shouting out the pain. His problem right now wasn’t me. It was the disease inside him. He trembled with the falling sickness, his teeth snapping shut, his flabby jaw suddenly tight.
I didn’t want to sit with him through the whole thing. I got up, took the pillow from where I’d dropped it on the floor, and pressed it against his face. His hands, unable to reach me, were shaped like claws. I pressed the pistol into the pillow and pulled the trigger twice in succession.
It’s true that pillows muffle the sound of gunshots, but they were still loud. I felt them in my head. His body didn’t relax; it was as if he’d been overcome by rigor mortis while still alive, death catching up afterward. I pulled my hand away from the pillow, but by then the blood had soaked through and stained me. I didn’t bother washing up.
I set the gun on the bedside table and dragged the chair over to the window to watch all the activity beneath me. It was breathtaking. I couldn’t even feel my heart anymore; that’s how beautiful it was.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Two hours after the carabinieri took me away, my extended family collected in the Seventh District cemetery back home. I heard about this later; it was Markus Feder’s doing. Despite a revolution in the streets, filling his body shop with corpses, Markus kept his head and made the arrangements for Lena’s funeral. He was troubled that he couldn’t track me down, but that didn’t discourage him. He made calls, pulled in a few favors, and spread the word through Katja.
Twenty-five mourners attended my wife’s funeral. Among them were Ferenc and Magda, who’d come to the Capital for the first time in thirty years, bringing along Fyodor Malevich. The three of them were on their way to a meeting with Rosta Gorski in the old Central Committee Building but took the time to say good-bye to Lena.
Gavra and Karel were also there, because, as Gavra told me later, he finally broke. It was Karel’s fault. On Sunday night, Karel’s constant pestering made him want to slap his friend. He kept saying, “Someone has to stay. Someone has to make it right.” Finally, if only to shut the man up, Gavra shouted, “Okay!” They snuck out of the airport, avoiding anyone who might recognize Gavra, and stole a decent-looking Karpat. Since I wasn’t home, and they couldn’t go back to their place, they went to Katja and Aron’s in the Seventh District, where they slept on the couch.
Katja and Aron drove Imre Papp’s widow, Dora, and ten-year-old son, Gabor, to the funeral; Bernard and Agota brought Sanja.
I wish I could have been there with them. The ceremony was run by a Catholic priest, because Markus Feder was Catholic. Though neither Lena nor I was religious, I don’t think she would have minded. They stood in the crabgrass cemetery, bundled tightly against the cold. When the ceremony was finishing, Gavra noticed a black ZIL saloon with tinted windows and government plates parked some distance away. He broke away from the mourners to check on it. As he neared, the back window rolled down. Rosta Gorski stared back at him.
“Gavra Noukas,” he said flatly.
“Yes,” said Gavra. He wore Katja’s Makarov in his belt and considered using it, but the car was also occupied by two large bodyguards.
“I’ve gotten some word about your friend.”
“Yes?” He didn’t need to hear my name to know who Gorski was talking about.
“He’s killed my father.”
That surprised Gavra. In fact, the news surprised everyone except Brano Sev and Magda Kolyeszar. “Where?”
“Italy.”
Gavra took a breath of cold air and glanced back at the mourners. “Why’re you telling me this?”
“I want you to recognize that it’s over.”
Gavra was surprised that there wasn’t any real anger in the man. His father had just been killed, but there was no sense of loss. Then Gavra realized why: Jerzy Michalec’s death actually protected the son. With a few bullets, I’d saved Rosta Gorski’s political career. No one would go digging into a dead father’s past. This was why Brano Sev had insisted the old man remain alive.
There wasn’t anything Gavra could say in reply, so he said nothing. He wandered back to the funeral as it was breaking up. The ZIL drove away.
Later, the funeral party moved to Max and Corina’s, which had just reopened. Cardboard covered the shattered windows, but the electricity still worked, and the brandy was cold. Gavra told the others what he’d learned, and shocked silence followed. Magda said she was only surprised I hadn’t ended up dead myself. “He seemed dead when I last saw him.”
Ferenc disagreed, and they argued over me.
It was then that Ferenc decided to put my case into his negotiations, which is what he did an hour later while sitting across from Rosta Gorski.
29 DECEMBER 1989- 20 MARCH 1990
THIRTY-NINE
The fact is that no one knew what to do with me. Brano had gotten my passport, through Ludwig, from the Austrian Interior Ministry, so it wasn’t fake, but it wasn’t quite authentic either. In his rush to put it together, Ludwig had skipped many of the required signatures. This was a favor to Brano he would always regret, because it left a black mark on his record that was hard to live down.
After two days of hospital observation, the Italians gave me a fresh supply of prescriptions and transferred me to a federal holding cell outside Venice, solely for illegal immigrants. It was a modern, concrete place with an always damp courtyard, much more comfortable than prisons back home. My cellmate was a Congolese worker named Tabu Bel, a big man with very black skin, who had been working summers in Italy and Austria, taking the money back home at the end of the season. This was his seventh year of migrant labor, and he’d finally been caught. He wasn’t dismayed by his situation. In German, he said, “Life is full of decisions.” He shrugged his thick shoulders. “No reason to regret them once you’ve made them.”
I told him that was easier said than done, and he asked me why an old white man was in jail with him. I told him, and that’s how the conversation ended.
On Friday, a visitor from our embassy in Rome arrived on the train and took a walk with me in the wet courtyard. Natan Jovovich was a small man, hair slicked off to the side to cover a bald patch, and he wore a fine Italian suit. I, on the other hand, wore the prison’s white jumper. “Mr. Brod,” he said, hands clasped behind his back as he walked. “You’ve put the government in a strange position.”
“The government put me in a strange position.”
He nodded; he’d been briefed on the story I’d given the Italian detectives. He, like them, didn’t believe a word of it. “Be that as it may, you’ve killed a representative of our government. If we brought you back, under the current laws you’d be executed for treason. By all appearances, you’re a counterrevolutionary fighting against the people’s democracy.”
I don’t think he caught the irony in what he’d said-”people’s democracy” was what Pankov had called his government. “So,” I said, “what’s the problem?”
“The problem, Mr. Brod, is that we don’t want to start our democracy by executing people. It’s the old way. Not our way.”
Again, thinking of Pankov, the irony was apparent, but I didn’t bother mentioning it. I said, “What you mean is, you don’t want my testimony made public.”
He sniffed. “Hardly.”
“You’ve been given some instructions, I bet. From the Capital.”
“We’re going to set you free.”
