The end result was that, as the townsfolk of Warwick descended into chaotic strife, and as the battles became less organized at every turn, it became less and less clear throughout the day for whom (or what) the governing authority, the group with the majority of guns, was fighting for.
Even less clear, as the townspeople grew increasingly agitated that their superior force might win the day, was the outcome that would result from the fact that the power of the government had been turned upon the people at large. To be clear, there were Spetznaz operatives who entered the battle and, as a result, there were people lying in the street bloodied and bullet-riddled. But this reality caused greater, not lesser, agitation among the people, and in those moments when the citizens forgot their differences for a moment and set their sights on conquering the soldiers, it became a question of how likely a soldier or two with a limited magazine clip could defend against an army of shovels and hammers and farm implements in the hands of people who were willing to charge into the face of danger and use them.
In short, the battle plan, if there had ever been a coherent one, was lost, as all battle plans eventually are, to the madness of conflict. The soldiers came to embrace the same survival instinct that the population did, and some simply decided that the best way to survive would be to lay down their weapons and refuse to enter a conflict that was, in the final analysis, against people not unlike themselves.
This reality, too, mirrored what was happening in many other corners of America.
The unraveling of what might loosely be called “the government” came to show, like the loosening of the bonds of civility that kept neighbor in careful compromise with neighbor in the first place, that the glue that holds society together proved itself to be thin indeed.
At some point during the day, Mikail and Vladimir and the others realized that their dreams of revolution were spiraling out of control because those dreams had not been shared in the hearts of a conclusive majority of their fellows. The fact that this is an age-old story in the history of the world made it no less true on that day in Warwick.
****
It was Kolya who suggested that they change to “English names.” The four had arrived successfully at the mid-point of the tunnel after having crawled into the dugout through the tunnel from the house. They’d spent a considerable amount of time covering their tracks inside the house, even going so far as to reassemble the bureau entrance and pull the drawers in after them so that the tunnel could not be easily seen from the cellar.
Then they’d prepared the dugout for comfort and settled in for a brief stay while they waited for the day’s events, and those of the following day, to unfold.
They each unpacked their packs and took out blankets and a little bit of food and lights and such. Vasily carried the backpack that belonged to the traveler named Clay, and for the first time he actually spent some time examining the contents. He found the items that he’d seen already – the fishing kit and the knife and other items – but in the thin light available to them now, he began to thumb through the books that were in the backpack, and once he did so, Kolya became very excited.
“Oh my, this is Whitman and Hemingway! I’ve been unable to get hold of these books for so long,” Kolya said, smiling broadly. “Everything good in Warwick, I was led to believe, came only through the black market, and I was told that I might be able to get things there that we couldn’t get in the stores. But, I never could figure out exactly to whom I should talk about this. I suppose that is one of the huge negatives to being considered a bookworm. People are suspicious of you if they think you might know more than they do. Believe me when I say that one of the reasons that I sought out such back alley subterfuge was that I wanted to find out who could get me more books from the outside. Ahh… these… these are two books that I dearly wanted.” Kolya’s eyes shone like diamonds as he asked Vasily if he could hold them, and when the books were passed to him he lovingly caressed them as one does a talisman. He ran his fingers across the slightly embossed lettering on the Whitman book’s covering, thumbing randomly through the Hemingway, and reading passages aloud to the others. The others sat and watched him as he turned his head away for a moment, and they noticed his faint shadow on the wall reach up and wipe a tear away from its eye.
Kolya reached inside the pack and drew out a thin volume with the title The Poems of CL Richter, and he asked what it was. Pyotr harrumphed that it was a load of self-indulgent garbage. He didn’t know who C.L. Richter was, but the words, according to Pyotr’s judgment, read like the elementary school musings of a spurned lover. Briefly looking through the volume, Kolya had come, more or less to agree, but with certain exceptions.
“Well, it is certainly not Shakespeare,” he concluded. “Still, it has its own little moments of beauty and truth. After all, those are the primary things we should seek in poetry. If it is true, then it can be beautiful.” He paused, thumbing through the book. “Like here… I like this one,” he said, and he read it aloud to them.
How, and Why, and Where I Love You.
Thick, like the sweetness of honey,
Like the Tupelo dream that we shared as we danced in the moonlight,
And thin, like the promise of money,
Like the watery bond that we shared as we swam in that tune. White,
Pure, like the color of holy,
Like the color of heaven we saw in our angel’s sweet blue eyes.
And black, like the heart of the lowly,
Like the dark of the leaven that rises when we tell our true lies.
Here, like the dreams that you left me,
Like the night when they visit and drape me in velvety slumber
And there, like the beams of thy theft be,
Like their flight, when the morning comes on, bringing cares without number.
