Eighth Installment of Otherwise: The Children’s Crusade
By Christopher Bernard
Chapter Twenty: The Graves of Academe
Ruhtra peered upward with a long, slightly perplexed stare toward a ragged line of mountains, like a vast, abstract frieze, a mile across the valley. It looked as though he were trying to remember something. The five had escaped across a hill from the oil depot; they now stood in a small clearing with a view over a landscape in front of the mountains to the west, caressed with the shadows of clouds moving across it.
The mountains stood, massive, chilly, passively defiant, great piles of rock incised by arrows of sky, granitic titans, here and there softened by a gauze of clouds over random declivities and half-hidden faults. They seemed to have irrupted from the floor of the earth like a series of fists or eyeless heads beating their way from lava through granite into the submissive air.
Petey stared, awe-struck: he had never witnessed such magnificence. They were the most awe-inspiring spectacle he had seen in his young life. He had seen photographs, movies, videos of alpine scenery, but they looked nothing like this.
It seemed utterly impossible there was any route that could take someone from here to there—they seemed to belong to a different order of being. A broken clump of vastness that went on, behind it, into infinite remoteness.
Yet obviously there must be some such route: they were as seductive as hallucinations, yet at the same time they looked hard and real as the earth beneath his feet. For once Petey completely believed in, as a fact as obvious as the hand in front of his face—no, he did not “believe in” anything of the kind.
He remembered feeling confused by his father’s angry, almost vindictive atheism whenever the hated word “religion” came up, and his mother’s curious temporizing, her pretence of extreme skepticism over her husband’s insistence that “religion” had been refuted by “science” and only fascists and buffoons refused to face and accept this. It was a sore spot for both of them: he would sneer at her refusal to accept materialism as “the obvious truth” about the world, and that the only realities were matter, energy, math, natural selection, and the drive for sex and power, and she would stare back at him with the kind of patronizing skepticism he used against religious believers; it drove him crazy. She would slip weird French names into the conversation just to see him turn purple, and start saying things Petey didn’t think for a second she really believed. His father would start raving about crazy Frenchmen, postmodernists, nihilists, charlatans and overeducated fools.
“So nothing’s true!” he would shout back. “It’s all mirage, every thing’s a hallucination! So, let me ask you, little Miss Smarty Pants: Is it true that nothing is true? Because if it is, it isn’t! And if it isn’t, it is!”
But Petey’s mother would just smile mockingly and his father would storm out. Petey had no idea which one had won the argument, because they both seemed to have lost, driven into opposing corners from which there was no escape.
But, for Petey, there it stood, the thing they were ultimately arguing about: a manifestation as clear as the sky above his head. The avatar, the symbol, the very handprint of a universal creative force, some kind of being, call it supreme, why not? What else could it be? Matter, energy, nirvana, God? Yet it didn’t seem anything like whatever was worshipped in churches, rituals, “holy books” or insinuated in the pages of Scientific American or The New Yorker, those brave attempts, often too clever by half, and hopelessly inadequate, to express its, in the end, enigmatic, indefinable but inescapable presence to a very dubious humanity. It was just there.
Of course there were no words for it. How could there be? It began where words ended. It was part of that frustrating but final thing you can see everywhere around you in all its glaring, shouting, whispering, obviousness, but that nobody can actually say. Though we keep trying in the very teeth of failure. Otherwise, how could we live at all?
That word again!
Petey shivered slightly. He remembered his mother telling him that, when you shivered like that, for no obvious reason (the air was still; if anything, it was rather warmer than not), it meant someone had just walked over your grave.
“Dreaming of giving them a climb?” asked Chace.
Petey was almost offended at the idea, though he immediately realized how silly it was to be offended.
“I always wanted to go mountain climbing!” Bumper chimed in as he too stared, entranced, at the peaks.
Ruhtra woke from his own trance.
“To cross them have to we may,” he said. He motioned Yram over and they spoke in whispers, at the end of which he looked her a question, to which she nodded. He turned to the three boys.
“The outline of these mountains to me strangely familiar seems,” he said, “and yet wrong. It exactly like the mountains that above my home town rose, but like in mirror image reversed.” He paused. “Those mountains in the east only I knew, fighting the sun each dawn as it rose, darkness and chill over us even in deepest summer thrown. And their faces only at each day’s end bright glowing in the red of the sunset. Then the answer came: these the same mountains indeed, but from the other side seen and I never before knew, in the morning glow.” He looked back at the mountains. “My home near be, but of the mountains the other side.”
“The home you described in your story?” asked Petey. “Where they took your father away?”
Ruhtra frowned and nodded.
Petey hesitated before asking the next question.
