Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash.
Writing inspired by the following SWC prompts:
Samizdat
The term samizdat originated behind the “iron curtain” in Soviet Russia. In modern English the word refers to a piece of banned, dissident or clandestine literature – often viewed as ‘dangerous’ by the ruling government – which has been secretly printed and smuggled into the hands of readers. Tell the story of a samizdat book or pamphlet.
Samizdat
by Connie Phlipot
The keys clattered in the backroom, audible during pauses in the din of excited voices at the kitchen table. Tat-tat-tat. Silence. An elderly woman, kerchiefed, opened the kitchen door.
“What’s up, Anina?”
“Ribbon. Out of it.”
Andrzej sighed and fumbled in his leather backpack. He held up a partially used typewriter ribbon.
“Will this do?”
“Hmph, maybe. But the carbon paper we’ve got is trash. Need spectacles to read the copies.”
“Well, you can’t keep using it indefinitely.”
“If you had to sit at this damn machine, breaking your fingernails, rather than dreaming big ideas that aren’t going anywhere, you’d use the copy paper until you could see through it.”
“I do write the manuscripts, you know. I don’t just talk.”
The three men and one woman at the table shuffled their feet. The patrols would begin in an hour and they had to get out of the hut before the noise and lights aroused suspicions.
“And the other thing. Reading this scratching of yours is wearing my eyes out. Soon I’ll be blind and then who’ll type your manuscripts.”
“Anina, just go back and finish.”
She slammed the kitchen door. Cups rattled and slopped tea onto the table. Andrzej sighed again. It was hard enough to reach a decision when his colleagues objected to every period and comma even without Anina’s interruptions.
At 23:55, the discussants gathered their notes into their backpacks and nylon shopping bags.
“Piotr, you go out first. The rest of us will follow in a few minutes if you don’t see anyone watching us.”
Anina shuffled into the room in her stocking feet and thrust a mass of typed pages at Andrzej.
“They’re smeared.”
“Too bad. What can I do with such a ribbon? I’m not a magician.”
Andrzej separated the copies and stacked them into piles. The fifth copy was too faint to read, but he couldn’t leave it lying on the table for some government snoop to find. He’d take it along, maybe Anina could type on the backside. In the other room, she was wrapping a blanket around the typewriter.
“I don’t see why we can’t hide this hulking contraption somewhere, like the barn. No miliman is going to root through the cow shit looking for a 100 year-old typewriter.”
She said this every time. And every time she cradled the typewriter in her arms as she sat in the back seat of Andrzej’s Moskvich. Always the backseat, even if no one else was riding with them.
“Sleep well, Anina.” He opened the car door to let her out in her village before continuing into the city. “Next time, I’ll bring more carbon paper and better ribbons.”
Not that he knew where he’d find those things. The stationery store had long ago stopped stocking carbon paper. One original was considered quite adequate by the Printing Ministry. He had heard that dissidents in some other country, probably Estonia — they were always head of the game — had some kind of simple copying machine. Simple, but still too heavy for Anina to carry like a baby — and it required special paper and ink. Where did they get that? Foreigners, no doubt — the emigre connection. Those Estonians, or whoever, were the clever guys and must be more connected to the world than his group.
Anina wished him sweet dreams. Thank goodness she seemed to have recovered from her pique. They’d be lost without her and her ilk of elderly women across the movement. Young women wanted to be part of the action — not to sit in a back room typing. And the men? Forget it. Like him, none of them had learned to type. Considered a woman’s job since the war, when women like Anina had to send out dispatches while the men fought. Who knew these ladies would now be working to overthrow the government they supported during the war? If they even knew that was what they were doing. No, they knew. He had learned never to underestimate someone just because they wore a headscarf and had bad knees.
One more challenge before going home and to bed. He turned off his headlights and took his foot off the gas peddle, letting the car coast down the gentle hill. At the bottom, he used the last bit of momentum to turn the car into a side road and into a shed. He removed the license plates and stashed them in his backpack, then walked the last hundred meters to his apartment block.
Andrzej always slept with the latest batch of papers on his nightstand. Of course, that wouldn’t save him if he were raided, but it gave him some comfort. And sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, he read through them, dismayed if he found typos. He couldn’t blame Anina, she was right that his handwriting was bad. Still, he relished his sharp, emphatic prose. Someday, these essays and calls to actions would be in thick volumes. Like the Federalist papers the Americans crowed about. They’d be in libraries, read and studied by students of history and democracy.
In the meantime, he had to get the copies into the hands of the right people. If there were a meeting of the Coordination Council, he’d just bring them along. So far, they had a workable security plan for those meetings. but in between meetings, he had to scramble, taking a cab to a remote village, then walking to another settlement where they would have arranged to pick up milk from a “farmer,” who was one of them. He’d hand him a bag of “deficitniy” goods from the city, with the samizdat concealed inside. It could actually be fun to play this serious game. But exhausting to scamper around the countryside. Getting lost on forest paths, mixing up the near identical names of villages.
He’d figure out the next steps tomorrow. Tonight, he’d pour a small brandy and rest.