The Girl from Krakow Read online

  As Dalglashin and Gil entered, a man rose from one of the wingback chairs, spread his arms wide, and smiled broadly, beaming Mediterranean warmth. Dimples on his large cheeks gave the man a disarming air of innocence. His dark hair and tanned skin made him look like the star of some Hollywood cowboy film. His suit was ill-fitting, but he rose from the deep chair like a very strong, very fit man.

  “There you are, comrade. I had almost despaired of your coming tonight.” So, this was not a chance visit to the Metropole, nor were the introductions about to be made entirely casual.

  “Enrique, here is the young countryman of yours I told you about. Comrade Doctor Guillermo Romero, permit me to introduce Comrade General Enrique Lister.” The buckling of Gil’s legs must have been evident, for Dalglashin put a firm hand under his elbow. Then Lister took his hand in a steel-clad grip.

  “Que bo coneixer-te.” It was Catalan, and Gil could see he was expected to reply in the same language.

  “General Lister, tinc l’honor de conèixer-la.” He really was honored to meet the most successful and charismatic military figure on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. The name was as well known to him as any he had learned in Spain; neither the prime ministers—Negrin and Largo Caballero, not even La Passionara, the communist woman orator Dolores Ibarurri herself—none had not outshone the fame of Enrique Lister.

  Lister indicated chairs on either side of his, and all three sat down. Switching to Russian for the benefit of Dalglashin, Lister asked what they were drinking. Dalglashin said “Georgian Brandy,” and Gil nodded agreement.

  “I am so glad at last to meet a fellow countryman, and a patriot too, Dr. Romero. Your reputation as a physician precedes you. But I know nothing of your experiences in our homeland. In that regard, perhaps, you have the advantage of me.”

  Gil replied with as much Iberian courtesy as he could muster. “My knowledge of your exploits in the war is unavoidably considerable. No one in Barcelona could have been ignorant of your victories at Madrid and your valor at Brunete, Belchite, and Teruel. In Cataluna the 11th division’s sacrifices on the Ebro were honored every day until the end.” Gil hoped the recitation would stand him in good stead.

  Lister nodded. “Not everyone in Barcelona was so happy with my war. When they sent me to Aragon to break up the anarchists and put an end to the POUM, the bleeding hearts bled, and the Trotskyites screamed for my blood.”

  Gil had no trouble remembering how he had almost been caught up in this purge when the NKVD started looking for Tadeusz Sommermann. But this was not the occasion to show any recollection of the matter. “I was a doctor in the maternity unit of the Hospital del Mar and didn’t have time for politics then.”

  “Do you now, Doctor?” Dalglashin’s question might have been menacing. Gil couldn’t tell.

  “Impossible. I hardly have time to breathe at Maternity Number 6.”

  Lister was happy to change the subject. “Joven, how did you manage to get out?” No one had called Gil joven for a long time, and Lister couldn’t be many years his senior. Was he using it as a term of endearment? Gil hoped so.

  “I left with the sixty thousand or so who ended up at Gers.” This was the largest of the camps set up for refugees by the French Popular Front government. It had been chaotic but humane in its way, quickly built in the rolling fields near a country town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. With the connivance of complaisant gendarmes, escape from Gers was not difficult for those who spoke French and had a place to go. Gil had met several of its escapees. If he had actually been at Gers, there might not have been a record, and he would not have had to stay long even if he had registered. It was a safer lie than the truth. After all, he had fled from the prospect of a roundup in which Lister had played a leading part.

  “Ah, yes. Gers.” Lister turned to Dalglashin. “What does the ministry know about affairs in Spain these days, comrade? Now the bloodbath has ended, does Franco still have a grip on things?”

  “The Americans are keeping him out of the war by feeding the entire country.”

  “Out of the war? There is an entire Spanish Division—the Blue—fighting against us on the Leningrad front. Ferocious too!” There was a little pride in Lister’s voice.

