Old Men at Midnight (16 page)

The next day I drove past the Hall of Columns. Workmen were taking down the huge painting of Stalin that had covered the facade of the building. One of the workers released the ropes too quickly and the face tumbled into the street below. They seemed in no hurry to retrieve it.

Our borders, some will insist, were everywhere tightly sealed. But do you know how many times I went back and forth across borders—crawling, sliding, cutting, running—in the two wars in which I fought during my life? In a time of war, one must necessarily act quickly. But in a time of peace, one makes a plan; one waits with patience. A year, two, five. And then one moves. And trusts to skill and luck.

I could not figure out all the maneuverings that went on
in our Politburo during the months that followed the death of the Dark Tyrant. The arrested doctors were ordered to speak to no one about their time with us and were sent home. Doctor Pavel Rubinov was buried in a Moscow Jewish cemetery. I attended his funeral, observing from a discreet distance. A cold day in March. I heard as if from another time a bearded old man chanting the Kaddish and then reciting a Psalm. Icy winds blew among the silent gravestones.

The fever and headaches came and went. None of the staff doctors seemed to know what was wrong with me. I didn’t want to see a Jewish doctor privately. That may have been foolish of me, but I felt too ashamed.

General Razumkov had clearly taken me under his wing, and I couldn’t figure out why. He would smile at me, wink, poke me in the ribs, share with me his vulgar jokes and political stories, slip me confidential information. After many weeks of conversations and allusions, I began to understand that my interrogation of Doctor Koriavin had been so successful that he had spent almost no time at all on the “conveyor” before confessing, signing, offering names. He had then remarked repeatedly to his interrogators and to General Razumkov that his acquiescence was entirely due to my interrogation. I had convinced him of the wisdom of yielding, he said. Apparently, that had saved General Razumkov’s head, which had been on the verge of being cut off because of our negligence and the slow pace of the investigation. I could not figure out what Doctor Koriavin had had in mind. Unless he knew how near the Dark Tyrant was to the end. And with all the doctors he
had named now locked up, there would be no one of sufficient skill around to tend to him, pull him through so he could wreak another two or three years of havoc, murder thousands more. And why not reward me for the charades we had played, for sparing him pain? Maybe. But I have never been able to figure it out.

The Moscow weather slowly turned warm. General Razumkov’s glee increased with every passing day. He put on more weight. “Our man might be the next Boss,” he said to me one day in his office. “You know what that means for
me
, for
you
.” His porcine features flushed and quivered with anticipation. I thought he would do a little dance around his desk. It astounded me, how closely he had linked our two destinies.

In the late spring, warnings started to come in from our agents in East Germany that there could be trouble there during the summer: demonstrations of dissatisfied workers and maybe riots.

Our minister, the possible future Boss of the Motherland, who was responsible to the Politburo for the stability of East Germany, immediately ordered up a security police team and put General Razumkov in charge.

It surprised no one that the general insisted I accompany him.

“If we do this right, it puts him in the front seat,” he said to me, barely able to contain himself. He was talking, of course, about our minister. “And if we put him in the front seat, you know what he’ll owe us? You’ll make general. I’ll see to that myself.”

The flight to East Germany was tedious. Razumkov sat
next to me, drunk on vodka and eager to get started breaking German heads. We would be purging the Party, smashing secret nests of workers. Nothing we hadn’t done many times before. I had no compunctions about tearing into the Germans. It was only eight years since the end of the war.

The opportunity to move, to act, to depend totally upon one’s skill and luck, came much sooner than I had anticipated. You quickly realize that you can get the guards accustomed to your odd comings and goings. Who would dare to question the movements of Colonel Leonid Shertov, the right arm of General Razumkov, himself the right arm of the possible future Boss? You have your car, which on occasion you now drive alone, ready at all times. You have a map, food, a versatile knife, heavy-duty wire clippers, civilian clothes, good hiking boots. You wait for a night of the worst kind of weather, lashing rain, mist, fog, wind. You know the exact hour before the change of the border guards, when they’re most weary, least alert. You know where to ditch the car, what roads to avoid. You mime the rise and fall of the ground with your body as you run in the rain through fields and forests. You lie flat in puddles of muddy water, ford cleansing streams, are drenched to the skin by the chilling rain.

