by Anne Fine
At last I had a pen in hand. Backing into a doorway, I took out the travel permit and stared.
Treltsky.
Preltsky?
Simple enough. A careful flick of the pen. And with a hundred thousand places in this vast country, who would be confident enough to pick an argument?
Within a shorter time than I could have imagined, I was back on a train, still travelling west. I had a red plush seat in a compartment for six, with lamps like glass dewdrops and a heater that would have doubled as a furnace in my old camp. The ticket inspector knew better than to ask to see my travel permit more than once, and all my fellow travellers stared anywhere except at the silver serpent on my cap, or into my eyes. I felt the authority of the uniform I wore in every furtive glance that shot my way. The insidious strength of it renewed my force of mind – though I was not so much of a fool as to forget it was a borrowed power, and one small trick of fate could once again turn my world upside down. I hadn’t failed to notice that, linked on behind like poor rough cousins happily ignored, were trucks just like the ones I had been herded onto before, to travel east, now rolling back for more fodder for the camps, more men to work their fingers to the bone and bodies into the grave.
I could be one of those again.
But not the same man. I’d changed too much inside.
I spent my hours staring out through the window. Now there was more to look at: villages and towns – real towns, with schools and prisons, bands and parades, and busy factories. The things I saw as we rolled past! Once, on a sun-drenched platform, I watched a boy teasing a kitten with a ragged end of string and was astonished that the young still passed their time with empty-headed amusements. I saw a woman and her friend exchange a confidence, throw up their aprons and rock. That must be grief, I told myself. It can’t be merriment. How could it be that, as one brave woman hurls herself from a window with a dying rallying cry, others can still be laughing at things so easily told? No, it’s not possible. No, not with all these nightmares being lived along the track.
I watched it all – old men in tears, and women doubled under the loads they carried, dragging their wailing children. Try as I might, I felt no pity. I wanted to shake them from their ignorant dreams. ‘You think your life’s a misery?’ I wanted to bellow through the compartment window. ‘Think again! When you want water, you drink. You empty your bowels at will, not when you’re ordered to do so. If you have lice, you’ve no one to blame but your own lazy self!’
By now, of course, they would be out of sight. But I’d still be staring back at where they’d vanished, thinking my murderous thoughts. ‘Stupid, self-pitying peasants! When your feet bleed, at least you can sit by the wayside without fear of a bullet in your brain. And if you’re lucky enough to have a lump of bread in the evening, at least you can hope there’ll be more where that came from. You don’t have to slave through the whole of the next day in icy blizzards, up to your knees in freezing slime, knowing for certain it will be hours and hours before you’ve half a chance of seeing even another crumb.’
And then I’d see a sight to soften me. The first mimosas. A glorious patch of willow herb. I’d gaze out into the blinding splendour of some bright morning and wonder what could ever have gone so wrong, that a country so rich in gifts could end up so dirt poor. As for the next Great State Plan! The next Stride Forward, the next Committed March! What sort of confidence could any leader have in any better future if he could send so many to rot for so long? I thought of the years marked down on our sentence sheets. Fifteen years! Twenty-five! Life! Anyone who truly believed that better times were on their way would be ashamed to write such numbers.
Get off the train, I tried to order myself. Cross the track. Go back the other way, to where you saw that clump of meadowsweet. Marry some pretty girl and tell yourself it’s not your job to live out anything more than your own life.
But even a fool would snap himself out of such fairytale dreamings. There was nowhere to hide. And when had any of us been allowed to choose for ourselves where to live, or even what to do? The Glorious Leader had managed to turn this whole great country of ours into one giant trap.
And even as the word rang through my brain, the train began to judder. The wheels screeched to a halt.
I watched my five companions glance uneasily towards the window. The track was swarming with men in uniforms just like my own.
‘Security check! Inspection! Out with your papers!’
Already those around me were rooting in their bags and pockets. The shouts grew closer. Yawning and stretching as if I’d had to face the fact that it was time to join my fellow guards and help with the inspection, I rose to my feet.
I slid the compartment door open and looked out. More guards with rifles stood along the track on the other side.
Brazen it out, I tried to tell myself.
But every instinct warned me. Not here. Not now. Instead, abandoning my bundle, I slid the door closed behind me and tried to walk along the narrow corridor past the other compartments with so much easy confidence that anyone who saw me would think I was one of the guards doing the check.
I worked my way to the back of the train and slid the bolt of the door that barred the way to the old viewing platform. Climbing the rail, I dropped down onto the large iron link that joined the prisoners’ trucks to the passenger compartments.
I peered out on both sides. There was no chance of getting away unseen. So, choosing one side, I stepped out as casually as if I’d just ducked under the link from the other.
Cocking a thumb behind me, I said to the nearest guard, ‘We’ve more men than we need on that side.’
He scowled. ‘We’ll never have more men than we need with this lot. They get stronger every day. Three trains derailed already this year. And then that bridge.’ He shook his head. ‘Yellow and Black! They have the cunning of weasels. They ought to change their colours. They should be grey and brown! That’s what they ought to call themselves. Weasels!’
