[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  His question was perfunctory and designed to flatter his master’s strategic thinking rather than raise an important point. Beryx knew very well that it didn’t matter if it was true. What mattered was the possession of the assertion of truth. What mattered was leverage against Moscow. What mattered was power. Without any real commerce going on, power was the only product being traded day to day in the phantom socialist stock market. And everyone had a piece of the action, no matter how small. Even a housewife could acquire some for herself if she paid attention—to the comings and goings of her friends and neighbors, to late-night conversations whispered behind closed doors, to the way her butcher grimaced while mouthing the words of a socialist anthem at the mandatory May Day Parade.

  The Hungarian watched Ceausescu as he leaned back into his chair, holding the documents close to his chest. His piece of the action had just gotten much, much bigger.

  “You’re a lucky Hungarian,” he told the assassin.

  Beryx Gulyas sniffed and stiffened his back. “I earn my luck. I’m worthy of it.” It was a bold statement, Beryx knew, especially since he was very well aware that luck, like beauty, made no distinction between the worthy and the unworthy. Still, he had to say something after his debacle at the Lavra. The papers in Nicolai Ceausescu’s hand were the only thing standing between him and a dank, one-room basement apartment shared with three other discarded failures. Already his Berlina had been taken from him. He had returned to Bucharest to find his spot in the airport parking lot empty.

  “Sputnik,” Ceausescu said. “I want it.”

  Beryx Gulyas nodded.

  “I want it!” Ceausescu sprang to his feet and kicked a painted plaster statue of Lenin that stood next to his desk. Lenin’s head hit the edge of a long, wooden file cabinet, decapitating the Soviet hero. “I want the plans! I want to build it. Not the idiots in Moscow! Me! Me! Me!” Ceausescu swept the perspiration from his forehead and smelled the tips of his fingers. He sat down at his desk again and proceeded to perform the remainder of his odd collection of compulsions: smelling his pants, knees, crotch, then his armpits. He scratched his scalp and sniffed his fingers, then relaxed—finally satisfied. “In the service of our esteemed Secretary General, of course, whom I will gladly serve to my death.”

  “Yes,” Gulyas said.

  “Our esteemed Secretary General will be pleased that we’ve found a pathway to the heavens, don’t you think?”

  I found it, Gulyas wanted to say. “Very pleased,” he answered.

  “And you’ll be leaving tonight?” Ceausescu told him.

  Gulyas nodded. “The plans this time. The plans.”

  He didn’t know if Tarkhan or the other Russian had the plans, but even if they didn’t, they had to know something. He could make them tell him. Or make the American girl tell him. Women were much easier to break.

  “You won’t fail again?”

  Beryx Gulyas sucked in his belly. He was ashamed of the weight he’d gained from his wife’s cousin’s cooking and was sure Ceausescu had noticed his expanded girth.

  “Never again.”

  Chapter 32

  Near the border of Russia and Azerbaijan

  I had that dream again,” Lily whispered. Ivanov, his eyes black like deep water under the light of a full moon. “He was hungry this time.”

  Alyona, pale as an eggshell and nearly blind, sat in the middle of her kitchen, boiling water for Lily’s tea over a glowing cow patty.

  She sang almost constantly—her voice like a Ney—mixing Russian and Arabic melodies the way a talented hostess might mix a cocktail. But she stopped singing when Lily started talking about Ivanov again.

  “I touched him,” Lily continued. “And he felt so real. My God, it’s like he was there. He was warm and I could smell his breath.” Lily took her tea from Alyona’s crooked fingers and blew on it, watching her breath make ripples on its glossy surface. “Then I woke up, but it seemed like he was still there, you know what I mean?”

  Alyona glanced sideways at her, pressing her thin lips together. Her russet hair, unmarred by gray and clipped into a Dutch boy, hung heavy at her ruddy cheeks.

  “Pasha says Ivanov has that effect on people. At least he doesn’t think I’m crazy.”

  Alyona placed her palm on Lily’s forehead as if feeling for a fever. She ran a long, white fingernail down the slope of Lily’s nose and tickled the tip, almost playfully.

  Lily smiled.

