Through the Fog, Darkly - Short story

‘Dammit,’ he said when he drew the curtain aside and looked out of the window. ‘The fog again.’ The air had been white for more than a week by then. He hated the fog because it made him feel as if there was an enormous weight on his chest; it made him gasp for air and wince at the cold blade of breath cutting into his throat.

It’d taken him half an hour to get dressed, shave, put the electric razor in the suitcase, take it out, put it in the handbag, take it out, and repeat this five times. (He was never sure about the regulations.) But now he was already in the car. He had a plane scheduled to take off in three hours.

It was cold, and the windscreen got steamed up quickly. The fog crept into the car through the ventilation system, and he couldn’t help wondering why it appeared to follow him. He’d been in the city almost all week, and the windows of the smoky office were so white they looked as if a curtain had been hung before them. But when he got home on Wednesday, a neighbour who’d never talked to him said they’d had some unexpected sunshine. Then, he stayed at home on Friday. He couldn’t see the block of flats across the street because of the fog; yet, they showed a dozen of sunny photos of the city during the weather forecast on the box, and the weatherman announced excitedly that the sky had been unusually clear for this time of the month there.

Before a crossing, as he slowed the car down at a red light, he could’ve sworn he saw iron-cold steam curling up from the vents on the dashboard. He coughed, and grasped his neck—it hurt with each movement he made. He turned the heating up hoping it’d help somewhat.

Slowly he reached the city and the inevitable gridlock. Twenty minutes later he was still waiting patiently at the end of a wriggling silver snake of cars, and began to shiver again. He tried to turn the heater to the maximum, tugging impatiently at the plastic handle. It snapped and broke off, leaving the slider behind the dashboard at the blue end of the scale. With a sigh, he turned his collar up, and tried to wait as long as he could before having to swallow.

And then, the fog dispersed. It happened so quickly he turned back to see the ground-floor cloud he’d just left behind. But there was nothing there. The white morning sun came out and drew harsh, pitch-black shadows on the grey city, and the three-storey buildings crawled peacefully along the cars that weren’t yet used to the newly installed traffic lights.

When he stepped into the terminal, the first thing he noticed was an air of eeriness. He soon discovered the cause for this feeling: there were very few people there. And they almost exclusively comprised of important-looking, bald men wearing eyeglasses with thick black bakelite frames, and women trying to look like Sophia Loren, with fur coats on their arms that you could buy nowhere in the country. A few foreigners: probably reporters, or staff at the British Embassy, he thought. But what were they doing in the country, anyway? An American couple; and an old lady with a large packet wrapped in brown paper and tied up with delicate string. Not too many altogether; too few even for the small Boeing that regularly flew between London and Budapest.

He should consider himself very lucky, he thought, holding out his brand new red passport to the officer at border control. The man took the tiny document, looked at the photo punched through with brass studs, then looked at him—was that disgust on his face?—and gave the passport back.

He quickly got through what in a courteous overstatement was called the security check. But the officers more than compensated for this efficiency with a slow and thorough inspection. It seemed they didn’t mind if the plane was blown up mid-air (they might’ve even welcome the possibility) as long as you didn’t smuggle out sensitive (that is, any) information about the country. After a long and tiring morning, he finally found a moment of rest in the lounge. He thought of the fog, and swallowed to see if his throat still hurt. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember if he’d packed those papers on the kitchen table in the handbag or the suitcase. Then there was some whiteness, then someone offering coffee or tea… and then he was woken up in the terminal by the sweet but forced voice of the lady with the nicely wrapped package.

‘Are young going to London?’ she asked.

‘Me?’ he said, looking at her as if he didn’t understand. The part of his brain that dealt with airports, suitcases and travel documents was still switched off.

‘Oh you don’t have to tell me,’ the old lady said. ‘I understand. My husband worked for the Ministry. He was never allowed to tell me where he went.’

At a loss as to what to say, he replied with a neutral ‘I’m sorry.’ He couldn’t help catching a glimpse of the rich party members flocking together smoking and laughing with their arms around their wives. Then he turned to the old lady, and smiled.

‘So,’ she continued, ‘do you work at the Ministry?’

‘Which ministry?’

‘What do you mean, which ministry? The Ministry.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, hardly audibly. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

The old lady looked at him and smiled. She seemed sweet. Perhaps a bit lost.

‘Look at the fog,’ she finally said, nodding in the direction of the large windows. ‘I wonder if they’re going to let the plane take off.’

