Charon’s Final Passenger
Ray Nayler
Originally published in Asimov's March/April 2024
“There it is.”
I followed Alvin’s binoculars and saw it as well: a shadow against the night sky, rising in an arc above the Kura River. The terraplane’s running lights were off, its shape indistinct. But yes: it was there.
Then there was another arc, so bright it eliminated all fine distinctions between dark and darker from the world. It intersected the first.
The explosion was close enough for us to feel, seconds later, the compression of air across our faces. The first arc became a trace of tumbling fire, a streak reflected on the surface of the river below. It came down, not in the water but in the tangle of houses somewhere on the allied side of the river – our side.
“Well,” Alvin said, “they got across, anyway.”
“But not alive.”
“Only one of them was still alive when they started this journey. That’s why we have you here.”
Our observation point was an abandoned apartment in one of Tbilisi’s tangle of wooden buildings. By the red light of Alvin’s flashlight we made our way down the staircase. In the lightless corridor we could hear music from behind a wall: an old phonograph, a plaintive voice backed by strings. Flakes of peeling paint crunched under our feet like dried mud. I remembered the building as seen from the street when we had entered: leaning so badly that props had been squared against its external walls, the doorless gape of the street entrance a trapezoid.
“You take me to the nicest places, Alvin,” I’d said.
Now I whispered, “Someone is living here.”
“Someone is living everywhere in this city,” Alvin answered. “We had to rent the lookout. And it didn’t come cheap.”
The power was out in this part of the city. The street was dark, but not the cave-dark of the building behind us, the doorway gaping into a sightless warren.
“I guess they charge extra for the broken windows and the pigeon shit all over the floor,” I said.
“Of course they do. Pigeon shit makes good fertilizer, and you can kill an intruder with a decent shard of broken glass – just wrap it in cloth first so you don’t cut your hand.”
Alvin would know.
“Now where to?” I asked. “Dinner was a stale cheese sandwich in a flophouse overlooking a river they shoot you if you swim in. If this is a date, I can’t wait to see the movie you take me to. I’ll be disappointed if it isn’t projected onto a torn bedsheet.”
Somewhere in the tangle of the allied zone, a siren screamed.
Alvin wouldn’t bite. “Now we go back to the hotel and wait for the salvage crew to make contact.”
“I hope they take their time about it. I could use some sleep.”
#
They didn’t take their time about it.
“I’m sorry about this, Sylvia.”
Alvin and I were in the back seat of a surface car, an Emka staff car reclaimed from the short-lived Soviet Union, once used to shuttle big-hatted generals back and forth from their staff offices. The interior was red velvet. I wondered if Stalin had ever had a chance to ride in it before his generals assassinated him. The driver, separated from us by a sheet of privacy glass, was some American PFC far too young to have fought in the war. The glass rattled in its wooden frame as the car crawled over cobblestones.
“Trying to get across in a terraplane wasn’t exactly subtle,” I said.
“It was the best option we had. And that rocket battery was supposed to have been silenced.”
The part of town we were passing through was filled with old villas. The headlights picked each of them out as we passed. Their stained plaster made them look like rotted wedding cakes. Everywhere I looked in Tbilisi, the city was the corpse of faded greatness. You could almost imagine the men and women of decades ago, monocled and bustled, strolling these avenues.
Their ghosts, anyway.
“That escape didn’t work out so well.”
“Nothing here does,” Alvin said. “Russian spies are still lodged inside the local security services, and as much as the Georgians hate the Russians, they are hardly fans of their new Turkish overlords. Some of them have forgotten how bad it was under the Bolsheviks – all they can think of is how bad it is under Istanbul, so the Communists are making converts again.”
“Maybe the Georgians would be better off on their own.”
“That’s exactly what they think – and exactly what everyone keeps promising them. But all the promises are for independence tomorrow. They want it today.”
“Imagine that.”
“Look,” Alvin said in the dark, “I’m with them in spirit. I am. But these days, for a little country like this, independence is a vacuum. Either Russia fills it, or the Allies do. And you can bet that, as bad as it might be in the Allied Zone, it’s ten times worse across the river. Why else would people be risking their lives to get across?”
“I’ve heard that vacuum argument before, Alvin, and maybe it’s true, but it sounds a little convenient. Us or them is a pretty good excuse to keep extending our power.”
“It’s more complicated than that, Sylvia – but I’m not very good at arguing at three in the morning.”
“Justifying great power politics in the middle of the night is tough. You have a hard job. Have I ever told you that? I’m going to buy you a drink sometime. I am.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Alvin said.
“So will I.”
The car stopped in front of a block of apartments, a faux-eastern Stalin’s Empire building hacked into the older neighborhood. The building couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, but it looked as ancient as anything else. Or as decrepit, anyway. A man with a lantern appeared in the arched hole of the entryway. The October night had turned cold. He had a woolen blanket wrapped around his shoulders for warmth.
“No power?” I asked.
“We have a line into the city’s emergency backup system,” Alvin answered, “but not to light the building: only for the machines.”
The Georgian with the lantern led us past a row of battered mailboxes, posters wheatpasted up on the whitewashed walls in a palimpsest of local elections. Every candidate’s face had been scraped out or defaced. All that was left were shirt collars, ties, the lace wings of dresses under their destroyed heads.
They had set up in the basement. Several kerosene lanterns stood in a ring around my chair and a small table. But the table wasn’t big enough for a body: the cables snaked under a white sheet. I walked over to it. One of the Georgians stepped forward to stop me, but Alvin held him back with a hand on his upper arm.
I pulled the sheet back. Under it, the tangled crown of the machine was worn by a severed head. There was very little gore. The neck was an anatomy lesson. The face was as calm as a marble statue head, dug from the earth after centuries. Violence had blurred its features.
“It was all Charon could recover of him,” Alvin said. “And we don’t know when we’ll ever get another agent this high-level out: Charon is dead. His network was betrayed. The Russians are across the Kura as we speak, dragging them from their beds into the Black Marias.”
“This didn’t happen to him when they were crossing the river.”
“No. This happened earlier. They were caught by a group of Chechen Bolsheviks coming through the mountains.”
“How long has he been dead?”
“A day, a day and a half.”
“No time to waste. His name?”
“We only know him as ‘Sorok.’ It means ‘forty’ in Russian.”
“Get me plugged in.”
The lantern-lighted faces of the Georgian and American agents were expressionist film pantomimes of dread. The basement was a mad doctor’s laboratory, complete with severed head and terrible machine. I sat in my chair and adjusted my crown.
“Come on, boys. Every second we waste, his memories degrade further. You aren’t the ones who have to pilot the memory loops in that head, so stop standing around like a bunch of frightened rabbits. Pull the switch, Alvin.”
#
The train is moving slowly past a stand of birch in rain, the wet white trunks syncopated against the evergreen dark of the forest behind. On the table near the window is a glass of black tea, a thick glass in a metal holder. The compartment is filled with the smell of tea. I am aware of these things first, and then aware of another person in the compartment. A woman’s voice, in Russian:
“And they were so enamored of the monsoon season, this season of stillness and romance, that they even had a perfume distilled: the smell of earth dampened by rain.”
“Who would wear such a thing?” Sorok says – I say.
“I think it sounds lovely. Think of the smell of rain when it begins – such a nostalgic smell. A smell that rises from the earth, as if bringing memories from the grave. It would take a brave woman to wear that scent, of course. She would be competing with every association her perfume raised in the mind. But eventually, if she were successful, she would become the one associated with that smell. And then, no matter what happened between them, every time it rained he would long for her. For the rest of his life.”
“And what would be the point of that? What is the point of someone longing for you after the relationship is over?”
“What you do not understand, dear, is that for many people that is the entire point of a relationship. To be longed for afterward, like the monsoon rains.”
“At your core,” Sorok says, “You remain a bourgeois romantic.”
“I’ve shot men for less than that,” the woman replies, without a noticeable change in the tone of her voice. “Shot them in the face, and watched the light go out of their eyes as their brains slid down a wall. I am a romantic, but of the revolutionary type. You should learn to recognize the difference.”
Now Sorok turns and looks at her. She is a tall woman, in a simple woolen worker’s shirt, her brown hair pulled back from the oval of her face. Her very average eyes meet his. She doesn’t look like a romantic, or a revolutionary, or like anyone in particular.
“All of this work,” she says, “to catch up with the Americans. A whole Soviet generation lost in rebuilding, because of something so simple as twelve hours on a clock.”
“I don’t follow,” Sorok says.
“Twelve hours earlier or later,” she says, “and that flying saucer they got all their technology from in 1938 wouldn’t have crash landed in the desert of New Mexico – it would have crashed in the desert of Turkmenistan. It would have been recovered by us, by the Soviet Union. It would have been reverse engineered by us. We would have been the ones to defeat Hitler. We would have turned Berlin to ashes. And then we would have driven the Americans back to the Atlantic and raised the red flag over London. Perhaps even over Washington by now, if it pleased us.”
“Where were you in the spring of 1933?” Sorok asks.
“I was in the Komsomol, in Leningrad.”
“I was in the Ukrainian countryside outside of Poltava. Do you understand what we did there?”
“I know there were excesses.”
