by Gene Wolfe
“You rush to judgment.”
“As you asked.”
Hair grinned. “Tell me why.”
“For many reasons. One, he thinks of himself.” She was writing as she talked. “Two, he is of Amerika, like this Rathaus. Three, he know him. They are in the same cell. Four, Rathaus know this man. He may trust him more than us. Is that enough? I have more.”
Baldy said, “That is enough. Will he escape, too? You cannot know, Naala, but what do you think and why do you think it?”
“I can know, as you do not say. He will not, and that is number five. He may try. Is it that which you intend? It will depend on his treatment and his hopes.”
She turned to me. “You wish to return to Amerika?”
I said, “First I’d like to get my passport back.”
She nodded.
“Second, I’d like to collect enough information and take enough pictures for a book about your beautiful country. When I have those—they’re what I came here for—I’ll want to go back, yes.”
Baldy grunted. It did not tell me whether he had liked my answer.
Hair said, “We were given to understand that you did not speak as we do.”
“I don’t,” I said, “or not very well.”
Naala gave me the hard smile. “You learn in prison?”
“In prison and in Puraustays, and while I broadcast for the Legion of the Light. Was it the Legion who got Russ out? Is that what you think?”
Hair said, “Would not they have taken you and left him? So I think.”
I said, “You’re right.”
“Thus you will not escape,” Naala told me. “Rathaus has friends here, you see? He believe they get him back to Amerika and they may try. I do not know. You, having no friends, might slip away from us and wander the streets.” She pointed to the door. “Do you wish it? Go! Not one here will shoot you.”
“In prison clothes,” I said.
“You will get others. You will steal them. Or you will steal money and so buy them.”
I shook my head, and she turned to Baldy.
“You see? He helps us, and we let him go free. Let him write this book as he wishes. He is a sensible young man.”
Hair grumbled, “He speaks like a child.”
“Like a little child he speaks a foreign tongue he has learned by listening. Soon he speaks better.”
“I do not mean a foreign—,” Hair began.
Baldy moved his hand a quarter of an inch or so, and that was enough.
“If he runs, it looks bad for me,” Naala told him. “It must be thus. I want him even so.”
There was more after that, but I have given you the main things and tried to quote all four of us as accurately as I could. Maybe this is the place to explain. I had taken notes, and I find that even when something happens to them later having written them down fixes them in my mind. So it is good to take notes, and when they get lost I have not lost the information, usually. Maybe you will doubt me when I say that, but there was one time when my notes were lost for a while then found again. There was not one thing in them that I had not remembered.
All right, Naala and I left together and walked maybe a mile to her apartment building. The shops and offices were all closed or looked like they were, and that was not where the bars and clubs were, so it was pretty quiet. I saw a couple of posters like the ones I described when I told about getting clear of the Legion of the Light, but I do not think I asked Naala about them.
In general, we did not talk much on that walk. I remember I said that we were likely to get busted because of my prison clothes.
She said, “Do not be concerned. They will not take you while you are with me. Tomorrow we get new clothing for you. I know a shop and I have good taste.”
I said, “I do, too. Or anyway, I think I have.”
“Men never do. Women sometimes, but not much.”
There was no elevator in her building, but that did not matter because she had a first-floor apartment. “You will like it,” she promised me. “It is nice, no?”
Of course I said it was. It was just three rooms and a bath, but all the rooms were big. The biggest room was a corner room with a lot of windows, maybe four feet above the ground. The kitchen was in one corner—a stove, a sink, and a little fridge. There was a desk in an alcove, too, with a telephone on the desk. I saw the telephone and thought, wow! But I did not say anything then. It was a spinning dial phone, something I had read about somewhere but never seen.
My bedroom was not as big as Naala’s, but it was still pretty big—a lot bigger than the cell I had shared with Russ Rathaus. There was a bed big enough to sleep two, a dresser, two bureaus, and two chairs. You could tell Naala was proud of everything. She pointed out all the pieces and told me all the drawers were empty, which I found out later was not quite true.
“It is better you keep the blind down, at night most particularly. If the window is light, people in the street see through the trees.”
I had already figured that out.
“They see through, or it may be they come to spy. When the sun come up, the blind may rise also. Then you have the light. You are hungry?”
“I’m too tired to be hungry,” I told her. “I’d just like a shower. Then I’ll go to bed, if that’s all right.”
“With me, you think.” She laughed.
I said no.
“For me you will be clean and smell sweet. This I appreciate, but you must sleep here.”
I said I would.
“If you come for me in the night, you will be hurt.” She had turned serious. “You may be killed, though I hope not. Do not tell others you were never warned.”
I said I would stay in my room unless I had to use the toilet.
“Still you wish a bath?”
I said I did.
“You may have one, but this you must do for me. Leave the uniform of correction on the floor beside my bathtub. You may take your shoes. Your stockings also.”
I said that was fine.
