The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(48)
After seven hours of dominoes, even my companions were silent, dozing upright against each other’s shoulders and necks. I sat squashed between a shoemaker and a soldier returning home and considered my next step. I was looking for Pietrok-112, and it seemed likely that whoever was trying to prevent me from finding it would be able to predict my movements. Given this, entering undetected could well prove a problem, even with new papers, and the sensible course of action would be to retreat and try another day.
Therein lay the concern: which other day would I try, and what if the trail I was following had run dry by the time I returned? How long did I dare leave this matter resting, and was I prepared to let it go? I was a hunted fugitive, a stranger in a strange land, and I had been neither for more than a hundred years. The discomfort of my predicament was apparent in my grumbling stomach and the ache in my perpetually turning neck, but I had papers, a gun and money, and the exhilaration of my situation had sent adrenaline pumping through my veins like never before. I resolved to press on, knowing that the rational justification for this act was flimsy, and choosing not to care.
There were guards waiting at the end of the line. Local boys who’d received a telephone call, average age twenty-three, average rank private. It seemed likely they had a description but no picture. I lifted a near-empty bottle of vodka from the open bag of one of my travelling companions, swilled some round my mouth, rubbed more into my neck and hands like a perfume, rubbed my eyes until they watered, and joined the queue coming off the train. The sun was setting already, an angry small ball of light on the grey horizon, dull enough to stare at. The platform was slathered in thin black mud, snow-crusted in the shade, sodden in the dwindling light.
“Name!”
“Mikhail Kamin,” I slurred, huffing heavy breath into their faces. “Is my cousin here yet?”
The guard examined my papers–perfect–and my face–less so. “Remove your hat!”
I removed my hat. It’s easy to overplay alcoholic stupor; my personal preference is to merely highlight those characteristics which you might be manifesting anyway, in this case subservience. I twisted the ear flaps of my hat between my fingers, chewed my bottom lip and peered up at the guard from beneath the furrow of my eyebrows, neck curled in and shoulders hunched like a wading bird.
“What is the purpose of your journey?”
“My cousin,” I mumbled. “Bastard’s dying.”
“Who is your cousin?”
“Nikolai. He’s got this really big house. You should do something about him because he’s always had this really big house and I asked if I could stay some time but he said no.”
I treated the guard to another fragrant blast of breath and saw him flinch. He passed back the papers, nose crinkling in disgust. “Get away,” he grunted. “Sober up!”
“Thank you, comrade, thank you,” I intoned, bowing my way from his presence like a mandarin from a Manchu emperor. I slipped and stumbled my way out into the muddy street, splattering black stains of slime up my trousers as I went.
The town, if we could call it that, went by the name of Ploskye Prydy, and as I walked down its one still street I half expected to find that the fronts of the wooden shacks sinking slowly into the mud were exactly that–fronts with no backing, a Soviet answer to the cowboy movies, from one of which, any second now, a wildly screaming Cossack would come bursting, pursued by an angry peasant maid with a cry of “God damn you! God damn you to hell!” No such adventure struck. It seemed little more than a place where the railway stopped, a transit town built to service the journeys of people heading to other destinations. The roads were defined merely by the place where the mud was most pressed down; the one store had a sign in the porch which declared, NO EGGS, and the old veteran on his crutches in the door, an obligatory feature of all good cowboy movies, droned the same two lines of the same forgotten song like a tape stuck in a loop. Nevertheless, in its own small way Ploskye Prydy stood as the gateway between civilisation and the land beyond, a ploughed expanse of black mud and drooping trees as far as the eye could see. The only structure of any note was a large brick building on the side of the tracks, where the air simmered and the chimneys choked blackness into the sky: a brick maker’s kiln, providing material for the newer developments further north with translated names as glamorous as Institute-75 or Commune-32, a place for all the family. I bribed my way on to the back of the brick maker’s truck, heading north, towards Pietrok-111, and spent three black but warm hours sitting between still-cooling bricks, which slid and rattled uncontrollably from side to side as we bounced along the one arrow-straight road to the north. Once the worst of the brick falls had happened, and I was relatively secure in a den of tumbled building blocks, it was almost possible to doze, cocooned in the warmth of the cooling slabs, until with a shudder the truck came to a stop and the back was pulled down with a cheery cry of “Pietrok-111. Hope you enjoyed the ride!”
I climbed out blearily from the back as the brick maker and his assistant began throwing the bricks into a mish-mashed pile on the side of the road, like a newspaper boy hurling his daily delivery at the door of a rude neighbour, chatting away brightly as they did so. I blinked against the dim lights of the town, making out apartment blocks, one general store and, towering over it all, a refinery whose flares of burning gas were the only signs of colour in the dead-black night. The stars overhead were tiny numerous waters, frozen in a cloudless sky. I found Polaris, turning my face further north, and asked of my companions, “How far is it to Pietrok-112?”