Good People (45 page)

He stood close to her and bowed. He smiled warmly, and his eyes sparkled. Suddenly he looked helpless with his desire to please.

‘Monsieur Thomas Heiselberg, au nom du commissariat populaire des affaires étrangères, je vous accueille en espérant que vous avez fait un bon
voyage.'
She had practised that sentence over and over until she could deliver it with a light accent, without pretension.

They exchanged further courtesies, scripted of course, and a few words about the good will of both states, the purity of their intentions and their mutual good wishes to the German and Soviet people. They set off on a short tour of the fortress. The two NKVD agents trailed behind. Even before she managed to say a word, he said, ‘This morning, after a nap on the train, I reached a very interesting conclusion. The pace of events in our dreams is so accelerated that human consciousness cannot process them. We dream and then analyse the dream with entirely different concepts of time.' While he was chatting away in excellent French, flaunting concepts whose meaning he took care to explain to her, the Russian peasant, she began to doubt her first impression; he seemed indifferent to the question of whether or not she liked him.

He prattled on, lecturing and explaining, as though courtesy did not require him to listen to his host. Did he believe that, as in his country, women here were also minor officials called upon to escort notables from one place to another? That wasn't possible: in their exchange of letters they had both signed with their full names, and he didn't come across as a man who would miss such details. When she told him that the peace treaty between Russia and Germany had been signed here in the Brest Fortress in 1918, bringing the war to an end, he gave a low whistle. ‘You chose a symbolic place for our first meeting, Mademoiselle Weissberg, if I may.'

‘Certainly, Monsieur.'

‘I remember the pictures in the papers: white walls, a small table and behind it a row of men in uniforms or in white shirts and black bowties, as in a chorus. Next to the walls the faces were all blurred. As a boy, those people grabbed my attention. In their old age, they would sit with their grandchildren and say, That's us there, the blurred faces at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
C'est terrible!
And my father scolded me for my tendency to take an interest in the scenery.'

‘My father encouraged us to stay away from politics,' she said. ‘My
younger brother Vlada used to cackle all day long with his boring opinions, so that our dinners became a nightmare.'

The German appeared satisfied: each of them had given the meeting a personal tone to the proper extent. He nodded to signal that these remarks were sufficient.

An amused chuckle tickled her throat: did he think that she didn't know the rules?

He studied the architecture. ‘From the outside the structure isn't particularly impressive. I imagined it entirely differently. Wasn't it Trotsky who formulated the fine print of the treaty?'

‘As you see,' she said, ignoring his provocative question, ‘part of the roof was smashed, and the damage to the facade was caused by the bombardment of the German army in September 1939.'

‘Well, the Poles barricaded themselves in here and caused trouble,' he answered.

When she told him about the change of regime in the fortress—how it passed from Russia to Germany to Russia to Poland, and now to the Soviet Union—he suggested that in Europe they should label the streets with numbers, as they did in New York, because conquerors kept changing the names of the streets and squares, and you felt as though you were wandering about in a maze, where the same streets were in different places at the same time. Numbers were the solution: for the benefit of both victors and vanquished.

At first the comment sounded amusing, but seeing his face relax with complacency she understood that he was making oblique fun of her work: Nikita Mikhailovich had asked her to sit on the committee that recommended new street names in Brest. Moscow Avenue had been her idea, and she was particularly proud of the streets that bore the names of two people her father admired, Mikhail Lermontov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze.

But how could the German know that? Her letters had been official, and the representatives of seven different institutions had read them before they were sent to Lublin; nowhere had she mentioned the matter of the streets. Very well, perhaps German intelligence had
prepared a report about her. Now she understood that nothing she had said about the history of the fortress was new to him—and it was almost certain he knew she wasn't Mademoiselle Weissberg but rather Madame Podolsky—and perhaps his comment about the street names was a response to the insult of the tourist's survey of history she had recited to him.

Here was something familiar, being pushed into the shadow realm where she looked at the world through another person's consciousness, wallowing in his intrigues and fears. Who was he really? Was he as obstinate as he looked? As eager to satisfy his ambition? Someone who would stop at nothing to get back at his enemies? Would a little sympathy mixed with implicit threats be enough to make him write a confession? Or shouting and a week without sleep? Every day in interrogation she had stripped back dozens of people—suspects, colleagues—and now him.

She refrained with all her power from staring at the grey sacks of skin beneath his eyes. His glance was cushioned with friendliness, and now and then he let it rest on a certain part of her body. When she spoke he nodded generously. She decided that not looking around at the fortress had cost him an effort, because the agitation in his eyes revealed his sensitivity to impressions. Well, she could teach him a thing or two; Styopa always said that her gaze didn't waste any time. The German clearly believed his mask was impermeable, his real face safely concealed. A lot of people laboured under that delusion until they met the NKVD.

They climbed the stairs to the meeting room, where a light meal awaited them, and she described her admiration for the actions of the Luftwaffe in Coventry, an action that history would fondly remember! He responded that he was no less impressed by the achievements of the ‘Red Army of workers and peasants' in their battle against the great power of Finland. They began to swoop across the expanses of history, showering compliments: the wonderful work of the Red Army in the battle on the Vistula, the military genius of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the great achievements of Russia in the war against Japan in the first
decade of the century (‘You really covered the Japanese in your hats'), Bismarck the benefactor, the firm way that Germany repelled Napoleon, and Fichte's
Addresses to the German Nation
(‘Never did the eminent conqueror encounter an enemy more lethal'). They were so amused by this game that they couldn't stop interrupting each other, but as soon as they sat at the table their joy disappeared.