‘True,’ I said easily, moving off along the train and peering under each truck in turn to make a show of being part of the inspection. He showed no interest. Neither did the guard standing beside the next truck.
Or the next.
And it was on the underside of the truck after that that I saw, unmistakably, that tiny little dewdrop of yellow paint I’d seen before, so long ago.
I lifted my eyes. Sure enough, though all the letters had faded over the years I’d been away, there were the words that I remembered, WE HAIL OUR GLORIOUS REVOLUTION, the last few letters painted by a different hand.
I couldn’t help it. I had to look inside. With no ramp to climb, it was a bit of a scramble. No one stepped forward to help. The guards along the track watched with indifference as I forced the side door open.
The stink of sweat and herrings hit me like a brick. For pity’s sake! Here, joined by no more than one strong link of metal, was my own past. My stomach clenched so tight, I nearly emptied everything I’d eaten that morning onto the floor. I heard the groans again. I saw the dead. I remembered the shouting. ‘Water! Give us water!’ I seemed to live the whole appalling journey in a moment before my wits came back.
I prowled around. Here’s where I used to lie. There were the wooden slats that blocked the windows. I knew the tracery of their patterns better than I knew my own fingertips. How I must have grown! Back then, I’d had to stretch to peer between the two of them. Now I was forced to stoop.
I laid my fingers where they used to rest to save my eyes from splinters. The memories flooded back. The old man dying from a broken heart after his letter was spoiled. The long discussions deep into the night. The bursts of laughter. The times we tried to derail the train by hurling ourselves at its sides.
Liv Ullavitch’s map. Yes! There it still was – those long thin lines gouged out along the side. Did the guards fail to see it for what it was when prisoners spilled out of the truck? or had the transports followed one another with such grim haste that no one
took the time to walk around? one simple swill of water, and back in service!
Outside, the tramp of boots was growing louder all the time. I heard raised voices, then an angry shout. ‘What are you doing, standing around so idly?’
Clearly the guard tried to defend himself. ‘Everything’s checked.’
‘Then check again, even more thoroughly! Check even one another’s papers. A bundle’s been found on the train, left by a man in uniform. Let no one you don’t know pass!’
Fresh searchers were very close now. I hadn’t spent so many weeks inside this truck without learning how to tell which doors were being slid open along the train.
Trapped!
Had I allowed the memories of past times to put an end to my future? I spun round. Nowhere to hide! Just wire cages in an empty truck. If I were caught, I might be dragged out but I’d soon be back, crammed in with a hundred other unlucky creatures.
The whole long nightmare would begin again.
In terror, I reached out to steady myself. I clung to the nearest wire. And suddenly another memory came back. I saw Liv forcing his way over the sleeping bodies to the side of the truck. ‘Give me some room. I want to look out.’
What had his companions grumbled back at him? ‘Keeping us waiting for some place that never comes?’
And he’d snapped back, ‘Scoff at your own stupidity! You would have burrowed through your hole only to freeze to death!’
This time there was no straw over the floor. I knelt and peered where I remembered the two men always sitting.
By all the stars! The skill! The quality of workmanship. The care those two men had taken to feather the planks beneath them so carefully no one would ever know. Why had they even bothered to strew straw over their handiwork? Dozens of poor souls must have sat on this very spot and noticed nothing! What a crying waste!
I tore my fingers scraping at the years of dirt. I found the knothole cunningly designed to let in one small finger.
I raised the strangely shaped trapdoor and slid down onto the axle of the truck. Then, reaching up, I dragged the little raft of planks back over and twisted it round till, like a piece of jigsaw, the trapdoor fell back in place.
Almost at once I heard the scuffle of boots above my head.
‘No one in here!’
May is the best month. May is the month I strolled through woods, teased the squirrels and stole from my countrymen. Whenever I needed something, I brushed down the uniform, put on the cap, and went to take it.
Everywhere I went, I asked about Yellow and Black. I’d stand so the sunlight flashed on the coiled serpent and spit out my questions. The frightened country folk tumbled over themselves in the rush to offer me answers – never, you understand, something they knew for themselves. Always something they’d heard.
I’d kick them around a bit. After all, hadn’t I learned in the camp exactly how much beating a man could take, and how it might loosen a tongue? Perhaps I’d get to hear a little more. Perhaps I wouldn’t. Still, three trains derailed in a single year in this one valley! As the days went by, I narrowed down the search. I knew that, sooner or later, the ones I planned to find would pass through again. I’d make myself known. offer my services. How could they doubt my loyalty once I’d persuaded them of the truth of my past? How could they doubt that I would happily spend the rest of my life working to save my tortured country?
Above the valley was a tumbledown hut. I saw the woodsman off with threats of violence and arrest, and took his place. Day after day I watched till they finally came – the only ones truly to believe things could be different.
Yellow and Black.
When a man’s youth has been kicked and starved out of him, it can’t be put back. Compared to me, the rest were babes in arms. Good-natured innocents, as different from myself as I was from the old Yuri of long ago – that simple, cheerful boy who used to look at freshly fallen snow and think of happiness and freedom – snowballs and sleds – not freezing drudgery.
