Bowling With the President of the United States of America — A Short Story
It was well past eleven at night — twenty-three, actually, since the Party had declared twelve-hour time illegal three years prior. Something about railways. Every citizen of the great nation of Shcarstan had, ostensibly, received a letter demanding they give up each piece which reported in twelve-hour time and receive, in its stead, a Party-approved replacement.
In the lamplight of the guest house’s dining room, both Arshakon and Grigoryan’s own tin-and-glass wristwatches gleamed on their arms, neighbors to cheap and worn linen suits, to heirloom silverware, and to cups of the bitterest espresso Grigoryan had ever tasted.
Like the over-extracted nonsense in his cup, like the flimsy timepiece on his wrist, Grigoryan was an ugly, unpleasant fellow who nevertheless got the job done. This was his own perception of himself. He reckoned that was the best you could expect from an agent of the Party.
Arshakon, by contrast, stood out from Grigoryan with a freshness describing a man too young to have achieved Fourth Clerk under the current regime. Grigoryan was old enough. He had fought in the civil war when he was twenty. Arshakon did not have the look in his eyes of a man who had seen those days.
The two men had met for the first time on the day they began their assignment, two Fourth Clerks standing in the unheated office of the Minister of Demographical Accounting. The Minister tasked them with designing a ballot for the upcoming election. “It must communicate to the common people the import of their decision,” the Minister said. “They must look at this slip of paper and think ‘Ah! I, alongside my neighbors, will decide who the prime minister will be! Through my action, we move from dictatorship to glorious freedom!’”
Arshakon and Grigoryan had traveled through fourteen provinces of Shcarstan before arriving at this, the fifteenth and final province, which had a name none of the locals knew. In each province, the clerks interviewed mayors, dairy maids, tax collectors, and goatherds, asking the things they would like to see on a ballot.
The clerks had returned three drafts of their project to the winter-frozen office of the Minister of Demographical Accounting. They had, in fact, only sent the most recent draft four days prior.
The work was disheartening. After a six-hour wagon trek up a mountainside, Arshakon and Grigoryan had arrived at this forsaken township only a half hour previously. A room had been prepared ahead for them through the erratic network of telegraphs and foot runners which the province used, having not yet obeyed the Party’s four-year-old command to install a telephone system stretching across Shcarstan from village to town. It was a ridiculous concept, one that would never be completed, one that might never be given a thought after its initial conception in the capital.
Much like this worthless project, Grigoryan thought. He and Arshakon now sat on the same bench at the rough, almost-square dining table in the village’s guest house. The housekeeper, a young woman none too happy that her guests had arrived three hours past due, bustled about them, gathering things from the room that served likewise as a kitchen. The table had been set for hours, but the clerks had pushed aside the housekeeper’s preparation to make room for their papers, and so with a thin grimace of irritation the housekeeper did her best to find places for pickles, cold chicken, and black bread.
“Damn woman,” Arshakon muttered as a splash of brine ran close to one of the dim papers. He scrubbed at the wet spot on the table with a threadbare shirtsleeve before replacing the sheet, a sample of eight distinct styles of calligraphy, none of which had proved popular with as many as half of the provincial clerks they had queried. “I jump every time she comes up from behind. Can’t she walk around like a normal person?”
Grigoryan liked the close bustle of the guest house. It was a two-room affair comprising the kitchen-cum-dining room they now occupied — a room plastered with cupboards and rafters and smoke-stained wallpaper — and a sleeping room connected to the kitchen with a door ajar. The place reminded Grigoryan of the house his father had built, which had seemed so large when Grigoryan had been young.
Arshakon picked up a piece of chicken and gnawed at it. “Damn it all,” he cursed. The man seemed to Grigoryan to lack focus. Every few days, Arshakon’s attention veered from one component of the ballot to another. Each time, he abandoned the fascination he had held with whatever line of instruction or design flair and gave himself wholly to the new.
Grigoryan found these fascinations pointless. He was of a mind that little mattered to the function of the thing. All the Shcarstani peasants and oligarchs could write their candidates on a bit of foolscap and send it in, and the result would be no different.
He left aside the probability that nothing would come of the ballot, that it would be another of the Party’s plans proclaimed in the capital for the benefit of the curated central broadsheets, and then never touched again.
