Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  In the skiff, he was much closer to the water than he had been on the Tisza, and he could see the war coming down the river—a gray sludge that floated on the surface, smashed tree trunks, dead birds, the tangled remnants of a feather mattress, a strip of German camouflage cloth wound around the end of a stick. What could that have been, he wondered.

  The barge was close to the point where the Drava entered the Danube, near the town of Osijek, on the inside of a tight curve to the north. In the fading light he could see that it was a very old barge, half sunk in the water, half settled into the mud of the shoreline. There were white gouges in the wood at the stern—it was obviously something of a hazard to navigation, abandoned there long ago and never removed. An old man was sitting on the stern, fishing with a line on a pole and smoking a pipe. The barge's former markings were still visible, whitewashed numerals that appeared to have faded into the rotted hull over time. A 825.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again it was still there. Someone had reached out for him. He took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Resisted the urge to leap out of the boat then and there and swim wildly toward the barge.

  In the bow, Andrej dozed on. He should be killed, Khristo thought. Because whatever cover story might be contrived at this point was going to be so thin that a light would shine through it. This close, the Czech automatic would do the job, and one more pistol shot on this river wasn't going to make a difference to anybody. But he hadn't the heart for it. The soldier's life had been spared in battle, he did not deserve to be shot dead in his sleep a few score miles from home. Khristo waited until the barge was out of sight, scooped some water onto his face, then shipped oars.

  Andrej woke up immediately. They were rotating slowly in the current, drifting toward the rocky profile of the near bank. “Can't do it,” Khristo said sorrowfully, breathing hard, wiping his face. “Just can't do it.”

  The soldier rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “What?” he said.

  “I tried,” Khristo said, and by way of explanation extended his blistered hand.

  “You can manage,” Andrej said. “I saw you.”

  Khristo shook his head apologetically.

  “Very well,” the soldier said, his expression resolute and cheerful. “I shall take over the oars for an hour, then we'll pull in for the night. That will fix you up, you'll see, by the morning you'll have your strength back.”

  “No,” Khristo said. “It's best that I go on by foot, out on the roads.”

  “Nonsense. Stand up and we'll trade places. Keep a lookout in the bow for your share of the work.”

  “I cannot allow it,” Khristo said, putting the oars back in the water and guiding the skiff into the near bank, making a great show of hauling at the water.

  “Don't be a proud fool,” Andrej said. “We must all work together now, remember, and take up the slack where we are able. I am able.”

  “Rowed halfway home by a legless man? Not me.” The bow skidded into the mud and Khristo hopped out, then pushed the boat back out into the water.

  The soldier worked his way down the gunwales to the rowing seat. “To hell with you, then,” he said bitterly, rowing the skiff toward the middle of the river, chopping angrily at the water with his oars.

  By the time Khristo worked his way back through the underbrush along the shore, the old man had lit a lantern. He clambered up on the barge and called out a greeting. The old man nodded in response, not bothering to turn around.

  “Any luck?” Khristo asked.

  “No,” the old man said, “not much.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yes. There used to be pike here.”

  “The markings on this barge—I used to have a friend whose boat had the same numerals. Quite a coincidence, no?”

  The old man nodded that it was.

  “I'd like to see him again, this friend,” Khristo said.

  “Then I'll take you there,” the old man said. He stood slowly, taking the line from the river and wiping the muck from it with thumb and forefinger, then kicked an old piece of canvas aside and, with his other hand, retrieved a Browning Automatic Rifle, the American BAR, much battered and obviously well used. “Your friend is my son,” he said, shouldering the heavy weapon, gripping it so that his finger was within the trigger guard. “You carry the lantern,” he said, “and go on ahead of me, so that he may have the pleasure of seeing his old friend arrive.”

  They walked for a long time, climbing into an evergreen forest where the sharp smell of pine pitch hung in the evening air. This was the land called Syrmia, lying between the rivers Danube and Sava, the edge of the Slavonian mountain range that ran north into the Carpathians. The trail reminded Khristo of Cambras—a steep, winding approach with potential for ambush at every blind turn. His lantern sometimes showed him a gleam of reflected light at the edges of the path. Weapons, he thought. But these sentries did not challenge him or show themselves, simply passed him on silently, one to the next.

