The Committee’s Vienna branch lay in the Innere Stadt, part of a Habsburg complex on Schulerstraße, behind St. Stephen’s Cathedral. He had expected something farther out, in the cheaper districts, but at number 9 he found the small bronze plaque with a symbol of a sun rising over
CLCN
INTERNATIONAL
He pressed the buzzer.
“Hallo?”
Brano leaned close to the speaker. “I’m here for the Filip Lutz lecture.”
The door hummed.
The office was on the second floor, and as he climbed the stairs Brano tried without success to push Dijana from his mind. It irritated him that he had been too confused to leave his phone number, but he assured himself that she was resourceful enough to track him down when she was ready, when she had done those unknown things that were required of her first.
There was another plaque on the open door that spelled out the name of the organization, above a Latin motto: IGITUR QUI DESIDERAT PACEM, PRAEPARET BELLUM. Whoever wishes for peace, let him prepare for war.
In the foyer, beside a rack overflowing with coats, stood a small woman with thick eyebrows. She pumped his hand energetically. “So glad to meet you,” she said in childlike English. “So glad you could make it! I am Loretta Reich, the Committee’s press agent, and you—oh!” She put a hand to her mouth. “I mean, is English okay?”
He nodded. “I’m Brano Sev. Filip invited me.”
“A friend of Filip’s!” She placed a finger on Brano’s forearm. “Well, we’re just tickled pink he agreed to do this for us. You know, without Filip we’d hardly get a thing done around here. He’s invaluable. Oh!” She looked around. “Let’s get you out of that coat and get you something to drink.” Then she laughed, showing all her teeth.
Loretta brought him into the large main room, where twenty people milled around rows of metal folding chairs, drinking. Lutz was beside a tall window that overlooked Schulerstraße, entertaining a semicircle of admirers, both men and women. Others looked American—tall young men with tans and tailored suits they wore with ease. One stood in a corner quietly talking to an old man with a white mustache and beard—the shadow with the Volkswagen who liked to sit outside his apartment. The old man noticed him looking, then gave a smile and a half nod.
“I hope you don’t mind zinfandel—the cabernet’s all gone!” Loretta laughed as she handed Brano a glass. “These people know how to drink!”
“How long have you been here in Vienna?”
Loretta tilted her head. “Well, I’ve only been here since November, but the office … we started it three years ago, in 1964.” Then she took a breath. “We do a lot of good work.”
“Like what?”
“Anti-communist seminars, mostly. Oh, we’ve had some success in the Austrian universities, particularly the Christian schools. And we’ve lobbied members of the Austrian and West German governments to include anti-communist education within their national curriculums.”
“You’re not recruiting again, Loretta?” Lutz tapped her shoulder with a cylinder of papers, which seemed to be her cue—she moved on. In his other hand was a glass. “Brano, glad you could make it.”
“You ready to speak?”
“Trying desperately to get drunk first.” He looked back over the crowd and took a sip. “See anyone you know?”
“A few familiar faces. Who’s that guy with the beard?”
Lutz squinted at the corner, where the white-haired man was still talking with his American friend. “Oh, that’s Andrew. Andrew Stamer. Left our country a while ago. Now I suppose you can call him an American. One of the founding members of the Committee.”
“He’s not Austrian?”
Lutz shook his head as Brano gazed at the old man, reviewing the two times he’d seen him outside the Web-Gasse apartment. Not one of Ludwig’s men, then, but a lone crusader who had somehow learned who and where Brano was, and was trying to reeducate him with cheap pamphlets.
Lutz noticed him staring. “You probably don’t want to meet him unless you’re planning to convert. He can be very persuasive. Most of these Christians are.”
“So you’re saying this isn’t a front for the CIA?”
Surprise slid into Lutz’s face. “I keep forgetting what you used to do.”
Brano cocked his head, as if agreeing.
“Which reminds me, you still need to tell me your story. Escape from the Crocodile needs some tales of adventure.”
As the crowd swelled, Brano recognized more faces from his Vienna files and heard accented English everywhere—Hungarian, Polish, Yugoslav, Czech, even Russian. They met and hugged and kissed cheeks, as if part of a secret society. But there was nothing secret about any of them. They all wore their faith on their sleeve; they were apparatchiks for their most precious word: liberty.
Ersek Nanz arrived a few minutes later to harangue Brano for not spending more time at the Carp. Brano shrugged and went for another glass of zinfandel. Beside the bottles were stacks of the Committee’s pamphlets with such titles as What Is Communism? and Watch Out! There’s a Marxist Behind You! and Christ’s Words on Profit. On the wall was a line of bronze plaques mounted on wood; on each was a name and a year.
Loretta came up. “You like our wall of martyrs?”
Brano squinted at the names. There was the man his sister praised, Father Jacek Wieslowski, as well as Yuli Daniel, a Russian writer who had been given five years’ imprisonment last year for publishing anti-Soviet works in the West. At the end was the old head of the Office of Policy Coordination who had killed himself, Frank Wisner.
“Frank Wisner?” he asked.
Loretta nodded earnestly. “Yes, yes. A great man, sadly gone. Andrew knew him well.”
