Liberation Movements (21 page)

The details.
The details. If only I’d let that fat guard rape me, then we wouldn’t be here. But my reaction was a reflex, as with any woman, and I told Petrov that I knew about Sasha, that we all knew that he had fondled his son years ago. He believed no one knew about that. But I did. I know everything.

That’s not pride talking.

As Jirair walks me to the cockpit I work back over the details. I’ve called the hotel and Adrian, yes, I’ve told him everything. That side is taken care of. If he follows the instructions—
if
—then my brother will be free. He’ll be liberated. And Gavra will remember that he once loved a beautiful man who slipped away in the night. Like names on a list, I can see them all so clearly that it cannot be wrong. Peter Husák, the easiest of all to control—the liars always are—will lie dead in his hotel. A kind of liberation as well. He will get what he deserves from the person he deserves it from—Katja Drdova—and in the process save my brother. She will save herself as well.

And this militiaman, Libarid—a good choice. A frightened man will do nothing, will sit and remain calm and make no trouble because he wants his own liberation too much. He wants the peace of solitude and many many women. But the hatred—the family history in Turkey—how did I not see that? No, it won’t change a thing. He’s just right, so at the cockpit door I give him a smile and mouth
It’s okay,
just to let him know he’s the right one for me.

And we’re inside.

“What is this?” says Emin in his own language, turning from the radio and ending contact with the ground.

Oh, the fear is everywhere. Emin is covered in it, poor man. This will sicken him. This act. Afterward he will no longer trust himself, and he will land smoothly at Atatürk International and give himself and his men up. After a childhood like his, and then killing a woman like me, everything will be undermined.
I hate myself,
he will say, just like I say it every day.

I’ve got it right. I swear I’ve got it right.

If the numbers are right.

They are. They must be.

But there’s so much to keep track of.

The two Turkish pilots are no trouble. None. They’re crouched in their seats wishing for nothing more than to see their children again as Emin grips that suitcase with the button on its handle that, if pressed, will send a brief shortwave pulse to the gray suitcase in the baggage hold. To the blasting cap embedded in the six pounds of C-4 explosive Peter Husák passed to him in the restaurant of the Hotel Metropol.

He repeats himself. “Jirair, what is this?”

What I’ve said has terrified poor Jirair.
How can she know? What is this woman?
So he will leave us in peace for it to be done.

“This woman, she needs to speak with you.”

“What?” says Emin. He’s had trouble keeping control of his frightened men these last several days and says what I know he’ll say: “Get her out of here. I don’t have time for her.”

Because he doesn’t remember me. Because all I said to him was
Excuse me, but are you Armenian? I have a cousin who’s Armenian
and watched as he tried to get rid of me. Watched and learned.

Jirair isn’t sure what to do, and so it’s time for me to speak. Calmly, now. Don’t show a thing.

“Your father told you the stories, Emin. He told you about what happened in Trebizond on the Black Sea coast, back in 1915. One day, the streets were filled with Turkish soldiers holding bayoneted rifles, who searched the Christian Armenian houses for weapons that did not exist. The town crier told the inhabitants that in four days all Armenians—there were about a thousand in Trebizond—would be evacuated for the duration of the Great War, and that any Muslim caught hiding an Armenian would be killed by hanging.”

His grip on that briefcase is loosening. Slowly now. Down to a whisper.

“Your father was ten years old at the time of the march inland, and he told you that when people fell behind they were bayoneted and tossed into the river, which would wash them back out, past Trebizond, to the sea. The river was choked with bodies that had caught on branches, the stink of decomposition hovering over their long march. Your grandmother fell during that march, was stuck through with a bayonet and tossed into the water; four days later your grandfather was shot. Your father escaped from an internment camp in the desert, where the starving rolled in the sun, cut apart by dysentery, and made his way back to Trebizond, where he found an apartment picked clean by Turkish peasants. Even the linoleum had been ripped from the floors.”

The surprise on Emin’s face—wide-eyed, mouth gaping—is almost comical. Don’t laugh. Don’t smile.

“That wasn’t the end, because your father and other stray boys were gathered and auctioned off to Muslim families so they could be converted to Islam. Again he escaped—which was lucky for him, because in the coming weeks even the converted Armenians were shipped off to their deaths.”

