Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

Chapter 3

Karlis Mielovicius and I crouched in the shelter of a clump of scrub pine. Fifty-odd yards to our right a dozen riflemen crept resolutely forward. When they drew even with us, I extended one arm parallel to the ground. The men stopped in their tracks, then dropped to their knees and brought their rifles to bear upon the ramshackle wooden structure ahead of us. I held my arm out straight and counted to five, then dropped my arm abruptly.

A dozen rifles snapped in unison, peppering the clapboard building with a steady volley of shots. Karlis and I sprang into action. He yanked the pin from a grenade, counted as he ran, and hurled the grenade into the open doorway. I counted with him and ran at his side. Then, as the grenade sailed into the building, we both threw ourselves to the ground.

The explosion tore the little shed in half. The riflemen were moving in now, firing as they ran, pouring bullets into the crippled shed. The gunfire dropped off as Karlis and I reached the doorway. I held up my arm again, and the rifle fire ceased entirely, and we went inside.

The shed was empty, of course. Had we been participating in an actual invasion of Latvia, the little building would have been strewn with the broken bodies of its defenders. But we were thousands of miles from Latvia. We were, to be precise, some five miles south and east of Delhi, in Delaware County, New York, where the Latvian Army-In-Exile was presently holding its annual fall encampment and field maneuvers.

“ Mission accomplished,” Karlis barked in Lettish. “Return to formation, double time.”

The riflemen trotted back to their tents. Karlis broke out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head, and he lit one for himself. He smoked with the great gusto of a man who limits himself to three or four cigarettes a day and who consequently enjoys the hell out of the ones he smokes. He sucked great drags from the cigarette, inhaled deeply, held the smoke way down in his lungs, then expelled it all in a vast cloud.

“The men did well,” he said.

“Very well.”

“I was less pleased with the close-order drill, however. But our marksmanship is good, Evan, and our men work with enthusiasm. We may be pleased.”

He was a huge, blond giant of a man, standing just over six and a half feet, weighing just over three hundred pounds. The U.S. Army might have had trouble finding a uniform to fit him. The Latvian Army-In-Exile had no such problem, as the dark green uniforms we all wore had to be individually tailored. Karlis’s required rather more cloth than the rest, that’s all.

Together we walked back to the tent we shared. It was the only tent in the entire encampment that had no beds in it. Since none of the army cots were long enough for him, Karlis preferred to take his king-size sleeping bag into the open and stretch out on the ground. I had no need for a bed, so on our first day in camp we’d had our double bunk carried away and moved in a pair of reasonably comfortable chairs. I sat in one, and Karlis sat in the other, and together we watched the sunset.

Karlis outranked me. He was a colonel in the Latvian Army-In-Exile, while I was a major. Our ranks may seem more impressive than they actually are. We have only officers in the army, no enlisted men. One aim of this form of organization is, admittedly, to provide our soldiers with the ego-gratification essential for an army in exile, but there is more to it than that. Our small group of men must be more than an effective fighting unit. Each of us will ultimately be called upon to command; when we invade Latvia, we will have to lead the workers and peasants and other patriots who flock to our standard. By providing every man with officer status, we will be better prepared to command our new recruits on the other side.

After all, there are only one hundred thirty-six of us, and we’ll have our hands full.

Karlis stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his boot, then automatically field-stripped the butt and scattered the shreds of tobacco to the wind. He balled the remaining bit of cigarette paper and flicked it away. Then he sat down again and sighed.

“Does something bother you, my friend?” I asked.

For a moment he seemed to hesitate. Then he said, “No, Evan. I am tired, that is all. Tomorrow we go home, and I will not be sorry to go.”

We had been in camp for a full week. For seven days we had spoken nothing but Lettish. For seven days we had arisen each morning at five and had put ourselves through a whole regimen of military activities, ranging from marching exercises to mock military operations, from classes and demonstrations in bomb-making and the use of various weapons to double-time marches with full field pack. We broke ranks each night for dinner, but the nights, while officially our own, were invariably given over to political discussions and songfests and folk dances. While an athlete like Karlis could stand up better than most under this sort of schedule, I could well appreciate that he would not be unhappy to return to Providence and the judo academy where he worked as an instructor.

