Russians now maintained, he guessed, were quiet diplomatic affiliations and a few oPAL-style networks using former Communist party members as agents. Moscow thought it best to respect the limits of Swiss patience-any tolerance for revolutionary activity had long ago disappeared. The young Jews in flight from the Pale no longer argued the nights away-Hasidism! Socialism! Bolshevism! Zionism!-in Genevacafés.Lenin, leaving exile in Switzerland in1917,had left no statues of himself behind, and the Swiss seemed in no hurry to install them.


It would now be necessary to go to war.


This was his obligation, his heritage, it required no justification. 'I need,' Von Polanyi had said, 'a man who can do good and not get caught at it.' Very well, Szara was that man. In his desk drawer was the address of a certain drapery shop in Frankfurt. To complete the connection, he needed only&poste restanteaddress, and this he obtained in Thonon, a pleasant train ride up the southern shore of LacLeman.A communication line was now established out of Germany.


As to where Von Polanyi's information would go next, that depended on what he provided, and it was clearly Szara's choice to make: Geneva was rich with possibilities.


Carefully, quietly, Szara built an inventory of candidates. The obvious-French and British political officers-and the not so obvious. Szara made contact with organizations interested in progressive political causes. He used the library, read old newspapers, identified journalists with strong contacts within the diplomatic community. Through one ofde Montfried'sattorneys, he managed an introduction to one of them, now retired, who had written about the Swiss political world with extraordinary insight. He took a vanilla cake and a bottle of kirschwasser to the man's home and they spent the afternoon in conversation. Yes, information was considered a crucial resource in Switzerland, a good deal of buying and selling went on. A certain Swedish businessman, a French oil executive, a professor of linguistics at the university. On hearing the last, Szara feigned surprise. The old journalist grinned. 'A terrific communist in the old days, but I guess he saw the light.' The look on the man's face-cynical, amused-told Szara everything he needed to know. He'd turned up the corner of a network.


Paris fell on14June.


Szara saw the famous photograph of theWehrmachtmarching past the Arcde Triomphe.He had hoped desperately for a miracle, a British miracle, an American miracle, but none had been performed. Because all eyes were on France, the USSR chose that moment for the military occupation of Latvia and Estonia, then took the Romanian territories of Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina on the twenty-sixth. Szara mailed a postal card to a drapery shop in Frankfurt. 'My wife and I plan to return home on the third of July. Can new curtains be ready by that date?' Three weeks later, a letter to M. Jean Bonotte,Poste Restante,Thonon. In response to his inquiry,Herr Doktor Brückmannwould arrive at theHôtelBelvedereon the tenth of September. Patients wishing to consult with the doctor on neurological disorders should arrange appointments by reference from their local physicians.


'Dear, dear,' said the little man who'd driven him to the inn nearAltenburg,'you seem to have had a difficult time of it.'


Szara fingered the scar, now turned white. 'It could have been worse,' he said.


'We assume you are ready to cooperate with us.'


'I'm at your pleasure,' Szara said, and outlined how he wished to proceed, particularly in the matter of couriers. He implied that a certain individual in Berlin would regularly perform such services, but here he was deceptive. That individual, Szara swore to himself, once in Switzerland, would never leave it, not as long as war continued./will save that life at least,he thought. Let them write it on his tomb. Von Polanyi would have to make other arrangements in the future.


'As you wish,' said the little man, accepting his choice. 'Now, I believe this will show our sincerity.' He handed Szara a brown envelope. 'Oh yes, one thing more. On turning over this document, Herbert asked me to say "Now lovers quarrel." I trust it makes some kind of sense to you.'


Until Szara, later that night, opened the envelope in his kitchen, it did not.


Then it took his breath away. In his hand he had two pages of single-spaced typewriting on plain white paper of indifferent quality. The first item concerned a Berlin photography studio on theUnter denLinden owned by a man named Hoffmann.HerrHoffmann was Hitler's favourite photographer; he took portraits of EvaBraun,Hitler's mistress, and other Nazi dignitaries. The month before Hitler attacked Poland, Hoffmann had used a largemap of that country to decorate his shop window. In April of1940,he'd displayed maps of Holland and Scandinavia. Just one week before, the third of September, maps of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltic countries had been posted.


The second item stated that the German transportation ministry had been ordered to make a study of east-west rail capacities leading to Germany's eastern border-the ministry had been told to assume that troops in excess of one million, plus artillery and horses, would have to be moved east.


The third item cited aviation fuel and maintenance requests for Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft operating overLiepäja,Tallinn, the island of Oesel, and the Moonzund archipelago-all Soviet defence lines in the Baltic-as well as the road network leading to Odessa, on the Black Sea.


