transport the body back to Mother Russia, where he would be buried with state
honors in his hometown. But somebody, alighting upon the transfer papers, had
taken them to apply to Vasiliev dead, not Vasiliev living. Mysteriously, the
body disappeared. Nobody would admit responsibility: the corpse had simply
been shipped out to some new posting.
Vasiliev's death merely served to intensify the thief's curiosity.
Mamoulian's arrogance fascinated him. Here was a scavenger, a man who made a
living off the weakness of others, who had yet grown so insolent with success
that he dared to murder-or have murdered on his behalf-those who crossed him.
The thief became jittery with anticipation. In his dreams, when he was able to
sleep, he wandered in Muranowski Square. It was filled with a fog like a
living thing, which promised at any moment to divide and reveal the card-
player. He was like a man in love.
4
Tonight, the ceiling of squalid cloud above Europe had broken: blue, albeit
pale, had spread over his head, wider and wider. Now, toward evening, the sky
was absolutely clear above him. In the southwest vast cumulus, their
cauliflower heads tinted ocher and gold, were fattening with thunder, but the
thought of their anger only excited him. Tonight, the air was electric, and he
would find the card-player, he was sure. He had been sure since he woke that
morning.
As evening began to fall he went north toward the square, scarcely
thinking of where he was going, the route was so familiar to him. He walked
through two checkpoints without being challenged, the confidence in his step
password enough. Tonight he was inevitable. His place here, breathing the
scented, lilac air, stars glimmering at his zenith, was unassailable. He felt
static run in the hairs on the back of his hand, and smiled. He saw a man,
something unrecognizable in his arms, screaming at a window, and smiled. Not
far away, the Vistula, gross with rain and melt-water, roared toward the sea.
He was no less irresistible.
The gold went out of the cumulus; the lucid blue darkened toward night.
As he was about to come into Muranowski Square something flickered in
front of him, a twist of wind scooted past him, and the air was suddenly full
of white confetti. Impossible, surely, that there was a wedding taking place
here? One of the whirling fragments lodged on his eyelash, and he plucked it
off. It wasn't confetti at all: it was a petal. He pressed it between thumb
and forefinger. Its scented oil spilled from the fractured tissue.
In search of the source, he walked on a little way, and rounding the
corner into the square itself discovered the ghost of a tree, prodigious with
blossom, hanging in the air. It seemed unrooted, its snow-head lit by
starlight, its trunk shadowy. He held his breath, shocked by this beauty, and
walked toward it as he might have approached a wild animal, cautious in case
it took fright. Something turned his stomach over. It wasn't awe of the
blossom, or even the remnants of the joy he'd felt walking here. That was
slipping away. A different sensation gripped him here in the square.
He was a man so used to atrocities that he had long counted himself
unblanchable. So why did he stand now a few feet away from the tree, his
fingernails, meticulously kept, pressed into his palms with anxiety, defying
the umbrella of flowers to unveil its worst? There was nothing to fear here.
Just petals in the air, shadow on the ground. And still he breathed shallowly,
hoping against hope that his fright was baseless.
Come on, he thought, if you've got something to show me, I'm waiting.
At his silent invitation two things happened. Behind him a guttural
voice asked: "Who are you?" in Polish. Distracted for the merest heartbeat by
surprise, his eyes lost focus on the tree, and in that instant a figure
dislodged itself from beneath the blossom-weighed branches and slouched,