by Jerry
It wasn’t till the third full day of his leave that I got Bobby to myself. Someone he knew had given him two passes for a day’s fishing up at Lake Varna and he invited me to go with him. I didn’t need asking twice. Tammy pulled a long face and said why couldn’t we borrow Dad’s car and all go, but Bobby said he’d only got just the two passes and that they wouldn’t let anyone in who hadn’t got one. He promised her we’d all go out somewhere before he went back.
Varna’s up in the hills about 15 miles north of our village. They built a dam there across the river years ago before the Revolution and then stocked the lake up with fish. Everyone thought it was going to be a Peoples’ Recreation Centre but somehow it got taken over by the Government and made into a sporting reserve for high ranking Party Members and their pals. Bobby never did say how he’d managed to get hold of those two passes.
We left on his bike straight after breakfast and were there in about half an hour, which was pretty good going when you consider how the road twists and turns. We motored in past a big sign-board which said ‘GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. KEEP OUT.’ and then pulled up outside the lodge. A Warden came out and Bobby handed him the passes and showed him his S.S.C. identity card. The Warden glanced at me, grinned, and then told us we could drive on round to the landing stage on the far side of the lake and borrow one of the rowing boats which were tied up there. ‘Any fish under half a kilo you put back,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’
The sun hadn’t yet had a chance to do more than just thin out the mist on the lake. There was no breeze at all and the pale green water was as flat as a looking-glass. When Bobby switched off the engine and my ears had stopped ringing I felt the stillness of the place creeping in on me like a sort of spell and I think I would almost have believed him if he’d told me that we were the only two people left alive in the whole world. Then I heard the plop! of a rising fish and that brought me back to my senses again. We sorted out our tackle, laid the rods in one of the boats, and then Bobby took the oars, rowed us out quietly into the middle of the lake, and we began to fish.
Dad used to say that you only know you’ve been truly happy after it’s all over—when it’s happening you’re so wrapped up in what you’re doing you don’t have any time left in which to realize how happy you are. I can see what he meant all right, but even so I’ll swear I knew I was as happy as I’ll ever be out there fishing on Varna Lake with Bobby that golden morning in August. At that moment, if I could have arranged to stop the world like a clock I think I’d have been quite prepared to do it.
We caught seven fish between us—two of them over the kilo mark—and then the sun began to quiver like a brass gong and the trout lost interest in anything we had to offer them and sought the shady depths. We rowed up and down for a while then made our way back to the jetty and had an early lunch of the sandwiches which Mum had packed up for us. After that we stripped off our shirts and stretched ourselves out on the warm planks of the landing stage. Even today I have only to catch a faint sniff of the aroma of ancient creosote to be transported back there again. Suddenly I noticed a pink scar running diagonally across Bobby’s left shoulder blade. ‘Hey! How did you get that?’ I demanded.
‘How did I get what?’
‘That scar on your back.’
‘Oh, that. On a.s.’
‘What’s “a.s.”, Bobby?’
‘Active Service.’
I sat up and stared at him. ‘Really? What sort of active service?’
Bobby opened one eye, looked at me, and then closed it again.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘You can tell me, Bobby. I promise I won’t say a word to anyone.’
He gave a brief snort of a laugh.
‘I swear,’ I said desperately. ‘I’ll swear by anything you like.’
His eye opened again and surveyed me. ‘What’s it matter?’ he said. ‘I’m the one who’s got it, not you.’
‘But I want to know,’ I pleaded. ‘Why won’t you tell me: It’s not as if I’m Tammy. I’m your brother. You know I won’t tell if you don’t want me to. Please, Bobby.’
There was a long silence.
‘Please,’ I implored.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘On one condition.’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ll bite your tongue off before you tell anyone else.’
‘Cross my heart,’ I said.
‘So what do you want to know?’
‘How it happened,’ I said, pointing to his shoulder.
‘I told you. On a.s.’
‘But what sort of a.s.?’
‘A culling.’
‘A what?’
‘An urban A.T. mission.’
