December 1971: Ballyizget
Rina speaks:
That December day, Výrobca stood at the highest point in Freedom Park, at that spot where, below, the river bent around Freedom Rock, and from which you could look downward to the old city of Ballyizget and then, raising your gaze slightly, north toward the steppes and foot hills that led to the Bassandan Alps. The Soviet occupiers almost never climbed so far as this peak. But on the clearest days, the oldest citizens said, you could look all the way past the curve of the earth, and see the three etched triangles of the sacred Annolungma Range—the Three Brothers—notching the most distant horizon against the blue.
On this day, though, the sky was lowering and gray, and the horizon was lost in mist. The wind that came up to the peak was sharp. Výrobca stood with his back to the cliffs, tall and lean, wrapped in a long dark overcoat, his head erect, his close-cropped hair bare to the skies. He stood at the podium, and for a moment he turned to his right, and looked west; his long and prominent nose likewise etched against the gray sky beyond him. He glanced down at the open book in his hand, and then raised his head to look at us: his eyes were dark sockets under thick brows. A few flakes of snow scudded past him, but he stood unmoved and unspeaking against the wind. And then finally he spoke.
“We are here to remember comrades, and to commemorate their courage. And that is a joy.
“But many have been lost, and for that we mourn. We owe them that recognition—of the price they paid to seek freedom for all peoples.”
I looked around me. There were comrades from the BNRO, but so pitifully few. Madame Szabo was there, barefoot even in this season: the concert mistress who had worked with Yezget-Bey since the 1940s; Szabo’s daughter, the purple-haired teenager who called herself Polli Kilotona. The dancer It Vũ Cong, who I knew from San Francisco, who had been so stern yet so kind to Robert Green. The ‘cellist Erzbieta, the pale-skinned ageless one who had shared the BNRO house with Etsy and It Vũ and the rest.
The American sailor was there, von Schmidt, who had piloted the Band, via the Rift, from Ballyizget Harbor, all the way to Newport in ‘65. The poet Ginsberg, who had known Yezget-Bey and Robert both—I didn’t know how he had to be at Freedom Peak, on this day, but there he was, with his bald pate and curly pepper-and-salt beard and thick horn-rimmed spectacles, his shoulders hunched against the cold wind and his fists jammed deep in the pockets of his rusty overcoat.
Yet so many were gone: the American Farina, who had sung with his wife and the BNRO at Big Sur in ‘65, when the Band first appeared out of the darkness: killed in a motorcycle accident on the PCH in ‘66. Ed Ricketts in Monterey, at Pacific Biological, where I had first met Ani, just before the fire in 1936 that destroyed the lab. Ed survived the fire, and Edie’s leaving him, but he never seemed to come all the way back from that trauma, dying in a freak accident when a Pacific Flyer train struck his old car, stuck on the tracks north of town.
The General: he had disappeared years before, and no one had seen him since he had fought with Výrobca and Olenev against the Soviet tanks in Budapest in ‘56. But the Bassandans were notoriously resistant to pessimism regarding a comrade’s fate; perhaps it was their belief in one another’s innate toughness, honed over centuries of occupation. Or perhaps it was because so many among the BNRO circle had in fact proven so resilient across the centuries. As the Colonel insisted, no one had seen his body.
I felt a small strong hand grip my arm just above the bicep, and turned to see the dancer Olenev, almost as tiny as I, dressed in fatigues, her straw-blonde hair sticking out from underneath her forage cap. She squeezed my arm with both hands, and then pulled off the cap, to bare her head in respect. I put my arm around her, and she kissed me on the cheek; her face was wet with tears. We held one another tightly.
Výrobca spoke again. Behind him, the dark clouds rolled over the city out of the north—but they were lit on their undersides by the low-angling sun setting to the west.
“The sutras of the Bassandayana stipulate that we must work for the good, regardless of the condition of our hope: its presence or absence. Or in the presence or absence of our friends. Or in the presence or absence of allies. Yet those teachings do not stipulate that we forget them: rather, that we should honor them.”
There was a silence, filled only by the sound of the wind hitting the cliff and blowing past the motionless figures around me.
Robin Dobar Momak, the ex-guerrilla commander, and leader of the Wood Elves’ Commune, the founder of the Electric Trees, stepped forward from the ranks of those listening, and turned to face us. The Colonel came forward as well, and turned; he was bare-headed, and his long loose gray hair tossed in the wind, though his face was set like stone. He clasped his hands, and looked outward and upward, over our heads, his gaze seemingly on something in the farthest southern distance, perhaps even beyond sight. Baba Robin took a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his worn fatigue jacket and pulled off his beret. In a quiet voice, which carried surprisingly well even in the wind, he began to read single names.