‘Oh I’m sure they will,’ he murmured, rubbing his cold palms together which suddenly got damp. He looked out as well. The view was astonishing. The fog, a wig-shaped cloud, stood about a hundred yards from the terminal. It was bright like ice, like a swab that somehow fell off a summer afternoon sky. It was coming nearer. And it was coming fast.

It was the plane that disappeared first into the all-encompassing whiteness. Then the jetway. When the fog finally hit the windows, there was a low rumble as the building shook under its weight. The man’s throat began to ache.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, gate number 19 is now open. Passengers travelling to London on board of…’

He looked around. The old lady was gone.

‘…proceed to gate number 19 immediately.’

He got a seat next to a window. A young woman sat down on the seat near the aisle; the chair between them remained empty. He was sitting just at the emergency exit over the wings, and after reading all the inscriptions and inspecting all the pictograms showing how to open the door (mainly out of curiosity—he’d never sat next to an emergency exit before, and this was his third time flying, anyway), so, after a thorough investigation of the door, he looked outside. The sun glittered in the cloudless sky, and through the tinted plastic it almost looked like summer.

‘It’s funny how fast the fog has lifted,’ he said, turning to the woman. She lowered the magazine she’d been flipping through, and looked at him with searching eyes.

‘I’m sorry, what fog?’ she asked.

‘The fog on the runway. Didn’t you see it from the terminal?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I think I was reading something.’

He had no idea what to say, and ultimately opted for a habitual ‘I see,’ and looked out again. He started to picture for himself how he was going to meet that man at the embassy and give him the papers. And whether he should call and meet his uncle who emigrated ten years before. Somebody would surely keep an eye on him, or, if not, they’d ask around and find out. He might get fired.

He was so immersed in these thoughts that he hardly noticed the take-off. It was smooth, as expected; unknown to him the control tower had predicted good weather throughout the journey, with a chance of clouds on the other side of the Alps.

An hour later, when they’d all finished their tiny meals and the trash had been collected and taken away, the captain switched on the remain-seated-and-fasten-your-seatbelts sign. ‘We’re going through some turbulence now. I apologize,’ he said over the intercom a couple of minutes later, as the plane creaked and twisted along the aisle. A short beep sounded, and the stewards and stewardesses rushed to their seats. The aircraft jolted. The man, holding on to the armrest, looked out. The air was milky white. When the plane suddenly started to fall like a newly formed raindrop and tilted to its side, he forgot to scream. Terrified, he was staring at a small wisp of smoke—the mist seeping in between the window and the wall. The oxygen masks were automatically released, and, amid the shouting and crying, passengers were ordered to adopt the brace position.

The aircraft took them on a gigantic celestial roller coaster ride as the pilots tried to stabilize its course. After the third freefall, they managed to get on a circular path, where the remaining force of the faulty engine was enough to keep the altitude. The plane was tilted to the right about forty-five degrees. The man offered his arm to the young woman, seeing that she was leaning out of her seat onto the aisle, but she refused with a smile in resignation. Five long minutes passed in this awkward position, but at least they weren’t falling.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We are on a stable course now. However, due to the engine malfunction, we will have to make an emergency landing. I’m informed that, fortunately, we’re just above a disused military air station in the village of Waldhäuser about 80 miles from Regensburg in Germany. We will begin our descent now.’

The man felt the pressure build up outside his eardrums as the plane turned down once more and started to descend like an ant on a corkscrew. All of them stood erect, forgetting the brace position in the momentary relief from fatal danger. He kept looking out of the window hoping to catch a glimpse of the ground, but he could hardly see the wing. It was as if they’d dropped into a bag of flour and were now in a cloud of swirling dust.

‘How high do you think we are?’ the woman asked. They had been descending steadily for more than ten minutes now. ‘Can you see the ground?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Let me see,’ she said leaning over him, and pressed her nose against the window.

‘Nothing. How high do you think we can be?’

‘Well, we surely have fallen a lot. I don’t think we got any higher after that. And then we’ve been descending for quite some time.’

‘Isn’t that worrying?’

‘What?’

‘We must be very close to the ground. The fog is not particularly thick now—look, you can make out the light at the tip of the wing. But we still can’t see anything else.’

He noticed her long blond hair and fresh smell. Even though she was about ten years his junior, she didn’t seem to get scared easily, and remained composed.

‘Have you ever been to Germany?’ he asked.

