A different sort of train ride back to Moscow. The wooden benches they'd barely noticed on the way out were now discovered to be of a diabolical hardness. Heads drooped. There was coughing and sniffling. They were exhausted, worn down by the intensity of competition, lost sleep, country air, and cheap, throat-searing vodka knocked back, toast by toast, at the farewell party. One of the officers had brought forth a battered fiddle—he did it every year—and all danced and sang. What the Arbat Street officers called Belovian love affairs were consummated one last time behind, beneath and, in the cases of the truly brave, inside various huts. Farewell, my pretty one. Life back in Moscow was not so free. Oh, one could manage—clandestine training would serve for other than political purposes—but it wasn't the same, hiding out in the boiler room. Better not to be so forthright. Marike had carried on rather openly, and she'd not been seen since. Sent home, most thought.
Khristo tried sleeping but it wasn't possible. With windows shut tight it was getting close in the train, and he went between cars wanting fresh air and there found Kulic, curled up out of the wind in one corner of the platform. Kulic invited him to sit down and Khristo rested his back against the smooth wooden boards. In the open air, the rail rhythms were amplified and white smoke from the locomotive streamed overhead. There was a strange sky, common for the Russian spring, with clouds and stars and a probing little wind from the south that stirred the birch groves.
“Well, comrade Captain,” Kulic said after Khristo had settled himself, “it wasn't for lack of trying.”
“We should have won it,” Khristo said.
Kulic shrugged. “It is different here.” His voice was without inflection.
The judging committee's decision had been announced at the farewell party. Unit Two and the smug Iovescu had come in first. They had been placed second, just ahead of Malya and the Hungarian captain and Unit Five. Khristo's unit had been awarded a full score for the assassination of General X—there was no way to deny their success. But the committee had awarded Unit Two the points for capturing Goldman on the roof. Goldman had challenged the decision—it was all a feint, right up to the point when the two bribed security guards had released Khristo's arms—but the challenge was turned aside: a political decision had been made and that was that.
The brownnoses won. That was always the way of it, Khristo thought, and there was a lesson to be learned there if one wanted to see it. Kulic was right, it was different here. Gazing at the cloudy, starry sky, he felt captivity as a slight pressure at the base of the throat and swallowed a few times, but it would not go away. Twenty years old. Life already twisted into a strange, contorted shape, like a tree growing in sand. When he'd been Nikko's age he had harbored a secret contempt for his father. A slave of the fish buyers, the landlords, the Holy Fathers, he'd seemed yoked to his life like a patient ox. Now and then a sigh, but never a protest, never a curse. Khristo had believed one could tear the yoke from one's neck, cast it into the Dunav, be free of the weight that had to be hauled from dawn to dusk every day of the year. He'd believed his father lacked the passion, the human fire, to shed his burden, and he was ashamed to be the son of such a willing beast. Now he knew differently, of course. He'd learned something about yokes.
“Do you hate them?” Kulic cut into his sorrow. Seemed almost to know what he had been thinking.
Khristo shrugged, not trusting his voice. Kulic punched him twice, lightly, on the upper arm. “Doesn't pay to think about it,” he said.
He didn't hate them. He didn't think he hated them. Though the fury that had possessed him when he'd “shot” Petenko would bear some thinking about when he could get away alone. But he didn't hate them. He was afraid of them. He was afraid of them because they were, in some sense, madmen. A boat carpenter in Vidin had gone mad with sorrow after his wife died and had spent all his days down by the river building endless mounds of stones, constantly correcting the height of the piles to make them all perfectly even. They were like that. They practiced a kind of witchcraft and called it science. When you went to get your papers stamped, you slid them beneath a curtain to a waiting official—you were not to see the faces of those who controlled your destiny. Like Veiko, they dealt in fear. Like Veiko, he thought ruefully.
Kulic continued, taking Khristo's silence for assent. “If you cannot go back, best go forward. What else is there?”
“You too?” Khristo said.
Kulic nodded sadly. “All of us. That's my guess.” He slumped backward and stared up at the sky. “I was one of the Komitaji. You know what that is?”
“The committee?”
