by Alan Furst
He leaned back in the hard wooden chair and sighed, looking out through the wire at a flat field of weedy grass. Above the guard towers, the sky seemed to stretch to the end of the world. Sascha Vonets was not meant to be a poet, that’s all one could say. It was just that his stubborn soul had, somehow, got into the habit of making soulful noises, and one had to do something or other about that, so his instinct had always been to chop up the thoughts so that they trickled down the page instead of marching, margin to margin, like a shock battalion.
He put the mutilated poem in a desk drawer and went back to his account ledger. The question was: what should the numbers say? This was harder, even, than cranes. One lived or died with this. So one had better get it right. Problem was, what did Brasovy want? To lie, the better part of the time, to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear just as he told Brasovy what he wanted to hear. Yet there had to be variation, otherwise the whole enterprise was simply too obvious, even for those straw-headed statues back in the Central Administration Office. Some days, one had to tell the truth so that, most days, one could tell the necessary lies. The analysis was correct, all right, but which day was today?
The production norms for the Utiny gold fields, in the Kolyma River region midway between the East Siberian Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, were in no way possible to fulfill. In winter, the temperature fell to sixty degrees below zero and the wind blew like a demon’s rage. The workers lived on translucent soup and a few ounces of gritty bread and died like flies. The work sucked their first strength out of them in a matter of weeks. After that, they began dying—not too fast, not too slow—and their ability to shift rock and sand declined rapidly. The previous spring they’d eaten a dead horse. The horse had been dead for a while, when they found it, and they ate the maggots as well. Others had received a barrel of axle grease for their wheelbarrows, and they’d eaten that down to the wood. Some ate Iceland moss, just to put something in their bellies. When they failed to meet the scheduled production norms, dictated by Moscow, they were stripped and watered down and left to freeze in the cold—though not quite to death. In summer they were tied naked to a pole so that the mosquito swarms could eat on them for hours. But what drove them crazy, they said, was the sound of it. The falsetto whirr in the ears.
He had learned, somehow, not to know of such things.
He had built a wall and lived behind it.
He had survived. It was his grandmother who’d kept him out of the execution cellars in the Lubianka. There went the jewelry, the candlesticks, the silver, everything she had put by to survive in bad times. They had sent him east—to the northeast corner of hell, to be precise—with a thirty-year sentence. But he was alive. And he had a debt to pay, a debt to them, and by God’s grace he would stay alive long enough to pay it. To make them cry out in anguish, as they had made others cry out. To make them burn, as they had made others burn. To cut their hamstrings, as they had cut millions, and watch them come tumbling down.
The cruelest thing he had to admit to himself was that, in some strange way, he had never been happier. Suddenly, in this necropolis of ice and flatness and dead gray light, he had a reason to live, for the first time in his life. At last, there was something he wanted. He wanted to hurt them as they had hurt him. How simple and childlike life turned out to be once it was pared down to the basic elements.
And the funniest part of it—if anything could ever be funny again—was that they had been right!
There they were, killing left and right on pretext. On the phantom basis of a hostile glance, an indiscreet word, a beard drawn on a poster, anything, and, the greedy swine, leaving him alive. The one who had truly spied on them and, better yet, continued to do so. Drunken old crazy poet Sascha wandering about in a daze with his absurd heart dragging behind him on a chain, this posturing fool, this poseur, was digging up their buried secrets every chance he got.
First he had done it in Moscow, long before he’d gone to Spain, in Dzerzhinsky Square itself. Little nighttime trips to the files. What’s old what’s-his-face doing lately? This? Hmm. That? My, my. The other thing? Dear me. We’ll just write that down, in a private little code of our own, and make it into a word, and remember that word.
And one could remember, once they were set into meter and rhyme, a thousand words.
When he had first arrived at the camp, they had assigned him the job of general laborer. He was supposed to shift seven cubic yards of gravel a day. Wet gravel. He spit on his hands and set to it; it meant survival, a man was capable of anything when pressed. He shoveled till his muscles rang, till his heart squeezed like a fist. Worked as the mucus ran from his nose and his breath rasped and whistled. The trustee came around just before they were marched back to the camp. Vonets, he wrote, 503775, two yards.
