by David Dodge
Her eyes were neither humble nor downcast. They blazed at me above the dusty cloth covering her face. She said,“Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“That’s it. I didn’t invent the system. I don’t support it. But we have to recognize it, or give ourselves away. If we attract any attention by not acting the part, we’re finished.”
“And if you insist that I do something stupid, what then? Humbleness and downcast eyes?”
“I won’t ask you to do anything stupid.”
“I wish I had as much faith in it as you have!”
“It’s a matter of preserving my own skin as well as yours. If you lose, I lose. Another thing. When we talk at all, which shouldn’t be any more often than absolutely necessary, we’ve got to avoid English. It’s less risky to take a chance on being overheard and understood than being overheard and identified as foreigners.”
If she had an argument for that, she swallowed it. The wheels of the dung-cart were rattling on the paving stones at the beginning of the village street. We followed close behind.
There were no indications of a Security watch in the village, but I ran my hand over my face to smear dirt and sweat together when we lost the protection of the dung-cart’s cloud of dust. We passed it and went on to the tiny village square near the mosque, the goats following their noses to the water of the fountain in the square.
Except for the constant roar of the loudspeaker high on the minaret, and a painted wooden Red Star hung from a balcony below it, the village drowsed in the thin autumn sunlight as it must have drowsed in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. A few skull-capped stall-keepers sat with folded hands by the wares they offered for sale, a few baggy-trousered peasant women peered at the goods over their veilingyashmaks, a few villagers went about their business. A cobbler, cross-legged in the shade of an awning, banged nails into a shoe. Across the square from where he sat, another awning was spread over a brazier on which an old woman was grilling koftes.
The smell of the broiling meat was too much to resist. We hadn’t eaten since the evening of the night that had ended with our break. I told Cora to stay with the goats – they were already scampering eagerly for the fountain – and went over to the brazier, fumbling coins out of my pocket before I got there. We didn’t have much money, but there was nothing better than food to spend it on.
The old woman had a wooden tub full of dolmas, cool in their wrapping of pickled vine leaves when I pushed my dirty fingers into the brine and took a handful. She scolded me for it automatically, without anger. I held up four fingers at the koftes on the grill, then counted out her price with a wordless grumble in my throat, picked up the koftes by their skewers and walked away. She didn’t give me a second look.
We ate by the fountain, licking our greasy fingers afterwards and drinking side by side with the goats, now sucking at their second load of water. I stood in front of Cora when she dropped her yashmak to drink, ready to glare like a belligerent husband at any man who wandered near enough to look at her exposed face. Nobody was interested. We had the fountain to ourselves. We monopolized it long enough to sit with our backs to the well-curb and listen to the loudspeaker for a few minutes.
There was no news of a couple of American press correspondents fleeing from justice. Only a regular alternation of stirring music, a short pep talk urging increased productivity on the farms and touting the blessings of collectivization, music again, another pep talk about the enormous strides the Republic was making in building roads, more music. The blare never stopped for a moment.
I hadn’t expected any news about ourselves. Security worked in the dark as a matter of principle, because announced fugitives from justice could count on at least the tacit support of a large part of the peasant population, bitterly opposed to the government, the Party, collectivization, the rokos, and all other manifestations of the Great Liberation. But there was no news of any kind, even loaded news. That was unusual.
The loudspeaker system was one of the Party’s strongest weapons. It blanketed the whole country. Private radios, of which there had never been many in the Republic, had been either confiscated or taxed out of existence. They were too easy to tune to foreign broadcasting stations, too easy to shut off from domestic broadcasts. The newspapers were all controlled, printing only releases from the government news agency, but no city worker could be forced to read them if he chose not to, and the majority of the peasant population was illiterate as well as antagonistic. To overcome this, the loudspeakers functioned nineteen hours a day, interspersing the Party’s version of current events with its din of propaganda, political indoctrination, and music. The speakers could be shut off only by direct sabotage, by the local Party authorities, or by the control center at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the capital. From this center the citizens of the Republic were wakened at dawn by the loud roll of the Red Army march, stimulated during the day with stirring music, put to sleep at midnight with a lullaby that was never necessary after the long hours of uninterrupted noise. Ordinarily some of the noise qualified as news, or a variety of news. Now there was none.
