Night Soldiers (50 page)

Applause thundered out for Bister's speech. The young woman from Production, standing next to Eidenbaugh, squeezed a cocktail napkin tightly in her fist and her eyes followed Bister as he walked away from the table. Mr. Drowne cleared his throat before he was able to speak again. “Thank you, Howard,” he said. “We are all very proud of you. Next”—he peered out over the crowd—“I think I see Bob Eidenbaugh. Bob?”

Eidenbaugh moved slowly to the front of the room, then turned and looked into the expectant faces before him. “I'm Captain Robert F. Eidenbaugh,” he said. “I used to work in the copy department. And I want to thank the Thompson people for a terrific party. As for my war, well, I was involved in staff work in London, lots of details, nothing very glamorous I'm afraid. Anyhow, I do want to wish everyone a merry Christmas.”

There was a scattering of polite applause as he made his way through the crowded room and Mr. Drowne stepped in quickly to fill the gathering silence. “And I'm sure that work was important!” he said firmly as his eyes sought the next speaker.

Eidenbaugh returned to his new friend as a Marine corporal described the landing at Okinawa. “Well,” she said, much too cheerfully, sensing his mood, “someone's got to do the paperwork.”

Robert Eidenbaugh stayed at the party for a half hour, then he went back to the Biltmore.

In Basel, Khristo Stoianev lived in a rooming house on the Burgenstrasse and walked to work every morning on little streets shaded by lime trees. Legally, he had been interned in neutral Switzerland for the duration of the war. In fact, he read Bulgarian newspapers and transcripts of radio broadcasts and fought the Germans with scissors and paste.

His task involved abstracting the truth from the Nazi-controlled Bulgarian press and radio. If they said a certain fact was true, he was to comment on the degree of falsity in the claim. Would the Bulgarians believe it? Which ones would know it to be false? Did he think it true? His English improved as he wrote copious, longhand answers to these questions, and he became adept at working through systems of lies: the shades and tones, the subtleties, the tiny crumb of truth that sweetened the digestion of a falsehood. He dealt also with the “hammers”—designed to bash the population on the head with information until some of them at least believed that two and two made seven and weren't they the lucky ones to have so much.

This particular approach—studying newspapers and transcripts—had been severely maligned by the NKVD instructors at Arbat Street. At the direction of Comrade Stalin himself. All worthwhile intelligence,
razvedka
, had to come from secret channels, undercover agents, and suborned informants. The rest—the use of open sources—was deemed mere research, women's work, not befitting the heroic Soviet intelligence
apparat
. The dictum, as put by Western intelligence services, ran,
we only believe what we steal
.

For Khristo, the work was boring and repetitive—a long, difficult test, he rather thought. He worked for a former college professor from Leipzig, a gentle soul who watered his plants every day, and neither praised nor criticized—simply accepted his work as though it were, each day, each time, a happy surprise, saying “Ah!” when he appeared in the doorway to hand in a thick batch of reports.

But it was clean where he lived and where he worked, quiet, Swiss, and it would be warm, he knew, in the wintertime. He had a casual woman friend who entertained him on Thursday nights. He had become entirely addicted to
Rösti
, a crisp pancake of fried potatoes and onions. He lived in a room of his own, and he had a radio. When the people he worked for asked him questions—about his former life and work—he answered them. As the summer turned hot and silent, he burrowed to the center of his circumscribed life and nested safe and sound. He thought about Aleksandra only now and then, when the summer nights were too quiet for sleep.

In late August, communist
partizans
rose in Bulgaria and threw the Germans out. Bulgarian fascists were executed. The Bulgarian Communist party immediately allied itself with the Soviet Union, and the newspapers and radio transcripts took an entirely different line—the propaganda remained much as it had under the Germans but was, Khristo felt, more artfully developed. The massed children's choirs who had “spontaneously” sung carols in Hitler's honor the previous Christmas now sang anthems dedicated to Joseph Stalin. By the ninth of September, 1944, the change of government had been completed. Parades were held. A news photograph from Vidin came across Khristo's desk. The old Turkish post office, on the same street where his brother had been murdered by fascists, was hung with two-story banners: portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Dmitrov.

