by Alan Furst
“I remember once,” Cara told him, “who was it? Sister Modeste. She wrote on the board: What if they should never have united themselves in that, over there?” Cara had started to laugh, remembering the moment. “Panic! Se joindre, a homicidal verb. It’s much simpler in Spanish. And then my friend Francesca, after the sister wrote out the answer, leaned across the aisle and whispered, ‘Well, I’m certainly glad I know how to say that!’ “
Morath poured out the last of the wine, Cara finished hers, put the glass on the floor and wound herself around him. He kissed her, reached over and undid her bra, she shrugged her shoulders, he tossed it on a chair. Some time later, he hooked a finger in the waistband of her panties and slid them down her legs, slow and easy, until she pointed her feet so he could get them off. He could feel her breath on the side of his face, it always changed at that moment.
Then, for a time, they lay still. She took his hand and held it against her breast-she wouldn’t let him move-as though this was sufficient, no need to go further. He wondered what might be nice to do, his mind wandering idly through the repertoire. Was she thinking about that? Or something else? He loves me? Morath opened his eyes and saw that she was smiling.
All very good to think about, in the morning, cast adrift in the cold world. She didn’t wake up when he left, sleeping with her mouth open, a hand trapped under the pillow. Somehow he could look at her and know she’d made love the night before. He almost dozed, as the train left the empty streets and moved through the countryside. Her tits, her ass, looking up at her, looking down, fucking. She whispered sometimes, talking to herself. He could never actually hear what she was saying.
It was a very slow train, that left at dawn. Going east, it crawled, as if it really didn’t want to get there. It would go through Metz and Saarbrucken, then on to Wurzburg, where passengers could change for the train to Prague, with connections to Brno, to Kosice, and to Uzhorod.
Eastern France, a lost season, not winter, not spring. The sky low and heavy, the wind colder than it should have been, the train crawling through dead, weedy fields.
A pleasant countryside, once upon a time, small farms and villages. Then 1914 came along and war turned it into gray mud. It would never really heal, people said. A few years earlier, when the snow melted, a farmer had come upon what had, evidently, once been a trench, where a squad of French soldiers, heading into battle, had been suddenly buried by the explosion of an enormous artillery shell. Then, with that spring’s thaw, the farmer saw a dozen bayonet points thrust out of the earth, still in marching order.
Morath lit a cigarette and went back to reading-Nicholas Bartha’s Land of the Kazars, published in Hungarian in 1901.
The sovereign stag should not be disturbed in its family affairs. What is a Ruthenian compared with it? Only a peasant. The hunting period lasts two weeks. For this pastime, 70,000 Ruthenians must be doomed to starvation by the army of the officials. The deer and the wild boar destroy the corn, the potatoes and the clover of the Ruthenians (the whole harvest of his tiny lot of half an acre). Their whole yearly work is destroyed. The people sow and the deer of the estate harvest. It is easy to say the peasant should complain. But where and to whom? Those who have the power he sees always together. The village chief, the deputy sheriff, the sheriff, the district judge, the tax-officer, the forester, the steward and the manager, all are men of the same education, of the same social pleasures, and of the same standard. From whom could he hope for justice?
When he’d learned he’d be going up into Ruthenia, he’d borrowed the book from the baroness Frei’s enormous library-purchased by the Baron from universities that fell, after 1918, within the borders of other nations. “Saved from the fire,” he’d say. Morath smiled at the memory of him. A short, fat man with muttonchops who never knew himself just how much money he made with his “schemes.” For Morath’s sixteenth birthday, the Baron had taken him on an “educational ramble” to the casino at Monte Carlo, bought him a pair of diamond cuff links and a cadaverous blonde.
He’d sat by the baron’s side at the chemin de fer table and watched him write, at four in the morning, a check with an alarming number of zeros. Pale but smiling, the baron stood, lit a cigar, winked at Morath, and headed off toward the marble staircase. Ten minutes later, a black-suited fonctionnaire floated to his side, cleared his throat, and said, “The baron Frei has gone into the garden.” Morath hesitated, then stood and went quickly into the casino garden, where the baron was discovered urinating on a rosebush. He would die, ten years later, of a tropical disease contracted in the jungles of Brazil, where he’d gone to buy industrial diamonds.
