Dusk in Kalevia

by Emily Compton

  When he finished, the members of the Forest Clan were silent for a good long while. Toivo felt his nervousness return, wondering if perhaps he had miscalculated.

  Then, one by one, the revolutionaries began to clap. The applause was restrained, but he noticed tears rolling down cheeks, heads nodding solemnly in agreement. As he looked into the faces of his small audience, their expressions glowed far brighter than before.

  For Freedom, they thought, their minds echoing around him. For Kalevia.

  **

  Kaija felt amazing. She’d been so wretched recently, so utterly hopeless and spent--but now she found herself full of glorious purpose. God, what a speech! It had changed her in a way that she couldn’t quite articulate, and she overflowed with gratitude toward the golden-tongued foreigner. She touched the lump of the gun at her waist, and for the moment, she could have sworn she was invincible.

  “Thank you for that moving introduction,” Klaus said as he replaced Toivo at the head of the assembled rebels. “Now down to business. Since we’re all here, it’s high time we discuss our next move.”

  Kaija joined the others as they tightened into a circle around Klaus. She leaned close to the boy standing beside her.

  “Martin, did you hear anything about another attack?”

  Martin shook his head. “He never tells us what he wants to do beforehand. It’s easier to arrange when fewer of us are involved.”

  Klaus spoke again, and Kaija shut her mouth.

  “Punaiset Day, the memorial of the Red Rebellion, is fast approaching, and Chairman Uusitalo is going to be making his yearly speech.” Klaus sneered at the mention of the name. “Only this year it’s going to be...a little different.”

  He accepted a small paper from his second-in-command, a subdued man whose face stood as a testament to his time at war. The white slash of a scar neatly split his eyebrow in two.

  “We have plans to secure an important hostage to force Chairman Uusitalo to bow to our demands,” Klaus continued. “This should allow us to secure the release of many of our brothers who are languishing in political prison--to raise the call for our cause among a discontented populace. With him in our grasp, we’re poised to strike right at the heart of our Communist oppressors. Our voices will be heard!

  “How will this be done, you ask? Well.” He held up a newspaper clipping with the photo of the Chairman greeting his troops in a military parade. “We’re going to kidnap none other than Vesa Uusitalo, the son of our Fearless Leader.”

  Kaija felt as the world drop out from under her. She stared at the photo, and at the image of a smiling boy sitting beside the Chairman, a familiar face in an outlandish context.

  Vesa.

  “We’ll stop his car as he’s en route to school...”

  Klaus began to explain the details of the kidnapping, but she no longer heard. This had to be a dream. There was no way this could actually be happening.

  “Kai, you okay?” asked Martin, his words buzzing distant in her ear.

  She ignored the million questions that raced through her head. Only one thought blazed a path to the front of her mind.

  I have to warn him.

  **

  Returning to Vainola City in the passenger seat of a mechanic’s truck, Toivo ruminated on the absurd mess in which he had found himself. This is what I’m supposed to represent? he thought, anger nipping behind his despair. Another side willing to destroy the life of a child?

  He didn’t want this. He didn’t want war, of course, but he understood how blood could be shed in the quest for a greater goal. It was a tragedy he could understand, even if he hated it. But this? He wanted no part in any of it.

  He wondered if he could still bow out without sullying his hands further. After all, he’d already done his part, hadn’t he--swayed their minds with plenty of passionate rhetoric, working on them like a drug until they were ready to take on the world. Even he himself had been momentarily seduced into believing the righteousness of his cause. He’d been so filled with genuine zeal that the realization that it was all going to support something unsavory left him feeling swindled and disgusted.

  As they neared the outskirts of the city, the truck pulled into the road’s shoulder. The driver spoke to him for the first time since they’d left the meeting.

  “I can’t really drop you off,” he said apologetically. “You okay getting the rest of the way home?”

  “It’s fine. I’ll take the bus.”

  Toivo jumped down from the cab, burying himself up to his knees in the sandy roadside snow. He looked up at the taciturn man behind the wheel and thought about how average the man seemed, how well he blended into the general milieu of Kalevia. No one would ever guess that he was a member of a conspiracy to overthrow the government.

