Night Soldiers

Alan Furst Night Soldiers

First published in 1988

Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day. -V. I. Lenin, May 1922

Executive Order g6st TERMINATION OF THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES (OSS)

The Secretary of War shall, whenever he deems it compatible with the national interest, discontinue any activity transferred by this paragraph and wind up all affairs relating thereto.

-Harry S. Truman September 20, 1945

Levitzky's Geese

In Bulgaria, in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia. His brother was fifteen, no more than a blameless fool with a big mouth, and in calmer days his foolishness would have been accommodated in the usual ways--a slap in the face for humiliation, a few cold words to chill the blood, and a kick in the backside to send him on his way. That much was tradition. But these were _political__ times, and it was very important to think before you spoke. Nikko Stoianev spoke without thinking, and so he died. On both sides of the river--Romania to the north and Bulgaria to the south--the political passion ran white hot. People talked of little else: in the marketplace, in the church, even--a mark of just how far matters had progressed--in the kitchen. _Something__has happened in Bucharest. Something has happened in Sofia. Soon, something will happen here. And, lately, they marched. Torchlight parades with singing and stiff-armed salutes. And the most splendid uniforms. The Romanians, who considered themselves much the more stylish and urbane, wore green shirts and red armbands with blue swastikas on a yellow field. They thrust their banners into the air in time with the drum: we are the Guard of Archangel Michael. See our insignia--the blazing crucifix and pistol. They were pious on behalf of both symbols. In 1933, one of their number had murdered Ion Duca, the prime minister, as he�waited for a train at Sinaia railway station. A splinter group, led by a Romanian of Polish descent named Cornelius Codreanu, called itself the Iron Guard. Not to be outdone by his rivals, Codreanuhad recently assassinated the prefect of Jassy "because he favored the Jews." Political times, it seemed, brought the keenest sort of competitive instincts into play and the passionate reached deep within themselves for acts of great magnitude. The men of Vidin were not quite so fashionable, but that was to be expected. They were, after all, Slavs, who prided themselves on simplicity and honesty, while their brethren across the river were of Latin descent, the inheritors of a corner of the Roman Empire, fancified, indolent fellows who worshiped everything French and indulged themselves in a passion for the barber, the tailor, and the gossip of the cafes. Thus the Bulgarian marchers had selected for themselves a black and olive green uniform which was, compared with Romanian finery, simple and severe. Still, though simple and severe, they were _uniforms,__ and the men of Vidin were yet at some pains, in 1934, to explain to the local population how greatly that altered matters. It was a soft autumn evening, just after dusk, when Nikko Stoianev called Omar Veiko a dog prick. A white mist hung in the tops of the willows and poplars that lined the bank of the river, clouds of swallows veered back and forth above the town square, the beating of their wings audible to those below. The Stoianev brothers were on their way home from the baker's house. Nikko, being the younger, had to carry the bread. They were lucky to have it. The European continent lay in the ashes of economic ruin. The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency--showing wise kings and blissful martyrs--while bankers wept and peasants starved. It was, certainly, never quite so bad as the great famines of Asia. No dead lay bloated in the streets. European starvation was rather more cunning and wore a series of clever masks: death came by drink, by tuberculosis, by the knife, by despair in all its manifestations. In Hamburg, an unemployed railway brakeman took off his clothes, climbed into a barrel of tar, and burned himself to death. The Stoianevs had the river. They had fished, for carp and pike, sturgeon and Black Sea herring, for generations. They were not wealthy, but they did earn a few leva. That meant the Stoianev women could spend their days mending lines and nets and the family could pay the Braunshteins, in their flour-dusted yarmulkes, to do the baking. They had, frankly, a weakness for the Braunshtein bread, which was achieved in the Austrian manner, with a hard, brown crust. Most of their neighbors preferred the old-fashioned Turkish loaf, flat and round in the Eastern tradition, but the Stoianev clan looked west for their bread, and their civilization. They were a proud, feisty bunch--some said much too proud--with quick tempers. And they were ambitious; they meant to rise in the world. Much too ambitious, some thought. A time might just come, and come fairly soon, when the Stoianevs would have to bow the head--who were _they,__ one might ask, to have their damned noses stuck so high in the air? After all, had not the eldest son of Landlord Veiko sought the hand of the eldest Stoianev daughter? The one with the ice-blue eyes and thick black hair. And had he not been refused? A shameful slight, in the watchful eyes of Vidin. The Veiko were a family of power and position; property owners, men of substance and high rank. Any fool could see that. What fools could and could not see became something of a topic in Vidin following Nikko Stoianev's death. A few leading citizens, self-appointed wise men and local wits, who read newspapers and frequented the coffeehouse, asked each other discreetly if Nikko had not perhaps seen the wrong Veiko. That is, _Landlord__ Veiko. For Landlord Veiko was not in the town square that autumn evening. Colonel Veiko was. In his black and olive gre�n uniform, marching at the head of the Bulgarian National Union--all eighteen of them present that night. You see, the wise men told each other, to call a landlord a dog prick was to risk a slap in the face for humiliation, a few cold words to chill the blood, and a kick in the backside to send you on your way. That much was tradition. It had happened before. It would happen again. But to say such things to a _colonel.__ Well, that was another matter altogether, was it not. Omar Veiko, in either manifestation, landlord or colonel, was a man to be reckoned with in Vidin. A man whose studied effeminacy was a covert tribute to his power, for only a very powerful man raised neither voice nor fist. Only a very powerful man could afford to be so soft, so fussy, so plump, so fastidious. It was said that he dined like a cat. This Veiko had a mustache, a sharp, stiff, well-waxed affair that shone jet black against his cream-colored skin. He was a short man who stood on his toes, a fat man who sucked in his stomach, a curly-haired man who oiled his curls until they brushed flat. A man, obviously, of some considerable vanity and, like most vain men, a close accountant of small insults. A note of sarcasm in the voice, a glance of ill-concealed anger, a rental payment slapped overhard on the wooden desk. All such sins were entered in a ledger, no less permanent for being kept in Veiko's razor-sharp memory rather than on bookkeeper's pages. It was, in fine, the Turkish style: an effete, polished surface just barely concealing interior tides of terrible anger. An Eastern tactic, of great antiquity, meant to frighten and intimidate, for Omar Veiko's most urgent desire on this earth was that people be frightened of him. He lived on fear. It set him above his fellows, content to live out their days animated by less ambitious cravings. Some weeks later, Antipin, the Russian who pretended to be a Bulgarian, would nod slowly with grave understanding. "Yes, yes," he would say, pausing to light a cigarette, "the village bully." "We know them, " he would add, eyes narrowing, head nodding, in a way that meant _and we know what to do with them.__ Colonel Veiko marched his troop into the main square from the west. The sky was touched with the last red streaks of the setting sun. The twenty-five minarets, which gave the town its fame along the river, were now no more than dark shapes on the horizon. There was a light evening breeze off the water and, at the center of the town square, the last leaves of the great beech tree rattled in the wind, a harsh, dry sound. The Bulgarian National Union marched with legs locked stiff, chins tucked in, arms fully extended, fingers pointing at the ground. Legs and arms moved like ratchets, as though operated by machinery. All in time to Khosov the Postman, who kept the beat with a homemade drumstick on a block of wood. They badly wanted a drum, but there was no drum to be had unless one went al the way to Sofia. No matter. The desired effect was achieved. _A__ great modern age was now marching into the ancient river town of Vidin. Colonel Veiko and his troopers had not themselves conceivec this fresh approach to parades. It had come down the river froit Germany, twelve hundred miles away, brought by an odd tittle man in a mint-colored overcoat. He arrived by passenger steamer with tins of German newsreels and a film projector. To the peopk of Vidin, these were indeed thrilling spectacles. Nobody had evei seen anything like it. Such enormous banners! Huge bonfires ranks of torches, songs lifted high by a thousand voices. The people of Vidin worked hard, squeezed the soul from ever) lev, watched helplessly as their infants died of diphtheria. Lift was a struggle to breathe. Now came an odd little man in a mint-colored overcoat and he offered them _pride__--a new spirit, a new destiny. Omar Veiko, who could read the wind like a wolf, realized that this time belonged to him, that it was his turn. First he made himself a captain. Later, a colonel. The uniforms were sewn up by a tailor named Levitzky, whost family had for generations outfitted the local military: Turkish policemen stationed in the town, Austro-Hungarian infantry going to war against Napoleon, Bulgarian officers in World War I when the country had sided with Germany. The fact that money passed into the hands of Levitzky, a Jew, was regrettable, bul was viewed as a necessary evil. In time such things would be pul right. The uniforms were soon ready. The heavy cotton blouse was olive green, an Eastern preference. The trousers and tunic, oi thickly woven drill, were a deep, ominous black. A black tie sel off the shirt. Each tunic had a shoulder patch, a fiery crucifix with crossed arrow. The uniforms were received with delight. The heavy double-breasted cut of the jackets made the National Union members look fit and broad-shouldered. But the caps. Ahh, now that _was__ a problem. Military caps were not the proper domain of a tailor--that was capmaker's business, different materials and skills were required. There was, however, no capmaker about, so the job fell on Levitzky. A progressive. A reader of tracts on Palestinian repatriation, a serious student of the Talmud, a man who wore eyeglasses. Levitzky had an old book of illustrations; he thumbed through it by the light of a kerosene lamp. All Europe was represented, there were Swiss Vatican Guards, Hungarian Hussars, French Foreign Legionnaires, Italian Alpine regiments of the Great War. From the last, he selected a cap style, though he hadn't the proper materials. But Levitzky was resourceful: two layers of black drill were sewn together, then curved into a conical shape. The bill of the cap was fashioned by sewing material on both sides of a cardboard form. All that was lacking, then, was the feather, and this problem was soon solved by a visit to the ritual slaughterer, who sold the tailor an armful of long white goose quills. Colonel Veiko and his troopers thought the caps were magnificent, a little flamboyant, a daring touch to offset the somber tone of the uniforms, and wore them with pride. The local wise men, however, laughed behind their hands. It was entirely ridiculous, really it was. Vidin's _petite-bourgeoise__ tricked out in goose feathers, strutting up and down the streets of the town. The grocer preceded by his monstrous belly. The postman beating time on a wooden block. Laughable. Nikko Stoianev thought so too, standing with his arms full of Braunshtein's loaves on a soft evening in autumn. The Stoianev brothers had stopped a moment to watch the parade--very nearly anything out of the ordinary that happened in Vidin was worth spending a moment on. Veiko marched in front. Next came the two tallest troopers, each with a pole that stretched a banner: the blazing crucifix with crossed arrow. Three ranks of five followed, the man on the end of each line holding a torch--pitch-soaked rope wound around the end of a length of oak branch. Five of the torches were blazing. The sixth had gone out, sending aloft only a column of oily black smoke. "Ah, here's a thing," Khristo said quietly. "The glory of the nation." "Levitzky's geese," Nikko answered, a title conferred by the local wise men. "How they strut," Khristo said. They took great strength from each other, the Stoianev brothers. Good, big kids. Nikko was fifteen, had had his first woman, was hard at work on his second. Khristo was nineteen, introspective like his father. He shied away from the local girls, knowing too well the prevailing courtship rituals that prescribed pregnancy followed by marriage followed by another pregnancy to prove you meant it the first time. Khristo held back from that, harboring instead a very private dream--something to do with Vienna or, even, the ways of God were infinite, Paris. But of this he rarely spoke. It was simply not wise to reach too far above what you were. They stood together on the muddy cobbled street, hard-muscled from the fishing, black-haired, fair-skinned. Good-natured because not much else was tolerated. Nikko had a peculiarly enlarged upper lip that curled away from his teeth a little, giving him a sort of permanent sneer, a wise-guy face. It had got him into trouble often enough. In good order, the unit marched past the grand old Turkish post office that anchored the main square, then reached the intersection. "Halt!" Colonel Veiko thrust his arm into the air, held tension for a moment, then shouted, "Left... turn!" They marched around the corner of the open square, heading now toward the Stoianevs, white feathers bobbing. Veiko the landlord. The grocer. The postman. Several clerks, a schoolteacher, a farmer, a fisherman, even the local matchmaker. Nikko's grin widened. "Hup, hup," he said. They watched the parade coming toward them. "Here's trouble," Khristo said. There was a hen in the street. It belonged to an old blind woman who lived down by the fishing sheds and it wandered about freely, protected from the pot by local uncertainty over what the fates might have in store for someone who stole from the blind. It tottered along, pecking at the mud from time to time, looked up suddenly, saw the Bulgarian National Union bearing down upon it, and froze. Seemingly hypnotized. Perhaps dazzled by the sparking torches. Veiko marched like an angry toy--legs thrusting stiffly intothe air, heels banging hard against the earth. The hen stood like a stone. What could Veiko do? The local wise men were later to debate the point. Stop the parade--for a _hen?__ Never. The National Union had its dignity to consider. It had, in fact, very little else but its dignity, so it simply could not afford the sacrifice. It had to--this became immediately clear to everybody--march through the hen. No hen could stop _them.