No one, I told myself, is going to shoot a man smoking a pipe.
* * *
If I could have whistled, too, I would have done, but nevertheless I tried to look as nonchalant as possible. As I walked, the minutes went by, and the pipe got hotter and hotter as I clenched it between my teeth, smoke blowing into my eyes.
Somehow I had convinced myself that even the Red Army would understand that a man laden with bags, smoking and walking in broad daylight straight toward their lines could not possibly be a threat.
At that moment, an unbelievably loud bang shattered the peace of the frosty morning. It had been a while since I had heard gunfire, and my heart began thumping even before I had a chance to think.
Then there was a shout, and with relief I knew that the shot was only a warning.
“Stop!”
There was a flurry of snow ahead, very close to me. I’d nearly walked right on top of them. About twenty feet away a man roughly dressed in a Red army uniform emerged from a snowy thicket. If he had wanted to kill me, I would have been dead.
He aimed his rifle at me. He seemed unsure what to say, but he knew what to do. He lowered the point of the rifle toward me.
I lifted my bags slightly, showing I would love to put my hands in the air if only they weren’t so full. I puffed on the pipe for dear life, showing how incredibly nonchalant I was feeling.
There was a movement to my left and I saw another half dozen soldiers, their rifles pointing in a direction I didn’t find amusing. One of them waved me forward. I looked nervously down at my coat. It was the old coat that had seen me through years in Russia, in Petrograd, and away at the front. But it was an old Tsarist officer’s coat, and though it bore no emblems or other service marks, I wished I had changed it for something else.
One of the soldiers shouted.
“This way!”
Obediently, I walked with a gun at my back further into Red territory, and very soon we reached their front line trench. Here I was hastily bundled into a dugout, still at close quarters to a rifle.
“Spy, sir,” my escort said.
As my eyes grew used to the darkness, I saw a corporal sitting on a trunk, drinking tea. He looked up, a mixture of boredom and puzzlement on his face.
“Spy? Take him away and shoot him.”
“Wait!” I cried, “I’m English!”
“Really?” said the corporal, “and I’m American.”
Things were rapidly going against me.
“I’m telling the truth,” I said, in English, this time, and then in Russian, “and I’m no spy. I’m going to Moscow. To see Lenin.”
The soldier stared at me for a moment, then burst out laughing.
“Oh! To see Lenin, is it? Take him away and shoot him.”
“Listen,” I said. “Listen for a minute. My name is Arthur Ransome, and I have an important message from the Estonian government for Lenin. If you speak to Moscow they’ll tell you who I am. It’s vital I see Lenin.”
The corporal started to sit up.
“Vital? Why?”
“I can’t tell you that, but I give you my word.”
“Oh! The Englishman gives his word!” He stared at me, openmouthed. It was a look of belligerence.
“Try to see it this way. If I’m telling the truth, one phone call to Moscow will settle the matter. And if not, you can shoot me. But if you shoot me before you know the truth, you could be in a lot of trouble.”
He pondered this for a while, and eventually the logic seemed to dawn on him.
“And if you are a spy,” he said, “I can shoot you then?”
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. I promise.”
I was trusting a lot to Moscow, but fortune favored me.
“Regrettably,” he said, “we cannot speak to Moscow from here. We will have to take you to battalion headquarters. That will be best. In fact, then they can decide whether to shoot you.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see. Good.”
The corporal, now visibly relieved of the burden of having to make a decision, smiled at me.
“But would you like some tea before we go? It’s very cold this morning. It’s only cherry leaf, but it’s good and it’s hot.”
21
ALMOST THE SAME SCENE was enacted word for word at battalion headquarters.
Once again, my fate rested with the officer I was speaking to understanding that it might be best to ask questions first and shoot later, rather than the other way around, but at last, to my great relief, he agreed to telegraph Moscow.
“Just as soon,” he said, “as I can find the damn code book.”
He began rummaging around his quarters, looking nothing like an officer of any army, unshaven and badly dressed. When he finally found the leather-bound pocketbook, he held it up triumphantly.
“Aha! Now we will get some answers.”
I could only pray they would be the ones I needed, but my luck held, for Moscow replied within hours that I was indeed a journalist, and should be escorted under guard to Moscow immediately. Of my claims to bring a message to Lenin, there was no word either way, but I had done enough, for the moment, to save my skin.
One soldier was all they sent to escort me to Moscow, but one soldier with a gun was more than enough. Besides, they were taking me where I wanted to go. Next day we made our way across open land until we found a railway line, which we walked down, the path being easier hopping from sleeper to sleeper, than sliding through the snow. Eventually, late in the afternoon, we found a small halt, no more than a hut open on one side to the weather, and a small heap of coal. There was a water tank, but it would have been useless for refilling the engine; the temperatures were subzero and icicles like white spears hung from the tank.
My guard was not very chatty. I tried to speak to him, more than once, but he was having none of it.
“Is a train coming?” I said, and that was the one question he answered, with a single word.
“Da.”