Like me, they knew how leaders can arise – that all it takes is a determination greater than that of those around you. Like me, they knew that those who won’t lead must follow, or be ruled. But lacking the suffering that tempers a man of flesh and blood and feeling into pure steel, how could they pick up the burden?
Contact breeds trust. Trust brings responsibility. Responsibility leads to decision.
And orders are given.
But what are a few derailed trains when a whole country is broken? It was time to move on. The province first. Then, after that, we’d spread our wings wider and wider. So the day came to leave the valley and take our chances. I looked around the woodsman’s hut one last time.
Was it pure chance that, just as I kicked a pile of rags aside, the sun shone in so strongly it showed the faintest hummock on the dirt-packed floor?
There! To sharp eyes, the tell-tale marks of digging. A careful stamping down.
It was a scrap of folded oilcloth, buried no deeper than the span of my hand. In it are coins, I thought. Perhaps a few precious stones. or, at the very least, a useful knife. But when I unwrapped it, I found only a few coloured pages torn from a book.
I stared at them, mystified. And then I realized, from things my grandmother was hushed for saying, that they must be pictures of saints. Fat old saints! Nothing more useful! Yet buried so carefully!
Back in the camp there’d been a saying: ‘A prisoner on the run is like a baby: whatever he sees, he wants.’
Not so, I told myself. They might be precious to some ignorant woodsman who spent his summers here. But they’re quite useless to me. A memory came back of Igor in that roofless cottage in the woods, waking at night to read his greasy Bible. Were all these grizzled folk’s minds as wrinkled and empty as their skins, that they should take such risks to stick to old ways of thinking?
For there could be no God – certainly none worth bowing your head before, or kneeling to worship. In a world stuffed with horrors, such a ghostly overlord must either care for no one, or have no powers. In either case, why would these rheumy-eyed ancients risk their lives to hide his keepsakes? So far as I could tell, life was no more than a stretch of misery between two empty secrets. What was the stubbornness that lay in all these old folk, that they would cling so tightly to their God?
And as I reached the door, the answer came. Perhaps, like Grandmother, they’d realized right from the start that paradise can’t be built on earth – especially not with fear for bricks, and threats for mortar. Maybe if you’d been raised on all the mysteries of miracles and angels, these ‘great truths’ spouted by Our Glorious Leader had never seemed other than nonsense. Perhaps this ‘Shining Future’ dangled before us as a bribe had always appealed to them no more than some cheap bauble on a market stall.
What would they think of what I had to offer?
Easy enough to guess!
And those – like my parents – who’d reckon they’d seen it all before. What would they think?
The answer was plain. Small wonder any thoughts of going home had vanished into air. How could you put your mind to gaining power if you were haunted by a look in your mother’s eyes, the sound of your father’s sigh?
So should I go on? Would it be right or wrong to drag the country through another tide of bloodshed? People will always have failings. Reach for perfection and maybe the killing will never, ever stop.
Which was the right path to take?
It wasn’t possible to judge. The old scales were broken. The day the Leaders locked up the churches they’d ripped out God’s own ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and left an emptiness their false beliefs rushed in to fill. Man made the choices now. The person with the greatest power decided for us all where ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ lay.
For Our Great Helmsman, it was with some test of his own called ‘social danger’.
There would be time enough to learn what it would be with me.
But I had given orders. It was time to leave. The pictures of saints f
luttered across the damp floor. Already their colours had begun to seep, and by the time the woodsman lifted them out of the mud they would be ruined.
Why not? Why shouldn’t the old fossil share the common misery? Why should he wriggle out of what the rest of us suffered simply because, as a child, he had been taught to believe in some Maker who knew his name and loved him? God and his saints indeed! Unreal as shadows thrown across a wall to comfort a crying child. Why shouldn’t this old woodsman, just like the rest of us, be forced to strip his notion of himself down to the realization that he was no more than a cog in some vast national machine? A creature no more valuable – and quite as easy to crush – as an ant.
For that’s what the Leader had made of all of us! That’s what we were! To change things for the better would take a sternness and determination equal to his.
And this time we would get it right. There’d be no loss of nerve, no half measures and no falling short. To reach the goal, we’d need the efforts and conviction of every single citizen: the young; the strong; even the old. Not even weak-minded back-pedallers like this old woodsman could be left to wallow in their hollow comforts. Things were now desperate. So everyone must join the struggle, and those who weren’t with us – Yellow and Black – might as well be against us. Oh, all that long time ago I’d slid that other old believer’s greasy Bible back into his mattress without a thought. But not any more! If life in the camp had taught me anything at all, then it was this: keep to the rules of the nursery, and things would stay for ever as grimly insupportable as they were now.
A simple, never-ending road of bones.
So they would have to be taught. New aims. New drills. New banners. Yellow and Black. Everything they thought they knew would have to be uprooted. We’d take a leaf out of the Leader’s book. He knew the score. He’d used them all: imaginary terrors, empty promises, bright slogans. We would waste no more time. We’d plaster posters on every wall and paint our enemies in such dark colours that no one could fail to despise them. To build our new country, with freedom and justice for all, we would make pitilessness our only right, and pity our only wrong.
