The Bridge of Sighs Page 8
Terzian walked back to the wall, where the portrait of the General Secretary made Mihai’s eyes too blue to be true. He took it down, walked back, and smashed it against the counter, shouting, red-faced: “That’s fifteen years in the swamps, comrade! Do you need any help getting my information?”
The clerk dropped to his book and rattled through the numbers at an alarming speed. Terzian returned to his post by the door and lit another cigarette. Emil remembered the small, hard fist. The groin.
Then the clerk was nodding, his eager smile trembling. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Here it is, here’s your man. Janos Crowder. Yes, Crowder.” He took off his glasses again, his voice hysterical. “That’s your man, comrades. It’s your man!”
CHAPTER NINE
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Goes against my best judgment, but here it is, an inch of advice.”
Terzian’s words came with the smoke that was whisked out the open window. He turned left, south toward the station, and raised a brown index finger from the wheel.
“You’re an inspector now, you don’t have to be a sweetheart. You break something. You put the fear of the state into them. It’s how you get results.” He squinted at the road ahead and took another drag. “You kiss them and treat them like equals, they’ll shit in your mouth.” He made another turn and craned his head at a beautiful young woman in a summer dress emerging from a pharmacy. “It may not be your socialism, but it’s the only thing that works.”
This was the most he had ever heard from Leonek Terzian’s lips. It was not what he had hoped for—some dictate on tough- guy tactics—but he accepted it as a small, fetal victory and smiled into his collar.
Brano Sev’s poverty-stricken face nodded passively as Emil explained that an equipment merchant might call with some information. It was probably nothing, he said, but you never know.
Brano Sev’s cheeks were marked by three brown moles. Emil now clearly remembered his grainy newsprint features beside a headline: labor with valor! sev brings in the cowards.
“What kind of information?”
Emils stomach tensed. “The man was vague. Counterrevolutionary, he said. Jokes? Yes, offensive jokes.”
Brano Sev leaned into the edge of his desk, looking nothing like a Hero of Socialist Anything. The apple cheeks made it wrong. Emil wondered if those boy’s cheeks had made it difficult for him to be taken seriously in this most serious of all professions.
Sev held up a finger for Emil to wait. Then he unlocked a deep side drawer. He hefted it open and revealed hanging files stuffed with papers and photographs. He motioned with an open hand. “Do you see these, Comrade Inspector?”
Emil hesitated, then nodded.
“Each of these files,” said Brano Sev, “represents an individual living in our city whose central aim is to undermine our way of life. Do you understand what I mean by that?” Tension built beneath his calm voice. “For example—a simple example—there is a man living in the Fourth District who receives regular payments from the Queen of England. These come wrapped in brown paper, hidden behind a loose brick on the rear wall of the Lenin Gymnasium. Once a month he receives these payments. What for?” His flat, round face turned up toward Emil, and he opened his hands. “He passes information about his munitions factory. Do you know how we came to discover this man?”
Emil didn’t, and his immobility signified this.
“A neighbor saw this man throw away a volume of Comrade Chairman Stalin’s collected speeches “ Sev’s cheeks puffed as his lips widened into a smile. “Who knows why he did it? Maybe the book was old, or the dog urinated on it. But this old grandmother was disturbed enough to have us look into it, and we learned that our secrets were being sold to the British. You know where I’m going with this?”
Sweat had formed along Sev’s upper lip, clear little beads that joined and slipped into his mouth. Emil imagined the saltiness, then little old women burrowing through trash, then he imagined prisons run by state security devotees like this one. He started to answer, to say, Yes, Comrade, but Sev’s loud voice boomed through the station.
“There’s a war on, Comrade Brod! You don’t see it in the streets, and you certainly may not care about it, but despite your ignorance it goes on! Haven’t you heard of Berlin? The capitalists are barking at the gates. An entire world is out to crush us!” He breathed loudly, cheeks red and damp.
