Dark Star (51 page)

“Tomasz will get you, for a small fee, whatever you want.” Vainshtok took the pistol out of the holster and handed it to Szara. It
was a blued-steel Steyr automatic, an Austrian weapon, compact and heavy in his hand.

“You get to play with it for three minutes,” Vainshtok said. “But you have to give me five marbles and a piece of candy.”

Szara handed it back. “Is there anything to eat in this place?” Vainshtok looked at his watch. “In an hour or so they serve boiled beets. Then, at dinnertime, they serve them again. On the other hand, the china is extremely beautiful, and they're actually very good beets.”

Szara slept on a wicker couch on the sunporch. The hotel was jammed with people and he was lucky to find anything at all to sleep on. At a right angle to the couch, a Spanish consular official had claimed the porch swing for a bed, while a Danish commercial attaché, one of the last to arrive from Warsaw, curled up on the floor next to a rack of croquet sets. The three of them had managed a conversation in French, talking in low voices after midnight, cigarettes glowing in the dark, in general trying to sort out rumors—the prime topic of conversation at the spa. Elements of the Polish army were said to have withdrawn to the Pripet marshes with the idea of holding out for six months while French and British expeditionary forces were organized to come to Poland's defense. A Norwegian diplomat was believed to have been interned. This was curious because Norway had declared neutrality, but perhaps the Germans intended the “mistake” as a warning. Or perhaps it hadn't happened at all. The United States, the Dane was certain, had declared neutrality. A special train would be organized to remove diplomats from Poland. But many diplomats from Warsaw, having taken refuge in the town of Krzemieniec, in western Poland, had been casualties of a heavy bombing attack by the Luftwaffe. The Polish government had fled to Romania. Warsaw had surrendered; Warsaw still held; Warsaw had been so obliterated by bombing that there was nothing left
to
surrender. The League of Nations would intervene. Szara faded away without realizing it; the quiet voices on the porch and a light patter of rain lulled him to sleep.

It was a particularly golden dawn that woke him. The distant forest was alive with amber light. How hard summer died here, he thought. It made him wonder what day it was. The seventeenth of September, he guessed, making what sense he could of the jumble of days and nights he'd wandered through. The lawns and graveled paths sparkled with last night's raindrops as the sun came up and it was, but for a faint buzz of static somewhere in the hotel, immensely quiet. A rooster began to crow; perhaps a village lay on the other side of the forest. He looked at his watch—a few minutes after five. The Spaniard on the porch swing was lying on his back, coat spread over him like a blanket and pulled decorously up to his chin. Beneath a lavish mustache his mouth was slightly open, and his breath hissed in and out daintily as he slept. Szara caught, for just a moment, the barest hint of coffee in the air. Was it possible? Just wishful thinking. No, he did smell it. He wrestled free of the jacket tangled about him and sat upright—
oh, bones
—checking to make sure the valise was under the couch where he'd put it the night before. His beard itched. Today he would find some way to heat up a pot of water and have a shave.

Some campaigner he'd turned out to be. Not anymore. He was a creature of hotels now. Someone was making coffee—he was sure of it. He stood and stretched, then walked into the lobby. Anarchy. Bodies everywhere. A woman with two chins was snoring in a chair, a Vuitton suitcase tied securely to her finger with a shoelace. What did she have in there? he wondered. The silver service from some embassy? Polish hams? Wads of zlotys? Little good they'd do her now; the Germans no doubt had occupation scrip already printed and ready to spend. He moved toward the staircase and lost the scent, then backtracked into the dining room. Cautiously, he pushed open one of the swinging doors to the kitchen. Only a cat sleeping on a stove. The static was louder, however, and the coffee was close. At one end of the kitchen, another swinging door opened onto a small pantry and two women looked up quickly, startled at his sudden appearance. They were hotel maids, he guessed, pretty girls with tilted noses and cleft chins, one dark, the other fair, both wearing heavy cotton skirts and blouses, their hands red from scrubbing floors. A zinc coffeepot stood on a small parlor stove
wedged into one corner, and an old-fashioned radio with a curved body sat on a shelf and played symphonic music amid the static. The maids were drinking coffee from the hotel's demitasse cups. After Szara said good morning he pleaded for coffee. “Just tell me how much,” he said. “I would be happy to pay.”

