The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER TWO

The walk home should have taken twenty minutes, but he stumbled for over an hour along the dusty, cobbled side streets toward the low-lying sun. Old women with clothes in their hands looked down from balconies, and children fell silent when he passed. The occasional Russian soldier, standing with a pretty local girl in a doorway, was too preoccupied to notice him, but the stray dogs, strewn sleeping on the sidewalks, opened lazy eyes. Veterans with half or missing limbs, some in their frayed, dirty uniforms, tried to sell him rerolled cigarettes. His no sounded like a whisper. The pain throbbed through his intestines. When farmers began offering mangled fruits for his inspection, he almost shouted at them. A few policemen in their fresh uniforms watched him crawl past, and he knew, through his blurred vision and muted hearing, that they were all laughing at him. Even the dogs.

The Capital was a shithole. Bullets had scarred the walls along these streets, and most bomb-collapsed roofs had still not been repaired. With all the Russian soldiers, you’d never know that the war had been over for three years-and that their little nation had been on the winning side.

He hadn’t been around to hear the air-raid sirens and see the atmosphere filled with stone dust; it was enough to return afterward to find the houses along the Tisa had been cross-sectioned by mortars. Their open floors were a dream for any spy. After the war, upon his return from Finland, he had stood in the middle of the street and watched them cook in these homes, then go to bed like real families in real homes, and when they pulled up the covers he had wanted to run back to Helsinki. He’d seen too many great cities to be impressed by this ignorant, provincial village that just happened to have reached the dimensions of a city.

Heavy lead balls ground between his legs as the street narrowed and rose into the Fifth District, where the ornate Habsburg homes had somehow escaped German and Soviet artillery. Wrought-iron windows and balcony railings appeared; tinted glass still survived. They were once valuable because of their opulence, then because they were still in one piece. The aristocrats had fled long ago, their homes now stuffed with poor families- proles every one-who could prove their loyalties with prewar red cards.

They called us back to help the Liberation, his grandfather liked to boast, but when Emil’s grandparents returned to the Capital after the war, waving a faded, creased Party card, the Liberation was long over.

Emil stepped over transients sleeping in the entryway, two black-shawled old women from some other corner of the Empire. They had appeared in the spring-a little younger then, more talkative-looking for two sons they had obviously still not found. They slept on the steps during the day to avoid the apartment supervisor, and the effects of this insufficient bedding showed on their discolored faces. He tried to avoid waking their black, lumpy forms.

By the time he reached the top landing and made it through the heavy door with brod written in chalk, his testicles had settled into a low, dull throb. Grandfather lay sleeping near the open balcony door, beside a high cabinet filled with dusty books. His pale lips moved soundlessly in the white tufts where wool leaked from the sofa cushions. He was thin these days, sustained by cabbage and potatoes. His pallor was distinctly unhealthy. He blinked rapidly when Emil latched the door. “Boy?” he asked hoarsely, for a moment not seeing far enough. “Boy, you’re home!” He struggled up and wiped his face with thick, arthritic fingers.

Emil settled beside him, spreading his knees to give himself room.

“And?” said Grandfather, reverting to the shorthand of his excitement. “And?”

Emil shrugged.

“Come on, then.”

“Nothing,” said Emil, leaning back. The dim, airless room brought on a fresh sweat. “A desk. I sat at a desk for eight, nine hours.”

“Nothing?” His voice was vaguely disbelieving.

Except the chair, the cardboard sign and the groin. But he couldn’t go into it yet. He wasn’t up for the old man’s lectures.

“Nothing, Opa.”

Grandfather placed a cold, knobby hand on his grandson’s cheek. Smiling, he said, “Young. Needing something-what? — to dor

“Not so young.”

“What? Twenty?”

“Twenty-two.”

“A child.”

Emil sighed. “Hardly.”

Grandfather raised one hand while the other reached discreetly beneath a worn cushion. He produced a brown cardboard box the size of his palm. “Go on.”

Inside was a scuffed silver watch on a chain, ticking softly. It took an instant-a brief suspension of memory-then he knew his father’s watch. The one the late Lieutenant Valentin Brod would swing impatiently when they lived in the Third District, waiting for his son to return home for dinner. The one he left behind for safekeeping when he marched westward. Emil felt the ticking pulse in his closed hand.

“You like?”

Emil smiled.

“From a hero to a hero,” said Grandfather, raising the last syllable in preparation for one of the monologues that were, by now, melancholic compulsions. “Even in great times like this,” he said, “we have heroes taking care of the everyday. You understand?”

