The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The rain-wet blacktop stretched unnervingly into the darkness-this midnight flight had been the earliest available. He imagined slick rubber tires skidding forward, then the explosion amid the pine trees at the far end of the runway. The Soviet stewardess, a pretty Georgian in a long, straight skirt, told him to hurry. He turned back to the fat Aeroflot plane and mounted the steps. His feet were numb.

Through the window he saw the propellers kick and begin to spin. The vibration shook the whole cabin. Businessmen and government men-all the shades of Slav-cracked jokes among themselves. The stewardess made sure he was strapped in, and he noticed her hair was tied tight beneath a blue cap that reminded him of his nurse, Katka, in her medical cap. Hospitals.

Again, violent deaths. Explosions.

She smiled very close to his face-some musky scent from Moscow department stores-and he tried to relax, thinking of the field in Ruscova, of Lena, but he only saw men in tall grass, converging on Irina Kula s fenceless house.

The takeoff was shaky and insecure, but no one else seemed concerned.

He could tell the government bureaucrats by the smug way they called the stewardess over and tapped her ass to send her on her way. The businessmen were the ones who laughed loudly; the bureaucrats supplied the jokes. He’d heard there was big business to be done in Berlin-supplying a decimated city always took work. And these days, with all supply trucks cut off from the western half of the city, some westerners migrated east during the day to buy the goods the Americans and British hadn’t yet dropped from their planes.

He’d only seen pictures of Berlin: flattened residential buildings and fire-gutted churches. Some newer news clips showed women and children wrapped in gray blankets, crowds huddling around military transports full of bread. Three years after the defeat, and Berlin was still crippled and hungry.

When he felt flush he waved at the stewardess and she brought a paper cup of tepid water. She held it to his lips and whispered something he could not hear above the whine of the engines.

Then the cabin became very cold. For those without heavy coats, she retrieved blankets, and, covered by his, Emil turned to the window, where black clouds merged into black, starless sky. He wondered what the pilots could be using for navigation. He felt like a peasant facing a locomotive. Everything was beyond him.

Emil was astonished by how solid the chilly earth at Schonefeld felt. The Russian customs officer, a severe young soldier, looked him up and down and jotted his name in a notebook. A second guard stamped passports between yawns. It was three-thirty in the morning.

A taxi driver approached him, and Emil shared the ride with a fat bureaucrat he thought he recognized as one of the famous “thick Muscovites,” but wasn’t sure. He had a dramatic mane of wavy hair rising from his forehead. “Hell of a town,” he said, nodding at the shadowy ruins passing them by. “Been here before?”

Emil shook his head.

He stuck a thumbnail between his lips and picked at his front teeth. “But you can’t sleep here anymore. This trash with the Allies. Blockade, airlift, Christ — planes all hours of the night!” He cracked his window and let the cold hiss inside. “The Germans are remarkable people. Like slow-witted insects who don’t get it. They just turn up the jukeboxes and dance!”

He laughed at his own observation, and Emil noticed the taxi driver looking at them in the rearview. He was a thick-jowled man who steered with one arm. The other sleeve was pinned flat. A veteran, maybe. A one-armed veteran forced to listen to foreigners’ views on his people. The bureaucrat opened the window the rest of the way, and they could now hear the far-off murmur of airplanes.

The Hotel Warsaw was one of the few comfortable places in the Soviet sector. Half the buildings on the street were shells of rubble. He had seen this kind of damage on that train ride back from Helsinki, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, tall buildings compressed until they came up to your nose. It made him wonder how much space the Capital would take up if all the air were sucked out of it. A home was always smaller than you thought.

The Warsaw was generally filled to capacity, but when Emil tried out his German on the morose desk clerk, he learned that a small, cold room-just big enough for the bed frame and a sink-had recently been cleaned. He took it. His head lay near the windowpane, and through it came the whine of engines. It was like flies buzzing in his ear, and he wished he had a bottle of plum brandy to put himself out. He wished he had a stomach that could take that much liquor. He wished he could stop thinking of Lena. He would have to lie here until sleep, at its leisure, claimed him. Then, from the exhaustion of his anxiety and the low, dull pain of his wounds, it did.

