God’s Will

Mitya stands wide-legged in the opened doorway of a speeding rail car. He peers back into the darkness, always back, but there is nothing there to see. The American is gone, vanished into the cold night as though he never existed, except that Mitya’s eyes still throb, and his knuckles still ache.

Mitya is a simple man, a man adverse to complicating matters. That there is a God is unquestionable. That God ever gave a single moments worry over Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov is, however, not only questionable, but is highly unlikely. But suddenly Dmitri, or “Mitya” to friends and family, has been uncomfortably separated from the herd, singled out under God’s gaze in a defining moment, a moment rife with both life, and post-life, implications.

Dmitri Fyodorovich was put on this train wrongly. It was believed that he killed his father. He was arrested in innocence, but that innocence is suddenly gone. He deserves to be on the train now, as much so as do these swine who are huddled around him, for he has just killed the American. The irony is almost too much for him to contemplate.

“So then.” Dmitri Fyodorovich speaks to no one in particular. “My conviction is not a sentence of Man after all, but is the sentence of God!” Mitya finds himself somewhat proud of this fact; that God, with all of his important goings-on has created a moment just for him, even if the moment was only made to catch him in a wrongdoing. After all, is any moment of God’s time not a worthy moment?

Cold and clear the night. Wide and twinkling the skies. Like starlight the eyes of God hang low and large over the Siberian Plateau, gazing downward. Ahead, far into the vast distance, twin, silvery ribbons of rail point dreamily toward the preordained destiny God has mapped out for Mitya. Try as he might Mitya cannot understand it all.

“Not my will, Father, but yours be done.”

For thousands of miles nothing moves through the frigid darkness in any direction save the solitary, sequestered beam which creeps upon the darkened steppe. The drab light has done something that all of Mitya’s cursings, and ragings never could; it has drawn God’s eye, and his ire. The beam has spotlighted Mitya, along with the other unfortunate souls riding in the railcar with him. Seen from a million miles above Earth the locomotive’s headlamp would appear motionless to God, suspended in time even as it raced straightaway through the night with a singular purpose, and to a singular destination. But now a mortal sin has made the lowly beacon worthy of God’s attention.

“Is murder,” Mitya asked in a low voice that was immediately submerged in the blast of frigid air rushing through the doorway, “not permitable when committed against he who would take what is rightfully yours? Is that not what war is, and is killing in war not only correct, but glorious?” Mitya had himself once been a decorated soldier.

These are Dmitri’s thoughts as he considers the past and the future, but mostly he considers the more recent events of the preceding moments...

For it was only moments ago that the American was alive; a living man whose breath fogged white when it voiced his dreams, just as Mitya’s breath did. The prisoners in the railcar had spent the time cutting cards. The thin, colorless, corrugated walls of the freight car offered the men inside it no protection from the Russian winter, besides which the car‘s door had long since been removed, leaving the soot-coated prisoners inside the car to endure not only the fears of an unkown future, but also the mercilous gusts assaulting them from outside.

There trailing car contains the guards. The soldiers’ car is a caboose, fitted with seats, and with a decent wood-stove backed by metal reflectors. The guards give no thought to the missing door on the prisoner’s car. The guards are known to each other. They have made this trip many times. As comrades they are free to huddle together beside their stove with no worry of their prisoners escaping. Where, after all, would those prisoners escape to? There is nothing but slow, cruel, frozen death on the other side of that opened doorway on the prisoner’s car. Let them jump! They had might as well leap straight into the fires of hell!

So the prisoners in the freight car do not jump. Instead, they shiver inside their coats while donning their bravest faces. With hat brims pulled low they gnaw at their pipe stems, or stroke thick beards with stiff fingers, feigning nonchalance as best they can whilst the two largest of them argue.

One of the arguing men is Russian; a soldier, or a former soldier. That he was a soldier is obvious from his bearing, his polished shoes, and from the authoritative ring in his voice. He is the angry one, the contemptuous one. He was easily riled, and he will be quick to strike a blow.

The other is American. This one is more tranquil, but occasionally a red streak of something angry flashes from his eyes, or possibly it is only a mirage, just the glowering gleam from the wood-stove reflecting when he turns his head just so.

It is a small wood-stove in the prisoner’s car. It squats timidly in the corner, so small that it must be constantly fed, and still it does not glow warm enough to completely thaw even one man against the incessant, arctic gusts of cold air that rage through the opened doorway. As these are hard men, and strangers, there is no huddling together for warmth. Instead, the men stand at arms length, swaying stiffly to-and-fro like aquatic life within the unsteady motions of the car. Theirs is a strange dance performed to the steady clatter emitted from steel wheels beneath rough board floors. For added annoyance the occasional steam whistle reverberates within the car’s metallic walls, piercing the men’s ears, forcing them back awake, which is good. To sleep on the train is to die a frozen death.

The men are killing time, cutting cards for the chance to win short turns squatting in the warmth next to the stove. Mitya’s card, a “suicide king,” should have proven a winner, but then the American drew an ace. Despite Mitya’s indignant protestations the undisturbed American brushed past the angry Russian, giving an extra nudge with his shoulder in so doing before taking his attained spot beside what little warmth the stove might muster.

This insolence proves too much for Dmitri Fyodorovich. With suprising speed for such a large man, the Russian slams the American loudly against the tin wall of the car. Face to face the two men scream their rage. The Russian grasps the lapels of the American’s jacket, feeling for his neck, and throat. Undaunted, the American lifts thickly carved thumbnails up to the Russian’s eyes, thrusting them into Mitya’s closed lids. Desperate, a screaming Dmitri Fyodorovich lifts the American, tossing him unceremoniously through the open space where the railroad car’s door had once slid closed. Mitya’s momentum carries him to the doorway’s very edge where he teeters precariously, very nearly following the American into the dark void, an event that would have proven a relief for those lesser men left shivering in the car, had it happened.

... and so, now the Russian stands in the doorway, watching the snowy landscape, and the lowering stars like the eyes of God as they drift past the railcar. There is an inexplicable heaviness within him. He has been sent to a Siberian exile for a murder against Man that he did not commit, but one that he wished to commit all the same, as though God has read his mind all along. And now he has, in fact, committed a murder, so that Man’s punishment is justifiable, while God only watches. The ways of Heaven and Earth are strange, indeed.

Dmitri Fyodorovich is cold. He walks slowly to the place by the stove where the American should be. Mitya’s head is lowered, his mood solemn. He takes the American’s place, backing himself up to the furnace’s small comfort. His eyes wander through the car, taking in each man, wondering who the next challenger for this preferred spot might be, but it was the American who was the strong one. All of these others are weak, and resigned to their stations.

Tomorrow Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov will be a prisoner, a slave in a Siberian mine. After that, he will be in God’s Hell. But for now... well, for now it is enough that he is warm beside the fire.

God’s will be done.