Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Taken care of,” she said.

  I wondered if this was why she was rushing off to Tisakarad. The farther you got from the Capital—and Tisakarad was forty miles away—the less the ration system was followed. Local farmers had long ago realized the benefit of skimming off their Capital-bound shipments and bringing their pigs into the markets, where the city folk would trade anything for a bit of pork. I said, “I’m surprised Bernard let you go. Patak’s not safe, and I’ll bet Ferenc will drag you there with him.”

  “Think he has a say in it?” She turned Sanja to face her, switching to baby talk: “No, no! Daddy doesn’t have any say!” Sanja didn’t seem to have an opinion one way or the other.

  We’d just passed the last of the towers when the roadblock appeared. Two Militia cars were parked in the grass, and a makeshift gate—a long tangle of razor wire—had been stretched across the road. As I slowed to a stop, a big militiaman in a regulation blue overcoat tossed away a cigarette and came over to my window. I rolled it down, letting in the cold. He had fat sideburns growing from under his cap, and half his face was sunburned. “Where you going?”

  “Tisavar. What’s this?”

  “Turn around and head back. Traffic’s stopped today.”

  I handed over my Militia certificate. He cocked his head as he read it, then pushed back his cap with a knuckle. “Sorry about that, Comrade Chief.” He didn’t seem very sorry. “Orders from the top.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He squinted and rocked on his heels. “You know. Central Committee.”

  “To keep everyone in the Capital?”

  He nodded, then noticed Agota and Sanja. He gave them a smile.

  “Trains are down, too?”

  “Most,” he said. “First train they cut was the twelve thirty to Patak.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I think we all know what it’s about.”

  “But I can go through.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You’re not going to Patak, right?”

  “I told you. Tisavar.”

  He touched the brim of his cap, then stepped back and waved us on. Two younger militiamen with thick gloves dragged the razor wire aside so we could pass.

  We didn’t talk about the roadblock, or the fact that suddenly the Capital had become a prison. It had happened before, when the Central Committee overreacted to a bomb that destroyed a fertilizer plant in Krosno, back on November fifth—the thirty-second anniversary of the short-lived 1956 general strike that, in the end, led to Agota’s father’s internal exile.

  After two days, though, the roadblocks had been removed, and the government never spoke of it again. Perhaps Tomiak Pankov thought we would forget.

  We reached Tisavar a little before three. Ferenc and I, whenever something required a private meeting, always came here, to a point just within the ring of his allowed movement, an hour south of the Capital, just before Kisvarda. Before the Great Patriotic War, Tisavar had been a tiny Jewish-Slav enclave that had survived and even prospered under the Austro-Hungarian government as a market town for the farmers in the nearby region. In the thirties, the mayor decided it was time for a change, and he began lobbying the between-wars government for subsidies to start building cooperative granaries. The government agreed, but before the money could make it there, the Germans marched in. Then Tisavar disappeared.

  The Wehrmacht appeared in May 1939, having quickly overrun our little army. My father died in those short battles and was soon followed by my mother. At the time, I was living in the south, in Ruscova, with my grandparents, who had fled the soldiers in the Capital. The Occupation, for me, was largely about boredom. I was an anxious, too ambitious boy surrounded by dull farmers. Up around Tisavar, though, the Nazi presence was felt strongly. Soldiers patrolled the streets, and officers took over the administrative house, controlling the flow of money and property and Jews.

  The region was governed by Major General Karloff Messerstein, a delinquent from Thuringen who had joined the Nazi Party during its beer-hall days. He administered the region as if it were his private fiefdom, and, perhaps inevitably, some of the headstrong Tisavar boys used munitions left over from our short-lived war to blow up Messerstein’s car in 1942.

  The major general survived with burns and a broken leg, and from his hospital bed directed the retribution.

