Not This August

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Justin had been in high school during that war. “How did the uprising come out?” he asked.

  “They were killed to the last man, woman, and child,” Lowenthal said, surprised. “The ghetto was pounded into gravel by artillery.”

  Dr. Dace snapped: “I’m sick and tired of your Warsaw Concerto, Sam. Let’s get on with the work.”

  But after a while they were talking again. Justin learned that nobody there knew where Headquarters were, that the Russian railroad inspectors were free-wheeling, happy-go-lucky types whom it was easy to hoodwink and possible to bribe, that so far nobody had succeeded in corrupting an MVD man.

  The situation across the Mississippi, under the Chinese, was more urgent than it was in the East under the Russians. The ancient Chinese contempt for human life led to executions for such things as smoking in public. There was some sort of decree posted everywhere in which every American was placed under suspended sentence of death for banditry and terrorism; any noncommissioned officer could execute the sentence for reasons which seemed sufficient to him. However, the language difference made organization and communication much easier. If the American cringed to the color-conscious invader, the invader was happy enough about that gratifying fact to neglect training sufficient officers in the difficult English language to police the mails and wires.

  Somebody had a watch and announced that it was four-thirty and he for one wanted some sleep.

  “One last item,” said Dace. “What about him?” That was Mr. Sparhawk, sleeping soundly on the concrete floor. The old man woke up at once and asked mildly: “What about me?”

  “I’d like him to come along with us in the freight car,” Justin said. “We can keep him in the cave.”

  “Freight car?” said Mr. Sparhawk disdainfully. “William, how am I supposed to preach and teach in a freight car? You’re acting awfully strange, I must say. I had no particular objections about coming to this town, because after all one must go somewhere. But now a freight car and a cave? Too foolish!”

  Dr. Dace said: “I’ve heard about this egg. He preaches submission. Furthermore, he’s nuts. I say rub him out.”

  “What a savage little man you are,” Mr. Sparhawk said wonderingly. “You know, it’s all very well to talk, but violence won’t do. I was a colonel in the Brigade of Guards, gentlemen; I know what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?” Dace bristled.

  “Why, that I saw the Guards break under the Russian armored attack on Salisbury Plain. I saw the capture of the Royal Family with my own eyes. Her Majesty, of course, was superb. But—it was defeat, you know. That was when I discovered there was a basic mistake. If the Guards could be broken and Her Majesty captured, obviously we’d been mistaken all along with our guns and rockets and bombs and the answer lay elsewhere. Since then I’ve been seeking it, gentlemen—”

  “Mr. Sparhawk,” Justin said, “I wish you’d come along. I couldn’t have got this far without you. I don’t know whether I can finish it without you.”

  “You want me for a mascot?” the old man asked wryly.

  “Not a mascot. As—as a chaplain, I suppose,” Justin said.

  “Well—I’ll come along,” Mr. Sparhawk said. “As a chaplain. You bloody-minded individuals can use some spiritual ministration in any case.”

  Justin, without knowing why, felt immensely relieved. More, he had the impression that everybody else in the concrete storeroom was too.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Where the hell have you been?” demanded Gus Feinblatt in an angry whisper.

  They were in front of Croley’s store in Norton; Justin had walked down for sign-in day. The MVD starsheey syerjahnt was presiding inside the store over the book. Men and women apathetically walked in from time to time, found their place on the page, and signed. Then they stood around, or bought something, or just walked out.

  “Where the hell were you last sign-in? For that matter, where the hell have you been all month?” whispered Feinblatt. “We had Stan Potocki sign in for you. When we found you were gone and that nut Gribble of yours couldn’t tell us anything, we had Stan practice for a week and then come in with a bunch of us early to sign for himself and another bunch late to sign for you. We could have been shot! You just shouldn’t have done it, Billy!”

  “I had to,” Justin said. “Thanks, Gus.” He reached into his pocket and found a penny, a steel disk with a wreathed star on one side and the head of Tom Paine on the other. “Here,” he said. “Christmas Eve.” Gus took the penny automatically, looked bewildered, and Justin went into the store.

  “Vot name?” The sergeant scowled.

  “Moyoh eemyah Yoostin,” Billy said. “Fermer.”