  Ivanov had told Lily about Alyona—the woman who would help smuggle them out of Russia. Those who knew Alyona believed she was a witch, but Ivanov said he knew better. He said she was more a mole than a human being and that witchery of any kind was nonsense. His description had the flavor of one of his many eccentric observations. Much like the way Ivanov believed Pasha Tarkhan was a banyan tree with deep roots and an unending capacity for expansion—at least where his mind was concerned. But the holy man’s characterization of Alyona Artemieva as a mole was more literal.

  To begin with, she lived underground beneath a flat, grassless wasteland of dense, unfertile soil the color of milk chocolate—its only inviting feature. Her home, a series of subterranean rooms near the border of Russia and Azerbaijan, was laid out like an apartment. What had begun as merely a kidney-shaped hole no bigger than a coffin was now a living room, kitchen with seating area, bedroom, bath and guest quarters. Over a period of years—two, Alyona claimed—she had dug out her five rather spacious rooms with only a garden shovel, spackling the walls with clay and decorating her new home with bright, oriental pillows and surrealist drawings by her younger self. It was no wonder people thought she was a witch.

  Lily took Alyona’s hand into her lap. “I wrote down the name of the poet he mentioned back at the Lavra. The Persian. He said it again in my dream last night.”

  Alyona wore a sizeable opal ring on the middle finger of her left hand, and Lily began to twist it the way she would the diamond ring on her mother’s hand as she suffered through church Masses as a young girl.

  “Mansoor Nassa,” Alyona said.

  “Yes, yes, that’s it.”

  Lily wondered if perhaps Alyona had talked to Ivanov after all.

  “Fedot?” Lily heard Pasha say. She leapt from Alyona’s side and scampered into the living room, where Fedot had just lowered himself from the surface. Pasha embraced him like a bear, then took his face in his hands and kissed him wet-lipped on the brow.

  “We all made it,” Pasha said, removing the cork from a bottle of Alyona’s vodka. He passed it first to Lily.

  “Of course,” Fedot nodded. “The Holy One foresaw as much.”

  It had been nearly a month since they’d seen Fedot on that day in the Lavra—the day of the massacre. That time had been spent mostly underground, as Lily and Pasha traveled by day hidden within a circus caravan and by night lived with various zemljanky—subterranean dwellers like Alyona, who had deserted their city apartments and dug homes for themselves in the countryside. It was, as Alyona described, the only way to escape Russia without leaving it.

  “You came just in time, my friend,” Pasha said. “The caravan is returning from Derbent the day after tomorrow. From there, they’ve obtained permission to travel to Baku, then down the coast to Astara.”

  Fedot took another swig of the vodka, then sat cross-legged on a large pillow quilted from a prayer rug. Alyona peeked in from the kitchen, and Fedot greeted her in Russian. It was an informal greeting—one reserved for friends and family members.

  “Perhaps the caravan can get us close to the Armenian border. If we get into Armenia, it’s not hard to make the cross from there into Turkey.”

  Lily scratched her finger along the brushed dirt wall and tried to catch Pasha’s eye. “We’re inclined to make our way to Tehran,” she said, before Pasha could weigh in.

  He looked at her with a sharp turn of his head but said nothing.

  Fedot leaned against the wall, accepting a bowl of kufta with sangak bread that had been passed from Alyona to Lil
y to him. He dipped the bread into the broth and scooped up one of the meatballs.

  “Iran is friendly with the Americans,” he said. “But that’s precisely why it might be harder to enter.”

  Lily nodded. “Isn’t it the Americans we have to see—and the sooner the better?”

  “I don’t like having the microfilm so long,” Pasha said. “It needs to find a home—and fast—before it’s dropped into the wrong burrow and we, ourselves, tumble into an unmarked grave.”

  Fedot removed the brown bottle of Myer aspirin from his pant pocket, holding it up to one of Alyona’s oil lamps. “Spaceships. Do you honestly believe this is real?” he asked. “And not some sort of propaganda?”

  Pasha held out his palm, and Fedot laid the bottle gently in its ample center. “It’s real,” Pasha said.

  Fedot accepted this confirmation. Cradling their steaming bowls in their laps, the three of them ate, for the most part, in silence.

  “Loy Henderson is still in Iran, is he not?” Fedot inquired.