Cora said, “The shake-up must be a big one, to create a complete blackout. It’s a good sign.”
“Why is it a good sign?”
“Because the shake-up could extend even as far as Security. They may be too busy cleaning out their own stables to concentrate on us. For a while, at least.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I’m not counting on it. I’m hopeful.” She added bitterly, “There’s nothing wrong with being hopeful, is there?”
“Not if you can manage it.”
“I can manage it as easily as I can manage sour pessimism!”
“I’m not pessimistic. I’m realistic. Realistic enough to know that we’ve stayed here as long as we can, safely.” I stood up, feeling my joints creak. “Let’s go.”
She made no move to get up. She said, “I’m tired,” and put her head back against the well-curb, closing her eyes.”We can’t go on forever without rest. An hour or two here in the shade can’t be dangerous.”
It was worse even than panic. A few miles without challenge, a bite of food to eat, a drink of cool water, and she had forgotten to be afraid.
I was afraid enough for both of us. And I welcomed the spur of anger I felt at her taunt. I said, “Get up. Now. We’re leaving.”
She shook her head, still without opening her eyes. “No. Not for a while.”
I picked up my stick. I said, “Have you ever seen a peasant beat his woman? It’s an accepted form of discipline in this country when she doesn’t do what she’s told. Get up!”
She opened her eyes at that. In a voice of absolute incredulity she said, “You wouldn’t dare! I’d—I’d—”
Before she could think what it was she would do, I had shortened my grip on the stick and was lifting it to swing at her shoulders.
I didn’t have to bring it down. She scrambled to her feet. Her lace, as much as I could see of it above the yashmak, was flaming at first, then white under the dirt. She didn’t speak to me, or look at me, or acknowledge my existence for the rest of the afternoon. When we left the village, she stayed on her side of the goats, I stayed on mine. We plodded westward, mile after bone-wearying mile.
We were both stumbling with fatigue before we stopped for the night. We couldn’t sleep in a village or farmhouse without signing a house-book and producing identity papers we didn’t have, and it would invite suspicion to travel after nightfall even if we had had the strength to keep going. As soon as it was dark enough, we left the road for a bramble-grown ravine with a trickle of water running down it and a stand of dry grass among the brambles. The water and grass would keep the tired goats in the ravine, but to prevent them from grazing too tar up or down it I tore strips from my shirt and braided a rope to tie the wether. The ewes would stay near his bell.
When that was done, I milked one of the ewes into my skull-cap. It
wasn’t as clean as it might be, but we had no other container.
While I was milking Cora said, “What can I do to help?”
They were her first words since the incident at the village, and they weren’t an overture for a restoration of diplomatic relations. She still hated me. But sagging as she was with fatigue, done in, dead on her feet, she had to keep up her end.
“Can you milk a goat?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. Here.” I held the brimming skull-cap up to her. “Drink this. It won’t taste very good, but it’s all the food we have. We’re going to need all the energy we can get.”
“After you.”
It infuriated me beyond all reason. I was overtired and overstrained, no more than she was, but nevertheless, on the ragged edge of exhaustion. Her insistence on that small gesture of equality and independence made me boil over with senseless anger.
Hating her as much as she hated me, and with less reason I said, “There’s plenty of milk, more than we can possibly use. It’s convenient for me to sit here and strip this ewe dry while you’re drinking what you can hold. I’ll get my own later, from the next one. Furthermore, if you’ll drink yours now while there is still some light left, you can be gathering grass for a bed while I finish my own job. If we submitted the whole argument to a board of arbitration, they’d hold unanimously that the most practical procedure would be for you to drink first. Now take it!”
