The Quest for Anna Klein

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“I had no idea, of course,” Danforth said, “and I told Brock that. I had too little to go on, and I didn’t want to tell him anything about Anna he didn’t already know. Which was nothing.”

“So, you don’t think Brock knew anything about the Project?” I asked. “Anything about Anna being in France, anything at all about her?”

“I couldn’t tell what he knew,” Danforth said, “other than that an American woman had been translating for the Soviets in Warsaw just before the Germans invaded Russia, which was in June of 1941.” He leaned back slightly. “But if this woman was Anna, then she was still alive in June of 1941, alive and in Warsaw, which meant that she’d been turned over to the Soviets.” He paused, then added, “But why would the Germans have turned a woman who’d plotted to kill Adolf Hitler over to the Russians?”

I had no answer for this, and so I simply shrugged.

“Don’t feel inadequate, Paul,” Danforth said. “No one knew the answer to that question. Which is why I was ordered to find it.”

“Ordered? You?”

“I was still in the army, so who would have been a better choice?” Danforth asked. “By that time, I spoke passable Polish and a little Russian. Brock had a few leads. He knew that Romanchuk had later been arrested and sent to Auschwitz, which he’d survived. It was only after the war that he’d vanished. But then so had this woman, which left me no option but to assume that she was still alive.”

I thought over all Danforth had just told me, then said, “But realistically, could a woman who’d tried to kill Hitler have survived the war?”

“I had the same question, Paul,” Danforth answered. “And although the supposition seemed far-fetched, I looked into whether it might be possible. That’s how I came across the file on Olga Chekhova.”

Then he told me who she was.

She’d been born in Armenia in 1897, a niece by marriage to the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov. She’d gotten married quite young to a Jewish man, and she’d borne him a daughter. She later divorced him but she never lost interest in the welfare of her daughter. The Russian Revolution drove her to Germany She went by train to Vienna in the company of a Soviet agent, then on to Berlin, where she managed to get work as an actress. By 1930, she’d become one of the brightest stars in German cinema. She’d also attracted the notice of Adolf Hitler, in whose company she’d been photographed. Olga looked quite lovely as she sat next to the man himself, and the picture’s significance had not been lost on Soviet intelligence.

“From that picture, the Communists knew that Olga was a member of the true in crowd, familiar with all the Nazi bigwigs,” Danforth said, “and since she had family still in Russia, they decided she could be pressured into the spy game.”

They were right, and Olga Chekhova became a sleeper agent, Danforth told me. At one point she’d even been discussed as a critical figure in a Russian secret police plot to assassinate Hitler.

“Rather like Anna, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said at the conclusion of this narrative.

“A little too much like Anna,” I agreed. “What happened to Olga?”

“She was never discovered by the Germans,” Danforth answered. “Once Berlin fell, she was flown to Moscow, where she was debriefed. Then she went back to Germany, where she lived quite well under Soviet protection.” He smiled. “Her last words were ‘Life is beautiful.”‘

“When did she die?”

“In 1980,” Danforth answered. He saw my astonishment and added, “So you see, Paul, it was quite possible for a young woman who was gifted at languages and something of an actress to survive the war. Even one with deep Jewish connections whose name was later connected to a plot to kill Hitler.”

I nodded. “Well, Anna was a good actress. That can’t be denied.”

“No, it can’t,” Danforth agreed. “She acted a New York nut case and she acted the perfect assistant to an importer. She acted the art critic when the target was standing right in front of her. She acted the dedicated assassin up to the moment she was arrested.” All of this appeared to build darkly in Danforth’s mind, but he continued anyway. “She acted like she could kill a man,” he said, and then, after a grim pause that seemed to renew every ancient ache within him, he added, “and perhaps she also acted like she could love one.”

“But Olga Chekhova survived only because she’d been a Soviet agent all along,” I said.

Danforth now seemed a creature formed of shadows. “True enough, Paul,” he said quietly. “A Soviet agent all along. As Rache was too. Which meant that only Bannion had been what he seemed.”