And that was what I did, wrapping a towel around me to make a kilt when I went back to my bedroom. I could hear Naala talking on the phone in the big room, but I could not tell what she said. She listened more than she talked, or that is how it seemed to me.
My new bed was a lot bigger than my bunk in the prison had been, and a lot cleaner, too. I got in bed and covered up, and for a little while I thought about the man in black and Russ Rathaus. Like, suppose we found Russ. Would the man in black be mad at us? And did I really want to help Naala find him? Stuff like that.
She thought I was just a kid. I knew that, and maybe she was right in certain ways. But I knew she was with the secret police, the JAKA. That warehouse the screws had taken me to was probably JAKA headquarters here in the capital, and Baldy and Hair had been pretty far up in the organization, especially Baldy.
So thinking about that I could see they were not as interested in Russ Rathaus as they thought they were. What they were really interested in was the people they thought had helped Russ escape.
Well, would the man in black be mad at me? I kept coming back to that as I got sleepier and sleepier. Why had he helped Russ, and where was Russ now? Would he be seriously pissed at me…?
About then I fell asleep and had a dream that has stayed with me better than a lot of things that really happened. Maybe I should not tell it but maybe telling it, writing it down for you to read, will help me get away from it a little bit.
In my dream I was back at the ruined castle, although it was in better shape in my dream than it really was. I was tied or chained to a wall or something. I could not move. The man in black was in front of me, driving a stake into the ground by hitting it with the back of an axe. At first he tapped it to get it started. When it was started he took his axe in both hands and really slammed it, driving it deep in. Then he turned his axe around so as to hit it with the sharp edge of the blade. Just two or three strokes, and he had cut a point on it. I remember thinking I could not hav
e done that, and I know that is right. I could not have. If I practiced a lot I could learn to do it, probably. But it would take a lot of practice.
He went away then, and I waited, watching the stake and wondering what he was going to do. The sky was very blue, I remember that clearly, the blueness of it and the black of the castle wall. There were just a few little white clouds in that sky, and some black birds that flew but hardly ever moved their wings. They were pretty big, and I wondered what they were.
Then the man in black came back. The axe was gone, and he was carrying something. I could not see the face, but I knew somehow that I would recognize it if I could see it. He was tied like I was on the boat, his hands behind him and his feet tied together with rope. The man in black carried him like he did not weigh anything, like you might carry a dummy stuffed with straw.
He took him over to the stake he had pounded in and sharpened and lifted him, and turned him over so he was looking up at the blue sky and the black birds.
For what felt like a long time he held him like that, then he slammed him down on the point of the stake. I saw the wooden point come up out of him all smeared with blood. Maybe the man in black went away then, because I do not remember him anymore. It was just me and the man with the stake through him, only it was not really a man, it was the doll with Russ’s face. It wiggled around, trying to get off it, but wiggling only made the point go in deeper. I wanted to tell it how it could get off the stake, but I did not know what to say. It seemed to me there was no way it ever could.
Then I woke up.
10
NAALA
For a long time after that I lay awake, remembering where I was and thinking about the dream. Finally I got up and went to the bathroom. When I flushed the toilet it made so much noise I felt sure it would wake up Naala, but it did not. I washed my hands and went out into the big room, naked. There was milk and butter in Naala’s little refrigerator, and bread in her breadbox. I ate some and drank a glass of milk, washed up, and went back to bed to think some more.
It seemed to me that this country I was in was the stake. I was stuck on it just like Russ and trying to get off, but I never would. I would die here, like the doll on the stake in my dream. It might be better to resign myself to that, I thought. To accept it. I decided I would try, but there was always a little piece of me that was looking for a way off the stake, a way home.
In the morning Naala asked me to fix our breakfasts. I am not really much of a cook, but I can boil water if you know what I mean. I can do simple things and fix good, simple food. We had poached eggs on toast and one sausage apiece, with hot tea because there was no coffee. (I would have cooked more if there had been more to cook.) Naala did not compliment me on the food, but she did not complain either. She just said to stay the way I was, with shoes and socks and a towel tied around me for a kilt, until she got back. Then she went out.
That was my chance to snoop around the whole apartment and I took it. If I had found anything really sensational, I would tell you here, but I did not. What impressed me most was what I did not find. I did not find any pictures of Naala. None at all. I thought maybe there would be one of her with some guy. Or a school picture with two or three other girls. Something like that. There were not any.
The big handicap I had was that even though I could speak the language a little I could not read it. I found an address book, and I could see that some of the numbers had something to do with location and some were probably phone numbers. But I could not read the names. Nothing like that. There were a few books. One with pictures seemed to be about stage magicians, not how the tricks worked but how they looked on stage. There were pictures of their posters and photographs. I looked at all the faces without recognizing a single one.
Most of the books did not have pictures, so I could not even guess what they were about. There were maybe a dozen books altogether, plus the address book.
