Beneath the Darkest Sky Read online

  “How could they?” said Yury, pointing at the river.

  We all watched as a tall man sprinted toward the river about one hundred yards away. Where in God’s name did he possibly think he was going? An officer casually followed, as the prisoner entered the river and tried to wade across. None of the officers were yelling for the runner to stop. They just watched, as their fellow officer calmly walked after him.

  I pulled James in tight and covered his eyes. The prisoner hadn’t made it five yards across before the officer raised his rifle, took aim, and shot the man in the back of the head. It was a kill shot and his body was left floating there, no one ever attempting to retrieve him.

  I watched the prisoner’s beige newsboy hat drifting downstream, a symbol of a life taken far too soon, of a man’s hopes and dreams buried at the bottom of a mysterious river. I stayed fixed on the hat until it was out of sight. Who would find it? And when he did, might he wear it, never knowing that it belonged to an innocent man who’d likely left behind a young family, a family who would never learn of their loved one’s true fate?

  “I’m going to protect you, son,” I said, my hand still covering both eyes, his head pressed against my ribs. “Put all of your trust in me. You don’t have to worry. You will always be safe because I am your daddy. Think of this as a nightmare. Do you remember what I’ve always told you when you’ve had nightmares?”

  He nodded into my shirt.

  “That you always wake up from them.”

  The rest of us were still looking at the body as it began to sink. It was difficult to not see ourselves in this man. And I wanted to believe what I’d just told James. But I wasn’t so sure that our nightmare would end any differently than this escapee’s had. Maybe it was just a matter of whether we’d take our bullets from the front or from the back.

  “Not all of the train cars have seats or compartments,” said the old man, breaking the silence. “Many are just cattle wagons. We are fortunate in that sense.”

  “LISTEN UP, CAR TWENTY-EIGHT!” yelled one of our car’s officers. “There is beet and cabbage soup here for you. You get one ladleful per person. One! And a piece of bread! After you have eaten, you are to remain outside. Feel free to walk over to the river and wash your filthy selves. There are rags near the rear of the car for you to use. You stink like pigs! And if you want to join that piece of dead waste floating in the water over there, just try to cross the river. But, if you want to live and get back on this train, stay at the river’s edge. Do you hear me?”

  “DA!” we collectively said.

  “And one more thing before you line up here, zeks!” he said. “You worthless scum need to squat lower when you shit down the hole inside. The floor is a mess. If you can’t squat because you have old, bad knees, lay down on your back with your ass over the hole. And you better fucking get on your knees when you piss. That toilet rug is filthy. I hope you understand all of this because we are going to have to start watching you relieve yourselves until we find out who the clumsy shitters are. Now! Line up!”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Abram,” I said, as the six of us squeezed into the line of desperate souls. “What exactly is a zek?”

  “There really is no appropriate translation,” he said. “It is, in essence, a person who is a forced-labor camp prisoner, I guess you would say. But a zek has come to mean more than that even. It has intrinsic qualities . . . is deep-rooted. It is so unique to the Soviet Union. If you want to tell Americans one day about your horror story, assuming you live, you can translate most of it from Russian to English, but certain words like zek shouldn’t be translated. A zek is a zek. The word is wholly painful, an ungodly amount of death and pain associated with it, and must be respected as such.”

  “I see.”

  The soup was barely warm. James and I stood at the river’s edge sipping it, just the two of us now. I’d told him not to gulp it down. We had to savor each drop. They called it beet and cabbage soup, but there weren’t many beets or cabbage. Maybe a couple of root fragments in my bowl at best, and only a few rotten-looking strands of cabbage. I could taste a hint of beef stock, but it was basically warm pink water with a lot of salt. I hated beets, but the moment the officer had mentioned the soup, I was craving it.

  “Swish it around in your mouth, son,” I said. “Don’t swallow it fast. Let it soak into your tongue.”

