Victory Square (32 page)

“Anything bigger, you won’t be able to fit it in the house.”

“We’re not doing it half-ass this year,” said Ferenc. “We’ll find something on the way back.”

They argued, shooting barbs back and forth past me as we bounced along the shoddy country road, but I wasn’t listening.

Ferenc was right: Lena had worked for the Ministry, probably ever since we married in 1950. Four decades. For four decades, she’d maintained an enormous lie, and I never, not once, suspected.

It was humiliating. I’d lived forty years with a stranger. A liar. How could she have kept it from me during all those drunken years? The only way a drunk can keep such a secret is if she’s living with a complete fool.

Yes, I was angry at my dead wife. I felt like I was the good but dull and dull-witted husband in those films about adultery. The husband who listens to classical music and sucks on a pipe in his study, while in his bedroom his wife is breaking out of her monochrome existence with the gardener or the business partner. She’s filling her dead life with clandestine passion.

But adultery would’ve been easy. I could have walked in on her in another man’s embrace, shouted and wept, and been done with it. This was something more, a parallel life, no doubt Lena’s real life, and I never even noticed that it was right there, right next to me.

After forty years, I’d just learned that my life’s role had been the pitiful one. I was the dumb but harmless mouse, the one who never raised a question, who never noticed that my wife was a spy.

It was really too much to take. It felt as if every few minutes my life, and my world, changed. I wished it would stop. I wished that something, anything, would remain as I remembered it.

“Emil?”

I blinked. Ferenc was frowning at me as he turned onto a main road. I said, “What?”

“You’re not listening.”

“Sorry. What’s the topic?”

Bernard cut in. “He was telling you how much of a hero he was during the revolution.”

“Not a hero,” said Ferenc, shaking his head. “Just what happened.”

“You’re making yourself out to be a hero. Admit it.” “Shut up, Bernard.”

Sarospatak traces its official history back to 1201, when it was granted town status by the Hungarian monarch King Emeric. It grew during the Middle Ages as a stop on the trading route to Poland. In the early fifteenth century, Ferenc told me, King Sigis-mund declared it a free royal town, and in 1460 King Matthias granted it the right to its own market. With the Reformation it became an academic center, and in the mid-1600s the famous educator Jan Comenius taught there. Ferenc told me all this as we crossed the city limits, adding that the famous Rakoczi family, which had owned the town’s castle, took a major part in the revolution against the Habsburgs. “They call Patak‘the Athens on the Bodrog’because we’ve got a history of education and revolution here.”

“In that order,” said Bernard.

But on the outskirts, before reaching the muddy Bodrog River, there was no sign of the First City’s glorious past. The remaining Habsburg buildings were crumbling from years of neglect, and the pedestrians bundled against the cold seemed insecure and confused under the gray sky.

By eleven thirty, we crossed Bodrog Bridge. On a hill to our left, the Red Tower of Rakoczi Castle rose high, looking out over the entire city.

Ferenc and his friends’base of operations was a small third-floor apartment in the center, just off Comenius Street. I spotted the window, because a sheet hung from it with the words
NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC FORUM
painted in blue. The stairwell stank of mildew—some pipes had frozen and burst a month ago and still hadn’t been fixed—and Ferenc had to hit the door with his shoulder because it was bloated with moisture. I expected a little more from the cradle of our revolution.

Inside were five mismatched tables and seven mismatched chairs that had been borrowed from sympathizers. Today two young women and a young man watched a small television and manned two telephones, one of which had a lead that went out the window into a neighboring apartment. “Where the hell is everybody?” Ferenc asked them.

“It’s Christmas,” said one of the girls, a striking blonde. “I’m not staying here all day either.”

Christmas?
I thought.

Ferenc turned to me. “See? Is it any wonder those bastards in the Capital make more headway than us?” To the girl: “Aliz, you think the Galicia Committee’s taking off for Christmas?”

Aliz shrugged, then looked at the television, where, from a hospital bed, Rosta Gorski told a reporter that his injuries wouldn’t stop his mission to restore democracy to our beleaguered country. “It’s no secret my assailant is connected to the Ministry—his wife was an agent. This only strengthens my resolve.”

I found a chair and settled into it.

Ferenc sat with his workers and went through papers. Bernard put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s the guy, huh?”

I nodded.

“He’s calling you a Ministry agent.”

I nodded again as he pulled up a chair beside me and began whispering.

“This is what we’ll do,” he said, as if he’d been thinking about it a long time. “We go back to the Capital together. You and me. I’ve got my Militia Walther. We’ll find a way through the roadblocks, then I’ll track down Michalec’s address. He’s got to be living somewhere. We’ll get him to admit to everything on tape and play it on the radio from Patak.” He sounded excited by the idea. He was a lot like his father-in-law.

I was about to thank him but tell him no when the young man at the other table, who had sideburns down to his jawline, looked up from some papers at the television. “Hey. Guys. Look.”

All of us did as he asked and were surprised to see washed-out video footage of Tomiak and Ilona Pankov sitting at a long table, arms crossed over their chests, in a concrete-walled room.

“Turn it up,” I said.

•

Hours before
it was broadcast, before the last tapes had been recorded and edited to make sure none of the judges or lawyers would be seen in the final cut, Gavra was given a set of infantry fatigues. While the court delivered its verdict, he changed in the corridor, watched by his guard and Andras Todescu, who looked haggard and scared in his expensive suit. “So you’re going to do it,” said Todescu.

Gavra buttoned his pants.

“It must be done,” said Todescu. “Yes. It must.” Then he gazed through the open doorway. The prosecutor was listing the couple’s crimes.

Gavra didn’t want to see. He buttoned the jacket and walked farther down the corridor, peering into other, empty rooms. The guard didn’t bother following.

