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They moved downriver in the skiff, taken gently along by the current, rowing or poling from time to time, principally to keep warm. They’d rigged a waterproof groundcloth on four makeshift poles to keep the rain from falling directly on their heads, but autumn on the river demanded philosophical travelers—the drizzle often enough blew sideways, and there was every sort of dripping mist and fog. The river itself was wide here, often as much as a mile between
shores, as it moved through the Wallachian plain. The wheat harvest was long in, on sunny days farmers burned the yellow stubble and columns of thin smoke hung on the horizon. Now and again they would be passed by steam tugs pulling barges loaded down with sand, crushed rock, or timber.

On the Romanian side, there were occasional watch towers. Soldiers with slung rifles trained binoculars on them as they went by. On the Bulgarian shore, stands of oak and beech stood dark and silent. Antipin kept two fishing lines trailing from the stern, and patrol boats took them for fishermen. When the weather cleared, the river dawn was exquisite, a painting at first without color, shapes in negative light. Then strands of pearl-colored mist rose from the water, gray herons skimmed the surface, flocks of pelicans took off from the sandbars in midstream, and the hills turned blue, the birches white, the bare willows brown. It was a world of great stillness, and they instinctively spoke in undertones.

Antipin was no less a listener than he had ever been, and Khristo talked for hours. Mostly on the subject of Vidin and how life was there. Who was rich and who was poor. Lechery and drunkenness, religion and hard work, love and hate. It was like most places in the world, really, but Antipin sat and soaked the stories up with scrupulous attention. He was, Khristo came slowly to realize, learning it. On hearing the oft-told tale of Velchev’s wife and the borrowed chamber pot, Antipin recalled that Velchev’s wife was also Traicho’s daughter. Extraordinary. He knew the names of the fascists, the agrarians, the intellectuals who had supported Stamboliiski and the Peasant party.

And he could, it seemed, do anything he turned his hand to and do it well. Cut wood shavings to start a fire, gut a fish, rig a shelter, steer the skiff around the gravel islands that dotted the river. If this was the world he was entering, Khristo thought, he would have to learn very quickly, but the challenge was not displeasing to him. He had been set apart, for the first time in his life, and felt that his fortunes had taken a sharp turn for the good.

They moved past Kozloduj, past Orehovo and Nikopol. Past Svistov, where the Bulgarian poet and patriot Aleko Konstantinov
had been stabbed to death, where his pierced heart was exhibited in a small museum. Past the great city of Ruse, the grain port of Silistra. At the border, where the river flowed north into Romania, they pulled over and stopped at a customs shed. Antipin produced a Nansen passport in Khristo’s name, with a blurry photograph of a young man who could have been anybody. The Romanian customs officer accepted a
makhorka
cigarette and waved them through. It was, to Khristo, simply one more rabbit from the hat, one more specimen from Antipin’s collection of little miracles. He did wonder, once in a great while, what on earth made him worth such grand attentions, but these thoughts he put aside. There was enough of the East in him to take pleasure in the present moment and paint the future white.

Moscow knocked him virtually senseless.

They put him in a house—in pre-Revolutionary times the love nest of a wine merchant—on Arbat Street. But his training class was only just getting organized and they really didn’t want to be bothered with him. He had no money, but that did not prevent him from walking, from experiencing, for the first time in his life, the streets of a city.

Winter had come early. The snow and the city swirled around him and, at first, overwhelmed his mind. On the river he had drifted into the easy numbness of a long journey, a traveler’s peace, wherein constant motion caused the world to slide by before it could make trouble. Thus he was unprepared for the city, and the sights and sounds drove themselves against his senses until he was giddy with exhaustion.

