36 Yalta Boulevard

9 FEBRUARY 1967, THURSDAY

His back was stiff from the too-soft bed, so he stood beside it and stretched his arms and twisted, then rolled his shoulders, the smell of breakfast rousing him. After a quick wash he ate bread and jam and two boiled potatoes. The eastern sun lit the dust in the kitchen while Mother talked about the people she expected to come to her store today, because villagers were as predictable as the clock on the wall.

They walked to the center along the rivuleted gravel road, nodding at those who nodded, and he stood aside while his mother spoke hesitantly to old women before finally introducing him to Zuzanny Wichowska and Elwira Lisiewicz and Halina Grzybowska. He removed his hat for each woman, and though they gave him timid smiles, they did not offer their hands.

On each woman’s forehead was a fading black stain. Yesterday, he realized, had been Ash Wednesday.

His mother’s shop was a narrow, nameless place two doors down from the butcher’s. She unlocked the door and opened the curtains to let in light. Shelves packed with canned foods and liquor bottles grew to the ceiling, and under the glass counter lay sausages and cheese. She showed him the back room filled with boxes her young assistant had yet to unpack, then made coffee on an electric coil. While they drank, a tall sixty-year-old man in a faded smock appeared with pallets of bread, the ash on his forehead sweated almost completely away. Mother asked how his wife, Ewa, was, then introduced him to Brano as Zygmunt. Brano shook his hand while she signed the invoice.

“You’re enjoying Bobrka?”

“Just arrived last night.”

“Different,” said Zygmunt.

“Bobrka?”

“Different from the Capital.” He glanced at Brano’s polished shoes. “A big man in the Capital is just another man in Bobrka.”

“The reverse is true as well.”

“It may be,” he said, taking the invoice from Iwona Sev. “And that might be why I’m still in Bobrka.” He touched the brim of his hat before he left.

Brano said he would go for a walk.

“To register with the Militia?”

“Of course.”

“You’re as predictable as a villager, Brani.”

Without his mother as an intermediary, there was nothing to connect Brano to the ashed villagers who gave him cursory glances; there were no words to be said. He walked along the main road that branched out from the church, past yards with chickens and self-satisfied dogs, to where a single white Skoda was parked outside the Militia station, a small but austere concrete box with a tin roof and its Militia sign propped in the window. The interior was dim and simple: a gray, scratched desk, a chair on each side, and an empty bulletin board. A portrait of General Secretary Pankov in a crisp fedora hung over the desk. Brano waited until a voice cursed from the back room.

“Hello?”

The voice silenced.

“Hello?”

The far door opened and a wrinkled uniform appeared: a young man with black, greasy bangs swept over an ashless forehead. His sunken eyes were dark, his lips wide and without expression. “Yes? Need something?”

“I’m here to register.”

“Register?” He moved to his desk and sat down.

“I’m from the Capital. I’m staying here now.”

The man motioned to the opposite chair and removed a stack of papers from a drawer. He went through them, pulling one out, then shaking his head and returning it to the stack and trying another until he found the form he needed. He turned it around for Brano. “Here you go.”

Brano took a pen from a holder on the desk. “This is for foreigners. I need form AE-342.”

The militiaman flushed. “Yes, yes. How about that?” He returned to the stack. “Here, of course. AE-342.”

While Brano filled it out the militiaman eyed him, the only sound the pen tip scratching paper. Brano passed it over and watched him read. The hawk on his blue Militia shoulder patch was dirty. Then Brano handed over his internal passport, and the militiaman’s lip twitched at the sight of the Ministry hawk on the red cover.

“Uh, it says here you work at the Pidkora factory.”

“That’s true.”

“But your passport-”

“Former employer. 1 haven’t had a chance to change my documents.”

The militiaman cleared his throat. “Well, Comrade Sev, it’s good to have visitors in Bobrka. I’m Captain Tadeusz Rasko.” He stuck out his hand and Brano took it, rising imperceptibly. “How long will you be with us?”

“A week, I think. But my foreman is very flexible.”

“Very good,” he said. “So you’re here for a vacation?”

“I’ve worked hard this year.”

“I imagine.”

“What do you imagine?”

The captain’s mouth chewed air for a moment. “Just that you’ve worked hard, Comrade Sev.”

