1850-01: A Survivor's Story (Part Three)
Pavel Tzarkowski sits for an intake interview, recounting his life and his experiences during the Collapse.
This is part of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to go to the series’ page.
After lunch, Pavel left his family for his intake interview. During the orientation earlier in the day, they had been told that they would have to share some basic biographical information so they could figure out what roles they could fill as residents of Nova Espero once they had left the Hospital.
Pavel tepidly knocked on the slightly ajar door of Room 107. “Come in,” he heard a gruff voice exclaim.
Much like his family’s room, the office was bare. Opposite a particle board desk topped with a lamp, a typewriter, a legal pad, and a mug with some writing implements was a worn-out couch. Behind the desk were two bookshelves, covered with a few threadbare volumes. The mid-afternoon light permeated the window, illuminating the dust particles falling all around.
The interviewer himself was a man whose head appeared to be consumed with a simultaneously short-cropped and chaotic arrangement of black, curly hair. He wore a green sweater vest atop a rumpled, white-collar shirt, and warmly extended his hand towards Pavel as he entered the room.
“Welcome,” he said. “You must be Mr. Tzarkowski.” The man gestured toward the grungy couch and settled himself back at his desk.
“This should only take a few minutes, Mr. Tzarkowski. Please get comfortable and answer the questions as thoroughly as you can…”
We’ll start with some basics. Where are you from, originally?
Kravozhodwo is – was? – a small village in the Zoldish countryside. When Pavel was a child back in the 30s and 40s, only a single building had running water. None had electricity until he had gone on to middle school, and even then it was only the home of the local baron. He remembered running through the meadows in the Kravo River valley and hunting for crawfish with his sister Magdalena and his close friends. Because it was only a few miles from the headwaters in the peaks of the nearby mountains, the water there ran clear over the rocks on the riverbed.
He remembered partaking in cannonball contests in the pool that formed at the base of the nearby waterfall, and killing his first deer with his father. He also remembered it being his last deer, as his kindhearted father surely noticed the tears running down his son’s face after coming face to face with the animal’s carcass.
He remembered how excited his parents were when he got accepted to the prestigious Imperial University in Hegeliopolis, hundreds of miles down the coast. In his youthful haughtiness, he spent no time wondering whether or not they were crying on the platform as his train fled the station. His parents knew that people didn’t tend to come back to Kravozhodwo once they left. Pavel Tzarkowski had no intention of going back, save for maybe some holiday in the future. If he met a girl in Hegeliopolis, perhaps he would come back to show her off to his parents. Or if he had a child, maybe he would come back to introduce them to the village.
But alas, train tickets were too expensive. School and then work got too busy. Things got too hectic with the kids. Time passed, and it got harder and harder to justify taking a ten-hour train ride where at the end he would see firsthand his father’s advancing dementia, or the friends who had turned to alcohol or other drugs to numb the pain of the area’s shambolic economy.
And the family you brought with you…
Elizabeta. EE-lizabeta, she corrected him after he made the fatal error of pronouncing it with a soft “e.” She was an engineering student that had come to Pavel for help in their shared history course. Pavel didn’t ask for any payment in return, aside from help in the physics course he for some reason incomprehensible to him needed to complete in order to get his degree.
Truth be told, however, he could barely focus on her talking about classical mechanics or energy formulas. All he could focus on was how her auburn hair would, from time to time, jump from the loose knot she always had tied behind her head and droop down to her face. Or her occasional laugh, and the sweet satisfaction he felt whenever he tricked her into giving him one. Or the unresolvable knot his innards tied themselves into when he mustered up the courage to ask her out to dinner, and the feeling of that knot miraculously coming undone when she said yes.
The date started off as a disaster. The restaurant he intended on taking her to ended up being closed, and his backup was being fumigated. The flustered Pavel, sure that he had blown his shot with the woman who he was fully convinced was the most beautiful thing he ever saw, was reassured when she took the shortfalls in stride. She took him by the hand, dragging him to her favorite food cart nearby. Sitting on a bench along the Great Imperial Way, the two ate their Ylrikian noodles as they watched the sputtering city cars and jitneys pass by.
Despite previously breaking into a hot sweat whenever he saw her before, he found himself remarkably calm in her presence. He barely even noticed when her head eventually came to rest on his shoulder. Over the next two years, he wouldn’t feel a knot in his stomach around her again until he proposed. The same answer brought the same relief, all over again.
Finishing a doctorate in chip engineering is no easy task as it is. It’s even more difficult when you’re expecting a child. And yet, to Pavel’s deep admiration but not at all to his surprise, Elizabeta persisted. Once she was done with both – she received her diploma six days before giving birth – she egged Pavel on to pursue his own doctorate.
There was the tension of raising a newborn and Pavel’s busy schedule, not to mention Elizabeta’s starting a new career. The sleepless nights brought about by Anna’s intemperate nature were akin to an authoritarian torture technique. As sometimes occurs in such scenarios, the parental prisoners hurt one another in their emotional and physiological anguish.
But they loved each other. They cared. And evidently the whole thing didn’t stop them from having Filip just a few years later.
And your occupation prior to the War?
The history department at the Imperial University was a storied one. In its over a quarter of a millennium of existence, it produced well-renowned authors, groundbreaking research, and countless volumes filled with tales of Hegelion’s storied past.
