“Be temperate now, Annushka,” I murmured.
She rose twittering, the stethoscope dangling from her neck.
He coiled a massive hand around her waist—bent her backwards—planted his mouth on hers. Her jaws parted. Her hands were up his back in a flash, nails digging into his muddy flesh.
He broke away, gazed adoringly on her, whacked her on the bottom and said to me solemnly, “Every morning I thank God for big women.”
She went up on tiptoe and kissed him. “Men are such brutes.”
“Some are,” he said agreeably, pulling on his pants. Whistling he went into the wheelhouse, turfed Lili out and started the engine.
The barge edged out into the river. And there was another welcome sight—on the far bank, Kobi astride Tornado, motionless, like a Red Indian, their two images fused into one in the water’s reflection.
I raised both fists and shook them in triumph. He waved back, slipped his rifle sling and fired a couple of shots into the air.
I said to Lili, “How did the horse get here?”
“He was grazing beside the road. Kobi hopped out and hitched him on at the back of the armoured car. He rode him onto the barge. Tornado just stood in the middle of the deck, looking around as if he owned the boat. When we got into the middle of the river, he was so big he acted like a sail. So Kobi’s riding him along the towpath. Isn’t he beautiful?”
“And Boltikov?”
“Improving. I’m just going to wash his bandages.”
“Stiffy and Joseph?”
It was Shmuleyvich who replied. “Getting the wireless to work. Got a knock on the way here.”
“The aerial?”
“Safe and sound. Hey, boss, give me the course for Odessa, will you?”
We all laughed. Nothing to come could be more difficult than what we’d just pulled off. “Oh, south and west in a general manner of speaking,” I said cheerily. “Anything for a man who’s feeling peckish? Do we have a cook on board?”
“Be patient,” said Mrs. D.
There was no other traffic on the river. The war had made it too dangerous unless a crew could defend themselves. Thinking of which—but Shmuley interrupted me, saying, “We should find ourselves a pilot. This river’ll have bad places as well as good, sure to.”
Now I noticed someone had positioned a machine gun on the roof of the wheelhouse, which allayed my worries in that direction.
The right bank had the usual steep bluff with the towpath hacked out at its foot. On the left the countryside was flat for a bit, letting the river spread out and wander among marshes, stew ponds, duck decoys and a few houses on stilts. Then the forest took over again.
I lay back. The sun was at its sweetest. It was a beautiful early-autumn day: yellowing birches, maples just starting to colour, poplars spearing to the sky, which was itself perfectly blue—perfectly, from horizon to horizon, as if the day had decided to set an example to all the other days that God intended to follow it.
Russia, O Russia! World without end, world of every emotion known to mankind at twice normal proof. Could I ever leave it?
Lili was draping the washed bandages over the rail to dry. I called to her. She finished her job and sat beside me, touching. I took her hands between my paws and said, “What’s the best memory you have of your mother?”
Those eyes, just like Xenia’s but bigger. I thought, I’ll eat my hat if she’s fifteen. Seventeen, more like.
She cleared her throat: the truth was coming. “The best, the very very best? All right—when she said goodbye to me. In the chapel. Then she ran out—remember? She freed me. I loved her for that.”
“She gave you good advice—having my children. They’ll be terrific. My father had his faults but I make up for them.”
“My mother never loved me. I was a nuisance, I interrupted her life. She paid for me to be away, with her sister. Every month she sent Anna Marevna rouble notes folded in carbon paper so the post office clerks couldn’t see it was money. Once in a blue moon she came down to visit me. I just wasn’t part of her life.”
“Sounds like an honest arrangement.”
“I think Anna Marevna took all the guilt upon herself... I’m not old enough to understand about guilt. All I know is you have to have done something really horrible. You’ve done something, haven’t you? Tetka Anna used to mutter about it when she got to know whom Mamasha had gone off with. You shot someone? She wouldn’t tell me more.”