Morath glanced up at the luggage rack above the seat, making sure of his leather satchel. Inside, a passport he’d received at the Louvre, now sewn into the lining of a wool jacket. Pavlo, Polanyi called the man, a man he said he’d never met. The student. Who had gotten himself into the town of Uzhorod and couldn’t get out. “A favor for a friend,” Polanyi said.
In midafternoon, the train slowed for the Moselle bridges and the station at Metz, the buildings dark with soot from the mills. Most of Morath’s fellow passengers got off-not many people traveling into Germany just then. Morath took a walk on the platform and bought a newspaper. At twilight, the train halted for the French border control. No problem for Morath, officially a resident of France.
Two hours later, the train crossed the frontier at Saarbrucken. No problem there either. The officer who knocked on the door of Morath’s compartment was pleased to see the Hungarian passport. “Welcome to the Reich,” he said. “I know you will enjoy your stay.”
Morath thanked him graciously and tried to settle down for the night. The border station was floodlit a brilliant white; wire strung on stanchions, officials, sentries, machine guns, dogs. This is for you, it said, and Morath didn’t like it. It recalled a certain Hungarian saying: “One should never voluntarily enter a room or a country the door of which cannot be opened from the inside.”
Somewhere down the line, he was joined by a pair of SS officers and spent the night drinking cognac and discussing the old Europe, the new Germany, and how to lay Hungarian women. The two young officers-political intellectuals who’d gone to university together in Ulm-had a fine time. They talked and laughed, polished their spectacles, got drunk, and fell asleep. Morath was relieved to arrive in Wurzburg, where he slept overnight at the railroad hotel and left the next morning on the train to Prague.
The Czech border police weren’t quite so happy to see him. Hungary ran espionage networks in several cities and the Czechs knew it.
“How long,” the border guard asked him, “do you plan to stay in Czechoslovakia?”
“A few days.”
“Your business here, sir?”
“To buy woodland, if possible, on behalf of a group of investors in Paris.”
“Woodland.”
“In Ruthenia, sir.”
“Ah. Of course. You are traveling to …?”
“Uzhorod.”
The guard nodded and tapped Morath’s passport with the end of a pencil. “I will stamp a one-week visa for you. Please apply at the Uzhorod prefecture if you need to extend that.”
He ate a ghastly blutwurst in the dining car, finished Bartha, managed to buy a copy of Est, the evening edition brought in from Budapest, at the station buffet in Brno. Clearly, political life was heating up. Two members of parliament had come to blows. At a workers’ march in the Tenth District, bricks thrown, people arrested. To the Editor. Sir: How can we let these liberal pansies run our lives? An editorial called for “strength, firmness, singleness of purpose. The world is changing, Hungary must change with it.” A coffeehouse by the university had burned down. TENS OF THOUSANDS CHEER HITLER SPEECH IN REGENSBURG. With photograph, on page one. Here they come, Morath thought.
Outside the window, a strange countryside. Low hills, pine forest. Sudden rivers at spring flood, the sound of the locomotive sharpening as it passed through an open gorge. At the station in t
he Slovakian town of Zvolen, the train stood between Warsaw to the north and Budapest to the south. Next stop, Kossice, a border town before 1918. On the platform, women holding straw baskets, their heads covered with black kerchiefs. The train climbed through snow-patched meadows, came to a village with domed churches painted lime green. In the late afternoon haze, Morath could see the Carpathians on the far horizon. An hour later he got off in Uzhorod.
The stationmaster told him there was a place he could stay in Krolevska Street. It turned out to be a yellow brick building with a sign that said hotel. The proprietor had a white eye, wore a greasy silk vest and a knitted yarmulke. “Our finest room,” he said. “The finest.” Morath sat on the straw mattress, picked the stitching from the lining of his wool jacket, and extracted the passport. Andreas Panea.
