"Okay?" she asked.
"Okay," he said and picked through the breadbasket for a roll that suited him.
4
After I was back in my hotel room, I mulled over what Jeno had told me during dinner. "This shouldn't be so difficult, Inspector." He'd had several glasses of wine and was about to pour himself another. "It's straightforward, but your people keep dodging and wriggling. I argued that we should deal with you differently than we do with the Arabs, but maybe I was wrong."
"You want to give me a clue, even a little one? Because otherwise, I don't know what you're talking about." I could have pretended to go along, nodded when he said that people were wriggling. But I preferred to know who was wriggling, and why. At home I could live with ambiguity. Not here, not in this tidy country where every hedge was clipped and not a single sunbeam bounced in the wrong direction. There wasn't room for ambiguity here.
"Now that your heart rate is normal, tell me. What do you think of Dilara?" he asked. "More wine?"
"Beautiful girl," I said. "No more for me." Jeno?s expression changed. His eyebrows looked about to leap onto the table and do something with castanets. "Something wrong?" I asked. "Was that the wrong answer? You don't think she's beautiful?"
"These salted bread sticks are delicious, Inspector. Why don't you take some back to your room? They're from a wonderful bakery. Do you like baked goods?"
Chapter Four
"On your return, you will be hailed with a great ceremony at the airport. It will be thronged with press and cheering crowds, all to greet a man who had thought of abandoning the motherland but returned in its time of challenge and travail. Speakers will note that you are the grandson of a great hero; the blood lineage of the revolutionaries is always a good theme. There will be much waving of banners as you step from the aircraft stairs and plant your feet on the soil of your homeland. When they ask what made you return, you will say that Grandfather's words echoed in your heart, that you saw him in front of you constantly, that you searched your conscience and finally realized you could not betray the people. You will weep at the mistake you almost made, weep at returning to the bosom of the country, the land where your parents shed their blood."
My brother had left a message at my hotel for me to meet him again, this time in the park near the mission during the noontime break. As soon as I walked in through the gate and saw him sitting in the sun near the big pine tree, I knew I had made a mistake. Now that I heard what he had to say, I knew it was worse than a mistake.
"No. That I will not do." I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt. "I will not play that sort of fool. I will not misuse Grandfather or our parents for such a ridiculous show. I will not betray them. You know I won't do that. Why would you even suggest it? Are they so desperate at home to counter the defection in Beijing? Are they so rattled that they will grasp at anything, even this?"
My brother looked alien to me, and I thought I might despise him forever if I didn't make one last effort. "Don't you feel him near sometimes? I don't mean like a ghost, but in your blood? When you see an old man on the street who looks a little like he did at the end, walks like he did, very proud and straight, don't you think he is still around, a part of you?"
"Don't be a fool."
One more desperate attempt, one more and then I would quit. "Do you remember how Mother would sing at night, how her voice sounded in the darkness when she went down to the river to be alone? Can't you hear it on the wind, still?"
"How could you remember anything like that? You were barely more than a baby. You're romanticizing. There's no time for sentimentality."
"No, I remember. It is clear to me, her voice. I hear it sometimes."
"Do you want to know what I hear? I hear grandfather telling us that they were dead, that we had no family left but him and that we had to leave in the morning because the battle was moving our way."
"I remember her songs."
"You don't. You don't remember a thing. You didn't even cry when he told us. I don't think you knew what was happening."
"I remember Grandfather looking for someplace warm for us to sleep. I won't let you use him. It's betrayal."
"Use him? He's dead! We all have jobs to do, now and maybe after we die as well. Besides, he wasn't perfect, you know. Or maybe you don't."
"Perfect? What would you know about perfection? That's just like you, isn't it? Tearing down whatever makes you look small by comparison. Have you ever said anything decent about him? Have you ever mentioned what he did? No, you pretend as if he didn't sacrifice everything for us."
"This isn't about me. What I'm asking does no harm to the old man. Let him be useful again, really useful, not a musty symbol of a bygone era. For all you know, he might have approved. He approved of almost everything that you did, didn't he?"
That was meant to get to me. It did. "Damn you." I thought of stopping there, but then the words boiled over. When other people mentioned my grandfather, I could ignore them, or just walk away like I almost did in Pak's office with Sohn. That was impossible with my brother. With him it was different, exactly because he planned every word he spoke. Every word, every thought was for him part of an unending war fought against his own existence. But he did not fight on the front lines. He was a sapper who studied the structure, planned where to place the charge, and exploded it to cause maximum destruction. He thought of me as a bridge that had to be brought down to prevent the past from pursuing him.
"We aren't related anymore." I had never once thought of saying that, but there was no going back once I heard the words spoken in my own voice. "We aren't part of the same family. We don't share the same blood. From now on, we are strangers."
He was silent, but not with shock or hurt or even with contemplation. I knew what he was doing; he was searching even then for a way to destroy me. There was only one thing left to say, and I might as well say it. "We are nothing to each other," I said. "You and me, we have nothing in common, and we never did. Do you understand? Can I make it any clearer to you? We are not brothers. We are complete strangers who owe each other nothing. We will not meet. We will not talk. We will not acknowledge each other's existence. As far as I am concerned, you died and I did not mourn." He was looking out at the lake, pretending not to hear. I stopped for a moment to consider, but the words were already there, honed and dipped in poison that must have been fermenting for centuries. "Let me tell you this, if I ever find that you haven't died, if you ever work your way into my sights, if I am ever, for any reason, told to hunt down a man and kill him and it turns out to be you, I will pull the trigger. You hear me? I will pull the trigger."
That caught his attention. "No doubt you will, little brother." He got to his feet. "The only question is whether you'll live long enough to see that day."
2
I watched him walk down the hill, past the stand of oaks and the line of maples all the way out of the park. I willed myself to be calm, but I had no will left, not for that. I made it a point to draw few lines in my life. Drawing them rarely made sense. People who drew lines became trapped on the wrong side. Things changed, reality shifted, shapes became shadows and shadows faded into night. You can't see your principles in the dark. But where I did draw a line, I had no intention of erasing it.
At my grandfather's funeral, a day of bright sunshine, people I had never met before bowed their heads and murmured as they passed by that I should be true to his name. On the day he died, the radio called him the Beating Heart of the Revolution, and all at once, when I heard that, I knew what he had been trying to tell me for all the years I had been in his house. I never saw him bend.
When we were young, not long after the war, my brother came home a few times a year. Whenever he did, my grandfather would become silent. It was a great honor, my brother would say. He was attending the revolutionary school for the children of heroes killed in the war. The students were all orphans, but they had not lost their family, he told us. The fatherland was our family, the party was our future, the Great Leader was the center of our hope. No one could rest on what he had done in the past; it was to the future we owed our lives. To me, it was stirring stuff. My grandfather sat with his hands on his knees and was silent.