reaching for his coat.
A small American with round glasses stood beside Lutz. He looked nervous, but once the room quieted he took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and began to read, introducing Lutz as a “distinguished scholar of the communist world” who was “famous for his insightful articles in Kurier.”
The applause was loud, vibrating the walls. Some men whistled.
Lutz smiled and pressed the air for silence. Finally the crowd settled, and Lutz licked his teeth. “I didn’t know we had so many fans of yellow journalism in Vienna!”
Laughter.
“But, really, it is an honor to be invited here to speak to all of you. Thank you, Jeremy,” he said, nodding at the small man, now sitting in the front row. A smattering of applause. Lutz took a sip of wine from the glass sitting on the podium, then said, “We like to make jokes, but what I’ve come here to talk to you about tonight is a deadly serious subject. Over the last years we’ve heard a lot of talk coming from Moscow and Bucharest and Warsaw and my own home about the idea of international peace. The communist world, the message goes, is focused on the aim that all good men have in their hearts: peace in our time. And I think that all good men, upon hearing this for the first time, think, Well, why not? That’s an admirable thing for them to say.”
There were a few chuckles from the audience.
“No, don’t laugh. This is an honest response to the press releases issued by the International Communist Party. But the problem is that honest responses assume that the original statement is honest. And that is what I’ve come here to examine today.”
Lutz went on, but Brano focused instead on the heads lined up in front of him. Men and women alike seemed transfixed by Lutz’s vibrant voice, and sometimes they nodded ecstatic agreement. Lutz was casual. He could have been standing in a bar, giving a lecture on seduction. He knew all these people and was speaking to friends about something they all already agreed on. And when he said, “You know the old Hungarian joke: We’re a three-class society-those who have been in prison, those who are there, and those who are heading there,” everyone nodded because they already knew this as well. There was no one-except, perhaps, himself-to convert. The lecture, it seemed, had no point.
Then he felt a soft hand on his shoulder.
Dijana took the seat beside him. Her skirt was short, and she looked, he thought briefly, very bourgeois. In an exceptional way. She kissed his cheek and whispered, “I hear you will to be. Here.”
Brano felt an easy warmth fill him, as if he’d known all along that she would arrive and both of them were merely fulfilling their roles. “I’m glad you came.”
She placed a finger over her lips and looked up as Lutz enumerated the various corners of the world to which the Soviet Union had sent its troops and advisors in order to create wars, rather than end them. “Vietnam, Korea, Africa… the list goes on.”
She leaned close to his head. “You are liking this?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe it’s not bad idea we go.”
Lutz spread his arms to show just how much evil the communists of the world had committed.
“Pa da,” said Brano.
The Oskar Bar lay on the ground floor of a large, modern office building facing the Concordiaplatz car park. It was dark and empty, and when they settled at the bar Dijana grinned. “We don’t see no one what we know here. Is good?”
“It’s great,” he said, then placed a hand on her knee. “Have we waited long enough yet?”
She nodded seriously. “I sorry. But was something what I had to do first.”
“What?”
“You want to know?”
“Of course.”
“Okay.” She pursed her lips, then opened them and sighed. “Well, I had to say bye for someone.”
“Bye?”
“Da. Good-bye. A man what was my lover.”
“Wolfgang?”
“Wolfgang?” She thought that was funny. “No, I like the old men. Was Abel, a friend for Wolfgang. He also own the club what I work at, is his name. The Jazzklub Abel.”
“You were sleeping with your boss?”
Dijana started laughing. “Da da da! Is funny, no?” Then she tilted her head.
“What?”
“I think it’s not bad idea we go home now.”
The number 38 tram took them north along Nu?dorfer, and though Dijana held on to his arm, they did not speak. That pressure on his arm, the fingers she sometimes tapped against the inside of his wrist, and the blank smile she gave the passing street-they all helped to make the silence an ideal thing. It was different from the silence of the Bobrka countryside, different from the silence of an empty apartment. He remembered their walk last August, which had been loud, because she had been loud. Now she wasn’t drunk, and she showed no signs of nervousness. And he, surprisingly, felt none.
For a few moments, he even forgot about Vienna-he forgot about Ludwig and the sunburned shadow; he forgot about the Committee and Andrew Stamer, even Yalta Boulevard and poor Sasha Lytvyn; he forgot that he was an exile here, just like everyone else.
11 APRIL 1967, TUESDAY
Brano Sev was not a young man. He’d had half a century to acquaint himself with the other sex, and when he was younger he put much effort toward that. Those years just after the war, when he was building his career, he’d had brief affairs with women he met in bars. They were often a little older than him, war widows who knew what they were looking for when they sat alone at a bar. He’d go home with them and perhaps stay until the next morning. A few of these affairs stretched the length of a week, until the cold sexual calculation began to wear on both participants, and they would quietly call it quits.
He’d never lived with a woman, and this was something he regretted. He’d had one yearlong relationship, when he was forty-two, with Regina Haliniak, who still worked the Yalta front desk. That relationship, like this one, was prompted by the woman’s forthrightness. Three months into it, he suggested they move in together, and Regina laughed at him. Do you think I’m going to fallfor that? He never quite understood what she meant, and by the end of the year it didn’t matter. In the canteen of Yalta 36, she informed him that she’d begun sleeping with a lieutenant named Zoran, and she thought she might be in love. That word had never crossed her lips in the last year. Brano had looked at the gravy-smothered bread on his plate and shrugged.
Since then he’d stopped trying, settling for the brief, cool greeting of prostitutes living in the Canal District. Brano was self-aware enough to realize that he was no woman’s ideal. He was neither particularly attractive nor virile. He spoke too quietly, and when he was entertaining, it was by accident. He wasn’t even particularly loving-he knew this. He had learned the techniques of coldness because without them he wouldn’t have survived for this many years, but they had also assured that his many years would be spent alone.
Which is why he never quite trusted Dijana Frankovic. A young woman, even one with a fixation for older men, would be a fool to choose him. There were far more accomplished men in this city, more entertaining men, rich men. So even when he followed her up her stairs that second time, eyes on her skirt, he was still far from believing. He half expected to find that young man with his long hair sitting in her chair, or her boss, Abel-for these had to be her real lovers, and Brano was a game, something to pass the time. Or perhaps it was more sinister, and Wolfgang would attempt to strong-arm Brano out of his meager Raiffeisenbank account.
But the apartment was empty, and once they were inside her youth came out as she tore off his clothes and tried to take him there, on the floor. Later, in bed, she cried once, and apologized. “I don’t want you to thinking I am strange. Impulsive, I know this. I am. But, da, just what I know. This is the right thing.”
And when they lay there afterward, her head fitting so well against his chest, he asked her, because he still