  After an hour of hard climbing, the old man melted away and Khristo was alone in a clearing. He stood there patiently while, somewhere, a decision was made. Above him, an ancient fortress of weathered stone was built directly into the face of the mountain. There were hill forts scattered all across northern Yugoslavia, he knew, some of the sites already in use at the time of the Greeks and Romans and, the story went, never vacant for one day in all those centuries. From the top of the hill, the river would be visible for miles in both directions once daylight came.

  At last, a silhouette moved toward him from the darkness, a man who walked with great difficulty, his weight shifting violently with every step. Khristo raised his lantern so that his face could be seen and the man advanced into the circle of its light. Perhaps it was Drazen Kulic, he thought, or perhaps not. This man wore the blue jacket of a Yugoslavian army officer over a torn black sweater. He walked with the aid of a stick in his right hand, his left arm dangling useless by his side, the hand cupped and dead. A black patch covered his left eye, and the skin on that side of his face was ridged and puckered all the way to the jawline, pulling the corner of his mouth into an ironic half smile. The man stared at him for a time, searching his face, then said, “Welcome to my house.”

  “Drazen Kulic,” he answered formally, “I am honored to be your guest.”

  They walked together through a pair of massive doors made of logs cross-braced with iron forgings, into a cavelike room with a fire that vented through a blackened hole in the ceiling. There were some thirty people in the room, half of them sprawled asleep in the shadows, the other half occupied with a variety of chores: loading belts and magazines, cleaning weapons, repairing kit and uniform. They spoke in low voices, merely glanced at him, and ignored him after that. The women had bound their hair in scarves and wore sweaters and heavy skirts, while the men were dressed in remnants of army uniforms. The room smelled of unwashed bodies and charred wood and the fragrant odor of gun oil. The sound of working bolts, metal on metal, formed a rhythmic undertone as the guns were reassembled after cleaning.

  Kulic took him to a trestle table set against one wall, and an old woman appeared with two tin cans made over into cups and filled with home-brewed beer, a bowl of salt cabbage and a slab of corn-meal bread. Khristo used his knife to put pieces of cabbage on the bread.

  Kulic raised his beer. “Long life,” he said.

  Khristo drank. The taste was bitter and very good. “Long life,” he repeated. “And thanks to God for letting me see the signal on the barge. I could have missed it.”

  The right side of Kulic's mouth twisted up in a brief smile. “You have not changed, I see,” he said, “forever fretting over details.” He paused to drink. “At that bend in the river there is a cross-current, and if you do not see the barge you will hit it—though I take nothing away from God, as you can see.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “A mortar shell, in a graveyard in the Guadarrama, the mountains west of Madrid. I'd b
een a bad boy, and the NKVD ‘arranged' for it to happen. They meant for me to die, but I was only—well, you can see for yourself.”

  “I'd heard that you were captured. Also that the Russians got you out.”

  “Who told you that?” Kulic asked.

  “Ilya Goldman.”

  “Ilya!”

  “Yes. Years ago, you understand. In Paris, before the war.”

  Kulic took two cigarettes from the pocket of his uniform jacket, gave one to Khristo, struck a wooden match on the table, and lit them both. “In Paris, before the war,” he repeated, a sigh in his voice. He did not speak for a time, then said, “It's true. They did get me out. If I'd died they wouldn't have cared, but I was alive and I knew too much, so they couldn't leave me where I was. Then, after they'd sprung me, they tried to send me back to Moscow, but I vanished.”

  “Have you made it right with them?”

  Kulic shook his head no, exhaling smoke from his nostrils. “Bastards,” he said briefly. “Do you know what went on here, in Yugoslavia?”

  “Some,” Khristo said.

