Yalta Boulevard (33 page)

“Who you are talking?”

“What?”

He focused. “Who are you talking to?”

“I’m waiting to speak with Dr. Simonyi. He can take a look at you later.”

“Hang up.”

The old man frowned. “You sure?”

“Yes. Please. Hang up.”

The old man did as he was told, then cocked his head, but didn’t ask the question. “You must be hungry.”

They ate sitting on tall stools at the beige kitchen counter. He had a little trouble with the coffee—it trickled out of the corner of his mouth—but it was good, all of it, and it seemed to build energy beneath the pain.

“You know,” said the old man, “I’m not a stranger to this. The lake’s on the border, and we’re used to finding waifs washed up. You’re Hungarian, aren’t you?”

He hesitated, then nodded.

“Usually, though, we find them washed up with a few bullet holes in them. Back in ’fifty-six, we got hundreds across this lake. Some even settled here. Dr. Simonyi was one of those. First he tried his luck in Vienna, like they all do, but do you know how many Hungarian doctors showed up there? The competition was terrible. So he tried village life. He knows a thing or two about jumping the border. That’s why I was calling him. I thought he could help you, besides the medical attention.”

“Thank you. Not yet. Now I need sleep.”

“Sure you do. You’ve been through a lot. Did you have that condition before? The face,” said the old man, touching the left side of his own face.

“Yes,” he said, though he didn’t know.

They didn’t speak as they finished their plates; and afterward, when the old man offered him more, he just shook his head. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger and asked if there was a bed he could use. The old man pointed at the door beside the bathroom.

He got up and limped across the living room, clutching anything for support, and when he got through the door, he dropped into the bed with his clothes still on.

Behind his closed lids the memories began as action—a train at night, sitting across from three old provincial women. Him, running through rolling vineyards with gnarled, barren branches. Then water and reeds, ducking his head into cold blackness.

22 APRIL 1967, SATURDAY
•

He woke
to a large face with a thick jawline. It was handsome, with light blue eyes and flared nostrils. It smiled and blinked at him.

“About time you woke,” said the man, but not in German. Hungarian. “Gerhard was worried you’d die in his bed. That would be bad luck. He’d have to throw the damn thing out!”

“Is it night yet?”

“Listen to you—
Is it night?
You’ve been in and out for four days. We got you up enough to put some food in you yesterday, but I imagine you’re still pretty hungry.”

“You’re the doctor?”

“Andras Simonyi. Gerhard said you’re Hungarian. You speak it, but you’re no Magyar. Where are you from?”

“What happened to me?”

The doctor paused. “I don’t know. It’s possible you had a stroke. Give me your left hand.”

“A stroke?”

“A minor one, if one at all. Give me your left hand.”

It took some effort, but Brano was able to pull his hand from under the sheets and give it to the doctor.

“Make a fist.”

Though he could move his fingers a little, a fist was impossible.

“That’s better than I expected. I can’t say how much you’ll recover, but you haven’t done badly so far. How’s your memory?”

Brano considered that. “It was bad at first, but it’s come back.”

“All of it?”

“Almost all.”

The doctor nodded, then took Brano’s pulse and checked the dilation of his pupils. He seemed satisfied as he stood up. “There’s a robe over there with your clothes. Gerhard was good enough to clean them. Come out and join us. Let us know if you need some help.”

Brano said, “
Köszönöm
.” Thank you.

Once the doctor was gone, he slowly raised himself into a sitting position, feet just above the rug. He was naked, and he smelled sour, as if lake water had festered inside him. When he touched his face he felt a beard. His left side was still numb, but he was able to stand and make hesitant steps to the chair where his clean, folded clothes lay.

His memory, over the last four days of drifting in and out of sleep, had begun with a word from a dream—
zbrka
. Then other details followed, slowly filling him, telling him who he was, and why he was in Austria. He knew he had killed a man who had tried to kill him, and he remembered having the presence of mind, after shooting the man, not to run to the woman nor to the Westbahnhof, which was close to the restaurant. He’d instead walked quickly through the Liebengaste’s kitchen, past confused cooks, into an alley, with the dead man’s wallet and gun stuffed in a pocket. He’d taken a tram south to the Südbahnhof and boarded the first departing train, a slow regional with a rusting shell.

He remembered that he was sweating then, a spectacle for the prim suburban Viennese with their shopping bags and children. When the conductor arrived, he bought passage all the way down the line to Payerbach-Reichenau but instead got out at Neunkirchen. While waiting for the next train, he read a schedule he’d gotten from a somber man behind the ticket window, then went through the dead man’s wallet. He found the schillings and a driver’s license under the name of Karl Bertelsmann. He put the money in his pocket, then dumped the rest into a trash can. That’s when he noticed his shoe. He used his handkerchief to wipe the blood off of it.

He remembered taking the westward line to Mürzzuschlag, where the station bar was closed, and he paced the empty platform for hours as the sun set, wishing he had a heavier coat and trying not to wish for anything else. When he failed, it was her voice that came to him.
Dragi, where you are
going?
The headache returned, pressing sharply behind his trembling right eye.

By the time his eastbound connection arrived, he was sneezing.

