Assignment - Mara Tirana Read online

  “Can you hear me, Adam?” she said.

  He could not reply.

  Adam, Adam, he thought. His name was Adam, and he was the first man, the first of his kind. The stars wheeled and plunged around him. He drowned in emptiness. Everything had gone wrong, and he was afraid and alone with his fear, more alone than that first Adam, he thought, because that one had his Garden, and then Lilith, and then Eve. But he had nothing but the thin shell of an egg to protect him from the violence of the plunging, arching stars.

  “He cannot hear me, Jamak,” the old woman said.

  “I think he does,” a man said.

  “Is he going to die?”

  “He will die, or not die, as it will happen, Jelenka. We may all die with him."

  “Are you afraid, too, Jamak?”

  “We will know better,” said the man’s voice, “when Lissa returns.”

  Adam floated away, almost drowning, in a sea of pain. In his dream he saw the earth fall dizzyingly from him, to become a giant orb that drifted in sweet green mist against all his horizon. Exaltation filled him like a mystic rapture. Everything had started off so well. He was not afraid to be alone up there. He had been chosen from among so many; he would succeed where others had tried and failed and died.

  He would live. He wanted desperately to live.

  He had been given the best training; he was picked for his natural aptitudes, psychological presence, technical background, physical fitness. He, after the others, would not fail.

  And then the dream began.

  The old woman hovered over him like some old crone out of a medieval tale. He heard her voice from a far distance.

  “Help is coming, boy,” she said. “We have sent for help. Lissa will be here, and you must stay alive until she comes. But it is difficult. Can you hear me?”

  She spoke in the Slavic tongue of his grandmother that rang dim, faraway bells in the corridors of his memory. He did not reply. He dreamed.

  He began to fall again, but this Adam’s fall was not like the fall of that other, that first man in his Eden. This was a bestial primordial terror, this sensation of falling that was universal to all the children of man. He laughed to himself. The apeman fell from his high, leafy bough, and afterward his children were haunted by the nightmare. And he, this Adam, had fallen from the stars.

  He awoke and dreamed and awoke again. He was not sure how many times this happened. Past and present were confused in those hours. He knew he had crashed, and he remembered being carried by the old man, Jamak, to this stone hut in the mountains. But he kept passing out, falling into the dream again. He remembered one time when the old woman called his name.

  “Adam?” she had said. “Adam?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Ah. Ah. You can hear me?”

  “Yes, old woman.” His voice echoed and rang among the stars.

  “You have pain, I know, but we cannot help you with it. We have no medicine, but we have sent for Lissa. If the pain is very bad, we can get a doctor. But if we call a doctor, the police will know. Do you understand?”

  “No doctor,” he said. “Have you told anyone else about me?”

  “No. Then you know where you are?”

  He waited, and the old woman told him, and he knew he was a long way from safety. All the calculations for his orbit had reckoned on his landing where his information could be rushed back to Washington. But if he were found here, anything could happen, and everything he had suffered would be wasted.

  “We have sent for help from your own people,” the old woman said. “My Gija has gone for help, and surely someone will come soon and help you to escape from this country. Are you listening? Can you open your eyes?”

  He kept his eyes shut. “I hear you.”

  “It has been two days since you came to us. We sent Gija away at once. It will not be long now. Your friends will come and slip you away from here and it will be done in secret. It must be secret, or you know what will happen.”

  “I thank you, old woman,” he said.

  He wondered if his leg was broken. It felt hot and swollen. There was no such thing as penicillin in these silent, looming mountains where he had fallen from the stars. He could not move. Perhaps his back was broken, too. Something seemed wrong with his spine. No matter. A man died, one way or another. You fall from the stars, from life itself, into a black, dead net of the past.

  They meant to be kind, the old man, Jamak, and the old woman, Jelenka, in their stone hut in the mountains, with their pigs and two cows and the silent, wild Balkan gorges and tall pines all around. He thought the Turks had denuded all the forests during their long hegemony over this part of the world. But forests grow up again, Adam thought. The earth is always renewed after man’s devastation. But not he. He would never be whole again.

  He slept, and the dream went on.

  The rapture of the stars ended when the tumbling and the falling began. He rode in silence, the thundering trail of flame long dead behind him. Then the stars began to reel as if the entire universe had suddenly gone drunk or mad. He did not know what went wrong. Everything had been so precisely calculated and adjusted. The tumbling of the capsule that held him like an embryo in an egg could not be controlled. And then he fell.

  The air jets that were supposed to control such an emergency did not work. He pushed and pulled at the levers as he lay on his cushioned back, and through the periscope he saw the stars reel, he saw the vast floating globe of the green earth fill the universe and stagger away. He knew only panic. All the training of the arduous months behind him meant nothing, because he was going to die.

  The electronic tapes whirred, clicked and chuckled. Geiger counters recorded radiation, sensitive plates noted the impact of meteoric dust, and the cameras hummed. He was trapped in a steel cocoon, a mechanism designed to kill him.

  The tumbling could not be ended. The erratic orbit had begun when the monster Atlas rocket, with its second-stage Thor-Able, failed in one of its hundreds of thousands of components, somewhere on the roaring, fiery way up from Canaveral. All the ingenuity of man that had gotten him up here among the stars was useless now.

