Everything was gone with her. He did not sleep. He could not write. He had no dreams. His only desire was to find her, to bring her back to him. His only desire was to have back the life he had so often dreamed of escaping.
But no, it could not be true. She had been real. He had felt her lips on his. He had not imagined such mad passion. She had been real, and she was out there, somewhere, still alive, still burning inside of him. His life was dead, but he could still feel her warm heart beating in his body. There still remained a faint glimmer of life.
Then all at once he knew where she was. The dream they had shared together had been of a place of true freedom. They had dreamed of running off in the middle of the night, taking the tram to the end of the line and then scampering to another land, boarding a boat, taking each other away, taking each other back to paradise. How could he have forgotten their dream, when they had written it so many times, every morning of their life together. Escape, to a place where he didn’t have to spend time writing out his dreams, where he could write his stories, the stories he would whisper in her ear at night when they lay beside one another. Escape, to a place where she could paint the pictures she would describe to him on the warm days they would sit on the tiny ledge that served as their porch, as if they were two bugs clinging to the side of the building. Looking out into the distance, not toward the smoke of distant battles where the Regime was said to be burning villages of its own people, but out toward the river, that snaked toward the sun, that crept almost imperceptibly across the sky toward the peaceful west. Escape, to a place where their lovemaking was not scheduled, where they could come together at any time, in any location, where he could make love to her in infinite varieties and with such fervor and regularity that she would be sweating and exhausted and glowing with satisfaction.
* * *
With Milada he had suffered the desire to do everything, but lacked the freedom. Now the freedom had come, but without Milada he had lost the desire.
The structure of life once provided by the Regime was missing, and in this great void yawned a vast emptiness of feeling and experience. Not even sleep, now void of dreams, could comfort him. He wandered in a daze through the streets, searching for Milada, for clues, for any remnant of her existence. What he really searched for was himself.
He had been searching for seven months of freedom. He had found nothing, the few clues leading to dead ends. She had disappeared into freedom, as if Pavko were the Regime and he had been repressing her all along. As he troubled over this thought, he wondered if he was sad for the loss of her, or for the overthrow of himself.
There was a knock at his door. A young boy of perhaps ten years stood in the corridor. He held out a box. Pavko took it. The boy turned down the corridor.
“One minute,” Pavko called. “What is this? Who gave it to you?”
The boy gave a startled look over his shoulder and fled.
Pavko brought the box inside and opened it. It was full of papers, notebooks, and photographs. One was a grainy black and white print of himself standing outside a brick building on a particularly gloomy day, his coat turned up against the wind, checking the address he had been searching for against a scribbled note held tightly in its hands so it too would not be swept away by the winds of change.
He remembered that moment vividly. He had been certain he had found Milada that day. And he had. But when he knocked at the tiny chilly flat within the run-down building, the woman who emerged was not his wife, but an elderly aunt of the same name living amid the squalor of an embittered couple with five children.
Where the photograph came from, though, he did not know. Nor did he know what it might mean. So he quickly took up the top paper to read.
The paper was a facsimile of a report on himself. He read his name, his height, his weight. He read his given occupation, and his occupation before the Regime. He read a list of his known maladies. He read his prescribed period of lovemaking. He read a listing of everyone he had ever known or come in contact with.
All this and much more information was presented there in the document. For a moment he thought this was his own legend, the personal profile the Regime had gathered on him. He thought for a moment that the new government was sending these out to all its citizens, returning their lives, freeing them.
Then his eyes fell on the photograph again. It had been taken after the defeat of the Regime. It had been taken at least two months after freedom had fallen like a miraculous snow on the country. It was proof he was still being followed.
Whether a personal enemy with a grudge no longer repressed, or elements of the overthrown Regime still operating unobserved behind the chaos of freedom, he did not know. But this box of surveillance also contained something the sender did not know about. Inside this box Pavko also found a clue to Milada’s whereabouts. This box of Regime horrors was proof Milada would never be found in his country. The Regime had fallen, and the wind, which had so long been forbidden, blew in and carried her away like a seed to another garden where she was now blooming, free of the insidious weeds of tyranny and repression.
Under the Regime people had quickly learned to ignore the atrocities of the police and government officials out of a desire for self-preservation. News had spread quickly that if you involved yourself in any type of dispute, you would surely be shot for “crimes against the government.”
Milada had come home distraught one evening after encountering an old woman who had been her school teacher when she was a girl. The woman was being accosted by a young policeman who wanted to commandeer her bicycle. Milada had wanted to help her former teacher, but instead she had run as fast as she could, until she got home. Pavko knew what the consequences were, and he was glad she had chosen to come home. But it troubled him to enjoy the repression of her better instincts to help another human, the swallowing of her compassion, the subtle and sinister destruction of her humanity.
He wept because he knew that when the police came for him, she would do exactly the same thing.
