by Alan Furst
They met in Agayan’s kitchen, large, dilapidated, and very warm, on 2i November at eleven-thirty in the morning. Agayan, a short, dark-skinned man with a thick head of curly gray hair and an unruly mustache, wore an old cardigan sweater in keeping with the air of informality. Ismailov, a Russified Turk, and Dzakhalev, an Ossete-the Farsi-speaking tribe of the north Caucasus from whom Stalin’s mother was said to be descended-were red-eyed and a little tender from Saturday-night excesses. Terounian, from the city of Yerevan in Armenia, offered a small burlap sack of ripe pears brought to Moscow by his cousin, a locomotive engineer. These were laid out on the table by Stasia, Agayan’s young Russian wife, along with bowls of salted and sugared almonds, pine nuts, and a plate of Smyrna raisins. Agayan’s wife also served an endless succession of tiny cups of Turkish coffee, sekerli, the sweetest variety, throughout the meeting. Dershani, a Georgian, the most important among equals, was also the last to arrive. Such traditions were important to the khvost and they observed them scrupulously.
It was altogether a traditional sort of gathering, as though in a coffeehouse in Baku or Tashkent. They sat in their shirtsleeves and smoked, ate, and drank their coffees and took turns to speak-in Russian, their only common language-with respect for one another and with a sense of ceremony. What was said mattered, that was understood, they would have to stand by it.
Agayan, squinting in the rising smoke of a cigarette held in the center of his lips, spoke solemnly of comrades disappeared in the purges. The Ukrainian and Polish yidzh, he admitted, were getting much the worst of it, but many Georgians and Armenians and their allies from all over (some yidzh of their own, for that matter) had also vanished into the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. Agayan sighed mournfully when he finished his report, all the eulogy many of them would ever have.
“One can only wonder …” Dzakhalev said.
Agayan’s shrug was eloquent. “It’s what he wants. As for me, I was not asked.” The nameless he in these conversations was always Stalin.
“Still,” Dzakhalev said, “Yassim Ferimovich was a superb officer.”
“And loyal,” Terounian added. At thirty-five, he was by far the youngest man in the room.
Agayan lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. “Nonetheless,” he said.
“You have heard what he said to Yezhov, in the matter of interrogation? ‘Beat and beat and beat.’ ” Terounian paused to let the felicity of that phrasing hang in the air, to make sure everyone understood he honored it. “Thus anyone will admit anything, will surely name his own mother.”
“Yours too,” Ismailov said.
Dershani raised his right hand a few inches off the table; the gesture meant enough and stopped Ismailov dead in his tracks. Dershani had the face of a hawk-sharp beak, glittering, lifeless eyes-thin lips, high forehead, hair that had gone gray when he was young-some said in a single night when he was sentenced to die. But he’d lived. Changed. Into something not quite a man. A specialist at obtaining confessions, a man whose hand was rumored to have “actually held the pliers.” Ismailov’s tone of voice was clearly not to his taste.
“His thinking is very broad,” Dershani said. “We are not meant to understand it. We are not meant to comment upon it.” He paused for coffee, to permit the atmosphere in the room to rise to his level, then took a few pine nuts. “These are delicious,” he said. “If you look at our history-the history of our service, I mean-his hand may be seen to have grasped the tiller just at the crucial moment. We began with Dzerzhinsky, a Pole of aristocratic background from Vilna. Catholic by birth, he shows, early in life, a great affection for Jews. He comes to speak perfect Yiddish, his first lover is one Julia Goldman, the sister of his best friend. She dies of tuberculosis, in Switzerland, where he had placed her in a sanatorium, and his sorrow is soothed by a love affair with a comrade called Sabina Feinstein. Eventually he marries a Polish Jewess, from the Warsaw intelligentsia, named Sophie Mushkat. His deputy, the man he depends on, is Unshlikht, also a Polish Jew, also an intellectual, from Mlawa.
