The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Grandfather opened the door before Emils hand could touch the knob. He looked confused. “A call,” he said feebly. “Yes.”

“There was a call?”

Emil heard banging sounds from inside. Grandfather s confusion melted into shame. “How was I to know?”

In the bedroom, Lena threw clothes into her bag. She stopped only to shout: “Your grandfather has been advertising me!”

He was shuffling around the living room, shrugging helplessly. “How was I to know?” He stopped and said to Emil, “The man asked, Is Lena Crowder staying with you? What was I to say?”

“You lie” barked Lena, slamming her valise shut.

Emil held up his hands as though his command for calm might be heeded. Lena ripped up the bedsheets angrily, searching for something. Grandmother appeared from her bedroom with a fistful of scarves in dusty, muted colors. She presented them to Lena. “Will these do?”

Lena’s voice dropped an octave. “You’ve been very kind, Mrs. Brod.”

“Comrade Brod to you,” warned Grandfather.

“You wouldn’t know a comrade if he shoved Das Kapital-”

“I was in Moscow!”

“Now,” said Emil as he put his arms around his grandparents’ shoulders and led them into their bedroom. Once inside, they looked at him questioningly. “Wait here,” he said, and closed the door.

He squatted to pick up the cane, then returned to his bedroom. Lena stood up from the bed, arms crossed. She was in a ladies’ suit, narrow at the waist, wide mustard lapels. He lowered himself into a rickety chair, grunting. The beer had ruined his stomach.

“I’m leaving, Inspector Brod. You won’t stop me.”

“I don’t want to stop you,” he said. “Do you have a cigarette?”

She took out her pack, but didn’t have matches. While she went to the kitchen to find some, he wondered whom he knew in the city that she could stay with; Leonek was a choice anyone would figure out. But he knew very few people-solitude had never before been a problem. Those few he could dredge up-Filia, perhaps, and her soldier husband-he didn’t know if he could trust.

Lena squatted beside his knees, lit a cigarette and passed it to him. He took a drag and looked at the box in her hand: American. “We’re both leaving town.”

She picked tobacco off her tongue and waited for more.

“Do you have money?”

She nodded.

“A lot?”

She shrugged, then nodded again.

“No one can know where we’re going, all right?”

“No one except me?”

“Not yet,” he said, and took another drag. “I won’t tell my family, and I won’t tell you. Not until we’re on our way.”

She seemed all right not knowing. She settled on the corner of his bed and finished her cigarette without speaking. She looked at the narrow window and the short shelf of books he’d brought with him when everything with Filia had ended. And then she looked at him, her delicate features betraying nothing, yet hiding nothing. He wondered how she could do that.

Grandfather didn’t like the sound of it. “But where?” Emil told him that what he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. Grandmother raised a fat hand in farewell. When Emil looked back at them standing in the doorway, Grandfather, in his shame, looked feeble and old and alone.

By eleven-thirty, they arrived at the hospital. He asked her for some money. She reached into her handbag, then looked at him. “What for?”

“Irma.”

She handed over too much. He counted off enough and gave the rest back. Inside, he found the nurse in charge of Irma’s floor. She was a big woman, with a white coat that was stained with old soup. “How long is Irma…” He realized he didn’t know her last name. “A woman,” he tried again, and held a hand at shoulder height. “About this tall. Southerner. Dark hair. Bruised face?”

The nurse let the silence hang between them a moment. “Bobia. Irma Bobia.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Bobia. How much longer are you keeping her?”

She looked through files for a while, and Emil leaned against the counter, watching invalids maneuver slowly through the corridors. He thought of the Uzbek and his bodies a few floors below this one.

“Tomorrow,” she said flatly, and looked back at him.

It was Tuesday. “Can she stay until the end of the week?”

“This is not a hotel.”

The bills were on the counter now, visible under his hand. She noticed. “But it’s a difficult situation,” he said. “She can’t go home now. Not yet.”

The koronas were hypnotizing her. “Not yet,” she mumbled, then: “Friday?”

“Friday would be good.” He slid his hand forward until the money dropped over the edge of the counter and onto her desk.

He went by the room. Yesterday’s bribe had bought a tiny private room with an old, flat bed and a deflated pillow. Irma was asleep. Her blackened, puffy face no longer looked like her. The nose was fatter, the cheeks lumpy, and a few stitches sutured together the flesh around one eye.

Lena was scared and impatient. She asked how Irma was doing.

“She was asleep.”

“Then let me see her.”

He started the car and drove out of the Unity Medical Complex lot. “There’s no need to involve her anymore.”

Lena remained silent until the train station appeared in front of them. Then:”Well?”

He parked near a row of horses with knotted legs and chests.

“Well?”

“Wait,” he said.

The station was a dark, stone monstrosity that sucked up the morning light. Eyes followed Lena-soldiers and beggars. They heard her heels against the cobblestones. Emil shook off a beggar at the door who clutched at his jacket. Peering from above, the sculpted stone hawk sat on a ledge, at rest, wings tight to its sides. Then they were inside the cool, airy station, swallowed by its shadows.

They sat in the first-class waiting area, drinking something that claimed to be coffee. It was terrible stuff, the black, ground- acorn muck that had come with wartime and still lingered in public places.

“How long?”

“What?” He had leaned as far back as possible on the wooden bench to reduce the strain on his back.

“When does the train leave?”

The station clock said twelve-thirty. “Half an hour.”

“We’re going to Cluj? Romania?”

She had memorized the departures schedule, he realized. “Not the whole way.”

She sank into quiet speculation, marking up the map in her head. Through the windows he watched young Russian soldiers toss a wooden ball back and forth on the platform. There were five of them in their ragged uniforms, laughing whenever someone dropped the ball.