“Have you ever watched a person starve to death?”
“No.”
“Then don’t talk to me about what we would have done with all this wonderful technology.”
“Stalin was cruel,” the woman says, “and that is why he needed to be purged. It’s true his will was what held the Union together, when the Anglo-Saxon capitalists were trying to tear it apart, but he went too far. We can’t blame the whole Soviet Union for the things Stalin did.”
“He went . . . too far? Maybe I didn’t ask you the correct question,” Sorok says. “What I should have asked was, ‘Have you ever starved a village to death . . . on purpose?’”
“Of course not.”
“Then stop speaking to me in Party platitudes. We were all Stalin. All of us. He wasn’t a lone man making his decisions in a vacuum – he was a period in our personal histories we’ve been trying to shovel into a bin under the name ‘Stalin’ so we can toss it out and forget what we did. Well, I refuse to forget it.”
“You seem like the wrong kind of person for this work.”
“No. I am precisely the right kind of person for this work. We must see things exactly as they are. Not as we want to see them – as they are. Only then will we have clarity of purpose. Tell me: that man you shot. The one whose brains ran down the wall. Did he have children?”
“I don’t know.”
“A lover? A wife?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he was a colicky baby? An early reader? Was he a daredevil as a boy? Did he run faster than the others? Was he kind to his friends? What was his favorite book?”
“Enough. I understand.”
“You do not,” Sorok says. “Understanding cuts much closer to the bone. But yes – enough. My advice to you is this: when you watch the light going out of someone’s eyes, try to comprehend what that truly means. People are more than what happens to cross your path.”
“Tell me that the documents are safe with you.”
“They are safer with me than with anyone else. I have no illusions. Now is not the time for wondering what might have been: the world is out of balance. We have a responsibility to resist the Americans and their allies now, just as we had a responsibility to resist Stalin then. We did not live up to our responsibilities then, but we won’t make the same mistake twice. Now go – and take your tough talk with you.”
Sorok does not turn toward her as she leaves. I hear the door of the compartment slide shut. He looks at his tea, his scarred hands, then out the window.
There, through the static of rain, the wet white trunks of the birches are people: naked, starved, staring at the train as it lumbered past them. Standing between the train and the evergreen dark beyond.
#
“Was there anything?” Alvin asked.
We were in an apartment in the same building, in a kitchen that had seen a lot of use over the past few days. Dishes were piled in the sink. Charred matchsticks from lighting the stove were scattered over the loose teeth of the parquet floor. In other rooms of the apartment white sheets covered Louis Qinze furniture. One brocaded couch had been pushed near the front door and slept on: the woolen blanket was still there, as was one of the latest death ray pistols, like a cross between a Colt revolver and the intestines of a radio.
The Georgian who made us tea had a shadow of beard that went all the way up to his cheekbones. He grinned proudly over the glass he poured me.
“The herbs are from the mountains near my family home.”
And that’s what the tea tasted like: the mountains. A field of wild herbs at the edge of a tree line. My head ached from the loops. I felt dizzy. The tea made it a little better.
I turned to Alvin. “There was. The memories were clear – maybe some of the clearest I’ve seen, with just one or two . . . distortions.” That was not the word I had wanted to use: I had wanted to say, thinking of the naked people standing in the rain in the place of trees, “apparitions.” I glanced up at the Georgian, now attending ashamedly to the dishes in the sink.
“His name is Koba. He’s one of our cell. You can speak freely in front of him.”
“The memory was of a delivery of documents. It seems he got them. He was having an argument with a woman.”
“Over what?”
“Over – history. Politics. Party doctrine. It was strange: he didn’t sound like a spy.”
“What did he sound like?”
“He sounded tired. Honestly, he sounded like a man about to get himself killed.”
“How long before you can go back in?”
“Just as soon as this headache clears up.”
I looked at Koba, washing dishes by candlelight. Dawn bled in through the kitchen window.
“You don’t have to wash those dishes for me,” I said. “You should see my sink at home.”
“These are not my dishes,” said Koba. “They are my sister’s. She never washes them. She never cleans anything! She always leaves it for me.”
“My kind of woman.”
“Yes,” said Koba. “I think my sister is your kind of woman. You will like her. She also fought in the war.”
I didn’t bother asking him how he could tell I’d fought in the war, or where he had found out.
“Really? Which side was she on?”
“Our side,” Koba said. “The Georgian side. The resistance. We were with you.”
“Sort of,” Alvin said.
“Okay . . . most of the time.”
“Close enough,” Alvin said. “Though it was hard to tell, some days.”
“Listen, boys,” I interrupted. “I could use a lie-down. It will help me recover faster. It’s been a long night.”
“I will set you up a bed in one of the rooms,” Koba said.
“Good. Alvin can finish the dishes for you.”
#
All I can hear at first is the sound of my own breathing – of Sorok’s breathing. He is trying to breathe quietly, but he has been running. He puts a hand over his mouth. And as his own breathing quiets down, as the blood pounding in his ears quiets, he hears it: footsteps in the underbrush.
“I know you are here.” It is her voice – the woman’s voice. “I have been following you. I saw you transfer trains. You are supposed to be heading north, and instead you go south. Do you think I don’t know where you are going? They said give you the documents, so I gave you the documents. But they didn’t say not to follow you. They didn’t say not to take the documents back from you, if you betrayed us. And I knew you would. I could hear it in your voice, Sorok. Who were you waiting for in the woods last night? Who are you waiting for now? You don’t have what it takes for this work, anymore.”
“Maybe I never did,” Sorok says. He stands up and comes out from behind the tree.
The woman is twenty, thirty meters away at most. She wears a thin cotton jacket against the cold. I can see her breath in the air. In her hand is a pistol.
“Where are the documents?”
“You missed the moment,” Sorok says. “I already handed them over to our enemies. It’s done.”
“Impossible.”
“Not at all. I have known you were following me this entire time.”
“Well, then,” she says, “I have failed. There’s nothing left to do than clean up.”
She raises the pistol and fires. I feel the impact of the bullet, feel us fall back onto the ground. Luckily I am shielded, somewhat, from the pain. But not entirely. I am not him, but I am tangled with him. We look into a sky crowded out by pine trees. The bullet has hit him in the chest. He is struggling to breathe.
Then I hear another shot – a rifle, its thunderclap echoing off the hard surfaces of the woods. I hear the woman cry out, heard her fall. Then the sounds of her struggling on the ground. Voices in a language Sorok does not know.
The woman, pleading.
Then a face, looking down into Sorok’s. The face starved, the eyes bulging from their sockets. A dirty hand in his hair.
“Why did you have to die here, so far away?”
“I don’t know,” Sorok says.
“It is useless for you to die here. You could have died with us, in the village. It would have been better for everyone. You could have served a purpose. So much meat for the children.”
“I am sorry,” Sorok said.
“It is too late for your apologies. You should have died so many years ago. You could at least have been of use . . .”
In another world, I am tearing the headset from my head, trying desperately to break this connection. I cannot be here when he dies, and death is coming . . .
#
“Sorok gave the documents up.”
We were in the kitchen. Daylight streamed in through the dirty cotton curtains. Alvin had given me a glass of cold tea. My hands were shaking. I watched the leaves drift in the glass and waited for the moment I could lift it to my mouth without spilling it.
Alvin said nothing at all.
“Where’s Koba?”
“Out getting food.” Alvin sat facing slightly away from me.
In the street, I could hear a little boy yelling, in Georgian. Almost a chant. A newsboy, it sounded like. One of the words was nearly recognizable. Something English, but his accent veiled it.
“What’s eating you, Alvin?”
“President Roosevelt is dead.”
Roosevelt had been only a few months away from beginning his eighth term in office. I was silent for a moment. It was hard to search through my feelings. To sort them out, find something coherent.
We were all President Roosevelt, I wanted to blurt out. But that was the loops talking – the lingering entanglement tugging at my thoughts. I was still carrying an echo of Sorok around with me. There was still a little we in my I, as I liked to put it when I was feeling witty.
I wasn’t feeling witty.
“I’m sorry. Really I am, Alvin.”
He nodded, but wouldn’t make eye contact.
“Nobody gets to live forever, Alvin.” I said. “Not even the President of the United States of America.”
“He was assassinated.”
“By whom?”
“By agents of the Eleanor Roosevelt faction, they say.”
No. That wasn’t right. There was something else happening.
“Kennedy has declared martial law. He believes she is somewhere in the U.S. – that she will attempt a coup.”
“That doesn’t sound like her faction,” I said.
“I know.” Now Alvin looked me in the eye. It wasn’t grief that showed in his face: it was rage. A shadow under the skin, writhing in the muscle.
“What happens now?”
“We finish our job. The Turks are leaking information. Their intelligence services are compromised. The Georgians are on both sides of the river, and both sides of this conflict. We need to find those documents. You need to go back in there and find out who he gave them to. We need to keep them out of the hands of the Russian leadership, if it isn’t already too late.”
Martial law.
“He said he gave them to ‘our enemies’ – what could that mean?”
“I can think of then or twelve things.”
“I want you to know, Alvin: I’m not going to work for some junta. If things go south back home – I’m done. I’m out, and I’m looking to you to help me stay out.”
