Dark Star (13 page)

Szara spent part of Sunday morning removing a soiled sheet of cotton cloth that sealed the back of
Huldigung der Naxos,
then distributing the sheets of the Okhrana dossier across the back of the painting itself, securing them with brown cord tied off to the heads of tiny nails he pounded in with a tack hammer. The cotton cloth he refitted with great care, the bent nails installed by the original framer repositioned in the dents and rust tracks they'd formed over the years. The weight of the heavy gilded frame concealed the presence of the paper, he thought, and
a hundred years from now, some art restorer …

On Monday he was, for the first time, onstage as a German, speaking with slow deliberation, purging the Yiddish lilt from his accent, hoping to pass for a mildly unusual individual born somewhere far away from Berlin. He found that if he combed his hair straight back off his forehead, tied his tie very tight, and carried his chin in a position that, to him, felt particularly high, the disguise was credible. He took the name Grawenske, suggesting distant Slavic or Wendish origins, not at all uncommon in Germany.

He telephoned the office of an auctioneer and was given the name of a warehouse that specialized in the storage of fine art (“Humidity is your enemy!” the man told him). Herr Grawenske appeared there at eleven promptly, explained that he was joining the accounting staff of a small Austrian chemical company in Chile, muttered about his wife's sister who would be occupying his residence, and left Professor Ebendorfer's masterpiece in their care, to be crated, then stored. He paid for two years, a surprisingly reasonable amount of money, gave a fictitious address in Berlin, and was handed a receipt. The remainder of the officer's effects, and the fine satchel, were distributed to shops that supported charity missions.

Marta Haecht had given him the phone number at the little magazine where she “helped out the art director.” Szara tried to call several times, chilled to the bone as the flat Berlin dusk settled down on the city. The first time, she'd gone on an errand to the printers'. The second time, somebody giggled and said they didn't know where she'd gotten to. On the third try, close to quitting time, she came to the phone.

“I'm leaving tomorrow,” he said. “May I see you tonight?”

“There is a dinner. My parents' wedding anniversary.”

“Then late.”

She hesitated. “I'll be returning home …”

What?
Then he understood there were people near the telephone. “Home from a restaurant?”

“No, it isn't that.”

“Home to sleep.”

“It would be better.”

“What time is the dinner over?”

“One can't rush away, I hope you'll understand. It is a, it is an occasion, festive …”

“Oh.”

“Do you have to go away tomorrow?”

“It can't be helped.”

“Then I don't see how …”

“I'll wait for you. Maybe there's a way.”

“I'll try.”

Just after eleven the doorbell rang. Szara raced downstairs, hurried past the landlady's door—opened the width of an eye—and let her in. In the little room, she took off her coat. An aura of the cold night clung to her skin, he could feel it. She was wearing a midnight blue party dress, taffeta, with ruffles. The back was all tiny hooks and eyes. “Be careful,” she said as he fumbled. “I mustn't stay too long. Here it is not done to leave a party.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That a friend was going away.”

It was not a magic night. They made love, but the tension in her did not break. Afterward she was sad. “Maybe I shouldn't have come. Sweeter to have a memory of the snow.” With the tips of his fingers he pushed the hair back off her forehead. “I'll never see you again,” she said. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

He walked her home, almost to the door. They kissed good-bye, dry and cold, and there was nothing to say.

In the late November of 1937, the Soviet merchant vessel
Kolstroi
shipped anchor in the port of Rostock, moved slowly up the Warnemünde inlet into Lübeck bay and, swinging north into the Baltic and setting a north-by-easterly course to skirt the Sasenitz peninsula and pass south of the Danish isle of Bornholm, made for Leningrad harbor, some eight hundred and forty nautical miles away.