He hated the thought of not knowing what had happened to her, of losing her. He knew he, or Milada, or anyone could be taken at any time without warning or even cause. Public laundromats were notorious places of disappearance. He knew of a woman in their own building who had been handed a slip of paper asking her to come to the postal exchange to pick up a package, and she was never heard from again. No one knew when, where, or for what reason the next disappearance would occur. Perhaps, though, whatever death the government had in store was preferable to being spared: someone had recently told him about a perfectly healthy man who had been seized on his doorstep and thrown into an ambulance. At the hospital the doctor decided in order to save the man’s life he would have to remove both his legs.
Nostalgia made life seem almost easier under the Regime. At that time everyone knew who the enemy was. The government and its operatives were to be avoided, for they could turn on you at any moment. Now the government was to be regarded as a friend of the people, a protector, and had so far proved itself in this regard. But the enemy was suddenly everywhere and unidentifiable. What appeared to be a student on his way to university might suddenly rip the necklace off you. The good man who came to repair your burst pipe in the middle of a cold night coldly charged an exorbitant fee for his services.
Pavko’s random searching was like this new freedom: blind. He realized to have any real chance for success, his search for Milada would have to be given the form of a thorough investigation. He had no money to pay for an investigator, for they were in overwhelming demand. What he had to do was operate as his own investigator.
He spent a week drawing up checklists to guide his search. He wrote down the names or identities of everyone Milada would have come in contact with during her daily routine. He wrote down any relatives he could think of, especially those in other countries. He wrote down the names of places she had indicated as hoping one day to visit, or vacation, or even simply mentioned in passing. He wrote down all the
contacts and avenues he might explore at university, from professors to classmates to other schools she might need or want to transfer to. Then he wrote down the names of every government official they had ever been in contact with, for whatever reason. He even wrote down the policeman who had commandeered the bicycle of Milada’s teacher, and the teacher, too. He wrote down the names of hospitals. He wrote down the names of cemeteries. At last he wrote down the Ministry of Census, which was where he started his new investigation, asking for her legend.
Though her legend provided no clues to her disappearance, it did give him many other items to add to his checklist. Some places, such as the cordwainer and the bakery, he was surprised to learn she had gone to. But then, he also knew that much disinformation appeared in the legends, falsified or invented by the Ministry of Information, and as such he wrote those off. The one thing he knew for certain about Milada was they never had secrets from one another.
So with the grim certitude the entire population had developed through years of living under the Regime, he set off next to the cemeteries. The fact that he did not find her name on any lists of deceased, or discover her unidentified under a frozen sheet, filled him with both joy and exhaustion. It seemed almost as if it would be easier to know for certain she was dead and buried somewhere, than to have to go on wondering what had happened.
Next he set about visiting every hospital. He showed her picture. He checked admission records. He examined the descriptions of unidentified patients who had been treated since the collapse of the Regime. Again, to both his relief and dismay, he found no evidence of her anywhere. He knew, because of the records kept, these were his two best hopes of finding official documentation. Except, perhaps, from the university, what clues he might now uncover would be tinged by gossip and hearsay.
The university had been a major part of the Regime’s public relations campaign, and so, like individual artists, had been spared much but guarded most. This bipolar character had been a feature there for centuries. From the old monastery beside which it arose rode crusaders consecrated to God who were determined to kill as many infidels as possible. More recently, the central building had been converted into the largest Lebensborn in the country. But while still surrounded by the façade of an institute of learning, what began as a much-needed maternity home soon evolved into a eugenics laboratory. The building now housed the Physical Sciences, and it was there Pavko met a young female student who claimed to know Milada.
“Have you tried The Beggars of Azure?” asked the student.
His brow furrowed. He grew suspicious immediately, a wave that came surging back, something he had not felt since the Regime had fallen. “What do you mean?”
“She used to go there a lot,” said the innocent girl.
No place had been more familiar to him than that bookstore. Everything he had ever loved, including Milada, he had found there. When the Regime tried to shut it down, the bookstore became a symbol of resistance. Pavko recalled one brave man who stood on a burnt-out automobile in front of the building, brandishing a book in each hand, vowing the Regime would never destroy what was inside. Armed troops came and found it surrounded and protected by people, writers, readers, students, and Milada. General Jakupovic quickly realized to shut down the bookstore would be to cause harm to himself. To shut it down would only force the readers and writers underground, and foment dissent. But to leave it open and controlled he would always know where to find the most likely dissenters. And there would always be spies. And the worst books—those that described circumnavigation of the world, or the American Revolution, or romantic love—could be removed, hidden, banned, destroyed.
But most of all leaving the bookstore open and accessible allowed the Regime to show the rest of the world it was not bad or repressive. The Beggars of Azure became, along with a former beauty pageant winner appointed Minister of Truth, the bright and shining face the Regime had presented to the world. And so the Resistance was crushed.
Milada had stopped going there then, once the battle to keep it open had been conceded by the Regime, which lent that supposed victory a taste of failure.
“You mean you’ve seen her then?” Pavko asked. “She’s been there recently?”
