Night Soldiers ns-1
Page 3
Khristo Stoianev stood quietly, resisting the panic inside him. His eyes swept about the room, to the door and the press of bodies in front of it, to the smashed window, trying to choose. Before he could move in either direction, a hand took him above the elbow, a hard grip that hurt. It was Antipin, face completely without expression. “A cold cellar. There must be one,” he said softly.
“Where she cooks.” Khristo nodded toward the kitchen area, separated from the main room by a sagging drape on a cord.
“Come then,” Antipin said.
They brushed the drape aside. There was an old black wood stove, a rickety table, a bent-twig crucifix on the wall. A bin where potatoes and onions were stored through the winter. In order to circulate the air and keep the food from rotting, a square had been cut in the wall, then covered with a metal screen to keep the rats out. In winter, a piece of cardboard was hung over it on a nail to keep out the worst of the cold.
The widow, on hands and knees, was in the act of crawling through the broken-out screen of the narrow square. She disappeared suddenly, with a little cry, and they could see the night outside.
Antipin stopped him with a hand on the chest. “Let us see if there is a surprise planned. Wait for me to go through, then shout for the others.”
He was a square block of a man, but he moved like a monkey. Grabbing the upper edge of the frame with both hands, he swung out feet first. A few moments later, his face appeared.
“It’s safe,” he said.
Khristo moved toward the window, grasped the frame as Antipin had. Antipin raised a palm. “The others,” he said. Khristo shouted, heard a thunder of footsteps behind him, then went through. He landed on the side of the house facing the river, away from the dirt road.
Antipin peered cautiously around the side of the house, then waved for Khristo to follow him. Up by the road, a group of silhouettes stood beside a farmer’s open-bed truck. The shapes were silent, moving restlessly, pacing, turning to one another. In the darkness, Khristo could not see details-faces or clothing. One man detached himself from the crowd and walked slowly down the hill, toward the house.
Antipin, meanwhile, pulled the board away from the door and a group of coughing men came out in swirls of smoke and cinders. It was not difficult to jerk the nails from the wood, a kick from within would have done it, but the board had been cleverly positioned, across the knob, so that kicks against the door were ineffectual, and no one had thought to kick at the knob, an awkward target.
Khristo watched as the board was worked free of the door. It took him a moment to understand the device, it was too simple. But, when he did understand, something in the knowledge turned his stomach. Somebody, somewhere, in appearance a man like himself, had thought this method through. Had studied the problem: how to obstruct a door when setting fire to a house full of people so that those within could not escape, and had found a solution, and applied it. That there were those in the world who would study such things Khristo Stoianev had never understood. Now he did.
The man coming down the hill was Khosov the Policeman, brother of Khosov the Postman who kept the rhythm for the National Union parades. He was a policeman because no one had known what else to do with him. He was a man whose mouth never closed, who stared dreamily around him, seemingly amazed at a world full of ordinary things. He was slow. Everything had to be figured out. But when he did figure it out-and eventually he always did, especially if there was somebody around to help him-he could be swept away by a blind, insentient rage. At one time he had been much persecuted by children, until he beat one little boy very nearly to death with a broom handle.
The men stood around and watched the house burn. There was nothing to be done about it. A few buckets of water were tossed on neighboring roofs, to protect the dry reeds from embers floating through the night air. The widow knotted her hands in the binding of her apron and held it in her mouth while she wept, her wet cheeks shining in the firelight. The men around her were silent. They had brought a disaster down on her, and there was nothing to be done about that either.
Policeman Khosov came down the hill and stopped ten feet from Antipin. His eyes searched the crowd carefully; one had better not make a mistake here, as one’s fellows watched from the road above. They were counting on him, trusted him to go it alone; he wasn’t going to-not if he had to stand here all night-let them down.
One to another, each in turn, he peered at them, his face knotted with concentration, sweat standing on his brow with the effort of it, mouth open as always. Even though it might be you he sought, the sheer agony of the process made you want to help him.
Finally, he discovered Antipin, his eyes widening with the amazement of having gotten it right. He pointed with his arm fully extended, like an orator.
“You,” he said. “You, communist, come with me now.” His other hand rested on the butt of a large revolver in a holster.
Antipin made no move. There was a long silence, the fire crackling and popping as the dry roof timbers caught.
“Did you hear me?”
Antipin took a step forward, inclined his head toward Khosov and said, “What did you say?”
“I said come with me. No trouble, now.”
Antipin took another step. The fire played shadows on his back. He spoke very slowly, as to a child. “Go back up this hill, you braying ass, and tell your friends up there that their mouths will be full of dirt. Can you remember that?” The “mouths full of dirt” referred to events in the grave.
They watched Khosov’s face. Watched the slow painful process as the information was worked at, disassembled, examined. When comprehension arrived, his hand tightened on the butt of the pistol but it was much too late.
