Night Soldiers (11 page)

He threw his hands into the air and let them fall back to his thighs with a loud slap.

For a time they watched the stars floating by, lulled by the engine's steady beat over the rails. Kulic took a small penknife from his pocket and began paring a thumbnail.

Khristo sighed. The night made him sad. The history of Kulic's nation was like that of his own. The fighting never stopped. The conquerors kept coming. Other Kulics, other Khristos, all the way back through time, wandered the world. Away from love, away from home. They were destined to be eternal strangers. Melancholy adventurers, guests in other people's houses. From now on, forever, there could be no peace for him, no ease, none of the small domestic harmonies that were the consolation of plain people everywhere.

His pleasures were to be those of the soldier in a distant outpost—a woman, a bottle, a quick death without pain. Those he could look forward to. And, though his heart might still swell with poetry at the fire of a perfect sunset, there would never be the special one beside him to share such joys.

Distracted by a slight scratching noise, he turned to see Kulic lying on his side and carving on the wooden wall of the railcar with his penknife. Kulic stood up, made space for Khristo, pointed with the knife toward the wall. Khristo slid over. The scratching was tiny, hidden away in the extreme corner, only an inch above the floor: A 825.

“What is it?”

“
B
for Brotherhood.
F
for Front. Eight, two and five for the proper order of finish in the Belov exercises of March 1935. Our group, Unit Eight, won it. Even though they fixed things so that their stooges came out on top. Unit Two should have been second, and Unit Five third. Thus, somewhere in the world, wherever this railcar travels, our victory will be celebrated.”

He stuck his hand out. Khristo stood and grasped it firmly, the hand was hard and thickly callused. Kulic gestured with the penknife in his other hand. “We could make a blood oath, but pricked fingers are the very sort of thing these sniffing dogs take note of.”

They sat down again. Khristo could see the scratched letters and numbers in his mind's eye. He had read in a history book that the early kings of Greece could not trust their own countrymen not to assassinate them, so they imported, as guards, northerners, blonds and redheads from lands far away where they wrote in runes, scratch writing. These guards, time heavy on their hands, had inscribed their initials on the stone lions that, in those days, kept watch over the harbor at Piraeus. He now understood those men. Even the eternal stranger needs to leave a mark of his existence: I was
here
, therefore I
was
. Even though, after a long time away, there is nobody left who especially cares whether I was or not.

Kulic rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don't be so sad. Remember what I said—if you cannot go back, go forward. While you are alive there is hope. Always.”

“BF eight, two, five,” Khristo said. He felt better because of what Kulic had done, and he was very surprised at that.

“We tell nobody, of course.”

“Of course.”

Again they sat quietly. It occurred to Khristo, staring up at the Russian sky, that if you had nothing else in the world you could at least have a secret.

April. Sleet storms rattled the windows. Outside, on Arbat Street, a broken water pipe had revealed its presence as the spring thaw began and a group of workers was breaking up the pavement with sledgehammers. The boiler had been turned off and in the classroom Khristo wore wool gloves and scarf and cap. He could see his breath when he spoke.

“Good morning, Mr. Stoianev.”

“Good morning, Mr. Smiss.”

“Smith.”

“Good morning, Mr. Smi
th
.”

“How did you spend your evening?”

“I read a most interesting book, by the English writer Arthur Grahame.”

“What was it called?”

“Called
That Some Shall Know.”

“What did this book concern itself with?”

“It is a novel, about conditions of the agrarian poor in Great Britain.”

“And what did you find the most telling scene in this book?”

“The scene where the duke struck the peasant in the face with a riding crop.”

“Why did that interest you?”

“It showed the contempt of the ruling classes for their serfs, and that servitude exists even today in Great Britain, a nation that many in the world wrongly regard as progressive.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stoianev.” “You are welcome, Mr.
Smith.”

In the street, the sledgehammers rang against the cement, a slow, steady rhythm.

It was Kerenyi, the Hungarian boy from Esztergom, who found the dog hiding in the cellar. A wet brown thing with sad eyes, half starved, its broad tail sweeping coal dust from the cement floor in hopeful joy.

