but from that blank expression you couldn’t guess it.
“All consultation means is a lot of dull paper-pushing,” said Kaminski, smiling broadly to show us he wasn’t about to start doing any of that foolishness. “Where’s the closest bar?”
We all stared at his attempted joke.
“Seriously, though, I want everyone to feel free to approach me at any time. I’m from Moscow, you know, not the Moon.”
This Muscovite wasn’t from the Moon, but he was from Lubyanka. Even without his uniform, his KGB stripes were visible to all of us.
“Come on, guys,” Moska said, knowing when to step in and clear things up, “we’ve all got a lot of work to do.”
At his desk, Stefan and I looked over the coroner’s report. A simple suicide was, in the end, only that, and I tried to explain this to him. “But why now?” he asked. “Why does a man commit suicide now of all times?”
“Because it builds up. You don’t know how it can build up in a man. None of us does.”
He laid his chubby hands on the desk, spread wide. “But look around. Things haven’t been this good for a long time. The market’s fuller than ever before, political prisoners are coming back home, and you can read damn near anything you want. Why now? ”
I slouched deeper into my chair. “Tell me about him, then. What was he before he became a drunk?”
Stefan moved some pages until he came to a typewritten sheet. “Josef Maneck, born 1905 in Miskolc. His family ended up in the Capital in ’twenty-five, when his father opened a frame maker’s shop. The father died in ’forty-three, during the Occupation, and Josef took over his shop. He ran it for four years until, presumably because of connections, he became acting curator of the Museum of National Contemporary Art. In 1953 he was transferred to the Stryy Mineral Springs bottling plant outside town.”
“A bottling plant?”
“I suppose he wasn’t so good with the Culture Ministry. But he was no better on the assembly line. He was fired last year, for not showing up enough.”
“That takes a lot of work.”
“Arrested twice since for public drunkenness and fistfighting. Overnight stays.”
“And you need a reason for him to kill himself?”
Stefan stared through the page. “I guess I do.”
I noticed Leonek in the corner, at the coatrack, putting on his jacket to leave. He was a way out of this pointless conversation, so I did it, beginning something that would unravel so much. I asked Stefan to wait a moment, then went over to Leonek and told him I was sorry about his mother.
He looked surprised. “Thanks, Ferenc.”
“Come over for dinner. Okay? Tomorrow night.”
“Thanks, but no.”
“Really.” I put a hand on his arm to make my sincerity clear. “Magda’s a good cook, you’ll thank yourself for it.”
He shook his head again, his leathery Armenian face looser and more lost than I’d seen it before, his dark eyes drifting. But he was considering it, I could tell.
“Six o’clock, okay? We’ll leave from here, go get a drink, and be there in time to eat. It’s settled.”
“Why’d you do that?” Stefan asked when I returned.
“He just looks terrible.”
“He’ll work through it.” Stefan spoke with that same cold edge I’d heard earlier. Then he went back into the details of Josef Maneck’s miserable life, but by then I wasn’t listening to a word.
Mikhail Kaminski left with Brano, loudly describing the glories of Moscow nightlife, and Emil and Moska left together. Stefan asked if I wanted a drink. I said no. “You want to get right back to her, do you?” He smiled. “Come on, spend some time with your oldest friend for once.” But it wasn’t going to work. I was stuck in thoughts of Leonek’s dead mother, and of those days, long ago, in dark bars like the one we’d visited. After Stefan sighed and left, I called home.
“Hello, Daddy.”
“How was your day?”
“What day?”
“Don’t give me that.”
Agnes sighed. “It was satisfactory, Daddy. Very satisfactory.”
“Your teachers? How are they?”
“Too soon to tell.”
“And your friends? Are all of them still around?”
“You don’t even know my friends.”
I knew a few, but it didn’t matter. “Your mother there?”
“She’s downstairs, talking to that old woman again. Claudia. Want me to get her?”
“Just give her a message, okay?”
“I suppose.”
“Tell her we’re having a guest for dinner tomorrow. Can you do that?”
“When should I tell her you’re coming home? She always asks.”
“I’ll be,” I began, then realized I didn’t know. “Tell her I’ll probably be late. There’s a lot of work backed up here.”
“I’ll tell her.”
From her tone it was clear that Agnes saw right through me.
I sat straight in front of the typewriter. I’d rolled in a white sheet, twisted my ring, and now I waited for something to come. After a while, though, it was too dark to see.
10
I knocked on Georgi’s door after having walked down to the Tisa, trying to summon inspiration from the black water. The summer heat had brought out the smell of decay, and when the clamoring noise of a dogcatcher’s van filled with its barking victims flew by, the stink became too much.
Georgi let out a rude exclamation, kissed my cheeks with his wine-stained lips, and pulled me inside. His face was red, and the smile lines that sprouted from his eyes were white. “Have you met Louis? He’s leaving tomorrow! Come on, come on.” There were a lot of voices coming from the kitchen.
“Louis?”
“The Frenchman.” He reached up to my shoulder and urged me along.
They were up at this hour because they were always up-this is something they prided themselves on-ten or twelve men and women squeezed around a tiny kitchen table, drinking. Louis, the Frenchman, was in town, and everyone had made the pilgrimage to Georgi’s to see this emissary from the West. I’d forgotten.
“Louis!” Georgi called, and a fat man with oily, tasseled hair rolled his head back.
“Oui?”
“Mon ami” said Georgi. “Meet another of our writers!”
“This is a nation of writers!” Louis shouted, then rose wearily to his feet and stuck out a hand. “ You’re a big writer.”
He gave the kind of firm, rough shake men give when they consider my size, then turned my hand so he could see my rings, my sentimental reminders of the war.
“Each finger, huh?” Louis grinned as he settled back down. “I bet those rings have got some stories to them. Writers! ”
It was a kitchen of writers-Karel and Vera, Daniel, even Miroslav, and more-and I wanted none of them. All I’d wanted was Georgi, a quiet talk, and then some sleep. But Georgi couldn’t do anything quietly tonight. His Frenchman was in town. His French communist poet-an existentialist, no less.
The Frenchman sat up and said a few words of a love poem by Paul Eluard that I did not understand,