Brano nodded at his passport on the desk. “Can you stamp that, then?”

“Of course.” It took another minute of desperate searching to come up with the proper stamp, then more to find the inkpad. But Captain Rasko did finally place the small purple entry stamp on a clean page.

Brano walked farther out of town and then up the dirt road leading into the hills that surrounded Bobrka. He passed old women he barely recognized from previous visits on his way to the windswept fields spotted by patches of snow. He tugged his hat lower and slipped his hands into his pockets against the cold. There were a few houses up here, one freshly painted, but he stopped at the low two-bedroom that needed a paint job more than any other.

The front door was open before he’d reached the steps, and tall, thin Klara looked down on him, smiling. The spot on her forehead was very black, fresh.

“Mother said you’d be by.”

“That was a good guess on her part.”

He kissed her cheeks and held her briefly before she drew him inside, where the warmth encouraged him to strip off his coat and hat. There were more food smells here, pork and cabbage, and when she noticed him sniffing she asked if he was hungry. He was not. “But you’re so thin, Brano.”

“I’m fat enough.”

Klara began chain-smoking in the living room, while the fingers of her free hand pinched the fabric of her long brown skirt. He asked about her life, and she told an abbreviated story of the three years since they’d last talked, her dark eyebrows bobbing. While living with Lucjan’s parents, they had built this little house (which, during his last visit, before he left for West Berlin, had been nothing more than a concrete foundation) and moved in two years ago. “You’ve seen the outside, right? We got the paint from the factory in Sanok. Never use that stuff. It’s just like chalk, washes away.”

“I’ll remember.”

Lucjan was still working at the petroleum cooperative in a number of capacities, though these days his work was mostly administrative. “He’s immensely talented. He could do the work with his eyes shut.”

“He always seemed talented,” Brano lied.

“Lucjan’s been making his own vodka in the basement. You’ll like it. It’s fruity.” She wrinkled her nose when she said that.

Then she asked, and he told her the same vague things about his life that he had told his mother.

“A factory, huh?”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“But why?” she asked.

“What?”

“You told us you’d left the Ministry, but you never said why. Did you finally get disillusioned?”

He looked at her a moment, wondering if he could work his way through that lie as well. No, not with Klara. “I was fired.”

“Fired?” She straightened.

“Yes. I was working in Vienna, and a colleague double-crossed me. He sent in a report claiming that I had tried to sabotage his work. Can I have a cigarette?”

She handed one over and lit another for herself. “Well? Did you?”

“Of course not. I’d never sabotage the Ministry.”

Klara seemed amused, as if this were something she could not quite believe. “You were accused of sabotage and were then given a job in a factory.”

“If I didn’t have allies, I’d be in a work camp now. Not everyone in the Ministry believes this man.”

“Who is this man?”

He stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “Someone who wanted to get ahead and didn’t care who he ruined on the way up.”

“And…”

“And?”

“And did he get ahead?”

Brano nodded as he crushed his unfinished cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s an imperfect world.”

“And now you’ve come here.”

“A little vacation.”

“But here,” she said. “Why here? ”

He wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “It’s home.”

“You realize that everyone in town knows about you.”

“What about me?”

“What you do for a living.”

“What I did for a living.”

“It doesn’t matter to them. No one here trusts you.”

“I don’t see why they shouldn’t trust me. My job was only about uncovering the truth.”

She flicked ash off her cigarette. “Come on, Brano. They don’t want to end up another Tibor Kraus.”

“Who?”

“You know. That man from Dukla, the butcher.”

“I don’t know him.”

Klara sighed. “It was in The Spark. He’d been using one of those machines for making meat pies. What are they called?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, he adjusted the gears so it made them with an ounce less dough. Then he sold the extra dough on the side. Made some money.”

“He was caught?”

She nodded.

“Good.”

“He was executed, Brano. Because of meat pies.” She waited, but he didn’t say a thing. “This is what I mean about the villagers here. You scare them. You know you do. Hell, what you did to Father is almost a legend.”

“I helped him.”

“You’re the only one who believes that, but it doesn’t matter. You know what they think, and that’s why you never visit. It’s not relaxing to be in a place you’re not welcome.”

“So I’m not welcome here?”

