never had. Though I told you at first that I needed time to think about it, I knew I’d accept your offer. I had no choice.
Yes, I did tell her, but only that I’d been offered a job. It was an excuse for celebration, and I took her to the Hotel Metropol for dinner, using most of what was left of Stanislav’s money.
Right-how do you know this? Yes, afterward, on the walk home, I drew her aside and kissed her.
Is this really important?
No, she did not kiss me back. She became upset and ran away.
I can tell when he reaches orgasm, because men make it known. His silence turns to panting, and I feel him grow inside me. He straightens-at this moment men are the most proud. As if they are onstage, their leakage some kind of gold that only this particular man is capable of producing. Perhaps that’s why I push him out before he can stain me.
It doesn’t interrupt his performance. He rolls on his back and pulls on himself. At this moment the woman disappears anyway, and there’s just a man and his tool and the glory of his mess.
When he’s done, he opens his eyes and turns to me, but I’ve rolled away. I noticed, when I undressed, the expression when he first caught sight of the ragged scar just below my navel, and now it’s instinct to hide it from him.
“Katja,” he says, then slides up behind me. He’s making my buttocks sticky, and that only brings on more tears. “Katja, what’s wrong?”
Yes, yes. Okay? I followed her after she ran off. We were in Victory Park, and I caught up with her. I apologized. I said I understood how terrible it was, me being a friend of her fiance, and perhaps we could put it behind us. She calmed down and said she accepted my apology. Then I asked her if I had a chance. I mean, if Stanislav did not exist.
She frowned-I remember that face clearly. A frown, and then a smile that became a full, terrible laugh. I think she was going to say something, but I didn’t find out. I was having trouble hearing her at that point. I grabbed her, she was very light, and dragged her deeper into the park. I threw her down behind some shrubs and began to kiss her. She fought back, I think, but it wasn’t very hard to get her out of that skirt and…
I’m sorry, I blanked out there. But you know what I mean.
No, actually. I didn’t rape her. At first I thought I would, but then I remembered that I had a new life, a new career. One that had to be protected. And this girl, beautiful as she was, she was what one might call a loose end. So I used the knife that I had brought with me from Prague, the one I always carried inside my jacket. I used it on her. Right here.
For the recording, right? I stabbed her in the stomach.
I killed her.
I assume so. It’s a big knife, Comrade Sev.
In the darkness, after I get control of my tears and we’re just lying there, side by side, Istvan says, “There’s a phrase in Islam, al-hikmat al-majhuulah, which means ‘the unknown wisdom.’ It’s about those things that Allah does that are beyond our understanding.” He pauses. “It’s a comforting thing to believe that when the innocent suffer, there’s a reason, though we will never understand it.” I feel his hot palm on my thigh. “I find it a liberating thought. You?”
He waits for an answer, but I have none to give.
Gavra
They left through the rear of the apartment building, Gavra stomping through the muddy parking lot while Adrian carried his bag a few feet behind, avoiding puddles. Gavra said, “That Trabant. Do you know who it belongs to?”
Adrian didn’t.
He’d chosen it because the window was half down. “Don’t you have a car out front?” asked Adrian.
“Get in,” said Gavra.
He made quick work of the wires beneath the steering wheel, and soon they were moving through the dark streets. Once they reached the highway out of town, Adrian said, “Where?”
“Airport,” Gavra muttered.
“Where?”
Gavra looked at him then, as if only now aware he wasn’t alone in the car. “Sorry, it’s important we leave the country. I’ll explain later.”
“We’re going to Istanbul, aren’t we?”
Gavra slowed a little, peering over at him again. “How did you know that?”
Adrian shrugged. “She said you’d take me there.”
“She did?”
“She told me lots of things, Gavra. My sister was always right. Always.”
Katja
At five in the morning, Istvan’s snores wake me. I remain in bed, though, remembering what he said about the idle simplicity of pessimists. He’s right. For the past seven years I’ve let one incident paralyze me. That moment in Victory Park, the sharp cramp of that blade sinking into organs that were made to produce babies, waking up screaming in the Unity Medical emergency ward. Just one night. Years later, I married, but only because Aron Drdova did all the work. I’ve never really been involved in the marriage, instead standing off to the side with my arms crossed, waiting for its inevitable end. But this is not news-it’s something I’ve known but chosen to ignore as I’ve watched my husband, with his seemingly endless naive enthusiasm, labor for three years to keep us afloat, to make us into a family. Now he wants what I can’t give him-a child-and that makes it all that much worse, because I’ve never told him why a child is out of the question. He’s touched the scar and asked, but I’ve only given him angry silence.
As I quietly dress in the bathroom, I begin to wonder if this will change anything. After I’ve done what I’ve come here to do, will it make any difference to my marriage?
Probably not-but there, again, I’m doing what Istvan accused me of: I’m denying responsibility.
He’s still snoring when I get my handbag from the bedside table. It’s heavy. I don’t look back when I leave; I just go.
The gun in my bag makes me self-conscious in the early-morning crowd as I take the Tunel south to the Galata Bridge. Dark men catch my eye, a few even speak, and after a while they begin to look the same, as if any of them could be the man I slept with last night-the man whose name escapes me for a moment. He’s not the first one-night stand I’ve had since taking my vows to Aron, and probably won’t be the last.
No.
On the Galata I smile, because that, again, is the pessimist trap. As things have been, so they will remain. What bullshit.
I’m at the Hotel Erboy by seven, where there’s one other person in the lobby. A teenage boy reading a newspaper. The Cyrillic letters on the front confuse me a moment, then I realize it’s Pravda, PAB A.
For a while-I’m not sure how long, because time has again become strange-I sit in the high-ceilinged lobby, hands on the bag in my lap, looking past him to the elevator in the corner that sometimes spills guests who turn left and descend stairs to the restaurant.
The teenager smiles at me as he turns the page.
I go to the front desk, take a complimentary Herald Tribune from a pile, and return to my seat. My English is terrible, and I mostly look at pictures as the sound of morning prayers bleed through the windows.
A wall clock tells me it’s a little before eight when I come across the story beneath the face of a fat Turkish man. The story itself, which I translate with great effort, interests me now less than it should. Investigators admit to still being unsure about the cause of the explosion that downed Turkish Airlines Flight 54 just over a week ago, in the early hours of Wednesday, April 23, killing all 68 passengers and crew. “That it was a bomb placed by the Army of the Liberation of Armenia, we know, but whether its explosion was on purpose or the result of bad wiring is still being investigated,” said Istanbul police captain Talip Evren at a press conference Thursday morning.
