The Inhabited Island Page 18

  Green kept nodding in approval all the time. His predatory face glowed in malicious satisfaction, and his long, nimble fingers kept clenching and opening. He liked all kinds of surprises and loved anything risky. His past life was obscure. He was a thief and, apparently, a killer, a child of the dark postwar years: an orphan and a hooligan, raised by thieves, fed by thieves, and thrashed by thieves. He had served time in jail and escaped—brazenly and unexpectedly, as he did everything—and tried to go back to his thieves’ gang, but times had changed, his cronies wouldn’t tolerate a degenerate, and they wanted to hand him in. But he fought them off and escaped again, hiding out in villages until the late Gel Ketshef found him.

  Green was a smart young guy with a lively imagination: he believed the earth was flat and the sky was solid, and precisely because of his naive ignorance, stimulated by his turbulent fantasy, he was the only person on this inhabited island who suspected that Maxim was not some kind of Highlander (“I’ve seen these Highlanders, I’ve seen all their different varieties”) or some strange trick of nature (“Nature made us all the same, the ones in jail and the ones on the outside”) but actually an alien from impossible places, like somewhere beyond the heavenly firmament. He had never openly spoken about this to Maxim, but he had hinted at it, and he regarded Maxim with respect bordering on obsequiousness. “You’ll be our boss,” he kept repeating. “And then I’ll spread my wings under you . . .”

  How and where exactly he intended to spread his wings remained entirely obscure, but one thing was clear: Green really loved any risky business and he couldn’t stand any kind of work. And another thing that Maxim didn’t like about him was his wild and barbaric cruelty. He was a genuine spotted monkey, only domesticated and trained to hunt armored wolves.

  “I don’t like it,” Memo morosely said. “It’s a reckless gamble. No preparations, no checks . . . No, I don’t like it.”

  He never liked anything, this Memo Gramenu, nicknamed Hoof of Death. He was never satisfied with anything, and he was always afraid of something. His past was kept secret, because at first he had held an extremely high position in the underground. And then one day he had fallen into the hands of the gendarmes and survived only by a miracle—crippled by torture, he had been dragged out by his cellmates, who had set up an escape. After that, in accordance with the laws of the underground, he had been removed from HQ general staff, although he hadn’t aroused any suspicions. He had been appointed as Gel Ketshef’s deputy, taken part in two attacks on towers, personally destroyed several patrol vehicles, tracked down the commander of one of the brigades of Battle Guards and shot him in person, and was known as an individual of fanatical courage and an excellent machine gunner.

  He had been about to be appointed the leader of a group in a small town in the southwest, but then Gel’s group had been taken. Hoof still didn’t arouse any suspicions; he was even appointed the leader of the new group. But all the time he fancied that he sensed sideways glances that might not even exist but could easily have existed: in the underground they weren’t fond of people who were too lucky. Memo was taciturn and fastidious; he had a thorough knowledge of the science of clandestine activity and demanded unconditional obedience of all his rules, even the most insignificant. He never discussed general matters with anyone, dealing only with the business of the group, and he made sure that the group had everything: weapons, food, money, a good network of safe houses, and even a motorcycle.

  He disliked Maxim. Maxim could sense that, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t want to ask; Memo wasn’t the kind of person you could enjoy a frank conversation with. Perhaps it was all simply because Maxim was the only one who could sense Memo’s constant fear—the others could never even have imagined that the morose Hoof of Death, who spoke on familiar, casual terms with any representative of HQ, one of the founders of the underground, and a terrorist to the marrow of his bones, could possibly be afraid of anything.

  “I don’t understand the HQ’s reasoning,” Memo went on, smearing a new dollop of insect repellent on his neck with a grimace of disgust. “I’ve known this plan for a dog’s age. We were about to try it a hundred times, and we rejected it a hundred times, because it means almost certain death. While there’s no radiation, if things go badly, at least we still have a chance of slipping away and striking again somewhere else. This way, if just one thing goes wrong, we’re all done for.”

