side streets toward the low-lying sun. Old women with clothes in their hands looked down from balconies, and children fell silent when he passed. The occasional Russian soldier, standing with a pretty local girl in a doorway, was too preoccupied to notice him, but the stray dogs, strewn sleeping on the sidewalks, opened lazy eyes. Veterans with half or missing limbs, some in their frayed, dirty uniforms, tried to sell him rerolled cigarettes. His no sounded like a whisper. The pain throbbed through his intestines. When farmers began offering mangled fruits for his inspection, he almost shouted at them. A few policemen in their fresh uniforms watched him crawl past, and he knew, through his blurred vision and muted hearing, that they were all laughing at him. Even the dogs.
The Capital was a shithole. Bullets had scarred the walls along these streets, and most bomb-collapsed roofs had still not been repaired. With all the Russian soldiers, you’d never know that the war had been over for three years-and that their little nation had been on the winning side.
He hadn’t been around to hear the air-raid sirens and see the atmosphere filled with stone dust; it was enough to return afterward to find the houses along the Tisa had been cross-sectioned by mortars. Their open floors were a dream for any spy. After the war, upon his return from Finland, he had stood in the middle of the street and watched them cook in these homes, then go to bed like real families in real homes, and when they pulled up the covers he had wanted to run back to Helsinki. He’d seen too many great cities to be impressed by this ignorant, provincial village that just happened to have reached the dimensions of a city.
Heavy lead balls ground between his legs as the street narrowed and rose into the Fifth District, where the ornate Habsburg homes had somehow escaped German and Soviet artillery. Wrought-iron windows and balcony railings appeared; tinted glass still survived. They were once valuable because of their opulence, then because they were still in one piece. The aristocrats had fled long ago, their homes now stuffed with poor families- proles every one-who could prove their loyalties with prewar red cards.
They called us back to help the Liberation, his grandfather liked to boast, but when Emil’s grandparents returned to the Capital after the war, waving a faded, creased Party card, the Liberation was long over.
Emil stepped over transients sleeping in the entryway, two black-shawled old women from some other corner of the Empire. They had appeared in the spring-a little younger then, more talkative-looking for two sons they had obviously still not found. They slept on the steps during the day to avoid the apartment supervisor, and the effects of this insufficient bedding showed on their discolored faces. He tried to avoid waking their black, lumpy forms.
By the time he reached the top landing and made it through the heavy door with brod written in chalk, his testicles had settled into a low, dull throb. Grandfather lay sleeping near the open balcony door, beside a high cabinet filled with dusty books. His pale lips moved soundlessly in the white tufts where wool leaked from the sofa cushions. He was thin these days, sustained by cabbage and potatoes. His pallor was distinctly unhealthy. He blinked rapidly when Emil latched the door. “Boy?” he asked hoarsely, for a moment not seeing far enough. “Boy, you’re home!” He struggled up and wiped his face with thick, arthritic fingers.
Emil settled beside him, spreading his knees to give himself room.
“And?” said Grandfather, reverting to the shorthand of his excitement. “And?”
Emil shrugged.
“Come on, then.”
“Nothing,” said Emil, leaning back. The dim, airless room brought on a fresh sweat. “A desk. I sat at a desk for eight, nine hours.”
“Nothing?” His voice was vaguely disbelieving.
Except the chair, the cardboard sign and the groin. But he couldn’t go into it yet. He wasn’t up for the old man’s lectures.
“Nothing, Opa.”
Grandfather placed a cold, knobby hand on his grandson’s cheek. Smiling, he said, “Young. Needing something-what? — to dor
“Not so young.”
“What? Twenty?”
“Twenty-two.”
“A child.”
Emil sighed. “Hardly.”
Grandfather raised one hand while the other reached discreetly beneath a worn cushion. He produced a brown cardboard box the size of his palm. “Go on.”
Inside was a scuffed silver watch on a chain, ticking softly. It took an instant-a brief suspension of memory- then he knew his father’s watch. The one the late Lieutenant Valentin Brod would swing impatiently when they lived in the Third District, waiting for his son to return home for dinner. The one he left behind for safekeeping when he marched westward. Emil felt the ticking pulse in his closed hand.
“You like?”
Emil smiled.
“From a hero to a hero,” said Grandfather, raising the last syllable in preparation for one of the monologues that were, by now, melancholic compulsions. “Even in great times like this,” he said, “we have heroes taking care of the everyday. You understand?”
But before Emil could answer, the front door opened, revealing his squat, round grandmother. She shook drops off a hand, gripping a wet-bottomed paper sack with the other. Her white hair was twisted up like a flame.
“Cabbage in town,” she hummed melodically, and shut the door with a wide hip. “Stewed for my policeman? Inspector Emil?”
His smile became weary. “Let s not make a production.”
“Who’s making productions? Cabbage for a good price, a bottle of extremely cheap brandy. Some would say I’m out to kill you.”
She ran the groceries into the kitchen and emerged again, wiping her hands on a threadbare towel. When she noticed the watch in Emil’s hand, her shoulders sank.
“Avram Brod. You were supposed to wait.”
Grandfather shrugged theatrically and patted Emil on the back as his wife’s expression settled into a whitewashed, momentary fury.
Dinner repaired him in a way he hadn’t thought possible, and when they prodded for details, he lied with remarkable vigor. He said they were playful children, those homicide inspectors. They joked and threw paper balls and shared cigarettes. He said they all had nicknames-fun, childish names like Train Wreck and Mouse.
“What’s yours?” asked Grandmother.
“They’re thinking one up.”
“Even in great times like this,” Grandfather began again, grinning, then took a quick shot of plum brandy. He blew the heat out of himself. “Even now we’re young. It’s wonderful to be out of the provinces.”
Grandmother’s face shifted again. Mention of their return, after the war, from provincial Ruscova back to the Capital always brought on her mute severity.
“We’re no farmers,” Grandfather reiterated as she disappeared into the kitchen. He smiled at Emil and took a cigarette out of his vest pocket.
As if she could see through walls, Grandmother’s voice: “Don’t stink up my house!”
He palmed the cigarette and nodded toward the balcony. “Come on.”
Lime paint blistered off the gangly chairs, which, at their angle, looked down on Heroes’ Square. This was why, according to Grandfather, the Brods had it as their sacred duty to covet this apartment: the view. In the center, a naked bronze boy stood atop a dry fountain, holding garlands and kissing in the direction of the clouds. The fountain hadn’t worked since 1918, when a premature Bolshevik bomb ruptured its underground pipes; Grandfather claimed to have known the young man who died placing it. But rather than foment revolution, the bomb had only made the stone boy’s kiss eternally dry. Other pipes led to a line of six spigots on the mottled wall of a state bread store, and at any moment of the day, six wide-hipped, kerchiefed women could be found chattering and filling pails and bottles. Grandfather liked to watch this prized view at dusk, lascivious eyes leaping from rump to rump as he smoked. He puffed dramatically, his thin lips spilling smoke over his chin and nose. New electric lights illuminated six draped behinds. He passed the damp, poorly rolled cigarette to Emil, who took a quick drag and handed it back.
“There are numerous heroes. Kinds of heroes,” said Grandfather. “Your father, my Valentin. A reluctant hero
