Moscow knocked him virtually senseless.
They put him in a house—in pre-Revolutionary times the love nest of a wine merchant—on Arbat Street. But his training class was only just getting organized and they really didn't want to be bothered with him. He had no money, but that did not prevent him from walking, from experiencing, for the first time in his life, the streets of a city.
Winter had come early. The snow and the city swirled around him and, at first, overwhelmed his mind. On the river he had drifted into the easy numbness of a long journey, a traveler's peace, wherein constant motion caused the world to slide by before it could make trouble. Thus he was unprepared for the city, and the sights and sounds drove themselves against his senses until he was giddy with exhaustion.
And though the Moscow of his dreams—grand boulevards, golden domes—was as he had imagined, it shared the stage with a riptide of ordinary life. For every glossy Zil or Pobieda that disgorged important-looking people into important buildings, there seemed to be ten carts pulled by horses: the carts piled high with coal or carrots, the horses' breath steaming from flared nostrils, the red-faced draymen drunk and cursing like maniacs. The streets were crowded with old women in black dresses and shawls, bearded Jews in black homburgs, Mongolian soldiers with flat, cold faces. He saw a woman knocked down by a trolley, a bad fight between two men armed with broken vodka bottles. He imagined he could smell the violence in the air, mixed in with horse manure, coal smoke, and fried grease. A huge, bald, fat fellow urinated at the base of a pensive—chin on fist—statue of Karl Marx. Some militiamen happened along and shouted at him to stop. When he didn't—he called out that he couldn't—they rushed at him. He swung a thick arm, knocked a couple of them sprawling, but the rest ganged him and beat him to the ground with wooden truncheons, then stood there smoking until a Stolypin car arrived to take him away. Khristo saw inside when they opened the door: two rows of white faces in the darkness.
Yet, a moment later, turning the corner into Arbat Street he saw, he was almost certain, a ballerina. His spirit swooped, that such glory could exist on earth. Her face, her whole presence, appeared to have been drawn with a needle-sharp pencil. Hard lines: jaw, cheek, eye, and the suggestion of firm leg beneath the supple skirt as she strode along the street. The women of Vidin started working at the age of twelve and bore children at sixteen. The bloom shone briefly, then vanished. But this was a city and in a city, he reasoned, certain plants flowered in perpetuity. She was surrounded, as she moved along the sidewalk, by her personal theater: the faces in the crowd that watched her, the borzoi on a thin silver chain that preceded her, and two fat little men in overcoats who toddled officiously behind her. Her eyes caught his own for a moment, then flicked away, but her face remained utterly still. Like a seashell, he thought.
Such treasures were to be worshiped by the eyes alone. Were meant to inspire poems, were surely not meant to be craved after in the ordinary, mortal ways. But, in Moscow, the ordinary mortal ways were, for comrade Khristo, not entirely neglected. Communism was the golden opportunity of the working classes—everyone must share—and the Russian winter was an endless horror of white ice and white sky, demonic, survivable only with the three traditional warmings: the vodka, the tile stove, and the human body. Marike was her name, said as though the e were an a.
She was a Moravian German from eastern Czechoslovakia, a descendant of one of the Teutonic colonies strung all across Eastern Europe, a nineteenth-century attempt, inspired by religion and empire, to alleviate the tragic lot of the Slav by means of energetic German example. See how large my cabbage grows! That it grows on land that used to belong to your uncle we shall not discuss.
At the first wash of her he turned entirely to stone. She blew at him like a wind. She was an intellectual, a Marxist. She was intense, all business. She sang like a dockworker, ran like a soldier, and argued like a drill. God help the man or woman who let a false lick of lumpen deviationism creep into his words—Marike would soon have it out, and with a hot tongs at that. She had burned the mannerisms of the ass-licking bourgeoisie from her soul, now it was your turn. There was to be no diplomacy, no gentility, no sentiment.
But the most astonishing aspect of this human storm was the package in which it was wrapped. Where was, one wondered, the dirndl? She had crinkly orange hair drawn back tight and tied with a red ribbon. She had a broad forehead, and a permanent blush to her cheeks. She was full-breasted and wide-hipped, with freckled white forearms that could throw a haybale through the side of a barn.