He nodded.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Where are your loyalties?”
“In the same place they have always been,” Alvin said.
“Don’t be cryptic.”
“I’ve killed a fair number of people, Sylvia. In the war, and after. I didn’t do it for nothing. I did it for what we need to keep standing for.”
“Please don’t say ‘freedom,’ Alvin. Don’t make me lose respect for you.”
“Not freedom, Sylvia. Just the little person, unafraid.”
Koba came in, rattling the key in the lock so we would know it was him. He appeared in the kitchen doorway with a woman who couldn’t be anyone but his sister: she had the same face, only without the shadow of beard, and haloed by a mass of curls.
They both looked terrified.
#
This memory is old and has been replayed too many times. Replayed until it is ragged. The darkness at the edges has come into the center. The perspectives are off. We are in a train coupé, or perhaps we are in the café of a train station. The man we are talking to is at least two people at once: one of them is an older man, gray hair receded from an already high forehead. The other is still young, powerfully built, machine-like tendons on the backs of his hands. Sometimes I look out of Sorok’s eyes, and sometimes we both hover near the ceiling, looking down on the scene. It is often like this with old memories: the point of view slips, the memories accrue a camera eye, like scraps of old film.
Much is missing, garbled: when the waitress comes to the table, she punches our train tickets. Her face is a blurred oval. All that remains of her is an elaborate hairstyle. The station café rocks on its rails. Through the windows the porters wander with their baggage carts through the bogs and copses of a long journey. People wait on train platforms half-hidden among the trees. All of them are incomplete – hands holding a newspaper, a pair of riding boots pacing without an owner, an arm and vest consulting a pocket watch, the empty leather jacket of a commissar.
“What you need to remember, Sorok, is that every human being fights for their own cause. That cause is always immediate: their child, the man or woman they love, their next meal, living through a battle, saving their home. These people can be dealt with easily: give them what they want to gain their loyalty. Withhold it to move them where you need them to go. Threaten it to make them talk. At the best they are foot soldiers.
“But there are also the inhuman ones – the monsters walking around – the ones who fight for a larger cause. The generals, the commissars, the leaders. Some of their servants. They are tangled up with fantasies the size of nations. Figuring out what to give to them or take from them is harder. You could torture their families to death in front of them, and they would not talk. It is easier simply to kill them.”
The train car is torn away: the coupé sits in the middle of a field. Its blasted, ragged end opens out onto twisted rails. The field is hummocked, mounds of earth covering it. They might be graves, but no – they are people. They are sleeping, and as I watch from the train car, each of them rises and goes about their ablutions, their morning motions at sinks and buckets, their sleeves rolled up or torsos bared, angling their faces in mirrors or with closed eyes, automatic yet no two of them the same. And the man I am speaking with (I am sure he is the same man, though nothing tells me but the feeling I have) walks from one to another, shooting them in the back of the head to send them off to sleep again.
And then I was in the basement, Alvin’s hands on me. He was not supposed to do this – to interrupt the loop midway. He pulled the crown from my head. I vomited on the cracked concrete. Somewhere in my mind a train was torn open in a field. Somewhere in a field my mind was a torn-open train.
“You can’t do that, Alvin. You could kill me . . .”
“I am sorry,” he said, helping me up, pulling me to the door too roughly. “But this place is compromised. We have to go. Now. I thought it could wait: it cannot.”
The men in the basement were taking apart the machine. A man was carrying Sorok’s head in the glass box they built, the hoses to its refrigeration dangling. Then Alvin pulled me away.
“The machines. The loops . . .”
“They will either be able to defend them, and find a way to move them, or they will destroy them. You are more important.”
In the entryway of the building I saw the shadows of four people burned into the paint. Their disintegrated selves still drifted in the air.
I heard the sizzle of a death ray and, looking to the sound, I saw Koba’s sister leaned from a window, her teeth a square of hate. Behind us, where once there was a person, perhaps the one who would have killed me, nothing remained but a flurry of ashes.
The terraplane they had waiting for me was a cargo van, and as it lurched over the rooftops of the old town I wanted to be sick again, but I would not allow myself to do it: I was afraid if I did, everything will come apart – I would unravel completely, mind and body, spooling out like a dropped ball of wool on the metal bench of the van. Instead I looked out a smeared window onto the chaos of courtyards below. In one of them a woman was hanging laundry out to dry, as if it were the only thing in the world.
#
Alvin placed a sandwich in my hand. Nothing more than flat bread, raggedly cut in half, a chunk of farmer’s cheese pushed into it. But the bread was fresh, the cheese was fresh.
I must have made an approving sound when I bit into it because, next to me, Koba’s sister Nino said, “Hunger is the best spice.”
“I keep hearing that Georgia has some of the best food in the world,” I said, “But all Alvin feeds me is sandwiches.”
“You’ll just have to trust us,” Nino said.
The church we were in was disused, boarded up. Through the boards a few arrows of light angled through the dark to the flagstones. The church had been used as a warehouse. It was half-filled with bicycle parts and the bent skeletons of old bicycles. Wheels, shifters, and gears hung from the walls on nails – but someone had also pasted up a postcard icon. In the dome, pigeons fluttered and cooed to one another. The flagstones were painted with their guano. The church reeked of it – of the waste of birds and of bats, who I occasionally heard squeaking off in further darknesses.
Beyond where the torn away iconostasis once was, in the sanctuary of the church, they were setting up the machines. They had managed, somehow, to get them out.
I found myself wondering what would happen to me if they had not. Without the machines, I was of no use to the OSS. To Alvin, to the government, to any of them.
Sitting there eating my plain sandwich in that semi-darkness, I understood that everything I had become was a product of happenstance. All those years ago, I was nothing more than the only student lucky enough to survive the loops. They tested them on ten of us. Nine others died, and I lived. No-one ever figured out why.
I remembered smoking under the cherry tree that day, after the experiment. My hands shaking so badly I could barely get the cigarette to my lips.
“My name is Sylvia Aldstatt,” I had said over and over between drags on my Lucky. “And not anything else. Just Sylvia Aldstatt, and that’s all.”
That was the moment – under that cherry tree in full blossom, its petals dancing around me in the air while I tried not to go mad. That was the moment this new self was born.
Out of that survival I had built an identity, a livelihood, a career. I had built a life. If those machines were destroyed, so was that life. The thought of that change was horrifying, and I also longed for it. I would go home to California. I would never pilot my way again through the memories of the dead. I would become someone else – someone entirely mundane, who dealt only in the world of the living. A person for whom politics were an abstraction – not a cloud of drifting ash that moments before had been trying to kill me.
I knew I didn’t have the courage to change my life. I needed someone else to do it for me.
“What is going on, Alvin?” I asked, grasping his arm as he passed.
“We aren’t sure. It seems that the networks allied with the Russians are taking Roosevelt’s death as a moment of weakness.”
“That is exactly it,” said Nino. “They think without their Great Leader the United States will be paralyzed, the way Russia is paralyzed when one of their leaders dies. They are striking while they think you are on your knees. This is how their minds work: they think everyone else in the world is the same. They do not understand that America is not some mass at that follows a leader, without a will of their own: America is made up of independent people.”
She said it with such confidence. I knew Alvin was thinking the same thing I was: we both hoped what Nino was saying was true. Neither one of us was sure.
“Are we safe here?” I asked.
Nino shrugged.
Alvin said, “For a few hours, at least.”
“Then I have one more shot at it.”
“Only if you are sure it’s safe,” Alvin said. “I don’t like the way your eyes look. And your hands are unsteady.”
“He’s just like a big brother,” I said to Nino.
“Not like my big brother,” Nino said. “Mine is an idiot.”
I head Koba snarl in Georgian from the darkness. Nino spat a phrase back, and the other Georgians in the place laughed.
“What did you say to him?” I asked.
“I made a suggestion,” Nino said. “It is not actually possible for him to do what I suggested. But I would like to see him try.”
#
A village on fire. The way the houses collapse, their walls falling inward, their roofs caving as they sink into themselves, is the same way this memory is collapsing. In places, the fields surrounding the village extend to the charcoal smudge of trees. But turn your head, and there are no fields at all. Beyond the village, the world is gone.
We are here, we are not: Beneath our feet is green tile, hexagonal as a beehive. The hallway we are standing in exists only as the knowledge we have of it – there is no other trace left here, beyond that feeling. And a remembered smell. Not the smell of the village. Not the smell of fire, as it should be – of burning wood and flesh, as it should be, but rather the smell of an interior. A basement. The mid-winter smell of mildew that cannot be eliminated, of mop water and unwashed coats. The man we are standing with is saying, his hand on our shoulder, “Do you know why they call him Sorok? Forty? It is because during the Civil War, in Poland, he once killed forty White Russian officers in a single stroke. Prisoners of war. The orders came to shoot them, but we had run out of bullets. What to do? Sorok figured it out: he locked them in a train car on a siding and set it on fire. Within a week, every White Russian in the region had surrendered. They came to us with their hands up – walked out of the woods and threw themselves on their knees. This is a man who knows how to use terror.”
The village of train cars burns. The roofs collapse, the walls fall inward. Only the screams from inside them do not collapse.