Then, as the summer ended and the German armies of occupation fled east from Paris, a curious thing happened. A coincidence. He opened a folder of news clippings and saw that a mistake had been made. This folder contained news items not from the Balkans—but from the United States. He glanced at the clipping on top of the pile and saw a photograph of Faye Berns.

The article was taken from the business page of a newspaper in Manhattan, and it said that Miss Faye Berns had been appointed fund-raising director of the New York office of the World Aid Committee, which would seek to assist Displaced Persons in returning to their homelands once the war ended. The article was brief, but it did give the address of the World Aid Committee, and he copied it out on a piece of paper.

In the photograph, a three-quarter angle, he could see the changes. Her hair was shorter, there was a line to her jaw that hadn't been there before, and she had smiled for the photographer in a way that he didn't recognize. It was an artificial smile, posed and official.

For a long time he stared at the photograph, shocked by the degree to which memory had betrayed him, deceived him. Because he had always remembered her as she was in Paris, on the afternoon they had met by accident in the bookstore. He had, unwittingly, frozen her in time, kept her as she had been on a June day in 1937. He remembered her as she cried for Andres, remembered her as someone who would dare to love a man like Andres, who did not desert him, who paid the price of that love, and then survived. He remembered her as a girl who had flung herself against the world without caution, without a care for her safety. Now she was a woman who had grown up to accept the artifice of a smile, poised and confident, for a newspaper.

He remembered, particularly, both times they had touched: when she had slept on his shoulder in the car parked at the Bilbao docks, and when she had held his hands while they waited for the train to depart at the Gare du Nord. Did men and women ordinarily remember the times when they'd touched each other? He did not know.

Once again his eye ran over the article.
Miss
Faye Berns. So she had not married the man she had mentioned in the letter that had reached him in prison.

He decided to write to her, and spent the better part of an hour at his desk, composing in English. But it was not to be. The letter seemed to him, when he drew back from it, strange and wrong: a man she had once known, briefly, writing poorly in a language not his own and apologizing for it. He tore it up. The girl he had known in Paris might respond to such a letter, but the fund-raising director of the World Aid Committee would, he feared, find it awkward, even pathetic.

He took the folder into the professor's office. “This is not for me,” he said in explanation, setting the folder on one corner of the desk. “Ah!” the professor said, surprised that such a thing could happen.

And why
, he wondered, returning down the hall to his little room,
are they toying with me?
The “misdelivered” news clipping was no coincidence. It was a provocation. It was their way of letting him know that they were aware of his relationship with Faye Berns. What could that matter to them? What could they mean by it? And how had they known about it? More important, what did they expect of him now that he'd seen the clipping?

He didn't know. And decided to ignore the incident. If this were something truly significant, they'd press him further. He turned his attention to other matters, determined to put the entire episode out of mind. He bore down on his work for the rest of the afternoon, then, since it was Thursday, went off to visit his woman friend.

She was, as usual, responsive, falling in with his mood and treating him with a certain casual tenderness that he'd always found very comforting. Yet he was not his best self, distracted by the image of a woman with a professional smile in a grainy photograph. He imagined himself a great realist, and that passion without sentiment suited him perfectly. But at work on Friday morning he experienced a surge of emotion, more gratitude than love, and sent his friend a bouquet of flowers. For which she thanked him, with a certain casual tenderness, the following Thursday.

In Basel, the autumn came on quickly, and by October the mornings were frosty and clear. One such morning he arrived punctually for work and, on opening the vestibule door, came upon Ulysse and Albert and two other men he did not know. They were rolling down their sleeves and putting on their jackets and yawning—he had the impression they had been up all night and working hard.

