Good People

by Nir Baram

  She trailed after the agents. Her scalp felt hot and itchy. She poked a finger under the scarf, scratched vigorously, and in her heart she cursed the bastards. An annoying eddy of air hovered across the path and buffeted her. Why did the agents look so tall? Her back and calves hurt, but she hurried after them.

  ‘Comrade Weissberg, almost there,’ the driver called.

  The winds strengthened. Their shriek was piercing. Her panting sounded ugly to her.

  He was standing around a sharp bend, hidden from the climber’s eye. She almost collided with him. A woollen coat rested on his shoulders like a stylish robe. Behind him loomed a broad and silent building, whose illuminated windows cast pentagons of light onto the courtyard, which the night didn’t touch at all.

  His proximity surprised her, and she flinched. He placed a hand on her hips, and she pushed it away, but his other arm was already encircling her body, pulling it close to him.

  Maxim Adamovich Podolsky winked at her. ‘Alexandra Andreyevna,’ he laughed, ‘be careful not to fall and hurt yourself. Hosts of men will take to the streets to avenge you if we lose you.’

  ‘Hello, Comrade Podolsky,’ she said. Here, in the company of his colleagues, she addressed him formally.

  ‘Comrade Weissberg,’ he replied in an official tone and brought his lips to her ear. His breath warmed her earlobe. ‘I apologise for dragging you out here. This weekend there’s going to be an assembly of our people from the whole district. It’s a convenient, quiet place, as you see, and there are enough bedrooms for everyone. I gathered from your message that our meeting couldn’t be postponed.’

  ‘Correct,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, I’m sorry you had to walk up here. Those weren’t my instructions. I intended to meet you down below.’

  He was lying, she decided. He had been waiting for her around the bend, and those had been precisely his instructions.

  Podolsky reached his hand out to her with the familiar peacock-like gesture that he affected sometimes to amuse himself, copied out of books for foppish noblemen. Had he ever wondered why he chose that particular gesture? Maxim Podolsky was a man whose body was always stiffened with compressed power, confident that his every deed was for the good, rooted in noble motives, in his pure desire to benefit the people around him. He once quoted Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust:

  I am part of that force which would

  Do evil evermore, and yet creates the good.

  That was four years earlier, on the first day of their last year of school. Each of the students had been asked to bring a quotation that described who they were. She had chosen lines by Nadyezhda Petrovna:

  We studied death

  Not that which is not our own

  in which we have no interest

  We are not philosophers.

  ‘Your mum is a smart woman,’ said Podolsky. They stepped back down the path, leaving the circle of white light, and Sasha felt as if she had escaped from a trap.

  ‘I’ve already heard that tonight.’

  ‘Very smart,’ Podolsky repeated. ‘To the best of my understanding, she set up the little meeting in your house this evening so that our informer would lead us to the connection between Nadyezhda Petrovna and Bliumkin, and from there to the Trotskyites. An excellent trick. You should have seen the report that was handed to us.’

  ‘Osip Borisovich?’ she asked weakly. Sometimes even treachery that you expect can be painful.

  He ignored her. ‘The agents here were very excited. Reznikov from the second department was shouting like a madman.’ Podolsky pulled a face and pranced around her. ‘“Give me those traitors! Let me get my hands on them!”’

  Sasha shuddered. ‘So maybe it will help. Bliumkin?’

  ‘It wasn’t a bad idea to send us in that direction,’ Podolsky mused. ‘Bliumkin was eliminated even before Nadyezhda knew your father. The problem is that your father’s name already showed up in the Pyatakov affair, and now it’s showing up again.’

  He linked his arm in hers. The steep path she remembered from her climb up had flattened out. They neared the black cars. In the dark, from slightly above, the parking lot looked like a field of greenish-black trees, like the forests you see stretching away from the train window into another country.

  ‘If you listen, you can hear planes from here,’ he said, but she couldn’t hear anything. The way that aeroplanes, or, to be more precise, parachuting out of them, excited young men was irritating.

  They walked between the cars. Podolsky lit a match and looked into the windows, checking the back seats.

