by David Dodge
“In eight and one-half minutes we will have crossed the frontier zone and will be above the airport at Runstadt. Land there.”
“They’ll try to shoot us down at the frontier. No plane is permitted to cross in this area.”
“They might miss us. I can’t miss you. Obey your orders.” The pilot shook his head.
“You can put the gun away, Comrade President. I followed you in 1942. I’ll follow you now, although I don’t understand this. But we’re all dead if they hit us with an anti-aircraft shell, and only the captain of a plane can give orders in an emergency. If you want to cross the frontier to Runstadt let me take you across in my own way, without a pistol in my ear and on a straight course that will set us up like a balloon.”
Radovič didn’t answer. The rokos were pounding on the door by then, and the co-pilot’s fingers were sneaking again towards the microphone. Radovič jerked the pistol at him warningly.
The pilot said, “That door won’t hold forever. Put a bullet through it. It will be more useful to you there than scrambling my brains. I’m going to climb.” To the co-pilot he said, “Give me all the power we have and keep your hand away from that microphone. I make the decisions on this plane, subject to Comrade President Radovič’s command.” The co-pilot gave up when he found himself opposed by his captain. They climbed to maximum altitude, as steeply as the motors would take them. The pitch of the plane interfered with the rokos’ efforts to break down the door, as did the narrowness of the passageway in which they were trying to crowd themselves to bring their combined weight to bear. When they began to shoot at the lock, Radovič fired through the steel of the door, wounding one of them in the thigh and driving them back to the tail of the plane. They kept shooting from there, first at the door-lock and then, as the plane approached the frontier, in suicidal stupidity at random into the forward compartment. The pilot was cut by a flying splinter of steel before he could take cover, but the extra thickness of the washroom walls shielded an area around the co-pilot’s seat from the rokos’ fire. The co-pilot flew the plane during the actual zone crossing, with the pilot crouched beside him calling their maneuvers, andRadovič, jammed with them into the small protected corner, shouting into the microphone of the plane’s radio: “This is Janos Radovič, President of the Republic: Do you hear me, comrades? It is my plane that crosses the border towards Runstadt. Do not fire on me, comrades. Soldiers and citizens, this is Janos Radovič speaking, in the plane which flies across the frontier towards Runstadt. Hear me, comrades. This is Janos Radovič.”
His plea helped. Standing orders for troops manning the fortified border zone were absolute, but the power of the familiar voice they had listened to and obeyed for so many years was almost as strong. Some guns fired, many did not. Orders, counter-orders, demands, warnings, threats, and confusion crackled in the headphones which the pilot and co-pilot wore, while the slow old plane dodged and darted clumsily among blooming bursts of shellfire, the rokos’ bullets tore ugly holes in the battered door, and Radovič held off one danger with shots from his pistol while he tried to shield them all from the other with the power of his name: “Hear me, comrades. This is Janos Radovič—” A flight of pursuit planes had taken off to intercept them as soon as they were reported at the border zone, but it had a distance to go. By the time it caught up with them they were flying into another rising flight of interceptors on the far side of the frontier. The warning bursts of bullets which forced them down at Runstadt came from the second flight. The first flight turned back without firing a shot.
Cora would not confess, or did not remember, that she was frightened, even when the rokos were shooting into the pilot’s compartment from almost directly over her head and the plane bucked and jumped from near misses by the ground gunners. She said she was too busy planning the story in her mind.
She was, technically, on a pool assignment, covering for us all. But a reporter’s personal experiences are his own material, pool or no pool, and none of us could legitimately criticize her for the superb news beat she made out of hers. It was an opportunity that couldn’t happen twice in a lifetime. Everybody aboard the plane was held in isolation for forty-eight hours while they were screened and questioned, and no other reporters could get to Radovič. Only Cora. When the doors opened at last and the other reporters rushed in to find they were too late, she walked out with the story written, ready to file.
There were two stories, actually, although she ran them together. One was her own, of the escape, the other Radovič’s, of his imprisonment. Coming as it did so soon after Djakovo’s story, Radovič’s rocked governments. The entire French cabinet went out of office on the issue of peaceful coexistence. Statesmen all over western Europe took strong public pro- or anti-Radovič stands, mostly pro, and the American press boiled editorially. Djakovo had been a relatively obscure peasant fanatic, but Radovič was a world figure. What he had to say carried weight.
He told, without trying to excuse himself, of his own failures; how, with full power in his hands and the citizens of the newly established Republic solidly behind him, its first elected president, he had let power be stolen from him; how, because of his inexperience, his incapacity, the Party had been able to take gradually increasing control, first of the government, then of him as its figurehead; the methods they had used to break him when he tried, too late, to resist them; finally of his own shabby function as their mouthpiece. It was a naked, bitter confession. For three years he had functioned only as an announcer and salesman of the Party program; reading prepared speeches which were handed him to read, signing papers he was not permitted to examine, making hundreds of recordings on every subject from farm collectivization to international relations, sometimes reading into the recorder a vitriolic attack on the Republic’s foreign enemies within minutes after recording an appeal for friendship, tolerance, and understanding from the same enemies. They would not even let him shave himself or use a sharp knife, so he couldn’t commit suicide. And by the time he was desperate enough to attempt suicide they had so many recordings of his voice that they could have kept him alive for months. Not even his death could cure what he had done to his people. Only confession and explanation.
