What Happened on the Way to Haparanda

When the man awoke on the train, it was hurtling at a steady speed. He had been sitting up while sleeping– something he wasn’t usually accustomed to doing. Any recognition or moment of recall that could have explained his current whereabouts evaded him. His mouth and lips were dry and had the unmistakable aftertaste of some peculiar type of liquor. He looked around at the surroundings of the compartment, perplexed, hungry, and in a fog of slowly dissipating fatigue. It was a second-class compartment. He had been on enough trains in his life to know that. Despite the dull aching that pinched his temples, he looked out the window.

The view of lush meadows filled his sight. A soft, glowing sunset shone down on the green grass and pristine lakes. Sweden was his first thought. It has to be Sweden. He straightened up and looked at his clothes. They were darkish beige and slightly wrinkled. They fit just fine. He could recall these were his clothes. At least that much he could recognize.

He felt around in his pockets trying to locate a train ticket or passport or some type of identification. There were none. He could not even find a wallet. He paused and closed his eyes to summon composure. The thrash and clang of the train’s metal wheels on the tracks bumped along rhythmically. There was an obtrusive chill that leaked its way through the bottom cracks of the compartment wall where the window was. The wind lightly howled alongside the rush of air from the train’s locomotion. The cold air breathed its icy presence into the cabin, but it wasn’t too bitter. All he could deduce was that it was springtime weather in Scandinavia because the coldness didn’t indicate the harsh torture that was winter.

He stood on his feet and heard a clink. Something had tumbled from the upholstered seat and into the floor near his feet. In an overhasty manner, he moved his feet around to see if he could find what had landed on the floor so unexpectedly. He heard another clinking sound as if the object had been propelled yet again by his movement and touched some type of glass. The view in the cabin was dim so he stretched forward and bent down to get a closer look. It was a tin pocket watch and an empty glass bottle. He picked them both up. He smelled the edge of the liquor bottle. It smelled like vodka, but there was a tinge he could lightly detect which reeked of an odd odor. Was I drugged?

He clasped open the pocket watch. It was almost eight o’clock– sunset time in northern Sweden. How did he know that? He was German. It was coming back to him. He turned his head to the walls of the cabin. There was a small photographic portrait of King Gustav V placed nimbly on the wall. Yes, the photo was beginning to revive his stunted memory. He was in Sweden while the rest of Europe was at war. The great war they called it, but it was an abysmal war that had sucked the light and hope out of the entire world. Everything was talk of the war. No moment’s rest from it. It had gone on for years and wouldn’t ebb away. It lingered like a slow, desultory cancer. Why was he not on the frontlines fighting since he was German?

He looked at the opposing side of the compartment where a crinkled newspaper lay. He plucked it from the seat as his focus sharpened on the date at the top. April 15, 1917. It was a periodical from Stockholm. It was in Swedish of course. He could read it fluently as if it were in his native German– another pleasant surprise. He glanced at the headlines diligently and looked at the photos and subheading. One read: Food Shortages Continue in Sweden Allied countries cease agricultural trade with Sweden for refusal to embargo Germany.

Though many people in Sweden had sympathies for their German cousins to the South, they were officially neutral, but neutral meant Sweden could do business with anyone, even the Germans. Perhaps it is an immutable fact that the human longing for neutrality in all its obsequious pretension to be fair has the undeniable trait of being a short-lived fantasy that smacks of self-delusion. Take iron ore for instance. The iron ore Sweden sold from their mines to the Germans was used in the manufacture of weapons of war. These were the same weapons the Germans were using to kill the sons of Allied countrymen– sons of men who tilled the soil to grow the crops that fed the Swedes. It didn't look very neutral at all in the scheme of things. No wonder the Allies wised up and decided to stop selling food to Sweden.

