– Don’t be uneasy, Yuri. I repeat that this is a simple experiment. In any case, this man is condemned. And anyway, he is a Fascist bastard, no?
– All right. As you wish … Do you have need of us?
– No, but you can stay here if you want. Move away and let me be.
The two witnesses did just that and sat on stools that were situated in the back of the room. From there, intrigued, they observed the merry-go-round of the Siberian: He deposited the first two bottles next to the German then poured a part of their contents into a graduated cylinder connected to operating tubes. He also prepared the vials and the syringes. Iliev understood, then, that his colleague was about to effect a transfusion in defiance of all medical ethics.
– But ... you want to inject him with vodka? My word! he exclaimed.
– Yes, but that is not all. Have a little patience.
– I hope you know what you’re doing, Comrade ….
The Buryat did not flinch at this warning. He continued his preparations with seriousness and precaution. Iliev and Simonov attended the scene with apprehension, asking themselves what was going on in the head of the Siberian.
The latter took out his little altar, which he placed on the operating table. He added a small ceramic cup, into which he poured a little vodka. He then lit two candles and a stick of incense. With his two hands, he delicately fanned the grey smoke toward his face, which shone with a sort of ancestral bliss.
The Siberian closed his eyes. While grey vapours enveloped his weather-beaten face, he reached into his sack and extracted a small drum with white skin.[4] Without warning, he began to strike it sharply, at regular intervals, launching a strange litany. He chanted prayers that, for Iliev and Simonov, went back to the dawn of time. The words of the shaman were to them incomprehensible, though Simonov thought they were addressed to obscure Siberian divinities. There, in that far country, on the banks of the great Lake Baikal, spirits had certainly begun a great dance. Before this spectacle of another age, the two men were struck dumb, unable to move and interrupt their comrade in his enigmatic ceremony.
When he had finished his recital, Solotin got up and poured the vodka on the floor. On tiptoe, he returned to the wounded man and, suddenly, stuck a needle in his bruised arm. The vodka began to invade the body of the Teuton. Iliev dared not flinch, but he knew that the experiment was going to be cut short, that without a doubt, the German would kick the bucket in a minute or two! His blood would be poisoned by Product 61, the name given to the vodka brand by the Soviet soldiers because of the rank it occupied in the list of articles with which they were furnished. A product of the first necessity, which permitted the combatants to withstand the hell of war.
At first, the Fritz did not move. Then, after a few minutes, came some slight convulsions and, once the vodka had inundated his entire being, there were violent spasms that shook the unfortunate man. He began to bellow like a madman.
– Quick! Hide yourselves! Solotin cried, rejoining his confused comrades. They hid themselves in the back of the room. Brusquely, the wounded man got up. He staggered as his entire body was dismantled by fits and starts of unspeakable brutality. His head spun without end. Iliev could not believe it. This man should have died several minutes before because of all the vodka in his veins! Instead, against all medical logic, he had succeeded in standing up!
– But, good God, Ruslan! What have you done? shouted Iliev.
The other man remained tight-lipped. Totally caught up in what he was seeing. Iliev and Simonov, quickly understood that they were in the middle of assisting in a metamorphosis.
Indeed, the German had only a distant connection with the human that he had once been. His arms were transformed into powerful legs, ending in sharp claws. His skin cracked into multiple scales of a copper colour, shredding his grey uniform into a thousand tatters. Petrified, Simonov never ceased to cross himself and invoke all the saints of Russia. As for Iliev, he trembled like a leaf, searching desperately for a way to flee that accursed place. Solotin, for his part, did not lose sight of what was happening.
The groans redoubled in intensity, when the mutation neared its end. Finally, it gave birth to an infernal hydra. Part-human, part-dragon.
In seeing this monstrosity, the three men experienced an ambiguous feeling, mixing at once the worst of fears and the most unhealthy of curiosities.
