The Lights of Skaro (18 page)

She and I were sitting together near the fireplace. The two boys had moved as close as they dared to Sidik and Fatma and were singing earnestly to them, sometimes together in the bass, sometimes breaking together helplessly up to alto, most of the time one in one range and his brother in the other, both trying hard and so serious about it that they were funny. The father grinned, wagging his head in enjoyment, and the girls couldn’t help giggling. Cora laughed when I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.

Piotr watched us, smiling while he sang. The music went on, one song after the other, for a couple of hours before the old man put the balalaika down and jerked his thumb at the boys: Bed. They left the room reluctantly. Piotr didn’t jerk his thumb at his crew, but when he got up they got up. We all went together out to the barn and the hayloft where we were to sleep.

Cora and I lagged. We were as reluctant to end a pleasant evening as the two boys had been. We had forgotten, for a while, the situation we were in. Now awareness was back with us.

I suppose we were both wondering where we would be at that time the next night, feeling the same flutter in our stomachs at the thought that it was possibly our last evening to enjoy. But we had nothing to talk about until Piotr spoke to us in the blackness of the barn where we waited for the girls to go ahead of us up an unseen ladder to the hayloft.

“Kasper,” his voice said. “Zara.”

It was the first time he had used our new names instead of
gospod
and
gospodična.

Cora said, “Here we are, near the ladder.”

“Don’t go up yet.”

He waited until the ladder had stopped creaking and the girls were rustling around in the loft before he spoke again.

“It was a pleasant evening, wasn’t it? I saw you forget your trouble for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Good food, and good songs, and good friends to laugh with you. They are always necessary, wherever you go.”

“Yes.”

“We have those things, even here in my poor country.” He paused, hunting for words. “A peasant’s life is not bad. We work hard, but we eat better than people in the cities. We don’t have to listen to the loudspeakers. We don’t have to carry papers often, and the
rokos
don’t bother us too much. We make our own clothes, without need of ration cards or the danger of going to a city to buy. A man and woman, with good friends to protect them and help them, could live their whole lives out on some farm like this one, without discovery. They could marry and raise a family if they wanted to, although it would not be necessary. There would be gathering of friends, other evenings of singing…”

Cora said, “You don’t have to go on, Piotr. We understand.”

“But do you understand the other side of it?” His low voice was pleading. “You will have very little chance tomorrow, in Skaro. You must not underestimate your danger. They will be waiting for you, tomorrow and the next day and the next. In a month they will relax. In a year they may have forgotten you. In two years, five – who knows what can happen? You might like it here. You might want to stay, even when it is easy for you to go. Have you thought…?”

It was my turn to interrupt him. I said, “We’ve thought long and hard, Piotr.”

“I know. But have you thought together?”

He waited a long time for an answer. When he realized that it wasn’t coming he said earnestly, ‘Think together about it. Please. There is no need for a decision until the morning. Good night, my good friends.”

We heard him climb the creaking ladder.

Sometime later Cora said, “That was a difficult question.”

“I couldn’t answer it.”

“It would be hard to confess that you threatened me with a stick when I disagreed with you, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s past. And Piotr is right. We’ve got to make up our minds together. We’ve got to be sure that we both know what we’re doing. How do you feel about tomorrow?”

“I think I’ll let you continue to make the decisions for both of us, Jess. You’ve done all right so far.”

I thought that I hadn’t heard her properly. To my knowledge she had never voluntarily relinquished her freedom of will to choose a course of action in her life.

I said, “You missed Piotr’s point. If I’ve made the decisions so far, and rammed them down your throat when you didn’t like them, it was necessary. One of us had to do it, to keep us both in step. It’s different now. We can go on together, stay together, or split up. Piotr can hide one person as well as two.

“I know all that. I’d still prefer that you decide for us both.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not? You haven’t hesitated so far.”

“It isn’t fair to put the whole responsibility on me.”

“You assumed the same responsibility three days ago without consulting me.”

“I had to! It’s different now—”

“I don’t see any difference, except that I’m willing now instead of unwilling. I’m satisfied with the way you’ve managed for us both. If you decide to go, I’ll go with you. If you decide to stay, I’ll stay.”

