Brano was genuinely surprised to see the house as it had always been, small and remote from the road. After the dynamism of the Capital, he was in a place that lived as if nothing had changed in the last fifty years.
He parked in the gravel, took out his suitcase and briefcase, and paused at the gate. He took breaths of cold air until the red tint in his cheeks began to fade.
The kitchen light glowed from around the side of the house, so he walked through shrubs to the kitchen door. Whitewashed by the thin lace curtain, she was still heavy, her thick elbows on the table, staring at the playing cards laid out before her. She jumped at his knock.
As Iwona Sev approached the door she squinted, and he leaned close to the glass to help her out. Then her head slid back, eyes filling with light before the smile came. She pulled the door open and shouted, “Brani!”
He kissed her, then came into the kitchen, which had also never heard of progress. Wood-burning stove, gas lamp, a pail of fat in the corner. She held his face by the chin and turned it in the light. “You’re thin, thin. Are you all right? Is everything okay?”
He noticed that on her forehead, between her eyes, was a smear of soot. He kissed her cheeks again. “I’m just taking a vacation. It’s all right to stay here?”
“How can you even ask? It’s not every day I have my son here. Or every year, for that matter.” She tried to take his suitcase, but he wouldn’t let her. “Get those to your room and I’ll make something to eat. You must be hungry.”
He tilted his head from side to side.
“Of course you are. I’ll heat some soup.”
“You’ve got a spot,” he said, touching his own forehead.
She opened her mouth, blushing. “Oh yes, yes.” She wiped the spot with a thumb and looked at her dirty print. “If I had an electric stove, I’d be a lot cleaner.”
It could not really be called “his” room anymore. All personal effects—the toy oxcart with the broken wheel, the rotary board game, and even the set of French metal skiers with little metal skis and sleds—had been removed long ago, and his younger sister, Klara, had taken her possessions to her own home on the outskirts of Bóbrka. A group of framed photographs hung on the wall in a loose pastiche of half-forgotten faces. Uncles and distant cousins who were killed in the war, and their wives, who had remarried or stuck out the following years in solitude. A group shot of his mother’s family from the ’teens, faces serious, as befitted the weight of such a sitting. Brano was also there, at two, and at six years old, with curls that made him look uncomfortably like a girl; Klara as a nine-year-old had the same intense features she had carried into adulthood. In the center, a larger portrait of his father—his Tati—stood sentry over the others. It had been taken during the war, a young man’s face with too many worry lines sprouting from his eyes. His mouth was open, revealing the chipped front tooth Brano always imagined when he tried to remember the face of Andrezej Fedor Sev.
He sat on the edge of the bed, gazing at that tooth. The man was probably dead now, one tiny fraction of the endless stream of refugees who made their way west after the war. But this man had been ordered to leave, by his son, on a frigid October night.
Brano wiped his palms dry on his knees.
It was not his room anymore. It had become a home for guests. A guest room, and he was a guest. He put the suitcase into the wardrobe.
Her forehead was clean and the cards cleared away. She was heating pork stew in an iron pot and toasting bread. He asked her about the store. “Well, you know. Eugen is a good boy, but I don’t need him. I could do all the work myself. It’s a small place. But the State wants two employees, and who am I to argue?”
“You could bring it up at a council meeting.”
“Do you think that would help?”
“The State can’t know things unless it’s told.”
She hummed beneath her breath and stirred the fragrant soup. She added a spoonful of fat from the pail and let it cook a little more before ladling it into a bowl and collecting the toast. She poured him a glass of brandy and seemed pleased just to watch him eat.
He told her a few necessary details about the Pidkora factory and spent more time describing new construction in the Capital and everything that was changing. “The metro was a fantastic success.”
“That’s a good thing,” she said.
“When you travel you see the entire cross-section of the city—Gypsies and workers and university professors riding side by side.”
“And Politburo men?”
“Mother.”
“I’m only asking.”
He finished eating and sipped the warm brandy. She poured herself one and refilled his.
“And what about your personal life, Brani? Do you have friends? Any women you’d like your mother to meet?”
He hesitated. “No, no women.”
