They gave themselves a little cheer, raising hands over their heads.
She looked for a cigarette. There were a few others in the waiting room-a wealthy couple looked at them from the far gray wall, and a boy slept on a chair. She lit up and whispered, “How old do you think those soldiers are?”
“Seventeen, eighteen,” he said.
“And they’re peasants. You can tell by the way they walk and how they wear their uniforms. You think they want to be here?”
They were kicking the ball now, as if it were a soccer ball. Content enough, he thought.
“They want to be at home,” she said. “They want their mamas and their little farm girlfriends. They want their Mother Russia. They go crazy here.”
Emil straightened and looked at her gazing at the soldiers. Her face fell sadly into softer features. Her cheeks, her lips, her eyes.
The platform was crowded with farmers who had sold their vegetables early and had already begun drinking. They smelled like rotted meat and sweat. They held milk bottles filled with homemade brandies that they moved aside when Lena marched through them. Emil carried her bag with general success, and helped her up the steps. In the train corridor, men in earth-toned jackets clogged the small space with their smoke, and the least- full compartment they found contained a mother and her boy, curled together against the window, snoring. Emil put their bags in the overhead netting and sat beside the door s curtain. He watched her adjust her stockings beneath her skirt, then take a small mirror out of her bag and stare into it.
The conductor whistled down the platform. They felt the brakes releasing, the pull and counterpull, then the grind of the train moving southward.
“Ruscova,” he said to her.
“What:?”
He tried to keep his voice quiet, but it was almost drowned by the laboring engines and laughter from the corridor. “It s near the Romanian border.”
She snapped her mirror shut. “It’s your home village, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “But I grew up in the Capital.”
She looked over the sleepers’ heads at the city thinning into farmland. “Why does everyone think their home village is the best place in the world? I’d never force anyone to go to Stryy. That’s unmitigated torture.”
She was looking at him again, and he didn’t know what to answer.
“What’s this Ruscova like?”
He told her the details that came to him.
When she repeated his words, her voice was full of mockery: “Peasants and beautiful hills and big wooden gates.” She shook her head. “You haven’t been there in a while, have you?”
“Four years.”
“And you’re…twenty-five?”
“Two,” he said. “Twenty-two.”
Her mouth slid down her face, and she turned the purse over in her lap, then opened it and closed it. She closed her eyes. She opened them.
“It’s quiet and safe,” he said quickly, hopefully. “You can stay until I’ve figured this out.”
“Until you figure it out?” She was herself again. “ That’s reassuring.” She sighed. “Twenty-two?”
When the conductor arrived, he bought tickets for them both. The mother and her child were still asleep, but the conductor shook them awake. He looked over their tickets a moment, considered something, then told them to go back to second class.
She dozed a while, and he, after finding a position that did not hurt too much, rested his eyes. The hills dimmed as the low sun elongated their shadows, and after they had stopped in and left Berehove, Lena opened her eyes and smiled sleepily. “Is all this really about little Janos?”
“You tell me.” He opened his own eyes.
She wiped her face hard enough to stretch the lids over her skull sockets. “Nothing to tell, my Comrade Inspector. I swear.” A little yawn escaped her. “Janos leaves me, then he comes back. Then he’s dead. Take that as a warning.” She winked.
Emil smiled. “What did he do for money? Other than song- writing.”
“I don’t know what he did for money.” She fell to picking at the hem of her skirt.
“You never asked?”
“You’ve never been in a failed marriage.” There was a trace of scorn in her voice. “Have you.”
The early, fall dusk had begun without them noticing. They were nearing the outskirts of Vynohradiv, where light poles along the tracks flashed into the compartment. Her face was descending into thought like a woman in the moving pictures: the soft pulse of frames and light.
“He went to Berlin, you said. Six months ago?”
She nodded, pulsing. “Yes. Back in February.”
“Why Berlin?”