“That's what the word means. Called the Black Hand in Macedonia, something else in Croatia—you know how it is where I come from. Back in November, they murdered the king of Yugoslavia in Marseilles, King Alexander. The assassination was managed by a man called Vlada the Chauffeur. That action was accomplished by Komitaji. Some call us bandits, others, partizans.” He shrugged and spread his hands.
“You knew the people who did that?”
“Not personally. But I knew who they were. My group was active on the river. From the Iron Gate all the way up to the Hungarian border, including the city, Belgrade. And the truth about us was that some days we were bandits, other days, partizans. But always Komitaji. Bound by the oath of blood. Tradition of centuries—all of that. When we bury our dead, we do not close the coffin until it is in the grave. How is this? the visitors say. Oh, we answer, too cruel to shut out the last glimpse of sky until the very, very end. They like that idea. But the truth is different. Komitaji have always hidden guns in coffins, so the king made a law, and now it's a good country to visit if you like to see the occasional corpse being carried through the street.”
He laughed for a moment, remembering a particular national madness that seemed, from a distance, endearing. “Up on the river we are mostly Serbian,” he said, “though part of my family is Macedonian. We marched with Alexander the Great, of course, but then all Macedonians will say that. Just as all Macedonians are revolutionaries.”
“Like the Russians.”
Kulic glanced around the platform, though there could be nobody else there. “Shit,” he whispered. He moved closer to Khristo and spoke in a low voice. “We are revolutionaries because we cannot stand any man who tells us what to do. The Turk sent his tax collectors, we sent them back a piece at a time. These people, they crave to be told what to do. A whole bloody revolution they had, but they never left the church. Not really. They aspire to be priests. Do this, do that, today is Tuesday, all turn their hats back to front. Someone says why? They answer because God told me it is so and then they give him nine grams.”
“Nine grams?”
“The weight of the bullet, Captain Khristo. What goes in the back of the neck. They worship their Stalin, like a god, yet he is no more than a village pig, the big boar, poking his great snout in everybody's corncrib. These Russians will come after us some day, that is foretold, and we will give them an ass-kicking worthy of the name.”
They were quiet for a moment. Letting the sweet smoke of treason blow and billow around their heads.
“Yet you are here,” Khristo said.
“I deserve no better,” Kulic answered. “The king sent special police to our town—which is called Osijek, there are hill forts above the river there—and some fool shot them down. This fool hid in people's haylofts when the police came—army police, with machine guns, not the local idiots—but they started poking bayonets into the hay. So the fool moved up into the mountains. But they followed him there as well. One day came a Russian. We like such fools, he said, and he had false documents, a Soviet passport, and a train ticket to Varna, in Bulgaria, and a ticket on a steamer across the Black Sea to Sebastopol. So this fool—like all fools he thought himself wise—believed the Russian promises and left the mountains. Now you find him playing baby games with blank pistols, now you find him cheated of his victory, even his victory at baby games. But he accepts it. He takes everything they give out because he has no choice. He is like a bull with an iron ring through his nose. Every day they find a new way to tug on it.”
He threw his hands into the air and let them fall back to his thighs with a loud slap.
For a time they watched the stars floating by, lulled by the engine's steady beat over the rails. Kulic took a small penknife from his pocket and began paring a thumbnail.
Khristo sighed. The night made him sad. The history of Kulic's nation was like that of his own. The fighting never stopped. The conquerors kept coming. Other Kulics, other Khristos, all the way back through time, wandered the world. Away from love, away from home. They were destined to be eternal strangers. Melancholy adventurers, guests in other people's houses. From now on, forever, there could be no peace for him, no ease, none of the small domestic harmonies that were the consolation of plain people everywhere.
His pleasures were to be those of the soldier in a distant outpost—a woman, a bottle, a quick death without pain. Those he could look forward to. And, though his heart might still swell with poetry at the fire of a perfect sunset, there would never be the special one beside him to share such joys.
Distracted by a slight scratching noise, he turned to see Kulic lying on his side and carving on the wooden wall of the railcar with his penknife. Kulic stood up, made space for Khristo, pointed with the knife toward the wall. Khristo slid over. The scratching was tiny, hidden away in the extreme corner, only an inch above the floor: A 825.
“What is it?”
“B for Brotherhood. F for Front. Eight, two and five for the proper order of finish in the Belov exercises of March 1935. Our group, Unit Eight, won it. Even though they fixed things so that their stooges came out on top. Unit Two should have been second, and Unit Five third. Thus, somewhere in the world, wherever this railcar travels, our victory will be celebrated.”
