Good People (50 page)

There were rumours every day that the war had already begun, that Germany had invaded the British Isles, that in the Great War the Germans had punished Belgian children by cutting off their hands. Residents reported seeing tall German spies in summer suits. A shoemaker wrote to the city committee that he had sat behind a German spy in the railroad workers' clubhouse. The man had jumped onto a train going to Moscow. It was said that the women of Brest danced with handsome, silent men who wore white gloves, that German agents had poisoned the water in the wells. In the evening, in 1 May Park, there were dance parties, and after a while she realised that it was worth going there sometimes, because the place was swarming with drunken officers who possessed interesting information. One officer whom she danced with told her that his job was to observe European sheep, and that he reported directly to Golikov.

‘Don't talk to me in code,' she laughed and pinched his arms.

‘I really do observe sheep,' he panted. ‘Don't stop pinching, please. It's very simple: if Hitler decides to attack, he'll have to manufacture millions of woollen coats for his soldiers. The price of mutton will plummet, and the price of wool will rise. But there's no sign of that.'

Satisfied, she leaned her head on his shoulder: Maxim certainly didn't know about the sheep.

Nikita Mikhailovich listened to her arguments patiently. As far as he could tell, he said, the city was calm. Wherever there were people, there were bound to be rumours. A surprise attack was not a reasonable prediction. He revealed a great secret to her: intelligence people believed that the deployment of the German army at the border was in preparation for Hitler's demand that we transfer part of the Ukraine and the Caucasus to Germany. He would also ask to use the Soviet navy against England. If the government refused, Germany might
declare war. In any event, there would be time to prepare. Sasha answered that she trusted his opinion, but this was not connected to the fact that they had to silence the warmongers.

‘Every time we meet you encourage me to make arrests,' he joked, and his face showed he was happy. ‘It's lucky you're dealing with the parade now. Otherwise nobody would be left in the city.'

She dictated an article to the editor of the newspaper
Zaria
, making fun of those who spread rumours, who preferred to deal with fears of war between the Soviet Union and her ally Germany than work on behalf of a better society. On the same page they published an interview with a sixteen-year-old girl, who presented her plans for the future under the heading: ‘I Will Be an Engineer'. In her last year of school, Sasha had responded to her father's request and was interviewed by a Leningrad newspaper. The headline was: ‘I Will Be a Physicist, and in the Evening I Will Write Poetry'.

…

After she sent the new map of the city to Thomas Heiselberg, they exchanged several telegrams. It was decided that at their next meeting each side would present its general program. In his letters the German representative raised fanciful, megalomaniacal ideas: he wanted the parade to look like the World's Fair. He suggested gigantic pavilions should be set up in Brest, and he described the House of the Twentieth Century, which would be ‘the throbbing heart of the entire event'. He waxed poetical over a tram that would carry the crowd from pavilion to pavilion, and over a lighting system that would bathe Brest in a huge glow all night long. Sasha believed that, once he realised that his ideas could not be implemented anywhere except in his dreams, he would accept her plan.

Her parade would be a multi-stage event:

Of course, a historical thread was woven into her plan: in the morning, a homage to the great covenant between Russia, Germany and Austria against Napoleon, and in the evening a gesture towards the peace that both countries had declared in the fortress, ending Russia's part in the Great War. There would be an intervening tribute to the previous parade, which symbolised the treaty and the new spheres of interest of the two states. Wasn't that perfect?

The last letter she had received from the German disturbed her. First, he announced the postponement of the next meeting until the end of April, a delay that jeopardised the entire parade. The appropriate time to hold the event was between June and September, and given how much preparation was required, it was possible they would miss these dates, in which case the parade should be postponed to 1942, world change permitting. And there was another strange thing: the reserved tone that had prevailed at his earlier meeting had been replaced by his determination to influence the parade: ‘Imagination, Mademoiselle Weissberg, is a rare commodity among diplomats. With all due modesty, it seems to me that I'm the man who should lead the imagination department of the parade.'

As the date of the meeting drew closer, her faith in her plan deepened, and yet she had made no progress at all in dealing with the German representative. In her work she had frequently encountered people with flexible personalities that they could not control. This wasn't a tactic aimed at the interrogator but rather a sign of their torment. It made the interrogator's work complicated, because they hadn't yet decided whether or not they were guilty. Some believed they
could be everything, that every talent or trait they found in somebody else could become theirs. Others, and she felt this might include Thomas Heiselberg, struggled to become the person they wanted to be, but kept one eye fixed on the abyss they always believed was about to swallow them up.

These were dangerous people, because they were like a tiger that pounced on a plant with the same determination as it pounced on prey. Even the slightest gesture could be taken as a threat. They might respond in the most extreme way, as if a sword rested on their neck.

Thomas Heiselberg was in fine control over the cords of his flexible soul. To someone like him, she'd say: You are a magician. When you wave your wand one face disappears and another pops up. Or she might reach for an insult: You act with malice and behave as if there were no such thing as conscience. In either case he wouldn't be bothered at all. As he saw it, you'd acknowledged his power.

BREST

MAY 1941

A fine spring day, Thomas said to himself, but you have to admit that people die on days like this, too. In the morning they wandered the streets and decided on the parade route, the placement of the platforms for the dignitaries and the areas intended for the crowd. They visited 1 May Park and the stadium, and they met pleasant athletes at a training session, preparing with the municipal band for a performance in June. Their decisions were made quickly, but they were both of the opinion that they were excellent decisions, and not even a shadow of doubt passed over them.

‘Maybe it just seems that way, but I'm hearing more Russian in the streets than Polish. You work fast,' he observed.

‘Monsieur Heiselberg, in the street you hear the will of the people.' She noted that recently the residents of Brest had been seeing German planes. The Red Army air force was acting responsibly and escorting them out of Soviet air space, but those incursions didn't improve trust.

