“What did you do with your father?” asked Emil.
She looked at him before answering. “The family crypt. My great-grandfather saw one on a trip to Paris, and decided the Hanics needed one too. A small marble house with panels for each of us.” She wedged her bag between her cheek and the rattling window, which quieted it. “Maybe someday you’ll have to take me to Stryy, Inspector.”
“Not for a long time,” he whispered.
Her eyes were closed. She said, “You’re the only one I’ve got left, Emil Brod. You took a bullet for me. You’re all I’ve got.”
He almost tried to explain that the bullet hadn’t been for her, it had been the result of his own stubborn stupidity, but said nothing.
Men in the corridor made loud jokes about stupid policemen and hacked on their laughter. Gray curtains of smoke obscured their red faces, and he saw they were drunk farmers who had snuck up from second class.
Lena was asleep again, her cheek reflected on the window. The city of Hust came and went, and the black plains rose into the southern foothills of the Carpathians. But he could not sleep. It wasn’t just the pain. He reached in his pocket for his watch, but it wasn’t there. After a few tries he realized it had been stolen. A pickpocket. Somewhere back in the Capital.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They reached Sighet, the provincial capital, after eight. The seven hours in that train had about killed him. Outside the station he moved back and forth and twisted himself gingerly, pressing one hand to the aching small of his back, the other to his stitched stomach.
It was said in the Academy that the last thing an inspector should do is admit frailty to a victim. It would undermine the victim s faith in the organs of administrative justice, and lead to the demise of faith in the administrative systems in general. In a people’s democracy, faith was the only power that kept the order from collapsing into anarchy. The professor who said all this had spoken with a dense Russian accent, mauling words like faith and collapse. The students had all thought it funny; and it was, for a while.
Lena had no faith in the organs of administrative justice-he didn’t know where her faith lay-so there was nothing to hide. She watched him bend and twist, and held her bag close to herself. After a few minutes she asked a farmer for a ride into the center of town, and helped Emil into the cart without comment.
They ate omelets in a hotel cafe, and while she was in the bathroom he approached a table of three farmers who dropped their eyes to their plum brandies and fell quiet. But when he asked about getting to Ruscova, they caught the roll of his slightly affected local accent and smiled broadly. When one suggested a particular friend to drive them, another cut him off, claiming the man was a drunk. He pointed to the window and said to take the train, but the third reminded him that no trains went to Ruscova. The first finally admitted he didn’t know Ruscova. “It’s small,” said Emil. The third told the first that he was an idiot, because Bogdan lived in Ruscova. The second said that a bus went to Viseu de Sus and stopped at the end of the long dirt road that led to Ruscova.
“But the lady’s coming?” asked the first one, and shook his head. “Can’t ask her to walk all the way down that road.”
They nodded in solemn agreement.
“The bus has left, anyway,” said the second.
“Talk to Bogdan,” said the third, leaning into his cigarette and watching as Lena returned with her handbag folded beneath her arm. They were all watching. Lena settled at her table with smooth self-confidence, not even looking for him. White-skinned. Immaculate.
Bogdans cart, tied to a massive brown mare with red tassels hanging by her ears, was parked outside a Hungarian bar, across from the park. He was covering a floor of potatoes with burlap. His thin face peered at Emil from under his wide, black hat, but relaxed as they talked. Bogdan remembered the name Brod only vaguely, and Emil admitted they seldom visited Ruscova these days.
A little way into the journey, Bogdan began talking politics and did not stop until they had reached the village. He said he could remember when this was Hungary, and, briefly, Romania. He said he didn’t know who this General Secretary Mihai was, but he didn’t trust anyone who was known only by his first name. “It’s impolite, isn’t it?” In the thirties he was for the king because no one else said anything that made so much sense, but when the king got them into the war, he was no longer sure. He’d heard all the rumors of the king’s mistress, the catty Jewess who dragged him off to Paris and London for their lovemaking, but found it all hard to believe. “I can read well enough,” he said. “But how can you believe anything in a paper that uses exclamation points?” Emil admitted he didn’t know. Bogdan had a blemish like a dark hole on his cheek. He wiped it with an index finger as he tossed the reins with the other hand. He said the Germans weren’t so bad to them, not to the farmers, not even when they used the road to get to Stalingrad. “They left us alone. Why would they bother with Ruscova?” But once the Russians were on their border the Germans became desperate. “I remember a young man on a motorcycle. Blond hair, looked very much like one of them. He drove up and down the main street shooting his pistol. A little thing.” A Walther, Emil suggested, and Bogdan nodded. “It was muddy, and his tires became stuck. Do you remember this?”
Emil shook his head, but it was a lie; he remembered that hot day, the shouts and gunshots as he hovered behind a fence, watching it all happen.
“Well, the boy had shot old Harnass and Marta Ieronim. Marta died soon after. The boy had gone off his head. You weren’t around then?”
Emil said he didn’t remember this as his stomach shook painfully. Behind him, Lena was trying to sleep on a mattress of potatoes.
“Well, he finally couldn’t get his motorcycle moving, and by then he’d run out of bullets. He shouted at us. He said we were stupid Slavs and we were going to eat ourselves alive.” Bogdan shook his head, smiling into the night. “Imagine that! He had quite a mouth on him.” He snapped the reins and tsfced the horse into a trot. “He threw his gun at us, then rocks. That was a mistake. Some of our boys threw rocks back at him, then the rest of us started into it. Tsk-tsk.” He looked back at Emil, as if he were going to ask a question, then shook his head. “When the German boy realized what was happening, he ran out of the village. It was the middle of the day, and he couldn’t hide from us. There aren’t too many trees, you know.” Emil did. “We surrounded him on a small hill that was thick with big rocks, the size of your fist. I remember his mouth was bloody, and he shouted at us. More of the same. That he wasn’t afraid, that we would eat ourselves. Big man. He had a lovely uniform that got all dusty and dirty. Then we threw our rocks.” His finger had been back at his mole for a while now, stroking. “I’d never seen a man die like that before. I’d heard about it from the priest, they killed people like that in the Bible. The body,” he said, “it falls apart under all that. And the boy, he screamed for a while, a long while, and then he didn’t.” Bogdan paused, clucking his tongue at the horse. “It’s a terrible way; I don’t know why anyone would want to kill like that. Tsk- tsk. It takes such a long time.”
Emil looked off into the night. The breeze off the plains was cool.
He had been there, and he hadn’t been there. Through the slats in the fence, he had seen the boy on his motorcycle, skidding around, shouting, shooting. Then running out of gas. He threw his empty Walther at them, some rocks, then sprinted off. The whole town followed, but Emil lingered. He took the pistol from the dust and pocketed it. His grandparents were visiting another village, and, alone, plans formed in his head. Then he heard it, the German shrieking.
“Then the Russians came in,” Bogdan said after a while, muttering bitterly. “And this Mihai wanted to collectivize us.” But they were already on the outskirts of Ruscova.
He left them at the door of the village’s one bar-really the extra, candlelit room of a village widow-and Emil forced him to take some koronas for his trouble. It was a long fight, but Emil finally won. Lena hovered in the background, looking uncomfortably at the small wooden houses surrounded by weathered fences and the few villagers passing with burlap sacks and pails.
Emil didn’t know the widow who served them tea. She stood near the wall with crossed arms in the flickering light, and stared.
So did two small, sturdy men nursing brandies at another table. Lena sipped her tea. She was plainly uncomfortable.
