by Alan Furst
“Ja, ja,” she said, not really convinced he was right. Khristo’s preparations had made a grave dent in her supplies, and she felt she might regret that in the future.
But she was proud of him later on that day, as they steamed downriver through the center of Budapest, he could see that. He was standing forward of the pilothouse with a ten-year-old boy borrowed for the occasion from another boat—Tisza was the leader of this convoy, and everybody, Annika included, knew they had to make an impression. Khristo turned at one point and looked in the pilothouse window and saw a sly and appreciative grin on her face.
The noise was overwhelming. There must have been thirty thousand of them—Mongolian troops with European Russian officers—lining the quays of the city as they moved through it. They cheered and waved, raised their pepechas and their old rifles with long bayonets. Some of the officers came to fervent attention. The child next to him, Khristo realized, was meant for the theater. He thrust his little fist into the air with revolutionary passion and scowled patriotically as though he were about to cry with all the emotion of it. Or perhaps, Khristo thought, he came suddenly to believe it. That was surely possible. It was exciting, thrilling, those tens of thousands of voices roaring in unison as the seven boats passed, their crews standing atop the cabins and saluting fiercely, their steam whistles hooting in celebration. The roar increased to thunder as they sailed past the elegant old parliament building that faced the river, the soldiers inside apparently so excited that desks and chairs and a snowstorm of papers came sailing out of the windows.
This was Khristo’s finest moment. Annika handed him the pepecha through the pilothouse door and, in perfect imitation of a thousand posters, he held it high in one hand—the bandaged one, forearm bulging—shaking the weapon with revolutionary fervor: fuck with us and this is what you’ll get! The soldiers on shore, recognizing their very own weapon, the PPSh M1941, cheered even louder. And when he climbed up the iron ladder onto the roof of the pilothouse and repeated the gesture, using the flag for background, the cheering reached a glorious climax. On both banks, voices were raised in spontaneous singing—the Red Army anthem.
A real Soviet flag would not have worked, he knew; it would have puzzled them, made them curious. Where did he get it? Who is he? But the huge square of canvas, four feet high and six feet long, roped to a birch pole nailed into the back wall of the pilothouse, then stretched forward by a rope wound around the smokestack, as though it were flying stiff in a fast breeze—that took them past curiosity. That sort of gesture took them in the heart.
It was a grand flag: red with tomato sauce, hammer and sickle crudely painted with black tar. On both sides, so that all could see it.
Russian press dispatches, for March 29, 1945, would include a mention of the incident: “In Budapest, elements of the Hungarian navy overthrew their fascist officers and joined forces with the victorious divisions of Marshal Malinovsky’s Third Ukrainian Front in a display of patriotic solidarity.”
They were arrested, of course, but it was the mildest sort of arrest. Around a bend in the river, a Russian patrol boat guided them into a dock and the military intelligence people were sent for. Papers were produced, examined, held up to the light—but they had already “confessed,” in the most public way imaginable, to the worst of their crimes: being part of a supply system that served an enemy fighting force. Thus the intelligence people found little to provoke their interest. They had the “crime,” which satisfied one of their instincts, and they had the “penalty,” which satisfied the other. The penalty was a form of conscription: these tugboats and their crews would serve the Occupation garrison, which desperately needed a way to get back and forth across the river. The retreating Germans had blown every single bridge in Budapest, whose twin cities, Buda and Pesth, were divided by the Danube. In return for faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips—whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays—the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside. Vodka rations, supplied from the east, might come later, the Russian officers said, if they worked hard and kept their noses clean.
The tugboat people found this an excellent arrangement. They had their lives and their boats, they would be fed, and they were keenly aware that captured enemies of the Soviet armies rarely fared that well. After a few hours, they were sent back to their boats and told to await further direction.
Khristo was taken to a room. For him they had two captains with the top buttons of their tunics undone. One was tall, with colorless eyes, the other short and not happy about it. So, they started in, he was a Yugoslav conscript worker who had escaped from his masters in Prague. A curious tale. How had he done it? Describe a milling machine, please. And what was the lubricating procedure for a lathe. Had he ever used a router plane in his work? Where was the factory? What did it do? Where did he live? What was his mother’s maiden name? The street on which the factory was located—what did it look like? What was he paid? Had anyone helped him in his escape? How had he gotten from Prague to Bratislava? Transferred? Who had signed the order? The German supervisor? What was his name? What did he look like? The papers had been destroyed? How convenient. We know you’re an American spy, they told him. One of the tugboat crewmen had suspected it, had told them he was carrying gold. Where was it? Where was the radio? Where were the maps? Make a clean breast, they said; all we want is for you to work for us, surely you see you would be too valuable to be shot. Come on, they said, all three of us are in the same profession, if we don’t stick together the higher-ups will shaft us all, we know it, you know it, let’s make an arrangement, let’s make each other comfortable. Some of these bastards would poke your eyes out if we weren’t protecting you. Mongolians! You’re lucky it’s us and not them. We understand your problems.