“You’re not so young anymore.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“And when you reach a certain age you’ll kick yourself for not having a wife.”
“It’s possible.”
“Maybe we can find you a nice girl around here.”
“No. Mother, don’t try that.”
“If you’re not going to be sensible, then I’ll have to be sensible for you.”
“Mother.”
She finished her glass. “What, son-of-mine?”
“I’m quite happy with my life.”
“Nonsense. No one is happy with their life. Your Tati used to say that all the time, and he knew what he was talking about.”
He stared at his drink until she let the subject go. She went on to other matters, and by eleven had told him all about the happenings in Bóbrka. Alina Winieckim and Gerik Gargas had died in the last six months, the first of encephalitis, the other in a gory drilling accident. Alina’s husband, Lubomir, got a permit to move to the Capital—“Did you hear from him? I gave him your phone number.” Brano hadn’t. “Always unsociable, Lubomir. Always …” She twisted an index finger against her temple to signify insanity, then told him that the entire Ulanowicz clan had moved to Uzhorod.
Brano rubbed his eyes.
But there was good news as well, she told him. Wincet and Kalena Szybalski had gotten married after only a three-week courtship (though Kalena’s soon-swelling belly made the reason clear enough). Also married were Piotr and Jolanta, and Augustyn and Olesia. “There’s love in the air,” she said. “Maybe you’ll smell it, too.” Krystyna Knippelberg was seven months pregnant with her sixth. “You should see how ecstatic she is. But who wants six children? All she really wants is one of those Motherhood Medals, it’s obvious.”
“Is that so bad?”
“It’s bad when you can’t feed the five children you’ve got. Krystyna will have to send one off to the orphanage, mark my words.”
The most spectacular news, however, of Jan Soroka’s mysterious appearance did not cross her lips.
“And what about my sister?”
She yawned into the back of her hand, then took the bottle to refill his glass, stopping when she saw it hadn’t been touched. “Klara is doing well. Oh, very well. She and Lucjan are as happy as you can imagine. No children, though I talk to her.” She drank her brandy and put her chin in her hand. “Maybe Lucjan is seedless. You can’t blame a man for that, but I
would
like some grandchildren before I’m dead. Klara’s not my only child, though.”
“Maybe.”
“You see?” she said as she got up. “It’s not just in the Capital that interesting things happen.”
She kissed him good night and left the brandy out, but he didn’t drink any more. He sipped tap water and read Colonel Cerny’s copy of
Kurier
. In a long column called “An Eye into the Other Side,” Filip Lutz told of his own interrogation in 1961, a year before he escaped through Prague to the West. He said that the brutal treatment he received at the hands of the Ministry for State Security was the sure sign of a paranoiac society in the advanced stages of collapse. He gave the regime three years at most.
When the words began to blur, he went to the bedroom, undressed and folded his clothes, then climbed into the cold bed.
Brano was not the kind of man who liked to recall his youth, preferring to forget that time of
zbrka
—Dijana Franković’s word for “the confusion of too many thing.” Before and during the war, he had stumbled through the stages leading to adulthood with his loud friend, Marek. The road to adulthood had been so clumsy and hesitant that even at the end of that life he was still unsure what to call himself. But after sending away his father, the
zbrka
dissipated. He was Brano Oleksy Sev, first a private, and then a sergeant, a captain, a lieutenant, a major. Then a factory worker. Now, he was neither an officer nor a worker but something undefined, lying in this cold room in the north of the country, where he always found the childhood
zbrka
waiting patiently for him.
As he warmed, he closed his eyes to focus on the provincial silence. It seemed clean to him, without malice, but then the noise did come, in little bursts, then a long high note: drunk men’s howls wavering on the cold breeze, from far off. At least that was something familiar from the Capital.
9 FEBRUARY 1967, THURSDAY
•
His back
was stiff from the too-soft bed, so he stood beside it and stretched his arms and twisted, then rolled his shoulders, the smell of breakfast rousing him. After a quick wash he ate bread and jam and two boiled potatoes. The eastern sun lit the dust in the kitchen while Mother talked about the people she expected to come to her store today, because villagers were as predictable as the clock on the wall.