The airplanes had not ceased.

After a shower down the hall, he bought the sector’s currency — Ostmarks-at a bad rate from the front desk, and breakfasted in the hotel cafe. The bureaucrat from last night sat with a young brunette who looked like she had weathered a storm. She sipped at her coffee and stared straight ahead, while the bureaucrat shoveled fluffy eggs into his mouth.

It was a cool, brisk morning. There were a lot of pedestrians out, going to work, which was strange against the backdrop of a demolished city. It brought him back to that first year when he returned to the Capital, after the Arctic. Women in thick heels stepped carefully over broken bricks and stood outside shops waiting for work and busses. There were few men-German men, at least-except the very young and the very old. Russian soldiers with rifles walked in pairs, watching over everything under a sun that gave no warmth. It was all too familiar.

The rubble of broken buildings had been collected at some corners, and children scrambled up the little mountains, laughing. Some workers in coveralls held hammers and long, discolored boards cannibalized from exploded homes. Now and then his cane slipped, and he grew accustomed to watching the broken sidewalks. Ahead, a crowd descended into a metro station.

Always, the backdrop of planes. Buzzing.

It took a while, maybe an hour, before he picked them out. Ever since arriving, he had been paying close attention to faces. Maybe too much attention. He hadn’t seen a thing. When eyes met his he paused a moment to give them a once-over, or stopped now and then to look around, playing the lost tourist. Then, while looking at a store window stocked with ten colors of fabric, he noticed a man pause at a display of children’s clothes. Low-slung fedora. A leather overcoat.

He couldn’t know for sure, so he crossed to the other side of the street, took the corner, and waited in the blackened doorway of a firebombed restaurant. The man appeared soon, hands in his coat, and was followed by a partner. Fedora, leather coat and, for distinction, thick prescription glasses. The first was wide-faced, fat, while the one with glasses was thin. They both had serene, unsmiling faces.

Russian Intelligence. MVD. He was expected.

He left the doorway and took some streets at random. His shadows held back as he made his way up streets; then, just before he took a corner, they began jogging after him. Near an uprooted park, he found a sidewalk cafe and sat in the shade. By the time his coffee had arrived, the two men were at the edge of the park, waiting. They sometimes came together and talked, nodding and shrugging, and once a third man recognized them and shook their hands before leaving. Emil paid for his coffee, but did not leave. He gazed at the other customers, some pretty girls and an old man. He tried to clear his mind, to look utterly at ease, but when he did that, Lena came inevitably to him, and worry thickened his throat.

Finally, the shadow with the glasses spoke to his partner (who gave an unexpected, broad smile) and walked away.

Emil waited. Once the man was out of sight-looking for a telephone, perhaps, or a car-Emil got up and left the cafe.

The abandoned partner hesitated, unsure and again unsmiling, then followed.

Emil took quick turns, hobbling along, and dove into small, unlabeled streets. He was getting himself lost, he knew, but that wasn’t his worry now. In some dark alleys, men slept among trash cans, and in others, plump prostitutes muttered at him. Then he appeared in an empty, bomb-damaged courtyard with three possible avenues of escape. It was lined with trashcans on one side and a high pile of discarded clothing on the other. Emil crouched behind the clothes, as low as the pain would allow. The soiled clothes stank of death.

In no time the fat Russian appeared, gasping. He looked up each alley, considering the possibilities. Then he chose the middle way, and rushed forward.

Emil waited for his breath to return and his heart to slow. Then he backtracked, leaning more heavily on his cane. His stomach was troubling him again. A prostitute recognized him and smiled. “Change your mind, sweetheart?”

He offered a few coins and asked the fastest way to Wilhelm Strasse.