No!
Yes. Truth was, perhaps a little over three, but one’s production had to be shared, with “others”—he’d get used to it, they had a system. What was he worried about? At that rate, he wasn’t going to last anyhow.
He had managed to become a trustee before death got him, but it had been a close thing. One by one, he’d worked his way through the camp NKVD, looking for the right one, the one in whom a spark of ambition still glowed. And, at last, found him. I am, he’d said, a writer of reports. The old trick had worked again, just as it had back in Moscow. He couldn’t fly a damned crane to save his soul but when they needed drivel, and they needed drivel, he was their boy. Fair-haired.
Transportational facilities on the above date were diminished by the reduction of one unit necessitating a restructuring of production goals on said date.
Which meant the horse had died.
They made him a clerk.
That meant he lived in a room with four beds and a stove, that meant he worked in an office where they stoked logs into the stove as though tomorrow would never come, that meant he got a fishhead in his soup every night and twelve extra ounces of bread a day, which meant he could stay alive, and, in turn, that meant he could plunge the knife into their hearts and twist with all his might. In time.
It meant, most important, that he had something to trade, because the little diary he had kept for so long had to grow, had to stay current, or it would be worth nothing. In the Kolyma it was as though time had stopped. The wind moaned in the fir trees and the world was white. Blank. Yet, somewhere, life went on, operations continued, changed, assumed new shapes, involved new people. All the little details kept piling up and he had to have them, he fed on them, and they kept him on fire and alive.
So. He watched the new arrivals. The chekists were easy to spot, in their leather coats and boots and their smug, well-fed faces. They’d been interrogated, all right, but they’d put that nightmare behind them in the transit camps, on the cattle cars, and they came into the camp expecting to be treated, well, at least decently. They were, after all, party members.
Then it was the gravel. Or pulling a sledge piled with rocks by means of ropes around their shoulders, like beasts. And that’s when Sascha would come around. Could they, perhaps, use a bit of help? A friendly hand? They could? Well, he’d see what he could do. They should hang on, meanwhile, drive that shovel into the wet gravel, take the weight on their forearms, grunt with the effort of it a thousand times a day. He was working on it. The old man responsible for counting the shoes was fading fast, on his last legs—how would they feel about doing such a job? Not too demeaning, counting shoes? He watched their eyes warm with anticipation, their tongues hang out like dogs’. Soon, soon, he would tell them. Just get up at four tomorrow morning in the icy blackness and slurp up a few ounces of soup and have at it one more day.
And by the way, stop at my room sometime for a little chat.
He didn’t really have to ask them. So grateful were they for even the chance to hope that they spewed it all out—if for no other reason than to make themselves of sufficient importance in his eyes to be allowed to count the shoes. Oh yes, I was the one who got hold of Bakir, in Istanbul, the minister of
armaments. Greedy bastard. Had his hand out all the time until I told him how things were. He’s still ours, of that I’m sure. I’m the one who nailed him down.
One more new memory word. Entered, in case his mind should fail him, in an account book nobody ever looked at. As the months went by, the facts piled up. Well, Hitler really listens to his astrologer, you know, and I’m the one who went and found Borov, our own astrologer, who tells us every day what Hitler is being told.
The collection grew and grew. It would make quite a thick book when he finally got around to writing it all out. Perhaps he would make it into a poem, he thought, a patriotic poem or, even better, a patriotic poem dedicated to the NKVD itself. There it was. With each word keyed to the names and places that should have remained forever secret.
But it wasn’t time for that yet. He would content himself with research until a certain opportunity presented itself. Then, when the moment came, he was going out. His NKVD encyclopedia would buy him out. And then, whoever got the lists—the names, the places, the money, the deeds—whichever intelligence service that turned out to be, they would be the sword. His sword.
And he would sit back and watch them cut.