“When Dzerzhinsky dies, his other deputy, Menzhinsky, takes over. No Jew, Menzhinsky, but an artiste. A man who speaks Chinese, Persian, Japanese, in all twelve languages and who, while doing our work in Paris, is a poet one day, a painter the next, and lies around in silk pajamas, smoking a perfumed cigarette in an ivory holder, the leader of a, a salon. Lenin dies. This young state, troubled, gravely threatened, thrusts itself at our leader, and he agrees to take its burdens upon his shoulders. He seeks only to continue the work of Lenin but, in 1934, the Trotskyite center begins to gather power. Something must be done. In Lenin’s tradition he turns to Yagoda, a Polish Jew from Lodz, a poisoner, who eliminates the writer Gorky through seemingly natural means. But he is too clever, keeps his own counsel, and by 1936 he is no longer the right sort of person for the job. Now what is the answer? Perhaps the dwarf, Yezhov, called familiarly ‘the blackberry,’ which his name suggests. But this one is no better than the other-not a Jew this time but a madman, truly, and malicious, like a child of the slum who soaks cats’ tails in paraffin and sets them alight.”
Dershani stopped dead, tapping four fingers on the kitchen table. A glance at Agayan’s wife, standing at the stove in the far part of the kitchen, brought her swiftly with a fresh little cup of coffee.
“Tell us, Efim Aleksandrovich, what will happen next? ” Ismailov thus declared himself suitably chastened, symbolically sought Dershani’s pardon for his momentary flippancy.
Dershani closed his eyes politely as he drank off his coffee, smacked his lips politely in appreciation. “Stasia Marievna, you are a jewel,” he said. She nodded silently to acknowledge the compliment.
“It evolves, it evolves,” Dershani said. “It is beautiful history, after all, and guided now by genius. But he must move at the proper speed, certain matters must be allowed to play themselves out. And, I tell you in confidence, there are many considerations that may elude our vision. These yidzh from Poland cannot just be swept away wholesale. Such cleaning, no matter how appropriate, would draw unwelcome attention, might alienate the Jews of America, for instance, who are great idealists and do our special work in their country. Thus Russians and Ukrainians, yes, and even Georgians and Armenians must leave the stage along with the others. This is necessity, historical necessity, a stratagem worthy of Lenin.”
“Then tell us, Efim Aleksandrovich,” said Agayan, not unconsciously echoing Ismailov’s phrasing, “if today we are not in fact privileged to hear the views of our comrade in Tbilisi? ” He referred to Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, presently first secretary of the Georgian Communist party and previously head of the Georgian NKVD. The modest bite in the question suggested that Dershani should perhaps not call his wife a jewel in front of his colleagues.
Dershani took only the smallest step backward. “Lavrenty Pavlovich might not disagree with the drift of what I am saying. We both believe, I can say, that we will win this battle-though there are actions which must be taken if we intend to do so. Most important, however, to perceive his, his, wishes and to act upon them with all possible measures.”
This opened a door. Agayan tapped his cup on the saucer and his wife brought him a fresh coffee. Dershani had cited all possible measures, and form now decreed that Agayan seek to discover what they were. Once described, they had to be undertaken.
Dershani glanced at his watch. Agayan leapt at the possibility. “Please, Efim Aleksandrovich, do not permit us to detain you if duty calls elsewhere.”
“No, no,” Dershani said dismissively, “I’m simply wondering what’s become of Grigory Petrovich-he was specifically to join us this morning.”
“You refer to Khelidze?” Ismailov asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll call his apartment,” Agayan said, rising quickly, delighted with the interruption. “His wife will know where he’s gotten to.”
Dzakhalev snickered briefly. “Not likely,” he said.
Monday morning, striding through a fine, wet mist tha
t made the streets of Prague even grayer than usual, Szara went early to the SovPressBuro, which handled all Soviet dispatches, and filed the story he’d written on Saturday night. It had taken him some twenty-eight tries to get a title that settled properly on the piece. His initial instinct led down a path marked “Prague, City in — .” He tried “Peril,” “Sorrow,” “Waiting,” “Despair,” and, at last, in fury that it wouldn’t work, “Czechoslovakia.”
At the end of patience the rather literal “Silence in Prague” took the prize, a title, on reflection, that turned out to be a message from the deep interior where all the work really went on. For those who read with both eyes, the melodramatic heading would imply a subtle alteration of preposition, so that the sharper and truer message would concern silence about Prague-not the anguished silence of a city under political siege but the cowardly silence of European statesmen, a silence filled with diplomatic bluster that nobody took seriously, a silence that could be broken only by the sputter of tank ignitions as armored columns moved to reposition themselves on the borders of Germany.
