by Nick Mamatas
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I read and enjoy realist and postmodern short fiction, though I don’t write it much for reasons both practical and personal. Practically speaking, most literary journals do not pay, and an increasing number even demand payment for the privilege of having one’s work skimmed and rejected by a bored and ill-trained graduate student. Who needs it, except for writers keen to fill out their CV and compete for perhaps as many as a dozen tenure-track creative writing instructor jobs per year? That ain’t me.
Also not me—the type to publish in literary journals, and there is a type. Middle-class background; white, or if of color a member of the lower echelons of some nation’s ruling class; a graduate of a liberal arts university or a talented provincial making it clear that he is ready to play the game by spilling the beans on how the lower social orders live; not just holders of an MFA, but one from one of the right universities. But sometimes, I try anyway. “Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher” was one of those times, and it very nearly worked.
I decided to put a genre spin on a slice-of-life story. As an editor and anthologist, I’ve occasionally been tasked with finding the copyright holder of a long-forgotten poem or piece of fiction. It’s not unusual to follow a path through divorces and deaths to someone who has no idea what they own, or what it’s worth. Confusion abounds—first they think my contacting them is a trick, then they decide, often with the help of some attorney from the Legal Hut down at the mall, that the story they own must be worth a million dollars if someone wants to reprint it. It could be the next Star Wars! For me, it’s tedious, for them it’s several days or weeks of chaos and soul-searching. That is the stuff of literary fiction.
My wife’s family has a semi-famous ancestor, the imagist poet F. S. Flint (silex is Latin for flint), and I helped them contact Penguin about a reprint of his poem “Lament.” It includes these thrilling and awful lines:
The genius of the air
Has contrived a new terror
That rends them into pieces.
I have a cantankerous grandmother with dementia. I have an interest in pulp fiction and ghost stories. There are new terrors that will rend us to pieces. Once again, it all came together—a literary piece “of genre interest” as I put it in my cover letter to the special “ghost”-themed issue of Indiana Review. As it turns out, by ghost they meant stuff like the ghost of a marriage after it fails or something, but the journal did print a wonderful essay by my friend Carrie Laben, “The National Forest of Painted Wang,” which is about the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, and the phallic graffiti covering it.
So no mainstream literary journal for Tom Silex. . . . But there does exist a unique periodical, which is co-edited by science fiction writer Brian Slattery, and that is a real-life journal of mostly realist fiction and mostly thoughtful personal essays with the word review in its very title, and that does pay a lot of money—five hundred smackers!—for short fiction. (How, given its minute circulation? That is a question we do not dare ask.) New Haven Review even gives special consideration to authors with a connection to Connecticut, and “Connecticut is connected to Long Island via the ferry my grandfather and mother used to work on as food servers,” is connection enough! I had a ghost of a chance, and I took it.
THE GREAT ARMORED TRAIN
SO, THIS IS WHAT COMMUNISM MEANS? Gribov thought. The train was magnificent. It seemed too heavy to move, but it fairly glided along the tracks. It was the smoothest ride Gribov had ever been on, and it bustled with activity—warehouse, restaurant, barracks, even a Politburo office and telegraph station, a two-car garage, and even a small biplane among its twelve wagons. Never mind the armored engines with gun turrets. All this, and it doesn’t even have a name! It was just the train of the Predrevoyensoviet, Leon Trotsky. Didn’t the War Commissar have a wife or a girlfriend to name his personal armored war-train after?
But really, it was the workers’ train, and there was much work to be done. Gribov was a soldier, but no longer just a standard peasant with a rifle and a children’s book on the Russian alphabet to help him learn to read. He was one of the Red Sotnia, the hundred soldiers who made up Trotsky’s bodyguard and rushed out to join pitched battles. Not long before, he’d been in the cavalry train that followed behind Trotsky’s, shoveling horse shit. But the train, and the Bolshevik efforts, had taken some hits lately, and now Gribov was decked out in black leather, presumably ready to give his life for the world proletariat, and for comrade Trotsky. Gribov dutifully collected the train’s newspaper, V puti, but mostly used it to insulate his boots. It was cold tonight on the Polish border, and he was glad that Trotsky wrote so much. Almost toasty , he thought, as he leapt from the roof of one car to another, watching the forest for Mensheviks, for Cossacks, for Poles.
