Victory Square

FOUR

While Agota told Magda and Ferenc about her adventures photographing Tomiak Pankov, I sat with Bernard at his desk, Sanja on his knee. He fumbled with his daughter’s wispy blond hair and said, “Why are you driving her?”

“What?”

“Agi can take the train. You don’t need to bother.”

“It’ll be nice to get out of the city.”

“And go see Ferenc?”

I shrugged in a pretense of stupidity, but I think he knew what I was up to. He also knew why I wasn’t going to discuss it with him. A couple of months after he and Agota married, a man from the Ministry for State Security arrived in the office. He was one of those small, petty clerk-types who sweat a lot. I was on the phone at the time and watched him go to Gavra’s desk, introduce himself, and then ask for Bernard Kovar. Gavra took him over to Bernard’s desk, where the little man congratulated him on his marriage. Bernard, unsure, thanked the man and then acquiesced to a coffee. The three of them were gone for an hour.

I cornered Bernard that evening. He was scared but wouldn’t tell me what had happened, finally getting angry and telling me to keep to my own business. So, the next day, I cornered Gavra, who was more open. The Ministry was making a deal with Bernard. His father-in-law, Ferenc Kolyeszar, was of particular interest to the security of our socialist Utopia. Perhaps Bernard could share some of his insider knowledge with them, now and then.

“He said no, right?” I asked Gavra.

Gavra rocked his head from side to side. “They’ve offered passports for both him and Agota.”

“So?”

I was being naive, I know, because they weren’t just offering Bernard and his new wife the freedom to visit other countries; they were also promising not to harass them in the future. So, inevitably, Bernard made the occasional report to Yalta Boulevard. I knew it, Gavra knew it, and even Ferenc knew it, because I told him. Ferenc assured me that he and his son-in-law, despite their mutual annoyance, had come to an agreement. Ferenc wrote Bernard’s reports for him. In exchange, Ferenc promised never to tell Agota what her husband was up to.

Despite this, I wasn’t going to burden Bernard with information he didn’t need to know.

“Yeah,” I told him. “It’ll be nice to see Ferenc again.”

“You think he can help on this case? I mean, the‘Time for a change’part.” He sounded very earnest.

I took one of his cigarettes. “No. He won’t know a thing.”

He knew I was lying, but didn’t press the issue.

When his wife finished with my telephone, I had Bernard carry my box of old files to where I’d parked on Lenin Avenue. I followed with Agota and Sanja, wondering if she really knew nothing about her husband’s Ministry collaborations. At my Mercedes-bought, like everything, with Lena’s family money-Bernard kissed his family good-bye, promising to see them by the weekend.

We soon reached Victory Square; then a side road put us on Mihai Boulevard, which followed the banks of the Tisa River-”Lifeblood of the Nation,” we liked to call it. The water reflected the gray winter sky, lapping stone ramparts. Recent storms had raised the water level enough to frighten those who lived near the river. Lena and I lived higher up in the Second District and had no fear.

Many of the Habsburg buildings I remembered from my youth, which had lined the riverbank, had been demolished in the last decade. Tomiak Pankov, a great believer in the shape and look of socialism, returned from a 1978 visit to North Korea with a new vision for the Capital. Some said he was embarrassed by the provinciality of our city and raged whenever he came back from trips to Paris or London, but I’m not sure about that. I think he had a fastidious side to him, something that served him well under our first Great Leader, Mihai, when he was just a simple government bureaucrat in love with efficiency. Once he saw Kim 11 Sung’s rigid and clean society, and Pyongyang’s long, broad avenues and crowds in perfect, military formation, he felt he’d found paradise.

Now, everything that smelled of the past was being erased. Churches were demolished, or moved brick by brick to hide behind modern towers, and the outer rings of the city were replanned to accommodate the influx of farmers reassigned as factory workers.

We got on the Georgian Bridge, heading south, and on our left lay the ruptured skyline of the Canal District, full of cranes and half-finished block towers. Even the Canal District, that symbol of everything seedy and chaotic in the country, once home to prostitutes and drug dealers, was being turned into a New Town.

When we reached the southern bank, also full of new towers, Agota said, “I spent all yesterday in a line. You know that? Trying to get an extra ration book for Sanja. Four hours, just to have the bitch behind the window tell me Sanja was missing her A-32 form.”

“What’s an A-32?”

