Kingdom of Shadows (7 page)

Two days later, a letter at the post office, an address on the edge of Uzhorod, he had to take a droshky. Down streets of packed dirt lined with one-story log houses, each with a single window and a thatched roof. A woman answered his knock on the door. She was dark, with black, curly hair, wore crimson lipstick and a tight, thin dress. Perhaps Roumanian, he thought, or Gypsy. She asked him a question in a language he didn’t recognize.

He tried her in German. “Is Pavlo here?”

She’d expected him, he could sense that; now he’d arrived and she was curious, looked him over carefully. Morath heard a door slam in the house, then a man’s voice. The woman stood aside and Pavlo came to the door. He was one of those people who look very much like their photograph. “Are you the man from Paris?” The question was asked in German. Not good, but serviceable.

“Yes.”

“They took their time, getting you here.”

“Yes? Well, now I’m here.”

Pavlo’s eyes swept the street. “Maybe you’d better come inside.”

The room was crowded with furniture, heavy chairs and couches covered in various patterns and fabrics, much of it red, some of the fabric very good, some not. Morath counted five mirrors on the walls. The woman spoke quietly to Pavlo, glanced over at Morath, then left the room and closed the door.

“She is packing her suitcase,” Pavlo said.

“She’s coming with us?”

“She thinks she is.”

Morath did not show a reaction.

Pavlo took that for disapproval. “Try it sometime,” he said, his voice a little sharp, “life without a passport.” He paused, then, “Have you money for me?”

Morath hesitated—maybe somebody was supposed to give Pavlo money, but it wasn’t him. “I can let you have some,” he said, “until we get to Paris.”

This wasn’t the answer Pavlo wanted, but he was in no position to argue. He was perhaps a few years older than Morath had thought, in his late twenties. He had on a stained blue suit, colorful tie, and scuffed, hard-worn shoes.

Morath counted out a thousand francs. “This should tide you over,” he said.

It was much more than that, but Pavlo didn’t seem to notice. He put eight hundred francs in his pocket and looked around the room. Under a shimmering aquamarine vase with a bouquet of satin tulips in it was a paper doily. Pavlo slid two hundred-franc notes beneath the doily so the edges of the bills were just visible.

“Here’s the passport,” Morath said.

Pavlo looked it over carefully, held it up to the light, squinted at the photograph, and ran a finger over the raised lettering on the edge. Then he shrugged. “It will do,” he said. “Why Roumanian?”

“That’s what I could get.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t speak it. I’m Croatian.”

“That won’t be a problem. We’re going across the Hungarian border. At Michal’an. Are you carrying another passport? I don’t think we have to worry about it, but still . . .”

“No. I had to rid of it.”

He left the room. Morath could hear him, talking to the woman. When he reappeared, he was carrying a briefcase. Walking behind him, the woman held a cheap valise in both hands. She’d put on a hat, and a coat with a ragged fur collar. Pavlo whispered something to her and kissed her on the forehead. She looked at Morath, her eyes suspicious but hopeful, and sat on a couch, the valise between her feet.

“We’re going out for an hour or so,” Pavlo said to the woman. “Then we’ll be back.”

Morath wanted no part of it.

Pavlo closed the door. Out in the street, he grinned and cast his eyes to heaven.

They walked for a long time before they found a droshky. Morath directed the driver back to the hotel, then Pavlo waited in the room while Morath went to see the proprietor in a tiny office behind the kitchen where he was laboring over a bookkeeper’s ledger. As Morath counted out Czech koruny to pay the bill, he said, “Do you know a driver with a car? As soon as possible—I’ll make it worthwhile.”

The proprietor thought it over. “Are you going,” he said delicately, “some distance away from here?”

He meant,
borders.

“Some.”

“We are, as you know, blessed with many neighbors.”

Morath nodded. Hungary, Poland, Roumania.

“We are going to Hungary.”

The proprietor thought it over. “Actually, I do know somebody. He’s a Pole, a quiet fellow. Just what you want, eh?”

“As soon as possible,” Morath said. “We’ll wait in the room, if that’s all right with you.” He didn’t know who was looking for Pavlo, or why, but railroad stations were always watched. Better, a quiet exit from Uzhorod.