He asked Cora to quote him directly when he said, “I have been a traitor to my country. I confess it. I was not a willing traitor, only a weak and foolish one, but I was nevertheless a traitor. I do not ask to be excused. I ask only that those who followed me when I was not a traitor think of me as I was then, a man and a patriot, and believe that Janos Radovič died when he became President of the Republic and the tool of its enemies.”
He still had the revolver, and one unspent cartridge. He shot himself before the doors were opened to other reporters.
Cora ended her story with Radovič's self-pronounced epitaph, word for word.
Piotr continued to peer ahead through the windshield, which was blurred with dust and spattered steam from the radiator. He said nothing then, or minutes afterwards when Cora added, ‘So if you have to hate him, hate what they made out of him. Not the man you fought tor. And not yourself for fighting for him, Piotr.”
She couldn’t talk any more after that. She had to stand up and hang on to the body-stakes with the other girls. We were grinding through a boulder-filled creek bed, fording the stream where a bridge had washed away. The old truck bucked and bounced like a bronco.
There was glass or sharp metal in the stream bed. When we pulled back to the road at the far side a front tire was flat, with a clean gash through casing and tube.
Piotr and I got out to look at the flat. I asked him where he kept the spare. He said, “What spare? Four tires are all that are allowed.”
I felt suddenly cold. For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a ten-dollar recapping job we were all dead. But Piotr, although he had never seen a de-mountable rim before in his life, knew how it was that decrepit old trucks managed to keep running on the Republic’s roads. He unlocked a wooden lock
er on one of the running boards. It was full of rusty tools, cracked spark-plugs, tire-irons, pieces of wire, a patching kit, a jack, a hand-pump, slabs of old casing that could be used to make a boot. He said, “Work another miracle, gospod.”
It took me over an hour. He helped with the pumping, when I had finished patching the tube and glued a boot into the casing. The girls, after watching us for a while, thought it would be a good time to go for a swim in a pool of the creek.
Piotr saw no objection to it when they asked his permission. They were pretty casual about the location of the pool they picked to paddle in, and where they undressed. I got the impression that when peasant girls emancipated themselves from the yashmak and haremlik they emancipated right down to the buff. Cora had no choice but to be emancipated with them. But nobody came along the road to gawp, and Piotr and I were too anxious to finish our job and get moving to waste time on peep-shows. He yelled to them to get dressed while he was pumping the tire. I cleaned the windshield and filled the radiator while we waited for stragglers.
He did a peculiar thing when Cora came back to the truck. It was peculiar not for the gesture, which any Moslem might make, but because few orthodox Moslems would make it towards a woman, and if he weren’t an orthodox Moslem the gesture had no meaning. He took her hand and touched it to his forehead.
“Thank you for what you told me, gospodična,' he said. “It cured something that has hurt me for a long time. I am a better man for it.”
She said, “I’m glad.”
That was all either of them ever said about it. Her knees, as we both saw, were skinned and raw.
The girls were singing again when we got rolling. Piotr was talkative and cheerful. He skirted around the subject ofRadovič and Radovič’s escape without asking any leading questions, deliberately checking himself when the conversation turned towards Cora or me.
He said, “Of course I realize by now that you are newspaper people, probably American or English, and that you could tell me many more things if I asked you. I would like to hear all you could tell me, and if it were only for myself I would ask many questions. But in our organization we bind ourselves to an absolute rule: The less anyone knows, the less he can be forced to tell.”
“It’s a sensible rule.”
“It saves lives. The peasants with whom we will pass the night will believe that we are what we seem to be, a Party team. They would receive us with more welcome if they knew we are not, but it isn’t safe for them to know. You must both be careful not to talk too much where they can hear you. Just yes and no, or a nod. It will be an inconvenience for you, but for them it may – if you are – if they are questioned afterwards and can honestly answer, under pressure, that they knew nothing about you – you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
We rattled and bumped along for several miles before he spoke again, thoughtfully.
“There is one question I must ask, gospod. I leave it to you to decide how much you want to tell me. With Djakovo gone and Radovič dead, we have no leader, good or bad. This man who helped them escape, whoever he was – you need not tell me it was the same man, because there could not be two like him—“”
“It was the same man.”
“… this man who risked his life for Djakovo, and must have taken considerable risk to help Radovič – he is a leader. He is a man we could follow.”
Surprise made me turn my head to stare at him. Could this be Piotr, Djakovo’s man, who would not even eat the meat of a slaughtered animal, now talking about a leader whose weapons were dynamite, violence, and terror?
He sensed what went on in my mind.
“I know what you are thinking. But I could accept the need for those things now. So would others, when they hear the truth about Radovič. We followed Djakovo because he was a leader when we had none, and we were sick in our hearts because we thought we had been led to revolution and useless bloodshed by a traitor, for his own ends. Behind an honest leader we could fight again, with whatever weapons are necessary. If this man who helped Djakovo andRadovič would help us —”
“Piotr, I honestly don’t know why he helped them. It’s a puzzle I can’t answer. Whatever made him do it, it was not for their sake. It served only some purpose of his own. If you followed him you would be betrayed from the beginning, as you thought you were betrayed by Radovič.”
