Dark Star (55 page)

A small canal ran through that part of Kovno. The NKVD badge sank like a stone. So did the Steyr.

The dock in Riga was packed with Germans—their baggage, their clocks, their dogs, and a band to play while it all marched up the gangplank. German newsreel cameramen were much in evidence, Szara kept his face averted. By a curious tribal magic he could not divine, the crowds had organized themselves into castes—the prominent and the wealthy in front, pipe-smoking farmers next, and workmen and other assorted types to the rear. Everybody seemed content with the arrangement.

His papers had received only the most cursory check—who in
God's name would want to sneak under the tent of this circus? In fact, though it did not occur to Szara, the NKVD took full advantage of the Baltic migration to infiltrate agents into Germany: such returns to the homeland had always suggested interesting possibilities to intelligence services.

Szara was fully prepared for exposure. Any determined Gestapo officer would spot the crudely altered passport, and five minutes of interrogation was all it would require for the certain knowledge that he was an imposter. He planned to admit it, long before they ever went to work on him. The Jean Bonotte passport was sewn into his jacket, the French francs hidden in the false bottom of the valise, just where a type like Bonotte, a man from Marseille, no doubt a Corsican, no doubt a criminal type, would hide them. Germany and France were legally at war, though it had not yet come to any serious fighting. Mostly talk. German diplomacy was continuing, an attempt to smooth things over with the British and the French—why should the world be set on fire over a bunch of Poles? Szara expected he would, if discovered, be interned as a citizen of France. At worst a war spent in excruciating boredom in a camp somewhere, at best exchanged for a German citizen who happened to be on the wrong side of the line when the first cannon was fired. On the bright side, a German internment camp was probably the last place in the world the NKVD would think to look for André Szara.

Still, he did not wish to be caught. He was no German, not even a Romanian swine-breeding German from the Seven Hills, and he did not wish to be beaten up by this crowd. There was a deep and patient anger in them. For the newsreel cameras they were glad to be “going home,” but among themselves they promised that they would soon enough be “going back.” At which time, evidently, certain scores would be definitively settled. And worst of all, he knew, if they had cause to single him out and concentrate on his features, they were not above having a look to see if he were a Jew. No, he did not wish to be caught, and he had determined to avoid direct contact in every possible way.

To this end he played the part of a man ruined by sorrow, a victim of anti-German hostility. Practiced saying a single sentence in
the sort of
Volksdeutsch
accent common to a man like Kringen: “They took … everything.” He had to use it almost immediately. A burly fellow, standing next to him on the dock, wanted to strike up a conversation and offered a greeting. Szara stared at him, as though he were intruding on a world of private anguish, and delivered his line. It worked. As Szara watched, the man's expression went from surprise to pained sympathy, then tightened with anger. Szara bit his lip; he could not say any more without losing control. He turned his face away, and the man laid a great paw of a hand on his shoulder, the honest human warmth of the gesture very nearly shaming him into real tears.

A bright day. A calm sea.

Life aboard the passenger steamer was tightly organized. There were numerous officials in attendance but they seemed to Szara benign, meant to ease the transition of the emigrants into German life. He was processed—a matter of saying yes and no—given a temporary identity card, and told to report to the proper authorities wherever he settled and permanent residence documents would be provided at that time. Had he any notion of where he wished to live? Family in Germany? Friends? Szara hid behind his catastrophe. “Don't worry, old fellow, you're in good hands now,” said one official.

The public address system was constantly at work: a schnauzer discovered in the crew quarters, an uplifting message of welcome from Dr. Goebbels, the Winterhilfe charity was stationed at a table on the afterdeck, those with last names beginning A through M should report to the dining room for midday dinner promptly at one
P.M.,
N through Z at two-thirty. To promote the appetite, a songfest would begin in fifteen minutes on the foredeck, led by the well-known contralto Irmtrud Von something from the Munich State Opera Company and the well-known countertenor SS Untersturmführer Gerhard something else of the Bavarian Soldiers' Chorus, two inspirational artists who had volunteered to accompany the voyage and join their fellow
Volk
in singing some of the grand old songs.

