Our hero walks off his hangover and an old vitality begins to well up through the sluggish residue left by weeks, months, of dissolution. He has relaxed into the journey, and the bolt of adrenaline he suffers when he sees the checkpoint ahead feels like a sudden dose of poison. His stride falters, losing the rhythm of certainty, but he does not stop or turn aside. The checkpoint has of course been sited to give the illegitimate traveler minimum opportunities for escape. He has papers, but he is afraid of being the victim of love or hate. He tells himself he is only afraid of being stopped, but does not believe his own lie.
The soldiers are young, volunteers in the new New Army, dressed in flak jackets and running shoes and jeans. One of them is a woman. She is younger than our hero’s sister, with blond hair instead of black, brown eyes instead of blue, but she has a solemn, determined self-sufficiency our hero recognizes with a pang, though his sister is much more casual about her courage now. She is more casual about death, both our hero’s and her own, and he suspects she has learned to think historically while he still sees the faces of the living and the dead.
Young woman,
he thinks at her in a stern Victorian uncle’s voice,
you are becoming historical,
which is a joke that would make her smile.
“Where are you going?” the young sergeant asks.
“North,” our hero says.
“Away from the border.”
This statement is indisputably true. The peacableness with which our hero answers the young people’s hostility is not.
“Yes,” he says mildly, “I have business there.”
“Business.” The sergeant’s sneer is implicit behind the mask of his face. The bland, deadly façade of a brutal bureaucracy comes naturally to the nation’s youth, they have been raised to it. It was the look of freedom that had been, briefly, imposed.
Our hero does not respond to the sergeant’s echo. His mouth grows wet with a desire for vodka, and he has a fantasy, rich though fleeting, of walking into the shade of the soldiers’ APC with his arm around the young woman’s shoulders, hunkering down to pass a bottle around, to educate and uplift them with stories of the Homecoming War. That would be so much better than this. He unbuttons his shirt pocket and takes out his identity papers. The sergeant ignores them.
“We know who you are,” he says. “What business can you have away from the capital at such a time?”
This is not an easy question to answer honestly. Our hero does not want to lie, yet claiming an urgent war-related mission in the face of no vehicle, no companions, no standing in the government, is impossible. After too long a silence, our hero says, “I am going to the old capital. It is my ancestral home. I will fight my war from there.”
He looks deeply into the sergeant’s eyes, and for a moment he thinks the old mystique has come alive, the old ideals of courage, nobility, adventure rising between them like a bridge of understanding, or of hope. But this young man was bred with disillusionment in his bones, and the moment dies.
“Give me your papers,” the sergeant says with the blunt and sullen anger of disappointment. “I will have to call it in.”
As if she is summoned by his need, Colonel Vronskaya appears with a blast of fury for the recruits and a bottle for our hero. She embraces him with a powerful cushioned grip like a farmwife’s, and then stands with her hands clenched on his shoulders to study him in the strong spring sun. She is not handsome at close quarters, Martiana Vronskaya. Her eyes are too close-set, too deep-set, too small for her flat, spider-veined face. Our hero leans into her regard, reassured by the familiar hard and humorous clarity of the old New Army, practical, piratical, and oddly moral in her amorality.
“Jesus fuck, you seedy son of a bitch,” she says, shaking him. “This is the face we followed to victory?”
“Hell no,” our hero says, “but it’s the same ass.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
Vronskaya leads him to her car, a Japanese SUV rigged out in scavenged armor plate, and pulls a bottle of Ukrainian rotgut from a pocket of her bulging map case. They sit together on the back seat, passing the bottle between them as they talk. The river eases by, blue riffled by white around the ruins of a bridge.
“That river was like a sewer when we came. Shit brown,” Vronskaya says, and our hero braces himself for some heavy-handed nostalgia. But his companion stops there, and he feels a youthful apprehension rising through him. He can feel her tension, and knows she is also braced for something hard. Thinking to make it easier on them both, he nudges her arm with the bottle and says, “You still shooting deserters these days?”
Vronskaya cuts loose with an explosive breath and says, “Hell no, we just kick their asses back to the front.”
“It might be easier to tell them to sit down and wait.”
“Fuck,” Vronskaya says in agreement. She finally takes the bottle and drinks, passes it back. He drinks. She says, “Is that what you’re doing? Looking for a good place to wait?”
