by Ralph Peters
She looked up at the balconies hung with wash, collecting the tiny particles of poison that haunted the Moscow air. She did not understand how others could tolerate it so easily, accepting the decayed communal apartments, where families shared one another's dirt and secrets, the struggle for poor food, and men who never gave a thought to their women except when they were aroused or drunk or both.
As she passed a butcher shop, Valya automatically glanced in the window. White-aproned attendants stood about slackly, crowned with undersize white hats. The display cases were empty. But the display shelves in the window were decorated with pictures of various meats and sausages, as though the passerby might be fooled into visions of abundance.
Even the sight of photographed food made Valya feel sicker. The nation of empty shops. Of empty wombs. She felt unreasonably cold.
Around the corner, a line had formed, but for once Valya had no interest in what had suddenly become available. Her only concern was to find the quickest way past the huddling women in their coats that smelled of storage. A few idle men had joined the line, as well, and they looked Valya up and down.
Valya laughed to herself. And if you could have seen me an hour ago? If you could have seen the bloody mess of me. Would you have wanted me then?
Probably. And then they would have complained about the waste left on them. They were all pigs.
Valya stumbled slightly and almost lost her direction. The nearest faces regarded her sullenly, as though she might attempt to push into the line. She heard the word oranges. And it was a remarkable thing to think of oranges appearing wondrously, magically now, in October, with the groves where oranges grew engulfed in war. Surely, these would be the last of the year. But she had no appetite for oranges now.
Perhaps Yuri was fighting amid the orange groves. What a pretty place that would be to have a war. Perhaps Yuri was happier with his tanks and guns and soldiers than he had ever been with her. In his letters he offered no details of his life, only maudlin reminiscences.
Valya tried to focus her eyes, her efforts. To decide where she was really going. She tried to think about trolleys and bus stops, routes and schedules. But she was uncertain of this street. Abruptly, she changed her direction.
Her thoughts would not come clear. All of the faces she passed appeared identical. Even their scars were identical. Horrible scars. She began to cross a bridge slumped over a drainage canal. She idly touched the old wrought-iron work, a rusted reminder of past centuries, cold under her fingers. Then she found herself gripping the oxidized spearheads, clinging to the bridge, struggling to remain on her feet. A wave of unexpected pain rippled up from her belly to her stomach and she began to spill a bit of saliva from the corner of her mouth. Now, too late, she felt a growing wetness at the top of her legs. It was a joke. Another punishment. Valya, the girl who was in control of everything. Closing her eyes, she gripped the railing still harder, praying not to fall to the pavement. But closing her eyes only made it worse.
She opened her eyes. And the pain suddenly receded. But the wetness was still there, quickly losing its warmth, sliming down over the inside of her thighs.
For a long moment, she could only stare into the filthy murk of the canal. Spotted with oil rainbows. So still. Necklaces of garbage on the banks. Islands of junk expelled from high windows. When leaves floated down, the water seemed to reach up and clutch them, anxious to coat them with its filth. The high walls of the apartment buildings lining both sides of the canal were flecked like old, sick skin.
She needed a toilet but had no idea where to look. It was a country that could not even receive its own waste properly. Suddenly Valya imagined that she would die before she found anyone or anything that would help her. Two grandmothers scuttled by, commenting sourly about public drunkenness and sparking Valya back to life, into a powerless, frozen rage.
She had dirtied herself. She had dirtied her entire life. And what if Yuri ever found out? She would lose even that. The bare minimum of safety.
She made herself walk. She went into the first open building she could find and tried to clean herself in the shadows of a basement stairwell. Her underpants were slopping with blood and a thick wetness, and her handkerchief was too small to cope with the problem. At first reluctantly, then resolutely, she pulled the silk scarf from around her neck. Another gift from Naritsky. And she began to clean her thighs, struggling not to lose her balance or to faint, no longer even caring if anyone saw her.