  Dalglashin clarified. “I meant that Roosevelt is keeping Spain out of the war against the Americans and the Brits. Franco could take Gibraltar tomorrow with a couple of Guardia Civil.” He paused and then continued in an effort to find common ground with Lister. “What we also hear is that Franco is allowing some of the Republican prisoners out, if they are low rank and if they have some Fascist family to vouch for them. Some Republicans have even joined this Blue division in Russia to prove their loyalty or to get family out of the prisons.”

  Lister snorted. “He must have shot fifty thousand when he finally got control. I am surprised there was anyone left to send to prison.” Then he brightened. “Any chance the western allies will topple him?”

  “None, so long as he stays out of their war. Remember, it’s only a few years since Churchill was praising Franco and attacking the Republic.”

  “Things can change, yes? After all, it was only two years ago that Stalin was supporting Hitler.”

  Dalglashin quickly but furtively looked in each direction. This was an obvious truth, but dangerous to assert or even allow to pass unchallenged. He spoke a little louder than was necessary. “Enrique, you are being wicked now. We all know Comrade Stalin was playing for time. We were not ready in ’39.”

  “And you were ready in ’41?” Lister was completely unabashed.

  Dalglashin ostentatiously looked at his wristwatch and rose. “Enrique, I must go. Comrade Molotov has called a staff meeting for eight a.m. Can’t keep the Minister of Foreign Affairs waiting.” Gil took his cue from Dalglashin and stood as well. Lister remained seated, smiling affably, making no effort to delay the third secretary of Molotov’s ministry. But he reached out and clapped a hand on Gil’s wrist. It was the same powerful hand Gil had experienced when they had shaken hands. “Joven, Comrade Molotov doesn’t need you tomorrow morning. Stay.” There was that warm smile again, but the grip was exigent.

  Gil returned to his seat and waved to Dalglashin, who was already turning to leave. “I’ll find my own way home. Best to your family.”

  Lister began speaking Catalan. “Well, all that candid talk got rid of our friend quickly enough, joven.” So, it was intentional.

  Gil replied in Catalan. “Yes. But aren’t you a bit frightened to talk like this?”

  Now Lister began speaking in a much quieter tone, but still in Catalan. “To tell the truth, I am scared to death.” Gil remained silent. “I don’t see how I am going to survive in the USSR. You know the history?” He didn’t stop for an answer. “Well, maybe not. Pravda isn’t going to announce it, but Stalin has gotten rid of almost every important foreign communist who has come to Russia since his pact with Hitler. The rumor is he is going to shut down the Comintern and dispose of everyone.”

  Gil repeated the word, to indicate his ignorance. “Comintern?”

  “Com . . . intern . . . the Communist International. You really are nonpolitical if you don’t know what that is. It’s the organization of all the real communist parties around the world. If you are not Comintern, you’re a Trotskyite. Mark my words, by next year, even if you are Comintern, you’ll turn out to be a Trotskyite. It’s a mania with them, or at least an excuse for Stalin to dispose of anyone he wants to. And what he wants least are loudmouthed foreigners with their own ideas and any experience of what it’s like outside the USSR. He doesn’t like educated people or Jews much either, but I don’t make that list.”

  “But why?” Always best to play the ingenue, thought Gil.

  “But why?” Lister mocked him. Then he whispered, “Joven, if you had been awake for the last fifteen years, you would know that’s the way Stalin has stayed in power: being a paranoid megalomaniac. If you kill off everyone who might be a threat, there’s a good chance that you
’ve killed off some real threats among them.”

  Gil would have no part of this blasphemy. “Comrade General, I won’t listen to this.”

  “Joven, call me Enrique. I’m not telling you anything new. You were in Spain. You know as much as I do about the famine in the Ukraine, the show trials . . .”

  How can I stop him telling me this? “Famine? The Kulaks were hoarding.”

  Lister’s laugh was derisive. “And I suppose you think Kirov was killed by a petty thief?” Gil remembered the assassination of the most popular of the Soviet Union’s political leaders in the early ’30s. The murder was investigated by Stalin personally. But Lister was continuing. “The only thing they managed to keep quiet was the way they killed off Marshal Tukhachevsky and the rest of the Red Army general staff in ’37.” Now there was venom in Lister’s tone.

