Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

  After two days of hospital observation, the Italians gave me a fresh supply of prescriptions and transferred me to a federal holding cell outside Venice, solely for illegal immigrants. It was a modern, concrete place with an always damp courtyard, much more comfortable than prisons back home. My cellmate was a Congolese worker named Tabu Bel, a big man with very black skin, who had been working summers in Italy and Austria, taking the money back home at the end of the season. This was his seventh year of migrant labor, and he’d finally been caught. He wasn’t dismayed by his situation. In German, he said, “Life is full of decisions.” He shrugged his thick shoulders. “No reason to regret them once you’ve made them.”

  I told him that was easier said than done, and he asked me why an old white man was in jail with him. I told him, and that’s how the conversation ended.

  On Friday, a visitor from our embassy in Rome arrived on the train and took a walk with me in the wet courtyard. Natan Jovovich was a small man, hair slicked off to the side to cover a bald patch, and he wore a fine Italian suit. I, on the other hand, wore the prison’s white jumper. “Mr. Brod,” he said, hands clasped behind his back as he walked. “You’ve put the government in a strange position.”

  “The government put me in a strange position.”

  He nodded; he’d been briefed on the story I’d given the Italian detectives. He, like them, didn’t believe a word of it. “Be that as it may, you’ve killed a representative of our government. If we brought you back, under the current laws you’d be executed for treason. By all appearances, you’re a counterrevolutionary fighting against the people’s democracy.”

  I don’t think he caught the irony in what he’d said—”people’s democracy” was what Pankov had called his government. “So,” I said, “what’s the problem?”

  “The problem, Mr. Brod, is that we don’t want to start our democracy by executing people. It’s the old way. Not our way.”

  Again, thinking of Pankov, the irony was apparent, but I didn’t bother mentioning it. I said, “What you mean is, you don’t want my testimony made public.”

  He sniffed. “Hardly.”

  “You’ve been given some instructions, I bet. From the Capital.”

  “We’re going to set you free.”

  I stopped, and it took him a moment to realize I was no longer walking beside him. He looked back. I said, “What?”

  “We’re going to set you free. We don’t want to make an issue out of this. I’ve got your passport—we took it from your Friendship Street apartment—a six-month Swiss visa, and a little money to get you started.”

  “Wait,” I said, holding up a hand to silence him. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  He sighed, then glanced around at the high courtyard walls. I don’t think Jovovich had been inside many prisons. “When you have friends in high places, these kinds of things do happen.”

  I started to ask who my friends might be, but the answer was obvious. “Ferenc.”

  Jovovich nodded. “Mr. Kolyeszar was adamant about this. It was a condition of his little revolutionaries taking part in the elections as peaceful participants.” He came a step closer. “There’s Italian paperwork to deal with, but you should be out in the next couple of days.”

  I wasn’t sure what to think, or feel. I squinted at him. “Conditions?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We ask the same thing the Italians and the Austrians ask.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you never set foot in our country again.”

  My legs stopped working, so I settled on the cold gravel and shut my eyes.

  Jovovich approached. “Are you okay?”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Why not?”

  I wondered if he really was that dense.

  “Listen,” he said. “The alternative is that you stay here, in this prison, for the rest of your life. You’ll be in legal limbo. The Italians won’t try you, because we’ve asked them not to. We won’t take you. And the Austrians refuse to accept that passport of yours.” He squatted beside me, gravel crunching. “It’s up to you, Mr. Brod.”

  FORTY

  •

  On the last day of the decade, a Sunday, they let me go. I wished Tabu good luck, then shook his strong hand. The warden had an envelope for me. It contained my old passport, a pocketful of Italian lire and Swiss francs, and a train ticket out of the country, to Zurich. The warden, a young, rather elegant man, said I had forty-eight hours to leave, and would I need an escort? I told him no, I wouldn’t be needing one.

  My train was scheduled to leave from Mestre, just outside Venice, at six in the evening. So I took a taxi to the edge of the canal-woven city and started walking.

  I’d imagined this place all my life, but whatever pictures my feeble imagination might have come up with were nothing compared to the reality. In fact, I’d always imagined that it would look like our Canal District, with arched bridges and musty lanes and cats and everything crumbling.

  Venice was like that—it had all the things my Canal District had before the cranes started tearing it apart—but at the same time it was utterly different. It was in the details. I found myself turning corners and then stopping in my tracks to gasp at churches so complex and ornate that I couldn’t figure out how the human mind could produce them. Then, crossing a footbridge beside the Grand Canal, I noticed some tourists taking photographs up a watery alley. I looked, and saw it—a covered bridge, high up, connecting two old buildings.

