Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

The factory had been a barn at one time, and not a very nice barn either, a long, low, whitewashed building that could have used a lot more windows. The floor was dirty and splintery, but the walls were covered with pictures—some torn out of newspapers and magazines, some photos, stuck up there with pins.

Right then is when I got a surprise. All the women prisoners had big numbers just like the ones we had worn in prison sewn on their uniforms, and I could see our guide was looking at those. She did not know what Rosalee Rathaus looked like. We passed on a bunch of women who were working at sewing machines and making quite a racket, and finally our guide asked one of the guards, women with uniforms but no guns who were lounging around here and there. The guard just pointed.

She was a blonde, pretty thin and not much older than I was. Of course she had no makeup and she looked tired, but right off I noticed the bones in her face and her blue eyes. Fix her hair and give her a good night’s sleep and she would be a whole lot better than decent. Give her the right makeup, too, and the right clothes, and she might knock your eyes out. She was working a machine I had never seen before. You stacked cloth on it, then laid a pattern on top of the cloth and cut around it. It was sort of like a band saw but not exactly.

Naala said something to our guide, and she went over and pulled Rosalee away from her machine. After that we marched her outside where we could hear ourselves talk.

“You are Amerikan?” Naala asked. “The wife of Russell Rathaus?”

The blonde nodded. She looked a little angry and a little dazed, like she had just been smacked hard.

“Where is he?”

The blonde shrugged.

“He has communicated with you?”

She did not understand that, and you could see it. I said, “Maybe I’d better translate.”

Naala turned to our guide. “You! Get out of here!”

The guide objected.

“You were to show us where this woman was. You have done so. Now go!”

The guide argued, pretty loudly.

Naala’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Do you know who we are? We are the JAKA, you fool. Go, or you will wish you had never seen me.”

It is funny, but when somebody with a bad complexion goes pale, you don’t notice it. What you notice is that all the zits and things seemed to have jumped out at you.

I said, “We ought to go where she lives.” I had a couple of reasons for saying that, but the main one was I wanted to sit down.

Naala agreed, so I told Rosalee we wanted to see her cell block or whatever it was they called them here. It was the first time she had heard me speak English, and her eyes got big. While we were walking along, she told me it was called a group house. For three or four steps she held my hand.

The group house was pretty big and there were beds everywhere, real beds and what were probably army cots, and others that were just places various women had rigged up to sleep on. All the beds were sort of straightened around, and all of them had quilts sewn together out of scraps of uniform cloth. Those were about the color of mustard. Rosalee showed us hers, meaning a pad of scrap cloth on the floor.

There was a real bed not far from it. I sat down on that and said, “How much younger are you?”

“I’m twenty-four. He’s sixty-three.” She had known what I meant right away.

“Has he been in touch with you?”

There was a little tiny pause before she shook her head. “Can that woman understand what we’re saying?”

I did not think Naala really knew much English, but that did not matter. I knew what I had to say to get Rosalee to talk. “Hell no!” I made it definite.

“Then listen, please. Please, please listen because I mean every word. Get me out of here, and I’ll do anything you want me to do. Everything! Just get me out. Can you get me back to America?”

I said, “Maybe. It won’t be easy.”

“Russ’s rich, and there’s a joint account. I’m not sure how much is in there, but at least fifty thousand. I’ll give you the entire amount, every last dollar.”

I nodded and turned to Naala, keeping my voice down and talking fast. “I don’t know how much she’s going to understand, but she’ll have picked up a lot while she was in here. She probably knows more than she’s willing to let on.”

Naala nodded.

“I asked if Rathaus had been in touch. She said no, but she was lying. She wants out of here really bad. If we get her out but show her we can pop her back in anytime we’re pissed off at her we’ll get cooperation.”

Naala nodded again. “Outside we can beat her, also.”

I did not like that, but I think I covered it pretty good. I said, “Right. And if Rathaus finds out we’ve got her, he may want to bargain. Or try to get her away from us.”

“Either is good. In the last he will not succeed. Do you wish to take her now?”

“This minute, no. But today?” I shrugged. “Probably yes, if we can do it.”

I turned back to Rosalee. “How close were you to Rathaus’s business?”

“I was his secretary.”

“I see.” Of course I was trying to figure out whether she had heard what I said to Naala, and how much she had understood. “Up until you two were married?”

“And afterward, too. He didn’t want me sitting at home twiddling my thumbs, and I didn’t want him getting another secretary. Then they sold the business—he and Mr. Debussy did. That was when we came here.”

“Got it. Now listen up. I may be able to get you out, but I’m going to have to have some cooperation. Do you seriously want out—want it really bad—or are you just stringing me?”

“Oh, my God!” Rosalee looked like she was about to cry. “Please, please listen! I meant every word I said.”

“Okay. You’ve got an aunt who married some guy from this country.”

“Did Russ tell you that? Yes, I do.”

“Maybe he talked to your uncle about doing some business over here?”

“They argued about it. Russ wanted to make the dolls in our factory, but Uncle Eneas kept saying he could make them just as good and much cheaper here. I think Russ was thinking about setting up a little factory here, and that was why he agreed to come.”

“I thought he’d sold his company.”

“You didn’t know him.”

It took me a minute to digest that, because I had known Russ really well. Pretty soon I decided she was right. I said, “He thought dolls might go over here?”

She nodded. “There were two or three places here that were buying them.”

That was what I had been waiting to hear. “You say you want out. This is your chance to prove it. I can get you out, and if you can name all three I’ll do it.”

“Oh, Lord!” Rosalee backed over to another bed and sat down. “I can’t. I really can’t. The company names were, you know, so ordinary. If—if I had a keyboard, maybe. Two were stores and the other one was just a man’s name, and it was terribly foreign. I remember that. I—do you have to have this?”

I shook my head. “We have other ways of finding out. Only if you can tell us now it will impress my partner, and that’ll be good for you.”

She tried and tried hard. I could see that. But in the end she came up empty.

Naala said, “Ask where Rathaus is now. This she may know.”

So I did.

She thought about that one, too. Finally she said, “He’s outdoors someplace. That’s all I can tell you. Not in a building.”

That one threw me. I asked why she felt like that.

“He was in prison, wasn’t he? I think you said that.”

“I don’t think I did. I just asked if he’d been in touch.”

“Oh. Well, they put me in prison, so I always thought they must have put Russ in prison somewhere, too. If he weren’t in prison he would have been trying to get me out. That’s what I thought.”