Safe House

The policeman stuck the card in the reader, and turned his attention to the ticket as the reader beeped softly to itself. “A lot of counterfeits coming through lately,” he said absently, scratching the paper of the ticket.

Laurent stood there frozen.

“What some people won’t do,” his “uncle” said calmly, holding out his own ticket and card.

The reader stopped beeping, and the ISF man took out Laurent’s card, read it carefully, and handed it back to him. “Why aren’t you in school?” he said.

“Cultural holiday,” said Laurent, and the dryness of his mouth suddenly strangled him, making it impossible to get out the casual-sounding response he had been rehearsing for the past three days.

“Vlad Dracul’s old castle,” said his “uncle,” as the ISF man shoved his card in turn into the reader. “I went to see it when I was his age.”

“Ugly old pile of rocks,” said the ISF man, not impressed. “And the capitalist bloodsuckers actually charge you money to see it. Waste of time.” He pulled Laurent’s “uncle’s” card out of the reader, handed it back. “Still, a nice summer day…any excuse to get out of school, huh?”

Laurent found his attention fixed irrationally on the barrel of the gun belonging to the soldier standing closest to him. It seemed the ugliest thing he had ever seen.

“I like school,” he said abruptly. Though not entirely true, this was at least an entire sentence, and could be taken as a suggestion that he wasn’t frightened out of his wits.

The soldier holding the gun laughed. “Don’t worry, we won’t report you for wanting to be elsewhere,” he said, and glanced at the ISF man, who gave the two of them one last look.

“Go on,” the policeman said. “Have a nice day with the old bloodsucker. No fraternizing with the Western tourists, now.”

“Don’t care to talk to them much anyway,” said his “uncle” righteously. “Dirty profiteering foreigners. Come on, Niki.”

They walked on through the chain-link-fence gate, toward the train waiting on the platform. Then, “Nicolae!” someone shouted behind them.

The sound of the shout was as sudden and startling as a gunshot. Laurent turned, looked back to see who was getting yelled at — then belatedly realized it was him. The ISF man, expressionless, watching them, turned away. The soldier laughed, waved them on again.

They turned again, walked another twenty or thirty yards down the platform and climbed on the waiting train.

“Ha ha,” Laurent muttered under his breath as they got up into it and turned right through the narrow door into the second-class carriage. “Big joke, very funny.”

“Maybe,” his “uncle” said softly. Laurent swallowed.

They got into the carriage, sat down and waited. The carriage was very quiet. People came and settled down around them, waiting in bored silence. Down the carriage, a frustrated fly bumped and bumbled against the windows, trying to get out — bumped, buzzed, bumped again. Laurent watched the soldiers and ISF men going up the length of the train, shutting the doors that still lay open. Bang! Bang! Bang! The sound, in this nervous silence, was too much like gunfire for Laurent’s liking. The ISF man who had looked at him now came down the length of the train again, peering in the windows. Laurent made it his business to be looking out the other side of the train when the man came by again, paused outside the window, then passed on.

Silence again. Laurent sat and twitched.

Then there came a crash! from down the locomotive end of the train, and the world lurched forward as the diesel’s sudden convulsive forward pull propagated down the cars of the train. They were moving.

The train accelerated to about fifty Km/h and held that speed for maybe twenty minutes. With the unfriendly eyes outside the window gone now, Laurent pressed his nose to the smudged, dusty glass and looked hungrily out at the world. It streamed by him — houses with untidy gardens and houses with tidy ones, cabbage patches and corn piled up in the shock in broad fields already cut to stubble, parking lots, level crossings, manufacturing collectives with oil sumps built into their concrete “backyards,” piles of old tires, chained-up, ratty-looking guard dogs yapping inanely at the passing train. Then suddenly the locomotive began to slow again, and Laurent realized that they were coming to another fence, one that came right up to the edges of the track. Slowly the train lumbered through, past more guards on a concrete platform, the guards looking at the train with weary or even hostile eyes.

Then they were on the other side of the fence, and there were guards there, too, equally weary looking, but the uniforms were different, blue instead of gray. The train rumbled past them all, left them behind.

Laurent’s heart leaped irrationally. He looked over at his “uncle,” who was gazing out the other side of the train, past two dark-dressed ladies with parcels in their laps. After a moment, as if he felt Laurent’s glance, he looked over at him. He didn’t manage an answering smile, but he raised his eyebrows.

“Was that it?” Laurent said.

A slight nod. Then his “uncle” leaned back. “A while yet before Brasov,” he said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

“Okay,” Laurent said. His “uncle” shrugged his jacket up into a more comfortable conformation around him, closed his eyes. Laurent, turning to stare out the window, found that everything suddenly looked different. This was the beginning of the rest of the world.

After that, everything seemed to happen very fast. He was not able to burn the landscape into his mind as he had been before the border. There was too much of it, too many new things — first the mountains, then the broad plain beyond them. And he started seeing things he had never seen before, but had only heard about. They got off at Brasov and changed trains, and to Laurent’s amazement no one even bothered to check anything but their tickets. Also, waiting for them at the next platform was, not just one more weary turn-of-the-century diesel, but a long sleek backsloped electric locomotive resting there on welded track, with the long double fin of the new “wireless pantograph” down both sides of the loco, a genuine broadcast-power unit. Laurent and his “uncle” boarded it, and it roared away, swiftly achieving its top speed, in the neighborhood of 200 km/h. The wheel sound now was not clickety-clack, clickety-clack, but the subdued mmmmmmmmmmmmmtchk!mmmmmmmmmmmm of track welded together in quarter-mile sections. The train flew, and Laurent, ecstatic, felt as if he were flying with it. He waited until his “uncle” felt more lively, then they went into the snack car. Laurent’s “uncle” got a beer and watched with a tolerant eye as Laurent went from one side to the other of the snack car, goggling out the windows. Soon enough, there came the magic moment when another train doing 200 km/h as well passed them with a SLAM! of displaced air and the impossible whuffwhuffwhuffwhuffwhuff of five cars passing in two seconds, there and gone again, as if you’d imagined them.

Oh, Pop, if you could only see this—He thought it again and again.

But Don’t waste your time worrying about me, his father had told him after breaking the news of his departure to him, over a late-night glass of tea. Enjoy yourself. I’ll be coming after you as soon as I can. A few weeks or so…for I don’t dare leave the project the way it is at the moment. Too many people could get hurt. The fear had shown starkly on his father’s face then, unconcealed for a moment, but a second later it was sealed away again. Behave yourself over there, and enjoy the trip. I’ll be with you soon, and there will be lots more trips like this one when we’re together again…except when we make them, neither of us will be running.

The fast train ran from Brasov through the towns of Deva and Arad, to Curtici at the border. As they approached this new border crossing, Laurent began to sweat again…then was furious at himself when they got off that train, onto another — the maglev shuttle from Lokoshaza in Hungary to Wien in Austria — and the border guards at the station waved them through in complete boredom, without even bothering to look at their ID’s or their tickets. At the station they met Laurent’s “Aunt Dina,” a small, silent dark-haired woman with a plain face and kind eyes, wearing a dull dress that looked like some kind of uniform with the insignia removed. Who do you work for? he wondered. How did my pop ever set all thin up, and what will they do to him if they catch him?! But he didn’t ask any of these questions out loud.

They all got on the train together, and once it was underway — Laurent’s ID having once again undergone a change he didn’t manage to catch happening — his name became “Nikos,” and his “uncle” left them, patting