by Roger Bax
After we had been steaming north for an hour we crossed astern of a Finnish cargo boat homeward bound, and someone waved to us from the taffrail. We were glad when it was well past us. Otherwise, we saw nothing. Now that the Soviet Union controlled the greater part of its coastline the eastern Baltic seemed to be almost empty of traffic.
We could already make out the dark line of the outer islands. They looked, and were, very similar to those we had skirted and slightly penetrated a couple of days before. Stepan and Joe were studying the chart and Denny was translating. Stepan said the chart would be quite useless once we got inside the archipelago, but he was anxious to make the right landfall. As the water began to shoal Joe gave him the tiller and we cut down speed to a couple of knots.
For the next hour Stepan gave us as fine an example of pilotage as I’ve ever seen in my life. Joe was enthralled. He stood motionless in the cockpit with a faintly anxious smile on his lips while Dawn slipped between jagged rocks with only a foot or two to spare on either side. Sometimes it seemed that we were heading for a closed shore, and then at the last moment a new channel would open out and we would turn and glide between two more islands. We held no set direction for long, and often it seemed as though we were going right back on our tracks. But the islands were visibly closing in behind us, and with every twist and turn of the maze we felt a greater sense of security. Stepan had been right—it was possible to count the islands in hundreds. Some were flat and bare and marshy, like the islands off the Essex coast. Others were much higher out of the water, and thickly wooded with pine and oak and birch. They ranged in colour from brilliant green to the hazy blue of the far distance on a hot summer day. Every now and again we passed a withy or a spar, planted in the water to mark the safe channels for those who could read their meaning. Stepan didn’t seem to bother much about them. He gave the impression of knowing precisely where he was going all the time and he never faltered. The real danger was the sharp rock just awash, and such rocks were everywhere. As I sat perched up in the bows I could often spot them by the yellowing of the water, sometimes right ahead, but before I could call out Stepan had made the necessary change in our course. It was evident that he had a natural love for this kind of exploration, and that he had made the islands his playground, combining pleasure with duty.
After we had been rock-dodging for well over two hours he suddenly gave an exclamation and pointed ahead. “That is our destination,” he said. As far as I could see the piece of ground he was pointing to looked exactly like any of the other islands we had passed. It was about a hundred yards long on the side we were approaching, and half-way along, close to the water, was a copse of small oak trees. Stepan steered for the trees. We rounded a thin tongue of land, beyond which was a narrow inlet which ran in among the trees.
“Engine off,” called Stepan, and Denny threw the switch. We came to rest a few yards from the shore. Everything was very still. The surface of the water was like a mirror and there seemed to be almost no current.
“Now we must get the mast down,” said Stepan. That was a job that required all male hands, for Dawn’s mast was a considerable spar. We had a little trouble with the broken bowsprit, but in about fifteen minutes we had the mast safely lowered into the crutches which Denny had shipped, and the standing rigging and halyards all neatly lashed up and secured under the big green canvas cover which we’d brought with us but had certainly never expected to use. Then Denny started the engine again and we glided into the creek among the trees. Leaves were parted by Dawn’s bows, and small twigs cracked off. At last we came to rest against a dry bank in six feet of water.
Stepan beamed, and Joe gave him a friendly pat on the back—the tribute of one virtuoso to another.
“Here,” said Stepan confidently, “we can remain safely for weeks.”
Chapter Fourteen
At least we had gained a much-needed breathing space. We were all worn out with excitement and fatigue, and there were a few hurts to patch up. Stepan still had some pellets in his flesh, which Svetlana competently gouged out. My wrist was badly swollen and wouldn’t be usable for some days. Dawn’s bowsprit had to be repaired before we could sail again. All told, the respite had come just in time.
That it was only a respite soon became apparent. Half an hour after our arrival another aeroplane came zooming low across our island, barely fifty yards away. It certainly couldn’t have spotted us, for the trees in full leaf provided a perfect canopy, but it was an unpleasant reminder that our troubles were not over. By now the Russians must be feeling extremely sore. They had lost two girls, one uniform, a launch, a naval lieutenant and a possibly valued member of the N.K. V. D., and they had had a coastguard knocked on the head on their own soil. I hadn’t the least doubt they would make the most determined efforts to catch us, and that if they saw us again they’d show no mercy.
For the time being, however, we were all too tired to worry. After we had eaten a meal from cans we lay relaxed on the dry bank and exchanged accounts of our experiences. Svetlana and Marya told the stories I have related elsewhere. Marya said she had been informed of the special performance for Zhdanov only in the morning. She had thought of pleading illness, but at her first hint of a headache the solicitous Valentina had settled herself so comfortably in Marya’s room that the idea had had to be hurriedly abandoned. In the afternoon Marya had tried to slip away, but Valentina had stuck to her like a leech. It was only then that Marya had realized the girl’s function. Her efforts to get away alone—which naturally became more obvious as she became more desperate—had all been frustrated, and at last there had been no alternative but to dance. It must have been utterly nerve-racking for poor Marya and she didn’t seem anxious to dwell on her experiences.
