by Alan Furst
Then, almost the next thing he knew, he was driving. Through a great labyrinth of roads and paths that could have led anywhere or nowhere. Sometimes, with tears in his eyes, he drove into a blur, but never lifted his foot from the gas pedal. He drove, fiercely, angrily, toward the wind. Took any road on which the churning skies hurried toward him, their speed heightened by the rush of the car in the opposite direction. He passed, and barely noticed, an empty guard tower, barbed wire strung away in both directions, a wire gate hanging crazily on one hinge as though brushed aside by a giant. At last he saw an old man by the side of the road, poking listlessly at a garden path with a primitive hoe. Szara stomped on the brake. “Where in God’s name am I?” he called out.
“Vasi” said the man.
Szara tried again and got the same answer. They stared at each other, deadlocked, Szara angry, the old man more confused than frightened and saying finally, with politely controlled irritation, “What is the matter with you, sir, that you shout so? ” The man was speaking German, Szara finally realized, the common second language in that country. He let out a single cry of absurd laughter, slammed the shift lever into gear, and roared on into Lithuania.
He arrived in Kovno a fugitive. And stayed to become a refugee. Two cities anchored the northern and southern extremes of the Pale of Settlement, Kovno and Odessa. Szara, who had grown up in the latter, soon came to understand the former. These were border cities, Odessa on the Black Sea across from Istanbul, Kovno at the conjunction of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, and border cities lived by a particular set of instincts: they knew, for instance, when war was coming, because when there was war they were not spared. They knew the people who showed up before the wars. Immigrants, refugees, whatever you called them, they had a way of arriving just ahead of the armies and were taken to be an omen of difficult times, as migrating birds portend winter.
But Kovno’s long and complicated history had marked its citizens with the very characteristics that enabled them to survive it. Actually, by the time Szara arrived in the city known in his childhood as Kovno, it was called by the Lithuanian name Kaunas. Its nearby neighbor, however, remained Wilno, since it had been declared Polish territory, rather than Vilna, the Russian name before 1917. The Lithuanians themselves preferred Vilnius, but at that particular moment this alternative was running a poor third.
The people of Kovno, now Kaunas, were obviously multilingual. Szara had spoken German, Polish, and Yiddish in the city before he ever slept there. They were also virtually immune to politics, not strange for a city that has known Teutonic Knights and Bolshevik lawyers and everything in between. And they were, in their own quiet way, deeply obstinate. In all things but particularly in matters of nationality. The Lithuanians knew they were home, the Poles knew what they stood on was Polish soil no matter what anybody said, the Jews had been there for hundreds of years, faring about as well as they did anywhere, while the better part of the German population looked west, with longing hearts and the occasional song, to the Fatherland.
Nonetheless, obstinate though the citizens of Kovno might have been, it seemed, in the fall of 1939, that quite a considerable number of them were intent on being somewhere else.
Szara rented a third of a room in a boardinghouse, actually a boarding apartment, at the top of seven flights of stairs, sharing with two Polish Jews, cameramen in the Polish film industry who’d fled Warsaw by riding cross country on a motorcycle. One of the men worked nights as a sweeper at the railroad station, and Szara had his bed until he arrived home at six-thirty in the morning. That got Szara up early. After breakfast he haunted the steamship offices, willing to leave from any of the Baltic ports-Liepaja, Riga, Tallinn-but there were simply too many people with the same idea. Ships and ferries to Denmark-his first choice-in fact to anywhere on earth, were booked well into 1940. Cabins, deck space, every available inch. Undaunted, he took a train up to Liepaja and tried to bribe his way onto a Norwegian timber freighter, but only a precipitate exit from a waterfront cafe saved him from arrest. And the incident was witnessed-there were two vaguely familiar faces at the same cafe, seen perhaps at the steamship offices. No matter where he went or what he tried it was the same story.
