raised lettering on the edge. Then he shrugged. “It will do,” he said. “Why Roumanian?”
“That’s what I could get.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t speak it. I’m Croatian.”
“That won’t be a problem. We’re going across the Hungarian border. At Michal’an. Are you carrying another passport? I don’t think we have to worry about it, but still …”
“No. I had to rid of it.”
He left the room. Morath could hear him, talking to the woman. When he reappeared, he was carrying a briefcase. Walking behind him, the woman held a cheap valise in both hands. She’d put on a hat, and a coat with a ragged fur collar. Pavlo whispered something to her and kissed her on the forehead. She looked at Morath, her eyes suspicious but hopeful, and sat on a couch, the valise between her feet.
“We’re going out for an hour or so,” Pavlo said to the woman. “Then we’ll be back.”
Morath wanted no part of it.
Pavlo closed the door. Out in the street, he grinned and cast his eyes to heaven.
They walked for a long time before they found a droshky. Morath directed the driver back to the hotel, then Pavlo waited in the room while Morath went to see the proprietor in a tiny office behind the kitchen where he was laboring over a bookkeeper’s ledger. As Morath counted out Czech koruny to pay the bill, he said, “Do you know a driver with a car? As soon as possible-I’ll make it worthwhile.”
The proprietor thought it over. “Are you going,” he said delicately, “some distance away from here?”
He meant,
“Some.”
“We are, as you know, blessed with many neighbors.”
Morath nodded. Hungary, Poland, Roumania.
“We are going to Hungary.”
The proprietor thought it over. “Actually, I do know somebody. He’s a Pole, a quiet fellow. Just what you want, eh?”
“As soon as possible,” Morath said. “We’ll wait in the room, if that’s all right with you.” He didn’t know who was looking for Pavlo, or why, but railroad stations were always watched. Better, a quiet exit from Uzhorod.
The driver appeared in the late afternoon, introduced himself as Mierczak, and offered Morath a hand like tempered steel. Morath sensed a powerful domesticity. “I’m a mechanic at the flour mill,” he said. “But I also do this and that. You know how it is.” He was ageless, with a receding hairline and a genial smile and a British shooting jacket, in houndstooth check, that had somehow wandered into this region in an earlier age.
Morath was actually startled by the car. If you closed one eye it didn’t look so different from the European Fords of the 1930s, but a second look told you it wasn’t anything like a Ford, while a third told you it wasn’t anything. It had lost, for example, all its color. What remained was a shadowy tone of iron, maybe, that faded or darkened depending on what part of the car you looked at.
Mierczak laughed, jiggling the passenger-side door until it opened. “Some car,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“No,” Morath said. He settled down on the horse blanket that had, a long time ago, replaced the upholstery. Pavlo got in the back. The car started easily and drove away from the hotel.
“Actually,” Mierczak said, “it’s not mine. Well, it’s partly mine. Mostly it is to be found with my wife’s cousin. It’s the Mukachevo taxi, and, when he’s not working at the store, he drives it.”
“What is it?”
“What is it,” Mierczak said. “Well, some of it is a Tatra, built in Nesseldorf. After the war, when it became Czechoslovakia. The Type II, they called it. Some name, hey? But that’s that company. Then it burned. The car, I mean. Though, now that I think about it, the factory also burned, but that was later. So, after that, it became a Wartburg. We had a machine shop in Mukachevo, back then, and somebody had left a Wartburg in a ditch, during the war, and it came back to life in the Tatra. But-we didn’t really think about it at the time-it was an
The car had used up the cobblestone part of Uzhorod and was now on packed dirt. “Gentlemen,” Mierczak said. “We’re going to Hungary, according to the innkeeper. But, I must ask if you have a particular place in mind. Or maybe it’s just ‘Hungary.’ If that’s how it is, I perfectly understand, believe me.”
“Could we go to Michal’an?”
“We could. It’s nice and quiet there, as a rule.”
Morath waited. “But …?”
“But even quieter in Zahony.”
“Zahony, then.”
Mierczak nodded. A few minutes later, he turned a sharp corner onto a farm road and shifted down to second gear. It sounded like he’d swung an iron bar against a bathtub. They bumped along the road for a time, twenty miles an hour, maybe, until they had to slow down and work their way around a horse cart.
“What’s it like there?”
“Zahony?”
“Yes.”
“The usual. Small customs post. A guard, if he’s awake. Not any traffic, to speak of. These days, most people stay where they are.”
“I imagine we can pick up a train there. For Debrecen, I guess, where we can catch the express.”
Pavlo kicked the back of the seat. At first, Morath couldn’t believe he’d done it. He almost turned around and said something, then didn’t.
“I’m sure there’s a train from Zahony,” Mierczak said.
They drove south in the last of the daylight, the afternoon fading away to a long, languid dusk. Staring out the window, Morath had a sudden sense of home, of knowing where he was. The sky was filled with torn cloud, tinted red by the sunset over the Carpathian foothills, empty fields stretched away from the little road, boundary lines marked by groves of birch and poplar. The land turned to wild meadow, where the winter grass hissed and swayed in the evening wind. It was very beautiful, very lost.
A tiny village, then another. It was dark now, cloud covered the moon, and spring mist rose from the rivers. Midway through a long, slow curve, they caught sight of the bridge over the Tisza and the Zahony border station. Pavlo shouted, “Stop.” Mierczak stamped on the brake as Pavlo hung over the top of the seat and punched the button that turned off the lights. “The bitch,” he said, his voice ragged with fury. He was breathing hard, Morath could hear him.
In the distance they could see two khaki-colored trucks, river fog drifting through the beams of their lights, and a number of silhouettes, possibly soldiers, moving about. In the car it was very quiet, the idling engine a low rumble, the smell of gasoline strong in the air.
“How can you be sure it was her?” Morath asked.
Pavlo didn’t answer.
“Maybe they are just there,” Mierczak said.
“No,” Pavlo said. For a time, they watched the trucks and the soldiers. “It’s my fault. I knew what to do, I just didn’t do it.”
Morath thought the best thing would be to drive south to Berezhovo, find a rooming house for a day or two, and take a train into Hungary. Or, maybe better, drive west into the Slovakian part of the country-away from Ruthenia, land of too many borders-and then take the train.
“You think they saw our lights?” Mierczak said. He swallowed once, then again.
“Just turn around and get out of here,” Pavlo said.
Mierczak hesitated. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but if he ran away, that changed.
“Now,” Pavlo said.
Reluctantly, Mierczak yanked the gearshift into reverse and got the car turned around. He drove a little way in the darkness, then turned the lights back on. Pavlo watched through the rear window until the border post disappeared around the curve. “They’re staying put,” he said.