Late in the afternoon, he walked to the post office. The Czech postal clerks wore blue uniforms. On an envelope he had written Malko, Poste Restante, Uzhorod. Inside, a meaningless note-a sister had been ill, now she was better. The actual message was the address: the same as “Malko’s”, with a different name.
Now, to wait.
Morath lay on the bed and stared out the cloudy window. The finest room was bent at a strange angle; a low ceiling of wooden boards, whitewashed long ago, went in one direction, then another. When he stood up, it was only a few inches above his head. In the street, the steady sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestone. Ruthenia. Or, affectionately, Little Russia. Or, technically, Sub-Carpathian Ukraine. A Slavic nibble taken by the medieval kings of Hungary, and ever since a lost land in the northeast corner of the nation. Then, after the world war, on a rare day when American idealism went hand in hand with French diplomacy-what Count Polanyi called “a frightening convergence”-they stuck it onto Slovakia and handed it to the Czechs. Somewhere, Morath speculated, in a little room in a ministry of culture, a Moravian bureaucrat was hard at work on a little song. “Merry old Ruthenia / Land we love so well.”
At dinner, the proprietor and his wife served him jellied calf’s foot, buckwheat groats with mushrooms, white cheese with scallions, and thin pancakes with red-current jam. A bottle of cherry brandy stood on the plank table. The proprietor nervously rubbed his hands.
“Very good,” Morath said, pretending to wipe his mouth with the napkin-it had certainly been a napkin, once-and pushed his chair away from the table. He’d meant the compliment, however, and the proprietor could see that.
“Another blini, sir? Uhh, Pfannkuchen? Crepe? Blintz?”
“Thank you, but no.”
Morath paid for the dinner and returned to his room. Lying there in the darkness, he could sense the countryside. There was a stable attached to the hotel, and sometimes the horses whickered and moved around in their stalls. The aroma, manure and rotted straw, drifted up to Morath’s room. Still cold, at the end of April. He wrapped himself up in the thin blanket and tried to sleep. Out on Krolevska Street, somebody got drunk in a tavern. Singing at first, then the argument, then the fight. Then the police, then the woman, crying and pleading, as her man was taken away.
Two days later, a letter at the post office, an address on the edge of Uzhorod, he had to take a droshky. Down streets of packed dirt lined with one-story log houses, each with a single window and a thatched roof. A woman answered his knock on the door. She was dark, with black, curly hair, wore crimson lipstick and a tight, thin dress. Perhaps Roumanian, he thought, or Gypsy. She asked him a question in a language he didn’t recognize.
He tried her in German. “Is Pavlo here?”
She’d expected him, he could sense that; now he’d arrived and she was curious, looked him over carefully. Morath heard a door slam in the house, then a man’s voice. The woman stood aside and Pavlo came to the door. He was one of those people who look very much like their photograph. “Are you the man from Paris?” The question was asked in German. Not good, but serviceable.
“Yes.”
“They took their time, getting you here.”
“Yes? Well, now I’m here.”
Pavlo’s eyes swept the street. “Maybe you’d better come inside.”
The room was crowded with furniture, heavy chairs and couches covered in various patterns and fabrics, much of it red, some of the fabric very good, some not. Morath counted five mirrors on the walls. The woman spoke quietly to Pavlo, glanced over at Morath, then left the room and closed the door.
“She is packing her suitcase,” Pavlo said.
“She’s coming with us?”
“She thinks she is.”
Morath did not show a reaction.
Pavlo took that for disapproval. “Try it sometime,” he said, his voice a little sharp, “life without a passport.” He paused, then, “Have you money for me?”
Morath hesitated-maybe somebody was supposed to give Pavlo money, but it wasn’t him. “I can let you have some,” he said, “until we get to Paris.”
This wasn’t the answer Pavlo wanted, but he was in no position to argue. He was perhaps a few years older than Morath had thought, in his late twenties. He had on a stained blue suit, colorful tie, and scuffed, hard-worn shoes.
Morath counted out a thousand francs. “This should tide you over,” he said.
