The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They reached Sighet, the provincial capital, after eight. The seven hours in that train had about killed him. Outside the station he moved back and forth and twisted himself gingerly, pressing one hand to the aching small of his back, the other to his stitched stomach.

It was said in the Academy that the last thing an inspector should do is admit frailty to a victim. It would undermine the victim s faith in the organs of administrative justice, and lead to the demise of faith in the administrative systems in general. In a people’s democracy, faith was the only power that kept the order from collapsing into anarchy. The professor who said all this had spoken with a dense Russian accent, mauling words like faith and collapse. The students had all thought it funny; and it was, for a while.

Lena had no faith in the organs of administrative justice-he didn’t know where her faith lay-so there was nothing to hide. She watched him bend and twist, and held her bag close to herself. After a few minutes she asked a farmer for a ride into the center of town, and helped Emil into the cart without comment.

They ate omelets in a hotel cafe, and while she was in the bathroom he approached a table of three farmers who dropped their eyes to their plum brandies and fell quiet. But when he asked about getting to Ruscova, they caught the roll of his slightly affected local accent and smiled broadly. When one suggested a particular friend to drive them, another cut him off, claiming the man was a drunk. He pointed to the window and said to take the train, but the third reminded him that no trains went to Ruscova. The first finally admitted he didn’t know Ruscova. “It’s small,” said Emil. The third told the first that he was an idiot, because Bogdan lived in Ruscova. The second said that a bus went to Viseu de Sus and stopped at the end of the long dirt road that led to Ruscova.

“But the lady’s coming?” asked the first one, and shook his head. “Can’t ask her to walk all the way down that road.”

They nodded in solemn agreement.

“The bus has left, anyway,” said the second.

“Talk to Bogdan,” said the third, leaning into his cigarette and watching as Lena returned with her handbag folded beneath her arm. They were all watching. Lena settled at her table with smooth self-confidence, not even looking for him. White-skinned. Immaculate.

Bogdans cart, tied to a massive brown mare with red tassels hanging by her ears, was parked outside a Hungarian bar, across from the park. He was covering a floor of potatoes with burlap. His thin face peered at Emil from under his wide, black hat, but relaxed as they talked. Bogdan remembered the name Brod only vaguely, and Emil admitted they seldom visited Ruscova these days.

A little way into the journey, Bogdan began talking politics and did not stop until they had reached the village. He said he could remember when this was Hungary, and, briefly, Romania. He said he didn’t know who this General Secretary Mihai was, but he didn’t trust anyone who was known only by his first name. “It’s impolite, isn’t it?” In the thirties he was for the king because no one else said anything that made so much sense, but when the king got them into the war, he was no longer sure. He’d heard all the rumors of the king’s mistress, the catty Jewess who dragged him off to Paris and London for their lovemaking, but found it all hard to believe. “I can read well enough,” he said. “But how can you believe anything in a paper that uses exclamation points?” Emil admitted he didn’t know. Bogdan had a blemish like a dark hole on his cheek. He wiped it with an index finger as he tossed the reins with the other hand. He said the Germans weren’t so bad to them, not to the farmers, not even when they used the road to get to Stalingrad. “They left us alone. Why would they bother with Ruscova?” But once the Russians were on their border the Germans became desperate. “I remember a young man on a motorcycle. Blond hair, looked very much like one of them. He drove up and down the main street shooting his pistol. A little thing.” A Walther, Emil suggested, and Bogdan nodded. “It was muddy, and his tires became stuck. Do you remember this?”

Emil shook his head, but it was a lie; he remembered that hot day, the shouts and gunshots as he hovered behind a fence, watching it all happen.

“Well, the boy had shot old Harnass and Marta Ieronim. Marta died soon after. The boy had gone off his head. You weren’t around then?”

Emil said he didn’t remember this as his stomach shook painfully. Behind him, Lena was trying to sleep on a mattress of potatoes.

“Well, he finally couldn’t get his motorcycle moving, and by then he’d run out of bullets. He shouted at us. He said we were stupid Slavs and we were going to eat ourselves alive.” Bogdan shook his head, smiling into the night. “Imagine that! He had quite a mouth on him.” He snapped the reins and tsfced the horse into a trot. “He threw his gun at us, then rocks. That was a mistake. Some of our boys threw rocks back at him, then the rest of us started into it. Tsk-tsk.” He looked back at Emil, as if he were going to ask a question, then shook his head. “When the German boy realized what was happening, he ran out of the village. It was the middle of the day, and he couldn’t hide from us. There aren’t too many trees, you know.” Emil did. “We surrounded him on a small hill that was thick with big rocks, the size of your fist. I remember his mouth was bloody, and he shouted at us. More of the same. That he wasn’t afraid, that we would eat ourselves. Big man. He had a lovely uniform that got all dusty and dirty. Then we threw our rocks.” His finger had been back at his mole for a while now, stroking. “I’d never seen a man die like that before. I’d heard about it from the priest, they killed people like that in the Bible. The body,” he said, “it falls apart under all that. And the boy, he screamed for a while, a long while, and then he didn’t.” Bogdan paused, clucking his tongue at the horse. “It’s a terrible way; I don’t know why anyone would want to kill like that. Tsk- tsk. It takes such a long time.”

Emil looked off into the night. The breeze off the plains was cool.

He had been there, and he hadn’t been there. Through the slats in the fence, he had seen the boy on his motorcycle, skidding around, shouting, shooting. Then running out of gas. He threw his empty Walther at them, some rocks, then sprinted off. The whole town followed, but Emil lingered. He took the pistol from the dust and pocketed it. His grandparents were visiting another village, and, alone, plans formed in his head. Then he heard it, the German shrieking.