“Hazzard-Igniti. Date unknown.”
Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti—Abe, the kind and gentle scientist who had first hypothesized Rift theory, who had been the most welcoming part of the Monterey circle, who had taught Tommy Gassion about bivalves, and bought him pie, and brought Tommy’s mother, my beloved Ani, to that party at Doc’s Pacific Biological lab in ‘36 where we met and after which we made love. Disappeared by the Cossacks into the Gulag some time during the War, since when we had had only the faintest hints that he might survive somewhere, in some elsewhen.
“Stokes. 1967.”
My beloved big brother Mississippi, who had fought beside me at the Golden Rhino on the Ballyizget waterfront. He had been killed in that terrible wreck of the locomotive called the Beast, when it had been blown sideways through space at the start of the ‘67 tour. Thinking of that night when it had all gone wrong, my gaze strayed involuntarily down the hillside toward Ballyizget town. I couldn’t see the station from where I stood, but I remembered the horror of that night, when we fled on board the train, and then a lightning bolt struck, and then we were weightless, and then a cloudy Thing had invaded the train, and broken the carriages in half. Even now, years later, my mind shuddered away from thinking of the next moments in that distant time—when Stokes was lost, and… that Other, my Heart.
“Le Gwo. 1968.”
Etsy, from whom we had been separated in San Francisco in October of ‘67. We had heard terrible stories from Saigon in ‘68, during Tet. Indirect reports, and here too the Bassandans, in sheer denial, still refused to presume his death: though his body was reported to have been seen in the grounds of the US Embassy during that terrible January, they insisted, “It was not a Bassandan who saw him.”
But I knew he had died—I could feel it, both in my own heart and spirit, and in the story of the one who came next in this tolling list of the dead.
“Robert Green, dit Sun Bear. Disappeared 1969.”
Poor Robert. Perhaps the bravest and most poetic of us all: poetic, because he never shied away from writing the truth and sorrow of his own experience; bravest, for the same reason. Dead in a flophouse in Lower Manhattan in that last sad summer of the Sixties.
The toll of names continued, yet even at this solemn moment, my mind began to wander. Perhaps it was too painful to hear how long was the list, or to remember the stories and faces associated with all of the names. I looked past Dobar Momak, toward the Colonel, who had not moved from his clasped-hands stance since the recitation began. But as I looked, the Colonel raised his head, and gazed beyond, over and past us, and down the hill behind. His eyes widened, though he didn’t speak. I turned to follow his gaze.
And then for a moment, like a vision, trudging up the hill from the town below, I thought I saw my darling Ani, who had been lost to us when the Beast crashed in ‘67, four years before. I couldn’t trust my aging eyes, watering in the cold wind, and so I ducked my head and scrubbed my sleeve across my face, and looked again.
And of course I was mistaken: my eyes or my heart had deceived me. It was not Ani, but her son—my son, by adoption—Tommy Gassion, trudging up the hill from the river landing below. He saw me, and even at that solemn moment, his eyes lit with the faintest hint of a smile. He came to my other side, and like Kris put his arm around me. He was tall, like his mother, and strong, and I felt comfort at his touch that felt like hers.
Dobar Momak was concluding. He ceased speaking, and folded the paper, and then twisted it into a parchment stick. And then he and the Colonel both stepped up on the dais flanking Výrobca. The Colonel lifted a small lantern, and inside its shielding glass, lit a match; the lantern’s wick took flame, and despite the wind that was all around us, it burned as straight and true as if in a still quiet room.
Výrobca spoke.
“And so we send our friends and fallen comrades to the wind, as we burn the flame of their memories into our hearts.”
Momak thrust the parchment list into the lantern, and it took fire. He withdrew the paper, and in the wind, it flared up like a torch. He held it aloft, and then released it, and it burst entirely into flame as it soared upward and whirled away like a magic lantern up into the sky.
Finally the Colonel spoke, in a clear voice that rang like a bell over our heads and down the hill, and rolled over the city below.
“That we should never, ever forget.”
And, high over our heads, just at the limits of sight, lit under the gray clouds by the slanting reddish light of the setting sun, the flaming twist of parchment, holding the names of our fallen friends, burst like a firework, and rained down golden sparks across the sky.