“Maybe it’s all about Pavel Jast,” said Jan. “Maybe he framed you in order to improve his position with Yalta. He probably wants to get out of Bóbrka and go to the big city.”
“Did you tell him much about yourself? I mean, the things you don’t tell me.”
“I’ve told you much more than I told Pavel Jast.”
“Then that isn’t the answer. He could only improve his position if he arrived in the Capital with all the information on you that I couldn’t get.”
“But he could also improve his position if he stopped me from doing what I plan to do.”
“Which is to return to Vienna.”
“Or maybe I want to go to Moscow.”
They both laughed out loud, and Brano admired this clever man who could subdue his own fears and laugh with a man who might, at any moment, kill him.
Jan nodded past Brano’s shoulder, toward the road, his smile fading. “Isn’t that Captain Rasko?”
Brano turned, peering through the winter dusk he hadn’t noticed descending. The white Škoda was parked behind his Trabant, and Rasko took awkward, high steps through the snow toward them. They helped close the distance, and when they met, Rasko’s face was pinked by the wind. “Hello, Jan,” he said.
“Tadeusz.”
Rasko nodded at Brano. “Can I have a word with you?”
“I’ll talk to you later,” said Jan as he retreated toward the cows.
“What is it, Captain?”
Rasko was wearing a heavy coat—blue, Militia regular issue. He buttoned the top button. “I went over to the Nubsches’.”
“And?”
“And nothing, Comrade Sev. They’ve left. Taken a lot of clothes and gone away. I called the Dukla factory, and it seems Zygmunt abandoned his bread truck on the side of the road this morning. They don’t know where he is.”
“They fled.”
“They’re your alibi, Comrade Sev.”
Brano looked into the captain’s dark, steady eyes, then wiped his hands on his pants. “They’re still my alibi. They left because they were guilty. It’s obvious.”
“Not to Yalta.”
“What?”
Rasko arched a brow. “They’ve been in touch the whole time you’ve been in Bóbrka. Seems they don’t trust you completely. And when I told that colonel about the Nubsches’ disappearance, I was given leave to arrest you again.”
Brano’s hands jumped involuntarily from his hips. “Colonel Cerny?” He settled them down again. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“We live by our orders, Comrade Sev.”
That was a well-rehearsed line from the Militia Academy, the kind of motto only repeated at official functions. Now Brano Sev was hearing it in a field littered with blank-eyed cows.
He cleared his throat. “Give me a little more time.”
“It’s difficult.”
“No, it’s not. Tomorrow. I’ll have something for you by tomorrow.”
Captain Rasko squinted into the wind a few seconds, waiting for something more—a bribe, perhaps, or some sign of desperation—but Brano waited him out. The captain nodded. “All right. Tomorrow.”
As Rasko made his way back to his car, Brano turned back to Jan, who—magically, it seemed—had disappeared.
The captain was right. The Nubsches’ home, which he entered by reaching through the hole Rasko had broken in the window, was cleared out. Clothes had been thrown around the bedroom in a frantic act of packing, and remnants of a quickly thrown-together meal littered the kitchen: bread crumbs, cheese, salami. He went through each room, his calm slipping away, trying to find anything—a coat, perhaps—that connected them to Jakob Bieniek. But after tearing apart cabinets and wardrobes and searching under all the furniture, he realized it was useless. When he slammed the door behind himself, broken glass fell and shattered on the concrete steps.
As he drove through the darkness, he labored with the mass of facts that were filling him with an acute sense of
zbrka
. What he’d said so casually to Soroka—that he was being used—now felt real. Cerny was pressuring him, either to get results or to flee—he didn’t know which. There was no ready answer to the
why
of Jast’s frame-up nor the
why
of Cerny’s phone calls. Was it possible the colonel believed Brano had killed some nondescript milkman? Or was he only following the Lieutenant General’s orders?
Again, the question: Why?
His mother was settled in the dim kitchen with Lucjan’s vodka when he returned. Her head rolled back as she tried to get him into focus. “He returns!”
Brano sank into a chair without removing his overcoat. “Are you drunk?”
“What do you thing?” she said, slurring “think.”
