“Did you have any idea where you were going?” I asked.
“No,” Danforth answered. “For all I knew I was being taken to some other prison in the area. Then the door opened, and there it was. The train.”
They were rushed out of the stifling van, lined up, counted, and then herded into the waiting railway cars, Danforth told me. Though he had not known it then, he was now one of millions of zeks, slang he’d later learned meant “prison laborers.” Once in the car, he’d elbowed his way toward the far side where he could look through one of the slats as the train pulled away. Railroad workers stood on the side of the tracks, giving signals, waving the train forward. From the cast of their shadows as the train steamed past them, he knew that he was headed east.
Over the next hours, long miles of greenery swept by, punctuated only by glimpses, first of cities, then of towns, the towns becoming smaller and shuttling by more quickly as the train surged on. The men huddled in the darkness around him wept like small children, which Danforth found surprising until he realized that they were bereft because they’d been snatched from wives and children, mothers and fathers, deeper attachments than he had or, he feared, would ever have.
Within hours the first cries for water began, and once begun they continued without letup until at last the train stopped and buckets of water were passed; a few hours later, there were cries of agony as these same men now needed to pass the water they’d drunk. He would hear of trains that had holes in the floor for such relief, but this train had had no such accommodation, and so the men had finally wet themselves, and the floor of the car was soon soaked and slippery, the air smelling — at last overwhelmingly — of urine.
He guessed that the journey to the first transit camp had taken a little over twenty-four hours, and once out of the train, he and the zeks had been marched to a small provincial prison, where he’d stayed for nearly a week. There he’d been interrogated again and again, almost always being asked the same questions, and he came to realize that the powers that be believed that his search for Anna Klein was a ruse, that he was actually searching for something else, either a man or some government secret they were careful not to reveal. This wasn’t true, of course, as Danforth labored to assure them, but each time he denied that he was an American agent involved in anti- Soviet activities, there were shouted threats, blows, endless hours of enforced sleeplessness. Then, without warning, another train, another prison, another series of interrogations, more threats, blows, sleeplessness.
Again and again, he repeated the same cycle: a train, a journey, a different prison, the same interrogation, the same threats, blows, sleeplessness. There were so many prisons the exact number of them began to blur in Danforth’s mind, though the implication of that number never had. For this was but one rail line, as he knew, and if it was like the others that stretched into the wastes, then Russia’s eastern landscape sprouted prisons like the American midlands sprouted farms.
The greenery of the country entirely disappeared, first into the graying rain, then into a grayer sleet, and finally into a white so bright it throbbed from the fields it covered. The cold of these last days in transit was like nothing Danforth had ever felt. By then the ragged ranks had thinned, and so there was less body heat, making him somehow resent the ones who’d died and been pulled off the train, as if their weakness had been a betrayal to those who lived on.
But on each leg of this long journey, his Russian improved. He gathered idioms and slang and the innumerable vulgarities to describe sex and bodily functions that the Russian language possessed, as well as the bitter cynicisms to which the Russian mind seemed prone. He met priests, Orthodox Jews, atheists. He met men who believed in nothing and men who still believed in the very cause that had enslaved them, and in every transit camp he found some new, rebellious feature of a people he’d thought utterly flattened by oppression. He saw it in the way a loaf of bread or slab of smoked bacon would sail from a window into the prisoners’ ranks. He saw it in the efforts of local doctors to attend to their wounds with what few medical supplies they had. He saw it in a thousand sympathetic glances, soft nods, and, in one case, in the way an old man from the Great War had taken off his frayed cap as another round of zeks were driven past him, taken offhis cap and held it over his breast as if these dazed, bedraggled men were the heroes of Mother Russia.
With his improving Russian, Danforth began to make inquiries in the various camps and prisons in which he found himself, always in the hope of uncovering some little thread of informa tion about an American woman whom he described as being in her midthirties, a dark woman who was still or might once have been quite pretty, a woman who spoke many languages.
In response to these inquiries, a thousand sparks flew from what Danforth called “the great rumor mill of the Gulag.” He heard of a cruel interrogator who’d worked at an American camp somewhere near Dzhezkazgan, a lead he followed assiduously over the years, only to learn that no such camp had ever existed. He heard of a “very pretty woman” who’d served as a translator at Butyka, a woman known for her ruthlessness who he later learned was tall and blond. Neither of these had been Anna, of course, but even though they were false rumors, they engraved an image of her on Danforth’s mind as a woman who had survived and now served the enemy she had once despised, who carried out their interrogations and roamed their prison corridors, laughed with Stalin’s other minions, and smoked cigarettes with them in their communal dining rooms, and perhaps even from time to time chose some fat, drunken offi cial who might be useful to her, went to his room, and gave herself to him as she had once given herself to Danforth.
The last transport took him through villages with names that were no longer Russian, though whether he’d entered the lands of the Kazakhs, Tajik, or Uzbeks remained unclear. But even the Eurasian steppes were not far enough; other trains and finally a steamboat took him farther and farther to the east until it seemed he had been transported, one camp at a time, to the end of the earth.