The driver appeared in the late afternoon, introduced himself as Mierczak, and offered Morath a hand like tempered steel. Morath sensed a powerful domesticity. “I’m a mechanic at the flour mill,” he said. “But I also do this and that. You know how it is.” He was ageless, with a receding hairline and a genial smile and a British shooting jacket, in houndstooth check, that had somehow wandered into this region in an earlier age.

Morath was actually startled by the car. If you closed one eye it didn’t look so different from the European Fords of the 1930s, but a second look told you it wasn’t anything like a Ford, while a third told you it wasn’t anything. It had lost, for example, all its color. What remained was a shadowy tone of iron, maybe, that faded or darkened depending on what part of the car you looked at.

Mierczak laughed, jiggling the passenger-side door until it opened. “Some car,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” Morath said. He settled down on the horse blanket that had, a long time ago, replaced the upholstery. Pavlo got in the back. The car started easily and drove away from the hotel.

“Actually,” Mierczak said, “it’s not mine. Well, it’s partly mine. Mostly it is to be found with my wife’s cousin. It’s the Mukachevo taxi, and, when he’s not working at the store, he drives it.”

“What is it?”

“What is it,” Mierczak said. “Well, some of it is a Tatra, built in Nesseldorf. After the war, when it became Czechoslovakia. The Type II, they called it. Some name, hey? But that’s that company. Then it burned. The car, I mean. Though, now that I think about it, the factory also burned, but that was later. So, after that, it became a Wartburg. We had a machine shop in Mukachevo, back then, and somebody had left a Wartburg in a ditch, during the war, and it came back to life in the Tatra. But—we didn’t really think about it at the time—it was an
old
Wartburg. We couldn’t get parts. They didn’t make them or they wouldn’t send them or whatever it was. So, it became then a Skoda.” He pressed the clutch pedal to the floor and revved the engine. “See? Skoda! Just like the machine gun.”

The car had used up the cobblestone part of Uzhorod and was now on packed dirt. “Gentlemen,” Mierczak said. “We’re going to Hungary, according to the innkeeper. But, I must ask if you have a particular place in mind. Or maybe it’s just ‘Hungary.’ If that’s how it is, I perfectly understand, believe me.”

“Could we go to Michal’an?”

“We could. It’s nice and quiet there, as a rule.”

Morath waited. “But . . . ?”

“But even quieter in Zahony.”

“Zahony, then.”

Mierczak nodded. A few minutes later, he turned a sharp corner onto a farm road and shifted down to second gear. It sounded like he’d swung an iron bar against a bathtub. They bumped along the road for a time, twenty miles an hour, maybe, until they had to slow down and work their way around a horse cart.

“What’s it like there?”

“Zahony?”

“Yes.”

“The usual. Small customs post. A guard, if he’s awake. Not any traffic, to speak of. These days, most people stay where they are.”

“I imagine we can pick up a train there. For Debrecen, I guess, where we can catch the express.”

Pavlo kicked the back of the seat. At first, Morath couldn’t believe he’d done it. He almost turned around and said something, then didn’t.

“I’m sure there’s a train from Zahony,” Mierczak said.

They drove south in the last of the daylight, the afternoon fading away to a long, languid dusk. Staring out the window, Morath had a sudden sense of home, of knowing where he was. The sky was filled with torn cloud, tinted red by the sunset over the Carpathian foothills, empty fields stretched away from the little road, boundary lines marked by groves of birch and poplar. The land turned to wild meadow, where the winter grass hissed and swayed in the evening wind. It was very beautiful, very lost.
These blissful, bloodsoaked valleys,
he thought.

A tiny village, then another. It was dark now, cloud covered the moon, and spring mist rose from the rivers. Midway through a long, slow curve, they caught sight of the bridge over the Tisza and the Zahony border station. Pavlo shouted, “Stop.” Mierczak stamped on the brake as Pavlo hung over the top of the seat and punched the button that turned off the lights. “The bitch,” he said, his voice ragged with fury. He was breathing hard, Morath could hear him.

In the distance they could see two khaki-colored trucks, river fog drifting through the beams of their lights, and a number of silhouettes, possibly soldiers, moving about. In the car it was very quiet, the idling engine a low rumble, the smell of gasoline strong in the air.

“How can you be sure it was her?” Morath asked.

Pavlo didn’t answer.

“Maybe they are just there,” Mierczak said.

