36 Yalta Boulevard

PART THREE: THE INNER PARTS
18 APRIL 1967, TUESDAY

“ Hallo? ”

The sharp pain lay buried at the point where his skull met his spine. As if an ice pick had been shoved in, and occasionally someone tapped it, sparking white flashes in the darkness.

“ Hallo? ”

He was wet-through the pain he knew this. His lower half was freezing and rigid. And when he tried to open his eye-one, because only one would respond-he saw only blurred vertical lines.

“ Ja, ja. Offnen Sie die Augen.”

Beside the pain, and almost as intensely, he felt the deja vu of a moment repeated. As if this day had been before, or this day was all of his days, and every day of his life he woke cold and wet, in excruciating pain, with a gravelly voice shouting inside his head.

Or outside his head. For he could now see, through the vertical lines, which were reeds, that the voice belonged to an old man with rubber boots squatting in the shallow water. The man leaned closer, licking his cleanshaven lips.

“ Sprechen Sie deutsch? ”

He tried to whisper, “ Ja,” but his tongue wouldn’t move. So he blinked.

“ Konnen Sie sich bewegen? ” Can you move?

He didn’t know.

The old man reached out. “Here. Give me your hand.”

He had to focus, but after a moment he could raise his right hand, and when the old man caught it the ice pick slid out a moment, then punched back inside to find a new spot in his brain. He gasped. The old man heaved and pulled him up like a sack of… something. His head spun, and he did his best not to scream.

“You all right? Not dying on me?”

The old man pulled his arm over his shoulder and helped him move forward, half-dragging him toward a rusting Volkswagen just beyond the water. Their progress was slow, but the old man’s steadfastness kept them moving, and once they reached the car he used his free hand to pop open the passenger door. Then he slid his find into the seat.

The old man let out a rasping breath. “You could’ve died.”

“Where am I?” he tried to say, but his voice came out of the side of his mouth, garbled. He repeated it, focusing on each word.

“You’re by the Neusiedl Lake.”

He looked down at his body soaking the seat. His right arm and leg trembled, but he couldn’t feel his left side. “I am numb,” he enunciated carefully.

“Water’s cold,” said the old man. “Hypothermia, ja. That could kill you. Let’s get going.”

He closed the door and walked around the driver’s side. He sat behind the wheel and lit a cigarette, then, after a few tries, started the car and began driving down a dirt road.

Each bump, and there were many, was agony, and he tried not to be sick. The road became paved, and a town appeared up ahead, but they turned off onto another dirt road that ended in a low, simple house with flower boxes in the windows.

The old man helped him to the front door and opened it without a key. He turned on a ceiling lamp and spread his hands to the mess around them. “Wasn’t expecting guests.”

“A bathroom?”

The old man pointed at a door. “The aspirin’s behind the mirror.”

He hobbled to the door, holding on to a chair and a table along the way.

“Say,” said the old man. “You have a name, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said, then pushed into the bathroom, turned on the light, and pulled the latch.

After washing his hands and swallowing three aspirins, he stared at his wide, round face in the mirror, then touched the moles on his cheek. He had noticed the stiffness in his jacket pockets since the boat but hadn’t touched them. Now he reached in his inner pocket, coming up with a passport-his face, his name- SEV, BRANO OLEKSY. The face in the mirror was different, though, the left half sagging weakly. There were Austrian schillings in his pants pocket. He counted them with his good hand before, almost reluctantly, reaching into his left jacket pocket, the one he’d waited for with dread. He took out the pistol. He knew its make, its year, and that it was Hungarian, but he could not remember how he’d come across it. In his other pocket he found a stiff card with an account number from the Raiffeisenbank; on the opposite side was a handwritten telephone number.

The deja vu held back the fear. His loss of memory was not new-he knew this. Nor was the presence of a firearm. And the sense that he was a man in an immense amount of trouble-that was not new, either. He just didn’t know what the trouble was.

It took some painful minutes of searching, but finally he found that the rusting lid to the drain in the middle of the floor was loose, held down by only one screw. He turned on the water to cover his movements and inserted a fingernail beneath the lid. He slid it to the side. There was just enough space to fit the pistol into the drain and close the lid.

He took off his wet clothes, which was difficult with only one hand, then washed his body in the tub with that same hand. The water jumped unpredictably between scalding and cold, and the soap seemed to be made out of sandpaper, but after a while he was, relatively, clean. He toweled himself off and found, beside a small electric washing machine, a robe.

When he left the bathroom, he smelled fried food-eggs, kielbasa-and coffee. “Hello?” he called as he wobbled through the living room to the kitchen. Beside an icebox, the old man was on the telephone, smiling at him. He covered the mouthpiece. “You look better, but your face is still funny. Have something to eat.”

“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.