“Pick your ground and defend it to the end.”
“Lousy strategy, my friend. Lousy fucking strategy.”
“You have a better one to offer?”
“No.”
She drinks. He does. The rotgut burns going down, a welcome heat.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Ask your questions.”
“What,” she says, “you think your crazy sister is the only one who remembers her babya’s stories? Okay, okay.” He had made a sudden move. “She’s not crazy. She’s not here, so she’s not crazy. But don’t tell me this isn’t her idea.”
“It isn’t anyone’s idea,” our hero says, grandiose with vodka in his veins. “It’s fate.”
“Sure. Your fate.”
“You’d be happy to see us both on this road? You want us both to die?”
“No.” Vronskaya speaks with leaden patience. “I don’t want you
both
to die.”
Our hero slams out of the SUV, startling the checkpoint guards, startling himself. Mindful of weapons in nervous hands he smoothes his hands over his head, feeling the stubble pull at his sunburned scalp. Vronskaya heaves herself out of the car.
“Jesus fuck,” she says, “you’re serious. You’re really going to do this thing.”
“If you have any better ideas . . . ” our hero says, too tense to give it the right ironic lilt.
“Sure I have better ideas. Fight and die with your old comrades instead of skulking off like a sick dog who’s not allowed to die in his mistress’s house.”
“You never liked her,” our hero accuses.
“No, I never did. Have you ever asked her what she thinks of me? Of any of us?”
“She loves you better than you know,” he says, looking into Vronskaya’s eyes.
“Me? The country, maybe, I’ll grant you that. Me, she doesn’t give a shit for, and never has. Or—” But Vronskaya’s gaze slips aside.
Or you.
But our hero knows that’s not true, and knows that Vronskaya knows, so he can let it go. He says, “Will you believe me? This isn’t her idea. I was the one who wouldn’t let her go.”
Vronskaya shrugs, sullen. “So you’re the crazy one.”
“Maybe. I’ve always been a gambler, and this is my game to play.”
“It’s not a game you can fucking win!”
“And yours is? Come on, Martiana, we’ve already lost. We lost before a shot was fired. You know it, I know it. Those damn kids know it, and so do the soldiers dying in the retreat, and so do the babyas waiting in the capital. We’re losing. We’ve already fucking lost. East and West will meet at the river and swallow us whole.” Our hero is shouting, hoarse with months, with years of frustration. Vronskaya, her driver, the checkpoint guards, are all listening with the shame-faced scowl of those caught with their worst fears showing. “We’re fucked! We’re doomed!
Tell me I’m wrong!
”
In the silence that follows, they can hear a trio of small jets roaring by in the southern sky. The West has promised no civilian populations will be bombed. Even if they keep that promise, everyone knows the Russians won’t. Our hero squeezes the back of his neck, then lets his arms fall to his sides.
“I have one card to play, and I’m playing it. What difference does it make where I cash my chips?”
Vronskaya, long-time poker rival, long-time friend, gives him a mournful look and says, “It’s bad to die alone.”
But our hero won’t be alone at the end.
The old capital perches on a high bluff, a forerunner of the northern mountains, like a moth on a wolf’s nose. A wing-tattered moth on a grizzled and mangy old half-breed dog, more like, for the hillsides have been logged and grazed, and the ancient town has been starved down to its stony bones. But the river runs deep and fast in a curve around the old walls, white foam clean and bright around sharp-toothed rocks, and the castle high above the slate-roofed town still rears its dark towers against the sky. Sparrows and jackdaws make their livings there. The place might have been a museum once, but now it is not even a ruin, just an empty house with rotten foundations and a badly leaking roof. Our hero and his sister camped there for a time when the New Army was fighting to reach the modern city on the plain, and he remembers the ache of nostalgia, the romance of the past and the imperfect conviction that that past was his. But he had been younger then, and dangerous, and he could relish the pain.
The town is quiet. No loudspeakers here, just the murmur of radios and TVs through windows left open on the soft spring evening. It has taken our hero three days to walk this far, but the news is the same. Only the names of the towns marking the army’s retreat have changed. His old comrades have managed to slow the invasion some, and along with the sting and throb of his blistered feet and the ache of his empty stomach he feels the burn of the shame he would not admit to Martiana Vronskaya, that he has been walking in the wrong direction. There must be some value to this last mad act. He must somehow make it so.
