David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“To New Pokrovskoye?”

“Yeah. It’s a chart that he had under his desk. All of a sudden, the fucker broke. He just blinked and started beggin’ — like he’d lost his nerve all at once. So we asked him again and he spilled. Said the maps were there. Map of the eastern fuckin’ seaboard, but the names are all different. They’re written in Russian, so we can’t read them. He showed me where New Pokrovskoye is. It’s in fuckin’ Labrador. Way fuckin’ north. It’s gonna take some time to get there, but we can do it.”

“Good.”

“Now I don’t think he’s lying — but he’s not all there either you know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“So we’re going to take him with us. I’m thinkin’.”

Shadak thought about that. The sea voyage, on a boat filled with guns — in a convoy filled with guns. To New Pokrovskoye. The Black Villa. Where he slept. Where even Babushka could not enter.

“Hey!”

Shadak looked up.

“Fuck, Amar, pay attention.”

Shadak blinked. “The caves,” he said. “The Black Villa.”

“What?”

Shadak shook his head. He didn’t know what. He leaned back against the wall and lowered his hands into his face.

“He’s not the only one we should take,” said Shadak.

“That so? Who else?”

“New friends,” said Shadak. “We should wrap their eyes in bandages and plug up their ears — and if Babushka comes back… she can fucking well talk to me.”

“Ah fuck.” Bucci gave Shadak a despairing look. “I’ll go back inside — I’ve got to—”

Bucci’s voice trailed off. There was the sound of a car engine coming up the road. Shadak looked up.

A Ford minivan with California plates on it, its sides covered in mud, jostled along the road and pulled to a stop. It seemed to shimmer with the heat from its engine. Shapes moved inside, seat-lights flashed on and off, beyond the grime of the tinted windows.

Bucci sniffed. “Fuck,” he said, “What’s that smell?”

Shadak sniffed. It smelled like the Black Villa — inviting, comfortable…

And poison.

The side door slid open, and a young man stepped out. He looked like a surfer — all suntan and streaked blond hair. Behind him, Shadak could see others: a young woman who might have been the surfer’s girlfriend; an older guy with swept-back hair and tinted glasses that might have been the surfer’s girlfriend’s father.

“Hey,” said the surfer. “Are we too late to go to New Pokrovskoye? Man, we been driving through the night and then some.”

“We’d hate to miss out,” said the girl.

Shadak smiled his warmest come-hither smile.

“You have been talking with Babushka?”

“Whoa,” said the surfer. “How’d you know that?”

Shadak smiled again.

“I’ve been talking with her too,” he said. “I would like to talk with her again.”

The older man stepped down. “Well good luck,” he said. “We haven’t been in touch for hours.”

“She said we would see her again in New Pokrovskoye.”

“But we think we’ve missed the boat,” said the older man.

“Yeah,” said the surfer. “We’re bummed.”

“Bummed.” Shadak made a sympathetic face. “Well not to worry. It so happens that the last boat to New Pokrovskoye is due to arrive—” he looked at his watch “—in an hour or so.”

“And there’s room?” said the girl.

“Plenty,” said Shadak — and he didn’t add that if there wasn’t, well they’d make some room in the harbour. He wasn’t going to leave anybody behind in this place. And if he had his way, he wasn’t going to leave anyone in New Pokrovskoye either.

Alexei spotted the baby carriage wedged between two tall rocks on the steep slope of a valley. The carriage was a geometric marvel of dark blue steel tubes, plastic armatures and soft foam cushions, riding on four big, knobbly tires that looked purpose-built for the tricky off-road conditions of southeastern Afghanistan. The timing was wrong though — this thing had probably been manufactured in the late 1990s. Afghanistan, on the other hand, was vintage 1987. A rich black puff of oil smoke drifted across the blue sky. Small-arms fire chuffed in the distance, softening to pops and fizzes in the echoes of the rocky hills. Russians or Mujahedeen — one or the other or more likely both — were not far off.

Alexei wiped sweat off his brow as Vladimir glared up at him.

“Alexei Kilodovich! You are an idiot!” Vladimir was wearing a little blue terrycloth jumper, which offset the girlish bonnet tied over his head to keep the sun off. He clenched two tiny fists and kicked his blue-clothed feet in little circles. Alexei struggled with the carriage, and finally pulled it loose. Vladimir, faced scrunched in rage, continued talking as he went.

“I show you your history — give you a door to make it — to discover yourself. And what do you do? You walk through the fence — just as you were about to discover yourself.”

“It’s all bullshit,” said Alexei glumly. He righted the carriage, and walking backwards, pulled it jostling down to the little creek-bed at the valley’s base.

“Why do you use that term?” said Vladimir. He was in full sunlight, and tried vainly to turn away from it. “ Bull-shit . Cattle feces. Fertilizer. It means nothing.”

“That,” said Alexei, “is a good read on my meaning. This metaphor you put me in. Where’s the meaning? You can create anything with your mind — so can I — make it as convincing as flesh — and before you know it the memory and the truth and the shit start to mix.”

“How deep ,” sneered Vladimir. “Are you a philosopher, Kilodovich? Pah. I think you just have no stomach for this.”

The carriage wobbled over the jagged edge of a rock.

“It’s mental masturbation.”

“The way you approach it maybe.”

“Tell me how I should approach it then?”

“Oh, I don’t know… How about like the mystery that our lives are? A tapestry of a lie, that by unravelling you can discern the truth about yourself?”

“What a good idea,” said Alexei. As the ground grew more level, he turned the carriage around so he was pushing it. All Alexei could see was Vladimir’s tiny gesticulating hands over the carriage’s sun-shade. The diabolical baby was prattling on now about taking responsibility for life and facing up to one’s past with courage — and something about a present threat that would undo them all unless Alexei got to it, but Alexei paid him scant attention.

He found himself looking beyond the carriage, at the terrible splendour of Soviet Afghanistan. The valley they moved through was wide, and like the surface of the moon. Bomb craters had drawn radial pictures on the earth, marking trajectories of ash and sand and bone. On the far side, high cliffs thrust up in great spires like dribbling mud-crusted candles that blotted the sun. In the distance, there was a woofing sound that Alexei knew to be the noise of mortar fire. More craters on the way. He found himself smiling slightly, an unfamiliar feeling moving like feather through his middle.

He knew this valley.

He had been here before.

There had been, he started to recall, some good times here.

“You’re feeling nostalgic,” said Vladimir. “That’s what that is. It feels like you’re going to be sick. Like you’ve eaten too much ice cream. Like you’ve forgotten to bathe.”

“It’s pretty here,” said Alexei.

“It is not pretty here,” said Vladimir. “This is a great shame — a great evil.”

“You weren’t even alive,” said Alexei.

“It was a great evil.”

Alexei shrugged. He wasn’t going to get into a debate about Brezhnev-era Soviet foreign policy with a five-month-old in a baby carriage. “What are we doing here?” he asked.