11
I called the Militia switchboard in the morning and coughed through my lie. The operator took it as easily as she’d taken all the other calls that morning, finishing with a knowing Take care of yourself that meant more than a warning about illness.
Agnes and Magda left together, and I sat with Pavel and the newspaper. My coffee became cold. Although the fighting in Budapest would go on for a few more days, it was evident to The Spark that the battle was over. The Hungarian agitators of reaction are shrinking back into their bullet-riddled holes. They were defending from broken windows. And the Americans, despite their proud radio talk, were staying out of it.
There were only a few lines about the demonstration: Yesterday, an unwelcome scene appeared on our streets. Hungarian and other foreign elements staged a counterrevolutionary riot that quickly exposed their violent intentions. Four brave members of the People’s Militia were injured restoring order.
I was preparing to take Pavel for a walk when the telephone rang. It was Moska. “How are you feeling?”
I hesitated. “Sick. I feel sick.”
“So do I, Ferenc, but I can’t do anything about it. Other than Brano and Kaminski, this place is deserted.”
“Oh.”
“Listen. Your disappeared woman has been found.”
“Svetla Woznica?”
“Third District. Central train station. Ferenc, they picked her up for prostitution.”
“For what?”
“When they brought her in, someone noticed the missing person’s report, so they called over here. Are you too sick to pick her up? I can’t leave the station.”
“Can’t they drive her over?”
“Too short-staffed. Seems half their men are out with the flu.”
The Third District Militia station had been moved when its previous home-the old royal police station on Bishop Albert Street, later Engels Street-caught fire in 1952. The cause of the fire was never fully proven, but five Party officials who had, before the Liberation, been high in the Peasant Party were blamed. The charge was subversion, and they were executed. The new station was a concrete slab built on the ruins of a bomb-damaged apartment building. Flat-faced, four floors. It stood out on a street of Habsburg homes. Above double doors, a blue sign told visitors in flat, unadorned letters: MILITIA, DISTRICT III.
The old desk veteran who took me to the basement cells muttered about all the young men who had called in sick. “Forty-three years, and not a day missed. What’s this? They don’t fool me. Not one minute. Lazy. ”
I wondered if he really believed that. “What about this girl?”
“She wasn’t even hooking for money,” he said as he turned on the corridor light.
“What?”
“Ticket. She was selling her goods for a train ticket. Can you believe it?”
“Where to?”
“Does it matter?”
Svetla Woznica was behind a steel door with a barred view-window. She was curled up on the cot in the back corner, and though I didn’t look close, her bedpan smelled of fresh vomit. From the ceiling, a fluorescent light buzzed.
When she rolled over to look at us, at first I didn’t recognize her. Her upturned nose was ringed by a purple bruise where someone had hit her, and above her thin cheeks her eyes bulged out.
“Svetla Woznica?”
She used an arm to help sit up. Her hair was chopped strangely, as if with gardening shears. “You’ve come.” Her voice cracked.
“You going to take the whore?” asked the veteran.
I squatted beside the cot. Her skin, where it wasn’t bruised, was as white as a corpse’s. “Can you leave us alone?”
The veteran hesitated. “You’re not-” he began, then shrugged and walked out, closing the door behind him.
Svetla’s smile exposed a few missing teeth. “Want a good time, mister?” The Russian accent was more apparent now. “You’re very big, aren’t you?”
“How long has it been?” I pointed at her bruised forearm.
She looked at it too, and shrugged. “Yesterday morning. You got some?”
I tried to lay out the questions in my head, but the stink was distracting me. “Svetla, tell me why you left your husband.”
