I didn’t know how to get ready.
“When you were at the Front,” he said, “I slept with Magda. I had sex with your wife, and I wouldn’t trade that single night for anything in this world.” He tapped his head. “I keep it up here always. Why do you think I was so eager to get you this job? Misplaced goddamned guilt. I still valued our friendship. But I had your wife in your own bed, and I hope that knowing this ruins what little joy you still feel when you look at her.”
He stood rigidly on the steps, his chin up, waiting. He was expecting what I would have expected: a fist. His resolution fluctuated as I watched him, his eyes blinked, his nostrils flared as he breathed loudly, the sweat now coursing past his ears, but I did not move. I wanted to. I wanted to throw myself on him and break his bones. I wanted my fist, with each of its five rings and a story for each, to crush him. It would have been an easy thing. But I just looked at him, then past him, to where the city kept moving along the narrow street, pedestrians and automobiles and a few horses pulling emptied, dirty carts.
“Well then,” I heard him say. He took a step farther down, nodded briefly, and joined the traffic down below.
17
I don’t know why I didn’t hit him. He would have respected me for it. But the anger wasn’t upon me yet-it was only shock. Maybe it was simply the residue of our decades of friendship, and that for a long time he had been so good to me-because of guilt or some other weakness. Or maybe I knew he was right: Ever since the book had come out I’d stopped calling him, stopped working to maintain our friendship.
I went back into the station, where Leonek and Emil and Brano were standing around Brano’s desk again. Kaminski was talking, and they were all smoking, a soft cloud hovering above their heads. My phone was ringing.
“Daddy?”
“Yes,” I said, for a moment unsure who it was. “Yes?”
“Mother wants to know-”
“What does she want to know?”
“When you’ll be over for dinner. With this friend of yours. That’s how she said it- that friend of his.”
My watch took a second to focus. “Tell her seven. We’ll be there at seven.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“This friend of yours, he’s a cute one?”
It was a joke, I knew, but I couldn’t rise to it. “I’ll see you at seven.”
“Here,” said Kaminski, as I approached. He held out a cigarette. I took it, noticing the small pin on his lapel. A red rippled flag. “I was telling the guys about the Komsomol.”
“The youth brigades?” I asked. I didn’t care what he was talking about. I just wanted some noise.
“You know them,” he said. Everyone knew about the Komsomol. Even The Spark carried articles of their industrious exploits in unclaimed regions on the other side of the Empire. “I went to the virgin lands in northern Kazakhstan after my years here, to help farm. Such good soil. Terrible climate, but what soil!” He held his gangly hands out, palms up. “You know what it’s like to work with your hands like that? It’s a dream. That’s what it is. I coordinated the work, and I ate with these fine young people in the fields, then we all went back to work, such hard work, and at night we ate around a campfire and sang revolutionary songs. You have to imagine it if you weren’t there. Fifty, a hundred passionate young people singing songs about their hopes and dreams for the future. No, I don’t think you can imagine it.” He shook his head. “Over here, maybe it’s different. But in the Motherland, we’re in this together. We build everything from nothing. That’s socialism. It’s the collective spirit that moves us on. Do you understand?”
I lit the cigarette finally, and visions of Stefan-stretched naked over my wife, grunting, his flesh sweating-only now began to fade.
“The peasants,” he said, “they brought us flowers. Can you believe it? Maybe you don’t know real peasants here, but you don’t get flowers from Kazhak peasants for no reason. They knew we were there to save them, that we were there to save the Union. Khrushchev had told us to make the plains arable. And for the sake of humanity, that’s what we did. Not me personally, of course, I was only there a couple years, mostly administrative; but we did it, all of us working together. Last year we worried that everything was ruined by the drought, but this year, I’m told, the wheat yield is going to be unprecedented.” He shook his head again, this time with admiration. “They’re still doing it now. They sing their songs at night and work all day and hope for better things. And better things are happening. Just wait.”
It was a peculiar thing to see. This man from Moscow had us surrounding him in a corner of the office we never visited, had us listening to him as if he were our kindergarten teacher. He had a sparkle in his eye, and a lively voice, and when you didn’t pay too much attention to what he was saying, you could feel his excitement yourself. Emil and Leonek were transfixed. Brano stared, his face revealing nothing. Kaminski was a real orator. A tremor ran through my body. It was a terrible, magical feeling.
Then I noticed the index finger of his right hand. Moska was right; it twitched. And I remembered that the word administrative meant a lot more than paperwork and long lunch breaks.
18
At a nearby bar filled with workers sipping vodkas and beer, I ordered a couple brandies for us. Leonek reached for his wallet, but I put a hand on his elbow to stop him. A warm shower had fallen on our way there, and the place was humid with wet bodies and drooping hats. We squeezed into an empty table in the center.
I wanted to say something, to get this started, but nothing came to me. We drank in silence, him looking over the crowd, blinking, his dark face reminding me of what little I knew of his background-childhood in an Armenian village, until the Young Turks started butchering his people, then the life of a refugee until he landed here with his mother.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally.