Emin’s face is apoplectic, shifting through emotions. All the power he’s been trying to sustain leaves him quickly. Right. His eyes are wet, but he’s not crying. Not yet. He says, “What are you, a spy?”

“That’s exactly what I am,” I tell him. “A spy into your soul.”

Emin turns abruptly to Jirair. “Go.”

Jirair leaves and will walk back to the corner where Libarid is sitting in terror. They will speak, but briefly, because Jirair wonders who I could be—
what
I could be—and Libarid will sympathize with his confusion. That’s the nature of this. Confusion. With confused people you can do anything.

“Who are you working for?”

“For so many people, Emin. For Wilhelm Adler.”

“Wilhelm? But he’s…”

“He was never on your side. He works with Ludvík Mas, as do I. Remember that name. Ludvík Mas.”

He dwells on that a moment, and it connects to a memory he has of an early girlfriend, Yeva, whose father sabotaged their relationship, turning the young lovers against one another. “You’re here to ruin me,” he says.

“Yes, I am.”

He raises his gun to the side of my face, presses the cool barrel into my cheek.

Do it.

He won’t do it yet. Shooting a woman is not what he’s come here to do.

He must be forced.

“Yeva was a bitch. You know she was.”

“What?”

Keep him confused. “I’m not scared of you. Yeva wasn’t scared of you. No one is. Go ahead, pull the trigger. Your bullets can’t hurt me.”

This close, his face is coarse with all the sweat.

I spit into it.

He snaps back as if bitten, furious now. He’s going to do it. I know he will. First he’ll try to get answers wherever he can.

He steps back and snatches the radio handset. He’s weeping now. “She told me,” he says. “How did she know?”

“What did she say to you?” asks the radio.

“They’re lying,” I say quietly. “They know me.”

He peers through teary eyes at me as he speaks into the radio. “Just that…that…” He raises the pistol.

A gunshot.

But not his.

Another pistol, from beyond the door.

No.

I grit my teeth as the numbers fall apart and then line up again.

Emin’s head jerks around. He squeezes the handle of his briefcase.

Out there among the passengers. Could only be Ádám, my guard, or—

Childhood in Turkey. Slaughter by troops. Family on the run, then landing in a strange country with nothing to their name. Hatred grown old over the years and replaced by pragmatism. Pragmatism gives way to disappointment—where is the tough young man now? So he leaves the family, looking for that youth, and is put in the middle of a situation where he can rediscover that tough, angry young man.

Libarid.

I was wrong.

Another gunshot, and then the plane shifts, the floor tilts, I fall back—

I never saw this.

Gripping the suitcase detonator, he reaches for the door.

Which opens before he can touch it.

Libarid. You idiot.

But I’m the one who lost track.
I’m
the one with the bad wiring. Now I know.

And in that final instant I show him with my face that this was not how it was supposed to be.

Emin’s hand seizes up, thumb on the button.

For a
week I do not return. I stay in a coastal village east of Kilimli in a small pension that doesn’t bother asking for papers. Each night a heavy woman with dark hair on her upper lip brings my hot water in a pail for washing, and that first night I use it to clean Stanislav’s knife. Afterward I sit on the terrace wrapped in a towel, watching the Black Sea, which my hostess calls the
Karadeníz,
disappear into the night.

I sleep late and in the early afternoon drink tea in a café near the water. The proprietor, a thin man with sun-blackened skin, greets me personally by my second visit, then tells me in English about the trips I should take to Turkey’s many natural wonders. I understand little, but his English is musical, and his animated face is as absorbing as the sea. His monologues help me maintain my calm.

Afterward I walk the shore but don’t swim. Fishermen at the small dock watch me pass as they mend their nets, but they never speak to me, which is something I appreciate.

Here I eat what they eat, sea bass encrusted in salt. I drink their hot black tea with milk from glasses that singe my fingers and twice speak Russian with the café proprietor’s daughter, a literature student in Ankara. She has big dark eyes I’m envious of.

“You don’t have a man with you?”

I shake my head. “But I’m married.”

“And you came to Turkey alone?”

“I needed to get away.”

She scratches the corner of her lip with a long fingernail. “You are a progressive,
da?
”

I shrug.

