The three women were in tears when the time came to say goodbye, on the levee road a few hundred yards short of Kopanovka. Even the Count’s voice had sounded a bit strangled. Bob meanwhile resisting the urge to hug the old woman, for fear of impregnating her clothes with coal-dust. Frightening thought, that just a few grammes of coal-dust might put her into Khitrov’s hands… She’d been turning the cart, Nick leading the donkey round; Bob had told her, ‘We all owe you our lives. I’m sure none of us will ever forget you.’ Nadia sobbed, ‘We’ll be praying for you, Maroussia darling.’
‘More sense to pray for yourselves. Nobody’s going to do an old crow like me any harm. Go with God, may He protect you and bless you with happy lives, my children.’ She’d whacked Don Juan into a trot, mercifully cutting the bad moment short, and they’d scrambled down the side of the levee, so as to approach the village along the river and as invisibly as possible.
Irina whispered, ‘It’s dreadful, to think we’ll never see her again!’
‘I know.’ Nadia was still snuffling too. ‘It’s wrong. If only we could have persuaded her to come with us…’
Then there’d have been seven in the skiff, Bob thought. Although he had tried to persuade her, and was far from happy at the thought of her going back to Krasnaya Dacha… He was leading the party now, feeling his way carefully over uneven ground, hearing the girls’ whispers behind him and an occasional exchange of mutters from the Czechs, and with the village in sight ahead, roofs and chimneys clear-cut against the stars. Destination the waterfront, village quay – and either one boat or two.
The disadvantage of using two would be the risk of the boats getting separated and losing each other. Imagining the Czechs on their own in one boat being swept into the downstream channel that Maroussia had mentioned: he personally wouldn’t have been exactly distraught at losing them now, but an extension of the scenario was to see them stranded somewhere, arrested, and talking to save their own skins. Even if the rest of them had got clear by then, Maroussia would be – to put it mildly, vulnerable…
The village was very close now. Very small, too: a hamlet more than a village. Waiting for the others to catch up, he was looking down at the river, at its swift bubbling flow a few yards out from the bank. Closer in, the bank hid it. But a path led down: fishermen’s access, he guessed, perhaps the village boys. String and bent pins… An idea forming: why not make use of that current, let it work for us?
Once he had a boat he’d every intention of doing exactly that. But now – the business of getting a boat…
Brand new idea hatching. Hell of a lot better than one he’d toyed with earlier. That one had been to avoid any upstream work with a heavily-loaded boat by rowing straight across and landing on the central island or islands, the dried-out land in the middle of the river, hauling the boat across and relaunching it. Not impossible, with four men to do the portage. But the going might have been too difficult – swampy areas, for instance.
‘Hang on a minute, Nick?’
He wanted to check on how accessible or otherwise the river might be, down there where the path led. It might lead right down to the water, or the bank lower down might be sheer and so high above the present water-level that you’d need a ladder.
It was steep, anyway. He sat, went down feet first, using his heels and his bottom, hands flat on the dew-damp, slippery ground.
The path did take one right down to the water. Although – well, fishermen might use it, but not as much as cattle did. Cattle used it a lot.
And this was viable. A lot better than six people trooping into a tiny, dead-quiet village and probably waking them all up.
On the point of returning to the others he paused, groped in his pocket for Maroussia’s key and lobbed it into the darkness above the river. Hearing no splash, over the river’s continuous murmur. She’d told him, in the telega, that the key had been her husband’s, the Bolsheviks had never changed those locks when they’d converted storerooms into cells; she’d hung on to it, just in case a day might come when she’d have need of it.
As indeed it had. And again, thank God for her.
He climbed on up. His thought until this moment having been to go on his own into the village, get hold of a boat and bring it, embark them down there where the cattle drank. But – rethinking it now – swimming to the boats’ moorings would be far better. Or wading, or crawling along in the shallows – depending on how one found it. That short distance, even against a current of two or as much as four knots, would present no problems. And however small this place was there’d surely be boats – or at least a boat – at the quay.
