Which seemed entirely possible to Danforth, as they had previously decided on a bomb as the best method, a device Anna had been trained to make and use and hide, so it was feasible that they might both accomplish their mission and survive it.
She drew in a long breath as she turned back to him. “You would miss it, wouldn’t you?”
“Miss what?”
“Life.”
“Of course,” Danforth said with a sudden sense of alarm. “Wouldn’t you?”
She nodded.
Danforth thought of the odd question she had asked in what now seemed almost an earlier life.
“Speaking of life, what’s the most beautiful place you’ve never seen?” he asked her.
She smiled. “There are more of them than I can name, Tom,” she answered.
“Try.”
She did, and as she moved from place to place, it seemed to Danforth that she had never looked more eager to live. So much so that it would be many years before he wondered if even this — the hunger she showed for the world — had been but another of her many masquerades.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
I knew Danforth had related this conversation for a reason, and that for some other reason, he did not elaborate upon it but instead eased himself back slightly, as if trying to get a clearer view of some far-distant scene. “There is a little town called Dubno, Paul.”
This village had enjoyed a more or less quiet life, he told me, a small town that rested along the equally tranquil Ikva River. It was surrounded by a few rolling hills in that part of the Ukraine that was sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, depending on the politics of the time. The Soviets had seized it in 1939 and then been driven eastward by a German onslaught that, as Danforth reminded me, had seemed near invincible at the time.
“When the Germans took over Dubno,” Danforth went on, “about half its population was Jewish. There were fourteen synagogues in the town. Jewish doctors, lawyers, teachers.”
His voice took on the quiet intensity that marked these asides, an old-man Scheherezade,
“On October fifth, 1942, if a little girl on a certain street had looked out her bedroom window, she would have seen hundreds of people passing by as they headed out of town toward the old airfield an hour’s walk away,” Danforth continued. “They would have been dressed according to their class, some quite fine, some in hand-me-downs. Witnesses said they walked slowly and in great order, with only a few soldiers and dogs keeping watch.” To my surprise, I could hear the muffled steps of these hundreds; even without my knowing that the street they’d walked had been made of flagstone, I heard the rhythm of their feet over them, along with bits of indecipherable talk: the urging forward of the old, the calming down of the young.
“There was a shallow chasm three kilometers out of town,” Danforth went on. “This is where they stopped and stripped. Hermann Graebe, a German construction engineer who witnessed the event, saw great mounds of shoes and underwear and clothing. He said they stood in family groups, that people too old or sick or disoriented to disrobe were stripped by their younger relatives. One man bent down to his little boy, pointed to the sky, and seemed to be telling him something very important. A young woman, completely naked, came very near to Graebe as she made her way toward the execution pit. She pointed to herself as she passed by. ‘Twenty-three,’ she said. Twenty-three.”
I shook my head at this sad tale, though I had no idea why Danforth had now taken me so far east.
“German stock,” Danforth said suddenly. “Suppose, Paul, that I knew that twenty-three-year-old girl. Suppose it was ... Anna. Suppose I also knew the man who carried out the massacre at Dubno. Suppose that after the war I tracked him down, only to find that he’d died years before.” He smiled. “But suppose he had a son, a daughter, grandchildren. Should I kill them all?”
“Of course not,” I answered. “They had nothing to do with what happened at Dubno.”
“But they’re all I have left, Paul,” Danforth said. “They’re all I have left to get even with the man who killed the woman I loved.”
“Perhaps so, but it would be unreasonable to kill these other people,” I said.
“You’re right, it would be quite unreasonable,” Danforth agreed. “But vengeance is a passion of the heart, isn’t it? And as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” Before I could answer, he added, “And in that article you wrote, didn’t you say that in the current situation, our acts should flow from passion?”
“Yes,” I said softly.
Danforth’s eyes appeared to harden. “I agree,” he said.
For a moment, he peered at me silently. Then, like a driver abruptly realizing he’d missed a turn, he swung back to his earlier narrative.
“When I heard about Dubno, heard that story of the girl pointing at herself, crying out her age as she was heading toward her death, it reminded me of Anna,” Danforth said. “It reminded me of the way she was in the hotel that night in Berlin, talking about Venice or Vienna or some other place she one day hoped to see. She seemed like that girl in Dubno. Too young to die.”
The stricken look on Danforth’s face at that moment warned me away from asking about Anna directly. And so I said, “Where did you hear about Dubno?”
“I heard about it when Hermann Graebe testified at the trials.”
“The trials?”
“Nuremberg,” Danforth said. “When I was working at the war crimes trials. Graebe’s testimony was particularly interesting to me because it was at Dubno that a man with the daunting name of Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst changed. He was a German soldier who saw the massacre at Dubno, and because of it, he decided to kill Hitler.”
“So your interest is in his motivation?” I asked.
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “I studied them all. Every attempt on Hitler’s life.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to know the variety of motivations,” Danforth said. “In discovering them, I thought I might also discover Anna’s.”
“But why not just accept that she was a Jew, and Hitler was persecuting Jews?” I said.
“That motivation, or a thousand other ones, Paul,” Danforth said. “It would have been easy if she had been easy.” His gaze became piercing. “It’s what you don’t know that destroys you.” He drew in a sharp breath. “And believe me,” he added, “I did not know Anna Klein.” Danforth seemed almost to dissolve into this fog of unknowing, then he gathered himself once again. “But where were we, Paul?” he asked. “Yes. Berlin. That old hotel. So long in the tooth. I told her it reminded me of an old woman who’d once been beautiful.”
~ * ~
Berlin, Germany, 1939
Anna smiled. “Istanbul is like that,” she said. “Crumbling palaces along the Bosporus. My father called it an ‘aged courtesan.’”
It surprised Danforth that she mentioned her father, since she had spoken so rarely of her past, and many years later, he would wonder if this had been a line skillfully cast out, spare yet bearing just the sort of bait she knew would lure him deeper into the current, with its hint of the foreign, the exotic. She revealed herself in little flashes of her past in the way some lady of a royal court might allow a brief glimpse of her ankle.