Night Soldiers (61 page)

For Khristo, there was little to do aboard the
Brovno
. Ivo, the pilot, stayed in the wheelhouse while his brother-in-law, Josip, ran the engine down below and his son, called Marek, served as second engineer. The
Brovno
was a big, powerful river tug, built just before the war. They'd run her up an inlet in 1940, built a shack around her, dismantled the diesel engine and hidden the parts in three separate attics, then gone off to the hills to fight the Germans.

Khristo spent most of his time leaning on a railing and watching the land go by. Kulic had taken him off to the Osijek town hall and obtained, using forged identification papers, a Yugoslav work permit as a deckhand. So he was officially part of the
Brovno's
crew, but the captain wanted no part of him as a worker. “What do you want me to do?” he asked as they got under way at dawn.

Ivo thought for a time. “Coil a rope,” he said.

“And then?”

Ivo shrugged. “Put it in the rope locker, if you like.”

He did neither. The river was taking him home, and he wanted to stand at the railing and gaze at the countryside. The hundred and twenty miles from Osijek down to Belgrade passed quickly, and by nightfall they'd pulled into the river Sava and tied up while Ivo went off to the dockside office of the harbormaster. He was gone for a long time. When he returned, he rang for three-quarter power and nosed the
Brovno
through a forest of tugs and barges with such speed that their wake drew curses all across the harbor. “What did they say?” Khristo asked.

“He said he'd throw me in the river. I said I'd throw him in the river. Then he signed over the barge.”

“That took three hours?”

“We said it many different ways.”

They located the pipe-laden barge and tied up to it, positioning themselves at a point just forward of the stern on the starboard quarter, then, at Ivo's direction, resecured the load, tightening the cables down with a Stillson wrench. It was after midnight by the time they pushed the barge out of the Sava and back onto the Danube, turning east by north into the foothills of the Carpathians. How you came across the Hungarian plain, and then into the Serbian mountains, on a river that ran downhill, Khristo had never really understood, but the mountain shapes rose bulky and dark on either side of the river and the air grew sharp as they moved through the night. Ivo navigated by the beam of a powerful searchlight that swept the river ahead of him, revealing shoals and sandbars where the water foamed white. Somewhere past the giant fort at Smederevo, the light fell upon a pair of bodies, a man and a woman, joined together at the wrist by rope or wire, shifting slowly downriver on the current. “Collaborators,” Ivo said, his cigarette glowing red in the darkened pilothouse.

Khristo slept for a time, after Marek relieved Ivo at the helm, swaying in a hammock in the crew cabin, waking at dawn to a moment of panic as he tried to remember where he was. On deck, he saw that the
Brovno
had tied up to a small dock, for customs and passport stamps and to take on a Romanian pilot, a small man in a suit and tie. “For the Iron Gate,” Marek explained.

“Who is this?” the Romanian said, staring at Khristo.

“Deckhand,” Marek answered, winking at Khristo above the man's head.

Taking the hint, he went off and coiled a rope in the stern. Ivo, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, appeared and took the helm, and they were off at slow speed through the Kazan pass into Romania.

It was the strangest piece of river he'd ever seen, sculptured columns of rock thrust up in midstream and the mountains closed in like high walls. There were sudden dips and falls in the river, and the
Brovno
and its barge plunged and bucked past rocky outcrops that looked close enough to touch and echoed back the throb of the pistons above the water. As morning came, the passage filled with strange light. He kneeled in the stern, a piece of tarry rope forgotten in his hands, and watched a line of sunlight crawl up the slope of a mountain, turning the mass of dark shapes into a forest of evergreen trees, their branches hanging with the weight of morning rain, droplets glittering as the sun caught them.

The Bulgarian border station was a sagging dock at the mouth of the river Timok. Two army captains came on board and sat at a table in the crew cabin. Glasses and brandy were produced. One of the captains was dark-skinned and wore a thick mustache, the other was fair-skinned, with black hair and blue eyes. When they had finished their brandy, Khristo and Marek were brought in together to have their papers stamped. The pale captain looked at him curiously. “He's new,” he said.

“Yes,” Ivo said, “a hard worker. My sister's boy.”

