Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  8

  Looking for a Postcard

  The Bogdanakhi airstrip, already out of action, had been bombed again. The bombs had missed and hit a row of houses on the outskirts of town, near the railway station. The houses burned in a leisurely way, sending drifts of smoke into the center of town.

  Burnell did not dislike this picturesque touch. It made him feel intrepid—something to tell Stephanie about. “A pall is drifting across the table as I write…”

  Like many of the city’s inhabitants, he was in a ragged state. During the adventures of the previous night, he had ripped the leg of his jeans, so that his knee showed. In Europe, a certain kind of youth prided themselves in having knees or indeed buttocks protruding through tattered jeans: a folk gesture toward a vanished proletariat. Such tricks of sartorial fashion worked only in prosperous societies. Here, his naked knee served more as a badge of extinction than distinction, and all too well suited his low mood.

  He found the mayor’s office, situated in a building with a bullet-spattered facade on the main square, Ploshchad Dimbarza. The undusted interior presented a touching mix of battered filing cabinets, some electronic equipment, and worn Second Empire furniture. The walls were hung with vast oils of peasant girls in kerchiefs on co-operatives. He noticed how their scythes followed you round the room.

  Hardly surprisingly, Sigua was not there. The office and its staff looked tense. The girls were pale and nervous, huddling together under a faded portrait of Lenin glaring gloomily outwards at the intruder, like a musk ox protecting its young. No information was forthcoming. Burnell put this down to the air raid.

  Sigua’s deputy was finally induced to emerge from an inner cubbyhole: a scruffy young man smoking a cigarette and sniffing. He cringed and kept glancing at the girls, as if for assistance. His manner invited bullying; Burnell accepted. He stressed his friendship with Mayor Sigua, while refraining from mentioning the kiss at the banquet. This only caused the deputy to draw another cigarette out of a battered packet and burst into a smoke-filled explanation in Georgian.

  After more persistence on Burnell’s part, he fetched an official form from his cubbyhole. The form, completed in purple ink, stated that two functionaries, a priest and a protector, had been appointed for Dr. Burnell’s visit by Mayor Sigua. Sigua stated that civic funds had been issued on behalf of the WACH, in order that Dr. Burnell should proceed in safety to the historic Church of Ghvtismshobeli, the Church of the Mother of God.

  This was very satisfactory.

  Questioned through one of the office women, who spoke schoolgirl French, the deputy told Burnell that Father Kadredin, the priest designated, had volunteered for the mission. She said, “The Holy Father has engaged a gunman.” Burnell was not averse to this last statement; it had a truly Georgian ring to it.

  He asked again about Mayor Sigua. Again he received an evasive answer. All looked nervous. One slip of a girl crossed herself. The French-speaker told Burnell what he already knew, that the airstrip was bombed and out of action.

  “There is enemy everywhere. Everywhere enemy. Enemy in Bogdanakhi.” She looked suspiciously at Burnell. “Have you passport?”

  Burnell asked to send a cable to General Stalinbrass in FAM. This restored their confidence in his bona fides, and he was allowed to do so. In his message he asked for assistance and, if possible, a helicopter. The ladies offered a coffee, which he refused. He had determined to replace his tattered jeans with a good pair of trousers, if possible, and said he would return in an hour for a reply to the cable.

  There were fewer people than before on the streets. Burnell was too low in mood to worry about that. The city was smaller than had appeared the previous day: smaller and more broken. Its magic had fled and no bands played. Along one of the two main avenues, the houses proved to be mere shells, burnt out, their facades mocking. Bomb craters made some streets impassable. A line of trees had been roughly hacked down, to serve as firewood when electricity failed.

  Such shops as were open were practically empty of goods. On a patch of waste ground a few women stood behind stalls offering vegetables like museum pieces. A cock with its clockwork strut walked nearby, crowing intermittently in almost human terms of complaint. Burnell went over to look at a booth selling newspapers. He hoped to find a postcard to send to his ex-wife in California, but there was no such thing.

