Night Soldiers

in coffins, so the king made a law, and now it’s a good country to visit if you like to see the occasional corpse being carried through the street.”

He laughed for a moment, remembering a particular national madness that seemed, from a distance, endearing. “Up on the river we are mostly Serbian,” he said, “though part of my family is Macedonian. We marched with Alexander the Great, of course, but then all Macedonians will say that. Just as all Macedonians are revolutionaries.”

“Like the Russians.”

Kulic glanced around the platform, though there could be nobody else there. “Shit,” he whispered. He moved closer to Khristo and spoke in a low voice. “We are revolutionaries because we cannot stand any man who tells us what to do. The Turk sent his tax collectors, we sent them back a piece at a time. These people, they crave to be told what to do. A whole bloody revolution they had, but they never left the church. Not really. They aspire to be priests. Do this, do that, today is Tuesday, all turn their hats back to front. Someone says why? They answer because God told me it is so and then they give him nine grams.”

“Nine grams?”

“The weight of the bullet, Captain Khristo. What goes in the back of the neck. They worship their Stalin, like a god, yet he is no more than a village pig, the big boar, poking his great snout in everybody’s corncrib. These Russians will come after us some day, that is foretold, and we will give them an ass-kicking worthy of the name.”

They were quiet for a moment. Letting the sweet smoke of treason blow and billow around their heads.

“Yet you are here,” Khristo said.

“I deserve no better,” Kulic answered. “The king sent special police to our town-which is called Osijek, there are hill forts above the river there-and some fool shot them down. This fool hid in people’s haylofts when the police came-army police, with machine guns, not the local idiots-but they started poking bayonets into the hay. So the fool moved up into the mountains. But they followed him there as well. One day came a Russian. We like such fools, he said, and he had false documents, a Soviet passport, and a train ticket to Varna, in Bulgaria, and a ticket on a steamer across the Black Sea to Sebastopol. So this fool-like all fools he thought himself wise-believed the Russian promises and left the mountains. Now you find him playing baby games with blank pistols, now you find him cheated of his victory, even his victory at baby games. But he accepts it. He takes everything they give out because he has no choice. He is like a bull with an iron ring through his nose. Every day they find a new way to tug on it.”

He threw his hands into the air and let them fall back to his thighs with a loud slap.

For a time they watched the stars floating by, lulled by the engine’s steady beat over the rails. Kulic took a small penknife from his pocket and began paring a thumbnail.

Khristo sighed. The night made him sad. The history of Kulic’s nation was like that of his own. The fighting never stopped. The conquerors kept coming. Other Kulics, other Khristos, all the way back through time, wandered the world. Away from love, away from home. They were destined to be eternal strangers. Melancholy adventurers, guests in other people’s houses. From now on, forever, there could be no peace for him, no ease, none of the small domestic harmonies that were the consolation of plain people everywhere.

His pleasures were to be those of the soldier in a distant outpost-a woman, a bottle, a quick death without pain. Those he could look forward to. And, though his heart might still swell with poetry at the fire of a perfect sunset, there would never be the special one beside him to share such joys.

Distracted by a slight scratching noise, he turned to see Kulic lying on his side and carving on the wooden wall of the railcar with his penknife. Kulic stood up, made space for Khristo, pointed with the knife toward the wall. Khristo slid over. The scratching was tiny, hidden away in the extreme corner, only an inch above the floor: A 825.

“What is it?”

“B for Brotherhood. F for Front. Eight, two and five for the proper order of finish in the Belov exercises of March 1935. Our group, Unit Eight, won it. Even though they fixed things so that their stooges came out on top. Unit Two should have been second, and Unit Five third. Thus, somewhere in the world, wherever this railcar travels, our victory will be celebrated.”

He stuck his hand out. Khristo stood and grasped it firmly, the hand was hard and thickly callused. Kulic gestured with the penknife in his other hand. “We could make a blood oath, but pricked fingers are the very sort of thing these sniffing dogs take note of.”

They sat down again. Khristo could see the scratched letters and numbers in his mind’s eye. He had read in a history book that the early kings of Greece could not trust their own countrymen not to assassinate them, so they imported, as guards, northerners, blonds and redheads from lands far away where they wrote in runes, scratch writing. These guards, time heavy on their hands, had inscribed their initials on the stone lions that, in those days, kept watch over the harbor at Piraeus. He now understood those men. Even the eternal stranger needs to leave a mark of his existence: I was here, therefore I was. Even though, after a long time away, there is nobody left who especially cares whether I was or not.

Kulic rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be so sad. Remember what I said-if you cannot go back, go forward. While you are alive there is hope. Always.”

“BF eight, two, five,” Khristo said. He felt better because of what Kulic had done, and he was very surprised at that.

“We tell nobody, of course.”

“Of course.”

Again they sat quietly. It occurred to Khristo, staring up at the Russian sky, that if you had nothing else in the world you could at least have a secret.

April. Sleet storms rattled the windows. Outside, on Arbat Street, a broken water pipe had revealed its presence as the spring thaw began and a group of workers was breaking up the pavement with sledgehammers. The boiler had been turned off and in the classroom Khristo wore wool gloves and scarf and cap. He could see his breath when he spoke.

“Good morning, Mr. Stoianev.”

“Good morning, Mr. Smiss.”

“Smith.”

“Good morning, Mr. Smith.”

“How did you spend your evening?”

“I read a most interesting book, by the English writer Arthur Grahame.”

“What was it called?”

“Called That Some Shall Know.”

“What did this book concern itself with?”

“It is a novel, about conditions of the agrarian poor in Great Britain.”

“And what did you find the most telling scene in this book?”

“The scene where the duke struck the peasant in the face with a riding crop.”

“Why did that interest you?”

“It showed the contempt of the ruling classes for their serfs, and that servitude exists even today in Great Britain, a nation that many in the world wrongly regard as progressive.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stoianev.” “You are welcome, Mr. Smith.”

In the street, the sledgehammers rang against the cement, a slow, steady rhythm.

It was Kerenyi, the Hungarian boy from Esztergom, who found the dog hiding in the cellar. A wet brown thing with sad eyes, half starved, its broad tail sweeping coal dust from the cement floor in hopeful joy.

Kerenyi looked like a plowboy-even after the medical directorate had provided him with a delicate set of wire-framed eyeglasses-broad-shouldered and shambling, thick-handed, slow of speech, though his father taught mathematics in a school for the children of aristocrats. It had been the elder Kerenyi’s political convictions that had sent his son east, convictions turned into actions by the fiery speeches of Bela Kun, the Hungarian communist leader. Even after the students learned of his genteel background they still called Kerenyi “Plowboy.” There was a gentleness, a willing kindness, about him that reminded them of those who worked in the earth, those who never complained when the cart had to be pushed.