My eyes widened. ‘What’s that mean, Bobby?’
‘It means killing slummies,’ he said.
‘Killing who?’
‘Slummies. Terrorists.’
‘You’ve done that?’
‘I’ve done that.’
‘I never heard about it.’
Bobby said nothing.
‘I wasn’t on the news or in the papers, was it?’
‘Ah, shit, Rog. You’re still living in fairyland. Why don’t you grow up?’
‘What do you mean?’
He heaved himself up on one elbow, reached into the pocket of his tunic jacket and pulled out a packet of those thin, black cigarettes which he had taken to smoking. Hs lit one and dropped the spent match into the water through a crack in the boards. Then he fished out a pair of dark silvery glasses and put them on. They really did alter his appearance—made his face look thinner somehow. All at once he seemed years older. I didn’t even know if he was looking at me or not.
‘What happened Bobby?’ I said. ‘Did they attack you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, go on. Tell me about it. From the beginning.’
He turned over onto his back so that I couldn’t see the scar any more and he let the smoke sort of dribble out of the corners of his mouth. ‘From November to February we were stuck in a camp at Porto,’ he said ‘We were learning what A.T. was all about. ‘Selective training’ they called it. They were the toughest three months of my whole life. My section was in the charge of Sarko—Sergeant Instructor Sarkonovitch—Sonofabitch Sarkonovitch. That bugger knows every dirty trick there is to know and what he doesn’t know he invents. One day he gave us a demonstration on ‘Interrogation Procedures’ . . . Bobby paused, took a long, thoughtful pull at his cigarette, and then said: ‘Well, anyway, at the end of those three months our class was down to two-thirds. One of the lads was dead, two were in hospital, and five had just copped out because they couldn’t take any more. The rest of us were passed as ready for active service and sent off to join different regular units.
‘I hadn’t been with mine for more than a week when who should show up but Sarko. There was a rumour about Sarko being temporarily relieved of his post as instructor because there was an enquiry pending on the kid who’d been killed on exercise, but I think he’d volunteered just to get back into the action. Talking about ways of killing slummies just wasn’t good enough for him. He needed the real thing. A true professional.’ Bobby twisted his head towards me so that I suddenly saw the blue sky reflected in his glasses like twin, silver-rimmed puddles. ‘Ah, hell, Rog,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to hear all this crap.’
‘But I do! I do!’ I cried. ‘Go on. What happened?’
His head sank back. ‘What happened?’ he repeated. ‘Ajaka’s what happened.’
I vaguely recalled having heard something on the news but I couldn’t remember what it was. In those days that sort of political stuff didn’t interest me very much. But of course I knew that Ajaka had been the provincial capital of the old industrial area in the south before the provinces were all abolished after the Revolution. Now it was just another of the old decaying Plains cities with a poverty problem—a name you marked in on your sketch map for a Geography test and then crossed your fingers and hoped you’d got it right.
‘Wasn’t someone shot there?’ I said. ‘A General or something?’
‘Colonel Parathos, the Chief of the Secret Police. He wasn’t shot though. He was blown up.’
‘By terrorists?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you had to go in and get them?’
‘We were given the job of sorting out the mess after the S.P. had been and ballsed everything up.’
‘How did you do that?’
Bobby took his half-smoked cigarette out of his mouth and flipped it away into the water. ‘We wiped them out,’ he said.
‘The terrorists?’
‘Who else, dummy?’
‘How many of them were there?’
‘A couple of thousand.’
I laughed. ‘Seriously, how many?’
Again his head turned towards me and those strange, empty-sky eyes regarded me blankly. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘About two thousand.’
‘Two thousand terrorists!’ I simply couldn’t believe it. I don’t suppose the whole population of our valley comes to much more than two thousand. It just didn’t make sense.
‘It was a major op,’ he said. ‘It lasted for five days. We sealed off the whole of the old market quarter and smoked them out street by street. Our orders were total elimination. No prisoners. They called it an Urban Sterilization Exercise.’