On a shelf over the kitchen’s little stove, the clock struck twelve.
Arshakon threw his chicken bone at the clock. The housekeeper, who was on the other side of the room and rummaging through a cupboard for something, didn’t seem to notice. “So close to the end,” said Arshakon, “but still no closer to resolving the central issue.” He jabbed a finger at their current draft. “A ranked list gives us nuance, Grigori. I don’t know why that’s so hard for you to see.”
Grigoryan sighed. In the middle of the paper, bordered by elegant lines, the stallion crest of the Party, and several paragraphs of the legal text whose exact language had inspired much debate between Arshakon and Grigoryan, was a void. Within that void, they would need to set down lines for the names of candidates and boxes for their faces.
That latter element had been a hopeless concession on Grigoryan’s part. Arshakon was adamant that the peasants craved a personal connection to their candidates, that they would feel wonder and joy at seeing the faces of the men who were candidates for leader of their nation.
As few peasants could read, and local clerks would facilitate the ballot, Grigoryan thought this was a tacky waste of ink, but cared too little of it to argue.
This was different. “Nuance isn’t what we want,” he said tiredly. He had said the same in, well, a few more nuanced ways on the journey up the mountain, but was too fatigued for anything but directness now. Arshakon did not take kindly to direct disagreements, but with every passing moment Grigoryan cared less about that. “Imagine all the men in a village lined up in front of some poor clerk’s desk, asking to hear that list for the sixteenth time because he can’t decide whether Davros Martinosya or Mikaiel Demirdjyan belongs in slot twelve.
“Now imagine him asking again because he doesn’t know if maybe the winner of that contest may in fact deserve slot eleven instead. Now imagine he is only the third man to vote today, and it is almost time for lunch.”
Arshakon snorted. “This is an obscene enough undertaking, Grigori! All the men of the country voting on a new leader, from the poorest to the richest! A social triumph! What are a few more hours when the victor will serve his people for the rest of his life? This is…”
Despite the espresso, Grigoryan’s mind wandered. He was exhausted with the constant argument, fatigued in body and mind alike. Arshakon did not understand, and nothing Grigoryan could say would change that. Arshakon had not seen, as Grigoryan had, the way the ideals of brilliant men disintegrated when met by the wall of ordinary banality.
All the philosophers and the poets together will find themselves hard-pressed to keep a man from his work for a day. The earth needs tending; the animals need watering. The less a prime minister asks a man away from these things, the better his chances of success.
Unless there comes, across the telegraphs and highways where no wire crosses, the call to war. Men make a special exception for that.
Arshakon had not noticed Grigoryan’s absent mind. His soliloquy swept across the table like tobacco smoke, and Grigoryan ignored man and papers as he began assembling a plate of food.
The door to the sleeping room opened.
Grigoryan sat up with a start, hand moving into his coat to the Nagant revolver which every Party agent carried.
Seeing this, Arshakon cut off in mid-sentence, drawing his own weapon and staring at the emergent figure. “I thought the room was ours,” he muttered to Grigoryan.
As the figure resolved in lamplight, neither clerk lowered their weapons, for the man was a bizarre sight. A little shorter than two meters, he wore a suit of the Italian style that had been in fashion in the capitol perhaps five years ago. The material was worn in places, patched in others, a shape even worse than that of the Party suits which the clerks wore.
The man’s shoes were likewise of Italian leather, but well-kept, gleaming with oil and free of scuffs. A narrow blue necktie dragged down from the man’s collar to below his belt, and tufts of hair — not a full beard — sprouted from his face and above his crooked ears. His feet and shoulders and hands were gangly and enormous, and from his left hand dangled a red, white, and blue-striped canvas bag holding something that looked about the size of a man’s head.
The housekeeper started at the man’s appearance and rushed to the door of the sleeping room. “Oh, Mr. Kruny! I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you we would be serving other guests tonight… Please don’t bother them, they’re very important people from the Party…”
The man, Kruny, looked past the housekeeper’s shoulder and stared at Arshakon. “I heard you talking about voting,” he said. “That’s what folks use for elections, right?”
They use voting? What an odd turn of phrase. Grigoryan glanced toward the housekeeper. “Mistress, we thought we had the room to ourselves.”