“I’m telling you,” the man says – the man who is the man from the train station café, the coupe, and who is also the man wandering this place with a pistol, looking for survivors to shoot: “Sorok was made for things greater than what the army can offer him. We need him with us.”
And the village is gone, the man is gone, the fields are gone. The burning continues, but now it is a campfire, that is all. I am crouched in front of it, on my knees. We are crouched in front of it – the two of us, tangled up in this memory together. I can feel the tendrils of other memories, tugging. This one has the clarity of a recent memory: the trees around us have bark, the ground beneath our knees has the yielding fungal sponginess of the forest. But other memories are also here, pulling at us, and we don’t look up at the trees because we know there will be faces there. And once we see a face, there will be more faces deeper in. There are always more faces, deeper in.
“Yes,” Sorok says. “There are always more faces, deeper in.”
He is across from me now. I feel the heat of the fire on my own hands. He is on his knees, and now I see the papers curling in the fire.
“You tell yourself,” Sorok says, “That there is a limit to the things you will do. You tell yourself there is a line your country will cross one day. A line across which you will not follow. That there are things you will not do, people you will not work for. But the worst is that you tell yourself the line is in front of you. The truth is, once you start thinking of the line you will never cross, it is already behind you. You have already made your choices.”
“No,” I say. “Not always.”
Sorok looks up at me. “You are not here. You cannot speak.” Then he turns to look at the trees. “None of you are here. None of you can speak. I murdered you all. Be silent.”
He feeds more paper into the fire.
“The line is behind you, Sylvia,” Sorok says. “The line was in Berlin, hidden somewhere in the ashes under the linden trees: in the ashes the death rays made of people. People on the wrong side. The ashes of an enemy worth fighting. It was a just war, and you were on the side of justice. But what you did was not right. You walked through those ashes, remember?”
I’ve climbed down out of my Jeep to admire the leaves on this crisp fall day. Hitler is kaput, and all of us think the war is over. Nobody knows yet that the allies will turn on one another: that the war will go on for another year as Patton and our allied forces, plus what’s left of the German Wehrmacht, recommissioned by Patton as the Free German Army, drive Stalin and his Red Army back out of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Prussia, out of the Balkans and the Baltic states. And the war will go on in the Pacific after a shattered Japan surrenders, as we join with Chiang Kai-shek in his butchery of the Chinese Communists.
But here, on Unter den Linden, there is peace. The autumn leaves are beautiful, and I can see the Brandenburg Gate at its terminus. G.I.s have landed a few Jeeps near its steps. A couple of them have cameras, and are snapping pictures for their families back home. They are smiling, whooping, goofing around like the young boys and girls they are, happy to take off the masks of war. I walk slowly toward them, as if in a dream, while the leaves heave and scatter around my feet. I’m going to join them, smile and laugh with them. Everything will be all right. I’m staring up at the fall glory of the trees. The city is so quiet here — just the sound of military motors at a distance, the shouts of the victors up ahead, the laughter and the dry rattle of the autumn breeze through the leaves.
And then I turn and I see it: my footprints, leading from my Jeep to where I am standing. Under the thin veil of flame-tinted leaves, the trail of my footprints is sunk deep in the ashes of Berlin’s last defenders — ashes that carpet the ground everywhere in the city, an inch thick. And I put my hand over my mouth to muffle my screams.
“You cannot speak to me,” I say.
“And yet I do,” Sorok replies.
Sorok feeds another page into the fire. “I am giving you a gift, Sylvia. I have already done the right thing. These secrets are gone, before a new war could be started with them. Now all you must do is tell your people the truth – and hope they believe it.”
#
“The documents are gone.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Sorok never handed them off to his contacts in Russia. I watched him destroy them.”
It was only myself, Alvin, Koba, and Nino in the room. The room was little more than a shed now. Once it was a holy place, a chapel. A fresco of the mother and child rise above packing crates, their eyes gouged out.
I hadn’t come all the way back. I was still tangled – I coul feel it. I couldn’t quite get free of him. Behind the mother and child, other things shifted inside the wall. It had gained translucencies, depths it should not have. Forest depths. From behind the damaged seraphim, their six wings gathered around their battered faces like flames –
For our God is a consuming fire . . .
The voice also like a flame –
Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire . . .
“She is lying.”
Koba says it, but Alvin’s motion was toward Nino. Before I understood what I was seeing, she was unconscious on the floor, the death ray pistol clattering off one of the packing crates and falling. While my eyes were still on the gun, Alvin had already turned. The struggle with Koba was longer, but eventually he joined his sister on the floor. I could not tell, for a moment, if he was still alive. Then he sighed, like a man asleep and dreaming.
I felt the cut, then. I saw my own blood on the stones, saw the knife in Koba’s limp hands.
Then the bleed-off from a death ray field hit. The flash from under the door turned everything in the chapel to lightning and shadow. We were, all four of us, lifted an inch off the ground and then settled again.
The world returned to normal with a shudder.
“All clear.” The voice was an American voice, one of those flat Midwestern accents that can travel around the world for years without changing, solidly rooted as it is in a whole way of life.
I felt Alvin’s hand on my face, pushing hard against my forehead to stanch the bleeding.
“I’m sorry, Sylvia,” Alvin said. “I think this little adventure of ours may leave a permanent scar.”
#
I sink into the hot water of the sulfur bath, turning my face to the ceiling. The room I am in, a deluxe private room of this bathhouse, was tiled and domed – a small dome imitating the larger domes of the main spaces. In those large rooms the Tbilisi natives, the Ossetian escapees from Russian Communism, the Crimean Tatars plotting the liberation of their fellow Turkic nations along the Kama river in Russia’s heartland, and all the other informers, dissidents, and spies wash themselves in mutual suspicion.
Afterward they will return to the autumnal hovels they have rented at exorbitant prices. They pay these prices to be on this side of the river – a river that flows, many will tell you, between slavery and freedom.
They will tell you, if you ask them, that they are on the free side of the river. Some will say it with confidence, meaning every word. Some will say it automatically, in a tone that indicates they haven’t thought it through: they are simply repeating what they know others expect of them. And some will say it with the assurance that only comes of a lie, believing in fact that this is the world of slavery, and that the other side of the river is where freedom is: under a system that discards personal property in favor of a collective will. Koba and Nino were of this latter type, though they hid it for years while they worked for the Russians. Now where are they? My mind turns away from the thought.
Everywhere in the city, Kennedy’s voice has been playing on the radio. His disembodied words have been following me through sweet shops and tailors. Kennedy has been repeating himself from behind the doors of apartments, booming from the radios of taxis waiting at the curb, whispering from the kitchens of restaurants:
And what we must ask ourselves is this: what world do we want to live in? A world of peace, where every human being can exercise their rights freely? Or a world in which the hand is forced to do the things it would not do under the power of its own free will?
We do not promise a world free of hardship. Nor do we promise a world in which there is no pain. What we promise is a world in which every man and woman is free to choose how to meet those hardships and contend with that pain. A world in which human beings are more than gears in a collective machine. A world in which their talents thrive and grow, overcoming all challenges, in the light of freedom.
I wonder how many people Kennedy, head of the OSS since 1946, has had killed in the light of that freedom.
I wonder many things. I wonder how free any of us is to choose anything at all. I wonder what speeches are being given on the other side, and how much they differ from Kennedy’s in anything but the details of tone and delivery. I wonder what Koba and Nino thought of the value of the freedom Kennedy assures them they were born with. I wonder what Sorok’s killer thought of it – the woman who wanted to linger forever in the memory of her lovers, and yet also was willing to destroy the only instrument that makes human memories possible at all.
But most of all I wonder, watching the tiles of the ceiling sweat the sulphurous water of the springs, if the memory Sorok left with me will ever fade.
He has been there for days now. Not all the time – he comes and goes. He flickers into my awareness as I sit in restaurants, trying to taste food that seems meaningless. He is in the corner of my hotel room as the light fades into evening. As I am fitted for a new dress, he is there on the floor.
I think this little adventure of ours may leave a permanent scar.
As if on cue, there is a knock at the door. Alvin’s voice says, “Our rocket back to the U.S. is in less than two hours, Sylvia. I hope you’re packed.”
“Don’t worry about me, Alvin. My bags are already waiting at the ‘drome.”
He is the oldest kind of memory, glassy with age, the background of his moment gone, the scene against which he is projected visible through his skin. The returns of memory have carved everything away but his essence: a small boy, playing with a puppy that is all feet and ears. He is Sorok himself.
I wait for something to happen – I wait, each time the memory replays, for the moment of violence. I feel, the way Sorok must have felt, the menace of it: at any moment the play will turn to something terrible. The memory will end in a foreshadowing cruelty. The boy will reach for a stick. The boy will reach for a stone. The boy will begin down a path that will lead him to a burning train car on a siding. To a village of living skeletons.
But there is nothing. Just a boy, a dog, a memory nearly identical to memories in the minds of millions. A memory similar enough to many of my own.
All I want is for him to fade away.
But as I towel myself dry he is there. The sulfur steam passes through him, the tiles are visible through his skin and hair, but he is there. The puppy flops on a floor long erased, adoring and adored.
I think this little adventure of ours may leave a permanent scar.
