by Joan Lingard
‘I’ve got a sore ear.’ He clamped his hand over his left ear. He had complained about it before, but no one had had time to pay any attention.
His father examined it. ‘It does look a bit red, but I expect the swelling will go down. First thing we’ve got to do is change our clothes.’
The clothes in their bags were only slightly damp; the canvas had protected them fairly well. They changed and spread their wet clothes out on bushes to dry. Leo said they might as well rest a while and have their lunch.
The meal consisted of bread and water and a piece of hard cheese, but they were glad enough of it and the chance to ease their feet for a while. Kyril ate nothing and continued to complain and his mother to rock him.
‘He’s in pain, Leo,’ she said despairingly. ‘Can you do nothing to help him?’
His father took another look at the ear and frowned. ‘I don’t like the look of it, I have to admit. But there’s not a lot I can do. If only we had some heat to put on it.’
‘How can we get heat here in the middle of a field?’
‘We could ask the man who was ploughing,’ suggested Natasha. ‘He might let us come into his house.’
‘It’s a risk,’ said Leo.
Kyril cried out sharply again.
‘We have to do something!’ said his mother.
‘All right,’ said Leo. ‘We’ll try him.’
‘Can I go with you?’ asked Natasha.
‘Very well.’
There was no sign of the man in the half-ploughed field. The oxen stood idly by the plough.
‘He could be having his lunch,’ said Natasha.
Smoke was coming from the chimney of the nearby farmhouse.
‘They must have a fire,’ she said.
Her uncle nodded. ‘Let’s go and see.’
It was a small house, looked to be no more than two rooms, but it was in a reasonable state of repair, unlike many that they had seen. A porch screened the front door. They went up the steps and knocked.
The ploughman came out, a piece of bread in his hand. Leo apologized for disturbing his meal and explained their problem. ‘If we could just bring the boy into the warm for a few minutes and heat a sock to put against his ear.’
‘One moment.’ The man went back inside and reappeared almost immediately to say that they could come in. ‘But we cannot invite you to stay too long.’
‘No, we understand that. But thank you for your kindness.’
Kyril was brought in to the fire and the farmer’s wife gave them some salt to put inside a sock, which was then heated beside the stove. The warmth seemed to soothe the pain somewhat. Kyril’s eyes closed.
‘Poor boy,’ said the farmer’s wife. ‘A sore ear is a terrible thing. It eats into the whole head. I have some herbs that might help. I used them for my son when he was small.’
‘Is he grown up now?’ asked Natasha.
‘Yes, and gone away. He joined the Red Army. The last we heard, he was on the Eastern Front fighting the Whites.’
The news quietened them. But at least the Eastern Front was far away and the son was scarcely likely to walk in at any moment.
The woman mixed the herbs with water and Kyril was persuaded to swallow the bitter mixture. ‘It will reduce the fever,’ she promised.
They stayed an hour in the house and then they left, the farmer accompanying them back to the lane.
‘I am not a political man,’ he said. ‘I do not mind what colour people are. Red. White. It is all the same to me. As long as they leave me in peace.’
‘Thank you.’ Leo held out his hand to the man. ‘You are a good man.’
‘You are not far from the border. Take that track over there and keep going until you come to a stile. Cross that and you will find that you have crossed the border. Good luck!’
They took the track and kept going until they came to a stile.
‘So,’ said Leo, ‘this must be it. The border.’
He paused before he climbed over and then helped the others to cross.
‘We are now in Estonia.’
Estonia previously had been part of the Russian Empire, but it was no longer. Russia had been forced to give up the country to Germany. The Great War was still being fought between Germany and the Allied Forces. But the travellers were not thinking of that war, or what it might mean to them. They were looking back at Russia, their homeland.
TWENTY
A SMALL ABODE
‘A small abode in an open place.’
‘I think this one should be easy,’ said Alex cautiously. ‘A small abode could be a little house, couldn’t it?’
‘It could,’ agreed his father.
‘I’m going to start by trying The Little House on the Prairie. You’d call a prairie an open place, wouldn’t you?’ Sonya had been especially keen on those books. He couldn’t remember who had written them, however. His father had no idea either.
‘Still, a title’s a good start,’ said Duncan.
Alex was already searching. ‘I hope Sonya didn’t lend this one out to anybody!’ He found The Little House in the Big Woods first and pulled it out. ‘Laura Ingalls Wilder, that’s who wrote them. This can’t be it though.’
‘No, you wouldn’t call woods an open place.’
Alex continued his search along the shelves. Two rows from the bottom he pounced. He opened the book and lifted out a piece of paper.
‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Natasha had written. ‘That was a clue especially for Sonya; Alex might be the one to solve this clue. This nasty item tends to repeat itself. An American invention, I believe, first used in the Civil War. I pity the men who have to operate it, apart from those on the receiving end.’
TWENTY-ONE
THE BALTIC STATES, 1918 ANOTHER COUNTRY, ANOTHER BORDER, ANOTHER WAR
Now that they had left the Red Army behind and were in Estonia, they could relax a little. There was a new force to be wary of here, however: the German army of occupation. Germany might no longer be at war with the Russian Empire, but it had no liking for Russians, suspecting them all of being communist and supporting the Bolsheviks.