She turned to face the clerks, and her mouth dropped open. “To yourselves? I’m terribly sorry, sir. The message said nothing about that. I saved two beds as you reserved, but, no disrespect, sir, you didn’t pay for the other eight. If you’d like, you can reserve the others and I’ll turn away anyone else tomorrow, but you’ll need to sort it out with Mr. Kruny if you want his. He’s been here for the last four years, and…” her voice trailed off as neither clerk changed expression. She turned back to the suited man. “Mr. Kruny, I’d be more than happy to let you stay with my husband and I as long as these gentlemen are here, no charge — ”
Arshakon set his revolver on the table with a clatter. “Don’t worry about it, miss. We have nothing to hide.” His eyes gleamed. “Come on, friend. Sit down and join us for dinner. You seem like a man with strong opinions about elections.”
Grigoryan pivoted toward his companion, who, Grigoryan noted, had not put the Nagant away. Grigoryan lowered his own below the lip of the table, resting it upon his knee, out of sight.
“I ate,” said Kruny, “but I would like some ex-presso.” He sat opposite the clerks, setting his bag onto the seat beside him. “So you said you were doing voting. Is the Party fixing to have a president, like in America?”
“Like in America” was a very dangerous phrase. Though they had encountered no trouble from pro-Western rabble-rousers during the bulk of their trip, Grigoryan wondered if their luck had finally run out, if a dozen swarthy revolutionaries were squatting in the sleeping room.
“No,” said Arshakon. “Not like in America. They are a corrupt and hedonistic people. You know, they kill — ”
“Yeah yeah, they kill the negroes,” Kruny interjected. “Folks say that all the time but it isn’t really true you know.”
Arshakon’s cheekbones reddened. He was not used to being interrupted, let alone contradicted.
“I visited there once,” Kruny said in an eager voice. “I saw New York City, and no one was killing the negroes. It was a beautiful place. I met the President of the United States, and he gave me this.”
With a jerk, Kruny grabbed the bag and slammed it onto the countertop, rattling plates and cutlery. Arshakon and Grigoryan leaped to their feet, revolvers pointed at Kruny’s chest, but he seemed to ignore them.
Grigoryan’s nerves sung. His hands trembled.
His thoughts trailed off as he saw the object, which was large even in Kruny’s spade-like hands.
It was a glossy, blue-black orb like a polished gem. Three thumb-wide holes dug into it about six centimeters apart from each other. Kruny stroked it like a favorite dog. “It’s a ten-pin bowling ball,” he said, smiling down upon it. “I played all day at the American Bowling Congress building in New York City. It was the best day I’ve ever had.”
For three heart-pounding seconds, silence reigned. No thugs burst from the sleeping room, no shots rang through the kitchen, no poison gas emanated from the largest bowling ball Grigoryan had ever seen.
Behind Kruny, at the back of the room, the housekeeper’s eyes gleamed wide and dark. She had dropped a dish with butter upon it, but despite the waste stared only at the oiled revolvers pointing toward her.
Grigoryan felt a twinge of guilt.
Though his companion remained standing, Grigoryan sighed, holstered his revolver, and took his seat again. “It’s a beautiful ball,” he said. “I played bowling when I was a little boy, though I seem to remember the ball being quite a bit smaller. And… I’m sorry, sir, did you say the President of the United States gave it to you?”
“On account of I beat him best two out of three,” said Kruny, eyes still fixed on his treasure.
“I see,” said Grigoryan. “Well. Please forgive my friend. What he meant was we are electing a prime minister, not a president. He will serve the people for life, giving him the time to effectively act, unlike the American presidents who are limited by their laws to only a few years in office, which prevents anything of importance from being accomplished. My friend and I have a job to design the ballot for this election.”
“A ballot?”
“It’s the paper people will write the names of their chosen candidate on. We were talking about whether a person should write just one name, or rank every candidate from their favorite to least favorite.” He shot a glance to the still-alert Arshakon. “For more nuance.”
“I see,” said Kruny. He looked back up, though he kept his hands on the bowling ball. “A candidate is one of the people we’re voting for?”
“Yes.”
“Who are all of them?”
“I don’t know,” said Grigoryan. “You’ll find out when the ballots are sent around.” He hesitated. “Sir, I’m afraid my friend won’t sit down until you explain why you were standing around at midnight wearing a suit, and why you seem to live in a guest house. Do you have no home in this village, no people anywhere else? Where do you get the money to afford this?”