“Then why—?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell you anything else. Don’t ask me any more questions.”
He dropped it. But he scowled to himself for a long time afterwards.
He did ask one other question, although on a different subject. Towards the middle of the day, when we had stopped at a collective where the girls sang for their, and our, supper and we sat afterwards in the shade of a haycock eating bread and cheese, he said apologetically, “I have to know this so that I can make plans for the girls’ safety, gospod. I would not ask otherwise. Where will you try to cross the frontier?”
“At Skaro.”
“Upstream or downstream?”
“Through the middle of the town.”
“Through the town?”
“Yes.”
“It’s impossible. The bridge is guarded day and night. You can’t even get close to it, without papers.”
“It’s as close as we can get to any way out, without papers. We’ll swim the river.”
“You’ll be shot before you even reach it.”
“It’s Skaro, Piotr. I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
I said it curtly, to shut him off. I did not want my own fears reinforced by his.
Skaro would be a hard nut to crack. The town was strongly guarded at all times by the Red Army. For that reason, it was the least likely place we could be expected to try to break through. I had less fear of army patrols than I had of Bulič’s Security net. So far, we had been able to out-think his helpers. At the border itself we would have to out-think him, and I did not underestimate the difficulty of doing that. He would already have reinforced the guard along the whole western frontier, doubled and tripled precautions in border areas through which we might normally have expected to penetrate a loose patrol system with luck and the cover of darkness. There was neither looseness nor darkness in Skaro, but a tight twenty-four-hour watch and bright lights that burned from dusk until daylight. The controls were already so strong that they needed no reinforcement. It followed, by my reasoning, that Bulič would not waste his efforts in Skaro, and since his shrewd cleverness was more to be feared than anything else, strongly guarded Skaro was in fact our best chance. Not a good chance, but the best we could hope for.
Skaro’s advantages as a route of escape, which accounted for the tightness of the controls on the town, were several. The single bridge was barred and guarded, but the river, although swift, was fairly narrow at that point. Across the river was Free Territory, with an American-British-French military government in command and disciplined soldiers on sentry duty who might be expected not to shoot first and ask questions afterwards of a couple of swimmers. For another and most important reason, Skaro was the only point in the Republic where the quarantined frontier zone narrowed to the width of a river bank. Border control atSjolnič in the south-west and Gled in the north-west, the only two other gates open to road traffic, and on the single railway line that carried the Orient Express, was maintained at a distance of from three to eight kilometers inside the frontier. Beyond those points a traveler kept to the prescribed road at the prescribed hours, carrying prescribed papers, or could be shot out of hand. At Skaro, only at Skaro, the town was on the border itself, separated from Free Territory by the width of a stream. If we weren’t shot diving into the river or while we swam, and if Security didn’t pick us up before we got that far, we had a hope.
They were doing their best to head us before Skaro became an immediate problem. We were stopped at the next town by another road-block, although we passed it without trouble. Piotr had spoken to Sidik and Fatma abou
t the hip-wiggling. They stayed in the rear of the chorus this time, with Karsta screening Cora behind her broad beam and shoulders and waving arms, booming baritone at therokos. They wasted no time on her or on us, after the usual cold, menacing stare. My beard was thick enough by then, and my face so darkened by dirt and sunburn, that I could stare back at them, although not long enough to make the stare defiant. Even in a Party truck we were supposed to cringe. We did. They waved us through.
We loaded up with gas and oil at a depot it took Piotr half an hour to locate. There are no service stations in the Republic, only government depots hidden away on back streets which you find by asking questions and where you bail your own gas out of a barrel, pour your own oil, and pump your own flats if you pick up a nail, as we did.
It was a simple puncture this time, easy to patch, but it delayed us. We didn’t get away from the depot until after dark. The truck’s headlights were so dim that we had to creep the next few miles. I did the driving while Piotr peered off into the dark for landmarks, both of us tense and growing increasingly tense as the minutes went by. We were only a few kilometers from Skaro. If we overran the farm Piotr had in mind for our stopping-place, we might very easily find ourselves driving into the town without preparations for it. We could not pass the night there without identification papers, nor study the final obstacles we would have to surmount to reach the river, nor safely turn back and flee the town without attracting attention. It was a tremendous release of strain when Piotr finally said, “Here. To the left,” and I turned the truck off towards the welcoming lights of a big farmhouse shadowed by the bulk of an even larger barn.
The feeling of relief did not last. An automobile was parked in the farm barnyard.
The shape and size of the car was hard to make out in the dark, but any motor vehicle meant Authority. No private citizen in the Republic could own one, least of all a peasant farmer. I’m certain that Piotr’s first thought when we saw the shadowy outline in the barnyard was the same as mine, that we had run headlong into the net. He let out his breath in a long sigh when the dim headlights of the truck swept over the other car and we saw that it was a junky old prewar Volkswagen, fenderless and rusty.