Landing-stage below the quay, probably. As at Enotayevsk. The system would be universal, meeting the needs of fisherman and other river users.
‘Nick – no need to go into the village. The river’s accessible, at the bottom of this path. I’m going to swim from there, bring a boat back.’ He pointed downstream. ‘Going that way – don’t even have to pass the village.’
‘Brilliant… But I’ll go with you.’
‘Much better if you stayed with the girls. Suppose I got into trouble?’
‘Well…’
‘I go with you?’
Krebst…
‘Can you swim well?’
A nod… ‘Swim good. Row boat good, too.’
‘All right… Irina, is that a white shirt you’re wearing, under your coat?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘When you’re waiting down there, take your coat off? The white’ll show up, give me a mark… Nick, the path’s steep, and slippery, best go down on your bums. And watch out for bloody cowpats, I put my hand in one… Oh, look, if you wouldn’t mind – hang on to this lot for me?’
One jacket, assorted weaponry, boots…
Nadia was whispering in French to the other Czech, explaining what was happening. Bob led the sergeant down, and explained to him before they went into the river that he’d take one boat if it was big enough to hold them all, or two if they were all the smaller type of dinghy. Also, to save time and noise and be less visible, instead of getting into the boat or boats they’d stay in the water, swim with them.
‘Let’s go, then.’
Slithering in: the river’s flow immediately very noticeable. As well as cleansing: recalling Nadia’s critical remark… Soft mud bottom: easier to swim than wade. He looked back, waiting to be sure that Krebst could cope all right: and he could, was doing so, using a powerful breaststroke that was ideal for the purpose – producing no splash, only a little bow-wave as he forged into the current, face low in the water. Riverbank on the left darkly visible… Bob used breaststroke too, swimming a few yards ahead of him.
He could see the quay, its vertical stone-faced wall replacing the curve of riverbank and bushes. Houses’ roofs behind it. The post of a derrick, gibbet-like against the sky. River steamers would load farm produce here, he guessed.
Boats – Mesyats-type boats – ahead and to his left, more or less end-on, noticeable in the first place through movement – the flow of the current past them, the surface breaking where it lapped noisily around their timbers – and the boats jostling each other as they moved to it. Three – four… And that was a timber landing-stage. He glanced back, saw Krebst close to him, turned and swam to this near-end of the stage, almost under the first boat’s stern.
* * *
Irina whispered, crouching on the bank between Nadia and the Count, ‘Be awful if our food got wet. When they come with the boat, Nikki…’
‘I’ll take it from you and pass it over when you’re in. Don’t worry.’
Nadia said, after a pause, ‘Isn’t Bob absolutely splendid?’
‘He’s a good fellow.’ The Count added, ‘But of course this stuff—’ pointing at the water – ‘is his natural element. And boats and so forth, it’s his trade, that’s why he’s here. So – what’s the saying, if you keep a dog why do your own barking?’
From the direction of the village, a dog began to bark.
‘
Speak of the devil…’
Majerle, the orang-utan, muttered in French, ‘They’ve woken them up.’
A man’s voice – shouting. Words indistinguishable, but in a tone of alarm. More than one dog was barking now: it sounded very close. Irina hugged her brother’s arm: ‘Oh, God…’
‘Steady on…’
The barking was all one dog’s again, and even that one’s frenzy seemed to have passed its peak. Then, over the river’s thrum, what might have been a door slamming – or, in retrospect now, a shot. The orang-utan growled, ‘They’ve run into trouble, that’s for sure.’
He was a fool, Nadia thought. As well as highly unprepossessing. She muttered in French, ‘I see no reason to believe so. Just because some dogs start barking.’
‘You’re right, Nadia.’ The Count – clutching at the straw. ‘Absolutely right.’ He had his arm round Irina, who was whispering ‘Come on, come on…’
The boat virtually sprang at them out of the dark at that moment. Swerving sharply into the bank out of empty blackness and the river’s passing flood, a large figure materializing out of the shallows at its bow end and then another near the stern. Bob called quietly, ‘Nick – take this line?’
