The Lights of Skaro (8 page)

“Stay with them for the rest of the day. Wait for tomorrow and the breaks. I haven’t figured that far ahead. Right now we have to get out of town with the crowd. Finish eating first, so you can cover your face.”

The goats hated to leave their comfortable bed. I took the wether by the ear, as the bearded peasant had led the ewe – the wether followed his ear more readily than he did the collar, I found – and took him, the ewes trailing reluctantly behind, to the fountain. When we had watered them I led off again, carrying my pack like any other grimy, stubble-whiskered peasant homeward-bound from the market with his livestock, his woman, and his household purchases for the week. The pail I had bought, which I had hung on the outside of the pack, rattled noisily with the tin cups and spoons it held. Dealing with the
roko
mentality, boldness of movement, even noisiness, diverted suspicion. Furtiveness and quiet inevitably attracted it.

A pair of them waited, huge and silently ominous, in the gateway through which we left town in the direction opposite to the way we had come. Still not knowing what they were looking for, nor what to expect from us, they had been posted along the line to terrify us into giving ourselves away by some act of indecision, some nervous misstep at the sight of them that would betray whatever disguise we might have assumed. It was a standard technique. They were so menacing even to look at that people with guilty thoughts ran from them instinctively, convicting themselves.

These two, in their coffin-shaped undertakers’ coats, looked so much like the pair we had seen on the other side of the town that they might have been the same men. Had they been, and recognized one goatherd couple out of dozens, and exercised an elementary intelligence, they could have had us. Peasants coming to market from the east do not go home towards the west. But there was little chance that all three factors would work against us. We had the further help of an unpleasant diversion.

A man ahead of us in the crowd that was pressing out through the gateway, a solitary traveler with a pack like my own, carried a burden of guilt as well. By some bad luck he must not have known that the town was posted. Any farmer coming in from the countryside would have seen it, any townsman passing through the marketplace would have heard about it. This man must have spent the day in some cellar grinding out anti-government propaganda on a hand-press, or plotting sabotage. He didn’t know that the
rokos
would be there waiting in the archway. When he saw them he forgot, for a moment, to be bold. He faltered, tried to turn back, changed his mind and went on, betrayed by his indecision.

They let him go on past them before they called to him to stop. That was the
roko
mind. It pleased them to let the poor devil think, for a moment, that he had got by. When they called to him, he began to run, clumsy with his heavy load.

They went after him like a pair of hunting dogs, and caught him within a few steps. One held him while the other went first through his clothes, then through his pack. I don’t know what they found, if it was anything. They began to beat him, methodically, swinging their ham fists at his face and belly, holding him up to go on with it when he sagged and would have fallen to the ground. The line of peasants we were in went stolidly on, eyes straight ahead. But it was impossible not to hear the thud of the fists, the grunts of the
rokos
when they struck. The man was unconscious, and made no sound himself. There were only the grunts, the thud of fists, the animal odor of fresh blood as we passed. Those, and the sound of the loudspeakers from the town behind us roaring stimulating music.

We were fifty yards beyond the town wall, in the clear, before Cora pulled at her
yashmak
and said helplessly, ‘I’m going to be sick.”

“Hold it.”

“I-I can’t. I-”

“Stay with the crowd. Keep moving. Keep your head down.”

She was helpless for a minute, nauseated and staggering. I took her arm and kept her stumbling along. A donkey-driver who was switching his animal on past our goats looked at us with guarded interest as he went by, but there is nothing identifiably foreign or revealing about the distorted face of a vomiting woman except that she is sick. She got over it in a moment. After we had gone a little farther, I persuaded one of the ewes to stray off into the roadside ditch, and scooped a tin cup full of ditch-water when I went to herd it back. Cora rinsed her mouth and adjusted her
yashmak,
her eyes thankful above it as she returned the cup.

