a block away from number 25, the shadow paused, and when Brano looked he saw why. She was standing outside his door. She strode up to him in a short coat, then wrapped her arms around his neck. “Dragi, I am missing you. You are hungry?”
“I can be.”
“Dobro. I take you to dinner.”
Although he didn’t want to go there, the only local place he knew was the Liebengaste, and so, with their sunburned companion just outside the window, they settled at a table. The waitress who brought the menus nodded at him, remembering his last visit. He ordered schnitzels for them both, then, after the waitress had left, leaned toward Dijana. “I’m sorry, did you want schnitzel?”
“I don’t care, Brani. I just want to seeing you.”
He lit her cigarette and tried to avoid looking out the window.
“Last night,” she said as she took a drag, “I was at Jazzklub Abel. Not for the work, but a drink. Poor Abel- you should see him. He is very sad. But he asking me about you. He say, What this Brano Sev do?”
“Did you tell him?”
“I can’t to say you was a spy, of course. I say I don’t know. Something with business. And then I start to thinking-what I know about you?” She shook her head. “Nothing. I know you was a spy, but that is not information. I know you was friend with Bertrand, maybe you is dangerous. I know you go back to your home and you start to writing me, then you stop. I not know why. I not know even if you have wife-do you have wife?”
“No,” said Brano. “I don’t have a wife.”
“Then what?” Her voice rose and her cheeks turned pink. “I know I am a good girl, I not asking you questions because I have respect for the privacy. I waiting for you to tell me what you want to tell me. But you tell me nothing, Brani. I start to thinking maybe I’m stupid. You come again to Vienna and say nothing why you stop to writing.” She placed her elbows on the table. “Are you understand me?”
He moved his fork to sit beside his knife, then stared at it. He said, “I stopped writing to you because I was told you were a spy.”
When he looked at her, the flush had gone from her cheeks. “What you said?”
“There are photographs,” he explained. “Photographs of you with men from the KGB. In your apartment.”
“Boli me kurac,” she said, which was one of the few Serb phrases he knew-essentially, “my dick hurts,” meaning that this was simply not to be listened to. She said, “You people, you are terrible.”
Then she dropped back in her chair and crossed her arms. Brano was overcome by an unexpected desire to apologize. He hadn’t taken those pictures, but the pictures had come from his world. He was the kind of man who did this, who set up cameras with long lenses to see into a young woman’s private world. It was his world that made such things acceptable. While he was thinking this, the waitress brought their food. She seemed to notice the awkward silence, in which Dijana, her face reddening again, stared at her schnitzel with something like terror.
Once the waitress was gone, Dijana straightened again and leaned toward him, over her plate. She whispered, “Listen, Brano Sev. I don’t must justify what I am doing to you, not to no one. This is why I not live in Yugoslavia. They ask me always questions. Dijana, why you stop with your school? Why you not talk with your friends no more? Why, Dijana, your father is so sick-maybe you think he should not been in jail? They ask me, Dijana, why you want live someplace what is not your home? You are not patriot?” Her eyes were very big. “This is why I go. Because I will not to have interrogations no more. And not from the man what is my lover.”
Brano nodded into the fist holding up his chin. “If I were the manager of a club-if I were Abel-then you would be right, I’d have no need to ask this. But I’m not a restaurateur. I spent all my life doing intelligence work, and if you were a spy, it would matter to me. I don’t want to think you’re using me.”
“Using?”
He nodded.
“Too long,” she said. “For too long you doing this, you don’t see what is good no more.” She waited, but he didn’t answer. So she shrugged and said, “You want to know?”
“Yes.”
She touched the edge of her plate. “Why you think Bertrand buy me apartment? Because he love me too much? I was thinking this at one time, but no. He use me for place to meet with his friends. Those Russians. Of course I did not know they was KGB-he telled me nothing. But it’s not surprise me. He meet with them and I make coffee for them, and then he ask me not to stay there. He send me out to the store so he can to talk.”
Brano folded his hand over his forehead. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Why I should tell you?” She shook her head. “It’s not your business. And anyway, I sweared to him I will tell nobody. He make me swear. He was afraid Lutz will find out.”
“Lutz?”
“Pa da. Filip Lutz. They was friends, together all the time. Me, too, we all had good time together. In that time we was at the Carp. But Bertrand, he was scared from Lutz-he say if Lutz find out he is with Russians, then he is dead man.” She frowned then, momentarily confused. “You think maybe Lutz, he find out? He kill Bertrand?”
“I don’t think so,” said Brano. “What was Bertrand doing with the Russians?”
“I don’t know. Just talk. He meet them three times what I know of. In my apartment. But I don’t know what they was doing-I am no spy.”
“Wait.” Brano tried to think through the fresh accumulation of zbrka. “You and Bertrand and Filip were friends at that time.”
“ Da. And that terrible Ersek Nanz, too, you know. But after Bertrand die I stop going to the Carp. It depressing. Anyway, I wanted to be with you, not in Vienna. You remember?” Finally, a brief smile.
“I remember.”
“And you was thinking I am spy!”
Brano rubbed his scalp. “I wasn’t sure, but I suspected.”
“You still suspecting?”
“No,” said Brano. Then he called to the waitress for a bottle of wine.
15 APRIL 1967, SATURDAY
She didn’t have to be at the Jazzklub Abel until one, so they spent the morning in her apartment lazily, eating and making love, until a headache crept up on him. She gave him aspirin and boiled tea.
Brano could think of a hundred different ways to punch holes in the story she’d told him. For any good operative there were many layers of cover, each more convincing than the next. The thing that worried him most was her acceptance. She knew that he had worked for state security all his life, yet she had decided to simply believe that his life’s work was now over. Her father had been sent to a prison because of men like him, and she had left her country because of those same men. She had found refuge in the West and then, inexplicably, had chosen a lover from that world.
Brano found himself thinking over his tea that even if she were telling him the truth, he would never be able to accept it completely. He was, as she had pointed out, terrible.
“You are cold again.”
“What?”
She pulled her robe over her shoulder. “I can see when you, your head, it is far away.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s the way I am.”
She grunted and reached for her tea. “Pa da. Is what I am learning.”
In the afternoon he walked her to the Marienbrucke, which crossed the Danube Canal into the Second District, where the Jazzklub Abel lay.
“Why you not come with me?” she asked. “You can to meet Abel.”
“I don’t think Abel wants to meet me.”
“Why not? He’s not boy.”
“Maybe I don’t want to meet him.”
“Dragi,” she said, and kissed his cheeks. “You is not so cold after all.”
