Eye of the Red Tsar

2

THE MORNING AFTER THE COMMISSAR’S VISIT, PEKKALA SET FIRE TO his cabin.

He stood in the clearing while the black smoke uncoiled into the sky. The snap and wheeze of burning filled his ears. The heat leaned into him. Sparks settled on his clothes and, with a flick of his fingers, he brushed them away. Paint buckets stacked by the side of the cabin sprouted dirty yellow tongues of fire as the chemicals inside them ignited. He watched the roof collapse onto the carefully made bed and chair and table which had been his companions for so long now that the outside world seemed more dreamlike than real.

The only thing he saved from the fire was a satchel made from brain-tanned elk hide and closed with a button made of antler bone. Inside lay the gun in its holster and the book and the unblinking emerald eye.

When nothing remained but a heap of smoking beams, Pekkala turned and started walking for the trailhead. In another moment he was gone, drifting like a ghost among the trees.

Hours later, he emerged from the pathless forest onto a logging road. Cut trees were stacked ten deep, ready for transport to the Gulag mill. Strips of bark carpeted the ground and the sour reek of fresh lumber filled the air.

Pekkala found the car just as the Commissar had promised. It was a type he had not seen before. With rounded cowlings, a small windshield and a radiator grille that arched like an eyebrow, the machine had an almost haughty expression. A blue and white shield on the radiator grille gave the car’s make as EMKA.

The car doors were open. Lieutenant Kirov lay asleep in the backseat, his legs sticking out into the air.

Pekkala took hold of Kirov ’s foot and shook it.

Kirov gave a shout and clambered into the road. At first, he recoiled from the bearded ragman who stood before him. “You scared the hell out of me!”

“Are you taking me back to the camp?” asked Pekkala.

“No. Not to the camp. Your days as a prisoner are over.” Kirov gestured for Pekkala to get in the back of the car. “At least, they are for now.”

In a series of jerky turns, Kirov reversed the Emka and began the long drive to the settlement of Oreshek. After an hour of slipping and bumping over washer-board road, they emerged from the forest into cleared countryside whose openness filled Pekkala with a nameless anxiety.

For much of the drive, Kirov did not speak but kept an eye on Pekkala in the rearview mirror, like a taxi driver worried about whether his rider could pay the fare.

They passed through the ruins of a village. The thatched roofs of izhba huts sagged like the backs of broken horses. Bare earth showed through the coating of old whitewash on the walls. Shutters hung loose on their hinges, and the tracks of foraging animals studded the ground. Beyond, the fields lay fallow. Stray sunflowers towered over the weed-choked ground.

“What happened to this place?” asked Pekkala.

“It is the work of counterrevolutionaries and profiteers of the so-called American Relief Administration who infiltrated from the West to pursue their economic sabotage of the New Economic Policy.” The words spewed out of Kirov ’s mouth as if he’d never heard of punctuation.

“But what happened?” repeated Pekkala.

“They all live in Oreshek now.”

When they finally reached Oreshek, Pekkala looked out at the hastily built barracks which lined the road. Although the structures appeared new, the tar-paper roofs were already peeling. Most of these buildings were empty, and yet it seemed as if the only work being done was the construction of even more barracks. Workers, men and women, stopped to watch the car go past. Masks of dirt plated their hands and faces. Some pushed wheelbarrows. Others carried what looked like oversized shovels piled with bricks.

Wheat and barley grew in the fields, but they must have been planted too late in the season. Plants that should have been knee high barely reached past a man’s ankle.

The car pulled up outside a small police station. It was the only building made from stone, with small barred windows, like the beady eyes of pigs, and a heavy wooden door reinforced with metal strapping.

Kirov cut the engine. “We’re here,” he said.

As Pekkala stepped out of the car, a few people glanced at him and hastily looked away, as if by knowing him they might incriminate themselves.

He walked up the three wooden steps to the main door, then jumped to one side as a man in a black uniform, wearing the insignia of Internal Security Police, came barreling out of the station. He was hauling an old man by the scruff of his neck. The old man’s feet were wrapped in the birch-bark sandals known as lapti. The policeman pitched him off the steps and the old man landed spread-eagled in the dirt, sending up a cloud of saffron-colored dust. A handful of corn kernels spilled from his clenched fist. As the old man scrabbled to gather them up, Pekkala realized that they were, in fact, his broken teeth.

The old man struggled to his feet and stared back at the officer, speechless with anger and fear.

Kirov set his hand on Pekkala’s back and gave him a gentle nudge towards the stairs.

“Another?” boomed the policeman. He gripped Pekkala’s arm, fingers digging into his bicep. “Where did they dig this one up?”

Six months after Pekkala’s brother left to join the Finnish Regiment, a telegram arrived from Petrograd. It was addressed to Pekkala’s father and signed by the Commanding Officer of the Finnish Garrison. The telegram contained only five words-Pekkala Anton Rusticated Cadre Cadets.

Pekkala’s father read the fragile yellow slip. His face showed no emotion. Then he handed the paper to his wife.

“But what does that mean?” she asked. “Rusticated? I’ve never heard that word before.” The telegram trembled in her hand.

“It means he has been kicked out of the regiment,” said his father. “Now he will be coming home.”

The following day, Pekkala hitched up one of the family’s horses to a small two-person cariole, drove out to the station, and waited for the train to come in. He did the same thing the next day and the day after that. Pekkala spent a whole week going back and forth to the train station, watching passengers descend from carriages, searching the crowd, and then, when the train had departed, finding himself alone again on the platform.

In those days of waiting, Pekkala became aware of a permanent change in his father. The man was like a clock whose mechanism had suddenly broken. On the outside, little had altered, but inside he was wrecked. It did not matter why Anton was returning. It was the fact of the return which had changed the neatly plotted course Pekkala’s father had laid out for his family.

After two weeks without word from Anton, Pekkala no longer went to the station to wait for his brother.

When a month had gone by, it was clear that Anton would not be returning.

Pekkala’s father cabled the Finnish Garrison to inquire about his son.

They replied, this time in a letter, that on such and such a day Anton had been escorted to the gates of the barracks, that he had been given a train ticket home and money for food, and that he had not been seen since.

Another cable, requesting the reason for Anton’s dismissal, received no reply at all.

By this time, Pekkala’s father had withdrawn so far inside himself that he seemed only the shell of a man. Meanwhile, his mother calmly insisted that Anton would return when he was ready, but the strain of holding on to this conviction was wearing her away, like a piece of sea glass tumbled into nothing by the motion of the waves against the sand.

One day, when Anton had been gone almost three months, Pekkala and his father were putting the finishing touches on a body scheduled for viewing. His father was bent over the dead woman, carefully brushing the eyelashes of the deceased with the tips of his fingers. Pekkala heard his father breathe in suddenly. He watched the man’s back straighten, as if his muscles were spasming. “You are leaving,” he said.

“Leaving where?” asked Pekkala.

“For St. Petersburg. To join the Finnish Regiment. I have already filled out your induction papers. In ten days, you will report to the garrison. You will take his place.” He could no longer even call Anton by name.

“What about my apprenticeship? What about the business?”

“It’s done, boy. There is nothing to discuss.”

Ten days later, Pekkala leaned from the window of an eastbound train, waving to his parents until their faces were only pink cat licks in the distance and the ranks of pine closed up around the little station house.