36 Yalta Boulevard

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Hey, you. Comrade. Got a light?” He winked a second time in the old men’s direction.

  From his pocket Brano took a book of matches marked HOTEL METROPOL and handed it to Jast without looking away from the window.

  The first match faltered, but the second hissed and sparked until the cigarette was lit. Jast exhaled smoke and the stink of earlier vodkas, and Brano’s eyes watered as he accepted the matches back. But this was a different book of matches, white and blank. Jast said, “From the Capital, eh? Aren’t you Iwona’s boy?”

  Brano drank some more beer, then laid a few koronas on the counter. He turned to Jast for the first time and saw the red web of punished veins beneath his flaccid cheeks and nose. “I am,” he said.

  Another wink at the old men, who seemed unsure they liked the performance. The bartender ignored everyone. Jast grunted, the shot glass pressing into his chin. “Well, you’re not in the Capital anymore, comrade.”

  “I didn’t notice,” said Brano, and only after he left did it occur to anyone in the bar that this had been a joke.

  On the way back to his mother’s house, he clutched the matchbook in his pocket, turning it over and opening and shutting it while he watched faces along the road. Zygmunt, the old man who delivered his mother’s bread, seemed to be avoiding his gaze, but Captain Rasko acknowledged him as he stood in the mud with a young woman whose puffy lips made her look like the victim of abuse. He hadn’t expected to come across Lia Soroka out in the open, but he managed the surprise by nodding back at Rasko and at Jan Soroka’s unsmiling wife.

  He didn’t take out the matchbook until he had passed his mother’s front door. He flipped it open and read the sweat-smeared pencil scrawl inside the cover:

  Klara brought a large dish of pork cabbage rolls, and Lucjan ducked his head as he followed her in with his vodka, sealed in a used liter-sized soda bottle. Lucjan was nearly two heads taller than Brano, ruddy in the face, his wide shoulders stretching the back of his shirt, but his handshake had almost no strength at all. Mother took the vodka from him and disappeared with Klara into the kitchen.

  Lucjan tried to smile. “Klara says you’re on vacation.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You don’t know how long?”

  “A week, probably. Just long enough to get some rest.”

  “Must be nice, having that kind of relationship with your manager. He doesn’t care?”

  “He’s a good friend.”

  “Known him a long time?”

  “Are you always so curious?”

  Lucjan let out a nervous laugh, then settled on the sofa and began to roll a cigarette, his big fingers fumbling with the thin paper. Brano watched. “She told me you’re doing well at the cooperative.”

  “Klara’s an optimist.”

  “But you’re doing administrative work. That’s a good sign.”

  He licked the paper and sealed the cigarette. “What about you? You’re not used to working a factory job, are you?”

  “Not so different. There are orders, and I follow them. 1 do all right.”

  “That’s the answer I’d give, too.” He offered the damp cigarette, but Brano shook his head.

  Klara had known Lucjan Witaszewski all her life, and perhaps this explained the unimpressive choice she’d made at the age of seventeen. Brano had been working in the Capital for four years when the wedding invitation arrived in his mailbox. But that was 1948, and in the Capital there had been no end to the work. In almost every alley hid another criminal, the detritus all wars produce, and on top of that, there had been a new man in the Militia office named Emil Brod who had to be followed and examined and, finally, accepted.

  So he had mailed his response the next day: He could not come, but he wished them every happiness in their new, shared life, and had every hope that unity like theirs would be the backbone of their new, great society.

  Klara had never replied.

  Now, nearly two decades later, she placed two glasses of vodka on the coffee table and ran her fingers through her husband’s hair. “What’s the subject?”

  “Work,” said Lucjan.

  “Just as long as it’s not politics. Now drink.”

  Both men did as they were told, and Brano admitted that Lucjan’s apricot vodka was rather good. Lucjan shrugged his thanks.

  They went to the kitchen table while Mother dished everything out. “No ceremonies here,” she said. “Just eat.” Brano followed the order, but Klara bowed her head—a quick prayer—before lifting her fork.

  Conversation lingered on work as Lucjan revealed an unexpected excitement, describing the new drilling rig that had been delivered. “The Austrians know what they’re doing, I can tell you that. They sent over the Trauzl—a cable rotary rig on wheels. A real beauty!”

  Brano noted that the factories in Uzhorod were pumping out record numbers of tractors and industrial machines. Klara wasn’t impressed. “These production records don’t do anything for Bóbrka. You can see it yourself. Now that it’s winter, we’re hibernating, like always. Go out after dark, and Bóbrka’s a ghost town. I suppose the Capital never gets like that.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Brano.

  “Makes you wonder what goes on behind the windows,” Klara said. “They’re still living their lives.”

  “They’re eating their mothers’ meals,” said Mother.

  “And having more sex.”

  “Lucjan,” said Klara.

  Lucjan shook his head. “What they’re doing is playing cards. That’s what.”

  Mother frowned.

  “There’s a lot of gambling?” asked Brano.

  Lucjan’s face shriveled. Klara looked up.

