The Land Across

7 THE LEGION OF THE LIGHT

Martya shook me awake. “It is nearly noon! Get up!”

I blinked, called her a bitch under my breath, and sat up.

“Do not take my arm.”

I had not tried to.

“You will wish to tire me.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You must not. The beach yesterday? I am burn by the sun. It hurt me very much.”

“I got kicked, mostly in the face. I guess that’s painless compared to sunburn.”

My irony went right over her head. “That is most good. This morning Kleon tire me very much. My back is most pain. I scream, I twist. He thinks he is big, big man because of this.” She giggled.

“You won’t have to let me screw you to laugh at me.” I found my watch and put it on. It was eleven fifteen. Either my clothes had not been searched, or the searcher had been smart enough to replace all my things just as I had left them.

“There are”—she groped for a word—“boxes outside the front door. Three boxes such as are for travel with clothes. They were not there when Kleon go to his work, I think. He will move them, I think, if they are there. They are not mine or Kleon’s.”

I had never dressed faster. Both of my suitcases and my wonderful old camera bag were on the stoop. “This is great!” I told Martya. “I can take pictures of that ruined castle. Pictures of the Willows, too, and I’ll have clean jeans, shirts, everything.”

“You must not take my picture. I am too much red.”

“I don’t want to take your picture.”

“You are mean.” She pouted. “For this I do not make the breakfast for you.”

“That’s okay, I’ll find a café when I’m hungry.” The truth was that I was hungry already, but I was not about to admit it.

“You will take me with you?”

“Sure,” I said, “if you want to come.”

“But you do not like me.”

“I like breakfast a lot,” I told her. “Lunch for you, I guess.” I had slung my camera bag on my shoulder and was picking up my suitcases. “If I put these in my room, will Kleon take them?”

“I do not think but I do not know.”

After I had changed clothes, I put them under the bed, pushed far back. “If he does, there’ll be more trouble.”

She giggled. “He have win the first trouble, I think.”

“So do I,” I told her. “We’ll have to see who wins the last one. That’s the one that matters.”

It was a new café, closer and maybe a little cheaper than the ones we had been to before. The coffee was not up to Vienna standards but not at all bad.

“You will take pictures of the Willows?”

I nodded. “Film and electronic. The first to use if I can, the second for backup.”

“It will not be good, you show everything.”

“I won’t show everything in the book. What I decide to show will depend on the text, the stuff I’m going to write.” Honesty made me add, “And my editor. Editors are pure hell.”

“Many things are from hell,” said a small man in black at the next table. A cartoonist I know would have made him a mouse. He had the bright eyes and the scared daredevil look, so a mouse with black clothes and a backward collar. “I’ve come to help you deal with them.”

I just stared.

He stood up, picking up his plate and coffee cup. “I am Papa Zenon.” He put his stuff on our table and pulled up a chair. “You were not at the Willows.”

“You’re right. I overslept.”

“Many times. I was told I would find you there. It is a bad place? You have need of me, it seem.”

“We have find someone,” Martya told him. “We do not wish to be troubled.”

His smile was almost a grin. “By those who dwell in hell or the authorities?”

“We do not wish to be troubled at all. She have show herself to me in a mirror and is dead. You know? Who wish trouble by those others you name? No one, I think.”

The priest talked to me. “How long since…?” He drew a finger across his throat.

“Years,” I told him. “I don’t know what killed her.”

“Bones only?”

I shook my head. “Pretty much the whole body. The arms and legs and so on.”

“If I lay her to rest,” the priest said, “it must be in consecrated ground.”

Martya said, “This is what we wish, so she be at peace.”

“We must have a coffin, also.” The priest looked troubled. “She is large?”

“Small,” I said. “A small woman, very thin.”

“Yes. Speak more.”

“I was just thinking that it may not be possible to straighten the body out without tearing it up. We haven’t tried.”

Martya said, “She is like so,” and demonstrated, pulling her feet onto the seat of her chair and clasping her knees. “Only more than this. I cannot because I am…”

“More womanly,” the priest suggested.

“Yes, yes! Like that, Papa.”

“It will be a strange coffin. I do not know that I could obtain such a thing.”

“I know!” Martya looked at me triumphantly. “We must use one of your clothes boxes.” She turned back to the priest. “They are large, most strong. They do not let the water in, I think.”

