Night Soldiers (6 page)

As the winter lay down on the city, harder and harder through the month of November, her appetite grew. They did it in the attic, where the May Day portraits of Lenin, colossal things colored a vengeant Soviet red, were folded and stored. They did it behind the targets on the basement pistol range. They did it under the table in the kitchen while the cook snored asthmatically in the parlor. The pace and spirit of it never changed—a mad dash to the finish line, first one there wins, as though Revanchist Materialism waited just outside the door to gobble them up. He had heard, over the back fences in Vidin, that there were other paths through the woods, that one could also do this and that. But, on the one occasion when she was squiffed on Georgian brandy and he'd attempted to put theory into practice, his reward was a double whack on the ears. “Get off your knees,” she said, “that is an attitude of slavery!” So much for this and that, back to essentials. And the more they did it, the more aggressive she became in daily matters.

Over the salt herring at the long plank dinner table: “Did you know that Dmitrov is in Moscow? I think I saw him coming out of the Rossaya Hotel.”

“Dmitrov?” Khristo looked at her questioningly over his fork.

“Oh no. This I refuse to believe.
Georgy
Dmitrov. The Bulgarian hero.”

He shrugged. Voluta, a lean-faced Pole with black hair swept back from a high forehead, coughed into his hand with embarrassment.

“Your very own countryman.” She shook her head, lips pressed in resignation at the utter futility of him.

Goldman, a young man from Bucharest, stepped in to save him.

“Dmitrov took part in the great patriotic burning of the Reichstag,” he said. “His speech at the trial is to be learned in the schools. Now he is in Russia.”

“Oh,” Khristo said. “Our newspapers lie about such things or neglect them entirely.” As he struggled to learn all the new ideas, he learned also to cover what Marike called his
political infantilism
.

Hitler's speech on that occasion was one of many statements typed on paper slips and tacked to the dormitory wall, waiting in ambush for the wandering eye of the daydreamer: “This is a God-given signal. If, as I believe, the communists have done it, you are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history.” In Germany and in Russia, it became clear to Khristo, they were itching to go at it, there remained only the question of time and provocation.

Khristo struggled in his classes. English and French, an impossible snarl of alien noises. Political history and thought, a crosshatch of plots and counterplots, irredentist imperialism, Pan-Slavism, the sayings of Lenin, the revelations of Marx. The world was not as he'd thought.

Tides of confusion pulled at him, but he somehow remained afloat. He was now firmly established in the dormitory on Arbat Street, where he'd been given two blankets and one towel, introduced to a milling crowd of Serbs, Poles, Croatians, Jews, Slovenians and whatnot, forty souls in all, including eight women who had
their own sleeping quarters
—please take note, comrades. He had been handed a schedule of classes and a stack of books printed on mealy gray paper. Do not mark, others must use. Measured for a khaki uniform of heavy cotton. Poked and studied shamelessly by a large, frightening nurse. Drenched with kerosene in case of lice. Assigned a narrow cot between Voluta and Goldman. Told to learn the words to the songs by tomorrow morning, but the lights must be turned off at ten. Inside himself, Khristo was desolate. Not at all what he had expected. He had imagined himself as Antipin's assistant, just a bit important, we'll take him out dancing with us.

It was not to be. A white card outside the office door said V. I. Ozunov. A bald man with a fringe of black hair, a brush of a black mustache, delicate gold-rimmed glasses and a dark, ferocious face, who wore the uniform of an army major. Khristo sat hypnotized as Ozunov reeled off a monotone of forbidden sins. The underlying message was writ large: we have you, boy. Now dance to this music. As for threats, we needn't bother, right?

“What has become of comrade Antipin?” Khristo asked, one try for bravery.

Ozunov smiled like a snake. “Antipin was yesterday. Today is Ozunov.”

End of rebellion.

Yet as much as he struggled and sweated with the languages and the levantine webs of theory, there was one area in which he succeeded. He was, it turned out to his and everyone else's amazement, gifted in the craft.

It began with the affair of the knitting needles. Five students were taken to a classroom and seated around a scarred wooden table. The room stank of carbolic soap. Beads of condensation ran slowly down the fogged-up window, colored a sickly white by the winter sky above the city.

