Part of her wanted to knock gently on the door and ask him if she could help. The rest of her turned on her heel and went back to clean up from dinner. Mihai must have decided to do his nightly washing, because he didn’t come out until a long time later in his undershirt with a bandage around his upper arm, and then probably only because the phone on the little table beside the couch began ringing.
Tsura was already reading in bed. She froze where she sat flipping the page. Who would be calling them? No one ever called them. The phone was for little more than emergencies or occasionally Mihai calling to say he’d be home late from work. She and Mihai shared a look before he strode over and picked up the phone.
“Good evening,” Mihai said into the phone. His jaw clenched and he cradled the phone to his shoulder. He began to speak in German. After a few more exchanges, he put the phone back down.
“What is it?” Tsura asked, getting out of bed and walking closer to him.
“It’s work,” he said curtly. “They need me to come in for a special assignment.” He was already pulling out the suitcase from under the bed and then filling it with items from the dresser. Packing. As if he was going on a trip.
Tsura felt a flare of anxiety. “Do they usually do this kind of thing?”
“What kind of thing?”
“Special assignments. Calling you at all hours of the night and asking you to come in.”
“No.”
Now she wanted to strangle him, but for altogether different reasons. “What do you mean, no? No, as in it’s not usual, or no, as in, this is the first time it’s ever happened?”
He looked up at her. “No, it’s never happened before.”
Tsura started pacing. “So what’s different this time? Why can’t you do it when you go in to work next? What is a special assignment anyway? And why do they need you to pack?”
Mihai didn’t avert his gaze from her. “I don’t know. It must be sensitive, they wouldn’t say over the phone. But they told me to pack a bag and said that I might be gone for a few days.”
Tsura’s heart lurched. All the hostility she’d been feeling towards him evaporated with the threat that something was amiss. A million possibilities flooded her mind. None of them good. She went over to the radio and switched it on for cover noise and then came back to Mihai and whispered, “What if that’s just a ploy? What if they’ve found out what you’ve been doing?”
Mihai shook his head. “If they did, why not simply arrest me at work tomorrow?”
“Because tomorrow’s Christmas Eve and you don’t go back to work for three more days. Maybe they think you’ll use the opportunity to run.”
Mihai shook his head again, one hard negation. “Then they would come arrest me here.” He calmly put on a shirt and then a tie, looping the knot with neat, practiced movements.
Why was he being so blasé about this? She wrung her hands together. He just didn’t understand how quickly things could fall apart. One second you were walking in the market on a sunny day and everything was fine and then the next, police were shouting in your face and arresting you. “But what if they want it to stay secret because they don’t want anyone to know they had someone working right under their noses—”
Mihai reached over and placed a finger over her lips. “Shh, Tsura.” His voice was uncharacteristically soft.
Tsura blinked for several long moments, staring into his flint gray eyes.
He leaned down, whispering. “It’s far more likely that they simply need a translator. Prisoner interrogation. Secret visit by a foreign dignitary. Anything. My real work is to gather information to end this damned war, remember? It’s good that I’m the one they call.” His breath was a hot brush of air against her face.
Tsura blinked, momentarily forgetting her two-month campaign of staunch indifference to Mihai Popescu. He did seem to genuinely hate this war and want to help end it. But if that determination didn’t translate into saving a helpless person being hurt on a dark street corner as he walked by, what kind of man did that make him?
Maybe it didn’t matter what kind of man he was. Maybe in the end it was men like Mihai who would win this war and it was only the foolish girls like her who would be singing sad songs over the gravestones in the aftermath. She’d sung a song for the old man every day since his death, a token of remembrance. It was all she could give him.
Mihai walked over to the bed with measured steps and pulled out a bag from underneath. He came back to her, opening the bag at their feet.
Tsura frowned. “What is that?” she whispered.
He opened the bag wider and she saw several changes of clothes and a large stack of hundred lei bills. Reaching in, he pulled out a piece of paper.
“If I’m wrong and I don’t contact you within three days, then take this bag and run. Go to the address in here.” He indicated an envelope before sliding it back between the stacks of money. “My contacts there will help you get out of the country. Use the money for bribes to get to Constanța and to buy passage to Turkey. I have friends in Istanbul who you can stay with for the rest of the war.”
Tsura’s heart lodged in her throat. He spoke about it so calmly. How long had he planned for this possibility? “And what about you?” she choked out. “Will you join me there?”
He shrugged. “What will be will be.”
The radio fell silent as the station turned off for the evening, and Tsura was left staring at Mihai with her mouth hanging open. Did he really care so little about what happened to himself? Did he truly not feel one way or another about it, or was he that good of an actor? And why hadn’t he told her about this before? That he had a back-up plan. She should have known Mihai wouldn’t have left things to chance. He probably had back-up plans for the back-up plans. He turned away from her and tucked the case back underneath the bed. He pulled out another empty suitcase and filled it with a few clothes. They both remained silent as he finished packing and then shrugged on his suit-coat and an overcoat.
“I’ll call if it will be more than a few days.” He walked toward the door and then paused, turning toward her one last time. “Merry Christmas.” His voice was back to one of cool indifference.
Tsura had felt rooted to the spot while he packed so calmly, but now as he put his hand on the doorknob to open it, she flew across the room and hugged him hard. Devil him. He might be an unfeeling automaton, but she was not. She couldn’t bear to think of him getting hurt.
“Be safe,” she whispered in his ear, then kissed him once on the cheek for good luck.
He gave a strangled sounding grunt and nodded, then opened the door and was gone.