* * *
He did the rowing himself until he’d got them into the channel that branched off eastward. Then Krebst took over, with Bob navigating, making sure he stayed close to the left-hand bank, circling even farther northward when about an hour later the channel divided around the central island. The island in fact was barely visible – wouldn’t have been identifiable as such if one hadn’t known of it and been looking for it. The southward drag of current was very strong at that stage, and for about half an hour it was necessary to aim off by as much as twenty or thirty degrees – aiming the boat at the bank in order to crab along parallel to it. Things got easier after they’d passed the island; Nick took a spell at the oars, and Bob relieved him after another half-hour, by which time they’d been entering the main channel.
Two hours, roughly, since departure from Kopanovka.
He was the only one of them who hadn’t slept. He’d forced himself to stay awake – several times catching himself on the point of nodding off – because he’d realized that it was all being left to him now, Nick Solovyev having apparently – effectively – become a passenger.
As if he’d expended all his energies. Or had the stuffing knocked out of him, during those minutes facing Lesechko in his own ancestral home.
But maybe he was just exhausted. Bob himself didn’t remember ever feeling quite this tired. Not even in his year and a half in the Dover Patrol – in an ancient destroyer, wild days and nights often in force 8 gales playing hide-and-seek with German destroyers in and around the minefields, with hardly any rest even in harbour – repairing, refuelling, ammunitioning, maybe a few hours at anchor in the destroyer lines where it was about as rough as it was outside the breakwaters… Chaotic memories returning now because this state of exhaustion was comparable: and in present circumstances alarming, raising doubts as to whether one could trust one’s own judgement, or reactions in any new emergency.
He’d thought an emergency had been developing at Kopanovka, when the dog had started giving tongue. He’d been on the landing-stage, casting off the boat’s painter from an iron ring, and the ring had toppled, clanged against the iron plate securing it to the timber. That was all it had taken to rouse the dog – one clink… It had started barking, then a window had scraped up in one of the cottages and an old man had shouted angrily at it. Quavery old voice… Another dog had joined in for a while: Bob had thought the whole village would have been roused, that maybe he and Krebst were going to have to run – or rather swim – for it… Frightening prospect: without a boat they’d have been done for. Working fast, getting the stern line off – not all that simple in the dark, one had first to trace that line from the boat to another ring with other boats’ lines on it as well. Then – enormous relief – back in the water, towing the boat out from the stage: barks diminishing, the dog getting no support for its efforts and giving up, and finally the old man had slammed his window shut.
‘Bob – isn’t that the processing shed?’
Nick – in the stern with the girls, all three of them had been slumbering – was leaning forward, pointing. Bob rested on his oars, and looked round. Knowing they would come to that iron-roofed shed first…
That was it, all right. The shed’s long iron roof was a low slab of blackness against lighter sky.
Definitely lighter sky. He hadn’t realized it until this moment: but the stars were fading, in that eastern sector.
So in an hour, hour and a half at most, you’d have something like daylight here. And the emergency, therefore, was now. Having anticipated getting down into the delta by sunrise: now having it thrust into one’s sluggish mind that no such thing was possible. Roughly a hundred miles to go: having first to (a) get ashore (b) hide the boat somehow (c) get to the barn – hoping to God the truck would be there – unguarded, and with petrol in its tank…
And then – if all that worked out – you’d be making the journey south in daylight. In order to end up on that marsh with your small skiff and six people to take out to sea in it.
Bloody nightmare. And a head that felt as if it might have been full of lead… He told himself, Don’t try to think. Just get on with it.
Rowing, anyway… And asking Nick, ‘Tell me when you see the landing-stage. About a hundred yards beyond the shed, wasn’t it?’ He adjusted his course, edging the boat round to close in nearer the bank. At the same time, visualizing the landing place and the slope beyond it where he’d watched fishermen hauling their boats up, he realized that the obvious thing to do with this boat was exactly that, the same as they’d done with theirs. There’d be no counting of boats, it might lie there for months – at least for the few days they needed now with no one on their trail.
