“I like to swim,” said Petre. His head was just high enough to rest his chin on the edge of the table. “I’m a great swimmer.”
“I’m sure you are,” said Brano.
Jan rubbed his hair. “Eat, Petre. We’ll take you swimming in a few days.”
16 FEBRUARY 1967, THURSDAY
•
Again, Brano slept poorly. He lay in bed listening for feet in the grass outside, whispers, and a boot kicking in the front door, followed by shouts, screams, and perhaps even gunshots.
But az Orvos’s men did not arrive that night, nor the next morning, as the Sorokas used Madai’s cards to play a game that lasted hours. Madai spent the morning in the fields around the house in a heavy coat, examining the stunted, long-harvested cornstalks, while Brano browsed a Hungarian book on maize cultivation. He learned in the introduction that evidence had been found in Central American caves that maize domestication had been going on for eight thousand years. That page had been marked by a fold in the corner, and he wondered if Madai, when he questioned what he did with his life, cited this fact to prove he was part of an ancient tradition that gave his pesticides and harvesting machines symbolic power.
The silence that day was unique. It was a day of waiting, and in such a situation conversation becomes banal. Over cards, Jan sometimes sat back and chewed the inside of his cheeks, opened his mouth and, after reflection, closed it again. Lia was less indecisive; her jaw remained clamped shut all morning. Brano looked up from his book at Petre, who crawled around with a wooden model car Madai had given him, but even he did not make engine sounds.
Madai returned from the fields with wind-flushed cheeks and made lunch, recruiting Petre to help plate the sandwiches. When the boy dropped one on the floor and grew visibly upset, Madai assured him that he’d happily make twelve more if necessary. Over the meal, he told everyone that it would happen today, but not even he knew more than that. Brano doubted this but let it go. Despite the man’s petty lies, Brano found himself pitying this farmer-turned-counterrevolutionary. Because when the Doctor’s men arrived to take the Sorokas back home, Adam Madai, after interrogation, would end up somewhere in his fields with a bullet in the back of his head. The men were probably already here, crouched along the edge of the fields, watching.
Dwelling on the newspaper article gave him few answers. Yalta had commissioned Pavel Jast to kill Bieniek and frame Brano for the murder. Why? To give Brano a reason to escape with the Sorokas and track their route—and, he assumed, to close it down. Jast, using the murder as an excuse, spoke to Soroka, through Roman, to convince him to bring along Brano.
But killing an innocent man and framing Brano for it, then sending the story to The Spark—why this large machinery of conspiracy for such a simple case? The Sorokas weren’t important, at least not important enough to warrant this.
It reminded him of a phrase the Lieutenant General liked to use to describe the mind of counterintelligence, and particularly the mind of Colonel Cerny: “a byzantine imagination.” And he knew from experience that this kind of thinking could seldom be unraveled by a single agent. It was even possible that Jakob Bieniek had been connected to another operation for which he needed to be terminated, which then proved useful for Brano’s situation as well.
There was no telling, because Cerny had kept him in the dark. Perhaps Brano had not been brought back inside after all.
But there was another side at work. The West had given their amateur agent, Jan Soroka, Dijana Franković’s name as a cover. The Americans wanted something from him. Information, or simply him. They had not gotten anything out of him in Bóbrka, and it was unlikely they’d try anything in Hungary. They wanted him in Austria, the one place he wanted to avoid. His safety lay on this side of the Curtain, with the Doctor’s men, and on the other side his future was a black, inarticulate mist.
So when, a little after lunch, they heard an automobile engine outside, then footsteps. Brano twitched. He took a breath, waiting for the boots to kick the front door, shattering hinges, but exhaled when he only heard the soft rap of knuckles on wood.
Madai opened the door and kissed the cheeks of a small blonde woman whose thin jawbone shifted as she smiled. Under her arm was a brown paper package.
Madai turned to them. “Time to go.”
