PROLOGUE

They would soon reach Brest, he heard one of the guards mention. The guards were playing dominoes, noisily banging the small black pieces on a board laid across their knees, and smoking Machorka. The car swayed and rattled, and the stench of sweat and agony refused to lift despite the open vents and door.

Brest, he thought. Since last year – this much had penetrated taiga and prison wall – the town and fortress of Brest had been Soviet. Beyond them lay the border, lay Germany bloated with Nazi conquest.

The blurred anxiety, his since being told he would be deported, now came into focus; it took energy to assure oneself that nothing more terrible lay ahead than a transfer from the frying pan into the fire. He had settled with life. The death of Babette, cruel though it was to think of it this way, was the finish to a worry; fear for Julia remained, but even that was blunted by the hope that Sundstrom, with his talent and connections, might have escaped arrest and be taking care of the child. His own road ran in a straight line: the forthcoming ceremony at the border – that act of friendly international cooperation by which one police force handed an inconvenient Communist to another – led to a new jail and further questioning, though no longer by Dmitry Ivanich or Ivan Dmitrych, and then to a camp, German this time, and reunion perhaps with comrades he hadn’t seen for seven years, since 1933, survivors like himself.

The car lurched; the segment of landscape in the open door swayed. His heart contracted in sudden shock: what would he tell them?

This was a new angle; it held its own particular terror.

Tell them the truth? That he and Babette had been arrested like enemies of the people, at four in the morning – four ten, to be precise – and imprisoned, and starved, and beaten, and kept from sleep during the day and questioned at night, night after night, till their nerves screamed and their brains sagged? That they had done everything to coerce him into signing a confession to something he had never done, Ivan Dmitrych and Dmitry Ivanich shoving that sheet of yellow lined foolscap at him over and over again, hour after hour? That he had been left to rot in a cubicle of solid putrefaction, jammed in with an ever-changing number of men – Men, how proud that sounds, Gorky once had said – men confused and stupefied, staring blindly into space or slashing out over a drip of kasha, breaking into shrill hysterics or dying dumbly; men, like himself, left to wait for a decision that was to be made by some authority unknown at some time not scheduled?

Tell this truth to people who had suffered equal horrors and had kept their spirits alive and intact by the fierce, unquestioning faith in the country whose territory now ended beyond Brest and in the idea that gave birth to this country and in the bright, beautiful, glorious future that that idea radiated? Tell it to men in Sachsenhausen, or Buchenwald, or Dachau, who would have to weigh their belief and their faith against what they knew of him, Julian Goltz, Communist, member of the Reichstag; who, at the pain of losing what held them together in their time of trial, could only conclude that he was what he had refused to confess to Dmitry Ivanich and Ivan Dmitrych: a traitor?

It was a new angle that quite pardonably had escaped him in his fear for his child, Julia, whom he hoped was with Sundstrom; in his sorrow over Babette, dead in t