I described my own sortie, and Joe wound up the tale. He had rowed in to Viimsi immediately Denny had told him the news, taken up a position fifty yards or so out to sea, and waited. He had realized that the deadline I had set was about the limit for safety, but when the time came he just couldn’t bring himself to leave. He stuck around, debating wretchedly with himself, and then he heard what sounded like a fight along the beach. He had rowed cautiously to the spot and found us. We had all been very lucky. Poor Rosa had come out worst in the whole affair, but it seemed fairly clear that her arrest would have taken place anyway and was not specifically the result of helping us. She was very much in our thoughts as we turned in.
First thing after breakfast the next morning we discussed our plans. We had to assume that the Russians knew where we were, to within a few miles. The first ’plane must have reported our position at sea and the second our disappearance, and there was no place we could have disappeared to in the available time except the islands. But finding us would be a different matter. It was most unlikely they would be able to spot us from the air if we were careful, and they would need a large expedition to comb the islands by sea. In the end, we decided that our best course was to lie low for a few days and see what happened.
That was no hardship for any of us. After our exertions, this peaceful island seemed like Paradise. It was small but sufficient. Except at the edges, where tall dry reeds rustled, it was covered with short fine grass and studded with little rocks, bright with moss and orange lichen. There were no big trees except for the oaks which sheltered Dawn, but there were masses of prickly juniper and sweet briar and wild rose bushes. Near the centre of the island was a small hill from which it was possible to see the channel all around and to watch the wildfowl which abounded. The weather was warm, and we could swim or laze to our heart’s content.
Joe became very detached and independent. I think he was being tactful. Whenever I caught his eye he seemed faintly amused. He was very much the confirmed bachelor, watching with tolerant sympathy the difficulties of his less fortunate brothers. When he wanted company, he and Stepan got together. They both liked messing about in the open air and they plunged actively into island life. As for Denny and Svetlana, no one would have known they had ever be
en apart. They were a matter-of-fact couple and had slipped back into their old relationship with a smoothness which I envied. Their feelings were very evident. Svetlana hugged Denny publicly and violently and called him ‘honey’. She must have learned that from Steve.
Joe and Denny lost no time in getting to work on the broken bowsprit, and Stepan helped. Denny had hoped to be able to re-load the gun but the springs were smashed beyond repair. When the bowsprit was serviceable again Stepan asked Joe for a coil of light rope, and presently I saw his bronzed body stripped to the waist and looking like Laocoon in the toils. It appeared that he had had enough of sleeping on the hard boards in Dawn’s cockpit and was rigging himself a rope hammock between two of the oak trees. He had gone to work with Stakhanovite energy and very soon the hammock began to take shape. Joe watched for a while and then followed suit.
Stepan hummed little snatches of Ukrainian songs as he knotted up the rope. He had many childlike characteristics and one of them was the transience of his moods. For the moment, the shadow of a jail in Stockholm seemed to have lifted. He looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world, and it was difficult to believe he was the same man we’d hauled out of the water only the day before. All the time he kept up an admiring commentary on his own work, and as he struggled to keep ahead of Joe he said something about ‘Socialist competition’ which I didn’t bother to translate. Joe liked his competition straight.
All work had to be suspended during the afternoon when the roar of approaching aircraft burst upon our ears and we were forced to take cover. Judging by the noise, the Russians were making a reconnaissance in force over the whole length and breadth of the islands. No ’plane passed directly overhead but several swept by very close at little more than tree-top level, and away in the distance there was a steady drone. It was less terrifying than a raid, of course, but it was far from pleasant to feel that all these machines had been brought together for the sole purpose of hunting us down. We all felt a little shaken when, after an hour or so, the last sounds had died away, but we were confident that we hadn’t been seen.
Further reconnaissance seemed unlikely for the time being, so Marya and I went off in the dinghy to explore. Marya looked very slight as she took the oars, but I knew how misleading that fragile appearance was. You can’t be fragile and a ballerina as well. Actually she didn’t row far. We had bundled our swimming things into the stern and when we were away from the island we put them on and sunned ourselves, while the dinghy drifted in the barely perceptible current. It was the first time Marya and I had really been together since the escape. There were so many things we both wanted to say, but somehow this didn’t seem the moment to say them. I found the sight of her most distracting as she lay back in the smart two-piece which Denny and I had bought in London, trailing her fingers in the water and smiling at me. For a while we just looked at each other and then by a common impulse went ashore to a sheltered fragment of lichen-covered rock which had just enough grass for a couch and made love to each other.
When we got back to Dawn we found the hammocks finished and Stepan looking for new jobs on which to blunt his energies. He was as indefatigable as though he were trying to earn a remission of sentence by good conduct. He had helped Joe tidy up the cockpit and swab the decks and air the bedding. He had filled the kettle for tea and collected a large pile of dry sticks to keep the fire going. I noticed, not for the first time, that if either of the girls wanted anything he seemed always to anticipate their need. He was clearly going out of his way to be helpful and obliging, and it was impossible not to feel friendly towards him. Svetlana and Marya both kept up a sporadic, bantering conversation with him, and he and Joe were definitely buddies. Even Denny had by now almost forgiven him for his misdeeds.
