He went through more, but these papers told him nothing of importance. The answer, perhaps, was not here after all, and he was wasting a precious day burrowing through the inconsequential ramblings of a dead man. The window was dark—it was already evening. And he was expected for dinner. In his jacket pocket he found Bieniek’s passport—the wide face, the mole. He closed it again, then sat on the floor.
There were two pages on Zygmunt Nubsch, most of it mundane. Each morning he drove to the factory in Dukla, picked up his order, and delivered bread to state shops in the region. He and his wife, Ewa, attended church regularly and sometimes joined the Knippelbergs and all their children for picnics in the countryside. And, like so many men, he made the pilgrimage to Pavel Jast’s smoke-filled shack.
1 February 1967: There is a story going around that, at last night’s game, Zygmunt lost more than his shirt. He was drunk, and when he ran out of money, asked for credit. Jast refused, said he was tired of Zygmunt not being dependable. He wanted something more than money. Zygmunt knew what he meant. The same as with Tomasz Sakiewicz’s daughter. So he shrugged and bet his wife’s life on the hand. The story is that he lost …
3 February 1967: Saw him on his bread rounds today. He looks sick and pale. It seems the story is true …
6 February 1967: He’s smiling again. This evening he was in the center with Ewa. She’s alive, but now she’s the one who looks ill. Maybe he told her that her time is limited—or maybe he made another deal with Jast, and it’s only the knowledge of how close she came to death that’s ruining her.
There were voices in the cloud-deepened darkness. A woman’s shout from behind a closed door, the whisper of two children hidden in the shrubs, and a man’s cigarette-congested cough somewhere ahead, to the left. But he ignored them all, even the snow that leaked into his shoes, the images in his head as clear as a memory of that night with Dijana Franković: Pavel Jast’s smoky, cold shack, men around the dirty table, drunk, sweating over their game of Cucumber. Zygmunt, an old man with less sense than he should have, looks at what he thinks is a winning hand. But he’s cleaned out; there’s nothing left to bet. No more credit, you deadbeat, says Jast. Give me something more than money.
With the logic of a drunk and the narrow-mindedness of a villager, Zygmunt remembers Tomasz Sakiewicz. But all he remembers through the vodka haze is that Tomasz won his hand. He made the ultimate bet, and won.
So Zygmunt can, too. He says, Ewa’s life.
They all pause, because even though this happens, it’s rare, and never taken lightly. Jast even leans forward, cigarette smoldering between his fat lips, and squints. You’re sure about this, Zygi? A bet is a bet.
Yes, says Zygmunt. A bet is a bet.
“Hey!”
It was the man with the smoker’s cough, wandering up from the bus stop. The illumination from the church lit the dirty snow around the man but kept him in shadow. “Yes?”
He was tall, with a very long nose. “You’re Iwona’s son, right?” He slurred the words.
“Yes, I am.”
Gravel crunched behind Brano; three more vague forms approached. All men.
“Why’d they let you out, Comrade Security?”
“Because—”
“Because you can’t jail your own!” shouted a voice behind him, and laughter followed.
They were all very drunk.
Brano stepped back, but each direction brought him closer to one or another of the drunkards. So he waited. The first man was at his face now, looking down on him, those large nostrils flaring. “You’re a nasty son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
A second one—fat, his old soldier’s coat too small for his belly—had reached Brano’s left side. Both stank of home-distilled rotgut.
“You come here and slice up a respected member of our little village.”
The third, hovering on his right, nervously rubbed one palm with the fingers of his other hand.
“In fact,” said Brano, “that wasn’t—”
The fourth, whom he never quite saw, threw a hard fist into Brano’s kidney. The fat one grabbed his left arm, twisted, and pulled it down. Brano swung with his free hand, catching a chin, then tumbled into the snow.
What followed was a battery of sharp pains and stunned blows to the head and futile attempts to use what skills he had long ago been taught and had often practiced. But those times he’d fought one man, maybe two, and there was a universal rule of fighting that, once a certain threshold is reached, talent and training are of no importance—the greater numbers always win.
