The Amber Room

by T. Davis Bunn

  “You must save them for another time. We cannot keep my daughter cooped up all night.” The eyes crinkled once more. “You are an excellent listener.”

  “There’s a lot to learn.”

  “I see you mean that. Very well, I shall await your questions with pleasure. For the moment, let me simply tell you what I intended, which was my very earliest memory. It was of our trek to Poland. We moved mostly at night, you see. The woods were often safer than the roads, for the roads were ruled by thieves. In the woods there were only wolves, and the animals were said to be much kinder to those they caught than the thieves.

  “My mother used to talk of that walk, of how she trod endlessly behind my father as he broke a path and flattened the snow. Many times she wanted to stop and go to sleep, she said. It was only looking at my tiny face that kept her upright and marching onward.

  “Mama used to say that I only thought I remembered what I did. She said I heard her speak of it so often that the memory became my own. But that is not true, young man. I can still see the icy nighttime landscape with the great shadow-trees and their dark branches cutting jagged edges through the sky overhead. Many nights there was a bright moon, our only light, and it transformed the forest into another world, one I have often returned to in my deepest dreams.

  “Only my head rose from the knapsack’s confines. I remember clearly the way blankets were wrapped securely around my arms and legs. It would be so very hard at first, when we set off each day at dusk, not to squirm and complain at being trapped. But then, ever so slowly, the icy fingers of cold would begin to claw their way into my papa’s leather satchel and wrap a steely grip around my little hands, and it would grow steadily easier to remain still and drift in and out of wakefulness. I knew what the cold was trying to do, you see. I had seen in my dreams how death sent the beasts of winter in to snatch me away from my body. After a few hours of traveling, I would be rocked to sleep on my papa’s strong back, and then I would see the beast of cold there nibbling at my fingers and my feet, trying to cut the cords and let death draw me up and away.

  “Then I would start awake, and there would be my mother’s face, drawn and exhausted and worried, and I knew, as little as I was, that I had to be strong for her. When we were bedded down for the day in some kind farmer’s barn or an empty house or if necessary in a riverbank cavern, I often heard my mother ask why I remained so quiet. Not even a whimper of sound, my mother would say, how is that possible for a girl of her age? And my father would look at me, and somehow I knew he understood, because instead of answering he would bend over and caress my forehead and tell me over and over that I had to be strong, and that when I could not, I had to ask God to be strong for me. That was my first lesson of faith, young man. I have carried it with me all of my days, and it has served me well. When I found that my strength was not enough, I turned and let God be strong for me. And He has never let me down. Never.

  “The trip took twenty days. We lost six of the people who started off with us, two to thieves, one to a wolf, the rest to the beasts of hunger and cold. I lost both of my little toes, and no matter how my parents and the doctor might blame it on frostbite, I knew.”

  Magda nodded her head slowly, holding Jeffrey transfixed with glistening eyes. “Oh yes, young man, I knew. I had slept and dreamed and watched the beasts of winter gnaw them off.”

  * * *

  On the train ride back to London, Jeffrey remained silent and reserved. A half hour into the journey, Katya asked him, “What are you thinking?”

  “Something your mother said.”

  “Are you going to tell me what you talked about?”

  “Later I will. Right now, it’s still a little raw.”

  “Yes, I see it in your eyes. Mama’s stories have a tendency to do that sometimes.” She reached for his hand. “Just tell me what you were thinking of, then.”

  “I was just wondering how it was possible for Poland to keep such a strong sense of identity over such a long period. Two hundred years, Katya. I know you told me about how the church became an anchor for the people, their language, and their heritage. But it seems to me that it wouldn’t be enough. There must have been a lot of strangers who moved in, people who after a while started calling themselves Poles. And what about all the Poles who went overseas?” He turned and looked out the window. “I tell you the truth, when I think about the dreadful things your people endured, it feels as if somebody is stabbing at my heart.”

