Victory Square

TWENTY-ONE

I worried about Gisele Sully. If she followed my instructions and spoke only in French, then she would be safe. No one would assume she’d understood anything during those minutes before I shot Rosta Gorski. No one would assume I’d told her anything. But I didn’t trust that she would keep her mouth shut, and that terrified me.

If she made it, though, the cassette in her pocket might bring something positive out of all this mess.

I also worried about myself. Sixty-four years is only as old as the life you live, and for too long I’d spent my days in a chair behind a desk. My heart slapped the inside of my chest as I galloped down the steel service steps; my lungs burned. But I reached the Citroen before anyone decided to start looking on other floors for me. I nodded at the soldier who’d let us in, and he said, “Where’s the lovely Frenchie?”

“She decided to stay,” I answered, gasping, but winked. He laughed.

I had to drive quickly. I took the turnoff that placed me on Mihai Boulevard, then crossed the Georgian Bridge, heading south past the Canal District. I could only guess how long it would take them to search the Central Committee Building, decide I wasn’t there, then send out my name and description to the army units checking papers around the edge of the Capital.

By that hour-it was eleven thirty-cars had started to appear on the streets again, and I had to swerve around smoke-coughing Karpats and Trabants and Skodas while avoiding oncoming traffic. I reached the roadblock by noon, stopping behind four Karpats as the soldiers casually leaned over windows, checked papers, and chatted with pretty girls. I almost laid on the horn to hurry them up but decided against attracting attention.

When I reached the front of the line, I was faced with the same soldier who’d checked me and Agota on Wednesday, the one who had given Agota and Sanja a flirtatious smile. Having faced hundreds of faces since then, all of them much more memorable than mine, he didn’t remember me. When he asked where I was going, I answered honestly. “Tisakarad and Sarospatak.”

“The First City,” he said.

“What?”

“First City of the Revolution. That’s what they’re calling Patak now.”

I forced a smile. “First City it is.”

He waved me on, and soon I was in the fields that lay to the south of the Capital. I wondered what would become of all this farmland, which in 1947 had been nationalized, chopped up, and given to farmers who owed half their yield to the State. By 1950, they were giving 95 percent to the State. I imagined some of the families who’d once owned all this land were still around, and soon they’d be filing claims to get it back. What would happen to the farmers who’d spent the last forty years working the soil?

That’s when it came over me, and enveloped me. I pulled over on a barren patch and climbed out. Beneath my feet, frozen mud stood in ridges. I turned slowly, taking in all of it.

Shooting Rosta Gorski had cleared out a part of my head that I hadn’t used, probably, since I was a child. My personal tragedy receded for a moment, and for the first time I saw that my country had become an entirely different place. It was as vast and beautiful as it had always been; everything I knew and loved was inside its borders. But now it had changed. Maybe that’s when I changed as well. After forty years, I suddenly felt the need for all of this to survive. I actually believed I could protect it.

It’s the other reason I’m writing this.

I got back in the car and kept driving-carefully, because my eyes kept tearing up, turning the landscape into mist. The afternoon sun burned my roof as I crested the next hill, and the golden countryside spread out for miles.