At that moment, a tension filled his chest as the train’s velocity gained speed. The clanging of the wheels against the tracks struck hard and ground with a discordance and rapidity that startled him– jarring sounds like that of a blacksmith pounding an anvil to death. He was almost flung from his feet as the cabin rocked back and forth. The man used his arms to regain balance on the cushioned seat and dropped the newspaper as it wafted to the floor out of his sight. The train was moving faster, and the compartment swayed unrelentingly. He thought he heard an unmistakable collection of gasps from women's voices in the neighboring compartment.

Had they lost control of the train? Surely not. They just had a complete moron for a conductor.

The door of the cabin opened. The man thought he would see a steward who had come to offer an explanation for why the train was barreling unhinged through the Swedish tundra like a furious cannonball. It wasn’t a steward at all. It was a peculiar man in a black suit and blue tie. He had a striking appearance, but what was most noticeable were the bandages on his hands and his ruddy, red face, peeling and scaly as if they had been belligerently sunburned. Despite his beleaguered condition, the man seemed to be in good spirits. The stranger was a short man and bald. He entered smiling.

“Hello, Karl,” the stranger said. “Go ahead and take a seat.” His German sounded very natural, but it contained the hint of a strange accent, almost English. Little wobbly stars of light were blinking in his brain. He felt dizzy, but this German train passenger who had awoken confused and as doddery as an old man on the borderlands of senility realized that his name was indeed Karl. It was as if his mind were a black cave whose entrance was blocked with a complex lattice of cobwebs. Cobwebs that were about to be cleared away as slender but multiple beams of light seeped into his brain simultaneously. The two men sat down opposite each other in the train. The stranger looked calm, untroubled, as he pulled tobacco from his pocket to put in a pipe. Karl, on the other hand, gazed wide-eyed eager to listen.

“How did you know my name, sir? You must help me. I’m suffering from some type of amnesia,” Karl said. The steam whistle from the train engine wailed like a banshee as its speed continued. The locomotion huffed and puffed. The metal grinded onward. Despite the increased level of noise and the combined fear and bemusement at their sudden acceleration, Karl focused on the stranger’s voice which had a detached easiness about it. As he listened, even Karl himself sank into a solemn aloofness. The sun was nearing its point of no return for the evening and all that gleamed forth from the outside was a pink, twilight haze poking densely through the window.

“Those drugs really do the trick. You can’t even remember your own bloody name. I didn’t think you would wake up so quickly. At least I don’t have to throw you out while you are still asleep.” The stranger nonchalantly puffed on the smoke from his pipe and pulled forth his own pocket watch to look at the time.

“We have some time before this train will derail according to my precise estimates. In about twenty-six minutes. Casualties should be at a minimum, but I’m counting that all those in the sealed carriage will perish.”

“Derail? The train will derail. We have to do something,” Karl said.

“We are going to do something. We’re going to jump my friend.”

“No, we have to tell the conductor,” Karl said, about to leap from his seat.

“Sit down, Karl,” the stranger said, now more forcefully, raising his voice. He still had his pipe casually placed between his lips. “The conductor is out. I drugged him along with the other crew near the front of the train. The air brakes on the train are not going to work either. They have been disabled. Certain people on this train are going to die, and hopefully, it will look like the perfect accident once the smoke clears.” The man said this as he sighed deeply and exhaled a blue puff of smoke. “No pun intended,” he said, his eyebrows lifting up in a strange smirk.

“Why?” Karl said.

“Good heavens, man. Why don’t we jump now, and I’ll tell you once we land in the grass?”

“No, tell me now,” Karl said.

“You’re German secret police, Karl. We both are. We’re partners. We’ve been partners for a while. We’re handlers for this train’s cargo.”

“What cargo?”

“Not what per se but who. 30 Russian communist revolutionaries who’ve been living in exile in Switzerland. 30 give or take, and their leader. They’re on their way back to Russia via Sweden– where we are now. They had to travel all the way from Stockholm to the far north– a town called Haparanda. It’s near the Finnish border. It’s the only route they can take to avoid detection and get back to Russia without the Russian authorities finding out and deporting them back to Switzerland.”

