Liberation Movements (6 page)

I’ve been
three days with as many hours sleep, but only now do I feel it. Climbing out of the taxi, the hot sun makes me momentarily blind, and the airport is suddenly replaced by a field of dizzying sunspots. When I reach back to the taxi for support, it’s already gone, and I stumble into a cloud of hot exhaust.

I’m trying to focus through the fatigue, clutching my small leather purse and counting its contents in my head: a new external passport, some money, and a roll of audiotape.

At the TisAir desk I wait behind a young couple who squeeze each other’s hands as they wait for the clerk to stamp their tickets. It seems to take a long time, but I’m not sure. Because time has become strange. Until only a week ago—yes, Wednesday, 23 April—I was faced with the regular minutiae: the sour husband, the paperwork-clogged desk in the militia office, the condescension from my workmates. A frustrating life, being the only woman working homicide, but a simple one to understand.

Now I’m at the counter, explaining to the pert blonde with a blue TisAir cap that I would like to go to Istanbul on the seven o’clock flight.

She scans a list on a clipboard. “Will you be bringing luggage?”

“Just me.”

She wields a pen. “And you are?”

“Katja Drdova.” I hand over my crisp passport as evidence.

The ticket costs more koronas than I expect, but I count out the money without argument, nodding when she explains that I’ll have to also purchase a visa in the Istanbul airport. My skin is beginning to tingle. The exhaustion affects my bones, or it feels that way, as if dirt has wedged its way into my joints. And my senses are becoming acute—an ill woman behind me breathes with the intensity of a tractor engine.

Ticket in hand, I cross the bright tile floor to a small corridor past the pay phones to the bathrooms. I splash water on my face and look in the mirror, prodding the corners of my eyes with a fingertip.

Old.

But I’m only twenty-four.

Given the heavy lids and shallow creases across my brow, it’s an understandable mistake.

I consider calling Aron from one of those pay phones. He’ll return to an empty house tonight, and, though it won’t be so strange, after a while he’ll worry. He doesn’t deserve that. But what could I tell him? That I’m going to Turkey unexpectedly? That’s not something people just do. People just don’t do this.

My hands tremble when I show my ticket to the uniformed border guard, but he doesn’t seem to notice. At the gate, I ask a fat man with a little red star on his lapel for a cigarette. He smiles glassily as he lights it for me; then I feel him following me with his eyes as I find a seat by the window and smoke, staring at the planes taxiing on the tarmac.

This, I recall, is where Libarid was. Maybe this exact spot.

When the news came a week ago, I was on the telephone with Aron, who had called from the factory to continue our previous night’s argument about having children—he’s never been able to understand my refusal. Chief Brod opened his office door and leaned against the frame. In my ear, Aron was saying, “I’ve been patient with you; you know this. You can’t say I haven’t been patient.”

Chief Brod is a simple man who wears his emotions on his sleeve, and when he stood in his doorway with his gray-threaded blond hair parted perfectly, like a schoolboy’s, in his face I knew this was something big; it was something tragic.

“Let me call you back,” I told Aron.

“This is original, cutting me off in the middle of—”

But I’d hung up, and Imre and I followed Emil into his office.

“It’s Libarid,” our chief said.

“He’s in Istanbul,” I said. “Right?”

“Bulgaria.”

I grinned—
grinned.
“What’s he doing there?”

“Yeah,” said Imre. “He got a girlfriend there?”

Emil cleared his throat. “Brano called from Istanbul.”

Both Imre and I made faces at that name.

“Libarid’s dead,” Emil told us, then filled in the details—Armenian terrorists, an explosion—and I found myself repeating
Armenia, Armenians
in my head but making no sense of those words.

Aron and I had dined with Libarid and his family now and then. He was a good man—a poor investigator but a decent person—and an Armenian. His wife, Zara, smiled a lot; she seemed content in a way I used to think was a little stupid. But she served wonderful food, delicious pieces of lamb with yogurt they called
kalajosh
and
lahmajoon,
a lamb-topped pizza. When we left Aron would always mention how contented Libarid seemed with his wife and child. I think he was jealous.

And then Libarid was dead, part of a fireball in the Bulgarian sky.

That was only a week ago. Now I’m joining the other passengers in a crowd around the dark stewardess who does her best to smile as she tries to force everyone into a straight line. It’s plainly impossible, so she gives up and takes ticket stubs from whoever offers first and sends us out the door, across the hot tarmac to the plane. The fat man with the red star is a few people ahead, and as we step out under the bright, bewildering sun I watch him put on sunglasses. His head, tilted to the side, eyes covered, looks vaguely mysterious.

That’s when I wish I could have brought my gun.

1968

In the
morning, Peter and Josef conferred with friends in the empty dormitory canteen. School had been closed indefinitely, but Jan had a key. Peter retold his story humbly—the nighttime fire, the Russian jeep, then running—and they nodded, all confirming his stupidity.

“But why didn’t you stick with Toman and Ivana?” asked Gustav, an older, bearded student from the medical school. “Maybe you would’ve gotten away, too.”

“The soldiers were my fault. I’d started the fire. So I had to lead them away from the others.”

That earned him a collective nod of respect.

