Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  Yes, there was a system to it. They were not like Admiral Kolchak’s or the Japanese soldiers, who roamed the countryside like animals. Killing, raping, burning, looting, without any sort of method or record or intent. For those soldiers there was no mission at all, certainly no war— they followed instead only an odd sort of patternless migration, fueled by a boredom, emptier and more terrifying still.

  For the most part the Americans lived on friendly terms with the Russians themselves. They loved the women best, of course—and the women loved them. For those who did not go mad there arose even, after a while, a bemused acceptance of the absolute aimlessness of their situation there—then even a desire to preserve it. To maintain, for as long as possible, the perilous imbalance of their ledger books; to keep their enemies on strings (which could, when necessary, be easily disconnected). Otherwise, they liked to boast that they had no real adversaries, and held no grudges. That even the Bolsheviks were “not too bad” if you got to know them. Perhaps because of the easygoing manner they generally adopted toward them, they were sometimes even rumored to be Bolsheviks themselves—a rumor they perpetu-ated through the stories they would sometimes tell as regards to their own missing men. No one ever died in that wilderness, it was said. They merely defected—then roamed the countryside with the Bolsheviks, like wild dogs with wolves. And maybe it was true, because sometimes even the one genuinely verifiable number provided in the ledger books—the number of deployed Americans—did not add up at the end of the day. They would be less a man, who could be officially recorded neither as living nor dead; his body—overlooked somehow in the accounts—left to the final, unforgiving judgment of the desert instead. By reinventing these missing men as Bolshevik soldiers, the Americans gave them up—but only to the other side. They imagined each of them as heroes, gaining instant stature and glory—a sort of Bolshevik Kolchak, if there could be such a thing. Twelve or thirteen women, one of each race and hue, in his tent at night; his lapels slung with the borrowed medals of Japanese, Czech, even American soldiers …

  As much as the fantasy further abstracted the already abstract enemy lines, it also served to give some sort of structure to the great void into which the Americans lost their men—a void that threatened them also, and from every side. To imagine death not as the great emptiness they feared, but as a foreign army with an express and certain purpose at final odds with their own. It was easier to imagine it that way than any other, because no matter how they resisted it, no matter how many times they rubbed their crosses or recited their Hail Marys into the desert, the emptiness of the landscape just ate up the words. If there was a heaven—if there was an afterward to anything at all—it was easier to imagine that it was as a Bolshevik soldier.

  And it was not all talk, either. There was actual proof in some cases that defections did, at times, occur. Douglas’s father himself had known of a certain case where a young American soldier—only seventeen, he’d admitted, when he’d signed—had come over with the sole intent of joining the revolution. A little Jewish kid. Scrawny, but tough, too, and with so many brains it made you wonder why he wanted to have them blown away—splattered in every direction across the Siberian landscape. But he did, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do or say to stop him. When he talked, it was you who doubted, instead. Maybe the kid was right. There were moments when even Douglas’s father found himself very close to actual belief when the kid spoke about the possibility—the real possibility, the kid said—of justice, and liberty for all: poor and humble, red-skinned, black-skinned, Semitic or white; women as well as men. Moments when he wanted to follow him—that scrawny little kid from New Jersey—out into the desert, so beautiful did what the kid say seem to him then.

  It was, at any rate, a comfort later—after the kid disappeared one night—to imagine him out there, with that direction still. Even after all the talking he’d done, it had seemed sudden when it happened. An accident. As though the kid had been sucked up like a Hail Mary into the oblivious blankness of the landscape. But he had not. Douglas’s father knew for a fact this time, and it did—it gave him some comfort to know it. To imagine the kid carrying out his plan just in the way that he had said he would. It had been, after all, a very simple plan, and barring any unforeseen circumstances—illness, capture, or death (circumstances which, it had to be admitted, the kid was just as susceptible to on this side as the next)—there was no reason to believe that he was not out there still. That his plan was not indeed being carried out, perhaps even now, all these years later, when the Americans and even the Japs have retreated and Kolchak, even, and all his women—of every race and hue—and his cache of stolen wealth and treasure has dissolved, without leaving of itself even a trace, into the seams of the earth.

