The poet Kaspar Tepylo shared a room with a minimalist painter. There were canvases of large blue squares on red backgrounds stacked in a corner and a bowl of cigarette butts beside a jar of dirty brushes. “Never live with a painter,” he advised me. “The messes are incredible.”
We walked through to his sparse bedroom, a mattress and desk covered with neat stacks of paper. A few books were lined up beside a radiator that didn’t seem to be working. He offered me the desk chair as he settled his tall, thin frame on the corner of the bed. He scratched a concave cheek. “So what is it, Ferenc?”
Like everyone, he was a friend of a friend, an unsuccessful poet who was assigned to work on construction sites and scribbled lines at night. “I need to talk to Nestor Velcea.”
“What’s Nes been up to? I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“I just need to ask him some questions. It’s about a case.”
“What kind of case?”
“A murder.”
“Oh.” He stood up and found some cigarettes on the desk. “I haven’t seen him since, I don’t know, early September. He stayed here for a while after he came back from the camps. Here in this room.”
“Then he left?”
Kaspar nodded. “Told me he’d found a place. But he never gave me the address.”
“Any ideas?”
“I’ve asked around, but he’s not staying with anyone I know.”
“Tell me,” I said. “What’s he like?”
He ashed on the floor and sat back down. “He’s different now than he was. More withdrawn-which for him is saying a lot. He never told me what happened in the camps, but he’s got a terrible limp. And he’s missing this little finger here.” He held up his left hand and pointed at it, then took another drag. “I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just smiled. To tell the truth, he made me nervous.”
“But you let him stay here?”
“I couldn’t turn him away, could I? I remember how he was before he was sent away. He was supposed to have been a good painter. A lot of promise.”
“You didn’t see his paintings?”
He shook his head. “Never let me. He always said they weren’t finished, but I think he was just scared of criticism. I suppose that’s why he didn’t spend time with other painters, just writers. He said he found painters boring.”
“But he used to live with Antonin Kullmann.”
Kaspar shrugged. “When you’re broke you have to make concessions.”
“Why was he sent to the camps?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Nestor was never political. He couldn’t stand the idea of painting for political reasons. It was all propaganda, he said, no matter who was making it. I think he was a little too insistent on this, but to each his own, right?”
“I suppose.”
“And he told me he never signed his paintings. This was strange, too. How did he put it? Yes: He didn’t want his identity to overshadow the integrity of the work. I think I know what he meant-but again, it’s a little extreme.”
“So when he was picked up, it was a surprise?”
“To everyone. A few of us filed a protest at Victory Square, but that did no good.” He looked at his long ash. “Until the Amnesty, we heard nothing.” He tapped the cigarette, and the ash dropped to the floor. “You know, he has family in the provinces. The south, somewhere, I’m not sure. Maybe he went back to his village.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why not?”
I got up and took my hat from the desk. “Get in touch with me if you hear from him, will you?”
45
I could only hold off thinking of him for moments, and in between those moments I imagined him in a cold concrete cell, suffering the light of a bare, dusty bulb hanging from the ceiling, then facing interrogators with complicated electrical equipment that attached to the tenderest parts of Georgi’s body. Clubs striking his legs; heat and cold on his flesh.
At the station, Leonek stopped me on his way out to say that Kliment was “a mensch, a real mensch.” He had agreed to track down Boris Olonov. But I couldn’t share his excitement. On my desk was a message from Ozaliko informing me that I had an appointment with Lev Urlovsky at ten the next morning. I folded the message into my pocket and sat down. I tried to focus on this artist who had returned from the camps to kill his old roommates and an art curator. But it didn’t work, and when Kaminski and Sev strolled in and began talking by Sev’s desk my distraction gained material form. Kaminski wandered over. “Hello, Ferenc. Did you give my wishes to Magda and Agnes?”
“Sure.”
“Are you working hard?”
I looked at him.
“I believe we had a deal, Comrade Kolyeszar.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m working hard.”
“Good to hear.” He returned to Sev and bent over the desk and read something Sev was pointing at, but I couldn’t quite see them anymore. I could hear him laughing, saying Good good, but could no longer make out his features.
I took the tram home. It seemed unbelievable that the other riders could chat and smile or simply doze in their seats. I wanted to shake them out of their ignorance-didn’t they know what was going on, at that very moment, on Yalta Boulevard? But they knew. They knew that they could be next. I could be next.
I took a bath, sinking into the murky, cooling water, thinking still of electricity. Agnes knocked on the door. “You going to be in there forever?”
“Just until I’m clean.”
She knocked again. “I don’t know if I can wait that long.”
So I toweled off and went to the bedroom to lie down. She bolted past me and slammed the bathroom door shut.
Magda came once and settled on the edge of the bed. “Was it awful?”
“Of course it was.”
“Did he seem…I don’t know. In good spirits?”
I turned my head, the pillow crackling in my ears, and looked at her. “What do you mean, good spirits? ”
“You know what I mean. It’s Georgi we’re talking about.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No good spirits today.”
She got up to finish dinner.
We didn’t tell Agnes, because there was no need yet. She talked about the rope-climbing exercise that she and Daniela had apparently excelled at. The Pioneer chief-a man with the unlikely name of Hals Haling-brought them to the head of the class as examples of the female ideal of fitness, then awarded them with lengths of knotted rope.
“I suppose you were proud,” said Magda, trying to smile.
“You’d suppose, wouldn’t you?” Agnes said into her plate. “I mean, it’s all kind of stupid in the end, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Climbing ropes. All we did was climb up so we could come back down. What’s the point in that?”
I managed a smile of my own. “That’s pretty perceptive, Agi.”
She nodded formally at me. “Thank you, Daddy.”
“You can take it further, though, can’t you?”