  As he turned back into the other main avenue, a man was running by. It was Jim Irving. When Burnell hailed him, Irving paused and then came over. He shook hands, asking concernedly if Burnell was all right.

  “I want to get you out of town fast, OK? I’m just fixing details. The Dead One has made a fatal move.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Later. Tell you later. Going to attend a meeting.” He was about to press on when a beggar came over at a fast shuffle and seized his hand. It was the blind man to whom Irving had spoken on the previous day. His notice still hung round his neck. He had been standing in a doorway, and came when he heard the American’s voice.

  They shook hands. While Burnell stood by, they conversed in Georgian. The beggar showed Irving a saucepan full of money. Even as he held it out for inspection, a passer-by dropped another coin in it.

  The beggar went off in one direction, Burnell and Irving in the other. Burnell asked why the beggar’s luck had changed.

  “His faith in the kindness of his fellow-men has been restored. He figures it’s all on account of the new notice around his neck.”

  “What exactly did you write on his notice?”

  “I put, ‘Next week, the moon above us will be full—I shall not see it.’ That did the trick. As you maybe learnt at the banquet, these Georgians set great store by poetry. Some of ’em do, let’s say.

  Giving himself a self-satisfied smile, he was off again.

  Pretty smart, thought Burnell, and continued his search for trousers.

  Douglas Freshfield in his book had praised the shops of Bogdanakhi. He noted that they contained a wealth of Western goods, including saddles, hip flasks, china dolls with eyes that closed, and opera glasses. But that had been almost a century and half ago. Civilization had received many body blows since then, and was retreating under a tide of edicts, insurrections, orphans, invoices, and independence movements.

  The only goods on display were cheap print dresses, more vegetables, and quantities of a small white enamel cooker made in Volgograd, with which several shops were over-stocked. There was no chance of replacing his cameras.

  Turning into a side street, he discovered an old garage converted into a store. The owner, an Armenian, presided over a trove of junk, including furniture and clothing. Among the clothes were hats, boots, and garments from many cultures. At the murky back of the store, Burnell came on a pile of English cavalry twill trousers, well-provided with pockets, and ginger in color. He bought a pair which fitted, and strode out into the sunlight wearing them, his old jeans under his arm. The feeling of self-consciousness would pass; and perhaps the ginger would fade.

  In Ploshchad Dimbarza was a bar, conveniently situated next to the mayor’s offices. To determine whether it was open or not was a problem. No sign announced its function, its owner perhaps working on a Georgian ethical principle that those who could not detect the presence of drink unaided did not deserve any. Burnell went in.

  A small terracotta-colored space was filled with the officers of the West Georgian Republican Army. Among them was Ziviad Orpishurda in his black SAS jacket. Kaginovich was not present. The officers had their heads together in a conspiratorial way. Their heads went up, their glasses down, when Burnell entered. They immediately made preparations to leave.

  “Look, I don’t want to break things up,” Burnell protested.

  All the cheer of yesterday had evaporated. The men’s faces were pale and drawn. With a clatter, they gathered up their weapons from behind the bar, nodded to Burnell, who stood aside for them, and filed out into the square. Jim Irving was left, sitting alone at a round marble
-topped table. Without quite erasing a frown, he motioned Burnell to sit down.

  “Let me buy you an arak, Roy.” He had a Borzhomi mineral water in front of him. The dim room was now deserted except for the two of them and a short fat bartender in shirt-sleeves, who served up a drink with alacrity. He retired behind his bar, to stand under a fading portrait of the old king, Herekle II, who was looking reproachfully into the nostrils of a horse.

  “There’s going to be trouble,” Irving said. “You’d better get out of town.”

  He spoke in rather a curious way, out of the corner of his mouth.

  To Burnell came a kind of folk memory of old Western movies seen on television. Whatever else was lost, old time-stained names returned; Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper… This was a replay with Irving seeing himself in the lead. The bar, the barman, the lull before the storm, the sunlit square empty outside, the sheriff prepared for trouble, his Winchester out of sight under the table, uttering his immortal lines. “We got till sunset… Go while the going’s good…”

  Nervously trying to act his part, Burnell tossed down the arak, right to the back of his throat. He felt no better afterwards. It tasted much like the anis he drank in Paris bistros. Only the glass was dirtier. “Perhaps I need a Borzhomi too,” he said, with a plunge out of character.

