The Power(84)

It wasn’t hard at first. He’d made friends enough to shelter him as he travelled first out through the city and satellite towns and then towards the mountains. He knows Bessapara and North Moldova; he’d travelled here, researching the story about Awadi-Atif a lifetime ago. He feels curiously safe here.

And a regime cannot, in general, turn overnight from one thing to another. Bureaucracies are slow. People take their time. The old man must be kept on to show the new women how the paper mill is soused down, or how the stocktaking check on the flour order is made. All over the country, there are men still running their factories while the women mutter among themselves about the new laws and wonder when something will happen to enforce them. In his first weeks on the road, Tunde took photographs of the new ordinances, of the fights in the street, of the dead-eyed men imprisoned in their homes. His plan was to travel for a few weeks, and simply record what he saw. It would be the last chapter of the book that’s waiting for him backed up on USB sticks and in filled notebooks in Nina’s apartment in New York.

He heard rumours that the most extreme events had been in the mountains. No one would say what they’d heard, not precisely. They talked grimly of backward country folk and of the darkness that had never quite receded there, not under any of a dozen different regimes and dictators.

Peter, the waiter from Tatiana Moskalev’s party, had said, ‘They used to blind the girls. When the power first came, the men there, the warlords, blinded all the girls. That is what I heard. They put their eyes out with hot irons. So they could still be the bosses, you see?’

‘And now?’

Peter shook his head. ‘Now we don’t go there.’

So Tunde had decided, for want of another goal, to walk towards the mountains.

In the eighth week it began to be bad. He arrived in a town by the edge of a great green-blue lake. He walked, hungry, through the streets on a Sunday morning until he came to a bakery with open doors, a fug of steam and yeast leaking deliciously into the street.

He proffered some coins to the man behind the counter and pointed at some puffy white rolls cooling on a wire rack. The man made the accustomed ‘hands open like a book’ gesture to ask to see Tunde’s papers; this had been happening more frequently. Tunde showed his passport and his news-gathering credentials.

The man leafed through the passport, looking, Tunde knew, for the official stamp declaring his guardian, who would then have co-signed a pass for him to be out shopping today. He went through each page carefully. Having conscientiously examined it, he made the ‘papers’ sign again, a little panic rising in his face. Tunde smiled and shrugged and tipped his head to one side.

‘Come on,’ he said, though there was no indication the man spoke any English. ‘It’s just some little rolls. These are all the papers I have, man.’

Until now, this had been enough. Usually someone would smile at this point at the absurd foreign journalist or give a little lecture in broken English about how he must be properly certified next time, and Tunde would apologize and give his charming grin, and he would walk out of the store with his meal or supplies.

This time the man behind the counter shook his head miserably again. He pointed towards a sign on the wall in Russian. Tunde translated it with the help of his phrasebook. It was, roughly: ‘Five thousand dollar fine for anyone found to have helped a man without papers.’

Tunde shrugged and smiled and opened his palms to show them empty. He made a ‘looking-around’ gesture, cocking his hand over his eyes and miming a scouting of the horizon.

‘Who’s here to see? I won’t tell anyone.’

The man shook his head. Clutched the counter, looked down at the backs of his hands. There, where his cuffs met his wrists, he was marked with long, whorled scars. Scars upon scars, older and newer. Fern-like and coiled. Where his neck pulled away from the shirt were the marks, too. He shook his head and stood and waited, looking down. Tunde grabbed his passport back from the counter and left. As he walked away, there were women standing in open doorways watching him go.

Women and men who were willing to sell him food or fuel for his little camping stove became fewer and farther between. He started to develop a sense for those who might be friendly. Older men, sitting outside a house playing cards – they’d have something for him, might even find him a bed for the night. Young men tended to be too frightened. There was no point talking to women at all; even meeting their eyes felt too dangerous.

When he walked past a group of women on the road – laughing and joking and making arcs against the sky – Tunde said to himself, I’m not here, I’m nothing, don’t notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing here to see.

They called to him first in Romanian and then in English. He looked at the stones of the path. They shouted a few words after him, obscene and racist words, but let him go on.

In his journal, he wrote: ‘For the first time today on the road I was afraid.’ He ran his fingers over the ink as it dried. The truth was easier there than here.

Halfway through the tenth week came a bright morning, the sun breaking through the clouds, dragonflies darting and hovering over the pasture meadow. Tunde made his little calculation again in his head – enough energy bars in his pack to keep him going for a couple of weeks, enough film in his back-up camera, his phone and charger safe. He’d be in the mountains in a week, he’d record what he saw there for a week more, perhaps, and then he’d get the fuck out with this story. He was in this dream so securely that, at first, rounding the side of the hill, he did not see what the thing was tied to that post in the centre of the road.