Victory Square

FIFTEEN

We made it back to my apartment by ten without incident. Karel and Aron, now asleep on the couch and chair, had finished off my vodka and scotch, which annoyed me, but I was too exhausted to complain. Katja woke Aron, and Karel awoke on his own, rubbing his eyes and asking where Gavra was.

“Had to go to the station,” Katja told him.

“Why?”

“He thought it was important.” She didn’t know how much Karel knew of his best friend’s work. If Karel didn’t know who Brano Sev was, he might know nothing.

After a round of sullen embraces, she took Aron home in the Militia car, and Karel turned on the television. For some reason, that angered me as well. Of the two channels, one was still in government hands, playing an old Pankov biography, full of washed-out colors of his family’s peasant home. On the other channel, a young man who needed a shave reported on where in the city the rooftop snipers had been spotted but urged the entire city to spend the day in the squares and celebrate “this new era of freedom. Long live the Soft Revolution!”

I gathered the files we’d taken from the archives and brought them to bed. I undressed, considering a wash, but didn’t want to track through the living room and have to speak to Karel again. All I wanted was sleep. By then the shock of yesterday was fading, leaving me wrung out, and the depression was settling in. The same thing happened when Libarid died in 1975 and Imre ten years later. Shock, followed by depression, followed by anger.

But I persisted, because this was so much more devastating. I’d lost my wife; I’d lost everything. I couldn’t go to sleep empty-handed. I reached for the Captopril.

According to my own thick file, my career began with my second case, looking into the murders of prostitutes in the Canal District, back when prostitutes could still make a living there. There was a small photo of me, which was updated every five years. This one was from‘87, and I had the blank expression of a prisoner.

According to an inserted sheet that was thinner and whiter than the rest, I joined the First District homicide department on 23 August 1948 (which was true) but didn’t actually do any work until two months later. My documented history simply skipped over the case that started my career and nearly killed Lena. As if it were a figment of my imagination.

With Dusan Volan’s file, I began to understand. Volan was a soft-looking old man who in 1949 ruled over a variety of tribunals. Another page that was less yellowed and brittle than the rest mentioned that in August 1949 he sentenced one Jerzy Michalec to death for “counterrevolutionary activity.” That is, actions against the communist government.

The truth was that Michalec had been sentenced for being a murderer and a Nazi war criminal.

The same case was mentioned in Lebed Putonski’s file-again, “counterrevolutionary activity.”

Brano Sev’s file, which was always limited because of security considerations, was simply missing the year 1948. His photograph was older, from the seventies, a round, aging face with three moles on the left cheek. Tatiana Zoltenko’s photo, taken last year, showed a tough colonel in her late sixties with black-dyed hair pulled back tight enough to raise her colored eyebrows in surprise. Since I didn’t know her role in the prosecution of Jerzy Michalec, I didn’t know what had been doctored in her file.

The pillow behind my back had grown soft, and I was slipping deeper into it. I had to rub my eyes raw to keep from passing out as I squinted at Michalec’s file. He was born in Szekszard, Austro-Hungary, 12 January 1909. By now, if he was still alive, he’d be eighty. In 1933, he married Agnes Holler in Vienna, and ten years later Agnes died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The rest of the story-his history with the Gestapo-was not mentioned.

I found a photograph from a 1979 visa mug shot. Years in a socialist labor camp had put weight into his haggard eyes, and he’d lost the extra fat that living well after the war had given him. Remarkably, he was smiling in the picture. I wondered why.

I set the picture aside and found this: August 1949: Sentenced to death for counterrevolutionary activity. Charges included collaboration with anticommunist forces with ties to American and British imperialists, as well as sabotage of Soviet military communication lines.

I finally closed my eyes, feeling sick. I’d been seeing it all wrong, and here was the evidence. Still, I had to go through more pages, through the rest of Jerzy Michalec’s history, to be sure.

The file told me that a month after his verdict, Michalec’s punishment was commuted to life in a labor camp. He served it until 1956, when our former leader, Mihai, bowing to the new wave of tolerance emanating from Khrushchev’s Moscow, initiated a blanket amnesty for political prisoners. Jerzy was among those freed.

