by Alan Furst
“My Hlinka watchdog,” she said, “he still lives?”
Khristo looked at the man. “Yes,” he said.
“He crawled in here for company while he died,” she said. “That much we give him.”
He nodded his agreement.
“When he’s gone,” she continued, “pitch him overboard. On my boat, you must work.”
She was a small tug, so wide-beamed in the middle and high in the bow she seemed half submerged. Her current name, K-24, was just barely visible amid the rust stains and moss green patches on her hull. She had been designated K-24 in 1940, when Hungary had joined the Axis powers. Aside from a few gunboats and a small fleet of tugs and barges, Hungary had no navy. It had no coastline and no access to the sea, though it was governed by an admiral, Miklós Horthy, throughout the war.
The tug had been launched in 1908 at a dockyard near Szeged and christened the Tisza, after the river on which the city was located. She was forty feet long, built low to the water in order to slide beneath the old Danube bridges. Her steam engine was Austrian, a simple boiler that put forth 200 horsepower on a good day and would burn coal or wood but in its time had run on straw, hay, cotton waste or anything else that could be set on fire. When the Americans were bombing up and down the river—hitting the Romanian oil transfer points at Giorgiu and Constanta, finally taking out the oilfields at Ploesti—she had been regularly strafed, something about the slow progress of a tug inciting turret gunners to a frenzy as they passed above her. One fighter pilot—“a splendid idiot” was the way Annika put it—had spent the better part of a half hour machine-gunning a bargeload of gravel, to no particular point, having first nearly melted his barrels in fruitless attacks on the Tisza’s pilothouse, which was covered by a two-inch sheet of iron plating painted to look like a wooden roof. The Tisza had, in four years of war, taken its share of hits at the waterline, in the engine boiler and the smokestack, but these were easily enough patched.
She was, Annika admitted, an old lady and a noisy one. Her pistons hammered relentlessly as she ran, and you could hear her coming a good way off, ticking like a clock gone mad. “A dirty old lady,” Annika’s husband had called her, in the days before the war. Her stack—chopped off a few feet above the roof level of the pilothouse because of this or that bridge—trailed sooty clouds of smoke into the sky, black, gray, or white, depending on what they had to burn that day.
Leaving Bratislava, the smoke was black as they used up the last of the Czechoslovakian coal. “From here on, it’s brushwood,” Annika told him, casting a meaningful eye toward the double-bitted ax that stood in one corner of the pilothouse. “She’ll run on trash, if she must.” The Danube grew its own fuel, abundant softwoods—alder, willow, big-leaf maple—that lined its banks and drank its water. It was light, fibrous stuff that grew up in a year and burned up in a minute but it was abundant, and the Tisza had never minded it. “Thank the Lord for the current,” Annika said, “and for a load of one river boy rather than a barge of sand.”
Just south of the Bratislava docks, the river became the north-south boundary between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, passing entirely into Hungarian territory at the town of Stúrovo. In mid-afternoon, Khristo hid belowdecks, behind a coal bin next to the boiler, where he at last dried out while the Hungarian border guards came aboard to joke with Annika and consume several bottles of beer and a tin of jam. When they’d gone, Annika came down the hatchway and showed him how to stoke the boiler and manage the primitive gearing system that changed propeller pitch. “Three speeds,” she said, “all slow. And if we have to go backward, I come and show you. You must be a little bit the mechanic.”
But for most of the day, not much was demanded of him. He stood by Annika’s side and watched the shore as they moved through the vast Hungarian plain. It was a March afternoon on the river as he remembered it, cold and gray, with racing clouds above and occasional moments of sunlight passing into sudden rain squalls that roughed up the surface of the water, then disappeared. They went past odd little towns full of bulbous shapes and steeply pitched roofs with storks’ nests woven into the eaves. Deserted towns, they seemed; only a few skinny dogs came down to the water to bark at them. Perhaps the people had fled as the fighting moved toward them—west to the German lines or east to the Russian. He did see the barge of wounded Germans, what was left of them, being towed upriver by another tug with whom Annika exchanged a greeting of whistle blasts. Sometimes the sky cleared, revealing the low Carpathians in the northern distance, sun shafts piercing the cloud and lighting the ridges a pale green.