“Only Bannion,” I said softly. “And so he was completely expendable.”

“As the innocent always are,” Danforth said. “Because they are of no importance to either side. And so we can kill them without losing anything save the value we once gave to innocence.”

“But you couldn’t know that any of this was true,” I said.

“No, I couldn’t,” Danforth admitted. “Because the best conspiracies work like nesting dolls, Paul. They hide inside each other.” He smiled, but it was a dark, painful smile that gave him a rather wizened look. “It took me years and a great deal of moving around, mostly in those rattling trains that wound through Eastern Europe, but I finally found Rudy Romanchuk,” he said, by way of returning to his tale. “He’d gone back to the Ukraine, just as Brock had thought, a town the Germans called Lemberg.”

~ * ~

Lemberg, Ukraine, 1951

Danforth had started in Warsaw, which still lay in ruins, went on to Radom, and then continued farther eastward in long torturous rides on belching, coal-fired trains and groaning buses, all of them crowded with peasants who ate bread and cheese and washed it down with bottles of miód pitny, which they passed from one to another as if it were a favored grandchild.

“You speak not bad Polish,” an old man said to him on the road out of Zamość, Danforth on this occasion riding in a horse-drawn lorry with a group of former Polish prisoners, all of them huddled together on a layer of wet hay. The old man held up the bottle the others had been passing around. “Vodka come from old word,” he said, “gorzalka. You know what means gorzalka?”

Danforth shook his head.

The old man placed his gnarled hands on either side of his face, rocked his head left and right, smiled widely, and fluttered his eyes almost girlishly. “It mean,” he said, “‘to glow.’”

This had been the brightest moment of Danforth’s eastward journey. The rest had been a long ordeal of bone-battering travel through a landscape he’d last visited many years before the war, and the vast sweep of its destruction amazed him, even though he’d followed the Third Army through France and walked the charred remains of Dresden and the rubble of Berlin. War is one thing, as he would later realize, but massacre is another, and in town after wasted town he’d seen the cruel arrogance of the German invasion and the cruel vengeance of the Soviet reoccupation. He’d walked the pit of death in Dubno and valley of death in Bydgoszcz, and once he’d reached Lemberg it was beneath the bridge of death he’d walked to find Romanchuk’s freezing hovel on Peltewna Street.

As he traveled along that winding way, Soviet soldiers had been anything but welcoming, and he was stopped repeatedly and interrogated in small concrete rooms pocked with bullet holes and ripped by shrapnel. But the old art of bribery still possessed its ancient power, and he’d been free in the dispensing of it, softening these war-weary men with meals and liquor and speaking his precarious Russian in ways that made them laugh and drink more and in their sad stupor remove whatever was barring his movement east.

They’d been boys, for the most part, the soldiers and border guards who’d detained him, and in their faces Danforth had seen the youth that war had taken from them. They were cynical and cunning and something in them had been deflowered so that on a whim and in an instant they could become unimaginably brutal. In every town, he’d heard stories of men slit open at the abdomen and then made to dance until their bowels unraveled, of herds of women driven down roads and across fields and over bridges as human mine detectors, of villagers arranged in towering pyramids until those who formed its base were crushed to death. But it was an old woman’s tale of a teenage girl taken from her father’s house near the camp at Lambinowice that he’d never forgotten. She’d been an ethnic German, the old woman said, her parents killed in the anti-German reprisals that had been unleashed by the conquering Russians and thereafter swept the eastern territories. The girl had been entirely naked and radiantly blond, the perfect Aryan victim. A rope had been tied around her neck and she’d been tugged forward like an animal on a leash and loaded into the back of a truck filled with Polish partisans, all of them, as Danforth imagined it, “glowing.” She’d never been seen again.