That at least I was glad of, because I knew we would freeze if we stayed out overnight. Then there was no more conversation, and we sat in the halt. I watched my breath steam out in the freezing air, smoked a pipe and wondered if my life would end by a train track in the depths of the Russian forests. It wasn’t something I had planned, but right then it seemed all too possible.
When the train finally came rolling down the track toward us it seemed unreal. In the half-light of dusk, both sound and vision seemed impaired; the train moved slowly toward us like a leviathan from a dream, blowing vast clouds of steam into the air next to us, the wheels slowing and slipping as the brakes brought it to a standstill.
The last silence of the snowy forest lurked behind us, and we clambered aboard. The train jolted into life again, almost unwillingly, but we were away before my soldier and I had even found somewhere to sit.
The train was packed, mostly with soldiers but with ordinary people, too. My guard made some of them move so he could sit opposite me in a compartment. All the while his rifle lay across his chest, as if he expected me to run at any minute. As the journey wore on, however, his mood changed. I think he had finally realized that I wasn’t going to try to escape, and I began to chat to him about Moscow, a place, it turned out, that he had never been. Eventually I told him about Evgenia, and then I knew I had touched something in him, perhaps some story of his own, because he listened hard and nodded furiously from time to time as I spoke.
Sometime later an old woman came along the carriage with flasks of tea, and I bought some, sharing it with my guard. We had had nothing to eat all day, and the tea sloshed around inside us, but it was hot. Night came thick and deep beyond the carriage windows, and the soldier fell asleep, still cradling his gun, but now, as if it were a baby.
Finally I slept, too.
* * *
By midmorning, we were approaching Moscow. All the way, my heart had been beating faster and faster, as I grew more and more apprehensive about what I would find, and whether I might
be welcomed, or not.
There was no way out, but somehow that made me feel worse. I had to return to the West. I had to, but only with Evgenia.
As we got off the train, my escort, whose name I had learned was Dragonovich, seemed unsure of what to do.
“You must go and see Lenin?” he asked, as if I was in charge.
“That’s right,” I said. “You should take me to see him. We’ll find him at the Kremlin. Here, I’ll call a drozhka.”
I trotted out of the station, and Dragonovich tagged along, clutching his rifle and pack and staring all about him at the wonders of the Moscow architecture.
As we approached the Kremlin wall, his mouth fell open. The onion domes and spires of Red Square rose beyond.
“My God,” he said, “it’s so beautiful. And so terrible.”
I nodded. He was right; he had put his finger on exactly what I always felt in Moscow. I took the chance to suggest something to him.
“It would be as well for me to see Comrade Litvinov first. At the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.”
Dragonovich, still wide-eyed like a child, nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “very well.”
I breathed easier. It would be sensible to see Litvinov, that was true, but I had another reason for the detour.
We had some trouble with the Red Guards at the gates, but soon we were up into the vast maze of the Kremlin itself. I knew Evgenia might be hidden somewhere in its vast belly; I was possibly very close to finding her now, but had to keep my nerve. I led the way and in a short while was knocking on Litvinov’s door.
As I walked in, the old man rose from behind his desk and glared at me. My soldier hovered behind me, completely out of his depth and aware of it.
“Mr. Ransome!” Litvinov declared. “You are a most persistent individual!”
He snatched a piece of paper from his desk.
“Do you know what this is?” he shouted. “I have just received this, this telegram. From Reval, where the Minister for Foreign Affairs writes to tell me that you are already on your way to Moscow. This despite the fact that I had specifically forbidden your journey.”
I spread my hands.
“There must have been some confusion,” I said.
“So I see. And who is this?”
He turned his wrath on Dragonovich.
“What do you want? Did you bring him here, or did he bring you? Never mind. You have a unit to return to, I assume? Yes? So get out of my office!”
The soldier slunk away, his tail between his legs. I felt sorry for him; I wondered whether he would even manage to find his way back to the station, never mind the Estonian front.
Litvinov sat down. His anger seemed to have left.
“What are we to make of this, Mr. Ransome?”
So I told him. I told him about the peace proposals from Estonia, and I think he believed me.
“I will call Lenin and you can tell him this yourself.”
He picked up the receiver of the phone on his desk.
“Of course,” I said, quickly, reaching out a hand to stop him using the phone. “But would you mind first, to tell me … to let me, I mean, see someone else?”
Litvinov smiled.
“So that’s it. Love? You would have made a good Russian, Mr. Ransome. A very good Russian. Very well. I will phone Comrade Lenin shortly and tell him you are on your way. Of course, the Kremlin is a big place. You might, I suppose, lose your way…”
There was a sly look in his eyes and a grin on his face.
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” I said.
“I presume you know which way to lose yourself?”
“The floor beneath this one, on the northern side?”
“Exactly. You have half an hour.”
* * *
Even as I left his office I could hear Litvinov asking to speak to Lenin, and I hurried through the high dark corridors to find the Education Department.
I was outside the door, and lifted my hand to knock, then let it fall.