No, no, he told them, you’ve got it all upside down. He was a member of the Yugoslavian Communist party—he’d destroyed the card ten minutes before the Germans got him or it would have been lights out for him. He was a worker. All he wanted was to go home, eat some real food if he could find it, see what his old girlfriend was up to. He’d repaired German aircraft at a factory in Prague. The production schedules were set weekly, based on an anticipated workload known to three foremen. The day before he left, an ME-110 wing had been trucked in with damage from small arms fire—the number on the wing was something like 7705-12. The German security officer in the factory was called Bischau. Production norms were not being met. He had committed several acts of sabotage, using emery grit and other materials. The name of the Communist party secretary in Kralijevo, his hometown, was Webak, but he believed it to be an alias. German casualties were being barged down the river Nitra, then up the Danube to Austria.
Flies for Yaschyeritsa, he thought.
He spooned it into their mouths as they slapped him and kicked his shins. Something to write down. Names, numbers, addresses. He never met their eyes and made them work for every bit of it. Dried up several times, was driven back to the subject. At last, he began to bore them. He’d taken the edge off their appetites and seemed to them less and less like anything resembling a banquet. Would he, they wanted to know, just in case he should some day be allowed to return to Yugoslavia, keep in touch? Nothing formal. Just the odd observation on life and circumstance in his homeland.
Such a request caught him entirely unaware. He blinked stupidly, paused for some time, mulling it over like a machinist’s problem. Well, he told them, this was not anything he’d ever considered, but he could find little wrong with it. The fascists in Yugoslavia had nearly destroyed the country, they must in future be resisted. If he could help in such an effort, be of some value, he saw nothing wrong with it. Any patriotic Yugoslav would do no less—he was sure of that.
Well, they said, they would see him again. And th
ey let him go.
He returned to the Tisza and told Annika the sad facts of life. “Too bad,” she said sorrowfully, staring off into the darkness as though she could see her lucky gods heading downriver.
“I am sorry,” he said.
They stood at the rail together. From the streets of the city they could hear drunken singing and shouting and the occasional shot fired. “Be grateful that you are alive, Annika,” she said to herself sternly, pulling her sweater tight against the night chill rising off the river.
“What now?” she asked him.
He nodded east and said, “One way or another.”
“You are a funny sort of an American, river boy, that speaks Bulgarian and Russian and God knows what else.”
“American?”
“You run from the Germans and fool the Russians. What else could you be?”
“Just a man going home.”
“Very well,” she said, “I shall remember you so.”
They were together in silence for a time, he was reluctant to leave her. She patted him twice on the shoulder and went belowdecks. When she returned, she handed him the Czech automatic that she had hidden for him, two tins of jam, a clasp knife, and a few ten-florin Hungarian coins.
“You are kind, Annika,” he said.
“For luck,” she said. “You cannot give a knife without a coin.” She leaned out over the bulwark and unknotted a kerchief that held the small fortune he had given her—they both knew she dared not keep it.
“Farewell, my little friends,” she said sadly. “Once upon a time you were a rich man’s pride. You have made a great journey, but now you stink like old cheese, and the Russians will smell you out.” One by one, at first, then all together, she let them fall from her open hand, gold coins lost in a river.
He walked up a ramp onto the quay and made quickly for the side streets. He had intended to steal a rowboat and drift silently away from the city, but there wasn’t an unguarded craft of any description that he could see—not with all the bridges down, there wasn’t. So he walked south, making his way to within sight of the river from time to time to be sure he wasn’t wandering off course.
The city had apparently seen many weeks of street fighting. A few blocks were mounds of stone and dirt and splintered wood, but it took bombs or artillery to do that. Where he walked it was mostly building façades pocked with mortar shells and sprinkled with the whitish chip marks of small arms fire. There was hardly an unshattered windowpane to be seen—glass crunched continually beneath his boots—and the clouds of flies and the smell of unburied bodies nauseated him. He clamped a hand over his mouth and nose and breathed against his own skin and that seemed to help a little.
There were no Russian officers to be seen, just a few drunken troopers trying to make their way back to wherever they thought their units might be. At one point, a Mongolian corporal rushed out of a doorway and, embracing him with a clasp like iron, lifted him completely off the ground, put him down, and began singing wildly and dancing him around in a bear hug. The man was only an inch or two above five feet tall and his breath reeked of turpentine. Khristo danced along and sang at the top of his lungs—he knew that when you are that drunk, everyone else had better be too—whooping and yowling like a lunatic. After they had sworn friendship for life and Khristo had gravely accepted the hand of his sister in marriage, the man went staggering away and disappeared into an alley.
He spent the better part of the night reaching the outskirts of the city. When first dawn began to lighten the road, he wandered into a neighborhood of little shacks, crawled under a piece of tin sheeting at the back of a roofless house, and fell asleep.
It took him four days to reach Yugoslavia. There was nothing moving downstream—no opportunity for stowaway or expropriation presented itself—so he walked, on a road that meandered down the eastern bank of the river for some hundred and ten miles. He had to guess the distance; only a few mile markers remained and some of those had been altered to deceive invading armies, but it was at least that far.
