Victory Square

22 DECEMBER 1989
FRIDAY
THIRTEEN

Gavra was at the phone before I could get to my feet. “Hello?” he said hopefully, then dropped an octave. “Oh, yes. Moment.” He leaned out of the kitchen and said, “It’s for you, Emil.”

Ferenc greeted me with “Was that Gavra Noukas?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, Emil. All this going on and you’ve got a Ministry agent in your house?”

Up to that point I hadn’t considered how it looked having Gavra around, or whether or not he was a risk. Ferenc had never met Gavra, but over the years, the young Ministry man had become just one more associate I trusted to assist me in my work-the only caveat was that I knew to hide things from him that his job might compel him to report. I treated Bernard the same way. “Don’t worry about him,” I said. “Did you hear about Lena?”

“What about Lena?”

So I told him. I spoke with the same distant, unsettling calm he had first used to tell me about the shootings in Sarospatak. When I finished, he was silent a moment. “I don’t know what to say,” he managed. “I loved that woman.”

“Not just you.”

“Who the hell did it?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did you find Tatiana Zoltenko?”

That seemed to confuse him. “Well… yes. I mean, we found her, but she’s dead.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t look suspicious, though,” said Ferenc. “She ordered her unit to fire on some demonstrators, and one of the soldiers turned around and shot her. A Ministry corporal. The guy’s a hero now.”

I almost collapsed.

I never did find out if the hero-soldier-who I later learned was a Ukrainian named Dubravko Ilinski-shot Colonel Tatiana Zoltenko out of moral conviction, or because he’d been paid to do it. Either way, the list of endangered senior citizens had shrunk to only three: myself, Brano Sev, and Jerzy Michalec. As of seven o’clock the previous evening, at least, Brano was still alive. Alive enough to call Gavra. I had no idea about Michalec.

To fill the awkward silence, Ferenc told me that Sarospatak was nearly theirs. The army in that region had not yet turned to their side, but it wasn’t confronting them either. The soldiers had retreated to their barracks on the northern side of town. Twice, he used the phrase “the Soft Revolution,” and that marked my introduction to the term-but, like the mysterious quote on the memorial to Tisavar, I’d never figure out what it meant. “Fantastic,” I told him.

He could hear my lack of enthusiasm. “I don’t expect you to feel it now, Emil, but it really is.”

By the time I hung up, Ferenc had told me five times how sorry he was about Lena, but his pity left me cold. When I came out, Gavra was slipping into his coat, which I noticed was covered with dry red paint.

“He thinks he’s going to Yalta,” said Katja.

“No,” I said.

Gavra wasn’t waiting for my permission. He took his Makarov from his pocket and checked the cartridge. “It’s the only place I can get an international phone line.”

Despite being a little drunk, I could register how dangerous this was. “Weren’t you listening to the radio? The army’s out there. They see you going into Yalta Boulevard, they’ll check your papers. They’ll lock you up, or kill you.”

“I have to get in touch with Brano. I’ll lay odds he’s the one who sent me to the States.”

“I thought you were in Yugoslavia.”

“I lied, Emil. It’s my job.”

Karel crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s not your job anymore.”

“Then I’m going with you,” I said. I wasn’t sober enough to care about my own safety. Nor did I care about my fatigue. It was late, and I’d been squeezed out like a cleaning lady’s sponge. A fresh headache flickered around the edges of my brain.

“No, you’re not,” said Gavra.

“Don’t argue.”

Katja broke our stalemate: “What about the files?”

We looked at her. I said, “What files?”

She looked at me as if only now, after all these years, had she recognized what a stupid man I was. “It’s a straight shot up Friendship to the Eleventh District. No one’s watching the Central Archives. We get in there, we can find out who authorized Rosta Gorski to take out those files. Then we follow up on it.”

As usual, she made the most sense.

Aron wanted to come with us, but Katja took him aside and whispered a convincing argument against it. By the time she finished, his face had reddened; I wondered what she’d said. Karel, almost unconscious now from the half bottle of scotch he’d put away, didn’t ask to come. He only grabbed Gavra’s sleeve in a particularly affectionate gesture and told him to come back soon. Gavra promised he would, then gave Karel the keys to his Citroen. “Just for emergencies. Don’t leave the house. Okay?”

