Liberation Movements

Katja

I’ve been three days with as many hours sleep, but only now do I feel it. Climbing out of the taxi, the hot sun makes me momentarily blind, and the airport is suddenly replaced by a field of dizzying sunspots. When I reach back to the taxi for support, it’s already gone, and I stumble into a cloud of hot exhaust.

I’m trying to focus through the fatigue, clutching my small leather purse and counting its contents in my head: a new external passport, some money, and a roll of audiotape.

At the TisAir desk I wait behind a young couple who squeeze each other’s hands as they wait for the clerk to stamp their tickets. It seems to take a long time, but I’m not sure. Because time has become strange. Until only a week ago-yes, Wednesday, 23 April-I was faced with the regular minutiae: the sour husband, the paperwork-clogged desk in the militia office, the condescension from my workmates. A frustrating life, being the only woman working homicide, but a simple one to understand.

Now I’m at the counter, explaining to the pert blonde with a blue TisAir cap that I would like to go to Istanbul on the seven o’clock flight.

She scans a list on a clipboard. “Will you be bringing luggage?”

“Just me.”

She wields a pen. “And you are?”

“Katja Drdova.” I hand over my crisp passport as evidence.

The ticket costs more koronas than I expect, but I count out the money without argument, nodding when she explains that I’ll have to also purchase a visa in the Istanbul airport. My skin is beginning to tingle. The exhaustion affects my bones, or it feels that way, as if dirt has wedged its way into my joints. And my senses are becoming acute-an ill woman behind me breathes with the intensity of a tractor engine.

Ticket in hand, I cross the bright tile floor to a small corridor past the pay phones to the bathrooms. I splash water on my face and look in the mirror, prodding the corners of my eyes with a fingertip.

Old.

But I’m only twenty-four.

Given the heavy lids and shallow creases across my brow, it’s an understandable mistake.

I consider calling Aron from one of those pay phones. He’ll return to an empty house tonight, and, though it won’t be so strange, after a while he’ll worry. He doesn’t deserve that. But what could I tell him? That I’m going to Turkey unexpectedly? That’s not something people just do. People just don’t do this.

My hands tremble when I show my ticket to the uniformed border guard, but he doesn’t seem to notice. At the gate, I ask a fat man with a little red star on his lapel for a cigarette. He smiles glassily as he lights it for me; then I feel him following me with his eyes as I find a seat by the window and smoke, staring at the planes taxiing on the tarmac.

This, I recall, is where Libarid was. Maybe this exact spot.

When the news came a week ago, I was on the telephone with Aron, who had called from the factory to continue our previous night’s argument about having children-he’s never been able to understand my refusal. Chief Brod opened his office door and leaned against the frame. In my ear, Aron was saying, “I’ve been patient with you; you know this. You can’t say I haven’t been patient.”

Chief Brod is a simple man who wears his emotions on his sleeve, and when he stood in his doorway with his gray-threaded blond hair parted perfectly, like a schoolboy’s, in his face I knew this was something big; it was something tragic.

“Let me call you back,” I told Aron.

“This is original, cutting me off in the middle of-”

But I’d hung up, and Imre and I followed Emil into his office.

“It’s Libarid,” our chief said.

“He’s in Istanbul,” I said. “Right?”

“Bulgaria.”

I grinned- grinned. “What’s he doing there?”

“Yeah,” said Imre. “He got a girlfriend there?”

Emil cleared his throat. “Brano called from Istanbul.”

Both Imre and I made faces at that name.

“Libarid’s dead,” Emil told us, then filled in the details-Armenian terrorists, an explosion-and I found myself repeating Armenia, Armenians in my head but making no sense of those words.

Aron and I had dined with Libarid and his family now and then. He was a good man-a poor investigator but a decent person-and an Armenian. His wife, Zara, smiled a lot; she seemed content in a way I used to think was a little stupid. But she served wonderful food, delicious pieces of lamb with yogurt they called kalajosh and lahmajoon, a lamb-topped pizza. When we left Aron would always mention how contented Libarid seemed with his wife and child. I think he was jealous.

And then Libarid was dead, part of a fireball in the Bulgarian sky.

That was only a week ago. Now I’m joining the other passengers in a crowd around the dark stewardess who does her best to smile as she tries to force everyone into a straight line. It’s plainly impossible, so she gives up and takes ticket stubs from whoever offers first and sends us out the door, across the hot tarmac to the plane. The fat man with the red star is a few people ahead, and as we step out under the bright, bewildering sun I watch him put on sunglasses. His head, tilted to the side, eyes covered, looks vaguely mysterious.

That’s when I wish I could have brought my gun.