__ So the hen was deemed not to exist. True to its breed, the hen did not cooperate. It did exist. When the first black boot swung over its head, it rose into the air like a cyclone, wings beating frantically, with a huge, horrified squawk. It could not really fly, of course, so descended rapidly into the scissoring legs of the following rank, which stopped short, legs splayed, arms and torches waving to keep balance, amid great cursing and shouting. The following rank did its part in the business by crashing into the backs of those in front of them. This happened directly in front of Khristo and Nikko. Who clamped their teeth together and pressed their lips shut, which made the thing, when finally it came tearing up out of them, a great bursting explosion indeed. First, as control slipped away, a series of strangled snorts. Then, at last, helplessly, they collapsed against each other and roared. Veiko could have ignored it, with little enough loss of face, for everyone knows that giggling teenagers must, at all costs, be ignored. But he did not. He turned slowly, like a man of great power and dignity, and stared at them. Khristo, older, understood the warning and shut up. Nikko went on with it a little, the issue altering subtly to encompass his "right" to laugh. Then changed again. So that, by some fleeting alchemy of communication, it was now very plain that Nikko was laughing at Veiko and not at the misadventures of a stray hen. But the hen did its part. Everyone was to agree on that point at least. For, as Colonel Veiko stared, the hen ran back and forth, just beyond arm's length of the milling troopers, cackling with fury and outraged dignity. Raucous, infuriated, absurd. Thus there were two outraged dignities, and the relation between them, a cartoon moment, made itself evident to Nikko and he laughed even harder. His brother almost saved his life by beltinghim in the ribs with a sharp elbow--a time-honored blow; antidote, in classrooms, at funerals, to impossible laughter. Nikko stopped, sighing once or twice in the aftermath and wiping his eyes. Behind Veiko, the troop was very quiet. He could feel their silence. Slowly, he walked the few paces that separated him from the brothers, then stood close enough so that they could smell the _mastica__ on his breath, a sharp odor of licorice and raw alcohol. They always drank before they marched. "Christ and king," he said. It was what they said. It was what they believed in. It was, in this instance, a challenge. "Christ and king," Khristo answered prompdy. He'd heard what was in the voice--somediing itching to get out, something inside Veiko that could, at any moment, be born, be alive and running free in the street. "Christ and king." Nikko echoed his brother, perhaps in a bit of a mumble. He was confused. He knew what a challenge was, on the boats, in the schoolyard, and he knew the appropriate response, which was anything but submission. Anything. But here the provocation was coming from an adult, a man of some standing in the community no matter what one thought of his damn feathers and banners. Between Nikko and the other kids his age it was just a snarly thing, cub feints, a quick flash, perhaps a few punches were thrown and then it was over. But diis--this was domination for its own sake, a nasty reek of the adult world, unjust, mean-spirited, and it made Nikko angry. Veiko saw it happen--the tightening of the mouth, the slight flush along the cheekbones--and it pleased him. And he let Nikko know it pleased him. Showed him a face that most of the world never saw: a victorious little smirk of a face that said, _See how I__got the best of you and all I did was say three words. The troop re-formed itself. Veiko squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, thrust his lead marching leg into the air. "Forward!" From Nikko: "Yes sir, Colonel Dog Prick!" Not too loud. Just loud enough. An audible mumble particularly native to fifteen-year-olds--you can choose to hear this or not hear it, that's up to you. A harshinsult--_khuy sobachiy__--but by a great deal not the worst thing you could say in a language that provided its user with a vast range of oath and invective. It was a small dog, the phrase suggested, but an excited one--dancing on its hind legs in expectation of affection or table scraps. Veiko chose to hear it. Stopped the troop. Backed up until he was even with Nikko and, in the same motion, swept his hand backward across Nikko's face. It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to hurt. It was the blow of a tenor striking a waiter, and it was meant simply to demonstrate the proposition _Iam someone who can slap__your face. Veiko returned the hand halfway, to a point in line with Nikko's nose, pointed with an index finger, and shook it firmly twice. Lifted his eyebrows, raised his chin. Meaning _Naughty boy, see what__happens when you curse your betters? Nikko let him have it. He could toss a hundred-pound sack of fish onto his shoulder. The shot was open-handed and loud and the force surprised even Nikko. The feathered cap flew off and Veiko staggered back a step. He stood absolutely still for a long moment, the red and white image of a hand blooming on his cheek. Both brothers went down under the first rush. There were no shouted commands or battle cries; it was an instinctive reaction, blind and furious, and it no longer had anything to do with military formations or political slogans. It had become entirely Vidin business, Bulgarian business, _Balkan__ business. There was an initial rain of blows, ineffective flailing punches that hit the Stoianevs, the ground, other troopers. Khristo's mind cleared quickly; he tried to curl into a ball, tried to protect head and groin, but he could barely move. There were five or six of them on top of him, and it was a lot of weight. He could smell them. Licorice _mastica,__ garlic, boiled cabbage, bad fish, bad teeth, uniforms sweated and dried and sweated again. He could hear them. Grunting, panting, soon enough gasping for breath. Khristo was a moderately experienced fighter--in Vidin it was inevitable--and knew that street fights burned themselves out quickly. He did not thrash or punch. Let them get it out of their system. Nikko was fighting. He could hear it--his brother cursing, somebody's cry of pain, somebody yelling, "Get his head!" Damn Nikko. His crazy boiling temper. Punching walls when he got mad. Damn his wise-guy face and his fast mouth. And damn, Khristo thought, turning his attention to his own plight, this fat, sweaty fool who was sitting on his chest, trying to bang his head against the cobblestones. In just about two seconds he was going to do something about it--dig an elbow into fat boy's throat, drive it in, give him a taste. Then Nikko screamed. Somebody had hurt him, the sound cut Khristo's heart. The street froze, suddenly it was dead quiet. Then, Veiko's voice, high and quivering with exertion, breath so blown that it was very nearly a whisper: "Put that one on his feet." For the first time, real fear touched him. What should have been over was not over. In Khristo's world, brawls flared and ended, honor satisfied. Everybody went off and bragged. But in Veiko's voice there was nothing of that. They hauled him to his feet and they made him watch what they did next. It was very important to them that it be done that way. There were four or five of them clustered around Nikko, who lay curled around himself at their feet, and they were kicking him. They kicked as hard as they could and grunted with the strain. Khristo twisted and thrashed but they had him by the arms and legs and he couldn't break free, though he ground his teeth with the effort. Then he ceased struggling and pleaded with them to stop. Really pleaded. But they didn't stop. Not for a long time. At the last, he tried to turn his face away but they grabbed him under the chin and forced his head toward what was happening and then he could only shut his eyes. There was no way, however, that he could keep from hearing it. The moon was well up by the time Khristo reached home. A shack by the river, garden vines climbing along a stake fence and up over the low roof. With Nikko- on his shoulder, a long night of walking. He'd had to stop many times. It was cold, the wind had dried the tears on his face. The uniformed men had left in a silent group. Khristo had stood over his brother's body. He'd felt for a pulse, out of duty, but he knew he need not have done it. He'd seen death beforeand he knew what it meant when a body lay with all the angles bent wrong. He had knelt and, slowly and carefully, with the tail of his shirt, had cleaned his brother's face. Then he took him home. Where the dirt road turned into his house, the dogs started barking. The door opened, and he saw his father's silhouette in the doorway. The Russian, Antipin, came a few weeks later. Like the odd little man from Germany in the mint-colored overcoat, he came on the river. But, the local wise men noted quietly, there were interesting differences in the manner of his coming. The German had arrived by river steamer, with a movie projector and a steel trunk full of film cans and pamphlets. The Russian rowed in, on a small fishing skiff, tying up to one of the sagging pole-built docks that lined the river. The German was an older man, balding, with skin like parchment and a long thin nose. The Russian was a young man, a Slav, square-faced and solid, with neatly combed brown hair. The German had to use German-speaking National Union members to translate for him. The Russian spoke idiomatic Bulgarian--at least he tried--and they could understand his Russian well enough. All along the river, the Slavs could speak to each other without great difficulty. The German arrived as a German, and his arrival was honored. The postman's chubby daughter waited at the dockside with a basket of fruit. There had been a banquet, with speeches and copious brandy. The Russian said, at first, that he was a Bulgarian. Nobody really believed him. Then a rumor went around that he was a Czech. Because it was a rumor, there were naturally some who believed it. Somehow there was confusion, and the Russian-Bulgarian-Czech, whatever the hell he was, wasn't much seen around the town. To a few people, the Stoianevs among them, he admitted that he was a Russian and that his name was Antipin. Vassily Dmitrievich. The falsehoods were a _gesture, __ he explained, not serums, necessitated by the _current situation.__ The German smoked a cigar every night after dinner. It looked peculiar, outsized, in his thin weasel's face. The Russian rolledand smoked cigarettes of _makhorka,__ black Russian tobacco, earthy-smelling weed grown in the valleys of the Caucasus mountains. He was provident with it, offering constantly. Poor stuff, it was true. But what he had he shared, and this was noticed. Of all the points of difference that distinguished the two visitors, however, there was one that absorbed the coffeehouse philosophers a great deal more than any other: The German came from the west. The Russian came from the east. The German came downriver from Passau, on the German side of die Austrian border. The Russian came upriver from Izmail, in Soviet Bessarabia, having first sailed by steamer from the Black Sea port of Odessa. And, really, the local wise men said, there you had it. That was the root of it, all right, that great poxed whore of a river that ran by every front door in the Balkans. Well, in a manner of speaking. It had brought them grief and fury, iron and fire, hangmen and tax collectors. Somewhere, surely, it was proposed, there were men and women who loved their river, were happy and peaceful upon its banks, perhaps, even, prayed to its watery gods and thanked them nightly. Who could know? Surely it was possible, and it was much in their experience that that which was possible would, sooner or later, get around to happening. Fate had laws, they'd learned all too well, and that was one of them. And it was their fate to live on _this__ river. It was their fate that some rivers drew conquerors much as corpses drew flies--and "the metaphor was greatly to the point, was it not. Thus it was their fate to be conquered, to live as slaves. That was the truth of it, why call it something else? And, as slaves, to have the worst slaves' luck of all: changing masters. For who in history had not tried it? Put another way; if they had not tried it, their place in history was soon given over to the next applicant. Every schoolchild had to learn the spellings, for dieir national history was written in the names of their conquerors. Sesostris the Egyptian and Darius the Persian, remote bearded figures. Alexander the Great--one of their own, a smart Macedonian lad, a very demon for the love of a fight like they all weredown there, a hundred miles south in what they called the _dark__ Balkans. With reason. Charlemagne came through this way, and so did Arpad the Hungarian. (Magyars! A curse on their bloodl) Genghis Khan, with his Tatar armies, who believed that babies grew up to be soldiers and that women were the makers of soldier-babies. And acted accordingly. The Romans had come down on rafts, after Dacian gold. The legions of Napoleon were stopped some way upstream. (What? A disaster avoided? Oh how we will pay for _that.)__ And at last, the worst. The Turks. As love can be true love, or something short of it, hatred too has its shadings, and the Turk had stirred their passions like none of the others. It was the Turk who earned the time-honored description: "They prayed like hyenas, fought like foxes, and stank like wolves." The Turk who decreed that no building in the empire could be higher than a Turk on horseback. The Turks who, when they were fed up with local governors, simply sent them a silken strangling cord and had them manage the business for themselves. Now there was a condition of stale palate that a man could envy! Even murder, apparently, would with time and repetition produce a state of listless ennui. In 1908, after three hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks withdrew, leaving, alas, only a minor cultural legacy: bastinado, the whipping of bare feet; pederasty, the notion of sheep-herding mountain youths agitated even the pashas' burned-out lusts; and the bribery of all high persons as a matter of natural law. The first two faded quickly from life in Vidin, though the latter, of course, remained. The local wise men would have been astonished to discover people who did not know that greed far exceeded sadism and lechery in the succession of human vice. The mosques were turned into Eastern Orthodox churches, the minarets painted pale green and mustard yellow, and the people of Vidin were free. More or less. By 1934, the Bulgarian people had enjoyed twenty-six years of freedom over the course of three centuries--if you didn't count military dictatorships. A sad record, one had to admit, but God had set them down in a paradise with open doors front and back--the great river. Open doors encouraged thieves of the worst kind, the kind that came to live in your house. And when the thieves stole away, to whatever devil's backside had spawned them, they left something of themselves behind. For historical custom dictated that conquest be celebrated between the legs of the local women, and each succeeding conqueror had added a river of fresh genes to the local population. Thus they asked themselves, sometimes, in the coffeehouse: Who are we? They were Bulgars, a Turco-Tatar people from the southern steppe, chased down here in the sixth century by invading Slavs from the north. But they were also Slav and Vlach, Turkish, Circassian and Gypsy. Greek, Roman, Mongol, Tatar. Some had the straight black hair of the Asian steppe, others the blue eyes of the Russo-Slav. "And soon," a local wit remarked, gesturing with his eyes toward the river steamer that had brought die German, "we will be blond." It was remarked, by others there, that he spoke very quietly. As did Antipin. In the evenings, in the melancholy dusks of autumn when small rains dappled the surface of the river and storks huddled in their nests in the alder grove, he would roll his _makhorka__ into cigarettes and pass them about, so that blue clouds of smoke cut the fish-laden air of the dockside bars. He was, they discovered, a great listener. There was something patient in Antipin; he heard you out and, when you finished, he continued listening. Waiting, it seemed. For it often turned out that you only thought you were finished, there was more to say, and Antipin seemed to know it before you did. Remarkable, really. And his sympathy seemed inexhaustible, something in his demeanor absorbed the pain and the anger and gave you back a tiny spark of hope. _This is being writ down,__ his eyes seemed to say, _for future remedy.__ At times he spoke, some evenings more than others. Said things out loud that many of them literally did not dare to think, lest some secret police sorcerer divine their blasphemies. Antipin was fearless. What were dark and secret passions to them seemed to him merely words that required saying. Thus it was he who spoke of their lifelong agonies: landlords, moneylenders, the men who bought their fish and squeezed them on the price. It seemed he was willing to challenge the gods, quite openly, without looking over his shoulder for the inevitable lightning bolt. "To them you are animals," he said. "When you are fat, your time has come." "But we are men," a fisherman answered, "not animals. Equal in the eyes of God." He was an old man with a yellowed mustache. Antipin waited. The silence in the smoky room was broken only by the steady drip of water from the eaves above the window. The cafe was in the house of one of the fishermen's widows. After her husband drowned, people stopped by for a fruit brandy or a _mastica__ at the kitchen table. Somehow, the condolence visits never quite ceased, and in time the widow's house became a place where men gathered in the evenings for a drink and a conversation. Finally, the fisherman spoke again: "We have our pride, which all the world knows, and no one can take it from us." Antipin nodded agreement slowly, a witness who saw the truth in what others said. "All people must have pride," he answered after a time, "but it is a lean meal." He looked up from the plank table. "And they can take it from you. They can put you on your knees when it is to their purpose to do so. Vour house belongs to the landowner. The fish you catch belongs to the men who buy it from you. The little coins buried in your dooryard belong to the tax collectors. And if they take them from you, you will get nothing back. These people do with you as they wish. They always have, and it will continue in this way until you stop it." "So you say," the fisherman answered. "But you are not from here." "No," Antipin said, "I am not from this town. But where I come from they fucked us no less." "We are taught," the fisherman said after a while, "that such things--such things as have been done elsewhere--are against our Lord Jesus Christ." "Perhaps they are right." Antipin's face was that of a man who acceded to superior logic. "When they come to fake you away, you must remember to call for the priest." At this, a few people chuckled. Someone at the back of the room called out dramatically, "Father Stepan, come quick and help us!" A hoot of laughter answered him. "A grand day," another man said, "when the capon runs to save the cock!" Antipin smiled. When it grew quiet again, the fisherman said, "You may laugh while you can. When you are older, perhaps you will see things in a different light." The man sitting next to Antipin bristled. "I'll go to meet God on my own two feet, not on my knees," he said. "Besides," he added, slightly conciliatory, "there can be nothing wrong with a little laughter." "There can be." It was said plainly, from where Khristo sat on the edge of a table facing Antipin's end of the room. "It is a step," Antipin said, "to laugh at them. The holy fathers in their expensive robes, the king, the officers. But it is only the first step. We have a proverb..." But they were not to hear the proverb. What stopped Antipin in midsentence was a series of loud bangs against the wood of the door frame on the exterior of the house. A puzzling sort of sound--a pistol shot would have had them all up and moving--everyone just looked up and sat still. A moment later they were on their feet. Glass shattered out of the room's single window--a glittering shower followed by an iron bar, which swung back and forth to finish the job, hammering against the interior of the frame. The men in the cafe stood transfixed, every eye on the window. The iron bar withdrew. There was a shout outside, something angry but indecipherable, then a glass jug was thrown into the room. It was filled with a brownish-yellow liquid that plumed into the air as the jug rotated in flight. It broke in three when it landed and the