Victory Square

TWENTY-EIGHT

After breakfast, we prepared to go into Sarospatak so Ferenc could show off “the operation.” Magda had stared at me often during the meal, but I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to tell me until I was putting on my coat. She pulled me aside. “What I said last night is true.”

“I know.”

“The other part, I mean. I love you. And I want to help you. I don’t care if what they say about Lena is true. If she worked for them, she did it because she felt she had no choice. No one’s going to convince me otherwise.”

“Thanks.”

Bernard decided at the last minute to join us, because he wanted to find a Christmas tree for Sanja. Squeezed between them in the truck, I realized that, whatever his flaws, Bernard loved his family. “Here,” he said near a cluster of pine trees before the main road.

Ferenc didn’t bother slowing. “Too small.”

“Anything bigger, you won’t be able to fit it in the house.”

“We’re not doing it half-ass this year,” said Ferenc. “We’ll find something on the way back.”

They argued, shooting barbs back and forth past me as we bounced along the shoddy country road, but I wasn’t listening.

Ferenc was right: Lena had worked for the Ministry, probably ever since we married in 1950. Four decades. For four decades, she’d maintained an enormous lie, and I never, not once, suspected.

It was humiliating. I’d lived forty years with a stranger. A liar. How could she have kept it from me during all those drunken years? The only way a drunk can keep such a secret is if she’s living with a complete fool.

Yes, I was angry at my dead wife. I felt like I was the good but dull and dull-witted husband in those films about adultery. The husband who listens to classical music and sucks on a pipe in his study, while in his bedroom his wife is breaking out of her monochrome existence with the gardener or the business partner. She’s filling her dead life with clandestine passion.

But adultery would’ve been easy. I could have walked in on her in another man’s embrace, shouted and wept, and been done with it. This was something more, a parallel life, no doubt Lena’s real life, and I never even noticed that it was right there, right next to me.

After forty years, I’d just learned that my life’s role had been the pitiful one. I was the dumb but harmless mouse, the one who never raised a question, who never noticed that my wife was a spy.

It was really too much to take. It felt as if every few minutes my life, and my world, changed. I wished it would stop. I wished that something, anything, would remain as I remembered it.

“Emil?”

I blinked. Ferenc was frowning at me as he turned onto a main road. I said, “What?”

“You’re not listening.”

“Sorry. What’s the topic?”

Bernard cut in. “He was telling you how much of a hero he was during the revolution.”

“Not a hero,” said Ferenc, shaking his head. “Just what happened.”

“You’re making yourself out to be a hero. Admit it.” “Shut up, Bernard.”

Sarospatak traces its official history back to 1201, when it was granted town status by the Hungarian monarch King Emeric. It grew during the Middle Ages as a stop on the trading route to Poland. In the early fifteenth century, Ferenc told me, King Sigis-mund declared it a free royal town, and in 1460 King Matthias granted it the right to its own market. With the Reformation it became an academic center, and in the mid-1600s the famous educator Jan Comenius taught there. Ferenc told me all this as we crossed the city limits, adding that the famous Rakoczi family, which had owned the town’s castle, took a major part in the revolution against the Habsburgs. “They call Patak‘the Athens on the Bodrog’because we’ve got a history of education and revolution here.”

“In that order,” said Bernard.

But on the outskirts, before reaching the muddy Bodrog River, there was no sign of the First City’s glorious past. The remaining Habsburg buildings were crumbling from years of neglect, and the pedestrians bundled against the cold seemed insecure and confused under the gray sky.

By eleven thirty, we crossed Bodrog Bridge. On a hill to our left, the Red Tower of Rakoczi Castle rose high, looking out over the entire city.

Ferenc and his friends’base of operations was a small third-floor apartment in the center, just off Comenius Street. I spotted the window, because a sheet hung from it with the words NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC FORUM painted in blue. The stairwell stank of mildew-some pipes had frozen and burst a month ago and still hadn’t been fixed-and Ferenc had to hit the door with his shoulder because it was bloated with moisture. I expected a little more from the cradle of our revolution.

Inside were five mismatched tables and seven mismatched chairs that had been borrowed from sympathizers. Today two young women and a young man watched a small television and manned two telephones, one of which had a lead that went out the window into a neighboring apartment. “Where the hell is everybody?” Ferenc asked them.

“It’s Christmas,” said one of the girls, a striking blonde. “I’m not staying here all day either.”

Christmas? I thought.

Ferenc turned to me. “See? Is it any wonder those bastards in the Capital make more headway than us?” To the girl: “Aliz, you think the Galicia Committee’s taking off for Christmas?”

Aliz shrugged, then looked at the television, where, from a hospital bed, Rosta Gorski told a reporter that his injuries wouldn’t stop his mission to restore democracy to our beleaguered country. “It’s no secret my assailant is connected to the Ministry-his wife was an agent. This only strengthens my resolve.”

I found a chair and settled into it.

Ferenc sat with his workers and went through papers. Bernard put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s the guy, huh?”

I nodded.

“He’s calling you a Ministry agent.”

I nodded again as he pulled up a chair beside me and began whispering.

“This is what we’ll do,” he said, as if he’d been thinking about it a long time. “We go back to the Capital together. You and me. I’ve got my Militia Walther. We’ll find a way through the roadblocks, then I’ll track down Michalec’s address. He’s got to be living somewhere. We’ll get him to admit to everything on tape and play it on the radio from Patak.” He sounded excited by the idea. He was a lot like his father-in-law.

I was about to thank him but tell him no when the young man at the other table, who had sideburns down to his jawline, looked up from some papers at the television. “Hey. Guys. Look.”

All of us did as he asked and were surprised to see washed-out video footage of Tomiak and Ilona Pankov sitting at a long table, arms crossed over their chests, in a concrete-walled room.

“Turn it up,” I said.