When the words began to blur, he went to the bedroom, undressed and folded his clothes, then climbed into the cold bed.
Brano was not the kind of man who liked to recall his youth, preferring to forget that time of zbrka — Dijana Frankovic’s word for “the confusion of too many thing.” Before and during the war, he had stumbled through the stages leading to adulthood with his loud friend, Marek. The road to adulthood had been so clumsy and hesitant that even at the end of that life he was still unsure what to call himself. But after sending away his father, the zbrka dissipated. He was Brano Oleksy Sev, first a private, and then a sergeant, a captain, a lieutenant, a major. Then a factory worker. Now, he was neither an officer nor a worker but something undefined, lying in this cold room in the north of the country, where he always found the childhood zbrka waiting patiently for him.
As he warmed, he closed his eyes to focus on the provincial silence. It seemed clean to him, without malice, but then the noise did come, in little bursts, then a long high note: drunk men’s howls wavering on the cold breeze, from far off. At least that was something familiar from the Capital.
9 FEBRUARY 1967, THURSDAY
His back was stiff from the too-soft bed, so he stood beside it and stretched his arms and twisted, then rolled his shoulders, the smell of breakfast rousing him. After a quick wash he ate bread and jam and two boiled potatoes. The eastern sun lit the dust in the kitchen while Mother talked about the people she expected to come to her store today, because villagers were as predictable as the clock on the wall.
They walked to the center along the rivuleted gravel road, nodding at those who nodded, and he stood aside while his mother spoke hesitantly to old women before finally introducing him to Zuzanny Wichowska and Elwira Lisiewicz and Halina Grzybowska. He removed his hat for each woman, and though they gave him timid smiles, they did not offer their hands.
On each woman’s forehead was a fading black stain. Yesterday, he realized, had been Ash Wednesday.
His mother’s shop was a narrow, nameless place two doors down from the butcher’s. She unlocked the door and opened the curtains to let in light. Shelves packed with canned foods and liquor bottles grew to the ceiling, and under the glass counter lay sausages and cheese. She showed him the back room filled with boxes her young assistant had yet to unpack, then made coffee on an electric coil. While they drank, a tall sixty-year-old man in a faded smock appeared with pallets of bread, the ash on his forehead sweated almost completely away. Mother asked how his wife, Ewa, was, then introduced him to Brano as Zygmunt. Brano shook his hand while she signed the invoice.
“You’re enjoying Bobrka?”
“Just arrived last night.”
“Different,” said Zygmunt.
“Bobrka?”
“Different from the Capital.” He glanced at Brano’s polished shoes. “A big man in the Capital is just another man in Bobrka.”
“The reverse is true as well.”
“It may be,” he said, taking the invoice from Iwona Sev. “And that might be why I’m still in Bobrka.” He touched the brim of his hat before he left.
Brano said he would go for a walk.
“To register with the Militia?”
“Of course.”
“You’re as predictable as a villager, Brani.”
Without his mother as an intermediary, there was nothing to connect Brano to the ashed villagers who gave him cursory glances; there were no words to be said. He walked along the main road that branched out from the church, past yards with chickens and self-satisfied dogs, to where a single white Skoda was parked outside the Militia station, a small but austere concrete box with a tin roof and its Militia sign propped in the window. The interior was dim and simple: a gray, scratched desk, a chair on each side, and an empty bulletin board. A portrait of General Secretary Pankov in a crisp fedora hung over the desk. Brano waited until a voice cursed from the back room.
“Hello?”
The voice silenced.
“Hello?”
The far door opened and a wrinkled uniform appeared: a young man with black, greasy bangs swept over an ashless forehead. His sunken eyes were dark, his lips wide and without expression. “Yes? Need something?”
“I’m here to register.”
“Register?” He moved to his desk and sat down.
“I’m from the Capital. I’m staying here now.”