“They’d leak in wet dirt,” I told her, “and I wouldn’t give you one even if it didn’t. Couldn’t we buy a suitcase here?”

The priest nodded. “Of course. As for the rest, you must find a roll of waterproof plastic, and tape. We will wrap your luggage many times in this and seal him with the tape. I will bury her aboveground so she may remain more dry.”

I must have looked dumb, because he smiled and said, “You shall see. Tonight?”

“Yes. Martya and I will buy a suitcase as soon as we leave here.”

“Let us meet at the Willows tonight.”

I nodded. “What time?”

“An hour after sunset. Do you fear the wolves?”

I shook my head.

“You are a brave man.” He grinned. “I, also!” He rose and blessed us, and was out the door before I could thank him.

“He didn’t pay,” I told Martya. “I can pick up his bill, I suppose.”

“You are a fool. He is a spy of the JAKA.”

For a moment or two I tried to collect myself, sipping coffee and looking around at the shabby, cheerful room in which we sat—the mismatched chairs and the worn carpet, the yellowed hunting prints on the walls and the flowery cracked saucer that had held my cup. They told me (quietly and sadly, like old ladies who know they may never get up from mama’s old chaise longue, never get out of the warm, friendly bed) that there had been aristocrats here once, with Strauss waltzes at the castle and commoners who pulled off their caps to the countess—commoners who had been happier and richer and one hell of a lot freer than their great-grandkids were here in the Democratic Republic. When I thought all that I never imagined that people would make a religion out of it, but I was about to find out.

“You did not know this?” Martya asked. “That he spy for the JAKA?”

I shook my head.

“The little man who come from the ministry send him. So he is a spy. He thinks you will know. I think the same. You gave him money.”

I nodded. “A hundred dollars.”

“So he must tell those who sit at desks that you are watched and all will be well. But you will know you are watched.”

“And be umsichtig.”

“I do not know that word, but yes.”

“It was nice of him.”

“For us, yes. For him better. And now?”

“Finish eating.”

“We are almost finish. And then?”

“Buy a suitcase, the biggest we can find, and take pictures of the Willows.”

That went well enough at first. Martya went with me and helped put the body in the suitcase we bought. I could have locked it—there was a little flat key that any kid could have replaced with a paperclip—but I left it unlocked, figuring that Papa Zenon might want to sprinkle the body with holy water or something.

After that I took pictures of Martya, mostly to show the scale of things. She was pretty small and made the rooms look humongous. There were five or six of her coming down the big staircase, and we even built a new fire in the fireplace where my fire had been the night before. Martya got it going with one of the candles we had bought for our lantern, something I wanted to kick myself for not thinking of. After I got the fireplace shots she said she was tired and went home. I stuck around, taking a few pictures here and a few more there. Most of them were in rooms I haven’t talked about in this, and some were up on the second floor. There was a third floor, too, but I did not go up there.

The most interesting room I found was on the ground floor, anyway. It was the master bedroom. You could tell right off that it was the master bedroom even if it was not very big. For one thing, there was a great big bed right in the middle of it, a really high bed with a tester and a little two-step ladder so you could climb into it. For another thing, the ceiling was all one big picture painted right on the plaster, naked girls having a picnic in the woods. There were trees and wildflowers and all that, and a guy with horns like a goat’s peeking out of the bushes to look at them. Some of the paint was gone and some of the plaster had fallen but I liked it anyway and when it was new it must really have been something, even if the girls were kind of fat.

There was a chest of drawers and a fireplace and some other stuff, but the big thing for me was that picture. I must have taken twenty shots of it, trying to get it right. It was hard to get all of it in, or even most of it, and it was hard to light even with the strobes. I had just gotten the best shot of all when I heard somebody tapping on the front door.

This is something I remember so well it hurts. I had been lying on the floor taking pictures, and I sat up and put my camera back in my camera bag, and shut it (turning the little catches), and got up and went to the door.

There were three guys standing around on the porch, one wearing a raincoat, one a big sweater, and one a long black wool vest over a T-shirt. Raincoat said, “Can we come in?”

It did not hit me right off that he had said it in German, and how did he know I did not understand much of the language here but I spoke German? I just said, “What do you want?”

“We want to talk to you. It would be more friendly, perhaps, if all of us could sit down. So we hope that you will ask us in.”

I shook my head. There was something about them that made me edgy. “We can talk right here,” I said.