“They were old friends?”
“I think so, yes. During Wisner’s last year, in London. Very close, those two. Frank Wisner’s determination is an inspiration to us all.” She touched the corner of Wisner’s plaque wistfully, then wandered away.
Brano looked around for Andrew Stamer, but he was no longer in the room. He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find the pockmarked, scarred face of Sasha Lytvyn. “Brano Sev.”
“Hello, Sasha.”
The man smelled of something stronger than zinfandel, but he held no glass. Instead, his hands twitched at his sides. “I thought I saw you at the party.”
Brano held his wine glass between them. “I saw you as well.”
“You’ve been in Vienna a long time?”
“Not very long. You?”
“A decade. But I never forgot you, Brano.”
“How is your arm?”
“My—” Sasha looked down at his left arm, then unbuttoned the cuff. He slid back the sleeve to expose a forearm covered in mottled, burned flesh.
“About the same,” said Brano. Lutz was taking his place at the head of the room, behind a small podium. “Take care, Sasha.”
Brano walked to an empty seat in the rear, and when he glanced back saw Sasha Lytvyn in the foyer, reaching for his coat.
A small American with round glasses stood beside Lutz. He looked nervous, but once the room quieted he took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and began to read, introducing Lutz as a “distinguished scholar of the communist world” who was “famous for his insightful articles in Kurier.”
The applause was loud, vibrating the walls. Some men whistled.
Lutz smiled and pressed the air for silence. Finally the crowd settled, and Lutz licked his teeth. “I didn’t know we had so many fans of yellow journalism in Vienna!”
Laughter.
“But, really, it is an honor to be invited here to speak to all of you. Thank you, Jeremy,” he said, nodding at the small man, now sitting in the front row. A smattering of applause. Lutz took a sip of wine from the glass sitting on the podium, then said, “We like to make jokes, but what I’ve come here to talk to you about tonight is a deadly serious subject. Over the last years we’ve heard a lot of talk coming from Moscow and Buch
arest and Warsaw and my own home about the idea of international peace. The communist world, the message goes, is focused on the aim that all good men have in their hearts: peace in our time. And I think that all good men, upon hearing this for the first time, think, Well, why not? That’s an admirable thing for them to say.”
There were a few chuckles from the audience.
“No, don’t laugh. This is an honest response to the press releases issued by the International Communist Party. But the problem is that honest responses assume that the original statement is honest. And that is what I’ve come here to examine today.”
Lutz went on, but Brano focused instead on the heads lined up in front of him. Men and women alike seemed transfixed by Lutz’s vibrant voice, and sometimes they nodded ecstatic agreement. Lutz was casual. He could have been standing in a bar, giving a lecture on seduction. He knew all these people and was speaking to friends about something they all already agreed on. And when he said, “You know the old Hungarian joke: We’re a three-class society—those who have been in prison, those who are there, and those who are heading there,” everyone nodded because they already knew this as well. There was no one—except, perhaps, himself—to convert. The lecture, it seemed, had no point.
Then he felt a soft hand on his shoulder.
Dijana took the seat beside him. Her skirt was short, and she looked, he thought briefly, very bourgeois. In an exceptional way. She kissed his cheek and whispered, “I hear you will to be. Here.”
Brano felt an easy warmth fill him, as if he’d known all along that she would arrive and both of them were merely fulfilling their roles. “I’m glad you came.”
She placed a finger over her lips and looked up as Lutz enumerated the various corners of the world to which the Soviet Union had sent its troops and advisors in order to create wars, rather than end them. “Vietnam, Korea, Africa … the list goes on.”
She leaned close to his head. “You are liking this?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe it’s not bad idea we go.”
Lutz spread his arms to show just how much evil the communists of the world had committed.
“Pa da,” said Brano.
The Oskar Bar lay on the ground floor of a large, modern office building facing the Concordiaplatz car park. It was dark and empty, and when they settled at the bar Dijana grinned. “We don’t see no one what we know here. Is good?”
“It’s great,” he said, then placed a hand on her knee. “Have we waited long enough yet?”
She nodded seriously. “I sorry. But was something what I had to do first.”
“What?”
“You want to know?”
“Of course.”
“Okay.” She pursed her lips, then opened them and sighed. “Well, I had to say bye for someone.”
“Bye?”
“Da. Good-bye. A man what was my lover.”
“Wolfgang?”
“Wolfgang?” She thought that was funny. “No, I like the old men. Was Abel, a friend for Wolfgang. He also own the club what I work at, is his name. The Jazzklub Abel.”
“You were sleeping with your boss?”
Dijana started laughing. “Da da da! Is funny, no?” Then she tilted her head.
“What?”
“I think it’s not bad idea we go home now.”
The number 38 tram took them north along Nußdorfer, and though Dijana held on to his arm, they did not speak. That pressure on his arm, the fingers she sometimes tapped against the inside of his wrist, and the blank smile she gave the passing street—they all helped to make the silence an ideal thing. It was different from the silence of the Bóbrka countryside, different from the silence of an empty apartment. He remembered their walk last August, which had been loud, because she had been loud. Now she wasn’t drunk, and she showed no signs of nervousness. And he, surprisingly, felt none.
