from Monika. She said, “You better stay calm in my place or I’ll kick you out.”
Ersek smiled, lips wet. “No you won’t.”
She winked at Brano. “On top of being a pain in the ass, this guy’s Norwegian. Don’t know why I let him in here.”
“Because I publish half your clientele.” He turned to Brano, his high voice warbling. “You’d think there would be some appreciation, wouldn’t you? A guy from Oslo starts printing up all the half-intelligible mutterings of these barely evolved people, and what does he get for it? He gets a guy like Sasha who doesn’t turn in anything because he’s meditating on his compositions. Tell me, back in your country is ‘meditating’ a euphemism for ‘drinking’?”
“Sometimes it is,” said Brano.
“Well, then, I won’t start printing your stuff, either.”
“Meet Ersek Nanz,” said Monika.
Ersek stuck out a cold palm, and Brano took it. “Brano Sev.”
“You’re new?”
“A couple weeks old.”
“You’re not a writer, are you?”
“Not at all.”
“No,” Monika said under her breath. “He isn’t.”
“Good.” He took a swill of beer. “People seem to think that being oppressed is the only qualification you need to be a writer.”
“Sometimes it’s enough to give you a story to tell,” said Monika.
“But you have to know how to write it.”
“Then why do you bother?” asked Brano.
Ersek looked at him. “Huh?”
“Why waste your time with bad writers?”
Ersek blinked a few times, and when he spoke he almost whispered. “Because Monika’s right. Someone’s got to get their stories out.”
“Then stop complaining.”
“Your second one’s on me,” said Monika.
Ersek tilted his head, paused, then moved his stool closer as Monika placed another beer on the counter. He’d been a publisher here, he told Brano, for the last five years. “A guy told me it was an easy gold mine. I think he was trying to ruin me.” The idea had been that there was no reputable publisher printing first-person accounts of Eastern Europeans who had fled to the West; the only publishers were receiving funds from the CIA, “making crappy propaganda.” Ersek shrugged. “And it made sense to me. You’ve got a ready market in all these exiles, wanting to hear their own stories. But you know what I didn’t take into account?”
“What?”
“Exiles are cheapskates. That’s what they are, down to the last man. And in the end, they don’t give a damn about their fellow exiles.”
“Is that really true?”
“Take it from me, friend. I’ve seen them all.”
And he had. He’d published many names Brano had heard before in the Ministry. There was Balint Urban, who fled just after the war and wrote narrative poems about wartime misery. Stanislaus Zambra, “like most of these guys,” was obsessed with a single event that he re-created in each novel; for him, it was the murder of his sister in 1961 in the prison beneath Yalta Boulevard, committed while he was in the same cell, watching.
“I don’t know why I bother with Sasha Lytvyn, though. Even when he’s sober his writing isn’t all that great.”
Brano leaned forward. “Sasha Lytvyn?”
“You know him?”
Brano shook his head, but he did know Sasha. He’d last seen him over a decade ago, in the early fifties, when Sasha Lytvyn parachuted with a partner into the forests north of Sarospatak with a pistol, a map, and a shortwave radio transceiver. He had been recruited by the benignly named Office of Policy Coordination, which, under the Truman administration, carried out a clandestine war, parachuting recent emigres back into the East in order to foment revolution. That CIA office had built its army from the ranks of the displaced persons camps of postwar Europe, trained them in sabotage, and tossed them out of airplanes.
But almost nothing they did was secret, at least to the East. The Office of Policy Coordination was riddled with leaks, including the famous Kim Philby; and in the end its leader, Frank Wisner, had a mental breakdown, living out his final years with the English until paranoia and mania finally led him to end his own life two years ago.
That evening in 1952, Brano had been on the reception committee when Lytvyn and his partner descended through the birches into a ring of well-informed soldiers. He’d been an amiable prisoner, answering questions with the carefully constructed cover story Brano and his associates had already been briefed on. But, with time, Lytvyn did deliver his secrets, as they always do; his partner, however, didn’t survive the interrogation. Once it was over, Lytvyn was put to work in the eastern mines. Then, like many, he was released in the ill-planned amnesties of 1956. After that, he must have found his way here.
“He’s got a lot of stories,” said Ersek. “But these stories have made him a dribbling wreck of a man.”
“I imagine,” said Brano. “Who’s the best?”
Ersek didn’t hesitate. “Filip, hands down. Filip Lutz. You heard of him?”
Brano, smiling slightly, shook his head.
“But even the great Filip Lutz,” said Ersek, “even he suffers from the condition all these exiles share.”
“What’s that?”
“Insufferable goddamned nostalgia.”
And as if on cue, someone put a coin into the jukebox and the bar was filled with a melody Brano knew, played on strings, the prewar national anthem that had been banned in 1947. A couple of drunks in the back stood up on wobbly legs, glassy-eyed, and placed their hats over their hearts.
2 APRIL 1967, SUNDAY
“What do you think, Brano?” Ludwig spoke today without inflection.
“About what?”
“The Carp. You spent a long time there Friday night, talked to a lot of people.”
“It’s good to talk with your own kind sometimes.”
“Any of them old friends?”
“I did recognize a couple faces, but I don’t think I ever knew them.”
“And no one approached you.”
“Just to introduce themselves. We’re a polite people.”
Ludwig nodded into his whiskey. “But you did it the smart way.”
“Smart?”
“You told them the truth. Or a kind of truth. It surprised me at first-I thought you’d arrange some innocuous cover.”
“Too complicated,” said Brano. “Thanks for the mail, by the way.”
“Mail?”
Brano reached into his pocket and brought out the pamphlet A Communist War? Ludwig raised his eyebrows as he accepted it.
“Your reading materials are improving, Brano.”
“You didn’t put it in my mailbox?”
Ludwig shook his head, smiling as he read. “The Committee for Liberty in the Captive Nations? When I give you political tracts, they won’t be from American fundamentalists.” He shook his head. “Maybe Friedrich did it. He’s quite the churchgoer. But these people…”
“What about them?”