She was as calm as I was desperate to escape the hook on which I was impaled. I said, “But why, Cora? Are you superstitious? You can’t believe the nonsense about leaving money on a winning combination just because it happened to win once!”

“You might put it that way. Or you might say that I think your judgment in certain respects is at least as good as my own, probably better. You might even conclude that I don’t want to let you beat me on a story, or risk myself alone to beat you. Make up your own reason. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll go along.”

“And if we both end up standing against a wall—”

“… there’ll be no recriminations,” she finished. “I’ve said all I’ll ever say about it, whatever happens. Good night, Jess.”

I heard the ladder creak as she climbed to the hay-mow.

I wasn’t ready for sleep. I prowled the barnyard for a while, stumbling over things and muttering at them to let off steam. There was a dog chained somewhere who didn’t like night prowlers. He made enough noise to drive me back to the barn and up the ladder in a few minutes. I spotted the rustles and soft breathing of the girls at one end of the hay-mow, and found Piotr at the other end by his snores. I dug myself a hole near him, crawled into it, pulled loose hay on top of me, settled into the most comfortable bed I, had discovered in days, and lay there sleepless until dawn.

I knew when midnight passed. The continuous loudspeaker bleat becomes so familiar in time that your ears shut themselves to it. You become conscious of the sound only when it stops. A murmur from the far-away minarets in Skaro quit at twelve, but the silence didn’t help my rest. I shifted around in my hole, pulled sharp straws out of my skin, rolled Piotr over on his side to stop his snoring, smoked a cigarette at the risk of incinerating everybody in the barn, and sweated out the problem that Cora had handed me.

There was just enough balance between the horns of the dilemma to make the choice a tight one. On one hand, we did not have an even chance of getting across the river. If we weren’t shot there was the prospect of being taken alive by Bulič. I did not try to convince myself that it would be better for us than shooting in the long run. We would have to risk everything to win everything. On the other hand, all that Piotr had said was true. We could probably hide out indefinitely, with his help. The net would tend to relax with the passage of time. The situation in the Republic might change. Bulič might drop dead, or be assassinated. The longer we stayed away from the border the better our chance of getting across it; in weeks, months, or more probably years. In the meantime, we had the prospect of a reasonably secure life which would not be without certain attractions. Cora was one of them.

I don’t feel that I am flattering myself when I say I believe she had indicated plainly that she would go along with anything I elected, to and including the settling down and family-raising suggested by Piotr. I could hope for worse arrangements. Cora was clever, attractive, and loyal, a woman any man could be proud of. In the past few days we had learned to respect each other. We would get along together well, with or without a family. Jim Oliver and a lot of other men I knew would have jumped at my chance. Cora alive, willing, and safe was a big argument for avoiding the risk of seeing Cora dead or in prison.

One trouble was that we weren’t peasants. The life that seemed so attractive to Piotr was no attraction to me. I had been raised on a farm, a far less primitive farm than any in the Republic, and I knew what it was to slop pigs, roll out in the middle of the night to help deliver a cow of its calf, bend my back to a dung-fork. Cora didn’t know those things, and she wouldn’t enjoy learning them. I hated them. I was a news reporter, as she was. I wanted to go on being a news reporter. I didn’t want to be a skull-capped peasant pushing an ox-drawn plough in a muddy field, or watch Cora turn into a drab, overworked drudge hiding behind a
yashmak.
That was what we faced as long as we stayed; life, but not much of a life. The alternative was a gamble. Heads, tails, good luck, bad luck...

Another trouble, and a big one, was that I didn’t understand Cora. What does a man do when a more than ordinarily attractive woman offers him a business-like deal to set up housekeeping if he feels like it, without mention of love, affection, passion or anything at all except mutual convenience? I didn’t know how to handle the offer. I didn’t know how to handle Cora, anymore. She was too complicated for me.