  “You’re not entirely right, Hoof,” Ordi objected. “We have Mak now. If something does go wrong, he’ll be able to drag us out, and he might even manage to blow up the tower.”

  She was lazily smoking and looking into the distance, toward the swamp, cool and calm, not showing any surprise, and ready for anything. She made people feel timid, because she saw them only as more or less efficient means of destruction. She was all there in plain sight—there were no dark or hazy patches, either in her past, or her present, or her future. She came from an intellectual family; her father had been killed in the war, and her mother still worked even now as a teacher in Utki Village. Ordi herself had worked as a teacher until she was thrown out of the school because she was a degenerate. She went into hiding, tried to flee to Hontia, and ran into Gel at the border as he was bringing in weapons. He had made her into a terrorist.

  At first she had worked out of purely ideological motivation—she was fighting for a just society in which everyone was free to think and to do whatever he wanted to do and was capable of doing—but seven years ago the gendarmes had picked up her trail and taken her child hostage, in an attempt to force her to surrender and turn her husband in. HQ had forbidden her to turn herself in, because she knew too much. She had never heard anything more about her child and regarded him as dead, although privately she didn’t believe that, and for seven years now she had been primarily motivated by hate. Hate came first, followed by the substantially dimmed dream of a just society. She had taken the loss of her husband incredibly calmly, although she loved him very much. Probably she had simply become accustomed, long before his arrest, to the idea that you shouldn’t cling too tightly to anything in this world. And now, like Gel at the trial, she was a living corpse, but a very dangerous corpse.

  “Mak’s a greenhorn,” Memo morosely said. “Who can guarantee that he won’t lose his head when he’s left on his own? It’s absurd to count on it. It’s absurd to abandon the old, well-thought-through plan, just because we now have the greenhorn Mak. As I’ve already said, this is a reckless gamble.”

  “Ah, come off it, boss,” said Green. “That’s what our work’s like. If you ask me, old plan or new plan—it’s all just a reckless gamble. How could it be anything else? You can’t do it without any risk, and with these pills, there’s less risk. They’ll go crazy down there under the tower when we pounce on them at ten o’clock. At ten o’clock they’re probably drinking vodka and singing songs, and we’ll pounce on them, and maybe their rifles aren’t even loaded and they’re all sprawled around drunk . . . No, I like it. Right, Mak?”

  “And I, you know, like it too,” said Forester. “The way I reckon it is, if this plan surprises me, it’ll absolutely amaze the Battle Guards. Green’s right when he says they’ll go crazy . . . Anyway, we’ll get an extra five minutes without agony, and after that we’ll see . . . If Mak brings down the tower, everything will be fine altogether . . . Oh, won’t it be fine!” he suddenly exclaimed, as if struck by a new idea. “No one before us has ever brought down a tower, have they? They’ve only bragged about doing it, but we’ll be the first . . . And then, while they’re fixing this tower up again—think how long it’ll take! We can live like human beings for a month at least . . . without these rotten, lousy fits . . .”

  “I’m afraid you have misunderstood me, Hoof,” said General. “Nothing in the plan changes. We simply make our attack unexpectedly, strengthening it by using Bird and somewhat changing the procedure of withdrawal.”

  “And if you’re afraid Mak won’t be able to drag us all out,” Ordi said in the same
lazy voice, still gazing at the swamp, “don’t forget that he’ll only have to drag out one, or two of us at the most, and he’s a strong boy.”

  “Yes,” said General, looking at her. “That’s true . . .”

  General was in love with Ordi. No one saw it apart from Maxim, but Maxim could tell that it was an old, hopeless love, which had begun when Gel was alive, and had now become even more hopeless, if that was possible.

  General wasn’t a general. Before the war he had been a worker on an assembly line, then he had ended up in a training college for junior officers and fought in the war as a corporal, finishing it as a cornet. He knew Cornet Chachu very well and had scores to settle with him (following disturbances in a certain regiment immediately after the war). General had been hunting Chachu without any success for a long time. He was a member of underground HQ staff but often took part in practical operations, being a good soldier and a knowledgeable commander. He liked working in the underground, although he didn’t have any real idea of what would happen after the victory was won.

