Good People by Nir Baram Page B

grew distant and she mourned every day for what they had lost.
    They reached the last row of cars. The sky was folded across the horizon. Podolsky told her that an American they had interrogated said that in a city near New York there was a large parking lot where young couples sat in cars and watched movies on an enormous screen. It was cheap entertainment, just a few cents. He liked the idea of watching a movie and being alone at the same time. Even the most corrupt of capitalists can sometimes have bright ideas.
    The image cheered her up: couple after couple sitting in their black cars and watching a new film. It was strange how Maxim calmed her down, dulled her senses. More than anything, she wanted to lie down on the hood of one of the cars and look at the clouds. The first sentence that occurred to her was: ‘Maxim, if we walk in a straight line, do you think we’d get to the sea?’ And at once she heard Nadyezhda’s warning voice: ‘Resist the charms of nostalgia.’
    ‘Is Nadyezhda Petrovna all right?’ she asked.
    ‘She was in solitary for a while. She quoted a line of Khlebnikov to Reznikov, who was interrogating her.’
    ‘The police station—a splendid place! The place for my appointment with the state,’ Sasha said under her breath. She always planned to recite that line when she was arrested.
    ‘Yes, despite everything, it amused him. But the next day in her cell she met two young Jewish girls who were accused of leading a counter-revolutionary Zionist organisation, and she explained to them what Zionism was. They recited the lesson she had given them, and when the interrogators discovered where they had heard this, they accused her of everything. Later she even told Reznikov that an upright fellow and investigative magistrate like him ought to understand that those two calves didn’t know a thing about Zionism. They had been planning to confess, but they were afraid their answers would be no good and they’d be shouted at, so she helped them out with some ideas. Reznikov screamed that she was insinuating that they were fishing for false confessions, and threw her into the cellar.’
    Sasha stopped listening. He was spouting off again. He knew that stories about Nadyezhda didn’t concern her now. The hum of an engine could be heard in the distance, and a black car came around the bend. Podolsky gave it a suspicious glance, and a dreadful thought took hold of her: maybe she hadn’t understood what his real position was? Maybe he wasn’t as influential as he pretended. The car had unnerved them both. An external eye had invaded their rendezvous. Now he became businesslike, severed from the past—from hasty kisses in the schoolyard, from looking at the sky from the Republican Bridge in the last hour of the night as the stars disappeared. She hadn’t dared ask him directly, expecting that he himself would put an end to the worry that had gnawed at her for so long; it was more than a year since she had concluded that Nadya would be arrested.
    She needed answers. There was no more time. ‘Can you help my father?’
    He exhaled loudly. Sasha imagined that the air he breathed out was permeated with all the things he knew and she didn’t. There was a silence. Maybe he was expecting that she wouldn’t force him to answer. A second car drove into the lot. Its headlights gleamed on the car roofs.
    ‘It was very smart of you to turn to me,’ he said in the end, possibly surprised, possibly accusing. He seemed to have realised how much she expected of him. ‘Actually, it was the only thing you could have done.’
    A man and a woman emerged from the first car, stood on either side of it, smoked, and spoke softly. Podolsky seemed to recognise them, and grew calmer.
    ‘Your Nadyezhda Petrovna would have been arrested anyway. You figured that out. Her time in Leningrad was over. We just couldn’t find the time to tell her. The fact that I was the one who received the information allowed me to take care