When they stopped it was in a darkness punctuated by the occasional flash of a spotlight sliding over the water from a guard tower north of them.
Both front doors opened and shut, and they waited. The woman appeared first, looking at them through the flaps without expression. Then she nodded to the right, toward a watery darkness thick with reeds. “It’s not far- about eight hundred yards that way. Once you’re across, turn right and then wait at the dirt road. You’ll be picked up.”
After Brano whispered his translation, Lia stuck her head out. “We’ll catch pneumonia.”
“That’s the least thing you have to worry about,” she answered. “Jan.”
Jan looked up from Petre, who was in his arms.
Brano translated her next words. “You’re responsible for watching the spotlight over there.” She pointed. “When it approaches, all of you go under. Understand?”
“We won’t make it,” Brano said in Hungarian. “Will we?”
“We’re more organized than you think. They’re focused on the Fosus Corner tonight, not here.” She looked back at the empty road. “Hurry. They’ll be here soon.”
“And what will you be doing when they arrive?”
She smiled at Brano as the driver, who he could now see was a fat soldier with a rough face, put his arm around her. She said, “I’ll be fucking my friend in the back of this truck.”
As they crawled down from the gravel road into the cold water that rose to their knees, then their waists (Petre’s neck), he let go of the last tenuous hopes that he would be saved from this. But this had always been part of his work-no matter how vast the security apparatus behind you, the fact was that, in the end, you were alone.
His wet shirt puffed around his neck, and he pushed it down, working hard to reach that stage that followed uncertainty, the one Jan Soroka had always seemed to inhabit-acceptance. He barely heard it when that same man whispered, “Now.”
Brano looked around, saw the light sliding over the water toward him, and realized he was alone, ripples spreading through the reeds where his companions had been. Then he dropped into the icy water.
Images flashed. Bobrka. Childhood. A quiet, shy boy, who never raised his hand in class. Unexceptional in school, where they used beet juice in lieu of ink, he was neither poor nor impressive, and it seemed likely that he would farm the earth in the same way his father and grandfather had. And this is what he did, from the age of twelve, tilling potatoes alongside his father in the arid fields.
His one lasting friendship, with Marek Piotrowski, was temperamental, based on this loud oaf’s momentary whims. When dissatisfied, Marek could sometimes be found on a Bobrka side street, kicking Brano Sev into the dust.
Then, in 1939, the Germans took over his country. He was twenty-two when the frantic soldiers marched into his house and handed his father a piece of paper, which told him he would no longer grow vegetables; he would spend his days in a factory, welding large strips of steel into antitank obstacles. Two nights later, with his friend’s encouragement, Brano and Marek disappeared, soon finding what they sought: the partisan camp.
He came up, stifling a cough with his fist. His cold head was pounding. The others looked at him, Petre’s wet face grinning. Black makeup dribbled from Lia’s eyes.
A breeze iced his wet hair as he glanced back to where, on the road some distance away, a jeep was parking behind the truck they’d left. A gathering headache pulsed behind his right eye.
They continued forward, stumbling sometimes over the stiff reeds. Petre fell; Lia righted him. They could still not see the far bank, but Jan walked with stiff confidence, glancing occasionally back at the activity on the gravel road. He turned again and paused, noticing a flicker. “ Now.”
The partisan camp was not what they expected. It was makeshift, ready to be transported at any moment, and when they asked to be shown how to use a rifle, the commander, a shopkeeper from Dukla, Laszlo “Lion” Cerny (though he wore no stripes, he called himself a major), instead handed them a weathered book by Karl Marx. Read this, he told them. Then we’ll teach you how to kill Germans.
Will this teach us to kill the proper way? asked Marek.
Shh, said Brano.
While the partisans snuffed the fire and raided German convoys, Brano read. History is economics in action… The philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point, however, is to change it. Marek stood over him with a pine branch held like a rifle. He made shooting sounds with his mouth. What the bourgeoisie… produces above all is its own gravediggers… The workers have nothing to lose but their chains.
In the end, reading didn’t matter, because a failed raid on an officer’s tent turned out to be an ambush and cut the partisan camp in half. Want to learn how to shoot? asked Cerny.
The two of them nodded.
Let’s practice on Nazis.
And that was the day Marek was killed by a bullet from a machine gun mounted on a personnel carrier. Brano lay beside him in the grass, trying to deal with his jammed rifle (he had fired only two shots), and when he heard the quiet sigh to his left, through the grass, he knew before looking that his friend was dead. But he looked anyway. He stared at the hole in Marek’s neck, which throbbed, producing an astounding amount of blood that glued the blades of grass together.
A hand pulled him, gasping, out of the water. Jan’s face was close to his. “Don’t drown, stupid,” he whispered.
Brano blinked at him, the pain in his head sharp now.
As they continued, the reeds thickened and the water lowered to their waists again. They could no longer make out the truck. Jan looked around, then said, “ Now.”
The frigid water swallowed Brano.
Over the next years their raids became more frequent, and his rifle usually did not jam. He became familiar with the recoil against his shoulder and the uniformed Germans who crumpled quietly on the road. Sometimes they shouted and squealed, though usually they dropped in silence. Cerny said, You’ve got an eye, Sev. You’re a one-shot killer. He became known as that-“One-Shot”-by everyone in their mobile camp. He was respected for his efficiency and for his modesty.
Perhaps that was why, in the summer of 1944, Cerny took Brano out into the woods and sat him down.
It’s winding down now, you know.
What?
The war. The Americans are coming in from the west, but the Russians will be here first. You know what that means, don’t you?
Brano didn’t want to disappoint. It means the dictatorship of the proletariat is upon us.
Don’t give me dogma, Brano. What this means is that we are going to run things now. Orders have come in from Moscow. We’re to organize.
Organize?
Don’t pretend you don’t understand. Cerny ruffled Brano’s hair, and for the moment, Brano forgot that he was a twenty-seven-year-old man being treated like a twelve-year-old boy. The most important thing in an emerging socialist state is what?
Brano shrugged.
You know the answer.
He did. Security against insurrectionists.
Cerny smiled. Now, comrade, you’ll never be alone.
And if Brano was angry about anything, it was for that one lie.
Through his blurred, aching eyes he could see barren land ahead, past the reeds, and when the light swung across the water again, Jan said nothing. Because now they were beyond the reach of the spotlights; they were in Austria.
At the bank, the upturned hull of a shattered blue rowboat stuck out of the water. Petre pointed at it as he struggled through the reeds, and whispered something to his mother. Lia told him to be quiet.
“Don’t worry,” said Jan. “We’ve arrived.”
“My God,” said Lia, but she whispered it.
They were exhausted and cold when they staggered onto the muddy grass that sucked at their feet. They