“Do you still have family there now?”
“What family?” Ruhtra asked bitterly. “None have I to know.”
“Not even your mom?” Bumper asked innocently.
“My mother!” said Ruhtra angrily. “Not the person who my father betrayed, even if all accident it was she claimed!”
The three boys gave each other an appalled look. Yram didn’t seem surprised but let her gaze fall to the brown layer of pine needles covering the forest floor at their feet.
“If right I be,” said Ruhtra, looking down into the valley below them, “old Pelham College in this valley lies.”
“Though all colleges in the Great Closure of ’53 abolished,” said Yram.
“Or into military or re-education camps turned,” added Ruhtra. “Or konzentrationlager.”
“Like the one we saw before we got on the train?” asked Bumper.
The prison camp for academics the three had seen in Nevahwen loomed briefly in Petey’s memory; it felt like an eternity ago. Burning books! Turning universities into concentration camps! Terrifying entire cities into emptiness and silence! What world did they live in? How did such evil have a right to exist? Especially in a world that had in it something so wonderful as this, this vision across the valley . . . ?
Chace was unusually quiet, as though lost in his thoughts as he looked into the depths of the valley below them. Petey followed his gaze but saw nothing unusual.
“My grandfather there worked long before born I was,” said Ruhtra, “before job and career and all hope ended. At any rate, we a local branch of Link to contact need. We one there as likely as elsewhere to find. We as certain plants grow best: in the darkest of shadows. In this case, the shadow of our enemies.”
And all five began the slow descent down the thickly forested slope into the valley.
“It looks like the whole place has been turned into a camp,” Petey whispered to Chace as they peered at what looked it had once been a small town along the side of a narrow river snaking across the valley floor beneath them. The town was built largely in styles fashionable in the first half of the twentieth century. Petey recognized the styles because sections of Holloway were built very similarly, a combination of wood and stone with thick blocky window frames and doorways, small front porches with wide stoops, shingle walls and A-frame roofing with short brick chimneys, to keep snow off in winter and, in summer, the coolness in. Three layers of barbed wire fencing surrounded most of the town in a belt of sand and uprooted trees, with guard towers at roughly hundred-foot intervals. Petey could see the guards inside the nearer towers, in black uniforms and helmets with imperial spikes on their crowns, like photographs Petey had seen of the German Kaiser from the first world war, and carrying rifles or machine guns hanging from their shoulders. Their backs complacently faced the forest or river, their focus entirely inside the camp, where people stood or moved desultorily in groups or alone in what Petey could see even from here were filthy rags. The people were emaciated, unwashed, hollow-eyed, some little more than skeletons covered with skin. Some lay unmoving on the long-untended grounds. No one made any attempt to help them. Or even seemed to notice them; they walked past the forms curled or splayed out on the ground as though without even seeing them. Like city residents the homeless. Petey wondered if they were alive.
In the middle distance Petey could see a tall bell tower blackened by fire smoke and burnt-out hulks of what looked like had been at one time school buildings, class room halls, dormitories, gymnasiums, a sports field, a library . . .
“Yes,” said Ruhtra, as though responding to a question. “There where my grandfather taught.”
“Wisdom and gentleness died in the light,” Chace said, as though reciting something from memory, “of the groves of academe as they burned in the night.”
“Is that a poem?” asked Bumper.
“No,” said Chace, “it’s a Snicker wrapper.”
“Lovely it be,” said Yram. “You it make up?”
“My English teacher read it in class the day before we were blown here by the storm. It stuck, for some reason. I usually have no head for poetry, that’s Petey’s bailiwick.”
(“What’s a ‘bail’wick’?” Bumper whispered to Petey, who scowled and shook his head under an ironic glance from Chace.)
“In its way a true thing it be,” said Ruhtra. “Poems speak truths no other way there be. At times.”
“A poem takes a truth and turns it into a lie that tells a truth,” Chace said, again as though reciting. “My teacher said that too. I guess that means poems are otherwise true.”
“As if!” said Petey under his breath.
“But isn’t that what he just said?” asked Bumper, in all innocence.
“Hey, the poetry seminar to drop we need,” said Ruhtra, “and out of here go before the guard with the rifle a good look at us gets.” He motioned down toward a guard who, apparently bored by the view inside the camp, was turning toward them to refresh his eyes on the mountain scenery surrounding them.
The five pulled back and huddled behind a screen of brush and trees as they watched the guard, cradling his weapon, take a long gaze at the landscape, then lift his rifle and sight it at a bird crossing above the huddled five, then another, then a third, only then finally returning, with a shrug, to his duty-bound oversight of the camp.