  “Kaginovich has to be killed,” Irving said, from under an imaginary stetson. He sipped his mineral water, the good man forced to take up his gun again.

  “You were going to tell me how he acquired his nickname,” said Burnell, trying to force Irving from his self-imposed role.

  Irving fixed his disconcerting eyes on Burnell before speaking.

  “Moral emptiness. That’s what the world’s suffering from. That’s what we’ll die of, Roy. ‘Without vision, the people perish Moral emptiness. You can feel it round you all the time.”

  “To be honest, I can’t feel it, Jim. You mean here in Transcaucasia?”

  “Everywhere. In you too, I’d say. Maybe that’s why you can’t feel it. That dissolute banquet yesterday—it disgusted me. You know a great deal about churches and mosques but they’re just empty shells to you. You have no religion.” Of course the old Westerns often had a preacher to point a moral.

  “Spare me, Jim, for I have sinned. Barman, erti Borzhomi please!”

  Irving leaned forward, tapping the table with an index finger. “Don’t fool around with your soul! Try to understand the inner meaning of the situation here. Every human drama is also a theological drama. Lazar Kaginovich was born of the dead. That is why he is a leader in this part of the world, where all bar nationalistic creeds are dead. Hearts are dead. Oh yes, they pretend Christianity, but those decades under Communism have perverted their faith.”

  “Look—” said Burnell. But Irving fixed him with blazing blue eyes and launched into a terrible story.

  Thirty years earlier, he said, an epidemic of cholera swept through Georgia. The Soviet authorities kept quiet about the disaster—censored it, so that the outside world never heard of the epidemic. Mass graves were dug. Thousands of people, men, women, children, died. Prayers were illegal but were said nevertheless by the few surviving priests.

  “OK. A young girl called Medea lived in Bogdanahki. She was just twenty years old, well-liked, very pretty, and a member of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Movement. Medea fell ill. She was taken to hospital. There she appeared to die. Parents wept, gave her up for dead, and a priest performed last rites over her. An over-worked doctor signed her death certificate. She was laid out on a slab to be buried next morning.”

  Medea was renowned for her prowess in gymnastics. She was famous as far away as Tbilisi. News of her death caused a stir, even when so many people were going daily to their graves.

  A Commissar in his sixties, white-haired, white-moustached, had had his eye on Medea and encouraged her career. As a token of respect, he volunteered on behalf of the Komsomol to stand vigil all night over Medea’s corpse. The family didn’t dare refuse the honor.

  But the old fox’s motives were not pious. Drinking in the morgue, alone in the small hours, the Commissar got to peeking at the beautiful corpse. He became excited. Ripping off the coverings, he had a good look, and copulated with Medea’s dead body.

  “That’s what he did, Roy. The sin was well attested. Raped the dead body, front and rear…”

  “Look, I’m not exactly feeling too great,” Burnell said.

  Irving took a sip of his mineral water before continuing.

  “Came the morning, Medea’s parents found the body had been interfered with, the sheets ripped. They called in the doctor, they raised Cain, they rang through to Tbilisi to protest at the desecration. To save its face, the hospital backed them, for once. An order went out for the old monster’s arrest. The penalty for such a crime was death.

  “The Commissar fled for his life. He just disappeared. Some say he slipped across the frontier into Turkey, where such crimes are taken more lightly.

  “But Medea was not dead. She had fallen into a coma. The cholera had vanished. It was a miracle. Even as her parents wept over her defiled body, Medea stirred and came to life!”

  “I see,” said Burnell. “So the old Commissar did some good after all—pumped life back into her…”

  Irving looked pained. “Nothing of the sort. Like I said, a miracle happened. The parents believed that God had spared their only child.”

  “Wait a minute! In that case, God had also arranged for the Commissar to have a go at her.”