In the late afternoon they pulled into the harbor at Szöny and tied up next to a line of tugs, some of them joined to empty barges. Annika went off visiting, hopping nimbly in her carpet slippers from deck to deck, stopping at each pilothouse to gossip and exchange news. It was dark by the time she returned. They sat together by a miniature parlor stove in the kitchen area of the crew quarters—two hammocks and a battered old wardrobe chest—while Annika added water to flour and rolled up csipetke, tiny dumplings, boiled them in a pot of water, and added some dense tomato sauce from a tin can, then a single clove of garlic—“to make it taste like something”—squeezed flat between thumb and forefinger before ceremonial addition to the stew.
“Oh, for an egg,” she said sadly, “or a pinch of rose pepper. You would love me forever.”
In Prague, Khristo had lived on bread that was part sawdust, and horsemeat stewed with onions to hide the spoiled taste, and he wolfed down his portion of dumplings in sauce. “I’m in love with you already,” he said.
“Well, there’s enough of it,” she said, referring to a stack of zinc-colored cans of tomato sauce piled up on a shelf. “There used to be fish,” she said, “but the bomb concussions have done for them. Big ones, catfish with whiskers. Strong—but cooked in milk they were sweet. Ach”—she shut her eyes and grimaced in sorrow—“this stupid war is a curse. It took my husband, both sons, most of the men on the river. The winter of ’43 got them, retreating from Moscow in the snow, so cold that when they took their pants down by the side of the road, they froze up back there and died.” Her mouth tightened at the thought and she crossed herself. “One or two came back. Husks. Good for nothing after that—they’d seen too much.”
She cleaned her bowl with a thumb and licked off the last of the tomato sauce. “They are fighting east of us, just as I warned you. Near the prison at Vác, downriver from the bend at Esztergom. The Hungarian Third Army, they say, what’s left of it, and the Sixth Panzer, facing the Third Ukrainian. Mongolian troops, river boy, they fight on vodka and if you’re a woman, God help you die quick. They haven’t been here for a thousand years, yet we’ve never forgotten them. They surrounded forty-five thousand German troops up by Lake Balaton, and pffft, that was that.”
“What are people saying?” Khristo asked.
“Well, the Russians have got Budapest, so that’s the end of the government. No great loss. Some say the thing to do is cross over the lines, surrender to the Red Army—others want to wait here. The Russians will need us. They’ll pay something, at least, to have their supplies move on the river.”
“And so?”
“Some of us are going to try to sneak through tonight. Maybe they stop fighting and have a snooze.”
“I doubt it.”
“So do I. How far east are you going?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he said.
“So I guessed.”
“Have you got anything black? Like paint?”
“Paint! You are crazed. Some tar, maybe.”
“It will do,” he said.
They chugged slowly out of Szöny harbor just after midnight, eight tugboats moving in single file along the dark river. Since they could expect to be under observation by Hungarian and Wehrmacht rearguard units, each flew the flag of the collapsed Hungarian regime on the short pole astern. The best navigator of the group, a stooped old man called Janos, took the lead in his boat, followed by T
isza and the others. The moon was fully risen, but the spring westerly had increased its force and a low scud of cloud obscured the light, leaving the river in drifting shadows. Difficulty of navigation was increased by a drop in temperature that brought a heavy mist off the water, swirling in the wind as it blew downstream. This made Janos’s job harder, but turned the boats into ghostly, uncertain outlines from the perspective of the shore.
Of Janos, Annika said, “He is half blind, so the darkness will not bother him. He navigates with his feet, he says. By the run of the water under the keel he knows his way.”
“Is that possible?” Khristo asked.
“He is on the river since childhood. Thus he is a good navigator, also a good liar. Take your pick.”
