“This isn’t West Germany.”
Twin Lugers whipped out to cover the group.
“We guaranteed to spirit you out of East Germany. This is Poland: once the realm of King Boleslaw the Bold, later part of the Greater Third Reich. We’re at Oswiecim. Auschwitz.”
“We should’ve guessed you’re a double agent.”
“Now, now. Let’s part like civilized people.”
The Lugers waved them away. The twins clicked, bowed, and began to lash the tarp. The others hid Ben as he stole around to the cab. He climbed up, reached in, Torschlusspanikknopf. He jumped down, ran, flung himself to the ground.
Vavoom! The earth hemingwayed, seamed. Stormy flames devoured the wreckage. Something clammy struck Ben and clung to his flesh. He forced open his eyes. He dripped with King Coleslaw the Cold, out of the hamper. There was nothing to see of the twins. He got up and joined the others; the heat drove them away.
A road map of East Europe had blown clear; Frank took charge of it and they tramped and farmcarted back toward East Germany. Only, when they sneaked across a border, they found themselves inside Czechoslovakia. The sky swung like a censer.
“How’d we get so far off course?”
“Take a good look at the map.”
It was one of the new Soviet maps. The cartographers had shifted towns, railroad lines, lakes, and rivers from their true sites, by as much as twenty-five miles, to mislead Western strategists when guiding and targeting missiles.
“We’re near Prague—if we believe the signposts. The American embassy; let Uncle Sam get us out.”
They found a station, a waiting train, and a compartment to themselves. The conductor punched six one-way tickets, smiling at Liza and nodding reassuringly. Almost at once, they were in Prague, taxiing to the U.S. Embassy. The Marine guard stopped them at the door. Carol snuggled up to him.
“We want to see the Ambassador.”
“May I see your passports?” They handed him their passports. He looked from photos to faces and shook his head and handed them back. Their passports were blank. “Sorry.” He scraped off the marine growth and shut the door in their faces.
They walked Prague aimlessly, then found an aim when they grew aware someone was shadowing them. Surely an agent of the Czech SSB who had picked them up at the embassy, he wore a trench coat and had bare feet to match. They stopped midway on a bridge, leaned on the parapet, and eyed themselves in the Moldau. Their shadow did the same.
Talking lightly to throw their shadow off, they agreed this bridge most likely was the one Good King Wenceslaus depontiated St. John of Nepomuk from, after torture failed to make Nepomuk open up to the king about what the queen had said in the confessional. As one, they snapped back from the parapet; inertia left their reflections on the water. They stepped softly away; once across, they glanced back. The poor schlemiel was still watching their reflections in the Moldau.
They had shaken their shadow but they kept on the go till, dog tired, they had to rest. Ben sat emptying his shoe, pouring a cone of time and space. Boothill. He scraped scatological matter from the sole. Look your last on last things. Doré had engraved the Wandering Jew sitting wearily down, on Judgment Day, and easing off his shoes. Fitting; the Wandering Jew had been a shoemaker. Was Jesus the Wandering Jew? He could’ve switched bodies with the shoemaker he put the curse on: humble shoemaker going to the cross, Jesus going on to numberless crossroads. Ever and afar. Ben looked around for the time, saw the hand of a Hebraic clock move counterclockwise on the old Ghetto Town Hall: Over the way, Staronová Synagoga burst on his retina.
He shoved on his shoe; the others followed him to the heaped-up cemetery. A womb of stillness; they felt the soothing heartbeat. Mother Earth. The bedrich bride. Layer upon layer of graves. Ben broke the spell. He hunted the grave of the MaHaRal of Prague, Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Bezalel, maker of the Golem. The MaHaRal had molded clay from the Moldau’s banks into the likeness of a giant man. In an ecstatic state he had animated it by writing on its brow the Hebrew word for Truth, and the robot had helped save the people of the ghetto. Ben found the grave, a chiseled vault.
