Yalta Boulevard (15 page)

“Of course.” Roman handed over a wad of bills. “It’s all there.”

The thin man counted the koronas with spastic fingers, his mouth forming numbers. “Yeah, okay. Looks right,” he said, pocketing the cash. “Let’s get moving.”

Lia took Petre into the woods to urinate while Brano and Roman carried the suitcases to the truck. It was filled with boxes of canned plums that the thin man, with Roman’s help, shifted aside. They made a narrow corridor to the boxed-in space in the back. Jan seemed to have disappeared. They deposited the luggage in the corner as Lia and Petre returned, the boy now very awake, scrambling inside while they helped Lia up. Jan appeared again, a burned-down cigarette in his lips, and they all retreated to the secret room behind the boxes. Before the driver and Roman walled them in, Jan asked how long they’d be driving. “Four, five hours,” said the driver, but his voice wasn’t very authoritative.

From the other side of the boxes, Brano and the Sorokas heard the men murmur to each other; then Roman’s voice, louder, wished them luck. The men jumped down into the gravel, and the doors ground shut—first one, then the other—and the darkness was complete. Petre yelped, but Lia calmed him. A rusty squeal as the latch was pulled into place, then the snap of the lock being secured.

Brano sat against the luggage as the Sorokas huddled in the opposite corner, their whispers indecipherable above the knocking groan of the engine and bone-crunching thumps when they hit potholes. This man was not a careful driver; he sped and slammed the brakes indiscriminately, and occasionally they heard his voice through the wall, singing:
Infant holy, infant lowly, for his bed a cattle stall. Oxen lowing, little knowing, Christ the Babe is Lord of all
.

The song crept on, its melody circular and incessant.

Swift are winging
,
Angels singing
,
Nowells ringing
,
Tidings bringing
,
Christ the Babe is Lord of all
,
Christ the Babe is Lord of all
.

Despite himself, Brano found he was humming along.

Although he could neither see nor hear them, he knew the Sorokas were scared. He had watched them during Roman’s drive, Lia most of all—her stern silence was a mask. She had never fled her country before, and here she was with her boy, at the mercy of strangers who handed the family off to one another like a shipment of … of canned plums. Worse, they had brought along a state security agent neither of them had any reason to trust.

Brano closed his eyes—the darkness remained dark—and felt the truck’s erratic thumps and leaps dig into the old wounds from Bóbrka.

After three or four hours, the truck stopped and idled. Lia whispered to her husband, and he whispered back. The truck moved forward a few feet, then stopped again. Petre asked when he’d be able to pee again, and Brano leaned in their direction. “Stay quiet now. We’re at the Hungarian border.”

They answered with silence. The truck lurched, crept forward, and stalled. Was restarted and crept again, then turned off. They heard the thin man climb out of the cab and talk with the border guards, make a joke and laugh. Then footsteps around the back of the truck. The snap of the lock being opened, the doors unlatched. Brano heard the boy’s quick inhale, and when the doors opened gray late-morning light bled through the boxes. Lia’s hand was tight over Petre’s mouth. Above her hand, his eyes were perfectly round, focused on Brano. Jan held Lia from behind, biting his lips.

The driver talked with the border guard about plums and how late he was running. The guard told him he was always running late. “You shouldn’t drink so much, Jaroslaw, it messes up your nerves. Know what my wife gets me to drink? Slivovitz, the kosher stuff. Wake up fresh every morning. Those Jews know what they’re doing.”

“I’ll remember.”

Then they closed the doors again and, after a few minutes and a couple more jokes, the truck moved on. Once they were on their way, Jan said to the darkness, “Welcome to the Hungarian People’s Republic.”

The second roadblock only checked the driver’s papers. It seemed that Jaroslaw knew all the people he ran into; he even spoke to them in Hungarian. This was his regular delivery route.

After a while, they stopped again, and Jaroslaw opened the doors. “Let’s move, everyone. I’ve got to get this stuff to Budapest.” He climbed into the truck and started shifting boxes as Brano moved the ones on their side.

They were at the end of a long forest trail, beside a small dacha. Impatient, Petre ran to a tree and dropped his pants. Jaroslaw unlocked the dacha and beckoned them inside, nervous hands fumbling with the keys as he spoke.