She boxed him on the bicep to get his attention—it was all he could do not to rub it. “We are equals,” she said. “This gives you no rights. Understand? Does not make you my master. Yes?”
Yes. They had stolen an hour on the coarse blanket of her bed in the women's section of the dormitory, where she'd hauled him off in accordance with the banner strung above the inside door of the entry hall:
BPATCKИЙ фPOHT34 r˙,πPИBETCTBYEM!
Brotherhood Front of 1934, Welcome! It was Marike's idea to welcome him, just as it was her idea to bang on his bare back with her fists to urge him to a greater gallop. She chose him openly. Studied him, considered the genetics, the dialectics, the inevitability of history, then let her blue-veined breasts tumble out of her shirt before his widening eyes. Farewell Vidin, thou backwater. Hail to the new order, and if this belt does not come soon undone I shall rip it in half. He was, beneath it all, nineteen and alone and away from home for the first time in his life and he clasped her warm body like a life preserver, then proceeded to a happy drowning. A proletarian coupling, simple and direct, nothing fancy, and without precaution. Should a tiny artillery loader or fighter pilot chance to come tumbling out some months hence, he or she would be another soul pledged to revolution and glad of it. No dreamy slave of love, Marike closed her eyes only at the last, exhaled a huge purr of relief, then casually chucked him off. To work, it meant, enough of such frivolity, a hygienic relaxation had been achieved.
As the winter lay down on the city, harder and harder through the month of November, her appetite grew. They did it in the attic, where the May Day portraits of Lenin, colossal things colored a vengeant Soviet red, were folded and stored. They did it behind the targets on the basement pistol range. They did it under the table in the kitchen while the cook snored asthmatically in the parlor. The pace and spirit of it never changed—a mad dash to the finish line, first one there wins, as though Revanchist Materialism waited just outside the door to gobble them up. He had heard, over the back fences in Vidin, that there were other paths through the woods, that one could also do this and that. But, on the one occasion when she was squiffed on Georgian brandy and he'd attempted to put theory into practice, his reward was a double whack on the ears. “Get off your knees,” she said, “that is an attitude of slavery!” So much for this and that, back to essentials. And the more they did it, the more aggressive she became in daily matters.
Over the salt herring at the long plank dinner table: “Did you know that Dmitrov is in Moscow? I think I saw him coming out of the Rossaya Hotel.”
“Dmitrov?” Khristo looked at her questioningly over his fork.
“Oh no. This I refuse to believe. Georgy Dmitrov. The Bulgarian hero.”
He shrugged. Voluta, a lean-faced Pole with black hair swept back from a high forehead, coughed into his hand with embarrassment.
“Your very own countryman.” She shook her head, lips pressed in resignation at the utter futility of him.
Goldman, a young man from Bucharest, stepped in to save him.
“Dmitrov took part in the great patriotic burning of the Reichstag,” he said. “His speech at the trial is to be learned in the schools. Now he is in Russia.”
“Oh,” Khristo said. “Our newspapers lie about such things or neglect them entirely.” As he struggled to learn all the new ideas, he learned also to cover what Marike called his political infantilism.
Hitler's speech on that occasion was one of many statements typed on paper slips and tacked to the dormitory wall, waiting in ambush for the wandering eye of the daydreamer: “This is a God-given signal. If, as I believe, the communists have done it, you are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history.” In Germany and in Russia, it became clear to Khristo, they were itching to go at it, there remained only the question of time and provocation.
Khristo struggled in his classes. English and French, an impossible snarl of alien noises. Political history and thought, a crosshatch of plots and counterplots, irredentist imperialism, Pan-Slavism, the sayings of Lenin, the revelations of Marx. The world was not as he'd thought.
Tides of confusion pulled at him, but he somehow remained afloat. He was now firmly established in the dormitory on Arbat Street, where he'd been given two blankets and one towel, introduced to a milling crowd of Serbs, Poles, Croatians, Jews, Slovenians and whatnot, forty souls in all, including eight women who had their own sleeping quarters—please take note, comrades. He had been handed a schedule of classes and a stack of books printed on mealy gray paper. Do not mark, others must use. Measured for a khaki uniform of heavy cotton. Poked and studied shamelessly by a large, frightening nurse. Drenched with kerosene in case of lice. Assigned a narrow cot between Voluta and Goldman. Told to learn the words to the songs by tomorrow morning, but the lights must be turned off at ten. Inside himself, Khristo was desolate. Not at all what he had expected. He had imagined himself as Antipin's assistant, just a bit important, we'll take him out dancing with us.