  Pasha shook his head. “It’s a man named Chandler now. A new type of American agent—cynical, factual to a fault. But I’ve seen him be brilliant as well.”

  “Agent, you said?” Lily asked. “I thought he was a diplomat.”

  Pasha put his hand over hers. “My dear—I am a diplomat, too.”

  “I see,” Lily said.

  Pasha was a professional liar, as he’d said on more than one occasion. Even if his lies were morally justifiable in a way. He was unequivocal and unapologetic when it came to this fact about himself, and it was in moments like these when Lily wondered how freely Pasha’s lies of necessity could flow from his professional to his personal life. It was quite reasonable under the circumstances that he could be making love to her in order to manage her better. What disturbed Lily most of all was that this possibility was even more unwelcome to her than the mortal danger in which she’d found herself.

  “It’s not that we couldn’t work something out with him,” Pasha continued. “I just wouldn’t be too quick to trust a man like Chandler. Especially without an intermediary of some sort.”

  “What about Mansoor Nassa in Tehran?” Lily proposed. Pasha squeezed her fingers.

  “The poet?” Fedot asked.

  “I think so.”

  Fedot chewed his last meatball, blotting his lips with Alyona’s hand-embroidered napkins. “There’s only one Mansoor Nassa.”

  “So, you know him?” Pasha asked.

  Fedot shook his head. “I’ve read him. Why would I know him?”

  “Because Ivanov does,” Lily said.

  Alyona entered the living room again, talking animatedly—her ring-clad fingers whizzing about her head and shoulders like dragonflies. Fedot sat, unmoving, and listened to whatever she was saying. Lily caught none of it—not even a word. Although Russian had begun to ring familiar in her ear, Alyona’s dialect was alien—filled with elongated vowels punctuated by a terse staccato of consonants. Not at all the mellifluous parlance spoken by Pasha and Fedot.

  “What else did the Holy One say of this man?” Fedot pressed, turning his attention to Lily.

  “Where is he?” Lily asked. “Ivanov, I mean.”

  Fedot shrugged. “He left the Lavra weeks ago and has been staying in his village with his wife.”

  Lily put her face into her hands, inhaling the sickly sweet smell of tarragon and dried cherries on her fingertips. A mixture Alyona had said was Porphyri Ivanov’s favorite, Lily’s fingers had smelled of it from the moment she woke up. She’d told no one about that—not even Alyona.

  “Ivanov spoke of the poet at the Lavra, and in my dream last night,” she said. “Do you think I’m losing my mind?”

  “Miss Lily,” he said. “You assume what you call your mind was yours to lose in the first place.”

  Pasha chuckled, cupping his hand over her shoulder.

  “It’s not funny,” she said. “Are we making our plans based on the visits of a ghost of some sort in one of my dreams?”

  “He’s not a ghost,” Fedot said. “A ghost is the spiritual remains of a dead person. Porphyri Ivanov is very much alive.”

  “And apparently able to infiltrate my subconsious—unless I’ve gone insane.”

  Fedot put his bowl of kufta down and folded his hands in his lap. “Miss Lily,” he said. “What if I were to look you in the eye as I do now and say, yes, foolish woman, I think you’re crazy?”

  Lily closed her eyes and remembered the way Ivanov had first appeared in her dream, humming “Rum and Coca-Cola.” She was sitting with members of the caravan—not the performers or the side-show freaks, but laborers, a group of hard-living Mongols who on most evenings roasted over a large bonfire whatever rodents had wandered across their path—two chinchillas and a squirrel turned over the flames. The Mongols were drinking and whispering amongst themselves, and Pasha was dozing off, his head cushioned by Lily’s thigh when the humming trailed off and she heard Ivanov start to giggle. He appeared—characteristically—from behind a tree, beckoning her into a stretch of woods but a few yards from the caravan. She was wearing the long, white dress she’d had on when Tony died on Monemvasia, and it was stained in blood. When she jerked awake, she thought she was still wearing it, but no. Lily had been naked and wrapped around Pasha like ivy.

  “If you were to say I was crazy?” she said. “Fedot, I would be relieved.”

  Pasha laughed, stroking her hair, and Fedot drank the remaining broth in his bowl. Lily put her bowl aside and pulled her knees close to her chest, resting her chin upon them.