Kerenyi looked like a plowboy—even after the medical directorate had provided him with a delicate set of wire-framed eyeglasses—broad-shouldered and shambling, thick-handed, slow of speech, though his father taught mathematics in a school for the children of aristocrats. It had been the elder Kerenyi's political convictions that had sent his son east, convictions turned into actions by the fiery speeches of Bela Kun, the Hungarian communist leader. Even after the students learned of his genteel background they still called Kerenyi “Plowboy.” There was a gentleness, a willing kindness, about him that reminded them of those who worked in the earth, those who never complained when the cart had to be pushed.

It was to Ilya Goldman that Kerenyi went after he discovered the dog. Goldman, the son of a Bucharest lawyer, had come to Moscow just as Kerenyi had, for ideological reasons. Kerenyi idolized the Jewish Goldman, who, small, near-sighted, exceptionally clever, embodied for him the idealistic intellectual who would lead the world into the new age.

In the cellar, late at night, Goldman threw his cap against the far wall and the dog galloped across the room and brought it back to him, eyes shining with achievement.

Kulic was brought into the business because he had a friend in the kitchen, a skinny girl who scrubbed the soup pots and slipped him a few extra scraps when she could.

They never did agree on a name. Or a breed. Kerenyi claimed it was part Viszla, the pointer dog of Hungary. Goldman, a city boy, had no opinion on the matter, but Khristo, after Kulic had dragged him downstairs to show him “the new student,” thought it more retriever than pointer. With most of Unit Eight now reassembled they could not leave Voluta out of it, and it was Voluta who stole the soup bowl that they used as a water dish.

To coordinate the operational necessities—food, water, waste removal, play—they required an operational code name. It was Kulic who suggested BF 825—the symbolic cryptogram he'd carved on the wall of a railway car. Thus an apparently blank slip of paper Khristo found in his pocket read, when pressed against a hot pipe: “BF 825 requires a theft of bread from the evening meal.” It was their Codes and Ciphers instructor who had taught them that canine urine would serve, in extremity, for secret ink. She would, they thought, be amused to learn how her instruction was being used—but of course she could not be told about it.

They had the dog for ten days, and they would forever associate it with Kerenyi. As the dog loved all who befriended it, Kerenyi was always prepared to be kind, to lend a hand when he could. Everyone at Arbat Street, student and instructor alike, knew that Kerenyi had no business being there—such ready affection would only get him in trouble, sooner or later—but the instructors were loath to fail him and his fellow comrades spent long hours making certain he could pass his examinations.

One Friday the entire group was marched off to a vast theater in central Moscow to hear a four-hour speech by Ordzhonikidze, the passionate Georgian from the Caucasus, a prominent leader among the Bolsheviks, and when they returned the dog was gone. Its dish, toy, and piece of blanket were gone as well and the floor had been swept clean of coal dust and mopped with carbolic.

A week later, the weather broke.

The spring rains swept in from the west, warm and steady. The great snow mounds, blackened by months of soot and ash, turned crystalline, then spongy, and the cobbled streets ran like rivers. The Moskva rose in its banks, people crossing the bridges stopped to watch great chunks of dirty ice spinning past below them. Rain pat on the roofs, ran down the windows in big droplets, dripped from gutters, downspouts, eaves, and the brims of hats. It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter.

Late that afternoon, they came for him.

Two members of the school security staff took him to the parlor, then stood politely to one side. The power station had gone wrong again, so the lamps flickered and dimmed and left the corners of the room in shadow.

Sascha was leaning against the back of a sofa, a white scarf looped casually around his neck, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a brown leather coat that glistened with afternoon rain. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth and the smoke, drifting through the soft dusk that lit the parlor, made his presence cloudy and obscure. He raised one hand and flicked the fingers, at which signal the two security officers left the room.

“I am told you do very well here,” he said.

“Thank you, comrade Sascha.”

“I am called Sascha. Only that. Save your
comrades
for those who need them.”

He moved about the room, slowly and speculatively. The end of the cigarette glowed briefly and two long plumes of smoke flowed from his nostrils.