Ulysse's eyes lit up when he saw Khristo and he smiled broadly. “Well, well,” he said, in perfect American English, “look what the cat dragged in.”

Khristo grinned sheepishly, a little taken aback, and they shook hands warmly. Ulysse turned to leave, his overcoat, as always, worn capelike over his shoulders, and his bodyguard followed. As Albert moved past, he winked at Khristo and banged him affectionately on the shoulder with his fist.

“Hey buddy,” he said.

I
N
D
ECEMBER OF 1944, AT THE
U
TINY GOLD FIELDS ON THE
Kolyma River, in a far southeastern corner of the Siberian USSR, Captain Ilya Goldman sat before a table of unpeeled birch logs in one of the interrogation rooms of Camp 782. Alone for the moment, he held his head in his hands, closed his eyes to shut out the world, and listened to the timbers creak and snap in the frozen air. A light wind blew in off the East Siberian Sea, sighing in the eaves, rising and falling. Otherwise, there was nothing.

On the table before him were two stacks of files, which represented prisoners already processed and those yet to be seen. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling on a long cord. At his feet, a malevolent cold flowed up through the floorboards, seeping through his boots and socks, a kind of icy fire that caused the skin to itch and burn simultaneously. This he accepted. Traveling the Utiny camps, he had come to admire the cold, a cunning predator that used the human body as a wick, crawling upward in search of the center of warmth. The heart—that was what it wanted.

And welcome to it
, he thought.

He took a deep breath, closed his mind to anger, and tried to concentrate on the notes he had just completed. They were scratched on the stiff, waxy paper native to Soviet bureaucracy—wood-flecked, pale brown stuff meant to last for a thousand years. The millennium, therefore, would know that at least one inmate of Camp 782 had claimed that the bread ration was more than adequate, perhaps excessive, and gone on to suggest that food allocations be reduced, so that the heroic men and women of the patriotic Red Army might better strengthen themselves for the fight against the fascist invader. So said Prisoner 389062, a nameless yellow skull that had sat nodding and trembling before him, twisting a cap in his hands in the ancient gesture of the peasant and attempting, toothless mouth stretched to its limits, what could have been taken for a smile. The statement had been dutifully recorded and signed by Captain I. J. Goldman, Office of the Inspector General, Bureau of Labor Camps, Fourth Division, Sixth Directorate, NKVD.

Thus, in bureaucratic terms, he had been buried alive.

Since the inception of his service in Spain, Ilya Goldman had moved exclusively in the upper echelons of the NKVD—First Chief Directorate, Fifth Department—the prized Western Europe posting. Ideologically, he was trusted. Professionally, he was considered clever and sharp-witted, a man who played the game and avoided the pitfalls: protecting his friends and protected by them, gaining influence, banking favors every day. Words of thanks were, casually, waved away.
Some day
, he would tell his newfound friends,
you can help me out
.

But when the great day came—a punitive transfer to the office responsible for the labor camps—his friends did not answer their telephones, and down he went. Into an abyss where grace and wit counted for nothing. Here you needed only a steel fist and an iron stomach, though it helped to be blind and deaf. He despised himself for allowing such a thing to happen, for not comprehending that it could happen. He had stood so high in his own opinion: brilliant, deft, an intelligence officer who
belonged
in Madrid, in Paris, in Geneva. A smart little Jewboy from Bucharest—he mocked himself—sophisticated and urbane, in NKVD argot a
cosmopolite
, deserved no less. The service would never send such a fine fellow off to the Gulag, to listen to memorized speeches from a parade of exhausted skeletons. Oh no, they'd never do that.

But he had failed them, had tried to deceive them, and they'd found out and punished him.

His downfall had come about in Romania, of all places, the homeland he had not seen for ten years. Sad, wretched place, backwater of southeastern Europe with its ridiculous decayed nobility and peasants who had believed, truly believed, Iron Guard leader Codreanu to be the reincarnation of Christ. Their leaders had sided with Hitler, and the Romanian divisions had fought bravely enough, in the Crimean peninsula and elsewhere, before the massive Russian counterattacks had inevitably rolled them back.

