A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  “Men like Michael cannot be redeemed. They have to be eliminated, like vermin. I watched him drag that woman off by the hair to the tents where Igor and his lieutenants stay, and the guards did nothing to stand in his way. I thought they were going to rape her, and then realized that’s not the worst thing they can do to you here. I listened to her screaming for hours. Hours. I tried to cover my ears, but her cries slipped through, ringing out in my brain. They didn’t just rape her, Elías. They cut her up. Do you understand what I’m saying? They cut her up and ate her.”

  Elías stared at Claude, sickened. It was the fever, he thought. His friend was delirious. And yet a few days later there were new episodes of cannibalism. Bodies found tied to pines who had had parts of their thighs torn off, their stomachs ripped out, horrific stories being told by the deportees, who tried to stick together like a frightened flock of sheep growing smaller by the day as new bodies turned up at dawn, eviscerated. The two garrison commanders had already hanged several prisoners suspected of being the guilty parties, but they were young and felt overwhelmed by the situation.

  A terrifying thought began to torment Elías. He couldn’t get out of his head the idea that Irina and Anna were at the mercy of these animals.

  “For now they’re safe,” Claude said, trying to calm him. “Irina is a surgeon and the medical officers protect her because she’s useful to them. But I don’t know for how long. You’ve got to get them out of here, Elías. This is insane, and it’s going to get truly demented, barbaric.”

  “If we could just go back and start again, go back to before it began…” he murmured.

  “Don’t be naïve, Elías. She’d never have glanced your way—or mine. We both know that. We should thank Stalin, in the end, don’t you think? It’s because of him that we got to meet her. Neither of us could ever have competed with her husband…The book of poems that upsets you so much? It belonged to Irina’s husband. He knew Mayakovsky personally, they were friends. When the poet blew his brains out—goaded by Stalin—and fell into disgrace, Irina’s husband sent a piece to Pravda with his last unfinished poems. He knew his actions amounted to signing his own death sentence.”

  Elías observed his friend, disconcerted. Claude seemed to cough half his guts out and then spat green phlegm.

  “What did you expect?” he asked, flushed and panting. He was struggling to breathe, wheezing like a broken bellows. “I’m a man, too, you know.”

  Elías nodded with an indulgent smile. He might have only one eye, but it had been enough for him to see that his friend was in love with Irina, too.

  The guards had improvised a makeshift table using two barrels and a board, which they placed on the shore by the dock to distribute the flour rations. Irina stood in line beneath the watchful gaze of the guards, who stood with their fingers on the trigger. They were nervous and tired, there had already been altercations at previous distribution times, and they wouldn’t hesitate to fire into the throng of prisoners if they felt threatened. Still, a swarm of arms groped at them wildly, pushing and shoving. Elías watched the scene in alarm. People surged back and forth like a wave, and Irina pressed Anna to her legs to keep her as close as humanly possible. A very young soldier grew nervous when a gang of deportees burst forth like an avalanche, landing atop the improvised table and sending sacks of flour to the ground. Instantly, the hungry mob fell upon them, scrabbling for crumbs.

  The soldier fired on the first man to land on him, and this created a concertina effect: Other soldiers copied him, despite the order to cease fire shouted by the officer in charge. None of the men, stricken by panic, listened or was able to obey. In no time, it was complete pandemonium. Some ran pell-mell for a nearby wooded area, others dove into the river and attempted to make it to the far shore—a suicide mission given the freezing temperatures and distance. Fearing a mass escape, the soldiers opened fire indiscriminately, shooting those who tried to flee and spearing them with bayonets. Some of the deportees counterattacked, in a wildly unfair fight, trying to grab the soldiers’ weapons, striking them with sticks, stones, anything they could find, including their bare hands and teeth.

  Elías ran toward Irina. Amid the chaos, she stood turning in circles, disconcerted, clasping her daughter to her chest. Anna was shrieking, terrified. Everywhere, bodies fell and gunfire rang out. Elías punched and kicked his way through the mob in order to reach them. Leaping, he pulled Irina and Anna to the ground, protecting them with his body.