But before Emil could answer, the front door opened, revealing his squat, round grandmother. She shook drops off a hand, gripping a wet-bottomed paper sack with the other. Her white hair was twisted up like a flame.

“Cabbage in town,” she hummed melodically, and shut the door with a wide hip. “Stewed for my policeman? Inspector Emil?”

His smile became weary. “Let s not make a production.”

“Who’s making productions? Cabbage for a good price, a bottle of extremely cheap brandy. Some would say I’m out to kill you.”

She ran the groceries into the kitchen and emerged again, wiping her hands on a threadbare towel. When she noticed the watch in Emil’s hand, her shoulders sank.

“Avram Brod. You were supposed to wait.”

Grandfather shrugged theatrically and patted Emil on the back as his wife’s expression settled into a whitewashed, momentary fury.

Dinner repaired him in a way he hadn’t thought possible, and when they prodded for details, he lied with remarkable vigor. He said they were playful children, those homicide inspectors. They joked and threw paper balls and shared cigarettes. He said they all had nicknames-fun, childish names like Train Wreck and Mouse.

“What’s yours?” asked Grandmother.

“They’re thinking one up.”

“Even in great times like this,” Grandfather began again, grinning, then took a quick shot of plum brandy. He blew the heat out of himself. “Even now we’re young. It’s wonderful to be out of the provinces.”

Grandmother’s face shifted again. Mention of their return, after the war, from provincial Ruscova back to the Capital always brought on her mute severity.

“We’re no farmers,” Grandfather reiterated as she disappeared into the kitchen. He smiled at Emil and took a cigarette out of his vest pocket.

As if she could see through walls, Grandmother’s voice: “Don’t stink up my house!”

He palmed the cigarette and nodded toward the balcony. “Come on.”

Lime paint blistered off the gangly chairs, which, at their angle, looked down on Heroes’ Square. This was why, according to Grandfather, the Brods had it as their sacred duty to covet this apartment: the view. In the center, a naked bronze boy stood atop a dry fountain, holding garlands and kissing in the direction of the clouds. The fountain hadn’t worked since 1918, when a premature Bolshevik bomb ruptured its underground pipes; Grandfather claimed to have known the young man who died placing it. But rather than foment revolution, the bomb had only made the stone boy’s kiss eternally dry. Other pipes led to a line of six spigots on the mottled wall of a state bread store, and at any moment of the day, six wide-hipped, kerchiefed women could be found chattering and filling pails and bottles. Grandfather liked to watch this prized view at dusk, lascivious eyes leaping from rump to rump as he smoked. He puffed dramatically, his thin lips spilling smoke over his chin and nose. New electric lights illuminated six draped behinds. He passed the damp, poorly rolled cigarette to Emil, who took a quick drag and handed it back.

“There are numerous heroes. Kinds of heroes,” said Grandfather. “Your father, my Valentin. A reluctant hero for sure. Then there are eager heroes. Like Smerdyakov. Correct?”

“I suppose,” said Emil. His father, who had loved his family and the Church more than war, had waited until the king’s soldiers knocked at the door, demanding he defend his country against the Nazi blitzkriegs. Grandfather had never quite forgiven this ambivalence in the fight against fascism. A stark contrast to the war hero known as Smerdyakov, or the Butcher, whose eagerness had outstretched even the Red Army’s. The legend-it could hardly be called anything else-was that he joined the Soviet soldiers when they liberated the Capital, a stranger stepping into history. He went with them into Czechoslovakia, and near Prague rushed ahead to Berlin on his own, with only a pistol. When the Red Army finally caught up with him, he brought the soldiers to the room on the second floor of a crumbling apartment building, where he had kept his tally. Twenty-three dead German soldiers, in a pile. Killed in a mad, single-handed enthusiasm.

The Brods’ fighting spirit was more diluted with each generation. Grandfather, the tiger who ran to Moscow to aid the Bolsheviks in their liberation of mankind. Father, the moral soldier. Emil, who had not seen a day of war, only its aftermath. He had killed no one, at least not during war.

“Your father was split,” said Grandfather, nodding into his chest. “He had loyalties everywhere. The Church, the king, the land. He was muddled. It was sad to see.”

“He was sensible enough.”

Grandfather frowned in the shadows and was briefly lit by a streetlight that flashed before hissing out. The women’s mutter- ings came to them on a warm breeze. “You know the last time I sat before the iconostasis and listened to those priests?”