“You already told me.”
“I would have liked to make the funeral. Were there a lot of people?”
He shrugged. “The guys came, and her friends from the neighborhood. There were enough.”
“That’s good.” I sounded a little stupid. “How old was she?”
He looked at his glass on the table. In the voices and sweat of all the men around us I remembered the clean, sweet-smelling Italian, then, inevitably, Stefan’s disgusted face.
“She pushed her way through so much.” Leonek looked at me. “Even when the Turks killed my father, she kept a level head. Through Yugoslavia, to Bulgaria and Italy, then here, she kept everything together. I wanted to stay back home and fight. But they would have killed me too. She knew this. She made me come with her.”
I thought I should say something, but what do you say to that? I noticed then that he’d shaved, he looked clean, and this was something I appreciated.
“I even considered moving to the Armenian Republic a few years ago. Can you imagine that?” A smile finally split his face. “But this is my world now, not Central Asia. I wouldn’t know what to do in Yelevan.”
I agreed.
“You remember when Sergei was killed?”
I nodded.
“It was her again. She was the one who made me let it go, to stop looking into his murder. I was angry at her a long time about that. He and I were close-we were the two foreigners in the station house. Sergei was a brother to me. You know that.”
I did.
“At first I didn’t understand. But she understood.” His thin hands were on his glass, his fingers tapping. “Then people in the other offices were sent away-suddenly, with no warning, their desks were empty. Remember that?”
We all remembered that.
“Only then did I start to understand. She always knew. She saved me.”
She had saved herself as well. An old woman who knows how to survive knows that her son had better stay employed. Back then it was truer than ever. We all learned a degree of blindness-first during the Occupation, and then after the Liberation.
The d
oor banged open, and five laughing students barged in. They had pink faces and shoddy clothes. “Five brandies!” shouted the first one, with an attempted mustache shadowing his lip. They gathered around the bar, talking animatedly. The workers looked at them a moment, then went back to their drinks.
“School must be going well,” said Leonek.
“Demonstrators,” I told him. “They were in Victory Square today.”
“How about that.” He turned in his seat to face them. “This is something, isn’t it?”
I shrugged.
“Remember how it used to be? No one would think to demonstrate. And look at them now!” His face pulsed as he considered it. “God, I wish I was young.”
“You are young.”
“We’re both young,” he said. “We should be out there too, standing next to them.”
It was good to see him pleased by this thought. “You going to make up a sign?”
“Why not?”
“What would it say?”
He put his chin in his palms, elbows on the table-he really did look young. “I don’t know. Isn’t that amazing? I’ve got no idea. What about you?”
“I’m not the demonstrating kind.”
“What does that mean?”
He was waiting, eyes big. “I have a wife and a daughter,” I said. “If I get thrown into jail, how would they fare? I don’t want my girl to grow up fatherless.”
He opened his mouth-something was ready to pop out-but then he shut it. He said, “Maybe that’s why I should do something. No one depends on me anymore.”
“Maybe.” But then I remembered what men like Mikhail Kaminski and Brano Sev would use to keep demonstrators from forcing Russian tanks to roll down our streets: interrogations, informers, secret police, and prison camps.
19
I drove us through the busy evening streets, stopping for busses and trams and bicycles, until we were back among the unfinished towers of the Ninth District. We parked half in a ditch, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to make it out later on. Claudia was outside with her chickens again-she stopped to give me a severe nod. She was still waiting for me to pick up her drunkard brother, and no doubt Magda had been filling her head with advice to pester me. But this time she chose silence.
Agnes opened the door. She wore a knee-length dress I had never seen before, with a pattern of purple-and-yellow flowers. She stood on her toes to kiss my lowered cheek. “Do you remember Leonek?” I said. “Leonek, Agnes.”
Leonek kissed her hand, and, over his head, she winked at me.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked.
She nodded toward the kitchen, then Pavel trotted in from the bedroom and gave Leonek two high barks.
Magda’s hair hung over her face as she brushed a plate of chicken bones into the trash can. When she looked up at me, I could hardly see her through the strands. She brushed them away with her wrist and smiled. It was the first time we’d really seen each other for a while, and momentarily it was as if nothing bad had ever passed between us in the provinces.
Then it came back to me: Stefan, his choking breaths beating out of him as he writhed over her breasts, her clean smooth belly, her face.
“You’re late,” she said.
“How was the train?”
“Well, it got me here.”
I went to a cabinet for the wine as she washed the plate off in the sink and set it with other dishes on a towel. “You know Leonek, right?”
“Sure, yeah. I don’t remember the last time I saw him. A year ago?”
“His mother died recently. So he might be a little strange.”
“I see.”
“Come on, then.”
Leonek stood up stiffly when we came out, Agnes folded on the sofa beside him. He kissed Magda’s hand with purpose. It reminded me, if I needed the reminder, that Magda was really quite beautiful; she could still stop a man in his tracks.