Kruny’s eyebrows knitted. “I always wear this,” he said. “I have three suits from a tailor in New York City when I visited it. I put on a new suit in the morning and wash my old one. When I was in New York City, I heard a man speak about wearing the clothes for the job you want every day and every night, and he was the richest man in the world, so it worked for him.”
“I… see. Well, what is your job now, and what is the one you want?”
Kruny ducked his chin. “Well, I haven’t really worked for a while now, I guess.”
By this time, the housekeeper had made her way to the other side of the room, and she was humming a frantic tune as though trying to avoid hearing the conversation.
Arshakon twisted his head and shot her a glare before sitting back down, though he kept his revolver up. “You don’t work? That takes some real guts to admit to a couple of Party boys, friend. You know we don’t look fondly upon those who live on charity.”
“No, no, no!” Kruny lifted both hands in a placating gesture, but clapped them back upon the ball as it rolled toward his lap. “I, uh, it’s inheritance. My father was a business man in America, that’s why I went to visit his lawyer after he died and get the money he left me. It was all in gold and I’ve been using it to pay for everything here, I’m not living on anyone’s charity!”
Grigoryan put his face in his hands, sighing. How had someone like this survived so long, someone so eager to approach Party agents with fond recollections of America and open admission of not only connection to but inheritance from a wealthy capitalist?
“You are aware,” Grigoryan said, unable to keep the fatigue from his voice, “that the Party made the reservation of inherited money beyond one hundred rubles a serious crime with prison time attached?”
“Well…” Kruny shrunk in his seat. “I spent most of it in New York City. Things don’t cost very much here. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
Blood thumped in Grigoryan’s head. Beside him, Arshakon was fairly licking his chops. He seemed to be drinking in every word of Kruny’s admission, as though drawing up arrest documents in his head. “Well,” Grigoryan said at last, “Kruny, if you have no job, what do you do all day?”
“Oh,” he said, “I have the job I have always wanted since I was in New York City when I visited America. There was an old building which no one was using, and so I bought it with some of my inheritance. I am the manager and commissioner of the Shcarstan Bowling Council!” He sat back proudly.
No one spoke for a long time. The housekeeper, her face bloodless and her lips a thin line, began clearing the table of the largely untouched food.
With a condescending snort, Arshakon began shuffling papers together. “I am happy,” he said lightly, “that you seem to have found more joy and purpose in your life than most men I have met. Recently, I have been asking those men their opinions of what they would like to see on this electoral ballot. It is a tool to empower the people, and so the people’s opinion is paramount.”
Kruny nodded. “The mountain is a beautiful place to live,” he said.
Arshakon ignored him. “It is clear that your experience with America, though clouded by the glamor of capitalism’s facades, has nonetheless instilled within you a fondness for the ideas of freedom and liberty. Would you agree?”
Grigoryan did not know whether Arshakon was trying to trap the man or to give him another chance. He wished for a cigarette.
Kruny opened his mouth and then closed it before answering. “I just want to say I’m very grateful you all are working hard at this. Can you tell the other people at the Party that I said thank you?”
Arshakon pushed forward. “Kruny, friend, do you know other people as interested as you in liberty? We’d be grateful if you would help us talk with the people of your village. As we are with the Party, some people have difficulty trusting us, difficulty opening up and sharing with us what they really feel. And what they feel is what we are here to find out. Friend, will you help us with this tomorrow?”
Kruny bobbed his head. “I would be honored. I’ll introduce you all to the people in the Shcarstan Bowling Council. They’re good folks, smart guys who love freedom and bowling as much as I do. Maybe you could even play a couple games with us.”
Grigoryan forced a smile.
Within a quarter hour, the three men lay in the dark of the sleeping room. Their beds were straw mattresses upon wooden frames. They were some of the nicest accommodations Grigoryan had known over the course of their trip.
He and Arshakon took turns lying awake, pistols across their chests, as Kruny snored on the other side of the room.
The next day, the men woke at about six and went about the work of washing, shaving, and breakfast. As he had described, Kruny scrubbed the suit he had slept in as well as his own body in the metal tub which the housekeeper prepared for her guests in the kitchen’s corner, and then dressed himself in another, similarly weathered Italian suit of a greener cloth which he had kept folded underneath his bed.