“Far as I can tell, it’s to prove she exists. But there she was, crying on my hip. I don’t need a goddamned A-32. It’s a real laugh, isn’t it?

First, the maternity laws say I can’t have an abortion, then they make sure I’m barely able to feed the kids I end up with.”

“Want me to make a call?” I asked. I’d done this enough times before. As soon as the dietary laws started going through three years ago, specifying the forms required to get your food ticket booklets, the flaws became apparent. If you were missing a stamp on one of the four forms required-or on one of the sixteen forms needed to get those four primary forms-it meant you had to fall back on bartering with your neighbors or visiting the black market.

“Taken care of,” she said.

I wondered if this was why she was rushing off to Tisakarad. The farther you got from the Capital-and Tisakarad was forty miles away-the less the ration system was followed. Local farmers had long ago realized the benefit of skimming off their Capital-bound shipments and bringing their pigs into the markets, where the city folk would trade anything for a bit of pork. I said, “I’m surprised Bernard let you go. Patak’s not safe, and I’ll bet Ferenc will drag you there with him.”

“Think he has a say in it?” She turned Sanja to face her, switching to baby talk: “No, no! Daddy doesn’t have any say!” Sanja didn’t seem to have an opinion one way or the other.

We’d just passed the last of the towers when the roadblock appeared. Two Militia cars were parked in the grass, and a makeshift gate-a long tangle of razor wire-had been stretched across the road. As I slowed to a stop, a big militiaman in a regulation blue overcoat tossed away a cigarette and came over to my window. I rolled it down, letting in the cold. He had fat sideburns growing from under his cap, and half his face was sunburned. “Where you going?”

“Tisavar. What’s this?”

“Turn around and head back. Traffic’s stopped today.”

I handed over my Militia certificate. He cocked his head as he read it, then pushed back his cap with a knuckle. “Sorry about that, Comrade Chief.” He didn’t seem very sorry. “Orders from the top.”

“What does that mean?”

He squinted and rocked on his heels. “You know. Central Committee.”

“To keep everyone in the Capital?”

He nodded, then noticed Agota and Sanja. He gave them a smile.

“Trains are down, too?”

“Most,” he said. “First train they cut was the twelve thirty to Patak.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I think we all know what it’s about.”

“But I can go through.”

“Sure,” he said. “You’re not going to Patak, right?”

“I told you. Tisavar.”

He touched the brim of his cap, then stepped back and waved us on. Two younger militiamen with thick gloves dragged the razor wire aside so we could pass.

We didn’t talk about the roadblock, or the fact that suddenly the Capital had become a prison. It had happened before, when the Central Committee overreacted to a bomb that destroyed a fertilizer plant in Krosno, back on November fifth-the thirty-second anniversary of the short-lived 1956 general strike that, in the end, led to Agota’s father’s internal exile.

After two days, though, the roadblocks had been removed, and the government never spoke of it again. Perhaps Tomiak Pankov thought we would forget.

We reached Tisavar a little before three. Ferenc and I, whenever something required a private meeting, always came here, to a point just within the ring of his allowed movement, an hour south of the Capital, just before Kisvarda. Before the Great Patriotic War, Tisavar had been a tiny Jewish-Slav enclave that had survived and even prospered under the Austro-Hungarian government as a market town for the farmers in the nearby region. In the thirties, the mayor decided it was time for a change, and he began lobbying the between-wars government for subsidies to start building cooperative granaries. The government agreed, but before the money could make it there, the Germans marched in. Then Tisavar disappeared.

The Wehrmacht appeared in May 1939, having quickly overrun our little army. My father died in those short battles and was soon followed by my mother. At the time, I was living in the south, in Ruscova, with my grandparents, who had fled the soldiers in the Capital. The Occupation, for me, was largely about boredom. I was an anxious, too ambitious boy surrounded by dull farmers. Up around Tisavar, though, the Nazi presence was felt strongly. Soldiers patrolled the streets, and officers took over the administrative house, controlling the flow of money and property and Jews.

The region was governed by Major General Karloff Messerstein, a delinquent from Thuringen who had joined the Nazi Party during its beer-hall days. He administered the region as if it were his private fiefdom, and, perhaps inevitably, some of the headstrong Tisavar boys used munitions left over from our short-lived war to blow up Messerstein’s car in 1942.

The major general survived with burns and a broken leg, and from his hospital bed directed the retribution.