“No,” Pavlo said. For a time, they watched the trucks and the soldiers. “It’s my fault. I knew what to do, I just didn’t do it.”

Morath thought the best thing would be to drive south to Berezhovo, find a rooming house for a day or two, and take a train into Hungary. Or, maybe better, drive west into the Slovakian part of the country—away from Ruthenia, land of too many borders—and then take the train.

“You think they saw our lights?” Mierczak said. He swallowed once, then again.

“Just turn around and get out of here,” Pavlo said.

Mierczak hesitated. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but if he ran away, that changed.

“Now,” Pavlo said.

Reluctantly, Mierczak yanked the gearshift into reverse and got the car turned around. He drove a little way in the darkness, then turned the lights back on. Pavlo watched through the rear window until the border post disappeared around the curve. “They’re staying put,” he said.

“How far is it to Berezhovo?” Morath said. “Maybe the best thing now is to take the train.”

“An hour. A little more at night.”

“I’m not getting on a train,” Pavlo said. “If your papers don’t work, you’re trapped.”

Stay here, then.

“Is there another way across?” Pavlo said.

Mierczak thought it over. “There’s a footbridge, outside the village of Vezlovo. It’s used at night, sometimes.”

“By who?”

“Certain families—for avoiding the import duties. A trade in cigarettes, mostly, or vodka.”

Pavlo stared, couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “So why didn’t you take us there in the first place?”

“We didn’t ask him to do that,” Morath said. Even in the cool night air, Pavlo was sweating. Morath could smell it.

“You have to go through a forest,” Mierczak said.

Morath sighed, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. “At least we can take a look,” he said.
Maybe the trucks just happened to be there.
He was wearing a sweater, a tweed jacket, and flannels—dressed for a country hotel and a train. Now he was going to have to crawl around in the woods.

They drove for an hour, the moon rose. There were no other cars on the road. The land, field and meadow, was dark, empty. At last they came upon a village—a dozen log houses at the edge of the road, windows lit by oil lamps. A few sheds and barns. The dogs barked at them as they went past. “It’s not far from here,” Mierczak said, squinting as he tried to peer into the night. The car’s headlights gave off a dull amber glow. Just as the countryside turned to forest, Mierczak stopped the car, got out, and walked up the road. A minute later, he returned. He was grinning again. “Believe in miracles,” he said. “I found it.”

They left the car, Morath carrying a satchel, Pavlo with his briefcase, and the three of them started walking. The silence was immense, there was only the wind and the sound of their footsteps on the dirt road.

“It’s right there,” Mierczak said.

Morath stared, then saw a path in the underbrush between two towering beech trees.

“About a kilometer or so,” Mierczak said. “You’ll hear the river.”

Morath opened his wallet and began to count out hundred-koruna notes.

“That’s very generous of you,” Mierczak said.

“Would you agree to wait here?” Morath asked him. “Maybe forty minutes. Just in case.”

Mierczak nodded. “Good luck, gentlemen,” he said, clearly relieved. He hadn’t realized what he was getting himself into—the cash in his pocket proved that he’d been right to be scared. He waved as they walked into the forest, glad to see them go.

*

Mierczak was right, Morath thought. Almost from the moment they entered the forest they could hear the river, hidden, but not far away. Water dripped from the bare branches of the trees, the earth was soft and spongy underfoot. They walked for what seemed like a long time, then got their first view of the Tisza. About a hundred yards wide and running at spring flood, heavy and gray in the darkness, with plumes of white foam where the water surged around a rock or a snag.

“And where is this bridge?” Pavlo said.
This supposed bridge.

Morath nodded his head—just up the path. They walked for another ten minutes, then he saw a dry root at the foot of a tree, sat down, gave Pavlo a cigarette and lit one for himself. Balto, they were called, he’d bought them in Uzhorod.

“Lived in Paris a long time?” Pavlo asked.

“A long time.”

“I can see that.”

Morath smoked his cigarette.

“You seem to forget how life goes, over here.”

“Take it easy,” Morath said. “We’ll be in Hungary soon enough. Find a tavern, have something to eat.”

Pavlo laughed. “You don’t believe the Pole is going to wait for us, do you?”

Morath looked at his watch. “He’s there.”

Pavlo gave Morath a sorrowful look. “Not for long. He’ll be going home to his wife any minute now. And on the way he’ll stop and have a word with the police.”