There was nothing particularly horrendous in this tale compared to other stories of anti-German reprisals Danforth had heard by then, and yet this scene had haunted him for the rest of his journey. He’d come to realize by the time he reached Lemberg that, as with Anna, it was the unknown fate that moved him. What tormented him was not what had definitely been destroyed but what had mysteriously vanished into time and space; not someone who without doubt had been shot in a prison courtyard but that other one — lost in night and fog — who’d last been seen strolling in a park or buying apples from a stand.

Night had fallen by the time he reached what appeared to be a shoemaker’s shop. A yellow glow came from the front window, a color Danforth recognized as candlelight because he’d seen so much of it radiating softly from the otherwise pitch-dark streets of the shattered cities through which he’d passed.

He knocked at the door and waited. It opened slightly and a thin shaft of light crossed the threshold. A small eye floated like a rheumy brown bubble in that same narrow slit, and to this eye Danforth presented his now-defunct military credentials.

In the German he hoped the man understood, he said, “I’m Captain Thomas Danforth. United States Army. I’m looking for Rudy Romanchuk on a matter of great urgency.”

The eye blinked once, slowly and wearily and even a bit resignedly, and Danforth saw the many crimes for which Romanchuk now thought he was at last to pay the price.

With no word, the door opened and Danforth stepped inside a badly damaged room, precariously supported by cracked walls and splintered wood, and with a disturbing droop in the ceiling. Water marks spread across that ceiling and then down the peeling walls to a bare concrete floor, broken and stained, on which stood old furniture and a few crippled machines. The room’s shattered appearance echoed the mood of Central Europe, Danforth thought as he glanced about: crumbling, torn, a thing of jagged borders, more or less idle.

“American? So far?” Romanchuk asked in very broken German, making it clear that the man had probably spent very little time in that country. Romanchuk’s grin flashed like pieces of silver. “You have plenty money.”

When Danforth didn’t answer, Romanchuk grabbed a spindly wooden chair and drew it over to the coal stove that rested in the center of the room. Beside it an old crate contained the few chunks of coal he’d managed to procure by God only knew what illicit means.

Danforth sat without taking off his coat; the room was too cold for that, as a film of ice on the window made clear. He could see that Romanchuk was frightened, as if he expected to be arrested, hauled back to the American sector, tried for some crime of which he was no doubt guilty, then hanged or sent to prison. But he could also see that Romanchuk had been in such tight spots before and that he’d grown confident in his ability to slither out of them.

“I’m not here to arrest you,” Danforth told him. “I’m looking for a woman.”

Relief flooded Romanchuk’s face. “I can get woman,” he said.

Years later, when Danforth read of the thriving sex slave trade in Moldova, he’d wondered if Romanchuk was still alive, a wrinkled old pimp who’d slipped across the border to steal Moldovan girls from their small villages and sell them in the back-alley clubs of Chisinau. It would have been typical, he’d thought then, Romanchuk at last become some version of Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, evil the undying fuel that powered and sustained him.

“Woman. Young girl,” Romanchuk added.

Danforth restrained the violent urge that swept over him and said, “I’m looking for a particular woman. You may not have heard her name, but when the Soviets interrogated you in Warsaw, she was the one who translated your answers.”

Danforth could see that Romanchuk was still trying to read the situation and somehow use it for his own gain. He was a criminal through and through, Danforth recognized, the sort of man who never once got up in the morning and asked himself how he might make an honest living. Danforth had encountered scores of such people in his postwar interrogations, a whole criminal class the Germans had used to carry out some of their most dreadful crimes: rapists and murderers who’d been taken from their cells in countless eastern towns, supplied with whips and truncheons and ax handles, and then unleashed to storm through streets and hospitals. During a particular atrocity he now recalled, a schoolyard full of children still in their uniforms had been attacked. Remembering the dreadful photographs he’d seen, the knots of terrified little boys and girls, hulking brutes still in their prison clothes raging among them, their truncheons in midstrike or already making contact, he found himself amazed that such miscreants, along with the nation that had unleashed them, had not been exterminated at the end of the war.