He stuck his hand out. Khristo stood and grasped it firmly, the hand was hard and thickly callused. Kulic gestured with the penknife in his other hand. “We could make a blood oath, but pricked fingers are the very sort of thing these sniffing dogs take note of.”
They sat down again. Khristo could see the scratched letters and numbers in his mind's eye. He had read in a history book that the early kings of Greece could not trust their own countrymen not to assassinate them, so they imported, as guards, northerners, blonds and redheads from lands far away where they wrote in runes, scratch writing. These guards, time heavy on their hands, had inscribed their initials on the stone lions that, in those days, kept watch over the harbor at Piraeus. He now understood those men. Even the eternal stranger needs to leave a mark of his existence: I was here, therefore I was. Even though, after a long time away, there is nobody left who especially cares whether I was or not.
Kulic rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don't be so sad. Remember what I said—if you cannot go back, go forward. While you are alive there is hope. Always.”
“BF eight, two, five,” Khristo said. He felt better because of what Kulic had done, and he was very surprised at that.
“We tell nobody, of course.”
“Of course.”
Again they sat quietly. It occurred to Khristo, staring up at the Russian sky, that if you had nothing else in the world you could at least have a secret.
April. Sleet storms rattled the windows. Outside, on Arbat Street, a broken water pipe had revealed its presence as the spring thaw began and a group of workers was breaking up the pavement with sledgehammers. The boiler had been turned off and in the classroom Khristo wore wool gloves and scarf and cap. He could see his breath when he spoke.
“Good morning, Mr. Stoianev.”
“Good morning, Mr. Smiss.”
“Smith.”
“Good morning, Mr. Smith.”
“How did you spend your evening?”
“I read a most interesting book, by the English writer Arthur Grahame.”
“What was it called?”
“Called That Some Shall Know.”
“What did this book concern itself with?”
“It is a novel, about conditions of the agrarian poor in Great Britain.”
“And what did you find the most telling scene in this book?”
“The scene where the duke struck the peasant in the face with a riding crop.”
“Why did that interest you?”
“It showed the contempt of the ruling classes for their serfs, and that servitude exists even today in Great Britain, a nation that many in the world wrongly regard as progressive.”
“Thank you, Mr. Stoianev.” “You are welcome, Mr. Smith.”
In the street, the sledgehammers rang against the cement, a slow, steady rhythm.
It was Kerenyi, the Hungarian boy from Esztergom, who found the dog hiding in the cellar. A wet brown thing with sad eyes, half starved, its broad tail sweeping coal dust from the cement floor in hopeful joy.
Kerenyi looked like a plowboy—even after the medical directorate had provided him with a delicate set of wire-framed eyeglasses—broad-shouldered and shambling, thick-handed, slow of speech, though his father taught mathematics in a school for the children of aristocrats. It had been the elder Kerenyi's political convictions that had sent his son east, convictions turned into actions by the fiery speeches of Bela Kun, the Hungarian communist leader. Even after the students learned of his genteel background they still called Kerenyi “Plowboy.” There was a gentleness, a willing kindness, about him that reminded them of those who worked in the earth, those who never complained when the cart had to be pushed.
It was to Ilya Goldman that Kerenyi went after he discovered the dog. Goldman, the son of a Bucharest lawyer, had come to Moscow just as Kerenyi had, for ideological reasons. Kerenyi idolized the Jewish Goldman, who, small, near-sighted, exceptionally clever, embodied for him the idealistic intellectual who would lead the world into the new age.
In the cellar, late at night, Goldman threw his cap against the far wall and the dog galloped across the room and brought it back to him, eyes shining with achievement.
Kulic was brought into the business because he had a friend in the kitchen, a skinny girl who scrubbed the soup pots and slipped him a few extra scraps when she could.
They never did agree on a name. Or a breed. Kerenyi claimed it was part Viszla, the pointer dog of Hungary. Goldman, a city boy, had no opinion on the matter, but Khristo, after Kulic had dragged him downstairs to show him “the new student,” thought it more retriever than pointer. With most of Unit Eight now reassembled they could not leave Voluta out of it, and it was Voluta who stole the soup bowl that they used as a water dish.