A finger pointed at Emil’s chest. “These are not just platitudes! Each day people die, trying to keep this great experiment running!”
He stopped, his small eyes swimming in their sockets, flashing at other corners of the room. They steadied gradually, focusing, settling finally on Emil. When he spoke, it was again with control.
“People have to take responsibility for their freedom. You understand?” He waved a hand at the files. Casual. The shouting was over. “These are only suspects from the last three months; the rest are on file in the Central Committee. Do you really think I can follow all these people myself?” He threaded his fingers on the desk.
Emil had to answer now. “Of course you can’t, Comrade Sev.” His face flushed. “I just-” He started to raise his hands—they were like ice—then let them drop.
Brano Sev picked up his lecture where he had left off. The Allies trying to force us out of Berlin, the tenuous victory of the working class here at home, the martyrs of the Liberation, the insidious influence of opportunists and the apathetic.
The eyes of the whole office were on Emil. They were waiting. For an explosion, maybe. Or a final folding. The lecture went on. The humiliation was a numbing thing, and he felt as though he were standing outside of himself, and he had to force his body to do simple things. Nod. Say I understand and I apologize.
The numbness kept him distanced from the anger forming in his gut. Hard, dense. He was distracted by the humiliation that saturated his body.
Nod.
Part of him thought: This is a lecture by Brano Sev on the necessity of Brano Sev.
Stand straight. Do not look away.
Another part: Youre not getting my case. Just try. I’ll kill you.
The thrashing was over. He only knew because Sev, livid again, threw himself into his chair and picked up the telephone to call Third State Equipment Supply, SA.
Turn around. Walk back—balance, now—to your desk. Sit down.
Stefan was on cherries today, tossing white, sucked pits into the wastebasket. He used his tongue to clear residue from his incisors, and raised an eyebrow when Emil looked.
Take out your watch. Five p.m.
Ferenc spoke into his own telephone quietly, shooting brief, clandestine glances, as if he were talking about Emil. But maybe that was the paranoia again. He put the watch away. Terzian was nowhere to be seen. His jacket and leather satchel were gone, and the light in the chief’s office was out.
Stand up. Take your jacket. Don’t look at him. Ahead, through the door.
Emil appeared on the front steps where the angled, late afternoon sunlight glowed on the windows opposite.
He told himself to look around, for safety.
The heat was thick with animal smells, and shouts rang out down below. The humiliation still blocked up his ears, so the vendors’ shouts were whispers. The lounging district cops didn’t look up as he passed.
Two streets down he bought a bottle of cheap plum brandy from a state store. The tall woman behind the counter with so much black hair looked at him suspiciously. Then he went to an empty state restaurant. More black hair, white smocks, suspicious and slow service. He almost walked out before the pork cutlet arrived. The potatoes had gone cold. After a while he started drinking from his brandy at the table, straight from the bottle, and the waitresses, chain-smoking in the corner, conferred worriedly. He returned to the garage as the sun was setting. He took another coarse swig just before starting the engine, another before nodding to the attendant in his glassed-in box. But the teenager s eyes were already closed, dozing.
The Capital was
behind him. It was black out here, farther west than the city’s lights could reach, and all he could hear were the wind and the roaring engine. The Tisa’s stone and concrete banks had become mud and grass a mile back. His speeding headlights lit the flat sides of long grass, the occasional fence post or discarded plank of wood and, once, a broken-down and stripped Soviet jeep. All around were flat fields.
Another mile, he would reach Lena Crowder’s house.
This was the blackness of provincial nights. He remembered those first weeks in Ruscova, the terror it had provoked in him, a teenager in fields that were as dark as closed eyes.
To the north, the land rose from plains to an omen of the Carpathians. He pulled to the side of the road, climbed down a muddy slope, and pissed in the river.