I had told my office that I was experiencing a recurrence of my fever and headache and would probably be sleeping late. I don’t know when it finally dawned on them that they now had a headache of their own.

East Germany to Czechoslovakia to West Germany.

I emerged from a forest beyond a village road and crossed in a deluge of rain two hours before dawn.

The West Germans and Americans listened with interest to what I had to say. I was not the first to cross over—nor the last.

There was no doubt a big noise made about it in Moscow and a lot of talk concerning enemies of the people and how one can never trust Jews. But they probably forgot about me when East Germany exploded with violent demonstrations a short while later. Our minister, blamed for that, was either shot or strangled at a meeting of the Politburo—that was the word I got, though the world heard about a trial.

I don’t know what happened to General Razumkov.

Now let me say this, though it would not surprise me if it cannot enter the hearts of those who suffered at my hands. All the anguish I caused others in my zealous protection of that once splendid dream; all the emptying of hope and civilization I inflicted upon those who stood before me; all the many questions I asked as an act of wounding and all the answers I received through another’s screaming; all the worlds I permanently altered in the hearts and minds of people—for all those deeds and a great many more, I uttered, as I stepped into freedom, a Russian word,
“Proschay,”
which means “Good-bye forever.” And also means “Forgive me.”

For a long time afterward I wondered who had moved into my Moscow apartment and what had become of my painting of the village.

The fever and the headaches? An intestinal parasite I picked up during my months with the Red Army in the Crimea.

“Treatable,” says my American doctor, “but not curable.”

It comes and goes. It is tenacious, like memory.

T
hat melancholy April, two weeks after Benjamin Walter’s wife fell ill, a woman moved into the Tudor on the other side of the rhododendron hedge. The postman, the gardener, and the owner of the local bookstore made it a point to inform him that the woman was the noted writer I. D. Chandal. Benjamin Walter, preoccupied with scholarship and in the midst of struggling for months with his memoirs, had little time for fiction. But he knew the name I. D. Chandal.

He was sixty-eight, and ailing. A tall, lean, stately man, with thick gray hair, a square pallid face split by a prominent nose, and large webbed eyes dark with brooding behind old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles. His long, large-knuckled fingers swollen at the joints, the dry, papery hands flecked with age spots; his lips thin and turned down at the corners; his body fragile, bones prone to breaking.

At times, in the company of intimate friends, he referred to the memoirs as his deathwork.

Much to his wonder and disquiet, when he’d begun the task of remembering his early years he discovered that his
zone of deep memory was, as he put it to himself, well fortified and resistant to frontal assault. Only reluctantly did it begin to yield to determined probing, surrendering now and then a tiny territory of uncertain value: a narrow city street deep in snow; a parental voice quivering with anger; a man’s pale eggplant features spectrally detached from name and frame; a wisp of odd melody curling and fleeting as a morning mist. He barely recognized those fragments from his past, was unable to locate what he single-mindedly sought and uncovered in his scholarly tunnelings: the linking trails of cause and effect; the cords of connection, as he labeled them, that invariably led him to a unified chronicle.

He would sit in his oak-and-leather desk chair or lie back on his worn recliner, brooding, searching, writing, discarding. He had for fifty years not reflected much about his very early past, believing always that he could retrieve it with ease. How very disconcerting, the obsidian face that it now presented to him.