liquid flowed slowly across the floorboards in a small river. Stove oil--the reek of it filled the room. The men found their voices, angry, tense, but subdued, as though to conceal their presence. From without, a cry of triumph, and a blazing torch of pitch-coated rope hurled through the window. The fire caught in two stages. First, small flames flickered at the edges of the oily river. Then an orange ball of flame roared into the air with a sigh like a puff of wind. The earlier banging sound now began to make sense, as several men thrust their weight against the door but could not open it. It had been nailed and boarded shut from outside. The intention was to burn them to death inside the widow's cafe. The man near Antipin who, moments earlier, had made clever remarks, leaped into the air and screamed as the fire exploded. Seeing the mob of men shoving and cursing at the door, he rushed to the window and started to clamber through, without heed tothe long shards of glass hanging from the frame. The iron bar, swung at full force, hit him across the forehead, and he collapsed over the sill like a dropped puppet. Khristo Stoianev stood quietly, resisting the panic inside him. His eyes swept about the room, to the door and the press of bodies in front of it, to the smashed window, trying to choose. Before he could move in either direction, a hand took him above the elbow, a hard grip that hurt. It was Antipin, face completely without expression. "A cold cellar. There must be one," he said softly. "Where she cooks." Khristo nodded toward the kitchen area, separated from the main room by a sagging drape on a cord. "Come then," Antipin said. They brushed the drape aside. There was an old black wood stove, a rickety table, a bent-twig crucifix on the wall. A bin where potatoes and onions were stored through the winter. In order to circulate the air and keep the food from rotting, a square had been cut in the wall, then covered with a metal screen to keep the rats out. In winter, a piece of cardboard was hung over it on a nail to keep out the worst of the cold. The widow, on hands and knees, was in the act of crawling through the broken-out screen of the narrow square. She disappeared suddenly, with a little cry, and they could see the night outside. Antipin stopped him with a hand on the chest. "Let us see if there is a surprise planned. Wait for me to go through, then shout for the others." He was a square block of a man, but he moved like a monkey. Grabbing the upper edge of the frame with both hands, he swung out feet first. A few moments later, his face appeared. "It's safe," he said. Khristo moved toward the window, grasped the frame as Antipin had. Antipin raised a palm. "The others," he said. Khristo shouted, heard a thunder of footsteps behind him, then went through. He landed on the side of the house facing the river, away from the dirt road. Antipin peered cautiously around the side of the house, then waved for Khristo to follow him. Up by the road, a group ofsilhouettes stood beside a farmer's open-bed truck. The shapes were silent, moving resdessly, pacing, turning to one another. In the darkness, Khristo could not see details--faces or clothing. One man detached himself from the crowd and walked slowly down the hill, toward the house. Antipin, meanwhile, pulled the board away from the door and a group of coughing men came out in swirls of smoke and cinders. It was not difficult to jerk the nails from the wood, a kick from within would have done it, but the board had been cleverly positioned, across the knob, so that kicks against the door were ineffectual, and no one had thought to kick at the knob, an awkward target. Khristo watched as the board was worked free of the door. It took him a moment to understand the device, it was too simple. But, when he did understand, something in the knowledge turned his stomach. Somebody, somewhere, in appearance a man like himself, had thought this method through. Had studied the problem: how to obstruct a door when setting fire to a house full of people so that those within could not escape, and had found a solution, and applied it. That there were those in the world who would study such things Khristo Stoianev had never understood. Now he did. The man coming down the hill was Khosov the Policeman, brother of Khosov the Postman who kept the rhythm for the National Union parades. He was a policeman because no one had known what else to do with him. He was a man whose mouth never closed, who stared dreamily around him, seemingly amazed at a world full of ordinary things. He was slow. Everything had to be figured out. But when he did figure it out--and eventually he always did, especially if there was somebody around to help him--he could be swept away by a blind, insentient rage. At one time he had been much persecuted by children, until he beat one litde boy very nearly to death with a broom handle. The men stood around and watched the house burn. There was nothing to be done about it. A few buckets of water were tossed on neighboring roofs, to protect the dry reeds from embers floating through the night air. The widow knotted her hands in die binding of her apron and held it in her mouth while shewept, her wet cheeks shining in the firelight. The men around her were silent. They had brought a disaster down on her, and there was nothing to be done about that either. Policeman Khosov came down the hill and stopped ten feet from Antipin. His eyes searched the crowd carefully; one had better not make a mistake here, as one's fellows watched from the road above. They were counting on him, trusted him to go it alone; he wasn't going to--not if he had to stand here all night--let them down. One to another, each in turn, he peered at them, his face knotted with concentration, sweat standing on his brow with the effort of it, mouth open as always. Even though it might be you he sought, the sheer agony of the process made you want to help him. Finally, he discovered Antipin, his eyes widening with the amazement of having gotten it right. He pointed with his arm fully extended, like an orator. "You," he said. "You, communist, come with me now." His other hand rested on the butt of a large revolver in a holster. Antipin made no move. There was a long silence, the fire crackling and popping as the dry roof timbers caught. "Did you hear me?" Antipin took a step forward, inclined his head toward Khosov and said, "What did you say?" "I said come with me. No trouble, now." Antipin took another step. The fire played shadows on his back. He spoke very slowly, as to a child. "Go back up this hill, you braying ass, and tell your friends up there that their mouths will be full of dirt. Can you remember that?" The "mouths full of dirt" referred to events in the grave. They watched Khosov's face. Watched the slow painful process as the information was worked at, disassembled, examined. When comprehension arrived, his hand tightened on the butt of the pistol but it was much too late. Antipin flowed easily through the space between them and punched Khosov in the heart, a downward motion, as though his balled fist were a hammer. It blew the breath from Khosov's mouth and made him sit down and wrap his arms around his chest. Antipin leaned over and took the revolver from the holsterand smashed it to pieces on a rock. Khosov groaned, then hunched over, struggling to breathe. Antipin reached down and put two fingers inside his nostrils and jerked his head upright. Khosov gave a shrill little cry like a hurt animal. "Now you go up there and tell them what I said. That they shall eat the dirt." Antipin let him go and he managed to stand up, still gasping for air. Blood ran freely from his nose and he tried to stop it with his hand. He gave Antipin one terrified glance--this is a thing that makes pain, stay away from it always--then turned and scrabbled up the hill, holding his nose, head turtled down between his shoulders like a child running away from a beating. Khristo watched him go, then turned to look at the men around him, illuminated by the light of the burning house. They coughed and spit, trying to get the smoke out of themselves. Someone had dragged the man from the windowsill where he had fallen and laid his smoking body on the ground. He had been burned black in the fire, but those who had heard the sound of the iron bar knew he had been beyond feeling anything at all. Up on the road, the group of silhouettes shifted nervously as Khosov the Policeman scurried toward them. Khristo sensed clearly that this was not the end of it, that it would go on, that each act would become a debt to be repaid with interest. Nikko's death had seemed to him, to his family, a tragedy of bad fate--like a drowning, or a mother taken at childbirth. You had to live with death, God gave you no choice. Today it was your turn, tomorrow it would touch your neighbor; thus people gathered around you, held you up with their spirit, tried to fill the empty place. He now understood that Nikko's death was a tragedy of a different kind. It was part of something else; there was a connection, a design, at first faint, now much clearer. The unknown intelligence that conceived a method of blocking doors could also see a purpose in the murder of a fifteen-year-old for laughing at a parade. As Khosov climbed toward the road, a man near Khristo said, "We had better stand together here." The old fisherman took a step back. "I am no part of this." "Go home then," someone said. "They know where you live." "I do not oppose them. I will tell them that." "Then there will be no problem," the man said, a sour irony in his voice. On the road, Khosov and the others climbed onto the back of the truck, which stuttered to life and bounced away down the dirt road. Khristo found Antipin at his shoulder. "Come with me," the Russian said. "Let us take a little walk together." They walked down to the river, past the sagging pole docks, to the sand beach below the walls of the old fort, called Baba Vida--Grandma Vida--built by the Turks three hundred years earlier, though some of the inner walls had blocks set by Greek and Roman hands. It was well after midnight, a stiff breeze blew off the river, they could just make out the dark bulk of the Romanian shore on the other side. Antipin rolled two cigarettes and gave one to Khristo, lit a wooden match with his thumbnail. They bent toward each other to protect the flame from the wind. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness as they walked along the beach. "You understand, do you not," Antipin said, "that they meant for me to kill him." "Who?" "The policeman." "Khosov?" "If that's his name." "Why?" "Why. To create an incident, to make politics, to give their newspapers something to say: bloody-fanged Bolshevik murders local policeman. Yes?" Khristo thought about it for a time. He understood it, but it seemed very strange. Events occurred, newspaper stories were written. That the sequence could be staged--events made to happen 50 _that__ stories would be written--had simply never crossed his mind. "The murder was their alternative, a second scheme to try in case their first one failed." Khristo squinted with concentration. The world Antipin was describing seemed obscure and alien, a place to be explained byan astrologer or a magician. Violence he knew, but this was a spider web. "You see," he continued, "they meant for all of us to die in that house. An accident, they would say. Those pigs were swilling brandy and some lout knocked over an oil lamp and whoosh, there it went and too bad. But you see, Khristo Nicolaievich, I repeat only their words. And words may be spoken in different ways. Their fine faces would tell a much different story. The wink, the sly look, the flick of a finger that chases a fly, would give those words quite another meaning. _We burnt them up,__ they would say, with pride in their eyes. That's how it is, boys. We take care of our own problems around here. We don't go crying to the _politsiya.__ We see something wrong--we go ahead and fix it." Khristo nodded silently. Veiko, the others, were like that. "So, you can see how it works? They had the policeman ready in case we got out of the house. Sent him down to arrest me. Knew very well he was too stupid to manage it. A simple provocation. Right?" "Right." "You are a thinker, that I can tell. You turn the world over in your mind to see if it is truly round." Khristo was both flattered and a little uncomfortable to be addressed in this way. One didn't hear compliments. He took a drag at his cigarette, feeling very much the man. There was something so admirable about Antipin. The local toughs were blowhards, dangerous only in a group. Antipin was strong in another way entirely, he had an assurance, carried himself like a man who owned the ground wherever he stood. The notion that he, son of a fisherman in a little town at the end of the world, could win the respect of such a man was definitely something to be thought about. "I try to understand things," he answered cautiously. "It is important that people understand"--here he got lost--"things," he finished, feeling like a bird with one wing. "Naturally," Antipin said. "So you see their intention. Get rid of a problem, let everybody here and about know you got rid of it, and perhaps others will not be so quick to cause problems. Bravery is a quirky thing at best--you know the old saying about brave men?" "All brave men are in prison?" "Just so. We have it a little differently--all brave men have seen heaven through bars--but the thought is almost the same." He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. "We Slavs have suffered. God knows how we have suffered. In the West, they say we cannot be bothered to count our dead. But we have learned about human nature. We paid a terrible price to learn it, because you must see desperation before you can understand how humans truly are. Then you know. Lessons learned in that way are not forgotten. Do you see this? He paused a moment, then continued. "I will tell you a story. When Catherine was empress of Russia--you'll remember, she was the one who fucked horses--she chanced to be wandering one day in a wood some distance from St. Petersburg and found a beautiful wildflower. She was enraptured by it, such a tiny, perfect thing, and so she decreed right then and there that a soldier be assigned to guard the spot just in case, in future days, it should bloom again. Eighteen years later, someone chanced to find that order in a file and went out there, and there was a soldier guarding a spot in the forest, in case a wildflower might bloom, in case, if it did bloom, some shitfoot of a peasant might come along and stomp on it--as if he had nothing better to do." Khristo was properly silent for a moment; he loved and respected a story like little else. Antipin bent to the sand, put his cigarette out, slipped the remnant in his pocket. "Was the flower grown? When they went there the second time?" "The story does not say. I like to think it wasn't. But the point has to do with being ruled. Being someone else's property. Fifty years ago the landlords owned their serfs, hundreds of them, to do with as they pleased. They would marry them off, one to another, to please their wives' romantic fantasies. We love dolls in Russia, Khristo Nicolaievich, it helps us remember our past." "Perhaps it was like that here too," Khristo said. "When the Turks ruled us." "The Turk still rules you, my friend, except that he has takenoff the fez and put on a crown. Czar Boris, your king calls himself. Czar! And he is the toy of the army and the fascist officers' clique that calls itself _Zveno,__ the chain link. You are young, and have lived a natural life on this river, perhaps you don't yet understand how these bastards work. You see Veiko and his little army, and you know them for what they are--bullies, drunken piss-bags out for a good time. But when there is fertile political soil, your Veiko will soon be a towering tree. As things stand now, he is the future of this country." He paused a moment, cleared his throat. "Forgive me, there is a demon in me that demands to make speeches. Let me tell you, instead, what will happen here. Your brother died at the hands of swine, and nothing was done. Nothing will be done." Khristo's heart sank. A thousand times he had wished that that night could be lived over again, that he could take Nikko by the scruff of the neck, as a wise older brother should have, and haul him away from the ridiculous parade. He had loved his brother well enough, his death was a piece torn away from his own life, but there was more than that. The sorrow of the family had lodged in his father, and he suspected, no, he knew, that his father blamed him for it. "Do not feel shame," Antipin said quietly, reading his mood. "It was not your fault, no matter what you think. You should not blame yourself. I do not grant absolution, I am not a priest. But it is history that I understand, and this thing had to happen. It was _meant__ to happen. That it happened to you, to your brother, is sorrowful but you will someday see that it was inevitable. The important thing is this: what will you do now?" "I don't know." His voice sounded small. They had reached the end of the beach and stood for a time, the Turkish fortress looming above them, the river running quietly along the sand, white foam visible in the darkness. "I will presume," Antipin said, "to jump history a pace and I will tell you what to do. Do not waste your time with grief. It is a great flaw in our character, our Slavic nature, to do that. We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain." "What then?" "Come with me. East." Antipin nodded his head downriver. His eyes followed Antipin's gesture into the darkness, toward the East. His stomach fluttered at the idea of such a journey, as though he had been invited to step off the edge of the world. "Me?" he said. "Yes." "Why?" In wonder. "Here, in this town, it will go on. You will not survive it. They murdered your brother; they must now presume you to be their mortal enemy, very troubling to keep an eye on. As the eldest brother, responsibility to even the score rests with you. With me or without me, Khristo Nicolaievich, you must go away. You may very well save your family's life, you will certainly save your own." Khristo had not meant _why go.