  “Don’t move!” he shouted.

  When the last gunshots stopped echoing, the island was littered with bodies. The air reeked of gunpowder. Even the soldiers, whose violence only minutes earlier had been brutal, contemplated the horrific scene in silence, shocked and horrified at the results of their rage. Some vomited, others sobbed disconsolately. More than two hundred men, women, and children died that day. Barely half a dozen soldiers fell.

  And suddenly, in the distance, penetrating the mist rolling in off the river, came the sound of music. Surrounded by corpses, an old man sat on a fallen trunk, playing harmonica. Sorrow engulfed his tune. The scene before them was atrocious, hallucinatory, and somehow incredible. But the old man was real, the sound of his harmonica rising above that of the moaning of the injured. The man’s belly, his ruddy peasant face, greasy hair, and bloody hands holding the harmonica were as true as the sound coming from his lips.

  The commander who had ordered his soldiers to hold their fire approached the old man, revolver in hand, advancing like a robot. Everyone thought he was going to shoot him. For one seemingly endless minute, he stood observing the old man. Then he removed his coat and gently covered the man’s shoulders as if it were his father or grandfather. The officer sat beside the old man, absorbed, as he listened to him play; he pushed the brim of his cap back with the tip of his gun, his gaze lost among the fallen bodies, some in grotesque positions, on their knees with eyes and mouths open, gazing up at the sky. With trembling fingers, he found a cigarette in his combat jacket, lit it, and took a long drag. Then he aimed the gun at his own temple and blew his brains out.

  The officer’s body fell sideways over the old man, who finally stopped playing the harmonica, his face now covered in blood. For a moment, his stubby kulak fingers hesitated at the officer’s skull, but then he pulled the young man’s head to his belly, as though it was a broken toy.

  After an instant of bewilderment, arms and hands swarmed the pair, stripping them of clothes, boots, and anything else that might be of value. From among the whirl of bodies, Elías saw Michael take the officer’s revolver and hide it in his clothes. And then the horde moved on, taking part in a ritual as old as human folly: Like bands of desperate buzzards, they set to stripping every dead body of anything they could.

  “I’ve got to get you out of here,” Elías murmured, holding Irina and Anna to his chest.

  Claude passed away two weeks later. He’d been nearing death all morning, as he lay with his head over Irina’s shoulder, nestled between her breasts. His lungs whistled and wheezed at irregular intervals, in what approximated breathing. Irina rocked him in her arms, whispering a nursery rhyme into his ear and kissing his burning forehead, as Elías had seen her do with Anna so many times before. For a few seconds, Claude opened his eyes and looked out at the world, cooking up one final witticism. For that brief moment, in the fluttering of his eyelids, he once more became the dashing, rangy young man he’d been, the confident cynic whose razor-sharp irony always left a trace of bitterness.

  “You should have picked me,” he murmured. “I’m better looking than that Spaniard, and less melodramatic.”

  Irina looked down at him with a timid smile, caressed his cheek fondly, and nodded, as though confessing that, indeed, she’d wasted her time and kisses on the wrong man. It wasn’t true, and all three of them knew it, but that didn’t matter. Sometimes lies are the only consolation there is.

  Elías left the barge and headed for th
e far end of the dock. He sat by the river’s edge, disconsolate, and for a long time observed the reddish rays of sun marbling the water, the mist that never burned off all the way, the barges with their prows submerged in the muddy sand. It struck him that men were like the stunted trees on the opposite shore. They would never be able to take root in ground this muddy, but they’d fight to the end to survive, trying desperately to reach up toward the sun, only to inexorably rot and molder and die in the attempt. He was filled with sorrow, thinking of Claude’s laugh, the vim and vigor he’d shown the day the four of them met on the train to Moscow, which seemed like a thousand years ago.