For a few moments, he even forgot about Vienna—he forgot about Ludwig and the sunburned shadow; he forgot about the Committee and Andrew Stamer, even Yalta Boulevard and poor Sasha Lytvyn; he forgot that he was an exile here, just like everyone else.
11 APRIL 1967, TUESDAY
•
Brano Sev was not a young man. He’d had half a century to acquaint himself with the other sex, and when he was younger he put much effort toward that. Those years just after the war, when he was building his career, he’d had brief affairs with women he met in bars. They were often a little older than him, war widows who knew what they were looking for when they sat alone at a bar. He’d go home with them and perhaps stay until the next morning. A few of these affairs stretched the length of a week, until the cold sexual calculation began to wear on both participants, and they would quietly call it quits.
He’d never lived with a woman, and this was something he regretted. He’d had one yearlong relationship, when he was forty-two, with Regina Haliniak, who still worked the Yalta front desk. That relationship, like this one, was prompted by the woman’s forthrightness. Three months into it, he suggested they move in together, and Regina laughed at him. Do you think I’m going to fallfor that? He never quite understood what she meant, and by the end of the year it didn’t matter. In the canteen of Yalta 36, she informed him that she’d begun sleeping with a lieutenant named Zoran, and she thought she might be in love. That word had never crossed her lips in the last year. Brano had looked at the gravy-smothered bread on his plate and shrugged.
Since then he’d stopped trying, settling for the brief, cool greeting of prostitutes living in the Canal District. Brano was self-aware enough to realize that he was no woman’s ideal. He was neither particularly attractive nor virile. He spoke too quietly, and when he was entertaining, it was by accident. He wasn’t even particularly loving—he knew this. He had learned the techniques of coldness because without them he wouldn’t have survived for this many years, but they had also assured that his many years would be spent alone.
Which is why he never quite trusted Dijana Franković. A young woman, even one with a fixation for older men, would be a fool to choose him. There were far more accomplished men in this city, more entertaining men, rich men. So even when he followed her up her stairs that second time, eyes on her skirt, he was still far from believing. He half expected to find that young man with his long hair sitting in her chair, or her boss, Abel—for these had to be her real lovers, and Brano was a game, something to pass the time. Or perhaps it was more sinister, and Wolfgang would attempt to strong-arm Brano out of his meager Raiffeisenbank account.
But the apartment was empty, and once they were inside her youth came out as she tore off his clothes and tried to take him there, on the floor. Later, in bed, she cried once, and apologized. “I don’t want you to thinking I am strange. Impulsive, I know this. I am. But, da, just what I know. This is the right thing.”
And when they lay there afterward, her head fitting so well against his chest, he asked her, because he still wasn’t sure. He knew what kind of man he was, he said, and maybe she didn’t, but he wanted to tell her, because someday she would realize this and leave him. He told her he was an old man who had spent years dulling his emotions until they were almost nonexistent.
“But they exist?”
“Yes, somewhat.”
“For me they exist?”
“Da.”
She nodded into his chest and said that she understood his doubt and knew the kind of figure she cut. “People, you know, they not always trusting for my … honestly?”
“Your sincerity?”
“Da. My sincerity. But this is because I am too much sincerity too much of the time.”
He said he could see that.
“I am not blind,” she said. “I can to see your faults. And the future … what knows? Maybe we can to be together only one week, maybe five years. Maybe we cannot to live together. I don’t know. All what I know is this, Brano Sev. When I am with you, it feels like correct. And when you is not here, I want you to be with me. You understand?”
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He took a breath. “Yes. Yes, I understand.”
“Was not like that with Bertrand. And for certainly not with Abel. Good men, but…” She shrugged. “Maybe it just pheromones.”
“Pheromones?”
“Da,” she said. “Smell. Maybe only you have smell what for me is very good.”
He liked that theory, because it was biological and felt unchangeable. But when he slept, the doubt returned, making him restless, and when he woke, he kept his eyes shut, listening. He heard her steady, quiet breaths. Then he turned his head toward the sound and opened his eyes. The morning light lit the dribble of saliva that had drained from her lips into the pillow.
He made his way quietly across the creaking floor to the bathroom. He urinated and brushed his teeth with her toothbrush but avoided looking into the mirror. He didn’t want to compound his overwhelming doubt. What he wanted was to leave, so he crept back into the bedroom, where she still slept, a calf sticking out of the sheets, her toes curled tight. He put on his underwear and brought the socks into the living room, where he gathered the rest of his clothes. He put on his shirt, buttoned it, and pulled on his pants. Then, as he was tying his shoes, he heard her. “Dragi?”
He looked down at the shoelace knots he’d been mishandling. “Yes?”
“Dragi, where are you?”
He went to the bedroom doorway. She was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Why you have on your clothes?”
“I always get up early.”
“Come here.” He walked over to the bed and sat beside her. She looked up at his face. “You are going?”
“Just getting breakfast for us,” he lied.
36 Yalta Boulevard Page 21