  “What?” Gil could barely absorb the information. It was truly explosive. He had known nothing about the trial of the leadership of the armed forces. Was this why Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler—because he had killed off most of the officers needed to staff his army?

  “Of course, you wouldn’t have heard about this. The trials were secret. In 1937 Hitler was still the enemy. Stalin purged forty thousand officers from the army and had about seven thousand shot for being German spies—spies since the First World War, in some cases.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason. Stalin’s whim . . . paranoid fear of being overthrown, jealousy of trained military officers. No one knows. But everyone is frightened. It could start all over again, in the politburo, the party. I think it’s already started in the Comintern. The foreign party heads in Moscow are falling over themselves to show their loyalty and save their skins.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “What are we going to do, joven?” Lister patted Gil’s hand. “Yes, we. I am sure you are going to help me.”

  “Yes?” Gil was trying not to decline immediately. He didn’t even want to ask what Lister had in mind. Inviting Lister to go on was all he could think of.

  “Romero, your Catalan is wonderful for a Galicianer. Better than mine.”

  “I’m not from Galicia.”

  “Not the one in Spain, joven. I am from that Galicia. You are from the one much closer, the Austro-Hungarian Galicia. You’re probably a Pole, and you certainly never saw the inside of Gers.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Beg as you wish, Dr. Romero.” He gave the name a mock dignity. “But you really can’t fool me. To begin with, I have the ear of a native speaker, even if I don’t have the tongue of one. You’re no Catalan. And I have the list the Spanish party composed of everyone who went through Gers. You are not on it. I’ve checked.”

  There was no point in denials, though Gil was not going to help Lister learn the full provenance of his identity. With a sigh he asked, “So, what are we going to do?”

  “We are going to build me a little protection, in case the first secretary of the Spanish party, Diaz, or that witch Ibárruri, decides to sell me to the NKVD.”

  “La Pasionaria?” It was the only way Gil had ever thought of Dolores Ibárruri. The name was synonymous with “¡No pasarán!”—They shall not pass! “What could she possibly have against you?”

  “You are not listening. She and I, we both want to survive in Stalin’s scorpion cage. So we both have to be ready to sting each other. I’d sell her out with as little qualm as she’d hand me over, if that’s what it takes so I can continue to fight for Spain.”

  “But what could she do to hurt you?”

  “She may have trumped-up party documents that implicate me with the ICL.”

  This was a set of initials that Gil wished he had never heard. But he had, from Lena in Paris that summer of 1936. The International Communist League. “General, no one could accuse you of supporting Trotsky. You led the Republican divisions against the POUM yourself in 1937.”

  “It won’t matter. I’ll only be accused of killing them to cover my tracks. It’s the twisted logic of the NKVD.” Gil nodded regretful agreement. “That’s where you come in, joven. I’ve got some dirty linen too. And you are going to store it for me.” Suddenly there was a sinking feeling in the pit of Gil’s stomach. Lister was going to make him part of history whether he liked it or not—a dangerous part. Gil shook his head. Lister mistook it for disbelief. He nodded. “Yes, sister Ibárruri was playing footsie with the anarchists, the left deviationists, even the socialists. She was doing it even before Stalin and the Comintern called for the Popular Front. So, we can fight fire with fire.” An index finger poked painfully in Gil’s chest as Lister emphasized the we.

  “My friend, over the next few weeks and months, I am going to get you the original Spanish Communist Party archive, with security reports going back to the early ’20s. You are going to hide them somewhere very clever, somewhere no one will think to look. You are not going to tell anyone, including me, where you will hide them. All you will do is send a letter to someone in Alma Ata, in Siberia, an envelope with nothing in it, but with the location where you hide the material as the return address. That is all, joven. If I don’t know where you have hidden it, I can’t betray that location to the NKVD or anyone else.”

  Gil couldn’t help admiring this man, but he was not going to take risks for him. This was worse, much worse than the knowledge he had been burdened with by the dying NKVD captain’s confession. “But I can betray it,” he told him, “and I will spill everything if they torture me.”

