New World a-Coming, Ch. 49
May 1967: the Spring Tour, and a confrontation boarding the Beast
Bassanda
From the Rihanna Ní hUallacháin correspondence:
For the spring ‘67 tour, we were supposed to meet at the platform of a satellite station on the west side of the capitol, to board the Beast—in those years, it was still mostly touring by train, in the satellites.
We were still sponsored, but at any given time the State Police might be looking for someone in our orbit—or the cops might even just turn up, at a gig or recording session, the more public the better, and start hassling us. Checking IDs, searching our personal belongings, messing with our sound or our gear, insisting they had to have a list of all the lyrics and song titles. And there were a lot of band members who came from the ethnic minorities, or who like Szabo and Yezget were already on watch lists, or just didn’t fit the Soviet line—hell, I think they even had records on me and Ani because we were “inverts” who didn’t like men—nice language they used, right? Really, I think stadtspolizei just always wanted to let us know that they didn’t like us, and that, regardless of official BSSR arts policy, if we pissed them off they could fuck with us with impunity.
That was also a time—after Stalin died—when things were getting more and more restless in the satellites. From the underground press, we heard about the resistance actions in Poland and Czecho, and there were a lot of hotheads in Ballyizget, some of them even in the Band, who were spoiling for more confrontations. Ani and I were older, though most of the youngsters didn’t know it, and we’d been through some political violence before. So we weren’t nearly as ready to try to crack heads, because there were still way more cops than there were of us. And we knew that Yezget-Bey was trying to steer a course, and that we could help him best by keeping our heads down.
There was sabotage and violence— in the provinces, and even in the capitol, from Olenev’s women in Cell #1—but Yezget-Bey was emphatic that any of that direct action had to be kept far away from the Band. He was concerned about members’ safety, and that of their families, and he insisted, even in the face of the youngsters’ grumbling, that we had to keep our heads down and work the networks.
Now, looking back after he’s gone, I think he handled that whole period when things blew up in the late Sixties with a lot of skill. I think he, and Baba Robin, and maybe the Americans, had seen enough, and they knew way better than we did how ugly a secret war could get. I think they could feel the whole Soviet apparatus tottering. He was more radical than any of us, but he’d been at it longer, so he understand about thinking the long game, and he just wanted to keep us playing.
And then also, I don’t know but what there was a lot of clandestine activity going on as the Band moved through the various tour stops, via the Beast. We had a dining car, and a sleeping car, and instrument storage, and there was space for everyone. So, no matter how inhospitable the environment, we knew Wotan could just pull the locomotive and the Band’s cars onto a siding, and there’d be a safe place for us to be. And that meant that there might be other people who’d “join the Band” for a little while—with Szabo magicking their official papers out of nowhere—so we could get them out of a city or over a border.
Dobar Momak was tactically smart, too; his Wood-Elves maybe knew him mostly as “Baba,” their teacher and commune leader, but if you delved into his background—not from him, he’d never talk about it, but sometimes through indirect references from older Band members maybe—you realized that he’d had some experiences fighting the Nazis that set him up for war as well as for peace. He was in the North on their land now, growing food and delivering babies, but he’d fought with the partisans against the Nazis, and then against the Soviets, too. He wouldn’t let the community own weapons or train—he wasn’t building a cult—but I know sometimes he and Yezget-Bey talked about strategy, and I know there was some hookup between Cell #1, and activists in the west, and the Wood-Elves. Momak was smart with radio, from his time as a commando, and he knew about how to use low-wattage and randomized frequencies. But it was all very clandestine—not even the veterans in the Band knew everything.
So when it was time for us to leave for the spring tour in ‘67, the biggest consideration coming from the older heads in the Band was that we get everyone gathered together, without a lot of fuss or noise, and make sure their dependents were situated for the time we were gone on tour, and get on the Beast and then get out of town without raising any hackles amongst the Gestapo.
It was to be a single long day’s run, from Ballyizget to the first tour stop in Ankara, so our call time to be on the platform waiting for the Beast was before dawn. It was cold that night—March in central Bassanda could still be cold, in the 1960s—and we could see one another’s breaths on the platform. Stokes was there too, and we stood next to our bags and cases while Madame and Yezget-Bey conferred. I was there with Ani, and I remember she was looking especially beautiful that night, with her big eyes framed by long dark hair, inside the hood of her duffel coat. Looking at her under the arc lights, I realized that there were streaks of gray in her hair, but she’d never been more beautiful to me. All I wanted to do was take her back to bed.
I couldn’t do that, but I could hold her and touch her. Stokes was as silent as he always was, standing there beside us in a black suit, wearing his perpetual sunglasses, smoking a cigarette. But you could always feel the gentleness from him: he never got ruffled about anything, even when there was danger or violence. And when you were close to him—in proximity, or even at a distance, in friendship—you could feel his kindness and care for others.
