Unsure what he meant, I said nothing, but I watched his face. For a second, exhaustion flickered, a deep, inner emptiness into which his features collapsed; then he leaned forward, gulping his tea, though when my own hand touched my cup it felt cold. For a second, his eyes went to the window.
"Poor Harry," he murmured. "He called me a month or so back. He'd do that, every once in a while. Ask after the foxes — that was the excuse. He bought them for me, you see, when I quit working — six breeding pair, all registered. Harry liked to say it was a joint venture, just a hobby now but eventually the market was bound to come back. He always believed that. He loved foxes. 'They are cunning,' he'd say. He loved the mutations, like I've got* but he especially loved the natural reds. The most beautiful fur. Warm. Durable. Skins pretty easy to work. He was always saying we'd go in together in a big way — his money, what I knew. Harry always liked to have plans. That's what I noticed this last time he called. No plans. It was almost as if he was saying goodbye." He shrugged. "I guess maybe he was."
I took a moment, crushing my cigarette out in the saucer. He was talking now. Should I encourage him to continue, or put it all off till the morning? The trouble was, by the morning his defensiveness would probably harden to obstinacy — and Nick Berri, I suspected, could be a very obstinate old man. Making up my mind, I leaned forward a little and said, "Those men, Mr. Berri. Can you tell me about them?"
"They were Russians."
"How did you know?"
"They spoke it. They talked to each other."
"So you speak Russian?"
"Sure. My real name's Berzhin. My father was born in Kiev."
"But you're a Canadian?"
He nodded. "I was born in Montreal. Berri is French. My father, though, was Russian to the day he died. We always spoke it at home. That's how come I met Harry, you know. Because I could speak it."
"When was this, Mr. Berri?"
He shrugged. "Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? I'm not sure."
"Around the time Brightman first traveled to Russia?"
"You know about that?"
"Yes. I didn't think it was much of a secret."
"No, no secret at all. Anyway, that's how it happened. I went with him. He wanted someone who spoke the language but also knew furs. I was a grader by then — no one knew skins like Harry, but I knew enough."
"So you were his translator?"
"Sure, but I only went twice. After that, he'd picked up enough so he could go by himself." He coughed. "The Russians were really excited about furs back then, Canadian furs especially. Just a year or so before, Jack Caswell sold them sixty-five pair of silvers and that was the basis for their whole industry." He nodded, half to himself. "We got a real nice reception. The best hotels. Our own droshky to cart us around. Other people went to Russia and got the Black Bread Blues, but it was the caviar that did us in."
"This was when you met Zinoviev?"
"So you know that too?" He shrugged. "You're right, though. Kirov, then Zinoviev. The very first two the Bolshevik shot."
"Yes…" Then, on an impulse I added, "Didn't you meet a woman as well, Anna Kostina?"
"Bolshevik shot her too." He shrugged. "Poor Harry. He never had good luck with his ladies."
I remembered Grainger's words: the best lies always contain some of the truth, "Some people say he got her pregnant."
"That's crazy… though I suppose maybe not. You never know about women. She was interesting, though. A real Red — they say the women were even tougher than the men. Anna. The old lady, Breshkovsky. Anna knew everyone — Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev… and the Bolshevik killed them all, every last one of them."
"What about Dimitrov, Mr. Bern? Wasn't that someone else Anna introduced Brightman to?"
He frowned. "Been a long time since I heard that name."
"But you know it, don't you?"
He shook his head. "Not then, I didn't."
"When did you learn about him?"
"Same time as everyone else. When the Reichstag burned down, the big trial. I remember I once asked Harry if he knew anything about him and he told me he'd met him back then. Great man, Harry said. Maybe he was. The Bolshevik never got him."
"You must have been proud to meet him."
His eyes went shifty. "Did I? I guess you do know a lot— maybe more than I know myself."
"I wouldn't say that, Mr. Berri, but I think you did meet him. This would have been a little later, probably the spring of 1940. Dimitrov made a secret trip to Canada that year, for the Comintern. I'm not exactly sure why, but he probably wanted to tell North American Communists to forget about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He wanted them to ignore it. Stalin and Hitler were in bed together, but the workers were to back the war effort to the hilt. He came to Halifax to tell them that — maybe the Canadian and U.S. governments even helped him to get there — and I think that's when you met him."
"So what if I did?"
"But isn't that the point of all this, Mr. Berri? Dimitrov's political mission had a private side as well, and that's where Harry Brightman came in. Dimitrov was frightened. Kirov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Tukhachevsky, Pyatakov, Bela Kun, Lenski, Warski, Copic, Eberlin… Stalin had already amassed a huge list of victims and Dimitrov was afraid he would be next. So he was trying to save what he could. He knew there was no hope for himself — even if he'd refused to go back they would have got him eventually — but he thought he could save the life of one little girl. Maybe the child was his, maybe not; that doesn't make any difference. In any event, with Brightman's help, he smuggled the child out of Russia and then Brightman adopted the child as his own. It was all done very slickly — but not slickly enough. Forty years later, someone got on to him."
I watched Bern's face. It concentrated in a frown of genuine puzzlement, then he shook his head slowly. "You've got it wrong. You still don't understand."
I shrugged. "Don't I?" But I was sure I did. "You tell me then, Mr. Berri."
He was silent. A moment passed. His eyes held mine for a second, then shifted to the dark window. The foxes were still whining, crying, and barking just as before. He listened; and I could see the pain which their pain brought into his face. Maybe I was pressing too hard, I thought, maybe I should hold off till tomorrow. I tried to keep my voice gentle. "If you like…" I began. But he was already shaking his head. Slowly, he pushed himself up from the table.
"No, no," he said, "that's all right. You don't understand — you don't understand nothing at all. But I'll tell you. Just give me a minute to settle them down."
A side door led out of the kitchen, and beside it, on an old newspaper, was a pair of muddy rubber boots, their tops turned down in a cuff, just like the boots I'd worn as a child. He put these on and opened the door. I made no move to stop him, and when the latch clicked shut, I stood up myself. Looking out, I peered through my reflection into the night. You don't understand, he'd said. Had I got it all wrong? I didn't think so; but I knew, of course, that the "all" still eluded me. I stepped outside. There was a cast-cement porch, tilted at a rather uncertain angle. From here the night seemed vast, stretching away, while high in the sky the clouds were like enormous shadows cast before some infinite, silvery light. Across the lawn, I could see the glistening tracks Berri's boots had made in the dew. I followed them across the wet grass, through the orchard, where the sharp, sour smell of fallen apples undercut the musk of the foxes, and then onto a stretch of packed dirt. Beyond this, the cages lifted out of the gloom.
I waited, standing a little away. Inside their cages, the foxes twisted and floated like puffs of mist, and as Berri moved past each pen, the fox inside would leap up and bark with excitement. I caught up to him as he reached the last of the cages. The wire was torn. As he pushed the mesh together, the edges sprang back with a twang. He murmured, "She was the mother of most of these. That's partly why they're so frightened."