Good People (43 page)

That sentence amused her. Once again he was offering her deals: Come back, get pregnant to me at last and I'll help Nikolai. All their letters were actually endless negotiations, full of strategy.

She skimmed the rest of the letter—everything was so predictable—and then stretched out on the armchair and closed her eyes. Every day she looked forward to the noon break so she could stretch out on her chair and give herself over to her dreams, in which she was another person, and Leningrad was different, and she had exquisitely witty ripostes to the pack of mourners and accusers. In her dreams she could die, and it wasn't so frightening: one turn of the steering wheel, and she plunged into a chasm; pressing a pistol to her neck; standing naked before the charging tanks of the Red Army; on the tracks in front of the
Red Arrow
when it was going seventy kilometres per hour. Only in her sleep could she strip away all her orchestrated actions—her gestures, responses, expressions—in which everything was done according to set procedures, even behaviour that seemed improvised. But living a rehearsed life also allowed her, no matter how busy she was, to think, to withstand a toxic attack of memory, to talk to the dead and hear them—like the chess machine she had read about in a French newspaper when she was a girl, an automaton that appeared in the court of Maria Theresa and defeated the best players. (When she finally learned that the whole thing was a hoax, she was very sorry.) And there were terrifying moments, when, without warning, the machine stopped. Just like an hour ago, standing before Nikita Mikhailovich. Then she was at a loss, furious, as two desires struggled
within her: to destroy everything and pay the price, or to deliver herself once more to the machine and remain alive.

A knock on the door woke her. The streetlights were already shining. She had slept for at least two hours. She scrambled to put on her puff-sleeved blouse, scattered some papers on her desk, sipped some water, turned on the light and, while she hurried to the door, patted her hair and smoothed her shirt.

‘Good evening, Comrade Weissberg.' Nikita Mikhailovich was leaning against the wall. She tried not to blink. She was already used to the transition from darkness to light.

‘Good evening, Comrade Kropotkin.' She emphasised the official tone and gestured to the armchair he liked.

He followed her. The scent of pine wafted from his clothes. He closed the door behind him and turned off the light. ‘Please don't ask again whether it's necessary,' he said. He didn't like the lighting in her office. The streetlamps were sufficient in his opinion. He passed her, removed his jacket and sat on her chair.

‘In this light your hair is blue.'

‘You always say that.'

Nikita Mikhailovich also had a weakness for her, but unlike Styopa he was cautious, and whenever he felt he was succumbing to her charms, he took care to keep a distance for a few days. Of course he desired her, but he acknowledged the hopelessness of it. Unlike other men who allowed her to seduce them, he remained faithful to his principles: she was married to Maxim Podolsky, he was married and a father of two, and that was that.

‘You don't have to apologise for falling asleep. This week someone called my attention to your habit of taking an afternoon nap, and I made a ruling: let the girl sleep.'

‘Someone called your attention,' she repeated, amused by his custom of blaming other people for providing information that it was beneath his dignity to deal with.

He poured a vodka for them both, and they clinked glasses over the table. She glanced at his hands—he was drunk, that was all. When
he was very drunk his fingers trembled and turned crimson.

‘Do you remember the last day of your first week in Brest?' he asked.

‘Certainly.'

‘Where were we standing?'

‘On the roof of Building Number Eight.'

Early morning, May, people flooded the small street, men in summer suits, women in flowered spring dresses, straw hats, sunglasses, girls holding colourful parasols, dozens of children clutching toys and dolls. Folding tables, sacks of flour, loaves of bread wrapped in towels.

‘Where are the trucks?' she had asked Nikita Mikhailovich.

‘There's no need for them. The railroad station is fifteen minutes away on foot.'

‘Who are those people?'

‘Mainly merchants,' he had said, ‘representatives of Polish companies, agents in the wood trade, some of them speculative investors in American companies. All sorts of shareholders in banks, including Jews, and those bastards had the nerve to name one of them the People's Bank. Some are connected to the bank that diverted money to Zionists. Look at them now: they might deserve our pity, and their deeds seem minor compared to their punishment. But remember that for many years the bourgeoisie concealed everything from us. We recommended that the parents tell the children they're going on a long trip.' He sighed. ‘Brest is so small, and the world is huge.'

