Dusk in Kalevia

by Emily Compton

  Demyan sneered. “No, I had it all under control, if you had just given me time to call in a few of my agents. You had to send the army up here, endangering the hostage and wasting all the hard work I spent building up my network within the movement. ” Demyan’s voice was tinged with scorn. “Don’t forget--you aren’t my only commander, Kuoppala. They’ll laugh about this back at the Kremlin.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take this one back to his father,” Demyan said, taking Vesa gently by the arm. “We’re done here.”

  Toivo followed silently at his heels, feeling a little dazed. Everything had moved so fast that he’d barely had time to come to terms with any of it, but the dark swells in the snow whispered the tragedy unfolding all around him.

  Demyan was already in a fine mood, muttering something about “putting that damn paskapää in his place,” but Toivo slowed his steps. His eyes wandered back to the four men kneeling in the snow--the last surviving rebels of the battle.

  “Wait,” Toivo said. “There’s something I need to take care of...”

  Demyan followed Toivo’s gaze, and clicked his tongue in annoyance.

  “You have fifteen minutes. We’ll be in the car.” Demyan leaned in to whisper. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Demyan led Vesa off, their footsteps crunching away in the snow. Once alone, Toivo approached the line of prisoners, innocuous in his government-regulation uniform.

  He was terrified one of them would turn around and recognize his face, thinking he was the one who had betrayed them, but their eyes were fixed on the ground, their spirits ravaged by defeat.

  Fantasies of staging a daring escape ran through Toivo’s head, and he considered the relative invulnerability of his own body. Sadly brushing aside that foolishness, he stepped closer. There was one thing he could still give them, though, as the hope of the rebellion...

  He went to each man, pretending to count them, putting a hand on each shoulder. Trying to summon as many memories as they would allow, Toivo brought up every recollection of bravery, every moment of camaraderie and brotherhood they had ever shared. He poured himself into the holes left by their grief, trying to give them one last glimpse at what they were to die fighting for.

  Before Toivo was ready to go, however, he was pulled roughly aside.

  “Move.”

  It was Kuoppala. Although he hid it well, Toivo could sense that the man was still fuming from the dual attacks he had suffered. Toivo began to back away slowly, afraid that he might do something to provoke this maniac and reveal himself.

  “One of your lot attacked me and tried to escape,” Kuoppala snapped at the prisoners. “We shot him.”

  Toivo felt a bit of hope ebb out of the men.

  “But I don’t think that’s good enough.” Kuoppala had the pistol in his hand, pacing around them as though he carefully weighed his decision. He aimed the gun at each man in turn.

  “You all deserve to die. Which one will it be?”

  He was close now--close enough to brush the pistol across the backs of their necks. One of them jumped slightly, and he laughed and cocked the hammer.

  “You? Oh. I think maybe you, Big Guy.” He tapped the pistol on the back of Klaus’ head. “Yes, you don’t look easy to break. How about some last words?”

  Klaus closed his eyes, and began to speak in his deep, resonant voice.

  Toivo’s speech.

  “When we go before the firing squad, we will refuse the blindfold. Our backs to the wall, we shall look them in the eye, and they shall know...”

  “What is he rambling about?” Kuoppala scoffed.

  “They shall know that we go to our graves as free men, for when we die...” He looked up, his eyes burning with defiance.

  “We die for liberty.”

  The shot was sudden; a whip-crack that sprayed a bloody mist into the air. Klaus wavered and slumped to the ground, his body twitching a few times before finally growing still.

  “Take the rest of them back,” Kuoppala said, as he watched the dying man’s last tremors. “We’ll see what we can get out of them before they get their turn at the firing squad.”

  Toivo covered his mouth, struggling to remain invisible.

  He had done nothing to help them, just pushed them into a battle they couldn’t possibly win, criticizing their methods but still leaving them with the fervor to run to their deaths. He hadn’t even stayed by their sides, as Demyan did with the humans who had called him. Toivo was a fraud, a fleeting, meaningless symbol; he had only returned to his people in disguise, out of reach, to watch them die with his blasted speech on their lips.