A bugle blew, and we went to dinner. We ate well – the day’s heavy exercise had provided almost everyone with a good appetite – and then we lingered over coffee until the women and girls of the Female Auxiliary made their appearance. It was the final night, and the program called for folk dancing around the bonfire and whatever additional delights might occur to various couples.

But Karlis had grown increasingly depressed. “I’m going to the tent,” he announced.

“You won’t stay for the dancing?”

“Not tonight.”

“The girls are lovely,” I said.

“I know. But it hurts my heart to see them. Lettish women are the most beautiful on earth, and the sight of them tears at my soul.” His voice dropped to a conspiratorial level. “If you wish their company, I do not blame you in the least. But I have two bottles of French cognac in my knapsack. I have been saving them all week, and one of them is for you.”

The girls were lovely, but many of them were wives and sweethearts, and there didn’t look to be enough unattached ones to go around. Besides, a week of hard work had taken its toll. Suddenly the thought of a good bottle of cognac held more appeal than the idea of dancing heroically around the campfire until one collapsed exhausted. I conveyed my feelings to Karlis, and together we headed back to our tent.

He found the two bottles, handed one to me, kept one for himself. We did not have glasses and made do without. We opened the bottles, offered the inevitable toasts in Lettish to the speedy liberation of Latvia from the yoke of Soviet domination and, that bit of formality safely out of the way, drank deeply from the bottles.

We put a good dent in both bottles before any real conversation got going. The moon was almost full, and we sat drinking in the moonlight and listening to the sounds of joy filtering through the night air from the campfire. Letts are good at having a good time, and the bunch around the campfire seemed to be doing just that. Letts are also accomplished at touching the very nadir of depression, and Karlis was drifting to that very point.

I have a touch of the chameleon about me. Had I stayed at the campfire, I would have joined in the fun. Now, in the moonlight with Karlis’s cognac in me, I shared his mood. I became quite maudlin and ultimately I dragged out the charcoal sketch of my son Todor and showed it to Karlis.

“My son,” I announced. “Is he not beautiful?”

“He is.”

“And I have never seen him.”

“How can this be?”

“He is in Macedonia,” I said. “In Yugoslavia. And I have never returned since the night of his conception.”

Karlis stared at me and at the picture, then at me again. And then, quite suddenly, he began to cry. He cried with his whole body, of which there was a great deal. His massive chest heaved with great sobs, and I remained respectfully silent until he managed to regain control of himself.

And ultimately, his voice choked with emotion, he said, “Evan, you and I, we are more than fellow soldiers, we are more than comrades fighting together for a great cause. We are brothers.”

“We are, Karlis.”

“To have such a wonderful son and never to have seen him, that is a great tragedy.”

“It is.”

“I too have a tragedy in my life, Evan.” He drank, and I drank. “It is this tragedy that keeps me from dancing with the lovely Lettish girls at the campfire. May I tell you of my tragedy?”

“Are we not brothers?”

“We are.”

“Then, tell me.”

He was silent for a moment or two. Then, his voice pitched low, he said, “Evan, I am in love.”

Perhaps it was the cognac. Whatever the cause, I thought that those were the saddest and most poignant words I had ever heard. I began to weep, and now it was his turn to wait for me to get control of myself. After I had had another drink, he began to tell me about it.

“Her name is Sofija,” he said softly. “And she is the world’s most beautiful woman, Evan, with golden hair and the skin of a fresh peach and eyes as richly blue as the Baltic Sea. I met her at the Tokyo Olympics in nineteen sixty-four. You know that I represented the United States in the shot put.”

“And placed second.”

