Night Soldiers ns-1

by Alan Furst

  “Farewell, my little friends,” she said sadly. “Once upon a time you were a rich man’s pride. You have made a great journey, but now you stink like old cheese, and the Russians will smell you out.” One by one, at first, then all together, she let them fall from her open hand, gold coins lost in a river.

  He walked up a ramp onto the quay and made quickly for the side streets. He had intended to steal a rowboat and drift silently away from the city, but there wasn’t an unguarded craft of any description that he could see-not with all the bridges down, there wasn’t. So he walked south, making his way to within sight of the river from time to time to be sure he wasn’t wandering off course.

  The city had apparently seen many weeks of street fighting. A few blocks were mounds of stone and dirt and splintered wood, but it took bombs or artillery to do that. Where he walked it was mostly building facades pocked with mortar shells and sprinkled with the whitish chip marks of small arms fire. There was hardly an unshattered windowpane to be seen-glass crunched continually beneath his boots-and the clouds of flies and the smell of unburied bodies nauseated him. He clamped a hand over his mouth and nose and breathed against his own skin and that seemed to help a little.

  There were no Russian officers to be seen, just a few drunken troopers trying to make their way back to wherever they thought their units might be. At one point, a Mongolian corporal rushed out of a doorway and, embracing him with a clasp like iron, lifted him completely off the ground, put him down, and began singing wildly and dancing him around in a bear hug. The man was only an inch or two above five feet tall and his breath reeked of turpentine. Khristo danced along and sang at the top of his lungs-he knew that when you are that drunk, everyone else had better be too-whooping and yowling like a lunatic. After they had sworn friendship for life and Khristo had gravely accepted the hand of his sister in marriage, the man went staggering away and disappeared into an alley.

  He spent the better part of the night reaching the outskirts of the city. When first dawn began to lighten the road, he wandered into a neighborhood of little shacks, crawled under a piece of tin sheeting at the back of a roofless house, and fell asleep.

  It took him four days to reach Yugoslavia. There was nothing moving downstream-no opportunity for stowaway or expropriation presented itself-so he walked, on a road that meandered down the eastern bank of the river for some hundred and ten miles. He had to guess the distance; only a few mile markers remained and some of those had been altered to deceive invading armies, but it was at least that far.

  He was not alone on the road. Small knots of refugees, old people, women and children, walked along with him or passed him going the other way, their possessions rolled in blankets on their backs or pushed along in handcarts or baby carriages. There seemed to be equal numbers of them headed in each direction, and this puzzled him. In his experience, refugees moved only in one direction: away from war. But this was different, he thought. This was something he had never seen before.

  In 1940, when he’d fled from the German armies down clogged French roads, the air had been filled with wild rumors and the electricity of unfolding events. That had been a terrible time, but despite its sorrow and confusion there’d been a perverse ecstasy to it-the struggle of ordinary people, caught in the open by a moment of history, to survive. This was far worse. These people were the defeated, the uprooted; hopelessness and despair hung about them like smoke. They walked slowly, hypnotized by exhaustion, and their eyes never left the ground.

  He began to suspect, after a time, that the refugees on the road might not have a destination. Perhaps they had no papers or permits, perhaps when they tried to stay somewhere they were chased away. He did not know the reason, but the people walked without purpose, as though walking itself was now all they could do, and they meant to walk until they dropped or until some authority appeared and told them what was required of them.

  On the first day, he caught himself walking too quickly, with too much purpose. He cut a stick from an exploded tree and, after that, fell naturally into the appropriate limp. By the second day he was covered with a fine, gritty soil that blew in the wind, and he was tiring, and there was no longer any difficulty at all about blending in. He walked past empty villages where open shutters banged in the wind, past burnt-out farmhouses seen at a distance across fields of unplowed mud, past blackened tanks with guns pointing at the sky. At night he slept on the ground, waking damp and sore, and the brief flurries of rain meant that he never really dried out.

  He had started out in reasonably good shape. In Prague he had spent so much time on the move, hurrying from meeting to meeting, always behind schedule, that the walking of the first two days did not bother him overmuch. His shins ached where the Russians had kicked him, but that would pass, he knew, and he had unwrapped his hand to let the air heal the long, white blister that had formed on it.