On the twenty-third of July, at 3:25 in the morning, Khristo Stoianev was arrested by personnel of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—the DST The apprehension was smoothly accomplished. As he headed toward the Marais on foot, going home from work, he was stopped at the foot of the Pont de Sully. Two well-dressed men came from nowhere, flowed to either side of him and took him gently by the upper arms. He did not resist. At the other end of the bridge he could see two men leaning against either side of the parapet wall. Some distance away, up and down the Quai de la Tournelle, were two idling Citroëns. As he was led to a third automobile, one of the detectives informed him that he was under detention for violation of Subsections 104, 316, 317, and 318 of Article 9 B of the Criminal Code of 1894, revised, Part XII. He had no idea what all that meant. Later on, a ferret-eyed man who claimed to be his avocat, defense counsel, explained the charges as having to do with procurement of a weapon in aid and abetment of a homicide. There were other accusations, which the avocat referred to as “nieces and nephews.” Going to procure the weapon, paying for it, and failing to report the transaction to the provincial office of taxes and registrations.
The DST Citroën did not turn across the Seine toward the Palais de Justice but stayed on the Rive Gauche, headed, he speculated, for the École Militaire district. The detectives ignored him; they spoke quietly among themselves about the new rules regarding compensation received for working on holidays and Sundays. They were preceded and followed by other cars, and they drove cautiously along the empty boulevards.
Khristo used his last twenty minutes of freedom to watch the nighttime city slide past the car window. The air was warmish and still, and the summer heat made the aroma of the streets sharp-edged and uncomfortably sweet. It was the hour—appropriate for arrest, he thought—when the city cleaned itself. Large trucks hauled away the garbage, the market squares were hosed down, and old women scraped at the cobblestones with brooms made of twigs.
He said good-bye, in his mind, to Aleksandra. Since the night of the brasserie shooting he had telephoned the contact number for Ilya many times, but the call was never answered. It was not disconnected, it simply rang, in some empty place somewhere—he imagined an anonymous trading company—and there was no one present to pick up the receiver. But he was wrong about this, for he had tried the number (just once more) in early July and reached a busy signal. He knew, intuitively, what that meant. There was somebody by the phone, somebody under orders not to answer it. He imagined the Russian clerk, love-struck in Paris, chancing one little telephone call to a special friend. He had also gone back to the Matrimonials in the newspaper, phrasing the BF 825 signal in a number of ingenious ways, but the only response had been letters from lonely women who wanted to be married. He had also watched the newspapers for discoveries of the unidentifiable bodies of young women. There turned out to be a lot of those, poor souls dragged from the river. Times were hard, people got tired of their lives.
He was tired of his own. His stomach twisted in knots over what lay ahead of him in a French prison, but somehow he could not bring himself to feel “trapped” or “captured.” He was already in prison—a prison of borders, passports, false names, and de facto nonexistence—a citizen of nowhere. He remembered the train ride back to Moscow from Belov, the dark realization of a homeless, wandering future. So it had been written, so it had turned out to be. Cruel of the fates, he thought, to let me taste this place, to know it, and then to take it away.
They moved slowly past the grand buildings of the École Militaire and drew up to a gate with a bored gardien slouching against a sentry box. As they rolled to a stop, Khristo saw a green Morgan parked across the street, the driver’s face obscured by shadow.
A chain was removed, the detective maneuvered the car past concrete bollards and parked in a courtyard with shrubs and flowers around three sides. In the building above him, almost all the windows were dark. He got out of the car and asked if he could smoke a cigarette before going inside and they allowed him to do that, lighting up with him and smoking in silence.
When he could see the first edge of dawn, a fading darkness in the eastern sky, he put the cigarette out and took a last breath of free air before they led him across the gravel courtyard into the building.
In the fall of 1937, in Cell 28 of the 16 th Division, at the Santé prison, Prisoner 16-28 received two letters.
