The truck with the new conscripts was second in line. It followed behind the captain's truck, its motor grinding and growling and sending back a stink of gasoline fumes to the men riding in the open bed. Where the road was dry the tires threw up clouds of dust that choked them. Where it dipped into the ravines and swamps the truck wallowed in the mud.425Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiETOj7CT9P
Aloj sat with his teeth clenched and his friends balled into fists as he watched the road unwind behind the truck. He was so full of rage that he felt he would explode. Now, after all these months, he understood how Borbura had felt and why she never recovered after the soldiers got her. Even though these men had barely touched him, he knew now what it meant to become a prisoner. I will get away, he told himself. They can't keep me. They can't make a soldier out of me.
But there some orders he had to take, along with Tokar and Kszar. Several times the trucks got stuck, and all the men were ordered out to push, and Aloj wondered then why he had ever thought loading sausages was hard. Tokar and Kszar were tall enough to push, but the truck was too high for him to get a grip on the tailgate and his feet slid out from under him in the mud. But he pushed anyway, because he knew he had better work up a sweat or one of the soldiers was likely to crack him in the rear with his gun butt.
Around noon they halted. The soldiers climbed out to stretch their legs, and the boys were allowed to step briefly into the bushes, one at a time, under guard, and then told to wait near the truck.
Now the three of them stood in a tight, hard knot, staring at the woods on either side of the road and at the circle of soldiers who surrounded them like a wall of daggers. One man in particular seemed to have been ordered to watch them, and though his manner was relaxed, Aloj saw that the muzzle of his rifle followed them like a compass needle.
They knew better than to talk out loud, but Aloj had to say one word---the word that had been burning inside his mind since they left the village. Now, barely breathing it out, he said, "Escape?"
Neither Tokar nor Kszar moved or answered. Their guard, who hadn't heard Aloj, shifted his gun long enough to spit in the dirt and then it swung back to point directly at the center of Aloj's back.
Tokar's eyes flickered up briefly. "River." He mouthed the word, not even letting himself give it as much breath as Aloj had. Not that he needed to. All three of them knew that the road the trucks were following had not crossed the Danube. That meant that the Danube lay somewhere to their right, though hidden in the woods, and if they could get to it, it would lead them back to their village. But without anyone saying it, all three understood that such a journey could easily cost them their lives and that only after they escaped the soldiers--which was clearly impossible at the outset.
Kszar shook his head, a faint jiggle that could have been the motion to shake off a fly. But he made himself clearer by raising his foot and just by accident bringing the toe of his shoe down on top of Aloj's foot. Stay. Don't run. If we run, they'll shoot us, Aloj read. He nodded slightly.
They stood quiet and motionless then, as Captain Maric climbed out of his truck and came back to talk to the sergeant who seemed to be in charge of the second truck.
"All right, Barinovic, you take the recruits and go on in. You know what to do."
The sergeant nodded. He was short and thickset, with a belly that hung a little over his webbing belt. He looked as if he might have Mongol blood in him.
"I will rejoin you before sundown," said the captain. "See how much training you can accomplish this afternoon..." He turned, and he and the sergeant stared at the three boys beside the truck. "I will hold you personally responsible, Barinovic, and I expect a good job. If there are any 'injuries'"---the captain gave the sergeant a long hard look---"I will hold you responsible for that also."
Then the captain turned back and climbed into the lead truck. Half of the soldiers climbed into it also, and as the truck sped away, Aloj saw that they had two machine guns mounted and manned in the truck bed and all of the soldiers carried their rifles at the ready.
At the fork in the road the captain's truck turned and disappeared down the overgrown track to the left. The sergeant turned to the remaining men. "Load up!" he barked sharply. Aloj and the other two scrambled up into the truck bed, followed by the soldiers, and crouched down next to the chickens, who squawked fitfully and thrashed their legs. Aloj felt like one of the chickens, although his legs weren't tied.
Although the new recruits sat on the floor of the truck bed, there were rough benches along each side where the regular soldiers sat just high enough so they could see out over the sides. Two men rode standing up and facing forward over the cab. Their personal guard still watched them, but all the men had their rifles at hand, and all seemed to have an animal alertness that told Aloij they would react in an instant, in case anyone tried to dive out of the truck into the jungle. He could almost feel the burn of a bullet in his back.....
As the truck coughed and choked and they started to roll forward, taking the right folk in the road, Aloj began to wonder what would happen if he asked a question.
"Where---where are we going?"
No one glanced at him or answered.
He waited a while and then tried again. "Where are we going?"
One soldier turned and stared at him indifferently for a moment. Aloj tried to catch his eye, but the man looked away.
Aloj let several moments pass and finally, as the truck jolted over deeper and deeper potholes and ruts, he said, to nobody in particular, "Hey, drugovi---where are we going?" He tried to look neutral and not like somebody who'd just been kidnapped.
The man sitting opposite him glanced down. He had a scar from temple to chin. He smiled faintly. "Druze?" he said softly.
Immediately Aloj saw he had made a mistake, had overstepped a dangerous boundary. He hoped it didn't blow up in his face. "No," he said hastily, staring hard at the scar. "You are the drugovi. We are...."