Nikita Mikhailovich tapped the cup of vodka with the finger adorned by his wedding band, as though seeking her attention. ‘Of course we knew the history of the Weissbergs, but we still didn't know exactly how your parents and brothers were exiled. Maybe it was like that, maybe at night, maybe they were summoned for interrogation and never returned. I wanted you to see this part of our work here: purifying the district of destructive factors. All of them.

‘I knew that in your work in Leningrad you were able to manipulate the accused in interrogation rooms, but I was pretty sure that you'd never seen people crowded together in the morning outside their house
on a busy street with the two valuable possessions that they've managed to gather up, a few pennies in their socks, before the caravan marches off, one-two-three, and then, silence. I reckoned this picture might remind you of events that happened to you, and cause you some distress. But you inundated me with technical questions about procedures, making suggestions about efficiency, and I realised that all the praise poor Styopa heaped on you—and I doubted its truth, because I knew about his dopey attraction to young women—all that praise was justified.'

He poured more vodka for her, and she drank. His tactics were obvious: there were people who reacted to a small shock with big gestures, and others were just the opposite. She remembered the conclusion she had drawn when she stood next to him on the roof—above them the blue sky, and beneath them the procession in fancy dresses, scarves and parasols, embroidered kerchiefs. Stepan Kristoforovich was a department head, Nikita Mikhailovich was a movie director.

‘The only thing that I didn't understand then,' he said, ‘was that it would be a mistake to judge you according to your reactions. You're an artist of reactions.'

‘So it seems to you.' She was annoyed. ‘Maybe it's because you judge women according to different standards. Even advanced Communists like you are still stuck in the pages of the
domostroy
.
*
We'll always conform to a type in your eyes: the Great Mother, the Helpmate, the Faithful Servant, Madonna or Whore—and now I'm the Ice Woman.'

‘Why don't you assume the man sitting before you also has a many-layered soul? I wasn't born NKVD. Maybe it will surprise you, but until the age of twenty my great dream was to live in Oblomovka.'
**

‘Nikita Mikhailovich, I tell you what's on my mind. We've even discussed my marriage several times. Maybe you assume that I have
thoughts that I don't?'

‘I'd like to know what they are,' he sighed, and put his feet up on the desk. ‘If I forced you to drink this whole bottle, would we finally hear one true thing?'

His drunken aggressiveness frightened her a little. ‘Once I read in a book: if you want to conceal information from an enemy, don't reveal it to a friend.' The laughter cost her an effort.

‘As usual, very clever,' he said apathetically. ‘We are starting to think—and you'll deny it, of course—that you're no longer able to do the things that we do here.'

‘Nikita Mikhailovich, we all suffer sometimes because of what we're exposed to, but we remain focused on the goal we believe in.'

‘Well, our feeling is that you've believed enough.'

‘Are you firing me?' She was teasing him. She guessed that he bore good tidings.

‘Alexandra Andreyevna, maybe you misunderstand me. My intentions towards you have always been pure. I admire you, and feel sadness about the things you've had to endure at your young age.'

‘I don't need pity.'

‘We have a nice little project that I'd like you to devote yourself to.' He ignored her angry tone, as if he had foreseen the panic that would grip her the moment he doubted her tenacity. He had apparently spent weeks and months observing her.

‘You know that some differences have emerged between us and the Germans in our recent discussions with them. We're trying to ease the tension, warm things up. The Italian invasion of Greece is a new focus of interest for the Germans, and this is a golden opportunity to spread some good will. The commissariat for Foreign Affairs has put together an initiative for a joint activity in Brest, as a symbol of peace and cooperation. You remember that in September last year the Wehrmacht and the Red Army met here in Brest. The Germans evacuated the city just as they had promised, but before that, on this very street, our Semyon Krivoshein and the German general Guderian reviewed a parade of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht.'

‘Obviously I remember.'

‘Actually that parade was organised in a hurry because time was short. But since Brest is on the border between us and the Germans, it's a good place for joint initiatives.'

‘That sounds interesting.'

‘Under my personal supervision and in cooperation with German elements, you will administer the initiative to spread…'

‘…good will,' she intoned.