“I’ll be back this evening, and I’ll be able to tell you what’s happening next.”

“You don’t know already?” asked Lia.

He raised the corner of his lip. “I know what I’m doing, okay? I need to contact someone, and then I can get rid of you. But in the meantime, stay here and don’t go out. If anyone knocks on the door, you’re not here. Okay?”

Jan squeezed his wife’s arm. “We understand.”

There was stale bread and jam in the kitchen, so Lia made sandwiches while Jan and Brano sat in the main room, smoking Jan’s cigarettes. Jan seemed nervous, but when Brano asked, he said, “No, it’s all right. This is the way they said it would be. It’s still unnerving, though.”

“You didn’t follow this route before?”

“Before when?”

“When you went to Vienna.”

Jan smiled, finally admitting the truth. “No, that time I took a different route. Through Yugoslavia.”

Brano didn’t ask anything more.

They spent that day floating through the dacha’s two cold rooms. Lia and Petre took a nap together in the bedroom while the men talked. They discussed the discomfort of that truck, both hoping they wouldn’t have to board it again, and Jan told him that for the whole ride Lia had been sure they were heading to prison. “She just can’t believe what she’s doing. I’ve done it before, but I can’t, either.”

“Neither can I,” said Brano.

“But this time it’s for real.” Jan lit a cigarette, forgetting to offer Brano one. “This time I’m not going back.”

“And this is why you returned? To get your family?”

Jan shrugged. “What better reason is there?”

“What about me? I don’t understand why you brought me along.”

Jan looked at his cigarette, then, remembering, offered one. He lit it for Brano. “Because I could tell you needed it. You were in a bind. Like everybody else in Bóbrka, I knew you were going to be arrested.” He paused. “And I like you. It’s as simple as that.”

“I’d like to believe you,” said Brano. “But we both know it was decided long ago, in Vienna.”

Jan’s cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.

“Dijana Franković,” Brano explained. “The Americans gave you that name to assure that I’d be the one sent in. And I suppose they paid Pavel Jast to give me a reason to leave.”

Jan Soroka stared at his hands in his lap. He took a breath. “Well, Brano. Let’s say this was true, that I was part of some conspiracy to get you out of the country. Do you think the Americans would tell me everything?”

“I suppose they wouldn’t.”

“So what will you do?”

Brano took a drag of his cigarette. “What?”

“East,” said Jan, “or West?”

Brano surprised even himself by dredging up another smile. “I don’t suppose I have a choice anymore.”

While Jan slept, he watched Lia shepherd Petre around the dacha and intervene with a nervous smile when he began to talk too much to Brano. Perhaps she was afraid he’d repeat things he’d overheard. Brano hadn’t had much experience with children, but he felt that, despite the blemish on his cheek, Petre was like most boys—he saw this trip as an adventure. He peed a lot and asked for more bread and jam and exclaimed unexpectedly about details that caught his eye—“Mama, there’s a spider!” He pointed, trembling, at a dirty corner, where there proved to be no spider at all—but a cockroach. Brano began to suspect the boy was a little dumb, then decided that he was only overenthusiastic, with a penchant for quick, unreflective judgments. Lia would crouch over him and point out his mistake, and the boy would nod, register the correction, and move on to the next mistake. It was like watching a puppy and its master.

After the tense silence had stretched long enough, he asked Lia about her work in the Galicia Textile Works back in the Capital, how long she’d known Jan, and how Petre was at school. At first, she answered his questions easily, folding her relaxed hands in her lap. Her cheekbones were very strong; when she paused, she pressed her thick lips together until they wrinkled. He asked, and she told him that her fear was lessening now that the trip was under way.

“It feels like there are no more decisions to make, you know? It doesn’t matter if the original decision was wrong or not, because it’s irreversible. I’m no longer responsible.” A cigarette in her right hand sent ribbons of smoke into her face. “But what about you, Major Brano Sev? You’ve got a family back home.”

He adjusted himself in his chair. “My situation is different from Jan’s. My family survives well enough without me. In a way, it’ll be a relief to them that I’ve gone.”

She nodded doubtfully, then looked up at the bedroom door. Jan stood in it, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, smiling at her. “Christ, it’s good to see you here.”