Doesn’t everything?
Ray Nayler
Originally published in Asimov's March/April 2024
“There it is.”
I followed Alvin’s binoculars and saw it as well: a shadow against the night sky, rising in an arc above the Kura River. The terraplane’s running lights were off, its shape indistinct. But yes: it was there.
Then there was another arc, so bright it eliminated all fine distinctions between dark and darker from the world. It intersected the first.
The explosion was close enough for us to feel, seconds later, the compression of air across our faces. The first arc became a trace of tumbling fire, a streak reflected on the surface of the river below. It came down, not in the water but in the tangle of houses somewhere on the allied side of the river – our side.
“Well,” Alvin said, “they got across, anyway.”
“But not alive.”
“Only one of them was still alive when they started this journey. That’s why we have you here.”
Our observation point was an abandoned apartment in one of Tbilisi’s tangle of wooden buildings. By the red light of Alvin’s flashlight we made our way down the staircase. In the lightless corridor we could hear music from behind a wall: an old phonograph, a plaintive voice backed by strings. Flakes of peeling paint crunched under our feet like dried mud. I remembered the building as seen from the street when we had entered: leaning so badly that props had been squared against its external walls, the doorless gape of the street entrance a trapezoid.
“You take me to the nicest places, Alvin,” I’d said.
Now I whispered, “Someone is living here.”
“Someone is living everywhere in this city,” Alvin answered. “We had to rent the lookout. And it didn’t come cheap.”
The power was out in this part of the city. The street was dark, but not the cave-dark of the building behind us, the doorway gaping into a sightless warren.
“I guess they charge extra for the broken windows and the pigeon shit all over the floor,” I said.
“Of course they do. Pigeon shit makes good fertilizer, and you can kill an intruder with a decent shard of broken glass – just wrap it in cloth first so you don’t cut your hand.”
Alvin would know.
“Now where to?” I asked. “Dinner was a stale cheese sandwich in a flophouse overlooking a river they shoot you if you swim in. If this is a date, I can’t wait to see the movie you take me to. I’ll be disappointed if it isn’t projected onto a torn bedsheet.”
Somewhere in the tangle of the allied zone, a siren screamed.
Alvin wouldn’t bite. “Now we go back to the hotel and wait for the salvage crew to make contact.”
“I hope they take their time about it. I could use some sleep.”
#
They didn’t take their time about it.
“I’m sorry about this, Sylvia.”
Alvin and I were in the back seat of a surface car, an Emka staff car reclaimed from the short-lived Soviet Union, once used to shuttle big-hatted generals back and forth from their staff offices. The interior was red velvet. I wondered if Stalin had ever had a chance to ride in it before his generals assassinated him. The driver, separated from us by a sheet of privacy glass, was some American PFC far too young to have fought in the war. The glass rattled in its wooden frame as the car crawled over cobblestones.
“Trying to get across in a terraplane wasn’t exactly subtle,” I said.
“It was the best option we had. And that rocket battery was supposed to have been silenced.”
The part of town we were passing through was filled with old villas. The headlights picked each of them out as we passed. Their stained plaster made them look like rotted wedding cakes. Everywhere I looked in Tbilisi, the city was the corpse of faded greatness. You could almost imagine the men and women of decades ago, monocled and bustled, strolling these avenues.
Their ghosts, anyway.
“That escape didn’t work out so well.”
“Nothing here does,” Alvin said. “Russian spies are still lodged inside the local security services, and as much as the Georgians hate the Russians, they are hardly fans of their new Turkish overlords. Some of them have forgotten how bad it was under the Bolsheviks – all they can think of is how bad it is under Istanbul, so the Communists are making converts again.”
“Maybe the Georgians would be better off on their own.”
“That’s exactly what they think – and exactly what everyone keeps promising them. But all the promises are for independence tomorrow. They want it today.”
“Imagine that.”
“Look,” Alvin said in the dark, “I’m with them in spirit. I am. But these days, for a little country like this, independence is a vacuum. Either Russia fills it, or the Allies do. And you can bet that, as bad as it might be in the Allied Zone, it’s ten times worse across the river. Why else would people be risking their lives to get across?”
“I’ve heard that vacuum argument before, Alvin, and maybe it’s true, but it sounds a little convenient. Us or them is a pretty good excuse to keep extending our power.”
“It’s more complicated than that, Sylvia – but I’m not very good at arguing at three in the morning.”
“Justifying great power politics in the middle of the night is tough. You have a hard job. Have I ever told you that? I’m going to buy you a drink sometime. I am.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Alvin said.
“So will I.”
The car stopped in front of a block of apartments, a faux-eastern Stalin’s Empire building hacked into the older neighborhood. The building couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, but it looked as ancient as anything else. Or as decrepit, anyway. A man with a lantern appeared in the arched hole of the entryway. The October night had turned cold. He had a woolen blanket wrapped around his shoulders for warmth.
“No power?” I asked.
“We have a line into the city’s emergency backup system,” Alvin answered, “but not to light the building: only for the machines.”
The Georgian with the lantern led us past a row of battered mailboxes, posters wheatpasted up on the whitewashed walls in a palimpsest of local elections. Every candidate’s face had been scraped out or defaced. All that was left were shirt collars, ties, the lace wings of dresses under their destroyed heads.
They had set up in the basement. Several kerosene lanterns stood in a ring around my chair and a small table. But the table wasn’t big enough for a body: the cables snaked under a white sheet. I walked over to it. One of the Georgians stepped forward to stop me, but Alvin held him back with a hand on his upper arm.
I pulled the sheet back. Under it, the tangled crown of the machine was worn by a severed head. There was very little gore. The neck was an anatomy lesson. The face was as calm as a marble statue head, dug from the earth after centuries. Violence had blurred its features.
“It was all Charon could recover of him,” Alvin said. “And we don’t know when we’ll ever get another agent this high-level out: Charon is dead. His network was betrayed. The Russians are across the Kura as we speak, dragging them from their beds into the Black Marias.”
“This didn’t happen to him when they were crossing the river.”
“No. This happened earlier. They were caught by a group of Chechen Bolsheviks coming through the mountains.”
“How long has he been dead?”
“A day, a day and a half.”
“No time to waste. His name?”
“We only know him as ‘Sorok.’ It means ‘forty’ in Russian.”
“Get me plugged in.”
The lantern-lighted faces of the Georgian and American agents were expressionist film pantomimes of dread. The basement was a mad doctor’s laboratory, complete with severed head and terrible machine. I sat in my chair and adjusted my crown.
“Come on, boys. Every second we waste, his memories degrade further. You aren’t the ones who have to pilot the memory loops in that head, so stop standing around like a bunch of frightened rabbits. Pull the switch, Alvin.”
#
The train is moving slowly past a stand of birch in rain, the wet white trunks syncopated against the evergreen dark of the forest behind. On the table near the window is a glass of black tea, a thick glass in a metal holder. The compartment is filled with the smell of tea. I am aware of these things first, and then aware of another person in the compartment. A woman’s voice, in Russian:
“And they were so enamored of the monsoon season, this season of stillness and romance, that they even had a perfume distilled: the smell of earth dampened by rain.”
“Who would wear such a thing?” Sorok says – I say.
“I think it sounds lovely. Think of the smell of rain when it begins – such a nostalgic smell. A smell that rises from the earth, as if bringing memories from the grave. It would take a brave woman to wear that scent, of course. She would be competing with every association her perfume raised in the mind. But eventually, if she were successful, she would become the one associated with that smell. And then, no matter what happened between them, every time it rained he would long for her. For the rest of his life.”
“And what would be the point of that? What is the point of someone longing for you after the relationship is over?”
“What you do not understand, dear, is that for many people that is the entire point of a relationship. To be longed for afterward, like the monsoon rains.”
“At your core,” Sorok says, “You remain a bourgeois romantic.”
“I’ve shot men for less than that,” the woman replies, without a noticeable change in the tone of her voice. “Shot them in the face, and watched the light go out of their eyes as their brains slid down a wall. I am a romantic, but of the revolutionary type. You should learn to recognize the difference.”
Now Sorok turns and looks at her. She is a tall woman, in a simple woolen worker’s shirt, her brown hair pulled back from the oval of her face. Her very average eyes meet his. She doesn’t look like a romantic, or a revolutionary, or like anyone in particular.
“All of this work,” she says, “to catch up with the Americans. A whole Soviet generation lost in rebuilding, because of something so simple as twelve hours on a clock.”
“I don’t follow,” Sorok says.
“Twelve hours earlier or later,” she says, “and that flying saucer they got all their technology from in 1938 wouldn’t have crash landed in the desert of New Mexico – it would have crashed in the desert of Turkmenistan. It would have been recovered by us, by the Soviet Union. It would have been reverse engineered by us. We would have been the ones to defeat Hitler. We would have turned Berlin to ashes. And then we would have driven the Americans back to the Atlantic and raised the red flag over London. Perhaps even over Washington by now, if it pleased us.”
“Where were you in the spring of 1933?” Sorok asks.
“I was in the Komsomol, in Leningrad.”
“I was in the Ukrainian countryside outside of Poltava. Do you understand what we did there?”
“I know there were excesses.”
“Have you ever watched a person starve to death?”