“Mustn’t linger for Itchy Finger,” Chace muttered.
“A mile north of Pelham a village be,” said Ruhtra. “If the school for the township has contact with local Link, we there might make.”
So, sneaking away from the screen of brush, the five proceeded north through dense forest piled with old undergrowth that hadn’t seen a cleansing fire, it seemed, for generations. It was tedious work, as they avoided local roads as too dangerous and exposing, and much of the journey was on a slope, difficult enough when going down, almost impossible in the ascent. And, of course, not having eaten a decent meal in days, and most of them adolescents and thus in the midst of their most growing years—pretty much hungry all the time; another thing about being thirteen that Petey hated—they were famished.
After crossing one ridge, they were confronted by another impressive vision: at the end of the long steep valley at the bottom of which Pelham lay, an enormous dam stretched from mountain to mountain at the valley sides and backing what must have been a miles-long reservoir. It cast a gigantic shadow over the river valley at its base.
Towers stood at each end of the dam and buildings with electrical power generators displayed flumes of white water pouring into the river that eventually passed through Pelham.
“Gosh!” said Petey as they paused to take in the view of smooth, serene, monumental concrete and pure, even benign, assertion of human power. “It’s almost as amazing as the mountains.”
“‘Look on my works, ye Mighty,” said Chace, quoting another favorite poem, “and despair!’”
Ruhtra and Yram traded another puzzled look.
“But . . .,” Petey responded, remembering the famous poem about the statue of a dead monarch above the wreckage of a long-forgotten empire, and thinking But these aren’t ruins . . . !
Then he thought: . . . yet.
They moved on.
After another half hour’s trek, they saw, in a tiny valley beneath them, what looked like a gas station from a generation ago, with a rest stop, and Yram volunteered to go down and buy them breakfast. It took her almost half an hour to return (which made everyone anxious) triumphantly bearing doughnuts and milk; she also brought news.
“Entire country in lockdown be,” she reported. “In newspapers all over I see reported since assassination of Fürleiter failed. Over radio I hear: national anthem only music allowed, with regular warnings of national plot regime to take down. For a kid to buy newspaper suspicious look, so headlines I memorize: ‘National Manhunt for Failed Assassins,’ ‘Plot for Revolution Revealed,’ ‘Rebels On Sight Shot Shall Be,’ ‘Aid to Rebels: Penalty of Death.’”
“But nothing about the crusade?” Ruhtra asked.
“Nothing,” said Yram as everyone tucked into the doughnuts and passed around the milk. “And nothing about children.”
“To know more than they do they pretend,” said Ruhtra. “But at all and everyone out they will lash. Yet children the last they shall suspect. As long as together in loyalty we hold.”
“And nobody squeals,” said Chace.
“That hope we must,” said Yram.
“No,” said Ruhtra. “On that hope build we must. Otherwise not move at all we can or will.” He turned to the three boys. “A vow we take on Link to join: one for all, all for one. Whether of us only two. Or millions.”
Petey smiled when he heard the famous motto from adventure novels past.
“Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan!” Chace said, glancing, one after another, to each of the four fellows there. Then turning to Yram, and taking a reference from another legend altogether: “And Maid Marion!”
Ruhtra and Yram looked at each other and shrugged once again at the enigmatic references of their companions.
“It’d take too long to explain,” said Petey. “I guess you’ve never heard of the Three Musketeers? Or Robin Hood?”
A pause, then Yram turned excitedly to Ruhtra.
“Oh yes! Les Trois Mosquetaires you recall! And D’Artagnan le Gascon! And the Thrush of the Forest of Doowrehs!”
“Of course!” said Ruhtra. “The legends of Grosse Niatirb and Frankreich! Exactly right you be. All for one and one for all! Till all of Izan overthrown, till all of Izan fall!”
Yram and Ruhtra repeated, together, “Till all of Izan overthrown, till all of Izan fall!”
A shout rose from below.
“Achtung!”
The five froze and looked through a light screen of brush down the steep hillside.
An officer in an elegant, solid-black uniform was staring up toward them. He stood next to a polished black open-air car that looked newly minted from a World War II movie; it had just driven up to the gas station. A guard with a rifle stood at his elbow, peering up into the forest.
“Und alles Izan über wass?” the officer shouted with a searching look toward the screen of trees, long ferns and vines above him, and a broadening smile. “Und alles Izan quall?
“Jungen!” the officer shouted, his smile vanishing. “Kommt hier! Jetzt!”
They were silent. Then a shot rang out from the guard and something whizzed above Petey’s head.
“Jetzt!” even louder.