  “Communists fighting Chetnik fascists, centrists, monarchists, the Mihailovich units, and all of us, excepting the Chetniks, fighting the Germans. Some groups with OSS support, some with the British MI6, some with the Russians. Believe me, it is beyond imagining. We shot our wounded, Khristo, to keep them from the Gestapo. I did that, with my own hand, sometimes to friends I'd played with as a child.”

  “This war …” Khristo said.

  “This war was worth what was done only if we come out of it a nation. Forgive the speech, but it's true. When the Russians got here in force we'd already taken control—they could not do to us what they did to the Poles. But for that we paid a price.”

  “I know,” Khristo said. “I saw it in France.”

  “This was worse,” Kulic said simply.

  They were silent for a time. The sounds of the great room—the hiss of damp wood on fire, the cleaning of weapons, subdued conversation—flowed around them.

  “And now,” Kulic said finally, “it begins again. Only this time we are alone, or soon will be, and the NKVD begins to nibble. Assassinations, kidnappings, false rumors, the press manipulated, officials bribed, the destruction of reputations—you know their methods, I'll spare you the bedtime stories—but there is no misreading their intentions. They want Tito for a puppet. If they can't have him, they'll throw him out a window and try someone else. Meanwhile, our American friends are still here, and they help if they can, but they are about to fold up their tents and steal away into the night.”

  “I doubt that,” Khristo said.

  “You'll see.”

  “Drazen,” Khristo said after a moment, “the numbers on the barge.”

  “Still a mystery?” Kulic smiled with the right side of his mouth.

  Khristo waited.

  “I believe you sent a radio message to the Bari station. Some strange ravings about an NKVD colonel who is supposed to materialize in Sfintu Gheorghe on the twelfth of April. Well, you wanted a contact, now you have it.”

  “You are to help?” Khristo leaned forward, a little amazed.

  “Help.” Kulic repeated the word to himself and laughed. “How is your English?”

  “Good enough.”

  “I believe it went: ‘Find out what that crazy son-of-bitch does.' You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.”

  Khristo took a moment to assemble his thoughts. “What he does is bring Sascha Vonets out of Romania, with information, probably very good information. Ilya got Sascha's message out—from the camps. Voluta delivered it to me. It cost him his life. In Spain, Sascha told me what was coming—in the Yezhovschina purge of the security services—and Ilya warned me when I had to get out. Then, in Paris, I was trapped by the British, in an émigré operation against the Soviets, and sent to prison. For life. Voluta's organization set me free, just before the Germans took Paris. So, because of these people, because they endangered themselves on my behalf, I sit here drinking beer with you. One could simply walk away from such responsibilities. Is that your suggestion?”

  “These friends … are all NKVD friends.”

  “And you, Drazen.”

  “Perhaps someone wonders just what really goes on with you, where your heart is. You walked away from the Russians in 1936. Or maybe not.”

  “Horseshit,” Khristo said.

  “Yes? Could be. All apologies, and so forth, but explain to me why you are not the bait in an NKVD trap? You go up into that godforsaken Bessarabia—some little fishing village, a place beyond the end of the world. Romania now belongs to the Russians, so what you are trying to do is draw OSS operatives onto Sovietoccupied soil. Where they will be gobbled up and put on show. Somehow, heaven only knows how, American newspapers learn of this. ‘Oh-ho!' they say. ‘This bunch of wild asses in the OSS now spies on our great ally in the war. Off with their heads!' ”

  Khristo stood up. There was silence in the room.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Kulic said, making calming motions with his hand. The old woman returned and poured beer into his tin can from a pitcher. “Very well,” he went on, “you are a virgin.”

  Khristo sat down on the bench. His hands were shaking so he put them between his knees.

  Kulic leaned forward and spoke very quietly. “It is politics. The American government is going to shut down the OSS. The minute the Axis surrender is final—that's the end of it. Some sections will be moved around to other departments, some of the networks will be salvaged, but …”

  “And so?”

  “So there is no guarantee, even if you should manage to slip through the Russian nets on this river, that there will be anybody to help you in Romania.”

  “Even if you tell them that I am not a traitor?”

