by Alan Furst
“No,” Antipin said, “I am not from this town. But where I come from they fucked us no less.”
“We are taught,” the fisherman said after a while, “that such things—such things as have been done elsewhere—are against our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Perhaps they are right.” Antipin's face was that of a man who acceded to superior logic. “When they come to take you away, you must remember to call for the priest.”
At this, a few people chuckled. Someone at the back of the room called out dramatically, “Father Stepan, come quick and help us!” A hoot of laughter answered him.
“A grand day,” another man said, “when the capon runs to save the cock!”
Antipin smiled. When it grew quiet again, the fisherman said, “You may laugh while you can. When you are older, perhaps you will see things in a different light.”
The man sitting next to Antipin bristled. “I'll go to meet God on my own two feet, not on my knees,” he said. “Besides,” he added, slightly conciliatory, “there can be nothing wrong with a little laughter.”
“There can be.”
It was said plainly, from where Khristo sat on the edge of a table facing Antipin's end of the room.
“It is a step,” Antipin said, “to laugh at them. The holy fathers in their expensive robes, the king, the officers. But it is only the first step. We have a proverb …”
But they were not to hear the proverb. What stopped Antipin in midsentence was a series of loud bangs against the wood of the door frame on the exterior of the house. A puzzling sort of sound—a pistol shot would have had them all up and moving—everyone just looked up and sat still. A moment later they were on their feet. Glass shattered out of the room's single window—a glittering shower followed by an iron bar, which swung back and forth to finish the job, hammering against the interior of the frame. The men in the café stood transfixed, every eye on the window. The iron bar withdrew. There was a shout outside, something angry but indecipherable, then a glass jug was thrown into the room. It was filled with a brownish-yellow liquid that plumed into the air as the jug rotated in flight. It broke in three when it landed and the liquid flowed slowly across the floorboards in a small river. Stove oil—the reek of it filled the room. The men found their voices, angry, tense, but subdued, as though to conceal their presence. From without, a cry of triumph, and a blazing torch of pitch-coated rope hurled through the window. The fire caught in two stages. First, small flames flickered at the edges of the oily river. Then an orange ball of flame roared into the air with a sigh like a puff of wind.
The earlier banging sound now began to make sense, as several men thrust their weight against the door but could not open it. It had been nailed and boarded shut from outside. The intention was to burn them to death inside the widow's café.
The man near Antipin who, moments earlier, had made clever remarks, leaped into the air and screamed as the fire exploded. Seeing the mob of men shoving and cursing at the door, he rushed to the window and started to clamber through, without heed to the long shards of glass hanging from the frame. The iron bar, swung at full force, hit him across the forehead, and he collapsed over the sill like a dropped puppet.
Khristo Stoianev stood quietly, resisting the panic inside him. His eyes swept about the room, to the door and the press of bodies in front of it, to the smashed window, trying to choose. Before he could move in either direction, a hand took him above the elbow, a hard grip that hurt. It was Antipin, face completely without expression. “A cold cellar. There must be one,” he said softly.
“Where she cooks.” Khristo nodded toward the kitchen area, separated from the main room by a sagging drape on a cord.
“Come then,” Antipin said.
They brushed the drape aside. There was an old black wood stove, a rickety table, a bent-twig crucifix on the wall. A bin where potatoes and onions were stored through the winter. In order to circulate the air and keep the food from rotting, a square had been cut in the wall, then covered with a metal screen to keep the rats out. In winter, a piece of cardboard was hung over it on a nail to keep out the worst of the cold.
The widow, on hands and knees, was in the act of crawling through the broken-out screen of the narrow square. She disappeared suddenly, with a little cry, and they could see the night outside.
Antipin stopped him with a hand on the chest. “Let us see if there is a surprise planned. Wait for me to go through, then shout for the others.”
He was a square block of a man, but he moved like a monkey. Grabbing the upper edge of the frame with both hands, he swung out feet first. A few moments later, his face appeared.
“It's safe,” he said.
Khristo moved toward the window, grasped the frame as Antipin had. Antipin raised a palm. “The others,” he said. Khristo shouted, heard a thunder of footsteps behind him, then went through. He landed on the side of the house facing the river, away from the dirt road.
Antipin peered cautiously around the side of the house, then waved for Khristo to follow him. Up by the road, a group of silhouettes stood beside a farmer's open-bed truck. The shapes were silent, moving restlessly, pacing, turning to one another. In the darkness, Khristo could not see details—faces or clothing. One man detached himself from the crowd and walked slowly down the hill, toward the house.
Antipin, meanwhile, pulled the board away from the door and a group of coughing men came out in swirls of smoke and cinders. It was not difficult to jerk the nails from the wood, a kick from within would have done it, but the board had been cleverly positioned, across the knob, so that kicks against the door were ineffectual, and no one had thought to kick at the knob, an awkward target.
Khristo watched as the board was worked free of the door. It took him a moment to understand the device, it was too simple. But, when he did understand, something in the knowledge turned his stomach. Somebody, somewhere, in appearance a man like himself, had thought this method through. Had studied the problem: how to obstruct a door when setting fire to a house full of people so that those within could not escape, and had found a solution, and applied it. That there were those in the world who would study such things Khristo Stoianev had never understood. Now he did.