Kolya began to go on about how the poem generally lacked a certain central structure that was hinted at in that title, but, he said, it had never been fully developed, and he told the other three how the poem was merely a kind of list of emotions that the fellow had felt in his obvious loss, so there was truth there, and how the poem had a sad sweetness to it, and how it was like the honey in the first line. It needed, Kolya said, only to be tasted, it would not suffice for an entire meal—and it was then when Natasha had begged him please… please… to just stop. He was killing her with his endless analysis. Sisters and brothers don’t always agree on the merits of art, but the one thing they have no trouble agreeing upon is the need to silence one another.
Kolya had stopped, and then he noticed a poem folded into the first page of the volume, a poem by the Harlem poet Langston Hughes. That was when he suddenly looked at the others and decided that they should all assume new names.
“Look,” he said. “We’re about to enter a world that does not know us and does not accept us, even though we are as much a part of it as anyone else. There are certainly likely to be those who will be unfriendly. We would do well to make ourselves fit as closely as possible. We’ve already enough going against us. Though Lev taught many of us how to speak perfect, accentless English, he taught us all too well. We are not good at the vernacular, and slang… we know almost nothing of it. We were not raised to live in America. We were raised to live in Russia. If anyone were reading us… say… in a book… they would say, why do the characters speak so awkwardly? And by awkwardly, we would know that they actually mean correctly.”
Pyotr nodded. “I agree completely. That’s why Lev told us to flee to Amish country. He said we would not stick out there so obviously. Anyone who hears us there will think that we speak painfully awkward, though precise, English.”
Vasily, too, decided that he approved of the idea and said that he really liked the ring of the name from the poem that was folded into the volume. He decided he would call himself Lang. Kolya, for his part, decided to call himself Cole, partly because, he said, he had always liked the jazz musician named John Coltrane. “He played a Russian lullaby that was simply
spectacular,” he said, as if that settled the matter for him.
Pyotr liked the suggestion overall, but wasn’t willing to take it much further than he ought, so he decided simply to be known as Peter, the English version of his Russian name. And Natasha—was it the unwillingness to give in to her sibling?—had refused the entire matter.
“Well, you guys can do what you will,” she said. “As for me, I will live with the name my mother gave me.” And with that, and a firm nod of her head, the matter was settled for her, too.
****
Following this, the newly titled Lang began to dig through the backpack some more and found a small blue box inside. He asked Peter what was in it.
“I don’t know,” Peter said. “It rattles when you shake it. That is all that I know of that box.”
“What?! What?!” Cole asked. “You didn’t open it to find out?”
“No. It belonged to a man who has just died,” he said. “I believe in letting things be. In showing some respect for the departed.”
This was too much for Cole. “But aren’t you even a little bit curious?”
“No,” Peter said. And the sound in his voice suggested that he was unwilling to budge on the matter.
“What if it’s important? What if it has something in it that will aid our survival?”
Peter looked at Cole, unblinking. “Then we will still have it, won’t we? If we end up in dire need of something that is in a box and rattles, we’ll open it then.”
Lang and Cole looked at each other, and then at Natasha, who gave them no sign of help, and then they looked back at each other as younger men do in the presence of their seniors. They decided to let the matter drop. They placed the box and the books and the other items back in the backpack, and then placed the pack along the wall.
They were satisfied that they had seen everything the pack had to offer, but God from His omniscient seat in the heavens knew that they had not. In a small, zippered pocket near the strap of one of the handles was a weathered, crumbling business card that had been given to the traveler who had carried the pack into their community. It was perhaps best that they did not see it. If they had, they might have considered it trash and thrown it on the floor of the dugout to be lost forever. But they did not see it and so they did not throw it away. Instead, they simply sat and talked quietly while they waited for sleep to overtake them. That was a blessing, like most blessings are, in the way it happened without their effort or notice. The card, like the rattling in the box, would indeed be there still if, as Cole had innocently said, it was ever needed to aid their survival.
****
In his sleep, Lang dreamt of the town of Warwick. He dreamt of the people that he left there, of the way they’d passed through thick and thin together, how they’d come through holy and perverse. His dreams were in color and then black and white. He saw the others faintly through the moonlight, on the far side of the shore, heard the clamor of their uprising, and mourned for the loss that he felt in leaving.
One face in particular haunted him in his dream. The face of the sweet girl from the bakery named Irinna. He’d always loved her in secret, and he’d hoped that she might one day love him, too. He’d stood and watched her pass through the town as she made her deliveries for the baker. He’d watched her gently sweep away a wisp of hair from her lovely brow, leaving just a gentle trace of flour at times, which she would then wipe away with her sleeve and smile in embarrassment. He’d hoped that someday he might convince her to go on a date with him, but he’d never had the courage to ask
Her house was the one he’d gone to first when he was asking people to come along on their journey, and for a brief moment he’d hoped she would come. She’d seemed curious and receptive, asking questions about where they would go, how they would get there, when they would leave. He’d laid the plans out in hopes that she’d follow, but in the end she’d shaken her head and declined. She didn’t give a reason, simply saying that she wished him well, but that she just couldn’t go. He’d left in sorrow, and as he slept that sorrow returned.