‘Our pilots are young and not fully trained,' he recited. This was the excuse Frenzel had given to him, but a half-smile showed that it seemed weak to him as well. ‘Aside from that, they've heard so much about Communism, can you blame them for being curious?'

‘The parade will completely satisfy their curiosity.' She leaned towards him, flushed and excited.

Perhaps his elegant appearance at the first meeting had influenced her. This time, instead of wearing an ugly skirt whose edges had yellowed and a faded jacket, an abundance of joyous colours flowed from her body: a skirt with red and white polka dots, a tight coat with a plunging lapel. Her dark hair was combed to the side, and it had a bluish glow. She was all gathered in,
tirée à quatre épingles
. His fear of her eyes had ebbed away; at the railway station he already noticed that the look he remembered was not like the one she was giving him today, and he began to wonder whether the whole thing was a monster he had inflated in his imagination.

They reached the conference room in the afternoon. It was on the ground floor of an old building on a side street. She led him down a corridor that smelled of naphthalene. The hallway arrived at a small office where cobwebs hung over shelves laden with rolls of paper. They went through a doorway into a vaulted room, in the centre of which stood a rectangular wooden table. The brass doorhandles had been polished that morning, and on the floor were patches of white plaster that had been hastily scraped.

She announced with an apologetic smile that this was her new kingdom. She couldn't get the necessary inspiration for planning the parade in a bustling office. This was a lie, of course. Her new office had been created for this meeting; naturally her colleagues were not enthusiastic about having a German diplomat—and a diplomat was really an authorised spy—wandering about their offices.

A large sheet of paper was hung on each wall of the room. Two were maps sketched in charcoal, and the others were bright drawings of lawns and cypresses frozen like dark feathers, soldiers in uniform, behind them a blue river, carrot-topped children on a rose-coloured
path cheering for a column of toad-coloured tanks. Where were the women in crinoline, carrying parasols? He stifled a laugh—the children looked like fish in a bouillabaisse.

The sheets of paper hid the windows and blocked the daylight. Two table lamps cast weak beams of light, and their shadows skipped from map to map. She stood in the middle of the room, twirled on her tiptoes as though saying, please be excited! Then she approached him, her face glowing and her bandaged hand behind her back, in a gesture of respect. He couldn't remember whether she had concealed her hand at their first meeting. Now they were hidden away here, she had shaken off her chilly manners, and the professional restraint she had insisted on, even when laughing, vanished.

Doubtless she noticed his slight reservations about the decor, but she apparently had no doubt of her ability to inspire him. An interesting woman, Comrade Weissberg…Did the maps really have an intoxicating effect on her, or was it all an act? How disappointing that both possibilities seemed equally probable.

And there was something else: the parade was her entire world. She would tie a loop at the end of every sentence and, after every friendly exchange, toss the loop in a trice over another sentence, knotting them together into a conclusion involving some aspect of the parade. He found it hard to follow the pace of her loop-tying. When she noticed that his interest was waning, she would quickly present another irresistible idea, like a child feeding a dying bonfire.

She dragged him on a tour of the maps: this was the 1939 parade, and this is where the retinues stood, and this is the route the column took, and this black line represents the belt of people who watched, and here was the new parade: the armies deployed in three rows, grass-green, olive-green and grey tanks with a red star in front and tanks with a swastika, small cannon whose barrels were pointed at the horizon, and here was the parade through the streets of Brest, exactly along the route they had just taken. The gold dots showed the column descending from the bridges over the river, pouring out of the sun and storming the city. She would, of course, include his excellent comments.

She surveyed the maps lovingly, dwelling on the flaws, and when she touched them to emphasise a point her fingers removed invisible specks of dust.

He acknowledged the ‘deep impression' made by the design of the maps and the professional work, and was careful not to pass judgment on the ideas. When they stood in front of the last map, he felt a stab of pain in his right knee, which he had tired out on their walk that morning, and he wanted to sink onto one of the chairs. But she remained standing next to the picture of the sky over the fortress, decorated with flashes of fire, and presented her vision of searchlights and flares rising from the cannon. The searchlights reminded him of the light ship from the advertisements for Persil, one of his brilliant ideas at Milton, as well as a slogan that lit the Berlin sky: ‘Paul Hindenburg for President of the Reich.'

She smoothed her dress, which soon dotted the room: red and white spots appeared no matter where he looked. For now it was impossible to tell her about his recent actions, to speak reason with her, present his plan. It was too dangerous. She might go wild and destroy everything. He had to gain her confidence so that she would acknowledge the true state of affairs.

In a sympathetic tone he asked how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had responded to her plan. She spun around to him, hostile, and said that, as he knew, very few people were in on the secret.

He sat down. She detached herself from the maps and seated herself at the head of the table, her eyes open, as in a waking dream. He was prepared to bet his apartment in Berlin that he was the first person to see the maps. Her anticipation of approval was not disappointed—he praised her profusely—but it wasn't enough. Maybe she sensed his artificial tone. Like an actress returning for another curtain call, she asked his opinion of the maps again, and this time he showered her with compliments. That seemed to calm her down.

Then she stood up again and began to describe her multi-stage plan for the parade. She delivered the lecture with panache, and there was infectious power even in her little exaggerations. Comrade
Weissberg could have been an excellent saleswoman, Thomas said to himself.

They went for a walk. The moment they left the map room he felt relief, the visionary film left her eyes, and he hoped that soon he would be able to speak reasonably with her. His mood improved, and in the market he stopped at a stand laden with old things and insisted on buying her a present. She chose an army knife with tweezers and a screwdriver. He gave it to her with a bow: ‘If you please, a gift from the German Foreign Office. Just don't use it against us.'