“A neighbor saw this man throw away a volume of Comrade Chairman Stalin’s collected speeches “ Sev’s cheeks puffed as his lips widened into a smile. “Who knows why he did it? Maybe the book was old, or the dog urinated on it. But this old grandmother was disturbed enough to have us look into it, and we learned that our secrets were being sold to the British. You know where I’m going with this?”
Sweat had formed along Sev’s upper lip, clear little beads that joined and slipped into his mouth. Emil imagined the saltiness, then little old women burrowing through trash, then he imagined prisons run by state security devotees like this one. He started to answer, to say, Yes, Comrade, but Sev’s loud voice boomed through the station.
“There’s a war on, Comrade Brod! You don’t see it in the streets, and you certainly may not care about it, but despite your ignorance it goes on! Haven’t you heard of Berlin? The capitalists are barking at the gates. An entire world is out to crush us!” He breathed loudly, cheeks red and damp.
A finger pointed at Emil’s chest. “These are not just platitudes! Each day people die, trying to keep this great experiment running!”
He stopped, his small eyes swimming in their sockets, flashing at other corners of the room. They steadied gradually, focusing, settling finally on Emil. When he spoke, it was again with control.
“People have to take responsibility for their freedom. You understand?” He waved a hand at the files. Casual. The shouting was over. “These are only suspects from the last three months; the rest are on file in the Central Committee. Do you really think I can follow all these people myself?” He threaded his fingers on the desk.
Emil had to answer now. “Of course you can’t, Comrade Sev.” His face flushed. “I just-” He started to raise his hands-they were like ice-then let them drop.
Brano Sev picked up his lecture where he had left off. The Allies trying to force us out of Berlin, the tenuous victory of the working class here at home, the martyrs of the Liberation, the insidious influence of opportunists and the apathetic.
The eyes of the whole office were on Emil. They were waiting. For an explosion, maybe. Or a final folding. The lecture went on. The humiliation was a numbing thing, and he felt as though he were standing outside of himself, and he had to force his body to do simple things. Nod. Say I understand and I apologize.
The numbness kept him distanced from the anger forming in his gut. Hard, dense. He was distracted by the humiliation that saturated his body.
Nod.
Part of him thought: This is a lecture by Brano Sev on the necessity of Brano Sev.
Stand straight. Do not look away.
Another part: Youre not getting my case. Just try. I’ll kill you.
The thrashing was over. He only knew because Sev, livid again, threw himself into his chair and picked up the telephone to call Third State Equipment Supply, SA.
Turn around. Walk back-balance, now-to your desk. Sit down.
Stefan was on cherries today, tossing white, sucked pits into the wastebasket. He used his tongue to clear residue from his incisors, and raised an eyebrow when Emil looked.
Take out your watch. Five p.m.
Ferenc spoke into his own telephone quietly, shooting brief, clandestine glances, as if he were talking about Emil. But maybe that was the paranoia again. He put the watch away. Terzian was nowhere to be seen. His jacket and leather satchel were gone, and the light in the chief’s office was out.
Stand up. Take your jacket. Don’t look at him. Ahead, through the door.
Emil appeared on the front steps where the angled, late afternoon sunlight glowed on the windows opposite.
He told himself to look around, for safety.
The heat was thick with animal smells, and shouts rang out down below. The humiliation still blocked up his ears, so the vendors’ shouts were whispers. The lounging district cops didn’t look up as he passed.
Two streets down he bought a bottle of cheap plum brandy from a state store. The tall woman behind the counter with so much black hair looked at him suspiciously. Then he went to an empty state restaurant. More black hair, white smocks, suspicious and slow service. He almost walked out before the pork cutlet arrived. The potatoes had gone cold. After a while he started drinking from his brandy at the table, straight from the bottle, and the waitresses, chain-smoking in the corner, conferred worriedly. He returned to the garage as the sun was setting. He took another coarse swig just before starting the engine, another before nodding to the attendant in his glassed-in box. But the teenager s eyes were already closed, dozing.
The Capital was behind him. It was black out here, farther west than the city’s lights could reach, and all he could hear were the wind and the roaring engine. The Tisa’s stone and concrete banks had become mud and grass a mile back. His speeding headlights lit the flat sides of long grass, the occasional fence post or discarded plank of wood and, once, a broken-down and stripped Soviet jeep. All around were flat fields.
Another mile, he would reach Lena Crowder’s house.
This was the blackness of provincial nights. He remembered those first weeks in Ruscova, the terror it had provoked in him, a teenager in fields that were as dark as closed eyes.
To the north, the land rose from plains to an omen of the Carpathians. He pulled to the side of the road, climbed down a muddy slope, and pissed in the river.
When he got back to the car, a little dizzy, he wondered if he should go forward or back. Westward, farther than Lena Crowder’s, were Czechoslovakia and Hungary. His imagination could see Prague. Budapest. He saw them as he had in those Soviet moving pictures on the prison wall in Sighet-as cities of fantastic possibility, as an end to the drudgery of daily existence. Despite Helsinki, that enthusiasm for the great cities still trickled in his veins. He could drive on to the edge of the known world- everything was ahead of him.
Behind was home. A dull, continual humiliation. Ignorance and pain.
On the outskirts again, just before the unfinished workers’ blocks, he noticed a small shack on the side of the road. The one-room bar he’d seen before. A few carts were outside, some horses resting in the night, and when Emil pulled in he could clearly see bar painted sloppily over the open door, where light spilled out.
It was barely a room. Short tree stumps had been arranged as unstable stools around three small tables, and, at one, four stout farmers drank from shot glasses and played cards. The bar itself was a plank in front of a fat woman holding a bottle of clear, basement-distilled brandy. Behind her, along a single shelf, were three more bottles of the same poison. The place stank of sour liquor. He bought a glass and settled at a table in the dim back corner.
He tried to focus. On the case, the Crowder case. But he kept coming up with that round peasant’s face with three moles. Apple cheeks and propaganda mouth. He tried to evoke Lena Crowder’s face instead, those intense, elegant features. The product of another world.
She-yes- she could hold his attention.
There was a point in his life where his relationship with women had changed. As a boy growing up in the Capital, or even loitering in the Canal District, he saw women who struck him in a certain way. These women were in abundance. They had details that thrilled him: a face, a walk or the way a dress hung from their shoulders. In the summers between the wars he looked forward to the promenade of girls along the Tisa. They walked as if showing off their glory to the heavens.
It was enough on those hot days to see them pleased with themselves. Sometimes they gave him a smile. Not flirtation-not completely. Just an understanding that, for an instant on a perfect day, they could have the intimacy of eyes. Of a smile.
The effect was always devastating.
When the war came, the summers meant, instead, the sweating mothers of Ruscova. Women like his grandmother and her friend Irina Kula. Their smiles were obligatory: They meant nothing but the pleasure of seeing youth. Life, suddenly, had lost all sensuality.
The farmers shouted and he jumped, looking around as if waking. But then they were laughing-large mouths missing half their teeth-tossing cards on the table. He bought another shot from the barmaid-she gave it to him with a frown-and looked at the card players on the way back to his table.
In Ruscova the farmers were like that, men who worked like cattle and focused their pleasure into brief, intense games of luck. He sat down and closed his eyes.
Then the Jews came to Ruscova. They spoke Romanian or Hungarian, and French, and communicated as best
