In the ensuing weeks, there were ripples in the tight smooth surface of Soviet Far Eastern affairs. The ripples were not large or noticeable. Even the overstaffed secret police of the MVD failed to put the different sets of events together. They were too scattered, too trivial, too patently silly. Altogether, they made up the trail of Michael Andreanov Dugan, zigzagging his way toward a leafy valley.
When he passed from one scene to another, he moved always with a reason. None of them indicated his real purpose. They added up to nothing more than familiar and trivial human failings. Sometimes his disappearance put a petty official into a petty rage; more often, his running away seemed like a hilarious joke. But pursuit was baffled, not by disappearance or mystery, but by the apparent triviality of the surface case. Each place thought that it had its own local mystery and people did not connect the separate events…
BLAGOVESHCHENSK: TWO SECRET POLICE OFFICIALS TALKING
The deputy officer-in-charge of the MVD political police looked out of the office window and, without turning around, spoke to his assistant:
"I think we must have cleaned out Manchuria pretty well. The very last dregs of the deserters are showing up."
"Except, Comrade Captain, for the ones who have gone over to the American Fascists," said the young man portentously. He felt ill at ease in this bare room, with the crude furniture and this old lout of a pre-revolutionary Communist trying to run anti-espionage. This wasn't what they had taught back in Moscow. And there was nobody to talk to. These local people, now, acted as though he were the subversive one instead of welcoming him as their confessor and protector. And this impossible old man, with his rustic wisdom!
The deputy knew what his assistant thought of him. Two previous assistants had had the same attitude when they first arrived. One was now dead. The other had become a senior official in the Special Section of the N.K.A.R., the Narodnii Kommisariat Atomnovo Razvitiya, the People's Commissariat of Atomic Development. It was good to have an old friend in a high place, even if he had been promoted far over you. It made the old friend feel all the more benevolent, and made the world a safer place in which to live. Now this nasty little manlet, he — he wouldn't even remember gratitude.
The old deputy smiled quietly. "I do not think many of these last batches would go over to the Americans. For one thing, the Americans would send them right back to us—"
"That is contrary to all our information, Comrade Chief," cried the youth. "Don't you realize that the Fascist tentacles of Wall Street reach right into this room!"
"They wouldn't get much, comrade," said the old man. "Do you think they would want any of those last three deserters we got yesterday?"
"One was a lunatic. They couldn't use him," admitted the youth reluctantly.
"And the second had spent two years curing a broken leg. And playing around with peasant girls. A pure Russian type. Honest, and repentant."
"But that third one. The little Asiatic. He might be dangerous."
"Andreanov?"
"That's the one! How did we even know his name? Merely by his telling us. And no papers at all."
"Right." said the old man. "But what did he do?"
"He stole my wrist watch and tried to trade it back to me for vodka," said the young man bitterly. "The half-wit!"
"Simple as a child…. When you get the experience I have had, you realize that it takes more than a little spoken Russian and a little Soviet culture to modernize these Eastern peoples. What do you think he did in Mukden, with the Americans?"
"I wonder, now—" said the junior.
The old man interrupted. "I can tell you, as surely as if I had been there myself."
The young man's eyes opened wide. "What?"
"I'll wager he did steal their wrist watches and did trade them back for whiskey. Or else he waited for drunken Americans and, if they were drunk enough and helpless, he tripped them up and went through their pockets. The Americans could do no more with him than we could."
"Well, those three may not have been promising material for the Americans," said the young man, "but not all our stragglers are fools like that." He went on with the canned lecture which he had memorized in Moscow: on the necessity for combing the ranks of stragglers for the protection of state security.
The old deputy was not listening. He had lit a cigarette and was looking out of the window again. Sovietism had to come slowly, out here in the East. Wild childish figures like that poor little Asiatic with his easily detected thievery, his childish lamentation of guilt, his affected Russian surname which fitted him like a hand-me-down coat — what could you do with them? The little man had been so dreadfully simple, even though middle-aged. Most of these Asiatics never grew up. Well, the socialist future would be different, but it took its time coming.
The phone rang.
The young man picked it up. "Da… da… da…" his voice went mechanically. "Horasho," he ended. When he looked up, his pale eager face was smiling. "It's the customs lieutenant," he said, "and he says somebody got four wrist watches out of his locker today. What was he doing with four wrist watches, in the first place? He's stupid enough to say they were good ones. Do you think that Andreanov or the others?…"
"Do you think so?" asked the old man, sucking on the mouthpiece of his cigarette.
"Well," said the young man, "no. He didn't have a chance."