The package contained three white outfits that the adults were instructed to put on. The clothes were loose fitting, like pajamas, and when they stepped outside in their coats they saw a small white box-truck with a beefy, white-uniformed man standing beside its back doors.
“Don’t be afraid,” the woman said in Hungarian as they approached the truck. “The others are too full of drugs to be a bother.”
“What did she say?” asked Lia.
Brano said, “The truck is headed for a mental home. There are real patients in the back, but they’re too drugged to cause trouble.”
“A mental home?”
“But what about the kid?” he asked in Hungarian.
The woman shrugged. “He’ll be up front with us. We’ll say he’s one of the patients’ children, that I’m going to take care of him myself.”
“And his language?”
“He’s a mute. Psychologically scarred.”
While the big man put their clothes in the space behind the front seats, Brano explained the plan to the Sorokas. Lia didn’t want to be separated from Petre. “This is unacceptable. I’m not going to do it.”
“Li,” said Jan.
“Don’t try to calm me! I don’t know these people—neither do you!”
Brano paused at the back doors. “They don’t send seven-year-olds to mental homes. If he sits with us, your whole family will end up in prison.”
Lia’s crossed arms came apart. She crouched and hugged her boy, then whispered instructions to him.
There were three patients in the back, two men and a woman. The men hadn’t been shaved in a few days, and all three shared a vacant, large-pupiled stare focused on nothing in particular. Straps from the wall kept them from falling over. Brano and the Sorokas climbed past the patients, deeper into the truck. Madai stood at the doors, smoking and watching. “Remember,” he said, “you’re all patients filled to the forehead with drugs. You don’t understand what anyone says to you; you’re not even aware of anyone. If the truck stops, you put on those straps. Don’t make eye contact and, most of all, never speak. Is that clear?”
They all nodded.
The large man closed the doors.
Then the truck fired to life, and they began to move.
Brano could see little through the back windows covered in steel grating, but he mentally charted what seemed the most likely route. They crossed the Danube at the tip of Szentendrei Island, north of Budapest, then wrapped around the western side of the city to reach the northwest road to Győr. The truck sped along and the Sorokas whispered. Lia sometimes held Jan’s hand. Other times, the anger flushed her cheeks and she whispered something and crossed her arms. Jan held her elbow, trying to reason with her, then settled back. He gave Brano a nervous smile that Brano could not return, preoccupied by the hope that the Doctor’s men were not far behind them.
All along, the three patients sat beside them, swinging in their straps to the rhythm of the road, because no one existed outside the drugged dreams in their heads.
They were stopped once before Győr, and as they slowed Brano strapped himself to the wall, nodding at the others to follow suit. They heard the woman telling a soldier the brief, sad tale of the mute boy and his insane mother, who was in the back, and how she was going to take care of the boy herself rather than give him over to the state orphanages. The soldier admired her maternal instincts, but when they opened the back doors, it was clear that he admired her body even more. He hardly looked at the patients at all.
The soldier who opened the door just after Győr was less taken by her shape, perhaps because the sunset had cast her in shadow. “Where’s this sanatorium?”
“Sopron,” sh
e said.
He climbed into the truck to get a better look at the drugged woman. He put his hands on his knees and stared into her eyes. “Crazy,” he said. “You, my dear, are insane.” He shook his head as he climbed back down and told the blonde about his grandfather, who stumbled around a sanatorium near Debrecen and never remembered his grandson’s name. “I don’t know why we waste our time with them,” he said. “Might as well just shoot them.”
“They’re not animals,” said the woman.
“Are you sure?”
She closed the doors. “Of course. They’re human.”
The soldier laughed. “If all there is to being human is standing on two legs and having a face that isn’t a monkey’s, then maybe there’s nothing special about being human.”
It had been dark for a while when they stopped again and the large man opened the back doors. “Gyertek ki,” he said, and the Sorokas followed Brano around the patients’ knees, out into the cold. Petre bounced from foot to foot, then threw himself into Lia’s arms.
