The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  She seemed all right not knowing. She settled on the corner of his bed and finished her cigarette without speaking. She looked at the narrow window and the short shelf of books he’d brought with him when everything with Filia had ended. And then she looked at him, her delicate features betraying nothing, yet hiding nothing. He wondered how she could do that.

  *********

  Grandfather didn’t like the sound of it. “But where?” Emil told him that what he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. Grandmother raised a fat hand in farewell. When Emil looked back at them standing in the doorway, Grandfather, in his shame, looked feeble and old and alone.

  By eleven-thirty, they arrived at the hospital. He asked her for some money. She reached into her handbag, then looked at him. “What for?”

  “Irma.”

  She handed over too much. He counted off enough and gave the rest back. Inside, he found the nurse in charge of Irma’s floor. She was a big woman, with a white coat that was stained with old soup. “How long is Irma…” He realized he didn’t know her last name. “A woman,” he tried again, and held a hand at shoulder height. “About this tall. Southerner. Dark hair. Bruised face?”

  The nurse let the silence hang between them a moment. “Bobia. Irma Bobia.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Bobia. How much longer are you keeping her?”

  She looked through files for a while, and Emil leaned against the counter, watching invalids maneuver slowly through the corridors. He thought of the Uzbek and his bodies a few floors below this one.

  “Tomorrow,” she said flatly, and looked back at him.

  It was Tuesday. “Can she stay until the end of the week?”

  “This is not a hotel.”

  The bills were on the counter now, visible under his hand. She noticed. “But it’s a difficult situation,” he said. “She can’t go home now. Not yet.”

  The koronas were hypnotizing her. “Not yet,” she mumbled, then: “Friday?”

  “Friday would be good.” He slid his hand forward until the money dropped over the edge of the counter and onto her desk.

  He went by the room. Yesterday’s bribe had bought a tiny private room with an old, flat bed and a deflated pillow. Irma was asleep. Her blackened, puffy face no longer looked like her. The nose was fatter, the cheeks lumpy, and a few stitches sutured together the flesh around one eye.

  Lena was scared and impatient. She asked how Irma was doing.

  “She was asleep.”

  “Then let me see her.”

  He started the car and drove out of the Unity Medical Complex lot. “There’s no need to involve her anymore.”

  Lena remained silent until the train station appeared in front of them. Then:”Well?”

  He parked near a row of horses with knotted legs and chests.

  “Well?”

  “Wait,” he said.

  The station was a dark, stone monstrosity that sucked up the morning light. Eyes followed Lena—soldiers and beggars. They heard her heels against the cobblestones. Emil shook off a beggar at the door who clutched at his jacket. Peering from above, the sculpted stone hawk sat on a ledge, at rest, wings tight to its sides. Then they were inside the cool, airy station, swallowed by its shadows.

  They sat in the first-class waiting area, drinking something that claimed to be coffee. It was terrible stuff, the black, ground- acorn muck that had come with wartime and still lingered in public places.

  “How long?”

  “What?” He had leaned as far back as possible on the wooden bench to reduce the strain on his back.

  “When does the train leave?”

  The station clock said twelve-thirty. “Half an hour.”

  “We’re going to Cluj? Romania?”

  She had memorized the departures schedule, he realized. “Not the whole way.”

  She sank into quiet speculation, marking up the map in her head. Through the windows he watched young Russian soldiers toss a wooden ball back and forth on the platform. There were five of them in their ragged uniforms, laughing whenever someone dropped the ball.

  “I feel sorry for them,” said Lena.

  He watched them play a little more. “You should feel sorry for the rest of us.”

  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 Béréhové, 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 sock
ets. “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 café, 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.