Havana, Page 3

  “Eat it, damn you!” someone called.

  4715 did. There had never been any doubt about that. The bug squirmed against his teeth, then went still as it was halved, then quartered, then ground by forces beyond its comprehension. A weird prick of flavor, extremely odd, flew to 4715’s brain, reminding him of something. What, possibly? The paella in Spain in ’36, full of crackly shrimp and squid and zesty tomato? Or the leek soup at Stalingrad, so delicious after a day’s battle in the snowy wreckage? Or possibly the veal sausage and sauerkraut he’d had in a German city, ruined though it was, in ’45, before his final arrest.

  The bug vanished, leaving an aftertaste on his tongue to be savored for hours.

  Applause rose, for the diversion of 4715 and the cockroach had been more entertainment than the barracks had seen since Zek 2098 died spitting blood and cursing the boss several months or possibly years ago.

  “Thank you, my friends,” 4715 said, and it was true: these were his friends, with their hollow faces and shaven scalps, cheek-bones like bedknobs, eyes black and deep and exquisite with suffering. Tomorrow, the road, the eternal road on which they labored in the cold, a road that would kill them. It was being built against the possibility that the Boss would someday want to drive to the North Pole. Although the Boss had died recently, and would never drive to the North Pole, that hadn’t seemed to affect the roadbuilders of Gulag No. 432, not even a little bit. Onward, to the North Pole, in salute to triumphant socialism!

  So resigned were they, in fact, that when Senior Sergeant Koblisky entered the barracks with a loud thump and a bump, escorted by three men with rifles, it was an astonishment to all. The guards pretty much left the zeks alone on the one Sunday afternoon of the month they were not required to build the road to the North Pole, in case the Boss should come back from the dead and demand to be driven there. The guards didn’t want to be at 432 any more than the zeks did. Only one person wanted all these humans to be out here at 432 and he was dead now and it still didn’t matter.

  “Easy now, move back, you bastards, or I’ll have the corporal run a bayonet through you.” That was Senior Sergeant Koblisky in a good mood.

  It was so unfortunate that the Senior Sergeant, once a tank ace with Marshal Konshavsky’s Fifth Shock Army at Kursk, had uttered a sentence of compassion for the poor German bastards he’d just machine-gunned as they surrendered (under NKVD orders of the day). That was enough to transfer him to 432 after war’s end, a chestful of medals and twenty-eight Nazi Panzers destroyed or not.

  “Let’s see, where is he? I know you’re here, damn you. You didn’t die yet. I saw you yesterday, I saw you this morning, I—oh, there you are. 4715, get your ratty little ass over here.”

  “What?” 4715 said. “Why, I—”

  “Goddammit, get over here. It’s cold out, I want this over with so I can get back to my bottle. Wrap yourself up and let’s go.”

  4715 blinked, stunned. In fact this event was unprecedented in living memory. Men came, men died, men cried, men were buried, but men were never summoned. There was no point. It was almost incomprehensible.

  “Yes, Senior Sergeant, I—”

  “Here, wear this, dammit, it’ll save time.”

  He tossed the spindly 4715 a guard’s wool coat, something that weighed so much it almost crushed the poor man, who was used to rags stuffed with newspapers as a barrier against the cold. 4715 found the strength to wrap it about himself, wished he had shoes of leather instead of wood, and, escorted by his protectors, stepped out.

  Cold of course. The eternal wind, the eternal pelting of pieces of grit and ice and sand and vegetation; a gloom that was endless, a landscape that, beyond the wire, was itself an eternal flatness of snow and scrub vegetation giving way in a distance too far to be measured to leaden, lowering skies.

  It was spring in Siberia.

  The party trudged against the blistering wind across the compound to its one well-constructed building, a headquarters house, of stout timber, with actual smoke escaping a chimney to signify the presence of fire and warmth within. Immediately the clever 4715 spied the anomaly.

