Liberation Movements

Gavra

They got out at the same sidewalk where Libarid Terzian stood when he waved good-bye to his family for the last time, six days before. Adrian carried his little bag, but Gavra carried nothing. He opened the same door for Adrian that Libarid held open for Adrian’s sister, and, like Zrinka, Adrian smiled.

Gavra paused before continuing to the TisAir desk. He scanned the departures lounge, trying to find familiar faces. Then he noticed the sloped gray-haired Ministry man smoking by the gift shop, but he was more interested in flirting with the young, bored girl who worked the shop than watching out for people trying to escape their country.

Gavra crossed the faux-marble floor to the desk while Adrian took a seat in the waiting area. Gavra bought two tickets for the nine thirty flight, and as he returned his face became very red as he finally understood what he was doing. But he didn’t say anything to Adrian about it. He just handed over a ticket and explained, “It would be best if we went through passport control separately.”

“That’s fine.”

Gavra went through first and waited on the other side of the glassed-in desk as Adrian handed over his passport. Gavra was breaking every known rule this evening, and he couldn’t explain why. Brano had always been right-he was young and sentimental. He wasn’t cut out for this work. Anyone who would throw away his career because of a man he’d known only a few days had no respect for his career. That was logical. What did he expect to gain from this? A lifetime of happiness with a man he hardly knew?

As Adrian joined him with a smile, Gavra knew that he could have taken care of this back at Adrian’s apartment. It would have been difficult; it would have haunted him for weeks-perhaps months-but at some unknown point in the future he would have woken to a clean conscience, settling into the comfort of knowing that what he had done was simply a part of duties. As some people grasp hold of religion, Gavra would learn to grasp hold of the ideals of the Ministry.

But now-now he’d killed any chance for that kind of faith.

So he continued without thinking. It was better that way. He waited silently with Adrian at the gate, then took a seat with him just over the wing. He closed his eyes as the plane ascended.

Finally, when they were over Romania, Gavra whispered, “What else did she tell you?”

Adrian yawned into the back of his hand. “Excuse me.” He covered Gavra’s hand with his own. “She told me about this, that you would take me to Istanbul. She said I should go, because if I stayed I would die.”

Gavra shook his head. “I just don’t understand any of this. How can someone know these things?”

Zrinka’s brother took a breath. “It’s hard to explain. She tried many times, when we were children, but it’s hard.” He paused. “You and I, we’ve long ago accepted that there are things we will never know. We’re like characters in a Tolstoy novel-we know things are happening to other people, but we don’t know what those things are, or why those people do what they do. Zrinka, though, she’s like the reader of our novel.”

“But you’re not telling me how.”

“Okay. Think of it like mathematics. Statistics. What’s the probability that if I say something to you, you’ll do something else?”

“I don’t know.”

“I would know if I knew all the things that had happened to you up to this point in your life. And I mean everything. Then I could say with precision what you’d do next.”

“With precision?”

“To go along with this idea, you have to rid yourself of one concept.”

“What?”

“Free will.”

Gavra began to feel a little dumb.

“Or better yet,” said Adrian, “go ahead and believe in it, but remember that even free will is predictable.”

“Which one is it?” said Gavra. “Does it exist or not?”

Adrian shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that Zrinka knew what I or our parents would do next. As she got older, she knew more.”

“But she didn’t know everything that had happened to them up to that point. She couldn’t.”

Adrian paused, as if this were a good point. “Well, take that idea and turn it around. You meet someone, see how he’s acting, what he looks like, how old he is, what kind of language he uses. Then you can work backward to find out what’s happened to him. Psychology does this in a rudimentary way, but so simply that all they can say are things like You had a trauma when you were a child. Well, who hasn’t?”

Gavra nodded.

“Put those together. If I can tell your whole past from who you are now, and then with that information predict what you’ll do next, can even influence what you do or feel or think next, then you have a picture of what my sister was capable of.”

Adrian waited, watching Gavra absorb this, then confused him further by pushing it to its limit.

“There’s more. If you’re very good at this, you’re able to understand people you’ve never even met. For someone you have met to act this way or that, he had to have been influenced by contact with this kind of person, because only one kind of person, or one combination of people, could have affected that person in this exact way. And you learn that person’s past, and future, just as if you had met him personally. And so it grows. Before long, there exists a vast web of people whose actions you can predict. That is, if you can keep it all straight in your head.”

Gavra whispered, “You’re talking about omniscience.”

“Something like that. But not omnipotence. Certainly not that.”

Gavra still wasn’t convinced, but he had spent enough time managing interrogations to know how to follow a subject’s line of reasoning, no matter how absurd it seemed.

“That,” said Adrian, “is why she was able to know that I would meet you. She knew Ludvik Mas, so she knew Brano Sev. And because she knew him, she also knew you.” He paused. “She knew what Brano Sev needed to know.”

“That Ludvik Mas knew about the hijacking. But why did he need to know that?”

“I don’t know. I just know it’s important for me, and for you, that he know.”

Gavra rubbed his eyes. This line of reasoning was logical but impossible to digest. “I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t have to know. I know. My sister, as I’ve said before, was a saint. She spent her life since the age of fifteen suffering in hospitals and being studied and then manipulated. All to protect me.”

“How was she manipulated?”

“They gained her cooperation by threatening my life. She told me that.”

Gavra peered over the headrests up the length of the plane. Stewardesses in blue caps were serving drinks to businessmen in first class. And here he was, listening to a story that was beyond his capacity to comprehend.