The Lights of Skaro (9 page)

“You make it perfectly clear.”

“Good.”

He went back to his writing.

I stood and waited, looking at the scars on his head.

With the goons, you go when you are told to go, not before. Two years in Poland had taught me that.

I was supposed to make the mistake of taking his inattention as dismissal. I would get as far as the corridor before a couple of the boys brought me back; no bones broken, no blood showing, but aching here and there from hard elbows in my ribs and hard heels grinding down on my toes. It was another standard technique, effective to plant the first seed of terror which was their main weapon. I waited.

Twenty minutes later a dowdy woman in shapeless clothes and wrinkled cotton stockings brought in a card on which were pasted still-damp prints of the two photographs they had taken. Bulič signed the card, scrawled a couple of sentences on the blank back of it and handed it to me.

“This is your identification card and permission to be on the streets after curfew. Produce it whenever you are asked for it. The penalty for being without it between midnight and five in the morning is more severe than the penalty for being without it at other hours.”

“What does severe mean?”

His lips curled again.

“It is defined by my men when they administer the penalty. The offence is a minor one, not calling for formal trial. Similar to the offence of leaving my office before an interview has terminated. I see that you are a clever man, Mister Matthews.”

“Thank you. Is the interview terminated now?”

“Yes. You may go.”

I picked up my bags. Before I got to the door with them he said, “Don’t count too much on your cleverness. I have been opposed before by clever men. They are all dead or in prison.”

It was a stupid thing for me to do, but I couldn’t resist it. I said, “Then I can quote you as saying that you have caught Anton Djakovo?”

The sudden flare in his eyes made me regret the stupidity. He said, “It was a mis-statement. I should have said that all the clever men who have opposed me are dead or in prison or will be dead or in prison before I finish with them. Good night, Mister Matthews.”

Yoreska, when I saw him the next morning, was easier on the nerves. The nine o’clock appointment was for a press conference, as I found when I got there. Cora, Heinz, Léon, and Graham showed up at the same time. Cora looked thinner than usual, and pale. We didn’t have a chance to do more than say ‘hello’ in a waiting-room before Yoreska sent his blonde secretary-mistress, Danitza, to bring us in.

She was, as Oliver had said, a dish. A big, buxom, full-bosomed, long-legged, handsome, dumb, friendly dish. She teetered around on three-inch heels, the only woman I saw in the whole country with a pair of pretty shoes. She wore pink lipstick that was practically iridescent on her lips, a sweater that cupped her prominent breasts like a bathing suit and a skirt that was even tighter around her full hips. She was startling, particularly so in contrast with the other drab, poorly dressed, unlipsticked women visible everywhere in the capital who did not have the advantages of her position. I was introduced to her and liked her right away for the unaffected honesty of her whole reason for existence, which was to be admired and desired. Nothing else. The Party catch-phrases she used were words she had been taught to say. Her job was a convenient fiction permitting Yoreska to keep her near him. She was a nice, vain, brainless, good-natured, pretty animal. It was hard not to like her.

And it was hard not to like Yoreska. He had plenty of blood on his own hands, without counting what Bulič spilled under his orders. They had both come up the same ladder. But Yoreska, an older man than Bulič, had a veneer over his hardness. He knew how to smile and be cordial, as well as how to cut throats. The Party line, for the moment, was friendliness towards the West we represented. He made me, the newcomer, feel welcome.

He had glittery false teeth of stainless steel, Czech style, and wore a hair-piece to hide his baldness, a corset of some kind to hold his belly in. His uniform, of a Red Army general, was flashier than Bulič’s, with plenty of gold braid. After I had presented my letters and sat down with the rest of the press, he bared his glittery teeth at us – he seemed to be proud of his mouthful of metal – and got down to business. Danitza rested one lovely round hip on a corner of his desk and pouted over the state of her fingernails while he talked.