“Who is their leader?”

“An annoying man with a shrill voice and an unhealthy, obsessive taste for reading books by Marx and Engels. Can you imagine what the world would have been like had he preferred romance novels instead?”

“Who?” Karl said, wide-eyed.

“The man in the sealed carriage at the front of this train car. The one with all the fake counterfeit Russian rubles and the crazy ideas about the proletariat dictating the course of the world. He’s supposed to destabilize Russia’s economy and upend their politics. Help drum up enough anti-war support and convince the Russians to get out of the war. It will help the Germans immensely. Once Germany is no longer fighting Russia, the Germans can devote troops elsewhere and beat the Brits and the French along the western front. It’s a hell of a strategy.”

“Well what’s wrong with that? The war would be over on the eastern front, and it will help Germany win the war?”

The stranger drew another puff on his pipe a little bit longer this time and his eyes fixed ahead.

“Of course, this man, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin, as he’s known, cannot be allowed to reach Petrograd alive. That’s why I drugged you– to keep you from stopping me. We were supposed to be protecting him– to make sure he gets there. But you’re in for a rude awakening. Because this thing with Lenin is not going to go according to plan, not in the long-run at least. At first, the plan will work well, maybe too well. Lenin is going to contribute to bolstering the anti-war sentiments. Make peace with Germany, alright, and it all starts with a speech. He will make a speech at a train station in Petrograd. It has all been orchestrated by the German secret police to have a larger-than-usual audience and the press’s attention. Once he makes this speech, he gets a lot of publicity, and enough people in Russia will be behind him. The anti-war sentiment will run high. Here’s where the plan goes awry. In about six months, there will be another revolution in Russia, and not like the one we saw last month with Kerensky and the bourgeois taking power from the emperor. No, this time, Russia will be under Lenin’s grip, and he will transform Russia into the first communist nation in the world. Lenin is a bad man, but he is still human. His rule will last seven years– as long as an Egyptian famine– like something straight out of the Bible,” the stranger chuckled.

The stranger paused to suckle some more on his pipe as he exhaled out more smoke.

“When Lenin dies, however, his empire will be inherited by a demon disguised in human form and that’s when the real famine begins. The demon who rides this train with Lenin is a child of Lucifer himself.”

“A child of the devil?” Karl said dumbstruck.

“Eventually, there will be two of them disguised as humans, and they will introduce themselves soon enough to the world. They are brothers from the same pointy-tailed father. Almost like twins. They will be the worst the world has ever seen. One will rise from the turmoil of German politics in the 1920s and 30s. The other, who is on this train, will be quietly waiting in the wings of the grotesque theater that Russia is about to become once Lenin takes over. Given enough time, these two archdemons will turn Europe into hell on Earth and try to take the rest of the world with it. The war going on right now will just be considered the prologue to humanity’s longest horror novel.”

“How could you possibly know all this? You think you are clairvoyant?”

“My name is August von Clausewitz. I was born in 1920 in Munich, Germany. By your time standards, I haven’t even been born yet, but everything I’ve described is true, and I lived to see it all come to fruition. I saw what happened to my country. All the empty promises, the lies, the devilry of demagogues, and the stirring, hypnotic power of the head demon on stage, his voice transmitted by radio waves to millions. The demon harvested rotten fruit, and the people ate it willingly. But the demon looked and smelled and sounded so human. Its unholy image was plastered on walls all over the nation– the same German nation I grew to love as a boy. Then one day, the dark cloud finally came, like the mother of all dark clouds, looming overhead and billowing over everything and everyone like the shadow of the grim reaper’s scythe. Do you remember learning about the Black Death in the 14th century in Europe? This was like that except the Plague was bottled up in one person, and it had its own name, a name people hailed. The demon revealed itself for what it was, a creature filled with rage. The demon’s rage was unfathomable, and yet for all its ugliness, in all its pestilence that it summoned, the creature still appeared elegant to many.