For one ghastly moment Szara thought he might have to sing, but saw to his relief that a sufficient number of people remained at the perimeter so that he could safely avoid it. He stood for the rousing performance of “Deutschland über Alles” that began the program, watched the breasts of the contralto swell mightily with patriotism, then moved to the railing and became part of the small audience.

Almost all the passengers took part, and they were deeply affected by the singing; there were unashamed tears on the cheeks of both the men and the women and a kind of joyous agony on their faces as they raised their voices together. The mass rendition of “Silent Night”—Christmas carols were familiar to all—was extraordinary, sung with great and tender feeling as the ship rumbled through the flat Baltic waters.

Szara maintained his cover, nodding in time and seeming to mumble the old words to himself, but his internal reaction to the performance was something very nearly approaching terror. It was the instinctive and passionate unity of the singers that frightened him; the sheer depth of it was overwhelming. You couldn't, he thought, find three Jews in the world who would agree on what it meant to be Jewish, yet there were apparently fifty million of these people who knew exactly what it meant to be German, though many of those on deck had never set foot in Germany.

Something was wrong, what was it? Obviously they suffered injustice without end—that certain look was plain on their faces. They swayed and sang, seemingly hypnotized, held hands—many wept—and together formed a wall of common emotion, a wall of nostalgia, regret, self-pity, sentimentality, resentment, hatred, ferocity. The words bounced around inside him, none of them right, none of them wrong, none of them mattered. What he did know for certain at that moment was that they were poisoned with themselves. And it was the rest of the world that would suffer for it.

He avoided lunch, knowing it would be impossible to escape conversation over a table laden with food. A short, fleshy woman, with the tiny eyes of pure malice, sought him out—he could tell she'd been watching him—and silently presented a generous wedge of
Bundt
cake in a napkin. The group had understood him, accepted
him; he was damaged goods, to be left alone yet not neglected. She turned and walked away, leaving him to eat his cake in peace, while he suppressed a violent shiver that seemed to come from the very center of his being.

As the sun set, the voice on the public address system grew suddenly whispery with reverence and awe. A fortuitous change of plans: the ship would be met at Hamburg by a train of first-class coaches, all passengers would proceed to Berlin, there to be addressed by the Führer himself. Please do not be concerned for the friends and family who will come to the dock to meet you, there will be plenty of room for everybody. Heil Hitler!

And if Szara had a passing notion that he could slip away in the confusion of landing and find his way to the Copenhagen ferry, the reality of the arrival, two days later, put a firm lid on such nonsense. A wall of cheering Germans stood to either side of the disembarking passengers, an aisle of welcome, as effective as barbed wire, that lined the way to the railroad station.

So he went to Berlin.

To Szara, the city seemed dark and solemn. Stiff. Brooding. Whatever he scented in the streets was worse, much worse, than Kristallnacht in November of '38. Now the nation was at risk; this business was no longer some political maneuver of the Nazi party. France and England had declared war—the gall, the presumption of them!—and the people had coalesced in the face of such an astonishing development. That civilized nations—the British at any rate, not the unbathed French—would side with the Poles and the Jews and the other Slavic trash was simply beyond comprehension, but it was a fact of life and it had to be faced. They were equal to it.

At the Potsdam terminal a fleet of buses waited to transport the returning
Volksdeutsch
to the Olympic Stadium, where a crowd of seventy-five thousand people awaited their arrival. A special section toward the front was reserved for the Baltic emigrants, and Adolf Hitler would address them later in the evening. Szara had no intention of going anywhere near the place; security measures would be intensive wherever a national leader was expected and in this instance
would include the Gestapo, Berlin plainclothes detectives, identity checks—an imposter's nightmare. Though his thin cover had worked on the docks of Latvia, it would never stand up under that level of scrutiny.