  Early on in the Occupation, the Germans had enlisted the help of malcontents from our Ukrainian population. These young men had been promised that, once the war was won, the eastern half of our country (including the Capital) would be returned to the Ukraine as a state within the greater German Reich. The fools believed it, because they wanted to. Messerstein decided that, given their local knowledge and natural animosity for these westerners, his Ukrainian recruits would be ideal for the job.

  They first emptied the houses and led the townsfolk to what would later be called Anti-Fascism Hill, on the north side of town. There, over the space of two days, the entire population was executed and buried. Then, using a tank borrowed from a nearby Panzer division, they destroyed the stone administration buildings, then systematically burned every house. As an added touch, Major General Karloff Messerstein arrived on crutches to personally supervise the delivery of two truckloads of Hungarian salt, which were spread over the embers.

  All of this was in our history books, and people in the region never forgave the Ukrainian minority its role in the event. The irony, which the textbooks never mentioned, was that a week after the massacre, Messerstein died naturally of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Now, all that was left was a memorial in the middle of a swath of barren earth. It was placed here by Mihai during a 1951 ceremony, filmed by camera crews from all over the world. A statement on a bronze plaque attached to a stone pedestal, followed by a few lines from our national poet, Rikard Pasha:

  HERE MARKS THE SPOT WHERE TISAVAR WAS

  DESTROYED BY THE FASCIST MENACE ON

  8 OCTOBER 1942.

  A world like leaves of the impossible creation from God’s mind.

  All we can hope for is a dream made clear before we die.

  No one, not even Ferenc, had ever been able to tell me what those two lines of verse were supposed to mean.

  He was waiting for us in front of the plaque, gloved hands clasped behind his big form, gazing down. Ferenc was just as huge as he’d always been, and though he’d recently turned seventy, he still didn’t look like a writer; he looked like a retired thug. When we parked, he turned to face us, and I noticed his lumpy nose was a little bigger and redder than before. When he saw his daughter and granddaughter get out of the car, he lumbered over to hug them, grinning madly.

  Perhaps unconsciously, Agota had chosen in Bernard a man who was just like her father—huge, moody, and surprisingly astute at times—and this was perhaps why the two men couldn’t get along. They hated to see themselves reflected.

  When we shook hands, I smelled palinka on him and wondered if he was drunk. “Still trying to figure that out?”

  “Mihai,” he said, nodding at the plaque. “He was a mysterious man.”

  “Let’s walk.”

  Ferenc handed his keys to Agota and asked her to wait in his beat-up Russian flatbed truck. We walked across the salt-dead ground through the cold wind from Anti-Fascism Hill, which was dotted with crosses and bundles of dead flowers. “So you’ve got a lieutenant general’s corpse,” he said.

  “Poisoned. Someone laced his cocaine with pure heroin.”

  “Ballsy.”

  I agreed. “By now, Feder has filed his autopsy, so it’s official. I don’t have much choice—I’ll have to press on with the investigation. I just need to figure out how I’m going to do it.”

  “And you think I can help?”

  I looked at him, hands deep in my pockets. The wind was making my eyes water. “You’re at the center of things these days. You’d know if someone wanted Kolev dead.”

  “We don’t want people dead,” he said. “Those are the kinds of people we’re fig
hting.”

  “Remember fifty-six?” I said.

  He frowned. “What about it?”

  “You may not want to execute anyone, but that doesn’t mean someone on the fringe hasn’t decided to go that route.”

  “And you think I’d know.”

  “I’d ask Father Meyr instead, but I don’t know where he is.”

  Ferenc scratched his rough cheek, then turned to look back at the truck. We couldn’t see his family through the dirty windshield. “You’re right—it’s possible some angry kid got it into his head to kill Kolev. Though I imagine he’d use a gun instead. If so, I don’t know about it. But I think you’re looking in the wrong direction.”

  “Am I?”

  He nodded, then sniffed; he sounded congested. “End of last week, your dead lieutenant general came to Patak.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How wouldn’t I know?” he said, smiling. “When you’re preparing to march against the government, you become as paranoid as you can. You notice everything. And we noticed Yuri Kolev.”