“In this house, yes. But in Bobrka…” She waved the smoldering cigarette in a circular motion and let go of her skirt. “Who knows?” She stood up. “We’ll see you tonight?”

When he walked back into the village, the eyes that fell upon him had a different effect than they’d had an hour before. He had known he was not welcome, but Klara saying it aloud had made the idea flesh. A mutt behind a fence barked maniacally at him, and in the eyes of passersby he saw not only a lack of welcome but actual hostility. The old women were musing over how to fit him into their wood-burning ovens, and the men were wondering where on his body a shotgun blast would best end his untrustworthy existence.

The bar in the center was only large enough for three small tables and a short counter. One table was taken up by two old men playing cards on either side of a half-full bottle of rye vodka, and behind the bar a young man with a monobrow beneath his ashy mark bent over a case of Zywiec, counting bottles. Brano waited until he stood up. The recognition flickered and then steadied in the bartender’s eyes. “A beer?”

“Sure,” said Brano.

He removed a warm Zywiec from the box, uncapped it, and slid it over, then returned to his counting.

“And a paper?”

The man looked up. “What?”

“Do you have a copy of The Spark? ”

The bartender took a coffee-stained copy of the day’s paper from behind the counter. “Anything else?”

The two older men took a break in their game to watch Brano sit on a stool by the lace curtains, sip his beer, and begin to read.

On the front page, General Secretary Tomiak Pankov looked back at him from behind a podium in a slender suit, his bald head ringed by a thin patch of gray, talking of peace. When Pankov took power a decade ago, his first preoccupied year had been spent purging the Politburo and security apparatus of anyone too loyal to his dead predecessor, Mihai. Brano had survived that purge by sticking close to Colonel Cerny, whose ability at sidestepping the hammer was almost famous. Once his power was secured, Pankov became what he’d always been, a Party bureaucrat who made speeches on industrial levels and agricultural output; he focused on the numbers. But after a heart attack in early 1965, his focus changed, and he reinvented himself as an enlightened man of peace. The Spark reported that twenty-six nations had been present at the most recent international summit, called “The Doves of Peace”-Pankov was not known for his original titles.

Brano glanced up from the paper and peered out the window; Pavel Jast had arrived.

Comrade Colonel Cerny had given him the name of his contact, shown him a photograph, and added, An idiot, a gambler, and a drunk, but useful. That seemed about right. He could read those characteristics in the swagger Pavel Jast shared with all small-town informants, as if the entire People’s Army were marching behind them and would back up any stupid thing they did. So Brano returned to the paper as the fat man burst in, muttered something indecipherable to the two old men, then clapped a hand on the counter and demanded a vodka. He held the muddy glass to his lips as he rotated, leaning back to survey the tiny space. In the translucent window-reflection, Brano saw Pavel Jast’s eyes settle on him. Jast produced a cigarette and winked at the two old men before approaching.

“Hey, you. Comrade. Got a light?” He winked a second time in the old men’s direction.

From his pocket Brano took a book of matches marked HOTEL METROPOL and handed it to Jast without looking away from the window.

The first match faltered, but the second hissed and sparked until the cigarette was lit. Jast exhaled smoke and the stink of earlier vodkas, and Brano’s eyes watered as he accepted the matches back. But this was a different book of matches, white and blank. Jast said, “From the Capital, eh? Aren’t you Iwona’s boy?”

Brano drank some more beer, then laid a few koronas on the counter. He turned to Jast for the first time and saw the red web of punished veins beneath his flaccid cheeks and nose. “I am,” he said.

Another wink at the old men, who seemed unsure they liked the performance. The bartender ignored everyone. Jast grunted, the shot glass pressing into his chin. “Well, you’re not in the Capital anymore, comrade.”

“I didn’t notice,” said Brano, and only after he left did it occur to anyone in the bar that this had been a joke.

On the way back to his mother’s house, he clutched the matchbook in his pocket, turning it over and opening and shutting it while he watched faces along the road. Zygmunt, the old man who delivered his mother’s bread, seemed to be avoiding his gaze, but Captain Rasko acknowledged him as he stood in the mud with a young woman whose puffy lips made her look like the victim of abuse. He hadn’t expected to come across Lia Soroka out in the open, but he managed the surprise by nodding back at Rasko and at Jan Soroka’s unsmiling wife.