To coordinate the operational necessities—food, water, waste removal, play—they required an operational code name. It was Kulic who suggested BF 825—the symbolic cryptogram he'd carved on the wall of a railway car. Thus an apparently blank slip of paper Khristo found in his pocket read, when pressed against a hot pipe: “BF 825 requires a theft of bread from the evening meal.” It was their Codes and Ciphers instructor who had taught them that canine urine would serve, in extremity, for secret ink. She would, they thought, be amused to learn how her instruction was being used—but of course she could not be told about it.
They had the dog for ten days, and they would forever associate it with Kerenyi. As the dog loved all who befriended it, Kerenyi was always prepared to be kind, to lend a hand when he could. Everyone at Arbat Street, student and instructor alike, knew that Kerenyi had no business being there—such ready affection would only get him in trouble, sooner or later—but the instructors were loath to fail him and his fellow comrades spent long hours making certain he could pass his examinations.
One Friday the entire group was marched off to a vast theater in central Moscow to hear a four-hour speech by Ordzhonikidze, the passionate Georgian from the Caucasus, a prominent leader among the Bolsheviks, and when they returned the dog was gone. Its dish, toy, and piece of blanket were gone as well and the floor had been swept clean of coal dust and mopped with carbolic.
A week later, the weather broke.
The spring rains swept in from the west, warm and steady. The great snow mounds, blackened by months of soot and ash, turned crystalline, then spongy, and the cobbled streets ran like rivers. The Moskva rose in its banks, people crossing the bridges stopped to watch great chunks of dirty ice spinning past below them. Rain pat on the roofs, ran down the windows in big droplets, dripped from gutters, downspouts, eaves, and the brims of hats. It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter.
Late that afternoon, they came for him.
Two members of the school security staff took him to the parlor, then stood politely to one side. The power station had gone wrong again, so the lamps flickered and dimmed and left the corners of the room in shadow.
Sascha was leaning against the back of a sofa, a white scarf looped casually around his neck, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a brown leather coat that glistened with afternoon rain. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth and the smoke, drifting through the soft dusk that lit the parlor, made his presence cloudy and obscure. He raised one hand and flicked the fingers, at which signal the two security officers left the room.
“I am told you do very well here,” he said.
“Thank you, comrade Sascha.”
“I am called Sascha. Only that. Save your comrades for those who need them.”
He moved about the room, slowly and speculatively. The end of the cigarette glowed briefly and two long plumes of smoke flowed from his nostrils.
“Tell me, Khristo. Tell me the truth—I promise that your answer will not hurt you. Do you dream? Specifically, do you dream of her? The redheaded girl? Does she reach out to you at night? Or, perhaps, is she under water? Long hair streaming out? She might call out your name. Does she do that? Possibly a private name, a sweet name, that you shared.”
He reached the far corner, turned slowly, moved back toward the window.
“You may tell me, Khristo Nicolaievich. I am, among other things, your confessor.”
Khristo took a beat to organize himself. “I do not dream of her,” he said.
“Of what, then?”
“I dream of freedom for my people.”
He stopped walking and stared, canting his head over slightly. “Do you,” he said. Again he began to pace, took his hands from his pockets and clasped them behind his back. “Well, perhaps you do, after all, perhaps you do. We speak of such things. We speak of little else, in fact. But that it should actually happen …” He stopped. Seemed for a moment to commune with himself. “Maybe they have taught you that, your faithful instructors. Maybe they have taught you to dream in the prescribed manner. Imagine. To tame the dreams.”
“Not that, Sascha.”
“Hmm. Well, don't give up. Keep trying. You must, you know—the proletariat demands it—keep trying. Tell me, what do you think of this:
“Ten thousand banners marching, '
neath the reddened sun.
They sing, O hear it, a leader's glorious name.”
He waited. Facing Khristo, staring through the drifting smoke.
“It is a poem of inspiration,” Khristo said.
“Yes, oh yes, student Khristo, you do learn well here, they are right to say it. For you do not say it is inspiring—you do not know who wrote it, or when, or why, and you could be wrong. Very wrong indeed to be inspired by an improper sentiment. Such errors often cannot be forgiven, and where would you be then? Eh? On your knees in a cellar?”
He waited. Khristo had to answer.