The man coming down the hill was Khosov the Policeman, brother of Khosov the Postman who kept the rhythm for the National Union parades. He was a policeman because no one had known what else to do with him. He was a man whose mouth never closed, who stared dreamily around him, seemingly amazed at a world full of ordinary things. He was slow. Everything had to be figured out. But when he did figure it out—and eventually he always did, especially if there was somebody around to help him—he could be swept away by a blind, insentient rage. At one time he had been much persecuted by children, until he beat one little boy very nearly to death with a broom handle.
The men stood around and watched the house burn. There was nothing to be done about it. A few buckets of water were tossed on neighboring roofs, to protect the dry reeds from embers floating through the night air. The widow knotted her hands in the binding of her apron and held it in her mouth while she wept, her wet cheeks shining in the firelight. The men around her were silent. They had brought a disaster down on her, and there was nothing to be done about that either.
Policeman Khosov came down the hill and stopped ten feet from Antipin. His eyes searched the crowd carefully; one had better not make a mistake here, as one's fellows watched from the road above. They were counting on him, trusted him to go it alone; he wasn't going to—not if he had to stand here all night—let them down.
One to another, each in turn, he peered at them, his face knotted with concentration, sweat standing on his brow with the effort of it, mouth open as always. Even though it might be you he sought, the sheer agony of the process made you want to help him.
Finally, he discovered Antipin, his eyes widening with the amazement of having gotten it right. He pointed with his arm fully extended, like an orator.
“You,” he said.
“You, communist, come with me now.” His other hand rested on the butt of a large revolver in a holster.
Antipin made no move. There was a long silence, the fire crackling and popping as the dry roof timbers caught.
“Did you hear me?”
Antipin took a step forward, inclined his head toward Khosov and said, “What did you say?”
“I said come with me. No trouble, now.”
Antipin took another step. The fire played shadows on his back. He spoke very slowly, as to a child. “Go back up this hill, you braying ass, and tell your friends up there that their mouths will be full of dirt. Can you remember that?” The “mouths full of dirt” referred to events in the grave.
They watched Khosov's face. Watched the slow painful process as the information was worked at, disassembled, examined. When comprehension arrived, his hand tightened on the butt of the pistol but it was much too late.
Antipin flowed easily through the space between them and punched Khosov in the heart, a downward motion, as though his balled fist were a hammer. It blew the breath from Khosov's mouth and made him sit down and wrap his arms around his chest. Anti-pin leaned over and took the revolver from the holster and smashed it to pieces on a rock. Khosov groaned, then hunched over, struggling to breathe. Antipin reached down and put two fingers inside his nostrils and jerked his head upright. Khosov gave a shrill little cry like a hurt animal.
“Now you go up there and tell them what I said. That they shall eat the dirt.”
Antipin let him go and he managed to stand up, still gasping for air. Blood ran freely from his nose and he tried to stop it with his hand. He gave Antipin one terrified glance—this is a thing that makes pain, stay away from it always—then turned and scrabbled up the hill, holding his nose, head turtled down between his shoulders like a child running away from a beating.
Khristo watched him go, then turned to look at the men around him, illuminated by the light of the burning house. They coughed and spit, trying to get the smoke out of themselves. Someone had dragged the man from the windowsill where he had fallen and laid his smoking body on the ground. He had been burned black in the fire, but those who had heard the sound of the iron bar knew he had been beyond feeling anything at all. Up on the road, the group of silhouettes shifted nervously as Khosov the Policeman scurried toward them.
Khristo sensed clearly that this was not the end of it, that it would go on, that each act would become a debt to be repaid with interest. Nikko's death had seemed to him, to his family, a tragedy of bad fate—like a drowning, or a mother taken at childbirth. You had to live with death, God gave you no choice. Today it was your turn, tomorrow it would touch your neighbor; thus people gathered around you, held you up with their spirit, tried to fill the empty place. He now understood that Nikko's death was a tragedy of a different kind. It was part of something else; there was a connection, a design, at first faint, now much clearer. The unknown intelligence that conceived a method of blocking doors could also see a purpose in the murder of a fifteen-year-old for laughing at a parade.
As Khosov climbed toward the road, a man near Khristo said, “We had better stand together here.”
The old fisherman took a step back. “I am no part of this.”
“Go home then,” someone said. “They know where you live.”
“I do not oppose them. I will tell them that.”
“Then there will be no problem,” the man said, a sour irony in his voice.
On the road, Khosov and the others climbed onto the back of the truck, which stuttered to life and bounced away down the dirt road.
Khristo found Antipin at his shoulder. “Come with me,” the Russian said. “Let us take a little walk together.”
They walked down to the river, past the sagging pole docks, to the sand beach below the walls of the old fort, called Baba Vida—Grandma Vida—built by the Turks three hundred years earlier, though some of the inner walls had blocks set by Greek and Roman hands.
