Good People by Nir Baram

lead us to the connection between Nadyezhda Petrovna and Bliumkin, and from there to the Trotskyites. An excellent trick. You should have seen the report that was handed to us.’
    ‘Osip Borisovich?’ she asked weakly. Sometimes even treachery that you expect can be painful.
    He ignored her. ‘The agents here were very excited. Reznikov from the second department was shouting like a madman.’ Podolsky pulled a face and pranced around her. ‘“Give me those traitors! Let me get my hands on them!”’
    Sasha shuddered. ‘So maybe it will help. Bliumkin?’
    ‘It wasn’t a bad idea to send us in that direction,’ Podolsky mused. ‘Bliumkin was eliminated even before Nadyezhda knew your father. The problem is that your father’s name already showed up in the Pyatakov affair, and now it’s showing up again.’
    He linked his arm in hers. The steep path she remembered from her climb up had flattened out. They neared the black cars. In the dark, from slightly above, the parking lot looked like a field of greenish-black trees, like the forests you see stretching away from the train window into another country.
    ‘If you listen, you can hear planes from here,’ he said, but she couldn’t hear anything. The way that aeroplanes, or, to be more precise, parachuting out of them, excited young men was irritating.
    They walked between the cars. Podolsky lit a match and lookedinto the windows, checking the back seats.
    The asphalt in the schoolyard—warm, rough, strewn with trampled leaves. The first autumn of the fourth grade. Podolsky and his mates, a bunch of kids in grey trousers, ignite old rags dipped in turpentine, and the air above them bulges upwards. She and her friends, in their brown dresses, watch the antics from the second-floor windows. Behind the schoolyard gate stands the old man who sells beer. Podolsky collects coins from the other kids. He’s taller and stronger than all of them. His eyes shine as if they’d been rubbed with oil. He has a mane of red hair. Sasha takes her friend Zhenya’s hand, and they race down the corridor. A nasal welter of shouts and whistles. Children are playing a jousting game, her arm is pushed into Zhenya’s face, the principal keeps an eye on things through a crack in his office door, Zhenya shouts, but Sasha drags her outside. They’re already in the courtyard, approaching the knot of children.
    ‘We want beer too!’ she calls to the ruck of kids.
    Maxim Podolsky emerges. His neck is red, and white foam clings to the hair on his upper lip. ‘What will you give us for it?’
    She snatches the bottle from his hand and drinks, enjoying the knowledge that his lips were there a moment ago. A bitter taste on her tongue. Maxim Podolsky examines her, working out how to react. For a moment she’s frightened. Will he hit her? She saw him poke an elbow in a boy’s face in the jousting game, and, when his nose began to bleed, Podolsky said, ‘Kids make too much fuss about a little blood.’ Obviously someone like that, whose father was a Chekist and tortured people, wasn’t afraid of blood.
    Podolsky looked at her and made a servant-like gesture. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘the bottle is my gift to you.’
    Now she wanted to hold him. She repressed the urge. If she showed weakness, he might decide that his job was to protect her, and then he wouldn’t tell her the truth.
    ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Was Pyatakov really guilty?’
    ‘You’re asking whether Pyatakov, the Assistant People’s Commissarfor Heavy Industry, really planned to sabotage the ventilation system in the Kemerovo coal mines? Your dad was sitting at home, listening in outrage to the radio broadcast of Vyshinsky’s prosecution, and he said that Moralov and Radak and Pyatakov were fools. We know this trick: to describe clever defendants as fools, meaning you think their trial is unjust.’
    ‘My dad didn’t say anything like that,’ she said, but she was impressed: the account was precise.
    ‘I