"And is the question political?"
The young man started to give a short lecture on the theme "politics is everything" but he caught the sardonic smile on his boss' face. All he said was, "No."
"Fine. Let's eat lunch."
* * *
Dugan and his two comrades reached the main jail at Blagoveshchensk. After many days of waiting, Dugan was given a summary trial. He was dishonorably discharged from the Red Army, sentenced to four years' hard labor as a civilian convict, and provided with an identity card showing him to be a bad character. But when he was put on board a convict train which carried hundreds of men to an unstated destination, Dugan took along a considerable supply of liquor, four extra identity cards, and some spare clothes. He had traded the stolen watches for pens, for money, for other watches, and had gambled the proceeds till he was one of the richest men ever to board a forced-labor train. Soon after he got on the train, things began to percolate.
OZERYANE: WHAT THE LOCAL PEOPLE THOUGHT
They will never, at the railroad station, forget that particular Thursday night.
The freight train came in. Hooked on the back there were three prison cars full of howling monkeys. The guards were hiccuping along with the prisoners. Everybody at the train's end was as drunk as Christmas.
Some one of the prisoners — non-politicals, they were, going to Vladivostok for trial and reassignment — had traded a wrist watch (a gold-mounted one, they said it was, with diamonds) for four cases of vodka and some miscellaneous bottles of kvass. There was an investigation, but it was never found out how the smuggling was done.
Anyway they came in late at night Thursday, singing sentimental ballads and weeping copiously. Then they got loose all over the railroad yard. It took two hours to find them. One had climbed halfway up the water tower and would not have been found if he had not started making a Stakhanovite speech. Funny it was, the voice coming drunkenly out of the top of the night.
The sober old chief engineer kept insisting they had lost a man, but the guards, drunk or sober, knew their business. They got all the drunks back on the train, and confiscated all the bottles with liquor. And there weren't any strangers in town the next day…
But the stationmaster's wife found some rags along the right-of-way. They had been soaked with oil, and it took a lot of trouble to clean them. They were good foreign cloth. Khaki in color. She made her three-year-old boy two summer suits out of them. They had been torn rather neatly. Funny that anyone would throw away rags which were that good. But everyone knew how wasteful the train crews were!
* * *
In the Soviet Union, more than a hundred million people strained to be inconspicuous, lest a fanatical and all-powerful police system notice them to their notable harm. Four or five million people did not care whether they were noticed or not; they were working members of the Army, the police, or the Communist ruling cadres. A few hundred thousand, at the tops of their local worlds, basked in the perilous spotlight of personal fame.
Dugan was tempted to ride along with the inconspicuous people on the train; that was what an ordinary spy would have done. But he played his chances fifty moves ahead. What mattered was not what he did do — no, not that, but what the records showed him to be doing. He shuffled his swindled identity cards and selected the card of one Julius Goldfarb, presumably defunct.
Goldfarb could create a stir, obliterating "Andreanov." Andreanov could return and take "Goldfarb" as a minor mystery, to be impressed on the minds of Russian officialdom enough to be remembered, not enough to cause hot pursuit.
And then — the slip sidewise into oblivion.
GUBEROVO: WHAT THE RAILWAY STAFF BELIEVED
A funny little Jew came into the Railway Workers' Club. He said that his name was Julius Goldfarb and that he had been assigned to take charge of the club as manager. We asked him for his papers and he pulled out identification cards and all the rest. Very dirty. All the while he kept on babbling in Russian with so many German or Yiddish words thrown in that it was hard to understand him.
We told him that he could not take over a club like this one even if his name was Julius Goldfarb. Then he began to weep. It was very moving. He pulled up his sleeve and showed us the number which the Hitlerite German beasts had tattooed on him in a murder camp. He also took out a letter written in rather stilted Russian. It wasn't even the original of the letter, just a penciled copy. Some foreign Communist had told him to apply for a job at the railway clubs and somebody else had added the words, "Try Guberovo." The addition was a new handwriting.
We called in the MVD officer and he questioned the poor little Jew. The officer was very kind and after long interrogation he found that the poor refugee was even crazier than we thought. He made out a new set of papers for him and put him on the train for Birobidjan. But we'll be hanged if the fellow didn't get right off the train and climb right on the Vladivostok express. We wired ahead to Iman, Spassk, Mikhailovka, Voroshilov, and Vladivostok for somebody to pick him off the train and turn him around again.
IMAM: COMMENT OF A POLICEMAN
"How can those people at Guberovo expect us to take foreigners off trains when their telegrams reach us forty minutes after the train has pulled out?"