  With Klaus gone, the others would go to the darkness below State Security. They would be beaten as Toivo had been, but they wouldn’t heal. No, they were to be lined up at dawn, and then...

  It’s going to happen again. Over and over and over.

  He couldn’t remember walking back to the car. He just found himself at the edge of the road, approaching Demyan through the snow.

  Demyan leaned against the car, all hint of his former good humor gone.

  “He’s in a bad way,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the back door. “I think he saw someone close to him get hurt--a girl.” He looked away from Toivo, up at the slate gray of the sky. “Maybe the girl...”

  “Little Bear,” Toivo murmured.

  Demyan went rigid, jerking up from the car. “What did you say?”

  “One of the rebels was a girl dressed as a boy. I don’t know how, but I think those two knew each other. Her code name was Little Bear.”

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “The girl, Zophiel!” Demyan cried. “She was in the stars! Was she one of the living rebels?”

  Toivo gritted his teeth, remembering the faces and the minds of the men on their knees. Of Klaus’ body hitting the snow.

  “N-no,” he breathed.

  Demyan cursed and slammed a fist on the hood of the car.

  Toivo looked around him at the white wilderness, feeling utterly drained. What was the point of all this? Despite his guilt over the rebels’ situation, he couldn’t muster up the strength to think of the future. He didn’t know if he had the strength to finish another losing battle.

  “We’ve...got to go back,” he said at last. “The storm’s picking up, and Vesa’s safe, at least.”

  Demyan sighed. “Just...try to help him. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Toivo got into the car, sliding into the gloom that had settled upon it. He took one look at Vesa--hunched and miserable in the backseat, dried blood trailing from his nose--and gripped the dashboard with shaking fingers. He tried to remember his vow to help this boy, that his instinct to instill hope in these doomed humans had welled up only minutes earlier...

  Because now, that instinct terrified him.

  **

  Kaija didn’t know how long she had been wandering. There was no time anymore, no direction--only white and cold and pain. With every step, a fiery jolt shot up through her wounded leg, but she still limped forward, dragging a furrow in the snow that the blizzard filled in after her. The storm harbored her in the freezing blankness of its bosom, hiding her from her pursuers, but she wasn’t fooled--it was merely keeping her for itself.

  The blood that pumped out of her shoulder and leg was pleasantly warm at the source, but immediately trickled down to become a cold wetness, freezing stiff on her clothes. Her hands were numb, her face was numb, and she stared down at her fingers, glad to see that they had not yet gone completely white. At least she didn’t have to experience the stabbing pain of the wind on her extremities any longer.

  She was becoming terribly dizzy. She found herself thinking about a time long past, when she’d been a small child and someone had given her a balloon. She had held onto its string so tightly, terrified that it would float up and away forever and ever, but now it was her head being pulled up into the sky, barely attached to her body, drifting as light as air.

  No
w, for the first time in what had seemed like hours, the pain seemed to abate, and she no longer felt cold. No, more that that, she felt warm--warm and cozy, and so, so tired. All she wanted to do was curl up in the fluffy white, a down quilt over her body, and rest, just for a few minutes. She had been running all her life, so didn’t she deserve that much?

  She stopped and stared ahead. Something seemed off; there were no more trees ahead of her, just a white plain as open and bare as the surface of the moon. The snowfall had slackened, and she realized was looking out across the ice of a frozen lake, blue-gray in the swiftly fading daylight. The rolling storm clouds parted for a moment, and she caught a glimpse of Venus, shining green and beautiful in the dusk.

  So this is where I end, she thought. At last.

  She felt neither sadness nor panic at the thought of her death. It was better than she had ever hoped for: a chance to drift off to sleep under the stars. She would die free and alone, a poetic death--her mossy bones resting by the shore, picked clean by the ravens of the wood. Dying in the beauty of Kalevia, surrounded by the one thing the Communists couldn’t control.

