The Lights of Skaro

by David Dodge

  “Matches are expensive,” he told me. “Better carry a lighter. Heinz says please bring him a new one, with plenty of flints. He uses slivovič for fuel, so you don’t have to worry about that. Léon wants coffee, if you have room to spare in your bags, and reading material, anything, in any language but Slavic. Graham says he will give you the name of the only decent restaurant in the Republic for a bottle of Scotch. Cora wants half a dozen pairs of nine-and-a-half nylons, extra long, and a couple of pink lipsticks. Neon-light color.”

  I was writing it down. I said, “Extra long nylons? And pink lipsticks?” Cora was a small brunette who wore, as I remembered, bright scarlet lipstick.

  “They’re not for her. She has a contact named Danitza, Yoreska’s official secretary and unofficial mistress. A big blonde dish. Nylons and lipstick are her price for tip-offs.”

  “What about Cora herself? What does she need?”

  “Nothing.” He chewed moodily for a while on a piece of bread he was using to sop up gravy. “Sleeping pills, maybe. If you could get her to take them.”

  “Is she jumpy?”

  “Like a flea. She doesn’t belong there, Jess. She’s as much out of place in a police state as I’d be on a ladies’ volley-ball team. It’s no place for a girl. For hardshells like you and me, O.K. But—”

  “Have you ever suggested to Cora that she wasn’t as capable of doing her job as any man alive?”

  “She’s a pighead, I know. But the wear and tear shows on her. She smokes too much, drinks too much. I was getting the jumps myself, and I’ve been through it before. It’s worse even than Czechoslovakia. The loudspeakers yammer at you from five in the morning until midnight. When they shut up at last and you have a chance to sleep, you worry about the story you’ve just filed, you worry about your contacts, you worry about knocks on the door, you worry about an overnight shift in the Party line that will trap you Inside before you hear about it, you worry about everything. Bulič’s rokosare watching you all the time. I tell you, Jess – and I know you were in Warsaw and Moscow, but I still say it – you never saw thugs like Bulič’s bully-boys. They scare you just to look at them. Apes! Gorillas! Sub-men!”

  His voice rose higher with each word, then dropped again.

  “That’s another thing with Cora. She worries like the rest of us, and she’s scared stiff of Bulič. Physically. She gets the shudders just to look at him. We brave males don’t mind admitting that he scares us, but she’s too proud to confess it to any of us. It might sound like feminine weakness. There isn’t another woman in the whole bloody country she can talk to, let her hair down with. She’s all bottled up in herself. If you have any influence with her, Jess, for God’s sake get her out of there!”

  “Nobody has any influence with Cora. She makes up her own mind. But it must be pretty bad.”

  “Wait until you’ve had a few months in the People’s Paradise, friend.”

  “I mean the way you feel about her.”

  He flushed, then grinned.

  “Well, all right. Sure, I do. I asked her to name the date a couple of days before I left.”

  “What did she say?”

  “What she says to all the other candidates, I guess. She claims she wasn’t cut out to be a wife, only a reporter.” He made a face. “A girl like that. She patted my hand, though.”

  “That’s encouraging. Tell me more about Bulič.”

  “Bulič. Well, Bulič.” Oliver’s face sobered. “An ugly man, Jess. Ugly inside. Absolutely ruthless. The perfect man for his job. He’ll go after Yoreska one of these days, and I give him better than an even chance to come out on top of the heap. There isn’t a drop of softness in him anywhere, or weakness, or real loyalty to anything but himself. Only ambition and cruelty. He’s been a Party man all his life, but only because it served his ends, gave him the ladder he needed. Yoreska is relatively civilized alongside of Bulič. You may even like him. Bulič belongs in the jungle.”

  “Why hasn’t he gone after Yoreska before?”

  “Yoreska has the army, as well as the Party organization. All Bulič has is his Security thugs. So far.”

  “I heard a rumor in Istanbul that the man who helped the Gorzas get out of the country was Bulič himself.”

