The Third Antichrist (44 page)

‘But the army. They would stop you.’

‘The army?’

Markovich looked a little sick. ‘I mean the Romanian Special Forces – the Vanatori de Munte. Everybody knows that they use the mountains for winter exercises. Their base is at Curtea de Arge
ş
.’

‘You mean the army keep the pass open all through the year?’

‘Well...’ Markovich swallowed. ‘Yes. I suppose so. I have heard that truck drivers use it sometimes. To save time. When the weather is not as bad as it is now. That they bribe the soldiers to let them through.’

Abi closed the map. ‘Take me there.’

Albescu, Moldova
Saturday, 6 February 2010

69

Antanasia Lupei lay on her belly, her arms stretched out in front of her, her legs in the shape of a V behind her. They, too, had been shackled.

She had been jerking awake at odd times recently, with no clear idea of where she was. Once she had woken to find her brother lying on top of her, thrusting at her with his hips like a dog. For a while she had thought herself back at her father’s house again, with her father still alive, and her brother snatching a moment with her, as he sometimes did, when her father’s back was turned – pushing her up against the bedroom wall, perhaps, or spread-eagling her over the kitchen table while their father was haranguing the neighbours in one of his drunken rages. But physically she had felt nothing of what Dracul was doing to her. No inkling of penetration. No sense of outrage. No pain. All was numb. It was as if a ghost was mating her.

Curiously, her lips and head had seemed numbed, too – almost as if they had been injected with novocaine. She wondered if Dracul was drugging her, and then realized that of course he was. She would not have been able to tolerate his weight on her wounds if that had not been the case.

Later, when she woke again, she craned her head round in an effort to ascertain the true state of her back, but she was unable to free her neck from the pillow. It was then that she discovered that Dracul had strapped her to the bed with a fretwork of leather thongs. If she forced her eyes to the right – to the very extremity of her capacity to see – she could just make out the smudge of one of the straps against the light.

‘If you don’t tell me the name of the man you have been seeing – the man you have been preferring to me – I shall turn you around and knout you on your front.’

Antanasia closed her eyes. So he had been there all the time, watching her. Had he finally lost his mind? The pragmatic peasant in her had long ago decided that there was a danger that this would happen. It was abnormal for a man with a temperament as extreme as Dracul’s to live in an environment where nobody dared gainsay him. Where people assured him that he was God. That everything he did was perfect and just. If you subjected a man ridden with unacknowledged guilt – as Dracul was – to such adulation, you risked creating a monster. Antanasia found herself desperately wishing to see her brother’s face. To judge for herself how far he had ventured down the irrecoverable path to madness. But he had made it impossible for her to look at him. Impossible for her to meet his eyes. Impossible for her to confront him face on.

She drifted back into a half-sleep. During the course of the past fifteen years – the years roughly paralleling Dracul’s success as a cult leader – Antanasia had begun a process of self-education through reading. There was satellite television, too, at the house, and Antanasia had endeavoured to teach herself the rudiments of history by watching foreign documentaries. Thanks to such documentaries she now knew that Dracul’s hero, Joseph Stalin, had turned from a revolutionary luminary into a tyrannical despot as a result of just such an unsettling equation as her brother was now experiencing. That Molotov and Kaganovich had convinced their leader, in 1932, that all that he did was just. That the hundreds of thousands of kulaks he had killed as a result of his state-fomented famines in the Ukraine were necessary casualties on the road to successful collectivization.

‘I will make soap out of them,’ Stalin had declared jubilantly.

Antanasia had had occasion to speak to many Ukrainians during the course of her duties as the visible face of her brother’s ministry, for Albescu was a bare 50 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. As a result of these encounters she had heard numerous stories of the great famine of 1931 to 1933. Now, for reasons that escaped her, these stories were forcing their way back into her head – but filled out, coloured, and heightened, as if the opiates her brother was dosing her with were making them real.

One story, in particular, had begun to haunt Antanasia’s semi-lucid hours. An eighty-five-year-old woman – the traditionally headscarved grandmother of one of Dracul’s Crusaders – had motioned her aside one day. The old woman had pointed out a bread shop – one of many in Albescu.

It had been an everyday scene. An orderly queue of customers had begun to form outside the shop. Soon people were being served – thanking the baker, carrying off their purchases, passing titbits down to their children. It was a picture that was being repeated on tens of thousands of similar streets around the world.

‘So, Babushka? What do you wish to tell me?’

The old lady had looked up at her, her eyes moist with remembrance. ‘I grew up just one hundred kilometres east of here. Near Sharhorod in the Vinnyts’ka Oblast. In what was then called the Russian Ukraine.’ She crossed herself. ‘It might as well have been ten thousand kilometres away from what you are seeing now.’

‘What happened, Mother? Why did you call me away? What is it that I am seeing?’

‘In 1933, when I was nine years old, Stalin sealed up the borders of our country so that no one could either enter or leave. From that moment on, forty thousand people from our part of the Ukraine were forced to queue up every day in the hope of receiving bread. Most of those queuing were women, just like the ones you see in front of you here. Queuing in the hope of feeding themselves and their families. But that is the only similarity between then and now. There is no other.’ The old woman had begun to cry.