We took the stairwell, and at the second floor a door opened. My elderly neighbor, Zorica, peered out. Her husband had been a major during the Patriotic War, surviving with a chest full of medals and scars to match, but ever since his death in 1982 she’d lived alone off his pension. She often brought us food, because it was no secret that Lena was a lousy cook. Zorica clutched her robe shut at the neck and whispered, “Emil!”

I stopped by her door as the others went on.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Just stay inside.”

“You must know. You’re a Militia chief.”

“Pankov is gone.”

“What do you mean, gone ^ 7.”

I didn’t really know what it meant either. A president takes a helicopter from the Central Committee Building and flies away. That only means he’s left a building, not that he’s gone for good. “I’m sorry, Zoka, I don’t have time. Listen to the radio. It’s all there.” I didn’t want to tell her about Lena; that could wait.

The three of us piled inside the Militia Karpat Katja had used to drive me home. I felt claustrophobic and hot in the passenger seat, wishing I’d brought along my Captopril. It was nearly one, and this section of Friendship Street was vacant, but we could still hear voices from the south, in the direction of Victory Square. We drove north, the street lit only by the car’s headlights.

From the Second District, we crossed into the Sixth, where I lived just after the war with my grandparents. Back then, it had been a prestigious neighborhood, where Friends of the Liberators were given Habsburg houses cut up to accommodate many families. My grandfather, a communist since before the Russian Revolution, had been given a place with a view of Heroes’Square. In 1980, though, Pankov’s massive reconstruction of the Capital started in this district, and my old home, as well as the whole block and even Heroes’Square itself, was plowed into the ground and replaced with more socialist-friendly concrete architecture.

We came across marauding groups of drunks who seemed as confused about the situation as Zorica. Unlike Zorica, they weren’t kept indoors by their confusion. Some climbed through the broken window of a grocery store, stealing bags of flour and canned goods. Another group of five men tried to wave us down with dim flashlights-our blue-tinted license plates gave us away as government-and Katja swerved to get around them.

“Aron was right,” she said.

“What did Aron say?” asked Gavra from the back.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

Once we reached the Eleventh, Friendship was quiet again, and we stopped at the high stone wall surrounding the Central Archives. Through the bars of the gate we saw a small, unlit pillbox with a guard inside. Our headlights woke him, and he came out squinting. I got out of the car and approached.

“I need you to open up,” I said.

He shook his head. “We’re closed.”

I showed my Militia certificate, but that didn’t change his mind. He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “I’m under orders, Comrade Chief. That’s all there is to it.”

Gravel crunched behind me as Gavra walked up. “Any trouble?”

“Maybe. This man says we can’t come in.”

“Oh?” Without hesitation, Gavra took out his Makarov. “Comrade Guard, please open up.”

The guard also had a sidearm, a bulky Czech CZ-75 in a leather holster, and he considered it.

“Don’t,” said Gavra. “I don’t want to kill you, but it’s really been a very long day.”

Heinrich-the name he gave us when we asked-let us in, and we brought him with us across the parking lot to the high yellow-brick cube that held the archives of the People’s Militia. I’d been here often over the decades, spending endless hours among stacks of yellowed files, tracking down the identities of suspects and victims.

They’d bought a roomful of IBM mainframes last year and were going through the agonizing process of shifting the records to floppy disks, but with four floors of files and a socialist work ethic, this would take forever.

Katja did a trick on the front-door lock that impressed both me and Gavra, and even Heinrich-he let out a disappointed gasp. We passed through the entryway, where a wall of punch cards was positioned beside a time clock, and quickly found the central distribution office, with small file-card drawers stacked to the ceiling.

Once we got going, I realized this wasn’t going to be quick. None of us-not even Heinrich-understood the filing system, so for the first hour it was a matter of opening drawers at random, examining the cards inside, and then

trying to infer what that set of cabinets was for. In each set, we looked for “Gorski,” and finally found a typewritten card: GORSKI, ROSTA 1957 QPC-203-2948B

“What the hell does that mean?” said Gavra.

I looked at the guard and was pleased to see he was no longer scared. “Heinrich?”

He shrugged. “Higher mathematics.”

I liked Heinrich.