  In the end, his friend’s life had been nothing but pyrotechnics, fireworks in the sky that turned out to be useless illusions in the face of death. Everything that mattered to Claude—the buildings he wanted to build, the women he could have loved, books, music, impassioned conversations about politics, success and failure, joys and disappointments—all of it died right there. Right then. Death was beyond comprehension; his friend was crossing the great divide alone, as they all would. And nothing had been gained by Irina’s white lies, or Elías’s embrace, or any of the theories and religious rhetoric about the existence of some kind of God, some great beyond. He was alone.

  Elías noticed a perch or bass of some sort floating in the water and grabbed a stick to try to pull it closer. The fish’s scales had fallen off and its eye sockets were empty. The rotten stench it gave off was almost unbearable, but it would do for dinner. Hiding it between his legs, he was suddenly seized with the fear that someone might try to steal the putrid fish from him. And in that precise moment, he knew that if he managed to survive, his suffering would serve to rob him forever of any future joy or pleasure. Nothing, save pain, would seem real from this point onward.

  Irina approached Elías with something in her hand, and he realized Claude had died. He placed a hesitant hand on her cheek and tucked back a lock of her hair. Irina made to shrug him off, but then clung to his fingers and kissed his knuckles instead.

  “He wrote this, for you.”

  Elías read the words, made with a blackened branch scratched onto paper: They can’t take everything. My death is mine alone.

  Elías observed the fingernail marks Claude had left on Irina’s skin, the imprint like a claw. He’d clung fiercely to her until the end.

  “I don’t want to die here—not like this, not without a fight,” Irina murmured.

  The smell of damp wood, kindling the bonfires, came in thick gusts. Beneath the blanket of mist, they could see swollen bodies floating by, adrift. Others had become trapped in the river’s bends, entangled in the branches of fallen trees. Elías studied the thick gray expanse to the north. The steppe was what lay beyond their prison with no walls. Thousands upon thousands of kilometers of absolute silence, nothing between them and the Urals to the west and the Arctic Ocean to the north. Looking east was almost worse: Eastern Siberia and the taiga.

  But Elías had already made up his mind. They were going to escape, so they could die far from here. At least that way they would be on the move, heading someplace.

  Martin let out a stifled cry, a mournful-sounding groan. For a few seconds, Michael felt his lover’s rapid heartbeat beneath his hand. They shouldn’t be using up their energy this way, he thought, pulling away, his penis still erect. Plus, it was dangerous. If Igor caught them, he didn’t even want to imagine what would happen. Michael had seen him sodomize other men, but rape as a display of dominance and ownership was one thing, and what he and Martin did each night something else entirely. They made love.

  “Do you think he’ll take us with him?”

  Michael stroked Martin’s red hair. “He needs us,” he replied to calm him, though he didn’t actually believe it.

  Igor’s plan was to head northwest. He’d found a map showing routes intended to link the mining areas of the Urals with the lowlands of Western Siberia and Yenisei River, crossing the Kyrgyzstan steppe. The grandiose plan had been abandoned at the turn of the century—too unrealistic—but several kilometers-long sections of it still existed, and there were some abandoned wagons a few hundred kilometers away, somewhere between Nizhnevartovsk and Vampugol. Following that route would be a long detour, weeks at least, but it would finally enable them to wade across the Ob and then circle down to Tomsk.

  Thousands of kilometers of empty expanse, nothing in sight, no food, surrounded by wolves, at risk of dying in a swamp, or of hunger, thirst, or cold. Even contemplating the idea was absurd. And yet they were going to do it. Igor had been studying the map for weeks, stockpiling essentials, anything that might prove useful—clothing, shoes, what little provisions they could find, as well as a few firearms stolen off the bodies of murdered guards. He claimed that in less than a week they’d come to a small village or at least some Siberian farm. And after that, everything would get easier.