“No.”
“Then don’t talk to me about what we would have done with all this wonderful technology.”
“Stalin was cruel,” the woman says, “and that is why he needed to be purged. It’s true his will was what held the Union together, when the Anglo-Saxon capitalists were trying to tear it apart, but he went too far. We can’t blame the whole Soviet Union for the things Stalin did.”
“He went . . . too far? Maybe I didn’t ask you the correct question,” Sorok says. “What I should have asked was, ‘Have you ever starved a village to death . . . on purpose?’”
“Of course not.”
“Then stop speaking to me in Party platitudes. We were all Stalin. All of us. He wasn’t a lone man making his decisions in a vacuum – he was a period in our personal histories we’ve been trying to shovel into a bin under the name ‘Stalin’ so we can toss it out and forget what we did. Well, I refuse to forget it.”
“You seem like the wrong kind of person for this work.”
“No. I am precisely the right kind of person for this work. We must see things exactly as they are. Not as we want to see them – as they are. Only then will we have clarity of purpose. Tell me: that man you shot. The one whose brains ran down the wall. Did he have children?”
“I don’t know.”
“A lover? A wife?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he was a colicky baby? An early reader? Was he a daredevil as a boy? Did he run faster than the others? Was he kind to his friends? What was his favorite book?”
“Enough. I understand.”
“You do not,” Sorok says. “Understanding cuts much closer to the bone. But yes – enough. My advice to you is this: when you watch the light going out of someone’s eyes, try to comprehend what that truly means. People are more than what happens to cross your path.”
“Tell me that the documents are safe with you.”
“They are safer with me than with anyone else. I have no illusions. Now is not the time for wondering what might have been: the world is out of balance. We have a responsibility to resist the Americans and their allies now, just as we had a responsibility to resist Stalin then. We did not live up to our responsibilities then, but we won’t make the same mistake twice. Now go – and take your tough talk with you.”
Sorok does not turn toward her as she leaves. I hear the door of the compartment slide shut. He looks at his tea, his scarred hands, then out the window.
There, through the static of rain, the wet white trunks of the birches are people: naked, starved, staring at the train as it lumbered past them. Standing between the train and the evergreen dark beyond.
#
“Was there anything?” Alvin asked.
We were in an apartment in the same building, in a kitchen that had seen a lot of use over the past few days. Dishes were piled in the sink. Charred matchsticks from lighting the stove were scattered over the loose teeth of the parquet floor. In other rooms of the apartment white sheets covered Louis Qinze furniture. One brocaded couch had been pushed near the front door and slept on: the woolen blanket was still there, as was one of the latest death ray pistols, like a cross between a Colt revolver and the intestines of a radio.
The Georgian who made us tea had a shadow of beard that went all the way up to his cheekbones. He grinned proudly over the glass he poured me.
“The herbs are from the mountains near my family home.”
And that’s what the tea tasted like: the mountains. A field of wild herbs at the edge of a tree line. My head ached from the loops. I felt dizzy. The tea made it a little better.
I turned to Alvin. “There was. The memories were clear – maybe some of the clearest I’ve seen, with just one or two . . . distortions.” That was not the word I had wanted to use: I had wanted to say, thinking of the naked people standing in the rain in the place of trees, “apparitions.” I glanced up at the Georgian, now attending ashamedly to the dishes in the sink.
“His name is Koba. He’s one of our cell. You can speak freely in front of him.”
“The memory was of a delivery of documents. It seems he got them. He was having an argument with a woman.”
“Over what?”
“Over – history. Politics. Party doctrine. It was strange: he didn’t sound like a spy.”
“What did he sound like?”
“He sounded tired. Honestly, he sounded like a man about to get himself killed.”
“How long before you can go back in?”
“Just as soon as this headache clears up.”
I looked at Koba, washing dishes by candlelight. Dawn bled in through the kitchen window.
“You don’t have to wash those dishes for me,” I said. “You should see my sink at home.”
“These are not my dishes,” said Koba. “They are my sister’s. She never washes them. She never cleans anything! She always leaves it for me.”
“My kind of woman.”
“Yes,” said Koba. “I think my sister is your kind of woman. You will like her. She also fought in the war.”
I didn’t bother asking him how he could tell I’d fought in the war, or where he had found out.
“Really? Which side was she on?”
“Our side,” Koba said. “The Georgian side. The resistance. We were with you.”
“Sort of,” Alvin said.
“Okay . . . most of the time.”
“Close enough,” Alvin said. “Though it was hard to tell, some days.”
“Listen, boys,” I interrupted. “I could use a lie-down. It will help me recover faster. It’s been a long night.”
“I will set you up a bed in one of the rooms,” Koba said.
“Good. Alvin can finish the dishes for you.”
#
All I can hear at first is the sound of my own breathing – of Sorok’s breathing. He is trying to breathe quietly, but he has been running. He puts a hand over his mouth. And as his own breathing quiets down, as the blood pounding in his ears quiets, he hears it: footsteps in the underbrush.
“I know you are here.” It is her voice – the woman’s voice. “I have been following you. I saw you transfer trains. You are supposed to be heading north, and instead you go south. Do you think I don’t know where you are going? They said give you the documents, so I gave you the documents. But they didn’t say not to follow you. They didn’t say not to take the documents back from you, if you betrayed us. And I knew you would. I could hear it in your voice, Sorok. Who were you waiting for in the woods last night? Who are you waiting for now? You don’t have what it takes for this work, anymore.”
“Maybe I never did,” Sorok says. He stands up and comes out from behind the tree.
The woman is twenty, thirty meters away at most. She wears a thin cotton jacket against the cold. I can see her breath in the air. In her hand is a pistol.
“Where are the documents?”
“You missed the moment,” Sorok says. “I already handed them over to our enemies. It’s done.”
“Impossible.”
“Not at all. I have known you were following me this entire time.”
“Well, then,” she says, “I have failed. There’s nothing left to do than clean up.”
She raises the pistol and fires. I feel the impact of the bullet, feel us fall back onto the ground. Luckily I am shielded, somewhat, from the pain. But not entirely. I am not him, but I am tangled with him. We look into a sky crowded out by pine trees. The bullet has hit him in the chest. He is struggling to breathe.
Then I hear another shot – a rifle, its thunderclap echoing off the hard surfaces of the woods. I hear the woman cry out, heard her fall. Then the sounds of her struggling on the ground. Voices in a language Sorok does not know.
The woman, pleading.
Then a face, looking down into Sorok’s. The face starved, the eyes bulging from their sockets. A dirty hand in his hair.
“Why did you have to die here, so far away?”
“I don’t know,” Sorok says.
“It is useless for you to die here. You could have died with us, in the village. It would have been better for everyone. You could have served a purpose. So much meat for the children.”
“I am sorry,” Sorok said.
“It is too late for your apologies. You should have died so many years ago. You could at least have been of use . . .”
In another world, I am tearing the headset from my head, trying desperately to break this connection. I cannot be here when he dies, and death is coming . . .
#
“Sorok gave the documents up.”
We were in the kitchen. Daylight streamed in through the dirty cotton curtains. Alvin had given me a glass of cold tea. My hands were shaking. I watched the leaves drift in the glass and waited for the moment I could lift it to my mouth without spilling it.
Alvin said nothing at all.
“Where’s Koba?”
“Out getting food.” Alvin sat facing slightly away from me.
In the street, I could hear a little boy yelling, in Georgian. Almost a chant. A newsboy, it sounded like. One of the words was nearly recognizable. Something English, but his accent veiled it.
“What’s eating you, Alvin?”
“President Roosevelt is dead.”
Roosevelt had been only a few months away from beginning his eighth term in office. I was silent for a moment. It was hard to search through my feelings. To sort them out, find something coherent.
We were all President Roosevelt, I wanted to blurt out. But that was the loops talking – the lingering entanglement tugging at my thoughts. I was still carrying an echo of Sorok around with me. There was still a little we in my I, as I liked to put it when I was feeling witty.
I wasn’t feeling witty.
“I’m sorry. Really I am, Alvin.”
He nodded, but wouldn’t make eye contact.
“Nobody gets to live forever, Alvin.” I said. “Not even the President of the United States of America.”
“He was assassinated.”
“By whom?”
“By agents of the Eleanor Roosevelt faction, they say.”
No. That wasn’t right. There was something else happening.
“Kennedy has declared martial law. He believes she is somewhere in the U.S. – that she will attempt a coup.”
“That doesn’t sound like her faction,” I said.
“I know.” Now Alvin looked me in the eye. It wasn’t grief that showed in his face: it was rage. A shadow under the skin, writhing in the muscle.
“What happens now?”
“We finish our job. The Turks are leaking information. Their intelligence services are compromised. The Georgians are on both sides of the river, and both sides of this conflict. We need to find those documents. You need to go back in there and find out who he gave them to. We need to keep them out of the hands of the Russian leadership, if it isn’t already too late.”
Martial law.
“He said he gave them to ‘our enemies’ – what could that mean?”
“I can think of then or twelve things.”
“I want you to know, Alvin: I’m not going to work for some junta. If things go south back home – I’m done. I’m out, and I’m looking to you to help me stay out.”