Pavel witnessed the generational rift between the older, more liberal historians who remembered the world before the limited democracy in the Imperial Diet, and the younger, zealous nationalists who agreed with the emperor’s calls for restored glory. He watched as they mocked their predecessors, charging that they had been duped by rootless cosmopolitans and that a national redemption was necessary.
Pavel recalled seeing that Ylrikian noodle cart vandalized at the hands of people like his classmates, and remembered when he noticed that it was gone. He remembered the poisonous rhetoric that filled the airwaves with ahistorical nonsense about the Hegelio-Ferrian race’s divine superiority. He remembered his fellow doctoral students sporting pins calling themselves “Sons of the Empire,” and how one by one, the professors and advisors he looked up to suddenly and without warning “resigned” from their posts.
Pavel had enough humility to acknowledge that he was not some heroic dissident that stood up to the imperialists as they slowly chewed away at the nation’s institutions like a pestilential swarm of termites. Though he was sympathetic to the liberals, he couldn’t go to this or that demonstration against cronyism, or the military buildup near Sherbrooke, or increasing police brutality because work got too busy. He couldn’t go to the meetings of the budding resistance because things were too hectic with the kids. And what if he was found out? Would Elizabeta be left on her own to parent two small children, likely donning the scarlet letter of a woman attached to a “radical”?
Do you recall where you were on Deka 28, 1766?
Pavel was working at his university’s library on the day of the War. He had just finished reading through the Hegelion Standard, the principal mouthpiece of the Empire. The two great empires of that time were now in a shooting war – hopefully only a shooting war. Even Pavel was convinced that the gentleman’s agreement to restrict the fighting only to the disputed territories would hold.
Though unbeknownst to Pavel, the sword had finally broken free of its string, falling precipitously over the heads of hundreds of millions of people.
There were no sirens. No early warning systems. Only a thunderous cavalcade of destruction, wrought out over an entire continent. Bomb after bomb, blast after blast, an avalanche of missiles rained chaos on the city of ten million.
Thrown on his back by the percussion of the explosions, Pavel awoke amid an office filled with soot and vaporized paper scraps. The library, one of those unfriendly brick buildings of an earlier age that had the window coverage more akin to a military bunker than a palace of learning, became a surprisingly stable refuge. Much of its exterior was severely damaged, but in the reinforced, windowless core where Pavel and the other junior professors had their quarters, things were comparatively stable.
It was a Saturday, Pavel remembered. Elizabeta and the kids were likely at home, unless, God forbid, they went out to the park. Accessible by train within less than an hour, their suburban home some five miles away from the university seemed a world away.
In a fugue state, Pavel stumbled his way across the wreckage. What he thought of initially as a minor bombing campaign, perhaps a limited retaliatory strike, quickly revealed to be much more. Entire neighborhoods and urban districts had been unceremoniously smeared from the face of the continent. As he marched westward, Pavel could hardly recognize the Imperial Way, flanked by the crumbling remains of the bureaucracy, and where at each end stood the atomized remains of the Imperial Palace and the Diet.
Neighborhoods that Elizabeta and Pavel dreamed that one day, if they made it far enough in their respective fields, could own a stately home were flattened or severely damaged. He barely clocked that one townhouse they both loved – 18 Voorhees Square – was actively burning to the ground as he passed it by. Nor did he notice the screaming emanating from the basement servants’ quarters, their exits blocked by debris and rapidly filling with smoke from the flames or sewage from ruptured pipes.
In the lead-up to the War, as tensions boiled, Elizabeta had the foresight to stock up on canned water and other provisions. They had done so as a way to ease their anxieties, a sort of “what can we do about it?” solution to the potential cataclysm of great power conflict, in response to what could have been a paralyzing, existential horror of apocalypse. They never really expected the apocalypse to happen: they had just been programmed to take personal responsibility for their handling of it.
After two days of travel, Pavel finally made it home. Their humble, two-story home was in surprisingly good condition. In the middle of a block, it had been shielded from much of the force of a distant blast by their neighbors’ homes, and though the roof and windows had been ripped away, the house itself was in relatively good condition. Pavel found them in the basement, huddled around a lamp and emergency radio. Elizabeta nearly blew his head off with the antique shotgun Pavel’s father had sent them as a macabre wedding present, before realizing who was tumbling down the stairs.
Huddling in a pile of tearful embraces, the Tzarkowskis had in those first days achieved a luxury that so few in that age could claim: unorphaned children and unwidowed spouses.
The scruffy-haired administrator in his cord-knit sweater thanked Pavel for his time. The entire interview had only lasted around fifteen minutes but it had felt like hours. He didn’t even notice that tears were forming in his eyes. In the past two years, Pavel hadn’t had much time to wax nostalgic, or more productively, think about the circumstances that eventually landed him in this chair.
What was once an at-times discordant symphony had smoothed for quite some time before erupting into a half-decade-long cacophony. Things happened so fast in the lead-up to the War and then immediately afterwards. By the time Pavel had sat and reflected on everything that had happened, he felt as though he had gone deaf from all the noise.
Pavel made his way down the hallway, spotting Elizabeta exiting her intake room. She had briefly excused herself, as the interviewer prepared for Filip and Anna’s sessions. She and Pavel locked eyes. They knew, from the glisten of teardrops accompanied by the vacant stare, that they had both relived an entire, excruciating history in a matter of minutes.
They grabbed one another and embraced, sobbing into each other’s coats.
This is Part Three of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to read Part Four.