Alan Furst: Night Soldiers

“Come with me,” Antipin said, “and I will teach you something. I will teach you how to hurt them. Hurt them in ways that they do not begin to understand, hurt them so that they cry for mercy, which, by then, I think you will not grant. Your country has a sickness. We know the sickness well because we were once its victims, and we know how to cure it. We have taught others, we can teach you. You yearn to see the world, to move among men, to do things that matter. I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse’s backside. Come with me, my friend, it is a chance at life. This river goes many places, it does not stop in Vidin.”

Khristo’s heart rose like the sun. These were words he had waited all his life to hear without realizing, until now, that he waited. The river, he knew from hours of droning in the dusty schoolhouse, did not stop in Vidin. It rose in Germany, its legendary source a stone basin in the courtyard of a castle of the Furstenberg princes in the Black Forest. Called the Donau by all German-speaking peoples, it moved through the Bohemian forests to Vienna, crossed into Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where they named it the Dunaj, turned south through the Carpathians into northern Hungary, divided the twin cities of Buda and Pesth, flowed south into Yugoslavian Serbia, passed Belgrade at the confluence of the river Sava, known now as the Duna, roared through the Iron Gate-a narrow gorge in the Transylvanian Alps-and headed east, serving as a border between Romania and Bulgaria, where it was called Dunarea to the north and Dunav to the south. Then, at last, it turned north for a time and split into three streams entering the Romanian delta, snaking through the marshes to Izmail, Sulina, and Sfintu Gheorghe, where it emptied into the Black Sea, bordered by the Russian Crimea and Turkey, where the Caucasus mountains ran down to the sea, where Europe ended and Asia began.

“Well,” Antipin said, “how shall it be?”

“I …” He was not sure how to say it. “I do not think I am a communist.”

Antipin dismissed that wordlessly, throwing it away on the wind with a broad flip of the hand.

“Does it not matter?”

“You are a patriot. That matters. You are not our enemy. That too matters. Some day, we may convince you to be our true friend. All we ask is opportunity.”

They turned and walked back along the sand toward the town, where it was quiet and dark. So there will be cities , Khristo said silently, talking to his destiny. He had argued with it, prayed to it-to him it was a live presence, which might or might not heed petitions and curses, but one had to try-damned or praised it depending on what it did with him. Oh but what a trickster it was, this sly eel of a fate that wiggled his life about. He had yearned for Vienna or-someone had to find treasure, else why ever look-Paris. Now he rather thought it would be Moscow. Turn around then, and face east. Nothing new in this country. Still, a city. Golden onion domes, elegant buildings, people who read books and talked into the night of important things. Like Antipin, they would understand and appreciate him, encourage him. His imagination dined on caviar and inhaled the perfume of the one who sat across the table yet leaned so close.

“When?” he said.

“Tomorrow,” Antipin said. “They are done for tonight, except for the drinking and the singing. Tomorrow is soon enough.”

What few things he had, Khristo tossed onto a blanket in a small pile, then he tied the corners together in a thick knot. At dawn, it started to rain hard, little streamlets poured off the roof and dripped from the grapevine that grew above the kitchen window. They drank tea and ate what remained of yesterday’s bread. His mother embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, gave him a smile of love to travel on. His father looked at him for a long moment, from another world, then patted his shoulder-as though he would be back in a few hours-and plodded off toward the docks, walking head down in the rain. His sister, Helena, whose black hair and fierce blue eyes made her nearly his twin, reached across the table and touched his face. He went out into the yard and looked around for the last time. Helena ran out of the house and took him hard by the arms. “This is for the best,” she said, the rain running down her face, “but you must not forget we are here.” He could see she was afraid. “Promise,” she said. He promised. She went back into the house and he left.

At the squatty police station, a yellow building no higher than a Turk on horseback, the old fisherman showed up early and stood solemnly in a corner-one did not sit down and wait for the captain. He had lain awake all night, alternately cursing his luck and praying for deliverance. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. He had determined to make a clean breast of it, the authorities would have no question about where he stood. At last he was ushered into the captain’s office. A hangdog Khosov sat open-mouthed on a chair in the corner, like a bad boy at school. The remains of his pistol were gathered on the edge of the captain’s desk. There was, the old man announced, treason afoot, and he would have no more of it. There was a Russian loose in Vidin, spouting revolution and atheism in the cafes. He was prepared to tell them all he knew.

His understanding of the official methodology in such instances was woefully inadequate-“all he knew” wasn’t enough. They’d known of the Russian for a week-such heresies came quickly to the attention of the local gods-and had wired Sofia to find out what to do about him. Though the country was ruled by Czar Boris and his army officers and the future was clear to those with the stomach to see it, foreign policy was ephemeral, and it was hard to know where to put your foot. Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail. Thus, to date, the central administration in Sofia had been silent. As for the old fisherman with the yellowed mustache, him they took down to the basement, to see whether such things as were done there might not stimulate his memory. Their efforts proved fertile and a few hours of it had him, in whatever remained of his voice, making every sort of denunciation. All of it was copied down. Later it was widely believed that it was he who had denounced the Stoianev family.

They moved downriver in the skiff, taken gently along by the current, rowing or poling from time to time, principally to keep warm. They’d rigged a waterproof groundcloth on four makeshift poles to keep the rain from falling directly on their heads, but autumn on the river demanded philosophical travelers-the drizzle often enough blew sideways, and there was every sort of dripping mist and fog. The river itself was wide here, often as much as a mile between shores, as it moved through the Wallachian plain. The wheat harvest was long in, on sunny days farmers burned the yellow stubble and columns of thin smoke hung on the horizon. Now and again they would be passed by steam tugs pulling barges loaded down with sand, crushed rock, or timber.

On the Romanian side, there were occasional watch towers. Soldiers with slung rifles trained binoculars on them as they went by. On the Bulgarian shore, stands of oak and beech stood dark and silent. Antipin kept two fishing lines trailing from the stern, and patrol boats took them for fishermen. When the weather cleared, the river dawn was exquisite, a painting at first without color, shapes in negative light. Then strands of pearl-colored mist rose from the water, gray herons skimmed the surface, flocks of pelicans took off from the sandbars in midstream, and the hills turned blue, the birches white, the bare willows brown. It was a world of great stillness, and they instinctively spoke in undertones.