With that thought, Danforth’s still-fuming hatred of the Germans spiked, and on its hurtling flame he burst forward and grabbed Romanchuk by the throat.

“Now you listen to me,” he snarled. “You’re going to tell me all you know about this woman, and you’re going to do it because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.” He pressed his face close to Romanchuk’s and released every spark of his hatred and contempt. “Do we understand each other?”

Romanchuk stared at Danforth unbelievingly, a man who had seen many forms of hurt and hatred but never like this.

“This woman translated for you when the Soviets held you in Warsaw,” Danforth repeated, still speaking German. Then, using a Ukrainian word he’d been careful to learn at the beginning of his journey, he said, “Chutka!”

Talk!

With no further prompting, Romanchuk told Danforth that he’d forged a passport for a man the Soviets were desperately trying to find, a German agent they believed had betrayed them. “I tell them this guy want passport and identity card just before Germans make pact with Russia.”

“Did you know his name?” Danforth asked.

Romanchuk shook his head. “He was big deal, because Russian officer was wearing Order of Lenin.”

“Tell me about the woman who translated for you,” Danforth said.

“Small woman,” Romanchuk said. “Dark. Good-looking.”

“And her hair?” Danforth asked.

“It was very short,” Romanchuk said. “From behind, she could be boy.”

“Did you get any impression of where she was from?” Danforth asked. “Whether she was German or something else?”

“She was American,” Romanchuk answered without hesitation.

“How do you know?”

“When I was sit in the room, wait for questions, there was guard. Regular clothes, but he was guard, you know what I mean.”

Danforth said nothing.

“Another guard come in and just loud enough, he say, ‘She here, the American girl.’ And maybe in a minute she come into room with three men.”

Like many others Danforth had interrogated, Romanchuk seemed lost in surreal recollection. Danforth had seen the same look in the faces of both the witnesses and the defendants at Nuremberg, in the architects of the chimneys and in those who’d barely missed going up them. It gave the sense that they believed they could not possibly have done or suffered what they had done or suffered, that it had all happened in some unreal space, all been something . . . beyond.

“She didn’t say nothing to me,” Romanchuk went on. “She translate. My German not so good. My Russian not so good. We speak in Ukrainian, and she translate to Russian.” His eyes narrowed. “No. She was . . . saying wrong. Well, not exact wrong, she leave out important things.”

“Why would she do that?” Danforth asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe she protect this guy the Russians want.”

“She was protecting a German agent?” Danforth asked starkly.

“Yes,” Romanchuk said. “For example, she don’t say it was Argentina passport he want. She just say passport. They look for this man, but she don’t say where.” His grin was like the slavering of a dog. “I say nothing. Maybe he her lover or something.”

In years to come, Danforth would often try to re-create the storm of feeling that broke over him at that moment and that left him utterly desolate. It was as if he had seen the whirlwind from the inside, the terrible violence of its swirl.

Romanchuk laughed again. “She give Soviets false turn. They don’t know that. She act different.”

“How?”

“Like she was with them,” Romanchuk said. “Like she was on their side, a good comrade. Very friendly. Especially with the guy with the Order of Lenin. She even speak to him in Turkish.”

“Turkish?” Danforth asked.

“I hear, I know. I once work in Ankara,” Romanchuk explained.

“Did you understand what they were talking about?” Danforth asked. “This woman and the Soviet officer?”

“Moscow,” Romanchuk answered. “She ask him about city. He say it is crowded.” He laughed, then he said, “But there’s always room in Adult World.”

Adult World, Danforth thought, a term he’d picked up from his many interrogations, the comical Russian nickname for Lubyanka.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“Adult World because there was a famous toy store across the square from Lubyanka Prison,” Danforth explained. “Children’s World, it was called.”

“Funny,” I said grimly.

“Lubyanka was also said to be Moscow’s tallest building,” Danforth added without the slightest glimmer of humor, “because from its basement windows you could see Siberia.”

“Even funnier,” I said darkly.

