Safe House

Laurent turned to watch Dr. Armin Darenko walk away, hidden after only a moment or two by other people getting off the train.

He gulped again, and tried to get some control over himself, tried to look normal. “How long will it take us to get there?” he asked his “uncle.”

“Uncle Iolae” looked at his watch. “About three hours. Half an hour to the border, then checks and a change of trains…after that, fifty minutes to Ploiesti…then another two hours to Brasov.”

Laurent nodded, looked out the window…and found his father looking in at him. The face he saw there was one holding itself calm, but Laurent knew his father well enough that the attempt to hide the emotion didn’t work. Laurent did his best to hold his own worry inside as tightly as he could, for there was no point in burdening his father with it. He smiled and waved, and his father smiled, too, just a crack of a smile, a thin, strained look. And then Dr. Darenko turned and left.

Laurent could have wept at the suddenness of it, at the way the pain and uncertainty stabbed him…except that would have given everything away. He said nothing, and the train started up again, pulling forward with a groan. Then his “uncle” looked at him and said softly, “I know.”

Nothing more.

But there was something bracing about it — the sense of a shared secret, and someone who understood. And shared danger, that was there, too, so that Laurent reminded himself that he needed to get a grip. He got a grip, straightened himself in the seat, blinked, and then sneezed on purpose so as to get rid of the threatening burning in his eyes.

The next hour was nerve-racking in a way Laurent hadn’t expected. Until his father had left him with this stranger, it had all seemed like a game — exciting, not real. But now it was real. He was leaving, for who knew how long, and he might not see any of this familiar terrain again for a long time…maybe even never. He looked out the window and stared, when the train stopped again, at the band of trees that hid his school from the little station and the train tracks. All the kids he knew there, the ones he liked…he might never see them again. Then again, he thought, the ones I don’t like, I might never see them again, either…. But this was less of a consolation than he expected it to be, and as the train pulled away, he found himself staring at everything they passed — trees, patches of gravel by the tracks, old factories, junked cars — as if trying to imprint them on his brain, to memorize them. I may never pass this way again….

Soon enough they pulled into the town and station of Sihlea, where they would have to change trains, and Laurent and his “uncle” got up and made their way off, slowly, behind everyone else. This was new territory to Laurent, since it was illegal for “citizens not yet of age” to travel more than ten miles from home without a citizen- of-age to accompany them. His father rarely had time to take him anywhere, since the government kept him busy all the time in the labs and offices in Focsani and Adjud.

Laurent had sometimes grumbled about this. If his pop was doing such important services for the state, whatever it was he was doing, then why didn’t they let him get some rest sometimes, so that he would do the work even better? But having seen the look on his father’s face the first time he voiced this opinion out loud at home, Laurent now kept such ideas to himself. He might be thirteen, but he wasn’t stupid. Everyone at school knew there were subjects in their country that could cause you, if you were heard bringing them up, to be arrested and tried… or worse, simply to vanish and never be seen again. Whispered opinion varied wildly on whether these were good or bad ideas. What no one argued about was that it was bad to vanish.

As they got off, Laurent glanced around him. The platform was small, too small to take two trains front to back, so as the one they had been on pulled away, the second one pulled up to the platform from where it had been waiting in the nearby marshaling yard. Laurent’s “uncle” took him amiably by the arm, and the two of them joined the line of people waiting to get into the nearest door of the train.

It was identical to the first one as to grime and age, though slightly interesting to Laurent because he hadn’t seen this particular car working this line before. When the train started up again, he looked out the window at the new and unfamiliar countryside outside the town until his “uncle” said, “Here comes the conductor. Give me your papers.” Laurent reached into his pocket and handed them over. He tended to watch his paperwork carefully, as most people did in a country where being caught without it could get you sent to jail, so, never having taken his eyes off what he gave his “uncle,” he was astonished when the conductor came up to them, checked the papers, punched their tickets, and Laurent took his papers back…and found they were not the ones he had given his “uncle.”

He forced himself not to stare or look surprised. But Laurent found himself deep in the annoyance of someone who’d just had a magician pull an egg out of his ear and didn’t understand how it was done. He glanced at his ID card, his “internal passport,” and saw that his name was now Nicolae Arnui, as his father had told him it would be. The picture was his own. The embossing and the hologram looked exactly as they should have, a little beat-up. Laurent started wondering how much his father had had to pay for this forgery — and the sweat broke out on him yet again. Forging ID was one of the offenses for which, if they caught you, they shot you. And being caught carrying the forged ID could make you vanish….

“So tell me about that game with Garoafa,” his “uncle” said. Laurent groaned, but playing along, he told him all about it…while thinking how strange it was, all of a sudden, to have an uncle. Well, he had had one, but that uncle, the real Uncle Iolae, had been trapped on the Transylvanian side of the border when Partition happened, and when he tried to come back home, he vanished. No one in the family had talked about it except his mother. Now that she was gone, no one talked about it at all.

This new Uncle Iolae reminded Laurent strangely of his father, in the way that, when they weren’t talking, he would sit quiet for long minutes at a time, looking out at the landscape as if memorizing it. His father had that thinking, memorizing look no matter what he looked at, so that when he returned to paying attention to you after a spell of it, the absolute immediacy of his regard came as a surprise. He might be a dreamer, but he was one of the kind who then immediately upon waking got about the business of building what he’d seen in his dreams. Laurent had slowly started to understand that people like this are both valuable and dangerous — dangerous both to be and to be around. It was why the government made sure his pop had a good apartment and access to the “special purchases” parts of the state grocery and hardware collective stores, and why Laurent had new school uniforms every year, and went to a school that had better books and computers than any other in the city, and his father didn’t have to pay extra for it. But at the same time, there was always the hint that, if the dreams stopped, and the building of what was in them stopped, then all this would stop as well. There were other prices to pay, too — the knowledge that they were often watched, both of them, but his father most carefully of all. His father didn’t mention it, but there were times at home when Laurent could feel the fear more clearly than usual, the sense of being watched and obscurely threatened. And lately the fear had become stronger and stronger…until finally his father had told him, two days ago, that they were getting out. Or, rather, that Laurent was.

“Here we are,” said his “uncle,” and Laurent looked up in shock to see that they had reached Rinnicu Sanat, the town at the border. The border. A thrill of fear went through him. If the guards realized that the ID was fake—

He breathed in and out and tried once again to calm himself as he got up and followed his “uncle” down the aisle of the train. They got out into a slightly warmer day than the one they had left behind in Focsani. This area had some hills between it and the mountains, Laurent remembered from school, so that it had a more sheltered “microclimate.” But he was still having to fight off the shivers.

Come on, he told himself. If you look nervous, and give it away, they’ll come after Pop—

His “uncle” led him down to the end of the platform, down a flight of stairs, through a dark tunnel under the tracks, and up the far side, using another flight of stairs, to a middle platform in the station. There was another train waiting, an unfamiliar one, and between them and it, at a guardpost mounted at the top of the stairs and fenced in with wire, were guards with machine guns…and the police.

He saw just one ISF man in his neat gray uniform, watching them come up the steps. But one was enough. And the two soldiers who stood there watching them come up the stairs looked as if they hated the day, and hated standing there, and would hate Laurent, too, if he gave them the slightest excuse — a word or a look, anything that would draw their attention away from how much they were hating everything else.

This was the last barrier. Laurent hardly dared to look up as he brought out his ID card and his train ticket and handed them to the ISF man, afraid that he would notice that they were damp from Laurent’s sweating hands.