It was not to be. A white card outside the office door said V. I. Ozunov. A bald man with a fringe of black hair, a brush of a black mustache, delicate gold-rimmed glasses and a dark, ferocious face, who wore the uniform of an army major. Khristo sat hypnotized as Ozunov reeled off a monotone of forbidden sins. The underlying message was writ large: we have you, boy. Now dance to this music. As for threats, we needn't bother, right?
“What has become of comrade Antipin?” Khristo asked, one try for bravery.
Ozunov smiled like a snake. “Antipin was yesterday. Today is Ozunov.”
End of rebellion.
Yet as much as he struggled and sweated with the languages and the levantine webs of theory, there was one area in which he succeeded. He was, it turned out to his and everyone else's amazement, gifted in the craft.
It began with the affair of the knitting needles. Five students were taken to a classroom and seated around a scarred wooden table. The room stank of carbolic soap. Beads of condensation ran slowly down the fogged-up window, colored a sickly white by the winter sky above the city.
Ozunov paced up and down and addressed the backs of their heads, his hands clasped behind him.
“On your desk are sealed envelopes. Do not touch them. Also a pair of knitting needles. Do not touch them, either. We presume you to know what they are, much as we presume that you have never used them.”
They laughed politely.
“Good, good. You are not old babas after all, though your degenerate love of prattle and gossip might lead one to think otherwise. I am relieved.”
He paced.
They waited.
“Voluta!”
The Pole jumped. “Yes, Major Ozunov.”
“Turn the letter over. To whom is it addressed?”
“To the British ambassador, Major Ozunov.”
“A keen analysis, Voluta. Do we all agree?”
They turned their letters over. All were the same, they agreed.
“What might the envelope contain? Stoianev!”
“A plot?”
“Kerenyi?”
“The reports of spies.”
“Oh yes? Semmers, you agree?”
“Uhh, it is possible, comrade Major.”
“And so, Voluta?”
“A denunciation.”
“Goldman. Your opinion on this matter.”
“Perhaps a false denunciation.”
“Always the Romanian, eh Goldman? You see the complexity, the winding and twisting of political matters, I give you that. But then, could it not be a false denunciation? By spies? In Stoianev's plot? What about that? Or it could be the information, no shock to anyone around here, that Ozunov's students are a blithering pack of donkeys' behinds!” He finished with a shout.
He paced silently, his boots slapping the scrubbed wooden floor, and breathed with a fury. “The point is, comrades, you don't know. Not such a difficult solution, is it? You don't know because the letter is sealed. It could be birthday greetings from the Belgian consul. It could be a love note from the stable boy. It could be anything. Now, how shall we discover this elusive truth?”
Kerenyi: “Take the letter out and read it.”
“Brilliant! You shall now all do exactly that. When I give the word, you have ten minutes. Oh, by the way …” He stopped, leaned over Voluta and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Don't tear the envelope. We don't want the gentleman to know that someone is reading his mail. And here's a hint, little as any of you deserve it, use the knitting needles.”
For the next ten minutes, an intense flurry of effort. Ozunov, of course, made it much worse by announcing “thirty seconds gone” from time to time as they worked. To their credit, they kept at it long after hopeless frustration set in. They pried and poked and stabbed and wiggled at the envelopes. Voluta tried to force up the point of the flap and ripped a groove through the paper. Goldman, after a few moments of intense concentration, staring fixedly at the problem, determined that the knitting needles were a false technology, offered with the intention of misleading them, and picked at the thing with his fingernails. Semmers, with shaking hands, wounded himself in the palm and left red blots on the address. By the end of the ten-minute period, Kerenyi, a tow-headed boy from the Hungarian town of Esztergom, had letter and envelope in shreds and one of the knitting needles bent in a vee.
Khristo Stoianev held the letter in one hand, the envelope, still sealed, in the other. The letter read: Meet at noon by Spassky Tower.