By then I knew he was pulling my leg because he said it all so matter-of-fact-just like he used to when he was kidding me back in the old days. So I played right along with him in the way I’d always tried to do once I’d spotted what he was up to. ‘I expect Sergeant Sarko was pretty happy,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, Sarko loved every minute of it,’ said Bobby. ‘Specially the Preskar Tower. That was really the best. Forty-eight storeys high. They dropped us on to the top of it from two choppers and we went right down through it to the bottom, floor by floor. It took us a whole day. We killed 175. Thirty-eight of them were scored to Sarko.’
I giggled. ‘He counted them?’
‘He lugged them,’ said Bobby.
‘He what?’
With the forefinger of his right hand Bobby made a slicing motion down the back of his right ear. ‘Off,’ he said.
‘And Alkanian cows all have six legs,’ I retorted.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘Believe you! What do you take me for? Nobody does things like that! It’s . . . it’s not . . .’ but I couldn’t find the word I wanted.
‘It’s the truth,’ he said. ‘Every S.S.C. trooper’s done it. It’s the only sure way to establish a head count. Most of the bodies get blown up or burnt.’
‘But you’re in the S.S.C.’ I said.
‘So?’
‘But you’ve never done that.’
‘No?’
I stared at him and then I lunged out and snatched off his glasses. ‘You liar!’ I laughed. ‘Bobby Harkecz you really are the biggest, most awful bloody liar in the whole universe!
‘And you’re the world’s biggest fool.’
‘Well, at least I’m not fool enough to believe your lies,’ I said. ‘ “Lugging” ! Why didn’t you make it ‘cocking’ while you were about it?’
‘Because women don’t have cocks, old son. But they all have ears!
‘Women!’ I cried, launching myself at him and pummelling his bare chest with my fists. ‘Aren’t you forgetting the babies? The ones with the lasers hidden in their nappies? What about them?’
He gripped my wrists and held me like an iron vice (I had forgotten just how fit and strong he was). Then, in one easy movement he sat up and deposited me flat on my back on the boards at his side. ‘You want to know how I got my scar?’ he said, leaning over me. ‘So I’ll tell you, sonny boy. A kid of about your age did it with a long-handled bill-hook. She was hiding in beside a door when I kicked it in. If it hadn’t been for my webbing she’d have had my arm off. Sarko blew her to bits ten second later. You don’t believe me?’
I knew he was telling the truth and I said so, but by then he wanted something more than that from me. Still holding me down with one hand he reached back into his tunic jacket and pulled out the wallet which held his identity card. He let go of my wrist and thrust the wallet into my hand. ‘Undo the zip,’ he said.
Wondering what was coming I did as he told me and then held out the wallet to him.
He shook his head. ‘Take out what’s in the pocket.’
I dipped in my fingers and drew out a small sealed envelope of milky, opaque plastic. It measured about 3 inches by 2.
‘Open it.’
I looked at it and then I looked up at him.
‘Open it,’ he repeated.
‘It’s a joke,’ I thought, squeezing the envelope between my finger and thumb. ‘He’s been leading upto this all the way along. He’s planned it all just to see how big a fool he can make out of me. It’s a French letter, that’s what it is.’ And grinning I pulled free the tongue of the envelope and shook its contents out into my cupped palm.
It could perhaps have been a scrap of honey-brown chamois leather, but for the tiny hole which someone had pierched through the softly rounded lobe to hold a missing ear-drop. Where the sounds of life had once trobbed down through warm coils of convoluted darkness there was now nothing but a ragged vacancy framing the pink crisscross lines in the centre of my own palm. I stared and stared at it while a huge smothering tide of shame and anguish rose choking within my breast. I felt as if God’s finger was pointing down at me and that pitiful little morsel of a never-to-be lived life was silently accusing me of having connived at all the savagery and heartache in a world gone mad. As the hot tears blinded me and I buried my face in the cradle of my own arms all I could manage was to blubber: ‘But it’s Tammy’s! It’s Tammy’s!’