He nodded.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Where are your loyalties?”
“In the same place they have always been,” Alvin said.
“Don’t be cryptic.”
“I’ve killed a fair number of people, Sylvia. In the war, and after. I didn’t do it for nothing. I did it for what we need to keep standing for.”
“Please don’t say ‘freedom,’ Alvin. Don’t make me lose respect for you.”
“Not freedom, Sylvia. Just the little person, unafraid.”
Koba came in, rattling the key in the lock so we would know it was him. He appeared in the kitchen doorway with a woman who couldn’t be anyone but his sister: she had the same face, only without the shadow of beard, and haloed by a mass of curls.
They both looked terrified.
#
This memory is old and has been replayed too many times. Replayed until it is ragged. The darkness at the edges has come into the center. The perspectives are off. We are in a train coupé, or perhaps we are in the café of a train station. The man we are talking to is at least two people at once: one of them is an older man, gray hair receded from an already high forehead. The other is still young, powerfully built, machine-like tendons on the backs of his hands. Sometimes I look out of Sorok’s eyes, and sometimes we both hover near the ceiling, looking down on the scene. It is often like this with old memories: the point of view slips, the memories accrue a camera eye, like scraps of old film.
Much is missing, garbled: when the waitress comes to the table, she punches our train tickets. Her face is a blurred oval. All that remains of her is an elaborate hairstyle. The station café rocks on its rails. Through the windows the porters wander with their baggage carts through the bogs and copses of a long journey. People wait on train platforms half-hidden among the trees. All of them are incomplete – hands holding a newspaper, a pair of riding boots pacing without an owner, an arm and vest consulting a pocket watch, the empty leather jacket of a commissar.
“What you need to remember, Sorok, is that every human being fights for their own cause. That cause is always immediate: their child, the man or woman they love, their next meal, living through a battle, saving their home. These people can be dealt with easily: give them what they want to gain their loyalty. Withhold it to move them where you need them to go. Threaten it to make them talk. At the best they are foot soldiers.
“But there are also the inhuman ones – the monsters walking around – the ones who fight for a larger cause. The generals, the commissars, the leaders. Some of their servants. They are tangled up with fantasies the size of nations. Figuring out what to give to them or take from them is harder. You could torture their families to death in front of them, and they would not talk. It is easier simply to kill them.”
The train car is torn away: the coupé sits in the middle of a field. Its blasted, ragged end opens out onto twisted rails. The field is hummocked, mounds of earth covering it. They might be graves, but no – they are people. They are sleeping, and as I watch from the train car, each of them rises and goes about their ablutions, their morning motions at sinks and buckets, their sleeves rolled up or torsos bared, angling their faces in mirrors or with closed eyes, automatic yet no two of them the same. And the man I am speaking with (I am sure he is the same man, though nothing tells me but the feeling I have) walks from one to another, shooting them in the back of the head to send them off to sleep again.
And then I was in the basement, Alvin’s hands on me. He was not supposed to do this – to interrupt the loop midway. He pulled the crown from my head. I vomited on the cracked concrete. Somewhere in my mind a train was torn open in a field. Somewhere in a field my mind was a torn-open train.
“You can’t do that, Alvin. You could kill me . . .”
“I am sorry,” he said, helping me up, pulling me to the door too roughly. “But this place is compromised. We have to go. Now. I thought it could wait: it cannot.”
The men in the basement were taking apart the machine. A man was carrying Sorok’s head in the glass box they built, the hoses to its refrigeration dangling. Then Alvin pulled me away.
“The machines. The loops . . .”
“They will either be able to defend them, and find a way to move them, or they will destroy them. You are more important.”
In the entryway of the building I saw the shadows of four people burned into the paint. Their disintegrated selves still drifted in the air.
I heard the sizzle of a death ray and, looking to the sound, I saw Koba’s sister leaned from a window, her teeth a square of hate. Behind us, where once there was a person, perhaps the one who would have killed me, nothing remained but a flurry of ashes.
The terraplane they had waiting for me was a cargo van, and as it lurched over the rooftops of the old town I wanted to be sick again, but I would not allow myself to do it: I was afraid if I did, everything will come apart – I would unravel completely, mind and body, spooling out like a dropped ball of wool on the metal bench of the van. Instead I looked out a smeared window onto the chaos of courtyards below. In one of them a woman was hanging laundry out to dry, as if it were the only thing in the world.
#
Alvin placed a sandwich in my hand. Nothing more than flat bread, raggedly cut in half, a chunk of farmer’s cheese pushed into it. But the bread was fresh, the cheese was fresh.
I must have made an approving sound when I bit into it because, next to me, Koba’s sister Nino said, “Hunger is the best spice.”
“I keep hearing that Georgia has some of the best food in the world,” I said, “But all Alvin feeds me is sandwiches.”
“You’ll just have to trust us,” Nino said.
The church we were in was disused, boarded up. Through the boards a few arrows of light angled through the dark to the flagstones. The church had been used as a warehouse. It was half-filled with bicycle parts and the bent skeletons of old bicycles. Wheels, shifters, and gears hung from the walls on nails – but someone had also pasted up a postcard icon. In the dome, pigeons fluttered and cooed to one another. The flagstones were painted with their guano. The church reeked of it – of the waste of birds and of bats, who I occasionally heard squeaking off in further darknesses.
Beyond where the torn away iconostasis once was, in the sanctuary of the church, they were setting up the machines. They had managed, somehow, to get them out.
I found myself wondering what would happen to me if they had not. Without the machines, I was of no use to the OSS. To Alvin, to the government, to any of them.
Sitting there eating my plain sandwich in that semi-darkness, I understood that everything I had become was a product of happenstance. All those years ago, I was nothing more than the only student lucky enough to survive the loops. They tested them on ten of us. Nine others died, and I lived. No-one ever figured out why.
I remembered smoking under the cherry tree that day, after the experiment. My hands shaking so badly I could barely get the cigarette to my lips.
“My name is Sylvia Aldstatt,” I had said over and over between drags on my Lucky. “And not anything else. Just Sylvia Aldstatt, and that’s all.”
That was the moment – under that cherry tree in full blossom, its petals dancing around me in the air while I tried not to go mad. That was the moment this new self was born.
Out of that survival I had built an identity, a livelihood, a career. I had built a life. If those machines were destroyed, so was that life. The thought of that change was horrifying, and I also longed for it. I would go home to California. I would never pilot my way again through the memories of the dead. I would become someone else – someone entirely mundane, who dealt only in the world of the living. A person for whom politics were an abstraction – not a cloud of drifting ash that moments before had been trying to kill me.
I knew I didn’t have the courage to change my life. I needed someone else to do it for me.
“What is going on, Alvin?” I asked, grasping his arm as he passed.
“We aren’t sure. It seems that the networks allied with the Russians are taking Roosevelt’s death as a moment of weakness.”
“That is exactly it,” said Nino. “They think without their Great Leader the United States will be paralyzed, the way Russia is paralyzed when one of their leaders dies. They are striking while they think you are on your knees. This is how their minds work: they think everyone else in the world is the same. They do not understand that America is not some mass at that follows a leader, without a will of their own: America is made up of independent people.”
She said it with such confidence. I knew Alvin was thinking the same thing I was: we both hoped what Nino was saying was true. Neither one of us was sure.
“Are we safe here?” I asked.
Nino shrugged.
Alvin said, “For a few hours, at least.”
“Then I have one more shot at it.”
“Only if you are sure it’s safe,” Alvin said. “I don’t like the way your eyes look. And your hands are unsteady.”
“He’s just like a big brother,” I said to Nino.
“Not like my big brother,” Nino said. “Mine is an idiot.”
I head Koba snarl in Georgian from the darkness. Nino spat a phrase back, and the other Georgians in the place laughed.
“What did you say to him?” I asked.
“I made a suggestion,” Nino said. “It is not actually possible for him to do what I suggested. But I would like to see him try.”
#
A village on fire. The way the houses collapse, their walls falling inward, their roofs caving as they sink into themselves, is the same way this memory is collapsing. In places, the fields surrounding the village extend to the charcoal smudge of trees. But turn your head, and there are no fields at all. Beyond the village, the world is gone.
We are here, we are not: Beneath our feet is green tile, hexagonal as a beehive. The hallway we are standing in exists only as the knowledge we have of it – there is no other trace left here, beyond that feeling. And a remembered smell. Not the smell of the village. Not the smell of fire, as it should be – of burning wood and flesh, as it should be, but rather the smell of an interior. A basement. The mid-winter smell of mildew that cannot be eliminated, of mop water and unwashed coats. The man we are standing with is saying, his hand on our shoulder, “Do you know why they call him Sorok? Forty? It is because during the Civil War, in Poland, he once killed forty White Russian officers in a single stroke. Prisoners of war. The orders came to shoot them, but we had run out of bullets. What to do? Sorok figured it out: he locked them in a train car on a siding and set it on fire. Within a week, every White Russian in the region had surrendered. They came to us with their hands up – walked out of the woods and threw themselves on their knees. This is a man who knows how to use terror.”
The village of train cars burns. The roofs collapse, the walls fall inward. Only the screams from inside them do not collapse.