After morning preparations, Kruny led the clerks outside. Most of the households in the village kept goats, and a bead-eyed boy in a blue cap led a herd of these sinewy creatures down the village road as the men exited, their snake eyes rolling and nostrils spewing steam in the cold mountain air.
“Your friends are ready to meet right now?” Grigoryan asked, looking around at the stonewall dwellings they passed on their walk. “They are not at work?”
“Perhaps,” said Arshakon, “they also all went to America and inherited money from their rich fathers and now do nothing all day. One wonders what good money is in a village where no man produces value by his labor.”
“Oh, no!” said Kruny. “All of them are good, hard workers. Just all members of the Shcarstan Bowling Council meet in the morning before we go to work to have a good game and get our spirits up for the day.”
“Hmm,” said Grigoryan. “Kruny, that may be the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. My friend and I’ve been going all around the country over the past few weeks, and I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a bunch of people sitting around in the morning playing games instead of getting to work.”
“Folks do things different here,” said Kruny. “At least the SBC does. Maybe it’s why we’re so happy. I’m just trying to make people happy. There were a lot of happy people in New York City when I visited America, sir. Folks in this country don’t seem like it so much, and I just want to change that.”
They passed from the road down a forest path that had perhaps once been a goat trail but was now trampled by heavy work boots. Arshakon and Grigoryan wore the standard-issue Party boots of rubber and cheap stuffing, and while they kept the rain out on wet days, the things were terrible at trail walking. Grigoryan would have given much for the stocky boots he had once worn in the army, which at Party command had been replaced with the current pair.
For his part, Kruny fairly danced over bramble and stone in his loafers, heavy ball swinging in its bag like a book in a schoolboy’s hand. The boot prints certainly belonged to the friends they were to meet, the goatherds and farmers of the village.
They came upon a wide clearing in the forest. The somber pines rose darkly above the promised barn like judgmental sentinels. In every way, the building was out of place: Wooden while the village was stone, isolated from the people who ostensibly used it in times past, and not big enough — maybe ten by twenty meters — to house all the goats of a village.
Light diffused from behind oilclothed windows. The sun had risen before the men had set out, but tree shade darkened the clearing. Without the sunlight, the mountain air bit into Grigoryan’s bones. He drew his army-issue coat more closely around himself as they approached the barn’s entrance. At least the Party had not yet gotten it into their heads to take his coat.
Arshakon and Grigoryan stood behind Kruny as the man fiddled with the crooked door’s latch. Grigoryan held their bundle of draft papers under one arm, the other shoved deep into a fleece-lined pocket. Arshakon’s hand was instead thrust into the opening of his own wool coat, no doubt clutching the revolver there.
“What are you expecting?” Grigoryan muttered. “Surely you don’t still think this is some elaborate plan to assassinate us.”
“I don’t know,” said Arshakon. “But I don’t care to be surprised.”
The door opened, and Kruny stepped inside. “Morning, morning!” he bellowed, swaying under the influence of his bowling ball as he stepped up onto the raised floor of the barn. “Everyone, please welcome these folks. They’ve traveled a long way to come here and talk with us about freedom and liberty…”
Grigoryan stepped behind Kruny, heard Arshakon enter behind him, and was met by the overwhelming bite of raw pine.
Most of the floor, at least eighty percent of it, had been transformed into a smooth set of parallel lanes separated by small metal rails. At the end of each lane was a neat triangle of what looked more like white-painted belaying pins than the candlestick-shaped things he had seen otherwise used for bowling.
Before each lane in what appeared to be a dimple in the floor rested a polished wooden ball of about the same size as the thing Kruny lovingly carried. Every three meters along each wall was a window, and before it, a lit candle in an iron fixture.
Occupying the remaining bit of the barn, just beyond the door, seven men sat around a warped, peeling table which seemed to be the only thing which belonged in the outwardly neglected building.
These men turned to look at Kruny and the clerks, mouths agape, eyes narrowed, breath puffing in a communal cloud between them. They were rough men, and there was desperation in their eyes. Papers littered the table in their midst. Most of these men were young, perhaps in their twenties, but in one man’s eyes Grigoryan recognized a familiar haunting, that of a man who had known the war.