  Now, Douglas’s father said, when what had once been unimaginable (this present moment) has indeed come to pass, and we sit for some equally unimaginable reason on another segment of another railway line, it may be that a kid from New Jersey is the indispensable commander of a division of the Red Army. That, as we speak, he is on his way to delivering to all of us the justice he once promised he would bring. And though we might not recognize it as such when it comes, it will, you can be sure, be the final justice—having been conceived of, and wrought, like the earth itself, within an emptiness greater than any of us can imagine (even those of us who have witnessed it with our own eyes). Because, you see, if something—anything at all—is ever delivered, Douglas’s father said, from that great void, it will indeed be a justice that can at last not be registered in any book, and before which (we will have no other choice) we will have to prostrate ourselves, as before God. Yes, Douglas’s father said, we will have no other choice but to lay our souls down at our feet—just as Abraham once laid down his son.

  So—he said, leaning back on one elbow, and extending his free hand above him toward the blanketing sky—you can thank whatever you have to thank on this green earth that the day will never come. That no matter how many times you pray, no matter how many Jews from New Jersey, or Negroes or white men from heaven or hell, are plunged into the frozen desert of Siberia, or anywhere else, that final justice will not come.

  You can keep your children, Douglas’s father said. No one will ask for them. If they do—you can be sure it is the Devil who does. No, there is no justice that will now, or finally ever, prevail over that darkness. I know, because I have seen it. And so I can tell you: It is nothing but darkness.

  IT WAS THE RUSSIAN GENERAL SEMENOFF WHO CONTROLLED ALMOST the entire area around Mita, near where Douglas’s father and the rest of his unit were stationed. A legend long before any American arrived, Semenoff once claimed that he couldn’t rest easy at night unless he had killed at least one person that day. He did not—Douglas’s father assured them—suffer too many sleepless nights. From his roving base, constituted by three armored trains—the Terrible, the Merciless, and the Destroyer—Semenoff and his men cast a wide net of fear in every direction. It was, fittingly, the Merciless in which thirty of the most beautiful women in all of Siberia were kept in constant, rotating supply—never a single woman more or less. Even the most fleshstarved mind did not entertain too many thoughts of what went on inside that particular train. It was enough to have heard the rumors of Semenoff’s raids in which he wrenched the gold from old men’s teeth and flayed alive any who dared protest—to scream, to cough, or in any other way remind the general that he was, before he was killed, indeed, alive. For that offense, he would be punished rightly. Have his life, rather than snipped at the thread, slowly drained from him until there was nothing left but the thread itself, twanging sharply against bone—making the most unlistenable music for all who had the misfortune to hear. These rumors were enough to turn even the most foolhardy soldier’s heart cold with dread. And just so, when Douglas’s father found himself, along with the rest of his Army platoon, steadily approaching the Destroyer one night, his own heart was laden with such a crippling dread that, to this day, it drowned—very nearly—
even the memory itself.

  WE WOULD NEVER HAVE done it, he said. We would never have dreamed of disturbing the Devil like that, in his lair; would, instead, have let him continue to rape and pillage the earth for the rest of time—if he had not struck first. We were woken abruptly; it was the strangest thing, there was hardly any sound. Just, suddenly, dirt and sand, which—ripped loose from the earth—rained down upon us as we slept. Because of it, Douglas’s father said, I was not sure at first in which direction to turn. It even occurred to me that I had not yet fully awoken. That I was somehow still locked inside that alternate gravity of dreams. But as I watched and waited, I realized that even if that were the case there was no freeing myself from that hold. I waited. It was all I—any of us—could do. We waited, and we prayed that the sting of sand, which was the earth itself— ground by the force of opposing pressures over an unmeasured, unimagined interval of time into a fine dust—would not kill us before the cold new composite forms of bullets and shells.