He didn’t know how long the blows were delivered and the alcohol-heavy spittle rained on him, but when they finally tired and wandered away after a last kick in the ribs, he could not move. He no longer felt the gravel digging into his back or the snow that had soaked through his clothes. His arms were as heavy as trees. He blinked teary eyes at the black sky, unable to make out the crescent moon breaking through the clouds.
He hurt, but he’d been hurt enough times to know how to deal with pain. Pain was mental; it could be coerced and tamed. He compressed the aches into a dense ball that he moved to his heavy hand. He breathed steadily, the cold night burning his lungs. Now all he had to do was move, pick himself up and figure out how to walk. It was simple, the kind of thing an infant learns to do. But, like Zygmunt Nubsch after he looked at Jast’s winning hand, it took him a long time to learn to walk again.
His shoulder felt as if it had been ripped out and shoved back in, but he was able to let himself inside through the kitchen door. He heard their voices drift from the living room. A little laughter, and Mother’s sudden, “Is that you, Brani?”
He leaned against the counter and tried to take breaths. “Yes,” he said, then said it again, louder.
“Late,” came Klara’s unsurprised voice.
He found a glass and filled it from the tap, his shaking hands barely able to bring it to his lips. He sucked it dry, then looked at the muddy footprints he’d tracked across the floor. His head was pounding.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,” Lucjan said to someone.
Feet approached the kitchen as Brano refilled the glass. Then he turned and saw his mother stop, her face crumbling. “Brani!”
She was on him then, a white rag magically in her hand as she mopped the blood and grit that had smeared across his cheeks and forehead. “Brani, Brani,” she whispered.
Klara was standing, stunned, in the doorway. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.
Lucjan’s voice: “What?”
He hadn’t realized how much blood was on him until he took off his wet, spotted clothes in the living room. Before accepting a robe, he was for a moment naked in front of them, Mother kneeling, wiping his legs dry. He wasn’t sure what he felt, shame or more, but the pain he’d been holding in his hand seeped from his grip and spread through him again. He thought his head might explode.
Then he was in the robe and stretched out on the couch. There were sores on his face and bruises developing across his chest. Both his knees bled. He told them what had happened, ignoring their dubious silence. He shrugged, sending a sharp ripple through his back, and said that he supposed his attackers thought they were making some justice.
“Savages,” said Mother.
Klara lit a cigarette and stared at him. Lucjan patted Brano’s foot, which was the only thing that didn’t hurt. “Tomorrow we’ll teach them a lesson.”
He sneezed, shooting agony through his temples. “Don’t—don’t worry about it. I’ll survive.”
“Maybe you will,” said Klara.
“I always do.”
He was able to get up again and, with Lucjan’s help, make it to the dinner table. They served him his food, and whenever he began to reach out a hand they asked what he wanted and got it for him. As she passed him a plate with butter, Klara muttered, “You’ll survive until you don’t.”
Brano smiled while Lucjan, sitting next to him, used a knife to carve him some b
utter. “You’ve become a pessimist. I doubt your god would be too pleased with that.”
Klara considered that, then said, “Brano, you and your kind will survive until drunk men in the street have had enough. And they will.”
“My kind?”
“Apparatchiks.”
Brano looked at his mother, but she was focused on pushing food around her plate; Lucjan, finished with the butter, had begun sucking on a glass of vodka. Brano said, “This time you speak of. You think it’s near?”
“Nearer than you think.”
“I suppose you learned this from your Good Book. Revelations. Fire in the sky and all that.” He said, “Don’t choose faith over facts, Klara. It’ll always get you into trouble.”
“You pompous bastard.” She pointed her fork at him. “What about Father Wieslowski? Huh? Was it a mistake of faith that got him thrown into prison and then murdered by his guards? And where are they keeping Father Wolek?”