Ozunov paced up and down and addressed the backs of their heads, his hands clasped behind him.

“On your desk are sealed envelopes. Do not touch them. Also a pair of knitting needles. Do not touch them, either. We presume you to know what they are, much as we presume that you have never used them.”

They laughed politely.

“Good, good. You are not old
babas
after all, though your degenerate love of prattle and gossip might lead one to think otherwise. I am relieved.”

He paced.

They waited.

“Voluta!”

The Pole jumped. “Yes, Major Ozunov.”

“Turn the letter over. To whom is it addressed?”

“To the British ambassador, Major Ozunov.”

“A keen analysis, Voluta. Do we all agree?”

They turned their letters over. All were the same, they agreed.

“What might the envelope contain? Stoianev!”

“A plot?”

“Kerenyi?”

“The reports of spies.”

“Oh yes? Semmers, you agree?”

“Uhh, it is possible, comrade Major.”

“And so, Voluta?”

“A denunciation.”

“Goldman. Your opinion on this matter.”

“Perhaps a false denunciation.”

“Always the Romanian, eh Goldman? You see the complexity, the winding and twisting of political matters, I give you that. But then, could it not be a
false denunciation?
By
spies?
In Stoianev's
plot?
What about that? Or it could be the information, no shock to anyone around here, that Ozunov's students are a blithering pack of donkeys' behinds!” He finished with a shout.

He paced silently, his boots slapping the scrubbed wooden floor, and breathed with a fury. “The point is, comrades, you don't know. Not such a difficult solution, is it? You don't know because the letter is sealed. It could be birthday greetings from the Belgian consul. It could be a love note from the stable boy. It could be anything. Now, how shall we discover this elusive truth?”

Kerenyi: “Take the letter out and read it.”

“Brilliant! You shall now all do exactly that. When I give the word, you have ten minutes. Oh, by the way …” He stopped, leaned over Voluta and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Don't tear the envelope. We don't want the gentleman to know that someone is reading his mail. And here's a hint, little as any of you deserve it, use the knitting needles.”

For the next ten minutes, an intense flurry of effort. Ozunov, of course, made it much worse by announcing “thirty seconds gone” from time to time as they worked. To their credit, they kept at it long after hopeless frustration set in. They pried and poked and stabbed and wiggled at the envelopes. Voluta tried to force up the point of the flap and ripped a groove through the paper. Goldman, after a few moments of intense concentration, staring fixedly at the problem, determined that the knitting needles were a false technology, offered with the intention of misleading them, and picked at the thing with his fingernails. Semmers, with shaking hands, wounded himself in the palm and left red blots on the address. By the end of the ten-minute period, Kerenyi, a tow-headed boy from the Hungarian town of Esztergom, had letter and envelope in shreds and one of the knitting needles bent in a vee.

Khristo Stoianev held the letter in one hand, the envelope, still sealed, in the other. The letter read:
Meet at noon by Spassky Tower
.

Ozunov could feel his heart beating. It was the throb of the prospector finding golden flecks in an ordinary rock. What was this? A magnificent discovery, to be wrapped carefully and delivered, in all humility, to his superiors? Or something else. Something bad. Something very, very bad indeed. He began to sweat. Closed his eyes, reviewed the last few weeks in his mind.

Khristo had discovered the small, unsealed slit at the side of the envelope where the glue line ended. He had squeezed the envelope so that the slit bulged slightly; peering inside, he had seen the fold of the letter within. Carefully, he ran one needle inside the fold, then inserted the second needle between the top of the fold and the upper edge of the envelope flap so that the needles sandwiched the fold of the letter between them. With great patience, he began to rotate both needles, and soon the letter became a tube of paper with the needles at its core. When he had the whole letter, he drew it toward him through the slit.

Ozunov dismissed the others.

Stood in front of his desk. Folded his hands and tapped his thumbs together rapidly. From years of school, Khristo knew this situation intimately and it puzzled him. What had he done wrong? Clearly he had done
something
, they didn't push their glasses up on their foreheads and shut their eyes and pinch the bridges of their noses like that unless you had made a very great botch of it indeed.