They believed their final hour had arrived when the beast’s eyes, yellow and saurian, fell on them. The sight of this filthy being greatly disgusted them, including the thick slime dripping from its reptilian mouth, studded with sharp fangs. The men were medusaed, hypnotised.
In a burst of lucidity, Simonov grabbed his pistol and shot at this thing which faced him. At the same moment, two armed soldiers, alerted by the cries of the beast, entered the room. They were instantly roasted by a wave of fire. The beast spat anew and grilled another soldier who had just come in. Others followed, their guns rattling. Then the fire broke out, charring, burning, carbonising everything in its path.
Several bullets pierced the armour of the dragon, whose blood flowed purple on the floor. Entering into a maddened rage, he vomited new flames, deadlier than ever. In one bound, he escaped, breaking the glass of the windows in the room. In an instant, he had vanished in the dark. Outside, they heard gunshots and cries of terror. Then silence fell upon the plain.
– Damnation, what is this circus, Ruslan? bawled Iliev.
– I wanted … Let’s just say that I wanted to practice ... something that my master-shaman had taught me, explained the Buryat, hanging his head.
– What?! You’re mad! My word!
– Of course not. It was the curse of the man-dragon. I took the opportunity to test it … and it worked beyond my expectations ….
– It’s not possible, lamented Iliev, raising his eyes to the ceiling. We’ll have to find him and eliminate this demonic creature at once! Then I don’t know what canard we’ll serve the NKVD. If we tell them the truth, it’s the firing squad for us! At any rate, they’ll never swallow this unlikely story!
– It’s going to be easy to find, said Simonov, who was leaning out the window. His wounds left traces of blood in the snow. We mustn’t lose one minute!
Indeed, the monster was quickly located. He was hiding near the hospital, in the ruins of an old school. Illiev had commandeered a score of men to lay siege around the lair of the beast. They circled the place carefully with several batteries of machine guns placed at regular intervals. Each waited for the release of the prey, fingers poised nervously on the trigger.
While snow fell in fat flakes, cold tore the flesh of the combatants. And in this atmosphere frozen by ice, everyone could hear the rattle of the creature.
– It’s dying, said Simonov.
– Yes, it’s suffering like a martyr, added Solotin.
– Oh, you’re unfeeling, Ruslan! May I remind you that this thing was human not so long ago! And that, without all your bullshit, we wouldn’t be where we are, Iliev snapped.
The Siberian clenched his teeth, but refrained from answering.
– Be on your guards! If this trash raises its nose, shoot it! We’re waiting for reinforcements before the attack. Be ready, Iliev ordered all the soldiers.
– When I tell this to my wife, she’s going to think I’m nuts! Simonov said with amusement.
– I am truly sorry, Solotin said.
– You got lucky this time, my friend! I just learned tonight that the NKVD guys aren’t here. So, we can arrange everything as we like, Iliev reassured him.
The voice of the medical officer was then smothered by a rattling noise coming from behind the line of soldiers. An enormous machine that crushed everything in its path appeared from the shadows.
– The T-34![5] We can say that they haven’t slacked off with reinforcements! Iliev cried, delighted.
– With that, we will polish our friend’s scales! cheered Simonov.
Solotin, alone, remained silent, as if absorbed i
n internal, abyssal meditations.
The chariot came and stood with them, the barrel aimed straight at the shadows, where hid the man-dragon. His growls were now interspersed with ferocious outcries.
– Come on! Finish it! Fire! cried Iliev, dropping his arm.
And the tank fired at its mark. An explosion took out almost all of the pile of stones left over from the school. In unison, the machine guns began to vomit their deadly poison. The wounded creature could not hide and, with the energy of despair, tried to force a way out of the blockade. His flames carried off some unfortunates, but his body was soon riddled with bullets. Too handicapped to advance, he stopped and continued to defend himself with his hard skin. While his scales were now purple with blood, the beast still gave some blows with his claws until, in a last rattle, he sank into the fresh snow, lifeless. Iliev immediately ordered a ceasefire.