This was no moment of community, no joyful gathering of comrades before a day of work. These men were restless, dangerous. Revolutionary.
They bolted upright, the veteran shouting “Damn you, Kruny!” His voice warbled, covering the sounds of a few others drawing firearms.
Grigoryan moved without thinking. He turned and slapped the revolver from Arshakon’s hand, prompting a “You damn traitor!” before dropping the parcel of papers, falling to his knees, and putting his hands behind his head.
Arshakon scrambled for his weapon but the men were already upon them, two striking the clerk savagely about the face while another tied Grigoryan’s hands behind his back and then hauled him up.
All the while Kruny was weeping, mewling out “No, stop, these are good folks, they’re my guests, they’re just here to talk with us…”
In a minute the two clerks had been frisked and tied to rickety chairs shoved up against the table. The village men argued in one of the bowling lanes, leaving only the veteran to guard the clerks and Kruny mumbling to himself all alone, clutching his bag and staring down at the toes of his Italian leather shoes.
Grigoryan looked into the old man’s eyes. His coat was of the Protectorate style, putting him on the same side as Grigoryan during the war. Grigoryan ignored Arshakon’s dazed moaning, and looked down at the papers which the villagers had been reading.
They were plans to escape, to go to America. There was murder involved, and much treason, but these were no revolutionaries. Grigoryan looked back up to his guard. “Kruny was not lying,” he said in as even a tone as he could muster. “We came here to talk with the people of your village, not to seek dissidents and punish them. We are no police, adjustors, or tax collectors.”
“Of course he wasn’t lying,” said the man in a reedy voice. “Kruny is too stupid to be anything but earnest.”
“Then why do you keep him around sensitive things such as this?”
The man gave Grigoryan a tired look. “We’re a few people on top of a mountain. No one cares about us up here. That is our security.” He ran his gaze from the battered Arshakon back to Grigoryan. “But… I believe you, that you didn’t come here looking for us. Even the Party wouldn’t send two men atop a mountain to prevent a few men from seeking their freedom.”
“You’re wrong,” said Grigoryan. “A thousand times over. Yet, that is not why we are here. My companion and I are truly on a mission of freedom and liberty. Kruny can tell you about it.”
“Or you could.”
“I think he is more excited about it than I am,” said Grigoryan.
The man grunted. He had in his hands the bundle of papers which Grigoryan had taken along, but it remained unopened. “And in here, what will I find? No warrant for my arrest, I presume?”
“The Party doesn’t bother with such things,” said Grigoryan. “A waste of paper when they could be asking men to turn in their watches and boots instead.”
His captor grimaced at this. He drew an antler-handled knife from his belt and cut the string securing the bundle. The man laid out all Arshakon’s careful work, and those bits which Grigoryan had at times been permitted to help with, directly on top of the shipping charts, diagrams, and translations of English phrases into their own tongue.
“Kruny,” said the veteran. “Come here and explain these things to me.”
At the mention of his name, Kruny stopped his blubbering. He ran a hand through the greasy tufts above his ears, looking with swollen eyes toward the table. “We won’t hurt them anymore,” he muttered as he waddled up to Arshakon, looking at the man’s broken nose. “These folks are my guests, and we won’t hurt them anymore.”
“That man had a gun. He’ll be fine. No one will hurt him again.”
Three half-lies. Grigoryan’s heart beat more heavily.
Kruny looked down at the papers. “They just wanted to ask us about election,” he said. “The people at the Party are fixing to elect a president.”
“Prime minister,” said Grigoryan automatically. “We’ve gone through every province, giving overview and receiving feedback. This province was our last stop.”
Their guard exhaled a long breath. The hairs of his mustache trembled. “The Party is letting us choose our ruler? What does that even mean for goatherds living on a mountain who never see a Party officer once in five years?”
Grigoryan grasped for an answer. He thought there must be one, somewhere, that would reach this man. They shared an understanding of the sort of world that asked brothers and neighbors to put a gun to each other’s heads and squeeze the trigger until no one was left.
But that same understanding was the reason this affair could have no happy ending. “I doubt anything will change,” said Grigoryan. “Not in any different way than it does now.” He paused. “Maybe it’ll be a first step. My companion has been talking without cease these past few weeks about dignity and social triumph. People like you and me making the decisions. He’s an overblown child, and full to the brim with propaganda, but when he talks, I almost believe it.”
