The shin and pants she had found for him were too small, and the shoes hurt his feet. His toes peeped out of the holes she had cut like hot dogs out of a bun. He left her in the car and stumbled into the nearest house. He avoided two children curled up on the front room floor; they were sound asleep! Wasn’t it time they were off to school? Were they Beverly Rowntree’s younger brothers? He drifted on into a bedroom. Here women’s clothing hung on pegs, and dolls and toys lay scattered upon the linoleum. In a closet he encountered men’s work pants and several pairs of shoes. These fit, more or less, but his Fingers were too clumsy to fasten the belt and zipper, much less tie the shoelaces. His mother would be furious. He sat down and struggled.
The woman in the doorway didn’t look like Beverly at all. He couldn’t recall who she was: a tall, slinky, crewcut, teat-less wonder in shiny, black stuff that was so tight it looked like it was painted on. What homeroom was she from, anyhow? Was she in any of his classes? Beverly would be jealous.
“You are very dirty,” she said. “Maybe Natalie was right! You do look dead. There’s a shower that still works, back behind the kitchen.”
The strange woman helped him undress, took him into a small, white-tiled cubicle, soaped him, and ran cold water over his bruised limbs. Then she took off her own garments and joined him in the shower. When she pressed herself against him and tried to give him pleasure, he cooperated. She rubbed, pressed, kissed, and squeezed, but nothing worked.
He sensed her frustration. He ought to apologize, but Memory kept interrupting with inane remarks about Beverly and Emily and Mavis and other people. Finally, in tight-lipped silence, she stopped, shut off the water, dried him, and helped him dress.
She found eggs and dry bread and a jar of yellow jam in the kitchen, and they ate. At last she asked, “Who are you, Alan Lessing?”
Dumb question! His homeroom teacher must have his registration card. He hoped he wasn’t in the wrong class. That had happened once, and the embarrassment still rankled.
“You can’t speak any better than you can fuck, eh? How did you get… this… this way? Pacov? The police?”
Memory tried to say something, but he couldn’t hear it.
The woman said, “Look, I’m Riva. Riva Ayalon. Eh? You’re Alan Lessing.”
He essayed another smile. His face worked better this morning.
“We have to go north, to the Israeli bases in Russia. You understand me? Can you drive? Handle a gun?” He blinked at her, and she hissed, almost like a cat. Memory handed him a picture of Buttons, his cat when he was ten years old. It made him want to cry.
She said, “Are you so useless? I know you can do some things… your build, your muscles, the calluses on your hands all prove this! Whatever Pacov… the police… the Arabs… whoever… did to you, still you are not mindless. You must remember! Try!”
Memory asked permission to speak, but the captain refused. Too much, too bad. No, worse than bad. Unthinkable. Unbearable.
The woman ran brown fingers through her short, black hair. “Well, damn it, finish breakfast. We go now… before the sanitation teams come to ‘purify’ us survivors, eh? We take another pair of boots for you, some underwear, some clothes for me, some blankets.”
She went on muttering to herself while he returned to the stuffy darkness of the movie house, munched stale popcorn, and nuzzled Beverly Rowntree’s ample breast. It was a sad movie, all about a boy whose cat was killed by a car. He cried, and she wept, too. “It’s a sad world,” Memory piped up from the seat behind them. Was there no privacy?
After breakfast Riva ransacked the house but found nothing more of use. As they left he tried his rediscovered ability to smile on the two children in the front room, but they were still asleep and didn’t wake up. They must have been eating blackberry jam, because their mouths and cheeks were smeared with dark, reddish jelly. He couldn’t recall where he’d seen that before.
They drove all morning. Bright sunlight and the cloudless, azure bowl overhead reminded him of how his father used to sing “Blue Skies” while driving — until his mother nagged the old man into silence. The road was crowded, full of stalled cars, trucks, personnel carriers, even tanks. Was everybody off to the beach, then? The traffic jam was so bad that people had shut off their engines and were just sitting there waiting. Still, they all were surprisingly patient in spite of the morning’s heat. No one complained or honked, and those who had left their vehicles appeared content to sprawl quietly beside them beneath the blistering sun.
He awoke when the woman — what was her name? — pulled the car over onto the rocky shoulder. “Blocked ahead,” she said tersely. “Change automobiles. Find another one.”
He smiled at her, helped with the luggage, and clambered over the twisted cars and wreckage that filled the road Had there been a terrible accident, then?
His mother had a pat speech for such occasions: drunks, pot-heads, Bangers, and other similar ilk were the offspring of Satan, and reckless disregard for others’ rights — and for her rights in particular — was the downfall of civilization! Downfall? Something about that word disturbed him, but Memory snatched the thought away. It was like trying to think while standing under a waterfall.
They found a bigger and better car, an armored personnel carrier. The crew lay together in the shade beside it, eating blackberry jam in comradely silence. He grinned at them, but no one replied. Stuck up bastards! Always the way with tankers and APC crewmen! They didn’t object, though, when Riva took their vehicle. Shouldn’t even offer to pay for it.
After that they made good time, rolling right over smaller obstacles or knocking them aside and going around the bigger ones in a plume of tallow-hued dust. They rumbled through Nablus and then Nazareth — something important had happened there, long ago, but he couldn’t remember what — and in the evening the woman pulled up near a town she named Safad. Smouldering oil tanks and supply dumps lined the highway ahead, and the horizon was lit with flames, much like that place where he had been before. Already he had forgotten its name.
“I think they are all dead in the town,” she muttered. Mostly she talked to herself rather than to him. “How far does this Pacov extend?” Her features were fox-like, long nosed, with narrow, slightly slanted eyes, in the glow of the blue military flashlight she had found in the driver’s door-rack. She was peering at a map. He wanted to help, but he couldn’t understand the letters. This worried him; he recalled once being able to read, but not any more.
He essayed a puzzled “Ah?”
“What? No, no way. We can’t go in. There may be sanitation teams already there. They’d thumb us for sure.” She traced a red line with her finger. “Here, and here… over to Damascus, then up to Aleppo, and on to Russia. Pacov there, in Kharkov, Donetsk… the old Pacov, the first strike. Some Israelis there, but there’ll be more farther north, near Sverdlovsk, away from the European enclaves in Moscow and Leningrad. We have to get through their lines somehow, steal I.D., prove we came in with their original expedition, and get them to let us stay. It’s our only chance… that life or no life at all.”
He bent to gawk at the map. Her proximity aroused him, and she drew him close. “Want to try sex again, eh?” she asked. He did.
The hot-oil-smelling coziness of the cab took him back to Emily Pietrick, all fingers and tongue and teeth and straining limbs in the back seat of Larry Helger’s fancy convertible.