“When it was over, Europe was a wasteland. I can still see the pictures of the dead bodies. Mountains of corpses. People who did nothing wrong murdered in cold blood. Nothing but an endless display of frightening images. Images of the dead and of the survivors– though one could hardly tell the difference between the two. I had this distinct feeling that when it was all over, when the whole world could see with its own eyes what had happened, when the piercing horror had started to recede, it was briefly followed by this collective and powerless shrug. As if humanity said to itself, ‘Well, we didn’t think that could happen, did we?.’”

Clauswitz savored the smoke emanating from his nostrils this time. He honed his gaze as if focusing on something in the distance outside the train cabin window. Then he turned his head back to Karl just as purposefully.

“War ended in 1945. I had worked as a secret agent for His Majesty’s Government throughout the latter part of the war. I leaked information to British intelligence when I worked for the German government. It was an office job in Berlin. You should have seen Berlin when the war ended. The buildings were gone. Nothing but rubble. Sodom and Gomorrah would have made for more hospitable lodgings.

“Anyway, five years later, with Germany still rebuilding itself, this would’ve been 1950– the Brits recruited me for a top secret program. Let’s call it a program for which H.G. Wells might have claimed plagiarism. But it wasn’t a time machine as Wells would have envisioned. It was the work of the world’s greatest physicists. After the Manhattan Project, they had to put their creative energy on something else. Dr. Oppenheimer felt he was unstoppable, you see. If he could crush the uranium atom and build an atomic bomb, he could do this too, he thought. He was sure of it. Churchill was behind it 100% when he became prime minister again. My orders came directly from him.”

“Church-who?”

“Prime Minister Churchill of Great Britain. He was one of the good guys as far as good guys in power go. As for the two dictators, the enemies– you know what– never mind the names. Evil has too many aliases. How would the Prophet Daniel have described them? The beasts? That’s it. We were to go back in time and assassinate the two beasts that causeth desolation before they could be given a chance to seize power in their respective countries. The story with Germany was the same in Russia. The people were made to worship the image of their beast, and their beast slaughtered many. I was assigned to take out the Russian one– the one on this train with Lenin– though he actually wasn’t born in Russia. He’s from the Republic of Georgia.

“The only problem is they sent me back to the wrong time. 1897. I was 30 years old then, and for the past 20 years, I’ve been slowly dying or if not dying, decaying.” He looked down at his peeling, red hands as red as lobster claws. “Apparently, traveling back in time is the equivalent of taking a nice evening stroll through Hiroshima in August ‘45.” He laughed to himself though not really smiling.

“Never mind the reference. It took a toll on my health. But I luckily found my way to where I needed to be and was recruited by the German secret police. I worked for the Kaiser’s government and rose in the ranks. I specifically requested this assignment. We became friends and partners during that time. This whole time, you had no idea who I really was. Neither do my wife or kids. I already made arrangements for them to meet me outside of Germany. I can’t go back there. Not after I fail in my mission of protecting Lenin.” He smiled this time, the laughter that might have come having been prematurely stanched and supplanted by a pensive gleam in his eyes. Then the sudden moroseness passed.

“But Lenin and his entourage will never live to arrive at the station in Haparanda. From there, he would have crossed over the icy river into Finland by small boat, and then taken another train to Petrograd. But they won’t make it. Somehow I will have saved humanity from itself.” August von Clausewitz continued to puff on his pipe and looked at his tin pocket watch.

The train continued to gallop at a giddy speed, the wheels clanging and clunking, as you could hear a flurry of concerned voices outside in the train car corridor. Passengers were running outside in the corridor hall as frantic as monkeys being chased by a leopard. People could be heard swearing aloud. There was a Tower of Babel-like scene of different languages spoken taking place. There were Russians, Germans, Swedes, and Finns aboard all confused and pleading for answers. Women fainted. Stewards tried to calm people down. The last bit of sunlight sneaked away outside, plunging the train cabin into the solace of shadows. A small light bulb at the top of the cabin turned on and meekly illuminated the faces of the two passengers.