The first was signed by his “Aunt Iliane”—Ilya, clearly enough—who informed him that she was healthy, in general, though suffering the usual complaints of age. The farm was running well enough. Rain had split the tomatoes, but what could you do about the weather? They had been shorthanded throughout the grape harvest, since his cousin Alexandre had left. She had personally taken Alexandre to the station, Iliane reported, her health seemed fairly good—considering all she’d been through—and she was now traveling abroad. Of course, nothing had been mentioned to cousin Alexandre about his present circumstances—Aunt Iliane knew she would find that painful. As for him, she hoped he had seen the error of his ways, and she prayed daily that he would be spiritually reborn. Her arthritis made writing painful—he should not expect another letter anytime soon. She closed by imploring him to have courage. At first, she said, the family had been very angry with him. Now, when they saw what had become of him, while they did not exactly forgive him, they felt that justice had been served.
The second letter was from Faye Berns, in response to a letter he had sent her. She was heartsick that he was in prison—could anything be done? Could he receive money, or clothing, or books? He must write and tell her.
As for her, in some ways it was wonderful to be back in America. In others, not so wonderful. She felt dislocated, a little at sea. Her house looking out over Prospect Park seemed to have shrunk, her parents had gotten old. They had three Jewish refugees from Germany staying with them. A chemist from Berlin and his wife, who suffered from a nervous condition brought on by experiences with Nazi police officials. She paced the living room all night long, but what could anybody say to her? And an architect from Dresden who had been awarded the Iron Cross in the Great War. Even so, the Nazis had closed up his office. All the German Jews were in a very difficult situation—only the lucky and clever ones could leave the country now. A most curious thing had occurred when the three refugees docked at Ellis Island for immigration processing. A well-dressed man had appeared and offered to buy their clothing. All of it—even the underwear and socks. Not only had he paid them, he had given them excellent American clothing in exchange. After that experience, who could convince them that they were not in the promised land?
Her own news was that she was engaged to be married. His name was Leon, he was from Brooklyn, and he was finishing up law school at New York University. He was a very good and decent fellow who would ta
ke excellent care of her—really, he gave in to her a little too much. Her father more than approved of the match, since Leon shared his political views and, well, a lawyer. Even the owner of Bernstein’s, the second largest department store in Flat-bush, thought the seas would part for him. On consideration, they probably would, Leon was just that kind of person. She had not yet told him of her “other life.” Perhaps she wouldn’t, she wasn’t sure he would understand it. He was very anxious to have children, once his practice was established. Children? Well, that would be another adventure, certainly. She had seen a few of her friends from Pembroke, and most of them already had their first child.
She closed the letter by saying she hoped he would write again. Their day together had been very important to her. She thought of him often.
He read the letter many times and spent a long time considering his reply. Finally, he chose not to write back. What would be the point? In July, after three days in a detention cell, he had been taken to a small room and “tried.” The judge had apparently come in from a country house and was wearing white shoes, as for a garden party, beneath his robes. Over a fifteen-minute period, several documents had been read aloud in rapid, legal French. Then the judge sentenced him to spend the rest of his natural life in Santé prison.
Prisoner 16-28 was, in the French custom, isolated in his cell. This was believed to encourage penitence, which was, after all, the intent of a penitentiary. Cell 28 was six feet long and four feet wide. A bed folded up against the wall in the daytime and there was a chair, chained to a ring in the wall. There was a toilet, and a water spigot for washing. The cell was painted brown halfway up the wall, then yellow to the ceiling. In the door was a Judas port that served two purposes: surveillance once an hour and food three times a day, almost always mashed lentils and black bread. Drinking water was poured into his “quarter,” a tin cup that held a quarter of a liter, at mealtimes. Twice a week, for one hour, he was taken into a courtyard and allowed to walk the perimeter and converse with other prisoners. For the rest of his time he remained alone in his cell, allowed one book a week. These were usually boys’ adventure stories with morally improving points of view or, sometimes, religious tracts. Behind a fine mesh grille was a window made of thick, opaque green glass that bathed the cell in a milky light yellowed by the colors on the walls.