The fourth item described the German General Staff's planning process for replacing border guard units in the region of the river Bug, the dividing line in Poland between German and Russian forces, with attack divisions. A study of evacuation plans for civilians in the area had been accelerated. Military staff was to replace civilian directors of all hospitals.


The final item stated simply that the operation was calledBarbarossa:a full-scale attack on the Soviet Union, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to take place in the late spring or early summer of1941.


Szara had to go outside, into the air. He opened his front door cautiously, but all the houses on the street were dark, everyone was asleep. It was an overcast, warmish night, terribly still. He felt as though he'd been caught in amber, as though time had stopped dead on a wooded hill above Geneva. He had never in his life wanted so badlyto walk, he realized. But he couldn't. He could not. To walk aimlessly up and down these empty streets would be to call attention to himself, and the paper lying on the yellow oilcloth that covered his kitchen table forbade such a thing; now more than ever he could not compromise the gentility that made him invisible. Just walking-it seemed so harmless. In fact he wanted more, much more. He wanted what he thought of aslife, and by life he meant Paris, a crush of people in a narrow street, dusk, perfume, unwashed bodies, the sharp reek ofGauloisestobacco and frying potatoes. He wanted people, all kinds, laughing and arguing and posing, flirting, unconsciously touching their hair. He ached for it.


A lovers' quarrel,Von Polanyi called it. And wasn't he glib. No, that was wisdom speaking. A way of not exactly facing what it meant. It meant millions would die, and nobody, not anybody in the world, could stop it.Madness, he thought. Then corrected himself. He had seen a newsreel of Hitler dancing a jig outside the railway carriage inCompičgne,where the French had been forced to sign a peace treaty. A weird hopping little dance, like a madman. That was the line of the Western democracies-the man should be locked away somewhere. Szara had stayed to watch the newsreel a second time, then a third. The film had been altered, he was sure of it. One step of a jig had been turned into a lunatic's frenzy. Szara sensed an intelligence service at work. But Hitler wasn't mad, he was evil. And that was a notion educated people didn't like, it offended their sense of the rational world. Yet it was true. And just as true of his mirror image, Stalin. God only knew how many millions he had murdered. A decent, normal human being would turn away in sickness from either one of these monsters. But not Szara, not now. The luxury of damnation was not his. The accidents of time and circumstance demanded he rush to the side of one ofthe killers and hand him a sharpened axe. For now it had to be pretended that his crimes did not matter, and Szara, knowing the truth long before others, would have to be one of the first to pretend.


He did what had to be done. The linguistics professor was a short, angry man with a few brilliantined hairs pasted over a pink scalp. Szara understood him very well-combative, cocksure, vain, bathed in the arrogance of his theories. And, to be truthful, rather clever in his own devious way. The Communist party had always drawn such types, conferring importance on those denied it by their fellow humans. The man's eyes glittered with a sense of mission, and he was, Szara had to admit, terribly sly about what he was doing.


But Szara was the inheritor of a great tradition; Abramov's heir and?loch's, one could trace it all the way back to the Okhrana officer and beyond, and he was more than a match for the professor. Szara wandered through the stacks of the university library, tracking his prey. Then he missed it the first time, but not the second. Just a slick little brush pass with a fortyish woman in a dark knit suit. Szara, nudging a Victorian study of phonemes out of his field of vision, saw a matchbox change hands, and that was enough for him. When the professor next visited his office, an envelope had been slipped beneath his door. Von Polanyi's second instalment was scheduled for October, and Szara knew there would be more to come. He took a rather malicious glee in all the variations he would visit upon the professor. Perhaps next time he would mail him a key to a storage locker.


But the professor would do his job, of that Szara was certain. Passing the information up the network until some Kranov would tap out code on his wireless in the dead of night. So it would come to Moscow. In Szara's imagination, a welcome was prepared for theWehrmacht:Red Armyunits brought secretly to the border in goods wagons and covered trucks, tank traps dug in the dark hours when theLuftwaffe wasblind, pillboxes reinforced, concrete poured. Until the lesser demon broke the greater, and the world could go on about its business.




18October1940.


André Szarastood among the autumn-coloured trees of a forest in the Alpine foothills and watched the waters of the Rhine curl white at the pillars of a bridge. On the other side of the river he could see the German village of Hohentengen; the red and black flag moved lightly in the wind above the town hall. A pretty place, at the southern extremity of the Black Forest, and quiet. On Szara's side of the Rhine, a few miles away, was the Swiss village ofKaiserstuhl, alsopretty, also quiet. It was a peaceful border; not much happened there. At the German end of the bridge, two sentries stood guard over a wooden gate. A few log-and-barbed-wire barriers had been positioned at the edge of the village to thwart escape by a speeding car, but that was all.