  But then, he didn’t really believe in the victory. As a born soldier, he easily adapted to any circumstances and never tried to think more than ten to twelve days ahead. He didn’t have any ideas of his own—he had picked up a few things from the one-handed man and borrowed a few things from Ketshef, and a few things had been planted in his mind at HQ, but the most important things still remained what had been hammered into his head at the junior officers’ college. So when he theorized, he produced a strange mixture of ideas: the power of the rich has to be overthrown (that was from one-handed Wild Boar, who was evidently something like a socialist or communist); engineers and technicians should be put in charge of the state (that came from Ketshef ); cities should be razed to the ground and we should live in harmony with nature (some bucolic philosopher at HQ); and all of this could only be achieved by absolute obedience to the orders of senior commanders and a bit less idle chatter on abstract subjects.

  Maxim had clashed with him twice. It was absolutely impossible to understand what point there was in demolishing the towers, losing brave comrades and wasting time, funds, and weapons in the process, if a tower would be restored anyway and everything would carry on as it had been before, except that the population of the local villages would be convinced by the evidence of their own eyes what heinous devils these degenerates were. General had not been able to give Maxim an adequate justification for sabotage activity. Either he was hiding something or he himself didn’t understand what it was needed for, but he had repeated the same thing over and over every time: orders are not subject to discussion, every attack on a tower is a blow struck at the enemy, people must not be prevented from becoming actively engaged, otherwise their hate will fester inside them and they will have nothing at all to live for . . .

  “We need to look for the center!” Maxim had insisted. “We need to strike directly at the center, with all our forces at once! What kind of heads do they have in this HQ of yours if they don’t understand a simple thing like that?”

  “HQ knows what it’s doing,” General had gravely replied, thrusting out his chin and jerking his eyebrows up high. “In our situation, discipline comes first, and let’s not have any freebooting peasant anarchy. Everything in its own good time, Mak—you’ll get your center, if you live that long . . .” However, he regarded Mak with respect and gladly made use of his services when the radiation attacks caught him in Forester’s cellar.

  “All the same, I’m against it,” Memo stubbornly said. “What if they just shoot us down? What if we don’t manage it in five minutes and we need six? The plan’s crazy. And it always was crazy.”

  “It’s the first time we’ve used demolition charges,” said General, tearing his eyes away from Ordi with an effort. “But even if we take the previous means of breaking through the wire, then the fate of the operation is already decided on average after three or four minutes. If we catch them by surprise, we’ll have one or even two minutes in reserve.”

  “Two minutes is a lot of time,” said Forester. “In two minutes I’ll strangle all of them in there with my bare hands. Just as long as I can get all the way there.”

  “Getting there . . . yeeaah,” Green drawled in a strange, balefully pensive voice.

  “Don’t you want to say anything, Mak?” General asked.

  “I’ve already said what I think,” said Maxim. “The new plan’s better than the old one, but it’s still bad. Let me do it all myself. Take the risk.”

  “We won’t talk about that,” General replied in annoyance. “There’s no more to be said. Do you have any practical comments?”

  “No,” said Maxim. He already regretted having brought up the subject again.

  “Where did the new tablets come from?” Memo suddenly asked.

  “They’re the old tablets,” said General. “Mak managed to improve them a bit.”

  “Ah, Mak . . . So this is his idea?”

  Hoof said it in a tone of voice that made everyone feel awkward. The words could be understood like this: A greenhorn, not really one of us, and a crossover from the other side—so doesn’t the whole business have the whiff of an ambush? There have been cases like that . . .

  “No,” General abruptly snapped. “It’s HQ’s idea. So kindly comply, Hoof.”

  “I am complying,” Memo said with a shrug. “I’m against it, but I’m complying anyway. What else can I do?”

  Maxim sadly looked at them all sitting there in front of him, all very different from each other. In ordinary circumstances, the idea of gathering together would never even have occurred to them: a former farmer, a former criminal, a former teacher . . . They had only one thing in common: they had been declared enemies of society, for some idiotic reason they were detested by everybody, and the entire, immense state apparatus of oppression was directed against them.