The blond girl colored and looked down at her shoes. The dark one found him a tiny cup and filled it with coffee, adding a shapeless chunk of sugar from a paper sack. She offered him a piece of twig to use as a stirrer, explaining, “They have locked up the spoons somewhere. And of course there is nothing to pay. We share with you.”

“You are kind,” he said. The coffee was sharp and hot and strong.

“There is only a little left,” the dark girl said. “You won't tell, will you? ”

“Never. It's our secret.” He drew an
X
over his heart with one finger and she smiled.

The symphonic music faded away, replaced by a voice speaking Russian: “Good morning, this is the world news service of Radio Moscow.”

Szara looked at his watch. It was exactly five-thirty, that made it seven-thirty Moscow time. The announcer's voice was low and smooth and reasonable—one need not concern oneself too much with the news it broadcast; somewhere in the Kremlin all was being carefully seen to. There was a reference to a communiqué, to a meeting of the Central Committee, then the news that some forty divisions of the Red Army had entered Poland along a five-hundred-mile front. In general they had been welcomed, there was no fighting to speak of, little resistance was expected. Foreign Minister Molotov had announced that “events rising from the Polish-German war have revealed the internal insolvency and obvious impotence of the Polish state.” There was great concern that some “unexpected contingency” could “create a menace to the Soviet Union.” Molotov had gone on to say that the Soviet government “could not remain indifferent to the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Byelorussians inhabiting Poland.” The announcer continued for some time; the phrasing was careful, precise. All had been
thought out. War and instability in a neighboring state posed certain dangers; the army was simply moving up to a point where the occupation of contested territory would insulate Soviet citizens from fighting and civil disorders. The announcer went on to give other foreign news, local news, and the temperature—forty-eight degrees—in Moscow.

Later that morning news came from Lvov that the Germans were preparing to leave the city. A great wave of excitement and relief swept over the population of the Krynica-Zdroj, and it was determined that a column would be formed—Ukrainian bands continued their offensive; several travelers were known to have disappeared—to make the journey into town. A light but steady rain was deemed to be of no importance; the spa had an ample supply of black umbrellas and these were distributed by the smiling caretaker, Tomasz. The diplomatic corps made every effort to appear at its best—men shaved and powdered, women pinned up their hair, formal suits were dug out of trunks and suitcases. The procession was led by Tomasz, wearing an elegant little hat with an Alpine brush in the band, and the commercial counselor of the Belgian embassy in Warsaw, carrying a broomstick with a white linen table napkin mounted at one end, a flag of neutrality.

It was a long line of men and women beneath bobbing black umbrellas that advanced down the sandy road to Lvov. The fields were bright green and the smell of black earth and mown hay was sharp and sweet in the rainy air. The spirit of the group was supremely optimistic. Prevailing views were concentrated on the possibility of a diplomatic resolution of the Polish crisis as well as on cigarettes, coffee, soap, perhaps even roast chicken or cream cake; whatever might be had in newly liberated Lvov.

Szara marched near the end of the column. The people around him were of various opinions about the Soviet advance, news of which had spread like wildfire. Most thought it good news: Stalin informing Hitler that, despite their expedient pact, enough was enough. It was felt that a period of intense diplomacy would now take place and, no matter the final result of the German invasion,
they could go home. To Szara there was something infinitely Polish about the scene, these people in their dark and formal clothing marching along a narrow road in the rain beneath a forest of umbrellas. Toward the end of the six-mile walk, some of the diplomats were tiring, and it was determined that everybody should sing— “The Marseillaise” as it turned out, the one song they all knew. True, it was the national anthem of a recently declared belligerent, but they were advancing under a white flag, and for raising the spirits on a rainy day there simply wasn't anything better. Vainshtok and Szara marched together; the former, his shoulder holster abandoned for the journey, thrust his clenched fist into the air and sang like a little fury in a high, wavering voice.