* * *
Just why Bobby should have chosen so brutal a way of ripping open the chrysalis of my childhood and dragging me out into his ‘real’ world I never did discover, but it has occurred to me more than once that what he did to me then must have been at least as important for him as it was for me. Maybe he saw it as a sort of symbolic cutting of the cord that joined us both—the link of my need for him. Or perhaps he just felt a compulsion to unburden himself of the things he had seen and done. Or maybe he was simply sick to death of being anyone’s hero, even mine. To be honest I’m not even sure that he knew why he’d done it. Neither of us have ever spoken of it again from that day to this.
Bobby is a Lieutenant now. This summer I shall sit for my Finals in Agricultural Science. Tammy is engaged to a farmer.
All this happened long ago, and in another country.
. . . OLD . . . AS A GARMENT
Zenna Henderson
The night was crisp and cold—much more so than last year at this time. I hugged myself in my wraps and tilted my head far back to look up at the stars as I waited for Dan’l to toil his way up the two shallow steps to the front door of the Sashay Dance Hall. Way out here there were no city lights to hide the millionteen, skrillionteen stars webbing the whole cold, midnight-blue sky with their burning brilliance.
I drew a quivering breath of pure delight. Such beauty made you feel like running a-tiptoe—. Yes, I thought, the spirit can run like anything, but the flesh—! But tonight was delight, nevertheless. Tonight of the Dance! We were here, Dan’l and I. Still together. I hugged myself again, like a child, almost expecting the crisping of a taffeta sash, as yet not wrinkled down to a string across my skinny middle. And the lovely swish-bump of long, dangling curls against my shoulders—the product of a restless night of sleeping on lumpy, stocking-wrapped hanks of hair. The anticipation—the newness. Yes! In spite o*’ all the other times—the newness!
Then Dan’l was there, his breath laboring in his chest, his hand closing almost painfully on my arm.
“Let’s get in there, Becka,” he gasped. “We made it again!” And I felt the heavy down tug on my arm as he started toward the door.
Then we were through the door that closed
carefully, quickly behind us, and were caught up in the happy warmth of the cloakroom. I fumbled my coat buttons, my eyes trying to take in everyone at once. Thera—John—Chewey in his wheelchair, looking, as always, as if he’d just sneaked it away from some old guy to see how fast it’d go—and Dorrie, Mildred, and Van. I turned my back to the crowd to hang up my coat and Dan’l’s.
“There’s Chuck,” said Dan’l, “but I don’t see Stacy—”
“Oh,” I said, my heart catching. “I wonder—”
“Hi, Chuck!” Dan’l called. “Where’s Stacy?”
Chuck’s unhappy old face sagged into unhappier lines. “She—she felt old tonight, But she insisted that I come anyway.’ He looked around, his eyes not really seeing anything. “I don’t know—”
Tm so sorry,” I said. “Maybe next time—”
He looked at me reproachfully. “You know—” he said.
“I know,” I admitted. “Oh, Chuck!”
He spread his hands and turned away, his fingers fumbling at the back of his neck as he went.
The laughter and sudden, quick-running steps in the hall, beyond breaking through the enchanting, evocative sound of instruments tuning up, only emphasized the desolate slump of Chuck’s shoulders.
I’ve never tired of watching the miracle of the cloakroom—the tousled emerging of laughter and delight—the prancing away of young, vigorous feet. And afterward, the silent, limp grayness hanging from each hook in the room.
“Wake up, Becka!” Dan’l was groping to lift his hands to the back of his neck. “You’ve got time enough for daydreaming all the rest of the year—but not tonight! Not here!”
“True,” I said, “Time aplenty any other night. Here, let me.” The outer door slammed open and shut with a bang that shook the whole building.
“Sorry, folks.” It was Ditmar and his two sisters. “The wind’s coming up. Grabbed the gawdang door right outa my hand.” He tugged at his leather jacket buttons. “You know, this place is getting pretty rickety. S’pose we ought to think of rebuilding?”
“It s not all that old,” said Van.
Older’n you,” said Ditmar. “And we’ve given it some pretty hard usage. We ought to be thinking about the kids coming up.”