  “Don’t be facetious, Roy. Wickedness is wickedness. The poor girl was in some pain. The nurses washed her violated body before allowing the parents to take their daughter home. She soon recovered, was just a little brain-damaged… Lack of oxygen to the brain. On the whole she was unharmed, although she had lost the power of speech. Certainly unharmed enough to bear a child. An unwanted and illegitimate son…”

  “Kaginovich?”

  Irving nodded. “Kaginovich. Lazar Kaginovich. They gave the child the surname of the malefactor and the first name of Lazarus, risen from the dead. He was regarded as conceived in death. A miracle.”

  “Another miracle!”

  “See, it was a kind of virgin birth in reverse… The Dead One. As a kid, the community allowed him to do whatever he wanted, without check, because of the superstitious awe inherent in poor people. No father around to knock a little sense into him.”

  “What happened to Medea?”

  Irving’s voice was stern with unspoken judgment. “She died just two months ago, killed in the bombing. Only fifty, but an old woman, partly gaga. The army officers I was talking to say his mother’s death tipped something in Kaginovich’s mind. They can’t get through to him.” Turning, he slipped momentarily from his preacher role to revert to Western mode, calling, “Bartender, another drink for my friend.”

  “No more, thanks. It’s a pretty ghastly story,” said Burnell. “What happens now?”

  With a certain satisfaction, Irving said, “It’s happened. Kaginovich quarreled with Mayor Tenguiz Sigua after the banquet yesterday. Some say Sigua punched Kaginovich. The Dead One had him arrested, and has announced that the mayor is to be executed, shot, here in Dimbarza Square.”

  Burnell stood up. “It can’t be. They were friends.” In true cowpoke style, he downed the fiery arak the barman brought in one gulp, without thinking. The Dook would have hated anis. “He can’t shoot the mayor!”

  “Kaginovich can shoot anyone.”

  Irving put his hands behind his head and stretched out in lazy Gary Cooper fashion. “Fact is, Sigua is some kind of distant relation of Medea’s. They’re all related to each other here. But Kaginovich is making an example of Sigua. Seems Sigua refused to permit any local men to be conscripted into Kaginovich’s army. Kaginovich was relying on picking up a thousand reinforcements in Bogdanakhi. Sigua told him to get lost. He needs the men to defend the city against possible future ground attack from Tbilisi. So Kaginovich had him
arrested. Sigua has been denounced as a traitor and is to be shot at twelve noon.”

  Burnell felt only shock at this fresh evidence of man’s ingenuity to man. “What do Ziviad and the other officers make of it?”

  “They believe the city will be up in arms against them.” Still in the sheriff role, Irving said dramatically, “Shooting could break out at twelve. That’s why I want you out of here. Pronto.”

  Burnell looked at his watch. It was an hour to High Noon.

  He returned to the mayor’s office. The door was locked. He knocked and rang the bell. Finally the French-speaking woman looked out from an upper window.

  “Go away, m’sieu!”

  “My cable from Stalinbrass.”

  She disappeared. She reappeared. A piece of paper fluttered down to him. He ran and grabbed it. The text of the cable from FAM was brief. It read: “YOUR MESSAGE NOT UNDERSTOOD.”

  Burnell looked up. But all the windows of the building were closed. The woman had gone. He began to knock and ring; it might have been the House of the Dead for all the response he received.

  Faintly annoyed and considerably thirsty, he turned back to the bar he had left only a few minutes earlier. It too had closed. Of Irving there was no sign. He looked about the square. Every door was being shut, every shutter being locked in place.

  As Burnell stood watching these preparations, a noise reached him as of the rats leaving Hamelin Town. The citizens of Bogdanakhi were coming, whispering along in boots, trainers, and bare feet. Already a crude platform had been built in the middle of the square. They were coming to watch—not yet having had enough of death—the execution of their mayor.

  A terrifying blast of E flat major assailed him. He jumped. Piano notes like hammer blows ricocheted off the stone flags. From the metal throats of loudspeakers all round the square, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto stormed out at polysaturated amplification, shaking Burnell like all the voices of the wilderness crying in one. He ran for it, being a music lover.