  “You don’t know how much this means to us,” the mechanic said. “Our luck’s finally starting to turn around.” His eyes seemed to grow a little brighter.

  “Glad I could help.”

  Toivo wasn’t, really, but he said it anyway. The man nodded in respect before driving off.

  Toivo began to trudge through the wet snowbanks, his eyes fixed on the residential complex a few hundred meters distant. Something was bothering him--something in addition to the horror he felt at his unavoidable complicity in the kidnapping plot. He ignored the growing discomfort of his sodden trouser legs and went back over the details of the meeting until a sudden thought stopped him in his tracks.

  He put his hand on a telephone pole to steady himself.

  It was the girl--Little Bear, Kai--that he had ridden up with. Helping her had felt so right, the very sort of thing he had been created for, and the cloud and fire of her wounded heart had inspired his own fervor for the cause. Her memories had been so intense, sending such clear images that he’d felt her pain as his own.

  At the meeting something had happened to Kai. She’d hidden it well, but when she’d first seen the face in the clipping, he’d felt her quail beside him. He’d been too distracted by his own revulsion to make the connection, but now, as the content of her memories began to come back to him, he realized what her horrified reaction truly meant.

  The face dozing against her shoulder had been the face of the Chairman’s son.

  Toivo was flabbergasted. What on earth was the son of the leader of Kalevia doing falling asleep in the bed of a partisan fighter? The boy’s motivations were a mystery, but Toivo knew that Kai’s feelings were pure, and that she’d reeled with honest shock at the revelation of her beloved’s true identity.

  Now Toivo was afraid for Kai--afraid of the thorny plot in which they’d all been entangled. No matter which way her allegiances swayed her, he feared betrayal and catastrophe ahead. He thought of the gun in her pocket and hoped, prayed, it wouldn’t become the instrument to bring her story to a tragic end.

  Toivo brooded over the predicament as he rode back downtown; when the bus stopped a few blocks from his hotel, he still hadn’t come close to unraveling anything. He rounded the corner by the New International Hotel, ready to slip in through his secret door--and then saw, to his dismay, two state cars and a van parked out in front beside a group of gray-uniformed figures that hovered around the entrance.

  Oh, no.

  One of the State Security men pointed in Toivo’s direction.

  “There he is!” he cried.

  Knowing that running would be the worst possible choice, Toivo forced himself to walk toward the rapidly approaching threat. When they reached him, he looked into their angry faces with feigned innocence and shock.

  “Is there a problem?”

  The guard, Iiro, elbowed in between the men.

  “That’s him.”

  Iiro squinted down into Toivo’s face, shaking his head in angry disbelief. “I’ll never know how you did it, but you’re in for it now,” he said. He shoved Toivo back into the waiting arms of the officers.

  “Take him.”

  Toivo put up no resistance as they force-marched him toward t
he waiting vehicles, hoping that a reputation for good behavior might be an asset to him later. Toivo saw another guard place his suitcase in the trunk of one of the cars; this was probably the last Toivo would see of the New International Hotel. The old clerk was wringing his hands by the door, his liver-spotted pate red in the cold as he made excuses in a high, reedy voice.

  “I’ve been at the desk the whole day, Commander. I don’t know how he managed to get past. We checked his room...”

  The State Security men slammed Toivo against the side of the van, a hand in the center of his back pressing him hard against the freezing metal as other hands ran along his body, under his coat, between his legs. He was suddenly grateful that he’d given Kai the gun as he felt their searching hands course over him. They were exceedingly thorough.

  His arms were yanked behind his back, and he felt the handcuffs click around his wrists with a terrible finality. As they dragged him toward the back of the van, his gaze darted around the street, desperately trying for a last glimpse of the outside world that he could hold onto during the coming trials. One terrible little detail caught his eye.

  The mangled carcass of a dove lay in the dirty gutter snow nearby--wings spread in a streak of blood, ribs bare to the sky. A foraging raven stopped pulling strings of meat from the carcass and looked up at him with its bright, intelligent eye.