It was much more than that, but Pavlo didn’t seem to notice. He put eight hundred francs in his pocket and looked around the room. Under a shimmering aquamarine vase with a bouquet of satin tulips in it was a paper doily. Pavlo slid two hundred-franc notes beneath the doily so the edges of the bills were just visible.
“Here’s the passport,” Morath said.
Pavlo looked it over carefully, held it up to the light, squinted at the photograph, and ran a finger over the raised lettering on the edge. Then he shrugged. “It will do,” he said. “Why Roumanian?”
“That’s what I could get.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t speak it. I’m Croatian.”
“That won’t be a problem. We’re going across the Hungarian border. At Michal’an. Are you carrying another passport? I don’t think we have to worry about it, but still …”
“No. I had to rid of it.”
He left the room. Morath could hear him, talking to the woman. When he reappeared, he was carrying a briefcase. Walking behind him, the woman held a cheap valise in both hands. She’d put on a hat, and a coat with a ragged fur collar. Pavlo whispered something to her and kissed her on the forehead. She looked at Morath, her eyes suspicious but hopeful, and sat on a couch, the valise between her feet.
“We’re going out for an hour or so,” Pavlo said to the woman. “Then we’ll be back.”
Morath wanted no part of it.
Pavlo closed the door. Out in the street, he grinned and cast his eyes to heaven.
They walked for a long time before they found a droshky. Morath directed the driver back to the hotel, then Pavlo waited in the room while Morath went to see the proprietor in a tiny office behind the kitchen where he was laboring over a bookkeeper’s ledger. As Morath counted out Czech koruny to pay the bill, he said, “Do you know a driver with a car? As soon as possible-I’ll make it worthwhile.”
The proprietor thought it over. “Are you going,” he said delicately, “some distance away from here?”
He meant, borders.
“Some.”
“We are, as you know, blessed with many neighbors.”
Morath nodded. Hungary, Poland, Roumania.
“We are going to Hungary.”
The proprietor thought it over. “Actually, I do know somebody. He’s a Pole, a quiet fellow. Just what you want, eh?”
“As soon as possible,” Morath said. “We’ll wait in the room, if that’s all right with you.” He didn’t know who was looking for Pavlo, or why, but railroad stations were always watched. Better, a quiet exit from Uzhorod.
The driver appeared in the late afternoon, introduced himself as Mierczak, and offered Morath a hand like tempered steel. Morath sensed a powerful domesticity. “I’m a mechanic at the flour mill,” he said. “But
I also do this and that. You know how it is.” He was ageless, with a receding hairline and a genial smile and a British shooting jacket, in houndstooth check, that had somehow wandered into this region in an earlier age.
Morath was actually startled by the car. If you closed one eye it didn’t look so different from the European Fords of the 1930s, but a second look told you it wasn’t anything like a Ford, while a third told you it wasn’t anything. It had lost, for example, all its color. What remained was a shadowy tone of iron, maybe, that faded or darkened depending on what part of the car you looked at.
Mierczak laughed, jiggling the passenger-side door until it opened. “Some car,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“No,” Morath said. He settled down on the horse blanket that had, a long time ago, replaced the upholstery. Pavlo got in the back. The car started easily and drove away from the hotel.
“Actually,” Mierczak said, “it’s not mine. Well, it’s partly mine. Mostly it is to be found with my wife’s cousin. It’s the Mukachevo taxi, and, when he’s not working at the store, he drives it.”
“What is it?”
“What is it,” Mierczak said. “Well, some of it is a Tatra, built in Nesseldorf. After the war, when it became Czechoslovakia. The Type II, they called it. Some name, hey? But that’s that company. Then it burned. The car, I mean. Though, now that I think about it, the factory also burned, but that was later. So, after that, it became a Wartburg. We had a machine shop in Mukachevo, back then, and somebody had left a Wartburg in a ditch, during the war, and it came back to life in the Tatra. But-we didn’t really think about it at the time-it was an old Wartburg. We couldn’t get parts. They didn’t make them or they wouldn’t send them or whatever it was. So, it became then a Skoda.” He pressed the clutch pedal to the floor and revved the engine. “See? Skoda! Just like the machine gun.”