by Alan Furst
Yet Szara knew that he and Heshel were perhaps more similar than he wanted to admit. They were both citizens of a mythical country, a place not here and not there, where national borders expanded and contracted but changed nothing. A world where everyone was a Luftmensch of one kind or another. The Pale of Settlement, fifteen provinces in southwest Russia (until 1918, when Poland sprang back into national existence) ran from Kovno in the north, almost on the shores of the Baltic, to Odessa and Simferopol in the south, on the Black Sea; from Poltava in the east-historic Russia-to Czestchowa and Warsaw in the west-historic Poland. One had also to include Cracow, Lvov, Ternopol, and such places, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918. Add to this the towns of other off-and-on countries-Vilna in Lithuania and Jelgava in Latvia-throw in the fact that people thought of themselves as having regional affiliations, believing they lived in Bessarabia, Galicia (named for the Galicia in Spain from which the Jews were expelled in 1492), Kurland, or Volhynia, and what did you have?
You had a political landscape best understood by intelligence services and revolutionary cadres-fertile recruiting either way it went and often enough both and why not?
What can be so bad about a cover name or a nom de revolution if your own name never particularly meant anything? The Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century gave the Jews the right to call themselves whatever they liked. Most chose German names, thinking to endear themselves to their German-speaking neighbors. These names were often transliterated back into, for example, Polish. Thus some version of the German for sharer (and why that? nobody knew) became Szara, the Polish sz standing in for the German s, which was sounded sch. Eventually, with time and politics and migration, it changed again, this time to the Russian. And, when Szara was born, his mother wanted to emphasize some quietly cherished claim to a distant relation in France, so named him not the Polish Andrej or the Russian Andrei, but Andre.
A man invented. A man of the air. Just how would such a man’s allegiance be determined? In a land of, at best, shifting political loyalties often well leavened with fumes of Hasidic mysticism, a land where the name Poland was believed by many to be a version of the Hebrew expression polen, which meant Here ye shall remain! and was thus taken to be good news direct from heaven.
The czar’s Okhrana was recruiting in the Pale as early as 1878, seeking infiltrators-Jews did wander, turning up as peddlers, merchants, auction buyers, and what have you, just about anywhere- for their war against Turkey. Thus, when the operatives of the Okhrana and the Bolshevik faction went at each other, after 1903, there were often Jews on both sides: men of both worlds and none-always alien, therefore never suspected of being so.
They tended to show up somewhere with a business in one pocket. Szara’s father grew up in Austro-Hungarian Ternopol, where he learned the trade of watchmaker, eventually becoming nearly blind from close work in bad light. As a young man, seeking a better economic climate in which to raise his family, he moved to the town of Kishinev, where he survived the pogrom of 1903, then fled to the city of Odessa, just in time for the pogrom of 1905, which he did not survive. By then, all he could see were gray shadows and was perhaps briefly surprised at just how hard shadows punched and kicked.
His death left Szara and his mother, and an older brother and sister, to get along as best they could. Szara was, in 1905, eight years old. He learned to sew, after a fashion, as did his brother and sister, and they survived. Sewing was a Jewish tradition. It took patience, discipline, and a kind of self-hypnosis, and it provided money sufficient to eat once a day and to heat a house for some of the winter. Later, Szara learned to steal, then, soon after, to sell stolen goods, first in Odessa’s Moldavanka market, then on the docks where foreign ships berthed. Odessa was famous for its Jewish thieves-and its visiting sailors. Szara learned to sell stolen goods to sailors, who told him stories, and he grew to like stories more than almost anything else. By 1917, when he was twenty years old and had attended three years of university in Cracow, he was a confirmed writer of stories, one of many who came from Odessa-it had something to do with seaports: strange languages, exotic travelers, night bells in the harbor, waves pounding into foam on the rocks, and always distance, horizon, the line where sky met water, and just beyond your vision people were doing things you couldn’t imagine.
