Skeletons (2 page)

With all of its martial trappings stripped, the Soviet Union is a beautiful place. And in July the wheat, what there is of it, begins to sprout and climb. I knew I had arrived at what I wanted when I saw a field of this stunted gold, and got the driver to stop. He assured me that another bus back to Moscow would be by in an hour and a half and would get me back to Red Square long before noon. "I know you," he said thickly, smiling, showing one lost tooth. He poked me hard in the chest. "You're a good man. And you speak Russian!"

"Yes," I said.

He poked me again. "I'll be here myself for you in ninety minutes, deliver you myself."

I nodded thanks, wishing my sunglasses were bigger, and slouched out of the bus, a few passengers following me with their gaze as the bus lurched off.

Soon there was dirt under my feet. Just off the road there was a strip of rocky gravel and, past that, blessed soil. I removed my shoes, rolled up my pants, and moved into it. The first rows were hardened by sun and packed by weather. Stunted ranks of wheat chaff brushed against my shins.

There was a newly tilled patch of ground behind the wheat field, most probably for potatoes. I moved into it. I had found what I sought, freshly turned soil moving between my toes. This is what I had needed.

"The true democrat," a philosopher had once said, "is the farmer who tills the soil."

I lay down with my back against a soft furrow and lay looking at the sun. It had been a long road leading me to this one, and the previous nights had been hectic and filled with excitement. I pulled out a many-folded piece of paper from the pocket of my denim jacket and looked at it. The words I would say, inspired by the writings of Abraham Lincoln, suddenly looked fresh and viable again. I knew I could say them, and believe them, after all. The other words I had thought of saying, which would unmask me as the fraud I was, must stay unsaid, at least for the moment. Too much was at stake for the confessions of one man to destroy it. The words on this paper would do.

I refolded the paper and put it back in my pocket. I was suddenly tired, being here. I closed my eyes and slept.

There followed a foolish dream, a world of pink and blue petals where children danced and the sun was always warm and the rain was warm and new flowers bloomed each day. And, as I lay in a bed of petals and watched this world, a tingle washed over me, and a lovely, dark-skinned girl walked toward me through the petals smiling. She held out her hands, opened her mouth, and said a single word. The dream went on and then, finally, ended.

When I opened my eyes, I knew by marking the height of the sun that I had slept nearly too long. I rose, dusting myself, and marched back toward the road. In the near distance I saw the bus, like a sleeping beast, at the side of the road.

At the edge of the potato field I tripped over something and fell.

I picked myself up and looked briefly for the rock that must have caught my foot.

There was no rock, but rather, sticking up from the soil, the skeletal remains of a human hand, fingers splayed. The bones were bleached very white, but seemed covered with a ghostly mist of human form—

The fingers of the hand moved, jerking back and forth.

"You must come with me," a voice behind me said. I am not in the habit of being startled, but this time I jumped back, into a defensive stance, turning as I did so.

It was the bus driver, who had made his way to me through the field. "Please come," he said, looking at the skeletal hand fearfully.

"I'm not dreaming?" I said, dazed. "What I'm seeing is real?"

"Yes. Please."

I followed him through the ranks of low wheat, looking back at the spot where the human hand had been. Now there was not only a hand but a skeletal arm pushed up out of the soil.

"Wait," I said, taking hold of the driver's arm.

He crossed himself, turned back toward the bus, begging me to come with him.

"It's happening all over," he said. "We must go."

I stood my ground. It occurred to me that I must be dreaming, my other infantile dream balanced with this dream of strangeness. The day was still warm and pleasant, there were no blue and pink petals underfoot but pleasant wheat chaff nevertheless.

"This is not real," I said.

"It is," the driver said. He stopped, and looked as if he had lost his moorings. "At the last stop on my route there were two skeletons waiting next to the road. They attacked my passenger, an old woman named Mrs.
Borogrov
, as she left the bus. They used their jaws like weapons, biting into her. She mewled like a cat. I closed the door on one of them as he tried to enter the bus, catching the bone arm. I beat at it until he retreated, pulling the arm out of the door. The other passenger, an even older woman, tried to escape through the back door of the bus and they pulled her out and threw her to the ground. Mrs.
Borogrov
was not moving by then. I saw blood covering her face. There is an old cemetery thirty meters off the road in that spot, and I saw other skeletons climbing the low fence, coming toward the bus. They had my other passenger on the ground by then and were hitting her with anything nearby. One of them lifted a stone and brought it down on her head—"

I took him by the arm and shook him, realizing that he was in shock.

"You must come with me," he said. He stumbled back toward the bus.

I looked back at the field, seeing a nearly complete human skeleton pulling itself from the ground. There was something nearly invisible, a more human shape, surrounding it, like a vague shroud, but the impression mainly was of a collection of human bones in human configuration yanking themselves to a standing position.

The form looked at me with its skull, opened its jaw soundlessly, and began to stride toward me, cakes of soil dropping from its joints.

I moved back toward the bus, finding the driver already sitting in his seat, waiting for me. His eyes were glued to the skeleton approaching us.

"In," he said, his hand on the door handle, waiting to close it.

I jumped onto the bus, and the driver immediately pulled the door closed. The engine coughed once, then roared into grumbling life. The driver threw it into gear.

I moved into one of the front seats and looked out the dusty window. The skeleton had begun to run toward us, and reached the road as we pulled out, standing in the plume of dust the rear wheels kicked up. In rage it bent, searched the ground, and found a large stone, which it hurled at us, hitting the rear window.