Thousands of pebbles covered it, each standing for a visitor. Many visitors dropped letters, prayers for help, into the vault. Ben drew pen and pad. In the name of Shem . . . forash, Kumopen! He thrust the note into the vault, ground shook, the pebbles scattered, the stone split open, a coffin heaved up. Its lid lifted, shedding moldy letters and Ben’s note. A skullcapped, MGM-lion-maned man sat up and opened his eyes. The letters of Emet, Truth, shone on his brow. He looked blankly at the sojourner.
“Ato Bra Golem Dybbuk...Thou, Eleazar of Worms?” The blear passed from his eyes. “No. Who wakes me on the Sabbath?”
Carol’s nudge jarred Ben’s voice loose. “Ben Kaplan.”
“Shalom, ben-Kaplan. Help you want, no?” The mane shook slowly. “Joseph the Golem is no more. But the Psalms remain. ‘Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect, and in the book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.’ Is that not what you term DNA, my son? All matter is one: what matters is how you rearrange it. Take of me a pinch and get you yonder to Mount Blanik, where the old heroes of the goyim slumber. Them you should disturb on Shabbos. And there prepare you an ark each. And when you see a vulture sup, scatter the pinch.”
Before Ben could ask how to take a pinch of him to Blanik, the MaHaRal rubbed from his brow the first letter of Truth, leaving Met, Death. Murmuring the Shema Yisroel, he crumbled to dust, Ben hesitated. His mother’s voice whispered, “Go on, take a pinch.” Ben grimaced but picked up his note, took a pinch of the MaHaRal’s dust, and rolled a joint.
A bus dropped them off with the canvas foldboats they had charged to Ben’s Diner’s club card in a sporting goods store. On top of old Blanik they stretched rubberized sailcloth over knockdown frames and sat the night in the boats, holding the double-bladed paddles and wondering who would first say they were wasting their time.
Dawn. Bird shadow followed contours but bird substance proved crow. Its “Cras! cras!” promised no quick relief. They sat waiting. Another shadow, another crow. Frank nodded. “Quoth the Kafka, ‘Ravenmore!’ “ A third shadow. A vulture swooped down on a dead mouse in the grass; residue of rosy dawn scattered trembling light, the vulture burped culturedly and flew off. Ben field-stripped the joint, shaking out the dust and balling the paper. Breeze blew dust and paper into crevices and, though it had already eked out a mouse, Blanik labored.
“An earthquake!”
A sulfurous, ionized smell, then they were floating on the waters of a sudden hot spring that subsided, drawing their boats deep into the mountain. The quake had sunk potato fields and mushroom patches and they found themselves riding an underground river of bramboracka. It needed a little salt.
“Way we were facing, we should come out in Austria.”
“If we come out.”
They paddled madly to clear the luminous walls of the tunnel and the echoing emberhang and to keep the soup from capsizing them. The stream suddenly forked. Liza, in the lead boat, strove to bear right. Unexpectedly, she pressed a hand to her belly as if to pump out an aria, the paddle twisted in her other hand, and the boat swung left. The rest swore and followed. The tunnel darkened and narrowed; they could not help knocking loose stuff off walls and roof but brushed away most of the debris. They burst into day. Signs fleeting by and Frank’s map said they were in Yugoslavia.
And barely in time. The boats had torn and filled with lukewarm soup. It was no strain to laugh that off: yet it was to weep that the debris they hadn’t managed to brush away proved diamonds and gold nuggets. They pulled up under a bridge, let the boats settle, wrung themselves out, and the others turned on Liza.
“Why did you take the wrong turn?”
“I got a sudden cramp and lost control. I couldn’t help it. I’m not mescaline—I mean, I’m no heroine. Oh . . .” Her weeping satisfied them and they let her be.
<
br /> The scape faded out. A spot of darkness thinned, a Western Union Boy, ninety into the shades if a day, cycled out of the mist and handed Ben a telegram. Ben signed for it and diamond-tipped the messenger, who cycled away into mist.
