“You think he can help on this case? I mean, the‘Time for a change’part.” He sounded very earnest.
I took one of his cigarettes. “No. He won’t know a thing.”
He knew I was lying, but didn’t press the issue.
When his wife finished with my telephone, I had Bernard carry my box of old files to where I’d parked on Lenin Avenue. I followed with Agota and Sanja, wondering if she really knew nothing about her husband’s Ministry collaborations. At my Mercedes-bought, like everything, with Lena’s family money-Bernard kissed his family good- bye, promising to see them by the weekend.
We soon reached Victory Square; then a side road put us on Mihai Boulevard, which followed the banks of the Tisa River-”Lifeblood of the Nation,” we liked to call it. The water reflected the gray winter sky, lapping stone ramparts. Recent storms had raised the water level enough to frighten those who lived near the river. Lena and I lived higher up in the Second District and had no fear.
Many of the Habsburg buildings I remembered from my youth, which had lined the riverbank, had been demolished in the last decade. Tomiak Pankov, a great believer in the shape and look of socialism, returned from a 1978 visit to North Korea with a new vision for the Capital. Some said he was embarrassed by the provinciality of our city and raged whenever he came back from trips to Paris or London, but I’m not sure about that. I think he had a fastidious side to him, something that served him well under our first Great Leader, Mihai, when he was just a simple government bureaucrat in love with efficiency. Once he saw Kim 11 Sung’s rigid and clean society, and Pyongyang’s long, broad avenues and crowds in perfect, military formation, he felt he’d found paradise.
Now, everything that smelled of the past was being erased. Churches were demolished, or moved brick by brick to hide behind modern towers, and the outer rings of the city were replanned to accommodate the influx of farmers reassigned as factory workers.
We got on the Georgian Bridge, heading south, and on our left lay the ruptured skyline of the Canal District, full of cranes and half-finished block towers. Even the Canal District, that symbol of everything seedy and chaotic in the country, once home to prostitutes and drug dealers, was being turned into a New Town.
When we reached the southern bank, also full of new towers, Agota said, “I spent all yesterday in a line. You know that? Trying to get an extra ration book for Sanja. Four hours, just to have the bitch behind the window tell me Sanja was missing her A-32 form.”
“What’s an A-32?”
“Far as I can tell, it’s to prove she exists. But there she was, crying on my hip. I don’t need a goddamned A- 32. It’s a real laugh, isn’t it?
First, the maternity laws say I can’t have an abortion, then they make sure I’m barely able to feed the kids I end up with.”
“Want me to make a call?” I asked. I’d done this enough times before. As soon as the dietary laws started going through three years ago, specifying the forms required to get your food ticket booklets, the flaws became apparent. If you were missing a stamp on one of the four forms required-or on one of the sixteen forms needed to get those four primary forms-it meant you had to fall back on bartering with your neighbors or visiting the black market.
“Taken care of,” she said.
I wondered if this was why she was rushing off to Tisakarad. The farther you got from the Capital-and Tisakarad was forty miles away-the less the ration system was followed. Local farmers had long ago realized the benefit of skimming off their Capital-bound shipments and bringing their pigs into the markets, where the city folk would trade anything for a bit of pork. I said, “I’m surprised Bernard let you go. Patak’s not safe, and I’ll bet Ferenc will drag you there with him.”
“Think he has a say in it?” She turned Sanja to face her, switching to baby talk: “No, no! Daddy doesn’t have any say!” Sanja didn’t seem to have an opinion one way or the other.
We’d just passed the last of the towers when the roadblock appeared. Two Militia cars were parked in the grass, and a makeshift gate-a long tangle of razor wire-had been stretched across the road. As I slowed to a stop, a big militiaman in a regulation blue overcoat tossed away a cigarette and came over to my window. I rolled it down, letting in the cold. He had fat sideburns growing from under his cap, and half his face was sunburned. “Where you going?”
“Tisavar. What’s this?”
“Turn around and head back. Traffic’s stopped today.”
I handed over my Militia certificate. He cocked his head as he read it, then pushed back his cap with a knuckle. “Sorry about that, Comrade Chief.” He didn’t seem very sorry. “Orders from the top.”
“What does that mean?”
He squinted and rocked on his heels. “You know. Central Committee.”
“To keep everyone in the Capital?”
He nodded, then noticed Agota and Sanja. He gave them a smile.
“Trains are down, too?”
“Most,” he said. “First train they cut was the twelve thirty to Patak.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I think we all know what it’s about.”
“But I can go through.”
“Sure,” he said. “You’re not going to Patak, right?”
“I told you. Tisavar.”
He touched the brim of his cap, then stepped back and waved us on. Two younger militiamen with thick gloves dragged the razor wire aside so we could pass.
We didn’t talk about the roadblock, or the fact that suddenly the Capital had become a prison. It had happened before, when the Central Committee overreacted to a bomb that destroyed a fertilizer plant in Krosno, back on November fifth-the thirty-second anniversary of the short-lived 1956 general strike that, in the end, led to Agota’s father’s internal exile.
After two days, though, the roadblocks had been removed, and the government never spoke of it again. Perhaps Tomiak Pankov thought we would forget.
We reached Tisavar a little before three. Ferenc and I, whenever something required a private meeting, always came here, to a point just within the ring of his allowed movement, an hour south of the Capital, just before Kisvarda. Before the Great Patriotic War, Tisavar had been a tiny Jewish-Slav enclave that had survived and even prospered under the Austro-Hungarian government as a market town for the farmers in the nearby region. In the thirties, the mayor decided it was time for a change, and he began lobbying the between-wars government for subsidies to start building cooperative granaries. The government agreed, but before the money could make it there, the Germans marched in. Then Tisavar disappeared.
The Wehrmacht appeared in May 1939, having quickly overrun our little army. My father died in those short battles and was soon followed by my mother. At the time, I was living in the south, in Ruscova, with my grandparents, who had fled the soldiers in the Capital. The Occupation, for me, was largely about boredom. I was an anxious, too ambitious boy surrounded by dull farmers. Up around Tisavar, though, the Nazi presence was felt strongly. Soldiers patrolled the streets, and officers took over the administrative house, controlling the flow of money and property and Jews.
The region was governed by Major General Karloff Messerstein, a delinquent from Thuringen who had joined the Nazi Party during its beer-hall days. He administered the region as if it were his private fiefdom, and, perhaps inevitably, some of the headstrong Tisavar boys used munitions left over from our short-lived war to blow up Messerstein’s car in 1942.
The major general survived with burns and a broken leg, and from his hospital bed directed the retribution.
Early on in the Occupation, the Germans had enlisted the help of malcontents from our Ukrainian population. These young men had been promised that, once the war was won, the eastern half of our country (including the Capital) would be returned to the Ukraine as a state within the greater German Reich. The fools believed it, because they wanted to. Messerstein decided that, given their local knowledge and natural animosity for these westerners, his Ukrainian recruits would be ideal for the job.
They first emptied the houses and led the townsfolk to what would later be called Anti-Fascism Hill, on the north side of town. There, over the space of two days, the entire population was executed and buried. Then, using a tank borrowed from a nearby Panzer division, they destroyed the stone administration buildings, then systematically