The old man did not speak throughout all of this. When Grigoryan’s ambling words were finished, the veteran reached over and pulled one of Arshakon’s eyelids wide, staring at the dilated pupil underneath. Arshakon did not react.
“Those boys went too hard on him,” the man grunted. “Did you notice his skull cracked on a barn spike back there? I don’t think he’ll last a day without a proper hospital.”
Grigoryan felt nothing. “Then you’ll have killed an officer of the Party.”
Kruny did not react to any of this. He was, at the moment, looking at the bowling lanes which he must have, after one fashion or another, recreated from his cherished memories of New York City in America. There was pure love in his eyes.
Across the room, the huddle of men had stopped talking. They were all staring at the veteran, clearly waiting for a signal.
Grigoryan sighed. “Well, what are we waiting for? If you aim to put a bullet in my head, will you please not do it where Kruny can see?” Alien words. He felt as though he were talking about fetching a loaf from the baker, not his own execution at the hands of political dissidents.
The veteran picked up one of the ballot forms and stared at it. “In two weeks,” he said, “we will be gone to America. Us and all our families.” He looked up. “I was a surgeon.”
Grigoryan nodded dully. “Infantryman. Were you there at Ingala?”
Kruny left them. He waddled to the nearest lane, set his bag on the ground, and retrieved his gleaming American ball which he swore the President of the United States had given him, the only one of its kind among the wooden balls of Shcarstan. He took a peculiar stance, swept back his arm, and hurled the ball down the lane.
In a blue-black streak, the ball swooped toward the far wall, striking the triangle of pins nearly dead center, blowing all of them away except the furthest most on the right. “Split! That’s a split, a split,” Kruny chanted as he ran down the lane where his ball rested against bales of hay set behind the pins. He squatted down and began resetting the lane.
“Ingala,” said the veteran. “Hmph. The identifications of two Party officers will make our journey much easier. We will pray that, when your work is completed, it will likewise ease the journey of all who remain in this Godforsaken place.”
He picked up his knife, limped around the table, and severed Grigoryan’s bonds.
Grigoryan buried Arshakon’s naked corpse before he left. True to the veteran’s prediction, the man never awoke, but passed from life altogether around eighteen in the evening.
The lone clerk descended the mountain with his papers in a neat bundle. By the time he reached the mountain’s foot, he had determined to use Arshakon’s strategy of ranking candidates on the ballot. Such a ridiculous undertaking would not be made much more absurd with the addition of nuance.
Wearing a peasant’s clothes and a twelve-hour watch underneath his army jacket, Grigoryan stepped into the telegraph office of the town at the base of the mountain, from which he and Arshakon had sent their previous draft using a special code designed by the Party for transmitting visual information over telegraph. Grigoryan did not use this now, but determined to return their final draft in person. He did, however, plan to send a curt message informing the Party of Arshakon’s tragic fall from a cliff face during their journey.
There was a message waiting for Grigoryan at the station. In plain language it appeared to be a meandering letter about the best places to eat and sleep in the province. Once the true meaning was coaxed out through application of the Party’s cipher, it congratulated the clerks on their hard and steadfast work. It said they should not bother with an additional draft, that the one which they had sent was already being printed by every press in the capital. The war hero Petrosyan would be prime minister, said the message, and the ballot of Arshakon and Grigoryan would facilitate this historic event.
Then Grigoryan read the message again with his own private cipher.
“A man called Kruny lives in such-and-such a village. He has been brainwashed by the American CIA and is building an army to overthrow the Party. Arshakon is a member of this plot. Destroy these men, before the blight of America taints even the simplest citizens of great Shcarstan.”
Grigoryan stared at it for a long time.
“What the hell,” he muttered, crumpling the letter and putting it into his pocket. He wondered what other meaning lay in the message, hidden in the cipher of a dead man atop a mountain. He wondered if either clerk were ever intended to descend alive, and what might have been different had the message arrived only a day earlier.
Grigoryan turned his back on the great nation of Scharstan and began the long trek up the mountainside. His back had been to the wind as he descended, but now it bit him directly on the face.
He wished for espresso, for a cigarette, and for a world he could understand. All he had was his old army coat, and that was a poor substitute for any of them. Grigoryan reckoned that was the best you could expect from anything.