He didn’t take out the matchbook until he had passed his mother’s front door. He flipped it open and read the sweat-smeared pencil scrawl inside the cover:

Klara brought a large dish of pork cabbage rolls, and Lucjan ducked his head as he followed her in with his vodka, sealed in a used liter-sized soda bottle. Lucjan was nearly two heads taller than Brano, ruddy in the face, his wide shoulders stretching the back of his shirt, but his handshake had almost no strength at all. Mother took the vodka from him and disappeared with Klara into the kitchen.

Lucjan tried to smile. “Klara says you’re on vacation.”

“That’s true.”

“You don’t know how long?”

“A week, probably. Just long enough to get some rest.”

“Must be nice, having that kind of relationship with your manager. He doesn’t care?”

“He’s a good friend.”

“Known him a long time?”

“Are you always so curious?”

Lucjan let out a nervous laugh, then settled on the sofa and began to roll a cigarette, his big fingers fumbling with the thin paper. Brano watched. “She told me you’re doing well at the cooperative.”

“Klara’s an optimist.”

“But you’re doing administrative work. That’s a good sign.”

He licked the paper and sealed the cigarette. “What about you? You’re not used to working a factory job, are you?”

“Not so different. There are orders, and I follow them. 1 do all right.”

“That’s the answer I’d give, too.” He offered the damp cigarette, but Brano shook his head.

Klara had known Lucjan Witaszewski all her life, and perhaps this explained the unimpressive choice she’d made at the age of seventeen. Brano had been working in the Capital for four years when the wedding invitation arrived in his mailbox. But that was 1948, and in the Capital there had been no end to the work. In almost every alley hid another criminal, the detritus all wars produce, and on top of that, there had been a new man in the Militia office named Emil Brod who had to be followed and examined and, finally, accepted.

So he had mailed his response the next day: He could not come, but he wished them every happiness in their new, shared life, and had every hope that unity like theirs would be the backbone of their new, great society.

Klara had never replied.

Now, nearly two decades later, she placed two glasses of vodka on the coffee table and ran her fingers through her husband’s hair. “What’s the subject?”

“Work,” said Lucjan.

“Just as long as it’s not politics. Now drink.”

Both men did as they were told, and Brano admitted that Lucjan’s apricot vodka was rather good. Lucjan shrugged his thanks.

They went to the kitchen table while Mother dished everything out. “No ceremonies here,” she said. “Just eat.” Brano followed the order, but Klara bowed her head-a quick prayer-before lifting her fork.

Conversation lingered on work as Lucjan revealed an unexpected excitement, describing the new drilling rig that had been delivered. “The Austrians know what they’re doing, I can tell you that. They sent over the Trauzl-a cable rotary rig on wheels. A real beauty!”

Brano noted that the factories in Uzhorod were pumping out record numbers of tractors and industrial machines. Klara wasn’t impressed. “These production records don’t do anything for Bobrka. You can see it yourself. Now that it’s winter, we’re hibernating, like always. Go out after dark, and Bobrka’s a ghost town. I suppose the Capital never gets like that.”

“It doesn’t,” said Brano.

“Makes you wonder what goes on behind the windows,” Klara said. “They’re still living their lives.”

“They’re eating their mothers’ meals,” said Mother.

“And having more sex.”

“ Lucjan,” said Klara.

Lucjan shook his head. “What they’re doing is playing cards. That’s what.”

Mother frowned.

“There’s a lot of gambling?” asked Brano.

Lucjan’s face shriveled. Klara looked up.

Brano opened his hands and gave a smile so small that it could be seen by no one. “I’m not going to arrest anyone for it. That’s not what I do.”

Lucjan shrugged. “Everyone does it, right?”

“I do it myself,” he lied.

“But not like here, I hope,” said Mother.

“Like here?”

Lucjan looked at his plate. “It’s like in a lot of villages. These peasants run out of money, and the bets get a little strange. You know. I’ll bet my horse on this hand. That sort of thing.”

“Not so strange,” said Brano. “The same as betting your watch.”

“But what about your child?” Klara asked.

Occasionally, Brano had heard of this sort of thing during his years in the Militia office in the Capital, though it happened more often in the countryside: men betting the life of a daughter, a wife, a mother. It was a repulsive element of the old world that socialism had not yet wiped clean. But he pretended it was news. “Child?”