He took a tram into the old town with Jan, and on the way Jan pointed out pockmarked walls—on a cinema, a bakery, a post office. They were in the back of the crowded tram, whispering. “Josef and I were at the radio station, the morning after you left. Radio Prague asked people to come, so we came. Lots of us came.” He smiled. “And of course the Russians came, too. It was a terrible fight, took hours. A few times I thought we’d actually make them turn around and leave, but then…” He shrugged. “Well, they got through to the station.”

“How did you get away?”

“The Russians are stupid. They’ve got no idea how to work the back streets.”

“But they’ve won.”

“Fight’s not over yet,” Jan said as they got out. He touched his brow. “I’ll see you tonight at the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“Didn’t Josef tell you? The engineering students are coming, too. Eight o’clock, at the Church of Our Lady of the Snows.”

“Right. Of course.”

“The priest has a soft spot for us.” He winked. “Time to figure out our Plan B.”

Peter wandered the town, fists in the pockets of his thin pinstriped jacket, ignoring the forms passing him. He stumbled now and then on concrete broken by the treads of Russian tanks. He had nowhere to be, but at least he wasn’t in that old dormitory, surrounded by those students and their proud tales.

What he’d gone through in that field outside
eské Bud
jovice, terrible as it had been, was over in a matter of minutes. These students had been plotting and fighting for a week now, and for them it was just the beginning. A sense of valor kept them going. Unlike Jan, Peter had no residual pride to warm himself with.

He considered returning to the Torpédo, just in case that soldier was there to distract him for a while, but in Republic Square he heard a voice.

“Peter Husák.”

He turned. In that first second he felt nothing. Then his fingers grew cold and began to fidget in his jacket. Captain Poborsky’s bald head glowed in the gray light.

“Now don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me already.”

“Of—of course not.”

“Can I buy you a coffee?”

“Well, I have to—”

“I insist, Comrade Husák.”

The StB officer guided him back to the massive Obecní Dům, the Municipal House. Under the art nouveau glass awning, Peter hesitated, and the captain glanced back with a smile.

“Don’t worry, son. You’re with me.”

That didn’t help as they continued into the huge café and followed a maître d’ to a small table in the center. Under high chandeliers, Russian commanders in full uniform laughed with Czech apparatchiks and smoked furiously over shots of Becherovka and Smirnoff. This was not a place for students.

The security officer asked the waiter for two cups of café au lait.

“Peter,” he said, smiling.

“Yes?”

The officer tugged his mustache. “I’ve talked to a lot of young men and women over the past weeks, but you—you’re interesting.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t be modest. My world—an interrogator’s world—is a world of secrets. My visitors protect those secrets with lies. The lies are usually simple enough—
I didn’t do this, or that
—but you…” He wagged a finger. “Your lie puzzles me. You say you watched your friends cross into Austria, yes?”

Peter nodded as the waiter set down their cups and backed away.

“See? This is my confusion. The lie can only serve to incriminate you, as an accomplice to criminal human smuggling. When the fact—as today’s list of casualties proves—is that Toman Samulka and Ivana Vogler were shot down in a cornfield the day before you were picked up.”

Peter looked at his dirty fingernails. “I guess they came back.”

“That’s reasonable, right?” The captain paused. “No, I’m afraid it’s not. Because the report also states there was a third person in that field. A man who escaped because the gun on the jeep jammed.” He bobbed his eyebrows. “Pretty lucky man, you are.”

Peter took a sip of his coffee—hot milk singed his tongue. “I don’t know who that was.”

“Who?”

“The man who got away.”

The officer wagged his finger again. “Look at you! You’ve got the talent. You can keep a straight face—you don’t even blush!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What I’m talking about, Comrade Husák, is that you have a talent that shouldn’t go to waste. It’s not important to me what happened down at the border, but whatever happened, you’d rather lie to me than let it be known.”

Peter blinked because the cigarette smoke and crystal-refracted light were drying his eyes. “Nothing happened at the border.”

“You really are good,” said Poborsky. “I’ve looked at your record. Up until two months ago, you were a fine student. You studied your…music? You avoided marches. You didn’t even take part in socialist rallies.”

“Politics aren’t my concern.”

“Good, good. Because, between you and me, I hate zealots, no matter what side they’re on. They shout so much it hurts my poor ears.” He smiled. “You know, I’m told all the time that everything is political. Man, our socialist teachers explain, is a political animal, and, in fact, the personal
is
the political. But between you and me, I’ve never believed that. The political, in fact, is really only the personal dressed up in more flamboyant clothes. There is no political man, only men, whose politics grow from their personal traumas. You follow me?”

Peter didn’t answer, but Poborsky nodded as if he had. “I see you do.”

Peter knew where all this was leading, but he wanted the captain to spell it out. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I think your route in life is still to be charted. Because I think you are made for better things than musicology.”

Peter finished his coffee and set down the empty cup. The officer took a slip of paper from his pocket and placed it on the table. There was a phone number written on it.

“Take it,” he said.

Peter folded the paper into his jacket pocket. “Can I go now?”

“Who’s keeping you?” Comrade Poborsky leaned forward and whispered, “There’s another world out there. Just call that number when you’re ready.”

“For recruitment?”

“Recruitment or information. Whatever you feel is within your power.”

Peter walked out of the Obecní Dům.