  What they were about to do was senseless; in just a few hours’ time, most of them would be dead, but nothing in the world would change, and nothing would change for those who were left alive. In the best case they would have a brief respite from their hellish torments, but they would be lacerated with wounds and exhausted by fleeing from pursuit, they would be hunted with dogs, they would have to lie low in foul-smelling burrows, and then everything would start all over again. Making common cause with them was stupid, but abandoning them would be a shabby trick, so he had to choose the stupid option. And maybe no other way was possible here, with them, and if he wanted to get something done, he would have to put up with the stupidity and the pointless bloodshed, or just maybe he would have to go through with the shabby trick. A pitiful individual . . . a stupid individual . . . a shabby individual . . . But what else could you expect from a human being in a pitiful, stupid, shabby world like this?

  He just had to remember that stupidity was a consequence of powerlessness, and powerlessness derived from ignorance, from not knowing the true path . . . But surely it wasn’t possible that no true path could be found among a thousand paths? I’ve already followed one path, thought Maxim, and it was a false path. Now I have to follow this one to the end, even though I can already see that it’s a false path too. And maybe I’m fated to follow even more false paths and find myself in dead ends. But who am I trying to justify myself to? he thought. And what for? I like them, I can help them, and for today that’s all I need to know.

  “We’ll split up now,” said General. “Hoof goes with Forester, Mak goes with Green, and I go with Bird. Rendezvous at nine o’clock on the dot at the boundary marker. Only make your way through the forest, no roads. The pairs must not split up. Each person is responsible for the other. Off you go now. Memo and Forester leave first.” He gathered up all the cigarette butts onto a sheet of paper, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.

  Forester rubbed his knees. “My bones are aching,” he announced. “That means a spot of rain. It’s going to be a good night, dark . . .”

  11

  They had to crawl from the edge of th
e forest to the wire. Green crawled in front, dragging the pole with the demolition charge on it and swearing under his breath at the prickles jabbing into his skin. Maxim crawled after him, clutching a sack of magnetic mines. The sky was veiled in dark clouds, and it was drizzling. The grass was wet, so they got soaked through in the first few minutes, and they couldn’t see anything through the rain. Green crawled along by the line of the compass, without deviating even once—he was an experienced man, all right. Then Maxim caught an acrid odor of wet rust and saw three rows of barbed wire, and beyond the wire was the vague latticework bulk of the tower. When he raised his head he could make out a squat structure with rectangular outlines at its base; that was the fortified bunker, and there were three battle guards with a machine gun inside it. Indistinct voices reached him through the rustling of the rain, and then a candle was lit inside, and a weak yellow light illuminated the long embrasure.

  Still cursing under his breath, Green shoved his pole in under the wire. “All set,” he whispered. “Crawl away.” They crawled about ten steps away and started waiting. Green clutched the detonator lead in his hand and looked at the glowing hands of his watch. He was shaking. Maxim could hear his teeth chattering and his constrained breathing. Maxim was shaking too. He stuck his hand into the bag and touched the mines—they felt rough and cold. The rain grew stronger, and now its rustling drowned out all other sounds. Green got up on all fours. He kept whispering something all the time, either praying or cursing.

  “Right, you bastards!” he suddenly said in a loud voice, making an abrupt movement with his right hand. A piston clicked and there was a hissing sound, up ahead of them a sheet of red flame erupted from under the ground, and another broad sheet soared up far away on their left. They felt a sudden blow on their ears, and then hot, wet earth, clumps of decaying grass, and red-hot pieces of something came showering down. Green went hurtling forward, shouting out in a strange voice, and suddenly everything turned as bright as day, even brighter than day, blindingly bright. Maxim squeezed his eyes shut, feeling himself turn cold inside, and a thought briefly flitted through his mind—Everything’s lost—but there weren’t any shots, the silence continued, and he couldn’t hear anything except for rustling and hissing.