By the time he left Cracow he’d been a socialist, a radical socialist, a communist, a Bolshevik, and a revolutionary in all things- whatever one might become to oppose the czar, for that mattered above all else.
After Kishinev, where, as a six-year-old, he’d heard the local citizens beating their whip handles on the cobblestones, preparing their victims for a pogrom, after Odessa, where he’d found his father half buried in a mud street, a pig’s tail stuffed in his mouth- thus we deal with Jews too good to eat pork- what else?
For the pogroms were the czar’s gift to his peasants. There was little else he could give them, so, when they were pressed too hard by misery, when they could no longer bear their fate in the muddy villages and towns at the tattered edges of the empire, they were encouraged to seek out the Christ-killers and kill a few in return. Pogroms were announced by posters, the police paid the printing bills, and the money came from the Interior Ministry, which acted at the czar’s direction. A pogrom released tension and, in general, evened things up: a redistribution of wealth, a primitive exercise in population control.
Thus the Pale of Settlement produced a great number of Szaras. Intellectuals, they knew the capitals of Europe and spoke their languages, wrote fiercely and well, and had a great taste and talent for clandestine life. To survive as Jews in a hostile world they’d learned duplicity and disguise: not to show anger, for it made the Jew-baiters angry, even less to show joy, for it made the Jew-baiters even angrier. They concealed success, so they would not be seen to succeed, and learned soon enough how not to be seen at all: how to walk down a street, the wrong street, in the wrong part of town, in broad daylight-invisible. The czar was in much more trouble than he ever understood. And when his time came, the man in charge was one Yakov Yurovsky, a Jew from Tomsk, at the head of a Cheka squad. Yurovsky who, while an emigre in Berlin, had declared himself a Lutheran, though the czar was in no position to appreciate such ironies.
Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped to create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets-workers’ councils- ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szara and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years-until 1929, when Stalin finally took over-he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.
It could not last. Who were these people, these Poles and Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians, these people with little beards and eyeglasses who spoke French down their big noses and read books? asked Stalin. And all the little Stalins answered, We were wondering that very thing, only nobody wanted to say it out loud.
The steady rain beat down on Berlin; somewhere in the house the landlady’s radio played German opera, the curtains hung limp by the window and smelled of the dead air in a disused attic room. Szara put on his belted raincoat and walked through the wet streets until he found a telephone box. He called Dr. Julius Baumann and managed to get himself invited to dinner. Baumann sounded suspicious and distant, but Nezhenko’s telegram had been specific: the information was wanted by 25 November. There was no Soviet press bureau in Berlin, he’d have to file through the press office at the embassy, and 25 November was the next day. So he’d given Baumann a bit of a push-sometim
es finesse was a luxury.
He walked slowly back to the tall house and spent the afternoon with the Okhrana, DUBOK, the Caspian Oil Company, and thirty-year-old treffs in the back streets of Tbilisi, Baku, and Batum. They wanted him to be an intelligence officer and so he was. Fearless, heroic, jaw set with determination, he read reports for five hours in an anonymous room while the rain drummed down and he never once dozed off.
The Villa Baumann stood behind a high wall at the edge of the western suburbs, in a neighborhood where gardeners pruned the shrubbery to sheer walls and flat tabletops and architects dazzled their clients with turrets and gables and gingerbread that made mansions seem colossal dollhouses. A yank at the rope of a ship’s bell by the gate produced a servant, a stubby man with immense red hands and sloping shoulders who wore an emerald green velvet smoking jacket. Mumbling in a dialect Szara could barely understand, he led the way down a path that skirted the Villa Baumann and ended at a servant’s cottage at the rear of the property, then tramped off, leaving Szara to knock at the door.
“I take it Manfred showed you the way,” Baumann said dryly. “Of course this used to be his”-the cottage was small and plain, quite pleasant for a servant-“but the new regime has effected a more, ah, even-handed approach to domicile, who shall live where.”