  When the retro-rockets began firing, he knew it was too soon, off schedule. Only twenty orbits had been completed of a planned pattern of twenty-six.

  He wondered what announcements were being made on earth. Perhaps the whole teeming, hungry-complacent, angry-peaceful, man-woman, rich-poor millions on earth were watching, hushed and curious and awed, resentful or jealous, as he staggered through his starry path around home.

  He wept, and his tears were trapped inside the globe of his helmet. He did not know what was wrong with him. He knew about the rapture of the deep, that deadly euphoria suffered by skin-divers who went down into the sea too far. Perhaps space had a similar effect on the emotions. He did not think about it too clearly.

  Later, when the capsule hit the atmosphere for reentry, his memory became jumbled. He felt the jolts of the retro-rockets, knew the outer skin peeled off in a temperature of twelve hundred degrees, and felt the heat rise in the capsule. But this, at least, was securely planned. The air-conditioning functioned smoothly. The tumbling went on until the first series of parachutes opened and cut the rate of descent a trifle, tore free, and another series bloomed. He could see none of this. He had no idea where he was landing. Radar, and the automatic tracking signals, ought to help him. Even if he landed in the sea, the capsule would float long enough—he hoped—for someone to find him and pick him up.

  But this, too, did not go as planned. The capsule struck a mountainside at night—he did not know where—and then slid off a cliff and rolled and crashed down several hundred more feet. Only the crash padding saved him. As it was, the straps finally burst and he was aware of a vast gush of pain in his back and his legs, and then it was all blotted out.

  His first clear memory afterward was of the hut.

  The hut was small and crudely built, with a dirt floor and a Russian-style tiled stove
that gave off a welcome heat in the chill mountain night. The only light was the light of the moon that came through two small windows. Adam lay still and listened and looked. On that first awakening, fortunately, the pain was slow in coming.

  His first reaction was one of enormous gratitude that he had come down alive. But that was before he realized that his legs were wounded and wondered if he was paralyzed with a broken back.

  The hut was no more than twenty by fifteen feet. There was an ikon in one comer, and he thought he might be in Russia, and then he saw a poster tacked to the wall and the language was in the Cyrillic script of Rumania. The man’s face on the poster was that of a politician who, Adam vaguely remembered, had been executed for rightist deviationism in Bucharest about two years ago.

  He put the pieces together slowly.

  His capsule had come down somewhere in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, well behind the Iron Curtain. He was certainly not in a city, nor anywhere near a city, to judge by the lack of electric power and rudimentary facilities in the cabin. Most of the furniture, the crude chairs and huge bed, was hand-made.

  Two people slept in the bed across the room from his pallet, making small noises.

  “Hello,” Adam had called softly.

  The burly old man awoke at once; the woman was a little slower. She said something in a querulous voice, and the. old man hushed her and spoke to her in that curious, half-forgotten tongue that Adam remembered from his grandmother’s house in Pittsburgh.

  Then the old man came to him and said in English: “You are awake, American? That is good. Very good. How do you feel?”

  “What place is this?” Adam whispered.

  “We are forty miles from the Danube. The nearest village is called Viajec.”

  “Did you pull me out?”

  “Yes. There was a terrible storm. Are you able to eat?” “I don’t feel anything,” Adam said.

  “Can you sit up?”

  “Sure,” Adam said.

  But when he tried, nothing happened, except the pain that came, and he fainted.

  When he awoke the second time, he had a fever, like a slow-burning fire inside him. There was sunlight in the hut now, and he could see the old man clearly. The old woman was not in sight.

  He stared at the political poster on the wall. Giurgiu Zarije, a former foreign minister. The poster was several years old. The man. portrayed in it looked strong, young and handsome. Adam wished he could remember the details of the man’s execution.

  “You know who that is?” the old man said.

  “I’ve read about him in the newspapers,” Adam said. “He was my son. He is dead.” The old man had a large round head, with grizzled gray hair and a shaggy moustache stained yellow with tobacco. His hands were gnarled like twisted knots of oak, and they shook slightly as he adjusted the ragged blanket with a strange gentleness around Adam’s body. “You wonder where I learned to speak American?”

  “Where was. that?” Adam asked. He felt as if he were drifting away somewhere. He could hear chickens clucking outside, but he could not see more than a dim clearing and a distant mountainside clothed in autumn foliage, beyond the open doorway of the hut. “You speak English well.”

  “I lived in America, didn’t I tell you? I worked in the steel mills. I took my wife and two sons there. Giurgiu was young then. He always wanted to come back. After the war, he did so, and went into politics. He was always radical. He thought he could build a new life for all of us here.” The old man sighed. “So they shot him.”

  “He brought you back when he was successful, before they accused him?”

  “Yes. All of us. He was very proud of himself then.” “You say you had two sons.”

  “Gija is the younger—a pilot on the Danube barges. He is not here.” The old man spoke shortly. “I sent him to get help for you, from the West. But have no alarm. No one knows about you on Zara Dagh.”

  “How long is it—?”

  “Two days, Major. You are safe here.”