“That can’t be good for you.”
Her eyes were shiny. “Don’t start telling me what’s good for me. You’re on your way to jail.”
“You know?”
“The whole town knows. My criminal son.”
“Criminal son,” he repeated, and reached for the vodka bottle. There was a dirty water glass on the table that he filled to the rim. “But I didn’t do it.”
“What do I know about that? You don’t tell your mother anything.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Just like you told me about your Tati.”
“I did what I could.”
She looked at him for a little while, then spoke slowly. “You know, Brani, I’m an old woman now. I know a few things. I know, for instance, that life is sometimes too long. There are a lot of years. What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t made your father leave?”
“You know what would have happened. He would have been sent to prison. I had no choice.”
“Yes,” she said, and brought her glass to her cheek, pressing it into the soft flesh. “He would have gone to jail, but for how long? A couple years, maybe five. Then, my dear son, my husband would have been returned to me. We would have been a family again.”
He did not answer.
She said, “You think your life is going to be one way, then it isn’t. Your son leaves for the Capital, then your husband leaves the country. Your daughter marries an idiot who can’t give you grandchildren.” She took another drink and set her glass down. “Tell me, Brani. Do you think this is the family I always hoped for?”
He lifted his glass to his lips.
She passed out in her chair, and Brano carried her to bed. He undressed her, then pulled the duvet to her chin before kissing her forehead. He felt very much like a father at that moment—at least, how he imagined fathers felt—looking down on this old woman who, in her more honest moments, hated him. She’d had to eke out a living without her husband and had never remarried—she instead lived on the fantasy that Andrezej Sev would return from the West. But unlike Jan Soroka, most people did not return when they escaped the Empire. If they survived, they made their way as best they could, despite loneliness and poverty, and became citizens of another world.
And she was only partly right about what he’d done. There was no telling what would have happened to his father in one of those labor camps. Many never returned.
He drank more in the kitchen, enough to maintain dizziness, and took his passport out of his coat pocket. He had a dull face, he knew, not the kind of face a young Vojvodina Serb living in Vienna would fall in love with. In his other pocket he found Jakob Bieniek’s passport and flipped through its pages. Both men had features that suggested plainness, perhaps even stupidity.
He hung his coat by the door, then undressed in the bedroom. There was nothing to do but wait. Tomorrow—yes, tomorrow—Captain Rasko would visit, with full Ministry authorization, and take him to that puny cell. The climax of a half-year of failures. Then Brano would be faced with the end of everything. He would be transferred to a holding cell in Rzeszow, given a trial, and moved to a work camp. Perhaps Vátrina, in the Magyar provinces, where he had once visited an old colleague who had been put to work digging a canal that had never been completed, and probably never would be.
A factory job would seem like a blessing.
He was, inexplicably, free from worry. Some of it was the vodka, but as Brano climbed into bed and closed his eyes, the darkness swirling around him, he felt that it had to do with Jan Soroka, the man who chose to wander with idiot cows while the apparatus of state security haunted him. Jan was a disciple of acceptance.
So it surprised him when he opened his eyes to that familiar voice in the darkness. He reached out to touch the shoulder of a coat and heard the voice again, as if from a dream:
Don’t move, Brano. I’ve got a gun
.
Is this it?
he asked the darkness.
The voice said yes, this was it, though it didn’t mean what Brano had meant.
Right now. Come if you want, but now—grab your bag. No hesitation. But if you try to stop us, I’ll kill you
.
Jan Soroka turned on the bedside lamp.
14 FEBRUARY 1967, TUESDAY
•
Jan held
the gun as Brano dressed and filled his suitcase with the clean clothes his mother had folded at the foot of the bed. Neither spoke. After a stunned moment, staring into Jan’s bright face, Brano had understood that communication, more than possibly waking his mother, would introduce questions and explanations that undermined Jan’s command for no hesitation.