  Oliver laughed, without humor.

  “Somebody had been hitting the hemp leaves if you did. The only way Bulič would help anyone out of the People’s Paradise is in a basket.”

  “I didn’t think much of the rumor. Tell me one thing more, Jim. Was there any connection between your proposal to Cora, and the fact that you were fed up with the job, and the story you filed that any reporter as experienced as you are would realize was enough to get you thrown out?”

  “None of your business. I’m through talking. But I’ll give you a final couple of tips.”

  He held up two fingers. “First, cross Yoreska if you want to get out the way I did, but don’t cross Bulič. Keep yourrumors to yourself. When you land on his bad books, you’re cooked. Kaput. Fini. It’s his way of doing things. Second—”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s really a favor, Jess. If there’s any way you can do it, get Cora out of there. The ground is going to be torn up one of these days, when Bulič and Yoreska lock horns. I wouldn’t like to think of her there when it happens. Particularly if Bulič wins out.”

  “Is he down on Cora?”

  “He’s down on everybody. That’s the whole truth, Jess. He’s the only man I know of whose world is populated exclusively by enemies.”

  I remember when he told me that I made some gesture to indicate I thought he was exaggerating. Half in a doze, reliving the conversation, I must have tried to repeat the gesture. I lost the grip on my legs and fell over sideways against one of the ewes, who blatted angrily and thumped me with her hoof. It brought me back to a realization of where I was. Sitting in a marketplace nodding with sleep and regretting past mistakes of judgment wasn’t helping us to escapeBulič’s world of enemies.

  We had to move along soon. The sun was still high, but the trading was over. Most of the peasants were packing up to leave. We had to leave with them, in a crowd.

  Cora had had several good hours of sleep. When a man driving a yoke of oxen came our way, going towards the fountain to water his animals for the home trip, I pulled heryashmak up to cover her mouth, then shook her arm.

  She awoke immediately. Her eyes were blank and peaceful. She looked at me for a moment, unwinking, gathering her thoughts. When they had caught up with realities, she smiled, surprisingly.

  “This will make a wonderful story when we write it, Jess.”

  “If, as and when we write it.”

  “Just when. I’m confident.”

  “You’re fully awake, too, aren’t you? You know where you are?”

  “Why must you be so pessimistic all the time?’ Her voice was soft. “We’ll get out of it. You’ll get us out of it. I knew it back there on the road, when we tumbled into the ditch and they passed us by. I haven’t really worried since, not even when we came through the archway. I went to sleep feeling safe just because you were here with me.”

  I said, “I appreciate your confidence,” and began untying the wether’s cord from her ankle.

  She irritated me, with her great-big-wonderful-you routine, as much as she had angered me before with her stubbornness. I resented having that calculated, high-voltage charm turned on me, as if she could buy from me some further effort for her protection and safety that I wasn’t already making for both of us. I resisted a temptation to tell her tocork it up and save it for Bulič.

  The loudspeakers on the minarets picked up the chime of a bell striking three o’clock from Brotherhood and Unity Square in the capital, booming it across the nation to remind sixteen million people that they had their work quotas to fill before dark. Cora said, “How long did I sleep?”

  “About three hours.”

  “Jess! You should have wakened me.”

  “There was no need for it. The marke
t was bad. I sold one ewe and did some shopping.” I showed her my pack. “We’ve got blankets and socks and cigarettes. And food. You’d better eat something before we go.”

  I gave her a piece of bread and a slab of the roast mutton.

  Eating hungrily she said, “What are we going to do about them?”

  She meant the goats, our increasingly dangerous cover.

  “Stay with them for the rest of the day. Wait for tomorrow and the breaks. I haven’t figured that far ahead. Right now we have to get out of town with the crowd. Finish eating first, so you can cover your face.”

