The Lights of Skaro (17 page)

He did a peculiar thing when Cora came back to the truck. It was peculiar not for the gesture, which any Moslem might make, but because few orthodox Moslems would make it towards a woman, and if he weren’t an orthodox Moslem the gesture had no meaning. He took her hand and touched it to his forehead.

“Thank you for what you told me,
gospodična,'
he said. “It cured something that has hurt me for a long time. I am a better man for it.”

She said, “I’m glad.”

That was all either of them ever said about it. Her knees, as we both saw, were skinned and raw.

The girls were singing again when we got rolling. Piotr was talkative and cheerful. He skirted around the subject ofRadovič and Radovič’s escape without asking any leading questions, deliberately checking himself when the conversation turned towards Cora or me.

He said, “Of course I realize by now that you are newspaper people, probably American or English, and that you could tell me many more things if I asked you. I would like to hear all you could tell me, and if it were only for myself I would ask many questions. But in our organization we bind ourselves to an absolute rule: The less anyone knows, the less he can be forced to tell.”

“It’s a sensible rule.”

“It saves lives. The peasants with whom we will pass the night will believe that we are what we seem to be, a Party team. They would receive us with more welcome if they knew we are not, but it isn’t safe for them to know. You must both be careful not to talk too much where they can hear you. Just yes and no, or a nod. It will be an inconvenience for you, but for them it may – if you are – if they are questioned afterwards and can honestly answer, under pressure, that they knew nothing about you – you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

We rattled and bumped along for several miles before he spoke again, thoughtfully.

“There is one question I must ask,
gospod.
I leave it to you to decide how much you want to tell me. With Djakovo gone and Radovič dead, we have no leader, good or bad. This man who helped them escape, whoever he was – you need not tell me it was the same man, because there could not be two like him—“”

“It was the same man.”

“… this man who risked his life for Djakovo, and must have taken considerable risk to help Radovič – he is a leader. He is a man we could follow.”

Surprise made me turn my head to stare at him. Could this be Piotr, Djakovo’s man, who would not even eat the meat of a slaughtered animal, now talking about a leader whose weapons were dynamite, violence, and terror?

He sensed what went on in my mind.

“I know what you are thinking. But I could accept the need for those things now. So would others, when they hear the truth about Radovič. We followed Djakovo because he was a leader when we had none, and we were sick in our hearts because we thought we had been led to revolution and useless bloodshed by a traitor, for his own ends. Behind an honest leader we could fight again, with whatever weapons are necessary. If this man who helped Djakovo andRadovič would help us —”

“Piotr, I honestly don’t know why he helped them. It’s a puzzle I can’t answer. Whatever made him do it, it was not for their sake. It served only some purpose of his own. If you followed him you would be betrayed from the beginning, as you thought you were betrayed by Radovič.”

“Then why—?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell you anything else. Don’t ask me any more questions.”

He dropped it. But he scowled to himself for a long time afterwards.

He did ask one other question, although on a different subject. Towards the middle of the day, when we had stopped at a collective where the girls sang for their, and our, supper and we sat afterwards in the shade of a haycock eating bread and cheese, he said apologetically, “I have to know this so that I can make plans for the girls’ safety,
gospod.
I would not ask otherwise. Where will you try to cross the frontier?”

“At Skaro.”

“Upstream or downstream?”

“Through the middle of the town.”

“Through the
town?”

“
Yes.”

“It’s impossible. The bridge is guarded day and night. You can’t even get close to it, without papers.”

“It’s as close as we can get to any way out, without papers. We’ll swim the river.”

“You’ll be shot before you even reach it.”

“It’s Skaro, Piotr. I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

I said it curtly, to shut him off. I did not want my own fears reinforced by his.

