Olen Steinhauer - 36 Yalta Boulevard

“Your memoirs?”

Andrezej Sev flushed. “Letters,” he said. “To my family.”

“Your American family.”

“My wife’s named Shirley. From Tennessee.”

“Tennessee.” Brano settled in the desk chair, picturing Loretta Reich from the Committee for Liberty and her expressions. “Children?”

“Two girls.”

“And they have names?”

“Stacy and Jennifer.”

Brano, despite himself, cracked a smile.

“I didn’t want to burden them with foreign names.”

“I imagine.”

Andrezej Sev, still standing, looked at his feet. “Brani?’

“Yes?”

“How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine,” he said, wondering why the question, from this man, irritated him. “I mean, no. She feels her life’s a waste without you. And Klara, beyond the bad paint job, married an idiot. But she seems happy with her life.”

Andrezej Sev settled on the bed and patted his thighs, his voice deepening. “No one’s happy with their life. You don’t fool yourself into believing that kind of rubbish, do you?”

“That would be asking a lot. But my life functions. I make do.”

“Make do.” His father smiled. “I used to think that way, before I came west. It’s hard to explain, but when you arrived in Bobrka and told me to leave, I was almost… well, I was relieved.”

Brano adjusted himself in the chair, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at Andrezej Sev looking at his son’s knee.

“You remember what the war was like for me,” he said. “A German factory. I’d return home, and your mother was-she was… I don’t want to talk ill of her, but she wasn’t easy to live with. But back then I thought like you do. Happiness wasn’t what this world had to offer. Survival, yes. Survival and making do. Then I got out of that world. First to a displaced persons camp in Hamburg. There were some American soldiers there, collecting information from emigres. I made friends with them. And by “forty-eight they asked me to join a new organization.”

“The Office of Policy Coordination.”

He nodded.

“We’re all apparatchiks for someone.”

His father squinted, then went on. “I moved to Virginia and helped train agents.”

“How long did you do this?”

Andrezej Sev shrugged. “Until “fifty-three? Yes, “fifty-three.”

“Until the rollback operation was shut down.”

The elder Sev got up and took an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes from the dresser. He offered one, but Brano declined. So he lit one for himself and sat on the bed again. “We’re getting off track. The point is that my relationship to happiness changed. I still knew I’d never achieve happiness, but the Americans firmly believe you must try to find it. It keeps them in motion.”

This was a different man. The younger Andrezej Sev would have never gone into lengthy discussions of the intangibles of happiness or even love. Andrezej Sev had had the classic provincial mind-survival and subsistence. America had changed him into a creature with the leisure time to worry about such things; he’d become a creature of weekend television and football games and Main Street parades, while his new country’s soldiers slaughtered villagers in the jungles of Asia. And he’d become proud-pride was all over him. They were strangers on opposite sides of an iron fence.

“It’s my fault,” said Brano.

“What?”

“That you’ve become…” He tried to think of the right word. “ This.” His father stared at him. “Maybe Mother was right. Maybe I should have put you in prison.”

Andrezej Sev’s face dropped. He licked his lips. “You’re blaming yourself for what I’ve become?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, don’t.” He took a drag and spilled smoke into the room. “If you want to know the moment that changed me, you have to look later. A Saturday afternoon in 1951. It was summer, and I went with my new wife down to Virginia Beach with the other thousand vacationers.” He grinned. “Shirley had bought me an air mattress, because she knew I didn’t like to swim. Well, the fact was I couldn’t swim, but I didn’t want to admit that to her. We blew it up together, and I took it out to where the water came to my waist and climbed on it. I lay on my back and closed my eyes. It was very peaceful, and I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes again I was far out, past the pier. I panicked. I don’t know why, but I completely panicked. I began screaming like a child and fell off the mattress, into the water, and sank like a rock. I was sure, at that moment, that I was a dead man.”

“But you made it to shore,” said Brano.

“Not on my own, I didn’t. I got to the surface, yes, and I clutched the mattress to stay up. I kicked and splashed and made it to the end of the pier and held on to the piling. It was covered with barnacles that scratched the hell out of my chest and pierced the mattress. It deflated. I tell you, I was crying then. Weeping uncontrollably. And the next thing I knew, this big strong man-he’d seen Shirley screaming from the beach-had swum out to me, and he was telling me very calmly to let go of the piling. He carried me back to shore.”

There was silence for a moment, as Brano looked into his father’s eyes. “Why are you telling me this story?”

“You’re not going to like the reason.”

“Try me.”

“Well,” he said, leaning back, “I got to the shore and Shirley dried me off. She was crying. She thought I’d drown out there. And when I saw her tears, I knew. I learned it in one moment.” He paused again. “Brani, God truly exists.”

Brano felt the vibration of the wire recorder against his heart. “Is that what you call a miracle?”

“It’s what I call knowledge.”

Brano felt an urge to stand up, walk out of the room, and throw himself down the stairwell. This was more than he wanted to know. His mother had been right all along. But the vibration kept him in his seat. “So I suppose this explains your Christian friends.”

“They’re good people.”

“Maybe,” he said, rearranging the lines he’d put together on the way over here. “But if I come to America, you won’t force me to attend your church, will you?”

A large smile spread over his father’s face. “All I want is for you to be near me. I want to know my son again. Don’t worry, I’m not as evangelical as my friends.”

“That’s good to hear.”

Andrezej Sev leaned forward and patted Brano’s knee. “You’ve made me a happy man, Brani. You really have.”

“How do I do it?”

“We can do it now, if you like. I make a phone call and wait for my friends to show up. Then it’s just a trip to the embassy. You’ll be completely safe.”

“And then what happens?”

Andrezej Sev’s eyes grew as he lit another cigarette. “Nothing much. A quick debriefing, no more than a day-and nothing like Ludwig’s, you can be assured of that. Then we fly you to Virginia. A week or two more at Langley, and that’s the end of it. A new passport with a new name. It’s that simple.”

“And money?”

His father paused. “Start-up finances, until you get a job. If you need more, I’ll take care of it myself.”

Brano nodded, the lie becoming visual in his head: televisions, football games, parades-and possibly even her. “But I can’t leave yet. I have a few more things to do. We can meet tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“In the Volksgarten. You know the Temple of Theseus?”

“Of course.”

“Tomorrow at three, inside the Temple of Theseus.”

His father leaned back again and raised his hands toward his god, then clapped them together. His face reddened with pleasure. “This calls for a drink!” He went to the bedside table, removed a metal flask from the drawer, and poured palinka into two glasses he fetched from the bathroom. “To freedom,” said his father.