The man glanced down at the Yugoslav papers, then back up at Khristo. “He looks like a Bulgarian,” he said. “Who'd your sister marry?”

Ivo shook his head. “Do not ask,” he said, voice filled with mock sorrow. They laughed together.

The captain stamped his papers. “Good luck to you,” he said, using an old-fashioned Bulgarian idiom. Khristo smiled uncertainly and nodded his way out of the crew cabin.

Under way once more, they drew close to Vidin, and when the river turned south at the chalk cliff hollowed out by curving water, he was home. They chugged past the shacks by the river with grapevines that looped over the reed roofs, the pole-built docks, the minarets, and the Turkish fortress on the beach. He stood like a sailor, leaning on his elbows, one foot hooked in the lowest rail, and a woman in black waved from the shore. He waved back. Then the town receded in the distance, a small place lit by a weak April sun, the river turned east again, and it was gone.

The days and nights blended together on the river, it was as though the rules of ordinary life were suspended and hours no longer mattered. There were high guard towers on the Romanian shore—sometimes the glint of binoculars—and twice they were boarded from patrol boats and searched. But there was nothing to be discovered, only some Yugoslav river sailors and a load of iron pipe on a barge. Europe was lost behind them—after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea. At Silistra, the
Brovno
left Bulgarian territory and moved north toward the Romanian delta. A day later, they crossed the southern boundary of the strange land known as Bessarabia. Officially it was Romanian territory, called Moldavian Romania, lying south of the Ukrainian SSR, which was part of Russia. But the name Bessarabia was older than the official borders, and it had always been a lost place, home to ancient Russian religious sects expelled from the interior, home to Jews and Turks and Gypsies and Tatars and tribes so lost they no longer had any name at all. It was a place for people that nobody else wanted.

The spring wind blew hard from the west and the sky shifted gray and white and blue above them. Along the shore, birch and poplar groves were leafing out, softening the empty fields that ran to the horizon and vanished in the distant hills. At dawn, herons worked at fishing in the shallows. Khristo felt he was sailing on the edge of the world, east of the Balkans. At dusk, the mountains of Transylvania were silhouettes, backlit by the setting sun, and where the land fell away from the river he could see lakes that turned violet as night came on and great clouds of birds that rose from the shore and wheeled across the evening sky. The nights were black, with not a single light to be seen. Late one night they saw a bonfire on an island, with human shapes dancing slowly before it. Ivo shut the engines down but there was no music to be heard, only the sounds of insects and water sweeping by the hull and a deep silence.

In April of 1945, in Palestine, Jewish refugees arriving by freighter from Cyprus came first to the northern port of Haifa, where they sat on benches in a large shed and waited to be processed. They were called by number, and each held tightly to a worn scrap of paper and waited, patiently or impatiently, to see one of several men and women who sat at old school desks facing the benches. They came from everywhere—from Jelgava in Latvia, from Wilno in Poland, from Strasbourg in France—everywhere. They had survived Hitler in a number of ways. Some had spent years in an attic or a cellar—having never seen the sun for all that time. Others had lived in the forests like animals. Still others had hidden themselves by the use of deception—assuming non-Jewish identities, sometimes resorting to blackmail or bribery of officials to ensure that identity checks confirmed their false papers.

It was hot under the metal roof of the shed and there were flies, and the people waiting on the benches were exhausted. Heshel Zavi tried to be kind, to be patient, but he was not young anymore and these were difficult people, suspicious, often hostile. They had saved their lives, a miracle. They had reached Palestine, another miracle. They had dreamed of oranges and joyous rabbis. Now they were confronted with Heshel Zavi, an old man with a short temper who had to ask them questions and write things down on paper. To the people on the benches, those who sat behind desks and wrote things on paper were enemies.

Heshel Zavi didn't look much like an enemy—he was a burly old man in an open-neck shirt with a yarmulke set precariously atop stiff, wooly curls—but some of their other enemies had not looked like enemies either.
Well
, he thought,
it's to be expected
. He glanced at the chalkboard in the corner and saw that the next number was 183. He called it out in Hebrew. There was no answer. Too much to hope for, he thought. He grumbled to himself and tried it in Yiddish. Again, no answer. What next, Polish? Russian? He tried Russian.
Ah-hah
, he said to himself.