  She sank to her knees in the soft snow. No more running. No regrets. None.

  None?

  “Kill the hostage.”

  No, there was one great and terrible regret, and the memory of it drew tears from her eyes that left streaks of ice across her cheeks.

  Vesa was going to die.

  He wouldn’t be granted a beautiful death, but a betrayal at the hands of a corrupt monster--the fate of a pawn in their games. He was caught up in something she didn’t understand, and she was powerless to stop it. If her own death could save him, then it would all be worthwhile, but dying here and now meant that she could do no more.

  Kaija howled up at the sky like a dying animal, her voice going weaker and thinner as she spilt her grief into the frozen wastes. She clawed at the snow, churning it up around her, turning this way and that as she poured out the last of her energy in a fit of impotent rage...until she suddenly stopped when her eye caught something down at the shore.

  It was a cabin. A little summer house deserted for the season, standing all alone by the lake. At first she wondered if it were just a hallucination brought on by hypothermia, but it didn’t matter--it gave her something to struggle for. She pulled herself to her feet.

  One step, two. Every footstep was a battle, dragging the curse of her half-frozen body.

  Just a little rest, just let me sleep. Just a little.

  Down the bank, so slowly.

  No! You’re almost there. For Vesa--do it for him!

  Touching the wall, up the steps.

  Don’t you dare, don’t you dare quit now.

  The key was on a hook by the door, like it was expecting her.

  How kind of them, she thought.

  How kind...to save my life...

  And his...

  Chapter 10

  “Where am I taking you, anyway?” asked Demyan.

  Toivo turned his head from the window. He hadn’t really thought about it.

  “I don’t know,” he finally admitted, and went back to staring at the blankness outside the car.

  They had been driving for over two hours, crawling along the icy roads at an infuriatingly slow pace. Even for Kalevia in February, this storm was a heavy one; furious winds buffeted the car and whipped the snow up into a swirling tide that fought them every minute of the trip back to Vainola. Inside the car, another storm raged--the silent anguish of the boy in the backseat battered Toivo to the point where, given the choice, he would have preferred the tempest outside.

  At first Toivo had tried to soothe Vesa, plying him with past memories and future dreams, but the strongest memories were all of the girl, and only served to drive the boy deeper into despair. Leading Vesa on--convincing him there was a chance she was still alive somewhere out in the middle of the blizzard--seemed too cruel an option to pursue, for reality would eventually make its grisly return. Toivo’s heart just wasn’t in it, anyway; he was having a hard enough time wrestling with his own regrets to comfort a grieving teenager.

  “You can’t go back to the International,” Demyan continued.

  “No.”

  “My flat?”

  Toivo shook his head. He was tired of dealing with Demyan and Vesa--tired of the effort they both took. The car had finally crossed the bridge over the river; he could walk now. “Just drop me off here.”

  “In this snow?”

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  Demyan shrugged and pulled over to the curb.

  “Hey.” Demyan reached out for Toivo as he opened the door, tugging on the sleeve of his borrowed State Security uniform. “Hey, you.”

  “What?”

  “We’re both still alive. That has to mean something, right?”

  Toivo looked hard at the man in the driver’s seat, once more trying and failing to understand the motivations of his peculiar adversary.

  “Who knows?”

  Toivo watched the taillights of Demyan’s car vanish beyond the curtain of snow, and realized he was now truly homeless, a naked agent stranded in hostile territory. His cover blown and his mission botched, he had nothing left to do but find some obscure corner of the city where he could shelter and recoup the tattered shreds of the heart of Toivo Valonen.

  He leaned into the wind and fought the storm, clawing at it and butting it with his head. This was fine. He needed a fight to draw the venom from him, and the indifferent violence of the blizzard provided the perfect target at which to vent his unappeasable anger. For a moment, the sting of the flakes on his face slackened just long enough for him to open his eyes and catch a glimpse of the red neon letters that blinked on the marquee above the sidewalk. Perhaps the cinema, emptied of patrons by the foul weather, would serve as a refuge where he could sit silently and warm himself to the nonsensical patter of Soviet cartoons.