Her mouth opened behind her closed lips, as if she was going to be sick again. But she found her voice. “That prole bastard.” She rubbed her face. “Do you know? Did you get it out of him? Of course you didn’t.” She trembled in a way that reminded me of him. “He had the drug. It was for him. Then when Papa went back to Moscow Malik said, Svetla, you want a try? It’s very nice.” She closed her eyes. “It was nice, just like he said. But he didn’t say how you need it. Because that,” she said, tapping her temple, “ that was his plan. First a little, it’s for both of us. Svetla, we share. Then all of it, all the medicine for my little Svetla.” She was remembering with her expressions, half-crying, half-laughing. “You know how it is? At first it’s very good. And then it’s better.”
I watched her bruised nose, her squinting eyes, understanding slowly. “The morphine?”
“First morphine, yes. Then pills and needles with no names-names I don’t know. I’m a whore, not a doctor. Not like Malik.”
I swallowed.
“At first, you know, it was not bad. Then he said, You need rest, my Svetla. I know a spa in Southern Bohemia.”
“Trebon.”
She shook her head. “But we didn’t go to Trebon. I knew, I could tell he was driving to the mountains. To that dacha.” She covered her mouth with a hand, eyes big. “That was,” she said. “That was when it was very bad. He wanted to know what he could do to his little Svetla when no one could hear. He found a lot of things. He’s imaginative.” She uncovered her mouth. “And when he wasn’t doing his things, he moved me around. That prole’s so smart. He said Svetla, we exercise you so you don’t have bedsores, we make sure you don’t die. Like a very smart doctor.”
I started to say Why? but I didn’t know what that meant, or what the answer could be.
Her smile was wide and thin, and flattened out her emaciated face as she read my mind. “I wanted to go home. I want to go home.” She glanced at the steel door. “Malik, he wanted a quiet wife. He said, a good wife. He made me a good wife. You stay here, Svetla, with me. In that room with the lock. And no windows. He showed his love with a needle and his prick. You know what I mean? He dressed me up, put all that makeup on my face, and gave me this lovely hairstyle.” She touched her chopped bangs. “Needle and the prick.” She looked very tired. “And now. Now you take me back, I know. I know this. I’m a crazy whore, but I’m not stupid.”
12
I signed the forms and took her and her small bag of clothes into my custody. We drove along the Tisa as I tried to make up my mind. It was his word against a morphine addict’s. He’d gotten rid of the lock on the bedroom door, and she had taken the rest of the morphine and the other drugs he’d used to keep her incapacitated. There were no witnesses. Malik knew all of this, and that was why he had felt secure enough to face the People’s Militia when regulations required our entry-and, ultimately, to use us to retrieve her.
“How did you get away?”
She lifted her forehead from the door window. “Svetla’s not stupid. I told you this, now listen. I even have control, a little.” She smiled crookedly. “I just didn’t take it-the pills, no pills. Simple. Very hard, da, but simple. The medicine under the bed and Svetla playacted. After a week, just a week, I was stronger. Maybe Svetla shouldn’t have brought the medicine with her, but I did. Now here I am, back on the medicine.”
“But the lock. You were locked in.”
She considered it, then spoke slowly, “God unlocked the door for me.” She looked at a passing bus. “It was a miracle, you know? But not so strange. God wanted Svetla to get away, so she did. But first I looked for a knife, you know, to kill him. Malik is a clever prole. So clever. He took away all the knives. The whole kitchen, no knives! Such a clever prole.”
Malik forgets to lock her door, or maybe he’s decided there’s no longer any need, then she tears the kitchen apart in her desire to kill him.
I stopped at the central bank, and while she waited in the car, humming to herself, I stood in line and withdrew a quarter of the money from my account, more than half of it in rubles. Then, at the train station, I bought a sleeper cabin to Moscow, both beds so she would be alone.
I found the conductor and pulled him aside. Using both my Militia certificate and a stack of koronas, I commanded him to keep a close watch on her. “She’s not to leave the cabin, you follow? You bring her meals. She’s to stay on the train until Moscow, where someone from the Soviet Militia will pick her up. You are also to hold this,” I said, handing over an envelope heavy with rubles. “You will give it to the Moscow militiaman. He knows how much to expect. This one,” I added, handing over another, “is for the border guards. She does not have papers. You’re still with me?”
