第5章 Cheap Bread

For four years the office had given Vesna one standing instruction above all others, and it was not about documents or tradecraft or the management of fear. It was this: have no one. No lovers, no close friends, no habits a neighbour could describe. A cover that only exists at work is a cover with a single wall. Have no one, and there is nothing to pull on, nothing to threaten, nothing to hold in a room while someone explains to you what your colleague has just admitted. She had followed the instruction for four years with a discipline that occasionally frightened her, because she was, underneath the discipline, a person who liked people and had been raised to be kind, and unkindness did not come naturally. She had turned her kindness into a technique. She was pleasant to the woman at the kiosk and cold to the woman at the kiosk, at exactly the temperature that produced a familiar face and no friendship. She remembered birthdays and revealed nothing. She was, by any honest measure, very good. In her third year she had broken the instruction, once, in a way so small that she had almost convinced herself it did not count. His name was Stanko Dragas and he kept a pharmacy two streets from her flat, in a narrow shop with a brass balance in the window and a smell of camphor and paper that she had found, on her first week in the city, unexpectedly hard to walk past. He was fifty-three, a widower, unhurried, and hopeless at the small politics of a neighbourhood, and he sold her aspirin and asked her, in the first month, nothing at all. The absence of questions had been, at first, a professional relief. Later it became a habit. Later than that she was coming in for nothing at all, on her way home, to stand near the camphor and the paper and be, for eleven minutes, a woman buying nothing. He had never asked what she did, who she was, or where she had come from. He had asked her once, in the second winter, whether she had anyone to eat the holiday with, and she had said no, and he had said, then you will eat it here, and she had eaten it there, and had gone home and lain awake and understood precisely what she had done and refused, for the four remaining days of that week, to consider whether she would undo it. On the Friday before collection she went to the shop in the evening, because she had learned that leaving is a thing you do badly unless you have said goodbye, and she wanted to look at him once more with the knowledge that she was leaving and see whether it changed anything. It did not. He was weighing something for an old man and he looked up and said her name — Yva — with the particular mildness that she had come to associate with the shop, and the wrongness of it caught in her throat. "I am going away," she said. "For a while." "North?" "Perhaps." He wrapped the old man's parcel and handed it over and counted out the change, and when the shop was empty he said, "You have been going away since I met you." She looked at him. "I do not say it to be clever," he said. "It is what a man notices when a woman comes in for eleven minutes and buys nothing. You are always partly somewhere else. I decided a long time ago not to ask, because I have had one life taken from me already and I did not want a second one run by my questions." She had a hundred professional responses. She used none of them. "If anyone comes here in the next month," she said, "and asks about me, there is one thing I want you to do. I want you to tell them the truth. That I buy aspirin. That you do not know my work. That is the whole truth, and it is the safest thing you can say." "Will someone come." "It is possible." He thought about it. "Then I will say the truth," he said, "and I will not ask you a second question while you are still here, because you are already looking at the door." She left, and she did not look back at the shop, and she walked up through Kaldar with the evening shutting the shutters one after another, past the bakery where Rasim lived, past the cistern, and she was thinking about the shop and the eleven minutes and the holiday dinner, and that was why she saw the two men a full four seconds before they saw her. They were coming down from the cistern end of the lane, in plain clothes, unhurried, one of them carrying nothing and one carrying a leather satchel. They looked at the doors on both sides of the street the way men look at doors when they have a paper in a pocket with addresses on it. She did not run, because running is a confession. She turned into the doorway of her own building, took out her key, and stood with her back to the street, key in lock, taking a long time over a lock she could open in her sleep, while the two men came down the lane behind her and went past without stopping. Inside, she climbed to her flat and stood in the dark with her back against the door until her breathing was a stranger's again. A sweep. A house-to-house paper check in Kaldar, in a week when nobody was doing house-to-house checks. That kind of thing did not happen unless someone had asked for it. She had one person she could ask. On Saturday she went to the harbour office and stood under the lamp at the bad hour after midnight, and when Ferenc Balog came out of the dark she said, before he could speak, "Whose paper are they using for the Kaldar sweep?" "Agricultural census," he said. "It is normal." "It is not normal in October." "Nothing about this month is normal, Kolar. You knew that when you agreed to it four years ago." "That is not an answer." "It is the answer I have," he said, and there was something in his voice that she had never heard in it before — not a lie, exactly, but the sound of a man reading from a script he had not written and did not entirely endorse. "Nine days. Keep your head down, keep your lineman quiet, and when the day comes, move." "The lineman is not quiet. The Blackwake has asked him for a conversation." Balog's face did not move, and that, more than anything else he had said or not said, told her how bad it was. "Then he is a liability," he said. "And you know the rule about liabilities." She knew the rule. That was why she said nothing, and went home, and did not sleep, and spent the small hours thinking about a woman on a bicycle who could not afford to be kind, and the eleven minutes at a time the office would never know about. She had asked Molsen once, in the second year, in the flat tone she kept for the office in general, what had happened to the last woman who had sat at the desk by the window. Molsen had looked at her over the ledger and said that the last woman at that desk had gone home one evening and had never come in again, and that nobody had written to her and nobody had asked. Vesna had taken it at the time as a warning, which was the professional reading and probably the correct one. Standing in the street with the oranges in her bag, on the last ordinary evening of four years, she decided that a simpler reading was also true, which was that Molsen had been telling her a fact about the city, and that the city did not need to warn anybody about anything, because it had already seen everything and had grown used to losing people quietly in the ordinary course of a week. ---