“A mental home?”
“But what about the kid?” he asked in Hungarian.
The woman shrugged. “He’ll be up front with us. We’ll say he’s one of the patients’ children, that I’m going to take care of him myself.”
“And his language?”
“He’s a mute. Psychologically scarred.”
While the big man put their clothes in the space behind the front seats, Brano explained the plan to the Sorokas. Lia didn’t want to be separated from Petre. “This is unacceptable. I’m not going to do it.”
“Li,” said Jan.
“Don’t try to calm me! I don’t know these people-neither do you!”
Brano paused at the back doors. “They don’t send seven-year-olds to mental homes. If he sits with us, your whole family will end up in prison.”
Lia’s crossed arms came apart. She crouched and hugged her boy, then whispered instructions to him.
There were three patients in the back, two men and a woman. The men hadn’t been shaved in a few days, and all three shared a vacant, large-pupiled stare focused on nothing in particular. Straps from the wall kept them from falling over. Brano and the Sorokas climbed past the patients, deeper into the truck. Madai stood at the doors, smoking and watching. “Remember,” he said, “you’re all patients filled to the forehead with drugs. You don’t understand what anyone says to you; you’re not even aware of anyone. If the truck stops, you put on those straps. Don’t make eye contact and, most of all, never speak. Is that clear?”
They all nodded.
The large man closed the doors.
Then the truck fired to life, and they began to move.
Brano could see little through the back windows covered in steel grating, but he mentally charted what seemed the most likely route. They crossed the Danube at the tip of Szentendrei Island, north of Budapest, then wrapped around the western side of the city to reach the northwest road to Gyor. The truck sped along and the Sorokas whispered. Lia sometimes held Jan’s hand. Other times, the anger flushed her cheeks and she whispered something and crossed her arms. Jan held her elbow, trying to reason with her, then settled back. He gave Brano a nervous smile that Brano could not return, preoccupied by the hope that the Doctor’s men were not far behind them.
All along, the three patients sat beside them, swinging in their straps to the rhythm of the road, because no one existed outside the drugged dreams in their heads.
They were stopped once before Gyor, and as they slowed Brano strapped himself to the wall, nodding at the others to follow suit. They heard the woman telling a soldier the brief, sad tale of the mute boy and his insane mother, who was in the back, and how she was going to take care of the boy herself rather than give him over to the state orphanages. The soldier admired her maternal instincts, but when they opened the back doors, it was clear that he admired her body even more. He hardly looked at the patients at all.
The soldier who opened the door just after Gyor was less taken by her shape, perhaps because the sunset had cast her in shadow. “Where’s this sanatorium?”
“Sopron,” she said.
He climbed into the truck to get a better look at the drugged woman. He put his hands on his knees and stared into her eyes. “Crazy,” he said. “You, my dear, are insane.” He shook his head as he climbed back down and told the blonde about his grandfather, who stumbled around a sanatorium near Debrecen and never remembered his grandson’s name. “I don’t know why we waste our time with them,” he said. “Might as well just shoot them.”
“They’re not animals,” said the woman.
“Are you sure?”
She closed the doors. “Of course. They’re human.”
The soldier laughed. “If all there is to being human is standing on two legs and having a face that isn’t a monkey’s, then maybe there’s nothing special about being human.”
It had been dark for a while when they stopped again and the large man opened the back doors. “ Gyertek ki,” he said, and the Sorokas followed Brano around the patients’ knees, out into the cold. Petre bounced from foot to foot, then threw himself into Lia’s arms.
They were on a paved road surrounded by flat farmland. They took their coats and clothes, and the woman asked them to change.
“Out here?” asked Lia.
But even she submitted, undressing and redressing on the other side of the truck. The driver took the hospital clothes and gave the woman a brief kiss on the lips before driving away. They watched the truck disappear in the direction of a town. She turned on the flashlight to illuminate her wristwatch, then extinguished it. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll hide in the ditch until it’s time.”
“Time for what?” asked Brano once they were settled. The Sorokas mumbled behind him.
“Time to be picked up,” she said.
“We’re near the Ferto Lake, aren’t we?”
In the darkness he could just make out her head turning to him. “Yes.”
“A boat?”
“A boat would be cut to bits by machine guns.”
“So we’re crossing by land.”
“It’s not your concern.”
Brano grinned, though she couldn’t see his lips. “I think it’s all of our concern. I know a little bit about these kinds of operations, and I don’t want to think I’m in the hands of amateurs. I suppose you have contacts within the border guards?”
She raised herself to look down the length of the empty road. “Wait-there he is.”
A pair of lights grew from the direction of the town, then stopped about thirty yards away. Brano was able to see, once the lights went off, that it was a small military truck, its rear covered in canvas. From the driver’s side, a flashlight flickered three times. The woman stood up then, and the truck rolled closer. She jogged up to the window and began to speak with a man inside.
“What is it?” asked Jan.
“ Shh,” said Brano, listening.
“… Zsolt knows, I’m sure he does,” said the man. “The whole Fesus Corner is covered with troops.”
“Not so loud,” she told him. “What are the options?”
Brano couldn’t hear what the man answered, but he could hear the woman’s exasperated sigh.
“What are they talking about?” whispered Lia.
“Nothing,” said Brano. “Just personal things. Everything’s fine.”
The woman walked back to them. “Everyone, let’s go.”
Brano sat in the shadows by the canvas flaps, watching the road fade behind them, while the Sorokas, deeper inside the truck, whispered among themselves. They didn’t need to speak the language to feel that something was wrong. Brano knew of the Fosus Corner, a small point of Hungarian territory wedged into Austria on the eastern side of the Ferto Lake-Ferto to the Hungarians, Neusiedl to the Austrians. The driver was no doubt a border guard under the supervision of the Hungarian Interior Ministry, and the woman had bought him, either with money or something less tangible.
Brano leaned back as they passed through a town that, once they exited, he saw by a sign was Fertod. Then the road narrowed, and they passed through Sarrod and, after a while, the tiny village of Laszlomajor. Then, off to the left, he saw the low, flat spread of the eastern edge of the lake.
And there was no sign that the Doctor’s men were nearer to him than he was to the Austrian border. He briefly considered throwing himself out the back and running off. But he recalled Cerny’s last order: If you can’t stop him, then you follow and report hack when you can.
He had reported to the Doctor, but no one seemed to care.
When the truck turned and trembled across a rutted gravel road between the lake and a concrete canal, the obvious finally became clear. The Doctor would not come, because Yalta Boulevard wanted him in Austria. He covered his mouth with a hand, fighting a quick rush of zbrka and fear.