Ozunov could feel his heart beating. It was the throb of the prospector finding golden flecks in an ordinary rock. What was this? A magnificent discovery, to be wrapped carefully and delivered, in all humility, to his superiors? Or something else. Something bad. Something very, very bad indeed. He began to sweat. Closed his eyes, reviewed the last few weeks in his mind.
Khristo had discovered the small, unsealed slit at the side of the envelope where the glue line ended. He had squeezed the envelope so that the slit bulged slightly; peering inside, he had seen the fold of the letter within. Carefully, he ran one needle inside the fold, then inserted the second needle between the top of the fold and the upper edge of the envelope flap so that the needles sandwiched the fold of the letter between them. With great patience, he began to rotate both needles, and soon the letter became a tube of paper with the needles at its core. When he had the whole letter, he drew it toward him through the slit.
Ozunov dismissed the others.
Stood in front of his desk. Folded his hands and tapped his thumbs together rapidly. From years of school, Khristo knew this situation intimately and it puzzled him. What had he done wrong? Clearly he had done something, they didn't push their glasses up on their foreheads and shut their eyes and pinch the bridges of their noses like that unless you had made a very great botch of it indeed.
“So, Stoianev, tell Uncle Vadim. We'll talk man to man. Yes?”
Uncle Vadim? He said nothing.
“Where did you learn it?”
“Just here. I, ah, it revealed itself. The solution.”
“A lie.”
“No, comrade Major, I must disagree with you.”
“You think me stupid?”
“No sir.”
“Do not use that form.”
“Beg pardon, comrade Major.”
“Do you know, Stoianev, what is done in the Lubianka? In the cellars? What they do with the hoses? It takes no time at all. You will confess that your mother is a wolf, that your father is a dragon, that you keep the czar's dick hidden in a Bible. You will confess that you fly through the air and consort with witches. You will tell them who taught you such tricks—when and where and what you had for dinner. You understand?”
“Yes, comrade Major. I learned it here, just now.”
“I give you one last chance: tell me the truth.”
“From the first moment, it seemed the obvious way.”
Ozunov took a deep breath and exhaled, dropped his gold-rimmed glasses and settled them on his nose. “Very well,” he said, “I must offer you my congratulations.” He thrust his hand forward and Khristo shook it once, formally. “Now we are both dead men,” he added stoically, and gestured for Khristo to leave the room.
The news traveled. Everyone wanted to be his friend. He found himself regaining some of what he had lost when abandoned by the admiring Antipin. Even Marike relented. Took his hand and led him down to the warm, dusty boiler room where, on a scratchy blanket, he received a Soviet Hero's reward.
In the following weeks, Major Ozunov himself began to thaw. Khristo and his comrades chased each other through the streets of Moscow. Following each other and being followed. Eluding their pursuers, checking their backs in shop windows, running dead-drops in the parks, brushing hands in fast passes in Krasnaya Presnya Park. At the militia station near the school, the lieutenant said, “I see Ozunov is at it again.” Denunciations poured in from angry citizens. I saw them pass an envelope, comrade, just as bold as brass in clear daylight. Foreigners, I'd say they were. And most brazen. They were broken up into teams, competed in discovering and penetrating each other's operations. Semmers gave Goldman a bloody nose when he caught him stealing a master cipher. A baker reported that a group of hooligans had kidnapped a tall Polish fellow in his shop.
And Khristo won. And won again. It was Khristo's Red Star team that accepted the prize copy of Lenin's speeches. You could dodge through crowds, slither beneath a wagon, crouch down in a phalanx of cyclists, it did not seem to matter. You looked in the reflective shop window and there he was—just near enough, just far enough—doing something or other that made it seem he had lived on this street all his life. Twenty of them chased him into the Byelorussian railroad station on Tverskaya Street. Then, three hours later, trooped back to the dormitory empty-handed. To find Khristo waiting for them in the parlor, wearing a stiff-billed train conductor's cap. They knew him now for what he was, the best among them. They had seen it before, wherever they came from: the best in the classroom, the best on the soccer field, and they acknowledged his preeminence.
For his part, he learned to wear the star and honor its responsibilities. He encouraged the slow learners, lent a secret hand to those arrayed against him in competitions, and dismissed his successes as pure luck. Major Ozunov, in the hearing of other students, called him Khristo Nicolaievich, which put a seal on his ascendancy. Inspired by all this attention, he even managed to learn a little French.
