by IGMS
"She's waiting for Gavrilenko," Jansen said. "She'll wait forever, if she has to. You want to find out what all this is about, we have to bring him to her. Now."
The last word snapped out in a tone that surprised him; he hardly recognized his own voice. But it seemed to help Ben, who managed to get hold of himself and follow Jansen as the older man started up the guard tower stairs. Well, I did make it to corporal before it was all over. Might have made sergeant if I'd stayed in. Things I could have been. Jansen looked back once at the ghost. She had not stirred at all from her position, nor changed the direction of her gaze. Holy shit, the Russian's treed, is what it is. She's got him treed. He could not control a swift shiver.
Near the top of the stair he looked away from the tower and saw the darkness closing in, pitilessly paring away everything that was not itself.
The guardroom door was open. Gavrilenko backed away as Jansen and Richter came in, still seemingly holding himself together with both arms. In a rough, throaty grumble, a ghost itself of the striding peasant vigor Jansen had heard over the phone, the Russian said, "Unavoidably detained, Rawhide. Trouble on the range, I am afraid."
"You have to come down to her, Gavrilenko," Jansen said. "It's time."
"Is time, is time." Something of the jovial telephone derision flickered in the Russian's gruff voice. "Now you are sounding like a priest come to walk me to firing squad. No, Rawhide, I do not go with you. I stay here until she goes away. I can stay here.." He rose shakily to his full height, arms firmly folded across his chest.
"Leonid," Jansen said. "That woman down there -- the man with me is her son. Talk to him."
Gavrilenko turned to face Richter. His still-powerful face had gone grayish-white, making the beard stubble stand out starkly, like the last stalks of a gleaned-over wheat field.
"Her son . . ." Gavrilenko did not move, nor take his eyes from Richter's face for a long moment; then, to Jansen's astonishment, he began to smile. His teeth were remarkably white, unusual for an East European of his generation. He drew a short breath and recited, in the classic half-chanting Russian style, "After the first death, there is no other. Mr. Dylan Thomas, English poet."
When there was no response, Gavrilenko repeated, "He understood. Shakespeare, Pushkin, they did not understand so well as Mr. Dylan Thomas." He seemed unable to take his eyes from Richter. He said suddenly, "Your mother -- I knew her." The smile drew his lips flat against the good white teeth. "This one --" he jerked a thumb at Jansen -- "he only sees her dying, no more. But I . . . I saw her living -- she was good at living, Zinzi. Only a short time, we had, but we made of it what we can. Could -- what we could. You see, I forget my English so soon." The wide smile still clung to his lips, fading only slowly, like the shape of a cloud.
Richter's face was also taut, but his eyes remained steady and composed. He said quietly, "You were not my father."
Gavrilenko sighed. It was a long, slow sigh, almost theatrically Russian, and its wordless tone carried the suggestion of sorrow at once too deep to be born, and too hopeless to be worth bothering with. "No, I am not your father -- that was some student, she told me, gone off to the West before she even knew she was pregnant. But I could have been. For three weeks, I could have been."
It was not said boastingly or mockingly, but was somehow part of the sigh. Jansen thought about Arl's vanished husband and had to shake free of a sudden spasm of pure rage. "You helped her plan that run, didn't you? Had to be someone who knew the triggers, the timing."
"I do more, Rawhide. I show her the weak places, I show where the big searchlights are, where the VoPos hide -- everything I know, she knows." His voice had taken on the same singsong quality as when he quoted the Thomas line. "She had a little money, not so much. I spread it among the VoPos, everybody getting something -- so when she runs we are all turning into very bad shots, you understand? No big deal, everybody getting something." He clasped his big hands at the waist, like a child set to recite at school. To Richter he said, "I do all that for Zinzi Richter, for your mother. Because she was funny, and I liked her, you know? Also, I was young."
"Because you were screwing her and taking her money," Richter said harshly. "You used her."
"So? She is using me too." Gavrilenko appeared genuinely indignant. "You think she sleeps with me out of love? Chort -- she knows what she does, and so did I. She comes to me, straight to bed, down payment, right? Was a bargain, and both kept our word." He laughed abruptly. "Like I said, young."
