Night Soldiers (8 page)

He felt, had chosen to feel, absolutely nothing. A door had closed inside him. Marike joined Nikko on the other side of it. But he remembered the old story of the man who returns home one day to find his house occupied by demons. He hides in the basement. Each day, the demons put one brick on the trap door that is his only access to freedom. How many days shall he wait to confront them? Khristo would wait a day, many days, he hoped. He had not loved her—never would she have permitted such a thing to happen. Sentimentalism was to be fought at all costs. On her part, making love was only a trick you did for the sake of health or, perhaps, as an appreciative gesture toward a fellow worker. She was, he remembered, demonstratively unaffectionate, as though tenderness in the dance of lovers would betray the honest barnyard essence of their desire. Perhaps, he now thought, this had been her method of deception and had nothing to do with playing the part of worker. He had been naive, he realized, had simply not considered that deception could occur in such matters. Very well. It would happen no more. And, if it did—now that he knew of Sascha's existence and others like him—it would surely be the last time. Unless you could turn over and fuck in your grave. In this place you could not make a mistake. That was the lesson he had learned in the morning; God only knew what he might be taught in the afternoon. He watched the black figures on the street, their white breaths hanging in the air. What was this place? Who were these people?

The car turned into Arbat Street. In front of his building there was a Stolypin car, puffing black exhaust on the snow as it idled. No one moved to open his door, so he simply sat and waited. Two men in overcoats came quickly out of the building, holding the arms of a man running between them. It was Ozunov. He was barefoot, wearing blue silk pajamas. He stumbled a little, the two men jerked him upright and his glasses went askew. They stopped at the back of the Stolypin car, and one of the men let him go in order to open the door. Instinctively, he adjusted his glasses. Turned his head. For a bare instant, he stared at Khristo. His face appeared to have somehow shrunk, and his eyes looked enormous. Then the two men hoisted him into the back, as Khristo caught a brief glimpse of other people inside the trucklike compartment. One of the men slammed the door and dropped the steel bar into its bracket. The whole street could hear the clang.

Just at that moment, the door on Khristo's side of the car was swung open by the man from the passenger seat. He nodded toward the building entry. He was apparently forbidden to speak, but the look on his face, a smile without mirth or pleasure, made it clear that they had wanted him to witness this event. The winding trip home had been simply a matter of timing.

Khristo, his arms wide for balance, the peaked cap still pulled down on his head, tip-toed carefully across the ice into the building. Irina Akhimova awaited him just inside. She took him to the small parlor off the dining area, sat him down at a table, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Very slowly, he took off the hat, unwound the scarf. Set them on a chair beside him. Stared vacantly at the wall. It was unpleasantly silent in the room; he could hear himself breathing. He desperately wanted to fall asleep, and he swayed in the chair and bit his lip when his eyelids drooped.

“None of that,” Irina Akhimova said from the doorway. He came to with a snap. “Soldiers must not sleep at the post.” But the words were somehow tender and there was kindness in her tiny eyes. She beckoned him, led him into the kitchen.

In an iron pot, she was making
pelmeni
, ground pork and onions wrapped in dough and boiled. The air in the kitchen was fragrant; there was a glass of thin, freshly made sour cream set by a plate, he could smell the vinegar in it. Akhimova's enormous back was bent studiously over the pot as she prodded and poked the floating
pelmeni
with a long wooden spoon.

She served him. Filled his plate at the stove, then tilted it over the pot to let the steaming water run off. Placed it before him. Moved the sour cream closer, filled a tall glass with strong tea.

“Will you not join me, comrade Lieutenant?” he asked.

She made a dismissive noise, just the way the older women in his own town did, meaning that it was his moment for grand food, not hers.

It was his victory they were celebrating.

The
pelmeni
were delicious, garlic laid on with a broad lick, the way he liked it. He resisted a powerful urge to gobble, took his time, was spartan with the sour cream until, smiling broadly, she waved him on. He felt the meal bring his soul back to life. Despite the world, despite Marike and Ozunov, despite himself. His body, his heart as well, took the food to itself, became warm and grateful.