  She bent over, kissed his open palm, raised it and set it upon her cheek, totally unmindful of the stares gathering from other parts of the train compartment. “Thank you for caring, Jeffrey.”

  “The more I learn about all of this, the more I am amazed at who the Poles are.”

  “You’re as much a Pole as I am, Jeffrey. One grandparent, the same as me.”

  “Just in blood. I don’t speak the language. I don’t understand the culture, I’ve never even traveled there before last year. When she was young, my mother reached this stage where all she really wanted was to fit in with her friends. She wouldn’t even admit that her father had been born outside the United States. The whole idea of being half Polish embarrassed her.” He shook his head. “I wish there were some way I could go back and meet my mother when she was growing up, and tell her that she must hold on to her heritage, to learn the language and keep contact with the family. If not for her, then for her unborn son.”

  “I heard a story once,” Katya said. “A group of cows had gathered in a barn, and a flock of sheep were grazing on a nearby meadow. It came time for one of the sheep to lamb, so she went into the barn for shelter. By the time the lamb was born, a heavy snowstorm had started falling. Several of the other sheep, those with young offspring and a few of the weaker ones, also moved into the warm, safe barn.”

  She gazed at him. “Now tell me, Jeffrey. Does the lamb become a cow simply because it is born and spent its first days in the warm, safe barn, or is blood more important?”

  “Your stories are as harsh as your land. Where did you hear them?”

  “When we were still living in Baltimore, my father got into financial trouble. I was very little, but my mother went to work in a ceramics factory,” Katya explained. “Mama was in her late thirties when I was born. They had tried and tried for years to have children, and they couldn’t. Then they gave up, and a couple of years later I came along. Before I was born, Mama had started painting designs on pottery that a friend was casting. She had always painted, and she enjoyed applying her skills to ceramics.

  “Mama left me with a neighbor, an old Polish woman I called Chacha Linka. Babcha is the word for grandmother or old woman, and Halinka was her name. Chacha Linka was as close to pronouncing it as I could come. She never learned much English, and she only spoke to me in Polish. I don’t remember ever actually learning the language, but Chacha Linka talked to me in Polish all the time, so I must have picked it up. I can still remember coming home one day and saying something to my daddy and being so amazed that he couldn’t understand me. It just didn’t make any sense. How could I know something my daddy didn’t?”

  She turned to the window for a long moment, seeing out beyond the industry-scarred landscape to the world of remembering. “Chacha Linka had more stories than anybody I have ever known. A lot of them were about the Bolsheviki. That’s what she called the Russians until the day she died. Bolsheviki. Even though the revolution had been over for seventy years, she still called them that.”

  “Sounds like a name out of some old black-and-white movie.”

  “Not for her. Bolshoi means large or big, like the Bolshoi Ballet—the Grand Ballet. Bolsheviki meant members of the Great Party, although the Communists weren’t really so numerous. Lenin used that name to make it sound as if they represented all the people. It was propaganda appeal, making it appear bigger than it really was.”

  “All that doesn’t sound like the makings of a kiddie’s fairy tale.”

  “Some of the stories scared me,”
she agreed. “Some of them were awful. Really gave me nightmares. But some of them were beautiful.”

  “There’s so much I don’t know,” Jeffrey said quietly. “So much to learn. It’s like a treasure trove. You make me feel so enriched.”

  She turned back from the window to give him a look of pure gratitude. “There’s something I’ve wanted to speak with you about for a very long time. I wonder if maybe now is the time.”

  “We won’t know unless you try.”

  “Do you know what it means to tithe?”

  “Sure, I know the word. Ten percent of what you make.”

  “Ten percent that is dedicated to the Lord’s work.” She hesitated, and in that heartbeat’s span was transformed into a shy little girl. “I was wondering if you would like to tithe with me.”

  The way she said it brought a burning to the back of his eyes. “It sounds fine, Katya.”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I’d like that. Really.”