  The sergeant put his finger on the rectangle. He glanced at Justin and looked a little puzzled. Justin took the pen and looked at the signature above. It was a pretty bad imitation Potocki had done. With his trained fingers he imitated the imitation, trying not to draw the letters too obviously. It passed the sergeant’s comparison. Whether it would pass the later, leisurely comparison of the headquarters officer who was at least a part-time handwriting expert, he did not know.

  Justin read a comic book—Joe Hill, Hero of Labor—for half an hour. At twelve noon a jeep came by for the sergeant; he closed his book grimly and drove off with it to the next hamlet down the line.

  The store came to life then. Mr. Croley emerged from his cubbyhole to wait, dead pan, for customers to speak up. He sold some binder twine, fence staples, seed cake, cheese, imitation candy, and dark gray bread in a little flurry of business activity and then the store was empty again. Justin went to the counter.

  “I’d like to talk in your office,” he said. The storekeeper lifted the counter flap and went in first. “I hear you have some surplus stuff.”

  Croley sat at his small roll-top desk with the stuffed pigeon-holes and waited. Justin knew for what. He took out a bundle of money, big bills from Lowenthal’s safe.

  “Don’t have any,” Croley said. “Know where there is some, maybe. Big difference.”

  “Yeah. Big difference. Well, do you know where there might be some sacks of flour, dried peas, and beans? And case lots of canned horse meat, sugar, dried eggs, and tea?”

  “Expensive stuff.”

  Justin spread out the bills in a fan.

  Croley took them and said ritually: “I dunno for sure but I think maybe Mrs. Sprenger down past the gravel pit might be able to help you. I’ll just write her a note about it.”

  He wrote a note to Mrs. Sprenger on the back of an old sales slip and sealed it with a blob of flour paste. Justin got a glimpse, unavoidable in the tiny place unless he had turned his back, and saw that it seemed to be about flower seeds.

  Croley handed him the note and Justin started to leave. Transaction over. End of incident. But amazingly Croley detained him. “Imagine you’re getting around,” the storekeeper said with a wintry little smile.

  “Maybe,” Justin said cautiously. So the old skunk was adding up his absence—he had noticed it of course; Croley noticed everything—and the big bills. Justin counted on Croley’s own illegal part in the black-market transaction to keep his mouth shut. Counted too far?

  But Croley said: “Anything I can do for you, let me know.” And shook his hand!

  In a daze Justin said, “Christmas Eve,” and gave him a penny. Croley was looking at it in bewilderment as he left.

  Justin thought he had Croley figured. The old man was now firmly poised on the fence. Without being committed in any way whatsoever he was now ready to jump to either side. Never underestimate the adaptability of a Croley, Justin told himself.

  Gus had loaded his feed on the wagon. It was a pitifully small load, and his horses were gaunt.

  “Business proposition, Gus,” Justin called up to him. “Short trip down Cannon Road, light work, big pay.”

  “O.K.,” Gus said disconsolately. Justin climbed up and Gus flapped his reins on the horses’ backs. The wagon creaked down Cannon Road
toward the gravel pit.

  “I should have warned you,” Gus said bitterly. “You’re taking a chance being seen with me. I’m under suspicion as a dangerous conspirator—to be exact, a rootless Zionist cosmopolitan. The MVD came around last week. They searched the house. They took our Menorah, the Sabbath candlestick I haven’t lit since Pop died. And in the attic they found the real evidence. A bunch of mildewed haggadas, Passover prayer-books I haven’t used for twenty years. And Granpa’s Talmud in forty little volumes of Hebrew and Aramaic which I can’t read. That makes me a rootless-internationalist-cosmopolitan-cryptofascist-Zionist conspirator. They warned me to keep my nose clean. I guess they’ll be back one of these days when they haven’t got anything better to do and haul us away.” He lapsed into silence.

  “Stop at Mrs. Sprenger’s,” Justin said.

  The birdlike old lady read the note in terror, whispered to herself, “I wish I didn’t have to,” and showed them to the cistern in the back yard. The two of them levered its concrete slab cover aside. There was a ladder and the cistern was stacked with provisions.