“It had once been the gos strakhkassa,” Danforth continued. “The government insurance office. Strakhkassa means ‘insurance office.’ But strakh means ‘fear’ in Russian, so later people called it gos strakha, the ‘government terror.’”

“But of course, this was something Romanchuk only claimed to have overheard,” I said.

“Which meant I had nothing to go forward on,” Danforth said. “But I also had nothing to go back to, Paul.” He shrugged. “And so I went east.”

“East,” I said, as if I’d stumbled on a clue. “Where your story always seems to be tending. A story that is sort of a haunted-house tale now, it seems to me. With the protagonist searching from room to room, looking for that ghost.”

“Anna’s ghost,” Danforth said in a tone that gave me the impression that I was being led down a road whose end Danforth knew well, being conducted step by step, carefully and thoughtfully, toward some fateful final moment.

“From room to room, yes,” I said, “but always to the east.”

“Always to the east,” Danforth repeated. “How right you are, Paul.” His smile was paper thin. “Where you’ve never been, I think you said. The Middle East, I mean.”

“No, never to the Middle East,” I said a little defensively. “But as I told you, I’ve been to Moscow.”

“Ah, yes, Moscow,” Danforth said, and on that word resumed his tale. “I arrived there —”

“But wait a moment,” I interrupted. “Romanchuk said that Anna was giving the Russians a wrong turn.”

“Yes.”

“So, you were now convinced that this woman was working for the Germans?”

“Completely convinced,” Danforth said. “And I was also convinced that this woman was Anna.”

“So why did you continue looking for her?” I asked. “She had probably betrayed you. Probably gotten Bannion killed. Maybe even Christophe. She was a —”

“She was a Nazi pretending to be a Jew,” Danforth interrupted.

“Then why look for her?” I asked.

“Well, wouldn’t you look for the person who had used you and betrayed you while all the time working for a cause that killed millions of innocent people?” Danforth asked.

It was at that moment I saw the deep hatred he had harbored for so long.

“You were going to kill her?” I asked, more astonished by this notion than by anything Danforth had revealed so far.

“Yes,” Danforth said brutally. “Faced with such a betrayal, nothing should stay your hand, don’t you agree, Paul?”

“No, nothing,” I said, in an admiring tone I hadn’t used with him before.

“But it was no longer love that drove me,” Danforth said. “It was hatred.”

He let me ponder this stark reversal for a time, then he added darkly, “And so to Moscow, because there seemed no place else to go.”

He arrived there in November of 1952, he told me, a thin, weary man who’d developed pneumonia on the way and had spent several days in a barely heated room in Kiev, then yet more time idly strolling about and working to improve his Russian before he reached Moscow.

Moscow was a long way from the rest of the world, not only in miles, but in its steadily deepening paranoia.

“Everyone was terrified of everyone else,” Danforth said. “Brock’s contacts in Moscow were afraid that any help they extended to me would put them under suspicion. I knew that my time was running out, but I didn’t care. In fact, I had lost the capacity to care, Paul. And there is no place darker than that place.” He paused a moment, then added, “So dark I was almost glad when they came for me.” Suddenly he smiled, as if greeting a brighter turn in his tale. “It was snowing that day.” He glanced toward the window, layers of white deepening on the streets and sidewalks. “Like now.”

~ * ~

Moscow, Soviet Union, 1952.

The snow was falling heavily as Danforth made his way toward Gorky Street that morning, but nonetheless a long line of freezing Russians snaked from the entrance of the Lenin mausoleum, as it had every morning since his arrival in Moscow. It was as if a new list were published each evening telling you, you, and you that you must pay your respects to Comrade Lenin at an appointed moment on the following day, as if hundreds had been ordered to appear at the exact same time, guaranteeing an endlessly extended line and the continuation of the absurd pretense that Lenin and the frightful society he had helped create were still universally beloved.

