for sure. Then there are eager heroes. Like Smerdyakov. Correct?”
“I suppose,” said Emil. His father, who had loved his family and the Church more than war, had waited until the king’s soldiers knocked at the door, demanding he defend his country against the Nazi blitzkriegs. Grandfather had never quite forgiven this ambivalence in the fight against fascism. A stark contrast to the war hero known as Smerdyakov, or the Butcher, whose eagerness had outstretched even the Red Army’s. The legend-it could hardly be called anything else-was that he joined the Soviet soldiers when they liberated the Capital, a stranger stepping into history. He went with them into Czechoslovakia, and near Prague rushed ahead to Berlin on his own, with only a pistol. When the Red Army finally caught up with him, he brought the soldiers to the room on the second floor of a crumbling apartment building, where he had kept his tally. Twenty-three dead German soldiers, in a pile. Killed in a mad, single-handed enthusiasm.
The Brods’ fighting spirit was more diluted with each generation. Grandfather, the tiger who ran to Moscow to aid the Bolsheviks in their liberation of mankind. Father, the moral soldier. Emil, who had not seen a day of war, only its aftermath. He had killed no one, at least not during war.
“Your father was split,” said Grandfather, nodding into his chest. “He had loyalties everywhere. The Church, the king, the land. He was muddled. It was sad to see.”
“He was sensible enough.”
Grandfather frowned in the shadows and was briefly lit by a streetlight that flashed before hissing out. The women’s mutter- ings came to them on a warm breeze. “You know the last time I sat before the iconostasis and listened to those priests?”
Emil knew, but knowing did no good. He waited for the inevitable, watching two women step past a broken bicycle as they exited the square. Their places were filled by two newcomers and a mangy, spotted dog.
He prepared himself for the anger.
“October,” said Grandfather. “Nineteen-seventeen. Your father? The day he died, no doubt.” He scratched the back of his hand to tame the arthritis. “No doubt. What did that get him? A grave, if he was lucky.” He settled his hands on the loose arms of his chair and looked at Emil. The balls of his eyes were draped in loose-fitting lids. “We lose our adjectives. You’re following? When in ‘seventeen I heard Ilych in Moscow, I knew this was worth it. Jesus? We’re workers. More than Christians. And I don’t care who knows.” His white, swollen hands were ready to squeeze the chair into kindling, but his voice had a fatherly earnestness. “One man has only so much loyalty. Figure out where yours lies.”
It was here. The anger was sweating out of Emil’s pores, stiffening his jaw, flushing his cheeks. Down in the square the women filled their bottles and shuffled away, and Emil got up-stiffly because of his clenched muscles. He walked inside.
Mention of his father always brought the heat pouring into his head, making him angry and stupid. He stepped past Grandmother drying the table with a towel, and ignored her questioning look. He hurried through the dark corridor, past the building supervisor snoring in a chair, her wide girth spilling over the edges and a clipboard propped against her ankle. He descended the stairs, watching for loose boards, and when he emerged into the cooling night he walked briskly through the square, past the women at the spigots.
He did not look back at his grandfather. He pushed through the black cobbled paths that led to the water.
Nineteen thirty-nine had been a bad year. He was thirteen when his father was drafted into the king’s army, and his mother soon followed as a nurse. Grandfather was an old-time, ranting Communist, so when the Germans overwhelmed their nation s little army, he took Emil and his wife south to wait out the Occupation. Their train only made it as far as Vynohradiv before collapsing completely. They had to hitch rides in farmers’ carts the rest of the way to Ruscova. In that village, the peasants vaguely remembered the Brods, who had migrated to the Capital a generation before. They took over a weathered, cramped dacha abandoned by a family of panicked Magyars.
He heard whispers, and water dripping. Around him, soldiers lounged in black doorways, some with girls, others alone. Russians all. He turned down a wider, lit street.
The war years were spent with a pickax, cutting the hard soil and gazing at the hungry Romanian Jews Grandfather let stay with them. Some had seen things they could not speak of, while others would not stay quiet. There was a madman on a white horse convincing peasants to chop their Jews into pieces, and there was a meat factory in Bucharest that ate Jews alive. One of them-Ester, a girl about Emil’s age-was silent; she said nothing even when she sneaked into his bed on cold nights, but her desperation had always been palpable.
He could smell the Tisa up ahead.
When the official letter appeared in Ruscova and told them what they had suspected all along-that Valentin and Maria Brod were dead, their bodies buried somewhere in the snows of Poland-it was the end of 1944. The Red Army had liberated the Capital, and in nearby Sighet young Russian soldiers set up moving pictures to prove the superiority of Soviet society. See what socialism brings us, said Grandfather, pointing. Eighteen-year-old Emil gazed at the pulsing lights and shadows projected on the high wall of the municipal prison, and w ^ r as stunned by what he saw. Not the Soviet ingenuity, the tanks and bombers and troops, but the immaculate, chipped cities they marched through. Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Budapest. Where were these world capitals? Mute, desperate Ester, after a week of strange love, had moved on with her father long before, and there was nothing to tie him to the countryside. He even had his fare: a German pistol he would trade for a ticket. Only a couple weeks after that news- reel, he was on a train headed north, to Finland.
He reached the Georgian Bridge that led across to the Canal District, and leaned over the railing to stare into the black, silent currents of the Tisa. He felt the waste of years. Nine years since his father, and then his mother, had left him with this old couple-nine years adding up to this one failed day.
He turned around. The homes along the bank had been repaired haphazardly-boarded-up windows, patches of concrete.
The war had been over three months when, back from Finland, he stood in this same spot, hands in his pockets, spying on families. Then he was distracted by a noise. A half-naked woman-hands tied behind her back, a shaved head, bruised face and shoulders-was being dragged forward by a clamoring mob. The citizens led her down the street by a rope leash, with collaborator in cracked red paint across her breasts. He wondered what he had returned to.
CHAPTER THREE
On the way to the station house he stopped in an alley and scuffed his shoes in the dusty concrete. He twisted his stiff pants in his fists, leaving jagged wrinkles running up from the hem, and swung his jacket hard against a brick wall. He threw himself-and his white shirt-into that same wall a few times, and only after scratching his chin did he brush himself off and continue down the street.
They had abandoned all weapons but the most effective: silence. They attacked with leisure, the hours slowly accumulating, while Emil arranged and rearranged his desk supplies. There were no pranks, no laughter, not even the sense that they were watching him without looking. The big typist was at it again, banging away excruciatingly, and the others either read or ate or mumbled into the telephone.
Emil moved ink bottles to the deep side drawer that moaned when he pulled. Stacked crisp, white sheets on the corner of the desk. Placed department stamps in the accessible wide-top drawer-easily accessible because Grandfather had said that a man with stamps is a man with power.
He was pleased that his father’s scuffed watch, which he examined minute by minute, matched his new, weathered look.
From the administrative buildings on the opposite side of the street, sounds of revelry reached them. A celebration, punctuated by shouts and breaking glass. Emil gazed out the open window, but from his angle could only see a top floor of windows, and blue summer sky.
He was becoming adept at using his peripheral vision, seeing what was not directly seen. The chief, again, was nowhere. The state security inspector was making notes in a file. The fat one was eating sunflower seeds this time, the green flecks of yesterday s pumpkin seeds still visible beneath today’s black shards. Leonek Terzian read a book-Emil couldn’t make out the mysterious, squiggly characters on the cover.
There was no telling what their reasons were. He tried, but came up with nothing of use. Hazing no longer