  “Even then. You could be unknowing, no sort of traitor at all, yet still bait. You've seen such operations.”

  Khristo was silent. It had happened in Paris: he had been drawn into a scheme to stir up the Soviet intelligence apparat in Western Europe, and he had never known about it until too late, until Aleksandra was gone.

  Kulic's expression changed. There was suddenly discomfort in his face, regret, as though he had determined to do something that he did not want to do, but that he knew he had to do. “Khristo Nicolaievich,” he said quietly, “you are my old friend. I know your heart. But we are both part of something that is larger than two individuals and sometimes, in war, individuals cannot matter. There are times when a sacrifice has to be made. But, for one time, maybe we should try to let friendship win. Let us take you south, through the mountains. We'll put you on a boat, give you a passport of some kind, and leave you in Trieste. It's not a bad place, you can live there if you like. Or go to Paris and drive a cab. Live your life, stop fighting, have your politics over a coffee if you must have them, but for God's sake do not delude yourself about Americans. They change, Khristo. One minute they are excited, the next cool. What point is there in having two useless corpses in Sfintu Gheorghe instead of one? They may decide to leave you sitting there like a fool, untrusted, a provocateur for the Soviets, and such a thing would be too sad for an old friend to see. I will get you down the river, if you feel you must go, but my heart tells me that tragedy is waiting for you there.”

  Khristo lay on a blanket in the corner of the room but he was too cold to sleep. From time to time someone got up and fed the fire and he stared into the flames and wondered what to do. Lying next to him was a girl, perhaps seventeen, with a blanket pulled over her head like a shawl. Awake, she would be soft and pretty, he knew, but in sleep her face was aged and frightened. Her eyelids flickered, then her lips moved as though she were speaking in a dream.

  He was so cold. He had lived a cold, wasted life, he thought. Blown about in storms from Vidin to Moscow to Spain and then Paris. Santé prison had put an end to that, a white blank in his life. And what was the point? To end up dead in some little Bessarabian village? Wa
s that why he had been put on this earth?

  The end of the war was coming; it would be like a dawn, the living would sigh with relief and set about to change the world. He wanted to see it. He wanted to live. It would be the best of times to start a new life. Trieste. A part of Aleksandra's fantasy. Something about the place had always intrigued her. Perhaps she had been right. In Trieste, he knew, there were Slavs and Italians living side by side—he would not have to be an émigré, an alien, he could just be a man.

  Looking into the fire, he could see it. Little streets with radios playing behind shuttered windows, bakeries, dogs napping in the sun. He could walk beside the Adriatic with a newspaper folded beneath his arm. He could stop at a café and read the news. About the mayor and his deputies and the scandal over the contract for the repair of the local streets. Out at sea, a freighter would move slowly across the horizon.

  The girl sleeping beside him mumbled some words and, for a moment, her face was touched by sorrow.

  In the morning it was raining and wisps of fog hung in the tops of the pine trees. Someone gave him a cup of hot water flavored with tea and he felt much better after he'd drunk it. Then Kulic took him some way up the mountain—they had to walk very slowly, and Khristo helped him in the difficult places—to an open meadow, a sloping field with mist lying above the long grass and a row of wooden boards set in the ground. One of them was marked Aleksandra—1943

  Khristo stood with his hands in his pockets, his face wet in the rain. “She came down here in '37,” Kulic said. “When Ilya got her released, he bought her a ticket and put her on a train. He sent along a letter. ‘Keep her out of sight,' he said. ‘Encourage her to live quietly.' She did just that. Stayed in a village and worked in a shop, kept to herself. She was someone whose fire had gone out, though you could see, every now and then, how she'd been. But she seemed to have promised herself to be that way no more, to make the world pay for what it had done to her by withholding her light from it. Then we were invaded and went to war. In the strange way of things, it brought her back to life. She fought with us, first as a courier, then with a rifle. We took a German supply column in October of 1943—mules with mortar rounds strapped to them. And when the thing was finished we found her curled up behind a tree and she was gone. The magazine of her rifle was empty, Khristo, she bore her share of it and more.