Wieslowski was an old story, an easy one to dredge out whenever some Christian had run out of arguments. Wolek was one of his associates, arrested last June. “Socialism is a demanding mistress,” he told her. “And fragile. These so-called fathers were nothing more than hooligans undermining the foundations of our culture.”
“Did you just say, our culture?” She let out a rough laugh. “Read your history books, Brano. Christianity is the foundation of European civilization.”
“I have read them,” he said calmly. “European civilization survived despite—not because of—Christianity. There’s a reason why the height of Catholic power is called the Dark Ages. Because facts were given less credit than faith.”
Klara fell quiet a moment. Lucjan shoveled food into his mouth. Mother stared intently at her glass. Brano kept his eyes on his sister. They had never been particularly close as children; fourteen years’ difference and the sudden disappearance of their father had pushed her further away. Adulthood had done nothing to lessen this distance. Each sibling, in each town, had followed a different track, had built up his own values and hatreds, had formed his own language. Brano didn’t understand her—he knew this—but there was no sense backing down from her stupidity.
Quietly, she said, “You’ve got more faith than anyone at this table, you know that?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re the most religious person I know. Your faith in your beloved Ministry.”
“You saw my work as a religion?”
“At least in ours we have salvation.”
“Of a kind.”
“And we’re never alone. I don’t think you can say that about yours, Brano. The religion of the apparatchik only gives you paperwork and a bad conscience.”
“You could turn it around,” he said after a moment. “Maybe I’m not religious at all, and neither are you. Maybe you’re all apparatchiks for God.”
Klara looked at him, but before she could answer, Lucjan slapped a big hand on Brano’s back. “Apparatchiks for God?” He was laughing a laugh that sounded like desperation. “That’s good! I like it!”
Through the fresh flood of pain in his back, he understood: No matter how upset he made Klara, Brano wouldn’t have to deal with it at the end of the night; Lucjan would.
He said, “Doesn’t matter. I’m not in the Ministry anymore, and we’re just sharing our opinions. Right?”
Mother picked up her glass. “That’s the smartest thing anyone’s said this evening.”
Klara, red-faced, shoved her fork into her potatoes. “Just as long as no one arrests me for my opinions.”
13 FEBRUARY 1967, MONDAY
•
His back ached when he finally rose at noon; his ribs were tender, and his head still throbbed. A dark bruise had grown around his left eye. Mother was not in a good state, either. Her pale eyelids had swollen so that she peered at him through slits when he asked where Zygmunt Nubsch, the bread man, lived. “Why on earth do you want to know that?”
“I need to talk to him about something.”
“About this?” she asked, and touched a finger to his injured eye.
He walked to Zygmunt’s home, which was just across the street from the graveyard. Passersby flicked their gazes over his beaten face, but no one spoke to him. He paused at Zygmunt’s front gate and glanced back at the lines of stones, a jumble of styles, some clumsy and eroded, others fresh slabs with fine edges. A group of them were low and simple in the long grass, with Cyrillic names etched below five-pointed stars: Russian soldiers fallen during the liberation of their country from the fascists. He stomped through snow to the front door and knocked.
After a minute, a squat woman looked up at him, pulling a length of gray behind her ear.
“Ewa Nubsch?”
Though she peered at his bruises, she didn’t recognize his face, but his accent—measured and purposeful, from the Capital—gave her pause. She placed a shriveled hand on her breast. “Yes?”
“I’ve come to speak with Zygmunt. Is he in?”
She shook her head. “He’s working. You can speak to him this evening.”
“Perhaps I could ask you a couple questions, Comrade Nubsch.”
“I’m very busy now, Comrade Sev.”
“This is rather important.”
“But—” she said, then lowered her hand. “Come in.”
The Nubsch house was tidy and proper. A small television in the corner overlooked a sparse living room covered with lace doilies and table runners. Ten paperbacks were on display behind a glass-doored cabinet, and an electric coil-and-fan by the kitchen door kept the place very warm.
“Something to drink?”
“If you’re drinking.”
She hesitated again. “Coffee?”
“Perfect.”