Klara went back to her plate, her face as red as the Comrade Lieutenant General’s, but not from drink.

“Some guy,” said Lucjan. “An idiot. He was drunk, and he bet his little girl’s life on a hand of cards. Can you believe it?”

“So what happened?”

Lucjan smiled. “He won! Thank God.”

The silence that followed felt long, and they each looked at him: first Lucjan, before facing his plate again, then Mother, who gave a fragile smile. Finally, Klara’s stoic gaze held him for a long time before returning to her food. It was a look Brano could not quite decipher, but it gave him a sudden, overwhelming feeling that he was far from home and among strangers.

After dinner they returned to the living room and worked slowly on the vodka, Mother filling the silences with gossip Brano had already heard the night before. His sister and her husband had probably heard it all as well, for they only grunted into their glasses as she chronicled the love affairs of the town.

Then, with enough liquor warming him, Brano said, “A while ago, I took a trip to Vienna.”

“Vienna?” said Mother. “I didn’t know you went there.”

“I did, for a little while. Work. A friend of mine was having a party. There was some food, but it was gone quickly, and everyone began drinking heavily. I ran into the woman he was dating-she read tarot cards for a living.”

Lucjan snorted. “Tarot cards?”

“She was very nice to me. She had been drinking quite a bit. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar and leading the room in song.”

“You sang? ” said Klara.

“No.” Brano set his glass on the table. “After a while, this woman asked me to dance.”

“Did you dance?” asked Mother, looking around. “Have you ever seen Brani dance?”

“Never,” said Klara.

“I did dance, but not at first,” said Brano. “She continued to stand very close, watching me. So I asked her where my friend was. She said she had told him to go to hell. She’d told him he was a bore and she never wanted to speak to him again.”

Lucjan leaned forward. “She told him that?”

“Well, if he was boring-” began Klara.

“There’s a difference between the truth and civility.”

Klara shrugged at Mother, who smiled back.

“It was none of my business,” said Brano. “But I tried to defend him to her. She would have none of it. Finally, she grabbed my arms and pulled me close to her and said, Brano Sev, I love you’ ”

“She didn’t,” said Mother.

Klara grinned. “This is fantastic!”

Brano shook his head. “I told her she was mistaken. We’d only met once before, and she didn’t know who I was at all. She couldn’t be in love with me. It was impossible.”

“Nuts, that one,” said Lucjan.

“We danced a little, and by then it was very late. Most everyone had left. I wanted to get out of there, but she was clutching on to me. So I told her I’d walk her home. She was drunk, and it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.”

Lucjan clucked his tongue. “I bet it did, you rat.”

Brano looked at him. “On the walk to her apartment she told me she had a vision of her future, living on a lake with an older man standing behind her, protecting her. It was fate, she said, and she said that man was me.”

“Was you,” echoed Mother. Klara winked at her.

“I got her to her front door, where she snatched my hat from my head and told me I’d have to come up and let her read my future if I wanted my hat.”

“Your future! ” Klara burst out laughing. “This is priceless!”

Brano didn’t smile. He looked from one face to the other.

“So?” said Lucjan. “Did you learn your future?”

He shook his head and lied again. “I took my hat from her and went home.”

“Sure you did,” said Lucjan.

“I assumed that by the next morning she’d be so embarrassed by what she’d done that nothing else would happen. But I was wrong. She was still convinced she was in love.”

“And you saw her again?” asked Klara.

“Never. I left the next day. But she got my address and started writing me letters.”

“With your future?” asked Mother; then, realizing she’d made a joke, she started to laugh.

“It was a very strange experience.”

“You still get them?” asked Lucjan. “The letters.”

“Sometimes, yes.”

Mother touched the bun of her hair. “Here I was trying to set you up with some nice girls, and you’re involved in an international romance!”

“There’s always a surprise with Brano,” said Klara. “He sits there, mute as a stone, then comes out with the strangest stories.”

“But I wonder sometimes,” he said, lifting his glass again, “do you think I was wrong to say that?”

“Say what?” asked Lucjan.

He focused on Klara. “To say she couldn’t be in love with me. Do you think I could have been wrong?”

“There’s all kinds,” said Klara.

Mother nodded. “You just can’t know, can you?”