On the last day of December it snowed a blizzard and he was summoned to Ozunov's private office. Since dawn, kopeck-size snowflakes had drifted down the windless air. Through the major's leaded windows—his office had formerly been the master bedroom of the once grand house—Khristo watched the street whiten and fill.
Ozunov stuffed the bowl of a pipe with tobacco, then lit it carefully with a large wooden match. As the office filled with sweet thick smoke, the major produced a chessboard and pieces.
“Do you play, Khristo Nicolaievich?”
“Not really, comrade Major. In Vidin, there was no time to learn.”
“You know the moves, though. What each piece may do.”
“Of course I know that, comrade Major.”
“Good. Then let us try a game. What do you say?”
“I will do the best I can, comrade Major.”
“Mmm,” he said around the pipe stem, “that's the proper spirit.”
He offered his closed fists: Khristo picked the left hand and played black.
He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it “the Russian game.” Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights—an officer class—sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival.
Khristo had virtually no inkling of strategy, but he resolved to be the best opponent he could. The object of the game, he knew, was not to slay the other king but to put the opponent in a position where he had no choice but to submit. He had overheard one of Vidin's more daring wits describe checkmate as “all that Russian foot-kissing business.” Khristo's notion of a chess tactic was to sneak a pawn down one side of the board—hoping for a distracted or mortally unobservant foe—and quick make it a queen. At heart, the strategy of checkers thrown in well over its head. Failing that, he liked to send his castles hurtling back and forth, up and down, in obvious but savage forays, hoping to shock a piece or two from his opponent. The knights he rarely used—they had a herky-jerky motion he distrusted: things shouldn't go straight and then cat-corner.
Ozunov attacked down the left side of the board, giving up two pawns, but pinning Khristo's castle down with a bishop. Khristo wasted two turns hip-hopping his queen around the pawn rank—stopping to take Ozunov's apparently suicidal pawns—for he liked it to have an unobstructed field of fire. Ozunov reacted to this provocation with apparent caution, breaking off his bishop's attack on the castle, drawing the piece back to safety. It was Khristo's theory that a succession of entirely random moves might startle the opponent, give him pause, make him think you had some obscure trick up your sleeve. Ozunov pondered the board, smoke curling upward from his pipe, chin resting on folded hands, intent once again on his own attack. So intent that Khristo had a little flurry of victories, took a pawn and a bishop with his galloping castle, made Ozunov move to defend his king. He seemed, somehow, to have taken the initiative. Perhaps he really could play. He stared out the white window, hypnotized by the slow drift of the snowflakes, then forced his attention back to the game—he could not allow Ozunov to see that his mind wandered. Where was Marike? He'd not seen her at breakfast.
Suddenly, a tragedy. Ozunov's remaining bishop came wheeling out of ambush and snapped up his queen. Damn! Khristo quickly checked his pawns to see which had snuck farthest down the board. No solace there. Finally, for want of anything better to do, he threatened Ozunov's castle with a pawn. How on earth had Ozunov finagled his queen? His eyes wandered to the piece, lying on its side among the ranks of the dead by the edge of the board. Would he not have taken the bishop with his queen on the previous move if the path had been open? How had he missed it?
The game progressed, snow drifted in the street below, Khristo's forces were slowly picked to pieces. He tried to concentrate, to see the distant implications of each possible move, but the suddenly captured queen obsessed him. From that blow he would not recover, but he wanted at least to see the reason of it. In time, he realized what Ozunov had done. At first he could not believe it, but finally had to accept the fact that Ozunov had brazenly cheated him. Why? He didn't know. Even the strongest had a weakness somewhere—they'd taught him that themselves. Perhaps Ozunov could not bear to lose.
Toward the end of the game, as Ozunov chased his king mercilessly around the board—stopping only to pick off one of the few motley survivors—the Stoianev temper asserted itself. Khristo determined that he would not be fooled quite so easily and, just then, a distraction in the form of a telephone call came to his aid.
Soon enough the game was over, a last faithful knight eliminated, a few helpless pawns standing around like poor relations at a funeral. Ozunov reached over and laid Khristo's king on its side.
