The Rift

by H Schmidt

  The knock was not loud, not demanding. He walked to the door, and slowly opened it, ready to slam it shut if need be. Standing on the porch, a small man with a merry smile, a red beard covered with frost, and small, porcine eyes that seemed to glisten.

  “I have a letter for Casimir Bogdanon. They told me at the village I might find him here.”

  It had taken almost a month to make contact with the Old Man through the Swedish Embassy. The name selected was Casimir Bogdanon. They had received one message in the village. It said simply to wait. Only Carson was able to go to the village. To the villagers, he played the part of a peasant who had been given permission to live on the estates of Count Voravskii. Elizaveta knew most of the people in the village; it was for that reason that they decided it would be best if she stayed hidden in the cottage.

  The first months had not been difficult because they were able to get outside. Billy had found nets in the cottage, and would work with Carson in the cold waters, catching fish then drying them for the winter. Over the six weeks when the weather allowed the four to move about, they had cut wood and stored whatever food they could buy in the village. Once, they were lucky enough to find a peasant who would part with one of his pigs. Billy, who had killed and dressed mule deer and elk in Colorado, killed the animal. There was a smoke house in the back of the cottage, and they used it for the pig and most of the fish.

  Anna had the most difficult time. A Georgian who was not used to the bitter cold, who had lived the last three years in the Petrograd society, she refused to go outdoors. She huddled next to the stove, complaining about everything around her. They had talked about their situation. Billy, Carson, and Elizaveta had agreed that everyone would share in carrying wood and water, and all would spend time outside to avoid the effects of being shut in. Anna said she could not help. It was Elizaveta who dealt with her.

  “All of us are used to having others take care of our needs, Anna. We have to change now. So do you. Here, we must depend on each other. Everyone must do their share. If you do not, you cannot share the food, nor can you sit next to the stove. Do you understand?”

  Anna’s face turned red and she stared angrily at Elizaveta. She looked to Billy and Carson for help. She saw on their faces there would be none. Grudgingly, Anna carried her share of the load. It was not long, however, before she retreated into herself. Nothing Elizaveta could do seemed to help. When the courier arrived, only Anna did not rise to greet him, instead lying in her bed with her face to the wall.

  The courier was in good spirits. He had sailed from Helsinki to Pernau, then walked down the coast until he reached the cottage. He was a Finn, he said. No one bothered him on the trip. He had told the soldiers that would sometimes stop him that he was returning home to the new Russia.

  “I must have a new story on the way home. Once I reach Pernau, it will not be difficult.”

  “You are a Finn? The Finns are a worrisome lot. Many have sided with the Germans.”

  The man, whom Billy could see was much younger than he had at first thought, looked at Elizaveta, who had spoken to him.

  “Madame, the Finns side with no one but the Finns. We never accepted the Swedish king, nor did we accept a Russian one.” The mouth continued to smile, but Billy noticed the eyes had grown hard.

  “You are welcome to rest here for the night, if you like.” Billy interrupted quickly.

  “I must be on my way; I have three days to reach Pernau.” Billy went to the shelves and pulled down a tin of tea and a packet of sugar. “Please take these. Let me go outside with you. I would like to share some smoked fish fillets with you. I prepared them myself.”

  “I thank you for your hospitality. I wish you Godspeed in your journey, wherever it may take you.”

  The letter to Casimir Bogdanon was from Sweden informing him that his uncle had died. There was a bequest to him which could be redeemed by contacting the executor, Ulf Nygaard on Rose Street in Stockholm. A reply was necessary no later than March 1, 1918.

  “We are to be in Petrograd no later than March 1. That is two weeks from now. We must leave tomorrow.”

  Billy looked at the older man, who held the letter in his hands. Other than Anna, who seemed at the edge of her sanity, Carson had done the worst. The isolation, the separation from his wife seemed to diminish him. He had lost weight. Once a powerful man whose strength resonated as he spoke, he stooped over now and spoke softly, often losing his train of thought. Perhaps the news would revive him. If not, he could put everyone around him in danger.

  ---

  Friederich had requested permission to reduce the size of the battalion to only six hundred men. They had discarded the flamethrowers, supporting the infantry with six machine guns and four mortars. While there were armored cars available, and several lorries that might be commandeered, the countryside was more suited to travel by foot, to move the machine guns and mortars with horse drawn carriages. During the November offensive, Friederich had lost the last officer commanding his infantry companies. Now all three were led by sergeants with battlefield experience. General Schiffman had offered to request replacements for the dead officers, but the colonel had asked that he be allowed to keep the sergeants as company commanders. He had been personally disappointed, as had fellow battalion commanders, with the quality of the young officers coming to the front in the last year. He would stick with the solid sergeants he had now. No artillery would precede the movement of the Blitz Battalion, named by Hutier himself. It was Hutier who decided that the battalion be specially trained to perform its mission behind enemy lines. For almost a month, Hutier had expected the war to resume. He did not expect that the Russians would agree to the terms of the Brest-Litovsk agreement. In preparation, he had conceived of the idea of a battalion which lived off the land, that severed itself from the main body of the Eighth Army. Its job would be to disrupt enemy supply lines, to be able to move quickly to avoid encirclement and to occupy enemy troops far exceeding the six hundred men in the battalion. He had ordered that ten additional blitz battalions be formed.