  The asphalt in the schoolyard—warm, rough, strewn with trampled leaves. The first autumn of the fourth grade. Podolsky and his mates, a bunch of kids in grey trousers, ignite old rags dipped in turpentine, and the air above them bulges upwards. She and her friends, in their brown dresses, watch the antics from the second-floor windows. Behind the schoolyard gate stands the old man who sells beer. Podolsky collects coins from the other kids. He’s taller and stronger than all of them. His eyes shine as if they’d been rubbed with oil. He has a mane of red hair. Sasha takes her friend Zhenya’s hand, and they race down the corridor. A nasal welter of shouts and whistles. Children are playing a jousting game, her arm is pushed into Zhenya’s face, the principal keeps an eye on things through a crack in his office door, Zhenya shouts, but Sasha drags her outside. They’re already in the courtyard, approaching the knot of children.

  ‘We want beer too!’ she calls to the ruck of kids.

  Maxim Podolsky emerges. His neck is red, and white foam clings to the hair on his upper lip. ‘What will you give us for it?’

  She snatches the bottle from his hand and drinks, enjoying the knowledge that his lips were there a moment ago. A bitter taste on her tongue. Maxim Podolsky examines her, working out how to react. For a moment she’s frightened. Will he hit her? She saw him poke an elbow in a boy’s face in the jousting game, and, when his nose began to bleed, Podolsky said, ‘Kids make too much fuss about a little blood.’ Obviously someone like that, whose father was a Chekist and tortured people, wasn’t afraid of blood.

  Podolsky looked at her and made a servant-like gesture. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘the bottle is my gift to you.’

  Now she wanted to hold him. She repressed the urge. If she showed weakness, he might decide that his job was to protect her, and then he wouldn’t tell her the truth.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Was Pyatakov really guilty?’

  ‘You’re asking whether Pyatakov, the Assistant People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, really planned to sabotage the ventilation system in the Kemerovo coal mines? Your dad was sitting at home, listening in outrage to the radio broadcast of Vyshinsky’s prosecution, and he said that Moralov and Radak and Pyatakov were fools. We know this trick: to describe clever defendants as fools, meaning you think their trial is unjust.’

  ‘My dad didn’t say anything like that,’ she said, but she was impressed: the account was precise.

  ‘I wasn’t referring necessarily to your dad, but to people like him, for example those who admired Pyatakov and worked with him.’ Podolsky laughed. ‘Really, dear Sasha, I’m a little insulted by your question. You don’t understand that I only want what’s good for you. And you don’t understand that I’m talking to you with the sincerity that you can only show to marked people, the ones no one will believe. So it’s possible that Pyatakov didn’t sabotage the ventilation in the mines so the workers would die and hatred would be aroused against the government. But Pyatakov had a lot of complaints, and it’s quite likely that some criminal thought crossed his mind, and Moralov also talked too much. I have studied history well. Ideologies and fashions come and go, people believe in one thing and then its opposite, and all that stays the same is the startling elasticity of our souls. Sasha, people are contemptible. They always want to change things, to betray others. They dream of a better world, and then recklessly try to make their dreams come true. We’re not interested in actions or c
onsequences: people ought to fear their every criminal thought, to suspect everyone, to be secretive and to remember that no place is so dark that we won’t find them.’

  She leaned wearily against a car. He looked in another rear window, and cursed. When something happened that Podolsky had anticipated he cursed. Then he was inside the car, and when he emerged beside her he was holding a beer bottle. Sasha automatically snatched it away. It was their ritual. Not to perform it would mean the betrayal of everything that was between them.

  ‘All this is too familiar and not our old story,’ she grumbled. She drank some of the beer. How many nights like this had they spent together? Climbing garden fences, hiding behind the walls on the banks of the city’s canals, wandering the streets, assembling dreams about countries beyond the Baltic Sea. In high school, it was clear to them that nothing would separate them.