The man motioned to the opposite chair and removed a stack of papers from a drawer. He went through them, pulling one out, then shaking his head and returning it to the stack and trying another until he found the form he needed. He turned it around for Brano. “Here you go.”
Brano took a pen from a holder on the desk. “This is for foreigners. I need form AE-342.”
The militiaman flushed. “Yes, yes. How about that?” He returned to the stack. “Here, of course. AE-342.”
While Brano filled it out the militiaman eyed him, the only sound the pen tip scratching paper. Brano passed it over and watched him read. The hawk on his blue Militia shoulder patch was dirty. Then Brano handed over his internal passport, and the militiaman’s lip twitched at the sight of the Ministry hawk on the red cover.
“Uh, it says here you work at the Pidkora factory.”
“That’s true.”
“But your passport-”
“Former employer. 1 haven’t had a chance to change my documents.”
The militiaman cleared his throat. “Well, Comrade Sev, it’s good to have visitors in Bobrka. I’m Captain Tadeusz Rasko.” He stuck out his hand and Brano took it, rising imperceptibly. “How long will you be with us?”
“A week, I think. But my foreman is very flexible.”
“Very good,” he said. “So you’re here for a vacation?”
“I’ve worked hard this year.”
“I imagine.”
“What do you imagine?”
The captain’s mouth chewed air for a moment. “Just that you’ve worked hard, Comrade Sev.”
Brano nodded at his passport on the desk. “Can you stamp that, then?”
“Of course.” It took another minute of desperate searching to come up with the proper stamp, then more to find the inkpad. But Captain Rasko did finally place the small purple entry stamp on a clean page.
Brano walked farther out of town and then up the dirt road leading into the hills that surrounded Bobrka. He passed old women he barely recognized from previous visits on his way to the windswept fields spotted by patches of snow. He tugged his hat lower and slipped his hands into his pockets against the cold. There were a few houses up here, one freshly painted, but he stopped at the low two-bedroom that needed a paint job more than any other.
The front door was open before he’d reached the steps, and tall, thin Klara looked down on him, smiling. The spot on her forehead was very black, fresh.
“Mother said you’d be by.”
“That was a good guess on her part.”
He kissed her cheeks and held her briefly before she drew him inside, where the warmth encouraged him to strip off his coat and hat. There were more food smells here, pork and cabbage, and when she noticed him sniffing she asked if he was hungry. He was not. “But you’re so thin, Brano.”
“I’m fat enough.”
Klara began chain-smoking in the living room, while the fingers of her free hand pinched the fabric of her long brown skirt. He asked about her life, and she told an abbreviated story of the three years since they’d last talked, her dark eyebrows bobbing. While living with Lucjan’s parents, they had built this little house (which, during his last visit, before he left for West Berlin, had been nothing more than a concrete foundation) and moved in two years ago. “You’ve seen the outside, right? We got the paint from the factory in Sanok. Never use that stuff. It’s just like chalk, washes away.”
“I’ll remember.”
Lucjan was still working at the petroleum cooperative in a number of capacities, though these days his work was mostly administrative. “
He’s immensely talented. He could do the work with his eyes shut.”
“He always seemed talented,” Brano lied.
“Lucjan’s been making his own vodka in the basement. You’ll like it. It’s fruity.” She wrinkled her nose when she said that.
Then she asked, and he told her the same vague things about his life that he had told his mother.
“A factory, huh?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“But why?” she asked.
“What?”
“You told us you’d left the Ministry, but you never said why. Did you finally get disillusioned?”
He looked at her a moment, wondering if he could work his way through that lie as well. No, not with Klara. “I was fired.”
“Fired?” She straightened.
“Yes. I was working in Vienna, and a colleague double-crossed me. He sent in a report claiming that I had tried to sabotage his work. Can I have a cigarette?”
She handed one over and lit another for herself. “Well? Did you?”
“Of course not. I’d never sabotage the Ministry.”
