Bogdan is familiar with the concept of collective memory. Krysia, for instance, used to have a recurring dream in which she was pursued by German soldiers. Like him, she was born in ’58, so she’s unencumbered by recollections of life during the Occupation, yet that nightmare disturbed her sleep for years. One of his sisters has told him of a dream in which she’s being force-marched through a frozen landscape, obviously bound for the Gulag. If he’s ever experienced anything like that, he doesn’t recall it. But when the dog bounded after his partner just now, he heard the thud of jackboots.
A few meters shy of the house, the shepherd takes Marek down. Within seconds he’s on his back, flailing at his attacker, his high-pitched cries a pathetic counterpoint to the animal’s basso profundo.
Later, usually when he’s alone late at night and the vodka’s all gone, Bogdan will try to convince himself that the instant he stepped through that gate, he lost the capacity to make rational decisions, and in a manner of speaking that’s true. When you run out of good options, you just do what you do. In an altogether different sense, it will be a terrible lie, the worst one he’s ever tried to tell himself, and he won’t believe it for a minute.
The spotlights are still blazing. In the dark, he might not have found the crowbar. But there it lies against the wall, on top of a frozen drift.
Blood stains the snow. The dog has already bitten his partner numerous times: mostly on the hands and forearms. His claws have shredded the ski mask and made a mess of Marek’s face. In a minute he’ll go for the throat.
The big animal doesn’t swerve from the task at hand. He maintains his focus. He must hear Bogdan’s footsteps, the snow crunching beneath his inadequate shoes. But this is a diligent dog. His teeth remain embedded in Marek’s flesh even as the crowbar shatters his skull.
“Let’s hear your favorite Polish joke.”
He looks away from the road long enough to see Marek’s chest rise and fall. His eyes are closed, and the seatbelt appears to be the only thing holding him upright. He’s definitely in shock. In the military Bogdan learned it’s important to keep a shock victim conscious until he can receive medical attention; otherwise his brain may get too little oxygen. He knows a doctor he can trust. Anyhow, he hopes he can.
“Let’s hear one,” he says again. “Come on.”
His partner groans but doesn’t open his eyes. Both he and the car are covered in blood. “What?”
“You’ve been to the U.S. Don’t they still tell Polish jokes there?”
“A few . . . But not to Poles.”
Bogdan is breathing hard himself, sucking plenty of oxygen. His chest feels like it might burst. He’s starting to wonder if he missed a turn a while back. There seems to be a lot more snow on the road than he remembers, and it doesn’t look like anyone has come this way in the last couple hours.
“I bet you heard hundreds of them. Just tell me the best one.”
“Two Poles . . .” Marek begins, then stops. His head lolls against the door post.
They crest a hill, and on the downslope Bogdan slows to avoid braking. At the bottom, next to a creek, he recognizes an abandoned farmhouse where a friend of his grandmother used to live, so he knows they’re on the right road.
He picks up speed again, then reaches over and shakes his passenger. “Two Poles are doing what?”
“Walking.”
“Walking where?”
“To California.”
“And what happens?”
“In Arizona they get tired . . . so they buy . . .”
“They buy what, Marek?”
“A camel.”
“And then?”
“I can’t . . . I don’t know.”
He drives on. Before long, the road dead-ends at Route 780. They’re no more than twenty kilometers from Krakow, and as he prepares to make a left, he thinks of calling the doctor to alert him that they’re coming. The problem with that, though, is that he’d ask why they’re coming.
He turns onto the highway. It’s past eleven, the snow has quit falling, the road’s in much better condition here, and as far as he can see, it’s empty. So he lays his foot down on the accelerator. He’s always wanted to drive a car like this one, and if he weren’t terrified, he might be reveling in the BMW’s response. He’s never had such power at his disposal.
“You know what?” he says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Marek. But together, we’ve got the IQ of a hedgehog. That’s why we believed we needed to rob somebody smart. Just cut out the thinking part and get what he’s got. The problem is, one of the things he had was that poor German shepherd.”
They top a slight rise. Ahead he sees the taillights of an old Mercedes.
“Compared to us, Marek, that dog was fucking Einstein. Are you with me?”
“Aah.”
“Or maybe a better comparison would be to Rommel. Because the dog staged a flanking movement and took us from behind.”
The Mercedes must be a diesel. It’s belching soot from its tailpipe, needing a ring job as badly as any car he’s ever seen. The oncoming lane is clear, so he darts into it. As they pass, he glances toward Marek and catches a glimpse of the other driver, a woman bending over the steering wheel, peering through the windshield as if she either can’t see well or doesn’t know the way.
He shoots back into the right lane. And that’s when he hits the patch of ice.
He doesn’t know that the BMW’s iControl system has already sensed the skid and taken corrective action. So he reacts as he would have if driving his old Polish Fiat, slamming on the brakes.
In the rearview mirror, he sees the Mercedes swerve to avoid hitting them. It does a full three sixty, then disappears.
The roadbed is elevated a good three meters above the surrounding countryside. It’s the kind of physical detail you can’t fully appreciate just by driving through. Back when his grandmother was still alive, he traveled this stretch countless times, and if he ever noticed the raised roadbed, he doesn’t recall it. His attention was never on the road itself but on the sights outside the window. Green fields and pastures, languid cows. The children of peasants frolicking barefoot, country dogs lapping at their heels. After he started school, he began to understand that terrible things had happened here. The Germans had used the road during their hasty retreat, the Red Army in its relentless pursuit. Plenty of people had suffered violent deaths in this bucolic setting. But for him, the highway represented escape from the tiny flat his family occupied in a Communist high-rise.
On the embankment, he loses his footing, falls, and slides to the bottom. He jumps up, pulls the flashlight from his pocket, and turns it on. The Mercedes is several meters away, its engine no longer running. It must have rolled over at least once. The roof has compressed like an accordion.
He runs to the driver’s side. The glass is shattered, only fragments remaining in the frame. The woman’s eyes, when he sees them, make him gasp. They’re looking right at him—brown eyes, a little too convex, but they’re pretty, those eyes, and completely unfocused. They don’t see a thing.
He crosses himself, then touches her neck to check for a pulse. Immediately, his hand recoils. He shines his light into the rear seat, and after seeing the blonde hair and the arterial blood gushing onto the white coat, he bends over and retches into the snow.
Before clawing his way up the embankment, where he will climb into the BMW, put it in gear, and drive back to Krakow as fast as he dares, he stumbles around the front of the car to the passenger door and takes a look.
A