Statues were pulled down with ropes and sweat, and People’s commissars in greatcoats directed the workers. Really, though, the Revolution had run its course before they even entered Russia. They saw peasants dragging crates of potatoes through the streets, and for a long time this was their picture of revolution. Crates and sacks of potatoes. No one heard or saw Lenin anywhere. Then he was on the balconies again. “Once a criminal in hiding,” Grandfather said, his voice quivering, “now surrounded by generals who looked like dock workers. You hear him speak.” He tapped his ear. “It doesn’t matter what the words are. I couldn’t understand his accent. But no matter. Just him moving his arms, shouting in the cold. Foggy words in his mouth. A man.”
He wiped his eyes unabashedly with his too-large knuckles because thirty years ago was like yesterday. He had returned to the Capital with a red card in his bag and orders to foment revolution. He and his two friends already constituted a cell. But then the rigors of life set in again. Food and money. There was a war still tearing apart the rest of Europe, and food was scarce for everyone. All he could do was eke out a living selling withered vegetables to women in the Sixth District who couldn’t afford them, trying to support his wife and boy. Years passed, a world depression struck, and their cell consisted of three men who drank together, commiserating over their failures. War came again, and the king sent their boy Valentin-a father himself now-to Poland to defend the monarchy against fascists; then Valentin’s wife followed into oblivion. When the Germans marched into the Capital, they fled south with their insolent teenage grandson. Avram Brod had thought it could get no worse than the slums they had come from, but he had never been a farmer before, had never met the Romanian Jews who wore the terrors of the world on their faces.
By the time they returned to the Capital, the Brod clan was decimated, but in the chaos of the Liberation, that weathered, muddy red card earned them an apartment with a view. It was a miserable tradeoff-a family for a home-but Grandfather did everything in his power to justify what he could.
“The ‘thick Muscovites’ were everywhere,” said Grandmother.
“Be kind, Mara.”
The “thick Muscovites” were those men who, after spending the 1930s throwing rocks and shooting politicians, had escaped to Moscow during the war, where they camped out in hotels. General Secretary Mihai had been among them. They appeared again just behind the Red Army to set up the interim government, and with the 1946 elections had the remarkable good fortune of being voted immediately into power.
They were called “thick” because when they returned from Moscow they were, almost without exception, so plump their own families had trouble recognizing them.
In no time they were setting up tribunals, sentencing old comrades-primarily those who had chosen to stay in the country and fight the Nazis-to work camps and prisons, some to the firing squad. The Spark, the revived Party daily, gave notice of those old communists who no longer carried the torch, and would pay for their lack of enthusiasm. Finally the handsome Mihai-handsome despite the fresh rolls of fat-who before the war had styled himself as a partisan fighter against the monarchy before fleeing to Moscow, found himself with the title, first, of Prime Minister; then, in addition, General Secretary. His portrait began appearing everywhere.
Grandfather was settling into his emotions, ignoring the passing city. Emil noticed the glint of tears on the old man’s cheeks.
For Avram Brod, there were two events in history: the Russian Revolution and the Patriotic War, which resulted in his country’s proletarian liberation. In both these events he had been close enough to smell the dead, but too late to make a difference.
“This is the problem with History,” he said after the tears had dried and they were turning back toward home. He had regained his liveliness, and kept turning to look at passing shop windows. “When you’re living in the midst of it, you don’t even realize. You’re preoccupied by money and food and the appointment you’re late for. But look around yourself, boy. We’re living through it now.”
Emil slowed behind a delivery truck unloading heavy, unmarked steel barrels. The workers paused in their work to watch the Mercedes drive past.
“What happened in ‘seventeen was just the start. There are so many of us now. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, the Baltics and even the Czechs. It’s just the beginning. You may not believe it, but in ten years we’ll look back with nostalgia. We’ll forget how hard it was to get a little meat, or to repair the pipes. We’ll wonder how we were so lucky to live through these times. Helping to shape the great experiment.”
He was out of words again, and turned to the window. They were back in the Fifth District, moving slowly through dark, narrow side streets.
Emil concentrated on the functional details of driving. Shift, turn, accelerate.
“You glorify so much,” said Grandmother. When Emil looked in the rearview, he saw a face obscured by shadows. “The Russians are pigs.”
Emil kept his eyes on the road and the families wandering the cracked sidewalks. He’d seldom heard her contradict him like that. Finally, Grandfather’s voice came briskly: “Mara, you don’t know. I was in Russia. They fed me. They were good and true. I was the one who saw them in their own country.”
Her voice was hard. “Don’t tell me what I don’t know.” She shifted in the darkness. “I’ve seen enough Russians to last me a lifetime.”
Just before their building, in the reflection of a passing streetlight, Emil saw that she, too, had been crying.
He watched the others work. Leonek Terzian leaned into his telephone on the other side of the room, mumbling and nodding. He stared back at Emil with an indecipherable expression as he wrote in his notepad. Big Ferenc, beneath the bulletin board, typed slowly. Stefan, still unshaven, spat pumpkin seed shells that missed his wastebasket, and the security inspector-still, remarkably, in leather-arranged stacks of files on the floor beside his desk, which faced the blank wall.
This was manageable. This tenuous silence. Each person working on his own business.
He read over the notes from Lena Crowder’s interview. So little, he’d have to talk with her again. Part of him dreaded it, while another was eager for the chance to revisit her in that mansion. There was something beyond his prole jealousy that wanted to touch those expensive things. To see those legs folded beneath her.
He looked up as Terzian cradled the telephone and went to the chief’s door. When he knocked, Emil could hear the faint “Enter.”
He called the Fourth District police station, which had originally reported Crowder’s body, and recognized the voice of the bored young policeman who was able to eat butter near a bashedin skull. “Comrade Inspector?”
“You remember me?” asked Emil.
“Of course.”
“Do you remember telling me that Lena Crowder was not informed of her husband’s death?”
There was a brief pause, the hiss of wires. “Sure.”
“You know why I’m asking this?”
No reply.
“I’m asking because she already knew.”
A crackling exhale. “Maybe she read it in the paper.”
“She learned it from a phone call,” said Emil.
“I said nothing, Comrade Inspector.” His words were short, abrupt. “I spoke to no reporters. I did not call Lena Crowder.”
There was a small, warm anger inside him. By the time he had shown up, Lena Crowder s window of interrogation had been open, then slammed shut and bolted. And now, no one was taking responsibility.
“Then who made the phone call?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps you should ask Comrade Crowder.”
“I-”
“Brod.”
It was Chief Moska, filling his doorway. As he stepped back into the office, Emil hung up and followed.
Terzian was stretched out in a chair across from the chief’s desk, one leg tossed over a padded arm. The chief settled, grunting, into his own chair. Emil glanced around for a free seat that wasn’t there. He stood finally with his hands clasped behind his back, Academy-style. “Comrade Chief?”
Moska didn’t notice the slip. He looked at Terzian, who was focused on some point beyond the beige curtains, and said to Emil, “How’s the Crowder case coming?”
It was cooler in the office today. “The wife has been interviewed. But preliminarily. Someone informed her of