Baumann was tall and spare, with thin, colorless lips and the face, ascetic, humorless, of a medieval prince or monastic scholar. His skin was white, as though wind or sun had never touched it. Perhaps fifty, he was hairless from forehead to crown, which drew attention to his eyes, cold and green, the eyes of a man who saw what others did not, yet did not choose to say what he saw. Whatever it was, however, faintly displeased him, that much he showed. To Szara, German Jew meant mostly German, a position of significant hauteur in the Central European scheme of things, a culture wherein precise courtesies, intellectual sophistication, and quiet wealth all blended to create a great distance from Russian Jews and, it was never exactly expressed, most Christians.
Yet Szara liked him. Even as the object of that jellyfish stare down a long, fine, princely nose-who are you? — even so.
They were four for dinner: Herr Doktor and Frau Baumann, a young woman introduced as Fraulein Haecht, and Szara. They ate in the kitchen-there was no dining room-at a rickety table covered by a dazzling white damask cloth embroidered with blue and silver thread. The porcelain service showed Indian princes and thick-lipped, gold-earringed princesses boating on a mountain lake, colored tomato red and glossy black with gold filigree on the rims. At one point, the tines of Szara’s fork scraped across the scene and Frau Baumann closed her eyes to shut out the sound. She was a busy little pudding of a woman. A princess with a dowry? Szara thought so.
They ate poached salmon fillets and a rice and mushroom mixture in a jellied ring. “My old shop still serves me,” Frau Baumann explained, the unspoken of course perfectly audible. “During the hours of closing, you understand, Herr Szara, at the door in the alley. But they still do it. And they do cook the most lovely things and I am enough the domestic to reheat them.”
“A small premium is entailed,” Baumann added. He had a deep, hollow voice that would have been appropriate for the delivery of sermons.
“Naturally,” Frau Baumann admitted, “but our cook …”
“A rare patriot,” said Baumann. “And a memorable exit. One would never have supposed that Hertha was capable of giving a speech.”
“We were so good to her,” said Frau Baumann.
Szara sensed the onset of an emotional flood and rushed to cut it off. “But you are doing so very well, I haven’t eaten like this …”
“You are not wrong,” said Baumann quietly. “There are bad moments, too many, and one misses friends. That more than anything. But we, my family, came to Germany over three hundred years ago, before there was even such a thing as Germany, and we have lived here, in good times and bad, ever since. We are German, is what it amounts to, and proud to be. That we proved in peace and war. So, these people can make life difficult for us, Jews and others also, but they cannot break our spirit.”
“Just so,” Szara said. Did they believe it? Perhaps Frau Doktor did. Had they ever seen a spirit broken? “Your decision to stay on is, if I may say it, courageous.”
Baumann laughed by blowing air through his nose, his mouth deformed by irony. “Actually, we haven’t the choice. You see before you the Gesellschaft Baumann, declared a strategically necessary enterprise.”
Szara’s interest showed. Baumann waved off dinnertime discussion of such matters. “You shall come and see us tomorrow. The grand tour.”
“Thank you,” Szara said. There went filing on time. “The editors at Pravda have asked for material that could become a story. Would it be wise for a Jew to have attention called to him in that way? In a Soviet publication? “
Baumann thought for a moment. “You are frank, Herr Szara, and it is appreciated. Perhaps you’ll allow me to postpone my answer until tomorrow.”
Why am I here? “Of course, I understand perfectly.”
Frau Baumann was breathless. “We must stay, you see, Herr Szara. And our position is difficult enough as it is. One hears frightful things, one sees things, on the street-”
Baumann cut his wife off. “Herr Szara has kindly consented to do as we wish.”
Szara realized why he liked Baumann-he was drawn to bravery.
“Surely, Herr Szara, a little more rice and mushroom ring.”