Antipin flowed easily through the space between them and punched Khosov in the heart, a downward motion, as though his balled fist were a hammer. It blew the breath from Khosov’s mouth and made him sit down and wrap his arms around his chest. Antipin leaned over and took the revolver from the holster and smashed it to pieces on a rock. Khosov groaned, then hunched over, struggling to breathe. Antipin reached down and put two fingers inside his nostrils and jerked his head upright. Khosov gave a shrill little cry like a hurt animal.
“Now you go up there and tell them what I said. That they shall eat the dirt.”
Antipin let him go and he managed to stand up, still gasping for air. Blood ran freely from his nose and he tried to stop it with his hand. He gave Antipin one terrified glance-this is a thing that makes pain, stay away from it always-then turned and scrabbled up the hill, holding his nose, head turtled down between his shoulders like a child running away from a beating.
Khristo watched him go, then turned to look at the men around him, illuminated by the light of the burning house. They coughed and spit, trying to get the smoke out of themselves. Someone had dragged the man from the windowsill where he had fallen and laid his smoking body on the ground. He had been burned black in the fire, but those who had heard the sound of the iron bar knew he had been beyond feeling anything at all. Up on the road, the group of silhouettes shifted nervously as Khosov the Policeman scurried toward them.
Khristo sensed clearly that this was not the end of it, that it would go on, that each act would become a debt to be repaid with interest. Nikko’s death had seemed to him, to his family, a tragedy of bad fate-like a drowning, or a mother taken at childbirth. You had to live with death, God gave you no choice. Today it was your turn, tomorrow it would touch your neighbor; thus people gathered around you, held you up with their spirit, tried to fill the empty place. He now understood that Nikko’s death was a tragedy of a different kind. It was part of something else; there was a connection, a design, at first faint, now much clearer. The unknown intelligence that conceived a method of blocking doors could also see a purpose in the murder of a fifteen-year-old for laughing at a parade.
As Khosov climbed toward the road, a man near Khristo said, “We had better stand together here.”
The old fisherm
an took a step back. “I am no part of this.”
“Go home then,” someone said. “They know where you live.”
“I do not oppose them. I will tell them that.”
“Then there will be no problem,” the man said, a sour irony in his voice.
On the road, Khosov and the others climbed onto the back of the truck, which stuttered to life and bounced away down the dirt road.
Khristo found Antipin at his shoulder. “Come with me,” the Russian said. “Let us take a little walk together.”
They walked down to the river, past the sagging pole docks, to the sand beach below the walls of the old fort, called Baba Vida-Grandma Vida-built by the Turks three hundred years earlier, though some of the inner walls had blocks set by Greek and Roman hands.
It was well after midnight, a stiff breeze blew off the river, they could just make out the dark bulk of the Romanian shore on the other side. Antipin rolled two cigarettes and gave one to Khristo, lit a wooden match with his thumbnail. They bent toward each other to protect the flame from the wind. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness as they walked along the beach.
“You understand, do you not,” Antipin said, “that they meant for me to kill him.”
“Who?”
“The policeman.”
“Khosov?”
“If that’s his name.”
“Why?”
“Why. To create an incident, to make politics, to give their newspapers something to say: bloody-fanged Bolshevik murders local policeman. Yes?”
Khristo thought about it for a time. He understood it, but it seemed very strange. Events occurred, newspaper stories were written. That the sequence could be staged-events made to happen so that stories would be written-had simply never crossed his mind.
“The murder was their alternative, a second scheme to try in case their first one failed.”
Khristo squinted with concentration. The world Antipin was describing seemed obscure and alien, a place to be explained by an astrologer or a magician. Violence he knew, but this was a spider web.
“You see,” he continued, “they meant for all of us to die in that house. An accident, they would say. Those pigs were swilling brandy and some lout knocked over an oil lamp and whoosh, there it went and too bad. But you see, Khristo Nicolaievich, I repeat only their words. And words may be spoken in different ways. Their fine faces would tell a much different story. The wink, the sly look, the flick of a finger that chases a fly, would give those words quite another meaning. We burnt them up, they would say, with pride in their eyes. That’s how it is, boys. We take care of our own problems around here. We don’t go crying to the politsiya. We see something wrong-we go ahead and fix it.”
Khristo nodded silently. Veiko, the others, were like that.
“So, you can see how it works? They had the policeman ready in case we got out of the house. Sent him down to arrest me. Knew very well he was too stupid to manage it. A simple provocation. Right?”
“Right.”
“You are a thinker, that I can tell. You turn the world over in your mind to see if it is truly round.”
Khristo was both flattered and a little uncomfortable to be addressed in this way. One didn’t hear compliments. He took a drag at his cigarette, feeling very much the man. There was something so admirable about Antipin. The local toughs were blowhards, dangerous only in a group. Antipin was strong in another way entirely, he had an assurance, carried himself like a man who owned the ground wherever he stood. The notion that he, son of a fisherman in a little town at the end of the world, could win the respect of such a man was definitely something to be thought about.
