“That is why I say, an accident .”
“Ivan Ivanovich, in many ways you are a primitive. Should Joseph Cromb come to Russia, a man under sentence of death by the Soviet State but granted a safe conduct, and promptly meet with an accident, do you not suppose the world will understand that he was really executed? No, no, I think we will leave Mr Cromb alone for the time being. After all, is he not now working for us?”
Then he smiled. “In fact, I think we could do very well out of this, Ivan Ivanovich. I think we should roll out the red carpet for Mr Cromb. He has spent the last half-dozen years denigrating us. The world knows this. We will show the world that the Soviet State does not bear grudges. We will welcome Mr Cromb as one of ours. Yes, indeed, that will go down very well with the Americans.”
“Joseph Cromb will wish to see his sister.”
“Well, why not? I do not see any harm can come of it. And you, Ivan Ivanovich, will be a charming host at all times. The man is now your brother-in-law.”
Ligachev snorted. “And the other one?”
“What other one?”
“Included in the list of medical personnel rushing to our assistance in one Alexei Bolugayevski.”
Stalin’s frown returned. “Who is this?”
“Alexei Bolugayevski is entitled to call himself the Prince of Bolugayen. He is the son of the Princess Priscilla and the late Prince Alexei. He is half-brother of the late Prince Colin, and he is stepson of Joseph Cromb.”
“And he is returning to Russia? The arrogance of these people amazes me!”
“He also has a safe conduct,” Ligachev said. “Are we to roll out the red carpet for him as well? Am I to welcome him in my home, too?”
“Why not? But he is coming as a doctor, you say? We shall welcome him as an ally. How old is this young man?”
“He would be in his middle twenties, I suppose.”
“And he is the son of a dashing soldier, and a romantically minded, headstrong mother. I remember the Princess Priscilla well.” Stalin stroked his moustache reminiscently. “And undoubtedly he has been brought up to believe that he is a prince. Is he married?”
“That I cannot say. But I doubt it. I do not think a young married man would have been accepted for this mission.”
“Then he is the very last Bolugayevski. Oh, indeed, Ivan Ivanovich, welcome this apparition from the past! Treat him well. Entertain him. Inflame his mind with the great deeds of his ancestors, deeds which he should certainly seek to emulate. Especially against the traditional foe, the Germans.”
“It is expressly stated in the contract we have with these doctors that they are not to be exposed to actual combat, Comrade Chairman.”
Stalin smiled. “But who are we to oppose the patriotic spirit of a true Russian prince, even if he is an American citizen? In any event, Ivan Ivanovich, at the rate the Germans are advancing, it is quite impossible to determine that what appears a safe area one day may not be a battleground the next. Such things are out of our hands, are they not?”
*
“Listen,” Anatole said.
Tatiana raised herself and looked up through the trees, which obscured the sky. But not entirely. The aircraft was flying very low, circling over the morass beneath it and seeing nothing but the swamp, surely, but yet hoping for just a glimpse of life. The planes came fairly often, certainly four days a week. But they had never found anything on which to drop their bombs. Sometimes they dropped them anyway, blasting the foliage from a dozen trees or so. They had never hit anyone. The fugitives had learned to keep absolutely still and conceal their weapons while the aircraft were overhead. Not that they had many weapons. But even a knife, much less a rifle, might give off a gleam to be seen by eager eyes in the sky.
The aircraft noise died, and the birds could again be heard chirping away. Fewer birds now than a month ago; most had already left for the south. Lucky birds!
Anatole pulled on his trousers, then checked his fishing line. There was not much else to do in the Marshes than fish and hunt — there was a remarkable amount of wild life —and have sex. How odd, Tatiana thought, that four months ago I was a virgin, and looked forward to being one on my wedding night. How one’s ideas on life could change!