Early on in the Occupation, the Germans had enlisted the help of malcontents from our Ukrainian population. These young men had been promised that, once the war was won, the eastern half of our country (including the Capital) would be returned to the Ukraine as a state within the greater German Reich. The fools believed it, because they wanted to. Messerstein decided that, given their local knowledge and natural animosity for these westerners, his Ukrainian recruits would be ideal for the job.

They first emptied the houses and led the townsfolk to what would later be called Anti-Fascism Hill, on the north side of town. There, over the space of two days, the entire population was executed and buried. Then, using a tank borrowed from a nearby Panzer division, they destroyed the stone administration buildings, then systematically burned every house. As an added touch, Major General Karloff Messerstein arrived on crutches to personally supervise the delivery of two truckloads of Hungarian salt, which were spread over the embers.

All of this was in our history books, and people in the region never forgave the Ukrainian minority its role in the event. The irony, which the textbooks never mentioned, was that a week after the massacre, Messerstein died naturally of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Now, all that was left was a memorial in the middle of a swath of barren earth. It was placed here by Mihai during a 1951 ceremony, filmed by camera crews from all over the world. A statement on a bronze plaque attached to a

stone pedestal, followed by a few lines from our national poet, Rikard Pasha: HERE MARKS THE SPOT WHERE TISAVAR WAS DESTROYED BY THE FASCIST MENACE ON 8 OCTOBER 1942.

A world like leaves of the impossible creation from God’s mind.

All we can hope for is a dream made clear before we die.

No one, not even Ferenc, had ever been able to tell me what those two lines of verse were supposed to mean.

He was waiting for us in front of the plaque, gloved hands clasped behind his big form, gazing down. Ferenc was just as huge as he’d always been, and though he’d recently turned seventy, he still didn’t look like a writer; he looked like a retired thug. When we parked, he turned to face us, and I noticed his lumpy nose was a little bigger and redder than before. When he saw his daughter and granddaughter get out of the car, he lumbered over to hug them, grinning madly.

Perhaps unconsciously, Agota had chosen in Bernard a man who was just like her father-huge, moody, and surprisingly astute at times-and this was perhaps why the two men couldn’t get along. They hated to see themselves reflected.

When we shook hands, I smelled palinka on him and wondered if he was drunk. “Still trying to figure that out?”

“Mihai,” he said, nodding at the plaque. “He was a mysterious man.”

“Let’s walk.”

Ferenc handed his keys to Agota and asked her to wait in his beat-up Russian flatbed truck. We walked across the salt-dead ground through the cold wind from Anti-Fascism Hill, which was dotted with crosses and bundles of dead flowers. “So you’ve got a lieutenant general’s corpse,” he said.

“Poisoned. Someone laced his cocaine with pure heroin.”

“Ballsy.”

I agreed. “By now, Feder has filed his autopsy, so it’s official. I don’t have much choice-I’ll have to press on with the investigation. I just need to figure out how I’m going to do it.”

“And you think I can help?”

I looked at him, hands deep in my pockets. The wind was making my eyes water. “You’re at the center of things these days. You’d know if someone wanted Kolev dead.”

“We don’t want people dead,” he said. “Those are the kinds of people we’re fighting.”

“Remember fifty-six?” I said.

He frowned. “What about it?”

“You may not want to execute anyone, but that doesn’t mean someone on the fringe hasn’t decided to go that route.”

“And you think I’d know.”

“I’d ask Father Meyr instead, but I don’t know where he is.”

Ferenc scratched his rough cheek, then turned to look back at the truck. We couldn’t see his family through the dirty windshield. “You’re right-it’s possible some angry kid got it into his head to kill Kolev. Though I imagine he’d use a gun instead. If so, I don’t know about it. But I think you’re looking in the wrong direction.”

“Am I?”

He nodded, then sniffed; he sounded congested. “End of last week, your dead lieutenant general came to Patak.”

“How do you know?”

“How wouldn’t I know?” he said, smiling. “When you’re preparing to march against the government, you become as paranoid as you can. You notice everything. And we noticed Yuri Kolev.”

“He came three times over the last week,” I told him. “Under a fake name.”

“Yeah. Ulrich Lipmann.”

“What was he doing?”

“Not what you’d think.” He switched to the professorial tone he’d gotten accustomed to among his wide-eyed student revolutionaries. “Kolev didn’t go to the regional Ministry HQ. Instead, he went to the other side of town, to a bar where some of our guys hang out. He met with a Russian.”

“Russian?” I said dumbly. I do that sometimes.