Even at the thieves’ market, where the Pobeda caused low whistles of appreciation but very little financial interest. Sublime realists, Kovno’s thieves-where could one drive? South was occupied Poland, north the Baltic, east the USSR. To the west, the port of Memel had been snaffled up by the Reich in March, Konigsberg was German, now Danzig as well. Szara took what was offered for the Pobeda and fled. Trust the NKVD, he thought, to have eyes and ears at the Kovno thieves’ market.
Attempts at currency conversion got him precisely nowhere. He couldn’t sell his zlotys; German marks were being introduced in Poland and nobody was going there anyhow. The roubles weren’t even supposed to be outside the USSR-those he burned. The French francs, by far the greatest part of his little treasury, would have moved very briskly on the curbside foreign exchange markets, but he refused to part with them; they could be used anywhere and everybody else wanted them for the same reason he did.
The first few days in Kovno Szara was extremely cautious; he knew the Soviet intelligence apparat in Lithuania to be well established and aggressive. But, in time, he abandoned the principles of clandestine practice and became one more nameless soul whose principal occupation was waiting. He sat in the parks and watched the chess games with all the other refugees as the leaves turned gold in the slow onset of autumn. He frequented the cheapest cafes, dawdled endlessly over coffees, and soon enough people began to nod good morning: he was part of their day, always at the table in the corner.
He made one friend, an unlikely one, a gentleman known as Mr. Wiggins, who was to be found at the Thomas Cook steamship and travel office. Mr. Wiggins came from the pages of Kipling; he had a waxed mustache, parted his hair in the middle, and wore an old-fashioned collar, formal, uncomfortable, and reassuring. He was, in his way, a terribly decent man who served the Thomas Cook company with conviction and chose to see, in the refugee flood that swept through his office from dawn to dusk, not the flotsam of Europe but a stream of clients. Szara seemed to be one of his favorites. “I am so sorry,” he’d say, very real regret in his voice. “No cancellations today. But you will try tomorrow, I hope. One can’t ever tell. People do change their minds, that’s one thing I have learned in this business.”
Mr. Wiggins, and everyone else, knew that war was coming to Lithuania-or, if not war, at least occupation. The country had been freed of Russian rule in 1918-of Lenin’s dictum “Two steps forward and one step back,” this had been a step back-and had gotten rather to enjoy being a free nation. But its days were numbered and nothing could be done about it. Szara, as always encountering familiar faces, bought the local and foreign newspapers early in the morning and took them back to his lair, in the common kitchen of the apartment, for intensive study, sharing the bad news with his fellow boarders as they drank thin, warmed-up coffee and tried not to say anything compromising.
The future became clearer as the days passed: a great shifting of population was to take place in Estonia and Latvia and simultaneously in Germany. Slavs east, Germans west, it was just about that simple. The Germans, more than a hundred thousand of them, were to be taken aboard Baltic passenger steamers and shipped back to Germany, whence their great-great-grandfathers had migrated hundreds of years earlier. Meanwhile, various Slavic nationalities resident in Germany were headed east to join their long-lost brothers in the Soviet Union. This shuffling of populations was intended to reestablish the racial purity of Germany and to relieve the pressure on German settlers in Eastern Europe. They suffered horribly, according to Goebbels, because they retained their language and customs and dress in the midst of alien cultures and nobody liked them, being principally envious of their success. One could call them blond Jews, Szara thought.
But the fact of the migration hung over the breakfast table like a pall: if the Germans were l
eaving the Baltic states, who was coming?
There was only one candidate nation, and it wasn’t France. To Szara, schooled in a certain way of thinking since 1937, it had even a deeper resonance: if the division of Poland was one of the secret protocols in the Hitler/Stalin pact, what were the others? “Terribly sorry,” said Mr. Wiggins. “There simply isn’t a thing.”