A large rock stood near Petey’s shoulder, and he instinctively pressed against it to hide behind. It sat loosely in the soil, and he could hear pebbles and loose dirt give way beneath it. He pulled back, afraid it might give way and reveal them. But then he realized what might happen if it did give way: it hung above a steep embankment right above the car . . .
Petey poked Chace’s shoulder, pointed toward the car, and rocked the boulder gently. With an understanding smirk, Chace leaned in and added his shoulder to the stone.
A second shot rang out, riving the leaves above Bumper’s head. Bumper clasped both hands over his mouth, and Petey heard him wheeze in panic. Ruhtra and Yram saw what the two older boys were doing, crawled over quietly and began heaving along with them.
A third, then a fourth shot rang out, aimed at random but in their general vicinity. Suddenly the rock gave way and tumbled with a rattling roar down the clear, almost perpendicular slope toward the car, just missing the officer and guard, who tripped and fell back, dropping his rifle. The officer began screaming at the guard (maybe he thought the rifle bullets had inadvertently dislodged the rock), and the five staggered up the tree-thick slope, over a nearby ridge, and slipped away. Their escape made a bit of a ruckus, and half a dozen more shots rang out behind them.
“Here we be they know,” Ruhtra said, when they finally found a safe place under an old cedar to pause, “and they a force us to find will send. Comb these hills within hours they almost certainly shall. Stay here we must not. Notrevo, near Pelham, one chance for us if it we can find.”
Yram pulled something from her pocket as he said this.
“At gas stazion,” she said, “this I from a rack of maps swiped.”
“Excellent!” said Ruhtra, with a delighted smile.
It was a road map of Pelham and the area around it, though from many decades ago. It looked as if it had never been opened and crinkled and crisped as they unfolded it, its margins decorated with carefully arranged and calculated photographs of Pelham as a sedate college town from its prosperous (or merely aspirational) years, in full, reassuringly, platitudinous array, with views of the old-fashioned campus that managed to be both stodgy and glamorous, trees in autumnal colors, bespectacled professors doing hopeless Mr. Chips impersonations, blurry shots of tennis and volley ball games and crisp visions of graduation ceremonies divided between black robes and mortar boards, a slightly embarrassed group shot of the football team, and young scholars at serious or smiling leisure, flirting under flowering sumacs or bent over now-forbidden books in the Neo-Gothic library and troubled by little more than grades, tricky finances, weekend beer binging and complicated romances.
“Amazing it be,” said Yram as she perused, with a sigh, these photographs of a vanished past, “that this map not long ago impounded and burned.”
“The luck of the provinces,” said Ruhtra. “Innocent and ignored.”
“How do you mean?” asked Petey.
“None of this today allowed,” Ruhtra explained. “It all from history banished. Knowledge, study, learning—the past itself—an eternal threat to Izan be. Nothing to remind humankind of any possible alternative allowed. And the past, the country of alternatives: proof other worlds possible. For once was, once always may be.”
“Plus imagination,” said Chace.
“Imagination?” asked Bumper, struggling to get his mouth around the word.
“In your dreams,” Chace explained, unhelpfully.
“Where your hopes come from,” Petey said to Bumper, feeling very sage.
“True, imagination the other great threat,” said Ruhtra. “So: memory extinct, and dreams abolished.”
Petey felt suddenly afraid: had he had any dreams since the balloon had crashed? He couldn’t remember!
“How do they do that?” he asked.
“They don’t,” said Yram. “They the dreams from our sleep frighten. None dream if none sleep. But those with courage to sleep know dreams will come. Only fear locks the mind. Even Izan that cannot do.”
“The courage to sleep,” repeated Chace. “I’ll have to remember that for the pater when we get back home.”
Petey felt reassured, a little, by Chace’s casual hope. He wasn’t so certain: How would they ever escape this monstrosity of a world? There had been a portal in, and so there must be a portal out. But how would they ever find it? And then there was the grimmest thought of all: What if where he thought he lived was just a fantasy of what might have been, and this was the real world?
He shook the thought away.
The map provided its own modest hope: it showed a road leading to Notrevo several miles to the north, and they worked out, through guesswork and the shape of the town last seen from the hillside above it, that they were possibly a little less than a mile southeast of the town. And so, orienting themselves by the sun, which had begun moving toward the western horizon since their rudely interrupted lunch, they headed northwest down a long forested slope.
Twilight was just setting in when they approached a sports field belonging to the local high school. The field was being used for fütball practice.
Ruhtra seemed excited when he saw this.
“In luck perhaps we be,” he whispered.
“And not too soon,” agreed Yram with one of her rare smiles.
“How do you mean?” asked Petey.
“Right,” asked Chace. “What’s so lucky about this?”