“Check,” he said, “and mate, I believe. You agree?”
“Yes,” Khristo said.
“You dislike to lose, Khristo Nicolaievich?”
“Yes, comrade Major.”
“Then you must learn to play better.”
“I agree, comrade Major.”
“Losing your queen, that's what finished you I believe.”
Khristo nodded agreement.
“A very simple stratagem. Plain as your nose, eh?”
Khristo was not sure how to answer. Ozunov smiled, as though to himself, and poked idly at the bowl of his pipe with a toothpick. “I knew an Englishman once, a few years after the Revolution, it was my job to know him. We spent many hours in conversation, it was a most pleasant assignment really. There was nothing we did not speak of, women, politics, religion. All those matters that men like to speculate about when they are at ease. From this man I learned a particular thing. Fair play, he called it. Not such a simple notion, perhaps, when you probe to find its heart. A kind of code, which each gentleman must honor individually in order for all to benefit. In time I came to understand that it was a good system for those who had more than they needed, for those who could afford to give something away. But I also realized that I had never known anybody like that. Nobody I ever knew could say, ‘Here, you take it, I do not deserve it. I do not need it so badly that I will cheat and lie to get it.' Perhaps some day we may indulge ourselves in that fashion, we may have so much that we can afford to give some of it away, but not now. Can you understand this?”
Khristo looked hesitant. Ozunov laughed at his discomfort. “Yes, boy, I cheated you. I moved a piece while you were daydreaming out the window, enchanted by our Russian snow. I acknowledge it!”
“But why, comrade Major? You could have won without that.”
“Yes, I could have. You do some things well, comrade student, but you play chess like a barbarian. I wanted merely to teach you something, that is my job now.”
“Teach me what, comrade Major?”
Ozunov sighed. “I am told Lenin once called it the Bolshevik Variation, simply another strategy, like the Sicilian Defense. It has two parts to it. The first is this: win at all cost. Do anything you have to do, anything, but win. There are no rules.”
Khristo hesitated. He had a response to this, but it was very bold and he was not sure of himself. At last, he took the leap.
“I have learned what you wanted to teach me, comrade Major,” he said, opening his hand to show Ozunov the white pawn he had stolen when the telephone rang.
“You're a good student,” Ozunov said. “Now learn the second part of the Variation: make the opponent play your game. And the more he despises your methods, the more you must make him use them. The more he arms himself with virtue, the more you must make him fight in the dirt. Then you have him.”
He gestured with his pipe toward the white pawn lying on Khristo's palm. “Keep that,” he said. “A student prize from Ozunov. You have won the copy of Vladimir Ilyich's speeches, now you will have something to remind you, in times to come, how to turn them into prophecies.”
“Wake now, please.”
The hand jerked his shoulder. His body rose upright, by itself it seemed, and he suddenly found himself sitting. He struggled to get his eyes open. What time was it? His heart was beating like a drum at being torn from deep sleep.
“You are up? No falling back down in a heap?”
It was Irina Akhimova, one of the night guardians, an immense woman with tiny eyes and a voice like a ripsaw.
“Dress yourself, Khristo Nicolaievich. Quickly, quickly.”
At last his eyes opened. The dormitory was dark, the windows revealed snow drifted over the sill, black night above. Goldman stirred in the next bed. Somebody coughed, a toilet flushed. Ozunov's chess game had kept him awake a long time the night before, his mind tossed on the sea.
“What is it?” His voice was thick.
“Angels dancing on the roof!” Her harsh voice cut through the room. “How should I know?” She grabbed him by the hair, not so playfully. “And wear your warmest things, little rooster, lest your manhood become an icicle.”
She let him go with a flourish. He swung out of bed; she didn't take her eyes off him while he dressed. When he visited the toilet, she waited just outside. He wound a scarf around his throat, put on a sweater and his wool jacket.
“Very well,” he said.
She looked at him critically. Reached to a nail above his bed, whipped his peaked cap from it and put it on him, pulling it down as far as it would go. Then she took him above the elbow and led him out of the room. There was a mug of tea for him on the table in the parlor and a man's silhouette in the shadows.
“Here he is,” Irina Akhimova said to the shape, “and good morning to you.” She left abruptly. The man moved forward and stopped. His body was very still; he stared at Khristo and his eyes did not blink.