__ He had meant _why me.__ But Antipin had answered the wrong question the right way. It would happen like the old feuds--one of mine, one of yours, until only one stood. Since Nikko's death he had hidden this from himself but it festered within him. Now it had been said aloud and a weight fell away. "Come with me," Antipin said, "and I will teach you something. I will teach you how to hurt them. Hurt them in ways that they do not begin to understand, hurt them so that they cry for mercy, which, by then, I think you will not grant. Your country has a sickness. We know the sickness well because we were once its victims, and we know how to cure it. We have taught others, we can teach you. You yearn to see the world, to move among men, to do things that matter. I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse's backside. Come with me, my friend, it is a chance at life. This river goes many places, it does not stop in Vidin." Khristo's heart rose like the sun. These were words he had waited all his life to hear without realizing, until now, that he waited. The river, he knew from hours of droning in the dusty schoolhouse, did not stop in Vidin. It rose in Germany, its legendary source a stone basin in the courtyard of a castle of the Fiirstenberg princes in the Black Forest. Called the Donau by all German-speaking peoples, it moved through the Bohemian forests to Vienna, crossed into Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where they named itthe Dunaj, turned south through the Carpathians into northern Hungary, divided the twin cities of Buda and Pesth, flowed south into Yugoslavian Serbia, passed Belgrade at the confluence of the river Sava, known now as the Duna, roared through the Iron Gate--a narrow gorge in the Transylvanian Alps--and headed east, serving as a border between Romania and Bulgaria, where it was called Dunarea to the north and Dunav to the south. Then, at last, it turned north for a time and split into three streams entering the Romanian delta, snaking through the marshes to Izmail, Sulina, and Sfintu Gheorghe, where it emptied into the Black Sea, bordered by the Russian Crimea and Turkey, where the Caucasus mountains ran down to the sea, where Europe ended and Asia began. "Well," Antipin said, "how shall it be?" "I..." He was not sure how to say it. "I do not think I am a communist." Antipin dismissed that wordlessly, throwing it away on the wind with a broad flip of the hand. "Does it not matter?" "You are a patriot. That matters. You are not our enemy. That too matters. Some day, we may convince you to be our true friend. All we ask is opportunity." They turned and walked back along the sand toward the town, where it was quiet and dark. So _there will be cities,__ Khristo said silently, talking to his destiny. He had argued with it, prayed to it--to him it was a live presence, which might or might not heed petitions and curses, but one had to try--damned or praised it depending on what it did with him. Oh but what a trickster it was, this sly eel of a fate that wiggled his life about. He had yearned for Vienna or--someone had to find treasure, else why ever look--Paris. Now he rather thought it would be Moscow. Turn around then, and face east. Nothing new in this country. Still, a city. Golden onion domes, elegant buildings, people who read books and talked into the night of important things. Like Antipin, they would understand and appreciate him, encourage him. His imagination dined on caviar and inhaled the perfume of the one who sat across the table yet leaned so close. "When?" he said. "Tomorrow," Antipin said. "They are done for tonight, except for the drinking and the singing. Tomorrow is soon enough." What few things he had, Khristo tossed onto a blanket in a small pile, then he tied the corners together in a thick knot. At dawn, it started to rain hard, little streamlets poured off the roof and dripped from the grapevine that grew above the kitchen window. They drank tea and ate what remained of yesterday's bread. His mother embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, gave him a smile of love to travel on. His father looked at him for a long moment, from another world, then patted his shoulder--as though he would be back in a few hours--and plodded off toward the docks, walking head down in the rain. His sister, Helena, whose black hair and fierce blue eyes made her nearly his twin, reached across the table and touched his face. He went out into the yard and looked around for the last time. Helena ran out of the house and took him hard by the arms. "This is for the best," she said, the rain running down her face, "but you must not forget we are here." He could see she was afraid. "Promise," she said. He promised. She went back into the house and he left. At the squatty police station, a yellow building no higher than a Turk on horseback, the old fisherman showed up early and stood solemnly in a corner--one did not sit down and wait for the captain. He had lain awake all night, alternately cursing his luck and praying for deliverance. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. He had determined to make a clean breast of it, the authorities would have no question about where _he__ stood. At last he was ushered into the captain's office. A hangdog Khosov sat open-mouthed on a chair in the corner, like a bad boy at school. The remains of his pistol were gathered on the edge of the captain's desk. There was, the old man announced, treason afoot, and he would have no more of it. There was a Russian loose in Vidin, spouting revolution and atheism in the cafes. He was prepared to tell them all he knew. His understanding of the official methodology in such instances was woefully inadequate--"all he knew" wasn't enough. They'dknown of the Russian for a week--such heresies came quickly to the attention of the local gods--and had wired Sofia to find out what to do about him. Though the country was ruled by Czar Boris and his army officers and the future was clear to those with the stomach to see it, foreign policy was ephemeral, and it was hard to know where to put your foot. Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail. Thus, to date, the central administration in Sofia had been silent. As for the old fisherman with the yellowed mustache, him they took down to the basement, to see whether such things as were done there might not stimulate his memory. Their efforts proved fertile and a few hours of it had him, in whatever remained of his voice, making every sort of denunciation. All of it was copied down. Later it was widely believed that it was he who had denounced the Stoianev family. They moved downriver in the skiff, taken gently along by the current, rowing or poling from time to time, principally to keep warm. They'd rigged a waterproof groundcloth on four makeshift poles to keep the rain from falling directly on their heads, but autumn on the river demanded philosophical travelers--the drizzle often enough blew sideways, and there was every sort of dripping mist and fog. The river itself was wide here, often as much as a mile between shores, as it moved through the Walachian plain. The wheat harvest was long in, on sunny days farmers burned the yellow stubble and columns of thin smoke hung on the horizon. Now and again they would be passed by steam tugs pulling barges loaded down with sand, crushed rock, or timber. On the Romanian side, there were occasional watch towers. Soldiers with slung rifles trained binoculars on them as they went by. On the Bulgarian shore, stands of oak and beech stood dark and silent. Antipin kept two fishing lines trailing from the stern, and patrol boats took them for fishermen. When the weather cleared, the river dawn was exquisite, a painting at first without color, shapes in negative light. Then strands of pearl-colored mist rose from the water, gray herons skimmed the surface, flocks of pelicans took off from the sandbars in midstream, and the hillsturned blue, the birches white, the bare willows brown. It was a world of great stillness, and they instinctively spoke in undertones. Antipin was no less a listener than he had ever been, and Khristo talked for hours. Mostly on the subject of Vidin and how life was there. Who was rich and who was poor. Lechery and drunkenness, religion and hard work, love and hate. It was like most places in the world, really, but Antipin sat and soaked the stories up with scrupulous attention. He was, Khristo came slowly to realize, learning it. On hearing the oft-told tale of Velchev's wife and the borrowed chamber pot, Antipin recalled that Velchev's wife was also Traicho's daughter. Extraordinary. He knew the names of the fascists, the agrarians, the intellectuals who had supported Stamboliiski and the Peasant party. And he could, it seemed, do anything he turned his hand to and do it well. Cut wood shavings to start a fire, gut a fish, rig a shelter, steer the skiff around the gravel islands that dotted the river. If this was the world he was entering, Khristo thought, he would have to learn very quickly, but the challenge was not displeasing to him. He had been set apart, for the first time in his life, and felt that his fortunes had taken a sharp turn for the good. They moved past Kozloduj, past Orehovo and Nikopol. Past Svistov, where the Bulgarian poet and patriot Aleko Konstantinov had been stabbed to death, where his pierced heart was exhibited in a small museum. Past the great city of Ruse, the grain port of Silistra. At the border, where the river flowed north into Romania, they pulled over and stopped at a customs shed. Antipin produced a Nansen passport in Khristo's name, with a blurry photograph of a young man who could have been anybody. The Romanian customs officer accepted a _makhorka__ cigarette and waved them through. It was, to Khristo, simply one more rabbit from the hat, one more specimen from Antipin's collection of litde miracles. He did wonder, once in a great while, what on earth made him worth such grand attentions, but these thoughts he put aside. There was enough of the East in him to take pleasure in the present moment and paint the future white. Moscow knocked him virtually senseless. They put him in a house--in pre-Revolutionary times the lovenest of a wine merchant--on Arbat Street. But his training class was only just getting organized and they really didn't want to be bothered with him. He had no money, but that did not prevent him from walking, from experiencing, for the first time in his life, the streets of a city. Winter had come early. The snow and the city swirled around him and, at first, overwhelmed his mind. On the river he had drifted into the easy numbness of a long journey, a traveler's peace, wherein constant motion caused the world to slide by before it could make trouble. Thus he was unprepared for the city, and the sights and sounds drove themselves against his senses until he was giddy with exhaustion. And though the Moscow of his dreams--grand boulevards, golden domes--was as he had imagined, it shared the stage with a riptide of ordinary life. For every glossy Zil or Pobeda that disgorged important-looking people into important buildings, there seemed to be ten carts pulled by horses: the carts piled high with coal or carrots, the horses' breath steaming from flared nostrils, the red-faced draymen drunk and cursing like maniacs. The streets were crowded with old women in black dresses and shawls, bearded Jews in black homburgs, Mongolian soldiers with flat, cold faces. He saw a woman knocked down by a trolley, a bad fight between two men armed with broken vodka bottles. He imagined he could smell the violence in the air, mixed in with horse manure, coal smoke, and fried grease. A huge, bald, fat fellow urinated at the base of a pensive--chin on fist--statue of Karl Marx. Some militiamen happened along and shouted at him to stop. When he didn't--he called out that he couldn't--they rushed at him. He swung a thick arm, knocked a couple of them sprawling, but the rest ganged him and beat him to the ground with wooden truncheons, then stood there smoking until a Stolypin car arrived to take him away. Khristo saw inside when they opened the door: two rows of white faces in the darkness. Yet, a moment later, turning the corner into Arbat Street he saw, he was almost certain, a ballerina. His spirit swooped, that such glory could exist on earth. Her face, her whole presence, appeared to have been drawn with a needle-sharp pencil. Hard lines: jaw, cheek, eye, and the suggestion of firm leg beneath thesupple skirt as she strode along the street. The women of Vidin started working at the age of twelve and bore children at sixteen. The bloom shone briefly, then vanished. But this was a city and in a city, he reasoned, certain plants flowered in perpetuity. She was surrounded, as she moved along the sidewalk, by her personal theater: the faces in the crowd that watched her, the borzoi on a thin silver chain that preceded her, and two fat little men in overcoats who toddled officiously behind her. Her eyes caught his own for a moment, then flicked away, but her face remained utterly still. Like a seashell, he thought. Such treasures were to be worshiped by the eyes alone. Were meant to inspire poems, were surely not meant to be craved after in the ordinary, mortal ways. But, in Moscow, the ordinary mortal ways were, for comrade Khristo, not entirely neglected. Communism was the golden opportunity of the working classes--everyone must share--and the Russian winter was an endless horror of white ice and white sky, demonic, survivable only with the three traditional warmings: the vodka, the tile stove, and the human body. Marike was her name, said as though the _e__ were an _a.__ She was a Moravian German from eastern Czechoslovakia, a descendant of one of the Teutonic colonies strung all across Eastern Europe, a nineteenth-century attempt, inspired by religion and empire, to alleviate the tragic lot of the Slav by means of energetic German example. See how large _my__ cabbage grows! That it grows on land that used to belong to your uncle we shall not discuss. At the first wash of her he turned entirely to stone. She blew at him like a wind. She was an intellectual, a Marxist. She was intense, all business. She sang like a dockworker, ran like a soldier, and argued like a drill. God help the man or woman who let a false lick of lumpen deviationism creep into his words--Marike would soon have it out, and with a hot tongs at that. She had burned the mannerisms of the ass-licking bourgeoisie from her soul, now it was your turn. There was to be no _diplomacy, no gentility,__no _sentiment.__ But the most astonishing aspect of this human storm was die package in which it was wrapped. Where was, one wondered, the dirndl? She had crinkly orange hair drawn back tight and tied with a red ribbon. She had a broad forehead, and a permanent blush to her cheeks. She was full-breasted and wide-hipped, withfreckled white forearms that could throw a haybale through the side of a barn. She boxed him on the bicep to get his attention--it was all he could do not to rub it. "We are equals," she said. "This gives you no rights. Understand? Does not make you my master. Yes?" Yes. They had stolen an hour on the coarse blanket of her bed in the women's section of the dormitory, where she'd hauled him off in accordance with the banner strung above the inside door of the entry hall: ?????????????34?.,????????????! Brotherhood Front of 1934, Welcome!It was Marike's idea to welcome him, just as it was her idea to bang on his bare back with her fists to urge him to a greater gallop. She chose him openly. Studied him, considered the genetics, the dialectics, the inevitability of history, then let her blue-veined breasts tumble out of her shirt before his widening �yes. Farewell Vidin, thou backwater. Hail to the new order, and if this belt does not come soon undone I shall rip it in half. He was, beneath it all, nineteen and alone and away from home for the first time in his life and he clasped her warm body like a life preserver, then proceeded to a happy drowning. A proletarian coupling, simple and direct, nothing fancy, and without precaution. Should a tiny artillery loader or fighter pilot chance to come tumbling out some months hence, he or she would be another soul pledged to revolution and glad of it. No dreamy slave of love, Marike dosed her eyes only at the last, exhaled a huge purr of relief, then casually chucked him off. To work, it meant, enough of such frivolity, a hygienic relaxation had been achieved. As the winter lay down on the city, harder and harder through the month of November, her appetite grew. They did it in the attic, where the May Day portraits of Lenin, colossal things coloreda vengeant Soviet red, were folded and stored. They did it behind the targets on the basement pistol' range. They did it under the table in the kitchen while the cook snored asthmatically in the parlor. The pace and spirit of it never changed--a mad dash to the finish line, first one there wins, as though Revanchist Materialism waited just outside the door to gobble them up. He had heard, over the back fences in Vidin, that there were other paths through the woods, that one could also do this and that. But, on the oneoccasion when she was squiffed on Georgian brandy and he'd attempted to put theory into practice, his reward was a double whack on the ears. "Get off your knees," she said, "that is an attitude of slavery!" So much for this and that, back to essentials. And the more they did it, the more aggressive she became in daily matters. Over the salt herring at the long plank dinner table: "Did you know that Dmitrov is in Moscow? I think I saw him coming out of the Rossaya Hotel." "Dmitrov?" Khristo looked at her questioningly over his fork. "Oh no. This I refuse to believe. _Georgy__ Dmitrov. The Bulgarian hero." He shrugged. Voluta, a lean-faced Pole with black hair swept back from a high forehead, coughed into his hand with embarrassment. "Your very own countryman." She shook her head, lips pressed in resignation at the utter futility of him. Goldman, a young man from Bucharest, stepped in to save him. "Dmitrov took part in the great patriotic burning of the Reichstag," he said. "His speech at the trial is to be learned in the schools. Now he is in Russia." "Oh," Khristo said. "Our newspapers lie about such things or neglect them entirely." As he struggled to learn all the new ideas, he learned also to cover what Marike called his _political infantilism.