Secondhand Sorcery

The shrieking of the bus’s brakes woke Nadia as they pulled into town. She was getting better at sleeping through the noise; it had been several uninterrupted hours since a minor stop for a traffic light had forced her back to consciousness. Now it took a really major squeal of outrage, usually combined with a sudden lurch, to do it. It was just her luck that Hamza was a lousy bus driver, and the bus was an ancient clunker with brake pads as old as she was.

“I don’t know,” Fatima said in monotone from across the aisle.

Nadia peeled her cheek away from the increasingly grubby window glass. “You don’t know what?”

“Where we are. You were about to ask. You always ask when you wake up. And I never know. And I don’t know now either.”

“Oh.” She looked out the window. They were passing through the country now, all weedy green fields, clumps of forest, and the odd house. The road was one lane of bumpy unpainted asphalt, cracked in many places, and led to a place where the buildings were bigger and closer together. It looked like it could be any of a million different places, including the outlying parts of Istanbul. The sun was a few inches above the horizon, but Nadia couldn’t recall whether it was supposed to be morning or night by now. “Do you at least know what country this is?”

“Nope. I don’t think it’s Romania anymore but I don’t remember what country comes next. Poland or some shit. Wherever we are, it probably has a bunch of Y’s in its name, and women in fancy aprons milking yaks.”

Nadia felt herself smile, just a little. “Yaks? Those are Asian. We should still be in Europe.”

“They’re imports, okay?” she retorted at once. “Like Toyotas. It’s a thing.”

“I think this is Moldova,” a Metic girl said from the seat in front of Nadia. “That was the last border we crossed.”

“Thanks, twerp,” Fatima told her. “So … Moldova. There’s your answer.”

“Thank you, Firuza,” Nadia said to the Metic, and craned her neck to look at the front of the bus. Hamza’s face in the rear-view mirror had dark rings around the eyes. Gulya was slumped over in the seat behind him, a small Metic boy in her lap. “Has anybody dared to ask him where we’re going yet?” she added to Fatima.

“Russian turf, obviously. Dunno why. It’s not like the Russians are any friendlier than the Americans—we just killed their girl in Istanbul—and we’re going to step on toes wherever we go.”

“Yes. I know.” She went back to looking out the window. The actual town was closer now, close enough for her to see Cyrillic signs on businesses. That was a good sign, if they used the alphabet openly. The more securely Russian a place was, the more stable and settled it would be. Fewer turf wars.

Fatima crossed the aisle to look out the window next to her. “So all we have to do here is look out for those ‘prick’ people, right?”

“Oprichniki,” Nadia corrected. “And you do not look out for them. They look out for you. You don’t know who or where they are, and if you ever find out you will disappear.”

“Child, that is one messed-up system.”

Nadia shrugged. “It worked well enough in Kazakhstan. They don’t ask as much as you would expect. The government must pay its dues to Moscow and avoid relations with Westerners, and also keep basic order. If you do nothing stupid, your oprichnik leaves you alone. Ordinary people don’t even need to worry about them most of the time.”

“So, what, it’s like what we were doing to Thessaloniki?”

“More or less. What did you do in Afghanistan? How did your father rule?”

“Not like that. He had the familiar, so he was the boss. Mom’s whole extended family were his bodyguards. None of this secret police stuff.”

And your father was killed, she did not say. The gears ground as Hamza shifted, and she wondered if they would have to get yet another bus soon. This was their third since they abandoned the army trucks. Every vehicle switch meant several hours hiding somewhere out in the cold, and sometimes the dark, while Hamza hijacked a new one. They all had coats now, at least, but they couldn’t keep this up forever. They’d have to settle down eventually. Wouldn’t they?

“I think we’re running low on food again,” Fatima said. She seemed to be feeling chatty this whatever-time-of-day-it-was. “Do any of these signs say ‘grocery?’”

“I don’t know. The signs are in a Cyrillic alphabet, but it’s not Russian.”

“They what? How the hell does that work?”

“It’s Romanian,” Ruslan’s voice said from somewhere towards the rear of the bus, then added in more stilted tones, as though reading aloud: “’In Moldova the predominant language is Romanian, written with a Cyrillic script, although for political and cultural reasons the language is more commonly referred to as Moldovan within the country’s borders.’”

“Him and that damn book,” Fatima growled, shaking her head. “The next stop we make, I swear, it’s gonna disappear.”

“It’s still useful information,” Nadia said, as mildly as she could. Tempers weren’t what they used to be after several days on the road. She didn’t know how Ruslan would react if you took his only available book away, even if it was a traveler’s guide somebody left on a bus seat. He needed books the way infants needed pacifiers.

A boy suddenly stood up on his seat cushion a few seats in front of them, pointing out the window. “Hey, what’s that?”

