It took half an hour for the last men to be processed. Out of the maze of partitions emerged a bald officer wearing reading glasses. He held a single sheet of paper. Two guards took up posts beside him. More armed soldiers appeared at the tent’s exit. In the center of the guns squatted the former POWs.
The officer began to read off names. One by one the men rose and headed outside. Sunlight streamed into the room with each departure. It was almost blinding after so much time in the darkened tent.
‘Hung, Wu-shi!’ the officer called out.
Hung rose — a fact confirmed out of the corner of Chin’s eyes. Hung headed toward the bright sun — toward the trucks waiting outside. Chin gave in to the temptation and looked. Hung hesitated in the door and looked back. A guard pushed him through with a muzzle to his back.
Twenty men departed quietly in that manner. The officer handed the list of names to a senior sergeant and turned to address the remaining men. ‘You have all spent time around the imperialist war machine! You have seen their deceits, their cruelties, their evil natures! You may have been shown kindness by individual soldiers, who are themselves victims of their oppressive regimes! But their inhumane system brings out the very worst in men! They plunder Asia’s resources to feed the factories of greedy capitalists! They drop bombs, massacring innocent Chinese civilians whose sole crime was to demand a return of Asia to Asians! Whose sole desire was to realign boundaries drawn by hundreds of years of aggression by the West! To make just borders — founded on natural law! To put an end to the looting, the raping of Asia’s treasure by Europeans! And worse even than block after block of houses flattened by the criminal UN bombing of our cities has been your fate! Yours has been the worst of the indignities suffered by the People’s Republic! You have had to bear the unbearable! But your nightmare has now come to an end! The People’s Liberation Army salutes you! The people of China welcome you home!’
With that, the guns were lowered. The guards parted. They were each given a loaf of bread for the journey. They were led out. There was no sign of Hung’s group. No sign of Hung’s truck. No sign of Hung. Chin never saw or heard from his friend again.
And that began the great awakening in Chin. Not an enlightenment. Not a birth of ideas or a flowering of social consciousness. Beginning on the cold, dusty road heading south from the Amur, there arose instead a hatred that knew no bounds. It was all-consuming. It grew with Chin’s visit to Hung’s family. With each furtive stop by Hung’s former radical and now cowering university friends. With the one risky trip made to the Defense Ministry where, Chin found, Hung had never even been in the Army. He had never even existed — a fact the clerk confirmed with confidence after reference to a large book of names. A book which seemed to list the names of nonexistent people.
Chin’s anger grew to such proportions that he could express it to no one. No one knew how deep it ran. How Chin’s life was consumed by it. How it suffused his every day, his every act, his every thought. How it motivated and inspired him to work hard. To set his goals and excel as never before. For there was no one whom he could trust with such dangerous thoughts but a brother. And his brother no longer existed… he never had.
The office door opened, and in walked Miss Dunn. Kartsev confirmed with a tug on his jacket that his pistol remained hidden. He then rose with a truly genuine smile on his face and held out his hand. Miss Dunn hugged her arms across her chest. She wouldn’t even raise her wind-burned and red face.
Kartsev sneezed loudly and unexpectedly. He turned and extracted his handkerchief. ‘I apologize!’ he said. ‘Spring allergies, I’m afraid.’ She looked up at him defiantly — her lips pursed as she sucked in her cheek on one side, staring. Kartsev had to smile. He hadn’t seen such directness since… He couldn’t remember the last time. ‘I hope you weren’t treated badly. I gave specific instructions that you not be harmed, but… but people are getting a little sloppy these days.’ She frowned — still staring. ‘I’m sure you’ll understand, however, why I brought you here. Why this is such a momentous day.’
She snorted like a bratty child. ’Yeah! May Day,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Your big speech to an adoring people.’ Her smile turned up only one corner of her mouth. She never broke eye contact.
‘You’ve changed,’ he said out loud. It was a comment made not to her, but to himself.
She arched her eyebrows — her expression a study in boredom. ‘I’ve been through too much to put up with your bullshit.’ Her words were slurred. Her manner nonchalant. She wasn’t scared of him at all.
They stared at each other — Kartsev’s mood darkening. He walked over to his desk, but she didn’t follow. ‘Well,’ he said, trying to snap out of his funk, ‘actually I wasn’t talking about the rally. Come here. Let me show you.’
Miss Dunn hesitated for a moment before wandering over. She shoved her hands in the back pockets of her blue jeans. Slumped and slouching, she stood beside Kartsev.
‘You see the document on the computer screen?’ he asked. Her head was tilted and her hair half covered her face. But he saw her gaze rise to the monitor. The blue phosphors were reflected brightly in her eyes. ‘It’s my life’s greatest work. I call it “The Laws of Human History.” I’m really quite proud of it, if truth be told.’
Miss Dunn arched her eyebrows and said, ‘Hm.’ She lifted a paperweight from his desk and turned it from side to side.
Undaunted, Kartsev said, ‘I wanted to invite you to my “publishing party.” ’ He held his hands out to the empty office. She said nothing. The anticlimax was now complete. He didn’t know what to say, so he just leaned over to the mouse, rolled the cursor to the ‘Send’ button, and clicked. The blue status bar rose slowly till it read one hundred percent. Kartsev stood back. ‘There!’
After a few moments, Miss Dunn asked, ‘What?’ Her interest was finally piqued.
‘It’s published.’
‘What do you mean, it’s published?’
‘I sent it via the Internet to a few thousand different servers in about two dozen…’ Again he sneezed without warning. ‘Excuse me!’ he said — dabbing at his nose. ‘As I was saying, I had it translated into a couple of dozen major languages and posted it for all to read. I just wanted you to be here… when I published it.’
Miss Dunn was alert now — her old self. Her eyes darted to the monitor. ‘What’s the book about?’
Kartsev smiled. ‘It is nothing more than a… a work of non-fiction, if you will.’ He looked down at the floor. ‘Maybe you could call it a treatise if you judge by the number of bold statements I make in it.’ He laughed. ‘But I did strive to leave a mark.’
‘Oh… you’ve left a mark,’ Kate said — feeling her teeth grind. ‘You’ll be remembered for a long time.’
‘But I hope for so much more than mere notoriety,’ Kartsev said. ‘Social experimentation is a duty we owe mankind. No system is perfect. Pristine ideologies become sullied by implementation. Exemplary organizations lose their way, are corrupted or hijacked, or simply decay over time. Every human institution evolves in a complex but not indecipherable way.’