After another hour, on the third floor we found a storage unit numbered 203, which contained an aisle marked c in section QP. Gavra held on to Heinrich as Katja and I walked the aisle, which was long enough so that the far end appeared very small. Toward the end, Katja said, “There,” and pointed. Eight feet up was a file drawer marked 2948. She found a stepladder on wheels, and I climbed it. There was nothing between the files for GORJAN and GORSKOV. In the front of the drawer I found a single-page notice that referred the researcher to the overflow file, 2948B, in the basement.

By three thirty, we found it. Rosta Gorski’s file was only a few pages long, mentioning Gorski’s mother-Irina Gorski, widow-his home in Stryy, and his profession: farmer. There were two Militia sheets on him, dealing with small-time crimes. He’d stolen someone’s cow in 1971 when he was fourteen and was jailed for a night. When he was nineteen, in 1976, he’d started a brawl in a local bar and spent another night in jail, charged with hooliganism and drunkenness.

The last sheet was a replica of the first one, dated February 1980. It restated his name, mother (deceased as of 1979), place of birth, and profession, but with a single additional line: Stryy Militia reported the disappearance of

R. Gorski on 12 September 1979. As of 28.2.80 he has not been located.

“Nothing here about the files,” I said, folding up the papers and slipping them into my coat pocket.

It wasn’t until after five in the morning, an hour before the first archive clerks would arrive for work, that we finally tracked down what we were interested in. By then, I was exhausted, feeling the heat of overpressured blood thumping under my skin, but I kept going. It wasn’t a measure of my loyalty to the job; Yuri Kolev hardly even entered my mind. It was a measure of the guilt slowly growing inside me. The explosive charges that killed Lena had been meant for me. I-in part because I’d never had her car fixed-was responsible for her murder. I couldn’t take that burden. I needed to know, without a doubt, the identity of the responsible person, so I wouldn’t have to carry that guilt alone.

That’s how I was able to stay awake.

We again began in the central distribution office but realized after a long time that we were in the wrong place. Behind the office was another door leading to a table with two computer terminals, two pencils, and a stack of notepaper cut from used printed sheets. On the shelf were folders of perforated computer printouts that listed file numbers followed by codes. It took a while, but we found Gorski’s QPC-203-2948B, which was followed by TR000293X.

By then, Katja had warmed up one of the computers and started a file-keeping program called Nutshell. She typed in the code and waited. After half a minute of hums and clicks, it gave us two names:

1. ROMEK, NIKOLAI

2. KOLEV, YURI

I was amazed; it was the first time I’d witnessed the speed of computers.

“These,” she said, “are the two people who’ve signed out Gorski’s file.”

Gavra made a noise. “This is why they killed Kolev. They saw he’d been looking into Gorski’s file. That made him a threat.”

I touched Katja’s shoulder. “Can you find out what other files Romek signed out?”

She didn’t know, but she tried typing “1,” followed by ENTER. After a minute and a half, we were presented with this list:

1. GORSKI, ROSTA

2. 10-3283-48 (RUTH)

3. VOLAN, DUSAN (RUTH)

4. SEV, BRANO (AUTH)

5. BROD, EMIL (AUTH)

6. PUT0N5KI, LEBED (AUTH)

7. MICHALEC, JERZY (AUTH)

8. ZOLTENKO, TATIANA (AUTH)

9. PREV TEAR5

“There’s your answer,” said Katja, leaning back in her chair. “Romek authorized the release of all the files.”

“Type four,” I said.

She did, and a few lines of letter-and-number codes came back. I wasn’t sure what they meant, but Katja was able to decipher the abbreviations. “Brano’s file is in the building,” she said.

“No. None of the files were returned.”

She pressed a finger to the screen. “Right here. Taken out December eighth. Brought back yesterday, at six in the evening.” She turned to Heinrich; we’d sat him down at the other terminal. “What time does the building close?”

He shrugged. “Open and close at six.”

“Then it hasn’t been filed yet,” said Katja.

It was nearly six o’clock by now, so Gavra waited by the front door, watching for arrivals, while Katja and I went to the deposit room, a simple counter with steel shelves covering the wall, filled with returned files. We finally had some luck, because the clerk, eager to get home, had simply placed the returned stack of six personnel files-the 1948 case file hadn’t been returned-behind the counter for the morning clerk to deal with.

We left Heinrich at his pillbox. I guessed he would stay quiet about his night’s adventure rather than be grilled on why he hadn’t shot any of us. We hadn’t destroyed anything, and six missing files was probably their daily quota.