And, since the day was meant to be an exemplar, a homily on life as they wished him to perceive it, there was yet one more lesson in store.

“News from home,” she said solemnly when he had eaten as much as he could. She laid a sheet of cheap brownish paper in front of him. He stared at it, perplexed. Nobody in Vidin could have the faintest idea where he was. “Brought by friends,” she added in explanation.

He recognized his father's schoolboy letters, each one labored over with a stub of pencil:

My Son,
I greet you. I am happy to hear that you are with friends. Mama and I are well. Last Sunday, at the St. Ignatius church, your sister Helena took wedding vows with Teodor Veiko, the son of Omar Veiko the landlord. I know you will join us in wishing them prosperity and long life. It was a fortunate match. Life here will now go on more smoothly. It is my hope that you are studying your lessons and obeying your teachers, making something of yourself, and that the time will come when you may come home to us.

That my blessings find you in good health,

He had signed it “Nicolai Stoianev” with ceremony, a man who had written very few letters in his life. To Khristo, the message between the lines was quite thoroughly clear. Nikko's affront to authority and his own flight eastward had placed his remaining family in grave danger, and Helena had determined to sacrifice her happiness on behalf of her parents' lives. No Vidin child of his acquaintance would have done any less. He knew of Teodor Veiko, an older man, child of Veiko's youth. A drunkard, a violent man. But Helena was clever, would wind him around her thumb. The rest of the message was this: you cannot come home. That it should arrive on the day when his thoughts might well be expected to turn in that direction was no coincidence and he knew it.

“The news is good?” Akhimova asked.

“Yes, comrade Lieutenant, as good as can be expected.”

She leaned over his shoulder, he felt her bulk near him, and pretended to read the letter for the first time. She squeezed the tender place between his shoulder and his neck. “Be brave, Khristo Nicolaievich,” she said softly. “Be a good soldier.”

They had him.

The first step was to comprehend it. The second was to form, in the privacy of his mind, the words themselves—a reading of the sentence. He was held by a system based on the portcullis, a medieval security tactic no less effective for its age. A system of two gates. A visitor entered through the first gate—no questions asked. It locked behind him. He was now confronted by a second gate, held a virtual prisoner in a small space. Above his head, the walls were honeycombed with arrow slits and fighting ports. For the moment, only questions came from above. If the answers were found to be good, they opened the second gate. If the answers—or the stars, or the cast of the dice—were found to be not good, they did not open the second gate. After that, the disposition of the prisoner was more a matter of whim than tactics. The portcullis was a system based on the medieval assumption of evil in all men—again, a notion no less effective for its age—and the certain knowledge that any visitor carried your destruction in his hand, intentionally or not, a spy's gold or the Black Death.

Thus they had him and he knew it.

He could not go home. He could only move in the direction they pointed out—pray God you understood where they were pointing, pray God you did not make a misstep along the path. The lesson of
The Mistake
had been sharply staged for him in the departure of Ozunov. The major had permitted a spy to flourish in his house. Perhaps he was a witting accomplice, perhaps not. But, they said, we have no time to find out. No wish, either. The New Science is ingenious in that way: motive is unimportant.
Why
does not matter, only
that
. And the New Science is economical. An arrest, if properly managed, is also a lesson. Thus we make what we have go further, thus we spend wisely.

But they—the masters, the unseen—had incorporated a tiny flaw in their structure. It was endemic, they could do nothing about it. As Oriental rugs are woven with a single imperfect strand—that the weaver not be seen to compete with Allah, who is the only perfection—their system had one defect. It was not perfectly dark. Some light got in. For the more they trained Khristo in their methods, the more he understood their logic. It was a problem they couldn't overcome, but they knew it existed and they watched closely, and watching was their greatest skill.

Thus they had him
but
he knew it.