They walked to the center along the rivuleted gravel road, nodding at those who nodded, and he stood aside while his mother spoke hesitantly to old women before finally introducing him to Zuzanny Wichowska and Elwira Lisiewicz and Halina Grzybowska. He removed his hat for each woman, and though they gave him timid smiles, they did not offer their hands.
On each woman’s forehead was a fading black stain. Yesterday, he realized, had been Ash Wednesday.
His mother’s shop was a narrow, nameless place two doors down from the butcher’s. She unlocked the door and opened the curtains to let in light. Shelves packed with canned foods and liquor bottles grew to the ceiling, and under the glass counter lay sausages and cheese. She showed him the back room filled with boxes her young assistant had yet to unpack, then made coffee on an electric coil. While they drank, a tall sixty-year-old man in a faded smock appeared with pallets of bread, the ash on his forehead sweated almost completely away. Mother asked how his wife, Ewa, was, then introduced him to Brano as Zygmunt. Brano shook his hand while she signed the invoice.
“You’re enjoying Bóbrka?”
“Just arrived last night.”
“Different,” said Zygmunt.
“Bóbrka?”
“Different from the Capital.” He glanced at Brano’s polished shoes. “A big man in the Capital is just another man in Bóbrka.”
“The reverse is true as well.”
“It may be,” he said, taking the invoice from Iwona Sev. “And that might be why I’m still in Bóbrka.” He touched the brim of his hat before he left.
Brano said he would go for a walk.
“To register with the Militia?”
“Of course.”
“You’re as predictable as a villager, Brani.”
Without his mother as an intermediary, there was nothing to connect Brano to the ashed villagers who gave him cursory glances; there were no words to be said. He walked along the main road that branched out from the church, past yards with chickens and self-satisfied dogs, to where a single white Škoda was parked outside the Militia station, a small but austere concrete box with a tin roof and its Militia sign propped in the window. The interior was dim and simple: a gray, scratched desk, a chair on each side, and an empty bulletin board. A portrait of General Secretary Pankov in a crisp fedora hung over the desk. Brano waited until a voice cursed from the back room.
“Hello?”
The voice silenced.
“Hello?”
The far door opened and a wrinkled uniform appeared: a young man with black, greasy bangs swept over an ashless forehead. His sunken eyes were dark, his lips wide and without expression. “Yes? Need something?”
“I’m here to register.”
“Register?” He moved to his desk and sat down.
“I’m from the Capital. I’m staying here now.”
The man motioned to the opposite chair and removed a stack of papers from a drawer. He went through them, pulling one out, then shaking his head and returning it to the stack and trying another until he found the form he needed. He turned it around for Brano. “Here you go.”
Brano took a pen from a holder on the desk. “This is for foreigners. I need form AE-342.”
The militiaman flushed. “Yes, yes. How about that?” He returned to the stack. “Here, of course. AE-342.”
While Brano filled it out the militiaman eyed him, the only sound the pen tip scratching paper. Brano passed it over and watched him read. The hawk on his blue Militia shoulder patch was dirty. Then Brano handed over his internal passport, and the militiaman’s lip twitched at the sight of the Ministry hawk on the red cover.
“Uh, it says here you work at the Pidkora factory.”
“That’s true.”
“But your passport—”
“Former employer. 1 haven’t had a chance to change my documents.”
The militiaman cleared his throat. “Well, Comrade Sev, it’s good to have visitors in Bóbrka. I’m Captain Tadeusz Rasko.” He stuck out his hand and Brano took it, rising imperceptibly. “How long will you be with us?”
“A week, I think. But my foreman is very flexible.”
“Very good,” he said. “So you’re here for a vacation?”
“I’ve worked hard this year.”
“I imagine.”
“What do you imagine?”
The captain’s mouth chewed air for a moment. “Just that you’ve worked hard, Comrade Sev.”
Brano nodded at his passport on the desk. “Can you stamp that, then?”
“Of course.” It took another minute of desperate searching to come up with the proper stamp, then more to find the inkpad. But Captain Rasko did finally place the small purple entry stamp on a clean page.