“Right!” said Bumper, trying to imitate the tone of both Petey and Chace, though not really understanding any of the other four, either why they were lucky or why they were wondering.
“Find out we shall,” said Ruhtra. And, leaving the others behind a clump of brush, he crept into the open, slowly pulled himself to his full height, and, fighting the impulse to examine his surroundings, which might have made anyone suspicious who saw him, walked, as if taking a neighborhood stroll, the dozen or so yards to the chain-link fence surrounding the field.
Petey watched closely as the older boy spent several minutes watching the teams practice while following the well-nigh universal impulse to twine fingers through the diamond-shaped gaps in the storm fence. At one point, someone kicked the ball so it rolled past the foul line near the fence, and when one of the players ran over to retrieve the ball, Ruhtra spoke to him. The player shrugged and kicked the ball back into the field, then went over to the team’s lead player and spoke to him while glancing at the stranger leaning against the fence and looking like a schoolmate killing time after school. During the next break in practice, the team lead came over and talked briefly with Ruhtra. It looked innocent enough, like they were old chums reconnecting, but also awkward to anyone watching closely, like Petey, for instance. Their cheeriness was forced, as though they were trying a little too hard to seem like old friends to anyone who might be watching. Something else was going on underneath. Not only had they never met before, but they were passing a secret they were not absolutely sure they should be sharing with the other; at the same time, they had no choice but to trust each other, or pretend to. After a few minutes, the player left with a forced grin and an awkward wave, which Ruhtra tried to mirror as casually as he could as he turned and walked away, leisurely (though Petey could guess he was sweating to run), to where the others were hiding.
“The link holds” was all Ruhtra would say when he got back. Yram sighed with what seemed like relief.
“The link holds what?” asked Bumper in a whisper, genuinely puzzled.
“As many brains as a bumper,” Chace said placidly.
Bumper grinned proudly, then suddenly seemed to think better of it and looked suspiciously at the older boy.
“Don’t be mean,” Petey muttered at Chace. “You can be awfully rude,” he added, “for a Frenchman.” Which is what he called Chace when he wanted to get a rise out of him.
Chace glared at Petey, but otherwise held his tongue—in his case, a heroic feat.
“The huddle on the other side of the playing field lies,” said Ruhtra, ignoring the bickering friends. “There we must go and for the next signal wait.”
“A huddle?” asked Petey.
“Team lead a leader also of Link seems to be,” said Ruhtra, ignoring Petey’s question, “us as refugees from the east welcoming. Uncertain still. They caution exercise must. Secrecy and hiddeness till victory sure.”
Yram glanced at Ruhtra and got a nod in return before explaining, “A huddle a place be where leaders of local Link in secret meet. No word of Operation Crusade?” she asked, turning to Ruhtra.
“None. Which nothing means. The orders of crusade of secrecy supreme.”
“Where are we going after we meet?” asked Petey.
“Find out,” said Yram, “if the link holds.”
They worked their way cautiously through the woods to the other side of the playing field, then followed a path deeper in till they found a huge fallen trunk, ancient and half eaten into sawdust by termites and weathering. It had been a monumental presence in the woods for a generation, and another generation had passed since it had collapsed, for who knows what reason: a lightning strike, a surcharged blast of wind in a storm, its own deep age, creating a narrow island of light and calm. The sun had set not long before and a sanding of stars began to appear high above the heads of the five in the break in the forest canopy the tree fall had made.
They settled in near the trunk, waiting as the hours passed and the stars moved above their heads. They spoke little and listened hard to the eerie sounds in the night wood; the creaking of a twig in a breeze, the crack of a branch on the forest floor from some passing night animal brought its own alarm, especially after their recent confrontation with Izan. It seemed a comfortless wait, far longer than it actually was; the hours felt like days. They were also getting hungry again. Sleep was not an option.
The melancholy, half-eaten face of the moon had just appeared in the opening of sky above them when they heard footsteps moving toward them. Frightened, they skittered behind the trunk, with Ruhtra leaning out behind the maze of roots torn from the ground when the tree had been brought down. Petey carefully watched what he could see of the back of Ruhtra’s head, tense at first, then gradually relaxing as he seemed to recognize one of the approachers in the moonlight.
Ruhtra leaned back, curled his hands around his mouth and gave a quiet hooting sound, like an owl.
After a moment, a similar sound came from the other side of the fallen tree. Ruhtra waited almost a minute, then repeated the sound, this time twice. The other echoed immediately, also twice. Ruhtra then cautiously walked from behind the tree and disappeared from Petey’s sight.
