The Lights of Skaro (5 page)

The whole scheme, from the forgery of the
laissez-passer
and the withdrawal of Gorza’s guards to the peasant’s final promise that there would be no patrols on the road between the border post and the frontier, had required an exercise of Authority. Bulič
could
have arranged it all. He could also have arranged their escape much more easily and subtly, without exposing himself personally to danger or detection.

That was the block again. Accepting the incredible, that a peasant who looked and acted like Bulič might be Bulič, with Bulič’s all-powerful authority, he didn’t have to act the part of the peasant. It cancelled out.

I never got as far as wondering about a possible motivation for the whole thing. The first block stopped me. I couldn’t think Bulič out of the picture after I had got him into it, and it wouldn’t take shape round him. I put the story away, unfinished.

“I suppose that if I had worked on the angle of motivation I might have got past the other block,” I told Cora, finishing the tale as far as I could carry it. We were wrapped round each other again, the cigarette long since gone. The stars above us were like points of glittering ice, and I had no feeling left in my numb legs. “Not that it would have done any good. I couldn’t write the story even now, and you and I know as much about the motivations behind the things as anybody living. If, in our peculiar position, we can classify ourselves as still alive, that is.”

The wisecrack was worse than macabre. It was unbelievably stupid. It sent us right back to the nightmares I had been trying to talk away. I was groaning at myself for a fool before the words were out of my mouth. But she gave no sign that she had heard, not even a flicker of eyelashes against my neck. She had dozed again.

For that small favor I was grateful. There was no need for both of us to lie awake figuring our poor chances of survival. In the long hours that went by before first grey of dawn showed in the east, I calculated the odds against us at sixty-four thousand to two.

Thirty-two thousand
rokos
hunted us. Bulič at their head made each man twice the menace he would have been under any other leadership. That was how I felt about Bulič.

Just
after dawn it grew so bitterly cold that we couldn’t lie still any longer. We had to get up and stamp around, swinging our arms, to restore the blocked circulation.

I milked the goats again, warming my hands on their warm udders. The steaming milk tasted better than it had the night before, in spite of the flavor of the skull-cap. And there were no debates about who was to drink first. We shared a second, our last, cigarette as we had shared the first during the night. We were on good terms until I tried to bandage Cora’s heels before we started off.

She had been limping at the end of the previous day. Not much, but enough to show that her heels were blistering. I tore a couple of strips out of what was left of my shirt and ordered her to take off her shoes and wash her feet in the runnel at the bottom of the ravine.

“Why?’ she said, bristling at the order.

“So they’ll be clean before I put bandages on your heels. There’s no sense in bandaging over dirt.”

“My feet aren’t that dirty.”

“They aren’t clean, after a day on dusty roads and a night in a ditch. Go wash them.”

“I don’t like ice water on my skin at this hour of the morning. Anyway, my heels aren’t that bad. I’ll wait until later.”

“Later will be too late, Cora. If you’re getting blisters and they haven’t broken yet, now is the time to do something about them. Not after they’ve broken.”

“They’re my heels. I’ll worry about them. Thanks just the same.”

She turned away.

Looking back, I realize that I used all the wrong tactics with her. The curt way I had spoken in the cornfield, my threat with the stick in the village square, other things I did to hurt her ego, were all wrong. She wasn’t the type to be driven or bullied. She had pride, intelligence, ability, self-confidence. It was her pride that made her balk at being told to do something against her will, although she would have done it voluntarily if it occurred to her first. Anyone with patience could have reasoned with her, made our flight a partnership of two thinking people instead of a constant clash of two opposed wills handcuffed together by a common danger. But I had no patience. She made me angry at her refusal to recognize what seemed to me to be clear dangers. I flared up again.

“By God, they’re not your heels! They’re our heels! We’re travelling on four legs, and if yours give out I’m not going to carry you on my back simply because you’re afraid of a little cold water! Take your shoes off and wash your feet or I’ll do it for you!”

She whirled to face me, as angry as I was. “You’ll
what?
”

“
You heard it!”

“If you lay a finger on me, I’ll rip your face off! I’ve had all I’m going to take of your drill-ground domineering! I said my heels were all right! That’s all there is to it!”