SPASSK: REMARKS OF A RAILWAY GUARD
"The Kapitan had us search the train twice. The crazy Jewish refugee must have gotten off at Iman. Nobody had gotten on at Guberovo except for three or four Asiatic families, with long unpronounceable Mongol names. One of the young Asiatics had gotten tired of having taken the same name as the rest of the family. He changed over to the good Russian name of Andreanov and had given himself the Christian name, Josif. 'Just like the great Comrade Stalin,' he bellowed, every time we asked him about his name. Then the whole family laughed. We used him as interpreter because he spoke the best Russian.
"We arrested two other Jews. One was a former member of the German Social-Democratic Party, a bad egg if I ever saw one. The other was an old woman with a name that went Gold-something-or-other. We sent them both back up to Guberovo."
It had been a near thing at Spassk. The Asiatic families gave him precarious cover. He slipped away from them as the train pulled out of Spassk. It was night. As he jumped into the railway yard, he changed to the role of an animal or a lunatic — a living being who moved apart from identity or words. What he needed, he took by violence or stealth. For days and nights he roamed the woods, moving by the sun and stars, and by a map which was printed indelibly on his mind. The original of that map — the day of Sarah Lomax standing beside him — of Dr. Swanson smiling and talking — seemed infinitely remote.
YEVGENEVKA: NOTICE ON THE COMMUNITY BULLETIN BOARD
A ham and two loaves of bread were stolen from the apartment of Comrade Isogin.
Two shirts are missing from the laundry of the cooperative.
MONASTYRISCHCHE: WRITTEN JOURNAL, OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY SECRETARY
A truck carrying food supplies crashed into the bridge near here. The driver was severely injured and unable to give details.
Looters seem to have pilfered the wreck. The driver's weapons are missing and two cases of emergency rations have been taken. A house-to-house search will probably be called for tonight. People ought to have the common decency to report accidents instead of creeping around for loot and food, just as though they were hyenas.
* * *
Dugan came to an impassable river and crossed it on live wires, after he had stolen a tire. Only one person saw him, the nameless one, the predator; and she thought herself mad.
YAKOVLEVKA: WORDS FROM THE GARAGE FOREMAN
A tire has been stolen from one of our trucks. Notify the police and have a check made at the highway control points. This time they didn't even leave their old wornout tire. They just took the new one.
TWO KILOMETERS SOUTHEAST OF YAKOVLEVKA: HUSBAND AND WIFE TALKING
"Maksim, wake up and talk to me—"
"Go to sleep, Elena. It's bad enough for you to slop around the cabin all day long and pretend to be half sick, so that I have to cook my own supper. Don't keep me awake now."
"But I've got to tell you what I saw. I'm so lonely that if you don't talk to me about it I'll know that I'm going mad."
"Oh, all right."
"Put your head right here, Maksim. Now, can you see the power lines where they go over the river?"
"No."
"Can't you see them, with the moon behind the towers?"
"No."
She looked, too, and said disappointedly, "No, I suppose you can't. Now there's a cloud across the face of the moon. Well, do you know what I saw?"
"No."
"I saw a man walking the wires right over the river. Just like a tight-rope walker. He was a little man hunched over and he looked just like one of the dwarfs that you see in old fairy story books carrying little sacks over their shoulders. Maksim, am I going mad?"
"No."
"But Maksim, I did see him. Don't you believe me?"
"No."
"Well, then, you tell me what I saw, if you know it all!"
"Just a shadow. Nobody could walk on a wire like that. It's charged with electricity. And if he did walk across, he couldn't get down from the tower. There are guards there. You know that everything on that side of the river is 'Prohibited Area'."
"Maksim, what's in the prohibited area?"
"I don't know."
"You do so. You called it the oruzhenii raion, the zone of the weapons, in your sleep one night last month."
"No."
"But you did."
"No."
"Don't you want to talk to me, Maksim?"
"No."
"Good night, darling husband."
"G'night."
She lay there wide awake, with her head aching as it had ached for seventeen months — ever since Maksim, courting her, had been absent from work for three days in a row. He had been arrested, brought before the disciplinary court, and given a road-tending job in this awful place. Blaming herself for his misfortune, she had married him. But the loneliness! Nothing but the trees and the river and the sentries far away on the other side, and the road. And when they went into Yakovlevka, everybody looked so official and so scared. One or the other, always. It hadn't ever been this bad, back in Khabarovsk.
And now she saw hunched-up little men walking across the face of the moon.
Perhaps she was going mad.
The thought gave her a little comfort.