‘No, I haven’t been to either parts. I wonder what it’ll be like.’

If we live to see it, he thought, but said nothing. They both remained silent for a moment, probably thinking the same. As he looked at her, and she smiled a faint smile, the captain’s voice boomed into the air again.

‘Mrs Kelly, would you be kind enough to come to the cockpit, please.’ Mrs Kelly was one of the stewardesses. She moved as swiftly as her elderly legs could carry her along the slope of the aisle. The intercom remained on.

‘Why can’t I reach the German control? What on earth happened to them?’ the captain continued. There was some distorted speech, probably from the radio. ‘I need to verify my location. We can’t see anything. The nav is probably broke. It shows we’re a hundred feet above the ground. If we can land, it’ll be blind. Ah, Mrs Kelly, thank you for coming. I hear you’ve visited West Germany a couple of times. I mean the stuff outside airports. Tell me, have you ever been to…’

A female voice whispered something, and the intercom was switched off with a loud click.

‘I’ve been to London once before,’ the man said after a pause. He lowered his voice, as everyone sat silent, stunned by what they’d heard. ‘I went by plane. Strange thing. You get on in Budapest and get off in London. You miss everything in between. All you get is that little map on the screen.’

‘Yes,’ the woman said, after a moment of contemplation. ‘It’s so different from the car or the train. You don’t even know what’s down there.’

Mrs Kelly emerged from the cockpit, and walked silently to the back. As she passed the woman, she grabbed Mrs Kelly’s coat and asked, softly, ‘Have you been to Germany, then?’

Mrs Kelly looked at her, then at the man. Then, hardly above a whisper like a mother wishing good night to her child, she said, ‘No. The captain must’ve thought of someone else.’

They asked the couple sitting in front of them. They asked the old man behind with the funny glasses. They sat for a minute there shaking their heads, and then the man cried out loud in disbelief, ‘So has anyone here been anywhere between London and Budapest?’

To his surprise, people took the question seriously. Perhaps they’d grown tired of shouting, crying and praying. As the captain waited for some airport nearby to contact them, a lively discussion started. It turned out that one of the wives with a fur coat was originally from the Netherlands. Quite a few important-looking men had been to Austria. A young man, who was still a student (a couple of heads were shook in disapproval of such a waste of time), had visited Brittany in France. Somebody had gone to the north of Italy. But nothing in between.

‘So there’s east,’ said the woman, summarizing what they’d found out, ‘and there’s the west. And nobody’s seen what’s between the two. For all we know, it may be a rift, an ocean full of money and spinach, or a mountain made of glass. Or just nothing.’

The sky started to clear up. Although they had been descending, they were now on top of the clouds, with the air above becoming deeper and deeper blue.

‘Look at the sun,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I could see it once more.’

‘Don’t lose heart now,’ the woman chided him. ‘We must be so close to the ground, we could simply go outside and jump.’

‘Yeah, perhaps.’

At that moment, something hit the plane. It wasn’t the ground; it wasn’t a tree; it wasn’t even the peak of a mountain. In under a second, the sky turned into a greyish mist as the fog engulfed them again. Where it came from so suddenly and why, nobody knew. There was a strange noise from the right; the plane jerked, and it suddenly became frighteningly horizontal.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just lost both engines completely. Please brace for impact. Four… three seconds to landing.’

…two, three.

Four.

Five.

Nothing happened.

The plane was silent, apart from the occasional sobs. The air was whizzing past them as the plane was falling as a pebble. One minute passed, then everything grew still. The woman sat up, and folded her arms.

‘What are you doing?’ the man asked.

‘There’s no way we wouldn’t have hit the ground already at this speed.’

The man also sat up. ‘Which means?’

‘Look outside.’

He did. The greyness was gone. It was white, like a snowstorm, like the lamp in an operating theatre. His hands rose and, with a well-rehearsed gesture, opened the door of the emergency exit. There was a clang as the tiny metal hit the wing and disappeared in the whiteness. Holding on to the opening, he crawled out. There was but a breeze outside.

Slowly, he stood up, and stretched out his arms. He tried to push his hand so far away that it’d be totally lost in the fog. His coat was unbuttoned, and soon small droplets formed on his sweater. Looking down he smeared a couple into the fabric with his finger. The strange thing was, his throat no longer hurt.

He took a deep breath, and stared into the white nothingness. He realized he’d probably died, but had forgotten to go to sleep.