“I’m telling you,” the man says – the man who is the man from the train station café, the coupe, and who is also the man wandering this place with a pistol, looking for survivors to shoot: “Sorok was made for things greater than what the army can offer him. We need him with us.”
And the village is gone, the man is gone, the fields are gone. The burning continues, but now it is a campfire, that is all. I am crouched in front of it, on my knees. We are crouched in front of it – the two of us, tangled up in this memory together. I can feel the tendrils of other memories, tugging. This one has the clarity of a recent memory: the trees around us have bark, the ground beneath our knees has the yielding fungal sponginess of the forest. But other memories are also here, pulling at us, and we don’t look up at the trees because we know there will be faces there. And once we see a face, there will be more faces deeper in. There are always more faces, deeper in.
“Yes,” Sorok says. “There are always more faces, deeper in.”
He is across from me now. I feel the heat of the fire on my own hands. He is on his knees, and now I see the papers curling in the fire.
“You tell yourself,” Sorok says, “That there is a limit to the things you will do. You tell yourself there is a line your country will cross one day. A line across which you will not follow. That there are things you will not do, people you will not work for. But the worst is that you tell yourself the line is in front of you. The truth is, once you start thinking of the line you will never cross, it is already behind you. You have already made your choices.”
“No,” I say. “Not always.”
Sorok looks up at me. “You are not here. You cannot speak.” Then he turns to look at the trees. “None of you are here. None of you can speak. I murdered you all. Be silent.”
He feeds more paper into the fire.
“The line is behind you, Sylvia,” Sorok says. “The line was in Berlin, hidden somewhere in the ashes under the linden trees: in the ashes the death rays made of people. People on the wrong side. The ashes of an enemy worth fighting. It was a just war, and you were on the side of justice. But what you did was not right. You walked through those ashes, remember?”
I’ve climbed down out of my Jeep to admire the leaves on this crisp fall day. Hitler is kaput, and all of us think the war is over. Nobody knows yet that the allies will turn on one another: that the war will go on for another year as Patton and our allied forces, plus what’s left of the German Wehrmacht, recommissioned by Patton as the Free German Army, drive Stalin and his Red Army back out of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Prussia, out of the Balkans and the Baltic states. And the war will go on in the Pacific after a shattered Japan surrenders, as we join with Chiang Kai-shek in his butchery of the Chinese Communists.
But here, on Unter den Linden, there is peace. The autumn leaves are beautiful, and I can see the Brandenburg Gate at its terminus. G.I.s have landed a few Jeeps near its steps. A couple of them have cameras, and are snapping pictures for their families back home. They are smiling, whooping, goofing around like the young boys and girls they are, happy to take off the masks of war. I walk slowly toward them, as if in a dream, while the leaves heave and scatter around my feet. I’m going to join them, smile and laugh with them. Everything will be all right. I’m staring up at the fall glory of the trees. The city is so quiet here — just the sound of military motors at a distance, the shouts of the victors up ahead, the laughter and the dry rattle of the autumn breeze through the leaves.
And then I turn and I see it: my footprints, leading from my Jeep to where I am standing. Under the thin veil of flame-tinted leaves, the trail of my footprints is sunk deep in the ashes of Berlin’s last defenders — ashes that carpet the ground everywhere in the city, an inch thick. And I put my hand over my mouth to muffle my screams.
“You cannot speak to me,” I say.
“And yet I do,” Sorok replies.
Sorok feeds another page into the fire. “I am giving you a gift, Sylvia. I have already done the right thing. These secrets are gone, before a new war could be started with them. Now all you must do is tell your people the truth – and hope they believe it.”
#
“The documents are gone.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Sorok never handed them off to his contacts in Russia. I watched him destroy them.”
It was only myself, Alvin, Koba, and Nino in the room. The room was little more than a shed now. Once it was a holy place, a chapel. A fresco of the mother and child rise above packing crates, their eyes gouged out.
I hadn’t come all the way back. I was still tangled – I coul feel it. I couldn’t quite get free of him. Behind the mother and child, other things shifted inside the wall. It had gained translucencies, depths it should not have. Forest depths. From behind the damaged seraphim, their six wings gathered around their battered faces like flames –
For our God is a consuming fire . . .
The voice also like a flame –
Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire . . .
“She is lying.”
Koba says it, but Alvin’s motion was toward Nino. Before I understood what I was seeing, she was unconscious on the floor, the death ray pistol clattering off one of the packing crates and falling. While my eyes were still on the gun, Alvin had already turned. The struggle with Koba was longer, but eventually he joined his sister on the floor. I could not tell, for a moment, if he was still alive. Then he sighed, like a man asleep and dreaming.
I felt the cut, then. I saw my own blood on the stones, saw the knife in Koba’s limp hands.
Then the bleed-off from a death ray field hit. The flash from under the door turned everything in the chapel to lightning and shadow. We were, all four of us, lifted an inch off the ground and then settled again.
The world returned to normal with a shudder.
“All clear.” The voice was an American voice, one of those flat Midwestern accents that can travel around the world for years without changing, solidly rooted as it is in a whole way of life.
I felt Alvin’s hand on my face, pushing hard against my forehead to stanch the bleeding.
“I’m sorry, Sylvia,” Alvin said. “I think this little adventure of ours may leave a permanent scar.”
#
I sink into the hot water of the sulfur bath, turning my face to the ceiling. The room I am in, a deluxe private room of this bathhouse, was tiled and domed – a small dome imitating the larger domes of the main spaces. In those large rooms the Tbilisi natives, the Ossetian escapees from Russian Communism, the Crimean Tatars plotting the liberation of their fellow Turkic nations along the Kama river in Russia’s heartland, and all the other informers, dissidents, and spies wash themselves in mutual suspicion.
Afterward they will return to the autumnal hovels they have rented at exorbitant prices. They pay these prices to be on this side of the river – a river that flows, many will tell you, between slavery and freedom.
They will tell you, if you ask them, that they are on the free side of the river. Some will say it with confidence, meaning every word. Some will say it automatically, in a tone that indicates they haven’t thought it through: they are simply repeating what they know others expect of them. And some will say it with the assurance that only comes of a lie, believing in fact that this is the world of slavery, and that the other side of the river is where freedom is: under a system that discards personal property in favor of a collective will. Koba and Nino were of this latter type, though they hid it for years while they worked for the Russians. Now where are they? My mind turns away from the thought.
Everywhere in the city, Kennedy’s voice has been playing on the radio. His disembodied words have been following me through sweet shops and tailors. Kennedy has been repeating himself from behind the doors of apartments, booming from the radios of taxis waiting at the curb, whispering from the kitchens of restaurants:
And what we must ask ourselves is this: what world do we want to live in? A world of peace, where every human being can exercise their rights freely? Or a world in which the hand is forced to do the things it would not do under the power of its own free will?
We do not promise a world free of hardship. Nor do we promise a world in which there is no pain. What we promise is a world in which every man and woman is free to choose how to meet those hardships and contend with that pain. A world in which human beings are more than gears in a collective machine. A world in which their talents thrive and grow, overcoming all challenges, in the light of freedom.
I wonder how many people Kennedy, head of the OSS since 1946, has had killed in the light of that freedom.
I wonder many things. I wonder how free any of us is to choose anything at all. I wonder what speeches are being given on the other side, and how much they differ from Kennedy’s in anything but the details of tone and delivery. I wonder what Koba and Nino thought of the value of the freedom Kennedy assures them they were born with. I wonder what Sorok’s killer thought of it – the woman who wanted to linger forever in the memory of her lovers, and yet also was willing to destroy the only instrument that makes human memories possible at all.
But most of all I wonder, watching the tiles of the ceiling sweat the sulphurous water of the springs, if the memory Sorok left with me will ever fade.
He has been there for days now. Not all the time – he comes and goes. He flickers into my awareness as I sit in restaurants, trying to taste food that seems meaningless. He is in the corner of my hotel room as the light fades into evening. As I am fitted for a new dress, he is there on the floor.
I think this little adventure of ours may leave a permanent scar.
As if on cue, there is a knock at the door. Alvin’s voice says, “Our rocket back to the U.S. is in less than two hours, Sylvia. I hope you’re packed.”
“Don’t worry about me, Alvin. My bags are already waiting at the ‘drome.”
He is the oldest kind of memory, glassy with age, the background of his moment gone, the scene against which he is projected visible through his skin. The returns of memory have carved everything away but his essence: a small boy, playing with a puppy that is all feet and ears. He is Sorok himself.
I wait for something to happen – I wait, each time the memory replays, for the moment of violence. I feel, the way Sorok must have felt, the menace of it: at any moment the play will turn to something terrible. The memory will end in a foreshadowing cruelty. The boy will reach for a stick. The boy will reach for a stone. The boy will begin down a path that will lead him to a burning train car on a siding. To a village of living skeletons.
But there is nothing. Just a boy, a dog, a memory nearly identical to memories in the minds of millions. A memory similar enough to many of my own.
All I want is for him to fade away.
But as I towel myself dry he is there. The sulfur steam passes through him, the tiles are visible through his skin and hair, but he is there. The puppy flops on a floor long erased, adoring and adored.
I think this little adventure of ours may leave a permanent scar.
Doesn’t everything?