"Mother of God," the driver said, his eyes alternating between the road and the rearview mirror. "Mother of God."

"I must be dreaming," I found myself saying, out loud.

"The whole world is dreaming," the driver said. "The whole world, finally, is mad."

"Was there anything before this happened?" I asked. "Did anything happen before this started?"

"There was a kind of pleasant feeling, like something washed over me, just before," the driver said.

"I felt that, too," I said, remembering the tingle that had washed over me in my dream.

Behind us the skeleton had begun to walk calmly in our direction, in the center of the road.

For fifteen minutes, the madness retreated. We saw nothing but countryside, far houses dotting the low hills, a summer day. I thought perhaps I had been dreaming after all, had somehow boarded the bus back to Moscow and fallen asleep, to awaken now at this normal time. Only the driver's nervousness, his darting glances to either side of the road in watchfulness, peering even into the other cars on the road, made me think otherwise.

"You must do something," he said abruptly.

"What do you mean?"

"You must do something to stop this. I'm sure you can do it, you were able to get them to have that meeting in Moscow, to bring all those great men and women from around the world. You can make all this stop."

"Perhaps it was only something that happened outside of Moscow. Perhaps your government can take care of it."

"The government," he spat. "But I hope you are right."

Almost immediately he said, "Mother of God." We were at the outskirts of Moscow. A huge crowd had appeared ahead of us, off to one side of the highway, and as we approached we saw that what had appeared to be a mass of white shirts was in fact a crowd of skeleton figures.

"The National Cemetery," the driver said, in awe.

There, to the left, at the perimeter of the city, the sprawling National Cemetery seemed alive. I have visited others like it, such as Arlington National Cemetery in the United States, but this is on a vaster scale. There were many heroes of the Soviet revolution, many dead bodies to bury, and many of them were interred here.

And now it was alive, acre upon rolling acre, with white stick figures, moving en masse toward the center of Moscow.

Ahead of us a car screeched to a halt, the driver climbing out to stare at the spectacle in wonder. The bus driver cursed, sought to veer around him, caught the rear fender of the car with the bus and pushed it into the man, who went down.

"You must stop to help him," I said.

"Look."

The driver had slowed, but now we saw, breaching the embankment on the side of the highway, five skeletons. They stood and approached the man, who rose, holding his leg. One of the skeletons held a garden hoe aloft, and brought it down on the man again and again.

The other skeletons turned their attention to us.

"Shit," the bus driver said. He pushed the accelerator. But we only moved the car in front of us farther.

"The fenders are locked."

The driver put the bus into reverse. But already there was a line of cars. He hit the front one. There was a muffled shout. The bus driver nevertheless continued to try to back up. I heard more crashes and moved down the aisle of the bus to the broken back window to see cars sprawled all over the road, turning the highway into a parking lot. As far as the eye could see, skeletons were climbing up the embankment. Many bore crude weapons. Close by I saw a skeleton jab a long length of wood into the open window of a car, bending to see where he poked. There were muffled screams around us.

"We're getting out!" the bus driver shouted. He threw the bus into forward and veered hard to the right. We nearly tipped over the embankment. But the driver pulled the bus hard to the left and kept us on the highway. Cars in the opposite direction had now come to a halt. In front of us a few cars still moved into the city, but the roadway was becoming covered with a flow of white skeletons.

One of them tried to block the bus by jumping straight in front of it. The driver picked up speed and hit the skeleton. It went down. Peering through my window, I tried to see what became of it, but it was lost in a mass of moving white behind us.

As the cemetery drew away behind us, the number of skeletons thinned, and soon we were free of them.

"Perhaps Moscow is safe," the driver said. It sounded like a prayer.

We drove on until, a few blocks from Red Square, we could go no farther. And now, suddenly, the Red Army appeared, a phalanx of olive-green uniforms with red markings pushing all traffic off the road. The bus driver pulled over as a line of trucks passed, heading toward the outskirts of Moscow.

"This is the end of the line," the driver said apologetically.

"That's all right."

The driver opened the door, and I saw the fear on his face as I passed him.

"Are you going to stay?" I asked.

The battle going on in him was evident on his face. He reached out to take my shoulder, stood out of his seat. "I promised to deliver you, and I will," he said. "You'll be able to stop this madness."

I said nothing.

As we left the bus there was more noise than I could have imagined. Off in the distance I heard the crack of a rifle shot, then what sounded like a mortar. A plume of thin smoke rose from the east. Around us was chaos, soldiers trying to direct a swarm of aimless people. There was no panic, but rather a kind of pushing uncertainty. "What is it?" one man said next to me, to a woman who accompanied him. "What could it be? Is it the Americans? Is there war?"

"It's the Chinese!" another man said, with certainty in his voice. `The bastards have finally attacked."

"I'll bet it's the Germans," a woman close by said. "I always knew Germany would fight again."

"Why don't they tell us something?" the first man, the one with the woman, said. "Why do they always keep us in the dark?"

During all of this conversation the bus driver and I were trying to make our way through the crowd toward Red Square. The general movement seemed neither toward nor away from the square, but rather a kind of gelatinous stasis.

"Come with me," the driver said as another explosion, closer, definitely a mortar, went off, sending our close companions into another round of frantic speculation. "It's definitely the Americans—only they have the technology to sneak up on us like this!"

"No, they wouldn't, it's got to be the Germans!"

The driver pulled me through our immediate knot of people and soon we had crossed the street. "We'll go through GUM," the driver said. And, indeed, we now managed to stand in front of the huge department store, mere feet from the front entrance.