  To be able to survive for as many as three months separated from the Eighth Army, Friederich had to be able to live off the supplies of the enemy, to use enemy weapons where ammunition would not fit the German weapons, and to be familiar with Russian army operations. Hutier had offered men specially trained in Russian tactics, communications, transport, and weapons, but Friederich had asked only for two interpreters. While some of his men spoke some Russian, no one was fluent enough to be able to speak or fully understand the language. Instead of adding experts to his battalion, he had his men spend the last two weeks working with captured equipment.

  Three hours before dawn, the air was still. The squad leaders were moving among their men, checking their equipment, reminding them to protect their hands and feet. Company commanders moved about checking the firing pins, feed and ejection ports, tripods and ammunition belts on the machine guns, harnesses on their horses, the packing of the ammunition boxes, the hundreds of details that made up effective units. Special care was taken to insure that wagons carrying the land mines, guncotton, fuses, and igniters were properly loaded, that everything was there. The men had been fed; there was no way of knowing when they would get their next hot meal.

  General Hutier watched as the men moved south behind his own lines. Five kilometers to the south, aerial reconnaissance the previous day had pinpointed a soft spot in the lines of the Russian Twelfth. It was there the Blitz Battalion would pierce the Russian line and head into the open country. Was he making a mistake, sending his best out in the dead of winter? He looked at his watch. The colonel must penetrate the line and be in open country in ninety minutes. In one hundred twenty minutes the bombardment would begin.

  It was 1300 hours when Friederich ordered his battalion to rest in a wooded area. The forest was thick fir; they could not be seen from the ground. He remembered the constant buzz of British and French airplanes on the western front. Here, he must not grow too confident, b
ecause they seldom saw a Russian plane. It was easy to grow careless with the Russian Army in the last year. He remembered how he had cursed the Russian commanders at Tannenberg. Now it was worse. The men no longer seemed to care. They surrendered whenever the opportunity arose; when it did not, they ran. He posted sentries and watched the men settle in. Fires were allowed, but ordered to be kept small, in case they were being pursued. There was no tent for the battalion commander, only a piece of canvas with metal eyelets that could be stretched between trees.

  He had assembled his commanders as they reviewed the maps he carried with him. “There is a railroad bridge here.” He pointed to a spot twenty kilometers to the south. “A depot here. Shichler, I want you to take your company to destroy the bridge. There is a road you can take here. You will need to be in position before first light tomorrow. There is a full moon. Get some rest and some hot food before leaving. Traveling light, it should take you no more than four hours. You are to leave at 2300 hours.

  “The rest of the Blitz Battalion will concentrate on the depot. It appears the depot is not more than fifteen kilometers. We will leave at 2330 hours. It is important that both attacks occur at the same time. Schichler, you will attack to remove all resistance off the bridge at 0500 hours. We will begin our attack at the same time. Plan to rendezvous with the rest of the battalion at Ussuri. There is a large forest there. Enter the forest from the southwestern side where the two rivers meet.”

  ---

  The count opened the door slowly. Each time he did, he wondered whether it would be one of Dzerzhinskii’s Latvians. The Extraordinary Commission to Fight the Counterrevolution and Sabotage--the Cheka--its thugs roamed the streets of Petrograd from its headquarters in Gorokhavaia 2, picking up anyone their director decided was a threat to the revolution. For two months, since the middle of December, businessmen, members of the old Duma, persons on the list of enemies of the Bolsheviks, were rounded up. The count remembered the days of Plehve before the Revolution of 1905. Then, one of your friends would be taken into custody by the Okhrana and never heard from again. It was the same now.

  “My name is Pavel Szerbanski, Count Voravskii. Forgive me for the intrusion. In five minutes, you will receive visitors. They would like to renew their acquaintance with you. Because these are perilous times, they will not be able to come to the front door. They ask that you open the cellar door for them. Good night.”

  “Good night, sir.” The fat little man touched his fur cap and tipped his head in respect, turned and walked down the stairs into the night. The count reached into his waistcoat and pulled out his watch. He made note of the time, waited three minutes, then made his way into the cellar.

  He carried a lantern. Someday he would electrify the cellar, but that seemed unimportant now. For almost five months he had dreamed of her return but held out little hope now that the Bolsheviks had taken over. He had thought about leaving, but where would he go? The estates had been claimed by the people under the Land Decree. He was at the back door now. Always precise, he pulled out his watch.

  “Yes, it has been five minutes.”

  He let himself hope as he opened the door. When he saw the silhouette, he knew. Trying to hold onto the lantern and hugging Elizaveta at the same time, in that precious moment it was as if all the terrible times before had been washed away. In his arms, he felt the softness of his brother’s daughter. He wished he had another hand to wipe the tears that rolled down his cheeks.