The way home was closed. They had let him know that with the letter. He realized also that Antipin had operated openly in Vidin on purpose, that secrecy had not been his intention. If the fascists were after you, to whom could you turn? To the East, of course. Now, let us provoke the fascists: they will drive the sheep, we shall have the wool.

That winter, Khristo Stoianev learned to bear weight.

He understood the system in that way: a great heavy mass that pressed down upon you, that kept you struggling and gasping to remain, in any sense at all, upright. It crushed the mind because it demanded every resource, every tag end of memory and cognition, simply to stay afloat. Imagination withered, fantasy collapsed; only some of the strong would survive. There were special rules, special interpretations of the rules, regulations to be adamantly obeyed, regulations to be adamantly ignored, tests—obvious tests and subtle tests and obvious tests that hid subtle tests—provocations to be silently withstood, provocations to be instantly reported, papers to be kept on the person, papers to be written and handed in, papers to be punched at regular intervals, papers to be returned by a certain date, special passes, special permissions, “open” conversations, guided conversations. If there were a way to hammer a nail into a thought, they would have found it and done it.

To this weight add the weight of the winter. Which bore them all down, Bolshevist and cellar priest alike. A sky that turned black, then gray, then brown, then white, then black again. “The sun?” Goldman said in an unguarded moment. “I hear they've shot it.” If they had, it bled snow. The unrelieved whiteness became blinding over time, made a world without feature, a terrible empty blankness where, at last, the concept of
nothingness
—ПOΛHAЯПYOTOTA—became brutally real. And, finally, at the center of it all, was the cold. A cold that shrank you up inside yourself, a cold that collapsed every face to a frown or a snarl, a cold that blew in the wind like a whip or hung motionless in the air like dead smoke. Even to wash was agony, and all stank together. The sex shriveled back into the body, only alcohol could move the blood, and, with enough alcohol, the cold found new ways to feed itself. An old woman sat on a bench to rest for a moment. You came upon her, thinly glazed with ice, the following morning.

Khristo bore the winter cold as best he could and found ways to bear the other kind of chill as well. Would they, he reasoned, teach you French and English unless they intended to send you someplace where such languages were spoken? They would not. So he bent his back to it. It did not come easily, it did not come quickly, but he simply would not let go until he had a deathgrip understanding of it.

“Good morning, Mr. Stoianev. How is the weather today?”

“Good is the weather. Maybe snows little.”

“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”

“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”

“Not
leetle
, little, lit-tul.”

“Lit-tul.”

“Faster!”

“Little.”

By the hour, by the day, by the week. In February he was twenty years old. Goldman and Voluta and Semmers chipped in and bought him a cream cake. The cream was off. He ate it anyway and showed pleasure, licking his lips enthusiastically and humming with pleasure. Later, in bed, he curled around his stomach and fell into a sleep of exhaustion despite the cramps.

It was comradeship, he came to realize, that brought them through the winter agonies of 1934 and 1935. While the blizzards and the system swirled around them and the purges beat like a drum in the background, they held on to each other and rode out the storms.
Perhaps
, Khristo thought privately,
we are the truest communists in Moscow this winter. We share our pain. We share our food
.

The idea had been simple enough: send out an army of Antipins across the mountains and river valleys of Eastern Europe, recruit—never mind how—the young and vigorous. Look for stealth, raw courage, a gift for lies or seduction—you know what we want. Bring them back here. Teach them what they need to know. Make them—one way will work as well as the next—our own. Marxists, patriots, criminals, outcasts, adventurers. Mix it up, boys, you never know what you'll need. They will be
ours
. Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Croats—our brothers and sisters to the west. War is surely coming, and these seeds will make a harvest in future famines.

It was equally logical to run them through in batches, keep them in a group, for one always wanted to be sure
where everyone was
. In a country of two hundred million souls that covered eleven time zones, you could misplace the damnedest things: entire trains, whole battalions. Sometimes you never did find them. The country had a way of swallowing up what most normal persons would hold to be entirely indigestible objects, it drove some technicians quite literally mad.