“May I ask who wrote the poem?”
“I wrote it. I am a poet. Can you not look at me and see that? When I was very young, I was obsessed with foolishness, romantic nonsense. My poems were full of herons, birch trees, endless skies, and girls with pretty hands. Now, well, you have heard. Truth found me. Sought me out, perfected my heart. The plow, it whispered, your soul has lost its plow. ”
He stood close to Khristo and took him by the shoulders. The smell of alcohol was overwhelming, as though it sweated through his pores. Khristo squinted as the cigarette smoke burned his eyes. The room was suddenly very still.
“The plow of steel,” he went on, voice persuasive and logical, “turns our black earth to silver, / thus our Leader's wisdom / Opens our hearts to knowledge.” He drew back and waited a moment, returned his hands to his pockets and waited for a reaction. “Khristo Nicolaievich,” he said, “how do you not weep to hear such thoughts?”
When there was no response he took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it at his feet, where it smoldered in the carpet. Then he walked to the window and looked out. “This fucking rain,” he said.
He drew the leather coat around his shoulders as though he were suddenly cold, turned toward Khristo and gazed into his eyes. “Well,” he said, “we are to be married, you and I.”
Khristo did not answer.
“Yes,” Sascha said, “it is time you left this house of virgins.”
“I see.”
“But marriage, you know, is a serious business. You will have to be the very best of wives. Obedient and good-natured, ready always to protect the honor of the family. You must never flirt with strangers, or tell our secrets at the village well. And, of course, you must be eternally faithful. That most of all. Do you understand?”
“I do,” Khristo said.
Sascha smiled crookedly at the words, and nodded to himself. “Yes,” he said, “I almost believe you. You will give all but a little corner of your heart—a private place, you think.”
Khristo almost answered, then stopped.
Sascha laughed. “Knowledge is forgiveness, boy, and who among us has not crossed his fingers behind his back? Come along, bratets”—the word meant little brother—“and we'll go and see the priest.”
He stepped back and gestured for Khristo to precede him through the alcove that led from the parlor to the door of the house. He followed, and his hand fell affectionately on Khristo's shoulder. Sascha was slim and small-boned, an aristocrat, a man made for drawing rooms, but the force of the blow very nearly drove Khristo to his knees.
It was the same black Pobieda as before, idling at the curb, shiny with rain. And the same driver, a thick roll of flesh riding atop his collar. This time, Sascha joined him in back. Crawled across the gray upholstery, sank down in the corner of the seat, and closed his eyes. They tore across the city at great speed, the driver banging on the horn with a red fist. The windshield wiper squeaked as it jerked back and forth across the glass. The back end of the car fishtailed alarmingly as the driver bent it into the corners. They bounced through puddles, spewing up huge fountains of brownish water, and people scattered in front of them, flailing and slipping on the wet pavement. An old man, stooped almost double, was startled from a daydream as he crossed the street and dropped a large sack as he hobbled for safety. Potatoes rolled every which way—the car bumped as it passed over them. Khristo turned and looked back. The man was gathering them up from the gutter as best he could. The driver, glancing at his outside mirror, snorted to himself: “Horseshit in the soup tonight, Papa.”
The rain stiffened, sweeping over them in windblown sheets, and the Pobieda's amber beams seemed useless and insignificant in the dark blue light of the late afternoon. After cutting through a maze of city streets, they turned onto the ring road that surrounded the city, coming up on the occasional truck. The truck driver, knowledgeable on the subject of shiny black Pobiedas, would wobble off the road to let them pass.
Some twenty minutes later the car slowed, the driver peered into the gloom, grunted with satisfaction, and swerved between two armored cars parked in a vee at the entrance to a broad avenue. Khristo caught a glimpse of a horrified white face in the front of the armored car on his side as the driver punched the accelerator and went sideways through the narrow gap. The slewing turn woke Sascha up.
“Mitya,” he said, “you drive like a peasant.”
“I am a peasant,” the driver answered.
It was a grand, straight road that led out into the countryside, lined with towering poplars that swayed in the wind, a scene that suggested dispatch riders on horseback and carriages with footmen. Khristo stared out the window. There were police everywhere, wearing rain capes and armed with submachine guns. Hundreds and hundreds of them stamped their feet by the side of the road, snapping to attention as they flew by. A Stolypin car was parked at every intersection. Otherwise it was deserted, not a single vehicle going in either direction.