Skaro would be a hard nut to crack. The town was strongly guarded at all times by the Red Army. For that reason, it was the least likely place we could be expected to try to break through. I had less fear of army patrols than I had of Bulič’s Security net. So far, we had been able to out-think his helpers. At the border itself we would have to out-think him, and I did not underestimate the difficulty of doing that. He would already have reinforced the guard along the whole western frontier, doubled and tripled precautions in border areas through which we might normally have expected to penetrate a loose patrol system with luck and the cover of darkness. There was neither looseness nor darkness in Skaro, but a tight twenty-four-hour watch and bright lights that burned from dusk until daylight. The controls were already so strong that they needed no reinforcement. It followed, by my reasoning, that Bulič would not waste his efforts in Skaro, and since his shrewd cleverness was more to be feared than anything else, strongly guarded Skaro was in fact our best chance. Not a good chance, but the best we could hope for.

Skaro’s advantages as a route of escape, which accounted for the tightness of the controls on the town, were several. The single bridge was barred and guarded, but the river, although swift, was fairly narrow at that point. Across the river was Free Territory, with an American-British-French military government in command and disciplined soldiers on sentry duty who might be expected not to shoot first and ask questions afterwards of a couple of swimmers. For another and most important reason, Skaro was the only point in the Republic where the quarantined frontier zone narrowed to the width of a river bank. Border control atSjolnič in the south-west and Gled in the north-west, the only two other gates open to road traffic, and on the single railway line that carried the Orient Express, was maintained at a distance of from three to eight kilometers inside the frontier. Beyond those points a traveler kept to the prescribed road at the prescribed hours, carrying prescribed papers, or could be shot out of hand. At Skaro, only at Skaro, the town was on the border itself, separated from Free Territory by the width of a stream. If we weren’t shot diving into the river or while we swam, and if Security didn’t pick us up before we got that far, we had a hope.

They were doing their best to head us before Skaro became an immediate problem. We were stopped at the next town by another road-block, although we passed it without trouble. Piotr had spoken to Sidik and Fatma about the hip-wiggling. They stayed in the rear of the chorus this time, with Karsta screening Cora behind her broad beam and shoulders and waving arms, booming baritone at the
rokos.
They wasted no time on her or on us, after the usual cold, menacing stare. My beard was thick enough by then, and my face so darkened by dirt and sunburn, that I could stare back at them, although not long enough to make the stare defiant. Even in a Party truck we were supposed to cringe. We did. They waved us through.

We loaded up with gas and oil at a depot it took Piotr half an hour to locate. There are no service stations in the Republic, only government depots hidden away on back streets which you find by asking questions and where you bail your own gas out of a barrel, pour your own oil, and pump your own flats if you pick up a nail, as we did.

It was a simple puncture this time, easy to patch, but it delayed us. We didn’t get away from the depot until after dark. The truck’s headlights were so dim that we had to creep the next few miles. I did the driving while Piotr peered off into the dark for landmarks, both of us tense and growing increasingly tense as the minutes went by. We were only a few kilometers from Skaro. If we overran the farm Piotr had in mind for our stopping-place, we might very easily find ourselves driving into the town without preparations for it. We could not pass the night there without identification papers, nor study the final obstacles we would have to surmount to reach the river, nor safely turn back and flee the town without attracting attention. It was a tremendous release of strain when Piotr finally said, “Here. To the left,” and I turned the truck off towards the welcoming lights of a big farmhouse shadowed by the bulk of an even larger barn.

The feeling of relief did not last. An automobile was parked in the farm barnyard.

The shape and size of the car was hard to make out in the dark, but any motor vehicle meant Authority. No private citizen in the Republic could own one, least of all a peasant farmer. I’m certain that Piotr’s first thought when we saw the shadowy outline in the barnyard was the same as mine, that we had run headlong into the net. He let out his breath in a long sigh when the dim headlights of the truck swept over the other car and we saw that it was a junky old prewar Volkswagen, fenderless and rusty.

“Security wouldn’t have it,” he said. “Some crop inspector or tax collector. We’ll get rid of him.”

“How?’”

“You’ll see.”

He passed word to the back of the truck for action.