What’s it say?
“Stop.” We’re wasting our energy shaping the dream. We ought to put it into waking up.
We tried that. Someone’s working against us.
Or something. Maybe our web of energy’s made the dream real—an entity conscious of itself, following its own logic, holding us to keep from dissolving into baseless fabric. We need dreams, maybe dreams need us.
Tell it if it holds us it’ll die with our bodies. Promise we’ll redream if it lets us go now.
How do you talk to a dream? As well talk to the universe awake.
Maybe it has a locus in some symbol.
We can’t analyze dream symbols while dreaming, tell real from false.
The scape faded in. They plodded along the riverside, struck an asphalt road. The signpost pointed to Split. Liza sank to the ground, leaned back against the post, and said she couldn’t go on. Tears mingling with soup stains, she said she was a burden, said they’d be better off without her. Martin came back from scouting.
“Don’t quit now. We’re near the waterfront. Just think, Italy’s over there.”
At nightfall they stole down to the docks, passed ships flying Iron Curtain flags, found a Swedish freighter,Ariel. The watchman followed the Balkan custom and slept with his head covered. They climbed the boom of a cargo crane and dropped lightly to theAriel’s deck. They made their way below and hid in an engine room compartment. The Ariel got up steam and sailed with the morning tide.
When they felt sure she had gone beyond the limit, they made their way topside. The superstructure had folded down. Men with headphones manned electronic gear. They were aboard a Russian trawler.
A crewman must have shot them with knockout needles, for the next they knew guards were marching them along a swaying corridor. They wore pajamas, the costume of Russians traveling by train. A sign read Posadit’ v Sibiri. They were in the last car of a long train diminishing toward Siberia.
“Stoi!” They stopped stoically, and the soldier and the matron guarding them shoved them into a compartment. The soldier lit up a filter-tip Laika; at the matron’s glare he backed out into the corridor.
The matron sniffled and wiped her eyes as the last onion dome of Moscow slid from sight. Liza quickly lifted the Heroine Mother medal from the woman’s breast and hid it under the seat. At Kuibyshev the matron missed it and went into hysterics. The OBS news agency had interviewed her when she received it and all Soviet media had given her a big play. She frisked her charges roughly and got some satisfaction, but not her medal. They waited their chance. The train swung across the Muyun-Kum sands of Kazakhstan. She dug the medal out from under the seat and dug the pin into the matron.
The matron’s yelp brought the soldier back in but the matron’s leap brought the two together in a mutual knockout. Meanwhile, Ben jerked the emergency cord. The handle came off in his hand but air and steel spoke success.
The abrupt stop telescoped the train’s lines of perspective, analoging the matrioshka, the gaily painted wooden doll nesting a series of successively smaller dolls. Luckily, they were in the last and so largest car; with everyone else out or in shock, they alone having braced themselves, the six convicts climbed out, careful not to squash tiny engine and tinier engineer, into the middle of nowhere.
The sand was cold where they stopped to rest. They tested the sand all around. Everywhere fiery: yet here one spot of coldness. They scooped the sand away, uncovering a mammoth block of fossil ice. Quickly before it melted they rubbed off grit to lick the ice, then froze at what they saw. A huge amber egg lay inside the ice. The ice melted quickly into the thirsty sand. They hadn’t thought of food for a long time; while they wondered how to crack the leathery shell without a stone hand ax, it chipped open from within.
“Leapin’ lizards! A dragon!”
“No, a pterodactyl.”
A giant pterodactyl. They backed away, but it kept pace by growing. Sudden release from the pressure of cumulative time accelerated the creature’s life processes; it reached full growth in minutes. The scales hardened, the wing membrane dried stiff, the long tail section grew rigid.