  Brano opened his hands and gave a smile so small that it could be seen by no one. “I’m not going to arrest anyone for it. That’s not what I do.”

  Lucjan shrugged. “Everyone does it, right?”

  “I do it myself,” he lied.

  “But not like here, I hope,” said Mother.

  “Like here?”

  Lucjan looked at his plate. “It’s like in a lot of villages. These peasants run out of money, and the bets get a little strange. You know. I’ll bet my horse on this hand. That sort of thing.”

  “Not so strange,” said Brano. “The same as betting your watch.”

  “But what about your child?” Klara asked.

  Occasionally, Brano had heard of this sort of thing during his years in the Militia office in the Capital, though it happened more often in the countryside: men betting the life of a daughter, a wife, a mother. It was a repulsive element of the old world that socialism had not yet wiped clean. But he pretended it was news. “Child?”

  Klara went back to her plate, her face as red as the Comrade Lieutenant General’s, but not from drink.

  “Some guy,” said Lucjan. “An idiot. He was drunk, and he bet his little girl’s life on a hand of cards. Can you believe it?”

  “So what happened?”

  Lucjan smiled. “He won! Thank God.”

  The silence that followed felt long, and they each looked at him: first Lucjan, before facing his plate again, then Mother, who gave a fragile smile. Finally, Klara’s stoic gaze held him for a long time before returning to her food. It was a look Brano could not quite decipher, but it gave him a sudden, overwhelming feeling that he was far from home and among strangers.

  After dinner they returned to the living room and worked slowly on the vodka, Mother filling the silences with gossip Brano had already heard the night before. His sister and her husband had probably heard it all as well, for they only grunted into their glasses as she chronicled the love affairs of the town.

  Then, with enough liquor warming him, Brano said, “A while ago, I took a trip to Vienna.”

  “Vienna?” said Mother. “I didn’t know you went there.”

  “I did, for a little while. Work. A friend of mine was having a party. There was some food, but it was gone quickly, and everyone began drinking heavily. I
ran into the woman he was dating—she read tarot cards for a living.”

  Lucjan snorted. “Tarot cards?”

  “She was very nice to me. She had been drinking quite a bit. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar and leading the room in song.”

  “You sang?” said Klara.

  “No.” Brano set his glass on the table. “After a while, this woman asked me to dance.”

  “Did you dance?” asked Mother, looking around. “Have you ever seen Brani dance?”

  “Never,” said Klara.

  “I did dance, but not at first,” said Brano. “She continued to stand very close, watching me. So I asked her where my friend was. She said she had told him to go to hell. She’d told him he was a bore and she never wanted to speak to him again.”

  Lucjan leaned forward. “She told him that?”

  “Well, if he was boring—” began Klara.

  “There’s a difference between the truth and civility.”

  Klara shrugged at Mother, who smiled back.

  “It was none of my business,” said Brano. “But I tried to defend him to her. She would have none of it. Finally, she grabbed my arms and pulled me close to her and said, Brano Sev, I love you’”

  “She didn’t,” said Mother.

  Klara grinned. “This is fantastic!”

  Brano shook his head. “I told her she was mistaken. We’d only met once before, and she didn’t know who I was at all. She couldn’t be in love with me. It was impossible.”

  “Nuts, that one,” said Lucjan.

  “We danced a little, and by then it was very late. Most everyone had left. I wanted to get out of there, but she was clutching on to me. So I told her I’d walk her home. She was drunk, and it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.”

  Lucjan clucked his tongue. “I bet it did, you rat.”

  Brano looked at him. “On the walk to her apartment she told me she had a vision of her future, living on a lake with an older man standing behind her, protecting her. It was fate, she said, and she said that man was me.”

  “Was you,” echoed Mother. Klara winked at her.

  “I got her to her front door, where she snatched my hat from my head and told me I’d have to come up and let her read my future if I wanted my hat.”

  “Your future!” Klara burst out laughing. “This is priceless!”

  Brano didn’t smile. He looked from one face to the other.

  “So?” said Lucjan. “Did you learn your future?”

  He shook his head and lied again. “I took my hat from her and went home.”

  “Sure you did,” said Lucjan.

  “I assumed that by the next morning she’d be so embarrassed by what she’d done that nothing else would happen. But I was wrong. She was still convinced she was in love.”

  “And you saw her again?” asked Klara.

  “Never. I left the next day. But she got my address and started writing me letters.”

  “With your future?” asked Mother; then, realizing she’d made a joke, she started to laugh.

  “It was a very strange experience.”

  “You still get them?” asked Lucjan. “The letters.”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  Mother touched the bun of her hair. “Here I was trying to set you up with some nice girls, and you’re involved in an international romance!”

  “There’s always a surprise with Brano,” said Klara. “He sits there, mute as a stone, then comes out with the strangest stories.”

  “But I wonder sometimes,” he said, lifting his glass again, “do you think I was wrong to say that?”

  “Say what?” asked Lucjan.

  He focused on Klara. “To say she couldn’t be in love with me. Do you think I could have been wrong?”