‘It is all right, Babushka. Do not tell me this if it grieves you to do so.’

The old woman had raised her tear-stained eyes. ‘I must tell you this, my princess. Otherwise you will not understand. Not understand why I and my daughter and my son-in-law have given up everything we had to come over here and live with you. As part of the Coryphaeus’s community.’

Antanasia had felt a cold chill of unease ripple across her body. Like the stroke of the first zephyr that betokens a storm. She had taken the old lady’s hand. ‘Tell me then, Mother. I am listening.’

‘On this day that I am describing to you I was sent by my father to guard my mother’s place in the queue as she was too weak anymore to guard it for herself. My mother, you see, would not have tolerated my father doing what she considered woman’s work. She was still proud. A Ukrainian woman through and through. I stood in the queue for many, many hours, while my mother rested nearby in the road, unable to catch her breath. Finally, in order for those left in the queue to continue standing upright, each woman took hold of the belt of the woman in front of her. If we had not done this we would have fallen to the ground through sheer exhaustion. This waiting continued throughout the day. The pregnant and the maimed and the elderly were given no priority, my princess – they too had to stand in line and wait, or, if they were too weak, to fall by the wayside with no hope of bread. Comrade Stalin, you see, had brought us all to exactly the same condition. As my father would have said, “he had equalized us all”.The Babushka shook her head. Her lips began to tremble – stark, spasmodic movements, as if she were trying to finish a sentence, but could no longer do so.

‘Finally, after hours of silence, broken only by the spasms of coughing and the shuffling of feet, one of the women began to wail. This sound acted like a virus. Soon, all the women were wailing. The wailing was so loud, and it endured for so long, that it was as if the endless line of women had transformed itself into a single, tortured animal, fit only for the slaughterhouse. An animal inexplicably capable of understanding what lay in store for it. An animal suffering the torments of elemental dread.’

Antanasia snatched a hand to her cheek. ‘But how did you survive, Babushka?’

The old woman sighed. ‘There were bands of men at this time of which I am speaking. Party activists mostly. Committed Communists. They infested the countryside, spying on us from the watchtowers Comrade Stalin had had built to make sure the farmers did his bidding. Their primary task was to maintain quotas. Comrade Stalin had caused certain fields to be set aside as testing grounds for yields, you see. These fields were heavily fertilized. Then the grain they yielded was measured and recorded. The kulaks, without the benefits of pesticides and fertilizer, were then expected to match these yields. To pay to the state four fifths of the value of such yields before they were allowed to feed their families. But these yields were an impossibility, my princess. So we starved. The bands of men then came and humiliated the famished peasants. Treated them like dogs. Pissed on their remaining food. Raped their women. Forced the men to fight each other and to bark at each other like dogs for their entertainment. And they were always looking for children they could steal.’

‘To steal?’

‘Yes. To violate for their further amusement, and then to sell for eating.’

Antanasia dropped her hand to her throat.

‘They stole me. My father was weak. But he ran after them. Begged them to let me go. To take him instead.’

‘What did they do, Babushka?’

‘They had their way with me. They made my father watch. Then they killed him and jointed him like a pig. Later they sold the quarters to our neighbour in return for a cask of pickles.’

Antanasia shook her head. She couldn’t take her eyes off the old woman’s face. ‘And you?’

‘They liked me. One of the men in particular. I reminded him of his daughter back in Georgia. So they kept me with them to toy with. This is how I survived the next five years. Later, when the Germans came, we women knew just what to expect. There was no difference.’ The old woman half turned away.

‘Babushka, why are you telling me this?’

The old woman smiled. She covered Antanasia’s hand with her own. ‘Because I have seen your eyes, my princess. And I recognize what I see in them.’

‘What? What do you see in my eyes? Tell me.’

The old woman’s face closed down. ‘See? Nothing. They are just eyes. They are like mine. And the eyes of all the godforsaken women who have gone before me.’ She hesitated, as if she were dissatisfied with her summing-up. With the way she had concluded her story. She raised her head almost angrily. ‘What can eyes ever do? Later, during the Great Terror of 1938, these eyes of mine saw the shooting of 300 people in one night. My Georgian “father” was the main executioner. He used the same Nagant pistol he had killed my father with. Two men would hold the person to be executed by the arms, as you would hold a pheasant by the wings. This is designed to force the neck to stretch out. My “father” then shot the prisoners at the base of their skull. Another of my “fathers” would finish those who were not entirely dead with a shot to the temple. Then the bodies would be laid in pits that had been blown into the frozen ground by dynamite. They called this killing “the black raven flying”.’

The old woman shrugged – a thousand years of suffering was encapsulated in her movement.

‘This is what I wanted to say to you, my princess. Those eyes of yours. Those eyes now filled with tears. They are like my father’s eyes. And my mother’s eyes. They are like the eyes of the black raven that flew over us that night and carried away in its beak the souls of the dead and the dying.’

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an Pass, Romania
Saturday, 6 February 2010

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