The
Kolstroi,
heavily laden with machine tools, truck tires, and bar aluminum loaded at the French port of Boulogne, docked at Rostock only to complete its complement of eleven passengers bound for Leningrad. Moving up the Warnemünde in gathering darkness, the
Kolstroi
sounded its foghorn continually, joining a chorus of in- and outbound freighters as it reached Lübeck bay, where the Baltic fogbanks rolled in toward shore in the stiff northerly winds. André Szara and the other passengers were not allowed the freedom of the deck until the ship was beyond the German territorial limit. When Szara did seek the air, after the close
quarters of the ship's lounge where they were fed supper, there was little visibility, nothing of the lights on the German coast, only black water heaving in November swells and a building gale that drove iced salt spray onto the metal plates of the deck, where it froze into a lead-colored glaze. He bore it as long as he could, staring into the fog whipping past the ship's lights, unable to see land.

The
Kolstroi
was Soviet territory; he'd bowed under the vast weight of it before they ever sailed, his possessions spread out on a table under the cold eyes of a security officer.
The journalist Szara
meant nothing to this one,
Homo Stalinus,
human as clock. He was thankful he had disposed of the Okhrana dossier before he left Berlin—memory itself was frightening in the atmosphere aboard the freighter.

The passengers were a mixed group. There were three English university students, with creamy skins and bright eyes, terribly earnest young men on a dream voyage to what they believed to be their spiritual homeland. There was one middle-age trade representative, suffering from an illness—attempted escape, Szara thought—who was dragged on board by NKVD operatives. The tips of his shoes scraped the wooden gangplank as they carried him onto the ship—obviously he had been drugged senseless. He was not the only passenger going home to die. They were a strange brotherhood, silent, self-contained, having abandoned themselves to a fate they deemed inevitable; the man who'd been dragged on board proved the futility of flight. They rarely slept, greedy for their remaining hours of introspection, pacing about the deck when they could stand the cold, their lips moving as they rehearsed imagined conversations with their interrogators.

Mostly they avoided one another. A conversation with a tainted diplomat or scientist would be reported by the attentive security men and, how was one to know, might be made evidence in the cases against them, telling evidence, uncovered only in the last hours of the journey home—
we thought you were clean until we saw you talking to Petrov
—and dangerously sweet to the NKVD appetite for the fatal irony.

Szara spoke to one of them, Kuscinas, in younger days an officer in the Lettish rifle brigades that supported Lenin when he overthrew the Kerensky government, now an old man with a shaved head and a face like a skull. Yet there was still great strength in Kuscinas; his eyes glittered from deep in their sockets, and his voice was strong enough to hear above the gale. As the
Kolstroi
rose and crashed into the heavy seas off the Gulf of Riga, on the second day of the voyage, Szara found shelter under a stairway where they could smoke cigarettes and shield themselves from the bitter wind. Kuscinas never said exactly what he did, simply waved his hand when Szara asked, meaning that such things didn't matter. As for what was about to happen to him, he seemed to be beyond caring. “For my wife I'm sorry, but that's all. Foolish woman, and stubborn. Unfortunately she loves me and this will break her heart, but there's nothing to be done about it. My sons they've turned into snakes, all the better for them now, I think, and my daughter married some idiot who pretends to run a factory in Kursk. They'll find a way to disown me, if they haven't started already. I'm sure they will sign anything put before them. My wife, though …”

“She'll have to go to friends,” Szara said.

The old man grimaced. “Friends,” he said.

The
Kolstro
'
s
steel plates creaked as the ship pitched particularly high, then slammed down into the trough, sending aloft a huge explosion of white spray. “And fuck you too,” Kuscinas said to the Baltic.

Szara steadied himself against the iron wall and closed his eyes for a moment.

“You're not going to give it up, are you? ”

He flicked his cigarette away. “No,” he said, “I'm a sailor.”

“Will they arrest you?”

“Perhaps. I don't think so.”

“You have the right friends, then.”

Szara nodded that he did.