Petey listened hard to the sound of subdued conversation coming from the other side of the tree. It sounded tense, but friendly. Then Ruhtra returned and signaled the rest to follow.
In front of the fallen trunk stood three teenagers, two boys and a girl; one of the boys was the team leader Petey had seen talking to Ruhtra earlier. He was short, muscular, with a buzz cut and heavy, blunt features and wearing a red t-shirt with a team number on the back: a typical fütballer, which might be on purpose, a disguise to throw off suspicion. Nobody this much of a cliché could possibly be a rebel!
The other boy stuck out more; he was tall, black-haired, skinny and wore all black. He held himself a little aloofly, like the kind of high-school hipster Petey was not the most fond of at school.
The girl had a pixie cut and a huge pair of sunglasses, which seemed very strange, since it was the middle of the night. The glasses made it impossible to gauge her expression, which was also disturbing.
These were the local Link leaders? Petey thought, with a little dismay. A footballer and two poseurs! One of them a platitude and the other two too outlandishly rebellious to be taken seriously.
Petey thought again: maybe that was the point.
“These my companions,” said Ruhtra, introducing them.
“I Leibling,” said the team lead. “This Mercator,” gesturing to the tall boy and gesturing to the girl, “this Mary-Kate.” The two snarled at the five as though smiling was just too bourgeois.
Yram looked puzzled.
“Not Etak-Yram?” she asked the girl dubiously.
“Nay!” the girl in the shades spurted out. “I alt speak for me name use.”
“Elegant!” Yram replied with a quick smile to mollify the thin-skinned girl.
Leibling seemed the most responsible of the three and took the lead in discussion as Ruhtra did for the five strays.
“We in Nattahnam,” Ruhtra said, “when attempt made Him to bring down.” Everyone seemed to know exactly who was meant by “Him.” “Our cell had actions that week planned though nothing so grand. A false flag I suspect.”
“False flag?” asked Petey.
“Act by Nizan,” said Yram, “a national crackdown to provoke.”
“Word out,” said Ruhtra carefully, “about Operation Crusade.”
Leibling traded glances with his two companions.
“About such thing we nothing know,” he said tersely.
But they might “know something” if they trusted us, thought Petey.
“We for days on run,” said Ruhtra, and described their journey across the country in the empty oil truck.
“Like Jonah in the whale,” said Mary Kate, grinning grimly.
“Five Jonahs,” corrected Yram.
“Wonder it not indigestion get!” cracked the girl.
“Well, we did,” said Ruhtra. “Our cell scattered, perhaps all from Nattahnam gone. All contact lost in crackdown of city.”
“No,” said Leibling. “National. Even here. Curfew we break here to come.”
“But your team practice?” said Ruhtra.
“Different that. Fütball game of Izan, no interruption sign regime in control.”
“Leibling Junge Izan lead,” said Mercator.
Ruhtra and Yram both stared at Leibling, who glared at Mercator.
“Where else perfect place rebellion to plan?” said Mercator. “Perfect place for mole to live?”
“And spy to see,” added Mary Kate.
“Silent, secret, sudden . . . ,” said Ruhtra, repeating the opening of Link’s motto.
“. . . success!” said Leibling.
The five Link members then did something Petey found shocking: they raised their arms in what looked to Petey like Nazi salutes he had seen in ancient war movies, but there was a difference. First of all, the gesture was very quick; they lowered their arms immediately after raising them. Also, when making the salute, their thumbs crossed their palms. This made Petey wonder. Was this maybe a way to pass for Izan but sign they belonged to Link right under Izan’s nose?
He would learn later that indeed was the point of the salute.
It was after the salutes, and the completed motto, that the three local Link members seemed to relax and even trust this motley troop of hungry, unwashed refugees and fellow rebels from the eastern fastness of the kolonie.
Chapter Twenty-One: All Roads Lead . . .
The ruin loomed above the three boys like the hollowed-out husk of an enormous praying mantis. The three remaining outer walls were pierced with moldering holes randomly spaced like huge bullet holes from a practice cannonade; the fourth wall had caved in under time and its own weight. Girders and rebar stuck out at grotesque angles against the sky. It had been a cement factory, Leibling told them, abandoned after an economic collapse decades ago from which the region had never fully recovered. The factory had several levels of basement, used long ago for storing materials and products and now a warren of secret spaces, depot and bivouac, fortuitously convenient and peculiarly useful to an advanced conspiracy against the state – no one had ever advanced lower than the third basement, but legends had it there were countless levels descending to the bowels of the earth and would lead the unwary cellar spelunker to the very entrance of Hell.
The boys had been left alone in a stuffy corner of the topmost basement, with slices of curiously tasteless bread and undercooked sausages and bottles of warm coke, which their young appetites devoured with barely a demur.