  Camp 432’s motley of vehicles, consisting mainly of old trucks that had somehow survived the war, were drawn up in formation outside the headquarters building. These were the ancient contrivances that hauled the prisoners’ food out to them, and brought back the bodies, as the road headed farther and farther toward the Pole, a foot or so a day. Success was expected in 2056. But parked immediately before the building was something astonishing: a black, gleaming Zil limousine, well-waxed and showing only mud spatters on the fenders and a thin adhesive of dust after the drive from the railhead.

  But 4715 hadn’t time to conjecture on the meaning of this strangeness; he was inside and felt absolute, pure, quite beautiful warmth for the first time in many a month, or year, whatever.

  “This way. You must be clean, of course. Important men can’t be offended by your stink and filth. Really, it’s sad how you’ve let yourself go.”

  “True, I missed the morning bath. I decided on a second glass of tea instead, and a strawberry blintz with cream,” said 4715.

  “See, men, how 4715 has kept his wit? Not like some I know. All right, 4715, there it is. Have fun and be quick.”

  4715 stood before a shower stall in the guards’ quarters. He stripped quickly, stepped inside and turned on the blast of hot water. It scalded blissfully, grinding off years of filth. He shivered in pleasure, found a rough bar of soap and lathered. Possibly they were readying him for his own hanging; it didn’t matter. This was worth dying for.

  “Speshnev, Speshnev, Speshnev,” came a voice familiar to 4715 from a thousand or so years ago. 4715 blinked hard in the newness of it all; yes, his name. His name spoken publicly, loudly, affectionately, when to utter it had been forbidden for so long. It was a weirdness so profound he had no idea how to comprehend it, but that drama was dwarfed by the next, when he encountered the speaker himself, large and blustery, but with shrewd eyes and glossy hair that only partially softened the brutality of his features.

  It was his mentor, his teacher, his sponsor, his betrayer, his interrogator, his most reluctant torturer, his sentencer, the famous wizard of the service, one P. Pushkin, once a university professor and chess champion, then a secret soldier in the wars of Red conquest. P. Pushkin was the warrior incarnate, a kind of natural cossack who saw all opponents as manifestations of pure evil, fit only for obliteration. Though brilliant and even charming, his flaw and his genius was that he was without moderation in all things. He wore the dress uniform of a senior general of NKVD, and a chestful of ribbons that dwarfed even Senior Sergeant Koblisky’s.

  “How are you, my good man?” Pushkin inquired warmly, giving the spindly prisoner a bearish hug, as if Speshnev had just returned from a week in the country.

  “Well, I am fine,” said the man named Speshnev. “I just ate a delicious cockroach. I won it at cards from a Polish saboteur named 6732.”

  “I see you’ve lost none of your edge. That’s Speshnev, always at the top of his game, no matter the circumstance. Come, sit down, have some tea. A cigarette? No, cigarettes are probably meaningless to you at this stage of your socialist evolution. I’m hearing now they may even be bad for your health, so you were probably lucky to find them unavailable.”

  He smiled, flipped a ciggie from a pack of American Luckies, and made a show of putting the pack away. Then he smiled, the cigarette wobbling in the tightening of his lips in that broad smile, and handed the package to Speshnev, who quite naturally adored cigarettes even if he hadn’t had one in years.

  Speshnev internally cursed himself for his weakness of character, but he could no more turn down a cigarette than the shower, or the fresh clothes and the actual leather shoes he now wore.

  The lighter flared. It came to the cigarette Speshnev had inserted in his own lips; he drew the fire to himself, through the vessel of the tobacco, and his lungs flooded with the pure drug of pleasure. His head buzzed, his
senses blurred, and for a second, he was happy.

  Was this some plot? Make him see the things he had disciplined himself to forget. Get him to taste pleasure, comfort, warmth, which had all but ceased to exist except in the zone of the theoretical? Then to plunge him back to the bitter nothingness of the barracks? To return him to zekness? That would be beyond endurance. He would hang himself, there could be no other way.

  “I know you may have some resentments, Speshnev,” said Pushkin. “It can’t have been pleasant out here, no indeed. And though no official apology will ever be uttered, I think you will begin to see people who will admit that mistakes were made. A shake-up now and then is good, of course, but the Boss went too far. I told him myself, yes, I did. Boss, I said, I’m all for discipline and commitment and keeping the fellows on their toes, but don’t you think you’ve sent too many away? Well, you know the Boss, he always played his cards close to his chest. He just smiled in that mysterious way and went about his program.”