  He nodded and did as I said. We hadn’t eaten our black bread yet, as I wanted to spread the meal out for as long as possible. I knew that this paltry meal was only a preservation measure on the part of the officers. They didn’t care how healthy we were, but they also didn’t want us to drop dead too fast. Giving us some small amount of nutrition every week might be the qualifying minimum in their eyes. But they didn’t seem to know anything about vitamins and calories and dehydration. They were experimenting at best, and we were the test rats.

  “You need to come with me, big zek,” said an officer approaching James and me.

  “What about my son?”

  “He can wash up while you come. Don’t ask questions. Don’t talk at all. Come!”

  I looked at James and reassured him as best I could with my expression. Then I followed the officer over to the train car. It took everything for me to simply leave my son one hundred yards behind me, but I had no choice.

  “Come inside the car,” he said while we walked, many of the surrounding prisoners trying not to stare at us.

  As soon as we were inside he pointed for me to enter his compartment. I noticed how clean it was, how thick the mattresses were on the bunk bed, how stocked the food supply was—canned sardines, mustard, loaves of bread. There were two chairs.

  “Sit,” he said, and I did. “Don’t talk, zek. Don’t say a fucking word. I mean it. I just want to give you a good meal. Don’t ask questions. Just eat it.”

  He handed me a fork and a plate with a mound of grated vegetables on it. I was so hungry that I began eating immediately. Upon first taste, I recognized the dish as herring under a fur coat. It’s basically a layered salad made up of salted herring that is covered with boiled, grated vegetables. I could taste eggs, carrots, potatoes, and onions. And the dish looked like a fur coat because the top was covered with beets and mayonnaise, giving it a white-on-purple look. It was the best meal I’d ever had, and again, I’d always hated beets.

  After I’d completely devoured it, the tall, olive-skinned officer who’d been standing over me the entire time handed me a bottle of beer. I guzzled it down within twenty seconds, never stopping to question why he was giving me this special treatment.

  “You can go back outside and wash yourself now,” he said.

  “Comrade Officer,” I said, putting the bottle down and standing, “would it be okay to bring my son inside for a bite? I must tell you that I am a close associate of an important American diplomat who—”

  “Shut your fucking mouth, zek!” he said, poking me in the chest with the tip of his rifle hard enough to move me. “I told you not to speak. That is your last warning.”

  I did as he said and exited. Trying to guess what this offering of food had been about was futile at this point. It meant something, but I hadn’t the energy to try to guess. I just knew that the next two days’ ration of my black bread would go to my son. I certainly had enough in my belly to last a good while.

  On my way through the crowd again, I could see that the four others had joined James by the river, a sight that pleased me. I looked upstream and could see bare-chested prisoners washing their shirts in the water. They would rather wear wet, clean clothes than dry, dirty ones. I hadn’t really taken the time to concern myself with how the officers had arrested us that night, never allowing us to bring a single item with us. All we had were the clothes on our backs and our passports.

  “You’ve returned,” said young Yury, holding his blue newsboy hat at his side, his thick head of brown hair soaking wet, as he’d obviously dipped it in the river. “What did he want with you?”
<
br />   “He wanted to discuss my passport.”

  Why I was lying I didn’t quite know. I just knew that whatever the reason behind the meal would reveal itself at some point. Perhaps I could find a way to get James a serving next time. Or would there even be a next time?

  I looked down at James, his shirt off, sparkling beads of river water dancing in his frizzy hair, the sun warming his soft, cocoa skin. He had removed his brown soft leather shoes and socks as well. Seeing him in this condition—hungry, exhausted, and tormented—made me think about what had initially prompted me to leave our safe haven in the Montmartre section of Paris.

  Back there I felt as if we were immersed in an international artists’ community that had run away from the real world. Our day-to-day way of life, particularly amongst us American coloreds, felt temporary, like we were all cognizant of the fact that we needed to get back into the arena and fight for real structural and systematic change, the kind that would affect everyday Negroes, ones who couldn’t afford to run to Paris and play pretend, ones who were forever entangled in the long-existing and carefully woven web of institutional racism.

