“This guy wants to know about the camp. He’s a writer.”
Krany put out his cigarette and frowned at the lingering smoke. “Why’re you writing about that, Comrade?”
“Because somebody’s got to.”
The thick one nodded his agreement, but Krany still wasn’t convinced. “What are you going to say about the camp?”
“I’ll know when I learn more.”
“You some scaremonger who’s going to say we’re a bunch of thugs who like beating up on people?”
“Are you?”
He smiled then, and I pulled out my cigarettes. I offered them to the guards and left the pack on the table.
Krany, it turned out, was primarily a tower man. He had spent his days, summer and winter, up in one of the boxes overlooking the camp and the farmland surrounding it. He was one of the best shots in the camp, and once killed an escapee from a distance of five hundred yards (though his friend disputed that figure). “And he went down. I wanted to get his leg, just stop him, but it ended up going through his head.” He took another of my cigarettes.
The first guard’s name was Filip. He worked down in the mud with the prisoners. Each morning he would herd them out of their cots and march them to the quarry. “It was all about following orders,” he told me. “They were ordered to walk, and if they didn’t, we would hit them. Usually in the stomach and chest, because we didn’t want to break their legs.”
“Come on, Filip,” said Krany. “You broke some legs. I could see you just fine.”
“So you get carried away.”
“It was easier up in the tower. You didn’t have to smell them, you didn’t have to do that kind of work.”
I bought another round and asked if they knew Nestor Velcea. Krany shook his head, but Filip thought it over. “A small guy? What was he…an artist?”
“That’s the one.”
“Sure, I knew him. An okay kid. He thought we didn’t know about all those charcoal drawings he did. But when prisoners clean up a wall, you notice. The wall’s dirty already, and then you’ve got this big clean spot.” He smiled grimly. “Some of them were real idiots.”
Krany nodded. “Yeah, the artist. The one who did Gogu’s portrait.”
“Who’s Gogu?”
“The commander,” said Filip, and I remembered the portrait on the captain’s wall.
I passed out cigarettes, emptying the pack. “But Gogu said he didn’t remember Nestor. Does that make any sense?”
“Of course he remembers Nestor,” said Filip.
“He was pulling your leg,” said Krany. “He damn well knows who Nestor is.”
“But there were a lot of prisoners. Why would he remember Nestor?”
Krany looked at Filip, as if asking something. Filip shrugged. “What does it matter?”
Krany turned back to me. “Last spring, this gray Citroen comes up to the gate. Cosmin checks it, but the driver doesn’t have the right paperwork to come inside.”
“Who’s Cosmin?”
“No one. Another guard. Pay attention, okay?”
I nodded.
“So Cosmin won’t let him inside. And this guy gets out-a big guy, kind of oily hair-and starts shouting for Nestor through the fence. Only it’s daytime, and all the prisoners are off at Work Site Number One. He was a foreigner, maybe he didn’t know any better. So he’s shouting to an empty prison.”
“What kind of foreigner?”
“Don’t know,” said Krany. “But you could tell there was an accent. What a hothead he was. Finally, Gogu had to come out and deal with him.”
“I heard about it that evening,” said Filip.
“We all heard about it,” said Krany. “And this is why Gogu will swear he doesn’t know Nestor. Because the foreigner bribed him with a stack of koronas the size of my fist. Gogu tried to cover it up, he told him to put it away, and they went back to the office to take care of it. But we all saw it. Bribing’s no big deal, just as long as you keep it quiet.”
“So what happened?”
Filip said, “I brought Nestor back from the work site and into Gogu’s office. Gogu stepped outside for a few minutes to leave them alone. Then Nestor went back to work, and the foreigner left.”
“But-what was it about? What did he want?”
Filip finally lit the cigarette I’d given him. “No one knows. We asked Gogu, and he told us to keep out of his business unless we wanted to end up as one of his pets.”
“And Nestor, too,” said Krany. “He wouldn’t say a word, would he, Filip?”
“Not a word. I punched him a few times because I was so curious, but the lump just wouldn’t speak.”
60
It was after seven when I returned to the Elegant with my small bag of clothes. There was a different clerk at the desk, a young man who took my papers and wrote the information in a ruled notebook. In the middle of writing, he squinted up at me. “You came in here before?”
“For information.”
He tossed his head in the direction of the bar. “Tania’s waiting for you.”
I had forgotten about her. My mind was stuck in the realm of barbed wire and mud and beatings, and spending the evening with a woman just didn’t fit in. So I took back my documents and key and walked directly to the stairs, not looking up as I passed the doorway to the bar.
The stairs and the doors and the corridor and the tiny room-all of them had been built by cracked and bloody fingers, slumped backs and sore stomachs. I lay on the bed, my feet hanging off, and stared at the beige ceiling.
There was a knock at the door, but I didn’t get up. I was wondering what was said in Gogu’s office last spring.
The knocking started again, so I got up, grunting, and opened the door. Tania smiled at me. “Think you can get rid of me that easily?”
“Look. I’m tired.”
She put her hand on my chest and pushed me back. I noticed an open bottle of wine in her other hand as she closed the door. “You don’t look so tired to me.”
There was a certain prettiness to her, but I couldn’t see it then. She got two glasses from the bathroom and filled them up. There was no other place to sit than the bed. She tapped my glass against hers and winked.
“You kept me waiting so long I almost found myself another victim. But then I remembered this,” she said, touching the rings on my right hand. “And this.” She touched my chest. Then she set her glass on the floor and moved her round face up to mine. “And this,” she whispered, before kissing me.
The kissing was enough for a while, and we rolled on the bed, a mess of tongues and saliva. Sometimes she got up suddenly, leaned over the edge of the bed as I rubbed the back of her thigh, and took a sip, then returned with wine-reddened lips. But when she started to take off her clothes I stopped her. “No,” I said, and she frowned, took another sip, and began kissing me again.
This was all I wanted, something simple and almost childlike, and that’s all we did until we were lying together on the bed, both very tired.
Tania was twenty-five, had grown up in this town, and the only outsiders she met were connected to the work camp. “I like this, meeting people from all over. Most of them are pretty nice, and sometimes we can have ourselves some fun.”
