Dark Star (57 page)

“Very few.”

“Well, for me there is only one escape, and I was prepared to take it. I'd made my peace with the idea. In the beginning, when I stole away from Russia and came to live in Berlin, these people approached me. Threatened me. But I gave them very little, only bits of gossip and what they could read in the newspapers if they wanted. Then they played a second card. Your brother Sascha is in a camp, they said, where he deserves to be. But he's as comfortable as he can be under the circumstances; he works as a clerk in a heated room. If you want his situation to continue, you must be productive. It's up to you.”

“And you did what you had to do.”

“Yes. I did. In exile, I cared very little what I made of my life because
I discovered I wasn't touched by it. Perhaps Russia has something to do with that—to be sensitive yet not at all delicate, a curious strength, or weakness, or whatever you want to call it. But then I met this man, and suddenly it was as though I'd woken from a long sleep. Every small thing now mattered—the weather, the way a vase stood on a table, meeting someone and wanting them to like me. I had built walls—now they crumbled. And this I knew I could not survive. Not for long. I could no longer do what I'd done for the people who came around with money, and once they began to press I knew there would be only one way out. So I hadn't, as I saw it then, very long to live. Yet each day was vivid, and I trembled with life. They say it is the only gift, and now I came to understand that with all my heart. I never cried so hard, and never laughed so much, as I did in those weeks. Perhaps it was a form of prayer, because what came next was a miracle, I know of no other word to describe it.

“It was in early August. A man came to see me. Not here. At the theater, in the same way you did. Clearly he knew nothing of the general. A dreadful man, this one. Fair, wavy hair, thick glasses, a vile little chunk of a thing with no mercy anywhere in him. None. And what he mostly wanted to talk about was you. Something had gone wrong, something extremely serious, for nothing has happened since. No money, no demands, no couriers, nothing.”

She twisted the glass about in her hands, watching the light of the burning newspaper reflected in the red surface of the wine. “I've no idea what happened,” she said. “I only know it saved my life. And that you seemed to be the cause of it.”

He woke up in a kind of heaven. He had no idea how he'd happened to wind up on her bed but there he was, his face against the soft coverlet, his side a little sore from sleeping on the knot in the twisted belt of the bathrobe. He was in heaven, he decided, because it smelled exactly the way heaven, or his heaven at any rate, ought to smell: the perfume she wore—which reminded him of cinnamon—and scented soap, as well as wine, cigarette smoke, the
ashes of a dead fire, and the sweetish odor of a well-washed borzoi. He could, he thought, detect Nadia herself, sweet in a different, a human way. For a time he simply lay there, suspended in a perfect darkness, and inhaled. When he felt himself slipping back into unconsciousness, he forced his eyes open. A knitted comforter was tossed carelessly on the settee—so that's where she'd slept. His suit—apparently the maids had cleaned it—hung from a hanger on the knob of the bathroom door, and the rest of his clothing was piled neatly on a dresser. Miraculously clean and dry.

He struggled to sit up. Returning from the dead, it felt like. All those nights in Poland, lying on the ground on a blanket; followed by restless hours on a thin mattress in the Kovno apartment, people around him awake, coughing, talking in low voices. Now he hurt for every minute of it. He unhooked the white shutter that covered the lower half of the window and pushed it aside. An autumn garden. Surrounded by high walls. Dead leaves had drifted across the paths and mounded at the foot of a hedge. Nadia sat at a weathered iron table—she was reading, he could not see her face—one hand dangling above the wolfhound stretched out at her side.
Am I in Russia?
Wrapped in a long black coat and a red wool scarf she was lost in her book. The wind lifted her fall-colored hair, leaves spun down from the trees and rattled along the garden paths; the sky was at war, broken towers of gray cloud, blown and battered, swept past a pale sun. Certainly it would rain. His heart ached for her.

Later he sat in a garden chair across from her and saw that she was reading Babel's
Red Cavalry.
The wind was cool and damp and he pulled his jacket tightly about him.