He had disliked Moscow from his first day. Its one majestic vista was Kremlin Square, but that majesty had been dulled by the horrendous sprawl around it. Added to this was the sheer weight of oppression that turned each minute into a dull throb and that seemed to lace the air with molten lead.

Once on Gorky Street, Danforth headed for the Aragvi, the restaurant Brock’s contact had suggested, probably because it was one of the city’s most luxurious, and thus hardly likely to be chosen for a meeting anyone would want kept secret from the KGB.

A squat little Pobeda drew up alongside him; it moved slowly at the same pace as him and then spurted forward and stopped. A tall man in a long overcoat got out, nodded toward Danforth, then motioned him forward, smiling quite broadly as he did.

“Kiryukha,” the man said as he thrust out his hand.

The word meant “old friend” or “pal” or something of that sort, and it could not have surprised Danforth more.

Then in English the man said, “Get in car.”

Danforth did as he was told, and seconds later found himself cruising down Gorky Street, the big man at the wheel.

“You know what pobeda mean?” he asked.

Danforth admitted that he didn’t.

“‘Victory,’” the man said. “You call me . . . Flynn, okay?”

“Whatever you say,” Danforth replied dryly. “I’m Thomas Danforth.”

“Thomas Danforth your real name?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

The man grinned. “You spy maybe?”

“No.”

The man laughed heartily. “I Errol Flynn. American movie star.” He laughed again. “See, I give you my real name too. Real name and real what I do. So we always tell truth, right, buddy?”

They moved on down the street, then made what seemed to Danforth a series of random turns, Flynn whistling for a time, then humming something that sounded vaguely like a Slavic version of “Dixie.” They passed the Central Telegraph Office with its great clock, and then went along Pushechnaya and onto Dzerzhinsky Square, where the gray facade of Lubyanka loomed ahead.

“You know where you are, Thomas Danforth?” Flynn asked.

“Yes,” Danforth answered.

“Good,” Flynn said cheerfully. “Good you should know where you are.”

With that, he gave the steering wheel a violent jerk, and the Pobeda abruptly turned into the wide entrance to Lubyanka, then stopped before its forbidding steel doors. The doors were on rails, which Danforth had not known, so he watched in surreal and curiously untroubled surprise as they slid open to reveal the building’s broad central courtyard.

During all this, Flynn sat silently, staring straight ahead. It was not until the doors had disappeared into the walls that he spoke again. “Kiryukha,” he repeated as he pressed down on the little car’s accelerator. “You are here.”

Minutes later, Danforth found himself in a small office looking at a man in a military uniform behind a metal desk flipping through pages of a file.

“So, you’re looking for an American woman,” the man said in an English that was as perfect as an Oxford don’s. Before Danforth could answer, the man smiled widely and said, “Did you think we Russians are all illiterate peasants, Captain Danforth?”

Danforth shook his head.

“You know the story by Dostoyevsky?” the man asked.

“Which one?” Danforth asked.

“About a man in prison. All the other prisoners are talking about the Russian peasant. He is a type to them. A brute. That is what these men think. But the hero of the story remembers when he was a boy, there was a peasant who worked on his father’s estate, and on one occasion, and at the risk of his own life, this ‘peasant’ had put himself between this boy and a wolf.”

He watched to see if the moral of his tale had sunk into Danforth’s mind. “So, what is the meaning of this story, Captain Danforth?”

“That all Russians are not the same,” Danforth answered.

He laughed. “Some can read . . . and speak a fine English, is that not so?”

“Clearly,” Danforth said.

“I am Comrade Stanik,” the man said. “What can you tell me about this woman you are looking for?”

“She spoke quite a few languages,” Danforth said. “She was described by our contact as dark, young, pretty.”

“Why are you looking for her?” Stanik asked.

“Because we have some evidence that she gave false translations to your agents. We believe she did this in order to protect a German who later fled Germany.”

“And you think she has information about this agent?”

“Yes.”

“He must be very important to you then.”

“We lost a good man because of this German agent “ Danforth said. “We want him to pay for it. Her too.”