She leaned back against the wall, drinking in the dead air. She released the silken rag from her hand, and it fell heavily to the floor. As her eyes learned the darkness, she saw a row of dustbins, some with newspapers overflowing their collars. Determinedly, she tore off the cleanest-looking pages and bunched them, then held them against herself, trying to bring enough pressure to stop the bleeding. She was awash with sweat, and very cold.
She shoved hard at herself, trying to force away the ache as she stanched the flow of blood. How could men become so helpless over it? she thought. My God, what if they saw you like this? And she began to laugh again, dropping her head back against the cinder blocks, catching her hair.
She made her way back out into the gray day, walking out of any sense of time, until she came to a small, halfrecognized park. She limped down a curling path to a bench and sat down hard, as though dropping from crutches. She stared up into the gray vacancy, aware that she was cold, yet oddly calm and very still. There was no need to shiver. That would have been far too bothersome, too violent. She lowered her eyes slightly, to the emaciated white trees. Going bald. Their last leaves shriveled, hanging on randomly. Her bones pressed down on the cold slats. She felt a bit of wetness, but sensed that the worst bleeding had stopped.
Lies.
Suddenly, she felt hungry, even though her stomach still sent contradictory signals of nausea. Perhaps, she thought, it was just the other emptiness. My body wants to be full again. Any way it can. Utterly confused at herself, Valya buried her face in her hands. And, at last, she began shaking with the cold.
A female voice intruded. Speaking in a foreign language. English. But with a very bad accent. Perhaps an American. Valya looked up.
She saw the woman's clothes first. Because they were so much more impressive than the woman herself, who merely looked big and well fed. But the richness of the cloth in the coat, the wasteful generosity of its cut, the deep leather gloss and stitching of the shoes, these were qualities beyond anything that Valya possessed. The woman wore a scarf in rich, subdued colors, and Valya realized in shame that she would not have had the sophistication to choose such a scarf, that she would have missed it with her child's eye, captivated by hot colors and too-bold patterns. In a glimpse Valya saw the extent of her ignorance of the world in which she had imagined herself, realizing that her failure was even greater than she had intuited.
The woman held a book, and she turned hastily through its pages with her plump pink fingers. It was an English-language book. The cover said, A Guide to Moscow. The woman muttered a few English words. Oh, where is it now? Oh, wouldn't you know it? She caught her lower lip in her teeth as she scanned the pages, not once looking at Valya.
And perhaps I am not worth looking at? Valya considered.
The woman mumbled, tearing at the pages. Her English was so unlike the clean, careful sentences Valya drilled into her students. The boys in their blazers, arms growing out of the sleeves. And the white-aproned girls. This foreign woman had a nasal, distinctly unattractive voice.
She was not pretty. But her skin and hair had a quality as rich as her clothing, the sum of a foreign life of luxury. Even after all that had happened, the Americans were very rich. Valya could not understand why any of them would want to come to Moscow. For a vacation in a graveyard.
Perhaps she was a diplomat's wife. Of course. With the war, there could not be tourists. Or perhaps her husband was a great businessman. Naritsky said that business never stopped. Not even for wars.
The big woman
's face brightened. And she nodded positively to herself, like a horse about to neigh. She had found her page. And she began to speak.
It was an attempt at Russian. But it merely came out as gibberish. Valya could not understand a bit of it. But she obstinately refused to offer the woman a word of English.
The woman ceased reading and looked at Valya. Imploringly. The sudden confidence had disappeared again. But Valya would not meet the woman's eyes. It was hard enough to look at the soft, thick, flowing fabric of her winter coat, or to consider the fine soft shoes that Valya's own glued-together bits of vinyl and plastic sought pathetically to imitate. Valya was certain that this woman had never suffered, had never endured anything. That she had been able to gobble dependable little pills or use some comfortable device that kept her body out of hell and be damned to her soul. By accident of birth this woman had everything of which Valya dreamed. A life without want, without pain.
Let her suffer now. For this one moment.
The big woman tried again, more timidly, in a measured voice. And Valya could just make out the substance of it. Where was the nearest metro station?