  Toivo knew then that his troubles had only just begun.

  **

  Toivo couldn’t tell how long he’d been alone in the dark. His arms, cuffed behind him to the back of his chair, were beginning to ache in earnest. He had long since lost track of time, but judging by the scratchiness in his throat and the dehydration headache that crept up the back of his skull, it was almost morning.

  It had been ages since the last interrogator. All day his guests had followed a rough pattern: at approximately two-hour intervals, a brisk, uniformed cypher would enter his cell, shine a lamp in his eyes, ask him the same handful of questions repeated in as many conceivable ways as possible, and then leave Toivo to try and snatch some sleep before the next unwelcome intrusion. The prolonged absence of these nuisances was bothering him more than the interviews; waiting to hear the door behind him slam open itched in his mind like the maddening drip of Chinese water torture.

  That aside, he was surprised that his captors had refrained from the more inventive tricks in their repertoire. He supposed the emotional angle was out, as there was no family here to hold as leverage. Toivo hoped fervently that his foreign credentials would protect him, and the fear of causing an international incident would stay their hands from physical coercion--even though he knew that, ultimately, his passport was a flimsy shield.

  Perhaps they were trying the sensory deprivation route. Were he a normal prisoner, the blankness of the dark room would surely have unnerved him. Unfortunately for Toivo, he had unusual senses, and they were currently anything but deprived.

  When he ventured out beyond the cell walls, he could feel others all around him, crying out pitifully in the darkness. He felt their sobbed confessions in his bones, ached with their crushing despair. A woman begged to see her daughter. A man, desperate with exhaustion, was telling the story of how his friend had planned to cross the border in a car trunk, repeating the description over and over again to an unsympathetic listener with a portable typewriter. Toivo tried to reach through to the prisoners, but from where he was he couldn’t quite touch them; he merely brushed by them like a moth unnoticed in the dark.

  Realizing it was futile, Toivo drew back inside his cell, trying to ignore their unhappiness like a fellow human prisoner. Finally, after what seemed like eons, he heard the lock slide back on his door.

  A band of light was thrown across the opposite wall as the sound of heavy boots echoed in the corridor behind him. He felt people enter the room, their brutish souls fresh from sleep. Someone flicked a switch, and the room was bathed in the hard light of the overhead bulb.

  “Rise and shine.”

  Toivo squinted in the glare. Before him stood a tall, incredibly average-looking man with a friendly smile on his face. His initial appearance gave a reassuring impression of order and reason, but even before approaching the man’s mind, Toivo got a sense of something freakish. Like an amputee, the man felt incomplete--as though he were missing a vital part of himself.

  “Let’s get a look at you,” said the new interrogator. He snatched Toivo’s chin and yanked his head up roughly, inspecting Toivo’s face like a piece of merchandise. “So, you’re the one he was on about. I was expecting...more.”

  “He?” Toivo could read hints of power and arrogance in that iron grip, but all his usual pathways into the mind were muddled, leaving answers lost in fog. Gifts of Confidence and Hope seemed to fall flat on this aberration. It took Toivo a moment before the truth dawned on him.

  Here was a man without fear. The man literally feared nothing.

  Toivo swallowed against his dry throat. “Please,” he offered the interrogator. “I don’t understand... Why am I here?”

  “My friend...well, he seems to think you’re very important.”

  “Important? No, you must have the wrong man. I’m only a writer...”

  “He tells me that the Russians are especially keen on talking to you.”

  “I swear, I don’t know what...”

  A hand snapped out, and a blinding flash cleft Toivo’s sight. The pain followed like the roll of thunder--it rose in colors, towering before his fragmented vision, birthing sparks that danced and died. In the brilliant aftershock, he could feel the mysterious mechanisms in his body wake and rush to the aid of his broken nose.

  “You’re going to tell me why,” the man said calmly.

  “I swear...” Toivo began again, choking through the warm, sticky stream that had begun to flow over his lips and down his chin.