Like all refugees, Szara had too much time to think. He sat on a park bench and smoked a cigarette while the leaves drifted down. He had supposed, in escaping from Poland, that either death or glory awaited him, and so he’d taken his chances. With Maltsaev murdered he really had nothing to lose. But he had never for a moment imagined it might end up as a penurious life spent in dim cafes and shabby apartments, waiting for the Red Army to reach the gates of the city. He thought of trying to put a call through to de Montfried, to ask for help, but what kind of help could he offer? Money? More money that wouldn’t buy what Szara needed? Some of the prosperous Jews in Kovno were spending literally fortunes to buy their way out before the Russians arrived, and there were stories going around that some of them wound up losing everything, forbidden to board steamers by cold-eyed pursers with armed seamen at their side. Other rumors-and Szara knew at least one of them to be true-told of desperate refugees putting to sea in row-boats, sometimes guided by self-proclaimed smugglers, never to be seen again. Drowned? Murdered? Who knew. But the confirming postal card never arrived in Kovno and friends and accomplices could draw only one conclusion from that.
In the end, Szara realized that the trap opened in only one direction and he determined to try it.
“From Hamburg? Copenhagen from Hamburg, you say?” Mr. Wiggins, for just an instant, permitted himself to be startled. Then he cleared his throat, once again the traveler’s perfect servant. “No trouble at all, I’d think. Plenty of room. First-class cabin, if you like. Shall I book?”
It should have worked.
There were, of course, improvisations, as there had to be, but he managed those well enough and, in the end, it wasn’t his fault that it didn’t work. Fortunes of war, one might say.
He began with the hospitals. Wiggins helped him-the wealthy members of the German community went here, those of lesser means went there. Szara went there. A sad, brown brick structure, according to the name a Lutheran institution, in an innocuous neighborhood away from the center of the city. In a day or two of watching he’d determined how the hospital worked. In need of coffee or something stronger, the doctors, in accordance with their standing, patronized the Vienna, a dignified restaurant and pastry shop. The orderlies, janitors, clerks, and the occasional nurse used a nearby rathskeller for the same purposes. Szara chose the rathskeller. The hospital’s day shift ended at four in the afternoon, so the productive time at the rathskeller ran for an hour or two after that. He spent three days there during the busy hours, just watching, and he spotted the loners. On day four he picked his man: sulky, homely, no longer young, with large ears and slicked-back hair, always one of the last to leave, not in a hurry to go home to a family. Szara bought him a beer and struck up a conversation. The man was a native Lithuanian, but he could speak German. Szara found out quickly why he drank alone: there was something a little evil about this man, something he covered up by use of a sneering, suggestive tone that implied there was something a little evil about everybody. Asked just what it was that he did, Szara admitted he was a dealer in paper. He bought and sold paper, he said, adding a sly glance to show the man what a smart fellow he thought he was.
The orderly, as he turned out to be, understood immediately. He knew about such matters. He even winked. This one, Szara guessed, had seen the inside of a jail, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for something very unpleasant.
And what kind of paper was the gentleman buying these days?
German paper.
Why?
Who could say. A client wanted German paper. Not from Germany, mind you, and not from Lithuania. Paper from Poland or Hungary would do. Yugoslavia was even better.
The orderly knew just the man. Old Kringen.
Szara ordered another round, the best they had, and a discussion of money ensued. A bit of bargaining. Szara pretended to be shocked, leaned on the price, didn’t gain an inch, looked grumpy, and gave in. Would old Kringen, he wanted to know, get much older?
No. He was finished, but he was taking his time about it, didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.
Szara could understand, but his client couldn’t afford any, ah, embarrassment.
The orderly snickered, a horrible sound. Old Kringen wasn’t going anywhere. And lying where he was he didn’t need his passport, which was kept in the hospital records office. The orderly had a friend, however, and the friend would see him right. It was going to cost a little more, though.
Szara gave in on the price a second time.