When he got back to the car, a little dizzy, he wondered if he should go forward or back. Westward, farther than Lena Crowder’s, were Czechoslovakia and Hungary. His imagination could see Prague. Budapest. He saw them as he had in those Soviet moving pictures on the prison wall in Sighet—as cities of fantastic possibility, as an end to the drudgery of daily existence. Despite Helsinki, that enthusiasm for the great cities still trickled in his veins. He could drive on to the edge of the known world— everything was ahead of him.
Behind was home. A dull, continual humiliation. Ignorance and pain.
On the outskirts again, just before the unfinished workers’ blocks, he noticed a small shack on the side of the road. The one-room bar he’d seen before. A few carts were outside, some horses resting in the night, and when Emil pulled in he could clearly see bar painted sloppily over the open door, where light spilled out.
It was barely a room. Short tree stumps had been arranged as unstable stools around three small tables, and, at one, four stout farmers drank from shot glasses and played cards. The bar itself was a plank in front of a fat woman holding a bottle of clear, basement-distilled brandy. Behind her, along a single shelf, were three more bottles of the same poison. The place stank of sour liquor. He bought a glass and settled at a table in the dim back corner.
He tried to focus. On the case, the Crowder case. But he kept coming up with that round peasant’s face with three moles. Apple cheeks and propaganda mouth. He tried to evoke Lena Crowder’s face instead, those intense, elegant features. The product of another world.
She—yes—she could hold his attention.
There was a point in his life where his relationship with women had changed. As a boy growing up in the Capital, or even loitering in the Canal District, he saw women who struck him in a certain way. These women were in abundance. They had details that thrilled him: a face, a walk or the way a dress hung from their shoulders. In the summers between the wars he looked forward to the promenade of girls along the Tisa. They walked as if showing off their glory to the heavens.
It was enough on those hot days to see them pleased with themselves. Sometimes they gave him a smile. Not flirtation—not completely. Just an understanding that, for an instant on a perfect day, they could have the intimacy of eyes. Of a smile.
The effect was always devastating.
When the war came, the summers meant, instead, the sweating mothers of Ruscova. Women like his grandmother and her friend Irina Kula. Their smiles were obligatory: They meant nothing but the pleasure of seeing youth. Life, suddenly, had lost all sensuality.
The farmers shouted and he jumped, looking around as if waking. But then they were laughing—large mouths missing half their teeth—tossing cards on the table. He bought another shot from the barmaid—she gave it to him with a frown—and looked at the card players on the way back to his table.
In Ruscova the farmers were like that, men who worked like cattle and focused their pleasure into brief, intense games of luck. He sat down and closed his eyes.
Then the Jews came to Ruscova. They spoke Romanian or Hungarian, and French, and communicated as best they could. At first there was no need to hide them. Ruscova had not seen a single German since the beginning of the Occupation, so these immigrants wandered the village, taking work where they could get it, sometimes sleeping in the fields or renting a room from the locals. They were always planning far-fetched escapes to Paris. When the Germans took Paris, they wept and planned for London. For New York.
Then the Germans decided they could take Russia.
This brought convoys through the countryside. Fresh troops to replace veterans, bright-eyed Wehrmacht boys stopping in Ruscova for bread and pork on the way to Kiev, to Minsk, to Stalingrad. Sometimes German officers filled the dusty main square, smoking and joking, and the Jews had to be hidden. A few families latched their gates and shook their heads, but most, once they heard stories of the Bucharest meat factories, gave what space they had.
Tne convoys filled the center with heady fumes, and the closets and basements and cupboards of Ruscova were filled with Romanian Jewry. Even the Brod dacha kept its transients, and for a single week it held the tiny Caras family—a father and daughter. Each night they were there, the eighteen-year-old girl, Ester, sneaked into his bedroom.
She was one year older, but small and slight and mute. She had not spoken, her father said, since the day she saw her mother dragged by the hair down the main street in Iasi. It was terrible, the father told them, then shook his head and said nothing more.