She reached her arms over her head to stretch them out, then covered a yawn with the back of her hand. “He’d been there before, once a year at least. He told me he was visiting a friend. But I don t know for sure.” She looked at his pale, drawn expression. “What? Do you know?”
He knew nothing, but looking at her made him feel like he was seventeen again, looking at that flickering window to the world.
“Stryy was different than I remembered,” she told him after a while.
“How so?”
She shrugged. “The usual. I hadn’t been there in years, and it was so small. Nothing going on. Not a decent coffee in the whole town.”
“What did you do with your father?” asked Emil.
She looked at him before answering. “The family crypt. My great-grandfather saw one on a trip to Paris, and decided the Hanics needed one too. A small marble house with panels for each of us.” She wedged her bag between her cheek and the rattling window, which quieted it. “Maybe someday you’ll have to take me to Stryy, Inspector.”
“Not for a long time,” he whispered.
Her eyes were closed. She said, “You’re the only one I’ve got left, Emil Brod. You took a bullet for me. You’re all I’ve got.”
He almost tried to explain that the bullet hadn’t been for her, it had been the result of his own stubborn stupidity, but said nothing.
Men in the corridor made loud jokes about stupid policemen and hacked on their laughter. Gray curtains of smoke obscured their red faces, and he saw they were drunk farmers who had snuck up from second class.
Lena was asleep again, her cheek reflected on the window. The city of Hust came and went, and the black plains rose into the southern foothills of the Carpathians. But he could not sleep. It wasn’t just the pain. He reached in his pocket for his watch, but it wasn’t there. After a few tries he realized it had been stolen. A pickpocket. Somewhere back in the Capital.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They reached Sighet, the provincial capital, after eight. The seven hours in that train had about killed him. Outside the station he moved back and forth and twisted himself gingerly, pressing one hand to the aching small of his back, the other to his stitched stomach.
It was said in the Academy that the last thing an inspector should do is admit frailty to a victim. It would undermine the victim s faith in the organs of administrative justice, and lead to the demise of faith in the administrative systems in general. In a people’s democracy, faith was the only power that kept the order from collapsing into anarchy. The professor who said all this had spoken with a dense Russian accent, mauling words like faith and collapse. The students had all thought it funny; and it was, for a while.
Lena had no faith in the organs of administrative justice-he didn’t know where her faith lay-so there was nothing to hide. She watched him bend and twist, and held her bag close to herself. After a few minutes she asked a farmer for a ride into the center of town, and helped Emil into the cart without comment.
They ate omelets in a hotel cafe, and while she was in the bathroom he approached a table of three farmers who dropped their eyes to their plum brandies and fell quiet. But when he asked about getting to Ruscova, they caught the roll of his slightly affected local accent and smiled broadly. When one suggested a particular friend to drive them,
another cut him off, claiming the man was a drunk. He pointed to the window and said to take the train, but the third reminded him that no trains went to Ruscova. The first finally admitted he didn’t know Ruscova. “It’s small,” said Emil. The third told the first that he was an idiot, because Bogdan lived in Ruscova. The second said that a bus went to Viseu de Sus and stopped at the end of the long dirt road that led to Ruscova.
“But the lady’s coming?” asked the first one, and shook his head. “Can’t ask her to walk all the way down that road.”
They nodded in solemn agreement.
“The bus has left, anyway,” said the second.
“Talk to Bogdan,” said the third, leaning into his cigarette and watching as Lena returned with her handbag folded beneath her arm. They were all watching. Lena settled at her table with smooth self-confidence, not even looking for him. White-skinned. Immaculate.
Bogdans cart, tied to a massive brown mare with red tassels hanging by her ears, was parked outside a Hungarian bar, across from the park. He was covering a floor of potatoes with burlap. His thin face peered at Emil from under his wide, black hat, but relaxed as they talked. Bogdan remembered the name Brod only vaguely, and Emil admitted they seldom visited Ruscova these days.