They all approached with extreme caution, before realizing that their adversary was definitively no longer a threat. A circle was being formed around the body when Iliev spoke:
– Comrades, look well, because you will never again see anything like it … Needless to say, what happened this night must remain between us. Anyway, who would believe you? No one! They’d send you directly to the madhouse. In the meantime, I can guarantee you that any tattletale will have to deal with me. Any questions? All right, burn that!
Without a word, the troop obeyed and, when all was finished, the men dispersed. On the horizon, bursts of artillery streaked the sky, as if the war wanted to recall their good memory.
With heavy steps, Iliev, Simonov and Solotin reentered the hospital together. Silent, grave, they thought back to those moments they had just lived through. Simonov decided to lighten the mood.
– And what do you say to a little vodka to celebrate? he asked.
The laughter of the three companions went up into the starless night and resonated until dawn.
•••
Meddy Ligner was born in 1974 in Bressuire, a small town in the western part of France. He spent his first 18 years there. He goes back frequently to see his family and to play baseball with the famous Garocheurs. He studied history and afterwards, he taught French abroad in Finland, Russia and China. Since 2003, he has worked as a teacher of history and geography in Poitiers, France, where he lives with his wife, his daughter and his son. His website is: http://meddyligner.blogspot.com
•••
[1] The secret police of the USSR, who purged the Soviet Army repeatedly through the 30s and 40s.
[2] A semi-nomadic Mongolian group of tribes from southeastern Siberia. They are the largest surviving Siberian ethnic minority. The actor Yul Brynner was Buryat.
[3] The Gulag prison system made famous by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
[4] The signature instrument of the Siberian shaman. The NKVD murdered shamans throughout Siberia during the 20s and 30s, taking special care to confiscate and burn their drums.
[5] A Soviet medium tank, the most common design produced during WWII.
The Ascent
By Berit K. N. Ellingsen
Some say screaming is embarrassing and shameful, but under the right circumstances, or perhaps the wrong circumstances, screaming is actually very liberating. Because there are times and places when you would really like to scream, when you would absolutely love to scream, and feel a great and pressing need to do it, but you can’t.
•
One of those places is at the bottom of the swimming pool, when you’re lying there behind the wetsuit that’s too tight in all the wrong places, and the round, white swimming goggles that make you look perpetually startled. You’re trying to relax, trying to stay calm, trying to maintain that delicate balance between the need to breathe and the greed for another breath-hold record. All while your lungs ache for air, your throat swallows for the same, and the muscles in your body, down to tiny little flexors you didn’t know you had, burn from lack of oxygen, and the only thing that’s silent is your mind. Because this is mind over matter, brain over muscles and you over water. After the initial few minutes of hypoxia, the acute need to breathe vanishes, and you enter a free-floating state where it feels like you can go on forever.
Of course, you can’t; it’s just a question of how long your body can remain conscious on the small amount of oxygen you brought with you from the surface. In order to stretch the breath-hold time as far as possible without fainting, you have become intimately familiar with the signals from your body that say it’s about to black out: the pins and needles starting in your fingers and toes, like cruel little whispers, like the warm sun being momentarily obscured by a cloud. The prickly sensation invades your hands and feet, and slowly creeps up your wrists and ankles. There’s a round orb pulsing behind your eyes. For every contraction, the sphere changes colour, from deep electric blue, to warm glowing gold, back to blue, again. It doesn’t go away, even when you blink. The edge of your vision is framed by a moving spindly black, like a mass of dark spiders crawling around your eyes, only you can’t feel them. As the blue orb pulses slower, the black cloud starts to eat its way towards the middle of your eyes, the spiders multiplying. That’s the true signal, the body’s black flag of unconditional surrender to oxygen deprivation. You know exactly when to break off, when to push hard away from the blue tiles at the bottom of the pool and stick your head out of the water and breathe.
