Agnes was sitting at the table, and Magda stood by the sink, chewing the nail on her little finger. “What is this?”
“It’s nothing. Just some questions. I’ll be back soon.”
“Questions? Questions?” She shook her head, and her kiss was salty. She held my lower lip in her teeth. “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Tell them you’ll go in tomorrow. Or Monday.”
“I tried. If you need…”
“What?”
“If you need anything, call him.”
“Who?”
“Libarid.”
“Oh God, don’t say that.”
“Where are you going?” asked Agnes.
I pulled away from Magda, but she clutched my hand as I leaned over the table and kissed Agnes’s head. “Just to talk with these men. It’s nothing. I’ll be back soon, but if I’m not back tonight, you go on to bed, okay?”
She smiled a moment, then her smile disappeared. Perhaps she saw it in her mother’s face, because she started to cry quietly. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine, honey.”
Magda squeezed my hand until the rings pinched my fingers, then walked with me into the living room and helped me into my coat. Then she said to Sev, “Bring him back soon. Do you understand?”
He pressed his lips together. “Of course, Comrade Kolyeszar. I will do my very best.”
You hear this later.
You hear that the Magyars have it worse than anyone this year. Nagy is lured out of hiding from the Yugoslav embassy and over a year later is executed deep inside the Empire. Thirty-five thousand Hungarians are arrested and three hundred executed.
You hear that after the death of Mihai, after the convulsions of grief and homages to his immortality, the nation goes on. It is announced that a joint leadership is now in power, because how can such a man be replaced with just one? There are three: Bobu the Professor, Kozak the Engineer, and a name you’ve not heard before this, a name no one has heard: Tomiak Pankov, a Party apparatchik from before the war. Less than a week later, Bobu is arrested by state security at his mistress’s apartment in the Fifth District. The next morning The Spark explains all: He is guilty of financial improprieties. Kozak and Pankov shake hands on the balcony of the Central Committee chambers before a crowd that fills the entirety of Victory Square. They wear identical greatcoats to symbolize their accord, and then the arrests begin to riddle the Capital with holes where men once stood-you’re only one of many. The empty prisons swell as they did a decade before, after the war, and the trains lumber under the weight of the dispossessed on their way to the provinces and the camps. This is what you learn much later.
You learn that once the Capital is cleansed it is time to fumigate the Central Committee. Chairs in the great hall go empty, two, three at a time. Emergency elections bring in new, quieter men, younger men with a lifetime of service before them. Then, in February, Kozak delivers a speech to these new young men, says that he will resign his position for a quiet life in the provinces. He holds his hand up and tells them, tears in his eye, that it is the hardest decision of his career, as well as the wisest. Tomiak Pankov shakes his hand and smiles, then opens his arm to the Committee members. This movement lets them know what to do next: to give the poor old engineer a rousing farewell. Which they do, all standing and hollering. You never see the newsreels of this meeting-no one sees them. But you can imagine the fear in Kozak’s eyes and the desperate sound of all those shouting voices, wanting nothing but to live and to go on.
Winter
1
I look back over weeks and months in an attempt to give them order, but time can only be given shape by time. Fall had been my season of irresponsibility, and I had moved steadily through it, accumulating mistakes and fears and tragedies, and in the winter I was paid back for it.
The beginning was a white, four-door Mercedes. Brano Sev sat in front with the driver, and the second man remained in the back with me. Brano had not talked in the stairwell and maintained his silence all the way to Yalta Boulevard, where the shops were closed, their metal blinds like mouth braces holding the buildings straight.
Sev walked ahead of us as the guard opened the heavy door of Number 36 without a word. I couldn’t remember if he was the guard from Georgi’s visit. The inner doors parted, and we were in a cavernous, institutional green room, where two uniformed women sat behind a wide desk. Sev talked to the heavier one, and the other, her thin face revealing the shape of her narrow jawbone, watched me. The hawk on her shoulder patch matched the one on the wall above them: a copper sculpture five feet tall, the hawk at rest.
Two doors on either side of the desk led from this room. We took the left one through a low corridor, not unlike the Militia station’s corridors, but what I noticed was this: There were no names on the doors’ translucent windows, and no numbers. And that is when I became afraid. The unmarked doors of Yalta 36 were part of a world that was beyond my understanding.
We descended a concrete stairwell at the end of the corridor, and I wondered if Georgi had followed this same path. I tried to remember the details of what he’d recounted; but the growing panic was making me forgetful. Three levels down, Sev knocked on a steel door and waited for the tiny barred window to open and close. A series of locks were worked on from the other side, and then the door opened.
The guardroom was just big enough for a desk holding a telephone and a copy of The Spark. Hooks on the wall held keys. The guard was a meaty man with round glasses. He smiled and asked me to empty my pockets. All I had was some loose change, my wallet, and my Militia certificate. “Laces?” he said, and waited as I knelt and unthreaded my shoelaces. He spoke to Sev while looking at me. “Which one?”
“Seventeen.” Sev’s voice was flat.
The guard handed over a key and used another one on the next door. It opened onto a narrow, concrete corridor lined by more steel doors.
“Is this really necessary?”
Sev acted as if I’d said nothing as I followed him to the ninth door on the left. Here, at least, were numbers, but they were drawn with chalk-at any moment they could be wiped clean and changed. Sev worked with some effort on the lock, but got it open, then glanced at the guards who waited back with the jailer. In the dim light his face had lost all its color. “We both know it’s necessary. At least for now.”
I followed the direction of his hand, and the door closing behind me filled the cell with darkness.
2
When we were captured in the trenches near Humenne and marched westward, I had wondered what the prisoner-of-war camp would be like. My imagination had come up with details of a hypothetical cell: dirt floor, bunk, a slot in the door for food, maybe a hole in the corner for a toilet, and certainly a barred window one had to stand on one’s toes to look through to see the sun. None of these details matched the cell on Yalta Boulevard. It was extremely small, like-as Georgi had said-a soundproof water closet; unlike Georgi’s cell, this one was unlit. The ground was rough concrete, and there was no hole in it, only a small pot in the middle of the floor. No bunk and no window, no matter how high I reached my fingers up the wall. Then I remembered: I was under the earth.
The darkness settled on me with real weight. It became thicker with time, and after a while I could only sit in the corner, lacking the strength to climb up through it. I touched the dead German soldiers on my fingers and repeated their names. I think it helped, because it reminded me that in the war people died indiscriminately, and I