When Jaroslaw returned that night, they were in the kitchen, drinking tea without sugar, because there was none in the dacha. Jaroslaw went directly to a kitchen cabinet, where he retrieved a small bottle of palinka that no one had noticed before. When he brought the bottle from his lips the ends of his mustache glistened. “There’s been a little delay—nothing to worry about.” But his nervous fingers flicked against the bottle. “I’ll get you to the outskirts of Budapest tonight. You’ll stay with a friend of mine, then it’ll be taken care of.”

“For how long?” asked Jan.

“Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing.”

Jaroslaw had picked up another shipment in Budapest; this time it was canned apricots. They again camped behind the boxes, teeth rattling as Jaroslaw sped along and stopped twice for road checks. But he was a regular along this road, too, and the soldiers chatted with him and scolded him for his excessive lifestyle (he told them he was rushing back to see his Budapest mistress) and happily accepted the bottles of palinka he gave them.

They reached the maize farm east of Budapest a little after midnight. Jaroslaw ushered them out of the truck, tossed the suitcases down, and knocked on the door of a farmhouse with a steep, clay-tiled roof. A short man with a heavy limp greeted them and introduced himself as Adam Madai, the manager of the region’s farming collective. As soon as they were inside, Jaroslaw shook the farmer’s hand, wished them all luck, and left.

Madai was an energetic man, chain-smoking Moskwa-Volga cigarettes throughout the night. He kept getting up from the table to refill glasses and winked continuously at Petre—who, after blushing a few times, finally warmed to their host—the whole time chattering away. He knew their language well and said with visible pride that he was also adept at Romanian, German, and English and was now learning French from Juliette Greco records. He learned these languages, he told them, at the school of necessity. “No one, but no one, speaks Hungarian in this world.”

He said he’d gotten his limp in ’56, during the Revolution. He’d been in the streets with his brothers—that was the word he used for them—shooting at Russian tanks from behind barricades. Brano listened to his descriptions of walls exploding over his head, seeing his brothers dead in the street, the dread when he realized he’d used the last of his ammunition. By the time the Russians retook Budapest, he had slipped into the countryside, having been lucky enough not to make the lists of those destined for prisons and firing squads. Brano listened to everything, and by the end decided that Adam Madai was lying about all of it.

But that didn’t matter. Madai was a generous host, choosing to sleep on the couch while they used the two bedrooms. In a bedroom drawer, Brano found an electric bill in Madai’s name—at least he hadn’t used an alias with them. And when Brano poked his head out at three in the morning to make sure their host had not slipped away to turn them in, Madai sat up and offered him a shot of Unicum, the syrupy national liquor that few outside the country had a taste for. Brano politely refused.

15 FEBRUARY 1967, WEDNESDAY
•

Their breakfast
was a plentiful spread of coffee, salami, cheese, and pickled peppers that Madai jarred in his own basement. “The water around here is too hard, much too hard for pickling. So I have to drive over to Érd once a week for bottles. Erd water …” He closed his eyes. “Soft water—you can taste the difference.”

“Yes,” said Brano, wiping his eyes. “I can.”

“Have some more coffee. You look tired.” Madai reached for his hat. “I’m going to run into town to set things up. I should be back by the afternoon.”

“When are we leaving?” asked Jan.

“Hard to say. I’m not the one to do it, so it’s not up to me. But I need all your luggage.”

Lia, on the couch, said, “You need
what?
”

“Your luggage,” he repeated. “We’ll ship it separately. It’ll be waiting for you in Vienna.”

Lia raised her hands. “My whole life is in that bag, and you expect me to just hand it to you in the hope that it’ll make it over the border? I’ll keep my things with me, thank you.”

“Li,” said Jan.

“What? Am I the only one who understands this?”

“You’re right,” said Brano. “But we don’t have much choice. I imagine our escape path won’t work if we’re all carrying suitcases.”

“Exactly,” said Madai. “I don’t have to do this, you know. I’ve given you food and drink. I’ve kept you safe. At great risk to myself. Aren’t you comfortable here?”

“I’m scared out of my mind.”

“Come on, Li,” said Jan.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child!” She crossed her arms over her breasts. “I don’t know how you can do this. Giving yourself over to strangers.”