  “He came three times over the last week,” I told him. “Under a fake name.”

  “Yeah. Ulrich Lipmann.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Not what you’d think.” He switched to the professorial tone he’d gotten accustomed to among his wide-eyed student revolutionaries. “Kolev didn’t go to the regional Ministry HQ. Instead, he went to the other side of town, to a bar where some of our guys hang out. He met with a Russian.”

  “Russian?” I said dumbly. I do that sometimes.

  My surprise pleased him. “Now, this was something I didn’t know about until after it happened. A couple of our worker bees watched this going on, saw Kolev leave again, get into his pretty BMW and drive back to the Capital. But the Russian stayed to finish his vodka. They followed him into town to a small one-room apartment. Then they jumped him.”

  “Jesus.”

  Ferenc shrugged. “What can I do? They’re brash kids. But that’s how they learned he was Russian. They questioned him, but not too roughly. Best they got was a name off his passport—Fyodor Male-vich. Then they looked around. Guess what he had in a box in the wardrobe.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A colonel’s uniform. Not Russian, but our army.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know. The boys called a friend of mine, but by the time he arrived, old Fyodor had escaped. He knew what he was doing. He took on the boys one at a time, knocked them out, and fled—with the uniform. The kids’re fine; they just got headaches.”

  I didn’t know what to make of a Russian masquerading as one of our colonels, but it was all Ferenc had to offer. At least, it was all he was willing to offer me. We had a long-standing friendship, but he’d been a militiaman during some of the darkest years and knew how, despite a man’s desires, it was easy to be cornered, or blackmailed, and made to give up what you knew. His son-in-law was a textbook example. Ferenc’s reticence protected both of us.

  It was also disappointing. I’d hoped that Ferenc might be able to shed light on Kolev’s murder. If it had turned out to be committed by one of his friends, my job would have been, ironically, very simple. I would have whitewashed it. Pin the murder on the next corpse that came in, or start asking for access to files the Ministry wasn’t willing to give me; then I could throw up my hands and admit defeat. There were many ways to get rid of work you didn’t want to do.

  Walking back to his truck, he told me to keep my eye on the news. “Change is in the air.” He reminded me—as if I’d just come back from the moon—that all around us democracy had defeated totalitarianism, and he said that there was nothing Tomiak Pankov could do. Change was inevitable. “You should get involved, Emil. You’ve got a responsibility to the next generation. We’re bringing Democracy for them.”

  I grimaced.

  When people use those capitalized abstracts—Democracy, Freedom, Totalitarianism—with such conviction, I’m always left unnerved. It reminds me too much of life just after the war, when everyone was encouraged to speak like that. I said, “I’m just trying to survive long enough to get my pension.”

  “You’re the last one who needs a pension,” he said, thinking of Lena’s family money. “Besides, that’s the kind of thinking Pankov depends on.”

  He was right, of course. I told him to keep safe and make sure Agota and Sanja made it through the changes unscathed. He smiled and, unexpectedly, kissed both my cheeks. I, too, had been right; he was drunk.

  By the time I reached the Capital again, it was dark. Sensing a blood-pressure headache coming my way, I took two more Captopril. I found a new, fresh militiaman at the roadblock. He was sterner than the first had been, so I was sterner with him. I showed my Militia certificate, emphasizing my rank, and told him that if he didn’t let me through, Colonel Nikolai Romek of the Ministry for State Security would have a chat with him. It worked.

  I could hardly see the block towers because in this section of the Capital the power had been switched off again. It was a regular occurrence. In the Second District, the streetlamps were off, but the windows glowed.

  I parked on Friendship Street, outside our apartment, and carried the box of old files to the elevator. It was out of order again. So I lugged it up the three floors, stopping often to catch my breath. I’ve never been a man of formidable strength; all I’ve ever had is persistence. I reached the apartment huffing crazily.