  “There’s all kinds,” said Klara.

  Mother nodded. “You just can’t know, can you?”

  Lucjan licked his lips. “How come that kind of thing never happens to me?”

  Klara elbowed him in the ribs.

  The others had left and Mother was asleep by the time Brano put on his coat at the front door, pulled his hat over his forehead, then went down the front path, through the gate, and into darkness.

  Bóbrka on a moonless night was a land of unpredictable pits and obstructions. He stumbled in a few potholes and ran into carts left on the side of the road. Despite all the koronas poured into the oil complex in the forest, no one had thought to equip the village roads with light poles. The center was barely visible by the muted light from some windows and by the spotlight illuminating the church. He stopped, looked around, and began walking east, toward the woods.

  He’d never quite understood that night with Dijana, nor the letters she’d sent after he left. He’d even received one just before leaving the Capital for Bóbrka. Brani, why this silence? What we have it is good. He remembered standing at her door, and her saying in her stilted Serbo-Croat version of his language, I want for to read your future. Though she spoke German well, she chose out of adoration to speak his language to him, which she butchered mercilessly. Brano Sev, I am in the love with you.

  He emerged into an open field littered with blackened pump-jacks tipping their heads like chickens, then continued up a gravel road to the Emilia 4 pump, a high wooden tower built four decades before on the Canadian model and lit up like the church, though now it was used as a meeting room for officials in from the Capital. As a child, Brano had often climbed up inside it, alongside Marek, and across the roof of the low administrative building that stretched along the tree line. As he approached he heard what he’d heard the previous night: drunken howls from far off.

  The door to Emilia 4 was unlocked, and when he closed it behind himself, the cold darkness was an unwavering black. He heard the labored breathing of unhealthy lungs close by. Brano lit a match and stared into the grinning, red-veined face of Pavel last. Jast’s hands were stuffed in his pockets, and he reeked of vodka. “Evening, Comrade Sev.” He stuck out a thick hand.

  “What’s the name of your friend?”

  “You know who I am, I know who you are. What’s the point?”

  “Your friend’s name, Comrade Jast.”

  The big man dropped his hand. “The glorious Archduke Ferdinand, Comrade Sev.”

  “Thank you.” The match was burning his fingers, so he blew it out and slipped it in a pocket. “Let’s go outside.”

  They walked shoulder to shoulder behind the administrative building, where the trees threatened to swallow them. Jast took out a cigarette, but Brano asked him not to light it. “Of course, of course,” muttered last.

  “So what do you have for me?”

  Jast sucked on the unlit cigarette. “Soroka’s been staying in his parents’ house—that’s the two-story one just past the church.”

  “Cream colored?”

  “Yes, yes. His wife and boy go out to take care of errands—shopping, that sort of thing—but Jan I almost never see. A couple times I visited the house—clandestinely, you realize, just looking through the windows—but all I ever saw was the Sorokas eating and listening to the radio.”

  “Radio?”

  “Nothing like that. Just a receiving set. If he’s sending, I wouldn’t know.”

  “What do the villagers say?”

  “Villagers.” He sniffed. “They’ll say anything if it’s entertaining enough. Wienczyslaw thinks he’s working for us, preparing to turn Bóbrka into a New Town—tear down all the homes and build block towers. Armand has the paranoia to think he’s working for the Poles, to redraw the border and take the region back. Only the old folks believe his cover story.”

  “The one about the woman, Dijana Franković.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you?”

  “I try not to think too much. He’s working for the West—I’ve been told enough by Yalta to know that. But what does the West care about a dump like Bóbrka? Our oil deposits aren’t big enough to be important to anybody. All I can think is that he’s going to try
to take his family back with him.”

  “That was my assumption,” said Brano. “How do you suggest I make contact?”

  Jast took the spit-damp cigarette from his lips and then replaced it. They had stopped and were facing one another. “He does go to church.”

  “Every Sunday?”

  “On the two Sundays he’s been here it’s been regular. It’s the one thing I’d depend on.”

  They began walking back in silence, until Jast brightened and took something from his pocket.

  “Here—look at this!” He handed over a ballpoint pen, and in the light bleeding around the buildings Brano saw on it the image of a shapely blonde in a red evening gown.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Turn it over.”

  Brano did so, and watched the evening gown slide down her body, revealing breasts, hips, and the dark spot between her legs.

  “Pretty good, huh?”

  “Very nice,” he said as he returned it.

  “Got it from a friend who visited West Germany. The things they make there!”

  As they rounded the corner of the administrative building, Brano noticed two men approaching the wooden tower.

  “Damn,” whispered Jast. “The night watch is usually longer at the bar.” He turned back and waved for Brano to follow.

  They entered the woods, where Jast soon found a barely discernible trail, cursing when he ran into low branches, his heavy feet snapping everything they touched. As they progressed, Brano explained the method of their future meetings. The cue would be an empty matchbook left under the bus stop bench. “We’ll meet in the graveyard at eleven that same evening. Does this suit you?”