He started to protest, but I leaned over him to make it clear that we both knew what was and was not possible at the frontier.
I gave Svetla a third envelope of rubles, in case something went wrong once she was on the other side. That was when she finally understood what was happening. She started to cry, fell on her knees, and pressed her bruised, wet face to my hand. Some old women in the ticket line looked at me with scorn, and a few men smiled.
13
It took a while, and the operator had to call me back, but finally I was speaking, in very poor Russian, to the switchboard operator of the Moscow Militia. She was stern-sounding, but when she heard the name she brightened. Immediately. There was no one in the office around me, and Moska’s door was shut.
“Da?”
“Comrade Inspector Kliment Malevich?”
“Moment.”
I was trying to not think about Svetla’s story, the details she never quite spelled out, and to ignore the knots in my stomach when I didn’t succeed.
“What is it?”
I hadn’t spoken to him since he and his mother had left almost two decades ago. He had been a fat child then. “Comrade Kliment Malevich?”
“Da.”
“I was a friend of your father’s. In the royal police.”
He hummed into the phone, unsure of what to say.
“My name is Ferenc Kolyeszar.”
“I think I remember.” He sounded young. “Didn’t you…”
“Yes. Leonek Terzian and I discovered your father’s body.”
That seemed to reassure him. “Okay, Ferenc. How are you?”
“As good as can be expected in difficult times.”
“Truly.”
“And yourself? Your mother?”
“I’m excellent, but my mother’s been dead five years.”
“Was it easy for her? I hope.”
It was obvious to us both that I was no good at small talk. “Tell me, Ferenc. Tell me why you’ve called.”
I described the situation in as much detail as I could, so he would understand the necessity of what I was asking of him.
“Who’s this husband of hers?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“So he’s political.” He paused. “And I do what, exactly?”
“You give her a ride, that’s all. Find out where her father lives and drive her there.” I told him the exact number of rubles he would receive.
“You don’t need to pay me, Ferenc. I’ll do it.”
“Consider it expenses-what’s left over is a tip. And if the conductor gives you one ruble less, break his knees.”
Kliment laughed.
As I hung up, Moska came out of his office with a half-eaten sandwich, wiping a spot off his tie. “Where’s the Woznica woman?”
I swiveled in my chair. “Who?”
“Jesus, Ferenc.” He brought the sandwich down to his side. “Tell me.”
“Wasn’t her. Some hooker I’d known from before. I took her back to the Canal District and told her to stay away from trains.”
He didn’t know whether or not to believe me. But he had other things on his mind. “I’m sending you back there. To the canals. I’ve got a real murder for you.”
“I think I feel my illness coming back.”
Moska didn’t smile. “Come on.”
He settled in his chair and watched me sit across from him. “Do you know what you’re doing, Ferenc?”
I shrugged a forced unconcern.
“I was as disturbed as anyone by yesterday. You know that.”
I did know.
He picked up a typed sheet. “If you need to talk it over, okay? Just come to me. I’ll do what I can from my side, and if you need anything, let me know. Don’t ruin your career.”
“Thanks.”
He looked at me a moment more, then read from the sheet, his tone back to its usual efficiency. “Augustus II Square, number three. A burned body.” He handed it over, and there wasn’t a lot more. No identifying traits, just a body in the center of the Canal District. It had been called in anonymously and not yet verified. “You’re the only one around to take the case.”
“I can’t pass it on to someone else tomorrow?”
“Stefan’s still wasting time on that suicide, and Leonek’s working on a dead case-not to mention he thinks I hid Sergei’s files.” He shook his head. “That kid doesn’t have the slightest idea how a bureaucracy is run. Anyway, when Emil gets over his flu, he can help you.”
On my way out I passed Kaminski and Brano Sev in the corridor. Brano looked again like himself-he’d gone back to the long leather coat, and his somber mouth was too small to ever form a shout.
