Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

Was it a real prophesy? I think maybe it was.

Martya shook me awake. “It is nearly noon! Get up!”

I blinked, called her a bitch under my breath, and sat up.

“Do not take my arm.”

I had not tried to.

“You will wish to tire me.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You must not. The beach yesterday? I am burn by the sun. It hurt me very much.”

“I got kicked, mostly in the face. I guess that’s painless compared to sunburn.”

My irony went right over her head. “That is most good. This morning Kleon tire me very much. My back is most pain. I scream, I twist. He thinks he is big, big man because of this.” She giggled.

“You won’t have to let me screw you to laugh at me.” I found my watch and put it on. It was eleven fifteen. Either my clothes had not been searched, or the searcher had been smart enough to replace all my things just as I had left them.

“There are”—she groped for a word—“boxes outside the front door. Three boxes such as are for travel with clothes. They were not there when Kleon go to his work, I think. He will move them, I think, if they are there. They are not mine or Kleon’s.”

I had never dressed faster. Both of my suitcases and my wonderful old camera bag were on the stoop. “This is great!” I told Martya. “I can take pictures of that ruined castle. Pictures of the Willows, too, and I’ll have clean jeans, shirts, everything.”

“You must not take my picture. I am too much red.”

“I don’t want to take your picture.”

“You are mean.” She pouted. “For this I do not make the breakfast for you.”

“That’s okay, I’ll find a café when I’m hungry.” The truth was that I was hungry already, but I was not about to admit it.

“You will take me with you?”

“Sure,” I said, “if you want to come.”

“But you do not like me.”

“I like breakfast a lot,” I told her. “Lunch for you, I guess.” I had slung my camera bag on my shoulder and was picking up my suitcases. “If I put these in my room, will Kleon take them?”

“I do not think but I do not know.”

After I had changed clothes, I put them under the bed, pushed far back. “If he does, there’ll be more trouble.”

She giggled. “He have win the first trouble, I think.”

“So do I,” I told her. “We’ll have to see who wins the last one. That’s the one that matters.”

It was a new café, closer and maybe a little cheaper than the ones we had been to before. The coffee was not up to Vienna standards but not at all bad.

“You will take pictures of the Willows?”

I nodded. “Film and electronic. The first to use if I can, the second for backup.”

“It will not be good, you show everything.”

“I won’t show everything in the book. What I decide to show will depend on the text, the stuff I’m going to write.” Honesty made me add, “And my editor. Editors are pure hell.”

“Many things are from hell,” said a small man in black at the next table. A cartoonist I know would have made him a mouse. He had the bright eyes and the scared daredevil look, so a mouse with black clothes and a backward collar. “I’ve come to help you deal with them.”

I just stared.

He stood up, picking up his plate and coffee cup. “I am Papa Zenon.” He put his stuff on our table and pulled up a chair. “You were not at the Willows.”

“You’re right. I overslept.”

“Many times. I was told I would find you there. It is a bad place? You have need of me, it seem.”

“We have find someone,” Martya told him. “We do not wish to be troubled.”

His smile was almost a grin. “By those who dwell in hell or the authorities?”

“We do not wish to be troubled at all. She have show herself to me in a mirror and is dead. You know? Who wish trouble by those others you name? No one, I think.”

The priest talked to me. “How long since…?” He drew a finger across his throat.

“Years,” I told him. “I don’t know what killed her.”

“Bones only?”

I shook my head. “Pretty much the whole body. The arms and legs and so on.”

“If I lay her to rest,” the priest said, “it must be in consecrated ground.”

Martya said, “This is what we wish, so she be at peace.”

“We must have a coffin, also.” The priest looked troubled. “She is large?”

“Small,” I said. “A small woman, very thin.”

“Yes. Speak more.”

“I was just thinking that it may not be possible to straighten the body out without tearing it up. We haven’t tried.”

Martya said, “She is like so,” and demonstrated, pulling her feet onto the seat of her chair and clasping her knees. “Only more than this. I cannot because I am…”

“More womanly,” the priest suggested.

“Yes, yes! Like that, Papa.”

“It will be a strange coffin. I do not know that I could obtain such a thing.”

“I know!” Martya looked at me triumphantly. “We must use one of your clothes boxes.” She turned back to the priest. “They are large, most strong. They do not let the water in, I think.”

“They’d leak in wet dirt,” I told her, “and I wouldn’t give you one even if it didn’t. Couldn’t we buy a suitcase here?”

The priest nodded. “Of course. As for the rest, you must find a roll of waterproof plastic, and tape. We will wrap your luggage many times in this and seal him with the tape. I will bury her aboveground so she may remain more dry.”

I must have looked dumb, because he smiled and said, “You shall see. Tonight?”

“Yes. Martya and I will buy a suitcase as soon as we leave here.”

“Let us meet at the Willows tonight.”

I nodded. “What time?”

“An hour after sunset. Do you fear the wolves?”

I shook my head.

“You are a brave man.” He grinned. “I, also!” He rose and blessed us, and was out the door before I could thank him.

“He didn’t pay,” I told Martya. “I can pick up his bill, I suppose.”

“You are a fool. He is a spy of the JAKA.”

For a moment or two I tried to collect myself, sipping coffee and looking around at the shabby, cheerful room in which we sat—the mismatched chairs and the worn carpet, the yellowed hunting prints on the walls and the flowery cracked saucer that had held my cup. They told me (quietly and sadly, like old ladies who know they may never get up from mama’s old chaise longue, never get out of the warm, friendly bed) that there had been aristocrats here once, with Strauss waltzes at the castle and commoners who pulled off their caps to the countess—commoners who had been happier and richer and one hell of a lot freer than their great-grandkids were here in the Democratic Republic. When I thought all that I never imagined that people would make a religion out of it, but I was about to find out.

“You did not know this?” Martya asked. “That he spy for the JAKA?”

I shook my head.

“The little man who come from the ministry send him. So he is a spy. He thinks you will know. I think the same. You gave him money.”

I nodded. “A hundred dollars.”

“So he must tell those who sit at desks that you are watched and all will be well. But you will know you are watched.”

“And be umsichtig .”

“I do not know that word, but yes.”

“It was nice of him.”

“For us, yes. For him better. And now?”

“Finish eating.”

“We are almost finish. And then?”

“Buy a suitcase, the biggest we can find, and take pictures of the Willows.”

That went well enough at first. Martya went with me and helped put the body in the suitcase we bought. I could have locked it—there was a little flat key that any kid could have replaced with a paperclip—but I left it unlocked, figuring that Papa Zenon might want to sprinkle the body with holy water or something.