Especially as memory was what he was best known for; most notably, his remembering of war. War was his subject: war in general, the two world wars in particular. He was foremost among the sociologists of war, celebrated, esteemed. His monographs were studied in universities throughout the world, at West Point, in the Pentagon. Put to him an inquiry about the rise of the knightly class in Europe, and he would trace it to nomadic incursions from the steppes and to Viking raids; about the causes of the fall of Constantinople to Muhammad II in 1453, and he would
connect it to the horrors of the Fourth Crusade 250 years earlier; about the rise of the cannon and firearm, and he would begin a discourse on the crossbow, its stock and recoil; about the connection in the First World War between tranquil English town, hamlet, club, and pub to the ghastly stench and slaughter near Ypres, Wytshaete, and Messine, and he would respond with a lecture on the speed of the British postal service. Query him on these and similar matters of war, and you received unambiguous replies delivered in the rhythms and accents of exquisite Oxford English, with not the vaguest trope to indicate his New York beginnings.

His current reputation was vast; his embryonic years clouded. Information found in the usual brief biographies of notables yielded only bare bones: born in New York City in the 1920s; a void about his early years; then, in the Second World War, to England, France, and Germany with the American army; a decision to remain in England after the war; a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate from Oxford; marriage to an English woman of the aristocracy; scholarly articles and reviews for estimable American and international journals of sociology and military studies; a member of various august scholarly societies; abrasive essays in the
New Republic
and the
New York Review of Books;
the first major work, published when he was thirty-five,
Clausewitz and War: The Birth of the Battle of Annihilation;
and seven more books, among them the much-honored
The Triumph of Thanatos: War in the Twentieth Century
and the disputatious
Why So Late: America’s
Entry into the Second World War
. And his return to the United States.

Now, in near-old age, perpetually in the limelight, regularly approached, noted, quoted. In
Time, Newsweek
, and
Vanity Fair
, he was the Professor of War. The reason, no doubt, behind the
New York Times
report, in its “Friday Book Notes” column, of the impressive six-figure advance for his memoirs, and the widespread anticipation of their appearance.

In the third week of that unhappy April he sat laboring at his desk one morning, his wife ill in the adjoining room, the nurse at her side, and after a futile inroad into early memory, he raised his weary eyes and gazed out the window at the rhododendron hedge that was part of the border between his home and the Tudor, and saw I. D. Chandal, the new owner of the neighboring house. From a distance of about forty feet his weary eyes let him see narrow hips garbed in tight dark-blue jeans, and breasts covered by a light-blue, short-sleeved jersey. She stood gazing at the hedge, looking surprisingly young and trim for a woman said to be in her middle years.

He put down his pen and closed his eyes. Nothing was happening with the work that morning. Barren wells, puerile words. Might as well meet the new neighbor, clear the head of the long night’s frequent wakings.

He informed the nurse that he was stepping outside for a while. Fresh air, a walk in the woods. His wife lay asleep, breathing shallowly. White hair uncombed on the white pillow; beads of sweat on her pale forehead and cheeks;
bluish half-moons under her eyes. She lay diminished, her chest nearly flat. Once robust, moist, and wondrous with love in bed. His heart throbbed with grief. How recapture the past when the present exhausted him so?

But no, he told himself as he left the house and started along the flagstone path to the lawn and the hedge, it was not the accursed illness that had drawn up the blockade to memory; it was something—and here the warm air of the sunny morning fell upon his eyes and face—no, someone, some being from the past itself, a creature elusive as waning shadows and morning mist.

Well, he thought, approaching the figure by the hedge and feeling the heat of the late-morning sun rising from the young spring grass on the lawn, she is a good-looking woman, indeed. Change of neighbor, change of luck?

The hedge was about thirty feet in length, extending from the tall spiked wrought-iron front fence to nearly halfway up the lawn. Beyond the hedge the lawn ran smooth and straight, vanishing into the shadowy dead-leaf interior of dense woods. Three or four feet deep, the rhododendron hedge was situated on a section of the border line between the two properties, and I. D. Chandal stood on the Walter side, peering intently into its leafy interior, her back to Benjamin Walter. Close up, a woman small and dainty in stature, jeans tight, without the revealing curve of panties, he couldn’t help noticing; sandals and thin ankles and bare toes; he felt the beat and drum of his blood.