  This, of course, was apostasy; it would have earned any speaker a trip to the cellars instantly and a committee meeting with a Tokarev bullet behind the ear by dinnertime. But the Boss was dead; new things were in the works.

  So Speshnev merely enjoyed his fabulous cigarette, feeling its smoke in his lungs, and drank the tea and felt the warmth everywhere.

  Pushkin leaned forward conspiratorially. It was as if he were afraid men were listening and reports would be made, when in fact, if he so wished, he could order all the men in the camp shot.

  “I will tell you this, Speshnev,” he said in a whisper. “You may even have been luckier to be out here, though it can’t have been fun. No, but Moscow in the last years of the Boss’s madness was a terrible place. The fear, the paranoia, the betrayal, the burning out of whole bureaucracies, sometime three and four times, the brutal whimsy of the Black Marias as they took this one and left that one. No, it wasn’t fun. A fellow hardly knew what to do. Here at least things were clear.”

  Pushkin could not have believed this even for a second: he was a man without illusions, a practical man in all habits of mind. It pleased him, however, to utter the absurd and know that it would be accepted without argument.

  But Speshnev could not help himself. Merrily he said, “Yes, many a time, General, I woke at four in the morning for the long trudge across the snowy plains to work on that infernal road to the North Pole, telling myself, ‘I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth, and thank the stars I have General Pushkin in my corner, looking out for me!’ ”

  Pushkin ignored the irony, as was his whimsy of the morning.

  “Speshnev, it’s with great pleasure I have come all this way to announce your rehabilitation! Speshnev, so hard have I fought for justice in your case, so fiercely have I waged a campaign! I never forgot you, Speshnev, when all the others did. It is to me, Pushkin, that you should genuflect in thanks. I, Pushkin, give you your life back!”

  “Does this mean—unlimited access to cockroaches?”

  “Absolutely. Now listen. There is a county, Speshnev, that has long been oppressed. Its trajectory is toward chaos, crime, filth, degradation. It is owned lock, stock and barrel by American criminal and business interests, who use it as their whorehouse, shitter, and sugar factory.”

  “Actually, it sounds delightful.”

  “It is. Quite. The señoritas! Muchas bonitas!”

  “I take it this is a Latin country?”

  “The island paradise known as Cuba.”

  “Excellent señoritas.”

  “As there were in Spain. Same stock, actually, though with a tinge of negro blood for that extra paprika in bed.”

  “In my mind, I’m there already.”

  “Speshnev, there is a boy. We have him spotted. He is clever, committed, ambitious, unbearably courageous. He could be the leader.”

  “I see.”

  “You will study the documents on the train back to Moscow with me. But you already see where this is going.”

  “I see where I am going.”

  “This boy. He must be seduced, smoothed, trained, aimed, disciplined, taught to expect success. As he is currently situated, well, it’s that Latin temperament. Romantic, unrealistic, too quick to act, too slow to think. He needs a mentor, a senior fellow of wisdom and experience. Speshnev, with your magic ways, your charm, your ruthlessness, I think this is a task for you. It was made to order. It is your redemption, your future, your rehabilitation.”

  “So I’m to help the regime that imprisoned me twice. Eagerly, willingly, aggressively?”

  “Of course. There’s only a paradox if you build it yourself. You can have a model contradiction in which we punish you unjustly, almost to the point of death, certainly to the point of misery, then we demand heroic service of you. A lesser man might find a source of resentment somewhere in the equation. It takes a great man to make the contradiction irrelevant on the strength of his will alone. Speshnev, I won’t even ask you. Because of course I know the answer.”

  “There’s really not an alternative, is there? Not after tea and showers and American tobacco. Who could say no?”

  “No one, little 4715. No one.”

  Chapter 4

  The deer hovered between shadow and light. It was almost not there. The boy blinked, to make certain again that he had it fixed. There was a magical quality to it: the way it seemed to disappear, lose its lines among the blend of darkness and illumination, then to materialize, then again vanish.