  That is what I believed then. But my current predicament had me questioning this decision. My son and daughter hadn’t cared about any of this high-minded, critical thinking, this sociological examination of sorts that I’d been dead set on continuing. They’d been too busy playing with their carefree friends—oblivious to whatever frowns might have come their way from the occasional Parisian bigot.

  I put my arm around James and pulled him close, looking downstream again at where the murdered zek’s hat had drifted. His son, if he had one, would forever wonder where he was. The agony that child would have to endure was unfathomable. It was a pain I couldn’t dare let my boy experience. I had to stay alive.

  4

  Cap-Haïtien, Haiti

  Three years earlier

  AMERICA’S OCCUPATION WAS FINALLY COMING TO AN END. BOBBY and I stood along the pier in Cap-Haïtien as the USS Houston approached with President Roosevelt aboard. There was an excitement in the air, and many locals cheered and waved, hoping to get a glimpse of the president. He was visiting the island to put an end officially to America’s occupation. Later that evening, Bobby and I actually joined the president and his staff for a private dinner. I didn’t say a word. I just sat there and marveled at the way Bobby was able to so freely interact with Roosevelt’s inner circle.

  A lot had changed for Bobby and me. Not only had he been selected for a post as Minister-Counselor to Moscow, Russia, he had also asked me to come along as his personal assistant. He’d first learned of the possibility in September of last year, and the official news had come down this March. Per his orders, I’d spent the last ten months inundated with studying Russian. It had been an arduous task to say the least, but I’d made considerable progress and now considered myself semi-conversational. “A God-given gift for world languages,” Bobby liked to say I had.

  A few days later we arrived in Pétion-Ville, not far from Port-au-Prince, and convened for dinner at the beautiful little Hotel Kinam, a white-on-white gingerbread house that had been around since the turn of the century. We sat down to eat on the veranda just before sundown and I marveled at the design of the place. I knew that most of Port-au-Prince’s gingerbread houses had been built by just three architects: Joseph Maximilien, George Baussan, and Léon Mathon, all of whom were Haitian but had trained in Paris. And though we were in Pétion-Ville, I wondered if they’d built this nine-room hotel as well.

  With the sun setting in the distance beyond the almond and palm trees, I envisioned myself having a go at building such a home for Loretta and the kids. The latticework was central to its theme; it was wrapped around the porches, doors, and windows. Victorian in style, the home felt wide, high, and open, and the tall turret roofs looked like snow-cone cups, the pointy tops seeming to tickle the clouds.

  It was homes like these that made me pause and delight in the fact that I was an engineer. I sipped from my wineglass, wanting to dwell on pierced frieze boards, board-and-batten shutters, sawn balusters, braced arches, and scrolled brackets. But for now, I needed to be present at dinner.

  We dined over chicken and cashew nuts, pickles, fried pork, crab and lalo leaf stew, rice with black mushrooms, and goat head. As we were all to depart for Moscow in two weeks, the dinner was being treated as a bon voyage celebration. It was a table of eight, both of our wives in attendance, along with both sets of children.

  “It’s good to see you feeling better, Grant,” I said, referring to Bobby’s nine-year-old son. He’d previously been dealing with a bout of the chickenpox, an illness his eight-year-old sister, Greta, hadn’t caught yet.

  “He likes to sleep all the time,” she said, biting into a chicken leg, as Grant rolled his eyes and half smiled.

  “Do not,” said Grant. “You do more than me. I’m just resting like M. . . . like Dr. . . . like Dr.—”

  “Dr. Madison,” said Dorene, rubbing the top of little Grant’s blond head, a color he’d inherited from her.

  “Yeah . . . him!” said Grant, spooning his rice.

  Dorene doted on her children the way Loretta did ours. She was also similar to my wife in build, tall and thin with delicate features and a gentle disposition befitting an heiress. A calm, introspective woman with a stoic posture, a pristine etiquette.

  “I would like to propose a toast,” said Bobby, picking up the bottle of Bordeaux and filling our four glasses. He then pretended as if he might pour some in the children’s glasses. “James, Ginger . . . Grant, Greta . . . would you like to join us?”