My surprise pleased him. “Now, this was something I didn’t know about until after it happened. A couple of our worker bees watched this going on, saw Kolev leave again, get into his pretty BMW and drive back to the Capital. But the Russian stayed to finish his vodka. They followed him into town to a small one-room apartment. Then they jumped him.”

“Jesus.”

Ferenc shrugged. “What can I do? They’re brash kids. But that’s how they learned he was Russian. They questioned him, but not too roughly. Best they got was a name off his passport-Fyodor Male-vich. Then they looked around. Guess what he had in a box in the wardrobe.”

“Tell me.”

“A colonel’s uniform. Not Russian, but our army.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know. The boys called a friend of mine, but by the time he arrived, old Fyodor had escaped. He knew what he was doing. He took on the boys one at a time, knocked them out, and fled-with the uniform. The kids’re fine; they just got headaches.”

I didn’t know what to make of a Russian masquerading as one of our colonels, but it was all Ferenc had to offer. At least, it was all he was willing to offer me. We had a long-standing friendship, but he’d been a militiaman during some of the darkest years and knew how, despite a man’s desires, it was easy to be cornered, or blackmailed, and made to give up what you knew. His son-in-law was a textbook example. Ferenc’s reticence protected both of us.

It was also disappointing. I’d hoped that Ferenc might be able to shed light on Kolev’s murder. If it had turned out to be committed by one of his friends, my job would have been, ironically, very simple. I would have whitewashed it. Pin the murder on the next corpse that came in, or start asking for access to files the Ministry wasn’t willing to give me; then I could throw up my hands and admit defeat. There were many ways to get rid of work you didn’t want to do.

Walking back to his truck, he told me to keep my eye on the news. “Change is in the air.” He reminded me-as if I’d just come back from the moon-that all around us democracy had defeated totalitarianism, and he said that there was nothing Tomiak Pankov could do. Change was inevitable. “You should get involved, Emil. You’ve got a responsibility to the next generation. We’re bringing Democracy for them.”

I grimaced.

When people use those capitalized abstracts-Democracy, Freedom, Totalitarianism-with such conviction, I’m always left unnerved. It reminds me too much of life just after the war, when everyone was encouraged to speak like that. I said, “I’m just trying to survive long enough to get my pension.”

“You’re the last one who needs a pension,” he said, thinking of Lena’s family money. “Besides, that’s the kind of thinking Pankov depends on.”

He was right, of course. I told him to keep safe and make sure Agota and Sanja made it through the changes unscathed. He smiled and, unexpectedly, kissed both my cheeks. I, too, had been right; he was drunk.

By the time I reached the Capital again, it was dark. Sensing a blood-pressure headache coming my way, I took two more Captopril. I found a new, fresh militiaman at the roadblock. He was sterner than the first had been, so I was sterner with him. I showed my Militia certificate, emphasizing my rank, and told him that if he didn’t let me through, Colonel Nikolai Romek of the Ministry for State Security would have a chat with him. It worked.

I could hardly see the block towers because in this section of the Capital the power had been switched off again. It was a regular occurrence. In the Second District, the streetlamps were off, but the windows glowed.

I parked on Friendship Street, outside our apartment, and carried the box of old files to the elevator. It was out of order again. So I lugged it up the three floors, stopping often to catch my breath. I’ve never been a man of formidable strength; all I’ve ever had is persistence. I reached the apartment huffing crazily.

Lena wasn’t amused by my lateness. She didn’t answer my greeting, only stared at a rerun of Family Popa on television. She referred me to the oven, where a cold platter of boiled pork and cabbage waited. I scooped some onto a plate, ate half of it in the kitchen, and threw the rest away. “You going to wash that plate?” she called from the living room, just before a laugh track erupted.

“No,” I said and let it drop into the sink. “I need to keep you busy.”

It was an old, tired joke, but enough for her to shout back that if I wasn’t nice to her, she’d down a bottle of vodka. Then she reminded me-for the tenth time, according to her-that I still hadn’t talked to the mechanic about her Mercedes, which wasn’t starting. For the tenth time I told her I’d do it in the morning.

She finally took her eyes off the TV when I sat next to her and pulled up the box of old files. “What have you got?”

I took one out at random, blew off the dust, and opened it up. “Revisiting the past.”

“Which one’s that?”

I checked the label, then frowned. “Imre’s.”

“Oh.”