“But you do not know the identity of this agent?” Stanik asked.

“We only know his code name: Rache.”

Something glinted in Stanik’s eyes. “Rache?” he asked. “And if you find this woman, you wish to interrogate her?”

“Interrogate her, then bring her back to hang,” Danforth answered coldly.

He saw that this blunt sense of justice appealed to Stanik, and so he gathered himself in, fully playing the part now. “We Americans don’t like traitors any more than the Russians do.”

Stanik looked satisfied by this statement, though it was clear that something continued to nag at him. “And you think this woman is in Soviet territory.”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think this?”

“Because she was last seen in Warsaw,” Danforth said. “With Soviet authorities. One of them was wearing the Order of Lenin.”

Stanik glanced down at the file. “Romanchuk, Rudolph. Now resident in Lemberg. You spent an evening together some months ago, after which you were taken ill in Kiev.” He looked up and smiled. “I like to make sure our information is up to date. Have you anything to add?”

“No.”

Stanik closed the file. “Maybe you should stay here for a while,” he said, by which he clearly meant in Lubyanka.

“Stay here?” Danforth feigned a dismissive laugh. “I’m an American citizen.”

Stanik’s laughter was not feigned. “American citizen? We have plenty of American citizens staying here.” He leaned forward. “You have been in Moscow many days. Have you seen our people? Have you seen them in the lines, in the cold, holding their little bags?” He leaned forward even farther. “Do you know what they call these bags, hmm?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Avoski. Your Russian is not so good, so I will tell what it means. Avoski means ‘perhaps.’ Because it is their hope, you see. My people hold their little bags because perhaps they will have a little fish or a little potato or a little piece of hard bread to put in it.” He opened his desk drawer and put the file inside it. “My people have learned that they can be harmed and that nothing can save them from this harm,” Stanik said as if in conclusion. “And you, my American friend, are going to learn that too.” He shook his head. “No eastern front for the Americans and the British. Never an Eastern Front because you wanted the Germans to kill every last one of us.” He glanced toward the door and called out in Russian, a sentence spoken too rapidly for Danforth to catch anything but the mapakahuŭ, the Russian word for “cockroach.”

With a speed he would always remember as unreal, Danforth suddenly found himself in a small room of no more than four feet by nine feet, which he would later learn was called a bok. It had a metal door with a peephole and a food slot, and above the door there was a naked light bulb in a metal cage, very bright and very intense and that he guessed to be no less than 1,500 watts. A wooden bench had been pushed up against the wall opposite the door, and when Danforth finally sat down on it, he saw a single eye watching him through the peephole. At intervals over the next ten hours, this same eye came and went and came and went, as if it were not real at all but a glass eye slowly spun on some mechanical device, the Lubyanka version of a lazy Susan.

During this time he was fed black bread and a thin soup that tasted like water strained through barley.

At some point he heard the metal door clang open, and a small bald man in a lab coat stood before him with a guard on either side, each of them with a cap that seemed too small for him and that bore a distinctive red star.

The man in the lab coat said something in Russian; part of it had to do with clothes, but the rest Danforth couldn’t make out.

“What?” Danforth asked.

The man made a gesture of unbuttoning his lab coat and then repeated the command.

“Undress?” Danforth said. “I will do no such thing.”

The man gave a quick nod, and instantly the guards stepped forward, grabbed Danforth by his arms, whirled him around, and pressed him hard against the wall.

They held him there for a few minutes, one of them pulling up on Danforth’s right arm all the while, sending a streaking ache down his shoulder that seemed to settle, like a burning coal, somewhere near his wrist. Then they jerked him around to face the man in the lab coat once again.

The man repeated his earlier command, though he added the Russian version of Do it now, a phrase Danforth understood.

“All right,” he said, and with that removed his shirt and undershirt, his shoes and socks and trousers, and at last stood in his shorts.

The man pointed to the shorts and made a sign of dragging them down.

“Do it now,” he said.