Emil knew, but knowing did no good. He waited for the inevitable, watching two women step past a broken bicycle as they exited the square. Their places were filled by two newcomers and a mangy, spotted dog.

He prepared himself for the anger.

“October,” said Grandfather. “Nineteen-seventeen. Your father? The day he died, no doubt.” He scratched the back of his hand to tame the arthritis. “No doubt. What did that get him? A grave, if he was lucky.” He settled his hands on the loose arms of his chair and looked at Emil. The balls of his eyes were draped in loose-fitting lids. “We lose our adjectives. You’re following? When in ‘seventeen I heard Ilych in Moscow, I knew this was worth it. Jesus? We’re workers. More than Christians. And I don’t care who knows.” His white, swollen hands were ready to squeeze the chair into kindling, but his voice had a fatherly earnestness. “One man has only so much loyalty. Figure out where yours lies.”

It was here. The anger was sweating out of Emil’s pores, stiffening his jaw, flushing his cheeks. Down in the square the women filled their bottles and shuffled away, and Emil got up-stiffly because of his clenched muscles. He walked inside.

Mention of his father always brought the heat pouring into his head, making him angry and stupid. He stepped past Grandmother drying the table with a towel, and ignored her questioning look. He hurried through the dark corridor, past the building supervisor snoring in a chair, her wide girth spilling over the edges and a clipboard propped against her ankle. He descended the stairs, watching for loose boards, and when he emerged into the cooling night he walked briskly through the square, past the women at the spigots.

He did not look back at his grandfather. He pushed through the black cobbled paths that led to the water.

Nineteen thirty-nine had been a bad year. He was thirteen when his father was drafted into the king’s army, and his mother soon followed as a nurse. Grandfather was an old-time, ranting Communist, so when the Germans overwhelmed their nation s little army, he took Emil and his wife south to wait out the Occupation. Their train only made it as far as Vynohradiv before collapsing completely. They had to hitch rides in farmers’ carts the rest of the way to Ruscova. In that village, the peasants vaguely remembered the Brods, who had migrated to the Capital a generation before. They took over a weathered, cramped dacha abandoned by a family of panicked Magyars.

He heard whispers, and water dripping. Around him, soldiers lounged in black doorways, some with girls, others alone. Russians all. He turned down a wider, lit street.

The war years were spent with a pickax, cutting the hard soil and gazing at the hungry Romanian Jews Grandfather let stay with them. Some had seen things they could not speak of, while others would not stay quiet. There was a madman on a white horse convincing peasants to chop their Jews into pieces, and there was a meat factory in Bucharest that ate Jews alive. One of them-Ester, a girl about Emil’s age-was silent; she said nothing even when she sneaked into his bed on cold nights, but her desperation had always been palpable.

He could smell the Tisa up ahead.

When the official letter appeared in Ruscova and told them what they had suspected all along-that Valentin and Maria Brod were dead, their bodies buried somewhere in the snows of Poland-it was the end of 1944. The Red Army had liberated the Capital, and in nearby Sighet young Russian soldiers set up moving pictures to prove the superiority of Soviet society. See what socialism brings us, said Grandfather, pointing. Eighteen-year-old Emil gazed at the pulsing lights and shadows projected on the high wall of the municipal prison, and w ^ r as stunned by what he saw. Not the Soviet ingenuity, the tanks and bombers and troops, but the immaculate, chipped cities they marched through. Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Budapest. Where were these world capitals? Mute, desperate Ester, after a week of strange love, had moved on with her father long before, and there was nothing to tie him to the countryside. He even had his fare: a German pistol he would trade for a ticket. Only a couple weeks after that news- reel, he was on a train headed north, to Finland.

He reached the Georgian Bridge that led across to the Canal District, and leaned over the railing to stare into the black, silent currents of the Tisa. He felt the waste of years. Nine years since his father, and then his mother, had left him with this old couple-nine years adding up to this one failed day.

He turned around. The homes along the bank had been repaired haphazardly-boarded-up windows, patches of concrete.

The war had been over three months when, back from Finland, he stood in this same spot, hands in his pockets, spying on families. Then he was distracted by a noise. A half-naked woman-hands tied behind her back, a shaved head, bruised face and shoulders-was being dragged forward by a clamoring mob. The citizens led her down the street by a rope leash, with collaborator in cracked red paint across her breasts. He wondered what he had returned to.