It was from 1985 and labeled “unsolved”-but that was a lie. His was the second “unsolved” case surrounding a dead militiaman, the first being the death of my oldest friend, Libarid Terzian, during a botched airplane hijacking in 1975. Terzian’s case was transferred to the Ministry for State Security. Then, ten years later, we found my young Captain Imre Papp in the Canal District with five bullets in his head, lungs, and leg.

It made no sense to any of us. Imre wasn’t on a case, and he had a wife and child; he wasn’t the kind of man to go poking around the Canal District for whores. None of us knew why he was even there. We followed a number of leads, but they all ran cold until I got a phone call, at home, from Brano Sev.

The old man-then a general-had left the homicide department in the midseventies, moving on to an expansive office at Yalta Boulevard 36. Our friendship had always been tenuous-for plenty of good reasons, I’d never trusted him-and once he left the station we rarely saw each other. I didn’t call him, and he didn’t call me. And that was fine. I didn’t really want to spend time with a man so devoted to protecting socialism in our country-so devoted that he had even arrested our friend Ferenc in 1956. Which is why it was a surprise, and a little unnerving, to pick up the kitchen phone and hear his voice.

“Emil?”

“Brano, is that you?”

“Yes, Emil. Can you step outside a moment? I’d like to talk with you. About Imre.”

After that talk, I decided never to speak to the man again. But there was no sense dredging up those old, difficult memories now. I put the file back.

“Find the other one,” Lena said, moving closer.

“Which one?”

“Number one.”

I pretended I didn’t understand.

“When you fell madly in love with me?”

“Ah!” I said. “That one.”

She tapped the remote until the Popa family was silenced. “Come on. Show me.”

The files weren’t in order-some clerk had stuffed them in the box haphazardly. So I pulled out half the box, a stack of thirty files, and handed it to Lena. “Look for 1948.”

“I remember,” she said, “even if you don’t.”

Of course I remembered. In 1948, I was only twenty-two, and Lena was a thirty-year-old widow with a serious drinking problem.

The case had begun with the murder of her first husband, Janos Crowder, a songwriter found bludgeoned to death. He’d been blackmailing a political figure named Jerzy Michalec with documents proving that Michalec had been a decorated Gestapo agent during the war. In the end, Michalec-amazingly vital despite being afflicted with epilepsy-kidnapped Lena, then traded her for incriminating German documents I’d gone all the way to Berlin to track down. Despite our deal, Brano Sev used the photographs to bring the man to justice.

Jerzy Michalec was first sentenced to death, and I can still remember the show trial we listened to on the Militia radio. It was 1949. We heard everything-the prosecutors and the hysterical witnesses, and even the confusion when, during a judge’s tirade, Michalec suddenly shivered, frothing, taken by an epileptic seizure. Later, his punishment was commuted, and he was put to work in one of the many labor camps that filled the country during the late forties and fifties. Like a bad dream, he simply vanished. It was the way of the world back then. People vanished.

But the file wasn’t here. I went through my stack twice, then took Lena’s. In the front of the box, I found the order form I’d sent over, listing cases to be retrieved. Each had been checked by the archives clerk, except the one labeled “10-3282-48- MICHALEC, J,” which was marked NH — ne har. The file was missing.

The phone rang, and Lena went to get it. Central Archives was notoriously inefficient, but of all the files to be misplaced, I was surprised it would be this one.

“Cher comrade?” Lena was waving the receiver from its cord. “Comrade Kolyeszar requests your presence.”

While I talked, Lena went through the cabinets, finding a glass and making me a scotch and soda. She’d picked up the ten-year-old malt on a trip earlier that year to England. Unlike in the old days, she didn’t make one for herself.

Ferenc said, “Sorry to call at home.” He sounded strange, distant, and spoke with an unsettling calm.

“What is it?”

“They’re dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

Lena handed me the drink. Ferenc said, “I don’t know. They… they shot, Emil.”

“Who?”

A voice-Magda, I think-said something to Ferenc. Then Agota took the phone. “For fuck’s sake, Emil, he’s telling you the Ministry bastards shot into the crowd! We don’t know how many people they killed-but there are dead people. Lots. You have to spread the word. Understand? The Spark will say something different, but you have to tell them. You have to make sure they know ^?

Agota spoke to me with a voice I’d hear more and more over the next days. It was more than Ferenc’s abstracts-it was the voice of the astonished and self-righteous.