Khristo had never before seen anyone like him. He came from an unknown world, and this world, sealed, alien, hung about him like a shadow. His overcoat was finely made, with a soft collar standing upright.
On his head was a fur cap, set at an angle. He was perfectly shaven and smelled of cologne. He had longish, lank black hair, strong cheekbones, dark eyes so deeply set they seemed remote and hidden.
“I am Sascha,” he said. “Drink your tea quickly and come with me.”
Khristo gulped his tea. The voice was educated and genteel, but there was no question of not doing whatever it told you to do. He put the cup down. The man gestured toward the door.
The air outside was like ice, dead still, bitter with wood and coal smoke. White plumes blossomed slowly from every chimney. The snow was cleared away in a path to the street, where a low black car idled unevenly in front of the building. Sascha opened the back door for him, then went around and climbed in the front seat. The driver was bulky and thick-necked, with a hat like Sascha's set square on his head.
They moved slowly down the street on packed snow. The lights picked out dark bundles, which Khristo knew to be women, wielding shovels. They drove in silence, the driver turning the wheel gingerly as they crawled around the corners. On the horizon, Khristo could see a fading of the darkness, a thin light that he had come to know as the winter dawn. The upholstery in the car had a strong musty smell. Sascha moved the sleeve of his coat back an inch, he was wearing a watch.
Khristo tried to quiet his breathing, to slow it down. He did not want these men to know what he was feeling. The interior handles of the back doors had been removed.
They drove down Kutuzov Prospekt, a grand boulevard, past the Kremlin towers, then into a narrow side street that had been shoveled down to the paving. They passed under an archway, where a soldier with a rifle saluted them, then stopped in a courtyard full of black cars. The driver remained seated. Sascha opened his door and beckoned him out. He moved stiffly, shoulders hunched as he stepped into the sharp air. He had thought that facing death, facing whatever he now faced, his mind would be bright with panic, but this was not the case. Instead, he felt like a man at the bottom of a deep well, a statue, empty of feeling.
Sascha led him through a series of guarded doors until they stood in a grand marble entry hall dominated by a magnificent staircase and a domed ceiling that was a vast concave painting of nymphs and swains in a woodland. Khristo was directed to a small door set into a panel on one side of the rotunda. This opened on an iron stairway which they descended, their footsteps ringing against the walls. It was otherwise silent and very damp, lit, just barely, by dim bulbs in wire cages. Down three flights, they moved through empty corridors that seemed to go on and on, like hallways in a dream. At last, they stopped in front of an unmarked wooden door.
“Listen to me carefully,” Sascha said in a low, even voice. “We have caught a German spy. There has been a full confession—names, details, places of meeting, everything. You are not implicated in this. We do not believe you are implicated, but we do not know so very much of you. If you are to be one of us, we must assure ourselves of your disposition in such matters, so you will have to prove yourself. Now. On the other side of this door. My instructions to you are these: do not think, do not speak, do not hesitate. Only act. Follow directions. Do what needs to be done. You must not be sick, or stagger. Remember that you are a man full-grown.”
Sascha tapped on the door and it opened instantly. On the other side was a large man in white shirt and dark trousers with suspenders. The man had a cold, plain face and looked at him for a long moment without expression.
The room smelled strongly; musty, sweet, and damp. It had no windows, only water-stained floral wallpaper, a rough table and chair, and a carpet rolled up against one wall to reveal a smooth brick floor with a drain at the center.
The German spy knelt facing a corner of the room. Khristo saw the hands, tied behind the back with brown cord, the head bent forward, the eyes shut, the lips moving silently, skin the color of dirty chalk.
The man in suspenders moved forward. He limped when he walked, in felt slippers that did not make a sound on the brick floor. Standing by the kneeling figure, he looked back at Sascha, who nodded affirmatively. Gently, he pushed the head forward until the forehead was only a few inches from the floor, then took the orange hair tied back in a red ribbon and tucked it in front of her shoulder, revealing a white neck.
Khristo felt Sascha take him by the back of the hand and turn it palm up. He had bony fingers, cold to the touch, and a grip like steel. From his pocket he took a Nagant revolver, slapped it hard onto Khristo's hand, then stepped back.