A little way into the journey, Bogdan began talking politics and did not stop until they had reached the village. He said he could remember when this was Hungary, and, briefly, Romania. He said he didn’t know who this General Secretary Mihai was, but he didn’t trust anyone who was known only by his first name. “It’s impolite, isn’t it?” In the thirties he was for the king because no one else said anything that made so much sense, but when the king got them into the war, he was no longer sure. He’d heard all the rumors of the king’s mistress, the catty Jewess who dragged him off to Paris and London for their lovemaking, but found it all hard to believe. “I can read well enough,” he said. “But how can you believe anything in a paper that uses exclamation points?” Emil admitted he didn’t know. Bogdan had a blemish like a dark hole on his cheek. He wiped it with an index finger as he tossed the reins with the other hand. He said the Germans weren’t so bad to them, not to the farmers, not even when they used the road to get to Stalingrad. “They left us alone. Why would they bother with Ruscova?” But once the Russians were on their border the Germans became desperate. “I remember a young man on a motorcycle. Blond hair, looked very much like one of them. He drove up and down the main street shooting his pistol. A little thing.” A Walther, Emil suggested, and Bogdan nodded. “It was muddy, and his tires became stuck. Do you remember this?”
Emil shook his head, but it was a lie; he remembered that hot day, the shouts and gunshots as he hovered behind a fence, watching it all happen.
“Well, the boy had shot old Harnass and Marta Ieronim. Marta died soon after. The boy had gone off his head. You weren’t around then?”
Emil said he didn’t remember this as his stomach shook painfully. Behind him, Lena was trying to sleep on a mattress of potatoes.
“Well, he finally couldn’t get his motorcycle moving, and by then he’d run out of bullets. He shouted at us. He said we were stupid Slavs and we were going to eat ourselves alive.” Bogdan shook his head, smiling into the night. “Imagine that! He had quite a mouth on him.” He snapped the reins and tsfced the horse into a trot. “He threw his gun at us, then rocks. That was a mistake. Some of our boys threw rocks back at him, then the rest of us started into it. Tsk-tsk.” He looked back at Emil, as if he were going to ask a question, then shook his head. “When the German boy realized what was happening, he ran out of the village. It was the middle of the day, and he couldn’t hide from us. There aren’t too many trees, you know.” Emil did. “We surrounded him on a small hill that was thick with big rocks, the size of your fist. I remember his mouth was bloody, and he shouted at us. More of the same. That he wasn’t afraid, that we would eat ourselves. Big man. He had a lovely uniform that got all dusty and dirty. Then we threw our rocks.” His finger had been back at his mole for a while now, stroking. “I’d never seen a man die like that before. I’d heard about it from the priest, they killed people like that in the Bible. The body,” he said, “it falls apart under all that. And the boy, he screamed for a while, a long while, and then he didn’t.” Bogdan paused, clucking his tongue at the horse. “It’s a terrible way; I don’t know why anyone would want to kill like that. Tsk- tsk. It takes such a long time.”
Emil looked off into the night. The breeze off the plains was cool.
He had been there, and he hadn’t been there. Through the slats in the fence, he had seen the boy on his motorcycle, skidding around, shouting, shooting. Then running out of gas. He threw his empty Walther at them, some rocks, then sprinted off. The whole town followed, but Emil lingered. He took the pistol from the dust and pocketed it. His grandparents were visiting another village, and, alone, plans formed in his head. Then he heard it, the German shrieking.
“Then the Russians came in,” Bogdan said after a while, muttering bitterly. “And this Mihai wanted to collectivize us.” But they were already on the outskirts of Ruscova.
He left them at the door of the village’s one bar-really the extra, candlelit room of a village widow-and Emil forced him to take some koronas for his trouble. It was a long fight, but Emil finally won. Lena hovered in the background, looking uncomfortably at the small wooden houses surrounded by weathered fences and the few villagers passing with burlap sacks and pails.
