by Alan Furst
It was not to be. A white card outside the office door said V. I. Ozunov. A bald man with a fringe of black hair, a brush of a black mustache, delicate gold-rimmed glasses and a dark, ferocious face, who wore the uniform of an army major. Khristo sat hypnotized as Ozunov reeled off a monotone of forbidden sins. The underlying message was writ large: we have you, boy. Now dance to this music. As for threats, we needn’t bother, right?
“What has become of comrade Antipin?” Khristo asked, one try for bravery.
Ozunov smiled like a snake. “Antipin was yesterday. Today is Ozunov.”
End of rebellion.
Yet as much as he struggled and sweated with the languages and the levantine webs of theory, there was one area in which he succeeded. He was, it turned out to his and everyone else’s amazement, gifted in the craft.
It began with the affair of the knitting needles. Five students were taken to a classroom and seated around a scarred wooden table. The room stank of carbolic soap. Beads of condensation ran slowly down the fogged-up window, colored a sickly white by the winter sky above the city.
Ozunov paced up and down and addressed the backs of their heads, his hands clasped behind him.
“On your desk are sealed envelopes. Do not touch them. Also a pair of knitting needles. Do not touch them, either. We presume you to know what they are, much as we presume that you have never used them.”
They laughed politely.
“Good, good. You are not old babas after all, though your degenerate love of prattle and gossip might lead one to think otherwise. I am relieved.”
He paced.
They waited.
“Voluta!”
The Pole jumped. “Yes, Major Ozunov.”
“Turn the letter over. To whom is it addressed?”
“To the British ambassador, Major Ozunov.”
“A keen analysis, Voluta. Do we all agree?”
They turned their letters over. All were the same, they agreed.
“What might the envelope contain? Stoianev!”
“A plot?”
“Kerenyi?”
“The reports of spies.”
“Oh yes? Semmers, you agree?”
“Uhh, it is possible, comrade Major.”
“And so, Voluta?”
“A denunciation.”
“Goldman. Your opinion on this matter.”
“Perhaps a false denunciation.”
“Always the Romanian, eh Goldman? You see the complexity, the winding and twisting of political matters, I give you that. But then, could it not be a false denunciation? By spies? In Stoianev’s plot? What about that? Or it could be the information, no shock to anyone around here, that Ozunov’s students are a blithering pack of donkeys’ behinds!” He finished with a shout.
He paced silently, his boots slapping the scrubbed wooden floor, and breathed with a fury. “The point is, comrades, you don’t know. Not such a difficult solution, is it? You don’t know because the letter is sealed. It could be birthday greetings from the Belgian consul. It could be a love note from the stable boy. It could be anything. Now, how shall we discover this elusive truth?”
Kerenyi: “Take the letter out and read it.”
“Brilliant! You shall now all do exactly that. When I give the word, you have ten minutes. Oh, by the way …” He stopped, leaned over Voluta and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tear the envelope. We don’t want the gentleman to know that someone is reading his mail. And here’s a hint, little as any of you deserve it, use the knitting needles.”
For the next ten minutes, an intense flurry of effort. Ozunov, of course, made it much worse by announcing “thirty seconds gone” from time to time as they worked. To their credit, they kept at it long after hopeless frustration set in. They pried and poked and stabbed and wiggled at the envelopes. Voluta tried to force up the point of the flap and ripped a groove through the paper. Goldman, after a few moments of intense concentration, staring fixedly at the problem, determined that the knitting needles were a false technology, offered with the intention of misleading them, and picked at the thing with his fingernails. Semmers, with shaking hands, wounded himself in the palm and left red blots on the address. By the end of the ten-minute period, Kerenyi, a tow-headed boy from the Hungarian town of Esztergom, had letter and envelope in shreds and one of the knitting needles bent in a vee.
Khristo Stoianev held the letter in one hand, the envelope, still sealed, in the other. The letter read: Meet at noon by Spassky Tower.