“Miss Lambert and gentlemen, I will open the conference by welcoming Mister Matthews and wishing him better discretion than his predecessor.” He chuckled, to take any possible sting out of it. “We in the Republic want you to give your readers a fair and true picture of us. That’s why you are here, free to report your own impressions without censorship. But the picture must be fair and true; objective, uncolored by personal prejudice. We want your readers to see us as we really are, struggling in our own way for the goals of peace, democracy, and freedom, the brotherhood and unity of all men. We want, we beg for, understanding and friendship from the West, not hostility, suspicion, and a willingness to listen to our enemies rather than to us. You gentlemen, with Miss Lambert...”

He went on for ten minutes, selling the line with considerable eloquence and earnestness. Very probably Gorza’s blast in the international press just when efforts were being made to sell the Republic to the rest of the world as a decent kind of neighbor had brought Yoreska a reprimand from the Party. He was trying to make it up through us. But there was nothing to take notes for until he worked around to Djakovo, whose arrest was imminent. Security, by doubling and then redoubling the standing rewards for Djakovo’s betrayal, had finally brought information. He was pin-pointed in the north-west corner of the Republic, in or near a town called Varya Banya. Screening him out of the peasants who still protected him would take some time, but the area was blocked off and his capture was inevitable. His trial – his public trial, Yoreska emphasized – would follow.

Léon Rébillard said, “Will the press be permitted to interview him before the trial?”

Everyone, Yoreska included, saw the point of the question. Political prisoners were tried publicly only after they had been properly softened and knew their confessions by heart. What they had to say then was not what they might have said beforehand.

Yoreska answered smoothly, ‘It will be at Comrade Colonel Bulič’s discretion.”

“Could we ask Colonel Bulič for a commitment? My home office will want to have Djakovo’s story as soon as possible while he and Dr. Gorza are both still news. Arrangements for the trial may take some time.”

Léon was an old hand at the double talk. He didn’t even stress the word “arrangements’.

Heinz said, “My home office will feel the same way.” The rest of us nodded.

Yoreska pursed his lips.

The decision, of course, was his to make. Not Bulič’s. But he had his own forms of entertainment. He told Danitza to telephone Bulič and ask him to join the conference.

I learned later that he always had her telephone when he wanted Bulič. He did it deliberately, to get under Bulič’s skin. Danitza loved the game as much as Bulič hated them both for it. She was too bird-brained to realize that if anything happened to Yoreska, or if he lost interest in her, Bulič would finish her off like an annoying fly. She got on the phone and in her pouting, spoiled-child voice told the second most powerful man in the Republic to hurry up and get up to Comrade Minister Yoreska’s office, or else. Yoreska did not try to hide his stainless-steel grin of enjoyment at the way she put the phone down without waiting for Bulič’s reply.

I was sitting next to Cora, jammed against her on a bench. I felt her shiver. I whispered, “What’s the matter?”

“Watch Bulič.” Her low voice was strained. “See the way he looks at her when he comes in.”

I watched. It was a look of such black nastiness that I understood Cora’s shiver. But Danitza only smiled sweetly, swinging one long, beautiful leg from where she perched safely on Yoreska’s desk.

Bulič’s eyes were all that showed what he felt. He had good facial control. He said, “You sent for me, Comrade Minister?”

“I have explained to the press that you predict Anton Djakovo’s arrest within a few days. They want to know if they will be permitted to interview him before his trial. What do you want to tell them?”

“The decision is not mine to make, Comrade Minister.”

“I am suggesting that you give me your views, Comrade Colonel.”

“In that case, I see no reason why anything Anton Djakovo has to say before his trial has any importance.”

“You do not intend to allow the press to see him, then?”

“In no circumstances until the trial.”

“Thank you, Comrade Colonel. That is all.”

Yoreska was grinning his stainless-steel grin. Bulič turned away. As he went towards the door, Yoreska said, “You have the answer to your question, Miss Lambert and gentlemen.”Bulič’s hand was on the door knob. “But any number of things can happen to change the answer before ColonelBulič effects Djakovo’s capture.” Yoreska paused just long enough. “Djakovo may even die of old age.”

Danitza laughed aloud. Yoreska grinned. The man in the doorway turned around, looked at them, looked at us, the witnesses to his calculated humiliation, and closed the door quietly as he left the room. I no longer disbelieved what Oliver had said about Bulič’s world of enemies. We were part of it, without volition or choice.

