OPUS 21 by Philip Wylie Read Free Book Online

horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not being blind--being noncommittal at the outset--we had seen better.

    Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them.

    We'll put the truth in America's magazines.

    Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror. Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt.

    The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny.

    We'll tell them.

    It began, after that.

    The GPU men everywhere we went--pretending they spoke no English and reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing. The trip to the tea plantation in Batum--on a bus that deposited its other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns--with a driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide--the driver jumping out. Ted and I jumped, too--but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it failed to go over--or because we jumped also--or because he had steered so incompetently? How could you tell?)

    Odessa.

    The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch--the first we'd seen in the long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away. And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow.

    There was no water on the train.

    All night, we turned on the hard boards.

    In the blazing forenoon our car was shunted onto a siding and the Red Army soldiers--its only other occupants--marched away. Nothing was in sight but the sparse wheat of the Ukraine and its scalding mirages. We waited--with our thirst. Hung-over, desperate. Another train finally picked up our car and we went on--at the galling pace of communist transportation.

    I found the carafe of water in the toilet--where no water had been before.
    Recklessly, tremblingly, we drank it--equally dividing the thankful drops. And late that day, without further ado, we crossed the border to the relaxation, the seeming luxury, the comparative freedom of Poland.

    It was some days later, in the Palace Polonia Hotel, in Warsaw, when I woke with the cramps in my belly and legs.With a climbing fever.

    Time spun-hours commingled in the familiar wastes of pain. I knew belly-fire. I did not know my legs could hurt so hideously or curl up against my will. I lay vomiting, fainting, crawling to the bathroom and there, too weak to lift myself, pouring out rice water. Areas of my skin turned purple.

    Ted, untouched by an affliction neither of us recognized, took care of me. On the fourth day he brought a doctor and a nurse. On the fifth, I was briefly better.

    That evening, on my insistence, he left me for the first time since I'd fallen sick.

    He came back to the hotel alone, late, and sober--for he talked awhile with the concierge. He went to his room--beside the one where I lay ill--and opened the French windows, apparently to stare at Warsaw in the vermilion dawn. They found him on the sidewalk five floors below--dead.

    When the consul came to see me, and the pleasant young men from the embassy, we were unable to make out what had happened. Had he stepped too far out? Climbed up on the roof for a better view? Had the concierge mistaken his condition and had he lost his balance? Jumped? Or had he been pushed--in the fashion of political assassins who pursue their foes into other nations so as to conceal their bloody reach?

    We can never know.

    The embassy and the consulate thought he was murdered.

    And when I told Tom, my friend and doctor, the step-by-step progress of the first phase of my sudden sickness--when I remembered the thirst and the miraculous appearance of a carafe of water--Tom said, "I think you had cholera. It could have been in the water. Some people are immune to it. Maybe Ted was."

    Maybe.

    He was not immune to a