The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

He urinated in an alley, pulled out the cane, then leaned against a brick wall and vomited a thin stream. He took the tram back to the center of town. The black streets were mostly abandoned, and he even found a seat on the unlit car. His empty stomach bubbled angrily. He wanted to hold the photograph again, to prove to himself what he had seen, but was afraid that if he held it in his hands it would fly away.

Michalec.

A Hungarian who had married a Jew who had been put in an Austrian concentration camp. He had begun working with the Gestapo in 1941. Was his wife in the camp by then? Was this the leverage they had used on him?

But then she died in 1943, and his best work was yet to come. Did he know she was dead? Or was he working under the illusion he was saving his wife’s life by all the insidious jobs he did?

Or had he, by that point, become a different person?

Others make the rules, he had said. We only try to live by them.

Berlin slid by, and a drunk man in the front of the train gazed at him, squinting.

A war hero twice over: first for the Nazis, then for the Russians. He had turned sides as quickly as the war had shifted. With each shift of history he had relearned the rules. A clerk and then a spy and then a war hero, and now-Jerzy Michalec was a politicos. Untouchable. Almost.

When he recognized the annihilated Tiergarten, he got out and walked the rest of the way to the Gate, where the gray dawn lit pockmarked columns and loitering soldiers. He held up his passport, but no one looked. He didn’t recognize the American GIs who waved him through, nor the Russian peasants in soldiers’ uniforms who accepted him back into their sector. He asked one of them the time, and the Russian looked at his left wrist, where he had two watches side by side. “Six o’clock.” His other wrist had three watches.

This night had lasted forever.

A gray-haired man noticed him and jogged up. “Taxi? Taxi?” Emil wasn’t in the mood to debate prices. The car sat at the beginning of Unter den Linden. Past it, a few brightly lit clubs still tempted westerners with heat and electricity. Beneath the sound of the planes, the low bass of music, bands, voices. Emil climbed into the taxi. “Die Letze Katze” he said. The driver started the engine.

He took it out finally, and unfolded it. He wiped the sweat from the photograph with the corner of his shirt and gazed in the murky light at the two men passing a medal between them.

As Smerdyakov, Michalec had entered a crumbling Berlin and assassinated twenty-three German boys-by then that was all that was left of the Wehrmacht: old men and boys. He handed their bodies over to the Russian peasants, probably with a bag full of the dead soldiers’ watches and gold teeth.

The car trembled and shot pain through Emil’s side. He gasped.

It was clear, at last. The connection that had been nagging at him. The twenty-three soldiers Michalec had stacked up in a bombed-out living room in Berlin were what was left of the Hitlerjugend regiment he had taken into Poland and used to kill off a hundred Soviet boys.

He understood.

These children had seen their commander again, after months without him, in the midst of the bombs. He would have called them together for a meeting. He would have said, Lef s plan our own defense of the Reich. They had nothing else; it was their last hope. They were desperate children in an exploding city. He would have had them stand together at one side of the room, him at the other, as if it were a lecture. Their trust must have been immeasurable as they met in the living room with no ceiling, only jagged walls, the planes dropping everything onto their heads. They must have felt a surge of hope as he paced back and forth in front of them, holding his machine pistol like a mother would hold an infant. If they had any suspicions they would have beat them down, because knowing the truth would have been so much worse than those few minutes of delusion and devotion.

He wondered if Michalec had had to reload to finish them all off, or if he’d had two machine guns. Or a partner-the colonel: Herr Oberst? Or maybe he had simply been a careful, precise shot.

The taxi groaned up a dusty road, and Emil tried to orient himself. He saw piles of rotting mattresses and bedsprings and shattered wood. This was rubble Berlin, where not even three years of work had made a dent. Not a single building stood. Emil leaned forward, feeling it in his stomach. “Where are we?”

The driver glanced into the rearview, but said nothing. The car bumped over rocks.

“You” said Emil. He folded the photograph into the breast of his blazer. “Turn around. This isn’t what I asked for.”

But the driver was already parking.

They were surrounded on three sides by rubble, and inside this U stood three men. Two wore threadbare, cold-looking suits, while the third, who raised a hand to shield his face from the headlights, was elegantly dressed. A gray, long coat with white cuffs just visible at the sleeves. When he dropped his hand Emil recognized the Oberst. Hard, pale cheeks, wide lips. Very deutsch. He squinted.

The driver turned in his seat. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “ Get out.”

At each door a thug waited. He tried the weaker-looking one on the right, but he wasn’t weak at all. His big, sculpted hands wrapped completely around Emil’s forearm-a grip like a machine-and led Emil over to the colonel, who was tugging white gloves over his hands. Emil wondered if they were the same ones he wore while crushing Janos Crowder’s skull. Cleaned thoroughly, and bleached. Maybe they were what he always put on as a prelude to killing. Executioner’s gloves. From across the rubble came the whisper of Allied planes.