The escape from the German officers’ house had been far easier than they had dared hope. They had dropped from the bedroom window, into darkness, any noise drowned by the sounds of revelry from within, where that first tremendous victory was still being celebrated. Once in the town, amid the flames and the wreckage, they had been virtually safe. The citadel had still been holding out and the noise was tremendous. Everyone was in a state of high excitement. The Germans had imposed a curfew but few people knew of it, and although the conquerors were inclined to shoot at anyone they did not like the look of, that did not include three pretty girls. Tatiana had commanded Natasha and Sophie to submit to further rape and manhandling, as she had done herself, while carefully making sure none of their molesters realised they were armed with the two pistols they had taken from the dead officers.
Eventually they had escaped even the town and the soldiers. By then the early June dawn was already breaking, and on their way to the Marshes they had to crawl and hide. Fortunately, the dawn of the second day of the invasion had brought discipline back to the Germans; the conquerors of Brest-Litovsk had been required to resume their advance behind the main bodies which were already on their way to Smolensk. Brest-Litovsk had been left to the administrative troops, with a skeleton force to besiege the garrison until it could be bombed into surrender. The SS remained, required to seek out and eliminate all those regarded as undesirables by the Third Reich; these consisted mainly of Jews and commissars. And by the morning they had entered the bedroom at the officers mess and thus were now also on the hunt for the three girls. They were by dawn sufficiently far out of town not to know what was going on behind them, but Tatiana had no doubt a search was being carried out. They dared not risk exposure, and so found themselves a hiding place in an irrigation ditch between two cornfields, about a mile south of the railroad, where they spent the day huddled against each other covered by branches and leaves.
From a comfort point of view it was a relief that the ditch was dry, but before the day was finished they wished it had had a little water. They also had nothing to eat. But they were not tempted to go looking for either food or water as all around them roared and crashed the German war machine. There were men close by all day, inspecting and guarding and in places repairing the railway line, but so efficiently did they work that by evening those men were several miles to the east.
More terrifying were the tanks which came roaring out of the west, straight across the cornfields. On more than one occasion the huge monsters rolled right over the three girls, huddled in the bottom of their ditch, sufficiently narrow that there was no great risk of the tanks actually crushing them. It was none the less terrifying, and Tatiana had to hold Sophie’s mouth to prevent her from screaming. They had resumed their journey once it was dark, which was not until well after nine that night. By then they had been so hungry they had even risked approaching the railway line to steal discarded scraps left by the German engineers, while when they came to an almost dry stream they lay on their bellies and licked the water out of the mud cracks. Only two days ago, Tatiana remembered, she had worried about drinking unboiled water from a well!
It had taken them four days to reach the Marshes, hiding by day and crawling by night, drinking water wherever they could find it, eating whatever came to hand, which included uncooked corn husks, discarded food, and, to their great joy, the remnants of a larder in a farmhouse they reached on the third day. The tanks had rolled through and over the farmhouse, but they had not stopped to investigate what might have been left behind, and buried in the debris had been a whole smoked gammon! By now the main German force had moved on. The road was still in constant use, but that was several miles to the north. The railroad was also very busy, but traffic moved along this at such speed
it presented no dangers to the fugitives, while in addition the troops being carried forward were new men, who had not stopped in Brest-Litovsk, and knew nothing of what had happened there. One day, the three girls incautiously exposed themselves when in sight of the line, and the men on the train cheered and cat-called rather than shot at them.
But those who remained were setting about their grim task with brutal efficiency. On only their second day, when they had regained the vicinity of the railway station where they had been arrested, the girls came across what was obviously a mass grave. And from the few bits of clothing which remained attached to branches or half buried in the earth, they could not doubt it was the final resting place of those of their companions denounced by Constantina, as well, no doubt, as Commandant Markowitza. The thought that those innocents had been forced to strip naked, then dig their own grave, and then kneel, to be shot into it, was more horrifying than their own ordeal.
“What is going to become of us?” Natasha had asked.
“We are going to die,” Tatiana told her brutally. “But not until we have killed a whole lot of Germans.”