  “Have you gone mad?” asked Dorene, all of us laughing as she took the pitcher of water and began refilling their glasses.

  “Ah, come on . . . I want to try some wine,” said my son, James, demonstratively tilting his head to the side and acting disappointed. He had a flair for the dramatic. “Mom, can I try some wine . . . please!”

  “Yes, in about ten years,” answered Loretta.

  The children laughed, particularly his twin sister, Ginger, while James continued playing heartbroken, all the while doing so only to attract more attention, which he craved. But he always knew when to quit and not push it to the point of disruption. He was a good boy.

  “In due time, dear James, my boy!” said Bobby, lifting his wineglass with a smile, his cheeks a bit pinkish from the two reds he’d already consumed. But he was the picture of good health, his dark brown hair fixed in the style of Clark Gable, his physique as trim and fit as it was back in our Bureau days.

  “Yes,” said Loretta, raising her glass, “in due time, my son.”

  Dorene and I lifted ours as well, and the children followed suit.

  “To the Soviet Union!” said Bobby. “To Moscow, in particular! A place that can only be described as the great unknown! May she welcome us with open arms, keep us safe and warm through frozen winter with her sheepskin coats, and provide plenty of snow for these youngsters . . . so they can throw snowballs in Gorky Park while wearing their ushankas!”

  “Yay!” said the children collectively.

  “Hear, hear!” I said, all of us leaning over the candlelit mahogany table and clinking glasses.

  “Eh, Comrade Sweet!” said Bobby, holding his glass against mine a bit longer, looking at me the way a happy younger brother might show his affection to the older. At this particular time, and in this particular place, we were all happy.

  After the children had finished their dinner, Sissy, the Haitian nanny who’d been with the Ellingtons throughout our posting, whisked the four of them off to their respective hotel rooms so they could ready themselves for bed. It gave the four of us a chance to dive into a more substantive discussion.

  “I’m going to miss this hot weather,” said Bobby, taking a drag from his cigarette, his white linen shirt still clinging to his sweaty skin. “These veranda fans make it feel just about perfect. Having said that, I can’t help but worry about the many throughout this land
with no way of relieving themselves from it.”

  “That is why I married this man,” said Dorene, striking a match and lighting her Dunhill, then Loretta’s. “He is always thinking of others, never completely able to bathe in his own reverie.”

  “So your father has finally given you his complete blessing?” said Bobby, taking her hand and kissing it. “Her father would have preferred she marry McCormick Bradington. We both were at Columbia law school together, but unlike his parents, mine don’t own the entire state of Maine.”

  “You’re from Ohio, Dear,” said Dorene, furrowing her brow before smiling. Her bright white teeth were almost too perfect, as if an accessory to her coral linen dress.

  “Notice how she didn’t object to my claim of McCormick’s considerable wealth,” said Bobby. “She’s wonderful at deflecting, Press.”

  “Where I’m from we call that good-natured,” I said, having grown used to him calling me both Press and Prescott.

  “Thank you, Prescott,” said Dorene. “I chose this man because of his passion. And my father knows this. His passion for foreign service is as valuable to my family as any amount of wealth.”

  “I thought you said I had no more than six years before I needed to secure an ambassadorship,” said Bobby.

  “I love how you twist my words,” she said. “I said I’d be surprised if it took you longer than that, Dear.”

  “Word twisting is a skill this one here has mastered as well,” said Loretta, bumping my leg with the side of her knee, as she took a drag and then a sip of wine.

  Dorene’s father was the founder and chairman of Stanfield Gas and Electric, one of the major American utilities companies. To say she came from a considerable amount of wealth would be a gross understatement. But she was progressive in her thinking and completely at ease around common folk. Let’s just say she gave the word rich a good name, if that’s possible.

  “I think they’ve both gotten worse at it, though,” said Dorene. “This . . . word twisting. Since we’ve been here on the island, I mean. Do please take this as a completely innocuous comment, boys, but you may be making yourselves susceptible to the island’s voodoo. Beware in particular of the pati gason hex. American men are quite susceptible. You can be completely oblivious and then . . . wham!”