Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

Ulf a black and white television, which was something he never dreamed he could own. The pride he felt over the television in its honored position on the stenka made his chest burst.

As her supervisor and mentor, he told her to see his stenka and his precious possession, the television, currently broadcasting a political discussion on how Capitalists suppressed the negro, and how capitalism would erode the family should it take hold in the East. He explained to her, as a boss might, that she could have these things someday as well if she did her work for the State well. Ulf was expecting her to marvel at the images of talking men, and, on another channel, the ballet dancers that floated across the screen like beautiful ghosts. He did not expect her to peer behind the set, and in between the grille work, feeling the heat emanating from within, and trying to understand what made it work. She entered one of her fugues, urging the set to explain its miracles in a language only she could hear and understand.

Halina’s process to understand complex interactions was to close her eyes and imagine them working together, using her hands and fingers to trace mechanical motion or electron flow, a hula telling the story of signal flow from the V-shaped, foil wrapped antenna on top of the set, through a system that amplified its frenetic leaps in voltage and frequency that made a radio wave. She visualized amplified raw composite video frequency beating against an oscillator to produce the sum and differences of the two. The latter difference signal coupled through filters and detectors to teased out instructions for the electron gun to brighten or dim as it painted itself across the screen’s phosphors and extracted the audio that fed into the speakers.

This vivisection of the circuitry performing its own dance of electrons was what Halina saw; distinctly different from what Ulf saw. Ulf watched her dance in her work shoes, long flannel skirt, and shapeless blouse and was aroused. Ulf had never been with a woman, but he knew the basics of the act. He grabbed Halina from behind, her being only a third of his bulk and so easily subdued, but he quickly learned to avoid kicks from her braced leg.

Afterwards, she gathered the torn blouse around her exposed chest, and hobbled the six flights to her flat to clean up, knowing that the rape of a crippled Polish Jew would be of no interest to the Volskspolizei, especially when the perpetrator was consistent, if not a particularly articulate, informant to the Stasi. She also resolved that Nicolaus could never know, not out of concern for Ulf’s safety, but for Nicolaus’ already having been arrested for one crime already. If she became pregnant, he would learn of it soon enough. Meanwhile, she could easily avoid Ulf while attending her trade school class on welding and metal working during the day and to be sure, the foyer would never be mopped or swept again.

Henge Sarcophagus

In the final months of 1964, the Soviet Chairman of the Council of Ministers and party leader, after which so many structures throughout Eastern Europe were informally named, was forced into retirement and confined to his dacha. This was followed by the traditional scouring of whatever policies, plans, or accomplishments bore smudges of his thumbprint, smudges that surfaced as grudges is pursuit of retribution.

Under this political pressure washing did bring forth dusty records as far back as the close of the Great War. Among the documents that were since ignored, but were now raising questions, were odd references to a 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor, every member of which was missing. These included two Kapitans with engineering degrees, three Kapitans with chemistry degrees, a commanding officer, a full Polkovnik, and an engineer fluent in English with a degree from the prestigious Moscow and Novosibirsk State University in thermodynamics, too valuable to let slip away, or worse, fall into the hands of the decadent West.

The credentials were clear, even if the trophy to be retrieved was not. However, that all of them were now missing was just more suspicious than the bureau could bear, leading to the conclusion that instead of bringing home the trophy they were assigned to retrieve, whatever it may have been, they had instead stolen it, and were now living abroad on the Soviet kopeck in wealth and splendor.

A retrieval team was thus mustered from what was now called the KGB, and sent to the vicinity of Debica, Poland, to retrieve any evidence pointing to where the defectors may have fled with their valuable trophies.

The team sent to discover the fate of Sixth Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor followed local legends and alleged eyewitness accounts of a fire tornado that left the soil incapable of sustaining normal plant life. The area, so go the legends, was guarded by a ghost battalion of war-era Soviet soldiers, still standing at attention. Anyone venturing into the area will join them, standing guard forever over a savanna frosted with a permanent veil of poisonous ice. Peasant stories. Amusing. Fantastic stories to amuse and discipline misbehaving children.

Twenty years to the day after the record cold of 1944, the team arrived in relatively warm, pleasant spring weather, in the vicinity to inspect the area, fully expecting to take it off the list of potential sites and move on to the next.

As the team broke through the dense brush and ivy accumulated over the last two decades, some of the smug smiles dissolved. The forest, usually full of birds, frogs from the streams, a wall of sound from various insects, completely fell away to a clearing, absent of any wildlife, as still as the apse of a cathedral or a confessional booth. The soldiers could almost hear each other swallowing.

A translucent white porcelain ground cover matched the instructions on the handwritten map provided by the single village starszy23 willing to discuss the matter, as the perimeter to the ghost soldiers’ final billet.

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