He was not alone on the road. Small knots of refugees, old people, women and children, walked along with him or passed him going the other way, their possessions rolled in blankets on their backs or pushed along in handcarts or baby carriages. There seemed to be equal numbers of them headed in each direction, and this puzzled him. In his experience, refugees moved only in one direction: away from war. But this was different, he thought. This was something he had never seen before.
In 1940, when he’d fled from the German armies down clogged French roads, the air had been filled with wild rumors and the electricity of unfolding events. That had been a terrible time, but despite its sorrow and confusion there’d been a perverse ecstasy to it—the struggle of ordinary people, caught in the open by a moment of history, to survive. This was far worse. These people were the defeated, the uprooted; hopelessness and despair hung about them like smoke. They walked slowly, hypnotized by exhaustion, and their eyes never left the ground.
He began to suspect, after a time, that the refugees on the road might not have a destination. Perhaps they had no papers or permits, perhaps when they tried to stay somewhere they were chased away. He did not know the reason, but the people walked without purpose, as though walking itself was now all they could do, and they meant to walk until they dropped or until some authority appeared and told them what was required of them.
On the first day, he caught himself walking too quickly, with too much purpose. He cut a stick from an exploded tree and, after that, fell naturally into the appropriate limp. By the second day he was covered with a fine, gritty soil that blew in the wind, and he was tiring, and there was no longer any difficulty at all about blending in. He walked past empty villages where open shutters banged in the wind, past burnt-out farmhouses seen at a distance across fields of unplowed mud, past blackened tanks with guns pointing at the sky. At night he slept on the ground, waking damp and sore, and the brief flurries of rain meant that he never really dried out.
He had started out in reasonably good shape. In Prague he had spent so much time on the move, hurrying from meeting to meeting, always behind schedule, that the walking of the first two days did not bother him overmuch. His shins ached where the Russians had kicked him, but that would pass, he knew, and he had unwrapped his hand to let the air heal the long, white blister that had formed on it.
But he now began to comprehend what had happened to Voluta, how he had come to make the critical error that had nearly killed them both. To meet after curfew, in the open, at a guarded bridge, was a reasonable definition of suicide, an extraordinarily stupid mistake for a man who had spent his adult life in the shadows, for a man who crossed borders like the wind.
Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious in and of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer.
He woke on the morning of the third day to find that he was soaked to the skin and the back of his throat was on fire. In panic, he forced himself to a sitting position, then swallowed obsessively until the burning subsided. He was thirsty, dry as dust. The only water available collected in shellholes or farmers’ ponds or, in extremity, there was the river. But each time he had to drink he was in fear of cholera, so permitted himself only a few sips, imagining that his body would fight the bacteria better if it was limited to small doses. An old wives’ tale, he told himself. Yet something primitive within him insisted that it be done that way even if he knew better. The body runs on liquid, he thought, I must have it. No, said another voice, only a little.
Out on the road, a small group of old people in black clothing was already on the move, though
it was barely light. What did they eat? he wondered. He’d had a tin of jam the previous day. Had slid down an embankment onto the shore of the river, where he could hide in order to eat it. Like an animal with its kill, he thought. Plum jam. The most delicious thing there could possibly be. He’d sawn the tin open with his knife and spooned the jam up with his fingers. Walk, he told himself to stop the reverie. Walk and you will feel better. And there would be more jam tomorrow. Maybe the sun would come out and dry him off. Maybe the Americans would swoop down in one of their special planes—they seemed to have no end of them—and whisk him off to Switzerland, to Basel, to the Gasthaus Kogelmann. Where they served a thick pancake of fried potatoes and onions and, for those who took full board, Frau Kogelmann would make sure there was a second pancake for you if you were still hungry. When you drank some water, in the little dining area set off from the parlor, a boy came with a yellow pitcher and refilled your glass. You didn’t have to ask.
Of the fourth day he remembered little. The villages of Ercsi and Adony and Dunaföldvár seemed deserted. He would wait at the outskirts for a group of refugees and walk through with them, so as to pass unnoticed. But he was not challenged. Russian military police sat in American Jeeps and smoked cigarettes, watching him limp past. At Fajsz, a woman came out of a house and gave him a cup of water. Her face beneath the black shawl was seamed and windburned, yet she was young and seemed very beautiful because there was pity for him in her eyes. He drank the water and handed the cup back. “Köszönöm,” he said, his voice a dry whisper. She nodded in acknowledgment, then a voice called from a house and she went away.
Some miles before the town of Mohács, he left the Great Plain and entered the swampland of southern Hungary. Now it was not so far to Yugoslavia. Soviet troops had been there longer, river traffic would be closer to normal. It was a guess—information abstracted from Czech newspapers by Hlava and reported to him twice a week—but a reasonable guess. The German censors did not want the population to know where the lines were, but they could not resist reporting Russian atrocities against civilians—an attempt to stiffen public resistance as the time of invasion approached.