  The man hit him again. Toivo tasted blood in his mouth.

  “Tell me.”

  Toivo gasped for breath. “...I don’t know anything.”

  The interrogator squatted down to peer into Toivo’s face, and through his blurry eyes, Toivo could see that the man was still smiling as he rubbed his knuckles.

  “We’ll see about that, won’t we?” He patted Toivo’s aching cheek and then snapped over his shoulder at the two uniformed toughs standing against the wall. “Boys!”

  They leapt to attention.

  “Soften him a bit for Comrade Chernyshev.”

  With that, he was out the door and gone. The two men closed in on Toivo.

  They were professionals--that much was clear. As each well-placed jab hit its mark, Toivo cursed the tyranny of flesh.

  A punch closed one eye into red misery. He groaned.

  What works of suffering one body can visit on another, thought Toivo. Even knowing his own strength in the face of such a threat, Toivo longed to be spared the onslaught that was ravaging this body. Pain like this was a remarkable thing.

  He decided to try the easy way out: feigning weakness in defeat.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  A strike to the side of his mouth threw a spray of bloody saliva onto his arm.

  “A-anything!” he begged.

  A chop to one collarbone, then the other. A crushing blow to the lower ribs.

  He realized then that they didn’t want answers. They just wanted to cause pain.

  No, not even wanted. Not for themselves. They simply enacted the will of those above them, choking off their empathy until torture became a routine activity like taking out the daily rubbish. They were deadened to suffering; machines programmed to hurt. This realization frightened and wounded Toivo more than their blows, and he pleaded with them, unleashing a frenzied stream of memories that he pulled from them in desperation.

  Remember that you are human. Remember your little sister, your mongrel dog, your mother cooking soup. You, remember how your father taught you to skip stones on the river before he left for the war, and how your friend broke his ankle
and you carried him home. Remember how people feel each other’s pain. You are human...you...

  A fist caught him directly in the breastbone, wrenching the breath from his lungs and leaving him heaving in agony.

  The guards heard and remembered and felt, but they didn’t stop. Even while wracked by obscure pangs of empathy they continued the beating, guilt-ridden and ashamed.

  Eventually, Toivo ceased fighting. With every wicked blow, he retreated further inside himself, hovering on the edge of consciousness, his sole comfort being the knowledge that for him, at least, none of this was permanent.

  Finally, they finished with him. Soul-sick and red-knuckled, they turned the light off and locked the cell.

  Toivo drifted in and out of awareness, head lolling forward against his chest. Time flowed so slowly inside the prison of his injured body--an interminable, agonizing fever dream. Everything was horrible and confusing. His body didn’t even respond properly to his commands anymore, and every part of him seemed disconnected from everything else, alone and useless. At one point he realized that he was drooling, and there was no way for his numb, bound arms to wipe his mouth. Warm tears ran unbidden down one side of his face; the other eye was swollen shut.

  Yet one clear thought remained.

  This will pass.

  As his consciousness returned in fits and starts, he started to become aware of strange forces at work within him. Like a ball of light in his chest slowly siphoning the pain into itself and burning it away in cleansing flame, something was gradually starting to pull him back together. Without being told--slowly, slowly--fractures knit and lesions closed. The sluggish blood pooled in countless bruises pulled back like a tide into the sea.

  He was finally starting to regain some semblance of reality when he heard the door being unlocked.

  He stiffened. They’d come back--it was going to happen all over again. Adrenaline shot through him as he began to think of ways he could bargain with them, before an even more disturbing possibility crossed his mind.

  If these were the same men who had beat him, there was no way they’d fail to notice the remarkable recovery he’d made over the course of a few hours. Would they keep him here, destroying him and letting him heal, laying him out anesthetized on the examination table as doctors investigated the secrets of his puzzling anatomy? Could they kill him, or was it worse if they couldn’t? Death would at least bring freedom and a return to an incorporeal existence, but if death were impossible at the hands of a human... Toivo suffered, imagining the fate of a captured, invulnerable man.