“How can you dare to wake me up at this hour?” each one of them asked. “Do you have any idea how late it is?” He’d heard that last line so often that he’d taken to quoting Solzhenitsyn in response, “Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”
None of his exhortations mattered. The story was always the same—albeit with different words—at each of the places he’d stopped. He was told that Warwick was indeed in turmoil, but that trouble had been coming for far too long. Volkhov’s lessons on the dialectic came to mind. On whatever side one was on, they were convinced that it was high time the other side learned a lesson.
Volkhov’s speech! From just a few hours before… The wisdom contained there might as well be buried in that body bag along with the old man’s corpse.
While the world chose up sides along false lines outside the fences of Warwick and around the world, the microcosm inside the wire matched it all perfectly. Nothing divides humanity, to its own destruction, quite as effectively as a false choice.
There were those who favored running the thugs at the gymnasium out of town on a rail, and others who favored falling into line with their petite revolution and teaching the old guard (“the powers that be!”) a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget. There was talk of civil and uncivil war, and assumptions that the Spetnaz soldiers, who had parachuted in and who were now protecting the new government at the gym, would go along with whichever side showed up with the largest numbers. The ghosts of St. Petersburg in 1917 were never far from Warwick. Conflicts that had been brewing for a generation in Warwick were finally coming to a head, and his friends were not only unwilling to join in his exodus, they were hoping to get a scalp or two for their troubles.
“But don’t you see that this is no way to live?” Vasily had asked them.
They simply shook their heads in stubbornness and sorrow, for they couldn’t imagine any other way. “It has been coming to this, and they will get what they deserve,” they’d each said in their turn and in their own words. He’d heard that phrase so often, and with the definition of who “they” were changing to fit the exigencies of shifting opinion, that Vasily had simply come to expect its antipathy.
“But we don’t have to choose between two tyrants! We can go outside the wire and be free!” He’d sung, like a free bird singing to the masses in their chains.
“You can die just as easily out there as you can in here, Vasily.”
“Yes, I might die out there, but if I do, I will die on my own terms. At least I will have sought something higher and better than the false choices given to me by liars, by those who seek the power to coerce others. And look at the way we’re living now! The food will not keep coming from outside. This system is unsustainable. It is already interrupted. We don’t produce enough stuff in Warwick to feed and clothe ourselves. However our supplies got here before this trouble, they will eventually stop.”
“Dull, dull Vasily. Don’t be such an alarmist! We don’t need conspiracy theories when we have an enemy closer to hand. We’ll deal with them first, and then everything will get back to normal.” And one by one they had closed the door on him and gone back to bed until morning. As Volkhov had often said, “anything that one does not want to believe can easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.”
Vasily had become desperate. He’d decided within himself that he would not give up until he found at least one other person to come along with him. He had to do it. There was that conviction, that destiny, again. He had to do it if only to restore his faith in the power of reason. He was sensing that the world had gone mad, and he was growing angrier in response to that madness surrounding him. “How can they not see this?” he wondered. “How can they not understand that Mikail will kill them all before he is done?” And then, he thought, if Mikail does not do it, then time and the crushing weight of facts will finish them off in due time. This is the way it always is—one might choose to live in delusion, but reality is stubbornly persistent, and will assert itself at the most inopportune times.
After all of that, he now walked up the hill to Alyoshka’s house in the hopes that, at long last, he might find a reasonable man.
As he approached the house, he heard a voice behind him. “Why so grave, mate?” Vasily stopped in the street and turned around to find Kolya walking a few feet behind along the darkened path. “Don’t worry,” Kolya said, “it’s only me, your most holy digging friend. And, I might add, that it was very unfriendly of you to leave me to bury that old man by myself. When we returned to the site, everyone else had a partner but poor Kolya. He had to do all the work himself.”
Vasily hesitated, not knowing what to say. So he said what one always does in such cases. “I’m sorry, Kolya. I didn’t mean to. It was beyond my control.”
“That’s ok. I figured as much. When I saw that bulldog pull you to the side, I figured you would not have an easy time of it. In fact, I halfway expected we’d have to dig another hole when we returned from our little adventure with Vladimir.”
“Yes,” Vasily said, rubbing his hands together for warmth. “What was that about, anyway?”
“Oh, just some punk kids fighting over something the grandfathers of their grandfathers once said. Shockingly inconsiderate the ancestors of our ancestors were, leaving us with so much unfinished business. You may not have heard, but our little town is headed for a civil war.”
Vasily relaxed. Something in Kolya’s jovial indifference made him feel that he was safe talking to him. He laughed a little to himself. If the man were not indifferent, I wouldn’t trust him. In a land seething with dialectically opposed agendas, the safest man turns out to be the man without one.
“Yes, I’ve heard. In fact, I am trying to get people to opt out.”
“What do you mean? Not fight? But how can they avoid such a fight when the grandfathers of their grandfathers once said thus and so?” Kolya took off his glasses and winked at Vasily. “But, seriously. What do you mean?”
“I have a way out. I mean literally, an escape route. I am leaving today with a friend, and I’m trying to persuade people to follow… a thankless and fruitless task. Perhaps it’s the hour, or maybe I’m not as persuasive as I would like to be, but so far I have been thoroughly unconvincing.”
Kolya cocked his head to look at Vasily in that way one does to see if someone is pulling his leg. “You say ‘literally’ and, unhappily that word is often used today when ‘figuratively’ is actually intended. An escape route? Do you mean to say that you have a real live escape route, one that leads outside of these fences? Or… are you being metaphorical? I don’t see you as a politician, Vasily, or at least not as a very good one. I may be the only one in this town that likes you.”
Vasily smiled. “That is not only what I mean to say. It is what I am saying,” he replied, then watched as the young man straightened his head and carefully cleaned his glasses and then slowly put them back onto his face. He smiled through his rounded features, and Vasily suddenly became aware of him rubbing the blisters on his hands. He dropped his hand to his side.
The world spun on as sleepers slept in their beds, but in the street in front of Alyoshka’s house, there was suddenly an undeniable awareness by two men who in that singular moment were fully awake. Vasily had found his twin, his brother at arms. Kolya looked down and glanced at the earth still caked to his boots and shook it off, sending its tiny granules shushing across the lane’s hard-packed snow.