In the warmth of the full train, he became inexplicably dizzy. He worried that he would be recognized, but around him were old women who dozed, and when they woke they chose not to look at him at all. The only life in the car was a compartment of three drunk soldiers, howling into the night. One of the old women cracked her eyes at the sound, and he smiled and shrugged. She closed her eyes.

At Wallern im Burgenland, two stops short of Hungary, a soldier with a rifle smoked under fluorescent lights. He glanced up as Brano helped an old woman down, tensing his throat to suffocate a cough. Pain crackled through his skull.

He made the last bus to Apetlon as the station clock told him it was midnight. He and a smiling old man were the only ones on it.

From Apetlon he had walked, trying to retrace his path from months ago across the wet grass, but it was difficult; his memory was spotty. The headache surged again from the back of his head, and he found himself stumbling. But there was only one desire in him by then, to leave this country and return to a place where he understood the rules.

He stopped once when the sound of barking dogs reached him. He waited, sinking into earth that had become mud. His headache had ebbed, but when it started again, his left leg became weak; his face tingled.

He fell sometimes, rising with mud-colored hands. In spots he sank into brackish, cold water or stumbled over sharp reeds, and by the time he reached a marsh he thought might be the one he was looking for, he was soaked by cold water and sweat.

Then he stepped into the water.

His memory, perhaps out of revulsion, would not take him further.

Old Gerhard, boiling vegetables in a pot, was relieved there would be no deaths in his house. Dr. Simonyi was curious. He complimented Brano on his admirable German and Hungarian. “But what is your native tongue?”

Brano sipped hot tea. “
Mówi
po polsku
.”

The doctor frowned, and Gerhard leaned forward. “What was that?”

“Polish. My language.”

“You know,” said the doctor, “we’re both familiar with your situation. I left Hungary in “fifty-six, and Gerhard here has a soft spot for immigrants. Always has.”

“Beginning with this man,” said Gerhard.

“The point is, we’re not going to hand you over to the police. You don’t have to be shy.”

Brano nodded. “I appreciate everything. But really, I can’t remember much.”

The doctor sighed, either because he expected this or because he didn’t believe it.

“What about your name?” asked Gerhard.

“I assume you know it already,” said Brano. “My passport is in my jacket.”

The doctor smiled. “And we also know your native language isn’t Polish.”

“It’s my family’s language. So I wasn’t lying.”

“You were just skirting around the truth.”

Brano shrugged.

“Listen,” said the doctor, lowering his voice. “I imagine I have some idea what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking you want to get out of here. But that’s just paranoia, Brano. The best thing you can do for yourself now is to stay here. You understand?”

The doctor’s eyes seemed to be saying something more. Or maybe they were just asking to be trusted. He tapped the table with a flat hand—a wedding ring clicked. “Well, I suppose I should get back home. You can take care of our new friend?”

“Of course,” said Gerhard as he placed boiled carrots and potatoes on a plate. “No more grease, like you said.”

“Thanks again,” said Brano.

“My pleasure.’ The doctor and Brano shook hands, and Gerhard walked Simonyi out. Brano sipped his tea while they whispered by the front door. By the time the old man returned, he was finished eating, and he pushed himself into a standing position. “I suppose I should take another bath.”

Gerhard sniffed. “I was hoping you’d be the one to say that.”

The warming water ran into the tub, and Brano gazed at himself in the mirror above the sink. The weak half gave his face a suspicious look, like a wicked character in one of those films Ludwig loved. His left eyelid hung low, and his left cheek, beneath his spotty beard, had become flaccid. There was a razor behind the mirror, but he didn’t use it. He did use Gerhard’s toothbrush to scrape the detrius from inside his mouth. Then he sank into the water and, briefly, plunged his head under.

He had panicked—he knew this. After the one strand connecting him to his home had broken—or he had broken it, by killing Josef Lochert—Brano had panicked and fled. He hadn’t even worried about the border guards along the lake, had only plunged in without forethought; this, in the end, worried him more than the possible stroke. He had, in the space of a few minutes in a Viennese bathroom, collapsed. He could have stayed in Vienna, could have even marched out to that shadow waiting on the street and explained that the Vienna
rezident
had tried to kill him. Ludwig would have been amused, but in the end he would have been satisfied that Yalta considered Brano a defector and was trying to silence him.

He came up and took a breath. He wiped his eyes with his right hand and blinked at the bathroom.

His mistakes were now irrelevant. Brano Sev was on the Austrian border, physically less than he had been, and he could either stay under the guardianship of these strangers, trying to find a way into Hungary, or he could return to Vienna.

That second possibility scared him most, so he set it aside for the moment.

Gerhard could perhaps be trusted, but the doctor was an unknown. He met with numerous people each day and had a wife, and one loose word to the wrong person could lead anywhere. The doctor was Hungarian, and as such he respected the legalities of paperwork; he would certainly feel the need to file something on the crippled, waterlogged stranger in need of his care.

So Brano would leave.

He could not walk through the border, because the Austrian post would be looking for him. He would have to wade through the marsh again, or find a point south of Sopron to make the farmland trek to the barbed wire. But in his state, that would be impossible.

And so, the option that he held at an arm’s length came back to him.