Klara seemed amused, as if this were something she could not quite believe. “You were accused of sabotage and were then given a job in a factory.”
“If I didn’t have allies, I’d be in a work camp now. Not everyone in the Ministry believes this man.”
“Who is this man?”
He stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “Someone who wanted to get ahead and didn’t care who he ruined on the way up.”
“And…”
“And?”
“And did he get ahead?”
Brano nodded as he crushed his unfinished cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s an imperfect world.”
“And now you’ve come here.”
“A little vacation.”
“But here,” she said. “Why here? ”
He wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “It’s home.”
“You realize that everyone in town knows about you.”
“What about me?”
“What you do for a living.”
“What I did for a living.”
“It doesn’t matter to them. No one here trusts you.”
“I don’t see why they shouldn’t trust me. My job was only about uncovering the truth.”
She flicked ash off her cigarette. “Come on, Brano. They don’t want to end up another Tibor Kraus.”
“Who?”
“You know. That man from Dukla, the butcher.”
“I don’t know him.”
Klara sighed. “It was in The Spark. He’d been using one of those machines for making meat pies. What are they called?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, he adjusted the gears so it made them with an ounce less dough. Then he sold the extra dough on the side. Made some money.”
“He was caught?”
She nodded.
“Good.”
“He was executed, Brano. Because of meat pies.” She waited, but he didn’t say a thing. “This is what I mean about the villagers here. You scare them. You know you do. Hell, what you did to Father is almost a legend.”
“I helped him.”
“You’re the only one who believes that, but it doesn’t matter. You know what they think, and that’s why you never visit. It’s not relaxing to be in a place you’re not welcome.”
“So I’m not welcome here?”
“In this house, yes. But in Bobrka…” She waved the smoldering cigarette in a circular motion and let go of her skirt. “Who knows?” She stood up. “We’ll see you tonight?”
When he walked back into the village, the eyes that fell upon him had a different effect than they’d had an hour before. He had known he was not welcome, but Klara saying it aloud had made the idea flesh. A mutt behind a fence barked maniacally at him, and in the eyes of passersby he saw not only a lack of welcome but actual hostility. The old women were musing over how to fit him into their wood-burning ovens, and the men were wondering where on his body a shotgun blast would best end his untrustworthy existence.
The bar in the center was only large enough for three small tables and a short counter. One table was taken up by two old men playing cards on either side of a half-full bottle of rye vodka, and behind the bar a young man with a monobrow beneath his ashy mark bent over a case of Zywiec, counting bottles. Brano waited until he stood up. The recognition flickered and then steadied in the bartender’s eyes. “A beer?”
“Sure,” said Brano.
He removed a warm Zywiec from the box, uncapped it, and slid it over, then returned to his counting.
“And a paper?”
The man looked up. “What?”
“Do you have a copy of The Spark? ”
The bartender took a coffee-stained copy of the day’s paper from behind the counter. “Anything else?”
The two older men took a break in their game to watch Brano sit on a stool by the lace curtains, sip his beer, and begin to read.
On the front page, General Secretary Tomiak Pankov looked back at him from behind a podium in a slender suit, his bald head ringed by a thin patch of gray, talking of peace. When Pankov took power a decade ago, his first preoccupied year had been spent purging the Politburo and security apparatus of anyone too loyal to his dead predecessor, Mihai. Brano had survived that purge by sticking close to Colonel Cerny, whose ability at sidestepping the hammer was almost famous. Once his power was secured, Pankov became what he’d always been, a Party bureaucrat who made speeches on industrial levels and agricultural output; he focused on the numbers. But after a heart attack in early 1965, his focus changed, and he reinvented himself as an enlightened man of peace. The Spark reported that twenty-six nations had been present at the most recent international summit, called “The Doves of Peace”-Pankov was not known for his original titles.
Brano glanced up from the paper and peered out the window; Pavel Jast had arrived.