She prattled on. I wasn’t taken in by her innocence, no matter that her eyes were fantastic and made me tremble. She was leafing through my history, maybe fantasising about the children we were to have. A light gusting wind had sprung up. Poplar cotton was blowing across the river in drifts, like snowflakes. On it came the smell of my country—the fields of rye and oats, the rivers, the woods, the small black cattle, the bathhouses on a Friday evening. I lay back on the quilt, gazing at the sky.
I’d done it! Got the gold, turned the corner, recaptured luck— grabbed it by its horny ankles as it passed, as one would a chicken.
It was then that he came, while I was thinking about luck and the gold and Lili’s breasts and the way her buttocks had shifted against each other as we ran from the monastery; while I was thinking that everything comes right in the end so long as one has a calm attitude towards life.
Sixty-six
WE STOOD, we listened, heads cocked. Below, Stiffy and Joseph were having an argument in Anglo-Russian. The noise was so faint that we couldn’t hear it when they suddenly started shouting at each other.
Lili said, “Are you sure you’re not imagining it?”
Shmuley said, “If it’s one of those destroyers from the Romanov Bridge we’re as good as sliced and dried.”
“Not worth the effort for one small barge,” said Mrs. D. “They’ve got bigger fish to fry. Anyway, it’s gone now.”
But I knew what had been making that insistent humming noise, having heard it the previous dawn at close quarters. Glebov would have been too cowardly to dabble iodine down below, but he’d swabbed himself clean, had a few hours’ sleep— and come after me. No need to search upstream, towards the bridge. One way only that a gold barge would go. And it would be Glebov himself. No hired assassin this time. He’d want to get me in his sights and pump bullets into me until I was mince.
I said to Shmuley, “It’s him. He may have got bandaged bollocks but he has hatred in his heart.”
“Women on board, doesn’t matter to him?”
“Not a bit. He’s without mercy.”
He said nothing, spun the wheel to take us back under the willows on the flat side of the river.
Kobi had heard the plane too. He’d urged the piebald to the top of the bluff. Warriorlike he sat on the horse, hand shading his eyes, gazing upstream.
I said to Shmuley, “What did Kobi take with him?”
“Two rifles and half the ammunition.”
I tried to send the women below, down there with Stiffy and Joseph. Lili would have gone but Mrs. D. refused point-blank. She was going to stay with her man in case he was wounded. Moreover, if the barge were holed, it’d sink like a stone from that weight of gold and if she were below decks, she’d never get out.
She didn’t care for that idea, “Strong swimmer though I am, as you know very well and should be more grateful for than you are.”
That put me in my place.
“Yuri can’t swim well. He told you he could in order to stay with me and protect me—you know, when we swam into the godown. Now it’s my turn to look after him... Lili, do what you want, girl.”
Lili glanced mischievously at Shmuley and Mrs. D.—plucked at my sleeve. “This morning Yuri asked her to marry him.”
I said to Mrs. D., “Is that so? Hope you said yes. Then you can use him as a shield. He’s beefy enough to soak up a whole belt of ammo.”
“Don’t say that,” Mrs. D. said, ready to have another go at me.
I told her I’d say what I wanted and the barge was mine
and she could swim for it if she wanted but since Glebov hadn’t been blown up in the monastery, here he was again and was she going to help me or wasn’t she.
But still she wouldn’t go below, nor would Lili. I had to resign myself to that. Next I collared Joseph and Stiffy, one in each hand, and kicked them onto the deck, sparing no part of the boot. I wasn’t going to be beaten at this point. I didn’t know how. But it wasn’t going to happen and they were going to be part of it not happening.
We set about collecting mattresses, planks, loose partition boards and any old stuff we could lay our hands on to make the wheelhouse safe.
Joseph began bleating, “Excellency, Excellency, how can we put the mattresses up there if a mashinka is already there?”
“So get it down,” I roared.
The old squaddie surfaced in Stiffy. He shoved Joseph out of the way. Shirt off, he walked the machine gun on its tripod to the edge of the wheelhouse roof. I took it from him, some weight in it. Twenty yards forward was a winch bolted to the deck, a big old iron thing with double handles. I dragged the gun into its shelter and set it up. Stiffy ran over dragging a belt of ammo in each hand.
