Dark Star (6 page)

What had he hoped to find? Not this. A thick stack of grayish paper, frayed at the edges, covered with a careful pen scrawl of stiff Russian phrases—the poetry of bureaucrats. It was official paper, a bluntly printed letterhead announcing its origin as Bureau of Information, Third Section, Department of State Protection (Okhrannoye Otdyelyenye), Ministry of the Interior, Transcaucasian District, with a street address in Tbilisi—the Georgian city of Tiflis.

A slow, sullen disappointment drifted over Szara's mood. He carried the vodka bottle over to the window and watched as a freight train crawled slowly away from the railway station, its couplings clanking and rattling as the cars jerked into motion. The officer was not a noble colonel or a captain of cavalry but a slow-footed policeman, no doubt a cog in the czar's vast but inefficient secret police gendarmerie, the Okhrana, and this sheaf of misery on the hotel desk apparently represented a succession of cases, a record of
agents provocateurs,
payments to petty informers, and solemn physical descriptions of Social Revolutionary party workers in the early days of the century. He'd seen this kind of report from time to time, soul-destroying stuff it was, humanity seen through a window by the dim glow of a street lamp, sad and mean and obsessed with endless conspiracies. The thought of it made you want to retire to the countryside with a milk cow and a vegetable patch.

Not a military officer, a police officer. Poor man, he had carried this catalogue of small deceits over mountain and across desert, apparently certain of its value once the counterrevolution had succeeded and some surviving spawn of the Romanovs once again sat upon the Throne of All the Russias. In sorrow more than anger Szara soothed his frustrated imagination with two tiltings of the vodka bottle.
A paper creature,
he thought.
A uniform with a man in it.

He walked back to the desk and adjusted the gooseneck lamp. The organization Messame Dassy (Third Group) had been founded in 1893, of Social Democratic origin and purpose, in political opposition to Meori Dassy (Second Group)—Szara sighed at such
grotesque hair-splitting—and made its views known in pamphlets and the newspaper
Kvali (The Furrow).
Known principals of the organization included N. K. Jordania, K. K. Muridze, G. M. Tseretelli. The informant
DUBOK
(it meant “little oak” and had gone on to become the name for a dead-drop of any kind) enrolled and became active in 1898, at age nineteen.

Szara flipped through the stack of pages, his eye falling randomly on summaries of interviews, memoranda, alterations in handwriting as other officers contributed to the record, receipts for informer payments signed with cover names (not code names like
DUBOK;
one never knew one's code name, that belonged to the Masters of the File), a change to typewriter as the case spanned the years and reports were sent traveling upward from district to region to central bureau to ministry to Czar Nicholas and perhaps to God Himself.

Szara's temples throbbed.

Serves you right!
What in the name of heaven had he expected? Swiss francs? Perhaps he had, deep down. Those exquisitely printed passports to anywhere and everything.
Idiot!
Maybe gold coins? The molten rubies of children's books? Or a single pressed rose, its last dying fragrance only just discernible?
Yes, yes, yes. Any or all of it.
His eye fell in misery on the false plate lying on the floor amid a tangle of cut-up thread. He'd learned to sew as a child in Odessa, but this was not the sort of job he could do. How was he to put all this back together again? By employment of the hotel seamstress?
The guest in Room 35 requires the false bottom sewed back on his suitcase—hurry woman, he must cross the Polish frontier tonight!
A victim of betrayed imagination, Szara cursed and mentally called down the
apparat
as though summoning evil spirits. He willed Heshel with his sad little smile or Renate Braun with her purse full of skeleton keys, or any of them, gray shapes or cold-eyed intellectuals, to come and take this inhuman pettifoggery away from him before he hurled it out the window.

In fact, where were they?

He glanced at the bottom of the door, expecting a slip of paper to come sliding underneath at that very moment, but all he saw was
worn carpet. The world suddenly felt very silent to him, and another visit with the vodka did not change that.

In desperation he shoved the paper to one side and replaced it with sheets of hotel stationery from the desk drawer. If, in the final analysis, the officer did not deserve this vodka-driven storm in the emotional latitudes, the anguished people of Prague most assuredly did.