“I feel sorry for them,” said Lena.

He watched them play a little more. “You should feel sorry for the rest of us.”

They gave themselves a little cheer, raising hands over their heads.

She looked for a cigarette. There were a few others in the waiting room-a wealthy couple looked at them from the far gray wall, and a boy slept on a chair. She lit up and whispered, “How old do you think those soldiers are?”

“Seventeen, eighteen,” he said.

“And they’re peasants. You can tell by the way they walk and how they wear their uniforms. You think they want to be here?”

They were kicking the ball now, as if it were a soccer ball. Content enough, he thought.

“They want to be at home,” she said. “They want their mamas and their little farm girlfriends. They want their Mother Russia. They go crazy here.”

Emil straightened and looked at her gazing at the soldiers. Her face fell sadly into softer features. Her cheeks, her lips, her eyes.

The platform was crowded with farmers who had sold their vegetables early and had already begun drinking. They smelled like rotted meat and sweat. They held milk bottles filled with homemade brandies that they moved aside when Lena marched through them. Emil carried her bag with general success, and helped her up the steps. In the train corridor, men in earth-toned jackets clogged the small space with their smoke, and the least- full compartment they found contained a mother and her boy, curled together against the window, snoring. Emil put their bags in the overhead netting and sat beside the door s curtain. He watched her adjust her stockings beneath her skirt, then take a small mirror out of her bag and stare into it.

The conductor whistled down the platform. They felt the brakes releasing, the pull and counterpull, then the grind of the train moving southward.

“Ruscova,” he said to her.

“What:?”

He tried to keep his voice quiet, but it was almost drowned by the laboring engines and laughter from the corridor. “It s near the Romanian border.”

She snapped her mirror shut. “It’s your home village, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “But I grew up in the Capital.”

She looked over the sleepers’ heads at the city thinning into farmland. “Why does everyone think their home village is the best place in the world? I’d never force anyone to go to Stryy. That’s unmitigated torture.”

She was looking at him again, and he didn’t know what to answer.

“What’s this Ruscova like?”

He told her the details that came to him.

When she repeated his words, her voice was full of mockery: “Peasants and beautiful hills and big wooden gates.” She shook her head. “You haven’t been there in a while, have you?”

“Four years.”

“And you’re…twenty-five?”

“Two,” he said. “Twenty-two.”

Her mouth slid down her face, and she turned the purse over in her lap, then opened it and closed it. She closed her eyes. She opened them.

“It’s quiet and safe,” he said quickly, hopefully. “You can stay until I’ve figured this out.”

“Until you figure it out?” She was herself again. “ That’s reassuring.” She sighed. “Twenty-two?”

When the conductor arrived, he bought tickets for them both. The mother and her child were still asleep, but the conductor shook them awake. He looked over their tickets a moment, considered something, then told them to go back to second class.

She dozed a while, and he, after finding a position that did not hurt too much, rested his eyes. The hills dimmed as the low sun elongated their shadows, and after they had stopped in and left Berehove, Lena opened her eyes and smiled sleepily. “Is all this really about little Janos?”

“You tell me.” He opened his own eyes.

She wiped her face hard enough to stretch the lids over her skull sockets. “Nothing to tell, my Comrade Inspector. I swear.” A little yawn escaped her. “Janos leaves me, then he comes back. Then he’s dead. Take that as a warning.” She winked.

Emil smiled. “What did he do for money? Other than song- writing.”

“I don’t know what he did for money.” She fell to picking at the hem of her skirt.

“You never asked?”

“You’ve never been in a failed marriage.” There was a trace of scorn in her voice. “Have you.”

The early, fall dusk had begun without them noticing. They were nearing the outskirts of Vynohradiv, where light poles along the tracks flashed into the compartment. Her face was descending into thought like a woman in the moving pictures: the soft pulse of frames and light.

“He went to Berlin, you said. Six months ago?”

She nodded, pulsing. “Yes. Back in February.”

“Why Berlin?”

She reached her arms over her head to stretch them out, then covered a yawn with the back of her hand. “He’d been there before, once a year at least. He told me he was visiting a friend. But I don t know for sure.” She looked at his pale, drawn expression. “What? Do you know?”

He knew nothing, but looking at her made him feel like he was seventeen again, looking at that flickering window to the world.

“Stryy was different than I remembered,” she told him after a while.

“How so?”

She shrugged. “The usual. I hadn’t been there in years, and it was so small. Nothing going on. Not a decent coffee in the whole town.”

“What did you do with your father?” asked Emil.

She looked at him before answering. “The family crypt. My great-grandfather saw one on a trip to Paris, and decided the Hanics needed one too. A small marble house with panels for each of us.” She wedged her bag between her cheek and the rattling window, which quieted it. “Maybe someday you’ll have to take me to Stryy, Inspector.”

“Not for a long time,” he whispered.

Her eyes were closed. She said, “You’re the only one I’ve got left, Emil Brod. You took a bullet for me. You’re all I’ve got.”

He almost tried to explain that the bullet hadn’t been for her, it had been the result of his own stubborn stupidity, but said nothing.

Men in the corridor made loud jokes about stupid policemen and hacked on their laughter. Gray curtains of smoke obscured their red faces, and he saw they were drunk farmers who had snuck up from second class.

Lena was asleep again, her cheek reflected on the window. The city of Hust came and went, and the black plains rose into the southern foothills of the Carpathians. But he could not sleep. It wasn’t just the pain. He reached in his pocket for his watch, but it wasn’t there. After a few tries he realized it had been stolen. A pickpocket. Somewhere back in the Capital.