“All right,” Danforth said again, convinced, despite so grave a humiliation, that he was somehow the subject of an old parlor game. “All right.”

Once naked, Danforth stood silent and unmoving as the man looked in his mouth. With another gesture he demanded that Danforth lift his testicles, which Danforth did, then he waited as the man peered under them as if expecting to find a folder of state secrets. A third gesture instructed Danforth to face the wall, which he also did, and after which he endured the probing he expected. A fourth gesture directed him to sit down on the bench.

As he sat, the man in the lab coat handed his jacket to one of the guards, who methodically slit open its lining and pawed about, looking for whatever might be hidden there. The second guard did the same with Danforth’s shoes, slicing the soles open and digging out the heels before tossing them under the bench.

With these tasks completed, the man in the lab coat left, looking satisfied, and Danforth, still naked, was taken down the hallway, a guard on either side, to a room where he was told to shower.

He’d expected to be returned to his small room after the shower, but instead he was escorted, now by only one guard, down a long corridor with metal doors on either side. He suddenly felt the immensity of Lubyanka, how long and wide and deep it was, how easily one could disappear into its labyrinthine vastness.

Even so, he himself did not expect to disappear, and so, during the many days that followed, through all the interrogations and deprivations, the few blows and the long torture of enforced sleeplessness, he continued to believe that on this day or the next or the one after that, he would be released. It was an unreality that defied what he would later think of as Lubyanka’s greatest torture: the cries of the other prisoners on his block. They were loud and they were ceaseless, women crying for their children, children for their parents, officials for their superiors, some even for Stalin, who they seemed to believe knew nothing of this cruelty and would never have permitted it if he did. They came in such variety, these endless cries, that in the midst of his own hallucination, Danforth began to conceive of Lubyanka as the place where man’s immemorial complaints were gathered up and eternally stored in its echoing maze of metal and concrete.

Just stay sane, he told himself, just stay sane until they let you go.

Then, on a morning he calculated was three months after the start of his detention — he never allowed himself to call it an arrest— the door of his cell opened and he was led down a different corridor and into a different room to face a man he’d never seen.

“Please to sit yourself,” the man said in heavily accented English.

Danforth took a seat. “So, a new interrogator,” he said.

“I Comrade Ustinov.” He did not look up from the papers on his desk. “I do not have no questions,” he said.

“Really?” Danforth said with a small chuckle of the lightheartedness he’d incorporated into his general demeanor. “Then why am I here?”

“To go now,” Ustinov said. His pen whispered across a page in the routine way of a man who had thousands of times made the same notations on identical pages. “Please to sign this.”

Danforth took the paper the man slid toward him. “What is it?”

“List what you to possess when are come here,” the man said. He began to work on another page, filling in blanks, making checks.

An inventory, Danforth thought, at last I am to be freed. “Why not just give it all back to me?” he asked.

“We keep,” Ustinov answered, and with that he slid a single page across the desk. “You go other place.”

“Other place?” Danforth asked. “I’m not being released? Where am I being sent?”

Ustinov slid the paper farther toward Danforth. “Please to sign” was all he said.

Danforth glanced at the paper. “It’s in Russian. I won’t sign anything I can’t read.”

Ustinov stared at Danforth a long moment, then reached for the papers and returned them to the open file folder. “You wait unless-till time,” he said, and he immediately started scribbling on yet another paper.

“Unless-till time?” Danforth asked. He laughed. “Isn’t there someone who speaks English better than you?”

Ustinov’s face turned bright red, and he screamed, “Nye plozhna!”

Shut up!

At that instant, Danforth realized that he was never going to be released, and with the abandonment of that hope, he felt what all men feel at every moment they are not free, when they are fixed in a world in which there is nothing so pure it cannot be stained, nothing so sacred it cannot be defiled, no right so inalienable it cannot be usurped, no possession so justly earned it cannot be expropriated, no part of the body so private it cannot be violated, no particle of one’s identity so established that it cannot be erased.

~ * ~