This from his left, Fraulein Haecht, obviously invited to balance the table. At first, in the little whirlpool of turmoil that surrounds the entry of a guest, her presence had floated by him; a handshake, a polite greeting. Obviously she was nobody to be interested in, a young woman with downcast eyes whose role it was to sit in the fourth chair and offer him rice and mushroom ring. Hair drawn back in a maiden’s bun, wearing a horrid sort of blue wool dress with long sleeves-somehow shapeless and stiff at once-with a tiny lace collar tight at the throat, she was the perennial niece or cousin, invisible.
But now he saw that she had eyes, large and soft and brown, liquid, and intense. He knew her inquiring look to be a device, worked out, practiced at length in front of a dressing table mirror and meant to be the single instant of the evening she would claim for herself.
Said Frau Baumann: “Oh yes, please do.”
He reached for the platter, held delicately in a small hand with bitten nails, set it beside him, and served himself food he didn’t want. When he looked up she was gone, back into cover. It was the sort of skin, olive toned, that didn’t exactly color, yet he thought he saw a shadow darken above the lace collar.
“… just the other day … the British newspapers … simply cannot continue … friends in Holland.” Frau Baumann was well launched into an emotional appraisal of the German political situation. Meanwhile, Szara thought, How old are you? Twenty-five? He couldn’t remember her name.
“Mmm!” he said, nodding vigorously at his hostess. How true that was.
“And one does hear such excellent news of Russia, of how it is being built by the workers. War would be such a waste.”
“Mm.” He smiled with enthusiasm. “The workers …”
Finished eating, the Fraulein folded her little hands in her lap and stared at her plate.
“It cannot be permitted to happen, not again,” said the Herr Doktor. “I believe that support for the present regime in the senior civil service and the army is not at all firm, that man does not necessarily speak for all of Germany, yet the European press seems blind to the possibility that-”
“And now,” the Frau Doktor cried out and clapped her hands, “there is creme Bavarienne!”
The girl stood up quickly and assisted in clearing the table and making coffee while the Herr Doktor rumbled on. The blue dress descended to midcalf; white ribbed stockings rose to meet it. Szara could see her lace-up shoes had gotten wet in the evening rain.
“The situation in Austria is also difficult, very complex. If not handled
with delicacy, there could be instability …”
By a cupboard in the far corner of the kitchen, Frau Baumann laughed theatrically to cover embarrassment. “Why no, my dearest Marta, the willow pattern for our guest!”
Marta.
“… there must be rapprochement and there must be peace. We are neighbors, all of us here, there is no denying it. The Poles, the Czechs, the Serbs, they wish only peace. Can the Western democracies be blind to this? Yet they give in at every opportunity.” He shook his head in sorrow. “Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936, and the French sat behind their Maginot Line and did nothing. Why? We cannot understand it. A single, determined advance by a French company of infantry-that’s all it would have taken. Yet it didn’t happen. I believe-no, frankly, I know-that our generals were astounded. Hitler told them how it would be, and then it was as he said, and then suddenly they began to believe in miracles.”
“And now this terrible politics must be put aside, Herr Szara,” said Frau Baumann, “for it is time to be naughty.” The Bavarian cream, a velvety mocha pond quivering in a soup plate, appeared before him.
As the evening wore on, with cognac served in the cramped parlor, Dr. Julius Baumann became reflective and nostalgic. Recalled his student days at Tubingen, where the Jewish student societies had taken enthusiastically to beer drinking and fencing, in the fashion of the times. “I became a fine swordsman. Can you imagine such a thing, Herr Szara? But we were obsessed with honor, and so we practiced until we could barely stand up, but at least one could then answer an insult by challenging the offender to a match, as all the other students did. I was tall, so our president-he is now in Argentina, living God only knows how-prevailed on me to take up the saber. This I declined. I most certainly did not want one of these!” He drew the traditional saber scar down his cheek. “No, I wore the padded vest and the full mask-not the one that bares the cheek-and practiced the art of the epee. Lunge! Guard. Lunge! Guard. One winter’s day I scored two touches on the mighty Kiko Bettendorf himself, who went to the Olympic games the following year! Ach, those were wonderful days.”