The girls were tired after a long day. With nightfall, the temperature had dropped enough to make their skimpy costumes inadequate against the chill. They had already earned rest and food and warmth, but they earned it again. Karsta led off with a keynote for ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, their stand-by, and the revival meeting was on.

By the time they finished the first song and began another, everybody on the farm had gathered around the truck. Somebody brought a lantern, which gave almost no light, and somebody else brought flaming torches of pitchwood to wedge into the torch-holders that were fixed in the walls of farmhouse and barn for that purpose. The farmer had no choice but to suspend any other activity that was going on: work, meals, his wife’s childbirth or his own death, so that he, his family, his hired hands, and anybody else within ear-shot could listen to us. We were Party mouthpieces, carrying Party messages to the countryside as the loudspeakers carried them to townsmen and city dwellers. It was criminal sabotage to attempt to shut off either voice.

After the second song a girl with a loud, piercing voice made a speech for collectivization. In her words and with her delivery it was an invitation to pass through the gates of the Prophet’s Paradise. The other girls chimed in with handclapping and shouts of support that were the equivalent of ‘Hallelujah, sister!’ The speech went on and on and on, interminably. It was a coincidence, as we found out afterwards, that the man who drove the old Volkswagen was not an inspector or tax collector, but himself a Party propagandist for the farm program, armed with sheaves of statistics and concrete figures all much more convincing than hallelujah choruses to sell farmers on the idea of joining a collective. But he didn’t have the authority to shut us up, he couldn’t outshout us, and he couldn’t outlast us. He stayed for a while, taking such pleasure as there was in smelling the pitchy reek of torches and watching torchlight gleam on smooth bare arms and legs as the girls pranced and hallelujahed, bringing to the open-mouthed farmhands standing around the truck a promise that collectivization meant song, laughter, and gay acquiescent maidens running not too rapidly through the tall grass. His own sales talk, that collectivization would result in an increased productivity of corn, rye, and wool, would have been worthless after our show. He got into his car and rattled away. The revival meeting ended almost immediately afterwards.

We invited ourselves to spend the night. Our host was a square, squatty man with a huge black Turkish moustache. Whatever he thought about the Party and eleven unexpected guests, he kept it to himself. His wife, who wore pantaloons and baggy blouse although not, in the privacy of her home, the
yashmak,
disapproved strongly of the girls and their dress. She was tight-lipped and silent while she served us a good meal.

Her disapproving attitude was more than offset by the helpless fascination of her two lanky adolescent sons, who ate with us. They were hypnotized by Fatma and Sidik in particular. They couldn’t keep their eyes on their plates. The two girls flirted shamelessly with them. I saw the mother speak angrily to her husband, and his shrug and shake of the head. Nature would have to take its course.

Once, while he watched his sons stare glassy-eyed at the two lovely little beauties who were teasing them, a smile raised one end of the handlebar moustache. He was careful not to let his wife see it. But after dinner he brought out a balalaika and began to play folk songs that had to do with country girls and boys skipping through the fields in springtime.

It turned into an oddly pleasant party. We had muddy, over-sweet Turkish coffee which we drank from the small, long-handled copper pots in which it brewed, simmering on the hearth of a huge fireplace. The mother set up the coffee pots before she disappeared for the evening, still tight-lipped and disapproving. The old man, the two adolescents, Piotr, nine girls, and I sprawled or sat or lay around as we liked, sipping coffee and listening to the old man work over the strings of the balalaika with his thick, work-calloused fingers. There was a layer of dust on the instrument when he began, and he missed a few chords from lack of practice, but he was a surprisingly good player. So good that when he drifted into one of those old Balkan heartbreakers about the dear dead days beyond recall, with lost souls moaning down in the bass and unrequited love wailing along up in the treble, everybody began to sing; first Karsta, then the other girls, then the two boys. The boys’ voices were just changing, so that they kept soaring unexpectedly from lost souls to unrequited love and back again, down, up and down. Piotr joined in to help with the low notes, then the old man came in, finally Cora and I picked up the tune and began to hum.