His stomach still hurt, but it was the cold that bothered him. He couldn’t manage Brano’s mathematics in this chill. Escape paths, contingency plans, spatial relations, even past and future—they were all just beyond his reach. Then he heard the scuffle.

Todescu, pressed back against the opposite wall, stared at two soldiers dragging Ilona Pankov out of the room. Her hands were bound behind her back, but she tried to kick the soldiers, breaking the heel of her shoe. She stumbled. Tomiak Pankov followed; he didn’t fight.

He walked patiently between his guards, loudly humming a song. Gavra’s mind betrayed him by singing the words to the tune.

Arise ye workers from your slumbers.
Arise ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
And at last ends the age of cant.

He tried to silence his head but couldn’t. The song refused to leave as they were led toward him.

Then Michalec appeared, confused. In his hand was a bulky video camera. He ran, gasping, past the couple, almost knocking into Ilona Pankov, and grabbed Gavra’s arm. “You’re not supposed to be here. Come on.”

He rushed Gavra to the end of the corridor, then out a steel door into a freezing stone courtyard with high walls that stank of mold. Against one wall, three soldiers with Kalashnikovs stood smoking nervously. They looked up as Michalec shouted, “Now.
Now!
Other side.” He waved to a corner of the courtyard; they shuffled over stiffly. “Lose the smokes.” They tossed them to the ground. He set the camera on the stones, took the Kalashnikov from one of them, and handed it to Gavra, looking him in the eyes. “You’re going to stand in that corner over there. No fanfare, okay? They’ll come in through that door and you just do it. Okay?”

Gavra nodded dumbly, hearing:

Away with all your superstitions.
Servile masses arise,
arise! We’ll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

“Those guys,” said Michalec, jerking his head at the other corner, where the soldiers stood rigidly. “They’ll shoot you if you try

anything. So don’t. Now go.” He pointed at the empty corner, then picked up the video camera and walked to the wall, not far from the steel door. He propped the camera on his shoulder, looked through the eyepiece, and started shooting the courtyard, then focused on Gavra, who was gripping the Kalashnikov as if it were something he’d never seen before.

He was completely numb. It didn’t occur to him to just turn the gun on Michalec, and he would later hate himself for that.

The door opened, and there they were, stepping out into the cold dawn light, stunned.

Gavra couldn’t move. His hands were stuck. He couldn’t raise the gun or squeeze the trigger.

He didn’t have to.

The three soldiers in the opposite corner weren’t looking at Gavra. They were mesmerized by the Pankovs, who had started to run. Instinctively, one of them raised his Kalashnikov and pulled the trigger. That led the second one to do the same, and the third produced a pistol, stretched out his arm, and began firing, too. Loud snapping sounds filled the cold air.

So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face!
The Internationale unites the human race.

Gavra shivered, watching the couple run along the wall, stumbling. Ilona Pankov squealed. Bloodstains erupted on the stones as they fell, and he thought for an instant that he was killing them. Then he realized he wasn’t, and that troubled him more than even murder. He raised his rifle and squeezed, the recoil shaking through him. The scent of cordite was heavy as he filled the now-dead bodies with more bullets, so that they began to tremble, as if still alive. That only encouraged him to keep on shooting.

Once his Kalashnikov had run out of bullets, Gavra dropped it and watched as Michalec, breathing heavily, ran his camera over to the bullet-riddled bodies. More people poured into the courtyard, gaping, until all he could see was a wall of backs. He stepped over the rifle and walked past them, back inside.

In the corridor, he ran into the witnesses. Harold gripped his arm. “Is it done? Is it over?”

Gavra nodded, and Beth kissed his cheeks. As if a switch had been turned, the old people began to weep and hug and thank him, calling him their savior. Then they hurried on to get their own look.

Andras Todescu was crouched in the corridor, no farther than where he’d been minutes before. He looked up at Gavra with a pleading expression, but Gavra went on, past the now-empty courtroom and the other classrooms until he was outside in the cold again, near the stone walls surrounding the barracks. He got on his knees in the dirt, but his sickness stayed in him.

Sometime later, maybe hours, he saw a man get into a jeep clutching a medical bag filled with video cassettes. Then soldiers came out carrying stretchers with two bodies covered in gray army blankets. They put them in a truck and roared off. A while after that, he looked up to see Jerzy Michalec staring down at him, hands in his coat pockets, not smiling. “Hell of a thing,” said the old man.

That’s when Gavra noticed Michalec had blood on his coat, as if he’d hugged the corpses. “We have a deal.”

“Of course, of course,” said Michalec, but like someone who didn’t know what he was saying.

“My friend.”

He nodded. “Right. Liguria metro station. Five minutes’walk from here. He’s waiting for you.”

Michalec told the guards to let Gavra out. Once past the barracks walls, the gate closing behind him, Gavra started to run. His knees were wobbly, but he could just manage a straight line that took him past apartment blocks and people walking with shopping bags. They didn’t know. Not yet. They had no idea.

Somewhere along that brief run, Gavra became convinced that his friend was dead. It was inevitable, the only logical conclusion to this day. So when he found Karel sitting nervously on a bench in the brown-walled station, he squeezed and kissed his friend fiercely. The three other commuters waiting for the metro turned to stare. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

•

By now
everyone in our country knows that tape, has memorized every nuance and impotent rebuttal from both of them. But as the edited video played on, the cameras never showed us the faces of the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the members of the tribunal, or the audience we sometimes heard gasp at statements. We saw the Pankovs, staring and accusing and pointing fingers at people we never saw. Then, after a while of this, the camera cut to another table, and we saw the witnesses, one after the other, their stories progressively more terrible and damning.