“Then my final convoy stopped,” Danforth said, “and I was taken offa truck loaded with forty or so other zeks and marched through some thick woods to a place — according to my own grim fatalism — that surely had been determined long ago.”
Though he could not have known it, he was now a hundred miles up what would later be known as the Road of Skulls, a frozen labor camp that had been cut out of a forest whose trees he would fell and chop and load onto creaking lorries, cord after endless cord of wood hauled away on trucks that groaned like weary cattle as they made their way into the Arctic night. He would hew with axes that seemed little improved since the Stone Age, and his beard would grow and his body would thin and his eyes would shrink back into his skull; with each glimpse of himself in the frosty window he saw less and less of the man he had once been, and at last that man became little more than a shadow in the snow.
Thus did Danforth pass his many seasons in the Gulag.
“You don’t expect ever to climb out of that pit,” Danforth said. “You work and sleep, then work and sleep. You eat the soup that Solzhenitsyn described, with the eye floating in it. You watch life and death from the shelf-bed of your barracks, just in that way Shalamov recounts it.” He smiled. “Shalamov’s stories are much better in Russian, by the way.”
His smile held briefly, then slowly faded into a more solemn expression than any I had yet seen.
“You see honesty perish and honesty survive,” he said. “You see startling acts of kindness and unspeakable acts of depravity, just in the way Bardach writes about them in Man Is Wolf to Man. In later years, you read these accounts from your warm little apartment and remember that you didn’t have to work when the temperature fell below negative forty-one degrees and how while you were shivering in your bunk you hoped for the temperature to drop just enough so that you could stay in that frigid room a little longer. You expect this to go on forever, Paul. You expect to die and be buried in that frozen tundra. You stop believing there’s a world beyond the camp
because that world no longer exists for you. You watch the Kolyma River freeze and briefly thaw. You notice the return of the mosquitoes, and you hate them so much you look forward to winter. Every blessing brings a curse, even the gift of another day of life. Because you are already dead, Paul.”
He stopped suddenly, and his face took on the expression of one abruptly touched by a miracle.
“Then, one afternoon, just as you’ve gotten back from the woods, barely able to peel those wretched mittens from your fingers,” he said, “you are summoned to the camp commander’s offi ce, and there, to your amazement, you see what you think must be a ghost, because it could only have come from the life you had before you died. You stare at it, speechless, blinking. You cannot believe this ghost will speak. And then it does.”
“A ghost?” I asked, with a caught breath. “Anna?”
Danforth appeared to see that very ghost, though whether in the guise of a disordered young woman in a Greenwich Village bar, an art dealer’s assistant speaking perfect German, an assassin, or a spy, I couldn’t guess.
“Anna?” Danforth asked softly. “Ah, Paul, how different my little parable would be if that had truly been her name.”
PART VII
Traitor’s Gate
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Danforth looked at his watch. “Do you mind if we catch a cab?” he asked. “I should be getting home.”
“Home?” I asked. “Now?”
I was certain that Danforth’s story was drawing to an end and saw no need to interrupt it.
“One should know how another person lives, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said quite firmly. “It helps the moral understanding.”
Moral understanding?
I immediately felt the approach of a didactic remark, but before I could voice this queasy supposition or even protest the abrupt breaking off of his tale, Danforth was on his feet, pulling on his coat and twining his scarf around his neck with the determination of a man whose methods could not be questioned or his final aim deterred.
“Come, Paul,” he said. “It’s not far.”
This turned out to be true, though it was farther than I’d expected, since I’d reasonably supposed that Danforth lived near the Century Club. But our cab turned south onto Fifth Avenue, rather than north toward the swankier regions surrounding Central Park, and a few minutes later we arrived at a rather commonplace apartment building at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street.
“It would be a long walk to your club,” I said as we approached the building’s inelegant entrance.
“Oh, I’m not a member of the club,” Danforth said casually.
“Clayton was a member and his wife still is, so she very kindly allowed me use it as a meeting place today.”
“I see,” I muttered.
The lobby of Danforth’s building was entirely beige with a few plastic plants sprouting from plaster vases.
“Not what you expected, Paul?” Danforth asked.
“I guess not,” I admitted.
A small elevator lifted us to the fourteenth floor, and Danforth led me through an unrelentingly charmless corridor and into a cramped apartment whose one luxury was a wide southern view of Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan twinkling brightly in the distance, a horrible gap separating them.
“It must be a painful view now,” I said.
“And enraging,” Danforth said. “Sometimes I want to kill them all.” He peered out the window for a moment, then said, “But as you noted before, if we’d done that to the Germans, you wouldn’t be here, would you, Paul?”
“No,” I said.
“Because we would have killed that grandfather of yours,” Danforth added. “Where was he from, by the way?”
“Augsburg.”
“Hmm,” Danforth said. “There was a subcamp of Dachau near there.”
I could not deny that this mention of the Dachau concentration camp chilled me.