She limped off to the kitchen and ran water for a while, and he heard the pop and hiss of the gas stove being lit. Then she was in the doorway again, wiping her hands on a white towel. “Something to eat?”
“No, thank you,” he said, and settled in a chair. She ranged farther into the room but didn’t sit down. He said, “Do you mind if I ask a personal question?”
She shook her head with two tight jerks.
“Where did you get that limp?”
Ewa Nubsch looked down at her right leg, as if she had never noticed it before. She took a breath. “Well, you know, I’m not a young woman anymore.”
“Neither of us is young.”
She rocked her head from side to side. “I twisted the ankle in one of those badger holes in the fields. I should have been watching better.”
Brano looked at his palms, then placed them on his knees. “You know, Comrade Nubsch, there’s a rumor going around that I wanted to verify. About the thirty-first of January, a Tuesday night. Zygmunt lost a hand of cards.”
Ewa blinked at him.
“People lose at cards all the time; it’s seldom notable. But the story is that Zygmunt made a very rash wager. The same kind of wager Tomasz Sakiewicz made last year. But Tomasz was lucky enough to win his bet.”
She glanced into the kitchen, and by the time she turned back, she had found something to say. “There are a lot of rumors in Bóbrka, Comrade Sev. I wouldn’t believe them all if I were you.” She gave him a half-smile and limped off.
He followed her into the kitchen. It was small, but the space had been used economically. She poured the steaming water into a filter that dripped black coffee into a glass pot.
“Comrade Nubsch, we both know the story is true. I don’t really care about gambling, but I do wonder why you’re still standing here, living and breathing, making me a cup of coffee.”
Her eyes took on a forced vacancy, staring at the now-full coffeepot. “I really don’t know what you mean, Comrade Sev.”
“Card games in the provinces are a very particular phenomenon.”
“Are they?”
“Their rules are firm. And the gamblers, for lack of a better word, are like members of a cult. The rules give their live
s extra meaning. So when Zygmunt bet your life and lost, he couldn’t just change his mind. He had to follow through.”
She poured the coffee into cups, staining the counter with black puddles. “This is sounding ridiculous,” she said without looking at him.
“The only way Zygmunt could get out of taking your life was to make a deal with Pavel Jast. You would remain alive, but another life would have to be taken.” He approached her; she flinched. But he only took a cup. “The choice wasn’t up to Zygmunt, or you. It was Jast’s choice. Wasn’t it.”
She didn’t answer.
“Comrade Nubsch, I have no doubt that Jast cheated at that game—not because he wanted you dead, but because he wanted Zygmunt to commit a murder. He had someone particular in mind. Jakob Bieniek.”
She reached for the second cup but faltered, knowing she wouldn’t be able to bring it to her lips. She tugged at her ear; she swallowed. “Pavel Jast is a fiend. I’ve told my husband this for years, but the game—it’s hard to explain.”
“It’s an addiction.”
“More than that, Comrade Sev.” She focused on his ear, considering her words. “Do you know what Zygi used to be?”
“No.”
She paused, and when she spoke again the sentences were clear and without hesitation, as if part of a speech she had practiced for years. “He was the head manager of the Bóbrka Petroleum Works. He was an important man. But one day the Gas Committee sent some men from the Capital; they had no idea what they were looking at. A bunch of bureaucrats who made policies without understanding a thing.” She opened one hand and used the other to tap the wet countertop. “Zygi was foolish enough to point out this fact, and two weeks later he received a notice in the mail. He’d been given a new job. He was to deliver bread for Bóbrka and the surrounding villages. Do you know what that does to a man? A man with Zygmunt’s talent and experience?” She shook her head. “No, Comrade Sev. I don’t think you have any idea.”
“Then explain it to me, Comrade Nubsch.”
This, at least, was understood. His pains receded, the barking mutt behind the white wooden fence no longer distracted him, and he even found himself smiling as he walked past the church and the bus stop that still, beneath its bench, sheltered the empty book of matches Pavel Jast would never pick up.
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