  I didn’t need to ask for verification, because I knew. It was the bridge connecting the courthouse to the prison. The bridge from where the condemned caught his final stolen glance of freedom before descending to his new, barred home.

  Three months later, as I finish this, my life is something different than it once was. With the help of some fellow emigres here in Zurich, I found work—I clean the floors and walls and desks in a private high school. Gavra doesn’t understand why I do it, because I don’t need the money. The Galicia Committee government has so far upheld the deal Lena’s father once made with General Secretary Mihai’s government back in 1946, and her foreign investments are now mine. I can’t yet face dealing with all of Lena’s papers, though. Besides, I like the children. They’re the sons and daughters of diplomats from all over the world, and they laugh at me and ask why I speak German with such a funny accent. Despite this, I find myself thinking fondly of them when I’m at home in the evenings, writing this story.

  There are visitors. Twice, Ferenc has come bearing gifts and stories of the steady opposition the Democratic Forum and its presidential candidate, Father Eduard Meyr, has been erecting against the Galicia Revolutionary Committee, running up to the May elections. Despite his endless enthusiasm, we both know he’s failing.

  The Galicia Committee newspapers are what everyone reads— they’re funded by donations from various nongovernmental organizations fostering democracy. The recently inaugurated Sarospatak television station finds it hard to get an audience when the other two stations have an endless supply of subtitled Hollywood movies to distract everyone.

  The Democratic Forum recently lost a fight over the renaming of Sarospatak’s 25 August Square. Ferenc wanted it to return to its precommunist name, King Bela Square, but before they could petition the change, the Galicia Committee had changed the signs to read 23 DECEMBER 1989 SQUARE, the date of the Capital’s uprising. A tempest in a teacup, but it shows how little power the Democratic Forum has.

  So Ferenc has gone back to the basic technique of nonviolent resistance: the demonstration. Over the last two weeks, the Democratic Forum has staged demonstrations in Victory Square (now called Revolution Square), demanding a level playing field in the elections.

  But they’re small affairs, attended only by the most devout. The people of our country are by now exhausted. I can understand.

  Gavra visits every couple of weeks to help me get my facts straight in this. His life is different now, too. He and Karel moved t
o a detached house outside the Capital. He still travels, but now he travels as a spokesman for the Tisa Corporation, a company set up to convince Western investors to look east for their fortunes. “It’s early still,” he tells me, “but this really is the future.”

  “Coca-Cola and Ford,” I say without enthusiasm, but also without bitterness. Gavra’s a national hero, and I’m glad he’s been able to shed his past so easily. When I ask about Brano, he shakes his head. They haven’t talked.

  When he visits, Gavra spends a lot of time by the curtains, peering out at the clean Zurich street. I know what he’s looking for, because I’ve seen them myself. There are three that I know of, small men who smell of the East. I can’t imagine how bored they must be, following me from home to school, then to the market and back home. They’re with me all the time.

  “They don’t know what you’re writing, do they?” asks Gavra.

  “I keep it hidden in the floorboards. But they’ll know soon enough. Ferenc is picking up the manuscript next Tuesday.”

  Gavra finds me frustrating; he’s different than he was only a few months ago. Success has changed him. “You really think it’ll make a difference?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, because it’s true.

  “You better move.”

  “Move where?”

  “Away. Somewhere no one can find you. I can help.”

  I shrug. “And leave all my children?”

  It’s time to finish. I’m expecting Ferenc at any moment; he’s picking up these pages. Out on the street, not far from my door, two of my shadows are sharing a smoke. I can see through the curtains that the third is joining them; for once, they’re having a party. I have a feeling they’ll invite me soon.

  I don’t know if my story will help anyone, but it’s all I’ve got to offer. I hope it does help. Because, despite the lessons of forty years in the People’s Militia, there really is hope left in the world.

  If you’re reading this, it means there still is.

  —E. Brod Zurich, March 1990

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  •

  Students of the Romanian Revolution of 1989, which toppled the regime of Nicolae and Elena Ceau§escu, will notice many similarities between that reality and this fiction. It’s no accident. In 1999, the U.S. Fulbright Commission generously granted me a yearlong grant to work on a novel based on that curious and ecstatic moment in Romanian history. The result, a novel called Tzara’s Monocle, never saw publication, but the research that went into writing it inspired and helped inform this series of Eastern European novels, of which Victory Square is the conclusion.