Rain tapped lightly on the roof of the bam. I risked another cigarette. It was two or three o’clock in the morning by the time I came at last to the realization that all of my puzzling until then had been over side issues. Cora herself had once suggested that if we could ever solve Bulič we would know the answer to a number of other questions. I saw that I had to solve Cora. If I could figure her out, see what really lay behind that startling surrender of character, I would know the decision to make for us both. But it might mean life or death, and solving Cora was no easy job.

One
of the most amazing things she ever did was to put herself voluntarily in the danger that had led us to the barn where I lay sweating to work out the motivations that made her tick.

The Republic’s tight censorship grew even tighter after Radovič’s escape. Not a word, even about the fugitive plane, appeared in the domestic press. Graham, Léon, Heinz, and I received simultaneous notices from Security that our freedom of movement was limited to a radius of twenty-fivekilometers, about sixteen miles, from the Ministry Building on Brotherhood and Unity Square.

That kind of thing always meant that something important had happened or was going to happen outside the radius. Cora’s failure to check with us confirmed it. Our pool agreement was that she would telephone from Czernin Spa as soon as she got there, and give us twenty-four-hour reports afterwards of anything new. When we didn’t hear from her, we got busy pumping pipelines.

You can find out a few facts about anything if you work hard enough at it. We learned that a passenger plane had skipped across the frontier, under fire. We guessed more of the rest. What none of us could guess was that Cora, after her tremendous story had all but knocked over the Party’s political applecart, would be foolhardy enough to come back to the Republic.

Technically she had not broken censorship in filing a story from Outside, and if Radovič hadn’t given it to her he would have given it to somebody else. His only motive for escaping was to tell it. But technicalities were no protection against Security. Danitza tried to warn Cora of that through me.

I was puttering around the dingy room I had rented, hammering nails for clothes-hangers one afternoon, when I heard Danitza coming at a distance of about half a mile. That isn’t a joke. She was Yoreska’s chauffeur as well as his secretary, mistress, and stooge, and the car she drove was a Rolls-Royce he had imported for her, according to rumor, because she had read somewhere that even a child could learn to drive a Rolls-Royce. She wanted to see if it was true, or only another piece of imperialist propaganda. The car was the shiniest piece of machinery in the Republic. It carried the Party flag, the Red Star, Yoreska’s personal insignia as an Army general, and the loudest horn manufactured. Danitza couldn’t drive without using the horn. All motor vehicles in the Republic were required to toot at each corner, a different series of sounds indicating straight through or right or left turn, but the Rolls-Royce travelled always at top speed with a steady blast of noise going ahead of it like the stream from a firehose. Everybody yielded the right of way when they heard it coming. It saved their lives and Yoreska’s fenders.

It was unexpected to have the blasting horn stop in my street. I knew it wouldn’t be Yoreska coming to call. There was a
roko
on the pavement, when I looked out of the window, who would report Danitza’s visit to Bulič within minutes, but one spy more or less meant nothing to her. She came strutting into my room like a gangster’s moll, a cigarette dangling from her pink mouth, her prominent breasts poking aggressively under the tight sweater, her round hips rolling in the tight skirt. She crossed her long legs at me when she sat down. It was beyond her conception that any man who looked at her might not be bowled over with mad desire, and she liked to provoke the madness. But she was essentially a good kid at heart, and she was worried about Cora. She thought that I, as Cora’s compatriot, could do something.

“I’m not supposed to tell you this, and I’ll get into awful trouble if you repeat it—”

“I won’t repeat anything that would get you into trouble, Danitza.”

“… but the plane she and the President were on was attacked by planes from across the border and forced down at Runstadt. The President was seized and tortured to make him say things against the Party, and Cora put all the lies in a story. It isn’t safe for her to come back.”

“If what you say is true, there’s not much chance that either of them will come back.”

“Our leader has escaped his enemies before.” She looked sly, a child playing I-know-something-I-won’t-tell. I suppose Yoreska had fed her some kind of nonsense about the immortality of Leaders. “I’m not going to say any more about him. You’re one of his enemies. So is Cora, but I wouldn’t want to see her turned over to Bulič. The consulate in Runstadt cabled the Ministry this morning to ask if her visa could be dated for re-entry by plane, tomorrow.”