I stopped, and it took him a moment to realize I was no longer walking beside him. He looked back. I said, “What?”
“We’re going to set you free. We don’t want to make an issue out of this. I’ve got your passport-we took it from your Friendship Street apartment-a six-month Swiss visa, and a little money to get you started.”
“Wait,” I said, holding up a hand to silence him. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
He sighed, then glanced around at the high courtyard walls. I don’t think Jovovich had been inside many prisons. “When you have friends in high places, these kinds of things do happen.”
I started to ask who my friends might be, but the answer was obvious. “Ferenc.”
Jovovich nodded. “Mr. Kolyeszar was adamant about this. It was a condition of his little revolutionaries taking part in the elections as peaceful participants.” He came a step closer. “There’s Italian paperwork to deal with, but you should be out in the next couple of days.”
I wasn’t sure what to think, or feel. I squinted at him. “Conditions?”
“Of course,” he said. “We ask the same thing the Italians and the Austrians ask.”
“What’s that?”
“That you never set foot in our country again.”
My legs stopped working, so I settled on the cold gravel and shut my eyes.
Jovovich approached. “Are you okay?”
“I can’t do this.”
“Why not?”
I wondered if he really was that dense.
“Listen,” he said. “The alternative is that you stay here, in this prison, for the rest of your life. You’ll be in legal limbo. The Italians won’t try you, because we’ve asked them not to. We won’t take you. And the Austrians refuse to accept that passport of yours.” He squatted beside me, gravel crunching. “It’s up to you, Mr. Brod.”
FORTY
On the last day of the decade, a Sunday, they let me go. I wished Tabu good luck, then shook his strong hand. The warden had an envelope for me. It contained my old passport, a pocketful of Italian lire and Swiss francs, and a train ticket out of the country, to Zurich. The warden, a young, rather elegant man, said I had forty-eight hours to leave, and would I need an escort? I told him no, I wouldn’t be needing one.
My train was scheduled to leave from Mestre, just outside Venice, at six in the evening. So I took a taxi to the edge of the canal-woven city and started walking.
I’d imagined this place all my life, but whatever pictures my feeble imagination might have come up with were nothing compared to the reality. In fact, I’d always imagined that it would look like our Canal District, with arched bridges and musty lanes and cats and everything crumbling.
Venice was like that-it had all the things my Canal District had before the cranes started tearing it apart-but at the same time it was utterly different. It was in the details. I found myself turning corners and then stopping in my tracks to gasp at churches so complex and ornate that I couldn’t figure out how the human mind could produce them. Then, crossing a footbridge beside the Grand Canal, I noticed some tourists taking photographs up a watery alley. I looked, and saw it-a covered bridge, high up, connecting two old buildings.
I didn’t need to ask for verification, because I knew. It was the bridge connecting the courthouse to the prison. The bridge from where the condemned caught his final stolen glance of freedom before descending to his new, barred home.
Three months later, as I finish this, my life is something different than it once was. With the help of some fellow emigres here in Zurich, I found work-I clean the floors and walls and desks in a private high school. Gavra doesn’t understand why I do it, because I don’t need the money. The Galicia Committee government has so far upheld the deal Lena’s father once made with General Secretary Mihai’s government back in 1946, and her foreign investments are now mine. I can’t yet face dealing with all of Lena’s papers, though. Besides, I like the children. They’re the sons and daughters of diplomats from all over the world, and they laugh at me and ask why I speak German with such a funny accent. Despite this, I find myself thinking fondly of them when I’m at home in the evenings, writing this story.
There are visitors. Twice, Ferenc has come bearing gifts and stories of the steady opposition the Democratic Forum and its presidential candidate, Father Eduard Meyr, has been erecting against the Galicia Revolutionary Committee, running up to the May elections. Despite his endless enthusiasm, we both know he’s failing.
The Galicia Committee newspapers are what everyone reads- they’re funded by donations from various nongovernmental organizations fostering democracy. The recently inaugurated Sarospatak television station finds it hard to get an audience when the other two stations have an endless supply of subtitled Hollywood movies to distract everyone.
The Democratic Forum recently lost a fight over the renaming of Sarospatak’s 25 August Square. Ferenc wanted it to return to its precommunist name, King Bela Square, but before they could petition the change, the Galicia Committee had changed the signs to read 23 DECEMBER 1989 SQUARE, the date of the Capital’s uprising. A tempest in a teacup, but it shows how little power the Democratic Forum has.
So Ferenc has gone back to the basic technique of nonviolent resistance: the demonstration. Over the last two weeks, the Democratic Forum has staged demonstrations in Victory Square (now called Revolution Square), demanding a level playing field in the elections.
But they’re small affairs, attended only by the most devout. The people of our country are by now exhausted. I can understand.
Gavra visits every couple of weeks to help me get my facts straight in this. His life is different now, too. He and Karel moved to a detached house outside the Capital. He still travels, but now he travels as a spokesman for the Tisa Corporation, a company set up to convince Western investors to look east for their fortunes. “It’s early still,” he tells me, “but this really is the future.”
“Coca-Cola and Ford,” I say without enthusiasm, but also without bitterness. Gavra’s a national hero, and I’m glad he’s been able to shed his past so easily. When I ask about Brano, he shakes his head. They haven’t talked.
When he visits, Gavra spends a lot of time by the curtains, peering out at the clean Zurich street. I know what he’s looking for, because I’ve seen them myself. There are three that I know of, small men who smell of the East. I can’t imagine how bored they must be, following me from home to school, then to the market and back home. They’re with me all the time.
“They don’t know what you’re writing, do they?” asks Gavra.
“I keep it hidden in the floorboards. But they’ll know soon enough. Ferenc is picking up the manuscript next Tuesday.”
Gavra finds me frustrating; he’s different than he was only a few months ago. Success has changed him. “You really think it’ll make a difference?”
“I don’t know,” I say, because it’s true.
“You better move.”
“Move where?”
“Away. Somewhere no one can find you. I can help.”
I shrug. “And leave all my children?”
It’s time to finish. I’m expecting Ferenc at any moment; he’s picking up these pages. Out on the street, not far from my door, two of my shadows are sharing a smoke. I can see through the curtains that the third is joining them; for once, they’re having a party. I have a feeling they’ll invite me soon.
I don’t know if my story will help anyone, but it’s all I’ve got to offer. I hope it does help. Because, despite the lessons of forty years in the People’s Militia, there really is hope left in the world.
If you’re reading this, it means there still is.
— E. Brod Zurich, March 1990