“Yes. I would have won but for that ox of a Georgian. Well, no matter. Sofija was there as a member of the Soviet Women’s Gymnastic Troupe. No doubt you are aware that the Baltic gymnasts were the finest in the world and that the Letts are superior to those in the other Baltic States.”

I had not been aware of this.

“Sofija’s team was victorious, of course. That such skill should be perverted to enhance the glory and prestige of the Soviet Union! Such grace, such liquid motion.” He closed his eyes and sighed at the memory. “We met, Sofija and I. We met and we fell in love.”

He stopped to light his fourth cigarette of the day. I had a feeling that this might be a night when he exceeded his tobacco ration. He smoked this cigarette all the way down, until he could not hold it without burning his fingers. Then he put it out and field-stripped it and then he had another long belt from the cognac bottle.

“You fell in love,” I prompted.

“We fell in love. Sofija and I, we fell in love. Evan, my brother, it was not the sort of love to spend itself in a night or a week or a month. We truly loved each other. We wanted to have each other forever. We wanted to have children together, to grow old together, to become grandparents together, to remain together for all our lives.” And his ears filled with his own words, and once again he began to weep.

“Did you ask her to defect?”

“Ask her? I begged her, I sank to my knees and pleaded with her. And it would have been so easy then, Evan. An easy ride to the American Embassy in Tokyo, a simple request for political asylum, and in no time at all the two of us would have been together in Providence. We would have been married, we would have had children, we would have grown old together, we would have had grandchildren together, we would have-”

“But she refused?”

“This,” he said, “is the tragedy.”

“Tell me.”

“She did refuse at first. She is only a girl, Evan. She was twenty years old when we met. By the time of her birth Latvia had already been a part of the Soviet Union for three years, and the Russians were our allies in the struggle against German fascism. What did she know of a free and independent Latvia? She was raised in a little town some miles from Riga. She went to Russian schools and learned what Russian teachers taught her. She spoke Russian as well as she spoke Lettish, can you imagine? What could she understand of defecting? She wanted to be a patriot and did not understand what true Lett patriotism means. How could she comprehend the Soviet rape of the Baltic States? How could she know of this?

“So she refused. But love, Evan, love works powerfully upon Letts. When we fall in love, it is not a matter to be shrugged off. The games ended. We separated. I returned to the States, Sofija returned to Riga. And then, when it was too late, when it was no longer a simple matter of a taxi ride to the United States Embassy, then my Sofija attempted to defect. Her troupe was in Budapest for a gymnastic exhibition, and she tried to escape.”

“In Budapest?”

He shrugged. “Of course it was absurd. She was captured immediately and returned to Russia. She was immediately expelled from the all-Soviet team to the team of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, the L.S.S.R. Now, instead of touring the world, she plays matches with the teams of the other Soviet states. She does not leave Russia. She can never leave Russia. It is prohibited. She remains in Riga, and I remain in the States, and we go on loving each other and yet we can never be together.” He took a long pull of cognac. “And that is my tragedy, Evan,” he said. “That is my unhappy little love story, that is my tragedy.”

We drank, we cried, we drank, we sobbed, we drank. We discussed the utter impossibility of his situation, the unlikelihood of his ever finding another woman to replace Sofija, the slim chance that his love for her would ever fade away.

And at last he had an idea. “Evan, my brother,” he said, “you are able to travel, are you not? You are skilled at that sort of thing?”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, that you can slip in and out of this Iron Curtain. You have been to Macedonia, have you not?”

“To all of Yugoslavia,” I said proudly. “And to Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Never to Rumania or Albania or Poland. Or East Germany or Russia, of course.”

“And never to Latvia?”

“No.”

“But could you get to Latvia? They say that it is very difficult.”

Blame it, if you will, on the cognac. For what I said was, “For the determined man, my brother Karlis, there is no such thing as a frontier. I have had some experience at this sort of thing. What, after all, is a border? An imaginary line that fools have drawn across the face of a map. A strand of barbed wire. A customs checkpoint. An experienced man, a capable man, can slip through any border like water through a sieve.”