‘Exactly,' he growled. ‘And since that good will isn't official, and it derives from operatives on both sides who want to ease the tension, we'll describe this undertaking as “meetings at the lowest levels”, so low that in fact they aren't taking place. Your job will be to present creative ideas without committing anyone to them. After all, the major issues between Germany and the Soviet Union are managed in Moscow and Berlin.'

‘It sounds like entirely meaningless work.'

‘On the contrary, Alexandra Andreyevna. It could be very useful. We expect original thinking and high-flying ideas.'

‘Why me?' Her thoughts skipped over all the rituals she would soon be exempt from—discussions, letters, reports—all that bloody muck. She was already reconciled to knowing that, as long as she breathed, this is what her days would be filled with, unless she gave in to Maxim and got pregnant.

‘Why you? For all the reasons I just mentioned before, and because I read in your profile that you speak French. The Germans will also be sending representatives who speak the language of that miserable country. One of my close acquaintances, who met their representatives at a conference of the Gestapo and the NKVD last February, formed a good impression of them. In his opinion the Germans are professionals and can be surprisingly flexible.'

‘In Leningrad I wore out interrogators as well as the accused.'

‘There's no doubt you were born for this,' Nikita Mikhailovich laughed. ‘And you're never going to repeat what you just heard. I was only told about these meetings because I was required to authorise the
transfer of certain prisoners to the Gestapo.'

‘You didn't have to say that,' she said. ‘And this will be the main part of my work?'

‘This will be your job, nothing else. But there's one condition,' he added. ‘I'm tired of deceit. I want us to say true things to each other. I always tried to be faithful to Marcus Aurelius's dictum: “Those who fail to attend to the motions of their own souls are necessarily unhappy.”'

His words sounded to her like another amusing note passed between them at a meeting. It always made them laugh when one of them wrote, ‘Let's tell the truth.'

‘I don't tell lies now either,' she said cautiously.

‘You understand exactly what I mean.'

‘I'll do everything I can to keep my end of the bargain.' She stretched, and drank her vodka. There was no choice. Assuming that a strange madness had attacked him, she would supply him with a few ‘true things', and he would believe he held her soul in his hand. He had revealed that it wasn't a good idea to underestimate him, but there was no need to exaggerate his virtues either.

‘So it's all settled,' he said and swung his legs off the desk. ‘Your new job starts in a week.'

‘It sounds very nice,' she said sweetly. Could she call the warmth that bubbled inside her happiness?

LUBLIN

FEBRUARY 1941

One day Frenzel informed him that he was required to report to Party headquarters on Horst Wessel Street, the building that seemed to be hidden from sight but always rose up before him when he returned home at the end of the night: its iron gate was sunk in darkness, and the first glimmer of dawn emphasised the high pillars of the facade and tricked passers-by into thinking the pillars stood far in front of the building.

‘Do you know what it's about?'

‘Absolutely not,' Frenzel answered, but the teasing expression in his eyes betrayed that he did.

‘Do I have to prepare some of the Belorussian material I've gathered?'

‘If you want.'

‘What kind of material?'

‘The most select, of course.'

Thomas gave a mournful smile. Here was Frenzel—who not long
ago would have been putty in his hands—treating him like an amateur.

But Frenzel was right by his own lights: Thomas had always tried not to let others get the feeling they had information he needed or that he was worried by its absence, but he'd become careless. Lacking an audience to present a character to, he'd let things go. With the excuse that he was tired, he sank onto the chair in Frenzel's room. The glue that had stiffened him had started to disintegrate. The contours of his personality, by which he defined himself—pride, charm, his ability to identify the heart of the matter, the faith that his execution of his plans was correct and would bring about the desired result—had turned out to depend on circumstance. They were traits that had only sojourned in his body and now had subsided into memory. The voice of the consciousness that directed his actions had become a murmur. His weakness and inactivity threatened to drive him mad. Sometimes he wanted to transport himself from SS headquarters to the office of the district governor, to the house under the clock, and from there to Deutsches Haus, so he could hypnotise them all with a spark of his old charm, to plant in their minds the awareness that on the top floor of a building on Lindenstrasse was a man who would be an asset to anyone who pulled him out of his prison.