‘Nick, listen. We’ll land the girls at the stage. Then the four of us can pull this boat up and park it with the others. The girls can keep lookout while we’re doing it. And – listen…’
The brain did still work, after a fashion and at about half speed. Remembering now that those fishermen had wooden rollers on which they’d hauled their boats up, and guessing that the rollers would be up at the top of the slope, left there when the last boat had been taken up. So Nick could go up there, take a precautionary look around, leave the girls there and bring the rollers down. While the Czechs also disembarked here at the tilted landing-stage, to meet him when he brought the boat to the bottom of the slip.
Nick commented, about ten minutes later when they’d done it. ‘That was good thinking, Bob.’
He looked at him through the darkness. Finding himself short of words as well as sleep. He managed, ‘Let’s see if the truck’s there now.’ A hand on Nadia’s arm: ‘This way.’
Until they got up there, their only cover was the darkness. No trees, bushes, anything. Leading them uphill, with Nadia beside him and the Count somewhere on his left with Irina, the Czechs following, he forced himself to the effort of putting the immediate problems into words: less for anyone’s information than in the hope that someone – meaning Nick, primarily – might come up with answers, or comments that might lead to answers. The main points being that it would be light in about an hour, that if they set off in the truck now most of the journey would be made in daylight, and it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that the Cheka might have put out a general alert – anti-Bolshevik prisoners on the run. They’d use the telephones at railway stations, probably. Another point was that in daylight the truck – or lorry – might be recognized. And – finally – they’d arrive on the marsh in daylight, and for obvious reasons they’d want to put some distance between themselves and wherever they dumped the truck: so you’d have six people on the move, on foot, in daylight – possibly with an alert out for them.
His voice tailed off. It had been a major effort, trying to put it into words.
&nbs
p; He could see the barn now. And then the huts too: it was spotting the barn that had led his eye to them. But in any case it was, clearly, getting lighter.
‘Any ideas, Nick?’
‘Only – I suppose – push on…’
‘Not lie up here until it’s dark again, then push on?’
‘Oh, God – another day…’
Irina said, ‘I think Nikki’s right. Another day for them to send out descriptions, and have everyone looking for us.’
‘Well.’ Bob yawned. ‘You have a point. But I think the false trail I laid should hold them for a day or two. Before they start looking on this side, I mean.’
Nadia asked quietly. ‘You’d wait for tonight, Bob, would you?’
‘I – suppose…’
Looking at her dark profile, close to him. Thinking this had to be the right decision – if only because it would be dangerous to press on without getting some sleep first. But also, suppressing an inclination to put his arm round that tall, lithe figure: or better still – thinking about it now – to stop and use both arms, crush her body against his… Astonishing. Dead on one’s feet, a brain that felt like river-mud, and still… He thought, Survival of the species… Telling the others over his shoulder, ‘Let’s see if the truck’s here, anyway.’
15
He’d left them among the huts, at the end nearest to the barn – the fishermen’s huts which by now should all have been vacated and which might come in handy if one decided to sit the day out here. Or rather, sleep it out. Prior to deciding this he needed to prospect the barn – whether the lorry was in there, and petrol – and wanted to do it on his own, so in this rapidly thinning darkness it had seemed a good idea to leave them where there was some cover.
The business of the skiff was a bigger weight on his mind than the more immediate questions such as availability of transport and whether they moved on now or later. Even the prospect of having to explain it to them: for instance that the Caspian was no lake – or river – and that a small boat with six people in it had very little freeboard, would be shipping water in even a moderate breeze. With such a distance to be covered: and the fact that at this time of year – any time, but now especially with the summer on its way out – you could have a calm for breakfast and a full gale by lunch… And this was to think only of the weather hazards: disregarding the Bolshevik naval presence.
Bloody Sunset Page 27