  Podolsky leaned on the car opposite her. He lit one match after another and watched the flame as it died. His face was illuminated by each little spurt of light. It had become leaner, so the delicate lines of his cheekbones were emphasised. She knew that all his speeches about power and fear were for show. Maxim Podolsky wasn’t a man thrilled by power. He had inhaled more than enough of it when his father had been one of the heads of the Cheka in Leningrad and was ferried about in a chauffeur-driven limousine: invitations to a dacha on the coast, the best seats at the theatre, expensive presents for the new year, a spacious four-room apartment. In the Podolsky home the children ate delicacies that others could not even dream about. Drunk on his father’s power, little Maxim behaved as if he controlled the fate of everyone he knew, including his friends’ parents and his teachers. Then the party was over. Veteran members of the Cheka were discharged and accused of all sorts of crimes. Some were exiled, while others were purged.

  Maxim’s father lost his job; they were lenient with him. For years he sat at home and waited to be prosecuted or restored to the service, writing letters of complaint to all the institutions. He was not the only one. Millions of letters flooded the country: from the accused, their relatives, the relatives of their relatives, from citizens of good will, and informers. Later they evicted the Podolskys from their apartment. They moved into a shared flat. Maxim’s father would sometimes pick his son up from school. He would stand next to the gate in a fine woollen coat, his hair combed elegantly. He kept his head up, but every girl who ran into him immediately noticed that he trembled, his eyes were red, his face lined and his hair flecked with grey.

  All that year, the last year of high school, Sasha was trapped in her web of sadness. She couldn’t remember a single moment of grace. She and Maxim grew distant and she mourned every day for what they had lost.

  They reached the last row of cars. The sky was folded across the horizon. Podolsky told her that an American they had interrogated said that in a city near New York there was a large parking lot where young couples sat in cars and watched movies on an enormous screen. It was cheap entertainment, just a few cents. He liked the idea of watching a movie and being alone at the same time. Even the most corrupt of capitalists can sometimes have bright ideas.

  The image cheered her up: couple after couple sitting in their black cars and watching a new film. It was strange how Maxim calmed her down, dulled her senses. More than anything, she wanted to lie down on the hood of one of the cars and look at the clouds. The first sentence that occurred to her was: ‘Maxim, if we walk in a straight line, do you think we’d get to the sea?’ And at once she heard Nadyezhda’s warning voice: ‘Resist the charms of nostalgia.’

  ‘Is Nadyezhda Petrovna all right?’ she asked.

  ‘She was in solitary for a while. She quoted a line of Khlebnikov to Reznikov, who was interrogating her.’

  ‘The police station—a splendid place! The place for my appointment with the state,’ Sasha said under her breath. She always planned to recite that line when she was arrested.

  ‘Yes, despite everything, it amused him. But the next day in her cell she met two young Jewish girls who were accused of leading a counter-revolutionary Zionist organisation, and she explained to them what Zionism was. They recited the lesson she had given them, and when the interrogators discovered where they had heard this, they accused her of everything. Later she even told Reznikov that an upright fellow and investigative magistrate like him ought to understand that those two calves didn’t know a thing about Zionism. They had been planning to confess, but they were afraid their answers would be no good and they’d be shouted at, so she helped them out with some ideas. Reznikov screamed that she was insinuating that they were fishing for false confessions, and threw her into the cellar.’

  Sasha stopped listening. He was spouting off again. He knew that stories about Nadyezhda didn’t concern her now. The hum of an engine could be heard in the distance, and a black car came around the bend. Podolsky gave it a suspicious glance, and a dreadful thought took hold of her: maybe she hadn’t understood what his real position was? Maybe he wasn’t as influential as he pretended. The car had unnerved them both. An external eye had invaded their rendezvous. Now he became businesslike, severed from the past—from hasty kisses in the schoolyard, from looking at the sky from the Republican Bridge in the last hour of the night as the stars disappeared. She hadn’t dared ask him directly, expecting that he himself would put an end to the worry that had gnawed at her for so long; it was more than a year since she had concluded that Nadya would be arrested.

  She needed answers. There was no more time. ‘Can you help my father?’

  He exhaled loudly. Sasha imagined that the air he breathed out was permeated with all the things he knew and she didn’t. There was a silence. Maybe he was expecting that she wouldn’t force him to answer. A second car drove into the lot. Its headlights gleamed on the car roofs.