"Nothing."
"Yes. Nothing," Aloj agreed. It was certainly true. Anyone could see that. He and Kszar and Tokar---certainly they were nothing. Pigs would have been of greater value than they were at this moment. Pigs at least could be eaten. Aloj said no more but rode staring past the soldiers at the rising slopes and the woods as they thinned to the oaken forests of the higher altitudes. And finally, after two hours had passed, he recognized that, although they were nothing---not even pigs---they were being taken into the mountains. And that meant they were being taken to the hidden stronghold of the BCD.
Aloj rode silently now, penned inside himself with his own thoughts. He was angry, he would always be angry. He would always watch for a way to escape. But even as he thought of it, he knew escape was impossible. He could not think of a single man he had ever heard of who dared escape once either the BCD or the Syldavians "drafted" him. So--it all came down to this. He, Aloj, was about to become a soldier.
There were a very few things he thought about soldiers. They marched, fought, killed people, and sometimes---not often---they were allowed to come home between battles. Sometimes they sent messages, pictures, money. And if he, Aloj, became a soldier, and stayed alive, he might see his family again. Once in a great while, if there were a flood or powerful windstorm, the soldiers were sent home briefly to help dig out and rebuild. But they never came home because the war was over, because it was never over. It had never started. There was just war, all the time.
Before his father had been "recruited" by the Bordurians and died in some battle somewhere, he had told Aloj that, although many different ethnic and religious groups had resided together for 40 years under Koslovia’s repressive communist government, this changed when the country began to collapse during the fall of communism. . The provinces of Syldavia and Borduria declared independence, and war quickly followed between Syldavia and these breakaway republics. Ethnic tensions were brought to the forefront, and people who had lived peacefully for years as neighbors turned against each other and took up arms. When Borduria attempted to secede, Syldavia – under Muskar Tomic's leadership – invaded with the claim that it was there to “free” fellow Syldavian Orthodox Christians living in Borduria. Thus began the horrific Syldavian campaign to “ethnically cleanse” Bordurian territory.
The mission of the BCD, his father told him, was to stop the Syldavians. They wanted Borduria to be a country where farmers could live and raise crops on their own lands. The BCD wanted money from the UN to build hospitals, colleges, roads, and national schools. And they were willing to fight back against the Syldavians to accomplish all this.
The trouble was that in order to win the war, people had to die. And besides that, they heard that in the two territories the Bordurians now controlled, the people who were left were starving, and faster, because so many fields and villages had been destroyed by either one army or the other.
Aloj hadn't tried to decide which side was better---Syldavians or Bordurians. As far he was concerned, he couldn't see that it mattered. Nothing changed much, whichever army controlled your village.
But for now, he reminded himself, he might as well stop thinking about which army was right. Now he was one of them---a BCD soldier.
But it was a strange feeling. He had been watching soldiers ever since Koslovia collapsed. Syldavians wore light gray uniforms with orange and white shoulder patches that showed a great bird, a black pelican, in fact. Bordurian soldiers wore dull green uniforms, mismatched pants and shirts, and any kind of hat or cap they could find. They had no shoulder patches but wore shirts with a lightning bolt painted on the backs. Both Bordurians and Syldavians came to the village to "enlist volunteers" and "accept donations" of food and money. None of the "volunteers" or "donations" were willingly given by the villagers.
There were times when one army or the other brought a military band to play marches and folk songs during a visit. Aloj and his friends might have enjoyed the Music, but they chose to melt back into the woods instead of joining the dance....
Whichever army happened to be there brought men who stood up and gave speeches. Syldavian speakers talked about the "Bordurian scum" who "deserved to die." Bordurians talked about how the cost of living in the new Borduria would be low. Syldavians talked about free public education. Bordurians talked about how the free public education turned out to be for Syldavians only. The Syldavians sent Western-style paperback fiction novels into the villages to give the locals some time to get their minds off of the war, whereupon the BCD printed and distributed an underground newspaper telling how the president, Muskar Tomic, spent $3 million on a concentration camp for Bordurians, and his wife, Mrs. Tomic, reportedly shot a young Bordurian to death with a pearl-handled revolver, a gift from her husband.
The worst part about it all, his father had told him, was that both sides were wrong. It was God's land, in reality, belonging neither to Syldavians nor Bordurians. But the BCD had a point about Tomic's despotism. They said that President Tomic and Mrs. Tomic rode in a Rolls-Royce limousine over streets in Klow that the city couldn't fix, past pigs wallowing in the plaza, to dance at someone's palace to the music of a band that cost more than a new sewer system for a country village would have cost.
The struggle between the two kinds of people had been going on since the 12th century, his father had told him. It had never stopped, despite communism. Maybe, Aloj thought, it would never stop.425Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTshw4ub9Lz
The only thing to do, Aloj thought as the truck stopped to a crawl in a muddy stretch of road, was to try to stay alive. He was not at all sure he could do this, and what it would be worth if he did, but nevertheless, he would try......425Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡa6TXx3Iio2
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