He grabbed his coat at the front door, but Jan took it from him and patted the pockets. He handed it back and nodded toward the kitchen, where they left through the now-unlocked side door, into the cold. They marched through the deep snow in the backyard and climbed over the fence, landing behind the Grzybowskas’ house, then cut around the side to the road, where a silent green Volga GAZ-21 with Uzhorod plates waited. Inside, dark forms shifted. Jan threw Brano’s suitcase into the trunk and opened the back door for him. Petre, sleepy eyes suddenly widening, was in the middle, and on the boy’s other side Lia sat straight-faced, not acknowledging him. The fat man in the driver’s seat was from Pavel Jast’s house, the Cucumber game, the man who had put out his cigarette in a glass of vodka. He turned, reached a hand over the back of the seat, and narrowed his eyes. “You been in a fight?” he whispered.
Brano touched the bruise on his face. He nodded.
The man gave a huge smile and shook his hand. “Call me Roman.”
Jan sat in the passenger seat and closed the door quietly. “Well, let’s get going.”
Brano had expected none of this. The wake-up call had been as if from a dream, and his snap decision had been based on nothing. But his training had come back instantly—the requirement of all good agents that they learn to act, even without all the proper facts.
And this was the only move left to him. After clearly envisioning the end of everything, it was an amazing turn of fortune that he’d been awoken by another option.
Luck, though, was a suspicious animal.
Roman was a careful driver. He maintained a steady speed through Bóbrka, shifting gears smoothly, then exited from the west, passing the field with its dozing cows—then farther, through Kobylany, and beyond. Petre, with the blemish covering his left cheek, stared at Brano, but after a while bowed his head into his mother’s armpit and began to doze. Sometimes Jan glanced back at his wife, but Lia had closed her eyes as well.
He didn’t understand the risk Jan was taking. Though Brano had surprised himself by opening up to Soroka in that field, he had no reason to believe Jan felt the same. Had they really made a connection?
And Roman. He was the connection between Jan and Pavel Jast; he was Jan’s contact at the train station (watched by Jakob Bieniek) and Pavel’s Cucumber-playing friend who brought him pornographic pens from West Germany.
Pavel Jast was no mere small-town informer.
Although in the darkness he sometimes became confused, he was able to track their progress by villages. Nienaszów, Toki, Nowy-Źmigròd, Katy. The names were familiar, and the hills around them were filled with partisan memories; but now, knowing that he was leaving, yet not knowing why, they began to sound exotic to him, precious.
They made gradual progress along side roads, only rarely spotting another car driving in the opposite direction. Once, a truck appeared behind them, hovering close, and Lia craned her head around, the truck’s headlights illuminating the fear in her face. Roman slowed and waved his hand out the window, and the truck passed, soon disappearing.
Just after Krempna, they came upon a white Škoda blocking the road. Brano noticed the Militia hawk on its door. Jan reached for his gun, but Roman said, “Nothing to worry about,” as he braked. He climbed out and conferred with an older, uniformed militiaman beside the Škoda’s front hood; they shook hands and patted each other’s shoulders, and once Roman tapped the militiaman’s cheek with his fingers. Then the money appeared and was quickly handed over, and they shook again. As the Militia car pulled back into the shrubs, Roman got back behind the wheel. “This world is getting more expensive by the minute.”
Petre, as if in answer, whispered, “I have to pee.”
By Brano’s watch they had been traveling five hours; it was after seven, and an omen of sunrise lightened the sky. They had spent the last hour and a half winding slowly through the mountains north of Sárospatak and were now on the west bank of the Bodrog River, driving south through a birch forest. Roman pulled off onto the side of the road and cut the engine. Then he flashed his headlights—once, twice—and settled back.
“What is it?” asked Jan.
Roman grunted. “We wait.”
Lia reached for her husband’s shoulder, and he put his hand over hers, squeezing. Petre whispered, “Can I pee
now?
”
They didn’t have to wait long. A pair of headlights appeared, very bright, and it was soon clear that they belonged to a large truck. Along the side,
CARPATIA S. A
. was painted in three-foot-high white letters. A thin, nervours-looking man climbed out. He had a mustache as thick as Stalin’s and long fingers that tapped the roof of the Volga as he talked with Roman through the window. “So many? You said three—come on, what’re you trying to pull?”
“Don’t worry,” said Roman. “Everything’s the same.”
The thin man looked at each face, pausing on Brano’s. “You know what this means, eh?”