“I am a progressive,” she says, smiling. “I make my father crazy. He says I act like a man. He even calls me ‘son’!”

I look at the proprietor washing glasses.

His daughter says, “You like it here?”

“It’s very restful.”

“It’s very boring. This is not the real world. The real world is in the capital. Here…it’s like where you go when you want to die a peaceful death.”

I smile at her, then wave to her father for another black tea.

On Saturday, the tenth of May, I check out of the pension, thank the mustached woman, and say good-bye to the father and daughter at the café. Then I’m on the train.

During my week away, Istanbul has changed. It’s gotten brighter, the colors more vivid, the voices a higher pitch. I’ve still got plenty of Deutschmarks, but I’m afraid that if I go to the Pera Palas I’ll run into that man I slept with, whose name I’ve lost track of.

So I check into the dark but cheap Sultan Inn and take a nap on the small bed until evening, when I wash and go out.

It’s inevitable that I’ll return—it’s the old Militia cliché: A criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. So I find myself again in the lobby of the Hotel Erboy, where I struggled with the English in the
Herald Tribune
before following Peter Husák up to his room. I pick up another copy.

A desk clerk smiles at me as I pass him on my way to the elevator, which takes me to the fifth floor and a set of stairs leading to a small rooftop bar and restaurant half full of foreigners sipping drinks and stretching tired legs. I climb onto a stool and order
rakı
. The bartender, a small, efficient man, produces it quickly, alongside a dish of mixed nuts.

Here is a surprise. From the front page of the newspaper, General Secretary Tomiak Pankov glares back at me like a stern father. The headline tells me that he vehemently denies charges of funding terrorists leveled at him by a Swedish law-enforcement officer more than a week ago at an Interpol conference here in Istanbul.

That conference. The one Libarid never made it to.

Socialism,
says our great leader,
has no need of violence or subterfuge. It is recognized by all the world as our only hope for peace and the salvation of our natural environment.

I fold the paper, unsure whether I should smile at that. And I know then what that hesitation is—it’s the weight of knowing that I’ll soon be returning home. As if to remind me, a melancholy prayer begins from the glowing minarets of the Aya Sofia.

Behind me are small tables filled with strangers whom I, in my naïveté, assume are simple, only because I don’t know their secrets. And to them, I’m a simple face at the bar, nothing more.

Then I spot a face I know, and the surprise almost makes me drop my glass. My first impulse is to flee, but I’ve grown to hate my impulses. So I take my glass over to a table at the edge, where a handsome man is staring morosely into his beer, ignoring the vista of nighttime Istanbul.

“Hello, Gavra.”

He hasn’t shaved in a few days. His pink eyes show he’s been crying, and I wish I hadn’t disturbed him. He stands, hands flailing at his sides. “Katja.” His lips work the air a moment. “What are you—”

“May I?”

“Of course.” He waves at the other seat and settles back down.

“I’m on vacation,” I say.

He nods, but he looks very confused. “Me, too.”

“Are you all right?”

Gavra takes a drink, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as the muezzin’s prayer continues. “Not really.”

“Can I help?”

He shakes his head. “I’ll survive.”

For a while we only drink and he smokes, both of us looking everywhere except at one another. Then I bring up something I think will be easy for us to discuss. “Did you and Brano ever figure out that hijacking?”

He continues to not look at me, but I can see tears returning. “We’ll never figure it out.”

“And Adrian Martrich?”

Gavra’s taken by a sudden coughing fit, so I can barely make out his answer: “He’s dead.”

I don’t ask how Adrian died, because the fact is I’m not even interested. People die every day, and the life I led a long time ago, before killing Peter Husák—the life I’ll soon return to—carries no weight for me now. It will soon, but not yet, and I like this disconnection.

Once he’s recovered, he wipes his eyes and says, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he puts his hand on mine and squeezes. Although I’ve always been fond of Gavra, this touch disturbs me in a way I can’t quite place. Perhaps because the prayer is finished, and we’re in silence. I find myself thinking that, if all I had to worry about was solving some damned case, I’d be skipping by now. He says, with surprising conviction, “Katja, I just want to be home again.”

I smile, as if I understand.