And a third, visiting the rathskeller two days later. But he had what he needed. Old Kringen was a Siebenburger, from the Siebenburgen-Seven Hills-district of Romania, an area long colonized by German settlers. Szara had no idea why he’d come to Kovno, perhaps to take advantage of the emigration offer in neighboring Latvia, perhaps for other reasons. He was much older than Szara, from his photo a grumpy, hard-headed fellow, his occupation listed as swine breeder. Szara bought what he needed and, in search of privacy, found a hotel room in the tenement district that could be rented by the hour. He eradicated the birth date with lemon juice, wrote in an appropriate year for himself, smeared the page with fine dust to coat the damage to the paper, and changed the photograph, signing something illegible across the corner. Then he held it up to the light.
The new Kringen.
He had disposed of the Maltsaev papers while still in Poland; now it was the turn of the Szara papers. The walls of the tiny room were thin, and various groans and shouts to either side of him indicated that Friday night was in Kovno much as it was everywhere else. There was a woman-he imagined her as an immensely fat woman-with an enormous laugh on the other side of the wall. Something went thud and she shrieked with mirth, making whooping noises and pausing, he guessed, only to wipe her eyes. To such accompaniment, Andre Szara died. He sat on a straw mattress with a soiled sheet spread over it, his only light a candle, and scratched at whatever was biting his ankle. He’d borrowed a coffee cup from his afternoon cafe and used it as a fireplace, ripping a page at a time from his passport, setting the corner aflame, and watching the entry and exit stamps disappear as the paper curled and blackened. The red cover resisted-he had to tear it into strips and light match after match-but finally it too was dropped, its flame blue and yellow, into the cup of ashes. Farewell. He wondered at such soreness of heart, but there was no denying what he felt. It was as though Andre Szara, his raincoat and smile and a clever thing to say, had ceased to exist. Troublesome bastard just the same, Szara thought, stirred the ashes with his finger and poured them out the window into a courtyard full of cats.
A small canal ran through that part of Kovno. The NKVD badge sank like a stone. So did the Steyr.
The dock in Riga was packed with Germans-their baggage, their clocks, their dogs, and a band to play while it all marched up the gangplank. German newsreel cameramen were much in evidence, Szara kept his face averted. By a curious tribal magic he could not divine, the crowds had organized themselves into castes-the prominent and the wealthy in front, pipe-smoking farmers next, and workmen and other assorted types to the rear. Everybody seemed content with the arrangement.
His papers had received only the most cursory check-who in God’s name would want to sneak under the tent of this circus? In fact, though it did not occur to Szara, the NKVD took full advantage of the Baltic migration to infiltrate agents into Germany: such returns to the homeland had always suggested interesting possibilities to intelligence services.
Szara was fully prepared for exposure. Any determined Gestapo officer would spot the crudely altered passport, and five minutes of interrogation was all it would require for the certain kno
wledge that he was an imposter. He planned to admit it, long before they ever went to work on him. The Jean Bonotte passport was sewn into his jacket, the French francs hidden in the false bottom of the valise, just where a type like Bonotte, a man from Marseille, no doubt a Corsican, no doubt a criminal type, would hide them. Germany and France were legally at war, though it had not yet come to any serious fighting. Mostly talk. German diplomacy was continuing, an attempt to smooth things over with the British and the French-why should the world be set on fire over a bunch of Poles? Szara expected he would, if discovered, be interned as a citizen of France. At worst a war spent in excruciating boredom in a camp somewhere, at best exchanged for a German citizen who happened to be on the wrong side of the line when the first cannon was fired. On the bright side, a German internment camp was probably the last place in the world the NKVD would think to look for Andre Szara.
Still, he did not wish to be caught. He was no German, not even a Romanian swine-breeding German from the Seven Hills, and he did not wish to be beaten up by this crowd. There was a deep and patient anger in them. For the newsreel cameras they were glad to be “going home,” but among themselves they promised that they would soon enough be “going back.” At which time, evidently, certain scores would be definitively settled. And worst of all, he knew, if they had cause to single him out and concentrate on his features, they were not above having a look to see if he were a Jew. No, he did not wish to be caught, and he had determined to avoid direct contact in every possible way.