  That’s not to say that the unnamed country in this series is Romania. Some have suggested this, while others imagine it’s Hungary, where I live. Neither is the case. My piece of fictional real estate has always been the product of a Western imagination casting about for an image of the communist East, influenced by all the countries I’ve come in contact with and guided more by my personal obsessions than by any historical exactitude.

  Still, it’s an informed fiction, and in this volume the Romanian research is worn more on the sleeve. For example, the list of titles associated with Tomiak Pankov in chapter eighteen. Strange as it may seem, these are all actual terms used by sycophantic propagandists to refer to Nicolae Ceau§escu in Romania.

  358 AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In chapter two, the “newly finished Workers’Palace, that Third District monstrosity fronted by the long, cobblestone Workers’Boulevard, which The Spark continually reminded us was one meter wider than the Champs-Elysees” is based on the Casa Poporului, or House of the People, in front of Bucharest’s Boulevard to the Victory of Socialism. They are now called the Palace of Parliament and Unification Boulevard, respectively. As mentioned in chapter four, much of Tomiak Pankov’s radical civil reengineering, including the Workers’Palace, was inspired by a trip to North Korea, just as Nico-lae Ceau§escu’s was.

  Chapter eleven begins with a story of Tomiak Pankov’s hunting retreats and a Ministry sharpshooter killing game when Pankov missed. This, too, is from the stories of Ceau§escu, though in reality it was not the Ministry but the Securitate, Romania’s feared secret police.

  In chapter thirteen, the following conversation takes place between a soldier and Katja Drdova in reference to the rooftop “terrorists” shooting into crowds:

  “Yeah. Pankov made a deal with Muammar Qaddafi for his special forces to protect him in case this happened. Rumor is, when he came back on Sunday a second plane landed just afterward with about a hundred of these guys.”

  “Oh,” said Katja. “And Pankov? Where is he?”

  “Wouldn’t we all like to know?”

  Later, that Libyan rumor would become accepted truth, though in fact none of the snipers was ever caught, and no one could find records of a second Libyan flight landing at Pankov—now Tisa—International.

  The same rumor, also unsubstantiated, ran through Romania during the confused days of the revolution and afterward.

  Also in chapter thirteen is a lengthy telegram written by the country’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, recounting a meeting with

  V L. Musatov, “Deputy Director of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” The text of the telegram is amended from an original “Memorandum of Conversation with the Ambassador of the SRR [Socialist Republic of Romania] in the USSR, I. Bucur,” dated 21 December 1989 and found online at the wonderful Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The original is from Musatov’s perspective, whereas my fictional version is told from the ambassador’s side, but in both reality and fiction, the leaders believed that the Soviet Union, or at least the Warsaw Pact, might be behind the uprisings in their countries.

  The gunfight between “terrorists” and soldiers at the Hotel Metropol is also taken from reality, when the “terrorists” shooting into crowds were caught at the Hotel Inter-Continental in Bucharest. They shot from hotel windows, down to the street, and army units fired back. As in my fictional version, they were not captured.

  But the most obvious parallel between this story and reality is the trial of the Pankovs in chapter twenty-five. The spoken words of the trial are taken, with few changes, from a translation of the Ceau§es-cus’trial that was published in many papers during late 1989 and early 1990, made available by the United States government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service. I’ve made adjustments for clarity, and to fit into my nameless country’s story, but it’s largely taken from the actual proceedings. My major change, besides the obvious, is the use of prosecution witnesses; there were none in the Ceau§escus’trial.

  There are many other parallels. In Romania, it was from the western town of Timi§oara that the revolution first sprang, and the dissident pastor Laszlo Tokes was at the center of its movement. Also, the Timi§oara revolution was subsumed by the more powerful machinations of ex-communists in the capital, Bucharest. The reasons and explanations I give in Victory Square, however, are entirely my own.

  Even the story of the Russian Fyodor Malevich has a real-life parallel in the swirl of rumors during that period. In the days leading up to the Romanian Revolution, tourist traffic from Russia, entering through the Ukraine, grew abnormally. According to an auto mechanic in the north of the country, one Russian car, carrying four men, broke down on its way to Timi§oara. The Russians brought it to the mechanic, and as he worked on it the man discovered four Romanian officers’uniforms in the trunk.

  But as I say, Victory Square is fiction.

  For those interested in the true story of Romania under communism, along with its violent and sometimes awkward shifts toward democracy, you could do no better than to go to the works of Dennis Deletant, the foremost English-language scholar of Romanian culture and history. I owe a great debt to his efforts, as well as Edward Behr’s breathless account of the Ceau§escus’story, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of
the Ceausescus (Villard, 1991).

  —O. Steinhauer

  Budapest, October 2006

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