It was well after midnight, a stiff breeze blew off the river, they could just make out the dark bulk of the Romanian shore on the other side. Antipin rolled two cigarettes and gave one to Khristo, lit a wooden match with his thumbnail. They bent toward each other to protect the flame from the wind. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness as they walked along the beach.
“You understand, do you not,” Antipin said, “that they meant for me to kill him.”
“Who?”
“The policeman.”
“Khosov?”
“If that's his name.”
“Why?”
“Why. To create an incident, to make politics, to give their newspapers something to say: bloody-fanged Bolshevik murders local policeman. Yes?”
Khristo thought about it for a time. He understood it, but it seemed very strange. Events occurred, newspaper stories were written. That the sequence could be staged—events made to happen so that stories would be written—had simply never crossed his mind.
“The murder was their alternative, a second scheme to try in case their first one failed.”
Khristo squinted with concentration. The world Antipin was describing seemed obscure and alien, a place to be explained by an astrologer or a magician. Violence he knew, but this was a spider web.
“You see,” he continued, “they meant for all of us to die in that house. An accident, they would say. Those pigs were swilling brandy and some lout knocked over an oil lamp and whoosh, there it went and too bad. But you see, Khristo Nicolaievich, I repeat only their words. And words may be spoken in different ways. Their fine faces would tell a much different story. The wink, the sly look, the flick of a finger that chases a fly, would give those words quite another meaning. We burnt them up, they would say, with pride in their eyes. That's how it is, boys. We take care of our own problems around here. We don't go crying to the politsiya. We see something wrong—we go ahead and fix it.”
Khristo nodded silently. Veiko, the others, were like that.
“So, you can see how it works? They had the policeman ready in case we got out of the house. Sent him down to arrest me. Knew very well he was too stupid to manage it. A simple provocation. Right?”
“Right.”
“You are a thinker, that I can tell. You turn the world over in your mind to see if it is truly round.”
Khristo was both flattered and a little uncomfortable to be addressed in this way. One didn't hear compliments. He took a drag at his cigarette, feeling very much the man. There was something so admirable about Antipin. The local toughs were blowhards, dangerous only in a group. Antipin was strong in another way entirely, he had an assurance, carried himself like a man who owned the ground wherever he stood. The notion that he, son of a fisherman in a little town at the end of the world, could win the respect of such a man was definitely something to be thought about.
“I try to understand things,” he answered cautiously. “It is important that people understand”—here he got lost—“things,” he finished, feeling like a bird with one wing.
“Naturally,” Antipin said. “So you see their intention. Get rid of a problem, let everybody here and about know you got rid of it, and perhaps others will not be so quick to cause problems. Bravery is a quirky thing at best—you know the old saying about brave men?”
“All brave men are in prison?”
“Just so. We have it a little differently—all brave men have seen heaven through bars—but the thought is almost the same.” He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. “We Slavs have suffered. God knows how we have suffered. In the West, they say we cannot be bothered to count our dead. But we have learned about human nature. We paid a terrible price to learn it, because you must see desperation before you can understand how humans truly are. Then you know. Lessons learned in that way are not forgotten. Do you see this?”
He paused a moment, then continued. “I will tell you a story. Whe
n Catherine was empress of Russia—you'll remember, she was the one who fucked horses—she chanced to be wandering one day in a wood some distance from St. Petersburg and found a beautiful wildflower. She was enraptured by it, such a tiny, perfect thing, and so she decreed right then and there that a soldier be assigned to guard the spot just in case, in future days, it should bloom again. Eighteen years later, someone chanced to find that order in a file and went out there, and there was a soldier guarding a spot in the forest, in case a wildflower might bloom, in case, if it did bloom, some shitfoot of a peasant might come along and stomp on it—as if he had nothing better to do.”
Khristo was properly silent for a moment; he loved and respected a story like little else. Antipin bent to the sand, put his cigarette out, slipped the remnant in his pocket.
“Was the flower grown? When they went there the second time?”
“The story does not say. I like to think it wasn't. But the point has to do with being ruled. Being someone else's property. Fifty years ago the landlords owned their serfs, hundreds of them, to do with as they pleased. They would marry them off, one to another, to please their wives' romantic fantasies. We love dolls in Russia, Khristo Nicolaievich, it helps us remember our past.”
“Perhaps it was like that here too,” Khristo said. “When the Turks ruled us.”
“The Turk still rules you, my friend, except that he has taken off the fez and put on a crown. Czar Boris, your king calls himself. Czar! And he is the toy of the army and the fascist officers' clique that calls itself Zveno, the chain link. You are young, and have lived a natural life on this river, perhaps you don't yet understand how these bastards work. You see Veiko and his little army, and you know them for what they are—bullies, drunken piss-bags out for a good time. But when there is fertile political soil, your Veiko will soon be a towering tree. As things stand now, he is the future of this country.”
He paused a moment, cleared his throat. “Forgive me, there is a demon in me that demands to make speeches. Let me tell you, instead, what will happen here. Your brother died at the hands of swine, and nothing was done. Nothing will be done.”