looking down on this old woman who, in her more honest moments, hated him. She’d had to eke out a living without her husband and had never remarried-she instead lived on the fantasy that Andrezej Sev would return from the West. But unlike Jan Soroka, most people did not return when they escaped the Empire. If they survived, they made their way as best they could, despite loneliness and poverty, and became citizens of another world.
And she was only partly right about what he’d done. There was no telling what would have happened to his father in one of those labor camps. Many never returned.
He drank more in the kitchen, enough to maintain dizziness, and took his passport out of his coat pocket. He had a dull face, he knew, not the kind of face a young Vojvodina Serb living in Vienna would fall in love with. In his other pocket he found Jakob Bieniek’s passport and flipped through its pages. Both men had features that suggested plainness, perhaps even stupidity.
He hung his coat by the door, then undressed in the bedroom. There was nothing to do but wait. Tomorrow- yes, tomorrow-Captain Rasko would visit, with full Ministry authorization, and take him to that puny cell. The climax of a half-year of failures. Then Brano would be faced with the end of everything. He would be transferred to a holding cell in Rzeszow, given a trial, and moved to a work camp. Perhaps Vatrina, in the Magyar provinces, where he had once visited an old colleague who had been put to work digging a canal that had never been completed, and probably never would be.
A factory job would seem like a blessing.
He was, inexplicably, free from worry. Some of it was the vodka, but as Brano climbed into bed and closed his eyes, the darkness swirling around him, he felt that it had to do with Jan Soroka, the man who chose to wander with idiot cows while the apparatus of state security haunted him. Jan was a disciple of acceptance.
So it surprised him when he opened his eyes to that familiar voice in the darkness. He reached out to touch the shoulder of a coat and heard the voice again, as if from a dream: Don’t move, Brano. I’ve got a gun.
Is this it? he asked the darkness.
The voice said yes, this was it, though it didn’t mean what Brano had meant. Right now. Come if you want, but now-grab your bag. No hesitation. But if you try to stop us, I’ll kill you.
Jan Soroka turned on the bedside lamp.
14 FEBRUARY 1967, TUESDAY
Jan held the gun as Brano dressed and filled his suitcase with the clean clothes his mother had folded at the foot of the bed. Neither spoke. After a stunned moment, staring into Jan’s bright face, Brano had understood that communication, more than possibly waking his mother, would introduce questions and explanations that undermined Jan’s command for no hesitation.
He grabbed his coat at the front door, but Jan took it from him and patted the pockets. He handed it back and nodded toward the kitchen, where they left through the now-unlocked side door, into the cold. They marched through the deep snow in the backyard and climbed over the fence, landing behind the Grzybowskas’ house, then cut around the side to the road, where a silent green Volga GAZ-21 with Uzhorod plates waited. Inside, dark forms shifted. Jan threw Brano’s suitcase into the trunk and opened the back door for him. Petre, sleepy eyes suddenly widening, was in the middle, and on the boy’s other side Lia sat straight-faced, not acknowledging him. The fat man in the driver’s seat was from Pavel Jast’s house, the Cucumber game, the man who had put out his cigarette in a glass of vodka. He turned, reached a hand over the back of the seat, and narrowed his eyes. “You been in a fight?” he whispered.
Brano touched the bruise on his face. He nodded.
The man gave a huge smile and shook his hand. “Call me Roman.”
Jan sat in the passenger seat and closed the door quietly. “Well, let’s get going.”
Brano had expected none of this. The wake-up call had been as if from a dream, and his snap decision had been based on nothing. But his training had come back instantly-the requirement of all good agents that they learn to act, even without all the proper facts.
And this was the only move left to him. After clearly envisioning the end of everything, it was an amazing turn of fortune that he’d been awoken by another option.
Luck, though, was a suspicious animal.
Roman was a careful driver. He maintained a steady speed through Bobrka, shifting gears smoothly, then exited from the west, passing the field with its dozing cows-then farther, through Kobylany, and beyond. Petre, with the blemish covering his left cheek, stared at Brano, but after a while bowed his head into his mother’s armpit and began to doze. Sometimes Jan glanced back at his wife, but Lia had closed her eyes as well.
He didn’t understand the risk Jan was taking. Though Brano had surprised himself by opening up to Soroka in that field, he had no reason to believe Jan felt the same. Had they really made a connection?
And Roman. He was the connection between Jan and Pavel Jast; he was Jan’s contact at the train station (watched by Jakob Bieniek) and Pavel’s Cucumber-playing friend who brought him pornographic pens from West Germany.
Pavel Jast was no mere small-town informer.
Although in the darkness he sometimes became confused, he was able to track their progress by villages. Nienaszow, Toki, Nowy-Zmigrod, Katy. The names were familiar, and the hills around them were filled with partisan memories; but now, knowing that he was leaving, yet not knowing why, they began to sound exotic to him, precious.
They made gradual progress along side roads, only rarely spotting another car driving in the opposite direction. Once, a truck appeared behind them, hovering close, and Lia craned her head around, the truck’s headlights illuminating the fear in her face. Roman slowed and waved his hand out the window, and the truck passed, soon disappearing.
Just after Krempna, they came upon a white Skoda blocking the road. Brano noticed the Militia hawk on its door. Jan reached for his gun, but Roman said, “Nothing to worry about,” as he braked. He climbed out and conferred with an older, uniformed militiaman beside the Skoda’s front hood; they shook hands and patted each other’s shoulders, and once Roman tapped the militiaman’s cheek with his fingers. Then the money appeared and was quickly handed over, and they shook again. As the Militia car pulled back into the shrubs, Roman got back behind the wheel. “This world is getting more expensive by the minute.”
Petre, as if in answer, whispered, “I have to pee.”
By Brano’s watch they had been traveling five hours; it was after seven, and an omen of sunrise lightened the sky. They had spent the last hour and a half winding slowly through the mountains north of Sarospatak and were now on the west bank of the Bodrog River, driving south through a birch forest. Roman pulled off onto the side of the road and cut the engine. Then he flashed his headlights-once, twice-and settled back.
“What is it?” asked Jan.
Roman grunted. “We wait.”
Lia reached for her husband’s shoulder, and he put his hand over hers, squeezing. Petre whispered, “Can I pee now? ”
They didn’t have to wait long. A pair of headlights appeared, very bright, and it was soon clear that they belonged to a large truck. Along the side, CARPATIA S. A. was painted in three-foot-high white letters. A thin, nervours-looking man climbed out. He had a mustache as thick as Stalin’s and long fingers that tapped the roof of the Volga as he talked with Roman through the window. “So many? You said three-come on, what’re you trying to pull?”
“Don’t worry,” said Roman. “Everything’s the same.”
The thin man looked at each face, pausing on Brano’s. “You know what this means, eh?”
“Of course.” Roman handed over a wad of bills. “It’s all there.”
The thin man counted the koronas with spastic fingers, his mouth forming numbers. “Yeah, okay. Looks right,” he said, pocketing the cash. “Let’s get moving.”
Lia took Petre into the woods to urinate while Brano and Roman carried the suitcases to the truck. It was filled with boxes of canned plums that the thin man, with Roman’s help, shifted aside. They made a narrow corridor to the boxed-in space in the back. Jan seemed to have disappeared. They deposited the luggage in the corner as Lia