‘Say nothing,’ instructed Leo, ‘when there are any soldiers in the vicinity. Let me do the talking.’ He could speak some Estonian.
‘Why do so many people have to be fighting one another?’ asked Natasha. She found it difficult to follow who was at war with whom. ‘Does anyone like us?’
‘If we could get to Paris,’ said her uncle, ‘we would find friends there.’
Natasha knew Paris was a long way away. She remembered looking at it in her atlas at her happy little school in St Petersburg and thinking that one day she would like to go there. It was said to be beautiful. She had not imagined that she would be travelling like this, on foot, carrying bundles, keeping a wary eye open for possible enemies, dodging into woods whenever army patrols were sighted up ahead.
The days had lengthened and the nights were very short. At home, they had called the shortest summer nights ‘white nights’. They slept rough in woods or empty barns. A lot of the farm buildings seemed to have been abandoned; they were in a bad state of repair. The countryside looked sad and neglected.
Leo was carrying money so they were able to buy food in the villages, such as was available. It was mostly bread and hard white cheese and sometimes, if they were lucky, a pitcher of milk. The peasants looked at them with no great interest. There was no shortage of refugees roaming about, many of them Russian.
Kyril still complained of his ear, though it seemed not to have got any worse. He grumped most of the day and was restless at night. His father would sit on the ground rocking him, with his back against a tree trunk. Both father and son had deep shadows underneath their eyes.
‘We must go to Tallin,’ said Leo. ‘I have a friend there, a doctor, who I’m sure will take us in. We studied medicine together. It would be good to shelter in a house for a while and rest up. It would be wonderful!’
‘And have a bath?’ p
ut in Natasha. She had bracelets of grime around her wrists and her neck must be filthy! They had had to make do with washing in streams and without soap since leaving home. How long ago had that been? Two weeks? Three? She couldn’t begin to guess. The days had blurred, one into the other. Time had come to have little meaning. It seemed like a lifetime ago almost, when she and her mother had closed the door of their old home behind them.
As they approached the outskirts of Tallin, Estonia’s capital, their nervousness increased. But once they were in the city and mingling with the other throngs of poorly clad people, they realized that they did not stand out. Leo knew the city well enough not to have to ask for directions. He had visited his friend before, had stayed with him on several occasions before the start of the Great War in 1914.
It was a city on the sea, another Baltic port, like St Petersburg, and it had buildings that once had been fine, but had suffered much damage during the German shelling. Rubble lay in the roadway. Half-demolished houses stood open to the elements. Machine guns were still mounted at crossroads and other strategic points.
They passed nervously by. Natasha hoped Leo’s friend’s house would still be standing.
‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is the street.’
They turned into a broad, pleasant suburban street. War did not seem to have touched it greatly. The trees in the gardens were coming into leaf and the buildings were intact. Leo brought them to a halt in front of a large detached brick house.
The gate stood open. They went up the path in single file and saw that the garden had been neglected; weeds flourished and the grass grew wild. Would there be anyone at home? The place did not have the feel of being occupied. Natasha supposed though, that nobody would have had time during the war to cut grass and pull out weeds. And, as in St Petersburg, all the servants might have run away.
Her uncle knocked on the door and they waited on the steps behind him. For a moment, it seemed that their fears might prove well founded. Nothing happened. Kyril started to cry. Leo knocked again and after a short pause they heard a movement within and then the door opened a few centimetres. A woman holding a baby peered out at them.
Leo asked for his friend. The woman shook her head and was about to close the door when he said, ‘Wait!’ and put his toe over the step. ‘Are you sure?’
‘There’s no one of that name here.’
‘But this is his house.’
‘He doesn’t live here, I tell you. And you can’t come in. There are too many here already. All the rooms are full. There must be twenty of us in all.’
Leo let her close the door. The house had obviously been taken over by refugees. And as for his friend and his family? They would possibly never find out. That was the way it was in wartime.
‘We shall have to make our way to the railway station,’ he decided, ‘and see if we can get a train to Riga. We can’t walk all the way there.’ He also knew some people who lived in that city, though he would no longer count on finding them at home.
The station, when they reached it, was in a state of chaos. Finding an official proved difficult to start with and when they did, he could give them little information. He shrugged and waved vaguely at a platform. They bought tickets and sat down on the ground to wait. After three hours, a train steamed in and they piled on board with what seemed like ten thousand others.
It was hot in the carriage and the stench of close packed bodies was suffocating. One toilet served all the carriages and after the first half-hour it was in a disgusting state, foul-smelling and overflowing on to the floor. Natasha did not want to use it, but eventually she was forced to as she thought her bladder might burst. She had to hold her nose to stop herself gagging. There was no lock on the door. Her mother remained outside to keep other desperate travellers at bay.
The train chugged slowly along, stopping at times as if to take a rest and gather strength to continue. Hours passed. Natasha stood in the corridor with her uncle, watching the countryside unfold. More birch woods. Some small farms. Wild flowers growing in bright rashes in the hedgerows. A few cows. Her mind felt dulled. She felt almost as though she could have fallen asleep standing up. At some point they crossed the border into Latvia, though they were not aware when exactly they did so. Another border, another country.
