“Mother.”
She finished her glass. “What, son-of-mine?”
“I’m quite happy with my life.”
“Nonsense. No one is happy with their life. Your Tati used to say that all the time, and he knew what he was talking about.”
He stared at his drink until she let the subject go. She went on to other matters, and by eleven had told him all about the happenings in Bobrka. Alina Winieckim and Gerik Gargas had died in the last six months, the first of encephalitis, the other in a gory drilling accident. Alina’s husband, Lubomir, got a permit to move to the Capital-“Did you hear from him? I gave him your phone number.” Brano hadn’t. “Always unsociable, Lubomir. Always…” She twisted an index finger against her temple to signify insanity, then told him that the entire Ulanowicz clan had moved to Uzhorod.
Brano rubbed his eyes.
But there was good news as well, she told him. Wincet and Kalena Szybalski had gotten married after only a three-week courtship (though Kalena’s soon-swelling belly made the reason clear enough). Also married were Piotr and Jolanta, and Augustyn and Olesia. “There’s love in the air,” she said. “Maybe you’ll smell it, too.” Krystyna Knippelberg was seven months pregnant with her sixth. “You should see how ecstatic she is. But who wants six children? All she really wants is one of those Motherhood Medals, it’s obvious.”
“Is that so bad?”
“It’s bad when you can’t feed the five children you’ve got. Krystyna will have to send one off to the orphanage, mark my words.”
The most spectacular news, however, of Jan Soroka’s mysterious appearance did not cross her lips.
“And what about my sister?”
She yawned into the back of her hand, then took the bottle to refill his glass, stopping when she saw it hadn’t been touched. “Klara is doing well. Oh, very well. She and Lucjan are as happy as you can imagine. No children, though I talk to her.” She drank her brandy and put her chin in her hand. “Maybe Lucjan is seedless. You can’t blame a man for that, but I would like some grandchildren before I’m dead. Klara’s not my only child, though.”
“Maybe.”
“You see?” she said as she got up. “It’s not just in the Capital that interesting things happen.”
She kissed him good night and left the brandy out, but he didn’t drink any more. He sipped tap water and read Colonel Cerny’s copy of Kurier. In a long column called “An Eye into the Other Side,” Filip Lutz told of his own interrogation in 1961, a year before he escaped through Prague to the West. He said that the brutal treatment he received at the hands of the Ministry for State Security was the sure sign of a paranoiac society in the advanced stages of collapse. He gave the regime three years at most.
When the words began to blur, he went to the bedroom, undressed and folded his clothes, then climbed into the cold bed.
Brano was not the kind of man who liked to recall his youth, preferring to forget that time of zbrka — Dijana Frankovic’s word for “the confusion of too many thing.” Before and during the war, he had stumbled through the stages leading to adulthood with his loud friend, Marek. The road to adulthood had been so clumsy and hesitant that even at the end of that life he was still unsure what to call himself. But after sending away his father, the zbrka dissipated. He was Brano Oleksy Sev, first a private, and then a sergeant, a captain, a lieutenant, a major. Then a factory worker. Now, he was neither an officer nor a worker but something undefined, lying in this cold room in the north of the country, where he always found the childhood zbrka waiting patiently for him.
As he warmed, he closed his eyes to focus on the provincial silence. It seemed clean to him, without malice, but then the noise did come, in little bursts, then a long high note: drunk men’s howls wavering on the cold breeze, from far off. At least that was something familiar from the Capital.
9 FEBRUARY 1967, THURSDAY
His back was stiff from the too-soft bed, so he stood beside it and stretched his arms and twisted, then rolled his shoulders, the smell of breakfast rousing him. After a quick wash he ate bread and jam and two boiled potatoes. The eastern sun lit the dust in the kitchen while Mother talked about the people she expected to come to her store today, because villagers were as predictable as the clock on the wall.
They walked to the center along the rivuleted gravel road, nodding at those who nodded, and he stood aside while his mother spoke hesitantly to old women before finally introducing him to Zuzanny Wichowska and Elwira Lisiewicz and Halina Grzybowska. He removed his hat for each woman, and though they gave him timid smiles, they did not offer their hands.
On each woman’s forehead was a fading black stain. Yesterday, he realized, had been Ash Wednesday.
His mother’s shop was a narrow, nameless place two doors down from the butcher’s. She unlocked the door and opened the curtains to let in light. Shelves packed with canned foods and liquor bottles grew to the ceiling, and under the glass counter lay sausages and cheese. She showed him the back room filled with boxes her young assistant had yet to unpack, then made coffee on an electric coil. While they drank, a tall sixty-year-old man in a faded smock appeared with pallets of bread, the ash on his forehead sweated almost completely away. Mother asked how his wife, Ewa, was, then introduced him to Brano as Zygmunt. Brano shook his hand while she signed the invoice.
“You’re enjoying Bobrka?”
“Just arrived last night.”
“Different,” said Zygmunt.
“Bobrka?”
“Different from the Capital.” He glanced at Brano’s polished shoes. “A big man in the Capital is just another man in Bobrka.”
“The reverse is true as well.”
“It may be,” he said, taking the invoice from Iwona Sev. “And that might be why I’m still in Bobrka.” He touched the brim of his hat before he left.
Brano said he would go for a walk.
“To register with the Militia?”
“Of course.”
“You’re as predictable as a villager, Brani.”
Without his mother as an intermediary, there was nothing to connect Brano to the ashed villagers who gave him cursory glances; there were no words to be said. He walked along the main road that branched out from the church, past yards with chickens and self-satisfied dogs, to where a single white Skoda was parked outside the Militia station, a small but austere concrete box with a tin roof and its Militia sign propped in the window. The interior was dim and simple: a gray, scratched desk, a chair on each side, and an empty bulletin board. A portrait of General Secretary Pankov in a crisp fedora hung over the desk. Brano waited until a voice cursed from the back room.
“Hello?”
The voice silenced.
“Hello?”
The far door opened and a wrinkled uniform appeared: a young man with black, greasy bangs swept over an ashless forehead. His sunken eyes were dark, his lips wide and without expression. “Yes? Need something?”
“I’m here to register.”
“Register?” He moved to his desk and sat down.
“I’m from the Capital. I’m staying here now.”
The man motioned to the opposite chair and removed a stack of papers from a drawer. He went through them, pulling one out, then shaking his head and returning it to the stack and trying another until he found the form he needed. He turned it around for Brano. “Here you go.”
Brano took a pen from a holder on the desk. “This is for foreigners. I need form AE-342.”
The militiaman flushed. “Yes, yes. How about that?” He returned to the stack. “Here, of course. AE-