“Getting an eyeful?” Sascha asked.
Khristo turned away. It was not wise to look around too much—spies were said to memorize details of bridges and railways and police posts. Nobody in Moscow, despite the glare of the summer sun, wore sunglasses. It was not precisely forbidden, but it made people wonder why the eyes were concealed.
“It is the road to Koba's dacha,” Sascha explained, using Stalin's affectionate nickname. “Twenty miles of it. Three special battalions guard it day and night—even the foxes don't come here.”
Three battalions meant thirty-six hundred men. Day and night. What was it Antipin had said about the soldier who guarded the spot where a flower had once grown?
“Don't forget the bodyguard,” Mitya said.
“Correct,” Sascha said. “Wherever he is, dear Koba is accompanied by four hundred and two bodyguards. Not four hundred and three or one. The number must have special significance—so special, in fact, that none of us has ever figured it out. Nonetheless, you see how well our leader is beloved, that we protect him so.”
Mitya laughed. “ Big country, big numbers, everything big. When the bad spirits take our hearts and the blood runs high, we hack each other down like wheat, comrade student. Do you see? Koba knows us. Better than we know ourselves. We are all peasants—even the delicate flower in the back seat with you—and every peasant pines for the scythe in his hand. Wha-aaack!” He slashed at the dashboard with the side of his hand. “And there are eight hundred and four whose single job it is to watch the four hundred and two!”
“Mitya indulges himself,” Sascha said. “Now today, alas, you do not go to meet the Great One himself. If I were you, I would not be too sad about that. Whom Koba meets, he thinks about, and you are too young to be thought about in that way. No, today is our wedding day, as I have said, and the ceremony is to be performed by Yagoda himself. You know who that is?”
“Chairman Yagoda is the leader of the NKVD,” Khristo said.
“Very good,” Sascha said. “He is my boss and your boss, so be on your best behavior. Watch me, and do what I do. Remember that you are one of us.”
Khristo had overheard the instructors talking about Yagoda. It was obvious they feared him. Genrikh Yagoda had been born, raised, and educated in the Polish textile city of Lodz. Like his father before him, he was a chemist by training, and was known as Yagoda the Chemist. He had been Stalin's fist after the Revolution, no less an eminent chekist for being Polish. The great Dzerzhinsky, who had founded the Soviet intelligence services, was a Pole, and two of his notable assistants—M. Y. Latsis and Y K. Peters—were Latvians by birth. Yagoda, in 1918, had organized and directed the new Gulag system of labor camps. He had disappeared for a time, then, in 1934, had been appointed head of NKVD. It was rumored that he had plotted the death of Stalin's rival Kirov and had suggested that the assassination be used as pretext for getting rid of the Old Bolsheviks. There were rumors darker yet—his contemporary Bayonov had written that Koch's bacilli, introduced in the subject's food, would produce a galloping tuberculosis and a quick death from apparently natural causes. Thus there were some who would implicate him in Lenin's death as well as Kirov's.
For Khristo, the memory of that evening was never entirely clear. Certain moments stayed with him; every detail, every inflection of voice sharply recollected. Other times were lost in the mists. There were toasts—with different vodkas: Zubrovka, Polish Ostrova, the fiery Pertsovka. Two ounces every time. To Stalin. To revolution. To breasts and pussies. To departed friends. To the great city of Lodz. To Kiev. To Baku in the Transcaucasus. To Lenin. To life. To laughter. To friendship. Slowly the edges of the grand ballroom, all parquet and crystal to please the mistress of an aging prince, dimmed and faded from his vision. He began to feel as though he were sinking—a dizzying descent in both mind and body—into some desert valley at the depths of his soul. A sad and desperate place, arid, cruel, strewn with the bones of old friends and dreams, lost love, the times of childhood. He sank and sank, his chin sought his chest again and again, and he had to haul it upright with greater effort as time and toasts went on. The room swayed and bobbed in a light sea, and faces floated past his vision like ghost ships.
