When will it come? asked someone.
Trotsky frowned. He calculated. He searched for obscure quotations from the holy books of revolutions. He was about to squeeze all of history into one ironbound Marxist harangue when his gaze happened to fall on Adzhar. What stopped him then? The mischief in Adzhar’s eyes? The slight smile that was always hovering around the little man’s mouth?
The harangue never came. The frown flew from Trotsky’s face and he burst into wild laughter, the kind of unrestrained, totally goodhumored laughter seldom heard from a dedicated revolutionary whose work, like that of God’s, leans heavily on the serious side of life.
Adzhar, he said, your blintzes were superb tonight. Your borscht was excellent, and what’s more you’ve already answered that question for me, for mother Russia and the world. How long did you say your brave Passamaquoddy labored in his act of creation?
A dozen years.
Just so. Well we failed in 1905 and that means we will succeed in 1917.
Adzhar winked. Once more Trotsky went off into a burst of wild laughter. In revolutionary circles around the world Trotsky was often called The Pen because of the power of his writing. He made reference to this now.
Adzhar, he said, on the basis of that epic you told us tonight you should always be known as The Holy Ghost, and if you ever join us that’s what your code name will have to be.
The two men embraced, Trotsky insisting that a photograph be taken in order to memorialize the evening of Adzhar’s prophecy.
When the Third International was founded in 1919 The Holy Ghost was in Paris working for Trotsky, using his knowledge of French and German and Italian and Spanish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Lettish, Flemish, Dutch, Romansh, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, and several other tongues to recruit European agents and pass information from one movement to another. A Guatemalan, for example, spoke only his native Tzotzil dialect, and if Adzhar hadn’t learned Tzotzil in a cafe one afternoon in order to talk to the man the Comintern would never have known of the existence of this potentially valuable agent in Central America.
An innovation of his in Paris was a unit of moles, Jewish tailors he brought from Odessa and taught to make clothes characteristic of various regions in the world, and to plant ticket stubs and tobacco and other items in the linings of the pockets, so that Comintern agents could travel freely without fear of being recognized.
In 1919 he returned briefly to Russia to see Trotsky and was almost shot at the border as a White Russian. Fortunately he had with him the photograph taken at the shoemaker’s shop in the Bronx that showed him and Trotsky arm in arm beaming at the camera. He presented it to the guards and it saved his life.
Back in Paris one of his many new recruits was a young American who had been wounded in the First World War and wanted to end all wars. Quin, shall we call him? Adzhar even knew the neighborhood in the Bronx where the young man had grown up, for it happened to be the same as that of the shoemaker’s shop in the photograph.
He found Quin an intelligent young man, confident of himself, eager to learn, and eager to put his skills to work. He also found his enthusiasm naive perhaps, but Adzhar wasn’t so old that he couldn’t remember his own feelings when he left Tifiis and went to St. Petersburg.
He gave Quin some training and received orders to send him on to Moscow. It was not until several years later in Shanghai, after Adzhar had removed himself from espionage work, that he learned from a young American woman that his former pupil Quin had received intensive training at the school outside Moscow and been assigned to a mission in China.
Adzhar was disturbed by Lenin’s New Economic Policy after the Russian civil war. When Lenin died in 1924 he decided to give up his clandestine activities and return to the study of languages. He was then over sixty. The time had come to retire, he felt.
Thus he severed forever all connections with the Comintern.
From Paris he went to the Middle East, intending to learn Punic and Ugaritic, Mandaean and Nuzi Akkadian. He did learn them, but while in Jerusalem he met for the second time a man he had known five years before in France, a man he admired exceedingly, a Japanese diabetic who had converted to Judaism since they had last seen each other.
This man was Rabbi Lotmann, formerly Baron Kikuchi of the powerful landowning clan in northern Japan. Lotmann discussed the Orient with Adzhar, and it was because of him that Adzhar decided not to tarry in the Middle East but to continue his journey as far east as one could go.
In Malabar, where he stopped briefly to acquire fluency in Kulu and Kota and Toda, he fell in love with a young woman of wealth and married her, the only time he ever married, so long had it taken him to recover from the loss of Sophia.
His wife was a Nestorian Christian, a member of that nearly extinct sect that had flourished in the early Middle Ages. As a child she had fed her horse from a helmet that had been worn by a soldier in Tamerlane’s army. Either that experience or the trading traditions of her fathers, who had sold their peppercorns to both East and West, had caused the young woman to dream of someday going to Samarkand to visit the tomb of Tamerlane, from where she hoped to follow the silk route of antiquity through central Asia, perhaps as far as Peking. In the thirteenth century, after all, a Nestorian monk from Peking had traveled west to discuss theology with the pope and had continued on to Bordeaux, where he gave communion to Edward I of England. Why not reverse the journey? Lastly there was the inducement of a pilgrimage to the famous monument that Chinese Nestorians had erected at Hsian-fu in the eighth century.
Adzhar was delighted when he heard all of this. He and his wife went to Goa to organize a caravan and there found an omen of the misfortune to come.
Goa is built on hills and the sewerage system consisted of open drains cleaned by pigs that wandered the city. At the time they arrived there a band of Arabs had just sailed into port with a shipload of powerful drugs, some suspected of being from as far away as Mexico. The Portuguese were celebrating Easter with these drugs, the Arabs were celebrating Ramadan, and the Indians were supplicating their usual multitude of spring deities.
The problem was that the drugs were much stronger than anyone suspected. They were so lasting that many of their properties passed right through the body of the user, causing a phenomenon known as the high hogs of Goa. For several weeks the entire population had to remain locked indoors on their hills, without food or water, terrorized by marauding hordes of tipsy, careening pigs driven mad by the sewerage in the open drains.
Finally Adzhar and his young wife and the infant daughter recently born to them were able to set out in their caravan. They reached Samarkand without incident and turned east to cross central Asia. Along the trail of the ancient silk route Adzhar continued to acquire new languages, Kashgarian and Yakandian, Taranchi, Uzbek and Sart, Harachin, Chanar. All went well until they sighted the Gobi Desert. At an oasis on the fringe of the desert they were attacked without warning by a tribe of bandits appearing from nowhere.
Adzhar was away from the camp at the time. His daughter was playing under a blanket and escaped notice, but his wife and all the bearers were decapitated. Adzhar shouldered his daughter and crossed the Gobi on foot, his daughter dying of thirst before he reached another oasis.