It had been not weeks, but months. We had heard nothing from each other. My heart grew perfectly still, as if waiting to know it could beat again.
I didn’t knock, and just walked into the office.
One or two faces I didn’t recognize glanced up at me, and I looked blankly past them. Then, there she was. She left her desk and came to me, and in that short space, there was time for tears to roll down her face, and a smile to spread on her lips.
I put my arms around her gently, as if she might break, and she put her head on my shoulder and wept silently.
She stood back, and we were aware of being stared at by the other people in the room.
“Arthur!” she said. She laughed and then tugged both my hands. “Come here. Come with me. I have something you want.”
Still laughing, she pulled my hands and led me back into the corridor and down the hall.
“Do you remember?” she said. “Can you guess?”
I began to laugh, too, because I had smelled a familiar smell.
“Here,” she said, throwing open a door onto a small kitchen area. A pot bubbled over a portable stove.
“Potatoes,” she said.
“That’s what we want,” I said.
I had never eaten anything better, I swear, than that dish of boiled potatoes. My hunger from not eating for two days, and my hunger to be with Evgenia made that dish the sweetest food I had ever had. I gazed at her and she grinned back at me, unable to stop smiling. Her eyes sang.
This is what you want. This is what you want.
Then she stood.
“Oh!” she cried. “Wait here.”
She hurried from the makeshift kitchen where I sat perched on a stool, but was back moments later clutching something in her hands preciously, as if it were gold, or maybe an egg.
“Here,” she said. “Dessert!”
She produced the end of a bar of chocolate, about three squares, which we shared, and savored, ever so slowly.
“Wherever did you get that?” I asked.
“I’ve been saving it. For months,” she said. “I’ve been trying not to eat it. I told myself you were going to come back and that when you did we would share it. But sometimes there were days when I gave up hope. I’m sorry. But I didn’t know. On those days, I let myself eat one square. But I told myself that if I ate all the chocolate, you would never be coming back.”
She held up the empty wrapper and screwed it into a ball.
“You came back just in time, Arthur.”
She tried to smile, but she failed and the tears came again.
“I’m so sorry, Genia,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Never mind, you’re here now.”
“Yes. But now what? You know that the Whites are advancing on Moscow?”
She nodded, closing her eyes.
“Yes, we have heard. But Trotsky says they will be defeated.”
“He would,” I said. “He would and maybe he’s right. But what if he isn’t? You have to leave, Evgenia. I want you to come with me when I go.”
“Where? Where will you go? Where is there that’s safe for us? You can’t stay here, even if I could. And I can’t go to England. And neither of us can go to Stockholm.”
“Estonia,” I said, “Reval.”
“But we’re at war with Estonia.”
“Not for long,” I told her. “That’s how I got here, I’ve brought a peace proposal from Reval. Estonia wants peace with Russia, and I know Lenin wants peace with Estonia; it’d be one less part of the White Army for him to fight. Soon, Estonia will be a neutral country, and we can live there. Safely. Only…”
“Only what?”
“Well,” I said, hesitating. “Your mother. Your sister…”
“I know,” she said. “I know. But they know, too. We’ve talked about it. If my Englishman were to come for me … They’ll be safe, even if the Whites take Moscow; they are not Bolshevik, they are not known as I am.”
“So
you would leave? Leave them?”
“I will never leave them,” she said. “I may leave Russia, but they will always be with me. And Arthur, more than anything, I want to be with you.”
I held her hands but said nothing, because there was nothing to say. We understood each other, and that was enough.
“I don’t have long,” I said at last. “I have to go and see Lenin. Tomorrow we will leave. You should go home. See your family, and pack whatever you need to bring.”
“All right.”
“But don’t bring anything more than you can carry. Easily.”
“But Arthur, how are we going to get out?”
“The way I came in. Across no man’s land.”
22
MOSCOW TO REVAL.
Almost six hundred miles.
A journey that nearly cost us our lives. Three times.
* * *
Of the first part there’s not much to say. We finished our business in Moscow, I with Lenin, Evgenia with her family, and I saw little of her as she made preparations to leave.
Lenin was delighted with me.
All he was concerned about was peace with Estonia, but he, like Minister Piip, was not willing to trust anything to the wire, or paper, and gave me a full account of what I was to propose to Piip, which was in short, a peace conference. Of course, for the time being, that left Russia and Estonia at war, and it was that front line which Evgenia and I would have to cross.
“I have read your book,” Lenin said to me. “Six Weeks in Russia.”
I didn’t answer. Whenever anyone says that to me about something I’ve written it seems foolish to say anything until they’ve said what they thought of it.
“I was disinclined to like it,” he went on, “but then I had a letter from Radek. You know he is still in prison in Berlin, and he said it was the first thing he had read of the Revolution that brought us Bolsheviks to life, as real people. And so I changed my mind about it. You have done us a great service. If there is anything I can grant you in return, you have only to name it.”
All sorts of outrageous requests flashed through my head, but I let them go.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Just help us as far as you can to leave Russia.”
Blood Red Snow White Page 16