__ Hitler's speech on that occasion was one of many statements typed on paper slips and tacked to the dormitory wall, waiting in ambush for the wandering eye of the daydreamer: "This is a God-given signal. If, as I believe, the communists have done it, you are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history." In Germany and in Russia, it became clear to Khristo, they were itching to go at it, there remained only the question of time and provocation. Khristo struggled in his classes. English and French, an impossible snarl of alien noises. Political history and thought, a Crosshatch of plots and counterplots, irredentist imperialism, Pan-Slavism, the sayings of Lenin, the revelations of Marx. The world was not as he'd thought. Tides of confusion pulled at him, but he somehow remained afloat. He was now firmly established in the dormitory on Arbat Street, where he'd been given two blankets and one towel, introduced to a milling crowd of Serbs, Poles, Croatians, Jews, Slovenians and whatnot, forty souls in all, including eight women who had _their own sleeping quarters__--please take note, comrades. He had been handed a schedule of classes and a stack of books printed on mealy gray paper. Do not mark, others must use. Measured for a khaki uniform of heavy cotton. Poked and studied shamelessly by a large, frightening nurse. Drenched with kerosene in case of lice. Assigned a narrow cot between Volutaand Goldman. Told to learn the words to the songs by tomorrow morning, but the lights must be turned off at ten. Inside himself, Khristo was desolate. Not at all what he had expected. He had imagined himself as Antipin's assistant, just a bit important, we'll take him out dancing with us. It was not to be. A white card outside the office door said V. I. Ozunov. A bald man with a fringe of black hair, a brush of a black mustache, delicate gold-rim glasses and a dark, ferocious face, who wore the uniform of an army major. Khristo sat hypnotized as Ozunov reeled off a monotone of forbidden sins. The underlying message was writ large: we have you, boy. Now dance to this music. As for threats, we needn't bother, right? "What has become of comrade Antipin?" Khristo asked, one try for bravery. Ozunov smiled like a snake. "Antipin was yesterday. Today is Ozunov." End of rebellion. Yet as much as he struggled and sweated with the languages and thelevantinewebs of theory, there was one area in which he succeeded. He was, it turned out to his and everyone else's amazement, gifted in the craft. It began with the affair of the knitting needles. Five students were taken to a classroom and seated around a scarred wooden table. The room stank of carbolic soap. Beads of condensation ran slowly down the fogged-up window, colored a sickly white by the winter sky above the city. Ozunov paced up and down and addressed the backs of their heads, his hands clasped behind him. "On your desk are sealed envelopes. Do not touch them. Also a pair of knitting needles. Do not touch them, either. We presumeyou to know what they are, much as we presume that you have never used them." They laughed politely. "Good, good. You are not oldbabasafter all, though your degenerate love of prattle and gossip might lead one to think otherwise. I am relieved." He paced. They waited. "Voluta!" The Pole jumped. "Yes, Major Ozunov." "Turn the letter over. To whom is it addressed?" "To the British ambassador, Major Ozunov." "A keen analysis, Voluta. Do we all agree?" They turned their letters over. All were the same, they agreed. "What might the envelope contain? Stoianev!" "A plot?" "Kerenyi?" "The reports of spies." "Oh yes? Semmers, you agree?" "Uhh, it is possible, comrade Major." "And so, Voluta?" "A denunciation." "Goldman. Your opinion on this matter." "Perhaps a false denunciation." "Always the Romanian, eh Goldman? You see the complexity, the winding and twisting of political matters, I give you that. But then, could it not be? false denunciation? By _spies?__ In Stoianev's _plot?__ What about that? Or it could be the information, no shock to anyone around here, that Ozunov's students are a blithering pack of donkeys' behinds!" He finished with a shout. He paced silently, his boots slapping the scrubbed wooden floor, and breathed with a fury. "The point is, comrades, you don't know. Not such a difficult solution, is it? You don't know because the letter is sealed. It could be birthday greetings from the Belgian consul. It could be a love note from the stable boy. It could be anything. Now, how shall we discover this elusive truth?" Kerenyi: "Take the letter out and read it." "Brilliant! You shall now all do exactly that. When I give theword, you have ten minutes. Oh, by the way..."He stopped, leaned over Volutaand spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. "Don't tear the envelope. We don't want the gentleman to know that someone is reading his mail. And here's a hint, little as any of you deserve it, use the knitting needles." For the next ten minutes, an intense flurry of effort. Ozunov, of course, made it much worse by announcing "thirty seconds gone" from time to time as they worked. To their credit, they kept at it long after hopeless frustration set in. They pried and poked and stabbed and wiggled at the envelopes. Volutatried to force up the point of the flap and ripped a groove through the paper. Goldman, after a few moments of intense concentration, staring fixedly at the problem, determined that the knitting needles were a false technology, offered with the intention of misleading them, and picked at the thing with his fingernails. Semmers, with shaking hands, wounded himself in the palm and left red blots on the address. By the end of the ten-minute period, Kerenyi, a tow-headed boy from the Hungarian town of Esztergom, had letter and envelope in shreds and one of the knitting needles bent in a vee. Khristo Stoianev held the letter in one hand, the envelope, still sealed, in the other. The letter read: _Meet at noon by Spassky Tower.__ Ozunov could feel his heart beating. It was the throb of the prospector finding golden flecks in an ordinary rock. What was this? A magnificent discovery, to be wrapped carefully and delivered, in all humility, to his superiors? Or something else. Something bad. Something very, very bad indeed. He began to sweat. Closed his eyes, reviewed the last few weeks in his mind. Khristo had discovered the small, unsealed slit at the side of the envelope where the glue line ended. He had squeezed the envelope so that the slit bulged slightly; peering inside, he had seen the fold of the letter within. Carefully, he ran one needle inside the fold, then inserted the second needle between the top of the fold and the upper edge of the envelope flap so that the needles sandwiched the fold of the letter between them. With great patience, he began to rotate both needles, and soon the letter became a tube of paper with the needles at its core. When he had the whole letter, he drew it toward him through the slit. Ozunov dismissed the others. Stood in front of his desk. Folded his hands and tapped his thumbs together rapidly. From years of school, Khristo knew this situation intimately and it puzzled him. What had he done wrong? Clearly he had done _something,__ they didn't push their glasses up on their foreheads and shut their eyes and pinch the bridges of their noses like that unless you had made a very great botch of it indeed. "So, Stoianev, tell Uncle Vadim. We'll talk man to man. Yes?" Uncle Vadim? He said nothing. "Where did you learn it?" "Just here. I, ah, it revealed itself. The solution." "A lie." "No, comrade Major, I must disagree with you." "You think me stupid?" "No sir." "Do not use that form." "Beg pardon, comrade Major." "Do you know, Stoianev, what is done in the Lubianka? In the cellars? What they do with the hoses? It takes no time at all. You will confess that your mother is a wolf, that your father is a dragon, that you keep the czar's dick hidden in a Bible. You will confess that you fly through the air and consort with witches. You will tell them who taught you such tricks--when and where and what you had for dinner. You understand?" "Yes, comrade Major. I learned it here, just now." "I give you one last chance: tell me the truth." "From the first moment, it seemed the obvious way." Ozunov took a deep breath and exhaled, dropped his gold-rim glasses and settled them on his nose. "Very well," he said, "I must offer you my congratulations." He thrust his hand forward and Khristo shook it once, formally. "Now we are both dead men," he added stoically, and gestured for Khristo to leave the room. The news traveled. Everyone wanted to be his friend. He found himself regaining some of what he had lost when abandoned by the admiring Antipin. Even Marike relented. Took his hand and led him down to the warm, dusty boiler room where, on a scratchy blanket, he received a Soviet Hero's reward. In the following weeks, Major Ozunov himself began to thaw. Khristo and his comrades chased each other through the streets of Moscow. Following each other and being followed. Eluding their pursuers, checking their backs in shop windows, running dead-drops in the parks, brushing hands in fast passes in Krasnaya Presnya Park. At the militia station near the school, the lieutenant said, "I see Ozunov is at it again. " Denunciations poured in fromangry citizens. /saw them pass an envelope, comrade, just as bold as brass in clear daylight. Foreigners, I'd say they were. And most brazen. They were broken up into teams, competed in discovering and penetrating each other's operations. Semmers gave Goldman a bloody nose when he caught him stealing a master cipher. A baker reported that a group of hooligans had kidnapped a tall Polish fellow in his shop. And Khristo won. And won again. It was Khristo's Red Star team that accepted the prize copy of Lenin's speeches. You could dodge through crowds, slither beneath a wagon, crouch down in a phalanx of cyclists, it did not seem to matter. You looked in the reflective shop window and there he was--just near enough, just far enough--doing something or other that made it seem he had lived on this street all his life. Twenty of them chased him into the Bylorussian railroad station on Tverskaya Street. Then, three hours later, trooped back to the dormitory empty-handed. To find Khristo waiting for them in the parlor, wearing a stiff-billed train conductor's cap. They knew him now for what he was, the best among them. They had seen it before, wherever they came from: the best in the classroom, the best on the soccer field, and they acknowledged his preeminence. For his part, he learned to wear the star and honor its responsibilities. He encouraged the slow learners, lent a secret hand to those arrayed against him in competitions, and dismissed his successes as pure luck. Major Ozunov, in the hearing of other students, called him Khristo Nicolaievich, which put a seal on his ascendancy. Inspired by all this attention, he even managed to learn a little French. On the last day of December it snowed a blizzard and he was summoned to Ozunov's private office. Since dawn, kopeck-size snow-flakes had drifted down the windless air. Through the major'sleaded windows--his office had formerly been the master bedroom of the once grand house--Khristo watched the street whiten and fill. Ozunov stuffed the bowl of a pipe with tobacco, then lit it carefully with a large wooden match. As the office filled with sweet thick smoke, the major produced a chessboard and pieces. "Do you play, Khristo Nicolaievich?" "Not really, comrade Major. In Vidin, there was no time to learn." "You know the moves, though. What each piece may do." "Of course I know that, comrade Major." "Good. Then let us try a game. What do you say?" "I will do the best I can, comrade Major." "Mmm," he said around the pipe stem, "that's the proper spirit." He offered his closed fists: Khristo picked the left hand and played black. He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it "the Russian game." Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights--an officer class--sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival. Khristo had virtually no inkling of strategy, but he resolved to be the best opponent he could. The object of the game, he knew, was not to slay the other king but to put the opponent in a position where he had no choice but to submit. He had overheard one of Vidin's more daring wits describe checkmate as "all that Russian foot-kissing business." Khristo's notion of a chess tactic was to sneak a pawn down one side of the board--hoping for a distracted or mortally unobservant foe--and quick make it a queen. At heart, the strategy of checkers thrown in well over its head. Failing that, he liked to send his castles hurtling back and forth, up and down, in obvious but savage forays, hoping to shock a piece or two from his opponent. The knights he rarely used--they had a herky-jerky motion he distrusted: things shouldn't go straight and then cat-corner. Ozunov attacked down the left side of the board, giving uptwo pawns, but pinning Khristo's castle down with a bishop. Khristo wasted two turns hip-hopping his queen around the pawn rank--stopping to take Ozunov's apparently suicidal pawns--for he liked it to have an unobstructed field of fire. Ozunov reacted to this provocation with apparent caution, breaking off his bishop's attack on the castle, drawing the piece back to safety. It was Khristo's theory that a succession of entirely random moves might startle the opponent, give him pause, make him think you had some obscure trick up your sleeve. Ozunov pondered the board, smoke curling upward from his pipe, chin resting on folded hands, intent once again on his own attack. So intent that Khristo had a little flurry of victories, took a pawn and a bishop with his galloping castle, made Ozunov move to defend his king. He seemed, somehow, to have taken the initiative. Perhaps he really could play. He stared out the white window, hypnotized by the slow drift of the snowflakes, then forced his attention back to the game--he could not allow Ozunov to see that his mind wandered. Where was Marike? He'd not seen her at breakfast. Suddenly, a tragedy. Ozunov's remaining bishop came wheeling out of ambush and snapped up his queen. Damn! Khristo quickly checked his pawns to see which had snuck farthest down the board. No solace there. Finally, for want of anything better to do, he threatened Ozunov's castle with a pawn. How on earth had Ozunov finagled his queen? His eyes wandered to the piece, lying on its side among the ranks of the dead by the edge of the board. Would he not have taken the bishop with his queen on the previous move if the path had been open? How had he missed it? The game progressed, snow drifted in the street below, Khristo's forces were slowly picked to pieces. He tried to concentrate, to see the distant implications of each possible move, but the suddenly captured queen obsessed him. From that blow he would not recover, but he wanted at least to see the reason of it. In time, he realized what Ozunov had done. At first he could not believe it, but finally had to accept the fact that Ozunov had brazenly cheated him. Why? He didn't know. Even the strongest had a weakness somewhere--they'd taught him that themselves. Perhaps Ozunov could not bear to lose. Toward the end of the game, as Ozunov chased his kingmercilessly around the board--stopping only to pick off one of the few motley survivors--the Stoianev temper asserted itself. Khristo determined that he would not be fooled quite so easily and, just then, a distraction in the form of a telephone call came to his aid. Soon enough the game was over, a last faithful knight eliminated, a few helpless pawns standing around like poor relations at a funeral. Ozunov reached over and laid Khristo's king on its side. "Check," he said, "and mate, I believe. You agree?" "Yes," Khristo said. "You dislike to lose, Khristo Nicolaievich?" "Yes, comrade Major." "Then you must learn to play better." "I agree, comrade Major." "Losing your queen, that's what finished you I believe." Khristo nodded agreement. "A very simple stratagem. Plain as your nose, eh?" Khristo was not sure how to answer. Ozunov smiled, as though to himself, and poked idly at the bowl of his pipe with a toothpick. "I knew an Englishman once, a few years after the Revolution, it was my job to know him. We spent many hours in conversation, it was a most pleasant assignment really. There was nothing we did not speak of, women, politics, religion. All those matters that men like to speculate about when they are at ease. From this man I learned a particular thing. _Fair play,__ he called it. Not such a simple notion, perhaps, when you probe to find its heart. A kind of code, which each gentleman must honor individually in order for all to benefit. In time I came to understand that it was a good system for those who had more than they needed, for those who could afford to give something away. But I also realized that I had never known anybody like that. Nobody I ever knew could say, 'Here, you take it, I do not deserve it. I do not need it so badly that I will cheat and lie to get it.' Perhaps some day we may indulge ourselves in that fashion, we may have so much that we can afford to give some of it away, but not now. Can you understand this?" Khristo looked hesitant. Ozunov laughed at his discomfort. "Yes, boy, I cheated you, I moved a piece while you were daydreamingout the window, enchanted by our Russian snow. I acknowledge it!" "But why, comrade Major? You could have won without that." "Yes, I could have. You do some things well, comrade student, but you play chess like a barbarian. I wanted merely to teach you something, that is my job now." "Teach me what, comrade Major?" Ozunov sighed. "I am told Lenin once called it the Bolshevik Variation, simply another strategy, like the Sicilian Defense. It has two parts to it. The first is this: win at all cost. Do anything you have to