He looked at his watch and saw that it was not yet four o'clock. Shifted his weight to lean against an oak tree, the dead leaves rustling at his feet as he changed position. It was deserted here. Only fifteen miles fromZürich,but another world. In his imagination he tracked the courier: from Berlin south toward Munich, crossing the Danube in the province ofWürttemberg,heading for Lake Constance, then drifting toward Basel, where the Rhine turned north, at last a left at Hohentengen, and across the Hohentengen bridge. Again he looked at his watch; the minute hand hadn't moved. A wisp of smoke curled from the chimney of a woodsman's hut that housed the Swiss border guard. They, unlike their German counterparts across the bridge, did nothave to stand guard with rifles in the chill mountain air.


Now it came.


Szara stiffened when he saw it. A huge, shiny black car with long curves up the front fenders and little swastika flags set above the headlamps. It moved carefully around the barriers, rolled to a stop at the gate. One of the guards leaned down to the driver's window, then stood to attention and saluted briskly. The other guard lifted the latch, then walked the gate open until he stood against the railing of the bridge. The car moved forward; Szara could just hear it bump across the uneven wooden boards of the surface. The door of the woodsman's hut opened, and a guard came halfway out and casually waved the car forward into Switzerland.


Szara, hands thrust in pockets, set off on a dirt path that ran along the hillside, then descended to the road at a point where it left the view of the border guards. He had surveyed all the little bridges along this part of the Rhine and finally chosen the Hohentengen, walking through the operation a week earlier. He was now certain the meeting would be unobserved. Skidding on wet leaves, he reached the surface of the road and moved toward the idling car which had stopped by a road marker showing the distance toKaiserstuhl.Through the windscreen Szara could just make out-the October light was fading quickly and the oblique angle made it difficult to see-the silhouette of a driver in uniform and military cap. The glass of the passenger windows was tinted for privacy. He saw only a reflected hillside, and then his own image, a hand reaching to open the back door, a face cold and neutral, entirely at war with what went on inside him.


The door swung open smoothly, but he did not find what he expected. He blinked in surprise. These were not pale blue eyes, and there was no affection in them. Curiosity,perhaps. But not much of that. These were the eyes of a hunter, a predator. They simply stared back at him, without feeling, without acknowledgment, as though he were no more than a moving shape in a world of moving shapes. 'Oh, Seryozha!' she said, and pulled the borzoi back on his silver chain.


Szara must have looked surprised becauseNadiasaid, 'Why are you staring? I couldn't very well leave him in Berlin, now could I?'


They leaned across the dog's back to embrace. Szara's heart glowed within him. Seryozha's presence meant she had no intention of going back to Berlin. For her, life in the shadows was over.


Of that he was absolutely certain.












Afterword




This novel is based on a conversation held in a private clinic in Paris in Febraary of1937.While recovering from an automobile accident, the Soviet intelligence officer L. L.Feldbin-alias Alexander Orlov-was visited by his cousin Zinovy Katsnelson, a state security commissar for the Ukraine. Katsnelson claimed that members of the Ukrainian, principally Jewish, group within the special services intended to overthrow Stalin by denouncing him to the Communist party as a former agent of the Okhrana. Proof of the association lay in three copies of an Okhrana dossier held by the group. By March of1937,Katsnelson had been recalled to Moscow and shot.Feldbindefected from an assignment in Spain in July of1938,eventually reaching the United States. In the course of his debriefing, many years later, he reported what Katsnelson had told him.


Several characters in this book also appear in the novelNight Soldiers. I have tried to ensure that names, assignments, and locations are consistent in both books, with one exception: inNight Soldiers, therezident Yadomir Ivanovich Bloch(Yaschyeritsa) is a colonel general, a rank of such high visibility that he would not have been able to operate as he does inDark Star. Thus he has been demoted to lieutenant general in this novel.












Acknowledgments




I am grateful for the help of many individuals in the writing ofDark Star: historians of the period, librarians, booksellers, and friends-too many to name here. I would, however, like to thank Abner Stein and Anne Sibbald for their generous support and encouragement; manuscript editorLuise Erdmannfor seeking clarity and precision in a chaotic world; and especiallyJoe Kanon, inparticular for his confidence in my work, in general for making it possible for all sorts of writers to go on doing what they do best.









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