“Where are you going?” asked Lazlo.
“One goes where one must in the dark of night when a friend beckons.”
“What?”
The bearded man continued. “Friends, bodies separate but joined at the head, brain juices mingling. Borscht.”
Then Lazlo recalled where he’d seen the man. Club Ukrainka.
One of Tamara’s poet friends. He leaned close to the Zil’s window.
“An admirer of the poet Vasyl Stus sent me,” said the bearded man. “Vasyl Stus from the labor camp I am not, but if I dare…”
“No poems now. Tell me what you came to say.”
“It’s Tamara,” whispered the man. “She’s at the club. She wants you there.”
“Is she all right?”
“I don’t know. She appears normal, although Tamara is by no means a normal person. She said to find you and bring you to her.”
“I have my own car. I’ll drive. You can follow if you like.”
After he directed Stash to take charge at the roadblock, Lazlo sped off in the Zhiguli. Behind him, the Zil tried to keep up. And behind the Zil, its headlights illuminating the Zil’s smoky exhaust, was the van from the closed gasoline station.
Club Ukrainka was quiet. Tamara sat at her usual table in the corner, alone, the candle on the table unlit. She wore no makeup and did not stand to cheerfully call Lazlo to her table. A glass of red wine stood before her. He ordered the same and sat across from her, moving the unlit bottled candle aside. She looked tired as she sipped her wine. She pulled the shawl she wore tightly about her.
“Something is wrong,” said Lazlo.
When the bartender brought his wine, Lazlo noticed even he sensed Tamara’s anxiety.
Tamara waited for the bartender to leave before speaking. “The KGB picked me up this morning. They questioned me all day and let me go only two hours ago.”
“What did they want? Did they hurt you?”
Tamara took a gulp of wine, put the glass down, brushed her hair from her forehead. “I thought it would be about the writers’ union Chernobyl articles again, but it wasn’t. They wanted to know about you, Laz. How often you come here, what we talk about. They wanted to know what we talked about last weekend when we were together. I said it was none of their business. They said by the end of the day, I would not only tell them what we talked about, I would tell them what we did.”
Tamara wiped at her eyes. “And I told them, Laz. I told them what we did. I told them about the dinner you made. I told them we danced. I told them everything, because we did nothing wrong.
They said if I didn’t cooperate, we’d both be in trouble. The main interrogator was kind at first. A handsome young man simply doing his job. I was wrong to cooperate, Laz. They hinted about my sanity being in question. They had copies of the literary review and pointed out articles they insisted were anti-Soviet. I didn’t want to go to the psychiatric hospital, Laz. I didn’t want to be made into a crazy woman
…”
“Tamara, if you’re trying to apologize, it’s not necessary. You did the right thing. With these fools it’s best, if you have nothing to hide, to simply tell everything.”
“But they wanted me to say things about you.”
“Like what?”
“The young man kept referring to what you did when you weren’t with me. He wanted me to agree you and your brother and his lover…”
“Juli Popovics?” asked Lazlo.
Tamara tried to smile. “It was funny in a way. His name was Brovko, Captain Brovko. At the same time he’s implying conspiracy at Chernobyl, he’s trying to make me jealous. I said you told me about Juli Popovics yourself and I didn’t think it at all unusual for a friend of your brother to come to Kiev and…”
“And they didn’t hurt you during the questioning?”
“Except for helping me into the car, they didn’t touch me. In the end they simply wanted me to agree your trips to the Chernobyl region were mysterious. I told them because your brother lived there, it was obvious they were trying to create crimes where none existed.
Brother visits brother, and the KGB breaks wind.”
“They don’t like being made to look foolish, Tamara.”
“What should I have done, Laz?”
“Told them the truth and not volunteered your own opinions.
Said whatever you had to in order to protect yourself. Describe this Captain Brovko.”
“Tall, well-built, in his thirties. Spoke a refined Russian and looked almost German. Light hair and blue eyes.”
Lazlo looked about the room. The same few people were at other tables. The only new arrival was the bearded poet from the Zil, who sat alone at a table reading a book. The KGB men in the van, if they had kept up, were probably parked outside.
“What should I do now, Laz?”
“Nothing. And it would be best if we didn’t see one another for a while.”
Tamara reached across the table and touched his hand. “How long?”
He squeezed Tamara’s hand. “I don’t know where this will lead, but I have bad feelings about it. If I need your help at some point…”
“Simply tell me, Laz. What the hell, I can take it.”
Even though the club was closing up, Lazlo felt it would be best not to drive Tamara home. When he pulled away from the curb, he saw Tamara pause to look his way before getting into the ancient Zil with the bearded poet.
When Lazlo opened his apartment door, there was an envelope on the floor. Inside, a typed message on Chief Investigator Chkalov’s stationery said he was to meet Chkalov promptly at eight in the morning. Although he was dead tired, he knew it would be a sleep-less night-the men in the Volga watching Juli, the van following him from Club Ukrainka to his apartment, the KGB questioning Tamara, and now this message from Chkalov.
In bed he thought about the KGB outside. He imagined them taking him away to KGB headquarters on Boulevard Shevchenko, first to the room where they interrogated Tamara, then to one of the basement rooms
…
In the nightmare he is on a blanket beneath the chestnut tree in the yard of the old farm. Uncle Sandor sits on the blanket beside him, coughing up asthmatic sputum, spitting it into a scaly palm, and showing it to him. In the yard he sees Mihaly climb down into the wine cellar. A woman screams, the scream muffled as if she is in the house
… or down in the cellar. Suddenly, the wine cellar erupts with a red liquid explosion, and he awakens. On the clock at his bedside, only ten minutes have passed.
He lay awake recalling the wine cellar, the things Mihaly said about Chernobyl the previous summer. Mihaly referring to the Chernobyl reactors as female. Was this the scream he heard in the nightmare? He pieced together what Mihaly and Juli had said about safety problems, experiments, and backup systems being shut off.
None of the information came from his visit to the Ministry of Energy. It came from Mihaly and Juli. And now Mihaly was dead and Juli was being watched and might at any time be picked up for questioning by the KGB.
He looked at the clock again. After three. In less than five hours, he was due in Chkalov’s office. He got up, shaved, dressed, and went out into the night. He drove as fast as he could to militia headquarters, all the while glancing in the mirror in hopes the van speeding several blocks behind would crash and kill its occupants.
For the remainder of the night, Lazlo maintained a vigil at his small desk at militia headquarters. First he called Juli at Aunt Magda’s and told her he would be calling periodically. Juli said she was glad, not only because she was frightened of the men watching the house, but because she wanted to talk to him.
“If I can’t see you, at least I’ll hear your voice. I’ll sleep on the sofa.
The phone is under the cushion so it won’t wake Aunt Magda.”
After his first call to Juli, Lazlo called militia headquarters in Visenka. He pretended to be a neighbor of Aunt
