“It’s a good windup to the campaign,” Urman said. “It’s got everything.”
“Like a fruit salad. You really think Isakov has a chance?”
“He’s been a winner ever since I’ve known him. Since we joined the Black Berets. There are twelve candidates. He only needs a plurality.”
Isakov had not left the stage. He carried the girl from one side to the other while roses landed at his feet. Urman joined in the rhythmic applause.
“Why did he drop out?” Arkady asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“When you and Isakov met in OMON, he had just left the university.”
“He was bored. He was sick of books. They taught us something useful in OMON. Hit first, keep hitting.”
“Good advice. But he was a five-point student, at the top of his class, and in his last week, he threw away all that hard work. That doesn’t strike me as boredom. Something happened.”
“You never let up,” Urman said.
“It’s an innocent question. Anyway, you’re going to kill me as soon as you get the nod.”
Urman leaned close to speak confidentially. “Do you know how I kill an enemy? First I cut off his testicles-”
“You fry them and eat them and on and on. I heard all about it. But at the Sunzha Bridge, you simply shot people in the back.”
“I was in a hurry. With you I’ll take my time.” Urman reassured Arkady with a pat on the back and slipped away.
The crowd wasn’t leaving. A rhythmic clap continued and so many boys rode their fathers’ shoulders they were a second tier of enthusiasm. The sound system poured out the Soviet national anthem, the wartime version that included, “Stalin has raised us with faith in the people, inspiring them to labor and glorious deeds!” The applause doubled when Isakov returned to the stage to say informally, like a personal reminder, “The dig will tell the tale!”
Maybe, Arkady thought. Maybe Urman could make him beg for mercy, although Arkady had trained with a master.
“Skin is sensitive.”
Arkady was twelve years old. In Afghanistan. He had returned to camp covered with ant bites, each bite hot and throbbing and his face swollen.
His father sat on the cot and continued. “There have been experiments. Subjects have been hypnotized and told they were burned and blisters appeared on their skin. Other patients who were in pain were hypnotized and their pain went away. Not far away, perhaps, but enough.”
The General loosened his necktie and undid the top two buttons of his shirt. Took a sharp breath through his nose and sipped his scotch.
“The skin blushes with embarrassment, goes pale with fear, shivers in the cold. The question is, why were you riding around on a motorcycle outside the base? Outside the base is dangerous and off-limits, you know that.”
“I didn’t see any signs.”
“There have to be signs posted for you? What were you doing on the bike when you fell?”
“Just riding.”
“A little too fast, maybe? Doing some stunts?”
“Maybe.”
The General finished the glass and poured another. He lit a cigarette. Bulgarian tobacco. For Arkady, the match flame focused the pain of the bites.
“So far as the natives are concerned we are guest engineers building an airstrip under a treaty of friendship and cooperation. That’s why we’re in civilian clothes. That’s why we buy their pomegranates and grapes, because we want to cement our friendship and be even more welcome. But this is still a Soviet military base and I am still its commander. Understood?
“Yes.”
The cigarette smoke was aromatic and blue as a thunderhead.
“Were there any natives there? Did any of them see the accident?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Two men. I was lucky they were there.”
“I’m sure.” His father blew the flame out as it reached his fingertips. “It must hurt.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re thirteen years old?”
“Twelve.”
“Twenty bites is a lot at any age. Did you cry?”
“Yes, sir.”
The General picked a flake of tobacco from his lip. “The people who live here and surround this base are tough. These people fought Alexander the Great. They’re warriors and their children are trained to be warriors and, no matter what, not to cry. Understand? Not to cry.” His father’s face turned red. Arkady didn’t think it was from embarrassment. Veins spread on the General’s forehead and neck. “I am the commander of this base. The son of the commander does not fall off his bike in front of the natives and if he does fall off and is bitten by a hundred ants he does not cry.”
Two natives had stretched languidly in the shade of a saxaul tree to smoke cigarettes and watch Arkady on his motorbike chase ground squirrels across the desert floor. The boys were brothers with similar short, swirly black beards. They wore turbans, baggy trousers, oversized shirts, sunglasses.
“They’re watching,” the General said. “The minute we look weak, we will be under siege. That’s why we surround the camp with mines and discourage the natives from coming near and why we have never let them inside to see our electronic gear, until today, when they carried in my son because of his ant stings.”
“I’m sorry,” Arkady said.
“Do you know the consequences? I could lose my command. You could have set off a mine and lost your life.”
A gecko had darted in Arkady’s way. He had twisted the handlebars without thinking, and as the back end of the bike caught up with the front he flew over the machine and plowed face first into the gritty mound of an ant colony.
“Do you know what made Stalin great?” his father asked. “Stalin was great because, during the war, when the Germans took his son Yakov prisoner and proposed an exchange, Stalin refused, even though he knew that saying no was a death sentence for his son.” The General drew on his cigarette to make it flare. In spite of the ant bites Arkady felt a chill. “Tobacco burns at nine hundred degrees centigrade. The skin knows it. So I will give you a choice, your skin or theirs.”
“Whose?”
“The men who brought you, your native friends. They’re still here.”
“My skin.”
“Wrong answer.” From his shirt pocket his father gave Arkady two snapshots, one of each brother, bareheaded and stripped to the waist, lying in a bloody heap. “They wouldn’t have felt a thing.”
19
The sun was setting and the village was a picture of civilization going to sleep: a handful of cottages, half of them abandoned, a power line and the dome of a church. A woman shuffled under a yoke of water buckets. A smoke-colored cat followed. When the old woman shooed it, the cat nipped across the road and slipped between piles of metal and rubber belts, through stacks of fenders and tires. Arkady kept pace in the Zhiguli until the cat