  We survived. We did not lose one man—even to the Bolsheviks. And three nights hence, we drove ourselves like bullets into the belly of the Destroyer, seeking our revenge. And by the grace of God—we had it. We captured the Destroyer at the expense of only two of our men—one dead, one “missing.” But I knew nothing of that until later. And, until I awakened alone in perfect darkness, I could not have guessed that, this time, the “missing” man was me.

  IN THE PARTICULAR DARKNESS in which I woke, there was nothing— not even sensation at first, certainly no object, or gradation of light— against which I might measure myself. This, I thought, surely, is death. The moment I thought it I felt a great sense of relief, and then a deep gratitude—for whatever God had granted that I might take with me into death my own thoughts, or whatever it was that marked me as somehow separate from the rest of the world. It had been a thing I had much doubted, while living—even as a child. It was only something dreamed up, I thought, by men who could not bear the thought of dissolving into the simple mystery of things. Who had finally made of that mystery something so foreign to themselves they could almost look it in the eye. Confront it—like an enemy. Forgetting, of course, in doing so, that it is—that mystery—the very material from which they themselves, and all the guns and swords and shields that they fashion against it, have been drawn.

  But still, in that moment, first waking in total darkness, what a relief it was—to be waking up inside that dream! To have not yet been required to dissolve into those unremembered, unknowable spaces—from wherever it was, that is, I had come. But quickly, that relief turned to cold panic in my heart, because all at once I knew I wasn’t dead, but very much alive. I could not feel my body—still could not test it against any presence of light or of matter—but I knew, suddenly, that it was there; that I had not, and could not, escape it.

  After a very long time, which would have been impossible to measure, I managed to raise one hand. It felt like it weighed one thousand pounds. But I raised it, and felt with it for something to grasp. Something against which I might, at last, measure myself and thereby reenter the world of the living—within which I was still uncertain if I was fully contained. Above me, my hand hit dirt. Then more. I stretched it out as far as I could, first to the left, and then to the right. On either side, I hit dirt again. Only then did I realize. I was not, after all, and just as I had first assumed, lodged fully within the world of the living—but I was indeed “contained.” More fully then than I ever had been, or am ever likely to be again.

  I had been buried alive.

  I DO NOT KNOW how long I lay there; how many days and nights, or if perhaps it was only a matter of mere minutes or hours. There was no measure of anything except my own bare life against that darkness. But at a certain, unmeasured point I became aware of footsteps overhead and was overtaken by a new sensation, which even now I find difficult to name. Perhaps it was hope—but if it was, it was a hope so pure, so unattached to anything that might have taken the shape of a real or imaginable thing in which to hope, that I could not identify it. And then so quickly did it dissolve itself to dread—when, in the next moment, a door above me was raised and a blinding light entered my grave—that it would have been hardly possible, with any assurance, to distinguish it from that subsequent emotion. In fact, the light with which I had been so unexpectedly assaulted was only the dim light of an underground cell, but its contact with the absolute darkness to which I had by then grown accustomed nearly blinded me—and, indeed, blinds me still. So that even now, as I speak to you, a dark shape hovers above you, where that same light once imprinted itself in the negative—in the precise shape of the hope, mixed irreconcilably with fear, that I felt as the door to my grave was lifted and the living world streamed, unexpectedly, in.