The country had surrendered early in September. To the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR, theoretically, but the Russians were little interested in the diplomatic niceties of shared power and, within days, had presented their bill to the Romanians. Then sent NKVD personnel, Ilya Goldman among them, to make sure it was paid. In full. And on time.

It was, for a country that had just finished fighting four years of war, a bill of some considerable magnitude. Seven hundred million lei—about fifty million U.S. dollars—easily exceeding the contents of the Romanian treasury. But this was merely the first item on the bill. The government had to provide, in addition, the following: all privately owned radios, 2,500,000 tons of grain, 1,700,000 head of cattle, 13,000 horses, and vast tonnages of vegetables, potatoes, and cigarettes. All telephone and telegraph lines were to be torn down and shipped east in boxcars—once the latter had been refitted to accept the Russian rail gauge. Twelve divisions to be formed immediately to fight the Germans and the Hungarians. The list went on: ambulances, doctors, gold, silver, watches, timber—whatever they had, the entire national wealth. Further, the USSR would now control all means of communication, the merchant marine, all utilities and industries, all factories and storage depots, and all radio stations. If the Romanian population couldn't listen to them, with all the radios shipped east, foreign monitors could.

The directives went out and the peasants, by and large, obeyed. Ilya saw them shuffling into the villages and market towns with their livestock and the contents of their granaries and root cellars—even next spring's seed grain. God had directed their leaders, they seemed to feel, now God had forsaken them. Ilya watched their faces, and the sight broke his heart. To his superiors, of course, he was not a Romanian, he was a Jew—that was a nationality, a race—and they saw no reason he should feel allegiance to a country adopted in the distant past by some wandering peddler and his family. He was supposed to know these people, their little tricks and deceits, and he was supposed to squeeze them.

Not that his bosses meant him to do any of the rough stuff himself. No, they had special personnel for that, many of them former Iron Guardsmen who had now “seen the light” of progressive socialism. No more than thugs in uniforms, but they served a purpose. When there was shooting to be done, they did it. But Ilya heard it, and saw the bodies sagged lifeless on the posts behind the barracks. Sometimes one didn't have to shoot, a simple beating would suffice. When the peasants were beaten, they cried out for mercy from the lord of the manor—an old tradition. Clearly, they did not understand what was happening to them, protested their innocence, swore it before God.

Most of them, however, did as they were told. Brought in everything they had, garlanded their beasts before they were led away so that they might make a good impression on their new masters and be treated with kindness. One old man, parting with his plowhorse, slipped a carrot in Ilya's pocket. “He's a stubborn old thing,” he'd whispered, believing Ilya to be the new owner, “but he'll work like the devil for a treat.”

For the first few weeks, as the Carpathians turned gold in early autumn, he had steeled himself to it, took it as a test of courage, inner strength. But his superiors had not been entirely wrong about him; he did know these people, their little tricks and deceits. In fact, he knew them much too well. He knew the look in the eyes of a man who sees a lifetime's labor flicked away in an instant.

So he cheated.

Just a little, here and there, principally sins of omission, a matter of not reporting what he saw. But, as the weeks went by, the accounting was turned in and the numbers rose up through the apparatus to those whose job it was to compare, to set unit beside unit in order to judge production. And the showing of his group grew poorer and poorer until somebody caught on and sent somebody else down there to see what the hell was going on and it only took a little while before they got onto him.

The transfer followed immediately. He tried making certain telephone calls. But they'd marked him, and his friends knew enough to leave him alone lest the virus touch them as well.