For a long time they did not say anything.

And she did not look away, did not deny him her eyes:
if this is what you wish,
she seemed to say,
I will pose for you.
She touched nothing, changed nothing, and did not defend herself. The wind blew her hair across her face, Seryozha sighed, the light shifted as the clouds crossed the sun, she never moved. Then he began to understand that he'd misread her. This stillness was not simply
poise—what he saw in her eyes was precisely what was in his own. Could she be that deluded? To want somebody so lost and useless? Was she blind?

No.

From the moment he'd walked through the door of the dressing room he had been in love with her. That it might be the same for her had never occurred to him, simply had not crossed his mind. But maybe it worked that way—women always knew, men never did. Or maybe not, maybe it all worked some other way. He didn't really care. Now he understood that everything had changed. And now he understood what, just exactly what, he had been offered.

Sad, he thought, that he couldn't take it. They were castaways, both of them, marooned together on an exotic island—as it happened, the garden of a Florentine villa on the Schillerstrasse. But somewhere beyond the high walls a military band was playing a march and, he thought, the general will soon return from the wars. Only for a moment did he imagine a love affair in flight: the unspeakable hotel rooms, the secret police, the predators. No. She belonged in his imagination, not in his life. A memory. Met in the wrong way, in the wrong place, in the wrong year, in times when love wasn't possible. One remembers, and that's all. Something else that didn't happen in those days.

“When will you leave?” she said. “Today?”

“Tomorrow.”

Just for an instant he was clairvoyant: he could watch the question as it took shape in her mind. She leaned across the table until she was very close, he could see that her lips were dry from the wind, a red mark on the line of her jaw—suddenly she was out of perspective, too near to be beautiful. And when she spoke it was a voice he didn't know, so soft he could barely hear what she said. “Why did this happen?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't.”

She pressed her lips together and nodded a little. She agreed. There was no answer.

“There isn't anything we have to do, you know,” he said.

Her face changed, gracefully but completely, until he was confronted by the single great inquisitive look of his life. “No?”

•

He had never in his life been the lover he was with her.

They waited for nightfall—only the first in a series of common consents that flowed to meet the occasion. Szara could not safely go out in the street, and Nadia knew it, so there was no point in raising the issue. They simply passed a rather nineteenth-century sort of day; they read, they talked, they cut clusters of fall berries from a shrub to make a table decoration, avoided the servants, played with the dog, touched only accidentally and only now and then, and neither of them let on how it affected them. If living in the days of war demanded a love affair measured in hours and not in months, they discovered that a love affair was something that could be compressed in just that way.

They could have looked, from any of the windows in the front of the three-story villa, out on the Tiergarten and observed that day's life in Berlin: strollers and idlers, officers and couples, old men reading newspapers on a park bench. But they declined to do so. The private world suited them. They did not, however, build sand castles, did not pretend the present was anything other than what it was, and they tried to talk about the future. Difficult, though. Szara's plans focused vaguely on Denmark; from there he would extemporize. He had no idea how he might be able to earn a living; his writing languages, Russian and Polish, would not serve him very well anywhere he could think of. Émigré intellectuals lived in penury—sometimes the little journal paid, sometimes it didn't. The former aristocrats gave parties, everyone ate as much as they could. But even that tenuous existence was denied him—he was a fugitive, and the émigré communities were the first places they would look for him. Of course he could not go back to Paris, much too dangerous. Sad, because to be there with her …

Sad, because even to know him put her in danger. This he did not say, but she knew it anyhow. She'd seen enough of Soviet life to apprehend vulnerability in every one of its known forms. So she understood that one did what one had to do. Such realpolitik was very alchemical stuff. It started with politicians and their intellectuals, all this doing what had to be done, but it had a tendency
to migrate, and the next time you looked it was in bed with you.