“Barely” being the operative word.
Chace scowled at the first bite into his sausage.
“If only the French had conquered Acirema,” he said, his mouth half full.
Bumper blinked as he chomped away.
“I never had a French sausage,” he said, after politely swallowing and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. (No napkins had been provided.)
“You haven’t lived till you do,” said Chace. “Des saucissons de Provence avec des pommes de terre frites et une petite carafe du vin rouge du terroir local.”
“Stop it!” said Petey between bites of the black bread. “Showoff!”
“A fellow can still dream, can’t he? What’s life without a little fantaisie? Seulement de l’absurdité et du désespoir.”
Bumper looked bewildered, as no doubt was the intention.
“This place is crazy,” he suddenly said, in the tone his father used when giving the last word at a dinner table controversy.
“You can say that again,” said Petey with a sigh.
“So what do you think they’re going to do with us?” asked Chace after a long pause as the three boys pondered the events of the last several days. They had been in Acirema less than a week, though it felt like weeks, months, years . . . They had been catapulted into an infernal universe, and, despite their temporary and dubious protection, there seemed no real possibility escape.
“At least they haven’t locked us in,” said Petey.
“There isn’t exactly anywhere to escape to,” said Chace. “Except into the arms of the local concentration camp.”
“They seem to want us to join them, maybe?” Petey said tentatively. Bumper looked hopefully at him. “Though I don’t know what we can actually do for them.”
“The skill set of three American boys from the twenty-first century probably not being all that useful when leading a revolution in a permanent 1948,” said Chace.
“Exactly,” said Petey.
“What revolution?” asked Bumper, looking alarmed.
“The ‘crusade,’” said Petey. “The revolt they’re leading against the Izan.”
“Oh!” said Bumper, his eyes getting very round. He remembered stories about the American revolution he had been told in school. “Will we have to fight the red coats?” he asked excitedly.
“More like the Nazis,” said Chace.
“Huh?” asked Bumper.
“Remember World War Two?”
Bumper had seen war films about that. That would be a very different “revolution” if they had to fight the Nazis.
He became very sober. “That’s scary . . .”
“Mm-hm,” said Petey.
“But we won against the Nazis!” said Bumper, hopeful again.
“Not here we didn’t,” said Chace.
“And who knows which one is reality?” Petey asked in a soft voice, as if to himself.
“Let’s not go there again, can we?” Chace said in a weary voice. He really didn’t want to go back to his futile debates with his friend about “Otherwise”! Who cared what this place was, or what it called itself, or what it wasn’t, for that matter? The point was to get out!
“What?” asked Bumper, who hadn’t understood Petey.
“Never mind!” said Petey. “We won where we come from.”
“Well, our luck here doesn’t look as good,” said Chace.
All three boys stared somberly at the cement floor where they crouched.
“We gotta win,” said Bumper, in a suddenly grownup voice. “That’s all there is to it,” he added, channeling one of his father’s favorite expressions.
“Then maybe they’ll let us go home,” said Chace. “Assuming there is a way home, of course.”
“Of course!” said Bumper, trying to sound knowing hut only pretending to understand what Chace meant.
“Of course,” said Petey in a flat voice, understanding exactly what Chace meant.
Hours later Ruhtra and Yram returned. Ruhtra had a strange look on his face, as if he had seen a ghost. Yram kept shooting worried glances toward him.
They had been part of a group of Link members reconnoitering the Pelham concentration camp. The two had been assimilated to the group, it seemed, without question; Ruhtra and Yram must have convinced them they were, not only loyal members of the Link, but useful for whatever local operations were afoot.
“How did it go?” asked Petey.
Ruhtra gave the other boy a complicated look, as if both wanting to tell the truth and afraid to trust him with it. He glanced at Yram, who twisted her lips in a complicated moue.
“More terrible than ever I imagined,” he finally said. “Killing slowly those imprisoned their purpose seems: first their spirits, then their minds, their souls, then, at last, after final humiliation, their bodies. Cruelty senseless and obscene.”
He paused, as though struggling whether to say what he said next.
“A man near the outer fence I see. With others digging a grave for a wheelbarrow half a dozen naked corpses it held. His shoulders, his way of bending over, I recognize I think. Not sure. And hope myself wrong. This must not be! When he turn the other side of the pit to work, his face, a mask of bone and skin, I see. The mouth, the nose of a hawk, the eyes.” He paused. “I to believe do not wish. Yet my eyes to lie refuse. My mind with the truth itself punish. No time further to look, staying longer our mission endanger. We leave just as the bodies into the grave unceremoniously dumped. The man impassive with the others stood. Watching. With dead eyes. As if this fate for him coming, and knowing.”
