he can feel more than hear bucky come up behind him, but by bucky’s standards, the fact that zemo notices him at all means it's intentional. a way to interrupt zemo’s grief without interrupting it. bucky’s got a gun in his hand, not as a threat, more like a promise. none of them can start over again.
“i thought you’d be here sooner,” zemo says.
he supposes he’s going to die. for a moment he keeps looking straight at the memorial. it’s huge and impersonal, vaguely socialist-inspired in a way that makes it obvious the artist had neither an eye nor a taste for socialist art. it’s not, all things considered, a bad place to die - the grave of his people. poetic in a mayakovsky kind of way. he wonders if barnes would, if he asked him, aim for the heart.
they stand in silence for a moment, but it's not reverent.
“when i grew up, the city was called sloboda,” zemo says. he assumes bucky knows, it's the kind of historical trivia to be written on invading soldiers' outdated maps.
bucky was barnes and then james and before that, soldat. and before that, he was james and barnes and bucky.
bucky stares at him without saying anything. of course he knows. he was there, in the 80s.
“i always thought it strange, to name a city freedom.”
there are plans, zemo knows, to erect a wall of names here. they actually showed him the designs while he was in prison. sleek and clean-lined, nothing like home.
he had gotten angry at his therapist during one of his sessions – the irony of having a therapist in prison, the irony of him having a therapist in prison – and with anger he had turned calm and sharp and cutting. this is the fate of the sokovian people, isn’t it? he had asked. you keep me locked up in an anonymous cell in an anonymous prison and you call that justice, while my anonymous country has been turned into anonymous dirt. namelessness and placelessness have always been the most effective weapons the west used against those it deemed lesser.
but mr. zemo, the therapist had said (mr. sie-mo, even in the german they were speaking, the german mispronounciation of the english mistransliteration of what his family once took pride in having been a german name. it was probably slavic in origin anyway. impossible, nowadays, to tell). what happened in sokovia was not intentional and of course it will be commemorated. there are plans to expand the memorial, would you like to see them? they might help with your grief.
and of course they didn’t help, not that zemo thought that they were ever supposed to, in fact he suspected it was just another torture method to get into his head.
huge slabs of red granite, in concentric circles. names upon names upon names.
he wonders, if bucky shoots him now, would they add his one too, next to the ones of his family? he can picture it, all their names together like houses, like neighborhoods. this is where all that’s left of his father will be then, and his wife and his son and his life.
цемо, јохан
цемo, xaике
цемo, карел
цемо, хелмут
maybe some other family will walk past them, will teach their children that are growing up in perpetual exile to read the familiar cyrillic-written words.
bucky laughs. “did anyone ever actually call it that in conversation though? i thought it was just postwar propaganda.”
and of course he’s not wrong, most people either kept calling it djordjevo, after the small monastery that existed here in the 10th century which then gave name to a small settlement which then grew into a town, or novi grad, if they meant the newly erected capital district that was supposed to embody the triumph of the sokovian nation over fascism. the wide avenue of the friendship of peoples. the palace of the republic. the statue of marx.
when the western-backed anticommunist liberation forces of sokovia briefly ruled in the mid-1990s, sloboda had become so heavy, empty and unused that there were very few objections to the official renaming. of course by then, marx had been thrown into the river and the grand socialist palace had been covered in the flags of what they called the democratic republic of sokovia. novi grad, then, new town. another beginning for a very old place.
and then, after a decade more of civil war, when the left-wing partizan’s action committee took power for eight whole months, changing the name back to sloboda was discussed and dismissed as too cynical. with the scorpion, he had helped overthrow them. human bodies in the river this time.
and now, it’s all gone, the djordjevo monastery, the old town with the ottoman inflection it had acquired over the centuries, the socialist brutalist utopian buildings. even the civil war ruins. the river itself.
but zemo’s young pioneer group leader, an elderly woman who wore the red neckerchief with almost religious fervor, who made them sing partisan songs every thursday afternoon, she had told them, “we can all be proud and happy to live in sloboda, capital of our beautiful socialist republic,” and she had meant it.
he can remember neither her name nor her face.
and his father called it sloboda, not without pride, not without hurt, on 9th may celebrations, when he told the story – the one story he always told about being a fifteen-year old partisan, how they had danced in the streets after the official unconditional surrender of nazi germany (after over four years of occupation, after over four years of silence rather than the never-spoken markgraf-georg-stadt), these jaded, innocent titoists, and everyone had been singing sloboda, sloboda, all through the night.
“novi grad fit it better,” zemo tells bucky, now that it’s only a word on a tombstone. an non-descript name for an anonymous place.
bucky, and he has never done this before, says “helmut.” he pronounces it in english, which is only ever so subtly different from the original german, the shape of the l, the length of the u, it sounds awkward. only his grandfather, the baron, had used the german pronunciation, almost everyone else said his name the sokovian way. khelmut. a long time ago, his mother shouts it across the playground, a long time ago, a girl whispers it the night she becomes his wife.
there are prisons you can never get out of and you carry them with you wherever you go. bucky, too, knows this.
“i took the liberty,” says zemo (tsay-mo), says helmut.
(the last liberty of a town that was once briefly called freedom)
“of crossing off my name in your book.”