measuring equipment and cyrillics, and the Soviet soldiers who had arrived a year earlier did not leave.
Once, when she was in a mood, Filia said she only stayed with him because she was afraid of being raped by the Reds. You’re my protection against the Bolshevik drip. He looked at her stone eyes, hurt. Her smile came back and she asked why he had come back to the east, when he could have stayed in Helsinki, or gone on to London. Even America. She said America like an incantation.
Instead of answering, he told her his father had led a campaign through Warsaw that ended in a hero’s death. She didn’t believe him.
You’re telling the story with pauses and bursts; youre a bad liar. Her own husband was at the Front; she could see right through Emil. So he admitted he didn’t know anything about how Lieutenant Valentin Brod had died, nothing except Warsaw and a bullet, this knowledge culled from a sparely worded telegram addressed to his mother, who was by then dead as well. Was she satisfied? Hardly, Filia said, then asked again why he had come back from the west. He said because he needed to meet her. She laughed and said, Seriously.
He told her how his mother had died. Starvation. On the Front.
War and war. She had heard plenty of it, she said. But he told her anyway.
Maria Brod had been one of those nurses who followed their husbands all the way to the battle lines, then died. Stray bullets or disease or, if, like Maria Brod, they were unfortunate enough to become separated from their staff on those vast mountain ranges, they died of starvation and exposure. The Red Army soldiers who came across her body on a ridge of the Tatras mailed her papers back to the Capital, where a friend at their old address forwarded them on to Ruscova. But there was no word on what they had done to the corpse, and Emil imagined her still lying among the snow-stripped trees in the mountains, missing only her identification papers.
Filia didn’t ask anything more-this story, at least, was true. The following Monday morning she left for the factory, and did not return. By then the last of the troops were stumbling back into town, and her husband was no doubt among them. He was alone now, almost out of money, and his grandfather had moved from Ruscova to the Fifth District with a red card and a modicum of prestige.
“Today?” Grandfather asked when the silence of the table had stretched too long. “How was it?”
They were unbearable tonight. Both of them. It was no one thing they said; it was every word, every syllable. He plotted his escape. He would relocate near the water, maybe even the cleaner edges of the Canal District. Over boiled cabbage he did the math, knowing from the start the numbers were doomed, but following them hopefully to their predictable, lacking end. The pittance from the People s Militia would not earn his freedom; bribes, the government assumed, would make up the difference.
He’d had money once, but that had all been frittered away. On that girl.
“A day. Just a day.”
Grandmother frowned at Emil’s wrinkled, soiled suit. “You really must learn to take care of yourself. What’s that on your face?” She wiped the sore on his chin with a spit-damp finger.
He dreamed of seal boats cutting through the ice sheets of the north. A ship of nomads who thought nothing of risking their lives in the miserable cold. They had nothing to lose. They drank heavily and fought on the icy deck; by the time they reached the hunting grounds, the Croat was already dead, having plummeted, drunk, into the black waters. In his dream, when the dissatisfied Bulgarian pulled a knife on him over a card game, his stomach did not sink as it had in reality; it levitated. Then he floated up through the cabin ceiling. He dreamed of little fat bodies, gray and silver bundles sliding down ice slopes into the water, eyes like black coins with a woman’s long lashes. Their insides steamed when he cleaned them out; their red organs misted in the white snow. He dreamed of the Bulgarian who was found among the seal guts, facedown in the gore. Gored himself. Gutted and discarded on the ice.
When he woke his conviction of failure was somehow less inevitable. The night’s sleep, or the passage of time, had rejuvenated him, and he rushed through the alphabetizing of the chief’s files. He ignored its insignificance-the task was something he had to do as quickly and mindlessly as possible. Like the seal carcasses.
A few files fell open, and he scanned their contents. Criminals now locked away in prisons in the provinces, some working in the western swamps, raising land from mud, harvesting reeds. The records went back decades, and the prewar files had stamps with the icon of a crown. All that was over now. Some new files had symbols borrowed from the Soviets, while others-the hawk, primarily-were local. Wings pressed to its sides, its beak in
profile, talons extended. Hammers and sickles and stalks of wheat bent like parentheses. Above a star: 1917.
“Enter.”
He pushed the door open with the S-through-Z box and set it in the far corner. The chief watched as he brought in the other two, stacking them on the first. Then Emil stood before his desk. “Now,” he said breathily. “You have a case? For me.”
The boredom in Chief Moska’s eyes was overwhelming. “Those are in order?”
“Absolutely.”
“Maybe you should give them another look-over. To be sure.”
Emil’s face warmed. He closed the door and, after it latched, stood again in front of the chief’s desk. He spoke clearly and calmly, his jaw muscles tensed: “I don’t know what’s been going on here, why you and your men are acting like this. But I came here as a homicide inspector for the People’s Militia, and if you refuse to give me a legitimate case, I can’t be responsible for what follows.”
The chief leaned back and balanced a stubby pencil between his fingers.
Emil hoped his red face and boldness would give the impression of someone who might do anything if provoked, however reckless. It was the look a young man had to cultivate in the Arctic waters.
The chief brought the pencil to his mouth, his lips closing on it, and when he brought it away there was black residue. He spoke slowly, lazily. “Yesterday. Something came through and, well, I don’t want to waste my men’s time with it.” He was talking to the papers on his desk. His hands had given up on the pencil and were flicking through smeared, typewritten sheets. “Fourth District, a singer. No. Songwriter.” He licked his fingers with a fat, lead-blackened tongue as he searched through the pages. Emil made sure he missed nothing.
“This songwriter’s dead?”
“That’s how they come to us, Brod.” He held out a handwritten sheet.
Male, Janos Crowder, 35, dead in apartment, severe trauma to head. Liberation Street 12.
“Called in after hours,” the chief muttered. “District police station took pictures, samples, the usual. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”
Emil opened his mouth. He wanted to ask what the usual meant, but nothing came out. His feet seemed to disappear from under him. He had his case. So quickly, easily.
“You need mobilization papers? Get going.”
Emil found his feet.
On the tram, he held on to a leather strap, a pendulum swinging between a woman taking bites out of a round loaf of bread and two laughing boys repeating damn and shit to one another. Emil recalled the dead man. At least one of his songs was very famous, something children sang in school. He’d heard them on their marches down the boulevards, looking smart in kerchiefs and buttons, but he couldn’t remember the name of the tune. Part of a lyric came to him as they left the First District’s mustard-colored administrative centers for the carved entryways and wrought- iron gates of the unbombed, still-prestigious part of the Fourth: There are White Guards in your heart that must be torn apart.
There was nothing left of Janos Crowder’s face for him to recognize.
The policeman who had been waiting for him-a boy little younger than Emil, with a loose-fitting blue uniform- let him in and nodded at the body. A wrench lay a few feet away, where it had stained the thick, white rug in a brown mess.
The melody would not leave-it revolved in his head. There are White Guards…
It was a lush, expensive apartment, and it had been ripped to pieces. The humid stench was everywhere. Upturned shelves lay on the floor, atop books and broken vases; the sofa cushions had been sliced open and ripped inside out. A baby grand piano filled a corner. Its lid was propped open, and on the carpet beside it lay framed pictures that had slid off.
It was the stink, Emil realized, of rotting meat. The musk of the country’s finest patriotic melody-maker turning to mold.
