“They’re eating their mothers’ meals,” said Mother.
“And having more sex.”
“ Lucjan,” said Klara.
Lucjan shook his head. “What they’re doing is playing cards. That’s what.”
Mother frowned.
“There’s a lot of gambling?” asked Brano.
Lucjan’s face shriveled. Klara looked up.
Brano opened his hands and gave a smile so small that it could be seen by no one. “I’m not going to arrest anyone for it. That’s not what I do.”
Lucjan shrugged. “Everyone does it, right?”
“I do it myself,” he lied.
“But not like here, I hope,” said Mother.
“Like here?”
Lucjan looked at his plate. “It’s like in a lot of villages. These peasants run out of money, and the bets get a little strange. You know. I’ll bet my horse on this hand. That sort of thing.”
“Not so strange,” said Brano. “The same as betting your watch.”
“But what about your child?” Klara asked.
Occasionally, Brano had heard of this sort of thing during his years in the Militia office in the Capital, though it happened more often in the countryside: men betting the life of a daughter, a wife, a mother. It was a repulsive element of the old world that socialism had not yet wiped clean. But he pretended it was news. “Child?”
Klara went back to her plate, her face as red as the Comrade Lieutenant General’s, but not from drink.
“Some guy,” said Lucjan. “An idiot. He was drunk, and he bet his little girl’s life on a hand of cards. Can you believe it?”
“So what happened?”
Lucjan smiled. “He won! Thank God.”
The silence that followed felt long, and they each looked at him: first Lucjan, before facing his plate again, then Mother, who gave a fragile smile. Finally, Klara’s stoic gaze held him for a long time before returning to her food. It was a look Brano could not quite decipher, but it gave him a sudden, overwhelming feeling that he was far from home and among strangers.
After dinner they returned to the living room and worked slowly on the vodka, Mother filling the silences with gossip Brano had already heard the night before. His sister and her husband had probably heard it all as well, for they only grunted into their glasses as she chronicled the love affairs of the town.
Then, with enough liquor warming him, Brano said, “A while ago, I took a trip to Vienna.”
“Vienna?” said Mother. “I didn’t know you went there.”
“I did, for a little while. Work. A friend of mine was having a party. There was some food, but it was gone quickly, and everyone began drinking heavily. I ran into the woman he was dating-she read tarot cards for a living.”
Lucjan snorted. “Tarot cards?”
“She was very nice to me. She had been drinking quite a bit. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar and leading the room in song.”
“You sang? ” said Klara.
“No.” Brano set his glass on the table. “After a while, this woman asked me to dance.”
“Did you dance?” asked Mother, looking around. “Have you ever seen Brani dance?”
“Never,” said Klara.
“I did dance, but not at first,” said Brano. “She continued to stand very close, watching me. So I asked her where my friend was. She said she had told him to go to hell. She’d told him he was a bore and she never wanted to speak to him again.”
Lucjan leaned forward. “She told him that?”
“Well, if he was boring-” began Klara.
“There’s a difference between the truth and civility.”
Klara shrugged at Mother, who smiled back.
“It was none of my business,” said Brano. “But I tried to defend him to her. She would have none of it. Finally, she grabbed my arms and pulled me close to her and said, Brano Sev, I love you’ ”
“She didn’t,” said Mother.
Klara grinned. “This is fantastic!”
Brano shook his head. “I told her she was mistaken. We’d only met once before, and she didn’t know who I was at all. She couldn’t be in love with me. It was impossible.”
“Nuts, that one,” said Lucjan.
“We danced a little, and by then it was very late. Most everyone had left. I wanted to get out of there, but she was clutching on to me. So I told her I’d walk her home. She was drunk, and it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.”
Lucjan clucked his tongue. “I bet it did, you rat.”
Brano looked at him. “On the walk to her apartment she told me she had a vision of her future, living on a lake with an older man standing behind her, protecting her. It was fate, she said, and she said that man was me.”
“Was you,” echoed Mother. Klara winked at her.
“I got her to her front door, where she snatched my hat from my head and told me I’d have to come up and let her read my future if I wanted my hat.”
“Your future! ” Klara burst out laughing. “This is priceless!”
Brano didn’t smile. He looked from one face to the other.
“So?” said Lucjan. “Did you learn your future?”
He shook his head and lied again. “I took my hat from her and went home.”
“Sure you did,” said Lucjan.
“I assumed that by the next morning she’d be so embarrassed by what she’d done that nothing else would happen. But I was wrong. She was still convinced she was in love.”
“And you saw her again?” asked Klara.
“Never. I left the next day. But she got my address and started writing me letters.”
“With your future?” asked Mother; then, realizing she’d made a joke, she started to laugh.
“It was a very strange experience.”
“You still get them?” asked Lucjan. “The letters.”
“Sometimes, yes.”
Mother touched the bun of her hair. “Here I was trying to set you up with some nice girls, and you’re involved in an international romance!”
“There’s always a surprise with Brano,” said Klara. “He sits there, mute as a stone, then comes out with the strangest stories.”
“But I wonder sometimes,” he said, lifting his glass again, “do you think I was wrong to say that?”
“Say what?” asked Lucjan.
He focused on Klara. “To say she couldn’t be in love with me. Do you think I could have been wrong?”
“There’s all kinds,” said Klara.
Mother nodded. “You just can’t know, can you?”
Lucjan licked his lips. “How come that kind of thing never happens to me?”
Klara elbowed him in the ribs.
The others had left and Mother was asleep by the time Brano put on his coat at the front door, pulled his hat over his forehead, then went down the front path, through the gate, and into darkness.
Bobrka on a moonless night was a land of unpredictable pits and obstructions. He stumbled in a few potholes and ran into carts left on the side of the road. Despite all the koronas poured into the oil complex in the forest, no one had thought to equip the village roads with light poles. The center was barely visible by the muted light from some windows and by the spotlight illuminating the church. He stopped, looked around, and began walking east, toward the woods.