“Comrade!” one of the sharpshooters stationed on the roof whispered harshly. “Step lightly! You’ll bring them down upon us.”
“Comrade,” Gribov said, “we are on a giant train. Steam is billowing from the engines. Even idle, even under the new moon, we’re obvious.”
“And an opposing army flooding from the wood should be more obvious still,” another sharpshooter said.
“When I was a soldier under the tsar, we would never have dared to banter so,” said the first shooter.
“Thus I am thankful now more than ever for the Revolution, and the 2nd Latvian Riflemen’s Soviet Regiment,” said the second. The others, five in all, giggled. “But be quiet anyway,” the second shooter said to Gribov. “I’m working on my poem.” More chortling emerged from the dark.
“Poem? What?” Gribov asked.
“Don’t you read the paper?” the first shooter asked. “How do you know where we are on our way to?” More laughter, this time for the pun on V puti—en route or “on our way.”
“Comrade Fancy Dude has called on the poets of Poland to write poems denouncing the landlords and the bourgeoisie,” a new voice explained.
“Perhaps I will write a poem, then,” Gribov said. He laughed, once.
“What rhymes with pshek?” the second shooter asked, and he got a round of chuckles from the shooters arranged on either side of the train car’s roof. The new Communist mentality had not quite taken hold in the men of the Red Sotnia. After all, the Polish workers spoke as funnily as the Polish bourgeoisie. But Gribov couldn’t blame them for their elitism. They were an elite! It was a very nice train after all, complete with cloth napkins for Trotsky’s personal staff, so perhaps being part of the “One Hundred,” living aboard a futuristic conveyance, had confused them. Gribov could too write a poem, and a poem that would be understood by the Polish proletariat! Working man to working man, something these careerists from good families would never understand. The poem could be about the train, and its many magnificent attributes—the Rolls-Royce liberated from the tsar’s garage and outfitted with a pair of machine guns! It was always a thrill to hear it roaring forth from its special train car, metal flashing under the sun, lighting and thunder at once. . . .
“Carry on,” he announced to the sharpshooters, and moved on to the next train car, jumping lightly and expertly over the gap. It was a risk, but Gribov knew there would be no insults shouted at his back, for fear of alerting the enemy. There was no way the train was secret, but a sudden yelp could give away a comrade’s position to a Polish sniper.
A poem, a poem. . . . What would inspire the Polish working class to rise up, to greet the Red Army as liberators? No poem had been needed to persuade Gribov. His family were dirt-poor peasants and when he crawled into Petrograd to look for work on the piers, he was treated worse than his father had treated the animals on the farm. Nobody else offered anything but misery, and the phony promise of a heavenly reward. The heavens were dark tonight. No moon, no stars; the clouds were low and the color of slate.
A rush of wind almost sent Gribov’s spine tearing out of his back. Bursting from the trees had come a great grey owl, flying low and nearly silent just under the dome of the sky, wings stretched
a meter and a half from tip to tip.
Incredible! This would go into the poem, Gribov decided, but then the owl banked and turned, its claws wide and gleaming. Gribov couldn’t decide between drawing his pistol and just raising his arms. The owl took his face. Screaming, Gribov flailed and fell from the train. An alarm was raised, but from the woods Polish irregulars rained small arms fire down on the train.
Who would wake Trotsky? “The man would sleep through the Proletarian Revolution were he not in charge of scheduling it” was the common joke, but it wasn’t quite fair. Trotsky was awake twenty hours a day, so the four he slept were extremely necessary. He was difficult to awaken, and ornery when he finally arose. Even under Communism, whoever knocked on the door had better have his boots polished. Nechayev drew the short straw and was poised to knock when the door opened. Trotsky was already dressed, complete in leather coat and hat.