Still, they agreed, one had to hope. Humans survived the most awful catastrophes: walked away from the inferno with singed hair, missed the train that went over the cliff. Both felt they might just be owed a little luck from whatever divine agency kept those books. There were still places on earth where one could get irredeemably lost, it only took finding one. And how exactly did one go about herding sheep? Could it be all that difficult?

In the end, they refused to let the future ruin their day, which made them heroes of a low order but heroes nonetheless. And they had the past to fall back on, realizing almost immediately that the sorts of lives they'd led created, if they did nothing else, long and luxuriant anecdotes. They discovered that they had, on several occasions, been within minutes of meeting each other, in Moscow, in Leningrad. Had been in the same apartments, known some of the same people; their trails through the snowy forest crossed and re-crossed. What would have happened had they met? Everything? Nothing? Certainly something, they decided.

They weren't very hungry, as the day wore on toward evening, and just after dark they toyed with a light supper. Their conversation was somewhat forced, slightly tense, in the dining room with a ticking grandfather clock that made every silence ring with melodrama. Nadia said, “If it weren't for the general's feelings, I'd have poured soup in that monster long ago.”

They retired early. He, for form's sake, to a guest room, she to her blue and white sanctuary. When the noise in the kitchen subsided and the house grew quiet, Szara climbed the marble staircase.

They lit a fire, turned out the lights, played the Victrola, drank wine.

She surprised him. The way she moved through the daily world, fine boned, on air, made her seem insubstantial—one could hold her only cautiously. But it wasn't so. With a dancer's pointed toe she kicked the bottoms of her silk pajamas fully across the room, then
melted out of the top and posed for him. She was full and lovely and curved, with smooth, taut skin colored by firelight. For a moment, he simply looked at her. He'd supposed their joined spirits might float to some unimagined romantic height, but now he fell on her like a wolf and she yelped like a teenager.

And what a good time they had.

Much later, when they simply hadn't the strength to go on any longer, they fell sound asleep, still pressed together, the sheets tangled around their legs, drifting away in the midst of the most charming and vile conversation.

It was not yet dawn when they woke up. He touched her, she flexed with pleasure and sighed, a pale shape in the darkness, eyes closed, mouth open, breasts rising and falling. Suddenly he understood that sometimes there was no reaching the end of desire, no satisfying it. They simply would not, he realized, ever quite get enough of each other. Nonetheless, he thought, they could hope for the best. They could try. They could make a beginning.

He could have crawled out of bed at dawn and set out into the cold world, but he didn't. They stole another day, and this time they didn't wait for nightfall. They disappeared in the middle of the afternoon. At eight in the evening a servant set out a tureen of soup at the long table in the dining room with the ticking grandfather clock. But nobody showed up. And at eight-thirty she took it away.

He left in the middle of the following day. A taxi was called. They stood in the vestibule together until it came. “Please don't cry,” he said.

“I won't,” she promised, tears running everywhere.

The taxi honked twice and he left.

The Gestapo had him an hour later. He never even got out of Berlin. To his credit, he sensed it. He did not enter the Lehrter Bahnhof immediately but walked the streets for a while, trying to calm himself down—simply another traveler, a little bored, a little harassed,
a man who had to take the train up to Hamburg on some prosaic and vastly uninteresting errand.

But the passport control people at the staircase that led down to the platform didn't care what he looked like. A Berlin policeman took the Kringen identity papers and compared them to a typewritten list, looked over Szara's shoulder, made a gesture of the eyes and a motion of the head, and two men in suits closed in on either side of him. Very correct they were: “Can you come with us for a moment, please? ” Only will power and raw pride kept him from collapsing to his knees, and he felt the sweat break out at the roots of his hair. One of the men relieved him of his valise, the other frisked him, then they marched him, to the great interest of the passing crowd, toward the station police post. He wobbled once and one of the detectives caught him by the arm. They took him down a long corridor and through an unmarked door where a uniformed SS officer was sitting behind a desk, a file open in front of him. Reading upside down, Szara could see a long list of names and descriptive paragraphs on a yellow sheet of teletype paper. “Stand at attention,” the man said coldly.