Lucjan licked his lips. “How come that kind of thing never happens to me?”

Klara elbowed him in the ribs.

The others had left and Mother was asleep by the time Brano put on his coat at the front door, pulled his hat over his forehead, then went down the front path, through the gate, and into darkness.

Bobrka on a moonless night was a land of unpredictable pits and obstructions. He stumbled in a few potholes and ran into carts left on the side of the road. Despite all the koronas poured into the oil complex in the forest, no one had thought to equip the village roads with light poles. The center was barely visible by the muted light from some windows and by the spotlight illuminating the church. He stopped, looked around, and began walking east, toward the woods.

He’d never quite understood that night with Dijana, nor the letters she’d sent after he left. He’d even received one just before leaving the Capital for Bobrka. Brani, why this silence? What we have it is good. He remembered standing at her door, and her saying in her stilted Serbo-Croat version of his language, I want for to read your future. Though she spoke German well, she chose out of adoration to speak his language to him, which she butchered mercilessly. Brano Sev, I am in the love with you.

He emerged into an open field littered with blackened pump-jacks tipping their heads like chickens, then continued up a gravel road to the Emilia 4 pump, a high wooden tower built four decades before on the Canadian model and lit up like the church, though now it was used as a meeting room for officials in from the Capital. As a child, Brano had often climbed up inside it, alongside Marek, and across the roof of the low administrative building that stretched along the tree line. As he approached he heard what he’d heard the previous night: drunken howls from far off.

The door to Emilia 4 was unlocked, and when he closed it behind himself, the cold darkness was an unwavering black. He heard the labored breathing of unhealthy lungs close by. Brano lit a match and stared into the grinning, red-veined face of Pavel last. Jast’s hands were stuffed in his pockets, and he reeked of vodka. “Evening, Comrade Sev.” He stuck out a thick hand.

“What’s the name of your friend?”

“You know who I am, I know who you are. What’s the point?”

“Your friend’s name, Comrade Jast.”

The big man dropped his hand. “The glorious Archduke Ferdinand, Comrade Sev.”

“Thank you.” The match was burning his fingers, so he blew it out and slipped it in a pocket. “Let’s go outside.”

They walked shoulder to shoulder behind the administrative building, where the trees threatened to swallow them. Jast took out a cigarette, but Brano asked him not to light it. “Of course, of course,” muttered last.

“So what do you have for me?”

Jast sucked on the unlit cigarette. “Soroka’s been staying in his parents’ house-that’s the two-story one just past the church.”

“Cream colored?”

“Yes, yes. His wife and boy go out to take care of errands-shopping, that sort of thing-but Jan I almost never see. A couple times I visited the house-clandestinely, you realize, just looking through the windows-but all I ever saw was the Sorokas eating and listening to the radio.”

“Radio?”

“Nothing like that. Just a receiving set. If he’s sending, I wouldn’t know.”

“What do the villagers say?”

“Villagers.” He sniffed. “They’ll say anything if it’s entertaining enough. Wienczyslaw thinks he’s working for us, preparing to turn Bobrka into a New Town-tear down all the homes and build block towers. Armand has the paranoia to think he’s working for the Poles, to redraw the border and take the region back. Only the old folks believe his cover story.”

“The one about the woman, Dijana Frankovic.”

“Exactly.”

“And you?”

“I try not to think too much. He’s working for the West-I’ve been told enough by Yalta to know that. But what does the West care about a dump like Bobrka? Our oil deposits aren’t big enough to be important to anybody. All I can think is that he’s going to try to take his family back with him.”

“That was my assumption,” said Brano. “How do you suggest I make contact?”

Jast took the spit-damp cigarette from his lips and then replaced it. They had stopped and were facing one another. “He does go to church.”

“Every Sunday?”

“On the two Sundays he’s been here it’s been regular. It’s the one thing I’d depend on.”

They began walking back in silence, until Jast brightened and took something from his pocket.

“Here-look at this!” He handed over a ballpoint pen, and in the light bleeding around the buildings Brano saw on it the image of a shapely blonde in a red evening gown.

“Yes,” he said.

“Turn it over.”

Brano did so, and watched the evening gown slide down her body, revealing breasts, hips, and the dark spot between her legs.

“Pretty good, huh?”

“Very nice,” he said as he returned it.