“Then, you could enter the Soviet Union.”

“Of course.”

“You could get into Latvia.”

“I don’t see why not.”

He grew very excited. “You could take me with you,” he said hurriedly. “You could show me the way, you could help me, and you could sneak me into Latvia and to Riga and reunite me with Sofija, and we would never have to be separated again.”

“I… wait a minute.”

He looked at me.

“You would return to Latvia?”

“I cannot live without Sofija, Evan. Better to live in slavery with Sofija than in Rhode Island without her.”

“But your work with the Army-”

“I could be of even more assistance to the Army if I lived there. I could send bulletins back. I could do organizational work-”

“That’s not what I meant, Karlis. Don’t you understand? They know you there, they know of your work with the exile movement. You’d be arrested at once.”

“I could disguise myself.”

I looked at him dubiously.

“I could, Evan.”

“As what? A tree? A mountain?”

“Evan, I cannot live without her!”

And then, because my cognac bottle was very nearly empty, and because what had been in the bottle was now in me, and because one’s inability to sleep does not preclude the possibility that alcohol, in sufficient quantity, will addle the brain, I said something very stupid.

What I said was, “Karlis, you are like a brother to me. And Karlis, my brother, I can do much more for you than deliver you into slavery in Latvia. I can go to Latvia, Karlis, and I can find your Sofija and I can bring her back to you, and the two of you can then live in Providence for the rest of your lives, and you can get married, and you can have children together, and you can grow old together, and you can have grandchildren together, and-”

“You could do that, Evan?”

“I could.”

“You could bring my Sofija to me?”

“I could. And I will.”

If there is truth in wine, then there is also abject stupidity in brandy. From that point on, the night went as it had to go. Karlis assured me over and over again that I was the finest man on earth, a prince, a hero, a true and pure Lett. And eventually he got foggy enough to pass out, and I roused him just enough to lead him through the fields to his sleeping bag, where I helped him off with his uniform and tucked him off to sleep.

Then I walked around for a while in the cool air until something vaguely approaching sobriety returned. And at that point I realized just how absurd had been my promise to Karlis. I had never before attempted to get into Russia. I had never even contemplated the problem, nor had I considered the even greater problem of getting out once I had gotten in.

And now I had given my word that I would do just that. Not merely by myself, but that I would bring an unsuccessful defector out with me. This was so obviously impossible that it was really not worth thinking about.

Perhaps, I thought, the cognac would cancel out its own excesses. Perhaps when morning came, a weakened and hung-over Karlis Mielovicius would have blacked out the memory of the conversation and the ridiculous promise I had made him. Perhaps he would forget the whole thing.

He didn’t.

We broke camp in the morning. I had a hangover, and Karlis had a hangover, and, as far as I could see, half the camp had a hangover. It seemed as though alcohol had flowed as freely at the folk dance as it had in our tent, although the mood there was jubilant, while ours had been maudlin.

But Karlis’s words came through the hangover to me. “Evan, you will not forget what you said last night. You will go to Latvia, eh?”

I could have said no. The hell I could. I had built him up and I had to find the right way to let him down gently. This wasn’t the time for it, or the place, or the mood.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “But it may take time-”

“I know, Evan.”

“I’ll have to do a great deal of planning. Some specific research. I’ll have to get in touch with my Eastern European contacts.”

“My love can wait, Evan.”

I looked at that beaten blond giant and hated myself. By now, I thought, his girl was probably married to some petty commissar and enjoying the good life in revisionist Russia. Or, Lett that she was, she might still be torching for Karlis as he torched for her, consumed by this grand passion, with no hope of ever seeing him again.

I would stall him. What else could I do? I would stall him, and maybe someday he would forget about it. Or else, with time to let his hopes down slowly, he would simply realize that one could put little faith in the boasts and promises of a drunken Evan Tanner.

I went back to New York hating myself, and the hangover was only partially to blame.