Cora
was limping again. It was an effort for both of us even to swing our sticks at the goats’ lagging rumps. But the sun had almost reached the horizon, and the stream of home going peasants was thinning rapidly. We had only about another hour to go.

We were then passing through a country of small farm holdings, good flat land cut up into small parcels by thick, heavily-rooted ancient hedgerows, each parcel with its thatch-roofed stone house and cowshed and corncrib. It was the kind of farming at which the Party’s collectivization program was primarily aimed, to uproot the land-wasting hedgerows and replace the hundreds of small buildings with fewer, more efficient, large buildings on large tracts tillable with gang-tractors. But the peasants didn’t want efficiency. They wanted their own homes, thatched roof and all, their own cows in their own cow-barn and a solid protecting hedgerow around the piece of land that had been handed down from father to eldest son for generations. Cora and I had reason to be thankful for the stubborn peasant opposition to collectivization. It is much easier to disappear from sight in a country crossed and crisscrossed with hedgerows than on open flat land, efficiently farmed.

As it grew dark I looked for a turn-off. We had to leave the road by some established path. All possible short cuts for foot travelers and livestock had been explored for centuries, and some suspicious, sharp-eyed peasant would wonder about a couple who turned off the highway without an apparent destination. But the path we took had to be one that the same suspicious, sharp-eyed peasant would not himself take and see that we were strangers, without legitimate reason to be on his own road. By scouting on ahead of Cora and the goats while daylight lasted I found what we were looking for.

The cart-track was overgrown with short grass, although still clearly marked as a kind of road. It paralleled a thick hedgerow cutting through a second intersecting hedgerow that hid whatever lay beyond. There were no signs that feet, hoofs, or cartwheels had passed over it for days. We followed it until we were screened from the highway by the second hedgerow, and found beyond it the ruins of what had been a farmhouse, with the remains of its cowshed and a well.

Only stone walls and a chimney still stood. The thatched roofs had burned and collapsed, filling the interiors of the buildings with powdery ash and half-consumed beams. Charred doors and shutters had been ripped loose and added to the rubble, barnyard fences and a corncrib burned where they stood. The well-curb had been knocked to pieces and the pieces thrown into the well.

It was deliberate destruction of a home. When a peasant family was arrested for any reason, Security did that. It made collectivizing easier.

The stones had not filled the well. We could still get water from it with the pail and the piece of line I had used to tie up my pack.

I said, “Somebody’s bad luck is our good luck. We can risk a fire and cook a hot meal.”

Cora answered wearily, “I’m not hungry.”

“You should be. You lost the only food you’ve had all day.”

“I’m not. It still makes me sick to think of those two animals beating that man – holding him up and hitting him after he was unconscious.” She shuddered, making a sick sound in her throat.

“You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”

“Not so close. Not close enough to hear the grunting noises.”

“Don’t think about it. The whole idea behind a public beating is to terrorize you, make you afraid of them. If it works, you’re half-licked to start.”

“How do you not think about it?”

I couldn’t truthfully answer. I didn’t know. But I said, “Do something else. Let’s get busy while we can still see.”

The interior of the ruined farmhouse was a single room with a fireplace at the end, two windows, and a door. Wecleared a path to the fireplace end. The charred shutters were too badly burned to serve for more than firewood, but we propped the door in the doorway and hung our blankets to screen the windows. Afterwards I built a small fire for light, and left Cora enlarging our living space by piling rubble in corners while I went to milk the goats.

They were almost dry. From all four ewes I got only a few cupfuls. I penned them in the ruined cowshed by wedging a couple of charred roof beams across the doorway. In a fog of fatigue I brought them water, corn from the half-consumed contents of the burned crib, and straw, plenty of everything. They had earned it. I didn’t have any idea what we would do in the morning, but the goats had finished their job for us.

When they were taken care of and I had drunk the milk Cora refused to touch, I brought a pailful of water inside the farmhouse for our own use, then wedged the door in place again behind me. Although the screening job wasn’t light-tight I didn’t worry about it. We were a good half mile from the highway, behind a hedgerow on a cart-track no one had any reason to travel. We were, for the moment, safe, with a fire, blankets, food, and water.