his nostrils and jerked his head upright. Khosov gave a shrill little cry like a hurt animal.
“Now you go up there and tell them what I said. That they shall eat the dirt.”
Antipin let him go and he managed to stand up, still gasping for air. Blood ran freely from his nose and he tried to stop it with his hand. He gave Antipin one terrified glance-this is a thing that makes pain, stay away from it always-then turned and scrabbled up the hill, holding his nose, head turtled down between his shoulders like a child running away from a beating.
Khristo watched him go, then turned to look at the men around him, illuminated by the light of the burning house. They coughed and spit, trying to get the smoke out of themselves. Someone had dragged the man from the windowsill where he had fallen and laid his smoking body on the ground. He had been burned black in the fire, but those who had heard the sound of the iron bar knew he had been beyond feeling anything at all. Up on the road, the group of silhouettes shifted nervously as Khosov the Policeman scurried toward them.
Khristo sensed clearly that this was not the end of it, that it would go on, that each act would become a debt to be repaid with interest. Nikko’s death had seemed to him, to his family, a tragedy of bad fate-like a drowning, or a mother taken at childbirth. You had to live with death, God gave you no choice. Today it was your turn, tomorrow it would touch your neighbor; thus people gathered around you, held you up with their spirit, tried to fill the empty place. He now understood that Nikko’s death was a tragedy of a different kind. It was part of something else; there was a connection, a design, at first faint, now much clearer. The unknown intelligence that conceived a method of blocking doors could also see a purpose in the murder of a fifteen-year-old for laughing at a parade.
As Khosov climbed toward the road, a man near Khristo said, “We had better stand together here.”
The old fisherman took a step back. “I am no part of this.”
“Go home then,” someone said. “They know where you live.”
“I do not oppose them. I will tell them that.”
“Then there will be no problem,” the man said, a sour irony in his voice.
On the road, Khosov and the others climbed onto the back of the truck, which stuttered to life and bounced away down the dirt road.
Khristo found Antipin at his shoulder. “Come with me,” the Russian said. “Let us take a little walk together.”
They walked down to the river, past the sagging pole docks, to the sand beach below the walls of the old fort, called Baba Vida-Grandma Vida-built by the Turks three hundred years earlier, though some of the inner walls had blocks set by Greek and Roman hands.
It was well after midnight, a stiff breeze blew off the river, they could just make out the dark bulk of the Romanian shore on the other side. Antipin rolled two cigarettes and gave one to Khristo, lit a wooden match with his thumbnail. They bent toward each other to protect the flame from the wind. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness as they walked along the beach.
“You understand, do you not,” Antipin said, “that they meant for me to kill him.”
“Who?”
“The policeman.”
“Khosov?”
“If that’s his name.”
“Why?”
“Why. To create an incident, to make politics, to give their newspapers something to say: bloody-fanged Bolshevik murders local policeman. Yes?”
Khristo thought about it for a time. He understood it, but it seemed very strange. Events occurred, newspaper stories were written. That the sequence could be staged-events made to happen
“The murder was their alternative, a second scheme to try in case their first one failed.”
Khristo squinted with concentration. The world Antipin was describing seemed obscure and alien, a place to be explained by an astrologer or a magician. Violence he knew, but this was a spider web.
“You see,” he continued, “they meant for all of us to die in that house. An accident, they would say. Those pigs were swilling brandy and some lout knocked over an oil lamp and whoosh, there it went and too bad. But you see, Khristo Nicolaievich, I repeat only their words. And words may be spoken in different ways. Their fine faces would tell a much different story. The wink, the sly look, the flick of a finger that chases a fly, would give those words quite another meaning.
Khristo nodded silently. Veiko, the others, were like that.
“So, you can see how it works? They had the policeman ready in case we got out of the house. Sent him down to arrest me. Knew very well he was too stupid to manage it. A simple provocation. Right?”
“Right.”
“You are a thinker, that I can tell. You turn the world over in your mind to see if it is truly round.”
Khristo was both flattered and a little uncomfortable to be addressed in this way. One didn’t hear compliments. He took a drag at his cigarette, feeling very much the man. There was something so admirable about Antipin. The local toughs were blowhards, dangerous only in a group. Antipin was strong in another way entirely, he had an assurance, carried himself like a man who owned the ground wherever he stood. The notion that he, son of a fisherman in a little town at the end of the world, could win the respect of such a man was definitely something to be thought about.
“I try to understand things,” he answered cautiously. “It is important that people understand”-here he got lost-“things,” he finished, feeling like a bird with one wing.
“Naturally,” Antipin said. “So you see their intention. Get rid of a problem, let everybody here and about know you got rid of it, and perhaps others will not be so quick to cause problems. Bravery is a quirky thing at best-you know the old saying about brave men?”
“All brave men are in prison?”
“Just so. We have it a little differently-all brave men have seen heaven through bars-but the thought is almost the same.” He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. “We Slavs have suffered. God knows how we have suffered. In the West, they say we cannot be bothered to count our dead. But we have learned about human nature. We paid a terrible price to learn it, because you must see desperation before you can understand how humans truly are. Then you know. Lessons learned in that way are not forgotten. Do you see this?”
He paused a moment, then continued. “I will tell you a story. When Catherine was empress of Russia-you’ll remember, she was the one who fucked horses-she chanced to be wandering one day in a wood some distance from St. Petersburg and found a beautiful wildflower. She was enraptured by it, such a tiny, perfect thing, and so she decreed right then and there that a soldier be assigned to guard the spot just in case, in future days, it should bloom again. Eighteen years later, someone chanced to find that order in a file and went out there, and there was a soldier guarding a spot in the forest, in case a wildflower might bloom, in case, if it did bloom, some shitfoot of a peasant might come along and stomp on it-as if he had nothing better to do.”
Khristo was properly silent for a moment; he loved and respected a story like little else. Antipin bent to the sand, put his cigarette out, slipped the remnant in his pocket.
“Was the flower grown? When they went there the second time?”
“The story does not say. I like to think it wasn’t. But the point has to do with being ruled. Being someone else’s property. Fifty years ago the landlords owned their serfs, hundreds of them, to do with as they pleased. They would marry them off, one to another, to please their wives’ romantic fantasies. We love dolls in Russia, Khristo Nicolaievich, it helps us remember our past.”
“Perhaps it was like that here too,” Khristo said. “When the Turks ruled us.”
“The Turk still rules you, my friend, except that he has taken off the fez and put on a crown. Czar Boris, your king calls himself. Czar! And he is the toy of the army and the fascist officers’ clique that calls itself