It was midnight when he finished, and his back hurt like a bastard. But he'd gotten it. The reader would find himself;
his
street,
his
neighborhood,
his
nation. And the hysteria, the nightmare, was where it belonged, just below the horizon so you felt it more than saw it. To balance a story on “the people” he'd have to do one on “the ministry”: quote from Benes, quote from General Vlasy, something vicious from Henlein, and the slant—since the country had been created a parliamentary democracy in 1918 and showed no sign of yearning to become a socialist republic—would have to serve Soviet diplomatic interests by fervid anti-Hitlerism. No problem there. He could file on ministries with one eye shut and the pencil in his ear, and it would mean just about that much. Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said.

Then, as always happened after he wrote something he liked, the room began to shrink. He stuffed some money in his pocket, pulled up his tie, threw on his jacket, and made his escape. He tried walking, but the wind blowing down from Poland was fierce and the air had the smell of winter, so he waved down a taxi and gave the address of the Luxuria, a
nachtlokal
where the cabaret was foul and the audience worse, thus exactly where he belonged in his present frame of mind.

Nor was he disappointed. Sitting alone at a tiny table, a glass of flat champagne at his elbow, he smoked steadily and lost himself in
the mindless fog of the place, content beneath the soiled cutout of yellow paper pinned to a velvet curtain that served as the Luxu-ria's moon—a thin slice, a weary old moon for nights when nothing mattered.

Momo Tsipler and his Wienerwald Companions.

Five of them, including the oldest cellist in captivity, a death-eyed drummer called Rex, and Momo himself, one of those dark celebrities nourished by the shadows east of the Rhine, a Viennese Hungarian in a green tuxedo with a voice full of tears that neither he nor anyone else had ever cried.

“Noch einmal als Abschied dein Händchen mir gib,”
sang Momo as the cello sobbed. “Just once again give me your hand to press”— the interior Szara was overjoyed, this horrid syrup was delicious, a wicked joke on itself, an anthem to Viennese love gone wrong. The title of the song was perfect: “There Are Things We Must All Forget.” The violinist had fluffy white hair that stood out in wings and he smiled like Satan himself as he played.

The Companions of the Wienerwald then took up a kind of “drunken elephant” theme for the evening's main attraction; the enormous Mottel Motkevich, who staggered into the spotlight to a series of rimshots from the drummer and began his famous one-word routine. At first, his body told the story: I just woke up in the maid's bed with the world's worst hangover and someone pushed me out onto the stage of a nightclub in Prague. What am I doing here? What are
you
doing here?

His flabby face sweated in the purple lights—for twenty years he'd looked like he was going to die next week. Then he shaded his eyes and peered around the room. Slowly, recognition took hold. He knew what sort of swine had come out to the
nachtlokal
tonight, ah yes, he knew them all too well.
“Ja,”
he said, confirming the very worst, his thick lips pressed together with grim disapproval.

He began to nod, confirming his observation: drunkards and perverts, dissolution and depravity. He put his hands on his broad hips and stared out at a Yugoslav colonel accompanied by a well-rouged girl in a shiny feather hat that hugged her head tightly.
“Ja!”
said Mottel Motkevich. There's no doubt about you two. Likewise
to a pair of pretty English boys in plus fours, then to a Captain of Industry caught in the act of schnozzling a sort of teenage dairymaid by his side.

Suddenly, a voice from the shadows in the back of the room: “But Mottel, why not?” Quickly the audience began to shout back at the comedian in a stew of European languages: “Is it bad?” “Why shouldn't we?” “What can be so wrong?”

The fat man recoiled, grasped the velvet curtain with one hand, eyes and mouth widening with new understanding.
“Ja?”
You mean it's really all right after all? To do just every sort of thing we all know about and some we haven't figured out yet?

Now came the audience's great moment.
“Ja!”
they cried out, again and again; even the waiters joined in.