There was, in fact, another zone of silence on the subject of Prague, to the east of Czechoslovakia, where Stalin’s Franco-Russian alliance specified that the USSR would come to the aid of the Czechs if Hitler attacked them, but only after the French did. Thus the USSR had positioned itself to hide behind the promises of a regime in Paris that compromised on every issue and staggered from scandal to catastrophe and back again. Yes, Stalin’s Red Army was in bloody disarray from the purges of June ‘37, but it was sorrowful, Szara thought, that the Czechs would get the bill for that.
And there was, unknown to Szara, some further silence to come.
The dispatch clerk at the bureau near the Jiraskuv bridge, a stern, full-breasted matron with mounds of pinned-up gray hair, read “Silence in Prague” sitting in front of her typewriter. “Yes, comrade Szara,” she breathed, “you have told the truth here, this is just the way this city feels.” He accepted the compliment, and more than a little adoration in her eyes, with a deflective mumble. It wouldn’t do to let her know just how much such praise meant to him. He saw the story off, then wandered along the streets that ran next to the Vltava and watched the barges moving slowly up the steel-colored November river.
Szara returned to the press bureau on Tuesday morning, meaning to wire Moscow his intention to travel up to Paris. There was always a story to be found in Paris, and he badly needed to breathe the unhealthy, healing air of that city. What he got instead, as he came through the door, was a pitying stare from the maternal transmission clerk. “A message for the comrade,” she said, shaking her head in sympathy. She handed him a telegram, in from Moscow an hour earlier:
CANNOT ACCEPT SILENCE/PRAGUE IN PRESENT FORM STOP BY 25 NOVEMBER DEVELOP INFORMATION FOR PROFILE OF DR JULIUS BAUMANN, SALZBRUNNER 8, BERLIN, SUCCESSFUL INDUSTRIALIST STOP SUBMIT ALL MATERIAL DIRECTLY TO SOVPRESS SUPERVISOR BERLIN STOP SIGNED NEZHENKO.
He saw that the clerk was waiting for him to explode but he shut his emotions down at once. He was, he told himself, a big boy, and shifts of party line were nothing new. His success as a correspondent, and the considerable freedom he enjoyed, were based equally on ability and a sensitivity to what could and could not be written at any given moment. He was annoyed with himself for getting it wrong, but something was brewing in Moscow, and it was not the moment for indignation, it was the moment for understanding that political developments excluded stories on Prague. For the clerk’s benefit, he nodded in acceptance: Soviet journalism worker accepts criticism and forges ahead to build socialism. Yes, there was an overflowing wastebasket at his feet, and yes, he yearned to give it a mighty kick that would send it skittering into the wall, but no, he could not do it. “Then it’s to be Berlin,” he said calmly. He folded the telegram and slid it into the pocket of his jacket, said good-bye to the clerk, smiled brightly, and left, closing the door behind him so softly it made not a sound.
That night he was early for the Berlin express and decided to have a sandwich and coffee at the railway station buffet. He noticed a group of men gathered around a radio in one corner of the room and wandered over to see what was so interesting. It was, as he’d supposed, a political speech, but not in Czech, in German. Szara recognized the voice immediately-Adolf Hitler was born to speak on the radio. He was a brilliant orator to begin with, and somehow the dynamics of wireless transmission-static, the light hiss of silence-added power to his voice. Hitler teased his audience, tiptoeing up to a dramatic point, then hammering it home. The audience, tens of thousands by the sound of it, cheered itself hoarse, swept by political ecstasy, ready to die then and there for German honor.
Szara stood at the outer fringe of the group and listened without expression or reaction, pointedly ignoring an unpleasant glance of warning from one of the Czechs-Slovakians? Sudeten Germans? — gathered around the radio. The voice, working toward a conclusion, was level and sensible to begin with:
Then the final aim of our whole party is quite clear for all of us. Always I am concerned only that I do not take any step from which I will have to retreat, and not to take any step that will harm us.