Danforth’s smile seemed only to add a layer of deeper cold. “So how do you want it, Paul?” he asked.
“Want what?” I asked.
“Your coffee,” Danforth said.
‘Oh, uh, w-with cream,’ I stammered.
‘But milk will do, I hope?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Danforth made his way to the tiny kitchen that adjoined the almost equally tiny living area. While he made the coffee, I sat down and took in my surroundings. They were very humble, with little to lift their ordinariness but the large bookshelves that lined the room’s four walls, which, I noticed, mainly held books about spying, the tricks of that trade, along with a surprising number of titles about Germany, though not that country in the 1930s and 1940s, when Danforth was there, but during the Cold War, from its beginnings to the bringing down of the Wall. Some volumes contained an unexpected focus on the activities of the infamous Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Could it be, I wondered, that Anna had somehow used her charms and her linguistic talents to make her way up the pecking order of that evil force and then become the perfect servant of East Germany’s version of the KGB? And if so, what had she been? A Nazi agent? A Soviet agent? Both?
“There you are, Paul,” Danforth said as he handed me a cup of coffee, sat down in the chair opposite me with his own cup, and took a sip. “This should return me to sobriety.”
“I doubt you ever left it,” I said to him. “Despite your youthful adventure, you strike me as a cautious man.”
“Not always,” Danforth said with a telling glance at the bookshelf to his right, all those volumes of an East Germany firmly in the grip of a now-displaced Communism. “No, not always,” he repeated, then sank back deeply into his chair. “Especially when it comes to revenge.”
Revenge, I thought, the emotion that seemed still to inflame him and with which he returned us to his tale.
Kolyma, Soviet Union, 1964
“Robert?” Danforth asked tentatively. Many years had passed, and Clayton’s face, if indeed it was Clayton’s, was now webbed with wrinkles, his hair sprinkled with silver.
“Yes,” Clayton said. He was clearly stricken by the figure before him, Danforth’s ragged clothes and matted beard, his body so emaciated it was all but skeletal. “The commandant doesn’t speak English so ask him when we can leave,” he said.
“Leave.” Danforth couldn’t be sure he’d heard this.
“Yes, leave,” Clayton said. “Go ahead, Tom, ask him.”
Danforth turned to the commandant and asked the question in Russian.
“There is a supply truck to Magadan in an hour,” the commandant answered. He did not seem pleased by the paper in his hand. “It says you are to be released immediately, so be on your way.”
The commandant did not leave them alone and would not allow them to talk to each other, and so Danforth simply stared at his old friend until the truck arrived.
“Go,” the commandant said. He looked at Danforth sternly, and then something broke in his face, something that softened him and made him look almost wistful. “Give regard Broadway,” he said.
Later, as they sat on mounds of empty sacks in the back of the truck, Clayton said, “I’ve been looking for you for twelve years.”
“Twelve years,” Danforth repeated in English, a language that now seemed foreign to him. He made a quick calculation, the result of which astonished him. “I am . . . fifty-four years old.”
“Yes,” Clayton said softly.
Danforth realized that he had yet to ask Clayton a single question, and so he asked his first.
“Why did they release me?”
Clayton placed his finger to his lips and softly shook his head.
The failure of Danforth’s final mission suddenly pierced him. “Anna got away with it,” he said.
“Maybe not,” Clayton said.
Clayton told him that he’d invented the story of Anna’s execution, but that he’d done so with the best of intentions. He’d never suspected that Danforth would re
turn to Europe and certainly not that he would stumble upon what he called “the truth about Anna Klein.”
“But we’ll talk about all that in a few days,” he added, bringing the subject to a close. “After you’ve gotten your strength back. We can’t get transport out of Magadan right away, so just relax, walk around, enjoy the weather.” He smiled. “It’s summer in Siberia.”
And so it was, with temperate days and chilly nights that reminded Danforth of the country house he’d not seen for over twenty years and whose memory now filled him with a tragic nostalgia. “Winterset,” he said, as if it were a place he had only dreamed.
“Which you will see again very soon,” Clayton told him.
Clayton had booked them into a crumbling hotel in Magadan, and once there, Danforth shaved and bathed; these were luxuries whose pleasure astonished him. Simply to be clean. How few people knew such joy.
During the daylight hours, he took leisurely walks through the town streets, always followed, as he noticed and reported to Clayton.
“Me too,” Clayton said. “But we’re used to spies, aren’t we?”
They were short, Danforth’s first walks, and followed by hours of rest. He ate in the hotel’s spare dining room, always with Clayton who carefully eased him away from any further discussion of his abrupt release.
As he gained strength, Danforth walked farther from the hotel, and eventually as far as the docks, where he watched fishermen at their nets and followed the slow drift of the barges and steamers as they came into port. More than once, he saw a shuffling cargo of newly arrived zeks tramp down the gangway and into waiting trucks, and it struck him that if this steady stream had continued uninterrupted since his own journey here, then hundreds of thousands had passed this way, a number he found impossible to imagine or forget.