  ---

  Lieutenant William Housman had changed Reginald Merriweather’s life. One of Merriweather’s greatest pleasures in life was to mingle with those who were less fortunate than he. He enjoyed causes that made him feel good about himself. In Boston, he was among those who visited the sweat shops and carried signs condemning the practice. He attended speeches of labor leaders like Big Bill Haywood, helped in the movement to get Joe Hill a new trial, mourned his execution, and joined the workers in renditions of Hill’s “Casey Jones and The Union Scab,” For Reginald, the world of Beacon Street, where his corporate-lawyer father and well-bred mother lived with their only son, and Harvard was perfect as a world could be.

  From there, he could venture into the troubled world of poverty, discrimination and crime, speak out against its evils, then return to the comfort of his own. He and his classmates were taught from the moment they entered the Cambridge campus that they were among the few in America chosen to change that world. When they finished at Harvard, there were friends of Harvard who would see to it that they were given places where they would have the opportunity to fulfill their destiny to make the world better.

  He chose Russia because there were many people there with the same passion for revolution that he and his classmates felt. In the coffee houses, he would sometimes meet some of the Russian immigrants who had come to America after the 1905 revolution. He remembered they were often not much older than he, but he saw in them what he saw in Big Bill Haywood. It was something that excited him. It was, he and his classmates had concluded, brutality. Enemies were not persons to persuade, but to crush. Revolution was not a game, but a war. In Russia, the American Embassy became his Harvard, a world where he was safe, yet still allowed him to play the peeping Tom.

  Merriweather hated the lieutenant. Most of the people in the embassy knew who he was, that his uncle was a member of the Wilson cabinet, that he was someone with a future. Senior and junior members made a point of being nice to Reginald Merriweather because he was connected, a young man with a future. Lieutenant Housman did not play at this game. God, he doesn’t even know how to play, he said to himself.

  He hated Housman because of the way he made Merriweather feel. He could sense the hate and contempt the lieutenant had for him, and frankly, he scared him. All of the Americans talked about the night he was attacked, and what had happened to the attacker. He watched how the young Russian secretaries and clerks looked at him. A native of Colorado, a simple cowboy, it was Housman everyone talked about. Although the Americans in the embassy still treated Merriweather the same, he still could not escape the fact that it was the lieutenant that they really admired.

  He was glad when news got around that Housman had been caught in some seedy operation to steal information from Kerensky and in helping Kornilov, the reactionary general who had tried to take over Russia. He remembered the sense of depression when the place was buzzing that he was back. He simply appeared one day, and took back the old office he occupied. The ambassador had let it be known that the embassy stood by their earlier denial of any wrongdoing of the lieutenant, and that, in any event, the new Soviet government of Russia, had exonerated all political prisoners of the Kerensky regime.

  Two days ago, a day after Housman had returned, Merriweather received a message from Fedor Riezler. The note said simply that they had a mutual friend named Victor that the American had met while at Harvard. Reginald had tried to remember who Victor was, but he could not. He could not know that the tall, skinny red-head who had accompanied one of the tough-looking immigrants who had talked about world revolution was Victor. Something about the note bothered Merriweather. He had always done his job, had engaged in the social life in Petrograd until it ceased to exist, and watched the revolution unfold. In Boston, he felt safe when he ventured into the factory district, visited the coffee houses, or listened to speeches at union halls. He thought Fedor Riezler was still close to Lenin, in the vortex of the revolution. If he stepped inside, could he return?

  It was Housman who persuaded him to keep the appointment. Nothing that Housman did to him since he had returned, but his presence, the effect that it had on everyone. Housman diminished Merriweather by returning. Perhaps Riezler could help. There were even rumors that Riezler was behind the attack on Housman.

  ---

  The Old Man was angry. Cable traffic speaks in incomplete sentences, abbreviations of words and thoughts. What people feel, what they think, are seldom referred to in cables. Even the whys of things are omitted. Sometimes the hows are t
here, but not often. Billy was reading the cable. He knew it came from the Old Man. He knew what his instructions were, and he knew the Old Man was mad. He was mad at me, Billy decided. He was mad at Carson. Lenin, Kerensky, Kornilov.

  Billy thought about that meeting almost a year ago in the Georgetown house. The Old Man was used to getting his way. Now, everything he told Billy he wanted, he did not get. Kornilov was accused of treason. Lenin was alive, well, and in control. The Council of People’s Commissars, only a month before, had repudiated all foreign and domestic debts. But he thought he knew something else about the Old Man. He was no quitter. He wanted the money Russia owed his friends. He wanted the arms market, and he wanted to be there when the war was over. Americans had grown rich on the war. America, alone, had the capital to invest in Russia. Billy smiled when he thought of those fierce eyes, the eyes of the eagle.

  The instructions in the cable were the same. The conditions were more serious, but the only hope remained a military one. Since the fall of Kerensky, the issue had become clearer in the minds of the Russian officers. They had come to understand what Kerensky could not, that what the Bolsheviks represented was destruction of the old order, not a change in a system of governance. With the fall of the Kerensky government, and the taking of power by the Soviets, Kornilov, who had escaped from prison, had joined with General Mikhail Vasilievich Alekseev to form the Volunteer Army. There was no longer any confusion over the enemy.

  Billy had come to Russia in the hope that he could do what the Old Man asked. He now doubted that was possible; but it was not his job to decide that. He would try.