Poor Mottel actually crumpled under the assault. A world he presumed to love, of order and rectitude, had been torn to shreds before his very eyes and now the truth lay bare. With regret, he bid all that fatuous old nonsense adieu.
“Ja, ja,”
he admitted ruefully, so it has always been, so it will always be, so, particularly so, will it be tonight.

Just then something extremely interesting caught his eye, something going on behind the curtain to his right, and, eyes glittering like a love-maddened satyr, he bequeathed his audience one final, drawn-out
jaaa,
then stomped off the stage to applause as the Companions struck up a circus melody and the zebras ran out from behind the curtain, bucking and neighing, pawing their little fore-hooves in the air.

Naked girls in papier-mâché zebra masks, actually. Prancing and jiggling among the tables, stopping now and again to stick their bottoms out at the customers, then taking off again with a leap. After a few minutes they galloped away into the wings, the Companions swung into a sedate waltz, and the dancers soon reappeared, without masks and wearing gowns, as
Animierdamen
who were to flirt with the customers, sit on their laps, and tickle them into buying champagne by the bottle.

Szara's was heavy-hipped, with hair dyed a lustrous, sinister black. “Can you guess which zebra was me? I was so very close to you!”

Later he went with her. To a secret room at the top of a cold house where you walked upstairs, then downstairs, across two courtyards where cats lived, finally to climb again, past blind turns and dark passageways, until you came to a low corridor under the roof gables.

“Zebra,” he called her; it made things simpler. He doubted he was the originator of the idea, for she seemed quite comfortable with it. She cantered and whinnied and shook her little white tummy—all for him.

His spirit soared, at last he'd found an island of pleasure in his particular sea of troubles. There were those, he knew, who would have found such sport sorrowful and mean, but what furies did they know? What waited for them on the other sides of doors?

The Zebra owned a little radio; it played static, and also a station that stayed on the air all night long, playing scratchy recordings of Schumann and Chopin from somewhere in the darkness of Central Europe, where insomnia had become something of a religion.

To this accompaniment they made great progress. And delighted themselves by feigning shock at having tumbled into such depths where anything at all may be found to swim. “Ah yes?” cried the Zebra, as though they'd happened on some new and complex amusement, never before attempted in the secret rooms of these cities, as though their daring to play the devil's own games might stay his hand from that which they knew, by whatever obscure prescience, he meant to do to them all.

Warm and exhausted at last, they dozed off in the smoky room while the radio crackled, faded in and out, voices sometimes whispering to them in unknown languages.

The leaders of the Georgian
khvost
of the NKVD usually met for an hour or two on Sunday mornings in Alexei Agayan's apartment on Tverskaya street. Beria himself never came—he was, in some sense, a conspiracy of one—but made his wishes known through Dershani, Agayan, or one of the others. Typically, only the Moscow-based
officers attended the meeting, though comrades from the southeast republics stopped by from time to time.

They met in Agayan's kitchen, large, dilapidated, and very warm, on 2
i
November at eleven-thirty in the morning. Agayan, a short, dark-skinned man with a thick head of curly gray hair and an unruly mustache, wore an old cardigan sweater in keeping with the air of informality. Ismailov, a Russified Turk, and Dzakhalev, an Ossete—the Farsi-speaking tribe of the north Caucasus from whom Stalin's mother was said to be descended—were red-eyed and a little tender from Saturday-night excesses. Terounian, from the city of Yerevan in Armenia, offered a small burlap sack of ripe pears brought to Moscow by his cousin, a locomotive engineer. These were laid out on the table by Stasia, Agayan's young Russian wife, along with bowls of salted and sugared almonds, pine nuts, and a plate of Smyrna raisins. Agayan's wife also served an endless succession of tiny cups of Turkish coffee,
sekerli,
the sweetest variety, throughout the meeting. Dershani, a Georgian, the most important among equals, was also the last to arrive. Such traditions were important to the
khvost
and they observed them scrupulously.

It was altogether a traditional sort of gathering, as though in a coffeehouse in Baku or Tashkent. They sat in their shirtsleeves and smoked, ate, and drank their coffees and took turns to speak—in Russian, their only common language—with respect for one another and with a sense of ceremony. What was said mattered, that was understood, they would have to stand by it.