  “I just thought.” Again she paused and searched, her cheeks touched with a rosebud of blooming red. “I thought it might be a nice part of joining our lives together.”

  He reached across for her hand. It was on his tongue to ask her, but he checked the words at the very last moment. Not then. Not there.

  “I was thinking maybe we could find something, a project or a need the next time we’re in Poland together, and dedicate our work together on it to our Father.” Violet-gray eyes peeked out from beneath the protection of long, dark lashes. “Do you like the idea?”

  It was hard not to say what was on his mind, hard to hold to his original plan, hard to bring out the simple words, “I like it very much, Katya.”

  She looked at him with eyes that were never spent. Katya held his hand with both of hers and blessed him with her gaze for the remainder of the trip back to London.

  CHAPTER 10

  The farther from the main highway Kurt traveled, the more treacherous the road became. Four lanes dwindled to two, then the asphalt gave way to brick. Ice and snow packed between the stones created tiny, unseen deathtraps. Wrecks littered the roads, usually where slow-motion Ossie plastic cars met Wessie speed machines too intent on showing off to pay attention to the road and the weather. Kurt’s neck throbbed from the tension of trying to keep a fixed appointment time under impossible conditions.

  Kurt slowed for a truck entering a factory gateway, corrected a momentary skid, slowed even more. Near the Arnstadt city limits the road became flanked by the Karl Marx Industrial Estate, the high nameplates over each entrance now crudely whitewashed out. Chemical works gave way to cement factories, then to steel mills and a power station. On the other side of the street, high-rise workers’ barracks marched in endless rows. Not a tree could be seen in the more than seven miles of factories and tenements.

  He passed through the utterly charmless town and started climbing hills along a bone-jarring road. The radio kept him company with a mixture of American sixties’ pop, Wessie rock, and a clear-speaking, carefully neutered Wessie announcer. Every trace of the old regime had been wiped from radio and television. No one listened to the Ossie musical groups anymore. No one talked about them. No one even admitted that the music had ever existed.

  Kurt had eyes the color of dried mud. His face was as scarred and battered as a building site, marked by early bouts with various poxes. He tended toward gray in everything he wore—gray suits, ties, striped shirts, socks, dark gray shoes. It left him looking like a lump of angry mold.

  Kurt considered himself an out-of-work spy, which he was, but not with the dangerously glamorous past as he would have liked. His spy trips abroad, the ones he referred to in mysterious half tones when chatting up bar girls, had been as overseer to trade missions visiting industrial fairs; they had been boring as only a trade fair could be for someone who had not the first clue about the subject on display. The other East German delegates had immediately pegged Kurt for a stooge, and shunned him throughout the trip. His only company had been other Stasi stooges, most of whom spent their time either shopping or drinking or touring the local porno houses. Kurt had found their company worse than being alone.

  The fact that Kurt treated every trip abroad as an all-important mission earned him kudos from the home office and a reputation among traveling technicians as the ultimate pain. His presence on a technical trade mission meant that each morning at breakfast, every mission member had to submit a report on the previous day’s activities—what they had learned, whom they had visited, what technology they had managed to pry loose from suspicious Western salesmen. But the Stasi bureaucrats liked Kurt’s thoroughness. While his efforts never granted him his sought-after position as either an embassy staffer or a Western-based agent, they allowed him to travel at least twice a year to the West. In a country as tightly controlled as East Germany, this freedom was nothing to sneeze at.

  But for Kurt it was not enough. He had always wanted to be an international spook, always seen himself as made for a dangerous life. He took whatever self-defense courses were offered. He wore a full-length black-leather overcoat long after warm weather transformed it into a mobile sauna. While shaving he practiced heavy-lidded expressions, and imagined himself squeezing information from a suspect with his gaze alone. He refused to marry, avoided any long-term connection that might close the book on overseas assignments. He slaved nights over correspondence language courses, though he had no aptitude for foreign tongues, and proudly slaughtered both Russian and French and Spanish—for some reason, English had always baffled him. Every report he submitted featured a tone of overblown intrigue.