Jansen said, "Something obviously went wrong."
Gavrilenko was silent for a long time. He did not turn away from them, but he ceased to look directly at Richter, and his glances at Jansen had become defiantly despairing. He said finally, "The Stasi, Stasi, KGB -- eyes everywhere, even when you know they have eyes. The day she makes her run . . . suddenly, no VoPos I recognize, no VoPos I pay money to, whole new crowd. Stasi agents, every one -- I know this. What to do? I want to warn her, but I am on duty, they have made sure I have no chance. You understand?" He was glaring at them both now, looking more like an old bull than ever. "You understand? I had no chance!"
After a moment he shrugged, long and deliberately. "Also no choice." Now he clearly forced himself to meet Richter's eyes, and the physical effort was visible on his face. He repeated doggedly, "No choice."
Richter's silence was more than Jansen could bear. He had to speak. "So you shot her. She trusted you, and you killed her."
"They were watching me!" It sounded as though Gavrilenko's throat was tearing from the words. "All of them, firing wide, missing and missing, watching, looking like this --" he mimicked someone stealing covert side-glances -- "waiting for me to shoot and miss, so they know I am traitor. Her or me, and what would you do, brave Rawhide?" He was breathing like a runner whose strength has ended before his race. "Sweet, funny little Zinzi, nice girl -- you tell me what you would do, eh? I wait."
Neither Jansen nor Richter responded, nor did they look at each other. For his part, the constant image in Jansen's mind of Zinzi Richter's doomed attempt to reach her baby kept being replaced by one of his own daughters. Outside the guardroom door, the edged darkness was slicing in closer, while through the window, in a strangely dizzying sweep, he could see back across the Death Strip and the Wall to the apartment where he had spent much of two years staring at this very room.
"I wait," Gavrilenko repeated, and this time it was not a mocking challenge. This time it was soft and urgent, almost plaintive, as though he really did want an answer, was in desperate need of any reply at all, For a third time he said, "I wait to be told what I should have done. Speak, wise Americanski friends."
"That's a comedy word," Jansen said. "Nobody uses that anymore."
Then Richter answered him at last, his words falling like the muffled strokes of an old clock. He said, "Mr. Gavrilenko, I have to thank you. If your guilt were not so great, if you had just been an agent, a VoPo, who shot my mother and went off to lunch, it would never have dragged you here to see her again. It would never have called to Henry's guilt, or to my own guilt for being born, and causing her death . . . her stupid, stupid, needless death." For those few words there was a sound in his voice like claws on stone, and his hands kept opening and closing at his sides.
"You can't think that," Jansen said. "She could have died the exact same way, even if you hadn't been born. Believe me, you do not want to spend your life thinking --"
Richter cut him off. "What I think is not important. We're here, and this has got to be why we're here. What we do now is what matters. We go down to my mother, to look into her face. All three of us. This is not a request."
He looked sharply at Jansen, who nodded. But Gavrilenko backed away, shaking his head, saying, "No, no, I cannot, will not, no, never possible." He wailed and struggled frantically when Jansen and Richter caught hold of his flailing arms and literally dragged him out of the guard room. Old and ill, half-mad or not -- his eyes were rolling as wildly as those of a terrified stallion -
- he was still stronger than either of them alone, and their cramped passage down the guard tower's stairway was a battle. Jansen had a bloody nose by the time they had the Russian near ground-level, and Richter's shirt was splitting down the back seam. Through it all, Gavrilenko wailed and cursed in a absurd and piteous mix of Russian, German, and English, going utterly limp at the last, which meant hauling him the final few steps like a side of beef or bale of hay, until they were finally able to dump him at Zinzi Richter's feet and step back, breathless and exhausted.
The ghost saw them.
On her plain, unremarkable little face the joy of Richter's presence, his existence -- the fact of him -- leaped up like a flame in dry grass. Seeing this recognition, the tall man took her hands between his, bowed over them, and began to cry, almost soundlessly. She drew her hands free and held him close; but over his shoulder her eyes met Jansen's, and he actually staggered back a pace, shaken by the depth of the sorrow and sympathy -- sorrow specifically for him -- that he read there. He heard himself saying aloud, in absurd embarrassment, "Hey, it hasn't been as bad as all that. Really." But it had been, it had been, and she knew.