Had he been able to extract himself from that dream at that moment and spirit away to the town of Warwick, and if he could have hovered there to view the village where the chaos had overtaken even the premise of any workable resolution, he wouldn’t have been so inclined to feel that way. For as the town fell into complete and utter disrepair, the lovely Irinna was indeed inside her house making her own plans for escape. She was readying her belongings. She watched out the window to see whether there was any hope that the Spetznaz soldiers would bring the town back into some kind of order, or whether a coalition of the people would rise up and turn the tide in a decisive way.
As she watched, it became clear—it became clear to everyone, even the gang from the prison that had begun the trouble—that the cause was lost, and without it, so was the town. She sat quietly and waited until she heard a predetermined knock at the door that her escape route had arrived.
As the chaos descended and the town crumbled, she heard the knock. Rushing to the door in breathless anticipation, she found standing there a man whom she had come to love dearly. The match was made secretly as she made her bread deliveries in and around Warwick. She’d passed his house many times, and one time she stopped for a moment to chat, and then eventually stayed too long and then eventually wanted to stay even longer. And now she was ready to leave with her love.
She rushed to the door to find him standing there, just outside the window in the door. She looked up and saw him motioning silently through the glass to her. And with that, she grabbed her belongings and opened the door and took the hand of the stocky bulldog named Mikail Brekhunov.
****
Mikail had a few of the loyal Spetznaz soldiers with him, and the small group had decided that the cause was indeed lost in Warwick, and they were going to make a break for it and try to leave before some form of authority was restored and recriminations started.
They talked as they carefully made their way in a circuitous route back to the gym to gather up Sergei and Vladimir and the remnant of their loyal forces. In passing, Irinna mentioned to him, since they were now discussing escape, that the young, dull boy… Vasily… had come to her house last night and had asked her to escape with him. Apparently, even the town dunce had a way out.
This surprised Mikail, and not just a little. The red scar on his forehead began to throb and his mouth twitched as he mulled the thought in his mind. As they drew close to the gymnasium, his rage began to build, and, although they had not reached a place of safety, he grabbed Irinna harshly by the hand and spun her around to face him, his rage to the point of boiling over.
“How were they getting out?” he demanded angrily.
“I have no idea, Mikail. He gave no details. He just said that they were going to be leaving and that he wanted me to go with him.”
“Oh he did, did he? Who was going with him?!” He spat the words. “Damned fool!” It was unclear from the way that he said this exactly to whom he was referring. “Dumb, little Vasily! He wanted to take the most beautiful girl in Warwick with him?! He had a way out! Maybe young Vasily wasn’t so dumb after all!” He said this not in a way of kindness or to flatter Irinna, or even Vasily. He said it in anger. The soldiers escorting the pair were growing wary of being out in the open with the town in rebellion, and they attempted to move the two arguing lovers along with them in order to get them as quickly as possible into the safety of the gym.
“I kept that little idiot alive when Vladimir wanted to kill him! I gave him life! And this is what he gives me!”
“Mikail, there was nothing! He seemed to be going house to house. There was nothing between us!” As she said this, the soldiers grabbed the two and forcibly moved them toward the gym, toward cover.
The soldiers were moving in formation, sweeping their guns in wide arcs, and as they did so, the chaos of the town opened up around them and the people formed in crowds and looked on, urging an offensive.
&nb
sp; A sharp crack split the air, and the soldiers dropped to the ground instinctively. Mikail spun around and dropped to the ground with them, looking at the crowd to see if he could determine who had fired on them.
Just at that moment, the lovely Irinna stood still in the street. She reached her hand up to brush away the wisp of hair from her face and, as she did so she left a small trail of blood smearing across her fast-draining features. Looking up, Mikail reached for Irinna’s hand to pull her down with him, and only then did he see the blood running down her face, down her dress, circling the curves of the one he loved so. Her legs collapsed and she fell to the ground, falling into Mikail’s arms as he attempted to understand what had happened.
Mikail crouched over her, and the soldiers grabbed at them both and began to drag them, and then, seeing that the girl was dying, the soldiers dropped her and began forcibly to drag the unwounded Mikail towards the gymnasium, toward safety. Finally they broke out into a sprint as Mikail stumbled along in their midst. He gave a final look over his shoulder, over the shoulder of a soldier, and saw his lovely Irinna lying in the snow, bleeding into it. He turned his face toward the gym and picked up his pace with the soldiers, until they came into the warm embrace of their shelter.
In that look and in that moment, Mikail focused his mind on what was ahead of him. For now, perhaps for the first time in a lifetime of calculation, he found himself feeling an entirely new emotion. It was a feeling that he suddenly confronted but did not have any real way to account for in the way that he always calculated everything. It was feeling of overwhelming and ancient reckoning, a feeling of un-appraisable anguish.
Wick - The Omnibus Edition Page 26