Valya did not even try to answer. She merely stared up at the woman, meeting her eyes at last, in the profoundest hatred she had ever felt in her life. Her feelings toward the brusque attendant at the clinic, or toward Naritsky at the depth of her humiliation, toward other women who had stolen boyfriends or precious clothes, had never approached this intensity.
The foreign woman did not understand, of course. Or did not care. She simply gave up and wandered off in her plush confusion, wearing Valya's ambitions and dreams.
Valya's anger trailed after the woman, weakening with each of the foreigner's steps, finally disappearing with her. It simply took too much effort. Exhausted from the ferocity of her emotions, Valya slumped back emptily against the hard slats, her mind finally idle. Soon, she sensed, she would need to gather her strength and go on. But for one peaceful moment she sat vacantly.
A snap of wind crisped dead leaves around her ankles and calves, then a ragged handbill lofted against her skirt, caught, and fell back onto the pavement. Valya could just make out the faded headline:
VICTORY WILL BE OURS, COMRADES
5
Near Omsk, Western Siberia
1 November 2020
Colonel George Taylor stood erectly in his Soviet greatcoat, waiting for a ride. He set his ruined face against the cold and thought of enemies old and new, of the crisis lurching toward them all, and of a nagging problem with spare parts. He reviewed a recent disagreement with one of his subordinates, a general's son who had been pressed upon him, and that somehow tricked him into thinking about the woman he had left behind, about whom he disagreed with himself. Unexpected, contradictory, and so very welcome, she had a way of coming to mind whenever he failed to concentrate hard enough on the business at hand.
He quickly mastered his thoughts and marched them on. A part of him continued to suspect that the woman was plain bad medicine, and he had far more important problems with which to grapple. The Soviet forces were taking a godawful beating. And his own options were running out.
He whistled as he stood in the cold, without really being aware of his action. "Garry Owen," the old Irish reel that another cavalryman had taken for the U.S. Army, many years before. Taylor had begun the whistling business as part of the carefully constructed persona he had employed in Mexico, but afterward the habit proved impossible to unlearn completely. It settled into a sometime quirk, another sort of scar to be worn through the years, something you tended to forget until a stranger's reaction called your attention back to it.
It was very cold. The autumn snows had not yet come, but the industrial wilderness in which the regiment under Taylor's command lay hidden had the sharp feel of winter, of cold rusting iron. It struck Taylor as the sort of place that could never hold any real warmth, although Merry Meredith insisted that this part of Western Siberia could be miserably hot in the summer. The site was a museum of inadequacy, with tens of square miles of derelict means: work halls with buckling roofs, broken gantries and skeletal cranes, crumbling smokestacks, and mazes of long-empty pipes. Inside the metal shells lay useless antique machines, numbering in the tens of thousands. The sheer vastness of the abandoned site was unsettling. But it was a perfect place to assemble a military force in secrecy.
Still, it was no place a man would choose to be of his own free will. The site was a graveyard, leaking old poisons. It offered no evidence of life beyond a few withered fringes of grass, brown and futile in the decaying afternoon light. The regimental surgeon and the medics were going to great lengths to create sterile islands, to monitor toxin levels, to hold death at arm's length until the regiment was committed to battle. And Taylor let them go, commending their efforts, even as he suspected that the prophylactic measures were no more determinate than incantations or crosses painted on doors. The Soviets had poisoned this landscape, just as they had poisoned their country. This was the land of the dead. The cold acid-sharp air was haunted by death. The catacombs of plants and warehouses in which his war machines lay waiting felt infectious. Not only with the chemical waste of generations, but with a sickness of spirit. The troops either whispered or spoke too loudly in the course of their duties. Of all the grim places his career had taken him, only a few had made Taylor so anxious to leave. Above all, the broken industrial complex had a feel of enmity, of resentment. Of jealousy toward the living.
Taylor laughed, startling the officers gathered loosely around him. He was thinking that, after all, this landscape and he bore a certain resemblance to each other.