“The conductor is unconscious,” someone could be heard shouting in the corridor.

“Dear God in Heaven,” another person said outside.

“The Titanic is going down, and these people don’t have the good sense to jump ship, do they?” August said casually as he glanced at his watch one more time.

“You bastard, you’d let all these innocent people die just so you can kill Russian revolutionaries. You’re insane. What you just told me! No one in their right mind would believe it. You’re mentally deranged. A Europe ruled by two demons?” Karl said.

“I have my orders from Churchill himself. It’s collateral damage. How can I weigh these peoples’ lives against the millions who won’t suffer? After all I’ve seen on this Earth, in this life, I’m lucky I’m really not mentally touched. And that’s enough, Karl. We’re getting off. Whenever those drugs wear off, you’ll remember we’re good friends. Until then, this is how I’ll have to convince you to do what I say.” August removed a revolver from beneath his suit jacket. “You must jump with me.”

“No,” Karl impugned. Karl lunged for the revolver with both hands and grabbed August’s bandaged hands placing his fingers near the trigger to impede August from pulling it. August was caught off guard and struggled to keep hold of the firearm. Karl’s blunt fingernails tore easily into the pulpy, red flesh of August’s hand, penetrating even through the bandages. August squealed like a pig and loosened his grip on the revolver. Karl then tilted his body inward and stretched out both arms and pulled August’s gun and arms upward to keep the revolver as far away from his face as possible.

August was shrewd and quickly kneed Karl in the stomach. He was aiming for the groin but didn’t make his target. Karl let out a yell and let one of his hands go free so he could maneuver a punch at August in the face with his elbow. It worked. August was disoriented for a split-second and Karl elbowed him again repeatedly in the nose. Karl had the revolver in his hands now and swung it down so it thudded against August’s skull.

August fell to the floor in a lackadaisical state but swiftly came to once his head stopped spinning. August grabbed Karl’s leg and had little trouble in successfully knocking him down. If the train hadn’t been going so fast, Karl might have managed to maintain his balance, but instead, Karl went tumbling backward and crashed his head against the window. A spiderweb of broken glass formed where the back of his head landed. The pace of the train still galloped ferociously onward. It still looked like a locomotive but took on the will and character of a fiery horseman of the Apocalypse freshly escaped from the furnace of some underground, flaming abyss, bolting forward, out from a cracked seam in the Earth’s hollow crust. Like a mad, dark specter in the obscurity of twilight, it stole forward, assuredly haunting and wild. The iron beast dashed on desperately as if cognizant that hell’s backdraft could swallow it back down should it decelerate.

August said to Karl, “You fool! If you won’t come with me, I’m leaving you behind.” Karl had tumbled to the bottom of the train cabin and lay prostrate gasping for breath. August’s hands were oozing something thick and pink through the bandages and he scratched at his flaking scalp. The revolver was back in his hand. Instead of pointing it at Karl, though, he pointed it at the window and fired a shot. The window evaporated into confetti pieces of glass strewn about, and there was nothing left but a gaping hole which invited the strong roar of the train sprinting forward with unbounded fury. “Goodbye, Karl!” August leapt through the window and out into the dark meadows below.

Karl, overwhelmed, came to his feet. It was in that moment with the clear rushing of chilled air that immersed the cabin that Karl’s mind had completely recovered from its drug-induced stupor. He knew who he was and what he was there to do. “Herr Lenin,” he said to himself. “I must protect him.” Karl ran to the door, slid it back, and entered into the hallway past the panicky passengers.

The rushing of the train outside sounded like the roar of the ocean in a hurricane, but GeheimPolizei Agent Karl Schmidt flew down the corridor and saw Vladimir Lenin flanked by fellow Russians. His otherwise prominent bald head was shielded by a cap firmly attached to his head, but his goatee was not obscured, and it was undeniably the communist leader. Though he did not seem the callous, stoic leader from the photographs in the newspapers. At the moment, his countenance betrayed the same look of terror shared by the faces of his fellow passengers.