The same look of confusion fell over the girl’s face. “The last I saw her she was headed there for the new book by Ernesto Savonthary.”
* * *
Pavko became obsessed with the idea that Milada had been living so near him all this time and he had never known. If it was so, she had been hiding herself away from him. There was nothing that would have prevented them from being together now the Regime was overthrown. But why? Did she hate him? Did she fear him? Was she living with another man? What had all their time meant together if she could so easily just walk away without ever looking back, taking nothing with her?
He returned home that evening fuming with these thoughts. Whatever her choice had been, why could she not have had the decency and respect to tell him? All this time he had thought she was dead. Surely she could find her way home if she wanted. Was she so content to deny her entire previous existence? How could she live as if he was dead to her?
All around his tiny cramped one-room flat he saw signs, things left behind that he thought signified she would one day return. Some things were objects they had acquired together. But many more were things she had brought into their relationship. There was a cherished book, which had been given to her by her father. Pavko opened it and read an inscription inside the cover, and an image swirled inside his head.
He saw perfectly, as if he had been there himself, a man enter a house, covered with snow, carrying a Yule log in one hand and a package in another. He saw a young girl run into the room and throw her arms around the man, and then together brush the snow off his heavy coat. Through a tear that swelled his eye, he saw the girl rip open the package and caress the book.
The sudden appearance of this image, which he could not have known, sent him scurrying through the flat. He looked at a glass and saw another exactly alike being thrown, its contents creating an abstract mural on the wall where it crashed. A black skirt brought a feeling of jealous rage and embarrassment as he saw another man’s hands caress beneath the material the soft skin Pavko once knew so well. When the skirt began to rise, and Milada bent forward, Pavko shut his eyes, slammed the wardrobe, and growled into the night until the image was banished from his mind.
She had left, and left everything behind, including every one of her personal memories. He hated her for walking away so casually, so readily. She had left everything with him, except for an explanation. But he had to reconcile the fact that she seemed to be living so near and yet avoided all contact with him. And as he lay awake all night, alternately hating himself and hating her, finding hope and suffering despair, a tiny spark lit in his mind, and he fanned it into a flame. By dawn he had convinced himself that the only logical explanation was she had truly lost her memory and had been unable to remember where her home was, who Pavko was, or even who she was. And at last he had a clue to her whereabouts, and he was sure if he could just find her, stand in front of her, show her these things from her life, it would all come back to her, and she would come back to him.
When the rest of Barungrad had finally begun its day, Pavko set for the place they had met; the place he had once visited every day until the Regime tried to make him into a tool of propaganda; the place Milada had found a purpose against oppression and for freedom: The Beggars of Azure. To his frustration he could no longer find the street, nor anyone who knew the street. After wandering inside the medieval wall for nearly two hours, he happened upon a blind man propped in the doorway of an abandoned shop who, when asked if he knew the street, responded by asking what Pavko was looking for there. Pavko told him of the bookstore.
“Follow me,” the blind man said with a wave of his hand.
Pavko stood watching him, waiting, wondering where the man might lead him in his blind condition, and how long it might take. Th
e man never moved. Pavko glanced up and down the street, wondering how long he should wait, suspecting now that his sightless would-be guide was also saneless.
“Well?” Pavko finally said with impatience.
“Right around the corner,” the blind man replied, pointing.
Pavko followed his finger back in the direction from which he was certain he had just come.
The sightless man nodded.
Pavko retraced his steps to the corner. Where he thought he had passed a row of dilapidated and abandoned buildings that all had windows blind with newspaper, now he found a narrow street busy with people. Perhaps he had circled one too many times and lost his bearing. Then, all at once, he realized what had happened.
Everywhere he went—the cemeteries, the hospitals, and even his own flat—things had changed. But what he discovered was the things themselves did not change in essence, only in name. His cramped one-room flat that was once located in Josef-Wurmsdorf-Platz was now, without moving, to be found on Revolution Square. The Beggars of Azure, once situated between Havixbeckenstrasse and Grestainweg, now occupied the block between Liberty and Independence Streets. And perhaps this was what could account for Milada’s long absence. Perhaps she had been swept up in the celebrating crowds into a strange part of the city, into a part of the city that had long been forbidden to the masses, and therefore unfamiliar; so that when she tried to find her way home, she was hopelessly lost, the names of everything having changed in the meantime, literally, overnight. It was in this thought of Milada lost, wandering the streets in desperate search for their home, that Pavko regained the belief they were still meant to be together.
The exterior of the building was dirty, and one side had been painted with propaganda, which in turn had been violated by graffiti. The edges around the door had crumbled away, and looking up Pavko saw an entire corner of the top of the building was missing, probably destroyed by a mortar attack in the early days of the Regime. Gone was the wooden shingle that had once hung outside, and the picture window that had displayed the most important propaganda to passersby. Several men, white dust sticking to their sweaty skin, blocked the entrance, apparently making repairs to the door.
Tales of Mystery and Truth Page 6