  The goats hated to leave their comfortable bed. I took the wether by the ear, as the bearded peasant had led the ewe – the wether followed his ear more readily than he did the collar, I found – and took him, the ewes trailing reluctantly behind, to the fountain. When we had watered them I led off again, carrying my pack like any other grimy, stubble-whiskered peasant homeward-bound from the market with his livestock, his woman, and his household purchases for the week. The pail I had bought, which I had hung on the outside of the pack, rattled noisily with the tin cups and spoons it held. Dealing with the roko mentality, boldness of movement, even noisiness, diverted suspicion. Furtiveness and quiet inevitably attracted it.

  A pair of them waited, huge and silently ominous, in the gateway through which we left town in the direction opposite to the way we had come. Still not knowing what they were looking for, nor what to expect from us, they had been posted along the line to terrify us into giving ourselves away by some act of indecision, some nervous misstep at the sight of them that would betray whatever disguise we might have assumed. It was a standard technique. They were so menacing even to look at that people with guilty thoughts ran from them instinctively, convicting themselves.

  These two, in their coffin-shaped undertakers’ coats, looked so much like the pair we had seen on the other side of the town that they might have been the same men. Had they been, and recognized one goatherd couple out of dozens, and exercised an elementary intelligence, they could have had us. Peasants coming to market from the east do not go home towards the west. But there was little chance that all three factors would work against us. We had the further help of an unpleasant diversion.

  A man ahead of us in the crowd that was pressing out through the gateway, a solitary traveler with a pack like my own, carried a burden of guilt as well. By some bad luck he must not have known that the town was posted. Any farmer coming in from the countryside would have seen it, any townsman passing through the marketplace would have heard about it. This man must have spent the day in some cellar grinding out anti-government propaganda on a hand-press, or plotting sabotage. He didn’t know that the rokoswould be there waiting in the archway. When he saw them he forgot, for a moment, to be bold. He faltered, tried to turn back, changed his mind and went on, betrayed by his indecision.

  They let him go on past them before they called to him to stop. That was the roko mind. It pleased them to let the poor devil think, for a moment, that he had got by. When they called to him, he began to run, clumsy with his heavy load.

  They went after him like a pair of hunting dogs, and caught him within a few steps. One held him while the other went first through his clothes, then through his pack. I don’t know what they found, if it was anything. They began to beat him, methodically, swinging their ham fists at his face and belly, holding him up to go on with it when he sagged and would have fallen to the ground. The line of peasants we were in went stolidly on, eyes straight ahead. But it was impossible not to hear the thud of the fists, the grunts of therokos when they struck. The man was unconscious, and made no sound himself. There were only the grunts, the thud of fists, the animal odor of fresh blood as we passed. Those, and the sound of the loudspeakers from the town behind us roaring stimulating music.

  We were fifty yards beyond the town wall, in the clear, before Cora pulled at her yashmak and said helplessly, ‘I’m going to be sick.”

  “Hold it.”

  “I-I can’t. I-”

  “Stay with the crowd. Keep moving. Keep your head down.”

  She was helpless for a minute, nauseated and staggering. I took her arm and kept her stumbling along. A donkey-driver who was switching his animal on past our goats looked at us with guarded interest as he went by, but there is nothing identifiably foreign or revealing about the distorted face of a vomiting woman except that she is sick. She got over it in a moment. After we had gone a little farther, I persuaded one of the ewes to stray off into the roadside ditch, and scooped a tin cup full of ditch-water when I went to herd it back. Cora rinsed her mouth and adjusted her yashmak, her eyes thankful above it as she returned the cup.

  There was nothing to do after that but plod. The road was a stream of peasants, livestock, and carts, some moving faster than we were, some slower, so that we were always passing or being passed and could not talk safely even if we had had anything to talk about. The stream thinned gradually as groups turned off on side roads. We had to stay with the stream until dark, then leave it as if we had a fixed destination in mind, find a place to hide for the night, and find further, without being able to buy, bargain or trade, a cover to substitute for the goats when we went on the next day. Some peasants, probably most of those around us, would be willing to help us if they knew the position we were in. But others would sell us for the reward they would get, and we dared not take a chance on revealing ourselves to the wrong ones. Yet we were going to need help, or risk another dangerous theft.