We kept stifling yawns, but all three of us knew it wasn’t yet time for sleep. When your country is falling apart, time changes. Everything becomes equally urgent. Adrenaline kicks in, followed by something else, some undiscovered substance the body produces during national emergencies. Unlike Katja and Gavra, though, I was no longer young. My heart could only take so much of this before it would just give up.

I didn’t have to tell them where our next stop was, because Nikolai Romek’s house was the only place left to go. Gavra, who’d been at the colonel’s for a Ministry party last year, gave Katja directions.

Farther up Friendship, we saw a dead body outside an electrical shop. The woman, lying facedown, was alone on that vacant block. Katja slowed as we passed the blood-spattered body-she’d been shot in the back-then sped up, turning onto another street. None of us felt like talking about it, or even calling it in.

On Belgrade Avenue, the tower-lined road that would get us out of town, we saw an army roadblock at the intersection with Tisa Street. A jeep and a truck. Seven soldiers checking cars from each direction, Kalashnikovs strung over their shoulders.

“Can we make it?” said Gavra, leaning forward to see better.

“Pull over,” I told Katja.

She did so, and we squinted through the dim morning light. They weren’t bothering with the vehicles, instead asking each passenger for his papers. Katja and I would be fine, but I wasn’t sure about Gavra. I turned to him. “Let me see your documents.”

All he had on him were his passport, his Ministry certificate, and a driver’s license-but that, too, identified him as a Ministry employee. He’d left his Viktor Lukacs papers in his paint-smeared car.

I didn’t have to say what I was thinking. He saw the problem as well. “I’ll get out here.”

“Maybe we can get through another way,” said Katja.

We couldn’t. The army was fully aware of all the escape routes from the city, because it had secured the Capital for Pankov often enough.

So Gavra gave us the last of the directions; then I got out so he could leave. “Can you get back to my place?”

“If the metro’s open, it’ll be easy. Besides, I need to go by the station.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got papers to destroy.” He handed me his Makarov. “You’ll need this more than I will.”

We left Gavra on the sidewalk and made it through the roadblock without a problem. Katja flirted with the soldier checking our papers and asked how the revolution was coming along. He sighed and explained, as if to a child, that the terrorists-by that he meant the rooftop snipers-were still all over the city, shooting into crowds.

“Did you catch any yet?”

“Not that I’ve heard. But we know who they are.”

“Ministry, right?”

He shook his head. “That’s low even for the Ministry. We think they’re Libyans.”

Briefly, Katja glanced at me with a confused expression, then returned to him. “Libyans?”

“Yeah. Pankov made a deal with Muammar Qaddafi for his spe-cial forces to protect him in case this happened. Rumor is, when he came back on Sunday a second plane landed just afterward with about a hundred of these guys.”

“Oh,” said Katja. “And Pankov? Where is he?”

“Wouldn’t we all like to know?”

Later, that Libyan rumor would become accepted truth, though in fact none of the snipers was ever caught, and no one could find records of a second Libyan flight landing at Pankov-now Tisa-International.

Romek’s home was different from Csilla Volan’s but no less magnificent. It was one of the old Habsburg residences, not unlike the house where Lena grew up. Its grounds had been neglected, trees and bushes growing wildly, pressing into the long driveway that took us to the front door.

I clutched Gavra’s Makarov and rang the bell, but there was no answer. After a few more tries, I helped Katja break in through a window, and a high-pitched alarm squealed. She found the control box beside the front door and used a brass candelabra to bang at it until the plastic casing fell off and she could rip apart the wires. By the time she opened the door for me, we had silence.

It was a vast house, decorated in period furniture shipped in from France and Italy. I was particularly taken by the kitchen, which was entirely American. There was a microwave oven, something I’d only seen in films, and a fully stocked refrigerator nearly as large as my bed.

While I stood mesmerized on the tiled floor, Katja searched the house. She called me when she found Romek’s office on the second floor. Unlike the rest of the house, it was entirely modern, with another IBM computer on a steel desk beside a lamp made of aluminum wires that looked like a sculpture. While the computer powered up, Katja went through the desk drawers, and I looked at the bookshelves.

“Here,” she said. She was crouched beside the desk, holding out a slip of printed paper for me. It was a TisAir flight itinerary for three people: Nikolai Romek, his wife, Elena, and his son, Andrea. Three seats on a plane to Paris. The plane had left the previous night at seven.