Szara didn't sing. He was too busy thinking. Trying to sort a series of images in his mind that might, if he found the organizing principle, come together to form a single, sharp picture. Beria's ascension, Abramov's murder, the suicide of Kuscinas, the Okhrana dossier, Baumann's arrest: it all ended with forty Russian divisions marching into Poland.
Stalin did this,
he thought. Stalin did what? Szara had no name for it. And that made him angry. Wasn't he smart enough to understand what had been done?
Maybe not.

What he did know was that he had been part of it, witness to it, though mostly by accident. He didn't like coincidence, life had taught him to be suspicious of it, but he was able to recall moment after moment when he'd seen and heard, when he'd known—often from the periphery but known nonetheless—what was going on.
Why me, then?
he demanded of himself. The answer hurt:
because nobody took you very seriously. Because you were seen to be a kind of educated fool. Because you were useful in a minor but not very important way, you were permitted to see things and to find out about things in the same way a lady's maid is permitted to know about a love affair: whatever she may think about it doesn't matter.

What he needed, Szara thought, was to talk it out. To say the words out loud. But the one person he could trust, General Bloch, had disappeared from his life. Dead? In flight? He didn't know.

“ ‘Aux armes, citoyens!' ”
Beside him, Vainshtok sang passionately to the cloudy Polish heavens.
No,
Szara thought.
Let him be.

•

In the city, people stood soberly in the square that faced the ruined railroad station and watched in silence as the Wehrmacht marched west, back toward Germany. It was so quiet that the sound of boots and horses' hooves on the cobblestones, the creak of leather and the jangle of equipment, sounded unnaturally loud as the companies moved past. Some of the infantrymen glanced at the crowd as they went by, their faces showing little more than impersonal curiosity. The diplomats stood under their umbrellas alongside the Poles and watched the procession. To Szara they seemed a little lost. There was nobody to call on, nobody to whom a note could be handed; for the moment they had been deprived of their natural element.

The normal progress of the withdrawal was broken only by a single, strange interlude in the gray order of march: the Germans had stolen a circus. They were taking it away with them. Its wagons, decorated with curlicues and flourishes in brilliant gold on a dark red field, bore the legend Circus Goldenstein, and the reins were held by unsmiling Wehrmacht drivers, who looked slightly absurd managing the plumed and feathered horses. Szara wondered what had become of the clowns and the acrobats. They were nowhere to be seen, only the animals were in evidence. Behind the bars of a horse-drawn cage Szara saw a sleepy tiger, its chin sunk on its forepaws, its green-slit eyes half closed as it rolled past the crowd lining the street.

Toward evening, the diplomats walked back down the sandy road to the spa. Two days later, a Russian tank column rolled into the city.

Behind the tanks came the civil administration: the NKVD, the political commissars, and their clerks. The clerks had lists. They included the membership of all political parties, especially the socialists—Polish, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Jewish. The clerks also had the names of trade union members, civil servants, policemen, forestry workers, engineers, lawyers, university students, peasants with more than a few animals, refugees from other countries,
landowners, teachers, commercial traders, and scores of other categories, particularly those, like stamp dealers and collectors, who habitually had correspondence with people outside the country. So the clerks knew who they wanted the day they arrived and immediately set to work to find the rest, seizing all civil, tax, educational, and commercial records. Individuals whose names appeared on the lists, and their families, were to be deported to the Soviet Union in freight trains, eventually to be put to work in forced labor battalions. Factories were to be disassembled and sent east to the industrial centers of the USSR, stores stripped of their inventories, farms of their livestock.

Special units of the NKVD Foreign Department arrived as well, some of them turning up at the spa, their black Pobedas spattered with mud up to the door handles. The diplomats were to be sorted out and sent on their way home as soon as the western half of Poland conceded victory to Germany. “Be calm,” the operatives said. “Warsaw will surrender any day now, the Poles can't hold out much longer.” The Russians were soft-spoken and reassuring. Most of the diplomats were relieved. A registration table was set up in the dining room with two polite men in civilian clothes sitting behind it.