‘As for Coventry,' he said, ‘you know the British bombed our cities. Mönchengladbach was the first, and they killed hundreds of Germans before our planes came close to Britain. To be precise, they attacked our cities for months while the German government was making peace proposals.'

Too bad he had shaken himself out of their amusing game and rushed to defend Germany like a stern propagandist. Perhaps his zeal for his country's honour was stronger than it appeared. He played with a pencil, leaned over the table and sipped his tea. His face and neck had turned red.

‘Do you feel well?' she asked. ‘Do you need to rest?'

‘No,' he answered and straightened up.

They didn't touch the food. She exploited her chance and presented the first position paper, which had been translated into German, on the Germano-Soviet parade, and suggested that they set the date for the spring, because a military parade was a popular festival, and it was fitting to hold it on a sunny day. Then she asked how they could also include German citizens in the parade. It could be divided between Brest and Lublin, and perhaps it would be good to hold two small solidarity parades: the Pioneer Youth would march in Berlin, and the Hitler Youth in Moscow. He instantly responded that the idea would not be accepted by either government, and in any event the people of Berlin and Moscow wouldn't identify with strange youths wearing uniforms they still considered revolting. He surveyed the position paper with a bored face, as if the matter didn't concern him at all, and he had no desire to have anything to do with it.

‘Our task,' she said, ‘is to present creative ideas, not to decide whether they are practical. We don't have representatives of all the
branches of the army here. The committee is just the two of us, and our assistants. Therefore I suggest that we free our imaginations to put together ideas for a parade that will astonish the world and be remembered as one of the most impressive events of the twentieth century.'

He stroked the tabletop with dry-skinned fingers. The prominent veins on his hands betrayed early signs of ageing. ‘Look,' he said. ‘All my life I've been a practical man. I directed one of the largest market research companies in the world. I dealt with projects that demanded vision, but I always made sure to have a clear plan for implementing my ideas.'

He was so used to polishing his sentences with conceit that he didn't notice he was mourning the memory of his achievements, rather than glorying in them.

‘Even though you have a capitalist world view'—she had to move him from implementation to the realm of planning and theory—‘you're not working in the private sector now. Other forces govern our task. Maybe we should adopt a different point of view: our job is to write a story about a grand military parade in the Brest region in the spring of 1941. If we believe in it, maybe others will too. Even if they don't—can anyone deprive us of the act of creation?' She had said it to steer him onto the right course, but the idea actually pleased her; a few days in the fortress had convinced her that planning a great potential event was one of the best activities these times had to offer.

‘They can take the creation away, but not the time we believed in it,' he said.

So she hadn't fired his imagination but, as their discussion went on, he gave her precise and rich answers, and the occasional brilliant idea: the parade had to avoid making artificial gestures or depending on the good will of the masses, or spreading over large areas. It wasn't a national holiday. The spectacle had to be concentrated in one place, making an emphatic impression. These principles were self-evident, like saying ‘amen' in church.

His decisive tone suggested he had devoted time to thinking about
the parade, but it was clear to her that these ideas had occurred to him just now. His initial intention had been to oppose some of her suggestions so as to pretend to be involved in the project.

She glanced at the trays, and he looked at her as though he didn't understand. Then she reached out towards the golden pie crust. She stopped; her hand slid down to her hips. If he wouldn't approach the food, she wouldn't either. Instead she told him about Star, the owner of one of the largest estates in the region, who used to eat a roasted, stuffed turkey at the end of each meal. In a military exercise, Star broke the back of the horse he was riding, and the czar, also a large man, patted him on the shoulder. ‘Bravo,' he said, ‘you beat me.'

Did she tell him that story to stimulate his appetite? She didn't know.

The rumble of motors could be heard. Her limbs, crammed between the table and the wall, had stiffened. However she tried to extricate them would seem clumsy. Of course he was the reason, but how could his influence on her have been so great?

They had already been sitting there for hours. Monsieur Heiselberg? He tore through the position paper, stripping paragraph after paragraph of meaning—not because he opposed them but because his monotonous voice, with all the good will in the world, was enough to nullify them.

Sometimes she imagined that several versions of his face were talking to her together. The version of despair that scolded her: Girl, can't you see all this is futile? The cold, clinical version that mocked the entire situation, her devotion to it, her miserable ideas, her very existence. The condescending, compliant version that cried out: Very well, my dear, I'll volunteer my talents to fulfil your little dream.

Every sentence that escaped her lips sounded like a quotation of an idea they had already discussed. A strange feeling gripped her: she couldn't stay in the same room as him any longer; a spell had been somehow cast on her. Her buttocks had risen slightly, and she pressed them down to the chair. The desire to get rid of him was greater than any professional duty, no matter how practised she was at stifling her will.

She looked at his gold watch. It was twelve-forty. She gave a fluttering smile. That couldn't be. His watch was wrong.

‘You look amused,' he said, perplexed, and his face came to life.

‘I remembered a story my parents used to tell me.'

‘Would you like to share it?'

‘No. It's too personal.'

‘My mother died not long ago,' he offered, ‘in very sad circumstances. She was at home with our Jewish housekeeper, Madame Stein.'

‘Your Judaism didn't prevent me from choosing you,' Nikolai Mikhailovich said to her. ‘On the contrary. Let those fascists know that we'll never be like them.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that.'

‘Yes,' he answered and stretched his arms behind him. ‘Madame Stein was a Jew but different from the other Jews that I knew. She didn't have the talents that characterise Jews.'

He was like an actor practising sincerity. Or was he really speaking from his heart, and her suspicion was distorting her vision? She told herself that he had noticed her disgust and wanted to win a little Jewish sympathy.

The room was getting stuffy. The cheese and fish on the trays gave off a sharp odour, but he, who sat closer to the refreshments, didn't seem disturbed by it at all.