She did, wordlessly. I filled the skull-cap again, and a third time, and got her to try a fourth capful before she gagged. Afterwards I drank all I could hold of the warm, goaty, nauseous, sweat-and-felt-flavored milk, washed the taste out of my mouth with a drink from the runnel at the bottom of the ravine, stripped the remaining ewes’ udders dry, and was through for the day.
Cora had gathered enough grass to make a kind of pallet under the lip of a bank. She was lying on it, flat and exhausted. I sat down beside her. When she moved wearily to make room for me I said, “So there won’t be any misunderstandings, I’ll tell you ahead of time that I’m going to put my arms round you. I recommend that you do the same for me, inside my jacket. We won’t sleep much after the heat leaves the ground, but if we pool our body warmth we won’t freeze quite so fast. Do you mind?”
She said nothing.
Her body was rigid when I lay down and took her in my arms. She was small and slight, like a child, much slighter than I would have thought. To look at her, she was very womanly, with good breasts and the right kind of hips. It may have been her sure taste in clothes that made her seem more full-bodied than she was. She had a wonderful sense of proportion and value – about clothes.
She put her arms round me as I had suggested, inside my jacket. I felt her relax, very gradually. We were fairly comfortable, at first. Tired as we were, it didn’t take us long to go to sleep.
I don’t know how long we slept. Several hours, probably. I woke with a terrible biting ache of cold in my legs and arms. She was shivering violently. I did my best to rewrap myself round her, but we didn’t have enough calories left in us to do any good. Our sleep was finished for the night. I looked at the chill bright stars over our heads, then towards the east for some sign of a dawn that was still a long way off, and tried hard not to think about our troubles.
The small hours of the morning are a bad time to think about troubles. When you are too cold to sleep and too tired to wake up, your rational defenses are gone and you don’t have the substitute protection of unconsciousness. Your mind gets in a groove that spirals downward into gloom, despair and fear. My mind was pessimistic enough normally, even with its defenses up. Lying there in a semi-doze, freezing, unable either to sleep or to come fully awake, with a miserable, shivering girl cramping my arm where she lay on it, and the thought of Security spreading its nets for us, I began to picture all the things they would do to us if – when – they caught us. There was no habeas corpus in the Republic, or trial by jury, or a free press to shout about the rights of private citizens. Only the rokos, with their fists, boots, and bludgeons. I had seen the fists and the boots and the bludgeons swing on others, heard bones crunch and flesh split. The pictures were in my mind, ready to come to life with Cora and me in the middle of them. Vividly, with the reality of dreams and the continuity of conscious thought, I learned that night what a coward a man can be in his own mind.
In the middle of all this, it occurred to me that Cora was probably going through the same thing. Although we were physically chilled, the cold was not enough to justify the tremors that went over her body like waves. She was only half asleep, as I knew by the irregular movements of her eyelashes against my neck, and her imagination was as good as mine, her defenses no better. She wouldn’t confess to fear or weakness, ever. But the realization that she was probably having her own nightmares helped me to escape mine.
I said, “Cora.”
She started violently awake, all her body tense for a moment, then relaxing again.
“Y-es?” Her teeth clicked.
“Would you like to split a cigarette? We have two. I’ve been saving them.”
“Y-yes. Please.”
I freed my arm to get the cigarette and a match out of my pocket. Her lips were blue in the brief flare of the match, her pupils wide and frightened, her mouth slack. I had been right about the nightmares.
I had my own face in shape for the match light. I took a lungful of smoke, then gave her the cigarette and watched the spark of it glow and tremble in her lips as she inhaled.
I said, “I’ve been thinking about Dr. Gorza and his wife. It kind of helps to remember that they got away. When you start thinking about other things, I mean.”
The cigarette spark glowed again, less jerkily. She was waking up, restoring her defenses.