“Then let us go to a café. A café will not be as private, but perhaps we can get a good table, yes? You will be our guest, to be sure.”

I shook my head again. “What’s this about?”

Wool vest edged past Raincoat. I thought he was going to explain something, but he just grabbed the front of my shirt and jerked me out of the house. It was probably Sweater who pulled the bag over my head.

Here is where I feel like I need to explain something. You may not give a shit, but I feel like it is important and I ought to put it in. This was where I learned how to hit people.

Maybe you think you know already, and maybe you do. Only I thought I knew before when I did not. I had fights in elementary school like we all do, and two or three in middle school and even one in high school. None after that until I tangled with Kleon. Some I won and some I lost, like with Kleon. Only I did not know what I was doing, I just thought I did.

When they pulled the bag over my head I started fighting for real. I had not been hitting anybody really hard up until then, not hitting them like I would drive a nail. Something about the bag made me do it. Sometimes I could hear somebody grunt when I hit him, and sometimes feel him stagger, only I did not pay any attention to it then, only after. Once I got the bag off my head for a minute. That was great, and it was when I learned not to hit the face. Faces are too hard and will hurt your hands. The body is good anywhere. The neck is best of all, and I do not think there was one of those three guys that I did not down at least once. I am not bragging. I really think I could say twice.

If there had been two of them, I think I might have beaten them. There were three, and three was too many. I was fighting like hell when I lost track of everything.

When I woke up my head ached so much I wished I had not. I was lying on my face, the floor rocked, my hands were behind me so I could not touch my head, and my feet were fastened together some way. In my whole life I had never felt so rotten as I did just then.

And afterward, for hours. I learned that my hands were not tied—they were in metal handcuffs. I felt them all over, but there was no way to get them off. When I turned over and sat up, I saw my feet were tied with rope. It was not just my head that made the floor rock, it was really doing it. Now and then I could hear footsteps, and once in a while voices. Only nobody came.

Finally somebody did. It was Raincoat, with the beady little eyes and big sharp nose, only he was not wearing the raincoat anymore, just baggy black pants and an old white shirt. There was a gun, not very big, in a black flap holster on his belt. He said, “Would you like some soup?”

I said, “I’ve got to piss.”

He laughed. “A good excuse to get my handcuffs off it is.”

“No, I’ve really got to go.”

“Do you now?” There was a narrow bench fastened to the cabin’s wall. He sat down on it.

I said, “I can hold it awhile, but not forever. It will come out and soak my pants and I’ll stink. You won’t like it.”

“So we shoot you and throw you over the side.”

That was a bluff and somehow I knew it. I shrugged. “I can’t hold it forever. Nobody can.”

“So I am to pull down your pants and hold your whistle for you.”

I shook my head. “Take the handcuffs off and I’ll do it myself.”

“No.” He turned away and yelled, “Croton!”

Croton was Sweater, I was pretty sure, only he had taken it off. There was a gun, a pretty big one, stuck in his pants. He went off and came back with an old tin can. When we were done, he took it out. I suppose he emptied it over the side.

“That was a lot.” Raincoat was grinning.

“I told you.”

“You would like the handcuffs gone. Your legs free also.”

“Sure,” I said.

“By your good conduct you may earn those things. Do you like this country?”

Here was the prof’s big question on the final exam, and I knew it. If I could guess what he wanted to hear, I was in. If I fumbled it, I flunked. Was he secret police or communist reactionary? Or just plain crook? I could not decide, and in the end I decided the best way was just to be honest. That way I would not have a bunch of lies to keep straight.

So I told him, “I really like your country a lot, only not the clubs in Puraustays and not your cops. They nabbed me as soon as I got here when I hadn’t done anything wrong, and they took my passport. If they would give it back, I’d like them a whole lot better.”

He nodded like he understood. “Are we well governed, you would say?”

I shrugged. “It’s pretty bad in America, which is where I’m from, and—”

“It is because you are Amerikan that we have taken you.”

“No shit?”

“Of this we may speak later. Are we well governed?”

I shook my head. “It’s so bad in America that I want to say it’s got to be better everyplace else, only I’ve been around enough to know that’s not true. Every place I’ve been to, the people are generally pretty nice but the government stinks. The clubs in France and Germany are pretty good, and there’s some terrific clubs in Austria, but the government stinks in all of them, especially France.”

Raincoat nodded hard. “They have not the Light of Stability.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s it exactly.”