“Tell me, Khristo. Tell me the truth—I promise that your answer will not hurt you. Do you dream? Specifically, do you dream of her? The redheaded girl? Does she reach out to you at night? Or, perhaps, is she under water? Long hair streaming out? She might call out your name. Does she do that? Possibly a private name, a sweet name, that you shared.”

He reached the far corner, turned slowly, moved back toward the window.

“You may tell me, Khristo Nicolaievich. I am, among other things, your confessor.”

Khristo took a beat to organize himself. “I do not dream of her,” he said.

“Of what, then?”

“I dream of freedom for my people.”

He stopped walking and stared, canting his head over slightly. “Do you,” he said. Again he began to pace, took his hands from his pockets and clasped them behind his back. “Well, perhaps you do, after all, perhaps you do. We speak of such things. We speak of little else, in fact. But that it should actually happen …” He stopped. Seemed for a moment to commune with himself. “Maybe they have taught you that, your faithful instructors. Maybe they have taught you to dream in the prescribed manner. Imagine. To tame the dreams.”

“Not that, Sascha.”

“Hmm. Well, don't give up. Keep trying. You must, you know—the proletariat demands it—keep trying. Tell me, what do you think of this:

“Ten thousand banners marching, '
neath the reddened sun.
They sing, O hear it, a leader's glorious name.”

He waited. Facing Khristo, staring through the drifting smoke.

“It is a poem of inspiration,” Khristo said.

“Yes, oh yes, student Khristo, you do learn well here, they are right to say it. For you do not say it is
inspiring
—you do not know who wrote it, or when, or why, and you could be wrong. Very wrong indeed to be inspired by an improper sentiment. Such errors often cannot be forgiven, and where would you be then? Eh? On your knees in a cellar?”

He waited. Khristo had to answer.

“May I ask who wrote the poem?”

“I wrote it. I am a poet. Can you not look at me and see that? When I was very young, I was obsessed with foolishness, romantic nonsense. My poems were full of herons, birch trees, endless skies, and girls with pretty hands. Now, well, you have heard. Truth found me. Sought me out, perfected my heart.
The plow
, it whispered,
your soul has lost its plow
. ”

He stood close to Khristo and took him by the shoulders. The smell of alcohol was overwhelming, as though it sweated through his pores. Khristo squinted as the cigarette smoke burned his eyes. The room was suddenly very still.

“The plow of steel,” he went on, voice persuasive and logical, “turns our black earth to silver, / thus our Leader's wisdom / Opens our hearts to knowledge.” He drew back and waited a moment, returned his hands to his pockets and waited for a reaction. “Khristo Nicolaievich,” he said, “how do you not weep to hear such thoughts?”

When there was no response he took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it at his feet, where it smoldered in the carpet. Then he walked to the window and looked out. “This fucking rain,” he said.

He drew the leather coat around his shoulders as though he were suddenly cold, turned toward Khristo and gazed into his eyes. “Well,” he said, “we are to be married, you and I.”

Khristo did not answer.

“Yes,” Sascha said, “it is time you left this house of virgins.”

“I see.”

“But marriage, you know, is a serious business. You will have to be the very best of wives. Obedient and good-natured, ready always to protect the honor of the family. You must never flirt with strangers, or tell our secrets at the village well. And, of course, you must be eternally faithful. That most of all. Do you understand?”

“I do,” Khristo said.

Sascha smiled crookedly at the words, and nodded to himself. “Yes,” he said, “I almost believe you. You will give all but a little corner of your heart—a private place, you think.”

Khristo almost answered, then stopped.

Sascha laughed. “Knowledge is forgiveness, boy, and who among us has not crossed his fingers behind his back? Come along,
bratets”
—the word meant
little brother
—“and we'll go and see the priest.”

He stepped back and gestured for Khristo to precede him through the alcove that led from the parlor to the door of the house. He followed, and his hand fell affectionately on Khristo's shoulder. Sascha was slim and small-boned, an aristocrat, a man made for drawing rooms, but the force of the blow very nearly drove Khristo to his knees.