Emil didn’t know the widow who served them tea. She stood near the wall with crossed arms in the flickering light, and stared.
So did two small, sturdy men nursing brandies at another table. Lena sipped her tea. She was plainly uncomfortable.
“Ma’am,” Emil said loudly. Everyone looked up. “Do you know Irina Kula? I’m looking for her.”
The widow frowned deeply. “Of course I know Irina. Who are you?”
“From the Capital,” said the farmer with the mustache.
“I’m Emil Brod.”
The second, smooth-faced farmer stood up, and Emil thought his face was familiar. “Valentin Brod’s son!”
The others looked at the grinning farmer, then back at Emil. The widow began to laugh.
Irina Kula’s two-room house was as near as everything in Ruscova-a few houses down, then back through someone’s garden-and Irina glowed when she saw Emil. She pulled them both inside with her hands on their backs and called for her friend Greta, who was waiting in the kitchen. They were two fat, aproned women with sunburnt smiles. Their short hair had gone frizzy and useless years ago. Irina served plates of baked apples, one after the other.
“Tell me,” she said, watching them eat. “Your grandmother- how is she?”
“She works now, in a factory. Textiles.” “Shirts?” asked Greta.
“Slacks and jackets.”
“Factory pants,” Greta muttered disapprovingly. “And that red husband of hers?”
“Still red.”
He told them about his travels in the north, the cold Arctic, the cold Finns, and admitted to the massive beauty of Helsinki. Lena, he noticed, listened closely to all of it.
“But you came back,” Irina said, smiling.
“Where would I go?”
Greta slid a soft mound of apple from her wrinkled fingers into her mouth. “You came back and married.” She smiled at Lena as she chewed, and, after a moment, Lena smiled back.
Emil avoided as many details as possible, only enough to make them understand the severity and secrecy of his request for a room. “Just a few days. For her safety.”
Irina glowed. “She’ll live here forever if she likes-such a beautiful girl! Don’t you think?”
“Indeed,” said. Greta, nodding.
Irina gave a wide smile that was short on teeth. “She can be my daughter.”
“I thought I was your daughter,” said Greta haughtily, and both women laughed.
After a late dinner of pork-stuffed cabbage, Emil smoked on the fron
t porch, watching two shadowy horse-forms grazing in a black field across the road. They moved in increments, holding their bowed heads to the crabgrass, unaware. There were other small homes farther along, some with high fences blocking them from sight. Irinas home and a few others had no fences, and he could see straight through to the low beginnings of the Carpathians.
The door groaned, and Lena squatted beside him. She blinked, adjusting to the darkness. “You’ve got a nice little town.”
“Not mine,” he said. “Not much, either.” He pointed. “Some houses, fences and mountains, like I told you. The occasional horse.” He wondered how long she’d be able to take living in the sticks without her scotches and American cigarettes, in a hard bed, surrounded by the clumsy handcrafts of the peasantry. “Is Irina still up?”
“She’s listening to the radio,” whispered Lena, and Emil realized they had both been whispering all along.
As if on cue, tinny voices drifted through the window, submerged in hisses, then rose again like a swimmer struggling in the middle of an ocean.
“Only one station, she told me. And only sometimes.”
Emil pressed his palms against his knees. He reached for his cane. “A walk?”
They made it to the road without speaking, then crossed into the field where the horses cantered nervously away. Lena twisted long grass into a knot. “When I was in Stryy again, I was reminded what it means to be alone. It’s not good.”
Emil knew, and said as much.
“It’s hard to find someone,” she said. “To trust, I mean. It’s rare.”
He didn’t know how to answer that. The breeze was chilling him, but he hardly noticed.
She looked at the mountains, then back at the village. There were no lights. “How long are you going to be gone?”
“A week. If I take longer, I’ll send someone to get you.”
“You’re going to Berlin?”
He squatted, trying to get rid of the ache in his stomach that had pestered him since the train. Lena Crowder was no fool.
“You’ll fly?”
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