  “Please,” Mrs. Sprenger begged them, “please don’t take more than the note says. He thinks I take the things myself but I wouldn’t do anything like that. Please don’t make a mistake in counting.”

  They carried up the food and loaded the wagon, hiding it under the original load of fodder.

  “Christmas Eve,” Justin said to Mrs. Sprenger. And gave her a penny.

  “Thank you,” she said faintly.

  Driving away, Feinblatt asked, “What’s this Christmas-Eve-and-penny routine, Billy?”

  “Just a habit I have.”

  “You didn’t have it a month ago. Where’ve you been? You look different. You lost some weight, but your whole face looks different.

  “I had some teeth pulled.”

  “I see; that would do it. Billy, stop me if I’m going off side, but did you have your teeth pulled like, say, the Laceys down at Four Corners?”

  “That’s the way.”

  They were heading up Oak Hill Road by then and Justin was debating furiously with himself. He had to start somewhere, he had to start with someone. There’d never be a better starting place than strong, steady, bitter Gus Feinblatt. But he didn’t want to; he didn’t dare. He was learning the difference between trusting only yourself and trusting others. It was an agonizing difference.

  Stalling deliberately, he asked, “What’ll you have for your share of the loot?”

  “I don’t care. Some of the beans and flour, I suppose. We’re sick of potatoes. Lord, what a winter this is going to be! I’m lucky to have Tony and Phony here; they can haul wood so I can spend my time bucking and splitting. I guess we’ll make out if we close off most of the house and if we can get another grate for the stove. The old one’s about burned through. They aren’t supposed to go fifteen years without a replacement.”

  “Turn right,” Justin said when they reached the fork that led on the left to his place and on the right to Prospect Hill.

  “What for, Billy?”

  “There’s something I want to show you. And something I want to ask you. Look, you rootless Zionist, how’d you like to join a real conspiracy?”

  The horribly risky job of local recruiting had begun.

  BOOK 4

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  NOVEMBER 18…

  The farmer lay trembling with cold on the concrete basement floor of the Chiunga Junior High cellar.

  “To your feet, please,” the bored lieutenant said. The farmer tried to get up but his knees betrayed him. He collapsed again and whispered from the floor: “I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister. I told you I just got in the habit because everybody was doing it and I didn’t mean anything.”

  “To your feet, please,” said the lieutenant. “Now sit on the stool again.” He took a deep breath and roared in the exhausted man’s face: “Do you think I’m a child to be taken in by fairy stories? The prisoner is lying! The prisoner knows very well that the greeting ‘Christmas Eve’ with the passing of a coin is a symbol of defiance!” He turned down the dazzling light that reddened the farmer’s eyes and equally turned down his voice to a murmur. “You see, Mr. Firstman, we know the truth. Why are you keeping us awake with this stubbornness? You could be in bed now if you’d just said an hour ago that it’s merely a token of resistance, a sort of game, merely. What do you say, Mr. Firstman; will you be a sport and let us all get some sleep?”

  “All right,” the farmer screamed. “All right, I guess maybe it was. I guess we got a kick out of it, it was like a password, something you Reds didn’t know anything about. Call it anything you want to!”

  This took the light down another notch. The lieutenant offered him a cigarette and a light and cooed: “Please, Mr. Firstman, what we want is not the point. We hope you’ll help because whoever planted this dangerous seed wishes you and your friends no good. You’re in trouble now in a way, but it’s not your fault; the blame lies with whoever began this silly business. We only want you to help us find him, and certainly you don’t owe him any friendship the way he’s landed you here.”

  Firstman swayed on the stool after two deep drags at his cigarette. “I don’t know who started it,” he said stubbornly. “Like I said, everybody started to say it and pass pennies around but that’s all I—”

  The lieutenant plucked the cigarette from his lips and snarled: “There is no need to lie to us, prisoner.” And again the light blazed into his red-rimmed eyes.

  Two hours later he signed the confession and tumbled into his cot, snoring.

  The lieutenant studied the document with a look of deep disgust; the captain to whom he reported came in and caught him scowling.

  “And what’s wrong, Sergei Ivanovitch?”

