- Bronik Returns to Vienna
In the old days, before democracy, a tobacco shop looked like a farmer’s kitchen. The countertop would be crowded with unfilled jars and boxes and the glass case stained yellow from age and tobacco smoke. Peer through the glass top and you would see two shelves with small, separated piles of one or two or three packets of cigars, cigarettes, or pipe tobacco. Cuban cigars were cheap here but hard to find. Everything was hard to find. On open shelves cut into the stone wall behind the counter, there might be a few more items, only for smoking. Related goods that filled and brightened smoke shops in more frivolous cities—say London or New York—were sold here in dedicated magazinas: a candy store, a paper goods store. If you wanted a tobacco pouch, you would have to go to a store for leather goods.
Against the far wall in this tobacco shop, under a calendar, some pictures of working people and a few announcements printed in the alphabet of that country, would be a small wooden table with a not very clean oilcloth cover and two ungainly wooden chairs. The storekeeper, a smudge of a man with hair like a scrubbing brush, might be sitting on one of the chairs, reading a newspaper, the newspaper, drinking dense sugared coffee from a chipped cup. A friend might join him with a deck of cards.
On unspecified days new supplies would be delivered by a worker with a handcart, breathing hard, while customers hurried after him and lined up at the door. On such days the storekeeper did not sit. Merchandise was stacked on the table and chairs. No use putting it on shelves; it would all be gone before sunset. The merchandise was safe on a table. On the back wall, over the door that led to the storekeeper’s living quarters, there would be a blown-up photograph—never smaller than fourteen by eighteen inches—of a fair and handsome middle-aged man. It was the image of Bronik, the President of the country, taken many years before. Under Bronik’s eye, nothing would be stolen. [End Page 140]
This was not a country for niceties. Nobody emptied your ashtrays. Nobody came to refill your water glass. Not efficiency, not courtesy, only loyalty was required. And to make that point clear, Bronik was there, watching over every restaurant, every dance hall, every shop and home, his face at a strong angle, with prominent brow, implacable eye, a sharp cut of chin. In the halls of state, rows of banners presented the leader growing more rugged with time, like the geography of this mountainous country where nobody was called Mister.
Outside in the plaza, the statue of Bronik was higher than two men, so severe, so overshadowing as to intimidate even visitors. When you left the city, not reluctantly, you would see, high on the mountains, his name in Olympian letters, high enough, lit bright enough to follow you beyond the seaport, out on the sea. “Here we respect our President,” your young tourist guide has told you, proud of her country and contemptuous of yours. “We are taught to, in our schools.”
Bronik, in his middle sixties, still comported himself with dauntless authority, but now it was habit and veneer. He could foresee loosening dowels and cracking wood under the surface of his aging. This recognition was never admitted, never revealed, not to his most intimate servant, not to his most cherished mistress.
Only recently he had eluded his entourage to take a stroll along Vled Street, alone and in civilian dress, along the cobblestone road past the little walled park where citizens were permitted to sit on the benches during stipulated hours. He walked to the six-lane Moskva Boulevard between lines of straight-backed trees and cars parked under the sanction of looming street lamps. He walked alone, under the usual gray sky, wearing a pair of coarse woolen trousers and one of the dozens of chunky sweaters knitted for him by mothering women from his provinces.
More and more of late, he liked to avoid party headquarters—the...