Everyone who was awake obediently stopped what they were doing to look; Hamza even slowed down the bus a bit so they could check out the curiosity on the sidewalk. Nadia saw something roughly the shape and size of a human, but covered in a thick clear material, like glass. You couldn’t see what it was very clearly; there were streaks of pale green and milky white in the covering, which wasn’t at all even. It was lumpy and full of bubbles, and looked melted towards the bottom where it touched the pavement.

Nadia was just working out that the indistinct human figure inside was not a clever waxwork replica, and had his mouth open in a scream, when Hamza figured it out for himself and slammed on the accelerator again. Too late. The Metics were already whispering in frightened tones; as Hamza turned the next corner, several began to cry. Gulya made a few vague noises of reassurance before giving up and cuddling the boy in her lap a little tighter.

“I thought you said your pricky-nickies weren’t a big deal for normal people?” Fatima challenged her in a low voice.

“They weren’t in Guryev four years ago,” Nadia said. “And I don’t know what that person did. He might not have been an ordinary citizen.”

“Yeah, or he might have been a random pedestrian they put up as an example,” Fatima said. “Damn, girl, you’re making me miss Afghanistan, where all this was simple. We only killed people who hoarded their opium, things like that.”

But they didn’t see any more people covered in glass, and the rest of the town was the ordinary post-Soviet arrangement of moderately crummy apartment blocks. Eventually the criers settled down into sniffling and complaining, then gave up altogether when Hamza pulled up to a hotel. A few Metics even cheered. Nadia understood how they felt. Were they actually going to sleep in beds tonight? Were there baths? It was a nice-looking building, three stories of tan brick with a red roof, pretty arched windows, and a big grassy park behind it.

Hamza sent Gulya in to make arrangements, while he flopped down across the steering wheel. Gulya could buy up half the hotel, if it was free; Rhadamanthus had sliced open the wall of a bank near Bucharest a couple of nights back. They would only need to worry when business owners stopped accepting euros.

Gulya took an age to come back, and when she did there was a lot of bother over sorting how many kids went in each room—she’d checked out eight. The Metic girls predictably accepted the idea of sharing beds more easily than the boys, who whined that it wasn’t fair for Nadia and Fatima to only have to share a room. Several were hungry, but tired of the lunch meats and prepackaged snacks they’d been living off.

Hamza had to snarl a bit to shut them up, and a little gang of boys threatened to run away in the night. They got stuck rooming with Yuri for their pains, though Nadia doubted her brother would be a good influence on them, or go to much effort to keep them out of trouble. Mostly Hamza was still punishing Yuri for getting them in this situation in the first place. As if Hamza could have “only” murdered dozens of men in one night without getting the local authorities mad at him … but it was no good pointing that out. Even Yuri had the sense to keep his mouth closed. He’d take out his frustration on his roommates later.

It all went away from the blessed moment Nadia and Fatima closed the door behind them. The rooms, like the hotel itself, were gorgeously furnished in a mixed Russo-Turkish style, far too nice for a bunch of vagrants like them. Fatima had already called dibs on the shower, but Nadia was content to lie on the bed for a bit with all her limbs stretched out as far as they could go. It looked a touch darker outside the window, so she supposed it was evening. Good. She still felt tired. She’d dozed off by the time Fatima came out of the steaming bathroom to complain about having to put the same dirty clothes on again.

“We’ll probably go shopping tomorrow,” Nadia told her. “You can sleep in your underwear if you want, I don’t mind.”

“Oh, so I’m only wearing dirty underwear, that’s a lot better.” She thumped down on her bed, still wrapped in a towel, and started flipping through the TV. “Ugh. It’s all in not-Romanian? For real?”

“How can you even tell, changing channels that fast? I think I caught a bit of Russian on—”

“So what? I don’t speak that either. Don’t they have even one English channel with foreign shows? They did in Thessaloniki. I’d take a stupid BBC drama with guys in funny hats right now.”

“They wouldn’t show that kind of thing here. It would look treacherous, admiring Western art.”

“And then they’d get a visit from the pricky-nicky,” Fatima concluded with disgust. She brandished the remote like a whip, and the TV screen went black. After sitting there for a moment she got dressed in the bathroom, then came out and started trying to work out the direction to Mecca so she could do her evening prayers. Nadia was grateful when she went out to pester Ruslan about it; it meant she could say her own prayers in peace. Then hop in the shower!

Fatima was right; putting the same grubby clothes back on was a nuisance. And she didn’t care for lying in bed with the lights on while Fatima went over the whole room looking for details to be audibly dissatisfied with because she was bored and wound up. But just to lie on clean sheets instead of an inadequately reclined bus seat was wonderful.