“You rose from the dead,” he said, and Emil remembered the voice-a little thinner than before, weaker. Comrade Emil Brod? “Really quite amazing. Impressed and, in no small way, disturbed.” Irma was right: He had old eyes. “I guess we don’t need to discuss anything. The photograph, please.” He opened a hand to accept it.

Emil only half-heard. He was measuring the distance to the piles of rubble, their height, and how much time it would take him to scramble over and sprint toward the silhouetted buildings in the distance. But it was cold-he had to take that into account. And he didn’t know if he could sprint at all. He was still, and always, an invalid.

“I don’t have the photograph.”

The colonel’s face was pink in the cool breeze. He sighed audibly, but it was more a sign of weariness than disappointment. He looked at the thug whose grip was cutting off blood in Emil’s tingling arm. The colonel said quietly, “Take care of it,” and walked away.

The two men went at it together, laying into him with hard, rock fists. Stomach, chest (they knew his weak points) and face. A steel-toed boot struck his shin, nearly breaking it, and he went down quickly to the damp earth. All the fight in him was concentrated into squirming. His hands fluttered about, swatting uselessly. Rocks cut into his back as they leaned over him and swung, and the numb pain shot through him like the sounds of their voices, saying things in German he had trouble understanding. Then a pair of hands on him-he flinched, but the hands only searched his pockets and removed the photograph.

He closed his eyes to darkness, and when he opened them the two men stood over him, looking at the picture, passing it back and forth. The colonel was shouting. Snatching the picture from them with white gloves.

Then blackness.

Then all three, still standing over him. One pointed a finger down at Emil, then all their hands were moving. Then blackness. A shot rang out.

Then more talking, and Herr Oberst was holding a gun. Emil didn’t know what kind. It was aimed at Emil’s face. He moaned, turning his head. He saw the shadow of the barrel’s corridor.

Then a shot, but the gun was aimed elsewhere. One of the other men fell. A flash of light, and the second fell.

The colonel was squatting over him and looking into his face, upside down. He felt the breath on his nose, but the colonel’s words were unclear. Now for yours or Off with you or This is all yours. Emil understood nothing because he was sliding again into that warm black river.

Pain. And white, cold sky.

The sun burned overhead. Closing his eyes did nothing to help the grind of his nerves. Sitting up was misery.

He checked himself for holes.

He lay near the front of the taxi. His red-and-purple belly was bruised and aching, but not torn. There was blood on his shirt and jacket, but he didn’t know if it was his. In his right hand was a pistol.

He dropped it.

PPK. Walther.

Around him, inside the U of rubble, were two lumps of clothes, filled with two dead men. A face was twisted toward him-one of the thugs. The other-he crawled and checked the face with the hole in its jaw-was the second thug. Flies crawled over their features.

After a while he could stand, but standing was hell, so he threw himself on the fender to help stay up. He shivered from cold and from everything else. He uneasily drew himself up to his full height, and saw the dead driver behind the wheel, head back, the passenger-side of his head blown out by an escaping bullet.

The noise of western planes was suddenly louder, drilling his ear. He tried to be quick about getting to the door and not looking too closely at the corpse as he dragged it out. The seat was covered with dry, sticky blood.

Why am I not dead?

When he sat down he closed his eyes and left his hands on the wheel.

Twice, he thought. I have died twice and twice been reborn.

He held down the nausea.

If this could happen here, if Michalec had found him with so little effort, then Lena was finished. He knew it then, was finally, utterly sure: She was dead. The pain rolled across his skull, pressing him down.

The car started quickly, but was difficult to turn around in the rubble. He worried about crushing the bodies as he backed up and drove forward many times. Once he was turned around completely, he had trouble staying on the path. He had the feeling, and it was overwhelming, that time was moving very quickly while he himself moved in slow motion. Dust shot up as he scraped the concrete blocks and shattered wood that bordered it, and he heard the scrape of baby carriages and bricks. When he came to splits in the path he made intuitive guesses-slow, stupid presumptions. Once, he stopped, opened the door and vomited clear liquid. Finally the rubble ended, and he turned onto a cracked, paved road. A truck filled with Soviet soldiers drove by, their faces tired from late nights out. A few jeeps with stern senior officers followed. No one noticed the bruised, achingly slow man in the scratched taxi, who, every time he shifted, felt the adhesion of blood holding him to the seat.

More guesses. Vague remembrances. He appeared at the far end of Unter den Linden, but could hardly see the peak of the Brandenburg Gate because of speeding delivery trucks that filled the broad avenue. The city was going on as it had yesterday, and the day before. As though everything in Emils life had not just collapsed. After a few more streets, he was clear enough to find The Last Cat. The bar was closed. The taxi s clock said it was just after noon.