“Who was the man?” Petey asked, carefully.
Ruhtra pulled the words out painfully.
“My father.”
Yram looked at Ruhtra with deep dismay.
Silence settled over the five. There seemed to be nothing one could say or do that was remotely adequate to the moment. Any words of encouragement or hope, it seemed to Petey, would have felt grotesquely out of place. No commiseration was possible for something one could hardly imagine let alone comprehend. Petey tried to imagine his own father in the state described by Ruhtra; his mind refused to do it. It was as impossible as the example of an impossible thing described to his class one day by his algebra teacher.
“Nothing is impossible?” he had asked one day when one of his pupils had asserted, apropos of a mathematical demonstration asserting the contrary, that “nothing is impossible!” “I can give you something that is impossible, so impossible that you can’t even think it.”
“And what is that?” the romantic rebel asked defiantly.
“Iron wood.” The teacher paused. “Try to imagine it. You can’t. You will imagine wood, or you will imagine iron, but you will not be able to imagine wood that is made of iron or iron that is made of wood. You can imagine only . . .”
. . . my father or a prisoner in a concentration camp, but I will never be able to imagine both together, bound together; no, not “bound together”: one and the same, thought Petey. But now I can, he suddenly realized, seeing in his mind’s eye what Ruhtra had just described, only this time the hawk-like profile was the blunter profile of his own father, the mouth small and pursed, the shoulders sloping, the expression slightly absent as he turned from the grave he was digging to look intently at his young, problematic son.
“Maybe rescued he can be.”
The four boys looked up, a little unsettled, at these words from Yram.
Ruhtra gave the girl a look at once agonized and despairing.
“But how?” he said in a voice that sounded extraordinarily strange to Petey. It was like nothing he had ever heard before, a voice angry yet almost strangled, as though the speaker had considered the idea and, despite the strongest possible desire to believe in it, had rejected it as impossible, and therefore he was furious and resentful that anyone would ask him to entertain it anyway.
“Not necessary ahead of time always to know,” said Yram, calmly. “What essential be to know one’s aim. One’s goal. My grandfather once me tell, ‘Upon your goal concentrate, and all your world arrange itself around that goal shall do; with patience, mindfulness, alertness, wait, your eyes open keep and your hands to receive ready, and your world to you will the means to you hand, the road to your goal you show, and the tools necessary it to attain, into your hands they will drop.’”
Ruhtra looked very dubious on hearing that. What world did these people think they lived in! His expression showed he had swallowed whole the folly of the pessimist, proud of denying every hope in the proud faith in his impenetrable spiritual armor, in the power of his mind to see through the hollowness of every hope.
“No matter how clear the goal I see,” he said, “of what use is that if also I see to it no possible road?”
“Did you the goal to this see when from Nattahnam we escape? No. Only the escape we see – the goal – not to it which road. My grandfather say, ‘If your goal known be, all roads to it will lead.’ He right, I think.”
“Faith he had!” said Ruhtra, dismissively.
“Of a kind,” said Yram. “His own.”
“He’s not the only one,” said Chace, who usually kept his ideas to himself or his two friends. “My pater thinks like that. He likes to jam it down our throats every night over dinner. He calls it ‘positive thinking.’ It drives me crazy. It makes me want to become a nihilist just on principle. But,” he continued, pensively, “you make it sound like maybe there’s something to it. ‘Have a goal, and your whole world will organize itself around it.’ Maybe it’s not completely lunatic . . .”
“Truly,” said Yram.
Bumper smiled like a new sun as he listened to Chace. Petey felt a strange sense of relief; maybe Bumper was transferring his boy worship to Chace. It would be a relief not to have someone worshipping the ground he walked on. Though he also felt a little tug of something he never would have believed—no, it couldn’t be—betrayal? jealousy? But he didn’t have time to think about this now. He forced himself to concentrate on Ruhtra.
The older boy looked torn and profoundly skeptical, but Petey could see something lurking in his face, something the other boy neither realized nor wanted to believe in. Yet, in spite of all the reasons – and there were many – for despair, it was there, in quiet but unbending assertion. Success of any kind, however small, but above all against terrible odds, has always required, along with a bit of luck, one ingredient above every other one: the determination to effect it. And determination starves without at least a crumb of hope. And there are times when hope requires throwing pride to the wind.
____
Christopher Bernard is a prize-winning author of both poetry and fiction. The two earlier stories in the “Otherwise” series are If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia (winner of the Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction and short-listed for the K. M. Anthru International Literature Award).