They were on a paved road surrounded by flat farmland. They took their coats and clothes, and the woman asked them to change.
“Out here?” asked Lia.
But even she submitted, undressing and redressing on the other side of the truck. The driver took the hospital clothes and gave the woman a brief kiss on the lips before driving away. They watched the truck disappear in the direction of a town. She turned on the flashlight to illuminate her wristwatch, then extinguished it. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll hide in the ditch until it’s time.”
“Time for what?” asked Brano once they were settled. The Sorokas mumbled behind him.
“Time to be picked up,” she said.
“We’re near the Fertő Lake, aren’t we?”
In the darkness he could just make out her head turning to him. “Yes.”
“A boat?”
“A boat would be cut to bits by machine guns.”
“So we’re crossing by land.”
“It’s not your concern.”
Brano grinned, though she couldn’t see his lips. “I think it’s all of our concern. I know a little bit about these kinds of operations, and I don’t want to think I’m in the hands of amateurs. I suppose you have contacts within the border guards?”
She raised herself to look down the length of the empty road. “Wait—there he is.”
A pair of lights grew from the direction of the town, then stopped about thirty yards away. Brano was able to see, once the lights went off, that it was a small military truck, its rear covered in canvas. From the driver’s side, a flashlight flickered three times. The woman stood up then, and the truck rolled closer. She jogged up to the window and began to speak with a man inside.
“What is it?” asked Jan.
“Shh,” said Brano, listening.
“… Zsolt knows, I’m sure he does,” said the man. “The whole Fésűs Corner is covered with troops.”
“Not so loud,” she told him. “What are the options?”
Brano couldn’t hear what the man answered, but he could hear the woman’s exasperated sigh.
“What are they talking about?” whispered Lia.
“Nothing,” said Brano. “Just personal things. Everything’s fine.”
The woman walked back to them. “Everyone, let’s go.”
Brano sat in the shadows by the canvas flaps, watching the road fade behind them, while the Sorokas, deeper inside the truck, whispered among themselves. They didn’t need to speak the language to feel that something was wrong. Brano knew of the Fósűs Corner, a small point of Hungarian territory wedged into Austria on the eastern side of the Fertő Lake—Fertő to the Hungarians, Neusiedl to the Austrians. The driver was no doubt a border guard under the supervision of the Hungarian Interior Ministry, and the woman had bought him, either with money or something less tangible.
Brano leaned back as they passed through a town that, once they exited, he saw by a sign was Fertőd. Then the road narrowed, and they passed through Sarród and, after a while, the tiny village of Lászlómajor. Then, off to the left, he saw the low, flat spread of the eastern edge of the lake.
And there was no sign that the Doctor’s men were nearer to him than he was to the Austrian border. He briefly considered throwing himself out the back and running off. But he recalled Cerny’s last order: If you can’t stop him, then you follow and report hack when you can.
He had reported to the Doctor, but no one seemed to care.
When the truck turned and trembled across a rutted gravel road between the lake and a concrete canal, the obvious finally became clear. The Doctor would not come, because Yalta Boulevard wanted him in Austria. He covered his mouth with a hand, fighting a quick rush of zbrka and fear.
When they stopped it was in a darkness punctuated by the occasional flash of a spotlight sliding over the water from a guard tower north of them.
Both front doors opened and shut, and they waited. The woman appeared first, looking at them through the flaps without expression. Then she nodded to the right, toward a watery darkness thick with reeds. “It’s not far—about eight hundred yards that way. Once you’re across, turn right and then wait at the dirt road. You’ll be picked up.”
After Brano whispered his translation, Lia stuck her head out. “We’ll catch pneumonia.”
“That’s the least thing you have to worry about,” she answered. “Jan.”
Jan looked up from Petre, who was in his arms.
Brano translated her next words. “You’re responsible for watching the spotlight over there.” She pointed. “When it approaches, all of you go under. Understand?”