I groaned. “He’s gone.”

“Just before everything went to hell. As if he knew.”

I wondered about that: Did Romek know beforehand how Pankov’s rally would go? Had he arranged his and his family’s safety long beforehand? I checked the date at the top of the sheet-the ticket had been bought on Monday, the day after Tomiak Pankov returned from Libya.

The computer, Katja told me after a few minutes’frustration at the keyboard, was completely erased.

We continued searching but found nothing concerning the people on the death list, or Rosta Gorski, or that 1948 case. The most interesting thing was a photocopy that had been crumpled up and simply thrown in the wastebasket-a long-winded telegram marked TOP SECRET, sent from our Moscow embassy. It concerned a conversation between V. L. Musatov, “Deputy Director of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” and our ambassador to the Soviet Union, Ignac Molovich. It had been received, decoded, and stamped by Yalta Boulevard at 7:30 A.M. yesterday. V. L.

MUSATOV RECEIVED ME AT MY REQUEST. THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR TOLD ME THAT DURING THE MEETING OF T. PANKOV WITH THE SOVIET CHARGE D’AFFAIRES IN OUR CAPITAL ON 20 DECEMBER T. PANKOV SAID THAT HE POSSESSES INFORMATION THAT THE ACTIONS IN SAROSPATAK WERE PREPARED AND ORGANIZED WITH THE CONSENT OF MEMBER COUNTRIES OF THE WARSAW TREATY ORGANIZATION. I AFFIRMED THIS AND MADE THE POINT THAT OUR INFORMATION SUGGESTED SOME KIND OF ACTION OF INTERFERENCE INTO OUR INTERNAL AFFAIRS UNDER PREPARATION IN THE SOVIET UNION. THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR DECLARED THAT SUCH ASSERTIONS PUZZLED HIM, AND HAD NO FOUNDATION AND DID NOT CORRESPOND WITH REALITY. FURTHER, HE STATED THAT HIS WORDS REFLECTED THE USSR OFFICIAL POSITION WHICH POSTULATES THAT THE SOVIET UNION BUILDS ITS RELATIONS WITH ALLIED SOCIALIST STATES ON THE BASIS OF EQUALITY, MUTUAL RESPECT AND STRICT NONINTERFERENCE INTO DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. I ASKED IF THIS POSITION ALSO COVERED AREAS WHEREIN SOCIALISM IN ALLIED STATES WAS UNDER THREAT. THAT IS, WOULD SOVIET ASSISTANCE BE AVAILABLE TO NORMALIZE THE SITUATION IN SAROSPATAK? HE SAID THAT THIS POSITION COVERED ALL DOMESTIC AFFAIRS OF ALLIED STATES, AND THAT ASSISTANCE IN SAROSPATAK WOULD NOT BE AVAILABLE.

I had to read it a few times to work my way through the language, but it was plain enough. Pankov actually believed that this uprising had been instigated by the Warsaw Pact, and that the Russians in particular were behind it. It seemed ludicrous to me, since I knew that, for more than a decade, Ferenc and his friends had been building up their underground organization without any Russian support. But Pankov couldn’t imagine that his own people would have the will to rise up on their own.

Then I remembered Ferenc’s story. Yuri Kolev met with a Russian named Fyodor Malevich who kept an officer’s uniform in his wardrobe. Maybe Pankov wasn’t so paranoid after all.

Katja was intrigued by the final line. Our ambassador had asked if the Russians would help put down the uprising, and Musatov had flatly said no.

This made her delirious with pleasure. The world, she told me, had abandoned Tomiak Pankov completely, and now our country would finally speak with its own voice.

In a sense, you can argue that she was right.

Still, despite the revolutionary promise in what we’d found, there was nothing here for me. Romek had fled the country with his family, and I was left with no explanation as to why my wife had been murdered.

We spent a few hours going through the house, ripping open cabinets and drawers and even banging the wall in vain for hollow spots. In the backyard, the last strings of my hope snapped. Romek owned a long, rusty grill that must have been put to good use for sides of lamb at many summer garden parties. Now it was full of ashes and flakes of recently burned papers. Hundreds- thousands — of them. He’d cleaned up completely before he left.

“What now?” said Katja.

Weakened by all this, I sat on the cold dirt and tried to regulate my breaths. “Sleep,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “All I want is sleep.”