He recognized Karl at once as one of his German handlers.

“Der Kamerad,” Lenin said in German, “What is to be done?”

“It’s alright Herr Lenin. I will do what I can. My partner has betrayed us. He went stark, raving mad, a lunatic, but I was put on this assignment because I do know how trains operate. The air brakes may have been disabled, but there is an emergency back-up. It will be a hard brake, and I can’t guarantee the train won’t derail, but to do nothing less would be suicide. It will be safer than going at this pace at any rate. I must reach the bottom of the train car and find it. We don’t have much time.”

“Then you must do what you can, Kamerad,” Lenin said. “Otherwise, we will have to jump and risk breaking our necks.”

Agent Karl Schmidt nodded and rubbed his own face, trying to clamp back the floodgates of fear which were ready to come pouring in. He fought back the prospect of despair as his adrenaline took over. He opened the train car door which connected to the next adjoining car and made haste to the front of the train. What were his chances of success?

* * *

“A British spy,” said Lenin. It was almost a guffaw of words. “A German secret policeman working for the British this whole time. I should have known the British would try to foil my plans and have me murdered. They are ruthless, the British, but they have the most to lose from a proletariat revolution,” Lenin said, raving to his audience of comrades. It was nighttime in the tundra, and the train had come to a screeching halt many miles from their destination in Haparanda station. Almost miraculously, due to Karl's quick thinking and sagacity, he had managed to stop the train. Thank goodness Clausewitz had been unaware of how to disable the emergency brakes. The metal wheels scraped against the wrought iron of the tracks with a deafening fury and fire sparks sputtered, but fortunately, no one had been killed.

The passengers and crew were hunkering near the tracks and behind the train cars to shield themselves from the taut blast of the tundra’s nighttime air. They had already begun to build fires, like campfires, to keep warm and ward off the worst of the night cold. Temperatures were going to be freezing even though it was April. It was still northern Scandinavia. Once morning came, some would make an expedition on foot to Haparanda to bring back help. The train’s telegraph had been disabled as well.

Around the glow of one campfire, a handful of Lenin’s comrade revolutionaries were settled in, covered in blankets and slept near the fire, their nerves strained and almost shattered from the ordeal of the runaway train. Some were still awake and were sitting up and drinking coffee or vodka next to the fire and chatted sparingly. Sweden’s Lappland tundra was a peculiar place to spend the night, but the outside air was fresh, the clouds comfortingly immaculate and the glow from a crescent moon and the vibrant stars above interrupted the blackness of the dark night sky.

Agent Schmidt felt calm. He sat alone on top of a suitcase drinking a strong brew of tea with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His back was to the fire. He looked around as best he could and was mesmerized by the frozen dew of the grass which had soaked in and saturated the surrounding meadows in a glistening sheen amid the star-filled sky. Off in the distance, a herd of reindeer trudged leisurely.

Just then, the moment of tranquility was breached. A man in a well-tailored, gray suit coat and smoking a pipe approached Karl from behind and patted him on the shoulder, “Bravo, lad. Bravo. You saved Comrade Lenin and the rest of us. If only we could have gotten hold of that traitor. We would have wrung his scrawny, little neck.” Karl turned around. The man was noticeably pock-marked on the face, somewhat short but had a hearty air about him. He was clean shaven save for a thick, bristly mustache as dark as the hair on his head which was as black as boot polish. The man’s voice had a soft, pleasant tone. In the beam of the fire, however, Karl became a little unsettled. The man glared at him with yellow, wolfish eyes and a vulpine grin.

“May I have the pleasure of your name, Comrade?” asked the man.

“It is Karl Schmidt. And may I have the pleasure of knowing yours, sir?”

“My mother gave me the name of Josef. But please, call me Comrade Stalin.”