do, _anything,__ but win. There are no rules." Khristo hesitated. He had a response to this, but it was very bold and he was not sure of himself. At last, he took the leap. "I have learned what you wanted to teach me, comrade Major," he said, opening his hand to show Ozunov the white pawn he had stolen when the telephone rang. "You're a good student," Ozunov said. "Now learn the second part of the Variation: make the opponent play _your__ game. And the more he despises your methods, the more you must make him use them. The more he arms himself with virtue, the more you must make him fight in the dirt. Then you have him." He gestured with his pipe toward the white pawn lying on Khristo's palm. "Keep that," he said. "A student prize from Ozunov. You have won the copy of Vladimir Ilyich's speeches, now you will have something to remind you, in times to come, how to turn them into prophecies." "Wake _now,__ please." The hand jerked his shoulder. His body rose upright, by itself it seemed, and he suddenly found himself sitting. He struggled to get his eyes open. What time was it? His heart was beating like a drum at being torn from deep sleep. "You are up? No falling back down in a heap?" It was Irina Akhimova, one of the night guardians, an immense woman with tiny eyes and a voice like a ripsaw. "Dress yourself, Khristo Nicolaievich. Quickly, quickly." At last his eyes opened. The dormitory was dark, the windowsrevealed snow drifted over the sill, black night above. Goldman stirred in the next bed. Somebody coughed, a toilet flushed. Ozu-nov's chess game had kept him awake a long time the night before, his mind tossed on the sea. "What is it?" His voice was thick. "Angels dancing on the roof!" Her harsh voice cut through the room. "How should I know?" She grabbed him by the hair, not so playfully. "And wear your warmest things, little rooster, lest your manhood become an icicle." She let him go with a flourish. He swung out of bed; she didn't take her eyes off him while he dressed. When he visited the toilet, she waited just outside. He wound a scarf around his throat, put on a sweater and his wool jacket. "Very well," he said. She looked at him critically. Reached to a nail above his bed, whipped his peaked cap from it and put it on him, pulling it down as far as it would go. Then she took him above the elbow and led him out of the room. There was a mug of tea for him on the table in the parlor and a man's silhouette in the shadows. "Here he is,"Irina Akhimovasaid to the shape, "and good morning to you." She left abruptly. The man moved forward and stopped. His body was very still; he stared at Khristo and his eyes did not blink. Khristo had never before seen anyone like him. He came from an unknown world, and this world, sealed, alien, hung about him like a shadow. His overcoat was finely made, with a soft collar standing upright. On his head was a fur cap, set at an angle. He was perfectly shaven and smelled of cologne. He had longish, lank black hair, strong cheekbones, dark eyes so deeply set they seemed remote and hidden. "I am Sascha,"he said. "Drink your tea quickly and come with me." Khristo gulped his tea. The voice was educated and genteel, but there was no question of not doing whatever it told you to do. He put the cup down. The man gestured toward the door. The air outside was like ice, dead still, bitter with wood and coal smoke. White plumes blossomed slowly from every chimney. The snow was cleared away in a path to the street, where a low black car idled unevenly in front of the building. Saschaopened the back door for him, then went around and climbed in the front seat. The driver was bulky and thick-necked, with a hat like Sascha's set square on his head. They moved slowly down the street on packed snow. The lights picked out dark bundles, which Khristo knew to be women, wielding shovels. They drove in silence, the driver turning the wheel gingerly as they crawled around the corners. On the horizon, Khristo could see a fading of the darkness, a thin light that he had come to know as the winter dawn. The upholstery in the car had a strong musty smell. Saschamoved the sleeve of his coat back an inch, he was wearing a watch. Khristo tried to quiet his breathing, to slow it down. He did not want these men to know what he was feeling. The interior handles of the back doors had been removed. They drove down Kutuzov Prospekt, a grand boulevard, past the Kremlin towers, then into a narrow side street that had been shoveled down to the paving. They passed under an archway, where a soldier with a rifle saluted them, then stopped in a courtyard full of black cars. The driver remained seated. Saschaopened his door and beckoned him out. He moved stiffly, shoulders hunched as he stepped into the sharp air. He had thought that facing death, facing whatever he now faced, his mind would be bright with panic, but this was not the case. Instead, he felt like a man at the bottom of a deep well, a statue, empty of feeling. Saschaled him through a series of guarded doors until they stood in a grand marble entry hall dominated by a magnificent staircase and a domed ceiling that was a vast concave painting of nymphs and swains in a woodland. Khristo was directed to a small door set into a panel on one side of the rotunda. This opened on an iron stairway which they descended, their footsteps ringing against the walls. It was otherwise silent and very damp, lit, just barely, by dim bulbs in wire cages. Down three flights, they moved through empty corridors that seemed to go on and on, like hallways in a dream. At last, they stopped in front of an unmarked wooden door. "Listen to me carefully,"Saschasaid in a low, even voice. "Wehave caught a German spy. There has been a full confession--names, details, places of meeting, everything. You are not implicated in this. We do not _believe__ you are implicated, but we do not know so very much of you. If you are to be one of us, we must assure ourselves of your disposition in such matters, so you will have to prove yourself. Now. On the other side of this door. My instructions to you are these: do not think, do not speak, do not hesitate. Only act. Follow directions. Do what needs to be done. You must not be sick, or stagger. Remember that you are a man full-grown." Saschatapped on the door and it opened instantly. On the other side was a large man in white shirt and dark trousers with suspenders. The man had a cold, plain face and looked at him for a long moment without expression. The room smelled strongly; musty, sweet and damp. It had no windows, only water-stained floral wallpaper, a rough table and chair, and a carpet rolled up against one wall to reveal a smooth brick floor with a drain at the center. The German spy knelt facing a corner of the room. Khristo saw the hands, tied behind the back with brown cord, the head bent forward, the eyes shut, the lips moving silently, skin the color of dirty chalk. The man in suspenders moved forward. He limped when he walked, in felt slippers that did not make a sound on the brick floor. Standing by the kneeling figure, he looked back at Sascha, who nodded affirmatively. Gently, he pushed the head forward until the forehead was only a few inches from the floor, then took the orange hair tied back in a red ribbon and tucked it in front of her shoulder, revealing a white neck. Khristo felt Saschatake him by the back of the hand and turn it palm up. He had bony fingers, cold to the touch, and a grip like steel. From his pocket he took a Nagant revolver, slapped it hard onto Khristo's hand, then stepped back. A different pair of men drove Khristo Stoianev back to Arbat Street and the Brotherhood Front of1934.They too wore watches, conspicuously checking them now and again. But they drove slowly and carefully, and took a long, winding route through the city,which had now struggled to life amid the great snowdrifts. Black bundles--you could not determine the age or sex--shuffled head down, single file, along shoveled paths. The sky was dark and thick, the air still. It had long since stopped snowing. Khristo stared out the side window. They were watching him in the rearview mirror--in the same mirror he could see their eyes shift--and he hid his privacy by looking away. He felt, had chosen to feel, absolutely nothing. A door had closed inside him. Marike joined Nikko on the other side of it. But he remembered the old story of the man who returns home one day to find his house occupied by demons. He hides in the basement. Each day, the demons put one brick on the trap door that is his only access to freedom. How many days shall he wait to confront them? Khristo would wait a day, many days, he hoped. He had not loved her--never would she have permitted such a thing to happen. Sentimentalism was to be fought at all costs. On her part, making love was only a trick you did for the sake of health or, perhaps, as an appreciative gesture toward a fellow worker. She was, he remembered, demonstratively unaffectionate, as though tenderness in the dance of lovers would betray the honest barnyard essence of their desire. Perhaps, he now thought, this had been her method of deception and had nothing to do with playing the part of worker. He had been naive, he realized, had simply not considered that deception could occur in such matters. Very well. It would happen no more. And, if it did--now that he knew of Sascha's existence and others like him--it would surely be the last time. Unless you could turn over and fuck in your grave. In this place you could not make a mistake. That was the lesson he had learned in the morning; God only knew what he might be taught in the afternoon. He watched the black figures on the street, their white breaths hanging in the air. What was this place? Who were these people? The car turned into Arbat Street. In front of his building there was a Stolypin car, puffing black exhaust on the snow as it idled. No one moved to open his door, so he simply sat and waited. Two men in overcoats came quickly out of the building, holding the arms of a man running between them. It was Ozunov. He was barefoot, wearing blue silk pajamas. He stumbled a little, thetwo men jerked him upright and his glasses went askew. They stopped at the back of the Stolypin car, and one of the men let him gomorder to open the door. Instinctively, he adjusted his glasses. Turned his head. For a bare instant, he stared at Khristo. His face appeared to have somehow shrunk, and his eyes looked enormous. Then the two men hoisted him into the back, as Khristo caught a brief glimpse of other people inside the trucklike compartment. One of the men slammed the door and dropped the steel bar into its bracket. The whole street could hear the clang. Just at that moment, the door on Khristo's side of the car was swung open by the man from the passenger seat. He nodded toward the building entry. He was apparently forbidden to speak, but the look on his face, a smile without mirth or pleasure, made it clear that they had wanted him to witness this event. The winding trip home had been simply a matter of timing. Khristo, his arms wide for balance, the peaked cap still pulled down on his head, tip-toed carefully across the ice into the building. Irina Akhimovaawaited him just inside. She took him to the small parlor off the dining area, sat him down at a table, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Very slowly, he took off the hat, unwound the scarf. Set them on a chair beside him. Stared vacantly at the wall. It was unpleasantly silent in the room; he could hear himself breathing. He desperately wanted to fall asleep, and he swayed in the chair and bit his lip when his eyelids drooped. "None of that,"Irina Akhimova said from the doorway. He came to with a snap. "Soldiers must not sleep at the post." But the words were somehow tender and there was kindness in her tiny eyes. She beckoned him, led him into the kitchen. In an iron pot, she was making _pelmeni,__ ground pork and onions wrapped in dough and boiled. The air in the kitchen was fragrant; there was a glass of thin, freshly made sour cream set by a plate, he could smell the vinegar in it. Akhimova's enormous back was bent studiously over the pot as she prodded and poked the floating _pelment__ with a long wooden spoon. She served him. Filled his plate at the stove, then tilted it over the pot to let the steaming water run off. Placed it before him. Moved the sour cream closer, filled a tall glass with strong tea. "Will you not join me, comrade Lieutenant?" he asked. She made a dismissive noise, just the way the older women in his own town did, meaning that it was his moment for grand food, not hers. It was his victory they were celebrating. The _peimeni__ were delicious, garlic laid on with a broad lick, the way he liked it. He resisted a powerful urge to gobble, took his time, was spartan with the sour cream until, smiling broadly, she waved him on. He felt the meal bring his soul back to life. Despite the world, despite Marike and Ozunov, despite himself. His body, his heart as well, took the food to itself, became warm and grateful. And, since the day was meant to be an exemplar, a homily on life as they wished him to perceive it, there was yet one more lesson in store. "News from home," she said solemnly when he had eaten as much as he could. She laid a sheet of cheap brownish paper in front of him. He stared at it, perplexed. Nobody in Vidin could have the faintest idea where he was. "Brought by friends," she added in explanation. He recognized his father's schoolboy letters, each one labored over with a stub of pencil: My Son, I greet you. I am happy to hear that you are with friends. Mama and I are well. Last Sunday, at the St. Ignatius church, your sister Helena took wedding vows with Teodor Veiko, the son of Omar Veiko the landlord. I know you will join us in wishing them prosperity and long life. It was a fortunate match. Life here will now go on more smoothly. It is my hope that you are studying your lessons and obeying your teachers, making something of yourself, and that the time will come when you may come home to us. ~ That my blessings find you in good health, He had signed it"Nicolai Stoianev" with ceremony, a man who had written very few letters in his life. To Khristo, the message between the lines was quite thoroughly clear. Nikko's affront to authority and his own flight eastward had placed his remaining family in grave danger, and Helena had determined to sacrifice her happiness on behalf of her parents' lives. No Vidin child of his acquaintance would have done any less. He knew of Teodor Veiko, an older man, child of Veiko's youth. A drunkard, a violentman. But Helena was clever, would wind him around her thumb. The rest of the message was this: you cannot come home. That it should arrive on the day when his thoughts might well be expected to turn in that direction was no coincidence and he knew it. "The news is good?" Akhimova asked. "Yes, comrade Lieutenant, as good as can be expected." She leaned over his shoulder, he felt her bulk near him, and pretended to read the letter for the first time. She squeezed the tender place between his shoulder and his neck. "Be brave, Khristo Nicolaievich," she said softly. "Be a good soldier." They had him. The first step was to comprehend it. The second was to form, in the privacy of his mind, the words themselves--a reading of the sentence. He was held by a system based on the portcullis, a medieval security tactic no less effective for its age. A system of two gates. A visitor entered through the first gate--no questions asked. It locked behind him. He was now confronted by a second gate, held a virtual prisoner in a small space. Above his head, the walls were honeycombed with arrow slits and fighting ports. For the moment, only questions came from above. If the answers were found to be good, they opened the second gate. If the answers--or the stars, or the cast of the dice--were found to be not good, they did not open the second gate. After that, the disposition of the prisoner was more a matter of whim than tactics. The portcullis was a system based on the medieval assumption of evil in all men--again, a notion no less effective for its age--and the certain knowledge that any visitor carried your destruction in his hand, intentionally or not, a spy's gold or the Black Death. Thus they had him and he knew it. He could not go home. He could only move in the direction they pointed out--pray God you understood where they were pointing, pray God you did not make a misstep along the path. The lesson of _The Mistake__ had been sharply staged for him in the departure of Ozunov. The major had permitted a spy to flourish in his house. Perhaps he was a witting accomplice, perhaps not. But, they said, we have no time to find out. No wish, either. The New Science is ingenious in that way: motive is unimportant. _Why__ does not matter, only _that.__ And the New Science is economical. An arrest, if properly managed, is also a lesson. Thus we make what we have go further, thus we spend wisely. But they--the masters, the unseen--had incorporated a tiny flaw in their structure. It was endemic, they could do nothing about it. As Oriental rugs are woven with a single imperfect strand--that the weaver not be seen to compete with Allah, who is the only perfection--their system had one defect. It was not perfectly dark. Some light got in. For the more they trained Khristo in their methods, the more he understood their logic. It was a problem they couldn't overcome, but they knew it existed and they watched closely, and watching was their greatest skill. Thus they had him _but__ he knew it. The way home was closed. They had let him know that with the letter. He realized also that Antipin had operated openly in Vidin on purpose, that secrecy had not been his intention. If the fascists were after you, to whom could you turn? To the East, of course. Now, let us provoke the fascists: they will drive the sheep, we shall have the wool. That winter, Khristo Stoianev learned to bear weight. He understood the system in that way: a great heavy mass that pressed down upon you, that kept you struggling and gasping to remain, in any sense at all, upright. It crushed the mind because it demanded every resource, every tag end of memory and cognition, simply to stay afloat. Imagination withered, fantasy collapsed; only some of the strong would survive. There were special rules, special interpretations of the rules, regulations to be adamantly obeyed, regulations to be adamantly ignored, tests--obvious tests and subtle tests and obvious tests that hid subtle tests--provocations to be silently withstood, provocations to be instantly reported, papers to be kept on the person, papers to be written and handed in, papers to be punched at regular intervals, papers to be returned by a certain date, special passes, special permissions, "open" conversations, guided conversations. If there were a way to hammer a nail into a thought, they would have found it and done it. To this weight add the weight of the winter. Which bore them all down, Bolshevist and cellar priest alike. A sky that turned black, then gray, then brown, then white, then black again. "The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it." If they had, it bled snow. The unrelieved whiteness became blinding over time, made a world without feature, a terrible empty blankness where, at last, the concepto�thingness--?????????????