Ester never spoke as she slipped out of her nightshirt and drew back his sheets. During that week, she kissed him only once, on the shoulder, then clutched at him in desperation. She made grunting noises when they made love. She did not look into his face until she felt him coming, then she held his head in her hands and stared into him. Black eyes. Burgundy lips. A brown mole on her chin. Afterward, she held him close for a few seconds and, weeping, grabbed her nightshirt and ran out of the room.
Each night, the same stunning performance.
Their meals together were miserable affairs. Grandfather dominated the table, talking expansively about all his opinions on the Fascists and the Soviets, while Mr. Caras, not willing to risk his and his daughter’s safety, agreed with everything meekly. Grandfather seemed utterly unaware, and Grandmother said nothing, but Emil felt the pressure of embarrassment as he listened to those endless, useless words, and tried to get Ester to look at him, so he could show with his eyes that he was different. But she did not look anywhere but at her plate, and when, after a week, they moved on, she did not give him anything more. No words, no wishes for the future. Nothing. Then they were gone. To London. Or New York.
It was different after that. First in Helsinki, where he had gone to escape the boredom of provincial life, then back in the Capital, he noticed the change. It surprised him at first, then it offended him. He could not look at women as he had before. It was no longer enough to see that a woman was beautiful; he wanted to know how she was when she was frightened, what her face looked like in the dark. He was desperate to know what had made each woman who she was. It was perverse—he was perverse—but he was drawn to stutterers, and to women with limps; there were many after the war. Women who were injured, brutalized by life. Filia, he learned very quickly, had the basic inability to be happy. Lena Crowder was a bitter drunk. And he wanted her that much more.
He heard the engine, but didn’t look up until the soldiers stepped inside. He was going through the photographs of the two men in a nighttime street. He would not figure out anything tonight, not in this state—he knew this—but he examined them anyway: meeting, talking, shaking hands, separating. He thought of spies and secrets being traded. Propaganda mouths.
There was a noisiness about the soldiers, as though their clothes were made to announce them by rustling loudly along the thighs and arms. The farmers’ abrupt silence accentuated this effect. The three soldiers surveyed the room from the doorway, sniffed the sour air, then wandered to the bar and asked for vodkas. The barmaid shook her head and showed them the brandy. One of them—a young Russian with pimples along his cheeks—sucked on her bottle, then spat the liquor out on the counter.
A second Russian continually unholstered and reholstered his sidearm—a nervous movement—and stumbled to the wall to peer closely at a poster advertising a French apéritif. He said to the others, in Russian, “You want this? For the latrine.”
He was fiercely drunk, and his friends—one still in the doorway, the other leaning back against the counter—peered around the room that was going in and out of focus. The farmers had put away their cards and stared nervously at their empty hands on the table, and into their laps.
“Hey, sweetheart,” said one of the soldiers, and Emil had to squint to realize he was being addressed. “That your car outside?”
Emil answered in Russian: “It belongs to the state.”
“And are you the state, Blondie?”
They were all looking at him. The soldiers, the farmers, the barmaid. Emil was not drunk enough to be suicidal. He said, “I’m a servant of the state.”
The locals understood none of this exchange, and the soldiers knew it. The one by the advertisement said, “You think we should fuck the woman? Use your car. You can come along if you like.” His pistol was in his hand, then it was on his hip.
He did not answer at first. The anger was spilling back into his blood. He’d seen them before, the Russian soldiers who loitered around train stations and bars. They waited for pretty women, or just women, then followed them down the street. Rape was common enough; they picked up venereal diseases and spread them like evangelists.
Emil said, “She’s got the clap. Better leave her alone.”
All three began laughing, and the short one at the bar turned to her. His language skills were surprisingly good. “Is it true you’ve got the clap?”
She didn’t need to look at Emil to know he was nodding incrementally, trying to give her the answer. “It’s very bad,” she said, then started to cry.