This one was youngish, with a week's growth of stubble on his face. He wore the long overcoat and the traditional hat and shuffled to the desk, shoulders stooped, eyes lowered, much the usual thing, yet Heshel Zavi was not so sure. This one looked like a
yeshiva bucher
, a dedicated student of the Torah, yet there was more to him than that. He had small, clever features, there was something of the rat in him. Not quite a bad rat—Heshel Zavi amended his impression—a good rat, a wise rat, a rat in a children's story. But not a mouse. Definitely not a mouse.

“Sit down,” he said brusquely. “Welcome to Palestine. You will see me, then a doctor if you need one, representatives of the
kibbutzim
, and so forth. We are here to help you, please be patient with us. Do you understand?”

The man nodded that he understood.

“Very well. Your name?”

“Itzhak Gold.”

“Your name truly?”

“Not really.”

“Never mind. We don't care. Itzhak Gold it is. From where?”

“Kurland.”

“I'll write Lithuania.”

“If you like.”

“From a village?”

“The city of Kaunas.”

“Very well. I'll write Kaunas. Next, occupation.”

“Clerk.”

Heshel Zavi wrote the word in Hebrew. Another clerk, he thought, just what they needed. He glanced at the man's hands, un-callused and soft. Well, they would fix that. “You would, no doubt, like to be a clerk in Palestine.”

The man shrugged, as though to say he knew nothing else.

“It's farmers we need,” Heshel Zavi said. “Someone who can fix a tractor. Clerks we have.”

Again the man shrugged. “Perhaps there is a civil service.”

“Like me, you mean?” Amazing how many of them wanted
his
job—two hours in the country and they were ready to shove him aside.

“No, not exactly like you. You have a small defense force, I believe.”

“There are several, all with grand names. Night watchmen is what they are.”

“Ah,” said the man, his small, ratlike face lighting up with a smile, “the very thing for me.”

“You're sure? You can always change your mind. You
will
change your mind—that's mostly what we do here, we are preoccupied with it. People who have not been able to change their minds for two thousand years tend to make up for lost time once they have the opportunity. As for being a night watchman, well, there's not much future in that, is there.”

“A little, maybe. Where there are night watchmen, there will soon be someone to suggest what they should watch at night.”

Nimble, Heshel Zavi thought, and ambitious. He found himself liking the man, soft hands or not. He leaned forward across the desk. “Look,” he said, “if you can bear waiting a little longer, maybe I have a friend who might help you. But it will take time. I have you to finish, and many others.”

“I don't mind at all,” the man said. “I'll wait.”

The people of Sfintu Gheorghe would never forget the events of April 1945. The stories were told again and again—never the same way twice, of course, everybody had their own version of it, depending on where they'd been and what they'd seen and what they wished they'd seen. They weren't liars, exactly, they just liked to make a good story better. Who can blame them? After all, Sfintu Gheorghe wasn't much of a place. In the old days, five centuries earlier, it had been a port of call for Genoese traders, but now it was just a fishing village, a few hundred souls perched out on an arm of the Dunărea that reached to the sea. They were of Greek origin, descendants of the Phanariot Greeks who had once served as the bureaucracy of Turkish and Boyar rule. Those days were gone, of course, now they were simply fishermen who took their boats out on the Black Sea.

The sea
was
black, a curiosity of nature, teeming with life just below the surface, then, fifty fathoms down, a dead place with a bizarre chemistry of water. The normal oxygen had, in some ancient time, been replaced by poisonous hydrogen sulfide and nothing could live in it. So whatever died in the surface waters drifted down to the lower depths where, because there was no oxygen, it did not decompose. Think of it, they would tell the rare visitor. Sailors, great fishes, boats, sea monsters—
it was all still down there
.

They had a slightly peculiar vision of life in Sfintu Gheorghe, but that served them well during the second week in April because peculiar things went on. First, there was the madman. There were those who claimed the whole business started right there. Others disagreed. The Fortunate One, they'd say; the madman had nothing to do with it, he just happened to be around when the Fortunate One made his grandiose gesture. Nobody, however, denied that the madman had been there first, showing up on the tenth of April and hiding in the church.