  AFTER THAT THERE WAS a different sort of time. A time I could mark in the usual way, by the relation of light to object, object to light. I could measure it according to the regular intervals at which the door to my grave was opened—perhaps a space of six hours. Perhaps longer. But it doesn’t matter. In any case, I began to be able to keep time, to think backward as well as forward again. To brace myself at the sound of approaching footsteps, against the blaze that would soon rend the darkness, by shutting my eyes tightly against its incumbent glare. It was as though there was only one long moment that suspended itself between the all-consuming darkness and the all-consuming light. As though that silence, that blackness—which nothing, not even the functions of my own body (my heart, which continued, presumably, to beat, or my breath, which continued to traverse the distance between my lungs and my throat, or my kidneys and bowels, which continued to empty themselves, though there was increasingly less for them to expel) could interrupt—was the slow tick that preceded, however many hours later, the tock of the approaching footsteps and their accompanying blaze of light. At which point I would be hauled from my grave and strapped—my hands first, then my legs—to a straight-backed chair. The world would spin and then hover like a shadow above me. It never did take on any definitive shape, so that when I think back on that time now there is no image for me there to recall. And even the voices that echoed, that shouted at me in syllables I could not comprehend—even the pain with which my body greeted the lashes of the object with which I was beaten (making meaning, finally, of my throbbing head and limbs)—seems to fade into the indistinct shades of my memory, leaving only the faintest, lingering trail.

  LOOKING BACK, YES — DOUGLAS’S FATHER continued—those days or weeks (I am not sure how much time went by like that) appear to me as though peering backwards down a dim corridor; not from the present into the past, but from the past forward. Because it is those days at the beginning—when the pain, and the glare of the light and the insensate syllables that rained down upon me, indistinguishable sometimes from the lashes of a whip or a chain—that remain most vividly in my memory. As the days progressed—as I myself edged slowly closer toward my eventual release—things become much more murky, more difficult to recall. So that it is at the murkiest and furthest possible reach down the dim corridor of my mind as I peer ahead, into the future, that it happened I was released. This time onto quite a different sort of blankness.

  I cannot therefore tell you exactly how it came to pass. That, as the door opened one day to the glare—which, as all things must, had receded over time to a shadow of its former brightness, against which I hardly squinted anymore—I reached up and felt my hand connect with a throat. That I felt my hand close on that throat. That I felt beneath my hand what for all I knew was my own flesh collapse under my own weight; felt its resistance give way beneath the pressure of that hand, while the hand itself, exhilarated by its own strength, held fast—until there was no resistance at all. It was not until then that I realized the hand was my own, and I lowered the dull weight of another man’s body very slowly—almost with tenderness—so that at last it came to rest.

  It was not until that moment—coming alive beneath the body of a man I had killed—that I began to
reason with a certain faculty of mind that I had for some time forgotten. In short, I became human again. I began to think, to dream. I noticed things. I noticed that the light, for example, was dimmer than it had been at other times. That no one stirred. That, though it was surely strange, no one hauled the body from my own, in order to expose me—his murderer—below. No, it was only my own breath that stirred. Everything else was plunged into the darkness and stillness of death.

  Slowly, then, I began to ease myself from beneath the body of the dead man. We moved together, a sad, slow sort of dance—in which, neither being able nor fully willing yet to disrupt the connection between us, I slowly shifted my weight and at long last succeeded not in separating myself finally, but at least in switching positions. So that now— except for my broken leg, which was still partially pinned beneath the dead man (though I would not realize it until later)—I lay on top of him, rather than he on top of me.

  Now my heart—and the blood in my brain—was beating quicker and then again quicker, and the quicker it beat, the more I desired for it to continue beating. In a sudden burst, I managed to extract my leg from beneath the weight of the dead man and in the same moment realized it had been pinned. Only then—having severed that last bond between us—did I manage to raise myself from my shallow grave and make for the open door. Though it seems to me now that that first moment—that first free moment above the earth—lasted an age, I believe that I moved, in fact, quite quickly, despite my broken limb. That I surveyed the cell and, finding it bare and the door ajar, a key dangling in its hold, made my way toward it without hesitation. That indeed I paused only once to reach—for some reason—for the key in the door, and that having torn it from its hold I plunged with it into a night that was itself plunged, nearly, into the same breathless stillness as the grave I had so recently left behind.