country twice a year. She had family money. It all adds up.”
“Her father made a deal with the government,” I explained, not wanting to see it.
“Yes,” said Ferenc, “and then her father died. So they made a deal with her. She gets to keep the money and can leave the country whenever she likes, but only if she cooperates with them.”
Later, when I had a chance to cool down, I would see that it made perfect sense, but I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t ready to concede that for forty years my wife had lied to me. “You don’t understand, Ferenc. She hated Pankov. She hated the Ministry. To be honest, she hated this country. She only stayed because of me. No.” I shook my head. “They can put anything in those files. Or in the paper. Someone made a mistake or pulled a trick.” I pointed a finger at him. “It’s Michalec. He puts out a warrant for my arrest, then slanders my wife on top of it. So no one will help me.”
Ferenc looked at me. I wasn’t even convincing myself.
Still, I prattled on about Michalec and how he was a conniving son of a bitch. It wasn’t enough for him to kill people; he had to rub shit all over their reputations.
Ferenc told me quietly that Michalec had no control over what was printed in Liberation. It was a Sarospatak paper, and the list had been taken directly from the army clerks who had produced it. He wouldn’t help me with my self-delusion, and I hated him for it. He rubbed my knee.
“Come on, old man. Finish breakfast, then I’ll show you the operation. Show you what really matters.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
While growing up, Gavra had seen films made just after the Second World War, grainy black-and-white show trials where ragged-looking, stiff men stood in the dock and became witnesses for their own prosecution. In carefully memorized speeches, they stated their crimes against the people of our great country and asked the people’s forgiveness. These trials were notable for their consistency. A prosecutor went into a lengthy indictment, often very emotional, accusing the defendant of treason or collaboration or any number of crimes whose victim was the entire state. This was followed by the evidence, always in the form of teary-eyed men and women who had seen or heard or suffered because of the defendant’s treachery. As their statements went on, they grew louder. They stuttered and wept when their emotions became too powerful; they shot accusing fingers at the dock, where the defendant stared back blankly. With recent torture still fresh in the defendants’minds, anything was preferable to returning to those dank prison cells and beatings. Even the bureaucracy that would lead to a life of labor or a firing squad was better than those cells. So they didn’t interrupt the accusers. In fact, they sometimes nodded in agreement. Then, when the time came, they made their own statement, which concurred with everything that had been stated before. All they would say in their defense was that they’d been duped by foreign governments and their own insipid greed. They knew, and they expected, that the court would show no mercy, because mercy was something they did not deserve.
These films were documents of a particular time. Once Mihai, that wartime partisan and postwar hero, had annihilated or put to work everyone who might pose a threat to his administration, the show trials trickled away. They had served their purpose by cleaning the state of malcontents, and the films reminded everyone else of the dangers of too much unfettered ambition.
As he listened to the witnesses now, Gavra remembered those films. It was a different time, but they gave their statements much as their predecessors had. A few murmured nervously throughout, and the prosecutor had to ask them to speak louder, but most, including Beth and Harold Atkins, let their emotions enter the stories, and Beth cried three times as she tried to get it all out. Harold was defiant, pointing at the other side of the room while the Pankovs either stared blankly back or pretended to ignore what was going on. A few times, they tried to interrupt, and the president of the court scolded them. After a while, they saw it was no use and just let the old people rattle on and weep and shout.
The room, Gavra knew, was full of liars: the Pankovs, Michalec, Romek, and Andras Todescu (who had summoned enough courage to stand in the doorway). Even Gavra himself was a liar. The witnesses were the only ones in the room who were not liars; they were the only ones who were not despicable.
He knew the Atkinses’story, but when they told it again the emotion multiplied because they were finally faced with the villains they had spent the last thirty years hating. They had an audience with the devil, and the devil had no choice but to listen. “You broke apart a family, and you ended our lives,” said Harold, pointing. “You made us subhuman.”
A lone woman witnessed for herself and her now-dead husband and son, both of whom had been tortured to death in the early seventies within the walls of Yalta Boulevard number 36 around the time Gavra joined the Ministry. The story she told surprised even him, who had seen his employer do plenty of shocking things during his tenure.
Farmers arrived with stories of the effects of the “New Agro-Policy” Pankov implemented in the late seventies, leaving whole families starving while the land around them was full of wheat. The Maternity Laws of 1982 also produced witnesses, like one man whose wife, having already borne three children, was warned by her doctor to stop. An accidental pregnancy followed, and because abortion was now illegal, she died in childbirth, along with the baby. Others told of their fifth or sixth child being sent off to a state orphanage because there was no way to feed them all, and the child then disappearing. There were children dying of starvation in the Carpathian ranges and children dying of diabetes and influenza in hospitals with barren medicine cabinets. And homes. Homes had been lost endlessly as agro-policies forced fifth-generation farming families into socialist cubicles along the always-under-construction edges of the Capital, or the numerous homes that had been plowed under to make space for the Workers’Palace, which covered ten hectares of demolished land.
Some accusations were less visceral, such as the steady decline of electricity, which had turned once lively cities into morbid nighttime holes, and the fact that, during the last years, light bulbs available to the public had steadily declined in wattage. These days, the best you could get was a murky ten-watt bulb, all so that the country would use less electricity, and Pankov could pay off the foreign debt while he and his wife lived in well-lit splendor.
The witnesses included the senior citizens shipped in from other countries, as well as others who had never left, who could document what had become known as the Dark Eighties. There were stories of suicides, which Gavra knew had become more frequent in the last four years, and they asked what kind of man could do that to his people. What kind of man could make of his country a prison from which the only escape was suicide?
The Pankovs had no answer. They just shook their heads.
Gavra had no answers either. A few times he caught himself wiping tears from his eyes. No, it didn’t matter that this was all theater, because half the players didn’t know what kind of stage this was. They didn’t know they were being used.
Each time the Ministry was brought into the stories-and this happened frequently-Gavra felt a sharp pain in his stomach. What the Ministry did, he felt responsible for. He had murdered children and forced people from their homes and into underground cells and tortured them until they couldn’t remember their own names anymore. His breath became shallow as he remembered his own crimes, ones he’d actually committed himself, which were certainly many, and knew that whatever justification he’d had back then no longer applied. He was as guilty as the Pankovs, as Romek, who was smiling from his seat, and Michalec, who was now somber, arms crossed over his chest.
The stories continued. Whenever he thought they had finished, the prosecutor would motion to another person in the audience, state his name, and ask him to speak. It seemed to go on forever, and Gavra wanted to run out of the room-but couldn’t. It wasn’t Michalec or the big guard who kept him there; it was his own morbid curiosity. He wanted to know the stories, but more, he waited for the moment when Tomiak Pankov would cut in with a few words that would explain it all, offer up some simple evidence that would justify what had been done in his name, or express his shock and insist they knew nothing about this. But the best he ever offered was, “This should only be done in front of the Grand National Assembly.”
The president of the court told him to be quiet.
When the last weeping witness was led back to her chair, the prosecutor turned to the bench and said, “The people rest.”
