be afraid. I would not hurt him-I could not do that to Magda-but Leonek didn’t need to know that.
When he came to a stoplight, I placed my hat on my head and opened the door. “Good luck in the Jewish quarter.” I stepped out, and the bright light made me sneeze.
65
I called Magda from home. It was a brief conversation; we did not speak of Leonek. Agnes had become bored by the second day, and her parents were starting to drive Magda crazy. “When are you going to take care of this guy so we can come home?”
“Home?” I asked. It seemed like a word we were no longer allowed to use. “Soon. I’ll bring you back home soon.”
Vera did not come over that night, and on Thursday morning when I arrived at the station, Sev was waiting for me. He waved me over. I moved stiffly. “Ferenc.” He paused. “The morning you discovered Stefan’s body, why were you there?”
I looked at his hands on the desk. “To talk with him about our case.”
Sev moved his hands so his thumbs touched, a movement I remembered from Lev Urlovsky. “I’m just doing my job, Ferenc. You know this.”
“I know.”
“So please tell me the truth.” The absence of emotion in his face always gave it a dull strength.
“What are you getting at?”
He glanced around the empty office. “I am aware of your animosity toward Stefan, and I also know it was unfounded.”
“I know that now, too.”
“Good. So tell me. Why did you go to Stefan’s that morning?”
Just talking about it made me feel as I did when I stood looking down on Stefan’s body-weak. I pulled up a chair. “To talk, Sev. That’s all. I just wanted to talk it out.”
“And you wouldn’t have attacked him again, like you did in that bar?”
“I don’t think so. Leonek is still alive, isn’t he?”
Sev nodded at his thumbs. “Thank you, Ferenc.”
I stumbled back and shuffled through the papers on my desk from the past few days. Among the circulars about new penal codes from the Politburo was a scribbled phone message. Kliment had called.
I struggled with the Russian operators, using the words I knew and listening to them use all the words I didn’t know. I gave them the direct number Kliment had left. “Da?”
“This is Ferenc Kolyeszar.”
“Ferenc. Thanks for calling. Look.” He paused. “I’ve got some terrible news, you’re not going to like it.”
“I’ve gotten a lot of bad news lately. I can probably take it.”
“Two days ago Svetla Woznica was killed in her village. She was shot once in the chest and once in the head. They found her body in the woods outside town.”
I took a long breath. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it. And it’s clear enough who did it.”
“Was he seen there?”
“He didn’t hide. He arrived the day before by train, spent a lot of money in the hotel, and disappeared just before the body was found. He crossed over at Turka.”
“I can’t believe it,” I repeated.
“I’ve seen it before. Some men are that way. If they can’t have their woman, then no one can.”
I fogged over, thumbing my rings until they hurt, remembering that battered face at the train station, kissing my hands. But he was speaking again.
“-can’t do anything about it now. With the proper papers, I could follow him there, but it’s not the sort of thing they’ll sign for. I wish I could.”
“You’ve done enough, Kliment. Thank you. I’ll take care of it.”
“I figured you would, Ferenc. Watch out for yourself.”
As I hung up I looked over at Sev looking back at me. I think that was the closest I ever came to killing Brano Sev, even though he had nothing to do with Svetla’s death. But he was one of many-like the missing Kaminski- whose positions made them feel they could not be touched. I filled his empty features with all the evil in the world. He blinked. I stood up. But instead of ending everything right then, I made myself walk out the door.
66
The Canal District was colder than the rest of the city. The water seemed to suck any heat from the air, and wind funneled through the empty passageways. In Augustus II Square, where long before I had found a black shoe, the water level had dropped, and I arrived relatively dry at number three. The chalk x had faded away. The inner room was still a pool, the small well still dry, but the blemish from Antonin’s body was completely gray now, with spots of black corroded by the wet air.
I could not find Nestor, and Louis was in another country. I was no longer sure who had killed Stefan, but I was convinced I would never figure it out. And it didn’t matter how valiantly I protected my family-my marriage was slipping away. Now, my only virtuous act in recent memory-the only one that I had followed through on-had been erased. No action I took seemed to stick. I wanted to sleep.
In the mosaic beneath the water were chalices, wine, debauchery-a satyr leaned, grinning, over a white- robed young woman with a breast exposed. In the corner, a platter of wild berries and the head of a pig gazed up at me.
The Romans had themselves a time in their day, putting everything into their mouths like children. They slaughtered whole civilizations and sowed lands with salt. These were a people of extremes, but somehow over time all the extremes had been bred out of humanity, so that we wore ties and took busses and trams and clocked in and out of the jobs that fed our family. We spoke with calm, responsible detachment and made words that seemed to show what logical beasts we were. But the only important words are those that result in action-Vera knew this. And so did I. In the war I learned who I was-not by the words I spoke, but by the things I did.
We were captured near Humenne on a bleak, dry hill that had become our home for a week. We ran out of ammunition, and our commander, a young man from Hust, announced that the fight was over. Then he went behind the hill and shot himself in the mouth with his last bullet. The Germans came over the hill in a cloud of dust and their bold helmets, well fed and scornful. They arranged us into lines and walked us westward.
Before shooting himself, our commander had told us about the camps set up by the Germans. They were for Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. The Germans, he pointed out, were a people of extremes. His stories were difficult to believe, and some of us laughed at him, though since then his descriptions have seemed mundane. But on that dusty walk, as we starved on blistered feet, we began to suspect the truth.
Each day we stopped so the Germans could rest, and during one of these breaks I escaped with a couple other soldiers. I’ve written about this. I’ve written about the calculations we made, the old trenches we dropped into in order to escape snipers, the grass we ate to hold off starvation, the peasants’ homes where we rested and received nourishment. What I never wrote down was the bitterness between us when we stopped over a clump of grass and tried to divide it up. I used my size to force the largest portion, and once when another escapee-Yakov Teddi, a skinny boy with long hair-tried to take his fair share I kicked him in the face. This is something I never wrote about. My boot broke his nose, and I didn’t care. But he stayed with us until the end.
67