Standing in the pilothouse, Khristo could feel only the rapid pulse of Tisza’s engines. Yet the boat ahead of them moved slowly back and forth from the center to the starboard bank of the river, as though it were avoiding hazards, and the rush of water passing over a sandbar shoal could be heard to one side of the boat as they moved around it.
“A sandbar,” Khristo said. “He has taken us away from it.”
“Ja, ja,” Annika said, unimpressed. “A famous sandbar, one that everybody knows. What you and I must worry about are the new ones. Danúbio—the god of this river—stirs his mud up every winter and leaves it in different places, so that we may find it with our propellers.” She made a small correction with the wheel, apparently following some motion of the lead boat’s stern that was invisible to him. “A way down from here, there are granite blocks under the water, quarried by the Romans as piers for a bridge. The emperor Trajan desired to build a military road, from Spain to the Euphrates River, but he died. He left us his granite to remember him by and, when the water is low and there is sand on both sides of the river, it will peel the bottom of a boat clean off. I have seen it.”
They were silent for a time, staring ahead of them through the drifting fog. “Do you want me down below?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Stay up here with me and keep the pepecha handy. We are going full slow as it is, and if something happens you don’t want to be belowdecks.”
He thought of steam under pressure and what it could do and was thankful for the dispensation. “What use will the pepecha be against field guns?”
She shrugged. “Not much.”
The river meandered north and south at Esztergom, then swung around in a sharp bend by the Vác prison and headed due south, toward Budapest and eventually into Serbian Yugoslavia. They could hear the fighting well enough, like an approaching thunderstorm, and the sky flickered a dull orange with artillery and tank barrages, but most of the action seemed to be centered north of the river.
Moving along the northward curve toward Esztergom, a searchlight cut through the fog and raced forward from the last boat to the first, then pinned Janos’s tug in its beam. A loudhailer, sounding eerily close over the water, called out a command in Hungarian. As Janos, shouting in a cracked voice, answered the unseen officer, Annika translated into Russian:
“Convoy leader, identify yourself.”
“K-38 and seven K-class tugs—out of Bratislava.”
“Where bound?”
“Vác prison.”
“Say again, K-38.”
“Vác prison.”
“Have you gone mad?”
“Long ago.”
“The Russians are up there. Are you under orders?”
“Yes, sir. To remove special prisoners to the rear.”
“Written orders?”
“Verbal orders. From the SS. A German colonel accompanies us, would you like to hear it from him? I can wake him up for you.”
“Proceed, K-38.”
“Thank you.”
“God help you.”
“One hopes.”
The searchlight blinked out, and the running lights of the patrol boat faded away as it returned to station in midstream.
The convoy steamed on into the darkness, its slow progress taking them toward the steady beat of artillery exchanges in the hills above Vác. They could now see yellow muzzle flashes on the ridge-lines, and a piece of burning debris arced gracefully above them and hissed into the water. At first, the bass thudding of the gunnery was a massive rumble, low and continuous, that rolled and echoed above the river. But as they drew closer, the sound resolved into separate parts: the low thump of field mortars, the whistle of Wehrmacht 88s and the sigh of Russian field-gun rounds, the rhythmic crackle of machine-gun fire and the muffled impacts of exploding shells.
As they steamed around a bend in the river, the horizon glowed brighter and brighter and the sound swelled in volume. Then they were in the middle of it.
It was like a nightmare, he thought, because he wanted to run but could not move. His eyes streamed with tears from the billowing smoke—suddenly every object was blurred and misshapen. The prison on the far bank was burning, towers of flame from the roof and cell windows rolling into the sky as though sucked upward by an immense wind. The air around him buzzed and sang, and he thought he could hear voices from the near bank, calling out in a strange language, and a huge shower of sparks rained down on the boat. Then the water exploded, a white wall, and the river rocked backward. The window glass trembled and water sprayed across it, a prism refracting clouds of tracer, the fiery prison, the shore ahead stuttering from white light to blind darkness and back again. He went deaf. Braced himself against the pilothouse wall and felt the Tisza taking fire, like an animal kicking the hull.
