Alan Furst: Night Soldiers

There was something patient in Antipin; he heard you out and, when you finished, he continued listening. Waiting, it seemed. For it often turned out that you only thought you were finished, there was more to say, and Antipin seemed to know it before you did. Remarkable, really. And his sympathy seemed inexhaustible, something in his demeanor absorbed the pain and the anger and gave you back a tiny spark of hope. This is being writ down , his eyes seemed to say, for future remedy .

At times he spoke, some evenings more than others. Said things out loud that many of them literally did not dare to think, lest some secret police sorcerer divine their blasphemies. Antipin was fearless. What were dark and secret passions to them seemed to him merely words that required saying. Thus it was he who spoke of their lifelong agonies: landlords, moneylenders, the men who bought their fish and squeezed them on the price. It seemed he was willing to challenge the gods, quite openly, without looking over his shoulder for the inevitable lightning bolt.

“To them you are animals,” he said. “When you are fat, your time has come.” “But we are men,” a fisherman answered, “not animals. Equal in the eyes of God.” He was an old man with a yellowed mustache.

Antipin waited. The silence in the smoky room was broken only by the steady drip of water from the eaves above the window. The cafe was in the house of one of the fishermen’s widows. After her husband drowned, people stopped by for a fruit brandy or a mastica at the kitchen table. Somehow, the condolence visits never quite ceased, and in time the widow’s house became a place where men gathered in the evenings for a drink and a conversation.

Finally, the fisherman spoke again: “We have our pride, which all the world knows, and no one can take it from us.”

Antipin nodded agreement slowly, a witness who saw the truth in what others said. “All people must have pride,” he answered after a time, “but it is a lean meal.” He looked up from the plank table. “And they can take it from you. They can put you on your knees when it is to their purpose to do so. Your house belongs to the landowner. The fish you catch belongs to the men who buy it from you. The little coins buried in your dooryard belong to the tax collectors. And if they take them from you, you will get nothing back. These people do with you as they wish. They always have, and it will continue in this way until you stop it.”

“So you say,” the fisherman answered. “But you are not from here.”

“No,” Antipin said, “I am not from this town. But where I come from they fucked us no less.”

“We are taught,” the fisherman said after a while, “that such things-such things as have been done elsewhere-are against our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Perhaps they are right.” Antipin’s face was that of a man who acceded to superior logic. “When they come to take you away, you must remember to call for the priest.”

At this, a few people chuckled. Someone at the back of the room called out dramatically, “Father Stepan, come quick and help us!” A hoot of laughter answered him.

“A grand day,” another man said, “when the capon runs to save the cock!”

Antipin smiled. When it grew quiet again, the fisherman said, “You may laugh while you can. When you are older, perhaps you will see things in a different light.”

The man sitting next to Antipin bristled. “I’ll go to meet God on my own two feet, not on my knees,” he said. “Besides,” he added, slightly conciliatory, “there can be nothing wrong with a little laughter.”

“There can be.”

It was said plainly, from where Khristo sat on the edge of a table facing Antipin’s end of the room.

“It is a step,” Antipin said, “to laugh at them. The holy fathers in their expensive robes, the king, the officers. But it is only the first step. We have a proverb …”

But they were not to hear the proverb. What stopped Antipin in midsentence was a series of loud bangs against the wood of the door frame on the exterior of the house. A puzzling sort of sound-a pistol shot would have had them all up and moving-everyone just looked up and sat still. A moment later they were on their feet. Glass shattered out of the room’s single window-a glittering shower followed by an iron bar, which swung back and forth to finish the job, hammering against the interior of the frame. The men in the cafe stood transfixed, every eye on the window. The iron bar withdrew. There was a shout outside, something angry but indecipherable, then a glass jug was thrown into the room. It was filled with a brownish-yellow liquid that plumed into the air as the jug rotated in flight. It broke in three when it landed and the liquid flowed slowly across the floorboards in a small river. Stove oil-the reek of it filled the room. The men found their voices, angry, tense, but subdued, as though to conceal their presence. From without, a cry of triumph, and a blazing torch of pitch-coated rope hurled through the window. The fire caught in two stages. First, small flames flickered at the edges of the oily river. Then an orange ball of flame roared into the air with a sigh like a puff of wind.

The earlier banging sound now began to make sense, as several men thrust their weight against the door but could not open it. It had been nailed and boarded shut from outside. The intention was to burn them to death inside the widow’s cafe.

The man near Antipin who, moments earlier, had made clever remarks, leaped into the air and screamed as the fire exploded. Seeing the mob of men shoving and cursing at the door, he rushed to the window and started to clamber through, without heed to the long shards of glass hanging from the frame. The iron bar, swung at full force, hit him across the forehead, and he collapsed over the sill like a dropped puppet.

Khristo Stoianev stood quietly, resisting the panic inside him. His eyes swept about the room, to the door and the press of bodies in front of it, to the smashed window, trying to choose. Before he could move in either direction, a hand took him above the elbow, a hard grip that hurt. It was Antipin, face completely without expression. “A cold cellar. There must be one,” he said softly.

“Where she cooks.” Khristo nodded toward the kitchen area, separated from the main room by a sagging drape on a cord.

“Come then,” Antipin said.

They brushed the drape aside. There was an old black wood stove, a rickety table, a bent-twig crucifix on the wall. A bin where potatoes and onions were stored through the winter. In order to circulate the air and keep the food from rotting, a square had been cut in the wall, then covered with a metal screen to keep the rats out. In winter, a piece of cardboard was hung over it on a nail to keep out the worst of the cold.

The widow, on hands and knees, was in the act of crawling through the broken-out screen of the narrow square. She disappeared suddenly, with a little cry, and they could see the night outside.

Antipin stopped him with a hand on the chest. “Let us see if there is a surprise planned. Wait for me to go through, then shout for the others.”

He was a square block of a man, but he moved like a monkey. Grabbing the upper edge of the frame with both hands, he swung out feet first. A few moments later, his face appeared.

“It’s safe,” he said.

Khristo moved toward the window, grasped the frame as Antipin had. Antipin raised a palm. “The others,” he said. Khristo shouted, heard a thunder of footsteps behind him, then went through. He landed on the side of the house facing the river, away from the dirt road.

Antipin peered cautiously around the side of the house, then waved for Khristo to follow him. Up by the road, a group of silhouettes stood beside a farmer’s open-bed truck. The shapes were silent, moving restlessly, pacing, turning to one another. In the darkness, Khristo could not see details-faces or clothing. One man detached himself from the crowd and walked slowly down the hill, toward the house.