He parked and opened the windows to let out the stink. His hands, his feet, his face-everything shook. When he closed his eyes there were bodies.

Some women with carriages noticed him. They gasped and looked away quickly. Their pace increased. He saw other women, mothers and grandmothers and daughters. Their faces all reminded him of one. Affected faces, faces that have lost their girlhood. A grandmother with long gray hair braided at the neck asked if he needed some food. She seemed to talk so quickly that he had trouble understanding, and when he did understand, he could not make his mouth move fast enough-” Thank you, no, thank you,? m waiting for a friend.??? he all right. “

“The Americans did this to you?” It was Konrad Messer, standing a few hesitant feet from the window.

Emil groaned and opened the door. Everything was stuck, then it was unstuck. “Just let me in.” He hobble toward Konrad s grimace. “Please?”

The dark and cool, stale air of the club was soothing. He stripped and washed, using the kitchen faucet in the back while Konrad went to move the car away from his club. He came back shaking his head, then went to retrieve a spare suit he kept in the office for emergencies. It was a little large, but better than anything Emil had ever owned. No worker materials here.

Konrad handed him something sweet with gin. “You’ll need a few of these.”

Emil almost declined, he needed to make a call, but his hands shook too much, and he knew he couldn’t make sense yet. He threw the drink back. His stomach would have to take it. He leaned against the bar and began muttering about what had happened. He’d thought he would just tell a little, but when it began he couldn’t stop. Konrad nodded continuously to prove he was listening, but his expression never changed as he made gin drinks for them both.

“What are you going to do?”

He blinked into his glass. “Do you have a telephone?”

“In the office.”

He took a fourth drink with him. The world was beginning to slow. He talked to three operators in as many languages-their voices sped and slowed with the rhythm of his drinking-and then he waited for the callback. Konrads office was covered with yellowed photographs from before the war, men on stages. Showbusiness shots, vaudeville. Men standing next to other men who were dressed up like women. The telephone rang.

It took two more operators to patch him through to the station. He was told by a curt woman that Leonek Terzian, along with the rest of the homicide department, was not in the office. It was Saturday. He asked if there was a home listing for Leonek. “Who are you?” she demanded.

He read off his Militia identification number and told her this was an emergency. She made him wait while she conferred with someone else. Finally she returned and unhappily gave him the telephone number.

More operators, another wait for the callback. Then a woman’s faint voice: “Yes?”

He asked for Leonek Terzian.

The hiss on the line grew louder as he waited. Leonek’s voice was difficult to hear. “Emil? It’s you?” He was shouting. “Emil, listen.” A pause and a whisper directed at his mother to get out of here. “Emil?”

“Yes?”

“She wasn’t there.”

“What? She wasn’t- what ^ 7.” He had known it before, had known it in his bones: his premonitions had been astute. But hearing it aloud was entirely different.

“I went to Ruscova,” he said. “You didn’t tell me I’d have to get there by horse. But I made it. I went to that woman’s house. Irina Kula?”

“Yes yes, that’s it,” said Emil. Everything was being said too slowly.

“She wanted me to tell you it wasn’t her. She says it was Greta, her friend. She said you’d know her.”

Emil remembered a fat, frizzy-haired woman full of smiles.

“A man came for Lena. That’s what she said.”

“What?”

“She asked you to forgive her. She feels terrible.”

“Whatman?”

“I don’t know. Short, dark hair. That’s all I could get. Rude.”

Emil couldn’t speak. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He could smell Lena’s cigarettes and feel the shape of her ribs through the summer dress she wore in Ruscova. She had been crying then.

Something garbled came over the lines, ending with “dead.”

“What?”

“That maid. Irma? In the hospital-suffocated!”

Konrad brought Emil another drink and exited discreetly.

“You there?”

Emil wasn’t there. He was sitting at the desk, the telephone to his ear, but his body had contracted and convulsed, sending his thoughts elsewhere, to some desperate escape. Part of him wanted to cease right now. To turn off his head and call it quits. This was too much for one young man.

“Emil?”

All he could think to say was “I’m coming home.” He hung up.

A pile of twenty-three boys in a shattered Berlin apartment. Three bodies in the rubble. One in a living room, one in the Tisa. A girl in a hospital room, a pillow over her face. God, how they piled up. And Lena-yes, Lena-was just another. But why not me? Why was he not dead among the broken bricks?

He clutched his stomach and leaned over the floor, but this time nothing came.

He called the Schonefeld Aeroflot office. A shockingly friendly and perky Russian woman told him the next flight home wasn’t until four in the morning. Emil reserved a seat and finished his drink. He floated back to the bar. Konrad looked at him sympathetically and made a joke about his walk. Emil put his empty glass on the counter and asked for another.