They hadn’t—as far as she knew—committed any crimes in this country. They were paying for their rooms, and nobody here knew who they were. There was no need to stand shivering in the night wondering what Hamza was doing and when he would come back, and if the local police would be chasing him. For the first time in days, they could all relax. Eventually, around 2045, Fatima settled down and turned the lights out. They fell asleep to the sweet sound of Hamza screaming at the Metics for chasing each other down the halls with pillows. Everybody relaxed a different way …

Bells were ringing when she woke, the sun high in the sky. She thought about asking if she could go to church for the first time in years, but decided she didn’t dare just yet. It was still pleasant to order a typical local breakfast on the phone, and watch Fatima poke suspiciously at the fried cornmeal wedges full of melting sheep cheese.

They were shortly hauled out of their room to shepherd the well-rested and hyperactive Metics, but Nadia hardly minded. It was not as if they had anything better to do. Now that her stomach was full and they were out of immediate danger, the prospect of a self-directed, Titus-free life appeared ahead of her, and that long-wanted but unexpected happiness made everything it touched beautiful. She could pretend they were some kind of school group on a trip. It felt so normal!

Normality ended around 1030, when all the Metics were finally done eating and bathing, and they were all crammed together in the lobby discussing where to go and what to buy first. The woman at the counter was giving them funny looks, but did not seem afraid exactly, which was an improvement. They still had a fortune in euros and even Hamza seemed disposed to spend a little of it to help the family find their bearings. Nadia could almost see them settling down in—she glanced at the sun-faded brochures on the counter—Tighina, Moldova.

Then a car pulled up outside, disgorging a big man in a suit who marched imperiously into the lobby. A cold wind flapped his long dark grey overcoat around him as he opened the glass door. He looked around for a minute, sizing up their group, before finally turning to Gulya and saying, “Doamnă, sunteți responsabil de acești copii?”

“I am sorry, but I do not speak Ro—Moldovan,” she answered in Russian.

“You are in charge of these children?” he said at once in the same language.

“No, that would be me,” Hamza said. His Russian was still stiff and halting. At least he could pass for an adult, if barely. “Who are you, sir?”

The big man pulled out an ID. “Anatolie Rosca, Security Service. You are foreign,” he noted, with the air of a detective finding a vital clue. “What is your business in Tighina, and how long will you be staying? Where did you come from, and why?”

Hamza hesitated. They were a remarkable mishmash of nationalities, but most of them were obviously not from anywhere nearby. They might perhaps pass as a lot of Gypsies, with some half-breeds, but that would not win them favor from this man. Failing to satisfy his curiosity would sooner or later bring them to the attention of the local oprichnik and his familiar, who could pop up at any time and encase their whole bus in glass, just like the man on the street.

“We are refugees,” Hamza declared at last. “There is unrest in Istanbul, and we just escaped across the Black Sea. Several of us have died or were lost on the way. We are looking for a place to stay. It does not have to be here. We can move on if we are not welcome.” It was probably the best lie he could have come up with on short notice. But it still wasn’t great.

“You crossed the Black Sea. And now you have a bus.”

“Yes,” was all Hamza replied, as he could hardly improve the tale by adding to it.

“A Romanian tour bus, which somehow got over the border without coming to our attention!”

“We may have done something ... irregular to get across the border,” Hamza confessed.

“But why? Is there not room in all of Romania for, oh, thirty orphaned children? And why did these Turkish children hazard crossing the Black Sea, when a shorter trip might have found them homes in Turkey?”

“Turkey has enough orphans already,” Gulya put in. “Surely you are not afraid of children, sir?”

“I would be a fool not to be afraid,” he retorted. “And neither of you has a Turkish accent. I do not speak Turkish, but I could find a man who does. Shall we see how many of these brats speak even a word of the language, or can we abandon this farce? Where are you actually from?” Ruslan stepped forward and started babbling something in Uzbek, apparently hoping it sounded close enough to Turkish. The man said over him: “Have any of you been to Greece, perhaps? Thessaloniki?”

“Maybe,” Hamza admitted.

“You would have done better to say that before,” Rosca told them. If he was at all nervous in their presence, he did a marvelous job of hiding it. He would almost certainly not be the oprichnik himself, but he would have the emissor’s number on his phone.

“You’d do better not to turn us away,” Hamza answered. “I did say we are refugees. That is true. We have no home left, but we will move on if we must.”

“That will not do,” Rosca said. “Do you have any means of supporting these children? I do not think that bus was legitimately purchased, nor that you fled Istanbul with enough euros to acquire eight hotel rooms. This is a problem.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. How do you want to solve it?” Hamza said.

“The Republic of Moldova is not unsympathetic to the plight of refugee children, Turkish or otherwise. We are less sympathetic to wandering bands of thieves and robbers, or even beggars. But I believe some of you at least have valuable skills you might use to support your family. Do you not?”

“We might,” Hamza said, his hands balled at his sides.

Rosca smiled. “Then there may be a place for you in Moldova after all. Come with me, sir, and we will discuss this further.”

Hamza did not smile back.