And though the Moscow of his dreams—grand boulevards, golden domes—was as he had imagined, it shared the stage with a riptide of ordinary life. For every glossy Zil or Pobieda that disgorged important-looking people into important buildings, there seemed to be ten carts pulled by horses: the carts piled high with coal or carrots, the horses’ breath steaming from flared nostrils, the red-faced draymen drunk and cursing like maniacs. The streets were crowded with old women in black dresses and shawls, bearded
Jews in black homburgs, Mongolian soldiers with flat, cold faces. He saw a woman knocked down by a trolley, a bad fight between two men armed with broken vodka bottles. He imagined he could smell the violence in the air, mixed in with horse manure, coal smoke, and fried grease. A huge, bald, fat fellow urinated at the base of a pensive—chin on fist—statue of Karl Marx. Some militiamen happened along and shouted at him to stop. When he didn’t—he called out that he couldn’t—they rushed at him. He swung a thick arm, knocked a couple of them sprawling, but the rest ganged him and beat him to the ground with wooden truncheons, then stood there smoking until a Stolypin car arrived to take him away. Khristo saw inside when they opened the door: two rows of white faces in the darkness.

Yet, a moment later, turning the corner into Arbat Street he saw, he was almost certain, a ballerina. His spirit swooped, that such glory could exist on earth. Her face, her whole presence, appeared to have been drawn with a needle-sharp pencil. Hard lines: jaw, cheek, eye, and the suggestion of firm leg beneath the supple skirt as she strode along the street. The women of Vidin started working at the age of twelve and bore children at sixteen. The bloom shone briefly, then vanished. But this was a city and in a city, he reasoned, certain plants flowered in perpetuity. She was surrounded, as she moved along the sidewalk, by her personal theater: the faces in the crowd that watched her, the borzoi on a thin silver chain that preceded her, and two fat little men in overcoats who toddled officiously behind her. Her eyes caught his own for a moment, then flicked away, but her face remained utterly still. Like a seashell, he thought.

Such treasures were to be worshiped by the eyes alone. Were meant to inspire poems, were surely not meant to be craved after in the ordinary, mortal ways. But, in Moscow, the ordinary mortal ways were, for comrade Khristo, not entirely neglected. Communism was the golden opportunity of the working classes—everyone must share—and the Russian winter was an endless horror of white ice and white sky, demonic, survivable only with the three traditional warmings: the vodka, the tile stove, and the human body. Marike was her name, said as though the
e
were an
a
.

She was a Moravian German from eastern Czechoslovakia, a descendant of one of the Teutonic colonies strung all across Eastern Europe, a nineteenth-century attempt, inspired by religion and empire, to alleviate the tragic lot of the Slav by means of energetic German example. See how large
my
cabbage grows! That it grows on land that used to belong to your uncle we shall not discuss.

At the first wash of her he turned entirely to stone. She blew at him like a wind. She was an intellectual, a Marxist. She was intense, all business. She sang like a dockworker, ran like a soldier, and argued like a drill. God help the man or woman who let a false lick of lumpen deviationism creep into his words—Marike would soon have it out, and with a hot tongs at that. She had burned the mannerisms of the ass-licking bourgeoisie from her soul, now it was your turn. There was to be no
diplomacy
, no
gentility
, no
sentiment
.

But the most astonishing aspect of this human storm was the package in which it was wrapped. Where was, one wondered, the dirndl? She had crinkly orange hair drawn back tight and tied with a red ribbon. She had a broad forehead, and a permanent blush to her cheeks. She was full-breasted and wide-hipped, with freckled white forearms that could throw a haybale through the side of a barn.

She boxed him on the bicep to get his attention—it was all he could do not to rub it. “We are equals,” she said. “This gives you no rights. Understand? Does not make you my master. Yes?”

Yes. They had stolen an hour on the coarse blanket of her bed in the women’s section of the dormitory, where she’d hauled him off in accordance with the banner strung above the inside door of the entry hall:

BPATCKИЙ фPOHT34 r˙,πPИBETCTBYEM!

Brotherhood Front of 1934, Welcome!
It was Marike’s idea to welcome him, just as it was her idea to bang on his bare back with her fists to urge him to a greater gallop. She chose him openly. Studied him, considered the genetics, the dialectics, the inevitability of history, then let her blue-veined breasts tumble out of her shirt before his widening eyes. Farewell Vidin, thou backwater. Hail to the new order, and if this belt does not come soon undone I shall rip it in half. He was, beneath it all, nineteen and alone and away from
home for the first time in his life and he clasped her warm body like a life preserver, then proceeded to a happy drowning. A proletarian coupling, simple and direct, nothing fancy, and without precaution. Should a tiny artillery loader or fighter pilot chance to come tumbling out some months hence, he or she would be another soul pledged to revolution and glad of it. No dreamy slave of love, Marike closed her eyes only at the last, exhaled a huge purr of relief, then casually chucked him off. To work, it meant, enough of such frivolity, a hygienic relaxation had been achieved.

