The Green Light

The Green Light

-

"Who makes his death

from gray bread that grows hard, -or leaves

it there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the core

of a sweet apple?......."

-

Tom is fifteen when he decides that he will never die, walking out of Divination when Professor Vablatsky sees a Grim in his tea-leaves.

-

A year after that, a new student joins Hogwarts with a mahogany wand with a core of unicorn tail hair. It's balanced and straight and precise, cool to the touch. Too clunky for Charms, too inflexible for Transfiguration but just perfect for casting the Unforgivables. Tom thinks the man who made it knows about death; it is etched into the little silver sigil right at the base, obvious in the way the wand moves through the air, leaving a white crackle to mark its trail. 'Gregorovitch,' Dolohov says, and the name radiates power, vibrating through the wand and into Tom's fingertips.

-

'You're mad,' Dolohov pronounces, when Tom asks him the address. 'You'll die there in the cold, in the snow, and nobody will care.'

'I would care,' he replies, mildly, and applies for a visa the day he graduates.

It only comes through in December, splashed with red and official insignias. Tom tucks it into his pocket and gives thanks to the Soviet bureaucracy which gave him time to see death before he had to leave England.

-

"The defenders of the city used to say that the streets, avenues, and
parks near the Volga became slippery from blood, and that the Germans
slipped down to their doom."

-

Volgograd to Moscow

-

The only open wizarding city in the USSR is Volgograd. A cheap imitation of what once existed there, Tom decides, comparing history text photgraph to reality. He's glad it's winter-- he can avoid the tourists, not that there are many. The journey has to be made without magic, snaking across desolation to reach Moscow with its theatrical ruby stars and parades spilling into Red Square. Tom smiles through gritted teeth at the run-down office where a man who coughs mechanically casts a dampening charm on Tom's wand and marks it with a red band.

'I wouldn't recommend trying any magic,' he says, in slow Russian, using words that can be easily found in a pocket dictionary. 'The effects can be-- unpleasant.'

'Spasibo,' Tom replies, voice thinned by cold and annoyance. 'Da svidanya, comrade.'

He still keeps his wand in his waistband, though, bruising his hipbone every time he sits down, because the pain reminds him he is a wizard even when he's lost in a crowd of Muggles.

-

In the August of 1942, the Germans attacked Stalingrad with 700 planes, 500 tanks, 1000 mortars and 1200 guns but never took it. The Russians made each quarter, each house, each street an unassailable fortress and defended each position, each meter of territory, up to the last drop of blood. Everything plays out in front of Tom's eyes, recreated: war, close-up and in focus, shoulder to shoulder, bayonet to flesh, gun to temple rather than the impersonal sweep of thousands of soldiers rushing at each other in slow motion.

(but war is won in numbers)

By New Year's Day of 1942, the celebrations are choked with the ghosts of 400,000 Soviets and 300,000 Germans, all lying toe to head, sacks of flesh in the snow of Stalingrad.

There's nothing worse than death, glassy-eyed and undignified, spread out like meat against the white expanse.

Tom holds a sheet of parchment with cramped scribbling over a plastic-sheened map in his right hand. When he reaches each destination, he rereads his own writing, copied out from a dusty textbook in the back of a Muggle store.

Traktorozavodskiy District:

Population

-before the battle of Stalingrad: 75,000

-after the battle of Stalingrad: 150

Barrikadniy District:

Population

-before the battle of Stalingrad: 50,000

-after the battle of Stalingrad: 76

Ermanskiy District:

Population

-before the battle of Stalingrad: 45,000

-after the battle of Stalingrad: 32

Looking at the houses and people and even the light brown dog with the pudgy body that barks and barks, Tom realises that Memory Charms aren't the only way to make people forget. (There's nothing worse than death.) In a house that bore witness to a bloody, animal bayonet battle between a German schoolteacher and a Russian pianist, a woman hangs up her laundry and hums along with the radio.

-

The USSR is supposed to be atheist, but God has just been replaced. There's a torn down statue of Stalin, overgrown with moss, its head cracked open by the force of the landing. Robins have crept in and make their nests in the Leader's brain, and the mind which incubated the deaths of over twenty million people now incubates bird eggs. There is nothing worse than death.

-

There are steamships in the Volga which make scenic cruises northward, but Tom wants something a little more archaic. There is little challenge in leaning on a rail, feeling the water shift through the hull of a ferry. Instead, a man with a cracked-tooth smile harnesses his mares and charges him extra because it's the holiday season.