“So you’re feeling better,” said Kaminski. There was no more levity in his manner. He’d run out of it.
“Yes.”
“A lot of sick guys today. Me, I’ve got a sore back. Stumbled carelessly into a van. You, though,” he said, his trigger finger tapping his thigh, “You were quite sick yesterday. Very ill. It was obvious in everything you did.”
“I’m okay.”
Brano nodded at my hand, which held the folded sheet. “But you’re shaking. You’re not quite recovered.”
“Looks like we should keep an eye on him,” said Kaminski.
I pressed my lips together until they formed something meant to look like a smile.
14
The anxiety collapsed upon me on the front steps, the bright sun spotting my vision. I had bribed state employees of the railroads, frontier guards, and even a Moscow militiaman. I’d aided the wife of a Party official in leaving the country illegally. Yesterday, I had walked away from the scene of battle, and in the process attacked a member of the KGB.
I reached the empty sidewalk and found my car. I had trouble getting the key into the door, then into the ignition. My joints were heavy, gummed up. I leaned my head on the wheel and took deep breaths.
A burned body would not walk away. I could wait for tomorrow. Or the next day. Or forever.
There were only a few farmers in the markets I passed, looking bored and alone. No children, and all the window shutters were closed. A general, unspoken strike had descended on the Capital. Just as the students had predicted.
I turned on the radio and settled into the sofa. There was a show of song and recitation for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. There is nothing secret about the Party-we all know what it is. I wished the day would end. I lit a cigarette, and in the smoke saw Svetla Woznica sick in her cabin, racing toward the Soviet border. It’s all of us. It’s me; it’s you. I saw an empty city, shutters closed, then another one filled with tanks and gunfire and shattered windows. The Party is a tree in the desert; it’s a star at midnight. Magda beneath Stefan’s sweating white body, half-listening to the Americans’ radio broadcasts, then stumbling home and muttering some guilty words about Lydia, but feeling only the ache in her groin.
Be happy. A great Party means you are never alone.
Agnes showed up with Pavel,
and I realized I hadn’t noticed his absence. He sprang onto the sofa and climbed on me. His breath stank as he licked my chin. Agnes brought a cup of water from the kitchen.
“Why are you home so early?” I asked.
She sat on the floor and squinted-her glasses were nowhere to be seen. “Not enough teachers,” she said. “Sick. They tried to teach us anyway, but by lunchtime they saw it was no use.”
“You took the bus back?”
“Had to wait forever. But Daniela came along. Wasn’t so bad. Where were you? I thought you were sick too.”
“I had to work.” My cigarette was burned down, so I carried it to the kitchen, dropping ash along the way. Agnes changed the radio station.
“Daniela told me about this,” she said by way of explanation.
So we sat together on the sofa and listened to the Americans. It was a day of injustice, they said. Although sporadic fighting continued in some areas of the city, Budapest was now clearly lost. Imre Nagy was hiding in the Yugoslav embassy. I put my arm around Agnes, and she leaned into me. Pavel was quiet in her lap. When the news began to repeat itself, I turned it off.
Around six, as I was cooking eggs for dinner, Magda showed up. She seemed disheveled somehow, as if she’d put her clothes on backward. But they looked fine. She sat at the kitchen table and watched me with surprise. I didn’t think it was because I was cooking.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked finally.
“What?”
“Yesterday. The demonstration. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
I stared back at her. “How did you know?”
“Word gets around.”
I wondered if Stefan had shed tears when he’d told her the story. I set a plate in front of her. “You weren’t in a listening mood.”
After dinner, we put on the Americans again, sitting together like a proper family, until the screech of jamming overcame it. As I turned it back to music, I told Agnes that, whether or not everyone else listened to this station, it was still against the law. It should not be discussed outside the family. “The volume should remain low,” I said. “And afterward, always change the station. You understand?”
The confession tyb-2 Page 9
