I could hardly see the block towers because in this section of the Capital the power had been switched off again. It was a regular occurrence. In the Second District, the streetlamps were off, but the windows glowed.
I parked on Friendship Street, outside our apartment, and carried the box of old files to the elevator. It was out of order again. So I lugged it up the three floors, stopping often to catch my breath. I’ve never been a man of formidable strength; all I’ve ever had is persistence. I reached the apartment huffing crazily.
Lena wasn’t amused by my lateness. She didn’t answer my greeting, only stared at a rerun of Family Popa on television. She referred me to the oven, where a cold platter of boiled pork and cabbage waited. I scooped some onto a plate, ate half of it in the kitchen, and threw the rest away. “You going to wash that plate?” she called from the living room, just before a laugh track erupted.
“No,” I said and let it drop into the sink. “I need to keep you busy.”
It was an old, tired joke, but enough for her to shout back that if I wasn’t nice to her, she’d down a bottle of vodka. Then she reminded me-for the tenth time, according to her-that I still hadn’t talked to the mechanic about her Mercedes, which wasn’t starting. For the tenth time I told her I’d do it in the morning.
She finally took her eyes off the TV when I sat next to her and pulled up the box of old files. “What have you got?”
I took one out at random, blew off the dust, and opened it up. “Revisiting the past.”
“Which one’s that?”
I checked the label, then frowned. “Imre’s.”
“Oh.”
It was from 1985 and labeled “unsolved”-but that was a lie. His was the second “unsolved” case surrounding a dead militiaman, the first being the death of my oldest friend, Libarid Terzian, during a botched airplane hijacking in 1975. Terzian’s case was transferred to the Ministry for State Security. Then, ten years later, we found my young Captain Imre Papp in the Canal District with five bullets in his head, lungs, and leg.
It made no sense to any of us. Imre wasn’t on a case, and he had a wife and child; he wasn’t the kind of man to go poking around the Canal District for whores. None of us knew why he was even there. We followed a number of leads, but they all ran cold until I got a phone call, at home, from Brano Sev.
The old man-then a general-had left the homicide department in the midseventies, moving on to an expansive office at Yalta Boulevard 36. Our friendship had always been tenuous-for plenty of good reasons, I’d never trusted him-and once he left the station we rarely saw each other. I didn’t call him, and he didn’t call me. And that was fine. I didn’t really want to spend time with a man so devoted to protecting socialism in our country-so devoted that he had even arrested our friend Ferenc in 1956. Which is why it was a surprise, and a little unnerving, to pick up the kitchen phone and hear his voice.
“Emil?”
“Brano, is that you?”
“Yes, Emil. Can you step outside a moment? I’d like to talk with you. About Imre.”
After that talk, I decided never to speak to the man again. But there was no sense dredging up those old, difficult memories now. I put the file back.
“Find the other one,” Lena said, moving closer.
“Which one?”
“Number one.”
I pretended I didn’t understand.
“When you fell madly in love with me?”
“Ah!” I said. “That one.”
She tapped the remote until the Popa family was silenced. “Come on. Show me.”
The files weren’t in order-some clerk had stuffed them in the box haphazardly. So I pulled out half the box, a stack of thirty files, and handed it to Lena. “Look for 1948.”
“I remember,” she said, “even if you don’t.”
Of course I remembered. In 1948, I was only twenty-two, and Lena was a thirty-year-old widow with a serious drinking problem.
The case had begun with the murder of her first husband, Janos Crowder, a songwriter found bludgeoned to death. He’d been blackmailing a political figure named Jerzy Michalec with documents proving that Michalec had been a decorated Gestapo agent during the war. In the end, Michalec-amazingly vital despite being afflicted with epilepsy-kidnapped Lena, then traded her for incriminating German documents I’d gone all the way to Berlin to track down. Despite our deal, Brano Sev used the photographs to bring the man to justice.
Jerzy Michalec was first sentenced to death, and I can still remember the show trial we listened to on the Militia radio. It was 1949. We heard everything-the prosecutors and the hysterical witnesses, and even the confusion when, during a judge’s tirade, Michalec suddenly shivered, frothing, taken by an epileptic seizure. Later, his punishment was commuted, and he was put to work in one of the many labor camps that filled the country during the late forties and fifties. Like a bad dream, he simply vanished. It was the way of the world back then. People vanished.
But the file wasn’t here. I went through my stack twice, then took Lena’s. In the front of the box, I found the order form I’d sent over, listing cases to be retrieved. Each had been checked by the archives clerk, except the one labeled “10-3282-48- MICHALEC, J,” which was marked NH — ne har. The file was missing.
The phone rang, and Lena went to get it. Central Archives was notoriously inefficient, but of all the files to be misplaced, I was surprised it would be this one.
“Cher comrade?” Lena was waving the receiver from its cord. “Comrade Kolyeszar requests your presence.”
While I talked, Lena went through the cabinets, finding a glass and making me a scotch and soda. She’d picked up the ten-year-old malt on a trip earlier that year to England. Unlike in the old days, she didn’t make one for herself.
Ferenc said, “Sorry to call at home.” He sounded strange, distant, and spoke with an unsettling calm.
“What is it?”
“They’re dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
Lena handed me the drink. Ferenc said, “I don’t know. They… they shot, Emil.”
“Who?”
A voice-Magda, I think-said something to Ferenc. Then Agota took the phone. “For fuck’s sake, Emil, he’s telling you the Ministry bastards shot into the crowd! We don’t know how many people they killed-but there are dead people. Lots. You have to spread the word. Understand? The Spark will say something different, but you have to tell them. You have to make sure they know ^?
Agota spoke to me with a voice I’d hear more and more over the next days. It was more than Ferenc’s abstracts-it was the voice of the astonished and self-righteous.
I don’t mean to say people weren’t justified feeling this way; almost always, they were. I just mean that it was a voice I hadn’t yet accustomed myself to. My heart palpitated and my hand sweated. I gulped down the scotch and soda and handed the empty glass back to Lena, who was staring wildly. I said, “Just tell me what to do, Agi.”
What she wanted me to do frightened me, but I couldn’t do it until the next day, so for the rest of the night I was impotent. Predictably, there was no mention of the Patak massacre on the two state television stations that evening.
I wanted to distract myself with my old files, because there was some comfort in cases that had been solved and closed, but in light of what was going on, they were like stories out of a piece of fiction. Lena, on the other hand, was empowered by the news. “Finally, this godforsaken country is going to see the light.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, dear, that Pankov has crossed the line. He can starve us and cut off our energy, but once he starts shooting people in the streets it’s over. Only a desperate man resorts to this.”
I didn’t share Lena’s optimism. We’d both lived through the arrival of socialism, and both of us welcomed the idea of watching it leave again, but I worried-perhaps too much-about my friends. We weren’t like the Czechs or Poles. We’d never been the kind of people to vent our frustration through the ballot box.
My problem, of course, was that I had no faith in people to make my country better. After forty years in the