“We’re not under way, I presume,” Trotsky said, “because the tracks ahead have been destroyed. And we are concerned that if we head back along the line, we’ll encounter a Menshevik train. The cavalry train is also pinned down.”
A near-perfect set of wrong conclusions. Under any other circumstances, Trotsky would have been correct, but. . . .
“We have an infiltrator. She has sabotaged the engines. We were able to repulse the Poles, but we expect reinforcements by morning,” Nechayev said.
“She—” Trotsky began.
“So . . . we’ve heard,” Nechayev said.
“She’s not been captured yet? A woman? An individual woman?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Nechayev began. A few words later and Trotsky pushed past him, his own sidearm drawn, orders spilling forth.
The woman looked like a Pole; fair, with a round face, though there was something else about her coloration too, the bone structure around her cheeks. She wore the black leather uniform of a Red Sotnia fighter, though it was far too big for her. She’d made it as far as one of the supply cars. The men she had already dispatched slumped amidst piles of shoes, loose piles of tobacco, and potatoes spilling forth from the sacks they’d been stored in. Four guards had rifles trained on her. For a moment, Trotsky thought she was weeping silently, but then realized that the squint was just her eyes—she was a Tatar, or had some Tatar ancestry, anyway.
“Anyone have any Polish?” Trotsky asked. Then he tried, in Russian, then German, and even bad French, and English.
“Comrade Commissar,” one of the guards asked. “What shall we do? Shoot her? If we approach, she just . . .” he trailed off.
“. . . turns into an owl,” Trotsky finished. “Keep her pinned. Rotate comrades in and out of here. Let her stand there, looking foolish. Kick a bucket over to her so she can urinate without making a mess. If she does anything else . . . interesting, seal her in the car and detach it from the train on both ends. We’ll rendezvous the hard way.”
After hasty scrambles around tracks and over coaches to the restaurant car, everyone was full of questions, but only Trotsky was actually able to complete his sentences without interruption.
“You’d sacrifice the train, but—”
“Seal her in and set it on fire! That way—”
“How many more . . .”
“Why are you even taking this seriously?” Pozansky finally demanded of Trotsky. He was the senior of the commissar’s secretaries, and broad-chested, so his voice both metaphorical and literal carried like no other. “It defies all we know of science!”
“That is why,” Trotsky said. The room quieted. “Why am I on the verge of sacrificing our train? Because if a woman can metamorphose into an owl, our cause is lost. The proletarian dictatorship depends on proletarian revolution. The proletarian revolution depends on a dialectical understanding of history. The dialectical understanding of history”—the soldiers began shifting in their seats, as it sounded like Comrade Fancy Pants was gearing up for one of his extensive speeches—“and the dialectical understanding of history is built upon a bedrock of materialism.”
Trotsky tugged on his Vandyke. “We’re at war, so I’ll say it quickly. If she is some sort of mystical or supernatural being, our cause is lost. If magic is real, then Marxism is not. We may as well go home and light candles by the family icon.”
“What are the chances that this woman can turn into an owl in a way not possible to explain by some science, even if only the science of the future?” Pozansky asked. “And what are the chances that vodka and philosophical backsliding led to a certain level of embarrassment among our troop over the fact that a single, female saboteur eluded detection, damaged both engines, and killed several men with what was obviously a garden fork of some sort?”
“Low,” Trotsky said.
“Lower than the possibility that magic and superstition is real? That a fairy out of children’s tales attacked our train for the glory of Polish imperialists?”
“That depends on the nature of reality,” Trotsky said. “Which we will now investigate. Men, take the motorcars out. Find me a Pole who speaks Russian. Find me a Tatar familiar with the superstitions of his race. Find a book, a journal, anything, even if for children, on the subject of local folklore or avifauna. And try to make sure the Pole who can speak Russian is literate. Shoes and food and cigarettes and liquor to trade, and if the marketplace doesn’t meet our demands, well then, men, remember that you are Communists.”