"You're in a good mood, sir," Major Martinez said, baffled. His voice wavered in the cold.
Taylor turned his jigsaw-puzzle face toward the supply officer, cutting a smile up into his cheeks. "Come on, Manny. The Russians are late, there's a nightmare of a war going on, we're stuck here in this… this Soviet Disneyland, and we're all trying to pretend we're not freezing our butts off. Why shouldn't I be in a good mood?"
Even as he finished speaking, the constructed smile collapsed. He was in the worst of spirits, worried about his mission and his men, at a point beyond shouting. But he knew enough about the devils in each of the officers who relied upon him in this bad hour to want to be strong for them, even if he could not always be strong for himself.
"Well, it certainly isn't Texas," Martinez answered, with an exaggerated shiver of his shoulders.
"Or Mexico," Merry Meredith offered. A coffee-skinned man so handsome that most men underestimated his ferocity. Toughest intelligence officer Taylor had ever met. Loyal to the end. And, no doubt, missing his bright, redheaded wife and his children.
"Or Los Angeles," Martinez shot back. They were teasing each other with the most wretched military memories they could bring to bear.
"Or Zaire," Lieutenant Colonel Heifetz said suddenly, with an awkward, well-intentioned smile. "Lucky Dave" Heifetz found it terribly difficult to deal with his fellow officers on anything but a professional level, and he had a reputation as the greatest of stoics, the man without emotion. But Taylor recognized the intent of the clumsy reference, the overwrought grin. Heifetz, too, felt the need to draw a little closer in the dying afternoon.
Taylor never spoke about Zaire. It was a rule that everyone tacitly recognized. Except Lucky Dave, whose social skills had begun to wither years before, in another country.
Taylor nodded to his hapless subordinate. Even now, after so long a time, it was the best he could do.
But Heifetz did not understand. He blundered on. His
Israeli accent grew more pronounced when he was ill at ease, and it was unusually heavy now.
"Yes, I think so," Heifetz said. "I believe that Zaire must have been the worst of climates. A very bad place." Taylor shrugged, not quite meeting any man's eyes. "Up on the big river," he said. "It's a hard place up on the river. But the grasslands weren't so bad."
"Where the hell are the Russians?" Merry
Meredith said quickly. Meredith had been with Taylor longer than any of them.
"I can't believe they're jerking us around like this," Manny Martinez said. Martinez had made a life's work out of leaving San Antonio behind. Yet his body still wanted the southern sun.
"I don't think they're jerking us around, Manny," Taylor said. "Something's wrong. You can feel it."
"Everything's wrong," Meredith said. He was the regimental S-2, the intelligence officer, responsible, according to the time-honored division of labor, for enemy, weather, and terrain. "The Soviet front's coming apart. It's gotten to the point where I don't know which problem area to look at first." He laughed slightly, bitterly. "Hell, I think one of the reasons I'm standing out here with you guys is that I just can't take it back in the bubble anymore. The combat information's just pouring in. And all of the news is bad."
Taylor glanced off into the vacant afternoon. Still no sign of the Russians. It was especially troubling, since, up until now, they had been careful to live up to every support commitment, despite the overwhelming problems they themselves faced.
"Why don't you all go in and have a cup of coffee," Taylor said. "Go ahead. I need a little time to think. Merry, you can get us a threat update."
Taylor knew that they all wanted to go back inside the vast work hall where the regimental headquarters had been established. It was not much warmer inside, but the difference was enough that your mind did not dwell constantly on the cold. Still, none of them moved. Nobody wanted to seem disloyal to the old man.
"Goddamnit, fellas," Taylor said, "if I tell you to go back inside, you go back inside. Do you understand me?" Heifetz moved crisply for the battered tin door set into the huge double gates of the work hall. Heifetz always obeyed promptly, with no outward sign of approval or disapproval. Of them all, Taylor knew, Heifetz had the least interest in creature comforts. He would have moved as sharply had Taylor ordered him to march into a freezing swamp.