Ozunov could feel his heart beating. It was the throb of the prospector finding golden flecks in an ordinary rock. What was this? A magnificent discovery, to be wrapped carefully and delivered, in all humility, to his superiors? Or something else. Something bad. Something very, very bad indeed. He began to sweat. Closed his eyes, reviewed the last few weeks in his mind.
Khristo had discovered the small, unsealed slit at the side of the envelope where the glue line ended. He had squeezed the envelope so that the slit bulged slightly; peering inside, he had seen the fold of the letter within. Carefully, he ran one needle inside the fold, then inserted the second needle between the top of the fold and the upper edge of the envelope flap so that the needles sandwiched the fold of the letter between them. With great patience, he began to rotate both needles, and soon the letter became a tube of paper with the needles at its core. When he had the whole letter, he drew it toward him through the slit.
Ozunov dismissed the others.
Stood in front of his desk. Folded his hands and tapped his thumbs together rapidly. From years of school, Khristo knew this situation intimately and it puzzled him. What had he done wrong? Clearly he had done something, they didn’t push their glasses up on their foreheads and shut their eyes and pinch the bridges of their noses like that unless you had made a very great botch of it indeed.
“So, Stoianev, tell Uncle Vadim. We’ll talk man to man. Yes?”
Uncle Vadim? He said nothing.
“Where did you learn it?”
“Just here. I, ah, it revealed itself. The solution.”
“A lie.”
“No, comrade Major, I must disagree with you.”
“You think me stupid?”
“No sir.”
“Do not use that form.”
“Beg pardon, comrade Major.”
“Do you know, Stoianev, what is done in the Lubianka? In the cellars? What they do with the hoses? It takes no time at all. You will confess that your mother is a wolf, that your father is a dragon, that you keep the czar’s dick hidden in a Bible. You will confess that you fly through the air and consort with witches. You will tell them who taught you such tricks-when and where and what you had for dinner. You understand?”
“Yes, comrade Major. I learned it here, just now.”
“I give you one last chance: tell me the truth.”
“From the first moment, it seemed the obvious way.”
Ozunov took a deep breath and exhaled, dropped his gold-rimmed glasses and settled them on his nose. “Very well,” he said, “I must offer you my congratulations.” He thrust his hand forward and Khristo shook it once, formally. “Now we are both dead men,” he added stoically, and gestured for Khristo to leave the room.
The news traveled. Everyone wanted to be his friend. He found himself regaining some of what he had lost when abandoned by the admiring Antipin. Even Marike relented. Took his hand and led him down to the warm, dusty boiler room where, on a scratchy blanket, he received a Soviet Hero’s reward.
In the following weeks, Major Ozunov himself began to thaw. Khristo and his comrades chased each other through the streets of Moscow. Following each other and being followed. Eluding their pursuers, checking their backs in shop windows, running dead-drops in the parks, brushing hands in fast passes in Krasnaya Presnya Park. At the militia station near the school, the lieutenant said, “I see Ozunov is at it again.” Denunciations poured in from angry citizens. I saw them pass an envelope, comrade, just as bold as bra
ss in clear daylight. Foreigners, I’d say they were. And most brazen. They were broken up into teams, competed in discovering and penetrating each other’s operations. Semmers gave Goldman a bloody nose when he caught him stealing a master cipher. A baker reported that a group of hooligans had kidnapped a tall Polish fellow in his shop.
And Khristo won. And won again. It was Khristo’s Red Star team that accepted the prize copy of Lenin’s speeches. You could dodge through crowds, slither beneath a wagon, crouch down in a phalanx of cyclists, it did not seem to matter. You looked in the reflective shop window and there he was-just near enough, just far enough-doing something or other that made it seem he had lived on this street all his life. Twenty of them chased him into the Byelorussian railroad station on Tverskaya Street. Then, three hours later, trooped back to the dormitory empty-handed. To find Khristo waiting for them in the parlor, wearing a stiff-billed train conductor’s cap. They knew him now for what he was, the best among them. They had seen it before, wherever they came from: the best in the classroom, the best on the soccer field, and they acknowledged his preeminence.