On the fourth day they were at last alone. The railway line curved away to the north, and before them were the thickly clustered trees of the Marshes. They were in it before they quite realised it, Sophie sinking to her knees in a sudden bog and all three of them becoming covered in mud before they had managed to drag her out and gain some relatively firm ground. Then they had looked around themselves in consternation. They were all city-dwellers, their experience of the countryside consisting of this fortnight every year. For Sophie, this was only her first year, and even for Tatiana, it was but her third. In addition, their relationship with the countryside had always been strictly controlled by camp perimeters and camp activities, by rules and regulations. Creepy-crawlies and odd noises in the night were shared between the 20 girls in each tent, and thereby alleviated.
Now they were in a world of trees and bushes and water. And sounds, from the cries of the birds to the odd distant splash. All unfamiliar, and all basically sinister when they did not know what was causing them. “It’s a lost world,” Natasha whispered.
“In which we have to survive until our soldiers come back,” Tatiana had told her. Sophie burst into tears. “Pull yourselves together,” Tatiana said. “We must move on.”
“Where?” Nastasha asked.
“Further into the swamp. We are too close to the Germans here.”
Natasha shuddered. “I’m hungry,” Sophie complained. They had eaten the last of the ham that morning.
“Well, maybe we’ll find some food,” Tatiana said. “We certainly aren’t going to die of thirst.”
She made them get up and struggle on, trying to keep to the firmer ground, but being forced from time to time to wade through water which sometimes came up to their waists, while once Tatiana, who was leading, stepped into a deeper than usual hole and disappeared, having to be dragged back out spluttering by the other two. Following that they collapsed panting, on the next dry ground, promptly to be discovered by a cloud of mosquitoes.
Sophie lay on her back, slapping and scratching, staring up at the trees, and a bird perched on a branch, staring down at her. “Couldn’t we use one of the guns, and shoot it?” she asked.
Tatiana drew the Luger, checked that there was a bullet in the chamber, and levelled it, holding it in both hands. Even so it swung to and fro alarmingly; hungry and exhausted, she was not at her best. She forced herself to concentrate, tensed all her muscles, aware that Natasha and Sophie were staring at her, willing her to succeed. She drew a deep breath, had the bird in her sights, and squeezed the trigger.
The noise was sharp put penetrative. The bird flapped its wings and lazily flew away. “Shit!” Tatiana commented, and gazed at the man who had suddenly appeared, on another little knoll, perhaps 50 yards away. Then she saw another, and another. And then the flutter of a skirt. Natasha and Sophie had stood up also, and moved closer to Tatiana, seeking her protection. Natasha had also drawn her gun. “Put it away,” Tatiana muttered, and thrust her own pistol into her waistband; these people had to be their only chance of survival.
“I remember you,” said the figure in a tattered uniform, his sergeant’s stripes just visible on his torn sleeve.
“And I remember you, Comrade Sergeant,” Tatiana said. “I remember you, running away.”
“Ha!” snorted the sergeant. If he had thrown away his rifle in his haste to escape the battle for Brest-Litovsk, he had found himself a weapon since, and with his beard, his bandolier, and his tattered clothing looked as typical a bandit as Tatiana could ever have imagined. “And I suppose you have not run away?”
“We are running away,” Tatiana said. “But we have brought our weapons with us.” She showed him the Luger, and pointed to the pistol in Natasha’s belt. “And we have killed Germans.”
“You children?” asked another man, contemptuously.
“We killed two German officers,” Natasha said.
The men looked from one to the other, incredulously. “Well,” the sergeant said. “Hand over those guns.”
“Why?” Tatiana said. “We took them, in battle.”
“I am in command here,” the sergeant said. “I am Sergeant Shatrav. You must obey me.”
“Will you feed us?” Sophie asked.
“As long as you obey me,” Shatrav said.