There are two New Years in the Soviet Union: the Julian New Year of the Orthodox Church and the modern Communist Gregorian, thirteen days later.. Time stretches lazily between the two New Years, the official and the clandestine, and leaving up decorations is rebellion in itself.

Tom huddles up inside his furs, the cold wind sliding over the sleigh and inside his cloak. He loathes the swirls of snow that rush against his face and melt when he blinks his eyelashes. He loathes the way the storm melts into the sky and the white on white on white that he's a part of, because the pristine fur obscures his black hair and dilutes his blue eyes, leaving bloodless, pale skin. Instead, he focuses on the backs of the ice mares, the charcoal tails swishing against dappled grey hides with each meeting of hoof and ground.

Now and then, he opens his eyes and sees the Volga River, half iced-over, but the only stirrings of joy he feels in these cold lands where days pass in blue light is when the old man says, 'Moscow.'

The ruby stars are just as magnificent as everyone claims them to be, but they remind Tom of Christmas lights more than anything else. What he's really interested in is the Lenin Mausoleum, walking past red-uniformed guards and into a place of silence, where the loudest sound is his shoes on the polished floor. There's a rope barrier in ochre, slightly frayed and behind a gigantic glass casket. Lenin lies inside like he's sleeping and not dead, and Tom wonders whether there's a poisoned apple lodged in his throat.

But mostly, Tom leaves disappointed, because sleeping isn't all that much different from dead, and it's more like Madame Tussaud's than immortality.

-

"Tom on the Trans-Siberian express: like the Hogwarts Express stretched out over days and days, and what you see when you open your eyes at the end is not Hogwarts and the lake, but rather the largest ocean on Earth, black underneath the dawn."

-

Moscow to Vladivostok

-

This is where the journey begins. Moscow to Vladivostok. 9259 kilometres of classless land, proletarian paradise shot through with the black stripe of the Trans-Siberian Railway. A spine, an artery that covers one-third of the earth, and Tom imagines squeezing it with a smile. He shows the conductor his ticket and holds on to the edge of his seat when the express lurches into motion.

'Don't worry,' a pleasant-faced Slavic girl smiles, and Tom quickly uncurls his fingers.

He closes his window and sees the Soviet Union in fragments because the white that stretches to the edge of the earth and swallows the horizon spills into his eyes and makes him nauseous. Instead: a copse of stick-like trees, a sleeping bear, a patch of mountain, a woman wearing ragged fur, and the slicing whistles which announce the stations.

-

778 kilometres later is Ekaterinburg, where he steps off the train like the Tsars once did and traces their steps to the site of the Ipatiev House where they were murdered, and the bullets bounced off the Grand Duchesses' squirming bodies because their corsets were made of diamonds. While their parents and brothers lay on the floor, given a dignified imperial death by lead, the Grand Duchesses were hacked by bayonets. All that remains of their blood is a wooden cross.

Tom considers spitting on it, but really, it's already over, and there is nothing worse than death.

-

3000 kilometres later, a fifteen minute stop at Barabinsk, which has no other significance apart from the slightly buttery baked potatoes that he buys from an old woman wearing a lurid, floral print dress, warm and filled with Muggle memories as they slide down his throat with lumps of stiff, black bread. He throws it all up in the bathroom an hour later and wipes his mouth off with his sleeve.

-

The days grow shorter and shorter, and soon he can leave the windows open.

-

The Amur River crossing is really the only other thing he notices about the journey, apart from the way the two chatty, middle-aged women in the opposite seats deflate against each other in the nights when they're sleeping. The sound of the train's wheels on the tracks changes when they're over water and suspended in the air, the longest bridge of the Railway, a bit like magic but with cement and wire.

-

9147 kilometres later, the view from the windows is dominated by the unnaturally red cliffs of Ussuriysk, evidence of Mother Nature's communism. The compartment empties, and the conductor approaches him with a palm upturned like he's begging for arms. In reality, he wants paper, lines of printed text which are of great importance in the atheist Holy Rus, the revolutionary bureaucracy.

Tom uses his red-taped wand with a careless flick. The pain that flares through his arm is worth it for the confused expression on the conductor's face. He leaves with the impression that Tom is a naval cadet with the correct signatures, allowing him entry into one of Red Russia's most important military ports.

Vladivostok: perched on the edge of the USSR, a gateway for the Soviet navy (and other things, too, which is why Tom is here).

In a dusty office that smells strongly of vodka, an alarm flashes mutely on the wall, and one of the three grey-coated, underpaid wizards who work there notes down the time and place of the incident religiously before picking up the telephone to inform the Commissar. Tom knows this but doesn't really care, because he doesn't plan on being caught.

