You’ll fall asleep down here.”
Gavra knew what his mentor would say to that. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“You won’t fall asleep, then? I mean, if I’m in danger.”
“No.”
Adrian nodded, then climbed out. Gavra watched him walk gingerly to the glass door of his building and open it with a key. Before entering, Adrian turned back and shot him another smile.
Gavra lit a cigarette.
He watched neighbors arrive. Old men and women, a group of three teenagers lighting cigarettes, a family with two young children. Everyone appeared tired, returning from long Sunday lunches that inevitably grew into drunken dinners with lascivious uncles, dozing fathers, fussy mothers, and grandmothers cooking vast meals for dozens. Gavra remembered them from childhood as wonderful, exhausting affairs, where he would run around his grandparents’ farm with a pellet gun, shooting crows perched on branches. But he’d never known those Sunday lunches as an adult, because after joining the Ministry he had never returned home. He sometimes considered visiting-surely by now he had no reason to be uncomfortable there. He was an adult, and an officer of the Ministry for State Security.
Besides, it was so long ago that his father found him in his grandparents’ barn with that young farmhand from Krosno. Gavra had been sixteen then; fourteen years was a long time for any father to sustain his anger.
He’d lost his mental silence, and because of that he nearly missed it when, around six thirty, as the shadows of the occasional tree stretched across the glass entryway, an old Saxon walked up to the front door, fumbling with his keys, then stopped. The old man looked back as a younger man in a wide hat jogged up, calling for him to wait. From his open window, Gavra could hear the peculiar accent of the jogger. Flat, the syllables spoken from the front of the mouth.
Western. Perhaps American.
The old man noticed it, too, his surprise evident even from this distance, but let the man in with him as Gavra threw his cigarette out the window.
Gavra didn’t open the door, because there were perhaps eighty apartments in Zrinka’s brother’s ten-story building, making a total of at least two hundred inhabitants. There was no reason to assume this foreigner had arrived to see Adrian Martrich. So he hesitated, just a few seconds, until another man jogged across the pitted courtyard and used a key to get inside. The man’s suit was too tight, and an air of claustrophobia surrounded him.
Gavra climbed out of his car and began to run, because that second man was Ludvik Mas.
Peter
1968
They were the only customers left in the bar when it closed at one, and they stumbled arm in arm down Celetna, past soldiers standing against the old town’s medieval stone walls. Stanislav sometimes drunkenly saluted them. “Oblov, you’re still here?” he called in Russian.
A fat soldier on the opposite corner squinted. “Stanislav, get your ass out of my district or I’ll personally take care of that girlfriend of yours!”
Stanislav shot him a rude hand gesture, then grabbed Peter’s shoulder and walked on.
By the time they reached the arch of the Charles Bridge’s Old Town gate, Stanislav was failing. A long day of drinking had broken up his words into barely comprehensible syllables. “Got to…I’m…uh…tired.”
“You’re tired?”
“Da.”
“Should I get you to the train station?”
“No… nyet. There.”
Stanislav pointed at the small door on the inside of the bridge’s gate. “In there,” he mumbled. “Good for sit.”
Peter was surprised to find the battered old door unlocked. Inside in the darkness, he squinted to make out the twisting stone steps leading high into the tower. He peered back to see Stanislav falling through the door, then closing it behind himself. “I don’t think you’ll make it,” said Peter.
“Eh?”
“To the top.” He pointed up into the blackness.
“I’ll make it.” Stanislav ushered him up with his hands.
But as they reached the fourth narrow window that looked down on the bridge and across to the castle district, Stanislav sat heavily on a step.
“Just a little…rest. Da? But you…” He yawned and looked up. “But you will wake me? Eight,” he said. “Eight thirty.”
“I’ll do that.”
Stanislav stifled another yawn and closed his eyes. “You won’t…sleep?”
Peter settled on a step above the soldier and opened the window, letting in a cool river breeze. The alcohol had been washed away by his night’s act of betrayal, and as his eyes adjusted to the shadows of the bridge he wished they’d brought along another bottle. “Don’t worry. I won’t sleep.”
For a half hour Peter remained there, his knees up to his chest. The breeze coming in off the Vltava seeped through his thin coat and pants. From below he heard occasional distant voices he thought were Russian. Once, a truck rumbled across the bridge, and he watched its lights dwindle between the rows of statues.
“What’re you thinking, Peter?” Stanislav seemed to be speaking in his sleep.
“I’m wondering how I can have a life like yours.”
The soldier squirmed into a tighter fetal position, his head on the step just below Peter’s foot. “ Da, da. Well, wake me up when you know.”
Another truck passed under them, then the noise faded away. He had no answers. The only sure thing was that he could not return to the university. His phone call to Captain Poborsky had ended that. Those who had not been rounded up would know who had turned them in. They would manhandle him from his bed in the night, then carry him to some vacant janitor’s closet or toilet stall; they would teach him a lesson.
The soldier began to snore. In the darkness, Peter could just see his hunched back, the way he was rolled tight. On the crest of his hip, where his fine coat had fallen back, the knife from his father was looped in his belt. It seemed to Peter like a motif in their relationship. A single object that signified the difference between the two of them. Stanislav’s loving family was in that knife, and the knife, like the family, protected Stanislav as he made his way through the world.
Peter cleared his throat. “Stanislav?”
The snores continued, the soldier’s chest rising and falling.
Peter spoke quietly. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve done. I killed my best friend and the woman I loved. Not on purpose, but because of my stupidity. But now-now I’m not so sure. Did I mean to do it? Did I want us to be caught? Was I so jealous I’d rather they were dead than together? Because afterward I did something completely consciously. I made a phone call I never thought I would make. And right now, my old friends are in that convent on Bartolom jska. They’re probably…” He couldn’t finish the sentence aloud, but his mind repeated it in full: They’re probably being tortured. He cleared his throat again, his mind now inventing grotesque scenes that took place in that small basement room. Poor meek Jan in a chair, tied down, his glasses cracked and blood dripping from his fingernails.
He felt like he was going to be sick, so he put his face as far through the window as he could, sucking in fresh air.
It wasn’t only the gore of his imagination, but also the realization of this fact: Because his old friends were the kind of men they were, with their pride and convictions, at some point Comrade Poborsky would walk them out to the convent courtyard and shoot them in the head.
He looked out at the river and across to the lights of the castle district. That was something he would miss.