When the drinking slowed, the eating began. Ukrainian pork soup full of chopped red cabbage and garlic, cold peas with vinegar and salt, chicken stewed in cream. These he tasted, then filled up on hunks of black bread with sweet butter, first inhaling deeply of the bread—a time-honored curative for vodka drinking. The smells of the food made him enormously hungry, but the vodka mustn't, he knew, be tampered with. Let it sit down there and fume, don't make it angry by sending down a lot of chicken stewed in cream—it might not like that. The men in the room with him—there must have been forty—ate prodigiously. Physically, they were all sorts, though Sascha stood out among them in form and finery. There were dark-skinned Georgians with mustaches and oiled curly hair who, like Stalin, spoke a barbaric, halting Russian, a language they'd had to learn in school. Some were pale and beefy, like Mitya, though some grew paler, and some redder, as the evening wore on. It was this group who stood to accept the honor of the toast to Kiev, this group who smacked their lips the loudest over the Ukrainian soup. Sascha, it turned out from the toasts, was from Leningrad—St. Petersburg. The intellectual city, compared to political Moscow. Kirov had been from Leningrad. During the dinner, people wandered about talking to each other, and Khristo recalled odd fragments of conversation. There was an almond-eyed man with a shaven head and olive skin who did something with sugar beets in Kazakhstan. But most were chekists, intelligence officers, and when they talked to each other they spoke in private code—nicknames, obliquities. They laughed and whacked each other on the shoulders. And, finally, there was Yagoda himself.
He took Khristo by the elbow as they went into the sauna after dinner, accompanied by Sascha, Mitya, and several others. They were all roaring drunk by this time. They undressed in the yellow cedar antechamber, a large room decorated with Russian Orthodox icons, old wooden ones from country churches. There was Saint Prokopius with his handful of burning coals. The Virgin of Vladimir. The Anastasis—Christ harrowing hell. Saint Simeon on his pillar. Saint Lawrence racked with fire. Saint Basil. Saint Theodorus. Saint Menas, and the Patriarch Photius. They had the narrow faces and sorrowful eyes of Byzantine saints and bore the marks of time: wood rubbed smooth by handling, brass-colored halos worn down to the grain. More recent suffering—chips and pockmarks—was also evident.
Khristo hung his clothing on a peg. When all were undressed, Yagoda proposed a blasphemous toast. Raised his glass and called the saints faggots and whores, proposed a list of sexual indecencies and drank to each. Then, inspired, he ran to the wall where his clothing hung and returned with a pair of revolvers. The group shouted and clapped, howled with laughter and urged him on. Yagoda the Chemist, his glasses fogged, thick gray hair curling along the tops of his shoulders, began firing into the icons. The shots were painfully loud in the small room and it was all Khristo could do to keep his hands from covering his ears. Other revolvers were produced. Khristo was offered one and blew a hole in a triptych of the martyrdom of Saint Ephraem. His marksmanship produced a roar of approval.
In the sauna, they sat on cedar benches and Mitya poured a pail of water on the coals, filling the tiny room with white steam. Yagoda peered at Khristo on the bench opposite him.
“This one belongs to you, Sascha, am I right?”
A voice from the steam: “My very own.”
“And will he do the work?”
“Yes. Quietly too. The mice will never know he's around until it's too late.”
“You think he's a mouser?”
“A good one, if he works at it.”
“Yes, I agree with you. He has the look. Does he have the heart for it, though? That's what I worry about with a good mouser.”
From the steam, a different voice: “He's the one that blew up Petenko, at Belov.”
“Oh? This is him? The Bulgarian?”
“The very one, Stoianev.”
“Stoianev. Well, I like Bulgaria. A refreshing place, I think, where, it is said, the women do it while hanging from trees. Tell me, Stoianev, is it so?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “and while they do it, they bay at the moon.”
This produced a gale of laughter and wolf howls.
Yagoda nodded with satisfaction. “Sascha is a nimble lad,” he said. “He always finds the clever ones.” He leaned a little closer. He had the elongated face and small mustache of the intellectual, gray, speculative eyes and delicate features. “Not too clever, of course. That makes people edgy. Now tell me this, and we'll see how clever you really are. Who is it that has eyes like binoculars, ears like telephones, fingers like glue, and a mouth that whispers?”
Khristo shook his head. “I don't know.”
Yagoda threw his slim hands into the air and his eyes sparkled with mischief. “I don't know either,” he cried. “Let's dig him up and find out!”