“Got it from a friend who visited West Germany. The things they make there!”

As they rounded the corner of the administrative building, Brano noticed two men approaching the wooden tower.

“Damn,” whispered Jast. “The night watch is usually longer at the bar.” He turned back and waved for Brano to follow.

They entered the woods, where Jast soon found a barely discernible trail, cursing when he ran into low branches, his heavy feet snapping everything they touched. As they progressed, Brano explained the method of their future meetings. The cue would be an empty matchbook left under the bus stop bench. “We’ll meet in the graveyard at eleven that same evening. Does this suit you?”

“Pretty morbid, yes, but it suits me fine. Damn!” He flailed his arms against unseen branches, then fell. Brano crouched, reaching out a hand. He heard Jast’s voice. “What the hell?” And then, “Jesus Christ, what-” Then nothing.

Brano lit another match, which shook as his eyes focused. Pavel Jast also saw what he had tripped over, and leapt up, muttering, “ Oh fuck oh fuck.”

On the ground was a shirtless man, short and heavy, mouth gagged tight over a beard, his stomach and chest and arms covered by numerous tiny cuts. They had bled, tinting the white body pink. Brano touched the sticky, dead wrist, then the still-warm chest, and glanced at the well-tailored black pants and scuffed shoes. He dropped the match and lit another, while Jast jumped from foot to foot, babbling words Brano could no longer make out.

Before they split up at the edge of the woods, Jast told him how to get to Captain Rasko’s home. Brano returned to the dark village, which was no longer haunted by howls from the forest, continued past the church, and near the Militia station opened the wooden gate to a low one-bedroom. He knocked on the loose front door, then did it again. Something fell behind a window; a light came on. The lace curtain was pulled back slightly. Finally, Captain Rasko stood in the doorway, hands shoved in the pockets of a gray robe, his black hair sleep-pressed into an angle. “Comrade Sev,” he said, not bothering to hide his disappointment.

“Sorry to wake you, Comrade Captain. I’m afraid there’s been a murder. In the woods near the cooperative.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not.”

Rasko stepped back, and Brano entered. There were piles of clothes in the living room and a pungent smell from the kitchen. “Last murder we had was two years ago,” said Rasko.

“You’d better come look at it.”

“And that murder was before my time. I’ve only been Militia chief a year. I don’t even have a staff.”

Brano waited.

“I suppose I should get dressed.”

“I suppose you should.”

Despite the darkness, Brano was able to take him directly to the body. Rasko ran his flashlight beam up and down it. “Jakob.”

“You know him?”

“Of course. Jakob Bieniek. I know him as well as anyone else knows him.” He crouched, made a face, and touched the gag, turning the head aside. “After his wife, Janica, died-I guess that was five years ago-he became… well, strange.”

“How?”

Rasko used the flashlight to investigate the ground around the body. “He was a hermit, Comrade Sev. He dropped out of touch with everyone, which is a feat in Bobrka.”

“His job?”

“Delivered milk from the distribution point in Krosno. But even when he was driving, he wore these tailored suits. See those pants? And his shoes-always polished. He looked foolish.” Rasko shook his head. “What happened to him?”

“Looks like a razor blade, or a few of them, used many times.” Brano followed the flashlight beam with Rasko, walking around the body.

“A match.” Rasko crouched to pick it up.

“It’s mine.”

“Oh.” He paused. “So what were you doing out here?”

“Just walking. I couldn’t sleep.”

“So you came out here? ”

“Aren’t many trees in the Capital.”

Rasko stood still a moment, thinking. “No one really liked Jakob, but I can’t imagine anybody who’d feel this way about him.”

“Somebody did.”

Then they were quiet, staring at the now-cold body. Rasko took a length of wide red ribbon from his pocket and tied it to a tree. “Let’s go.”

At the militiaman’s house, Brano drank a glass of tap water while Rasko called the village doctor, who would get the body in the morning. Rasko told the doctor to watch for the red ribbon. Then he poured a tall vodka for himself and sat across from Brano. “Want to come with me tomorrow?”

“Where?”

“To Jakob’s house. See if we can turn up something.”

“If I won’t be in the way.”

“I’m alone here, Comrade Sev. Your presence can only help.”

Steinhauer, Olen

36 Yalta Boulevard