  He felt his heart pound. He was eight. He had worked his father’s deer camp for three years now and had seen them many times before, in the trees, or thrashing in fury as they were hit, just a second of rebellion against the steel message of the bullet, shot above the shoulder, or gutted skinless and hanging to bleed out from a rack. Nothing about it frightened him, except that he himself had not killed a deer yet. But he was ready.

  He had hunted squirrel with a Remington single-shot .22 until he hit what he aimed at every time. He had learned stillness. He had learned to sink to nothingness, until only the animal in him breathed, but only barely, yet at the same time he saw and heard so clearly.

  Now, cradled in his arms was a 94 Winchester, the .30–30, which he had just grown strong enough to shoot. He was eager, he was ready, the hunter’s bloodsong pounded in his ears.

  “Let him come out into the light, Bob Lee,” his father said.

  His father’s presence loomed behind him, calm and imperturbable. That was his father. Whatever he was, no one could take that from him ever: he was a man among men. Bob Lee had begun to pick up the signs, the subtle ways others deferred to him, the coming of silence when he walked into a room. It wasn’t just that his father was a state policeman or something they called a hero in the war. There was another thing. Something, well, hard to know what to call it. Just something else.

  Now the animal moved fully into the light. It turned. It seemed to look right at Bob Lee, with dark eyes as calm and intense as anything he’d ever seen. He looked right into Bob Lee’s eyes.

  Or that’s the way it seemed. They were like that: watchful for a bit, concentrated, and then forgetful. The entire animal tensed, its ears pricked, its nose sampled the air. It was about seventy-five yards away.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Soon the animal forgot that something hunting it could be out there. The thought vanished and, without a care, the deer returned to its eating, picking at the tender shoots in the shadow of a pine tree at the edge of the cornfield.

  “All right, Bob Lee,” his father whispered. “Easy up, hold that breath, see that front sight, head down and steady, tip of the finger against the trigger and then the squeeze. The gun will fire when it wants to fire.”

  “Make your daddy proud,” came the voice of Sam Vincent, his daddy’s best and possibly only friend.

  Bob Lee took a breath.

  He was nestled against the trunk of an elm. It supported him and absorbed his trembling. He drew the
rifle to his shoulder, let it point naturally to the animal, and the sight, steady as a brick, went to the beast’s tawny shoulder where the bullet would strike and take its life.

  He knew the rifle. It was cocked, but he’d thumb-lowered the hammer for safety. Now his thumb flew back to that hammer, and notched it back where with an almost inaudible click it seated itself. His thumb returned to the rifle’s grip, locked on, steadily, and his trigger finger went to that instrument, and began ever so gently to press against it.

  Steady now, just easy pressure, without disturbing the stillness of the sight, not a problem, something he had done in the fields and in his dreams for years.

  But—

  Maybe it was the sun, the way it lit the deer’s white withers. Maybe it was the spring smell of flowers alight in blossom. Maybe it was the buzz of some kind of insect life, or the chirping of some dim bird or other.

  He could not say. It wasn’t that he could not kill. The boy had killed before, understood that it was somehow man’s work, necessary, and it was what a fellow did, without complaint or doubt.

  But today, in the sunlight, in the warmth?

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, Bob Lee.”

  “I don’t know. I just—I don’t know.”

  “It is your call. You are the hunter. You may take the shot, and we will eat good tonight. But I cannot make the decision for you, Bob Lee. It’s a serious thing to take the life of something so beautiful. So you must decide.”

  The boy decided.

  “Maybe not this time. Maybe in the fall again, when it’s cold. It’s spring now. It’s all green, everywhere. Maybe not when it’s green.”

  “If that’s what you’ve decided.”

  “It is.”

  “Then that’s what it shall be. We’ll let Mr. Deer have his summer and his fun. Then we’ll come back for him in the fall.”

  “You know what?” Sam whispered to him, on the long trudge back, “I think you did make your daddy proud. You felt it, you did what was right. You didn’t do what someone said, and your daddy respects that.”