Night Soldiers

Inspired, then, to silence.

Mouth frozen open.

Leaping backward as the electricity of fright jolted his heart. Crossing his hands in front of his closed eyes, turning his head away. A perfect statue of a man in the last instant of life.

Not real death.

Not real bullets.

But the move was so sudden, so blurred, he had no time to sort it out. There was an animal lying along the length of the hood. It had sprung like an animal, without warning or hesitation, and it had landed like an animal, crouched, coiled to spring again. Then it had flung itself flat, both fists spewing flame.

For Khristo, the realization was explosive. He really thinks he is being shot. He could see Petenko in exquisite focus-glossy jowls, drooping chin-and the man’s terror opened a door in him. What burst through was a bright fountain of rage. This fat Russian bag of piss and vodka. Khristo ground his teeth and moaned in his throat and then heard hammers clacking on empty chambers.

There was rather a long interval.

Akhimova, her face a mask, stood up in the driver’s seat for no apparent reason. Petenko lowered his arms, came out of hiding. His voice was high and thin the first time he screamed.

“Lieutenant!”

Dropped an octave on the second try.

“Lieutenant!”

Khristo heard Akhimova exhale a long breath.

“Yes, comrade General?”

“This man …” He pointed. Khristo could see his finger shaking. Petenko blinked, slowly lowered his hand. This man could not be forced to his knees and shot then and there. This man was a student, of a sort, reciting his lesson, of a sort.

Petenko cleared his throat. Students in the street murmured to each other. The urgent need to return to normalcy was everywhere. Khristo, careful of the paint, slithered cautiously backward until he stood before the car.

Petenko turned his head a little to one side. “What is your name, young man?”

“Khristo Stoianev, comrade General.”

“You are Bulgarian?”

“Yes, comrade General.”

“They are proud people,” Petenko said. There was proper admiration in his voice. The working classes needed no national boundaries, they were as one race. The concept had been clearly set down.

His eyes, of course, told a very different story, but only Khristo could see what burned there and he was meant to see it.

A different sort of train ride back to Moscow. The wooden benches they’d barely noticed on the way out were now discovered to be of a diabolical hardness. Heads drooped. There was coughing and sniffling. They were exhausted, worn down by the intensity of competition, lost sleep, country air, and cheap, throat-searing vodka knocked back, toast by toast, at the farewell party. One of the officers had brought forth a battered fiddle-he did it every year-and all danced and sang. What the Arbat Street officers called Belovian love affairs were consummated one last time behind, beneath and, in the cases of the truly brave, inside various huts. Farewell, my pretty one. Life back in Moscow was not so free. Oh, one could manage-clandestine training would serve for other than political purposes-but it wasn’t the same, hiding out in the boiler room. Better not to be so forthright. Marike had carried on rather openly, and she’d not been seen since. Sent home, most thought.

Khristo tried sleeping but it wasn’t possible. With windows shut tight it was getting close in the train, and he went between cars wanting fresh air and there found Kulic, curled up out of the wind in one corner of the platform. Kulic invited him to sit down and Khristo rested his back against the smooth wooden boards. In the open air, the rail rhythms were amplified and white smoke from the locomotive streamed overhead. There was a strange sky, common for the Russian spring, with clouds and stars and a probing little wind from the south that stirred the birch groves.

“Well, comrade Captain,” Kulic said after Khristo had settled himself, “it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

“We should have won it,” Khristo said.

Kulic shrugged. “It is different here.” His voice was without inflection.

The judging committee’s decision had been announced at the farewell party. Unit Two and the smug Iovescu had come in first. They had been placed second, just ahead of Malya and the Hungarian captain and Unit Five. Khristo’s unit had been awarded a full score for the assassination of General X-there was no way to deny their success. But the committee had awarded Unit Two the points for capturing Goldman on the roof. Goldman had challenged the decision-it was all a feint, right up to the point when the two bribed security guards had released Khristo’s arms-but the challenge was turned aside: a political decision had been made and that was that.

The brownnoses won. That was always the way of it, Khristo thought, and there was a lesson to be learned there if one wanted to see it. Kulic was right, it was different here. Gazing at the cloudy, starry sky, he felt captivity as a slight pressure at the base of the throat and swallowed a few times, but it would not go away. Twenty years old. Life already twisted into a strange, contorted shape, like a tree growing in sand. When he’d been Nikko’s age he had harbored a secret contempt for his father. A slave of the fish buyers, the landlords, the Holy Fathers, he’d seemed yoked to his life like a patient ox. Now and then a sigh, but never a protest, never a curse. Khristo had believed one could tear the yoke from one’s neck, cast it into the Dunav, be free of the weight that had to be hauled from dawn to dusk every day of the year. He’d believed his father lacked the passion, the human fire, to shed his burden, and he was ashamed to be the son of such a willing beast. Now he knew differently, of course. He’d learned something about yokes.

“Do you hate them?” Kulic cut into his sorrow. Seemed almost to know what he had been thinking.

Khristo shrugged, not trusting his voice. Kulic punched him twice, lightly, on the upper arm. “Doesn’t pay to think about it,” he said.

He didn’t hate them. He didn’t think he hated them. Though the fury that had possessed him when he’d “shot” Petenko would bear some thinking about when he could get away alone. But he didn’t hate them. He was afraid of them. He was afraid of them because they were, in some sense, madmen. A boat carpenter in Vidin had gone mad with sorrow after his wife died and had spent all his days down by the river building endless mounds of stones, constantly correcting the height of the piles to make them all perfectly even. They were like that. They practiced a kind of witchcraft and called it science. When you went to get your papers stamped, you slid them beneath a curtain to a waiting official-you were not to see the faces of those who controlled your destiny. Like Veiko, they dealt in fear. Like Veiko, he thought ruefully.

Kulic continued, taking Khristo’s silence for assent. “If you cannot go back, best go forward. What else is there?”

“You too?” Khristo said.

Kulic nodded sadly. “All of us. That’s my guess.” He slumped backward and stared up at the sky. “I was one of the Komitaji. You know what that is?”

“The committee?”

“That’s what the word means. Called the Black Hand in Macedonia, something else in Croatia-you know how it is where I come from. Back in November, they murdered the king of Yugoslavia in Marseilles, King Alexander. The assassination was managed by a man called Vlada the Chauffeur. That action was accomplished by Komitaji. Some call us bandits, others, partizans.” He shrugged and spread his hands.

“You knew the people who did that?”

“Not personally. But I knew who they were. My group was active on the river. From the Iron Gate all the way up to the Hungarian border, including the city, Belgrade. And the truth about us was that some days we were bandits, other days, partizans. But always Komitaji. Bound by the oath of blood. Tradition of centuries-all of that. When we bury our dead, we do not close the coffin until it is in the grave. How is this? the visitors say. Oh, we answer, too cruel to shut out the last glimpse of sky until the very, very end. They like that idea. But the truth is different. Komitaji have always hidden guns