Hearing the sound of the Fokker getting louder, I glanced up and there it was, only quarter of a mile away, wheels almost touching the water, dancing in the sunny shimmer like a giant fucking hairy black spider.
Shmuley cut the engines. We were eighty yards from the willows and a good thick patch of osiers. But it’d be a neat piece of helmsmanship to get the barge under cover without grounding her.
Even neater would be to get there before Glebov got us.
His distance, four hundred yards. His speed, one hundred miles per hour. We had eight seconds to live the rest of our lives.
Looking at it another way: four hundred rounds per machine gun—therefore eight hundred separate chances of death.
Had I been any use to the world? Did my beetle really count for anything? Was there anything else I could be proud of?
The noise of the Fokker suddenly shrank. We looked up together, Stiffy flicking the sweat off his eyebrows with one finger. Glebov had swung away. He’d calculated that he’d time to get round in front of us and take us head-on. He was going to rake us all the way down, from bow to stern, about twenty yards before we got to the trees.
“Tickle her up, man,” I shouted to Shmuleyvich. Our impetus had slowed drastically. We were almost down to drifting speed. But we could still get there if Shmuley gave the barge some boot.
I had another thought, stemming from something Shmuley had said earlier: maybe I could induce Glebov to give us the breathing space we needed by exhibiting our women. Maybe when he saw them out there on deck, all soft and innocent, he’d become polite, compassionate, gentlemanski Glebov. I’ve said it before, when a revolution comes along, people try out new personalities. They have to, to survive. One should be surprised by nothing in a revolution. Novelty is their purpose.
The women had gone into the wheelhouse for shelter. “Kick ’em out of there,” I shouted to Shmuley. “Get ’em where he can see them. Have ’em take their blouses off and shake their tits out.”
Kobi started firing. His rifle shots punctuated the rumble of our engine and the howl of the Fokker. I could make out Tornado safe among the trees. That’d have been Kobi’s first priority. If we were killed, he’d have a means of escape.
A series of crashes from the wheelhouse: Shmuley was bashing the glass out of the windows with a wrench, to stop it flying about when the bullets struck.
He thrust a broom into Lili’s hand. “Here, girl, into the river with that glass, it’ll take your mind off things. Don’t listen to him about showing yourself. You’re not a tart.”
Stiffy and I were beside the machine gun, watching to see what she’d do—which was to saunter over to us as if there wasn’t an enemy within a hundred miles. She pointed to a minuscule piece of glass at my feet. Vast shards of the stuff were lying in heaps round the wheelhouse. But that wasn’t the point. That particular fragment of glass was where she was going to start.
It had been hot work barricading the wheelhouse. She’d taken off her tunic top. What was left was a vesty sort of thing tucked into her skirt band. She smiled up at me. Not coyly, not flirtatiously, more like experimentally. Then she bent to her work, harassing that piece of glass towards the scuppers with the smallest and least effectual dabs of her broom that any human could have devised.
White white shimmering skin, smooth as milk. No blemishes of any kind. Ribs just visible. And nodding beneath her shift, like lazy young animals, her glamorous, sweating breasts.
Stiffy drew in his breath sharply.
I said to him, “Changing your mind about women?”
“Never seen anything like them,” Stiffy said.
Then tossing a burst of gay laughter at us over her shoulder, Lili threw herself into the sweeping, sending great heaps of glass cascading over the side.
“Blimey, the things I can tell Mum,” exclaimed Stiffy.
Then we huddled as close to the winch as we could. But it was a pretence, and we knew it. When Glebov started to strafe the deck, only luck could save us. Looking round, I saw Lili was still out there, checking that she’d got the last of the glass. “Get into the wheelhouse,” I bellowed. “Don’t be such an asshole.”
Her huge blue eyes stared at me, then went flickering towards the Fokker. She propped the broom against the wheelhouse—
“Holy God, woman, stop fooling around. Get inside, go below, get out of it.”