  “But the radio in the capsule—”

  “It was destroyed. They could not trace it. No one has eome. They would have been here by now. If they know you came down in the mountains, they still do not know where, in this wilderness. No, you are safe enough, for now.” “The cameras and instruments—it’s important to get them back home. Otherwise. . . Adam paused and thought of his life and his terrors. . . otherwise, it was all for nothing.”

  “I understand,” the old man said gently.

  “And a doctor? I need a doctor.”

  “There are none who are safe.”

  “What's wrong with my leg?”

  “It is infected. It will heal or not, as God wills. Gija will come back in a few days. He will bring someone from your country, one of your people. It is the only way I could think of. If your friends come to take you out, all may still be well for you.”

  Adam looked around the stone hut.

  “They may not come for me,” he said quietly.

  “You are important to them, are you not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”

  He slept again, and was awakened to eat hot soup, and threw it up. His fever was worse. It brought him nightmares and strange memories. He woke up crying someone’s name. He shivered under the thin blankets. It was night again, and the old woman, Jelenka, came to the bedside and crooned to him, but he could not understand her words now. She had dark brown eyes that filled with tragedy and tenderness when she looked down at him, and somehow this frightened him.

  “Poor boy,” she said. “Poor boy.”

  “I was dreaming of Deirdre,” he said.

  “A girl?”

  “Yes. My girl.”

  “You will see her again. My daughter, Lissa, is here. She brought some medicine for you.”

  He heard a movement in the hut and then saw the girl. She had been standing in the shadows, motionless, tall and slim and dark. It must be cold out now, he thought, because she wore a scarf over her dark red hair and kept her thin coat buttoned to her throat. She had the dark brown eyes of her mother, but they reflected neither the tenderness nor the aged, wise compassion of the old woman. She looked at him coldly, with no emotion.

  “I have brought you penicillin, Major,” she said in a flat voice.

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  “It should help you.” She spoke English easily, with an American accent, and he guessed she had been born there. “But do you know how dangerous it is for us to ask for penicillin?”

  “I can imagine. I’m grateful.”

  “You cannot imagine. You are an American, and you do not know the meaning of life as it is lived here. But I brought it for you, anyway. Each tablet is one hundred thousand units. You will take two, every four hours. It will stop the infection in your leg.”

  “Is it broken?”

  “I think not. Your back muscles are only terribly strained. You will be well again.”

  She gave him the tablets and a tumbler of water. She looked down at him with cold brown eyes that seemed to be looking at someone else. Her mouth was a little too wide to be beautiful, but her dark red hair caught and held the gleam of light from the oil lantern. Behind her, Jamak stood beside his wife, and the old people looked exhausted and gray, like the shadows and the stones that made up the hut.

  Adam saw that the old man’s hands shook worse than before. “Lissa, where did you get the medicine?” Jamak asked. “I got it, I got it,” she said impatiently. “Is that enough?”

  “Were you careful?”

  “One cannot be careful asking for this sort of thing.” The girl spoke crisply. “I told Stana the Gypsy I needed it, and she got it from Medjan. I said it was for you, Jamak.” The old woman moaned. “You went to Petar Median?”

  “Who else? The Turk wants me.”

  “Did you promise—?”

  The girl’s face was cold with contempt. “What promises I made were with my lips, not my heart.”


  “Medjan will be angry. He is a lieutenant of the police, he will demand—”

  “He will demand, but he will get nothing except a knife.”

  “Lissa, Lissa—” the old woman moaned.

  “Be quiet. It is done. It was the only way.”

  “Will he stay away?”

  “Of course. I will not stay here on Zara Dagh. I will go back to Viajec. Why should he come here, if I am at the village, so close to his police station?” The girl walked back to where Adam lay and looked down at him. She spoke coolly. “How do you feel now, Major?”

  “Not good. I don’t like to have put you all in danger.”

  “We always live in danger. A little more, a little less. . ."

  “Don’t be angry with me,” Adam said.

  “I am officially a nurse in the village. Do you understand that? These old people are my parents. And Gija, who has gone to tell your countrymen where you are, Gija is my brother. We live on the edge of a very sharp knife here.”

  “You were bom in America, weren’t you? And you came back when your older brother Giurgiu sent for the whole family?”

  She shrugged. “Why not? He was a big politician here. I was only a child, anyway. I had no choice. And life brings unpleasant surprises. For Giurgiu, it was a firing squad, because he got too big and too careless in his position. And he left us all stranded here, in these mountains, treated like pariahs because we were his family.” Her words were bitter. The warmth that flashed in her eyes was that of anger. “Now you come here and Gija, the wild one, has rushed away like a boy playing a game, to go to the West for your friends.” “Lissa, what can I do?”

  “If you had died, it would be easier for all of us.” “Is the danger for you very great?”

  “Zara Dagh is a wild and lonely place. But I could get a doctor for you. And call the police. This man, Medjan, is from the police. He wants to marry me. My job in the village of Viajec is to be district nurse for the peasants. I am twenty-four years old, and because I am not married yet, the people say I am an old maid, sour and bitter, full of crazy American ideas. Do I look like an old maid to you, Major?”