After the tea things had been cleared away, Stepan said slowly, “One thing I don’t understand.”
He was looking rather accusingly at me, so I said “Oh?”
“You told Kleinman and me that Joe was your servant. You do not treat him as your servant.”
I’m afraid we all laughed—Joe most of all when I translated what Stepan had said.
“It was a trick,” I told him, “like your pretending to lose your anchor. We had to leave Joe behind to sail the boat after we’d got drunk. He’s our comrade, you see. You believed what we said because you wanted to believe it.”
“Now I understand,” said Stepan slowly. “It was clever.” He brightened a little. “So you are not capitalists, perhaps?”
“Would it be so wicked if we were?” I asked.
“It is a bad system,” said Stepan.
“Perhaps.”
“Where there are capitalists the workers are exploited. I know that it is like that in England. We have learned it in political lectures.”
“I know,” I said. “I know exactly what you’ve been taught. About five per cent of it is true and the rest is mostly lies. Anyway, we don’t keep girls from their husbands. And we don’t send people off to slave in camps just because we don’t agree with them. And we don’t beat them up in jail.”
“But if they plot against their country …” began Stepan. I could see we’d really started something, and since we’d nothing else to do I thought we might as well have it out. Stepan wasn’t a political animal. He’d been born honest, but he was as credulous as most Russians and he’d swallowed everything he’d been told. I asked him to tell us what he thought England was like, and during the next few minutes he gave us a fascinating caricature of our country. It was a place racked with poverty and unemployment, riddled with anti-semitism and class hatred; a country at once decadent and aggressive; a country still hungry for colonial exploitation; a country where culture was bourgeois and rotten and where even sport was commercialized. His very phrases were the ones you could hear any day on the Moscow radio. It was the old gramophone record, and we let him run through it.
Then we got Joe talking. I suspected that Stepan thought I was a bit too fluent, but he was ready enough to listen to Joe, and the translation gave time for ideas to sink in. Joe wasn’t politically-minded either, and he answered Stepan’s questions without guile. He described his workshop, and the way people lived at Southfleet, and what their houses were like, and the sort of work they did, and the sort of wages they got. It was little things that interested Stepan—the fact, for instance, that Joe was against the Labour Government although he owned nothing in the world but his workshop and his hands, whereas Denny was rather in favour of it although he seemed anything but exploited and was considerably better off than Joe. Stepan was puzzled, too, when Joe told him that a lot of ordinary working families in England had a whole house to themselves, often with a bathroom—until he remembered that that was because we lived on the wealth produced by our colonies. Then we had a long discussion about the respective sizes of English and Russian rations, which involved much pencil work changing pounds into kilograms. We talked a bit, too, about Parliament and habeas corpus, upon which Denny and Joe had strong views. What tickled Stepan most of all, I think, was our telling him that as soon as a Government was elected in England we began paying the Leader of the Opposition £2000 a year to try to turn it out at the earliest possible moment. He thought that was really crazy.
By the time we’d got round to where we started, which was about two hours after we began, Stepan obviously didn’t know what to think. He was like a man emerging into the sunshine from a dark cave, and you could almost see his mind blinking.
He said, very seriously: “I shall think about it. In Russia we have a saying ‘There is no rope strong enough to hang the truth.’”
“What a pity it’s only a saying,” I remarked. I had become a little weary of the discussion, for it had covered well-trodden ground. Also, I felt that in the circumstances it would be no kindness to Stepan to send him back to Russia full of heretical notions. He’d probably have quite enough trouble with the N.K.V.D. as it was. But Stepan’s appetite was whetted and he had all the persistence of the Russian. Half a
n hour later I saw him sitting on the bank with Denny and Svetlana and they were having no end of an argument.
Towards evening we had a further discussion about our plans. It was soon apparent that no one had any desire to stick a nose out of the archipelago just yet. Life on the island was very pleasant and appeared secure; the perils outside in the Gulf would hardly increase and might grow less as the days, passed. Stepan, naturally, was all for staying; Joe said we should have to watch our stores, but that we were all right for the moment. In the end we decided to wait for at least another day. “After all, it isn’t as though we haven’t plenty to occupy us,” said Denny cheerfully as he and Svetlana walked off into the gathering dusk, their arms round each other as usual.
Next day was quiet, with no ’planes over at all. Joe thought it would be wise to keep watch during the daytime just in case a hostile boat should creep up on us, so Marya and I spent most of the day on top of the little hill. Joe and Stepan overhauled all Dawn’s rigging, just for something to do, and then painted the whole of her topsides. There was no doubt that Stepan was a glutton for physical labour. To fill in any odd moments, he had sawed a chunk of wood from an old oak stump and was proposing to carve himself some chessmen. He said he would carve a piece a day, and seemed under the impression that he would be able to finish the whole set before we moved! I think he was enjoying the first real freedom he’d ever known in his life. Nobody tried to push him around, nobody expected anything of him, nobody asked him to break any records. He rarely spoke of Russia and he never mentioned Neva. He didn’t start any more arguments, but in the afternoon he wheedled Svetlana into giving him his first English lesson. There was no longer the least restraint between him and the rest of the company.