“I tried to do a story on it, human-interest stuff. It wouldn’t come off. But Madame Gorza was one of the most remarkable women I ever met. She was the strong one of that pair. Without her, he never would have made it.”
“Thanks.”
She handed me the cigarette at the same time she said it, so I wasn’t sure whether she had thanked me for a couple of puffs of smoke, or a compliment to her sex, or what she saw I was trying to do for her morale. I didn’t care. I was helping my own morale at the same time. Talking about a man and a woman who had escaped the rokos, worked their way through danger and guards and closed borders, to freedom, was as warming as a blanket. They had had help, and we had none. But their help had come to them unexpectedly when they needed it most, without their asking for it. As it might come to us. I didn’t expect it ever would. But I went on talking about their good luck just the same, dragging the story out and inventing details I didn’t know, to talk the night and our nightmares away.
The escape made a front-page splash in the United States as well as in Western Europe. It happened several months after the big switch in the external Party line, from Hate Everybody to Sweet Reasonableness with Co-existent Capitalism. The reasons for the switch are something history will decide, but what Gorza had to say about conditions in the People’s Free Federal Republic after he was safely out of it had a lot to do with the establishment of a Western policy of watchful wait-and-see. People listened to him because he was Sigmund Gorza. Other refugees had got out of the Republic before, hundreds of them. But they were mostly dispossessed middle-class shopkeepers, or men and women too old to work, or jailbirds, people the Republic didn’t want and were willing to let the West feed. No real attempt was made to keep them from filtering out through the Curtain, although now and then several would be caught and jailed, and as an example, a few shot. Men like Dr. Gorza were guarded night and day, and never allowed within twenty miles of a border in any circumstances.
He was an Austrian professor, a specialist in agronomy and food synthesis, one of the greatest living authorities in his field, more valuable to the Republic’s backward, opposition-riddled agrarian economy than ten thousand acres of growing wheat, and as great a loss when
he got away from them. Ed Cleary, of Allied Press, was the first reporter to talk to him and Madame Gorza after they were out. Ed had the good luck to be in Istanbul when they got that far. He scored a clean beat over all the competition, including me. I was covering for American Newspaper Alliance, on a temporary assignment that took me to Ankara when I should have been in Istanbul.
I talked to the Gorzas afterwards. Not to match Ed’s story, which I couldn’t do, but because I had an idea for a story of my own with a different angle. The woman’s angle, in this case. I by-passed Gorza to talk to his wife about how a woman feels with her life and her husband’s life thrust into her hands.
They didn’t even know they were escaping until the last minute. They had been trapped in the Republic for six years, ever since the Party took power after the war. Gorza had had a research contract with the Liberal Government that preceded the Party. When the Party took control they took over Gorza, his laboratory and the contract as well.
Madame Gorza said, “At first they promised us that we would be free to go when the contract ran out.” She was a thin, grey woman with a deeply-lined face. She kept her hands folded in her lap while she talked. Sometimes they twisted at each other or at the handkerchief she held. “They gave Sigmund everything he needed for his experiments, and a house, and a car. Very few people had an entire house to themselves, even a small one like ours, and almost nobody except very important officials had a car. We were well treated. But there were Security police with us always, night and day. We were never allowed to travel more than fortykilometers from the capital. I knew, long before Sigmund did, that they had no intention of letting us go, ever.”
When the contract expired, Gorza found out what they were really up against. His application for return of their passport and an exit visa was answered by a statement that the passport had expired and was invalid. An application for a laissez-passer to leave the country was ignored. Another application, for repatriation under the U.N. covenant, was rejected on a technicality. Gorza kept on filing more applications, desperate for some key that would unlock the door. He was an old man, a scholar, not a man of action. The thought of trying to get away without proper papers never occurred to him. With Security close at his coat-tails twenty-four hours a day, and his wife as a further encumbrance, he was helpless.