  “I guess it’s settled then,” she said. “We go to Tehran, where we will meet with the Holy One’s poet, as he prescribed.”

  “In the absence of any other concrete ideas,” Pasha said. “To have God pointing us in the right direction seems as good a plan as any.”

  Lily sat up straight, tucking her toes beneath Pasha’s seat cushion. “Ivanov isn’t God, exactly.”

  “No,” Pasha granted. He took her feet onto his lap and tugged off the colorful, knitted slippers the Mongols had given them. Lily’s toes were cool, and he began to massage them. “But he is the only one of us who seems to be in regular contact with Him. And you, my dear, seem to be the only one of us Ivanov will speak to directly—dream or no dream.”

  Fedot slept as soundlessly as Alyona, his arms at his sides and his head cradled in a soft, loosely knit sweater. He and Alyona were sharing her bed of foam rubber and Red Army blankets—utterly motionless, the both of them.

  “It’s the sleep of the dead,” Pasha chuckled.

  Pasha and Lily had made their bed on the floor—under one of Alyona’s drawings. It was ostensibly of a human skeleton, but only parts of the skull were recognizable as such. The rest of the image appeared both cubed and melted at various points. Lily reached up and traced her finger along a sinuous ribbon that may have been a spine.

  “I wonder what she calls this one?” she asked.

  “The lovers.”

  “Nice.” Lily’s face broke into a smile. “If this is what she thought of her love life, it’s no wonder she dug a hole in the ground and stayed there.”

  Pasha ran his fingers through Lily’s hair, still damp from their bath in a nearby stream. The water had been chilly but clean, and the smell of moss still hung about them like a day-old sprinkle of fine men’s cologne.

  “It’s not one of her old drawings,” Pasha explained. “She sketched it last week when she went mushroom-picking, and I believe it’s meant to depict you and me.”

  Lily turned toward Pasha and pushed herself up, leaning on her elbow. “Are you kidding me?”

  “After all this time,” Pasha chided. “You still don’t understand Russians.”

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her nose and her lips. “Bones don’t merely convey the end of life; they are our very foundation. Without them we would be a quivering blob—easily scraped up, leaving only a stain where we once stood.”

  Lily turned b
ack to the drawing and shook her head. “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t understand Russians.”

  Pasha’s expression sobered. He looked at her for a long time, reading the story within her eyes, as he would say. It was the type of penetrating gaze that Lily had worked hard all her life to avoid, yet it didn’t make her uneasy when Pasha did it. She wondered if he detected within her the remorseless drive that she had only recently begun to acknowledge. The drive Lily’s subconscious mind—and she had always denied there was such a thing—had tried to keep sated with a steady diet of debauched affairs, glamorous languages and expensive trinkets. She’d even endeavored to tame it by dropping out of school and becoming engaged to Richard Putnam. Lily supposed Pasha was the realization of that kind of drive. She stared back at him, trying to imagine if she, too, could have tortured a man like Ivanov or killed one of her lovers like Pasha killed Brenda “Brandy” France, as the newspapers had taken to calling her.

  “I’m a wreck, Pasha,” she said.

  He ran his finger along her jawline and over her chin, resting it in a tiny, barely observable dimple. “You are a work of art,” he said.

  When he said things like that, she believed him.

  “Maybe I’m just a piece of work.”

  “That, too,” he whispered. “But a fine piece of work at that.”

  Lily nestled her face into the crook between Pasha’s chin and shoulder, wrapping her arms around him. Pasha’s injuries and their subsequent flight from Moscow had stripped him of his extra girth. No longer did he carry with him the luxuriant fare offered at the homes of public officials, embassies and posh restaurants. This change from diplomat to fugitive was equally present in his face, where his weight loss brought into relief a series of deep lines around his eyes and mouth. Somehow, this new hardness of features made Pasha more appealing. It lured attention away from his heavy brow and to his eyes, which had softened since Lily had first met him at the Hotel Rude. The story within his eyes now conveyed who he once was—the boy, the brother, the son—as well as the long, burning chronicle of the man he’d become. Lily placed her hand on his cheek—warm and freshly shaven.