As the winter lay down on the city, harder and harder through the month of November, her appetite grew. They did it in the attic, where the May Day portraits of Lenin, colossal things colored a vengeant Soviet red, were folded and stored. They did it behind the targets on the basement pistol range. They did it under the table in the kitchen while the cook snored asthmatically in the parlor. The pace and spirit of it never changed—a mad dash to the finish line, first one there wins, as though Revanchist Materialism waited just outside the door to gobble them up. He had heard, over the back fences in Vidin, that there were other paths through the woods, that one could also do this and that. But, on the one occasion when she was squiffed on Georgian brandy and he’d attempted to put theory into practice, his reward was a double whack on the ears. “Get off your knees,” she said, “that is an attitude of slavery!” So much for this and that, back to essentials. And the more they did it, the more aggressive she became in daily matters.

Over the salt herring at the long plank dinner table: “Did you know that Dmitrov is in Moscow? I think I saw him coming out of the Rossaya Hotel.”

“Dmitrov?” Khristo looked at her questioningly over his fork.

“Oh no. This I refuse to believe.
Georgy
Dmitrov. The Bulgarian hero.”

He shrugged. Voluta, a lean-faced Pole with black hair swept back from a high forehead, coughed into his hand with embarrassment.

“Your very own countryman.” She shook her head, lips pressed in resignation at the utter futility of him.

Goldman, a young man from Bucharest, stepped in to save him.

“Dmitrov took part in the great patriotic burning of the Reichstag,” he said. “His speech at the trial is to be learned in the schools. Now he is in Russia.”

“Oh,” Khristo said. “Our newspapers lie about such things or neglect them entirely.” As he struggled to learn all the new ideas, he learned also to cover what Marike called his
political infantilism
.

Hitler’s speech on that occasion was one of many statements typed on paper slips and tacked to the dormitory wall, waiting in ambush for the wandering eye of the daydreamer: “This is a God-given signal. If, as I believe, the communists have done it, you are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history.” In Germany and in Russia, it became clear to Khristo, they were itching to go at it, there remained only the question of time and provocation.

Khristo struggled in his classes. English and French, an impossible snarl of alien noises. Political history and thought, a crosshatch of plots and counterplots, irredentist imperialism, Pan-Slavism, the sayings of Lenin, the revelations of Marx. The world was not as he’d thought.

Tides of confusion pulled at him, but he somehow remained afloat. He was now firmly established in the dormitory on Arbat Street, where he’d been given two blankets and one towel, introduced to a milling crowd of Serbs, Poles, Croatians, Jews, Slovenians and whatnot, forty souls in all, including eight women who had
their own sleeping quarters
—please take note, comrades. He had been handed a schedule of classes and a stack of books printed on mealy gray paper. Do not mark, others must use. Measured for a khaki uniform of heavy cotton. Poked and studied shamelessly by a large, frightening nurse. Drenched with kerosene in case of lice. Assigned a narrow cot between Voluta and Goldman. Told to learn the words to the songs by tomorrow morning, but the lights must be turned off at ten. Inside himself, Khristo was desolate. Not at all what he had expected. He had imagined himself as Antipin’s assistant, just a bit important, we’ll take him out dancing with us.

It was not to be. A white card outside the office door said V. I. Ozunov. A bald man with a fringe of black hair, a brush of a black
mustache, delicate gold-rimmed glasses and a dark, ferocious face, who wore the uniform of an army major. Khristo sat hypnotized as Ozunov reeled off a monotone of forbidden sins. The underlying message was writ large: we have you, boy. Now dance to this music. As for threats, we needn’t bother, right?

“What has become of comrade Antipin?” Khristo asked, one try for bravery.

Ozunov smiled like a snake. “Antipin was yesterday. Today is Ozunov.”

End of rebellion.

Yet as much as he struggled and sweated with the languages and the levantine webs of theory, there was one area in which he succeeded. He was, it turned out to his and everyone else’s amazement, gifted in the craft.