I hadn’t known this before, but it made sense, and was probably true. A lot of marginal, embittered people were suddenly put on the streets that year, making our jobs that much more difficult. It also marked the beginning of Ferenc Kolyeszar’s worst year.

Another whiter, and thus fabricated, sheet said Michalec was ar-rested by the First District Militia in 1968 for passing out leaflets supporting the Prague Spring, then again in 1976 for running a printing press from his basement. The arresting officer in 1968 was Lieutenant Libarid Terzian. In 1976, Captain Imre Papp.

Both of whom were now dead and couldn’t dispute the lie.

I shut my eyes again, trying to control my exhausted emotions. They had doctored the memory of my militiamen to protect a man who was once called the Butcher. Because that’s what Michalec was. The name had been used as a compliment, because of a single after-noon in the crumbling ruin of Berlin in 1945, when he assembled twenty-three Hitlerjugend boys under his command and killed them all. He presented their corpses to the Red Army and was cheered. Only a butcher could do that.

On the next page I found something even more striking. In June 1979, Jerzy Michalec applied for, and received, permission to emigrate to France. He left in September of that year.

September 1979.

I put the file aside and, in my underwear, stumbled through to the living room, where Karel was dozing in front of the muted television, the remote in his hand. I wondered where he had found that. On the screen, soldiers were crouched behind bullet-damaged cars, shooting up into the sky. I paused. It was Yalta Boulevard, and they were shooting up at the Hotel Metropol.

But I ignored it and went to my coat on the rack, searching the pockets until I found the few crumpled sheets from Rosta Gorski’s file. As I walked back to the bedroom, I checked them. Yes. September 1979 was the same month that Rosta Gorski, according to the Stryy Militia, “disappeared.”

By the time I made it to bed again, I knew it was true. When it came to Jerzy Michalec, coincidences did not exist. Michalec and Gorski moved to France together.

This, finally, was something.

But it only led to more questions. Why did they leave together? And how did Michalec, a labor-camp veteran, get permission to emigrate? For that, you had to go directly to Yalta 36 and suffer the rigors of an entire life study before you could even arrange your first interview. The Ministry only let you leave if it wanted you to leave.

I laid the files on the floor and slipped deeper under the covers, trying to silence my aching head. I was too tired to muddle through it all.

Despite my efforts I couldn’t sleep. I was finally able to push Jerzy Michalec out of my head, but his place was taken, instantaneously, by Lena.

Ever since the guests started filling my home, I’d set her aside because it was the only way to deal with what had to be done. I’ve set aside grief many times in my life, only to come back and face it later. All those tragedies were nothing next to this. The day before, I’d felt as if all my organs had been stolen from my body, but now they were back, all of them, bloated and painful.

I kept seeing her face, and the extra lines she had from a lifetime of hard drinking and smoking. That was my Lena. She’d been beautiful when she was young, but when she lost that beauty she never let go of the toughness that had always given her beauty power. Even during our worst moments-and we had so many-that underlying fierceness bound me to her.

I was always just myself, Emil Brod, a normal man. Average in so many ways. But Lena was always a little more of everything. Funnier, more social, more destructive, and more loving than I could ever hope to be. That made her more tangible than anyone I’d known in my life, all the way through to that final moment when she was cursing at the key she’d stuck into the Mercedes.

That did it. That’s what broke me. For the next hour, until the exhaustion finally did me in, all I could do was cry, and my ears were filled with that horrible electric hum. Somewhere in the middle of my fit I felt the real power of my discovery. Jerzy Michalec wasn’t just another senior citizen who’d been targeted for murder. He was rewriting history and killing off those who knew otherwise.

I didn’t know why, and I wasn’t sure how. All I knew was that he’d finished what he’d tried to do forty years ago-he’d killed me. By killing Lena, he’d succeeded more effectively than if he’d broken each of my bones and then put a bullet in my brain.