Then she gently released her son, and knelt down beside Gavrilenko, where he lay on his face, hands covering his eyes. With her own hands on his upper arms, she silently coaxed him to face her. Gavrilenko screamed once -- not loudly, but in a tone of pure terror, and of resignation to terror as well, like a rabbit unresisting in the clutches of a horned owl. He scrambled to a sitting position, his hands now flat on the ground beside him, face dazed and alien. The ghost commanded his eyes as she had Jansen's -- how long ago? -- holding them in thrall to her own, seeing through them and past them, down into uttermost Gavrilenko, his body shaking with the need to hide his eyes again but unable to do so. He whimpered now and then; and still clung to himself.
By and by he began to speak. "After first death, really is no other. You and me, Henry -- you remember us? Two tired, lonely, nervous boys in uniform, pretending to be men, doing job . . ." He rose slowly to his feet. "I kill so many people since then -- you know? Easy, really. Easy. Killings, I am telling you honestly, but no deaths . . . not after her." He did meet Zinzi Richter's quiet eyes then, though again Jansen saw the physical shock spread through his body. He said, "Different, you understand?"
Jansen asked, "You stayed in the army? No . . . what, you were KGB?"
"Oh, please, no KGB anymore," Gavrilenko reproved him. "In new democratic Russia, FSB -- execute you with new democratic pistol. No, Henry, I did my time in private enterprise. Big capitalist, all American values, even before it was common. You would be proud."
"The Mafia." Richter's voice was tight and thick, for all its evenness. "You worked for the Russian Mafia. You killed people for them."
Gavrilenko grinned at him like a skull. "Kill for the Mafia, kill for Mother Russia -- what difference? I was an independent contractor, just like American plumber." He nodded toward Jansen. "I went here, I went there, fix the sink, the toilet, go home, rest tired feet, watch the TV." He spoke directly to Zinzi Richter now, to no one else in the world. He said, "This is your blessing. You made me so."
Something he couldn't guess at made Jansen look away, and he fancied that he could actually see the darkness moving in around them if he watched it closely enough. From where they stood, nothing was visible now but the tower, the Wall in one direction, and the dark wall itself in the other . . . and after studying it, when he looked again on Gavrilenko he saw something that he could not have been expected to recognize, yet felt he should have seen from the moment he and Richter had entered the guardroom. With a sudden surge of wonder and pity, he whispered, "Leonid. You're like her . . ." He was trembling, and it was hard to get words out, or to remember what words were.
Gavrilenko shook his head slowly, heavily. "Not like her. She is long dead, forever young, forever innocent. While Leonid Leonidovich Nikolai Gavrilenko lies in Petersburg hospital, Walther PPK bullet in coward's brain." He grimaced in bitter disgust. "So many heads, so many bullets, one to a customer . . . only Gavrilenko, pig-drunk, old, sick, shaking with fear, cannot even kill himself decently . . . coward, coward, pathetic . . ." There were a few more words, all Russian.
The ghost of Zinzi Richter spoke then, without making a sound. Picking up her blue duffel bag, she looked at the three of them and mouthed a single word, rounding it out with great care and precision. Jansen could not read her lips, but Richter nodded. His mother gestured broadly, intensely with her free arm: pointing first toward the crouching, stalking darkness, then toward the Wall, unmistakably inviting them all to run with her while there was still time. She mouthed the silent word a second time.
Jansen and Richter both sensed Gavrilenko's decision before he even turned. They clutched at his arms, but he broke free with a frantic, wordless cry and dashed away from them, lunging and stumbling back toward the East Germany of their memories. Richter, quicker off the mark than Jansen, almost caught him at the inner wall; astonishingly, the old Russian hurled himself at it like a gymnast, leaping to catch the top, and was up and over it and straight into the darkness without hesitating. He vanished instantly, like a match-flame blown out, leaving no sound or glance behind him.
Richter stopped, staring at the edge.