So I didn’t feel shy about touching Ani, as she stood there. I had my left arm around her waist, and I could feel the warmth of her body, even through the duffel coat, even in the chill of the May night—it could still be cold in the spring, in the Ballyizget hills, in those years. She was bigger and taller than I, and so my hand rested on her left hip. For a minute or two, even though I kept my right hand—my knife hand—free out of habit, in feeling the warmth of her body, and the swell of her bottom under my forearm, my thoughts drifted back to the big bed, laden with quilts, that we’d left an hour before. Distracted, I stepped around in front of her, and stood on my tiptoes, and kissed her on the cheek. She looked down at me and smiled, and put both hands on my ribs. She bent her beautiful olive face down toward me, her eyes enormous in the gloom, and kissed me on the lips, there under the arc lights, and it felt as I had been there with her forever, and would be always.
And then, shockingly, there was a rough hand on my arm, and I was wrenched away from Ani, and a male voice was yelling at me—in words I couldn’t understand, out of sheer surprise—and a big bulky figure was blocking the arc lights. A club smashed into my right elbow, and I was pushed away and down, and fell hard on the pavement concrete. Instinctively I rolled onto my side, covering up my ribs and stomach with my elbows and knees—it wasn’t the first time I’d gotten stomped, and I expected the boots to come thundering down onto me. I heard Ani’s shriek of rage, cut off with a gasp of pain, and looked up to see a GPP officer, with the peaked cap and shoulder boards of a captain, grab her hair and yank her head back. She went over backwards, falling amongst the cases, and I almost lost sight of her, and I gathered my legs under me to launch myself at the cop, because I was going to rip out his throat with my teeth. The captain turned his head, and put a whistle to his lips to call his troops.
But before he could blow the whistle, three things happened almost at the same time: from a prone position, Ani lashed out with her legs, and the captain, his feet taken out from under him, fell to his knees; Stokes suddenly loomed over him, and there was a pistol in his hand. Stokes’s sunglasses were gone, and his hazel eyes were afire in the gloom as he aimed the pistol at the cop from point-blank range. But even as he pulled the trigger, the Beast’s engineer Wotan pulled his steam-whistle—could he somehow “see” what was happening, down the platform, at the other end of the train?—and its bass profundo roar drowned out the thud of the gunshot. The cop’s head exploded like a watermelon, as if the Beast’s whistle, not Mississippi’s pistol, had blown it open from inside.
The whistle ended, and there was a gabble of voices up and down the platform as the rest of the Band surged toward the folding steps that would get us onboard. I came to my feet at the same time as Ani, and grabbed for her hand, but Stokes hit me hard in the shoulder as he looked quickly in both directions. He said, quietly, but sharply and fiercely, “Get your gear and get on board, right now.” The crowd of Band people parted, and now I could see all the way down the platform to the locomotive at the far end, its smokestack, pouring electrical sparks, silhouetted against a Ballyizget skyline that was slowly turning gray and rose with the approaching dawn. I saw the Conductor’s long, long arm, clad in a white sleeve, wave out the side window of the engine car.
In the other direction, between our little group and the station, near the Beast’s baggage car and caboose, I saw Yezget Bey’s tall thin figure, outlined against the lit interior of the station, waving both arms in a criss-cross pattern, to hurry the rest of us on board. Beyond, in the distance, and even over the sound of the Beast’s turbines winding up, I heard multiple police whistles, and running booted feet, and—even further in the distance—a torrent of sirens approaching. There were gunshots. I froze for a moment.
Stokes stuffed his pistol into his belt and then, unexpectedly and with surprising strength, swept up Ani and myself, one in each arm on the left and right. He literally threw me through the air and up the steps of the railroad car; fortunately, I landed on my feet, and caught Ani as she landed behind me, staggering. Below, on the platform, Stokes threw one case after another up the steps to us, as we scurried to catch the baggage and push it into the car’s aisle.
One arm around Ani, who was still winded by the blow from the soldier who now lay, half-headed, dead on the platform, I watched as Stokes yanked out his pistol, and looked quickly both ways, up and down the platform. Then he pivoted to look up the steps at us, and his eyes—once again, without his ubiquitous sunglasses—were blazing reddish gold in the gloom, like the light coming from bronze on a metalworker’s anvil. Incongruously, he was smiling.
He took one step forward onto the lowest stair, grasping for the tall vertical railing by the side of the railroad car’s door. And there was an explosion, a shatteringly loud boom as if a lightning bolt had struck the platform—or the roof of the car—a shower of sparks as if the metalsmith’s forge had burst open.
And we blacked out.