  ‘It was very smart of you to turn to me,’ he said in the end, possibly surprised, possibly accusing. He seemed to have realised how much she expected of him. ‘Actually, it was the only thing you could have done.’

  A man and a woman emerged from the first car, stood on either side of it, smoked, and spoke softly. Podolsky seemed to recognise them, and grew calmer.

  ‘Your Nadyezhda Petrovna would have been arrested anyway. You figured that out. Her time in Leningrad was over. We just couldn’t find the time to tell her. The fact that I was the one who received the information allowed me to take care of the first stage of the investigation. But that woman arouses interest higher up as well. The poems that you copied for us—for example, ‘Moustached fuck in Koba’s church’—people were shocked by them, but also a bit amused by her courage.* After all, that sentence alone provides three reasons to eliminate her. The NKVD is aware of your contribution to the investigation, and people there know they should consider your request.’

  ‘And my father?’

  ‘He’ll be arrested. No doubt about that. I’ll do my best to see that he’s released.’

  ‘Can you prevent his arrest?’

  He looked at her as though saddened by her refusal to admit the obvious. ‘No.’

  A feeling of weightlessness overwhelmed her. How did people become so small? It happened suddenly. She looked at him. He’d broadened out but he was still of average height: in her imagination he had been tall.

  The deal she’d cooked up seemed perfect to her: they could have Nadyezhda, and she wouldn’t lose her parents. All the parties would get what they wanted. How could she have fooled herself into thinking she would have any influence at all? Now she was filled with helpless rage: all her actions had been in vain. She could hardly contain the urge to go berserk, to scratch her body until it bled. In her world—what a dumb world, where did it exist except in the imaginations of naive women?—the people at the NKVD saw who she was and paid heed to her requests. But it was all nothing. Instead they saw her as a grain of sand that was flung into the air and then fell to the floor.

  ‘And my mother?’ Had she brought this destruction down upon her parents?

 
‘Most likely not up to me. I intended to have Nadyezhda Petrovna sign a confession tomorrow, about the poems and the other poets who were her accomplices, and then send her into exile, so she can read her work to polar bears. But the director of the second department intervened, and now there’s the issue of Bliumkin. It’s written in the report. Maybe that’s good, because it will lead to the links she once had with counter-revolutionary organisations and shift the spotlight away from your parents.’

  Podolsky had just admitted it was out of his hands. He had said from the start that giving him the poems was less dangerous than not doing it. And yet, it was dangerous.

  Sasha shivered. They were sleeping now, all of them, and catastrophe was overshadowing their house. The final days they would spend together there would be trapped in the slender space between that night and its consequences: they would wake to the morning chill in the living room, to cups of tea and maybe cheesecake sprinkled with sugar, and they would all hurry to school or to work, and there would be some dinners when Dad would sit with them—for he had nowhere else to be now that his Nadya was in prison—and maybe another card game or a logic puzzle that he made up for the twins, who would fall asleep in the living room, and later shuffle up to the attic, and she would follow them, and, in a little while, their parents would follow too.

  How quickly her nightmares became facts. She had already wrapped them in a layer of steely acquiescence—she was like someone whose arms have been amputated, who leaves them behind and keeps running.

  One final question remained: ‘The twins?’

  BERLIN

  WINTER 1939

  ‘Thomas, the air is full of perfume,’ Carlson Mailer called out as he ran his fingers through his hair, which was brushed back against his scalp. Usually he took pride in his pompadour, which the people in the office called an ‘American’, and without it his forehead jutted over his black eyes, which always looked sombre. ‘A great party, isn’t it?’ His gaze skipped between the ladies in sparkling gowns and furs, and the waitresses in white skirts and silk stockings. He lit his pipe, a habit he had picked up from his new friend, Herr Professor, as he called the man from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Science. In the past few weeks Carlson had prattled volubly about ‘that genius’: ‘He’s a fellow you can do business with. During the war he and Professor Haber—that Jew who won the Nobel Prize, you drove him out of here, and he ended up dying like a dog—cooked up some compounds of poisonous gas for your army, and that gas didn’t gather dust in warehouses, as you know…’ Carlson winked. He was drunk.