“You are hungry, perhaps?”

“I’m not starved, but I could eat. I’d like some water, too.”

“You shall have better. Soon I return.”

Off he went, and I sat there feeling the rock of the boat and the tilt of the deck and wondering. I knew I had been handed something when he said the Light of Stability, only I did not know what it was or how to use it. I thought that if I could find out what it meant I would figure out how to use it. That is the way I was thinking then, when my head hurt so much it was hard to think.

Finally he came back, carrying a tray. “You have not the seasickness. That is well.”

“I’ve been seasick twice in my life,” I told him, “only not very much.”

He put down his tray in front of me and went around behind me. “If I unlock your hands you must do as you are told. This you understand, I hope.”

I said, “Sure.”

“Then I unlock so that you may eat. We have only the most small stove on this boat. One burner. But we do the better we can.”

I said I would behave and I did, just feeling the big soft lump on my head before I pitched into the food. It was fried fish and fried potatoes mixed with onions, none of it too bad. There was wine, too, I think Tokay. I would rather have had Pepsi or even water, but I drank every drop.

“Our government does not believe in God,” Raincoat said.

I nodded. “That’s too bad.”

“The churches believe, but all they teach is wrong. Would you be enlightened?”

I said, “Sure.”

“God exists and is real, but he did not create us. We create him.”

I told him I had not known that, and it sure was interesting.

“It is, and is true.” Raincoat stood up. “There is another, higher universe above this one we inhabit. Call it the Universe of the Ideal. There God dwells. He grants our prayers at times because he must. The more of us who pray for something, the more he must grant whatever it is so many pray for.”

“Like if everybody prays for peace?”

Raincoat had not heard me. “Thus all must pray for the Light of Stability. In change there is no progress. What is progress?”

I waited and he said, “Speak! You must tell me.”

“When things get better.”

“That is change. No! One prays for long hot summers so that she may lounge upon the beach, her sister for long cold winters so she may ski. Crops fail and fail again. The people starve.”

“That’s bad,” I said.

“That is the progress for which you have wished.” Raincoat turned away from me and stood looking out the porthole.

I drank a little sweet wine and waited.

“I have taken away from you my handcuffs.”

“That’s nice. I really appreciate it.”

“You will seize my pistol. Shoot me in the back. Escape.”

I had been thinking the same thing, only my legs were still tied. So I said he had been nice to me and the Light of Stability said it would be better to let him live.

“Exactly so. What is, is right. The enlightened will preserve it. The unenlightened destroy it, promising to bring into being something better, but to bring into being is more difficult than to destroy, and the somethings they bring better are always worse. Thus it is that we do not seek to overthrow the government, though the government seeks to overthrow us.”

“If you don’t want to overthrow the government,” I said, “why would the government want to overthrow you? It would seem to me that it would just pat you on the head and tell you to go ahead and have some fun.”

He turned to face me. “Ah! You do not understand governments.”

“That’s the flipping truth,” I said. I said flipping because I had the feeling he was not the type that would overlook fucking.

“A government is not so many men behind desks,” he told me. “A government is an idea. Without the idea…” He shrugged.

“Only you’ve got a different idea?”

“Exactly so.”

“But you ought to preserve the government, right? I mean from what you said a minute ago.”

“Which we seek to do. A government is an idea; if that idea is mistaken, it is a building built upon the water. Such a building may float for a time. You come to see him and are told, ‘This is our foundation, a foundation so solid it can never fail. Islands wash away. Continents rise but sink again into the sea. But there has always been water and there will always be water. Here we stand!’ The next day they are gone.”

I said, “I got it.”

“There was in the cellar a door that must not be opened, you see. Someone opened—the water rushed in. The communists sink while I watch. It was very quick. Very quiet, too.”

“So you want to change government’s idea.”

Raincoat nodded. “We are the Legion of the Light. We will tow it to shore, you see, and because you are Amerikan you will help us.”

“That’s right,” I said. It was not a lie the way I meant it.

From then on I was loose on the boat. Yes, I could have grabbed somebody’s gun and maybe I could have killed all three of them, but what were the odds? I figured I had about one chance in fifty. And maybe I would not even be wounded. And maybe, just maybe, I could handle that big boat all by myself. But the sails generally took two men and during the thunder storms (we hit a couple of bad ones before we tied up at the capital) they took at least three. We had four because I pitched in, figuring that if we sunk I would drown, too.