I found a douche bag and three condoms, and some pills and so forth that I could not be sure of. I also found a cleaning kit for a handgun. (I could tell it was for a handgun because the cleaning rod was only about a foot long.) There was a good deal of other stuff, of course, pots and pans, cosmetics, a sewing basket, and so forth. But nothing else that really told me anything about her.
There was a radio, too, but no TV. I turned on the radio wondering who was broadcasting for the Legion now, and it was me.
They had gotten me because I was an American. I am sure I said that. The idea was to make the government think they were getting their ideas over to the U.S. and getting new members here and so on. They wanted to look bigger than they were because they were not really very big at all. So they had been broadcasting in German and they had wanted to add English to it.
Maybe they had found out that making the government think they were big made the government want to cut them down to size. I hoped they had and were being more careful, and I was surprised at myself when I found out I hoped that. Pretty soon I got tired of listening to a bad recording of one of my old broadcasts and found some music. Some of it was pretty good, but I figured it was probably Austrian or German.
When Naala came home she had two shopping bags full of clothes for me. They were not as cool as the clothes I would have bought for myself back home, and everything was ready-made. But they were better than most people had where I was.
She said, “You like them. I will not ask.”
I turned off the radio. “Yeah, I do.”
“I see you smile. They have take all you have? In the prison?”
I tried to explain that the Legion of the Light had not brought anything but me and the clothes I was wearing.
“Possessions come and go.” She sat down. “We have them until we lose them or they wear out. Money the same. Perhaps we lose it. Perhaps we spend it. These are the same.”
I said, “Sure. Lose it where I’ll find it, please.”
She laughed. “Now you have again the nice clothes. For these you owe me very much and must tell me something. Rathaus is now free. Where will he go?”
“That’s easy. He’ll go to the American embassy.”
“It is watched. If he go, we have him. Another place.”
“Maybe he got past your watchers. Why don’t you let me check it out?”
“No. He is not there. Where else?”
I thought.
“While you think, we must eat. There is a café I like. You can sit in the trousers that cost me so much?”
I said, “Sure.”
She stood up. “Then come with me. You must not spill food. Or coffee, or any such thing.”
The café we went to is the Tetrasemnos. It was eight or ten streets away, which made me glad she had not bought me new shoes. Maybe I can explain here that the Legion of the Light had taken my money and my watch and so forth but had left me my clothes and my shoes. The prison had taken the clothes but left me my shoes. It got me to thinking that if I ever got my hands on something really fancy I would put it in my shoes. Right then the only things I had in my shoes were my feet and my socks. I had not gone through her bags enough to know whether Naala had bought me new socks, but I hoped she had.
The café was up three flights of stairs and was sort of refined and quiet. You got the feeling that not many people went there, and the ones that did went because it was a place where you could sit for a long time and not get hassled. There was a sad guy with a thin mustache who played the violin. That was the only music there. He was good, too, I had to admit. He would play for a while up on a little stage they had there. Then he would start going around to tables. He would stand by your table and play something beautiful. If you gave him money, he would go away, but if you did not he would play something else beautiful. And so on, until you gave him money or you left. I would have given him money if I had any. I did not, and I was glad when Naala gave him something.
So that was the kind of place it was. A man and a really pretty girl were sitting at a table not very far from ours. The
girl had a red fountain pen and was writing something on lined paper. She had small neat writing from what I could see of it, with none of the fancy flourishes some girls use. I could see she was not drawing little hearts for dots or anything like that.
The man just watched her. He had coffee and a little stem glass of brandy, and he would sip his coffee without looking at it, always watching her. He looked like he meant to eat her. Every so often a waiter would come by and pour more coffee in his cup, and he would pour a little brandy from his glass into the coffee. He never took his eyes off her to do it, though. When the violinist came around the pretty girl looked up at him and smiled, and the man took a bill from the side pocket of his jacket and gave it to him, but he never looked at him.
Only at the girl. That was after we had been there quite a while.
We sat down, and a waiter brought menus and wandered away. I said, “What’s good here?”
“Are you hungry?” Naala was grinning.
“Hell, yes.”
“Then everything is good. You have thought?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve thought a lot.”
“That is well.” She had a mean grin. “Those who work may eat. You understand this? So it is and so it must be. Those who do not work shall not eat. That is so, also.”
“Is thinking work?” I asked her.
“Some thinking is work. Yes? What is it you think? Rathaus does not go to your embassy. Where is it he goes instead? If you wish to eat, you must tell me.”
“You know about the dolls?”
She nodded in a way that told me absolutely nothing. Maybe she knew more than I did. Maybe she did not know a thing. Most likely it was somewhere between those two, but where was that? The nod did not tell.
“He and his partner made those dolls and sold them, in America at first but later all over the world. His partner was in change of production and R&D. Russ was in charge of sales and advertising. All that stuff. I don’t know if he sold any here.”