  In addition to this, Michael had an ace up his sleeve. He had the commander’s pistol, and no one but Martin knew about it. Every night he crawled out to the hiding place where he’d stashed it, opened the chamber and counted the five remaining bullets. The sixth was lodged in the officer’s brains. How much could be accomplished with five bullets? Plenty, if they were used wisely. One had Igor’s name on it. Michael was planning to blow the monster’s brains out the moment he was sure they were free and clear. He detested Igor with every fiber in his body. The second and third were for him and Martin, if the plan failed. Igor was recruiting young men with the promise of taking them along on the trip. The fools didn’t realize what he was actually intending to do. Igor planned to use them as pack mules for the exhausting journey and then, when hunger became unbearable, treat them as livestock. Michael had no intention of allowing those parasites to use him or Martin for food, if it came to that. Igor had already forced them to carve up one poor woman and then made them eat some of her flesh. No matter how many times he vomited or filled his mouth with sand, he couldn’t get the sickening taste out of his mouth.

  “We should ask Elías to come with us,” Martin said. He was absently strumming the three strings of a Russian balalaika. He’d traded a girl a pair of holey boots in exchange for it and fantasized about learning to play one day, even though he knew that sooner or later it would end up as firewood.

  Michael stroked Martin’s neck, still red from where he’d bitten it a few minutes earlier as they made desperate love. Suddenly his heart skipped a beat and he got a funny feeling: Martin wasn’t going to make it. He was too weak, thought too much, and couldn’t seem to shake off his scruples, which weighed him down like stones in the pockets of a man tossed into the river. He chased the premonition away, ran his fingers through his lover’s hair, and then kissed his shoulder lightly. Michael couldn’t recall the first time he’d seen Martin nude, the first time they’d kissed. Six months ago? A year? It didn’t matter; the days there were like centuries.

  “Elías would never come with us, Martin. We informed on him to the OGPU, and he detests us for serving Igor. You’ve seen the way he looks at us. He’d rip our throats out with his teeth at the first chance, if he could. Besides, he’ll never leave that woman and her daughter.”

  The truth was, he hadn’t even attempted to get Elías on his side. Claude’s death had brought about a change so marked in the Spaniard’s character that it was almost inconceivable. Far from sinking into depression or desperation, Elías had taken on a cold, calculating resolve. He’d clashed with the guards several times and savagely beat anyone who bothered Irina or her daughter. Michael had seen him crush a man’s skull with a tree trunk, smashing the branch against his head again and again long after the poor prisoner’s face was nothing but a pulpy mass of flesh. He stopped only when Irina approached cautiously, placing a hand on his arm. For a second Elías had looked at her as though he had no idea who she was, as though he’d crush her, too, if she seemed to pose a threat. But then he’d hurled the bloody branch like a de
ad cat and walked off to the beach, his good eye fixed on the misty haze.

  Igor, too, had noticed the change and no longer provoked Elías with insinuation—“I’m still waiting for your coat”—when the brigade went to work. Now he threatened him openly, and knew exactly how to get to him. One morning he approached, flanked by two of his men. Elías was digging a ditch that could have been intended only as a mass grave. Up to his knees in mud, his muscles tensed with each shovelful of dirt; insects hovered, buzzing around his sweaty head. Using a friendly tone of voice, Igor asked him to stop digging for a moment and listen: He had a proposition.

  “I’ve seen that woman you’re with all the time. She’s Siberian, right? I want you to sell her to me.”

  Elías glared back, his only eye full of calm, compact hatred. He no longer feared Igor, and this meant there was nothing Igor could take from him.

  “I can’t sell what doesn’t belong to me.”

  “I want the girl, too. She’s still too young, but I hear children’s flesh is tastier. Maybe I’ll fuck her first, and then let these hyenas rip her to shreds.”

  Without no hesitation, Elías picked up the shovel he’d been using and raised it above his head, as though to crack his skull. He barely touched Igor, but his intentions were clear, and that was enough. Before he could strike a blow, the two men with Igor leapt and began to beat him. Rather than merely defend himself, Elías fought back like a rabid dog backed into a corner.

  “A true Siberian wolf, at last,” Igor said with absurd pride, as though he himself were responsible for creating this new Elías.

  Igor stopped the men before they killed him, and then bent over his victim and placed a foot on Elías’s head as he lay in the dirt, whispering words that cut like a knife.