Within a few minutes conductors arrived in our car and instructed everyone to get off.
“Won’t do a bit of good,” Johnson declared. “In fact, I’d rather be on the train.” Nevertheless we joined the crowd before the door.
“Why do they do it, then?” I asked, trying to keep an eye on the clouds to the west.
“Oh, once a whole train got picked up and flung all over the countryside. Killed everyone on it. But if you’d been standing right next to it you’d have been just as dead.”
This was not very reassuring to me. “These tornadoes are common, then?”
Johnson nodded with grim satisfaction. “That’s the weather change in Russia I mentioned. Warmer midcontinent, but they get tornadoes now. Before the war ninety-five percent of the world’s tornadoes occurred in the United States.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true. They were the result of a combination of local weather conditions, and the specific geography of the Rockies, the Great Plains, and the Gulf of Mexico—or so they deduced, tornadoes being another meteorological mystery. But now they’re common in Siberia.” Our fellow travellers were staring at us, and Johnson waited to continue until we were off the train. “And they’re big. Big like Siberia is big. Several towns have been torn off the map by them.”
The conductors herded us to a clearing beside the track, at the very end of the train. Black clouds covered the sky, and a cold wind made a ripping sound in the trees. The wind grew stronger in a matter of minutes; leaves and small branches fell almost horizontally through the air above us, and by drawing just a few feet apart from the rest of the passengers, we could talk without being overheard; indeed, we could barely hear ourselves.
“Karymskoye is just ahead, I think,” Johnson said. “Hopefully the tornado will hit it.”
“You hope it will?” I said in surprise, thinking I had misunderstood, for to tell the truth Johnson’s English was accented somewhat.
“Yes,” he hissed, his face close to mine. In the muted green light he suddenly looked wild, fanatical. “It’s retribution, don’t you see? It’s the Earth’s revenge on Russia.”
“But I thought it was South Africa that set the bombs.”
“South Africa,” he said angrily, and grabbed me by the arm. “How could you be so naive? Where did they get the bombs? Three thousand neutron bombs? South Africa, Argentina, Vietnam, Iran—it doesn’t matter who actually put them in the United States and set them off, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure—perhaps they all did—but it was Russia that made them, Russia that arranged for their use, Russia that profited most from them. The whole world knows it, and notes how these monstrous tornadoes plague them. It’s retribution, I tell you. Look at their faces! They all know it, every single one of them, it’s the Earth’s punishment. Look! There it is.”
I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw that the black cloud to the west now sank to the earth at a certain point, in a broad, swirling black funnel of cloud. The wind howled around us, tearing at my hair, and yet I could still hear a low grinding noise, a vibration in the ground, as if a train many times larger than ours was speeding along distant tracks.
“It’s coming this way,” Johnson shouted in my ear. “Look how thick it is!” On his bearded, craggy face was an expression of religious rapture.
The tornado now slimmed to a black column, spinning furiously on itself. At its base I could make out whole trees flying away from it, scores of them. The bass roar of it grew; some of the Russians in the clearing fell to the ground, others knelt and prayed, raising twisted faces to the black sky; Johnson waved a fist at them, shouting soundlessly in the roar, his face contorted. The twister must have struck Karymskoye, because the flying trees were replaced by debris, pieces of a city reduced to rubble in an instant. Johnson danced a little tilted jig, leaning into the wind.
I myself kept an eye on the unearthly storm. It was moving from left to right ahead of us, approaching at an angle. The condensed spinning column was so solidly black that it might have been a tower of whirling coal. The bottom of this tower bounced off the ground from time to time; it touched down on a hill past the stricken town, blasted trees away from it, bounced into the air almost up to the black cloud above it, extended and touched down again, moved on. To my considerable relief it appeared that it would pass to the north of us by three or four miles. When I was sure of that, some of Johnson’s strange elation spilled into me. I had just seen a town destroyed. But the Soviet Union was responsible for my country’s destruction—thousands of towns—so Johnson had said, and I believed him. That made this storm retribution, even revenge. I shouted at the top of my lungs, felt the sound get torn away and carried off. I screamed again. I had not known how much I would welcome a blow struck against the murderers of my country—how much I needed it. Johnson pounded my shoulder and wiped tears from his eyes, we staggered against the wind across the clearing and into some trees, where we could scream and point and laugh, and cry and shout curses too terrible to be heard, lamentations too awful to be thought. Our country was dead, and this poor exile my guide felt it as powerfully as I did. I put my arm around him and felt that I held up a countryman, a brother. “Yes,” he hissed again and again. “Yes, yes, yes.” Within twenty minutes the tornado bounced back up into the cloud for good, and we were left in a stiff cold wind to compose ourselves. Johnson wiped his eyes. “I hope it didn’t tear up much track,” he said in his slightly guttural accent, “or we’ll be here a week.”
A shadow fell across the book, and Steve stopped reading. We all looked up. John Nicolin stood there, hands on hips.
“I need your help replacing that bad keel,” he said to Steve.
Steve was still in the forests of Siberia, I could tell by the distant focus of his eyes. He said, “I can’t, I’m reading—”
John snatched the book from him and closed it, thud. Steve jerked up, then stopped himself. They glared at each other. Steve’s face got redder and redder. I held my breath, disoriented by the abrupt removal from the story.
John dropped the book on the grass. “You can waste your time any way you want when I don’t need your help. But when I need it, you give it, understand?”
“Yes,” said Steve. He was looking down at the book now. He stretched to pick it back up, and John walked away. Steve kept inspecting the book for grass stains, avoiding our gazes. I wished I wasn’t there to see it. I knew how Steve felt about having such scenes observed. And here were Kathryn, Mando, Kathryn’s mother and sister and the others… I watched John’s wide back disappear down the river path and cursed him in my thoughts. There was no call for that sort of showing it over Steve. That was pure meanness—no past could excuse it. I was glad he wasn’t my father.
“Well, so much for reading,” Steve said in his joking tone, or close to it. “But how about that tornado, eh?”
“I got to get home to supper anyway,” Mando said. “But I sure want to hear what happens next.”
“We’ll make sure you’re at the next reading,” Kathryn said, when it became clear that Steve wasn’t going to respond. Mando said goodbye to Kristen and scampered off toward the bridge. Kathryn stood up. “I’d best see to the tortillas,” she said. She bent over to kiss Steve’s head. “Don’t look so glum, everybody’s got to work sometime.”
Steve gave her a bitter glance and didn’t reply. The others wandered off with Kathryn, and I stood up. “I’m off too, I guess.”