  It was a headache. I had to think about it, plan something. But I was so done in that I couldn’t concentrate. The goats were weary themselves, overdriven to the point that they didn’t even try to stray from the road, only moved along listlessly ahead of us to keep beyond the reach of our sticks. Cora, when she got over her shakiness, took it upon herself to do what little herding was necessary.

  It was a good thing that she was able to. I didn’t have an ounce of energy left. I could only plod, lifting one heavy foot to put in front of the other, step after step, mile after monotonous mile towards the setting sun, trying to think ahead for the time when the sun would disappear below the horizon and force a decision on us, my mind always sliding helplessly backward to those two rokos and the way they had grunted as they swung their fists.

  I was afraid of them. Not their sub-human minds, but their fists. I couldn’t argue myself out of that, or pretend that physical pain wasn’t a thing to dread, or persuade myself, a civilized man, that what would happen to Cora in their hands was nothing for me to think about. They would hammer us both to a pulp when they took us. As a preliminary softening, so that we would be in the right condition for refinements when they took us to Bulič.

  Bulič. Bulič. Bulič. Bulič. The syllables dogged my dragging heels.

  He had his finger on me from the first minute I came through the Curtain. I wasn’t particularly honored. All foreigners got the same treatment, particularly foreign reporters. Cora, Heinz, Léon, Graham, and Jim Oliver had been through the same thing, as I had in Poland and Russia. But Bulič was more thorough than some of his counterparts.

  I came on the Orient Express, the only train connecting East and West on a regular schedule. It would have been easier for me to fly in from Vienna, but when you get a visa to go through the Curtain you do it according to what the visa says. Mine said by train, on such and such a date, at such and such a place of entry.

  I don’t know who else was on the train. I may have been the only passenger. Grossing the border, I had an entire railroad car to myself except for two Red Army guards who stood in the vestibules with their backs to the doors during the first eight kilometers, when there were shields over the outside windows so that passengers couldn’t see anything of the fortified border zone. The train stopped at a small town where the shields were taken down, the guards got off and Border Control took over.

  The Border Control officials were army men, in uniform, with the Red Star at the peaks of their ca
ps. They were reserved, formal, and reasonably polite. They searched my baggage carefully, and I had to sign a statement that the coffee, lighters, nylons, Scotch, lipsticks, and other stuff I carried would not be sold or traded in the Republic. But they didn’t search me, or push me around.

  After they got off the train I was free to look at the countryside. There wasn’t much to see except village minarets, ox-drawn ploughs in the fields, and the burned-out skeletons of railroad cars that had been toppled from the right of way and left to rust. There was a lot of war damage still evident, even that many years after the fighting. When we stopped a second time, at a railroad junction, and I tried to get off and look around, I felt the finger for the first time. The doors of the car could be opened only from the outside.

  Two rokos were on hand to let me out when we pulled into the capital, late at night. I think Bulič picked his prize gorillas to meet trains, for the initial impression they would make. Both of these were monsters, taller and wider even than the average, with the over-developed jaws, beetling brows, and pendulous ears of glandular giants. The one who did the talking had been kicked or bludgeoned on the chin at some time in his career. His thick jaw was crooked. It wagged sideways instead of up and down when he spoke to me.

  “You are Jess Matthews.”

  It wasn’t a question. I said, “Yes,” just the same.

  “Come along.”

  At the same moment, while his crooked jaw was still wagging, his partner gave me a shove to start me moving. It wasn’t a playful push. I almost slammed into the first man. I was prepared for something like that, as well as a thumb in my eye if I didn’t take it nicely. I picked up two bags, a typewriter, and an overcoat without any help from either of them and went along.