-

The tips of the fingers of Tom's right hand turn dark purple, along with the veins that run underneath his skin, and he spits black blood onto the snow that runs alongside the train tracks.

-

Two hours is much longer than it takes to Apparate, but less time than it takes for wizards who aren't allowed to use magic to find him, and it is also the exact amount of time the Trans-Siberian express takes to reach Vladivostok, halting with the finality of a full-stop, exhaling like a dying boy as the metal wheels stop grinding against the track.

Later on, Tom retells this story as an example of why Muggles should never rule wizards, and the fact that he's still living is proof of it.

-

This time, it's a crush of uniforms and Party officials rather than tourists as he steps down from the train, epaulettes and file-edgings flashing silver in the bleak morning light that barely touches the ocean, glinting hard and metallic. It's as close to the end of the earth as Tom ever wants to go. When he closes his eyes, he sees white land and black ocean rushing towards each other, and there's little space between them for men, even great ones, and that's why he hates Russia.

An ink drawing, white paper and stark black lines, and the Pacific Ocean where the bottle spilled over.

-

He sways ever so slightly as he walks down the streets, but he's wearing a naval uniform 'appropriated' from the trunk of one of the sailors in the compartment opposite to his, and people just assume its alcohol rather than magical poison.

-

And really, Tom thinks, climbing the stairs of a mouldering house whose address he memorised long ago in England, everything until now has just been an interlude, the meandering line between A and B.

-

Seven minutes after he knocks on the door, the tip of his wand is against the tender patch of white skin just under Igor Karkaroff's jaw, pushing slightly so Tom can feel the blood pulsing underneath. 'Take me to him, or I will kill you.'

Tom enjoys laying this out like this, simple dichotomies. X or Y. A and B.

Igor does not imagine himself to be a hero, and that suits Tom perfectly.

-

The house seems to keep going, corridors extending back back back so far that without magic, they'd be nothing but a point in the cold ocean. Tom's wand burns his fingers, but he doesn't let go, shifting slightly so that his robes conceal the blackness that's rapidly consuming his right arm. The air is so heavy with concealment magic it's hard to breathe, like seeing everything underwater.

'V-Vasily,' Igor knocks on the heavy wood door, the kind that swells during the winter. 'Vasily, open up.'

It swings open without a sound, despite the bloatedness of the grain. A light-eyed wizard is sitting calmly at an oak desk carved into intricate serpents that seem to writhe in front of Tom's eyes. The shelves behind him are stacked with rows upon rows of wands and greenish glass boxes marked 'phoenix feather' and 'dragon heartstring' in muted bronze lettering. Tom lets Igor go with a quick Petrificus Totalus! out of the corner of his mouth.

'I have come a long way to learn from you, Gregorovitch.'

The wandmaker shrugs his shoulders, unimpressed by the British accent. 'Hogwarts teaches magic, boy; I do not.'

Tom opens his mouth and instead of words there is a sound like a long drawn out hiss, the exhalations of a dying boy but growing stronger. The serpents that line Vasily's desk slide off the table and slither delicately to the floor, brown wood turning shiny, scaly blacks and greens as they twine around Tom's feet and ooze onto his arms and shoulders. One of them twists around his right wrist and sinks his teeth into black flesh, poison rushing against poison in Tom's veins.

A pair curls around his neck and clamp their jaws on each other's tails, a perfect circle, an ouroboros, forever. 'It is not magic I want to learn,' he explains.

-

"But this: to contain death,

the whole of death...

that is indescribable."

-

There's really very little difference between nights and days in Siberia, because winter light has a dark, filtered quality. Gregorovitch shakes his head and says, 'The first step to eternal life is you have to die.'

-

And Tom Marvolo Riddle does, melting to ash in Lord Voldemort's mouth.

-

AN: This story is for Rhoddlet. She not only gave me inspiration and imagery and, really, the impetus for this story, but concrit'ed as well. The ice-mares, the image of Tom in a Russian winter storm, his feelings towards Russia-- all the good bits are hers, and all the crap is mine, and I apologise profoundly for it.

The first quoted text in bold and the last bit are from Rilke's The Fourth Elegy, the second is General Chuikov, who was in command of the defence of Stalingrad and the third bit of quoted text is by the brilliant Rhoddlet. The italicised text in the second section is from Stalin's order 227 and the appeal of the Urban Committee of Defense of Stalingrad. The phrase 'the first step to eternal life...' is from Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. The title is from The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."