The stern of K-38 began to move away from them and Khristo tore himself from the wall and ran crouched along the deck, throwing the hatch back and jumping six feet into the hold. He opened the boiler door with a bare hand—saw the red stripe across his palm but felt nothing. He piled armloads of brushwood through the opening, kicking it into the roaring furnace as it snagged on the rim, bowed and resisted as though it did not want to burn. The Tisza rocked again. He slammed the door with his boot and leaped up the ladder onto the deck. An enormous yellow flare went off above him and a wind knocked him flat on his face. He scrambled to his knees, ready to swim, then saw that it was the boat behind them. Its pilothouse was gone, stack bent over to the deck with white steam spraying from one side. As he watched, the boat yawed out toward midriver, a line of little flames licking along the bow. He scurried toward the pilothouse, like a rat in a burning barn, he thought, and saw human shapes onshore, running with the boat, their arms raised in supplication. One of them tried to swim out, then vanished.
What they did in Budapest, two days later, seemed entirely ingenuous. That was necessary. Had the tracks of planning and calculation showed through, it would have raised questions. But what he contrived was just simple enough, naive, to have about it a taste of the peasant’s innocence, and Khristo well understood what the Russians thought about that—especially those Russians whose job it was to think about things. It made them sentimental, for they saw their former selves in it.
Budapest was eighteen miles downriver from the Vác prison, just far enough behind the front lines to be, by then, choked with apparat of all sorts. The tugboat captains feared that as much as Khristo did, and river gossip confirmed their fears. There would be no sneaking through a web of those proportions—it had to be confronted.
Once the fighting was well behind them, Janos led them into a narrow stream which, at first, did not appear navigable, then widened suddenly and ran four or five miles into the empty countryside. What a dark alley was to a criminal, he thought, this byway to nowhere was to the boats. “When we have no customs stamp, we unload here,” was how Annika put it. “We are all smugglers, of course,” she added offhandedly, “some of the time.” The tugs tied off to trees on the bank, then everyone fell into a sleep of exhaustion.
The following morning, he joined the crews in chopping brush. Annika had applied lubricating grease to the burn and bound it up with an old engine rag, and the right hand slid up and down the ax handle anyhow, so
he was able to manage it. He relished the work, laboring under a pallid sun with his jacket and shirt off, the sweat running down his back. Both blades of the double-bit ax were sharp, and he could take a two-inch trunk down with two or three wallops. Softwood was like that, of course, but he fancied himself a great woodsman nonetheless, the darkness of Prague and the terror of the previous night sweating itself out of him as he hacked at the brush.
They made a fire and burned the Hungarian flags, then patched the hulls with canvas and tar, which would have to do until they got to a boatyard. There, he was told, fabled craftsmen could saw out a damaged section of wood and then, almost unbelievably, reproduce the precise curve and size of planking to be tamped back into place with mallets. Then, using a long file called a slick, they would bring the new planking to a perfect harmony with the old hull. And it would never leak.
At sunset, they stood in a circle with caps in hand and Janos spoke a short prayer for the lost crew and tugboat. Many of them had been slightly wounded going past Vác—a steam scald, a broken wrist, two minor shrapnel injuries, Khristo’s burned hand—but they all felt themselves fortunate to see the sun go down that night. They were close to Budapest, there were those who wanted to go on right then and have it over with, but Khristo made a short speech, translated by Annika, and they eventually decided to trust his perception of Soviet bureaucracy—which by nightfall was wobbly at best and sometimes surly, from a full day’s vodka ration, and didn’t much like the darkness in the first place.
The next morning, Annika chose a young, whippy birch and Khristo felled it and trimmed the branches. About his further preparations she was less than pleased, but admitted glumly that it would be for the best if a strong effect were achieved. “It is hard to know with that sort of army,” he explained. “Maybe they hug you, maybe they squeeze off half a magazine in your belly. They themselves don’t know what they’re going to do until the mood takes them.”
