Legends

Martin heard a voice he recognized as his own say aloud, “The river is called the Lesnia, which is the name of the woods it meanders through as it skirts Prigorodnaia.”

Katovsky slowed the Zil. “I thought you said me you never been to Prigorodnaia.”

“Never. No.”

“Explain, then, how you come to know the name of the river?”

Martin, concentrating on the voices in his head, didn’t reply.

He aced Russian at college … speaking it with a Polish accent.

… bringing his Polish up to snuff, they could also work on his Russian.

“Pull over,” Martin ordered.

Katovsky braked the car to a stop, two wheels on the tarmac, two wheels on the soft shoulder. Martin jumped from the car and started walking down the middle of the paved road toward Prigorodnaia. Off to his left, high on the slope near a copse of stunted apple trees, he could see a line of whitewashed beehives. His game leg and broken ribs ached, the migraine lurking behind his brow throbbed as he made his way across a landscape that seemed painfully familiar even though he had never set eyes on it.

… Jozef as a first name?

Half of Poland is named Jozef.

… precisely the point …

I happen to be rereading Kafka …

… suggest a Polish-sounding variation. Kafkor.

Martin detected an unevenness in the tarmac under his feet and, looking down, saw that a section of roadway, roughly the size of a large tractor tire, had been crudely repaved. It had been smoothed over, but the surface was lumpy and the seam was clearly visible. Gaping at the round section of road, he suddenly felt dizzy—he sank onto his knees and looked over his shoulder at the Zil drawing closer to him. His eyes widened in terror as he felt himself being transported back in time through a mustard-thick haze of memory. He saw things he recognized but his brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, could no longer locate the words to describe them: the twin stacks spewing plumes of dirty white smoke, the abandoned custom’s station with a faded red star painted above the door, the line of whitewashed bee-hives on a slope near a copse of stunted apple trees. And then, vanquishing terror only to confront a new enemy, madness, he could have sworn he saw an elephant striding over the brow of the hill.

The old man driving the Zil was standing alongside the car, one hand on the open door, calling plaintively to his passenger. “I could have crushed Beria every time,” he explained, “but I thought I would live longer if I came in second.”

The voices in Martin’s skull grew louder.

… studied Kafka at the Janiellonian University in Kraków.

… worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz.

… job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow … contact with the DDO target without too much difficulty.

Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out …

Martin, his facial muscles contorting, heard himself whisper, “Poshol ty na khuy.” He articulated each of the O’s in “Poshol.” “Go impale yourself on a prick.”

Pushing himself to his feet, feeling as if he were trapped in a terrible dream, Martin stumbled down the paved spur toward Prigorodnaia. Could he have met Samat before? He had a vision of himself leaning on the bar of a posh watering hole on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya called the Commercial Club. In his mind’s eye he could make out the thin figure of a man settling onto the stool next to him. Of medium height with a pinched, mournful face, he wore suspenders that kept his trousers hiked high on his waist, and a midnight blue Italian suit jacket draped cape-like over a starched white shirt, which was tieless and buttoned up to a very prominent Adam’s apple. The initials “S” and “U-Z” were embroidered on the pocket of the shirt. Martin saw himself placing on the burnished mahogany of the bar a Bolshoi ticket that had been torn in half. From a jacket pocket the thin man produced another torn ticket. The two halves matched perfectly.

Moving his lips like a ventriloquist, Samat could be heard mumbling, What took you so long? I was told to expect the cutout to make contact with me here last week.

It takes time to establish a cover, to rent an apartment, to make it seem as if we are meeting by chance.