There was nothing to do after that but plod. The road was a stream of peasants, livestock, and carts, some moving faster than we were, some slower, so that we were always passing or being passed and could not talk safely even if we had had anything to talk about. The stream thinned gradually as groups turned off on side roads. We had to stay with the stream until dark, then leave it as if we had a fixed destination in mind, find a place to hide for the night, and find further, without being able to buy, bargain or trade, a cover to substitute for the goats when we went on the next day. Some peasants, probably most of those around us, would be willing to help us if they knew the position we were in. But others would sell us for the reward they would get, and we dared not take a chance on revealing ourselves to the wrong ones. Yet we were going to need help, or risk another dangerous theft.

It was a headache. I had to think about it, plan something. But I was so done in that I couldn’t concentrate. The goats were weary themselves, overdriven to the point that they didn’t even try to stray from the road, only moved along listlessly ahead of us to keep beyond the reach of our sticks. Cora, when she got over her shakiness, took it upon herself to do what little herding was necessary.

It was a good thing that she was able to. I didn’t have an ounce of energy left. I could only plod, lifting one heavy foot to put in front of the other, step after step, mile after monotonous mile towards the setting sun, trying to think ahead for the time when the sun would disappear below the horizon and force a decision on us, my mind always sliding helplessly backward to those two
rokos
and the way they had grunted as they swung their fists.

I was afraid of them. Not their sub-human minds, but their fists. I couldn’t argue myself out of that, or pretend that physical pain wasn’t a thing to dread, or persuade myself, a civilized man, that what would happen to Cora in their hands was nothing for me to think about. They would hammer us both to a pulp when they took us. As a preliminary softening, so that we would be in the right condition for refinements when they took us to Bulič.

Bulič. Bulič. Bulič. Bulič. The syllables dogged my dragging heels.

He had his finger on me from the first minute I came through the Curtain. I wasn’t particularly honored. All foreigners got the same treatment, particularly foreign reporters. Cora, Heinz, Léon, Graham, and Jim Oliver had been through the same thing, as I had in Poland and Russia. But Bulič was more thorough than some of his counterparts.

I came on the Orient Express, the only train connecting East and West on a regular schedule. It would have been easier for me to fly in from Vienna, but when you get a visa to go through the Curtain you do it according to what the visa says. Mine said by train, on such and such a date, at such and such a place of entry.

I don’t know who else was on the train. I may have been the only passenger. Grossing the border, I had an entire railroad car to myself except for two Red Army guards who stood in the vestibules with their backs to the doors during the first eight kilometers, when there were shields over the outside windows so that passengers couldn’t see anything of the fortified border zone. The train stopped at a small town where the shields were taken down, the guards got off and Border Control took over.

The Border Control officials were army men, in uniform, with the Red Star at the peaks of their caps. They were reserved, formal, and reasonably polite. They searched my baggage carefully, and I had to sign a statement that the coffee, lighters, nylons, Scotch, lipsticks, and other stuff I carried would not be sold or traded in the Republic. But they didn’t search me, or push me around.

After they got off the train I was free to look at the countryside. There wasn’t much to see except village minarets, ox-drawn ploughs in the fields, and the burned-out skeletons of railroad cars that had been toppled from the right of way and left to rust. There was a lot of war damage still evident, even that many years after the fighting. When we stopped a second time, at a railroad junction, and I tried to get off and look around, I felt the finger for the first time. The doors of the car could be opened only from the outside.

Two
rokos
were on hand to let me out when we pulled into the capital, late at night. I think Bulič picked his prize gorillas to meet trains, for the initial impression they would make. Both of these were monsters, taller and wider even than the average, with the over-developed jaws, beetling brows, and pendulous ears of glandular giants. The one who did the talking had been kicked or bludgeoned on the chin at some time in his career. His thick jaw was crooked. It wagged sideways instead of up and down when he spoke to me.

“You are Jess Matthews.”

It wasn’t a question. I said, “Yes,” just the same.

“Come along.”