  Yet Kurt was never allowed to make the transition to full-time international spy. The hierarchies were distinct and separated by light years; international spies were normally chosen while still in university. In later life, the transition was possible only with that most treasured of possessions—a Party patron. Someone so high and so mighty that rules could be completely ignored, stomped upon, transgressed, and leave the receiver unbruised by having done the impossible.

  Kurt had no such connections. He was too harsh in attitude, too abrupt in speech, too lacking in the ability to fawn and grovel. Kurt rose within the national hierarchy by sheer brute ability. His dream for a last-minute transfer remained unquenched. His bitterness knew no bounds.

  * * *

  Kurt’s contact was standing where he had promised, beneath a glaring sign sporting a death’s head, a crude picture of an explosion, and the ominous words: “Deadly Danger of Bombs and Mines. Do Not Enter.” Kurt pulled into the narrow gravel pathway and stopped. The man was barrel-chested and short and powerfully muscled. He was dressed in the lightweight clothes of one who has learned not to feel the cold—denim overalls and unbuttoned jacket and a battered construction helmet. He thrust out one grimy hand, said in greeting, “The money?”

  “It’s here,” Kurt replied, climbing from the car.

  “Let’s have it, then.” When Kurt handed it over the contact counted carefully with stubby, blue-cold fingers. He pocketed the bills and said, “There’s only ten minutes of light left. Let’s go.”

  Kurt cast a nervous glance back at the sign. “I don’t see why we can’t talk this over in the car.” When the man did not stop, Kurt swore under his breath and started up the gravel slope.

  “Talk all day and it still wouldn’t be clear,” the man said, pausing by a second sign that proclaimed, in bold red letters, Lebensgefahr, Life-Threatening Danger. The man went on, “Yeltsin made his little speech and walked off with almost half a billion marks. Those fools in Bonn should have come up here and checked it out before handing over the money.”

  “Checked out what?” When newly elected Russian Premier Boris Yeltsin made his first official visit to Germany, he stated at the opening press conference that he knew where the Amber Room was buried. The news captured the headlines of every newspaper and magazine in Germany, and many in the rest of Europe. Yeltsin said that his r
esearchers, in their investigation of newly uncovered postwar files, had unearthed clear evidence of where the Nazis had stored the most precious of their plundered treasures.

  Yeltsin promised that he would disclose this site in return for additional emergency aid to his ailing nation. The Bonn government took his proclamation in stride, determined to allow nothing to upset relations so long as Soviet troops remained stationed on German soil. They replied that, in celebration of Yeltsin’s visit, they had already decided to give an additional four hundred million marks in emergency aid.

  Yeltsin’s lackeys then identified the site as the caves bored into the Jonastal, the Jonas Valley, outside Arnstadt. The caverns had been dug during World War II by prisoners brought from the neighboring Buchenwald concentration camp.

  After the first flurry of activity and official investigations, there had been nothing from Bonn except stony silence.

  Kurt’s eyes cast another glance at the sign’s warning. “Shouldn’t we find a safer place to talk?”

  The man snorted. “We’ve had droves of fat Bonn politicians come parading up here for months. Not to mention trucks and bulldozers and backhoes and even sonar equipment. I doubt if you’ll find anything they haven’t.”

  “So why the signs?”

  “The same reason all the Wessie fat-bellies left empty-handed.” He pointed to veined white cliffs rising above frozen pines. “Yeltsin said the treasures were buried in a cave. And then one of the researchers in Moscow admitted that it wasn’t the Amber Room that was mentioned in these records they found, but other treasures the Nazis hauled off from that same area around St. Petersburg. Hah. We know that. Everybody within fifty kilometers knows that.”

  Kurt showed exaggerated patience, hoped the man would come to the point before his feet froze to the ground. “So why isn’t everybody out digging?”