Sometimes, the surge of air rushing into your suffocating lungs and brain and muscles is so sudden and liberating that you black out, anyway, but then you’re caught by friendly hands and the record is still yours.
•
You think the static breath-hold records are a little stupid in themselves, a child’s play at the bottom of the pool. But despite that, you are proud of them. How many people can hold their breath for more than eleven minutes?
•
The exercise does have a purpose, though. It’s an appetizer for the main course, preparation for the real dives into black water. Those trips are another game, completely. There, you stand on a sled, a slim metal frame with a tank of air connected to two balloons, bright yellow for visibility in low-light conditions, wrapped shut. The sled moves along a thick wire, of the kind that’s used in sailing, and plunges into the deep to a predetermined depth. The sled uses its own gravity and your weight to fall into the blue. All you need to do is hang on, equalize the raging pressure in your ears by using a little of your own breath from a plastic bottle tied to your leg, tolerate the increasing cold and darkness, and refrain from screaming. After less than two minutes, the sled reaches the bottom of the line. Then you just need to be lucid enough to pull the strap that opens the tank and the main balloon, wait until the balloon has inflated and hang on hard while the sled rushes you up to the air and the light.
Some people think using a sled is cheating compared with swimming down yourself and then back up again, which requires considerably more energy and strength. But with the sled and a brief decompression at ten meters on the way up, you can go deeper than 200 meters and up again in one breath. For you, the purest challenge is not the swimming or the climbing, but withstanding the depth and the darkness and the lust for oxygen as long as possible. To go as deeply as humanly possible. The fight against the pressure and the water is an addiction to you and your over-developed diving reflex.
•
It’s for real, now, a new-record attempt at what is called “No Limits Diving”. No limits. The sled takes you down much faster than your body alone can. After just a minute, you’re down deeper than most divers go with air on their backs, the sled shrieking along the wire. You start in bright daylight in tropical waters and end up in a temperate dusk, where the water is cold enough to bite your hands and stiffen your cheeks. Together with the weight of the water that bears mercilessly down on you, it’s only just tolerable, even for the brief time it lasts. As you plummet down, the deep makes your heart slow and the blood to retreat from your arms and legs. Your organs squeeze up against your spine and your l
ungs fill with blood plasma to avoid damage.
•
Beyond the whirr of the sled as it falls on the wire, the deep is always quiet. It’s so quiet it sometimes feels like the building pressure in your ears is caused by the silence and not just the weight of the water. Riding the sled down is a little like lying at the bottom of the pool, only now you need to clench one hand around a handle, the other around the plastic bottle, and wriggle your lower jaw back and forth so your ears pop to equalize the brutal pressure. The cold makes certain you don’t go fully into that silent breath-hold space of the bottom of the pool. You reach the edges of it but not further. That’s why you can hold your breath for more than eleven minutes in a warm and brightly lit pool, but only for seven, or so, on the sled. There is also another thing. An ancient instinct refuses to let you close your eyes in the deep. Some divers fear sharks or eels or jellyfish while they’re down. But there are scuba divers at the top part of the wire and they look out for dangerous animals. If they see one, the competition is delayed until the animal has passed.
No, your fear is much older and more primitive than that. It’s the true fear of the deep. You have dived in many places of the world, from Arctic to tropical waters and everything in between. But everywhere, the deep looks and feels the same. It’s devouringly dark, jealously cold and crushingly heavy. It doesn’t need to strike or bite or poison you, like other dangerous things do. No, the deep simply uses its own weight to pacify you. It sits on you until you give up and leave, or stop flailing your arms and legs. Fortunately, the deep is mindless and doesn’t know you’re there. You regard that as a blessing. Still, you always keep a knife in a sheath on your thigh. Other divers laugh at you, ask if you plan to catch some fish while you’re down there, and wonder if you’re going to bring a harpoon at the same time? You say it’s for cutting yourself free if you get tangled in the wire or the balloons, but you know better. It’s for the ancient fear of the deep.
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