Alan Furst: Night Soldiers

The man nodded that he understood.

“Very well. Your name?”

“Itzhak Gold.”

“Your name truly?”

“Not really.”

“Never mind. We don’t care. Itzhak Gold it is. From where?”

“Kurland.”

“I’ll write Lithuania.”

“If you like.”

“From a village?”

“The city of Kaunas.”

“Very well. I’ll write Kaunas. Next, occupation.”

“Clerk.”

Heshel Zavi wrote the word in Hebrew. Another clerk, he thought, just what they needed. He glanced at the man’s hands, un-callused and soft. Well, they would fix that. “You would, no doubt, like to be a clerk in Palestine.”

The man shrugged, as though to say he knew nothing else.

“It’s farmers we need,” Heshel Zavi said. “Someone who can fix a tractor. Clerks we have.”

Again the man shrugged. “Perhaps there is a civil service.”

“Like me, you mean?” Amazing how many of them wanted his job-two hours in the country and they were ready to shove him aside.

“No, not exactly like you. You have a small defense force, I believe.”

“There are several, all with grand names. Night watchmen is what they are.”

“Ah,” said the man, his small, ratlike face lighting up with a smile, “the very thing for me.”

“You’re sure? You can always change your mind. You will change your mind-that’s mostly what we do here, we are preoccupied with it. People who have not been able to change their minds for two thousand years tend to make up for lost time once they have the opportunity. As for being a night watchman, well, there’s not much future in that, is there.”

“A little, maybe. Where there are night watchmen, there will soon be someone to suggest what they should watch at night.”

Nimble, Heshel Zavi thought, and ambitious. He found himself liking the man, soft hands or not. He leaned forward across the desk. “Look,” he said, “if you can bear waiting a little longer, maybe I have a friend who might help you. But it will take time. I have you to finish, and many others.”

“I don’t mind at all,” the man said. “I’ll wait.”

The people of Sfintu Gheorghe would never forget the events of April 1945. The stories were told again and again-never the same way twice, of course, everybody had their own version of it, depending on where they’d been and what they’d seen and what they wished they’d seen. They weren’t liars, exactly, they just liked to make a good story better. Who can blame them? After all, Sfintu Gheorghe wasn’t much of a place. In the old days, five centuries earlier, it had been a port of call for Genoese traders, but now it was just a fishing village, a few hundred souls perched out on an arm of the Dunarea that reached to the sea. They were of Greek origin, descendants of the Phanariot Greeks who had once served as the bureaucracy of Turkish and Boyar rule. Those days were gone, of course, now they were simply fishermen who took their boats out on the Black Sea.

The sea was black, a curiosity of nature, teeming with life just below the surface, then, fifty fathoms down, a dead place with a bizarre chemistry of water. The normal oxygen had, in some ancient time, been replaced by poisonous hydrogen sulfide and nothing could live in it. So whatever died in the surface waters drifted down to the lower depths where, because there was no oxygen, it did not decompose. Think of it, they would tell the rare visitor. Sailors, great fishes, boats, sea monsters- it was all still down there .

They had a slightly peculiar vision of life in Sfintu Gheorghe, but that served them well during the second week in April because peculiar things went on. First, there was the madman. There were those who claimed the whole business started right there. Others disagreed. The Fortunate One, they’d say; the madman had nothing to do with it, he just happened to be around when the Fortunate One made his grandiose gesture. Nobody, however, denied that the madman had been there first, showing up on the tenth of April and hiding in the church.

Hiding really wasn’t the word for it. Everyone knew he was there. A fellow with a bald head and a scraggy beard, clutching a piece of burlap that held a sheaf of soiled paper. Well, they thought, since the war some very odd people had shown up in the village, the madman was just one more, and he didn’t bother anybody. He spent his days in the tiny loft inside the onion dome atop the church, coming out at night to relieve himself. The priest would leave him a little something to eat, and they all waited to see what he would do. A few of them had hidden up there themselves, when some dangerous person from the government came looking for them-it was the official village hiding place, and the madman, for the moment, was welcome to it.

Then, on the morning of April 12, the magnificent gift was made to appear-as though by sorcery. A fisherman discovered it on the beach, crossed himself, prayed to God, then ran like the devil to spread the news. He brought with him the note he found, and read it aloud as people gathered to see what was going on: To the Good People of Sfintu Gheorghe, Greetings and God’s Blessing. For those who sheltered a man when he was cold, who fed him when he hungered, and who consoled him in the darkest hour of his life, a gift of appreciation.

He signed himself The Fortunate One .

Who was that?

Many candidates were suggested-the villagers combed their memories for lost travelers or storm-beached sailors that they’d helped-but no one of them was considered a certainty. His gesture, on the other hand, could easily enough be explained. The wicker hampers came from Istanbul, almost due south of them on the Black Sea, and they were clearly marked with an address in Turkish-a certain shop on a certain street, obviously the grandest of places. This man, whoever he might be, had been helped by the village-nursed back to health, some said-then traveled on to Istanbul, where he had made his fortune. Now, later in life, he had determined to make peace with his memories and acted lavishly to repay an old kindness. He must be, they decided, a very fortunate one indeed, for there were twenty hampers. Half the village gathered around them as their contents were revealed. Fresh hams. Purple grapes. Tomatoes. Squash. Even eggplant, the most treasured vegetable of all Romanians. Pears. Peaches. And Spanish champagne-at least thirty cases of it. How, someone asked, could you even have an eggplant in April? Where did these things come from? Not from any farmer they’d ever heard of. Grown in a glass house , others said, shaking their fingers up and down as though they’d been burned-the universal sign language meaning very expensive . It was all perishable, would have to be eaten that very night, so preparations for a great feast were immediately undertaken.

There was, in the otherwise joyous proceedings, one sour note. Sometime on the afternoon of the twelfth a few Bucharest types, tough guys in city clothes, showed up at Sfintu Gheorghe accompanied by a big, nasty-looking Russian in a leather coat, with his hair sheared off so you could see the big nasty bulge at the back of his skull. They were looking for the madman, though they weren’t very specific about it. This threatened to put a severe damper on matters, for if they took the madman they would also, clearly, take those who had aided him. But the people of Sfintu Gheorghe had not survived the horrendous regimes of their country for nothing. The city types weren’t going to be a problem-their eyes lit up when they saw the bounty and they immediately went to work on the peaches. The Russian was another matter. He was the sourest thing they’d ever seen, so they determined to sweeten him up in a very traditional way. A couple of dark little girls with black eyes took him off somewhere and fucked him senseless. To begin with, they teased him into drinking a bottle of champagne which, instead of slamming a lid down on his feelings or making him explode like a bomb, as the vodka tended to do, rendered him giddily lightheaded and merry as a goat. He took a little black-haired girl under each arm and vanished in a swirl of giggles and wasn’t seen again for two days, at which time he was discovered sitting in the mud in his un-derdrawers, holding his head with one hand and his balls with the other.