  “Relax, joven. With luck the security organs will never know of your existence. With a little less luck, you will be back in Poland or wherever you come from by the time they do find out about you. And with the most luck of all, none of these unpleasant truths about La Pasionaria Ibárruri will need to be revealed. Let’s just say this is the price you pay for being allowed to continue to masquerade as a Catalan hero of the Spanish Civil War. If you refuse, the least we will do is make you look like a real spy.”

  Gil began trying to think out the problem even as he walked through the lobby of the Metropole Hotel that night. Turn the material over to the security organs immediately? Impossible. He’d be swept up for a Polish spy as soon as they had his identity, and dead even before they discovered his Paris connections. Do as Lister demanded—hide the documents away? That would be a death sentence too if Lister ever had to use the material.

  How could he extricate himself? He couldn’t entirely. But he could make the whole thing look like a cock-up. That might help him wriggle off the hook.

  The packages started coming in October 1942, about one a month, wrapped in brown paper, tied up with string, marked “Medical Journals.” With the first one came an address in Alma Ata to which he was to send a card with the hiding place in the return address. That evening Gil remained late at his desk, updating his patient records. Then he climbed three flights to the medical records department, a vast open space surrounded by filing cabinets with patient records going back to prerevolutionary times. Walking around the room, he made a mental note of the file cabinets containing records more than thirty years old. They were the next batch to be burned at the end of the year, numbers 43 to 63. He then went to the typing desk, removed an envelope with the hospital’s return address, and put it in the typewriter. Above the words “Records Department, Maternity Hospital No. 6,” he wrote “files numbers 43–63,” typed the Alma Ata address, smudged any fingerprints he might leave on the envelope, and left it in the “out” tray. If anyone ever looked for them, they would learn the files had been burned as 30-year-old medical records.

  Then Gil took the unopened package of “Medical Journals” home. When he arrived he opened the coal grate, stoked up the fire, unwrapped the package, and carefully consigned each page to the flames, trying as hard as possible not to read any of it.

  The Comintern was indeed terminated in June the next year, just as Lister foretold. One evening during a bridge game at the home of Dalglashin, the th
ird secretary of the foreign ministry even mentioned the matter. Had Gil been ordered to elicit something indiscreet by his Spanish friend? Was the room wired for sound? Suddenly Gil lost all track of the cards that had been played.

  “Comintern dissolved?” Gil tried to sound indifferent.

  “Yes, Comrade Stalin’s way of assuring the western allies that their local communist parties will be loyal to their own countries, not to Moscow. If he means it, I don’t know what all those foreign party secretaries here in the Soviet Union will do to survive.” Gil made no comment.

  He went home that night consumed with fear. What if someone now came for the records?

  A year later the packages ceased coming. When Enrique Lister began to appear on the cover of patriotic magazines in the uniform of a Red Army general, Gil was able to breathe easy again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The war’s most pressing problem for Gil turned out to be less world historical and more cosmically coincidental than infighting among Spanish communists.

  One morning in late 1943, a new patient file came to Gil’s desk for a young Muscovite housewife named Karla Guildenstern. Quickly he ran his fingers down the patient’s details until he came to husband: Urs Guildenstern. Place of birth: Karpatyn, Western Ukraine. Occupation: Physician, Red Army, on active service, evacuation hospital, Leningrad front. Of course he’d get priority for his wife at the best hospital he could get. That meant the Krupskya.

  Gil had to think. Could he risk seeing this woman? Her husband was a doctor. She was sure to discuss the examination with him. He would ask what her doctor’s name was. He would remember the history, the shame. Even if he didn’t, a pregnancy, if that’s what she had come for, would eventually lead to a meeting with Urs at his wife’s bedside.

  Then what would Urs do? Ignore it, pretend nothing had ever happened, turn his back, ignore the pain Gil’s affair with Rita had caused? Or would Urs make a scene? Still worse, would he unmask Gil Romero as Tadeusz Sommermann?