At Camp 782, the procession of inmates continued all through the winter afternoon as the wind sang in the eaves. One left, another entered. Each prisoner had been judiciously selected by the camp commandant, so their statements were well rehearsed. It was all to do with self-sacrifice, patriotism, hard work, shock brigades that labored through the night to meet a production norm. And, of course, undying faith in the Great Leader. Ilya Goldman wrote it all down and signed it, an automaton, playing his assigned role in the ritual. The mute agony of these places—themselves lost in the silence of the endless, frozen land—would finish him if he permitted himself to feel it, so he had, by self-direction, grown numb, and now felt nothing about anything. There was no other defense. By early evening, only one file remained to be processed.

503775.
Admitted: 20 December 1936
Labor Classification: Clerk
Present Function: Office of Task Assignment
Security Notation: Reliable
Charge: Articles 40, 42, 42 A, 45 and 70 of the Judicial Code
Release Date: 20 December 1966

There was no name on the file, no age, nothing of 503775's life before admission to the camp system. Such information was classified and held elsewhere, no doubt in the files of the resident NKVD officer. But Ilya could tell by a glance down the page that this had, at one time, been
somebody
, somebody snaffled up in the purges of 1936, too important or favored to kill, thus consigned to the Utiny, a nonperson. The man was a trustee, with a good deal of power—clerk's power, but power nonetheless—so had apparently contrived to ingratiate himself with the camp administration. When he entered the room, Ilya felt a slight prickle of recognition.

To look at, he was no different from the others—hesitant, nervous, with humility suggested in every motion. He dragged a foot as he walked—a soft scrape on the floorboards—his head was shaven against the lice, camp rations had shrunken his features, and his eyes were slitted from years of the Kolyma weather, sun glaring off the ice fields. His shoulders were stooped, his beard long and lank—a man perhaps in his late fifties, though one could never be sure about age in a camp.

Ilya nodded him to the chair; he sat down, then launched himself into a speech of such patriotic frenzy that it became clear to Ilya why the commandant had placed him last on the day's schedule—a theatrical flourish to send the inspector general's little man off happy to his next camp. The phrases flowed like oil. “Let it be remembered” and “hour of the nation's need” and “strayed from the true course” and “dedicated more than ever to sacrifice.” All that year's favorites—the man was something of a poet, working in the genre of political cliché.

My God
, Ilya thought,
I'm talking to Sascha Vonets
.

He lurched forward, face lit by recognition. Opened his mouth to speak. Sascha's hand shot across the table and Ilya felt a rough finger pressed briefly against his lips in a plea for silence. Ilya was caught with admiration. Sascha didn't miss a beat—“inspired by the Great Leader”—as he pointed back and forth to the far wall and his right ear. Ilya nodded his complicity. The camp commandant was evidently making sure that nobody said
the wrong thing
. The interrogation room had been cleverly constructed within a maze of administrative offices, essentially three partitions built against an exterior wall. It was windowless, as all interrogation facilities were supposed to be; one wanted to avoid even the implicit suggestion that the prisoner had any way out of the difficulties in which he found himself. The camp commandant, Ilya realized, would likely have some flunky sitting next to one of the walls and taking verbatim notes in shorthand.

Sascha, having wound up his introductory remarks, now began the recitation of a poem entitled “Red Banners,” a reference to the NKVD medal of honor that could never be worn in public. This poem was, apparently, a personal contribution to the war effort. From the first stanza it became clear to Ilya that it was to be a kind of modern epic, an inspirational hymn of praise to the security services:

Arise!
O patriots of the shadows—
who do not see the flight of cranes
,
whose red banners fly in darkness only—
we salute you!

It went on for quite some time, stern images of struggle and heroism marching forward in a grand parade. Then, as he ended the recitation, Sascha came around the table and thrust two slips of paper into the front of Ilya's uniform jacket. When he moved away and sat down again, Ilya slowly exhaled the breath he'd been holding. Up close, the smell of mildew and stale sweat had nearly gagged him.

“Might one ask, comrade Captain, your opinion of my humble poem?”

“Laudable,” Ilya said. “I will certainly inform the appropriate agencies of the existence of this work, you may depend on it.”