She paid attention that time. It was the last I spoke for a while.
One hundred miles per hour—I gave him a good lead. The barrel swung easily: Kobi had kept it well oiled. In the same sight line I saw Glebov’s bullets tripping up the deck towards me. Tufts of wood were springing up at great speed, in two distinct furrows. They were pointing straight at us. Only the winch could save me. As for Stiffy—God what a din there was, and smoke and the rattle of empty shells, and soon I’d be firing vertically overhead and my throat’d be full in his sights, would be white as a lily, would be waiting for the carotid to be split by a small dull cone of lead dug by man from the earth.
Dug by whom? What was his name? Put his foot on the spade and up it comes and he says to himself, That’ll do for Doig— was that how it was, that I was to be killed by some ignorant horny-handed peasant?
Then without warning, the barge stopped dead—not brick-wall dead but near enough. I was flung against the winch— turned and flung, shoulder first, my head striking one of the handles. Stiffy—he was sent skidding down the deck, ended up yards away.
The pain was like having an arrow through my shoulder. I worked my arm a bit—got to my knees. Everything had slid off the wheelhouse roof. There was no sign of Shmuley. Mrs. D. was at the wheel.
“Mudbank,” she shouted. “Got to be.”
The Fokker—God knows what had happened to its bullets. Must have skewed everything for him, us stopping like that.
Lili staggered out holding her head. She’d got her tunic back on—looked unmarked, thank God. A splinter of wood in that young flesh’d have been the worst sort of crime.
“Watch out!” shouted Mrs. D. “He’s coming in again.”
This time we were dead mutton. He wouldn’t overshoot us a second time. He could take all day, make every one of his bullets count.
I went to haul the gun round to face the stern; it was where he was bound to come from next. Stiffy was out of it—alive but not doing anything very quickly. My shoulder was hell— then Lili was there to help me. One—two—three: we grunted together as we dragged the gun round.
I had my back to the winch now. We had no protection of any sort when he attacked.
She lay flat on the deck—gripped both sides of the ammunition belt, said, “Like this?”
“Get out, woman! Get back under cover!”
There was no time for more. A sort of silence fell upon us. Angels were hovering, death was approaching.
&nb
sp; Shmuley had reappeared, had the engine racing, trying to back us off the mud. But we remained stationary, all eighty feet of us. We were up at the bow—well and truly grounded. The nearest tide to lift us off was at Gibraltar. We’d have to wait for a winter flood. Could be Christmas.
I thought of Christmas and the black Fokker attacking through a snowstorm.
Glebov completed his turn and levelled out for the kill.
Stiffy had slithered back to his post, was trying to push Lili aside.
“Get ready, General.” Not budging, brave as a lion, her little fists clenched with battle-fever.
“Wait till you see the whites of his bandages,” said Stiffy.
We were going to die in good humour. And I was going to die in love, which Alexander Pushkin had always wanted to do.
Think ranges and trajectories, I said to myself. Concentrate. Kill the swine. One bullet through his black leather helmet, that’s all that it needed. Jaw, skull, earhole, I wasn’t particular.
He was coming in even lower than before, wheels only inches from the river. He’d have to climb sharply to clear the willows. His belly would look the size of a Zeppelin—if I was still alive to see it. So I’d aim for his head and keep my thumb on the button. Hope for his head, that was nearer the truth.
“Now!” said Lili and Stiffy together.
I started firing.
I can tell you nothing about the next twenty seconds, which were a yammering delirium of sound and smoke. I’d had the idea that Glebov’d be so full of choler that he’d shoot too soon, would maybe lose control of himself and run out of ammunition. If he kept a straight head on him I’d see the bullets running up the water towards the rudder: see them entering my barge over the stern counter, ripping the wood as they had the last time. I’d fling myself on top of Lili, to be killed or not. I’d keep my eyes open and watch the bullets approaching up the deck. That way I’d know the future before it arrived.
Cold Blood Page 32