When the troop dispersed, Trotsky raised an eyebrow at Pozansky. The senior secretary smirked back, and young Nechayev just looked confused.
“We cleared the train of anyone who might have been bamboozled by this stage magic,” Pozsansky explained.
“Obviously, she is wearing one of our uniforms. If she turned into an owl and then back, she would be nude,” Trotsky said. “What I am interested in, primarily, is finding out how our captive performs these tricks. It might make for a useful wedge between Polish workers and reactionary, credulous peasants.”
Nechayev said, “I thought we were never to lie to the working class.”
Trotsky shrugged. “We wouldn’t be. We’d be lying to the backwards elements of the peasantry. The Poles are lying to our people, of course, which is why this social-reactionary split has occurred.” Nechayev had the strong feeling that the only split that had occurred was that Trotsky was getting ready to have him demoted, arrested, or thrown off the train for passing on the owl story with such credulity.
“And we need to find out from whom she got one of our uniforms. We’ve not been through this part of the front before; we’ve had no recent casualties outside of the train from which the leathers could have been salvaged. If the Poles had decided to infiltrate, surely they would have sent a male, and a Russian speaker. I suspect some sort of love affair concocted by local peasant militias,” Trotsky said. “You two, move my desk over to the train in which our owl has been penned.”
A handful of comrades discovered Gribov on their way back from their mission. He was cold, bloodied, probably blinded, and one eye was missing entirely, but he lived. Much of his uniform was missing as well. They created a makeshift gurney from rifles and coats and brought him aboard, to the infirmary car.
Gribov was not a weak man, and he had fallen into a snow bank, so soon enough he was able to testify, haltingly. Pozansky took notes, argued closely over the advice of the medics.
“The owl? Not a small kite, or even an aeroplane of some sort?”
“It was warm, alive, smelled like the woods and dead prey . . .”
“Feathers would do that!”
“She took off my clothes. Just one little girl . . .”
“One? How do you know there was only one if you are missing one eye?”
“Just a pair of little hands . . .”
“Did they say anything?”
Gribov laughed. “Pshek pshek . . . you know how Poles sound. All consonants. Haha.”
“Comrade, there are many revolutionary Poles in our movement who might tell you that to a Pole, a Russian sounds like a child
,” Pozansky lectured. “Shaa shaa vaa vaaa.”
“Comrade secretary, please,” one of the medics said. “He needs rest, not political education.”
“We need to get to the bottom of the case of this infiltrator, comrade doctor!”
“Why not just shoot her and throw her into a ditch?” the medic demanded.
“Please don’t . . .” Gribov said. “She’s . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . my poem . . .”
“He’s delirious,” said the medic.
“Thank you for that insight, comrade doctor,” Pozansky said. “As we thought.”
Nechayev told Trotsky about finding Gribov, but that made the commissar only more interested in this interrogative theater. Soldiers had slowly moved into the train car, but kept their rifles, and further the length of two strides, between themselves and the girl. She looked like a wax doll of some sort. If not for the puffs of steam coming from her mouth with every exhalation, she could have passed for a bit of whimsical propaganda art amongst the supplies.
The soldiers had found several books on folklore, and a local bilingual speaker, an older woman who had experienced the border shifting between empires under her feet several times in her long life. She was not pleased to have been awakened at gunpoint and brought here for the interrogation, but she drank her tea and ate a potato and a bit of meat from the tin plate held on her lap with some pleasure. She could even read, but her glasses had been smashed during the trip back to the train, so her literacy was of no help.
“Do you two women know one another?” was the first question.
“I don’t associate with Tatars,” the old woman said. “Or Communists.”
“And yet here we all are,” said Trotsky. Nechayev put his hand to his forehead and sighed. Under the tsar he probably would have been whipped for the gesture, but Trotsky didn’t even notice.
“Ask her why she is against the proletarian revolution,” he said to the older woman. With a practiced sneer, she turned toward the girl and repeated the question in Polish. The answer was short.