Latvia was also under German command. They became aware of that as soon as they arrived in Riga. The grey uniforms of the German army were much in evidence in the station. The family was stopped at a barrier by two soldiers demanding to see their papers. They handed over their documents, the ones that had been forged and given to them on the day that they had left home. At this stage, it would have been better if they had had their original ones showing that they came from an aristocratic family. A count would not be suspected of being a communist.
‘Russians, eh?’
‘White Russians,’ said Leo. ‘We have fled from the Bolsheviks.’
‘Oh yes?’ The soldier looked him over, from the top of his dishevelled hair to the frayed boots on his feet. ‘And I’m the King of England!’
‘I can only give you our word.’ Leo could not tell them that he was Count Malenkov and his sister Princess Eva Denisova, for that would reveal that they were carrying forged papers.
‘Where are you going in Riga?’
‘To a friend’s house.’
They asked for the address and, with some hesitation, Leo gave it to them. He could not have risked giving a false address and it seemed unlikely they would follow it up.
‘All right then. You may go.’
They went into the streets. The capital of Latvia lay half in ruins. Shrapnel, rubble, lumps of twisted metal and shards of broken glass littered the pavements. The city, like Tallin, had been heavily shelled by the Germans before they’d occupied it. Leo stood in the middle of the pavement, appalled by what he saw.
‘It was such a lovely city!’
‘Your friends may no longer be here,’ said Natasha.
‘No, they may not. They might have gone into the country to escape the shelling. We have to be prepared for that.’
The hour was late, close to midnight. There was no sign of civilians in the shadowy streets, only soldiers. The family felt conspicuous and were glad of the poor lighting as they picked their way through the rubble. Glass crackled under their feet and Eva almost twisted her ankle on a fallen girder. Natasha took her arm. Leo was having a problem finding his way.
‘Half the landmarks are gone,’ he muttered. ‘But the apartment is round here somewhere, I know it is. I visited Karl here several times.’ They had also been fellow students at the University of St Petersburg.
‘What are we to do, Leo?’ Marie burst suddenly into tears. ‘We can’t go on like this much longer.’
‘We have no choice, dear.’ He put his arm round his wife’s shoulders. ‘If we don’t go on we lie down and die.’
She dried her eyes on a rag. ‘You’re right, of course.’
‘I have a feeling it’s just round this next corner.’
It was! The building still stood, so at least that was encouraging, and the bottom door was open.
‘They’re one flight up.’
They climbed the stairs to the first floor and Leo rang the bell.
Karl’s wife, Andra, opened the door on a chain, which she unhooked on recognizing Leo. She embraced him warmly.
‘Karl?’ asked Leo.
‘He was killed in the shelling. One night he left the hospital where he was working and got caught in the machine-gun fire. Half of our friends are dead.’ Tears welled up in Andra’s eyes.
‘Ours too.’ Leo shook his head. ‘You have our deepest sympathy, Andra.’
‘Come in, please,’ she said.
Andra had four children, all of whom were under the age of seven. Living also in the apartment was her sister with her three small children. Her husband had been another casualty of the war. It was fortunate that the flat was spacious.
‘We help one another,’ said Andra.
‘You are welcome to stay for a while, Leo, if you don’t mind all sleeping in one room.’
‘A room will be a luxury,’ Eva reassured her. ‘We are most grateful.’
‘I have little food.’ Andra was apologetic.
‘We shall find our own,’ promised Leo.
‘My uncle is very good at finding things,’ said Natasha.
‘And you are very good at helping to find them!’ he returned.
The family settled in. Leo was taken on at a city hospital and although his wages were not high, they were enough to feed them and to help Andra’s family too. Doctors were scarce in the city and therefore much in demand. Leo worked long hours and came home exhausted. Soldiers were returning from the war with horrifying injuries. They could be seen limping through the city streets in tattered, bloodstained uniforms, with soles flapping from their boots or with no boots at all, their feet raw and suppurating. Some collapsed and lay where they had fallen until a cart came to take them away. Many had to have limbs amputated.
Sometimes Leo took Natasha with him to the wards. She was thinking that she might like to be a doctor when she grew up. Whilst the sight of so much blood and suffering distressed her, it did not make her want to run away. She wanted to do something. She took water round the beds and helped the patients to take small sips. She talked to the men and asked them about their homes and families. One of them called her ‘our little angel’, which made her blush. The name caught on.
‘She’s too young to see such things, Leo,’ her mother protested. ‘She’s not thirteen yet.’
‘She has seen a great deal. Unfortunately. Her childhood has been shattered early. But that is how it is. She copes well, she is strong. Let her come with me, Eva. She wants to come.’
Sometimes Natasha went out walking with her mother. They liked to go down to the harbour to look at the sea. Riga was another port on the Baltic, like Tallin and St Petersburg. They would stand gazing at the sea and imagine setting sail on a boat that would bear them northward, back up the coast, to St Petersburg.