For his part, he learned to wear the star and honor its responsibilities. He encouraged the slow learners, lent a secret hand to those arrayed against him in competitions, and dismissed his successes as pure luck. Major Ozunov, in the hearing of other students, called him Khristo Nicolaievich, which put a seal on his ascendancy. Inspired by all this attention, he even managed to learn a little French.
On the last day of December it snowed a blizzard and he was summoned to Ozunov’s private office. Since dawn, kopeck-size snowflakes had drifted down the windless air. Through the major’s leaded windows-his office had formerly been the master bedroom of the once grand house-Khristo watched the street whiten and fill.
Ozunov stuffed the bowl of a pipe with tobacco, then lit it carefully with a large wooden match. As the office filled with sweet thick smoke, the major produced a chessboard and pieces.
“Do you play, Khristo Nicolaievich?”
“Not really, comrade Major. In Vidin, there was no time to learn.”
“You know the moves, though. What each piece may do.”
“Of course I know that, comrade Major.”
“Good. Then let us try a game. What do you say?”
“I will do the best I can, comrade Major.”
“Mmm,” he said around the pipe stem, “that’s the proper spirit.”
He offered his closed fists: Khristo picked the left hand and played black.
He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it “the Russian game.” Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights-an officer class-sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival.
Khristo had virtually no inkling of strategy, but he resolved to be the best opponent he could. The object of the game, he knew, was not to slay the other king but to put the opponent in a position where he had no choice but to submit. He had overheard one of Vidin’s more daring wits describe checkmate as “all that Russian foot-kissing business.” Khristo’s notion of a chess tactic was to sneak a pawn down one side of the board-hoping for a distracted or mortally unobservant foe-and quick make it a queen. At heart, the strategy of checkers thrown in well over its head. Failing that, he liked to send his castles hurtling back and forth, up and down, in obvious but savage forays, hoping to shock a piece or two from his opponent. The knights he rarely used-they had a herky-jerky motion he distrusted: things shouldn’t go straight and then cat-corner.
Ozunov attacked down the left side of the board, giving up two pawns, but pinning Khristo’s castle down with a bishop. Khristo wasted two turns hip-hopping his queen around the pawn rank-stopping to take Ozunov’s apparently suicidal pawns-for he liked it to have an unobstructed field of fire. Ozunov reacted to this provocation with apparent caution, breaking off his bishop’s attack on the castle, drawing the piece back to safety. It was Khristo’s theory that a succession of entirely random moves might startle the opponent, give him pause, make him think you had some obscure trick up your sleeve. Ozunov pondered the board, smoke curling upward from his pipe, chin resting on folded hands, intent once again on his own attack. So intent that Khristo had a little flurry of victories, took a pawn and a bishop with his galloping castle, made Ozunov move to defend his king. He seemed, somehow, to have taken the initiative. Perhaps he really could play. He stared out the white window, hypnotized by the slow drift of the snowflakes, then forced his attention back to the game-he could not allow Ozunov to see that his mind wandered. Where was Marike? He’d not seen her at breakfast.
Suddenly, a tragedy. Ozunov’s remaining bishop came wheeling out of ambush and snapped up his queen. Damn! Khristo quickly checked his pawns to see which had snuck farthest down the board. No solace there. Finally, for want of anything better to do, he threatened Ozunov’s castle with a pawn. How on earth had Ozunov finagled his queen? His eyes wandered to the piece, lying on its side among the ranks of the dead by the edge of the board. Would he not have taken the bishop with his queen on the previous move if the path had been open? How had he missed it?