“Then the Russians came in,” Bogdan said after a while, muttering bitterly. “And this Mihai wanted to collectivize us.” But they were already on the outskirts of Ruscova.

He left them at the door of the village’s one bar-really the extra, candlelit room of a village widow-and Emil forced him to take some koronas for his trouble. It was a long fight, but Emil finally won. Lena hovered in the background, looking uncomfortably at the small wooden houses surrounded by weathered fences and the few villagers passing with burlap sacks and pails.

Emil didn’t know the widow who served them tea. She stood near the wall with crossed arms in the flickering light, and stared.

So did two small, sturdy men nursing brandies at another table. Lena sipped her tea. She was plainly uncomfortable.

“Ma’am,” Emil said loudly. Everyone looked up. “Do you know Irina Kula? I’m looking for her.”

The widow frowned deeply. “Of course I know Irina. Who are you?”

“From the Capital,” said the farmer with the mustache.

“I’m Emil Brod.”

The second, smooth-faced farmer stood up, and Emil thought his face was familiar. “Valentin Brod’s son!”

The others looked at the grinning farmer, then back at Emil. The widow began to laugh.

Irina Kula’s two-room house was as near as everything in Ruscova-a few houses down, then back through someone’s garden-and Irina glowed when she saw Emil. She pulled them both inside with her hands on their backs and called for her friend Greta, who was waiting in the kitchen. They were two fat, aproned women with sunburnt smiles. Their short hair had gone frizzy and useless years ago. Irina served plates of baked apples, one after the other.

“Tell me,” she said, watching them eat. “Your grandmother- how is she?”

“She works now, in a factory. Textiles.” “Shirts?” asked Greta.

“Slacks and jackets.”

“Factory pants,” Greta muttered disapprovingly. “And that red husband of hers?”

“Still red.”

He told them about his travels in the north, the cold Arctic, the cold Finns, and admitted to the massive beauty of Helsinki. Lena, he noticed, listened closely to all of it.

“But you came back,” Irina said, smiling.

“Where would I go?”

Greta slid a soft mound of apple from her wrinkled fingers into her mouth. “You came back and married.” She smiled at Lena as she chewed, and, after a moment, Lena smiled back.

Emil avoided as many details as possible, only enough to make them understand the severity and secrecy of his request for a room. “Just a few days. For her safety.”

Irina glowed. “She’ll live here forever if she likes-such a beautiful girl! Don’t you think?”

“Indeed,” said. Greta, nodding.

Irina gave a wide smile that was short on teeth. “She can be my daughter.”

“I thought I was your daughter,” said Greta haughtily, and both women laughed.

After a late dinner of pork-stuffed cabbage, Emil smoked on the front porch, watching two shadowy horse-forms grazing in a black field across the road. They moved in increments, holding their bowed heads to the crabgrass, unaware. There were other small homes farther along, some with high fences blocking them from sight. Irinas home and a few others had no fences, and he could see straight through to the low beginnings of the Carpathians.

The door groaned, and Lena squatted beside him. She blinked, adjusting to the darkness. “You’ve got a nice little town.”

“Not mine,” he said. “Not much, either.” He pointed. “Some houses, fences and mountains, like I told you. The occasional horse.” He wondered how long she’d be able to take living in the sticks without her scotches and American cigarettes, in a hard bed, surrounded by the clumsy handcrafts of the peasantry. “Is Irina still up?”

“She’s listening to the radio,” whispered Lena, and Emil realized they had both been whispering all along.

As if on cue, tinny voices drifted through the window, submerged in hisses, then rose again like a swimmer struggling in the middle of an ocean.

“Only one station, she told me. And only sometimes.”

Emil pressed his palms against his knees. He reached for his cane. “A walk?”

They made it to the road without speaking, then crossed into the field where the horses cantered nervously away. Lena twisted long grass into a knot. “When I was in Stryy again, I was reminded what it means to be alone. It’s not good.”

Emil knew, and said as much.

“It’s hard to find someone,” she said. “To trust, I mean. It’s rare.”

He didn’t know how to answer that. The breeze was chilling him, but he hardly noticed.

She looked at the mountains, then back at the village. There were no lights. “How long are you going to be gone?”

“A week. If I take longer, I’ll send someone to get you.”

“You’re going to Berlin?”

He squatted, trying to get rid of the ache in his stomach that had pestered him since the train. Lena Crowder was no fool.

“You’ll fly?”

“I’ve never been on a plane,” he admitted. “I’m terrified.”

“You shouldn’t go. You could get killed.”

He wondered, amid her innuendoes and his own mounting confusion, if she understood how much danger she was in. Two old women could do nothing to protect her.

When she walked, her skirt moved with the breeze. “I’ll write you a check. You can’t afford the trip.”

“I’ll find a way.”

He heard her exhale a soft, weary laugh in the darkness, but couldn’t see her smile. “Not the People’s Militia. They won’t pay a single korona.” She was a little ahead of him in the grass, standing with her legs apart. She was so quiet he could hardly hear her, even this close. “You’re not sure about any of this, are you?”

He squatted again as the pain shot through him, and when he looked up she was right there, standing over him, shaking. The airy smell of her perspiration filled him. From the sound of her breaths, he knew she was crying. He stood up quickly, unsure, and held her shoulders. He slid his small, flat hand across her back and felt her ribs shaking against his chest. His cheeks were wet from her tears, and her short, hot gasps warmed them. His cane slipped from his grasp, and now both hands were on her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

She kissed him first, lightly on the neck, and when he kissed her salty lips it felt as if they had done this all their lives. There was no Janos Crowder, no People s Militia, no one. His legs gave out, and she fell with him into the grass. It had been such a long day.