But how will he know if he has succeeded? The thought of dying in uncertainty troubles him more than the thought of death, and he pauses in his climb up the town’s steep streets to sit at an outdoor table of a small café. His feet hurt worse once he is off them and he stretches his legs out to prop them on their heels. A waitress comes out and asks him kindly for his order. She is an older woman and he suspects her of having a son at the front: she is too forgiving of our misplaced hero. She brings him a cup of ferocious coffee and bread and olives and cheese. It all tastes delicious to our hero, and he looks up from his plate to tell his sister so, only to be reminded that she is not here. He wishes she was. He would like to see this small, cramped square through her eyes. She notices things: the sparrows waiting for crumbs, the three brass balls above an unmarked door, the carved rainspout jutting a bearded chin over the gutter. These things would tell her something about this neighborhood, this town, this world. To our hero, they are only fragments of an incomprehensible whole. The world is this, and this, and this. It is never complete. It is never done.
Oh God, our hero thinks for the first time, I do not want to die.
His feet hurt worse after the rest and plague him as he climbs the steep upper streets to the castle door. It is an oddly house-like castle, with no outer wall, no courtyard, no barbican and gate. The massive door, oak slabs charred black by the cold smolder of time, stands level with the street, and the long stone of the sill has been worn into a deep smiling curve by the passage of feet. Generations of feet, our hero thinks, an army that has taken a thousand years to pass through this door. The gap between door and sill is wide enough for a cat, but not a child, let alone a man. The sun has fallen below the surrounding roofs and the light has dimmed to a clear, still-water dusk. The stone is a pale creamy gray. The sky is as far as heaven and blue as his sister’s eyes. Our hero, hoping and fearing in equal measure, turns the iron latch and discovers, with horror and relief, that the door is unlocked. The great wooden weight swings inwards with a whisper of well-oiled hinges, and the boy sitting before the small fire in the very large hearth at the far end of the entrance hall calls out, “Grandfather! He’s here!” as if our hero is someone’s beloved son returning home.
He has no idea who these people are.
The old man and the boy share a name, so they are Old Bradvi and Young Bradvi. They stare at our hero with the same eyes, bright and black and flame-touched, like the tower’s birds. Our hero has heard the jackdaws returning to their high nests, their voices unbearably distant and clear through the intervening layers of stone. He remembers that sound, the mournful clarity of the dusk return, and misses his old friends, the lover he had embraced in a cold, cobwebbed room, his sister. He misses her so intensely that her absence becomes a presence, a woman-shaped hole who sits at his side, listening with her eyes on her hands. The boy explains with breathless faith that he and his grandfather have been waiting since the invasion began.
They live in the town. “My mother is there, in our house, watching the television, she wouldn’t come, but we have been here all the time.”
All the time our hero has been walking, this boy and his grandfather have been here, waiting for him to arrive. Despite himself, our hero feels a stirring of awe, as if his and his sister’s despair has given birth to something separate and real.
Old Bradvi says, “Lord, we knew you would come.” He makes tea in a blackened pot nestled in the coals, his crow’s eyes protected from the smoke by a tortoise’s wrinkled lids. In the firelight his face is a wizard’s face, and our hero feels as though he has already slipped aside from the world he knows, as though he has already stepped through that final door. When the boy takes up a small electronic game and sends tiny chirps and burbles to echo up against the ceiling, this only deepens the sense of unreality. Or perhaps it is a sense of reality that haunts our hero, the sense that this is the truest hour he has ever lived. The old man pours sweetened tea into a red plastic cup and says, “Lord, it is better to wait until dawn.”
Who is this man? How does he know what he knows? Our hero does not ask. Reality weighs too heavily upon him, he has no strength for speculation, and no need for it: they have all been brought here by a story, lured by the same long, rich, fabulous tale that has ruled our hero’s life, and that now rules our hero’s death. At least the story will go on. Stories have no nations, only hearts and minds, and as long as his people live, there will be those. He drinks his tea and listens beyond the sounds of the fire, the game, the old man’s smoker’s lungs, to his sister’s silent voice.