20
The silence hung over us as we dug into the bean soup, then the paprika chicken, forks and knives scraping plates, glasses pressing to lips, quiet gulps, water and red wine. I saw Agnes place a sliver of chicken in her lap, glance to the side and toss it to Pavel, who silently gobbled it. When she looked up again I gave her a sharp shake of the head. Magda glanced at Leonek, who was focused on his food, then looked at me. I smiled, but she didn’t. I said the most benign thing that came to mind: “A Frenchman told me recently that plot is dead.”
“What?” Magda asked, leaning forward as if she hadn’t heard.
“Plot. He says that no one’s doing it anymore.”
She grinned. “In the West maybe. Was that Georgi’s poet?”
“It was.”
Leonek looked up. “What are you talking about?”
“Literature,” I said.
“Oh.” He nodded at his plate.
Magda tried. She told us about the hour-long line she’d stood in, waiting for beef, but when she reached the front, all that was left was chicken.
While she spoke, Stefan’s pale flesh came to me again, and I couldn’t muster any comment. Neither could Leonek.
But her stamina was high. She launched into a description of her factory. “Textiles, we even make the Militia uniforms. Well, the shirts at least. Lydia works opposite me on the line, and she makes jokes about undermining quotas every time she leaves for a cigarette. You should meet her sometime, she’s hilarious. I’ll set you up.”
Leonek smiled politely but said nothing. I leaned down and scratched the mosquito bite on my ankle.
Magda watched him return to his plate; it was almost empty. “Would you like some more?”
“Thank you, no,” he said through a mouthful. “It’s very good.”
“I told you it would be,” I said. At the end of the table, Agnes was bent toward the floor, feeding Pavel, but I no longer felt like reprimanding her.
Magda refilled our wineglasses, then turned to me with round eyes and tilted her head in Leonek’s direction.
“Are you on a case now?” I asked.
His tongue searched behind his lower lip. “The city’s pretty quiet. Except for those students, maybe.”
I couldn’t see Agnes at all; she had vanished behind the edge of the table.
“Students?” asked Magda.
I shrugged. “Demonstrators.”
“Oh.”
“Otherwise,” said Leonek, “not many homicides.”
Magda spoke again, but slowly. “On the way home today, I saw two men in front of the cinema. I’ve never seen them before. They were pretty destitute. They had long coats, both of them, and through the flaps I could see their old prison shirts. Striped, you know?”
Leonek seemed to wake a little.
“They looked menacing to me, standing with their hands in their pockets, and when they watched me pass I was a little scared. I don’t know what they were thinking.”
I said, “I can imagine what they were thinking.”
“No-not that. I know that look. They were thinking something different.” She paused. “But you can’t really read faces, can you?”
“Sometimes you can.”
“They’ve been through a lot,” said Leonek.
We both turned to him.
“After the funeral, I talked to one of them in a bar.” He thought a second, eyes glazed, then returned. “Slavery. That’s what it was. And after years of being watched over by guards, after the malaria and executions-yes, that’s what he told me: They often executed men in a field near the barracks. After all that, what can you expect from someone?”
Agnes was in her chair now, paying attention. She stared at Leonek with something approaching wonder.
“Remember in August?” he asked me. “Just before your vacation. There was that Ukrainian. He came back from the camps and beat his son to death because he’d become a clerk for the Central Committee.”
“Lev Urlovsky,” I said. “He was at the Vatrina Work Camp.”
“Yeah.” He leaned forward
. “When we arrested him, he showed no remorse. None at all. It was strange to see.”
“After killing his own son?” said Magda. “That’s horrible.”
“Agnes,” I said, and it took a second for her to hear me. “Agnes, take Pavel for a walk.”
She sighed loudly, but got up and left the room. Pavel followed, nails clicking on the floor.
“You don’t know,” said Leonek. “You just don’t know what they’ve been through. The Turks were going to take my father to prison, but they shot him instead.” His hands settled on the table, on either side of his plate. “Maybe he was lucky.”
I heard the front door open and slam shut.
21
The two wine bottles were empty, so I went to get another from the kitchen, and when I returned, Leonek was leaning back in his chair, legs stretched out beneath the table, frowning again. Magda shrugged. When I filled his glass, he took it absently and pressed it to his lips, but did not drink. Then he set the glass back on the table and looked at Magda. “I’m going to do it,” he said.
I was almost afraid to ask. “Do what?”
He turned to me. “I’m going back into the files. I’m going to investigate Sergei’s murder.”
“You’re sure?”
“Why not?” He drank some wine. “I told you before, there are no more responsibilities for me. This is the only responsibility I have left.”
“Who’s Sergei?” Magda asked.
“You met him a couple times during the Occupation.”
“My partner, Sergei Malevich.” Leonek put his elbows on the table. “He was killed just after the war. Shot in the back of the head.”
“I think I remember. The Russian, right?”
We nodded.
“He was nice.” She looked at Leonek. “And it wasn’t investigated?”
I spoke up. “He was looking into the rape and murder of a couple girls in a synagogue. We knew who had done it, everyone knew: Russian soldiers. But we couldn’t do a thing. Sergei was insistent, though.”
The confession tyb-2 Page 5