  The theater had the same stolid grimness typical of Kalevian interiors, the art deco motifs on the walls failing to disguise bare pipes and chipped gilt. There was no one manning the ticket window, nor behind the refreshments counter dispensing packs of salted licorice and lemon soda.

  An old man leaned against the wall outside the door to the projectionist’s booth, smoking a cigarette. When he saw Toivo’s uniform, he suddenly grew animated, and waved him into the theater with profuse apologies and the odor of stale sweat and spilled beer. As Toivo seated himself in a stained chair in the back row, he heard the chattering whirr of the projector spinning up. The curtains drew back, and a private screening of the film began.

  First, the newsreel--mostly concerned with current events in Russia--was a brassy, annoying celebration of fabricated good news. Grain production was up, polio was down. There were new pictures from the lunar orbiter; hooray for the five-year plan. Toivo wasn’t surprised that in the entire fifteen minutes of footage, not once was there a mention of a rebellion in the state of Kalevia.

  By the time the feature presentation began, Toivo’s jaw was beginning to ache from his clenched teeth. The film industry in Kalevia was laughable; most of the films shown in the cinemas were of Soviet make. As he wondered what glorious tales of revolutionary sacrifice he would be forced to sit through, he noticed that the title that flashed on the screen in Cyrillic was not a Russian word, but a name: Sampo.

  It had a familiar ring to it--something that resonated pleasingly in the linguistic centers of Toivo’s mind, but he couldn’t pinpoint its origin. He decided not to worry about it; he just sat back and let it all wash over him.

  The film told a long, meandering story about the quest for a magical artifact, a mill called the Sampo that could give without limit, erasing the want of humankind. In the course of their adventures, the noble heroes were frustrated every step of the way by the machinations of a greedy witch who wanted the Sampo for herself. Toivo couldn’t concentrate, and he found himself growing more and more restless as the movie continued--the sun was hidden away,
the mill was lost at sea, and the hero lay dead on the ground by the water with his mother weeping over him.

  At the death scene, he was struck by another pang of odd déja vu. He tried to think who that woman reminded him of, and then realized he was remembering Äiti, the station agent. The resemblance was uncanny--it had little to do with the way her face looked, but rather an obscure feeling inspired by the sight of the grieving, nurturing figure.

  He’d almost forgotten about Äiti. She’d told him to return if there was trouble; she knew the territory. He was not looking forward to giving her his mission report, but she was his best option by far. His seat folded up with an audible clang as he got up and made for the exit without even bothering to watch the hero return to life.

  On his way out, Toivo watched the projector beam, an invention that had fascinated him since his return to earth. He observed it for a few seconds, the dark streaks dancing through it like fingers playing in a stream of water, and then left it to entertain an audience of empty chairs.

  **

  Even without the dove to guide him, locating the station again was surprisingly easy. Toivo felt his way to the riverbank through the whiteout, the door she had left open broadcasting on an arcane frequency that resonated with a homing mechanism of his own.

  In relatively short order, Toivo stood at the top of the slippery steps down to the water. His descent was terrifyingly slow, the wind tossing him to and fro like a plaything, and he tore his fingernails searching for handholds on the rough stone of the wall. In the interest of safety, he sank to all fours and crawled backward, pride abandoned as he imagined falling through the ice and struggling, undying, in the freezing river water.

  As he finally found the handle of the hatch, however, a gust of wind threw him off center, and for a nauseating instant he found himself hanging on the door, feet scrabbling uselessly in the air above the river. It was only by the power of his desperation that he managed to wrench himself back to the edge and stumble through the door, slamming it noisily behind him.

  Äiti was sitting by the fire as before. When she looked up at him, standing in her threshold in his gray wool and knee-high boots, she rose, her mouth forming a wrinkled little O.