But there was an accursed absence of confusion as the buses were boarded; the
Volksdeutsch
were infuriatingly patient and malleable, organizing themselves into neat lines—who, Szara tried to remember, had called the Germans
carnivorous sheep?
—and when he tried to disappear between two buses a young woman wearing an armband chased him down and courteously headed him back in the proper direction. In desperation he doubled over, his free hand clutching his belly, and ran groaning back into the station.
That
they understood and they let him go. He found a different exit, now simply a traveler with a valise. He spotted a sign for the number 24 tram, the Dahlem line, that would take him to Lehrter Bahnhof, where he could catch the late train to Hamburg. Things were looking up.

But it was not to be. He walked about on the streets near the station for a half hour or so, giving the busloads of
Volksdeutsch
time to depart, then reentered Potsdam station. But he saw a uniformed policeman and a Gestapo functionary checking identification at every gate that led to the tramways and realized that without the protective coloration of the emigrants he was in some difficulty. He stood out, he could sense it. Who was this rather aristocratic looking man in soiled clothing and a soft felt hat worn low over the eyes? Why did he carry a fine leather valise?

Resisting the urge to panic, he walked away from the station and found himself in even worse trouble. Now he was alone, on deserted streets.

The Berlin he'd known a year earlier still had its people of the night, those who liked darkness and the pleasures it implied. But no longer. The city was desolate, people stayed home, went to bed early; Hitler had chased decadence indoors. Szara knew he had to get off the streets. He felt it was a matter of minutes.

He walked quickly west, to the Leipzigerplatz, where he knew there was a public telephone. He'd memorized several telephone numbers, in case he lost the valise, and the receiver was in his hand
before he realized he had no German coins. He'd obtained reichsmarks from Poles who'd fled into Lithuania, enough to buy a ticket on the Copenhagen steamer, but he'd not foreseen the need to use a telephone.
Not like this, not for such a stupid miscalculation,
he pleaded silently. He saw a taxicab and waved it down. The driver was offended, declared himself “no traveling change purse,” but Szara bought two ten-reichsmark coins for fifty reichsmarks and the driver's attitude turned instantly to grave decency. “Can you wait?” Szara asked him, thumbing through his remaining bills. The driver nodded politely. Anything for a gentleman.

The telephone rang for what seemed like a long time, then, unexpectedly, a man answered. Szara mentioned a name. The man's voice was terribly languid and world-weary. “Oh, she's not
here,”
he said. Then: “I suppose you'll want the number.” Szara said he did, fumbling in his pocket for a pencil and a matchbox. The man gave him the number and Szara hung up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the driver scowling at his watch. There was a police car on the other side of the Leipzigerplatz. “Another minute,” he called out. The driver noticed his odd German and stared. Szara dialed the new number and a maid answered. Szara asked for “Madame Nadia Tscherova.” Relief flooded over him when he heard her voice.

“I find myself in Berlin,” he said. “Would it be terribly inconvenient … ?”

“What? Who is it?”

“A backstage friend. Remember? The terrible play? I brought you … a present.”

“My God.”

“May I come and see you?”

“Well,” she said.

“Please.”

“I suppose.”

“Perhaps you'll tell me where.”

“How can you not know?”

“The fact is I don't.”

“Oh. Well, it's a villa. Facing the Tiergarten, just at the edge of Charlottenburg, on Schillerstrasse. The third from the end of the
street. There's a … I'll have the coach lamps put on. When will you come?”

“I have a taxi waiting for me.”

“Soon then,” she said and hung up.

He got into the cab and gave the driver directions. “What part of Germany do you come from? ” asked the driver.

“From Italy,” Szara said. “From the Tyrol. Actually, we rarely speak German.”

“So you're Italian.”

“Yes.”

“For an Italian you don't speak so badly.”

“Grazie.”

The driver laughed and pulled away as the police car began to circle slowly around the Leipzigerplatz.

“Dearest!” She cried out in Russian. This was a different Nadia— affected, brittle. She threw an arm around his shoulders—her other hand held a glass—drew him close, and kissed him full on the lips. The kiss tasted like wine. “ ‘What ingenious devil has cast you on my doorstep?' ” she said. The maid who'd shown him in curtsied, her starched uniform rustling, and left the room.