Comrade Colonel Cerny had given him the name of his contact, shown him a photograph, and added, An idiot, a gambler, and a drunk, but useful. That seemed about right. He could read those characteristics in the swagger Pavel Jast shared with all small-town informants, as if the entire People’s Army were marching behind them and would back up any stupid thing they did. So Brano returned to the paper as the fat man burst in, muttered something indecipherable to the two old men, then clapped a hand on the counter and demanded a vodka. He held the muddy glass to his lips as he rotated, leaning back to survey the tiny space. In the translucent window-reflection, Brano saw Pavel Jast’s eyes settle on him. Jast produced a cigarette and winked at the two old men before approaching.
“Hey, you. Comrade. Got a light?” He winked a second time in the old men’s direction.
From his pocket Brano took a book of matches marked HOTEL METROPOL and handed it to Jast without looking away from the window.
The first match faltered, but the second hissed and sparked until the cigarette was lit. Jast exhaled smoke and the stink of earlier vodkas, and Brano’s eyes watered as he accepted the matches back. But this was a different book of matches, white and blank. Jast said, “From the Capital, eh? Aren’t you Iwona’s boy?”
Brano drank some more beer, then laid a few koronas on the counter. He turned to Jast for the first time and saw the red web of punished veins beneath his flaccid cheeks and nose. “I am,” he said.
Another wink at the old men, who seemed unsure they liked the performance. The bartender ignored everyone. Jast grunted, the shot glass pressing into his chin. “Well, you’re not in the Capital anymore, comrade.”
“I didn’t notice,” said Brano, and only after he left did it occur to anyone in the bar that this had been a joke.
On the way back to his mother’s house, he clutched the matchbook in his pocket, turning it over and opening and shutting it while he watched faces along the road. Zygmunt, the old man who delivered his mother’s bread, seemed to be avoiding his gaze, but C
aptain Rasko acknowledged him as he stood in the mud with a young woman whose puffy lips made her look like the victim of abuse. He hadn’t expected to come across Lia Soroka out in the open, but he managed the surprise by nodding back at Rasko and at Jan Soroka’s unsmiling wife.
He didn’t take out the matchbook until he had passed his mother’s front door. He flipped it open and read the sweat-smeared pencil scrawl inside the cover:
Klara brought a large dish of pork cabbage rolls, and Lucjan ducked his head as he followed her in with his vodka, sealed in a used liter-sized soda bottle. Lucjan was nearly two heads taller than Brano, ruddy in the face, his wide shoulders stretching the back of his shirt, but his handshake had almost no strength at all. Mother took the vodka from him and disappeared with Klara into the kitchen.
Lucjan tried to smile. “Klara says you’re on vacation.”
“That’s true.”
“You don’t know how long?”
“A week, probably. Just long enough to get some rest.”
“Must be nice, having that kind of relationship with your manager. He doesn’t care?”
“He’s a good friend.”
“Known him a long time?”
“Are you always so curious?”
Lucjan let out a nervous laugh, then settled on the sofa and began to roll a cigarette, his big fingers fumbling with the thin paper. Brano watched. “She told me you’re doing well at the cooperative.”
“Klara’s an optimist.”
“But you’re doing administrative work. That’s a good sign.”
He licked the paper and sealed the cigarette. “What about you? You’re not used to working a factory job, are you?”
“Not so different. There are orders, and I follow them. 1 do all right.”
“That’s the answer I’d give, too.” He offered the damp cigarette, but Brano shook his head.
Klara had known Lucjan Witaszewski all her life, and perhaps this explained the unimpressive choice she’d made at the age of seventeen. Brano had been working in the Capital for four years when the wedding invitation arrived in his mailbox. But that was 1948, and in the Capital there had been no end to the work. In almost every alley hid another criminal, the detritus all wars produce, and on top of that, there had been a new man in the Militia office named Emil Brod who had to be followed and examined and, finally, accepted.
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