I tell you that I always go to the outermost limits of risk, but never beyond. For this you need to have a nose [laughter; Szara could imagine the gesture], a nose to smell out, more or less, “What can I still do?” Also, in a struggle against an enemy, I do not summon an enemy backed by a fighting force, I do not say “Fight!” because I want to fight. Instead I say “I will destroy you” [a swell of voices here, but Hitler spoke through it]. And now, Wisdom, help me. Help me to maneuver you into a corner where you cannot fight back. And then you get the blow, right in the heart. That’s it!
The crowd roared in triumph and Szara felt his blood chill. As he turned to walk away there was a blur of motion to his right, the side of his head exploded, then he found himself sprawled on the filthy tiles of the restaurant floor. Looking up, he saw a man with a twisted mouth, his upper body coiled like a spring, his right fist drawn back over his left shoulder in order to hit a second time. The man spoke German. “Jew shit,” he said.
Szara started to get up, but the man took a step toward him so he stayed where he was, on hands and knees. He looked around the restaurant; people were eating soup, blowing on their spoons before sipping it up. On the radio, a commentator’s voice sounded measured and serious. The other men around the radio did not look at him, only the man with his fist drawn back-young, ordinary, broad, in a cheap suit and a loud tie. Szara’s position seemed to mollify the man, who pulled a chair toward him and sat back down with his friends. He placed a metal salt shaker next to the pepper.
Slowly, Szara climbed to his feet. His ear was on fire, it throbbed and buzzed and he could hear nothing on that side. His vision was a little fuzzy and he blinked to clear it. As he walked away he realized that there were tears in his eyes-physical, physical, he told himself-but he was in many kinds of pain and he couldn’t sort it out at all.
The Prague-Berlin night express left the central station at 9:03 P.M., due in at Berlin’s Bahnhof am Zoo station at 11:51, stopping only at the Aussig border control post on the east bank of the Elba. Szara now traveled with two bags, his own and the leather satchel. The train was cold and crowded and smoky. Szara shared a compartment with two middle-age women he took to be sisters and two teenage boys whose windburned faces and khaki shorts suggested they’d been on a weekend mountain-climbing holiday in Czechoslovakia and had stayed on until Tuesday before returning to school in Germany.
Szara had some anxiety about the German customs inspection, but the officer’s revolver now lay at the bottom of the Vltava and he doubted that a file written in Russian-something it would be normal for him to have-would cause any difficulty. Border inspections concentrated on guns, explosives, large amounts of currency, and seditious literature-the revolutionary toolkit. Beyond that, the inspectors were not very interested. He was taking, perhaps, a small chance, that a Gestapo officer would be in att
endance (not unlikely) and that he would know enough Russian to recognize what he was looking at (very unlikely). In fact, Szara realized he didn’t have much of a choice: the file was “his,” but not his to dispose of. Sooner or later, they would want to know what had become of it.
As the train wound through the pine forests of northern Czechoslovakia, Szara’s hand rose continually to his ear, slightly red and swollen and warm to the touch. He’d been hit, apparently, with the end of a metal salt shaker enclosed in a fist. As for other damage- heart, spirit, dignity; it had a lot of names-he finally managed to stand off from it and bring himself under control. No, he told himself again and again, you shouldn’t have fought back. The men listening to the radio would’ve done far worse.
The border control at Aussig was uneventful. The train slowly gained speed, ran briefly beside the Elba, shallow and still in the late autumn, and soon after passed the brown brick porcelain factories of Dresden, red shadows from the heating kilns flickering on the train windows. The track descended gradually from the high plain of Czechoslovakia to sea-level Germany, to flat fields and small, orderly towns, a stationmaster with a lantern standing on the platform at every village.
The train slowed to a crawl-Szara glanced at his watch, it was a few minutes after ten-then stopped with a loud hiss of decompression. The passengers in his compartment stirred about irritably, said “Wuss?” and peered out the windows, but there was nothing to see, only farm fields edged by woodland. Presently, a conductor appeared at the door to the compartment. An old gentleman with a hat a size too large for him, he licked his lips nervously and said, “Herr Szara?” His eye roamed among the passengers, but there was really only one possible candidate.