Obeying Shatrav had not been a difficult matter: he gave very few orders. Initially, what he wanted to do most was get between Tatiana’s legs, and she did not disobey his command to come to him. She didn’t have a choice. For the rest, the little group of refugees concentrated on existing. They were working their way through the livestock the villagers had brought with them, but they also caught fish and snared birds and the occasional boar; they did not attempt to shoot them — quite apart from the noise, for causing which the girls were roundly slated, they had a very limited supply of bullets, a dozen rifles and half a dozen pistols amongst some 60 men and women.
It seemed an inconsequential existence to Tatiana. “What happens when the snow comes?” she asked. It was already raining most days.
“We wait for the spring,” Shatrav told her.
“Will we not starve or freeze to death?”
“Some of us,” he agreed, making it quite plain that he did not plan such a fate for himself. Or for her, if she continued to please him.
“I think we should get out of here while we can,” she said.
“And go where? We are completely surrounded by Germans, north, south, east and west. Our armies have been destroyed. For all I know, they already have Moscow, are already at the Urals. The only place they haven’t occupied are these marshes. So this is the only safe place there is.”
Tatiana couldn’t believe that the Germans had overrun all of European Russia in four months. But she had no evidence that they hadn’t. “If we have been so badly defeated, then we are lost anyway,” she argued. “We can’t live here for the rest of our lives, swamp creatures!”
“Why not?” Shatrav inquired.
There was no immediate answer to that. And Tatiana very rapidly discovered that none of the other fugitives was particularly anxious to leave the safety of the marshes; that went even for Natasha and Sophie, who were just glad to be with friends, among whom, to their delight, they found two of their camping comrades; Anatole and Gregory. “We escaped from work detail,” Anatole explained. “It wasn’t difficult.”
Gregory giggled. “They said that if any of us tried to escape, they’d shoot three of those left behind.”
“What has happened to Constantina?” Natasha asked. One of the Jewish girls denounced had been a special friend.
“Oh, she is very popular with the Germans. She has her own quarters. Well, they couldn’t let her share our barracks. She’d have been lynched.”
“So I don’t suppose they were going to shoot her if you escaped,” Natasha remarked.
“But you left anyway,” Tatian
a remarked.
“Well...the Germans also told us they were going to work us all till we dropped dead. Except for some of the girls. They took them for whores.”
“So we thought we’d take our chances,” Anatole said. “We told the others to come with us, but they were too scared.”
“So I guess some of them got shot,” Gregory said.
Tatiana didn’t feel she could condemn them for sacrificing their comrades. They seemed to be in a survival of the fittest situation in any event. And she was actually very glad to see Anatole, her own age in contrast to the soldiers. Anatole seemed so much cleaner, and vastly less experienced, while she felt as if she had had a lifetime’s experience over the past four months. Thus she seduced him, and as it was a rare autumnal fine day they lay on the hummock in the sunshine listening to the plane circling overhead. “Are we going to die?” he asked, nuzzling her breasts. All men liked to nuzzle Tatiana’s breasts; she supposed she was the ultimate earth goddess.
“Of course,” she said. “But not for a few weeks yet.”
The following day the rain began in earnest, a sullen downpour which cascaded from the trees and soaked even the dry earth, while the water levels began to rise almost visibly. The fugitives sat, soaked and shivering because the rain was quite chill. “Surely we can create some kind of shelter?” Tatiana asked.
“Not worth the trouble,” Shatrav said. “The rain’ll stop, eventually. You object to being clean?”
Tatiana could have throttled him.
It was three weeks later that they heard the aircraft — at night. It was the first night in that period that it hadn’t rained, but there still seemed to be water everywhere. Shatrav sat up. “What the hell—?” The plane was flying very low.
The fugitives were all awake now, peering up into the darkness. “Look!” Anatole had very keen eyes, and he was pointing. They all stared, and some could make out the two pale patches in the gloom, floating down to the trees. “Parachutes!”
The Scarlet Generation Page 7