It wasn’t all.

She tried her best to keep her promise about my face. I lost some skin from my cheek where her nails cut me, but I got an arm lock on her, then both arms behind her back, and marched her, struggling silently and furiously, to the runnel. I tripped her there and put her down on the ground.

I had bitten off more than I could chew. There was no way I could hold her arms and get her shoes off at the same time, and she would have blinded me if I had released her hands. Her stockings complicated tilings even further. They were fastened to whatever she wore under ankle-length pantaloons and a skirt. I wasn’t angry enough to try to solve that problem. We were stalemated, for the time it took my anger to fade. She wouldn’t be reasonable, so I had to be.

I said, “I apologize for this, Cora. I shouldn’t have tried it. You have every right to slash me. But don’t do it again when I let you go, because I’ll have to protect myself and it will start all over, again. It’s important that we fix your heels now, before we start off. So important that I’m not going to leave here or let you leave until it’s done. I’m bigger than you are, and stronger, and I can catch you if you try to run. I can keep you here as long as I want to. Whether I’m right or wrong doesn’t matter. I’m a man and you’re a woman and I have all the physical advantages over you. I’m going to use them. Whenever you get round to recognizing the facts, please wash your feet and let me bandage them.”

She went on fighting me, wordlessly. I let her go and got out of the way.

She didn’t come after me. She put her head down in her arms and sat that way for a while, trembling. I turned my back to her, took off my shoes and socks, and put my feet in the icy runnel as a half-hearted gesture that struck me as silly even while I was doing it. My feet were in better shape than my face. I splashed water on my cheek until the bleeding stopped. When I looked at her again, she had the pantaloons off and was unfastening her stockings.

However much it hurt her to give in, it was lucky for us both that I had forced the issue. The blisters were big ones. They would have broken soon, crippling her. I fixed pads on her heels, then bandaged a couple of toes that had rubbed red. She stood for it, tight-mouthed, without thanks or a relaxation of her hostility. What she was thinking didn’t bother me, as long as she could continue to walk.

We were on our way shortly after the sun came up. I went ahead of the goats down the ravine to make sure the road was clear before I called to her to bring them out of hiding. Once we were on the road, swinging our sticks to keep the goats from straying towards the grass that grew in the roadside ditches, I felt that we had some chance of surviving for another day.

My reasoning was that Security would not learn about the stolen goats and associate them with us until at least the day had passed. It might be much longer, but we couldn’t count on it. The goats would be an increasing danger as time went by. We would have to find another cover soon, something that would logically explain the cross-country movement of a peasant couple. All the identification papers and travel permits in the Balkans were not as important to us as a good cover.

Two-thirds of the population in the Republic were peasants, most of them strongly anti-Party. Like other citizens of the country, they were required by law to carry identification papers, and special permits when they went farther than twenty miles from home. Because most of them could neither read nor sign their names they regarded the papers as nonsense and generally refused to carry them. This passive sabotage of Security regulations was encouraged by the leaders of the outlawed, underground, but still powerful Peasants’ Party, the main well of organized opposition to the government. A number of peasants had been jailed for failing to carry papers, but so many of them persisted in it that the government had to make a choice of continuing to imprison farmers who were badly needed in the fields, or ignoring the violations. They took the second choice. It was still a jail offence to be caught without the right papers, but in practice papers were asked for only in the cities, not in the country except when the demand was intended as an excuse for immediate arrest and a disciplinary beating on the way to a cell. Unless we gave ourselves away by some carelessness, or the
rokos
chose to try to screen ten million stubborn peasants to sift two out of the total, we had a remote chance of getting at least as far as the guarded border. As long as we had an apparent and obvious excuse to justify our trek.

The border was still ninety miles away, a difficulty to be met when and if we got there. Plodding up the road, I worried about the problem of converting goats into something equally useful and less dangerous.

We were climbing into hills, a countryside of small, rocky vineyards and apple orchards. There was not much traffic on the road; an occasional truck that drove our herd scampering for the ditch, an ox-cart now and then, once an empty horse-drawn farm wagon that clattered by with its tail-gate banging, frightening the goats clear off the road and into an orchard. We wasted several minutes rounding them up.