  “Nothing, Pavel Gregorievitch. Also everything. Farmer Firstman had signed an admission of his guilt. In principle, so he should have; his attitude was contumacious and it was clear to me that even if he has not so far engaged in wrecking, he certainly would when the occasion presented itself.”

  “What about ‘Christmas Eve,’ Sergei Ivanovitch?” the captain asked, beginning to set up the chessmen for their game.

  The lieutenant’s lips went tight. ‘Christmas Eve’ was the captain’s discovery, and on the strength of it the captain hoped to be a major soon. “It seems to mean ‘Pie in the sky,’ Pavel Gregorievitch. If you know the phrase?”

  “Approximately the same as Nietchevo,” the captain sighed. “I feared as much.” He moved pawn to king four.

  Immensely relieved, the lieutenant sat down and played the queen’s pawn gambit. “Administrative disposal?” he asked.

  Pawn took pawn. The captain nodded yes.

  The lieutenant pursued two trains of thought simultaneously. One concerned the “administrative disposal” of farmer Firstman: it would be his job to administratively dispose of him with a pistol bullet in the back of the neck; he was wondering which pistol to use. His cherished souvenir Colt .45 was far too heavy for the job—the other concerned the margin by which he should lose the chess game to the captain.

  The captain said abruptly: “We should sweat a few more of these ‘Christmas Eve’ sayers, Sergei Ivanovitch, but I will understand if results are negative. One cannot be right every time.”

  The lieutenant suppressed a smile. The captain felt self-pity, and his course was now clear. It was his duty to be roundly trounced in a dozen moves.

  NOVEMBER 20, temperatures seasonably cold with snow flurries over the Northeast and light variable winds.

  The proclamation left by the corporal in the jeep said the indigenous population was ordered to discontinue the faddish, slangy salutation “Christmas Eve” forthwith. For the said phrase could be substituted any one of the traditional cultural salutations and farewells in the following list:

  Ah, good day sir (or madame)!

  How are crops, (first name of person addressed)? And more. Mr. Croley looked it over word by word
in his empty store, then slowly tacked it to his bulletin board and waited.

  Lank old Mark Tryon came in after a while and asked: “Got any white bread?”

  Mr. Croley took a huge loaf of dark rye bread from its screened box in answer to that.

  “Cut me off two pounds,” Tryon said. “I s’pose you couldn’t slice it for me?”

  Mr. Croley shook his head once and measured carefully to cut off two pounds. Tryon read the placard meanwhile. He turned from it, dead pan, to pick up his chunk of bread and put down his dollar.

  “Christmas Eve,” Mr. Croley said, shoving back a penny change at him.

  Tryon blinked, said furtively, “Christmas Eve,” glanced at the placard, and scuttled out with the bread under his arm.

  Mr. Croley looked after him for a moment and then turned to check through the credit books on the widespread rack. He worked through the As, noting who was over five dollars, who over ten, who over fifteen. Sir or madame! he snorted to himself silently.

  NOVEMBER 23.

  Stan Potocki and his wife were out in the crisp cold butchering hogs. A huge fire roared and stank, for as they boned the meat they threw bones and gristle onto the blazing chunks. It was a funny way to butcher. Stan sawed and sliced, his wife dragged cuts away to hang in the barn and between times kept herself busy digging in a row of barrels. When she finished, the barrels would be flush with the ground, filled with brine and pork, covered with the winter woodpile.

  Mrs. Potocki leaned on her shovel for a moment, stamping her feet in the powdery snow. “Mrs. Winant didn’t say anything when I met her,” she said.

  “Henry Winant’s yellow,” Potocki grunted. “Killing ten sheep. ‘Maybe more later, Stan, but I can’t tell him hog cholera got my sheep, ya know.’ ” He was imitating Henry Winant’s nasal twang. “I told him wild dogs could just as easy kill twenty as ten, but he’s yellow. Got to face up to the Agro man anyway, why not do it for twenty sheep?” He added, “Goddamn it,” whetted his butcher knife, and stuck another pig in the throat. Inside he was already rehearsing his story for the Agro man. “Hog cholera, sudden outbreak. Had to slaughter and burn ’em fast, Lieutenant, you being an Agro man know how it is with cholera. Wanna see the bones and ashes? I’ll get a shovel, buried ’em right here.”