“We won’t make it,” Brano said in Hungarian. “Will we?”
“We’re more organized than you think. They’re focused on the Fósűs Corner tonight, not here.” She looked back at the empty road. “Hurry. They’ll be here soon.”
“And what will you be doing when they arrive?”
She smiled at Brano as the driver, who he could now see was a fat soldier with a rough face, put his arm around her. She said, “I’ll be fucking my friend in the back of this truck.”
As they crawled down from the gravel road into the cold water that rose to their knees, then their waists (Petre’s neck), he let go of the last tenuous hopes that he would be saved from this. But this had always been part of his work—no matter how vast the security apparatus behind you, the fact was that, in the end, you were alone.
His wet shirt puffed around his neck, and he pushed it down, working hard to reach that stage that followed uncertainty, the one Jan Soroka had always seemed to inhabit—acceptance. He barely heard it when that same man whispered, “Now.”
Brano looked around, saw the light sliding over the water toward him, and realized he was alone, ripples spreading through the reeds where his companions had been. Then he dropped into the icy water.
Images flashed. Bóbrka. Childhood. A quiet, shy boy, who never raised his hand in class. Unexceptional in school, where they used beet juice in lieu of ink, he was neither poor nor impressive, and it seemed likely that he would farm the earth in the same way his father and grandfather had. And this is what he did, from the age of twelve, tilling potatoes alongside his father in the arid fields.
His one lasting friendship, with Marek Piotrowski, was temperamental, based on this loud oaf’s momentary whims. When dissatisfied, Marek could sometimes be found on a Bóbrka side street, kicking Brano Sev into the dust.
Then, in 1939, the Germans took over his country. He was twenty-two when the frantic soldiers marched into his house and handed his father a piece of paper, which told him he would no longer grow vegetables; he would spend his days in a factory, welding large strips of steel into antitank obstacles. Two nights later, with his friend’s encouragement, Brano and Marek disappeared, soon finding what they sought: the partisan camp.
He came up, stifling a cough with his fist. His cold head was pounding. The others looked at him, Petre’s we
t face grinning. Black makeup dribbled from Lia’s eyes.
A breeze iced his wet hair as he glanced back to where, on the road some distance away, a jeep was parking behind the truck they’d left. A gathering headache pulsed behind his right eye.
They continued forward, stumbling sometimes over the stiff reeds. Petre fell; Lia righted him. They could still not see the far bank, but Jan walked with stiff confidence, glancing occasionally back at the activity on the gravel road. He turned again and paused, noticing a flicker. “Now.”
The partisan camp was not what they expected. It was makeshift, ready to be transported at any moment, and when they asked to be shown how to use a rifle, the commander, a shopkeeper from Dukla, Laszlo “Lion” Cerny (though he wore no stripes, he called himself a major), instead handed them a weathered book by Karl Marx. Read this, he told them. Then we’ll teach you how to kill Germans.
Will this teach us to kill the proper way? asked Marek.
Shh, said Brano.
While the partisans snuffed the fire and raided German convoys, Brano read. History is economics in action … The philosophers have only interpreted the world … the point, however, is to change it. Marek stood over him with a pine branch held like a rifle. He made shooting sounds with his mouth. What the bourgeoisie … produces above all is its own gravediggers … The workers have nothing to lose but their chains.
In the end, reading didn’t matter, because a failed raid on an officer’s tent turned out to be an ambush and cut the partisan camp in half. Want to learn how to shoot? asked Cerny.
The two of them nodded.
Let’s practice on Nazis.
And that was the day Marek was killed by a bullet from a machine gun mounted on a personnel carrier. Brano lay beside him in the grass, trying to deal with his jammed rifle (he had fired only two shots), and when he heard the quiet sigh to his left, through the grass, he knew before looking that his friend was dead. But he looked anyway. He stared at the hole in Marek’s neck, which throbbed, producing an astounding amount of blood that glued the blades of grass together.
36 Yalta Boulevard Page 13