“Lucky. Or maybe not,” Kuscinas said. “By the time you get to Moscow they may be the wrong friends. These days you can't predict.” For a time he was silent, eyes inward, seeing some part of his life. “You're like me, I suppose. One of the faithful ones, do what
has to be done, don't ask to see the sense of it. Discipline above all.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “And in the end, when it's our turn, and somebody else is doing what has to be done, somebody else who doesn't ask to see the sense of it, the discipline of the executioner, then all we can say is
za cbtoì
—why? What for? ” Kuscinas laughed. “A sorry little question,” he said. “For myself, I don't mean to ask it.”

That night, Szara couldn't sleep. He lay in his bunk and smoked, the man across from him mumbling restlessly in his dreams. Szara knew the history of that question,
Za cbtoì
Rumor attributed its initial use to the Old Bolshevik Yacov Lifschutz, a deputy people's commissar. His final word. Szara remembered him as a little man with wild eyebrows, the obligatory goatee, and a twinkling glance. Shuffling down the tile corridor in the basement of the Lubyanka—you got it on the way, nobody ever reached the end of that corridor—he stopped for a moment and turned to his executioner, an officer he happened to have known in childhood, and said,
“Za chto?”

Along with the purge, the phrase spread everywhere; it was scrawled on the walls of cells, carved in the wooden benches of the Stolypin wagons that hauled prisoners away, scratched into planks in transit camps. Almost always the first words spoken to the police who came in the night, then again the first words of a man or a woman entering a crowded cell. “But why? Why?”

We are all alike,
Szara thought. We don't offer excuses or alibis, we don't fight with the police, we don't look for compassion, we don't even plead. We are the people who called ourselves “dead men on furlough;” we always expected to die—in the revolution, the civil war. All we ask, rational men that we are, is to see the sense of the thing, its meaning. Then we'll go. Just an explanation. Too much to ask?

Yes.

The savagery of the purge, Szara knew, gave them every reason to believe there was, must be, a reason. When a certain NKVD officer was taken away, his wife wept. So she was accused of resisting
arrest. Such events, common, daily, implied a scheme, an underlying plan. They wanted only to be let in on it—certainly their own deaths bought them the right to an answer—and then they'd simply let the rest of it happen. What was one more trickle of blood on a stone floor to those who'd seen it flow in streams across the dusty streets of a nation? The only insult was ignorance, a thing they'd never tolerated, a thing they couldn't bear now.

In time, the cult of
Za chto
began to evolve a theory. Particularly with the events of June 1937, when the only remaining alternative to the rule of the dictator was ripped to shreds. That June came the turn of the Red Army and, when the smoke cleared, it was seen to be headless, though still walking around. Marshal Tukachevsky, acknowledged as Russia's greatest soldier, was joined in his disappearance by two of four remaining marshals, fourteen of sixteen military commanders, eight of eight admirals, sixty of sixty-seven corps commanders, on and on and on. All eleven vice-commissars of defense, seventy-five of the eighty members of the Supreme Military Soviet. All of this, they reasoned; the shootings, the icebound mining camps, an army virtually destroyed by its own country— could have only one intention: Stalin simply sought to remove any potential opposition to his own rule. That was the way of tyrants: first eliminate enemies, then friends. This was an exercise in consolidation. On a rather grand scale, ultimately counted in millions— but what was Russia if not a grand scale?

What was Russia, if not a place where one could say, down through the centuries, times and men are evil, and so we bleed. This, for some, concluded the matter. The Old Bolsheviks, the Chekists, the officer corps of the Red Army—these people
were
the revolution but now had to be sacrificed so that the Great Leader could stand unthreatened and supreme. Russia's back was broken, her spirit drained, but at least for most the question had been answered and they could get on with the trivial business of execution with acceptance and understanding. A final gesture on behalf of the party.

But they were wrong, it wasn't quite that simple.

There were some who understood that, not many, only a few,
and soon enough they died and, in time, so did their executioners, and, later, theirs.

The following day, Szara did not see Kuscinas. Then, when the
Kol-stroi
steamed up the Gulf of Finland, the first ice of the season pinging against the hull, the lights of the fortress at Kronstadt twinkling in the darkness, the security men and sailors began a frantic search, combing the ship, but Kuscinas had gone, and they could not find him.