At the same moment, while his crooked jaw was still wagging, his partner gave me a shove to start me moving. It wasn’t a playful push. I almost slammed into the first man. I was prepared for something like that, as well as a thumb in my eye if I didn’t take it nicely. I picked up two bags, a typewriter, and an overcoat without any help from either of them and went along.

We got into a car, and climbed out of it fifteen minutes later in a dimly-lit, bad-smelling cement courtyard without having exchanged another word. That was another part of the treatment. I was supposed to ask questions, although I would get no answers. I didn’t oblige them. I found out, by using my eyes to read signs, that I was in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Another shove started me through the mill. They photographed me first, full face and profile, while I stood against a wall that was marked like a police shadow-box to show my height. Then I was finger-printed. Nobody said ‘Please’ when I was told to take off my hat, or to roll my fingers on the inkpad. Nobody gave me anything to clean my fingers with afterwards. Inky, still carrying my own luggage, I was directed with another shove towards my first interview with Chief of Security Bulič.

I had seen pictures of him, of course. They didn’t do justice to the original. They didn’t show the way his tight lips curled back over his prominent teeth when he talked, or the cold animosity of his black eyes, or the harshness of his voice. His eyebrows were a straight, heavy black line above the bridge of his flat nose. His hair, cut short and showing, by the patchy way it grew, the scars on his tough bullet skull, was black. So was the uniform he wore, and his shiny, polished boots. He gave an overall impression of blackness. Blackness, ruthlessness, cruelty, and strength. That was Bulič.

There was no chair for visitors in his office. After the two
rokos
brought me in and left me there, he let me stand in front of the desk where he sat writing for a full couple of minutes before he looked up.

“Do you know who I am, Mister Matthews?” He used the English ‘Mister’ rather than
‘gospod’
or ‘
tovaric
’. “Mister’ was an insult, as he said it.

“Yes.”

“Good. I don’t have to tell you that I have the necessary authority to do what I say I will do.”

“No.”

“Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you will report to this building and present your credentials to Comrade Minister of Internal Affairs Yoreska. He will explain the rules which control foreign press correspondents in this country. He won’t mention penalties for violating the rules. If you ask him what the penalties are he will say that you are too experienced a man to violate rules, so penalties need not be discussed. But you will know what they are.”

His tight lips closed over his bulging, ugly teeth. He looked at me for a moment with clear, flat, undisguised animosity.

“You are subject to all the laws of the Republic while you are here. The penalty of spying is death. Our definition of spying extends into the field of what you may consider legitimate news gathering. Be careful of what you look into.”

For a hooligan, a street brawler who had fought his way with fist, gun, and club up from back-alley beatings and gutter killings to control the lives and destiny of a nation, his choice of words was surprising. He spoke like a man of education and good taste.

“The same penalty applies to any subversive activity; association with anti-government organizations, anti-government propaganda, aid to enemies of the state. For other major crimes, prison sentences or fines or both are imposed at the discretion of the People’s Courts. For lesser common crimes, the People’s Security Police are authorized to administer punishment in their own judgment, without need for formal trial. In one case only, there is a special penalty applicable solely to foreign press correspondents. For nonobjective reporting of events within the Republic which does not also qualify as a more serious crime, you will be expelled from the country within twenty-four hours. As Mister Oliver was. Have you any questions?”

“Can I expect Minister Yoreska to explain non-objective reporting when I see him tomorrow?”

His tight lips curled back from the bulging teeth. It could have been a sneer as well as a smile.

“That, and other things. He will make you feel quite welcome, Mister Matthews.” He leaned forward across the desk, looking up at me coldly from under his black eyebrows. “But so you will not misunderstand your position, I do not welcome you. If it were my responsibility, spies and saboteurs who masquerade as reporters, you and your lying colleagues who work to inflame the minds of men against us, would all be shot without mercy. Your friend Mister Oliver would not have left this country alive if it had been I rather than Comrade Minister Yoreska who made the decision. Do you understand me?”