“I try to understand things,” he answered cautiously. “It is important that people understand”-here he got lost-“things,” he finished, feeling like a bird with one wing.
“Naturally,” Antipin said. “So you see their intention. Get rid of a problem, let everybody here and about know you got rid of it, and perhaps others will not be so quick to cause problems. Bravery is a quirky thing at best-you know the old saying about brave men?”
“All brave men are in prison?”
“Just so. We have it a little differently-all brave men have seen heaven through bars-but the thought is almost the same.” He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. “We Slavs have suffered. God knows how we have suffered. In the West, they say we cannot be bothered to count our dead. But we have learned about human nature. We paid a terrible price to learn it, because you must see desperation before you can understand how humans truly are. Then you know. Lessons learned in that way are not forgotten. Do you see this?”
He paused a moment, then continued. “I will tell you a story. When Catherine was empress of Russia-you’ll remember, she was the one who fucked horses-she chanced to be wandering one day in a wood some distance from St. Petersburg and found a beautiful wildflower. She was enraptured by it, such a tiny, perfect thing, and so she decreed right then and there that a soldier be assigned to guard the spot just in case, in future days, it should bloom again. Eighteen years later, someone chanced to find that order in a file and went out there, and there was a soldier guarding a spot in the forest, in case a wildflower might bloom, in case, if it did bloom, some shitfoot of a peasant might come along and stomp on it-as if he had nothing better to do.”
Khristo was properly silent for a moment; he loved and respected a story like little else. Antipin bent to the sand, put his cigarette out, slipped the remnant in his pocket.
“Was the flower grown? When they went there the second time?”
“The story does not say. I like to think it wasn’t. But the point has to do with being ruled. Being someone else’s property. Fifty years ago the landlords owned their serfs, hundreds of them, to do with as they pleased. They would marry them off, one to another, to please their wives’ romantic fantasies. We love dolls in Russia, Khristo Nicolaievich, it helps us remember our past.”
“Perhaps it was like that here too,” Khristo said. “When the Turks ruled us.”
“The Turk still rules you, my friend, except that he has taken off the fez and put on a crown. Czar Boris, your king calls himself. Czar! And he is the toy of the army and the fascist officers’ clique that calls itself Zveno, the chain link. You are young, and have lived a natural life on this river, perhaps you don’t yet understand how these bastards work. You see Veiko and his little army, and you know them for what they are-bullies, drunken piss-bags out for a good time. But when there is fertile political soil, your Veiko will soon be a towering tree. As things stand now, he is the future of this country.”
He paused a moment, cleared his throat. “Forgive me, there is a demon in me that demands to make speeches. Let me tell you, instead, what will happen here. Your brother died at the hands of swine, and nothing was done. Nothing will be done.”
Khristo’s heart sank. A thousand times he had wished that that night could be lived over again, that he could take Nikko by the scruff of the neck, as a wise older brother should have, and haul him away from the ridiculous parade. He had loved his brother well enough, his death was a piece torn away from his own life, but there was more than that. The sorrow of the family had lodged in his father, and he suspected, no, he knew, that his father blamed him for it.
“Do not feel shame,” Antipin said quietly, reading his mood. “It was not your fault, no matter what you think. You should not blame yourself. I do not grant absolution, I am not a priest. But it is history that I understand, and this thing had to happen. It was meant to happen. That it happened to you, to your brother, is sorrowful but you will someday see that it was inevitable. The important thing is this: what will you do now?”
“I don’t know.” His voice sounded small. They had reached the end of the beach and stood for a time, the Turkish fortress looming above them, the river running quietly along the sand, white foam visible in the darkness.
“What then?”
“Come with me. East.” Antipin nodded his head downriver.
His eyes followed Antipin’s gesture into the darkness, toward the East. His stomach fluttered at the idea of such a journey, as though he had been invited to step off the edge of the world.
“Me?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why?” In wonder.
“Here, in this town, it will go on. You will not survive it. They murdered your brother; they must now presume you to be their mortal enemy, very troubling to keep an eye on. As the eldest brother, responsibility to even the score rests with you. With me or without me, Khristo Nicolaievich, you must go away. You may very well save your family’s life, you will certainly save your own.”
Khristo had not meant why go. He had meant why me. But Antipin had answered the wrong question the right way. It would happen like the old feuds-one of mine, one of yours, until only one stood. Since Nikko’s death he had hidden this from himself but it festered within him. Now it had been said aloud and a weight fell away.
“Come with me,” Antipin said, “and I will teach you something. I will teach you how to hurt them. Hurt them in ways that they do not begin to understand, hurt them so that they cry for mercy, which, by then, I think you will not grant. Your country has a sickness. We know the sickness well because we were once its victims, and we know how to cure it. We have taught others, we can teach you. You yearn to see the world, to move among men, to do things that matter. I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse’s backside. Come with me, my friend, it is a chance at life. This river goes many places, it does not stop in Vidin.”