They were the first beings in its ken; imprinting filled it with dangerous affection for them. Its teeth were long and sharp. But once they saw its forty-foot wingspread they set about harnessing it. It was stupid but the speeding-up made it a quick study. In an hour they broke it to makeshift bridle and saddles, its wings raised a sandstorm, and they were airborne, heading east across Siberia.
Almost at once they pipped on a radarscope and had to evade one SAM 2 (1 SAM 2:4, Ben made it); after that they flew low. Once, at the tingle of a radar beam, Carol drew a stick of spearmint gum from her cleavage and dropped the foil wrapping as wriggly chaff. At the easternmost tip of Siberia they met fog and climbed above it to get their bearings. Through an eyelet in the fog they saw Bering Strait and the lazy colon of the Diomedes: the Russian island and the American.
With freedom in sight, they felt their mount failing rapidly. Dying of old age, it could no longer buck the east wind; they tried forcing it higher to ride a westerly jet stream, but it hadn’t the strength in its wings. It barely held trim to glide down the wind that swept them back, across Mongolia and into China. With a last surge, it landed them safely by the side of a road, then expired with an apologetic hiss.
In death as in life its processes quickened: its beloved burdens dismounted just as the flesh rotted off its bones. The erstwhile riders in the sky gazed dry-eyed at the dry bones: their pet had served them loyally and long, but when you’ve seen one pterodactyl you’ve seen them all. They walked away along the road and came to a Tung Feng auto on the shoulder with a flat and no spare.
Sue tried acupuncture but all that happened was Ben complained of heartburn and chest pains. A repair truck wheezed up, the mechanic and the chauffeur stared, the truck backed out of sight again, and shortly two columns of Red Guards trotted up to find the foreign devils playing ping-pong with invisible tables, paddles, and balls.
These in turn found themselves in a hospital for observation and in Ben’s case for American restaurant syndrome. An intern stuck a red-lacquered depressor in Ben’s mouth.
“Mouth say tongue.”
“Ah.”
The intern blew the smoke of his Ming Hua cigarette out of his eyes and peered into Ben. “Must be poisonous weeds. Wrong thoughts. Read chapter four of the Chairman’s works and you’ll feel better left away. And exercise. Lots of outdoor exercise.”
They were helping repair a section of the Great Wall of China their captors called the Mongol Patch. On either side of the Great Wall one vastness was all they could see. They eyed each other wanly.
“How’d we get here? Time warp?”
“Great leap forward.”
Their overseer, with red eyebrows and yellow turban, came near, a long rope in his hand. “Wang yang pu loo!” They bent to their task. Melon plants blossomed in winter along the Great Wall; the soil was rich with corpses. Lifting bricks and mortaring them became harder. The edges of vision grew shadowy, blurred. A Liza-shaped hole appeared in the dream.
Liza, come back.
The hole filled with Liza once more.
What happened, Liza?
Bad trip, this whole thing. I can’t take any more.
Liza flickered out and in.
Just what we need, hysteria.
Part of the pattern. She’s been sabotaging us all along.
It’s not my doing. It’s the baby’s.
(Warm nourishing darkness. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.)
So! Baby makes seven!
Why didn’t you tell us?
I put it out of my mind because I did an awful thing: I didn’t let them know I’d been taking LSD.
Let who know?
The gynecologist and the parents. If it were really my own I wouldn’t feel half so guilty.
Make sense.
Don’t you see? She’s a host-mother.
You dug. A childless couple paid me to carry their child. The woman’s unable to bear. The husband fertilized one of her eggs and the gynecologist planted it in my womb.
How long have you been . . . with child?
Eight months. Why?
There’s our interference. Brainwaves begin—or at least register on detectors—around the eighth week. Your baby’s had time to learn brainwave alphabet and grammar.
And it’s not just any baby, way it’s been kicking up. LSD residue in Liza’s blood and tissues may have mutated the chromosomes in the germ cells. We don’t know what kind of genetic monster’s among us.
Orbit 11 - [Anthology] Page 12