The game progressed, snow drifted in the street below, Khristo’s forces were slowly picked to pieces. He tried to concentrate, to see the distant implications of each possible move, but the suddenly captured queen obsessed him. From that blow he would not recover, but he wanted at least to see the reason of it. In time, he realized what Ozunov had done. At first he could not believe it, but finally had to accept the fact that Ozunov had brazenly cheated him. Why? He didn’t know. Even the strongest had a weakness somewhere-they’d taught him that themselves. Perhaps Ozunov could not bear to lose.
Toward the end of the game, as Ozunov chased his king mercilessly around the board-stopping only to pick off one of the few motley survivors-the Stoianev temper asserted itself. Khristo determined that he would not be fooled quite so easily and, just then, a distraction in the form of a telephone call came to his aid.
Soon enough the game was over, a last faithful knight eliminated, a few helpless pawns standing around like poor relations at a funeral. Ozunov reached over and laid Khristo’s king on its side.
“Check,” he said, “and mate, I believe. You agree?”
“Yes,” Khristo said.
“You dislike to lose, Khristo Nicolaievich?”
“Yes, comrade Major.”
“Then you must learn to play better.”
“I agree, comrade Major.”
“Losing your queen, that’s what finished you I believe.”
Khristo nodded agreement.
“A very simple stratagem. Plain as your nose, eh?”
Khristo was not sure how to answer. Ozunov smiled, as though to himself, and poked idly at the bowl of his pipe with a toothpick. “I knew an Englishman once, a few years after the Revolution, it was my job to know him. We spent many hours in conversation, it was a most pleasant assignment really. There was nothing we did not speak of, women, politics, religion. All those matters that men like to speculate about when they are at ease. From this man I learned a particular thing. Fair play, he called it. Not such a simple notion, perhaps, when you probe to find its heart. A kind of code, which each gentleman must honor individually in order for all to benefit. In time I came to understand that it was a good system for those who had more than they needed, for those who could afford to give something away. But I also realized that I had never known anybody like that. Nobody I ever knew could say, ‘Here, you take it, I do not deserve it. I do not need it so badly that I will cheat and lie to get it.’ Perhaps some day we may indulge ourselves in that fashion, we may have so much that we can afford to give some of it away, but not now. Can you understand this?”
Khristo looked hesitant. Ozunov laughed at his discomfort. “Yes, boy, I cheated y
ou. I moved a piece while you were daydreaming out the window, enchanted by our Russian snow. I acknowledge it!”
“But why, comrade Major? You could have won without that.”
“Yes, I could have. You do some things well, comrade student, but you play chess like a barbarian. I wanted merely to teach you something, that is my job now.”
“Teach me what, comrade Major?”
Ozunov sighed. “I am told Lenin once called it the Bolshevik Variation, simply another strategy, like the Sicilian Defense. It has two parts to it. The first is this: win at all cost. Do anything you have to do, anything, but win. There are no rules.”
Khristo hesitated. He had a response to this, but it was very bold and he was not sure of himself. At last, he took the leap.
“I have learned what you wanted to teach me, comrade Major,” he said, opening his hand to show Ozunov the white pawn he had stolen when the telephone rang.
“You’re a good student,” Ozunov said. “Now learn the second part of the Variation: make the opponent play your game. And the more he despises your methods, the more you must make him use them. The more he arms himself with virtue, the more you must make him fight in the dirt. Then you have him.”
He gestured with his pipe toward the white pawn lying on Khristo’s palm. “Keep that,” he said. “A student prize from Ozunov. You have won the copy of Vladimir Ilyich’s speeches, now you will have something to remind you, in times to come, how to turn them into prophecies.”
“Wake now, please.”
The hand jerked his shoulder. His body rose upright, by itself it seemed, and he suddenly found himself sitting. He struggled to get his eyes open. What time was it? His heart was beating like a drum at being torn from deep sleep.
“You are up? No falling back down in a heap?”
It was Irina Akhimova, one of the night guardians, an immense woman with tiny eyes and a voice like a ripsaw.