Jansen joined him, and they stood together in silence for some minutes. The darkness, if it did not retreat, at least advanced no further. Jansen said finally, "You really think it was him that brought us here? It wasn't your mother?"
"I have no idea," Richter said, turning away from the void. "Maybe we all did it."
Jansen looked at the ghost of Zinzi Richter, waiting for them by the guard tower, forming for a third time the word he could not understand. "What is that?" he demanded of Richter. "What's that she's saying?"
Richter smiled. "Freiheit. German for freedom."
Abruptly Zinzi Richter turned and began to run, heading once again for the Death Strip, and Richter ran after her, his face as bright and determined as the face of any small boy racing with his mother. Jansen came panting in the rear, no better conditioned than the average sixty-six-year-old kitchen remodeler, but resolved not to be left behind in this place, to find his way back to a maternity clinic in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Arl . . . Arl . . . I'll be right there . . .
The spotlights came on, and the gunfire began.
Crossing the Death Strip, Jansen placed his feet exactly in Zinzi Richter's tracks, as her son was doing, and hunched down as low as he could, even as the rifle shots kicked up gravel close enough to sting his face and twitch at his shirt. He tried to shut the awareness out of his consciousness. Real bullets? Memories of bullets? Ghost bullets, fired by ghosts back in 1963 -- God! And then, despite a sudden blossoming fear of dying where he didn't belong, a single thought consumed him. It's not enough to follow. I've got to get there first.
Just as Gavrilenko's old legs and big old hands had taken him over the inner wall without assistance, so Jansen's legs, when called upon, somehow responded with speed that did not belong to him, and never had. He passed up a surprised Richter and forcefully crowded past Zinzi Richter as she set her ladder's hooks, stopping only long enough to pull the wire cutters from her duffel before starting to climb. Up the shaking rungs, atop the Wall, he worked faster than she could have, snapping wires real enough to tear his face and hands in half a dozen places. Then they were there with him, the mother and the son, and he swept them before him through the gap he had created, holding their hands as they eased themselves over the other side. He turned his back on the gunfire, covering both his charges with the width of his own torso, breath pulled deep into his lungs as if he could somehow expand to shield not just these two, but everything in the world. He felt their fingers slip away from his and he smiled.
The rifle fire kept up, but Jansen didn't move, thinking shit, if the Krauts didn't fire in damn platoons, they'd never hit anybody.
He heard the one sharp crack they say you never hear, and closed his eyes.
Arl, hugely pregnant and wheezing with the effort, was trying to keep him from falling out of bed in what must be the clinic's emergency ward. There were half a dozen beds around him, most empty, a couple with curtains drawn around them and nurses coming and going. Jansen caught himself, scrambled crabwise back onto the bed, said, "What the hell?" and tried to sit up. Arl pushed him back down, hard.
"No, you don't -- you stay put, old man." There was relief in her voice -- he caught that, having looked long for such things -- but also the same dull rancor and plain dislike that colored their every conversation, even the most casual. "You're staying right here until Dr. Chaudhry comes."
"What happened? The baby?"
"The baby's all right. I'm all right too, thanks." That wasn't just him, he knew; everybody asked about the baby first, and it was starting to piss her off as she neared her term. She said, "They found you on the floor in the waiting room. They thought it might be a stroke."
"Oh, give me a break. I just fell asleep, that's all. Been staying up too late watching old movies. I'm fine, shit's sake." He looked at his hands and wrists, saw no barbed-wire wounds, and started to get up, but she pushed him down again, and he could feel the real fury in her hands.
"You stay there, damn it. A lot of people think they're just fine after a stroke, and they get on their feet, take a few steps, and bang, gone for good this time." Her face was sweaty with effort and anger; but he saw fear there as well, and heard it in her voice. "On good days I can just about stand you, and on the bad ones . . . God, do you have any idea?"
"Yes," Jansen said. "Matter of fact."
Arl drew a long breath. "But when I saw you . . ." Her voice caught, and she started again. "I realized right there, I am not ready to have you gone, I'm not. Not you too, it's too damn much, do you understand me? Don't you dare die on me, not now. Not now."