I don’t mean to say people weren’t justified feeling this way; almost always, they were. I just mean that it was a voice I hadn’t yet accustomed myself to. My heart palpitated and my hand sweated. I gulped down the scotch and soda and handed the empty glass back to Lena, who was staring wildly. I said, “Just tell me what to do, Agi.”

What she wanted me to do frightened me, but I couldn’t do it until the next day, so for the rest of the night I was impotent. Predictably, there was no mention of the Patak massacre on the two state television stations that evening.

I wanted to distract myself with my old files, because there was some comfort in cases that had been solved and closed, but in light of what was going on, they were like stories out of a piece of fiction. Lena, on the other hand, was empowered by the news. “Finally, this godforsaken country is going to see the light.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, dear, that Pankov has crossed the line. He can starve us and cut off our energy, but once he starts shooting people in the streets it’s over. Only a desperate man resorts to this.”

I didn’t share Lena’s optimism. We’d both lived through the arrival of socialism, and both of us welcomed the idea of watching it leave again, but I worried-perhaps too much-about my friends. We weren’t like the Czechs or Poles. We’d never been the kind of people to vent our frustration through the ballot box.

My problem, of course, was that I had no faith in people to make my country better. After forty years in the People’s Militia, it’s hard to maintain such faith.

Around ten thirty, Bernard called and swore angrily that if anyone touched Agota or Sanja, he was going to blow something up. I suggested he not say this over the phone, but there was no stopping him. He finally made it around to what I knew, when I first heard his voice, he was going to ask: “Do you really need me here?”

“Go,” I said, hoping his Militia ID would get him through the roadblocks. “A dead Ministry officer, one way or the other, makes no difference.” I said that because I was foolish enough to believe it.

The foolishness stayed with me all night, even as I sat in bed watching Lena clean makeup from her hollowed cheeks in the vanity mirror. She’d listened in on my conversation, so she asked about the dead Ministry officer, and I told her about Kolev. She showed more surprise than I would’ve expected, lowering her hands from her face in shock. “You’re saying he was murdered?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Why did you run the tests? That colonel told you not to bother.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“You think he did it? Romek?”

“Maybe. But I don’t really know.”

She went back to her face, and I peered around for cigarettes but couldn’t find any. I looked back at my wife. It wasn’t just the stupidity that left me feeling calm. It was a kind of detachment. As I would a week later in Italy, I was thinking about something else, something to take me away from the moment, because the moment was frightening. I was remembering how thankful I was for the Afghan War.

All our life together, Lena had been an alcoholic. No- drunk is the better word. We twice separated because of her drinking, and her drinking led to two miscarriages and many, many hospital visits. Then, in 1983, Lena woke from another of her brief comas, this time triggered by a bottle of black-market rakija that had been mixed with methanol. The nurse smiled at her and laid a copy of the day’s Spark on her bedside table. After a couple of hours, she was finally able to focus enough to take in the front-page story about the Soviet troops who had been killed in the mujahideen’s most recent offensive in the Panjshir Valley.

Maybe it was the poison in her bloodstream, lingering even after the stomach pump of bad Serbian brandy-whatever it was, it had a lasting effect. On the third floor of Unity Medical, she cried uncontrollably.

Never the weeping sort, Lena nonetheless let forth at times with the hysterical weeping of the unbalanced; it was a sound that always troubled me. There in Unity Medical, though, it was as if someone else were crying, someone who understood exactly why she was crying, understood that if she’d had her wits about her, she would have been crying like this ever since she first picked up a bottle, sometime during her first disastrous marriage more than forty years ago.

She showed me the newspaper, and though I didn’t understand, I never admitted it. I didn’t want to undermine the vow she’d just made in a fit of emotion: As long as men were blown up in obscure corners of the world, she, Lena Brod, would not touch another drop of alcohol.

Now it was 1989, and she was seventy-two. A dry seventy-two. Her hands no longer shook, and when I returned home I no longer opened the door with apprehension, wondering about her unpredictable moods. In the winter of our lives she had given me something not unlike spring, and I was thankful.

Thankful for the floundering Soviet war in the deserts of Afghanistan, only recently ended, and for the cretin who added methanol to his batch so he could sell more of his black-market ra-kija to the alcoholics of our country.

Lena was staring at me, the light in the mirror shining against the large spectacles she’d slipped on to see me better. “What is it? You worried?”

“Not anymore,” I said. It’s amazing how the human mind can comfort itself.