--became brutally real. And, finally, at the center of it all, was the cold. A cold that shrank you up inside yourself, a cold that collapsed every face to a frown or a snarl, a cold that blew in the wind like a whip or hung motionless in the air like dead smoke. Even to wash was agony, and all stank together. The sex shriveled back into the body, only alcohol could move the blood, and, with enough alcohol, the cold found new ways to feed itself. An old woman sat on a bench to rest for a moment. You came upon her, thinly glazed with ice, the following morning. Khristo bore the winter cold as best he could and found ways to bear the other kind of chill as well. Would they, he reasoned, teach you French and English unless they intended to send you someplace where such languages were spoken? They would not. So he bent his back to it. It did not come easily, it did not come quickly, but he simply would not let go until he had a deathgrip understanding of it. "Good morning, Mr. Stoianev. How is the weather today?" "Good is the weather. Maybe snows little." "The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little." "The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little." "Not _teeth,__ little, lit-tul." "Lit-tul." "Faster!" "Little." By the hour, by the day, by the week. In February he was twenty years old. Goldman and Volutaand Semmers chipped in and bought him a cream cake. The cream was off. He ate it anyway and showed pleasure, licking his lips enthusiastically and humming with pleasure. Later, in bed, he curled around his stomach and fell into a sleep of exhaustion despite the cramps. It was comradeship, he came to realize, that brought them through the winter agonies of1934and1935.While the blizzards andthe system swirled around them and the purges beat like a drum in the background, they held on to each other and rode out the storms. _Perhaps,__ Khristo thought privately, _we are the truest communists in Moscow this winter. We share our pain. We share our food.__ The idea had been simple enough: send out an army of Antipinsacross the mountains and river valleys of Eastern Europe, recruit--never mind how--the young and vigorous. Look for stealth, raw courage, a gift for lies or seduction--you know what we want. Bring them back here. Teach them what they need to know. Make them--one way will work as well as the next--our own. Marxists, patriots, criminals, outcasts, adventurers. Mix it up, boys, you never know what you'll need. They will be _ours.__ Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Croats--our brothers and sisters to the west. War is surely coming, and these seeds will make a harvest in future famines. It was equally logical to run them through in batches, keep them in a group, for one always wanted to be sure _where everyone was.__ In a country of two hundred million souls that covered eleven time zones, you could misplace the damnedest things: entire trains, whole battalions. Sometimes you never did find them. The country had a way of swallowing up what most normal persons would hold to be entirely indigestible objects, it drove some technicians quite literally mad. Thus convenience for the accountants of the system made for the salvation of its inventory--survival could only be managed if they took care of each other. They learned that everyone in the group had something to offer. They learned who the stool pigeons were and fed them on small sins to maintain their credibility so that new, and unknown, informers would not be introduced. Thus together they learned their lessons. March, no sign of a thaw, winter giving every sign of an encore, it was their turn to occupy the village of Belov on the river Oka. An outing! A half-day ride in a rattly wooden railcar, chugging past bare birch groves and black-green forests of fir with snow-weighted boughs. Real countryside: woodcutters' huts, the occasional farm field in a peculiar shape. The Russians, to everyone'samazement, farmed in oddly configured patches of land, nothing square, perhaps the result of endless divisions of theversteamong sons over the centuries. But all they saw was new, and that was what mattered. It made their blood run fast after the shut-in winter months in claustrophobic Moscow. They yelled and capered and carried on like kids. Kerenyi managed to free the upper half of one of the windows. Painted--a horrid Soviet institutional green--shut for years, it shrieked as it opened, borne down by Kerenyi's great strength. At last, delicious cold air seasoned with railroad soot came rushing into the car. Hooray! Reaching up through the window, Kerenyi returned with a handful of snow from the roof. A rapid shaping in red hands, then a fat snowball sailed out the open window toward a hut. A near miss! They threw themselves on the other windows, and soon enough they were shelling the scenery amid shouts of triumph and exasperation. Well, you know how it is. It would have to be Iovescu, that appalling snitch, who would get it in the back of the head. Fat-faced goody-goody from the Banat. With vengeful eye he searched the crowd who, as one, raised their shoulders in shrugs of angelic innocence. Finally--wouldn't you know it--he picked on Ilya Goldman, one of the smallest, and chucked a fistful of loose snow at him. There was only one answer to that. The ensuing volley hit Iovescu and everybody else, producing squeals of fury as snow worked under the odd collar. Mayhem followed. In the melee, Karina Olowa, a Httle blond thing from Wilno, journeyed stealthily to the platform between cars and returned with a colossal snowbomb which, launched upward, splattered against the ceiling and rained down on various heads. A huge cry arose and that, at last, brought Lieutenant Akhimova and the other officers on the run. Order was restored. They'd used up most of the roof snow anyhow. In the little village of Belov they took over various thatch-roofed huts--where the Belovians themselves had got to, nobody could say--with wood bunks covered by mothholed blankets. They built coal fires in the stoves, trooped down to the church for dinner, where iron pots of soup were boiling and misshapen loaves of rye-flour bread were set out on long tables. After a winter of potatoes and cabbage and fish-bone soup, the smell of food was thrilling. There may even have been a few private thoughts of home. They built a bonfire that night and sang songs, then troopedoff to their respective houses--just like real townspeople--and slept the sleep of city dwellers on their first night in the country. The next morning, after tea and bread, they went to work. They were divided into fourteen teams of four--each team designated by a number and given numbered strips of material to pin to their collars. Khristo, Goldman and Volutawere a team, joined by a tall Yugoslavian named Drazen Kulic who, in his late twenties, was rather older than most of the others. Kulic seemed to have lived his life away from the sun--his hair, eyes and skin were almost without color. Yet he did not fade into the background; his presence was physical, hard, and there was something in the set of his face that was watchful and unforgiving. The four were designated Unit Eight. In the first exercise of the day, half the units entered Belov as security police, the other half were given blank-loaded Tokarev pistols, wooden boxes supposedly containing explosives, a notebook labeled _List of Partisan Units,__ and signaling flares--contraband to hide in their huts. As counterinsurgency officers, Unit Eight was assigned to search houses at the southern end of the village. On the edge of town, waiting for the whistle that would begin the exercise, Unit Eight held a meeting. Khristo would be the captain, would have final say in all things, though all would participate in planning and executing operations. Ilya Goldman was appointed intelligence officer and freed from all other obligations. He immediately undertook to make lists of the units they would oppose and cooperate with during the exercises. Goldman, a lover of detail, set himself to annotate these lists--in his own code--with observations on personalities, strengths and weaknesses in each unit. The first argument began right there. Now that Goldman was intelligence officer, he wanted a staff. Typical! Give him an inch and he took a mile! Goldman waited for the other three to calm down, then explained patiently. Lists took time, and observation. Operational efficiency could be sacrificed, for a day or two, in favor of acquiring data that (A) would be useful in defeating opposing units and (B) could be marketed to other units in exchange for cooperation--thereby increasing the data files and making the potential for trading even more productive. Khristo was impressed and promptly ordered Goldman to choosea staff. He selected Kulic. Khristo calmly pointed out that Kulic was physically strong, and if there were to be only two of them operating as security police that quality was important, principally for purposes of intimidation but who knew what it might come to--future assignments could well be affected by the outcome of the Belov games, and everybody wanted to do well. Fistfights were not out of the question. Goldman accepted Volutaas his assistant, and the two of them immediately went off and whispered in a corner. Therefore, when the whistle blew and the designated counterin-surgency units fanned out across the village, Unit Eight was represented only by Khristo and Kulic. Belov had been a reasonably prosperous little place: a small church with a dome, a town hall-police station, and a few small shops--really open market stalls--on the main street, which was surfaced in frozen mud. The sun had come out, beads of morning frost glistened in the roof thatch. Khristo, blank-loaded bolstered pistol riding his waist, strode along the main street and saw life anew from a policeman's perspective. A curious sensation, to go anywhere he wanted, to say what he liked to whomever he pleased. There was, he hated to admit it, some distinct comfort in such power. As other units commenced the exercise, Khristo and Kulic could see that they had adopted the time-honored forms. The hard-handed banging on the door. Shouts of "Open up! Security search!" When the doors were opened, they could see people who had recently been self-confident students transformed by circumstance into groups of huddled peasants. They found their assigned target, the hut of Unit Five, and briefly discussed their strategy. Kulic disappeared around the back, Khristo tapped lightly on a board below the window. The unit captain appeared at the window and gestured toward the door. "I needn't come in," Khristo said. The captain looked puzzled. "They sent me to tell you that you're in the wrong hut. This one here is supposed to be storage--Unit Five belongs next door." The captain nodded and disappeared from the window. Khristo waited, pleased to have the warming sun on his back. It stood to reason that when they moved, their contraband would have to move with them. The captain reappeared at the window andchopped the edge of his right hand into the bent elbow of his left arm, adding, for emphasis, an extended middle finger on the left hand. The universal sign language informed Khristo that his suggestion had been staunchly rejected, so he went and knocked on the door. The captain opened the door. "Nice try," he said acidly. "Keep a civil tongue when you talk to us," Khristo said, "or you're in the stockade for the day." No stockade had been mentioned in the rules, but one could never be certain. The man stared at him for a moment, then grunted and stood back. Khristo let Kulic in the back door. "Lieutenant Kulic will conduct the search," Khristo announced, folding his arms and leaning back against a wall. "Where are the rest of you?" one of the "peasants" asked. "You'll find out," Khristo answered, putting as much menace in his voice as he dared. "All stand up!" Kulic shouted as loud as he could. Unit Five stood, slightly sullen at being addressed so harshly. "All strip!" They stood with their mouths open. "Hurry up. Down to the skin," he yelled. "Against the rules." Her name was Malya. She was tall and sallow and won all the prizes for codes and ciphers. She stood with her arms folded and glowered at them. "You are state security," she added, "not dirty-minded boys." Her eyes glittered with contempt. As Kulic took a fast step toward her, Khristo's hand shot out and grabbed his elbow. Kulic shook him off but stayed where he was. "I'll be back," Khristo said. He ran out the door and down the street to the town hall, where the officers had constituted themselves a committee of the rules. He addressed Irina Akhimova."Comrade Lieutenant!" He stood at attention. "Yes, comrade student?" "We require the search of a female person." The officers, five or six of them smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, passed an eyes-to-heaven look among themselves. _Here we go again,__ it said. _Another year at Belov and already they are at it.__ Akhimova climbed to her feet, affecting weariness, brushed Khristo ahead of her with hand motions. "Yes, yes, comrade Security Officer. Lead the way." They arrived at the hut to find Kulic and Unit Five locked in a staring contest. Kulic's hand rested on the butt of his bolstered gun. Akhimova took Malya out the back door toward the privy behind die hut. In a moment they reappeared. Malya's face was angry, her cheeks well colored. "Donkey," she said to the unit captain. Akhimova handed Khristo a thickly folded wad of paper. "One current map of the Ukraine, six towns circled," she said, "tied to the upper left leg with string." She took a notebook from the side pocket of her uniform jacket. "Ten points subtracted from Unit Five. Ten points awarded to Unit Eight. Continue the exercise." As she walked out, only Khristo could see her face. She winked at him. He glanced out the window. Goldman went scurrying by like a ferret. So, for a week, it went. They battled among themselves, shadowing each other to clandestine meetings, plotting to suborn their opponents, bending every rule until the judging committee stomped about in a red-faced fury. They ran, in their _eshpionets__ kindergarten, every classical operation in the repertoire. Given the preponderance of males, there did seem to be a particular obsession with the honey trap--seduction for the purposes of leverage, the country air had stimulated more than one appetite--but no conquests for _intelligence__ purposes were recorded. They planted compromising evidence on each other--Khristo found a curiously whittled wooden dowel in the bunched-up blanket he used for a pillow. Even Goldman, their chief Machiavelli, declined to offer a theory on its intention. They buried it beside the hut and waited. That night Unit Five, led by the Hungarian captain, an officer-judge in tow, kicked the door open and accused Khristo of secreting an ampule of morphine. The following day, Volutaplanted it on somebody else, but he too discovered and removed it before the group was raided. The classical operations, it turned out to everyone's irritation, often had classical results. Which is to say, no results. They were accustomed, in all their games, to winning and losing, and the frequency of _no decision__ calls first puzzled, then annoyed them. They had stumbled on the dispiriting truth about spycraft, whichwas that few disciplines had a lower incidence of clear victories. "I bent my brain to get this right!" Goldman whined after some particular piece of treachery had fizzled before his eyes. They shared his frustration. Their coup of the first day had given them an inflated opinion of their abilities. They were now treated to the chilly reality of initial success diluted by subsequent failure. No matter how hard they went at it, a second Great Triumph eluded them. They won points, they lost points, but most of their efforts earned a "no decision." There were serious undertones to this competition. Most of them had been in Moscow for six months or more, and they had discovered thatmthis egalitarian society some were decidedly more equal than others. Elusive and shadowy it was, but privilege did exist. Being out and about in the city, you'd catch a glimpse, a scent of it. Clearly it was based on rank, one's position in the scheme of things, and their success in the competition, and generally in the school, would ultimately determine that position. But, try as they might, the members of Unit Eight could not work their way into first place on the list posted daily on the door of the church. They fluttered between second and third. That, it seemed, was the way it was destined to work out. Unit Two, a cadre of teacher's pets captained by the infamous brownnose Io-vescu, sat firmly atop the heap. The final exercise was witnessed by the god Petenko himself, driven out that morning in an open staff car, a picnic hamper riding next to the officer who acted as chauffeur. This Petenko was a fabled personage--his telephone calls produced ashen-faced terror in subordinates--who sported one of those battering-ram titles in which the words _deputy, assistant, minister, interior, state__ and _security__ all appeared. The tolling of a frightful bell. The sort of high but not too high job where the incumbent could snip your balls off without signing for them. Beside the point, perhaps, that he had seven months to live, or that some of his formercastratiwere waiting for him when it was his turn to go to the Lubianka--that day he was the czar. The assignment: assassinate General X as he enters the captured city. Citizens line the streets. Security is rife. This is a triumphal entry. Citizens and security were composed of the other thirteenunits--one unit had to do the job. General Petenko deigned to take the role of General X. His flunkies were enacted (in every possible way) by three members of the judging committee. The part of the car was played by his car. Unit Eight stayed up till dawn, blankets wrapped around their shoulders. They had been screwed, somehow, placed last on the schedule. By then, every other unit would have had its try, every possible variation, every deceit, trick, diversion and ruse would have been seen and identified. They pounded their heads to come up with something completely new. What made it worse was that their officers, the judging committee in the car and others in the street, were arrayed against them along with all the other units and _they,__ of course, were looking forward to it, popping away at their students with blank7.6�.rounds, symbolically slaughtering the incompetent. For the nineteenth time Captain Khristo asked Intelligence Officer Goldman what assets they had and for the nineteenth time was shown the two pistols Kulic had managed to weasel away from other units. He was, for such a heavy-shouldered brute, a surprisingly subtle thief. In addition, Goldman could make overtures to certain weak links, in other units, in search of covert assistance, but--who could know, they might well be delivering themselves into the nets of somebody's counterintelligence scheme. They themselves had played the traitor too often, in order to discern someone else's intentions, not to know that the prank could just as easily be played back on them. "It's getting light,"Volutasaid. "What can we do with two extra pistols and a few weak links? Or, really, _five__ extra pistols, we'll only need one to shoot the bastard." "Weak links cannot be trusted." Khristo spoke the axiom automatically. Kulic agreed, nodding sadly. Completed the worn joke: "Trust the strong even less." When, at long last, it came their turn to try the assassination, _weak__ was the word for their effort. It was getting on dusk, there were rumors of a splendid supper on their last night. Everybody was tired and cold and hungry--thirteen foiled assassinations made for a long day. Some units had come close, a few points awarded, but nobody had managed a clean kill. General X rode into town in stately fashion, waving at the assembled multitude from the front seat of the open car. Irina Akhimova, hands choking the steering wheel, drove the car slowly, her face frozen in rigid concentration. Never mind murder, her expression seemed to say, just don't scratch the bodywork. Poor Goldman was caught flat-footed on the roof of the church (by Unit Two guards, of course!--points to them), his "bomb, " a sock full of white flour, still hanging down the front of his shirt. Kulic, absurdly disguised with a home-cut eyepatch, was pounced on a moment later. Voluta, attempting to hide in an open doorway, simply raised his hands. Why get your shirt torn on the last day? At the end of the street, two security guards stepped out of the crowd with Khristo held between them. Truly, a disappointing try, especially from the everingenious Unit Eight. Bomb-from-the-church-roof had already failed, and failed quite miserably, twice that day. General X stood up in the front seat, became General Petenko, raised his hand for silence. The crowd gathered round for a blessing. "On behalf of the security workers of this progressive nation," he trumpeted, "I wish to bestow on you and your dedicated instructors compliments and congratulations. What I have seen here today is an inspiration to me, to all the proletariat everywhere. Perhaps not an inspiration of craft--for you are beginners, there is still great effort ahead of you--but an inspiration of _effort, seriousness,__ and..." Inspired, then, to silence. Mouth frozen open. Leaping backward as the electricity of fright jolted his heart. Crossing his hands in front of his closed eyes, turning his head away. A perfect statue of a man in the last instant of life. Not real death. Not real bullets. But the move was so sudden, so blurred, he had no time to sort it out. There was an animal lying along the length of the hood. It had sprung like an animal, without warning or hesitation, and it had landed like an animal, crouched, coiled to spring again. Then it had flung itself flat, both fists spewing flame. For Khristo, the realization was explosive. _He really thinks he is being shot.__ He could see Petenko in exquisite focus--glossy jowls, drooping chin--and the man's terror opened a door in him. What burst through was a bright fountain of rage. _This fat Russian bag of piss and vodka.__ Khristo ground his teeth and moaned in his throat and then heard hammers clacking on empty chambers. There was rather a long interval. Akhimova, her face a mask, stood up in the driver's seat for no apparent reason. Petenko lowered his arms, came out of hiding. His voice was high and thin the first time he screamed. "Lieutenant!" Dropped an octave on the second try. "Lieutenant!" Khristo heard Akhimova e)diale a long breath. "Yes, comrade General?" "This man..."He pointed. Khristo could see his finger shaking. Petenko blinked, slowly lowered his hand. _This man__ could not be forced to his knees and shot then and there. _This man__ was a student, of a sort, reciting his lesson, of a sort. Petenko cleared his throat. Students in the street murmured to each other. The urgent need to return to normalcy was everywhere. Khristo, careful of the paint, slithered cautiously backward until he stood before the car. Petenko turned his head a little to one side. "What is your name, young man?" "Khristo Stoianev, comrade General." "You are Bulgarian?" "Yes, comrade General." "They are proud people," Petenko said. There was proper admiration in his voice. The working classes needed no national boundaries, they were as one race. The concept had been clearly set down. His eyes, of course, told a very different story, but only Khristo could see what burned there and he was meant to see it. A different sort of train ride back to Moscow. The wooden benches they'd barely noticed on the way out were now discovered to be of a diabolical hardness. Heads drooped. There was coughing and sniffling. They were exhausted, worn down by the intensityof competition, lost sleep, country air, and cheap, throat-searing vodka knocked back, toast by toast, at the farewell party. One of the officers had brought forth a battered fiddle--he did it every year--and all danced and sang. What the Arbat Street officers called _Belovian love affairs__ were consummated one last time behind, beneath and, in the cases of the truly brave, inside various huts. Farewell, my pretty one. Life back in Moscow was not so free. Oh, one could manage--clandestine training would serve for other than political purposes--but it wasn't the same, hiding out in the boiler room. Better not to be so forthright. Marike had carried on rather openly, and she'd not been seen since. Sent home, most thought. Khristo tried sleeping but it wasn't possible. With windows shut tight it was getting close in the train, and he went between cars wanting fresh air and there found Kulic, curled up out of the wind in one corner of the platform. Kulic invited him to sit down and Khristo rested his back against the smooth wooden boards. In the open air, the rail rhythms were amplified and white smoke from the locomotive streamed overhead. There was a strange sky, common for the Russian spring, with clouds and stars and a probing little wind from the south that stirred the birch groves. "Well, comrade Captain," Kulic said after Khristo had settled himself, "it wasn't for lack of trying." "We should have won it," Khristo said. Kulic shrugged. "It is different here." His voice was without inflection. The judging committee's decision had been announced at the farewell party. Unit Two and the smug Iovescu had come in first. They had been placed second, just ahead of Malya and the Hungarian captain and Unit Five. Khristo's unit had been awarded a full score for the assassination of General X--there was no way to deny their success. But the committee had awarded Unit Two the points for capturing Goldman on the roof. Goldman had challenged the decision--it was all a feint, right up to the point when the two bribed security guards had released Khristo's arms--but the challenge was turned aside: a political decision had been made and that was that. The brownnoses won. That was always the way of it, Khristothought, and there was a lesson to be learned there if one wanted to see it. Kulic was right, it was different here. Gazing at the cloudy, starry sky, he felt captivity as a slight pressure at the base of the throat and swallowed a few times, but it would not go away. Twenty years old. Life already twisted into a strange, contorted shape, like a tree growing in sand. When he'd been Nikko's age he had harbored a secret contempt for his father. A slave of the fish buyers, the landlords, the Holy Fathers, he'd seemed yoked to his life like a patient ox. Now and then a sigh, but never a protest, never a curse. Khristo had believed one could tear the yoke from one's neck, cast it into the Dunav, be free of the weight that had to be hauled from dawn to dusk every day of the year. He'd believed his father lacked the passion, the human fire, to shed his burden, and he was ashamed to be the son of such a willing beast. Now he knew differently, of course. He'd learned something about yokes. "Do you hate them?" Kulic cut into his sorrow. Seemed almost to know what he had been thinking. Khristo shrugged, not trusting his voice. Kulic punched him twice, lightly, on the upper arm. "Doesn't pay to think about it," he said. He didn't hate them. He didn't think he hated them. Though the fury that had possessed him when he'd "shot" Petenko would bear some thinking about when he could get away alone. But he didn't hate them. He was afraid of them. He was afraid of them because they were, in some sense, madmen. A boat carpenter in Vidin had gone mad with sorrow after his wife died and had spent all his days down by the river building endless mounds of stones, constantly correcting the height of the piles to make them all perfectly even. _They__ were like that. They practiced a kind of witchcraft and called it science. When you went to get your papers stamped, you slid them beneath a curtain to a waiting official--you were not to see the faces of those who controlled your destiny. Like Veiko, they dealt in fear. _Like Veiko,__ he thought ruefully. Kulic continued, taking Khristo's silence for assent. "If you cannot go back, best go forward. What else is there?" "You too?" Khristo said. Kulic nodded sadly. "All of us. That's my guess." He slumpedbackward and stared up at the sky. "I was one of the _Komitaji.__ You know what that is?" "The committee?" "That's what the word means. Called the Black Hand in Macedonia, something else in Croatia--you know how it is where I come from. Back in November, they murdered the king of Yugoslavia in Marseilles, King Alexander. The assassination was managed by a man called Viadathe Chauffeur. That action was accomplished by _Komitaji.__ Some call us bandits, others, _partizans.__"He shrugged and spread his hands. "You knew the people who did that?" "Not personally. But I knew who they were. My group was active on the river. From the Iron Gate all the way up to the Hungarian border, including the city, Belgrade. And the truth about us was that some days we were bandits, other days, _partizans.__ But always _Komitaji.__ Bound by the oath of blood. Tradition of centuries--all of that. When we bury our dead, we do not close the coffin until it is in the grave. How is this? the visitors say. Oh, we answer, too cruel to shut out the last glimpse of sky until the very, very end. They like that idea. But the truth is different. _Komitaji__ have always hidden guns in coffins, so the king made a law, and now it's a good country to visit if you like to see the occasional corpse being carried through the street." He laughed for a moment, remembering a particular national madness that seemed, from a distance, endearing. "Up on the river we are mostly Serbian," he said, "though part of my family is Macedonian. We marched with Alexander the Great, of course, but then all Macedonians will say that. Just as all Macedonians are revolutionaries." "Like the Russians." Kulic glanced around the platform, though there could be nobody else there. "Shit," he whispered. He moved closer to Khristo and spoke in a low voice. "We are revolutionaries because we cannot stand any man who tells us what to do. The Turk sent his tax collectors, we sent them back a piece at a time. _These people,__ they crave to be told what to do. A whole bloody revolution they had, but they never left the church. Not really. They aspire to be priests. Do this, do that, today is Tuesday, all turn theirhats back to front. Someone says _why?__ They answer _because God told me it is so__ and then they give him nine grams." "Nine grams?" "The weight of the bullet. Captain Khristo. What goes in the back of the neck. They worship their Stalin, like a god, yet he is no more than a village pig, the big boar, poking his great snout in everybody's corncrib. These Russians will come after us some day, that is foretold, and we will give them an ass-kicking worthy of the name." They were quiet for a moment. Letting the sweet smoke of treason blow and billow around their heads. "Yet you are here," Khristo said. "I deserve no better," Kulic answered. "The king sent special police to our town--which is called Osijek, there are hill forts above the river there--and some fool shot them down. This fool hid in people's haylofts when the police came--army police, with machine guns, not the local idiots--but they started poking bayonets into the hay. So the fool moved up into the mountains. But they followed him there as well. One day came a Russian. _We like such fools,__ he said, and he had false documents, a Soviet passport, and a train ticket to Varna, in Bulgaria, and a ticket on a steamer across the Black Sea to Sebastopol. So this fool--like all fools he thought himself wise--believed the Russian promises and left the mountains. Now you find him playing baby games with blank pistols, now you find him cheated of his victory, even his victory at baby games. But he accepts it. He takes everything they give out because he has no choice. He is like a bull with an iron ring through his nose. Everv day they find a new way to tug on it." He threw his hands into the air and let them fall back to his thighs with a loud slap. For a time they watched the stars floating by, lulled by the engine's steady beat over the rails. Kulic took a small penknife from his pocket and began paring a thumbnail. Khristo sighed. The night made him sad. The history of Kulic's nation was like that of his own. The fighting never stopped. The conquerors kept coming. Other Kulics, other Khristos, all the way back through time, wandered the world. Away from love, away from home. They were destined to be eternal strangers. Melancholyadventurers, guests in other people's houses. From now on, forever, there could be no peace for him, no ease, none of the small domestic harmonies that were the consolation of plain people everywhere. His pleasures were to be those of the soldier in a distant outpost--a woman, a bottle, a quick death without pain. Those he could look forward to. And, though his heart might still swell with poetry at the fire of a perfect sunset, there would never be the special one beside him to share such joys. Distracted by a slight scratching noise, he turned to see Kulic lying on his side and carving on the wooden wall of the ratlcar with his penknife. Kulic stood up, made space for Khristo, pointed with the knife toward the wall. Khristo slid over. The scratching was tiny, hidden away in the extreme corner, only an inch above the floor:??825. "What is it?" "Bfor Brotherhood.Ffor Front. Eight, two and five for the proper order of finish in the Belov exercises of March1935.Our group, Unit Eight, won it. Even though they fixed things so that their stooges came out on top. Unit Two should have been second, and Unit Five third. Thus, somewhere in the world, wherever this railcar travels, our victory will be celebrated." He stuck his hand out. Khristo stood and grasped it firmly, the hand was hard and thickly callused. Kulic gestured with the penknife in his other hand. "We could make a blood oath, but pricked fingers are the very sort of thing these sniffing dogs take note of." They sat down again. Khristo could see the scratched letters and numbers in his mind's eye. He had read in a history book that the early kings of Greece could not trust their own countrymen not to assassinate them, so they imported, as guards, northerners, blonds and redheads from lands far away where they wrote in runes, scratch writing. These guards, time heavy on their hands, had inscribed their initials on the stone lions that, in those days, kept watch over the harbor at Piraeus. He now understood those men. Even the eternal stranger needs to leave a mark of his existence: I was _here,__ therefore I _was.__ Even though, after a long time away, there is nobody left who especially cares whether I was or not. Kulic rested a hand on his shoulder. "Don't be so sad. Rememberwhat I said--if you cannot go back, go forward. While you are alive there is hope. Always." "BF eight, two, five," Khristo said. He felt better because of what Kulic had done, and he was very surprised at that. "We tell nobody, of course." "Of course." Again they sat quietly. It occurred to Khristo, staring up at the Russian sky, that if you had nothing else in the world you could at least have a secret.