No passenger cars went by. Those few automobiles that existed in the Republic were driven either by top-level Party members, government officials or the
rokos.
In a way it was encouraging that we had seen no signs of Security since our first contact with them. In another way it was ominous. They were usually fairly predictable, and they should have been out ahead of us by then. They bothered me when they didn’t behave according to pattern.

There was another and more immediate problem to think about. We began to broil as the sun rose higher. It was a freak autumn day, very warm after the chilly night. Climbing, as we were, and running to hold the goats in line whenever a truck went by, we overheated under our double layers of clothing. One of the reasons we had slept so badly was because the inner layers were soaked with perspiration. The second night would be much worse unless we did something about it. But doing something about it, even suggesting it to Cora, presented a problem in itself. Getting her to take off her shoes because of a present danger, had been difficult enough. Persuading her to strip by the roadside for her future comfort would be a major project. Yet it had to be done if she were going to rest when we needed rest.

I thought of all the calm, reasoned arguments I could advance to convince her, and made up my mind not to get angry again, whatever she said and however stubbornly she reacted. As I was getting ready to make the suggestion, carefully choosing the right words with which to ask a lady to disrobe, she said abruptly, “I’ve got to take off some of these clothes. I can’t go much farther like this. I’m burning up.”

“I was about to suggest it. I’m steaming myself.”

“You’d be a lot steamier if you had a woolen
yashmak
wrapped round your neck.” She loosened it, using the end to wipe her damp face. “The female certainly gets a poor deal in this country. No wonder some of them join the Party. I would myself, just to get out of these clothes.”

She smiled when she said it, all friendliness and good fellowship. I didn’t know what had come over her, but I had no questions to ask nor complaints to make. We began to look for a spot where we could undress.

In the next half hour we passed no adequate hiding-place. There were only scrubby vineyards, the vines too low to hide us, and apple trees, their boughs too high. We finally reached the bare top of a hill which was not within sight of any farmhouse and from which we could see a good distance up and down the road. Even without cover, it seemed as safe a place as any.

“I said, “If you’re not shy—”

“In the circumstances, I’m not.”

“Then get at it. You watch the road in that direction, I’ll watch this way. We can see anything coming in plenty of time to cover up.”

It was one of those careless statements anyone might make.

Cora either had more to take off than I did, or was slower about it than I. I had got out of my clothes and back into the scratchy felt peasant pants while she was still peeling. She was down to a bare minimum and I was still naked from the waist up when we heard the first sound of a fast motor. I whipped round to see her frozen, staring down the road we had climbed. A Security car, recognizable by its size and the speed at which it travelled, was coming up the hill, trailing a long plume of dust. We saw it appear and disappear behind shoulders of the hill as it took the curves, skidding. The spouting dust cloud it left behind marked the rapidity of its approach even during the moments it was out of sight.

I suppose we had nearly half a minute to spare before the car reached the hilltop. It didn’t seem that long. The goats were well off the road, cropping grass beyond the shallow roadside ditch. I had time to sling the sheepskin jacket across my shoulders, but Cora, struggling frantically to pull on her baggy pantaloons, was beyond hope. If nothing else betrayed us, the underwear she wore would have been enough. Peasant women, when they wear underwear at all, don’t own lingerie that is made to order on the Rue Faubourg-St Honoré in Paris, nor look as Cora did in it. I swept up all the loose clothes, hers as well as mine, threw them into the ditch, pushed her into the ditch after them, pulled her down on the pile of clothing and spread myself on top of her like a coverlet, groping with my legs to cover her, pulling her arms in under my chest and sinking her as deeply as I could into the grass of the ditch. There was a small seep of water there. When the car went by, I was drinking from the seep, flat out and supporting myself on my spread hands as a man does when he stops by the roadside to suck water. There was a whoosh and a roar, then dust settling down round us, a blade of grass tickling my nose, Cora’s heart thumping against me as mine was thumping against her while we waited for the squeal of brakes and the sound of boots pounding back up the road towards us, then no squeal, no pound of boots, only the diminishing noise of the motor, a bleat from one of the goats, and Cora’s voice saying shakily, ‘If you don’t mind, Jess—”