  Lena wasn’t amused by my lateness. She didn’t answer my greeting, only stared at a rerun of Family Popa on television. She referred me to the oven, where a cold platter of boiled pork and cabbage waited. I scooped some onto a plate, ate half of it in the kitchen, and threw the rest away. “You going to wash that plate?” she called from the living room, just before a laugh track erupted.

  “No,” I said and let it drop into the sink. “I need to keep you busy.”

  It was an old, tired joke, but enough for her to shout back that if I wasn’t nice to her, she’d down a bottle of vodka. Then she reminded me—for the tenth time, according to her—that I still hadn’t talked to the mechanic about her Mercedes, which wasn’t starting. For the tenth time I told her I’d do it in the morning.

  She finally took her eyes off the TV when I sat next to her and pulled up the box of old files. “What have you got?”

  I took one out at random, blew off the dust, and opened it up. “Revisiting the past.”

  “Which one’s that?”

  I checked the label, then frowned. “Imre’s.”

  “Oh.”

  It was from 1985 and labeled “unsolved”—but that was a lie. His was the second “unsolved” case surrounding a dead militiaman, the first being the death of my oldest friend, Libarid Terzian, during a botched airplane hijacking in 1975. Terzian’s case was transferred to the Ministry for State Security. Then, ten years later, we found my young Captain Imre Papp in the Canal District with five bullets in his head, lungs, and leg.

  It made no sense to any of us. Imre wasn’t on a case, and he had a wife and child; he wasn’t the kind of man to go poking around the Canal District for whores. None of us knew why he was even there. We followed a number of leads, but they all ran cold until I got a phone call, at home, from Brano Sev.

  The old man—then a general—had left the homicide department in the midseventies, moving on to an expansive office at Yalta Boulevard 36. Our friendship had always been tenuous—for plenty of good reasons, I’d never trusted him—and once he left the station we rarely saw each other. I didn’t call him, and he didn’t call me. And that was fine. I didn’t really want to spend time with a man so devoted to protecting socialism in our country—so devoted that he had even arrested our friend Ferenc in 1956. Which is why it was a surprise, and a little unnerving, to pick up the kitchen phone and hear his voice.

  “Emil?”

  “Brano, is that you?”

  “Yes, Emil. Can you step outside a moment? I’d like to talk with you. About Imre.”<
br />
  After that talk, I decided never to speak to the man again. But there was no sense dredging up those old, difficult memories now. I put the file back.

  “Find the other one,” Lena said, moving closer.

  “Which one?”

  “Number one.”

  I pretended I didn’t understand.

  “When you fell madly in love with me?”

  “Ah!” I said. “That one.”

  She tapped the remote until the Popa family was silenced. “Come on. Show me.”

  The files weren’t in order—some clerk had stuffed them in the box haphazardly. So I pulled out half the box, a stack of thirty files, and handed it to Lena. “Look for 1948.”

  “I remember,” she said, “even if you don’t.”

  Of course I remembered. In 1948, I was only twenty-two, and Lena was a thirty-year-old widow with a serious drinking problem.

  The case had begun with the murder of her first husband, Janos Crowder, a songwriter found bludgeoned to death. He’d been blackmailing a political figure named Jerzy Michalec with documents proving that Michalec had been a decorated Gestapo agent during the war. In the end, Michalec—amazingly vital despite being afflicted with epilepsy—kidnapped Lena, then traded her for incriminating German documents I’d gone all the way to Berlin to track down. Despite our deal, Brano Sev used the photographs to bring the man to justice.

  Jerzy Michalec was first sentenced to death, and I can still remember the show trial we listened to on the Militia radio. It was 1949. We heard everything—the prosecutors and the hysterical witnesses, and even the confusion when, during a judge’s tirade, Michalec suddenly shivered, frothing, taken by an epileptic seizure. Later, his punishment was commuted, and he was put to work in one of the many labor camps that filled the country during the late forties and fifties. Like a bad dream, he simply vanished. It was the way of the world back then. People vanished.