“So, Stoianev, tell Uncle Vadim. We'll talk man to man. Yes?”

Uncle Vadim?
He said nothing.

“Where did you learn it?”

“Just here. I, ah, it revealed itself. The solution.”

“A lie.”

“No, comrade Major, I must disagree with you.”

“You think me stupid?”

“No sir.”

“Do not use that form.”

“Beg pardon, comrade Major.”

“Do you know, Stoianev, what is done in the Lubianka? In the cellars? What they do with the hoses? It takes no time at all. You will confess that your mother is a wolf, that your father is a dragon, that you keep the czar's dick hidden in a Bible. You will confess that you fly through the air and consort with witches. You will tell them who taught you such tricks—when and where and what you had for dinner. You understand?”

“Yes, comrade Major. I learned it here, just now.”

“I give you one last chance: tell me the truth.”

“From the first moment, it seemed the obvious way.”

Ozunov took a deep breath and exhaled, dropped his gold-rimmed glasses and settled them on his nose. “Very well,” he said, “I must offer you my congratulations.” He thrust his hand forward and Khristo shook it once, formally. “Now we are both dead men,” he added stoically, and gestured for Khristo to leave the room.

The news traveled. Everyone wanted to be his friend. He found himself regaining some of what he had lost when abandoned by the admiring Antipin. Even Marike relented. Took his hand and led him down to the warm, dusty boiler room where, on a scratchy blanket, he received a Soviet Hero's reward.

In the following weeks, Major Ozunov himself began to thaw. Khristo and his comrades chased each other through the streets of Moscow. Following each other and being followed. Eluding their pursuers, checking their backs in shop windows, running dead-drops in the parks, brushing hands in fast passes in Krasnaya Presnya Park. At the militia station near the school, the lieutenant said, “I see Ozunov is at it again.” Denunciations poured in from angry citizens.
I saw them pass an envelope, comrade, just as bold as brass in clear daylight. Foreigners, I'd say they were. And most brazen
. They were broken up into teams, competed in discovering and penetrating each other's operations. Semmers gave Goldman a bloody nose when he caught him stealing a master cipher. A baker reported that a group of hooligans had kidnapped a tall Polish fellow in his shop.

And Khristo won. And won again. It was Khristo's Red Star team that accepted the prize copy of Lenin's speeches. You could dodge through crowds, slither beneath a wagon, crouch down in a phalanx of cyclists, it did not seem to matter. You looked in the reflective shop window and there he was—just near enough, just far enough—doing something or other that made it seem he had lived on this street all his life. Twenty of them chased him into the Byelorussian railroad station on Tverskaya Street. Then, three hours later, trooped back to the dormitory empty-handed. To find Khristo waiting for them in the parlor, wearing a stiff-billed train conductor's cap. They knew him now for what he was, the best among them. They had seen it before, wherever they came from: the best in the classroom, the best on the soccer field, and they acknowledged his preeminence.

For his part, he learned to wear the star and honor its responsibilities. He encouraged the slow learners, lent a secret hand to those arrayed against him in competitions, and dismissed his successes as pure luck. Major Ozunov, in the hearing of other students, called him Khristo Nicolaievich, which put a seal on his ascendancy. Inspired by all this attention, he even managed to learn a little French.

On the last day of December it snowed a blizzard and he was summoned to Ozunov's private office. Since dawn, kopeck-size snowflakes had drifted down the windless air. Through the major's leaded windows—his office had formerly been the master bedroom of the once grand house—Khristo watched the street whiten and fill.

Ozunov stuffed the bowl of a pipe with tobacco, then lit it carefully with a large wooden match. As the office filled with sweet thick smoke, the major produced a chessboard and pieces.

“Do you play, Khristo Nicolaievich?”

“Not really, comrade Major. In Vidin, there was no time to learn.”

“You know the moves, though. What each piece may do.”

“Of course I know that, comrade Major.”

“Good. Then let us try a game. What do you say?”

“I will do the best I can, comrade Major.”

“Mmm,” he said around the pipe stem, “that's the proper spirit.”