Victory Square

TEN

I woke without having fallen asleep. My face was buried in my pillow, wet not from tears, because it would be a while before I could manage those, but from the cold sweat of sickness. The sheets and duvet were soaked as well, and from the living room I could hear the tinny horns that always preceded official announcements on television.

I sat up feeling dizzy. I was naked but couldn’t remember undressing. Katja had brought me home, so I guessed she’d done it, and I was overwhelmed by a sudden, deep embarrassment. I don’t know why. I reached for the medicine bottle on my bedside table and swallowed two more Captopril.

Through my closed window came voices, so I put on a robe and opened it. Yes-chants, many streets away. Then Katja’s voice from the living room: “Emil? You up?” She sounded scared.

“Yes.”

“Come look at this.”

I stumbled through the door and found her on the couch, face bathed in the blue glow, mesmerized. I sat next to her.

It all unfolded on television.

A camera moved across a crowd that filled Victory Square, but without sound, so we couldn’t hear what they were chanting. Their fists were raised high.

“So many people,” said Katja.

“Yeah.”

Then the camera turned to our Great Leader, Comrade General Secretary and President Tomiak Pankov, stepping out onto the Central Committee balcony, a hand waved in salutation. The old man’s heavy eyes were so familiar. Behind him appeared Ilona Pankov, his wife, the first deputy prime minister and chairwoman of the Academy of Sciences. She always stood near him. Tomiak Pankov’s bald head was covered in a tall black Astrakhan hat, and his fur-lined coat was buttoned to his neck. Even with the poor-quality video feed you could see his breaths in the cold air.

He began to speak, giving comradely salutations to the Party faithful filling the square, then said, “The news is filled these days with lies coming out of Sarospatak, where hooligans and warmongers, supported by the American CIA, have been attempting to undermine our great workers’state.”

It went on for a few minutes, and from the crowd we heard cheers. But then, when he said, “The anti-communist forces are betraying your heritage,” something else came from the crowd-loud, with abandon: boos and catcalls.

It was the first time we’d ever heard such a sound at a Party rally.

The technicians fixed the situation by piping in some prerecorded applause, but it was too late. Across the country, at the same moment, people in their homes heard the sound of Pankov being jeered. There was no way to make them forget it.

He went on. I saw apprehension in Ilona Pankov’s face, but her husband appeared oblivious, saying that he was instituting changes “to raise the monthly food rations and increase the wages of factory workers in our great land.”

Then it sank in. The canned applause was turned up to cover the rising tide of resentment from the square below him that even his microphone caught, and Pankov looked down with a stunned expression. “I promise r-raises across the b-board,” he stuttered.

Then his mouth fell open, and he took a step back from the microphone.

The picture disappeared, replaced by a red screen. At the bottom, in white letters, we were told that there were technical difficulties. We were asked to be patient.