  But he now began to comprehend what had happened to Voluta, how he had come to make the critical error that had nearly killed them both. To meet after curfew, in the open, at a guarded bridge, was a reasonable definition of suicide, an extraordinarily stupid mistake for a man who had spent his adult life in the shadows, for a man who crossed borders like the wind.

  Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious in and of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer.

  He woke on the morning of the third day to find that he was soaked to the skin and the back of his throat was on fire. In panic, he forced himself to a sitting position, then swallowed obsessively until the burning subsided. He was thirsty, dry as dust. The only water available collected in shellholes or farmers’ ponds or, in extremity, there was the river. But each time he had to drink he was in fear of cholera, so permitted himself only a few sips, imagining that his body would fight the bacteria better if it was limited to small doses. An old wives’ tale, he told himself. Yet something primitive within him insisted that it be done that way even if he knew better. The body runs on liquid, he thought, I must have it. No, said another voice, only a little.

  Out on the road, a small group of old people in black clothing was already on the move, though it was barely light. What did they eat? he wondered. He’d had a tin of jam the previous day. Had slid down an embankment onto the shore of the river, where he could hide in order to eat it. Like an animal with its kill, he thought. Plum jam. The most delicious thing there could possibly be. He’d sawn the tin open with his knife and spooned the jam up with his fingers. Walk, he told himself to stop the reverie. Walk and you will feel better. And there would be more jam tomorrow. Maybe the sun would come out and dry him off. Maybe the Americans would swoop down in one of their special planes-they seemed to have no end of them-and whisk him off to Switzerland, to Basel, to the Gasthaus Kogelmann. Where they served a thick pancake of fried potatoes and onions and, for those who took full board, Frau Kogelmann would make sure there was a second pancake for you if you were still hungry. When you drank some water, in the little dining area set off from the parlor, a boy came with a yellow pitcher and refilled your glass. You didn’t have to ask.

  Of the fourth day he remembered little. The villages of Ercsi and Adony and Dunafoldvar seemed deserted. He would wait at the outskirts for a group of refugees and walk through with them, so as to pass unnoticed. But he was not challenged. Russian military police sat in American Jeeps and smoked cigarettes, watching him limp past. At Fajsz, a woman came out of a house and gave him a cup of water. Her face beneath the black shawl was seamed and windburned, yet she was young and seemed very beautiful because there was pity for him in her eyes. He drank the water and handed the cup back. “Koszonom,” he
said, his voice a dry whisper. She nodded in acknowledgment, then a voice called from a house and she went away.

  Some miles before the town of Mohacs, he left the Great Plain and entered the swampland of southern Hungary. Now it was not so far to Yugoslavia. Soviet troops had been there longer, river traffic would be closer to normal. It was a guess-information abstracted from Czech newspapers by Hlava and reported to him twice a week-but a reasonable guess. The German censors did not want the population to know where the lines were, but they could not resist reporting Russian atrocities against civilians-an attempt to stiffen public resistance as the time of invasion approached.

  Good guess or not, he would have to find a way to get back on the river, he could not walk much farther. The hunger had stopped gnawing at him, but his mind was running in odd channels, wandering through images of the past. There was no sense to them; they were simply moments of other days, things heard or seen with no reason to be remembered. He would, from time to time, snap awake, recall who he was and what he was doing, but then he would drift away once more. A woman in Fajsz had given him a cup of water. Or had she? Had that happened? At one point, somewhere south of Mohacs, he came to his senses to discover that he was on his knees by the river, water cupped in his hands. There were black specks floating on the surface. He bent his head and sipped at it, but it was foul with dead fish and the taste of metal and he spit it out.

  “Serves you right.”

  Startled, he scrambled to his feet. The voice came from a small skiff not twenty feet away, its bow partly grounded on the sand. A man in the uniform of a Russian enlisted soldier was watching him intently. Then he realized, through a mist, that the man had spoken in Serbian, a Yugoslav language close enough to Bulgarian that he understood it easily. Had he left Hungary? Contrived to walk blindly through a frontier post?

  “Here,” the man said, “try this.” He held out a canteen, the flat kind used by the Red Army, its canvas cover dripping from being hung over the stern of the boat in order to keep the water cool.

  He waded over to the boat, accepted the canteen and took a brief drink. The water was cold and sweet. Handing it back, he saw that the man was wearing several ranks of medals on his jacket. He was young, nineteen or twenty, with service cap pushed back on his head to reveal hair chopped short in military fashion. The bottoms of his trousers were tied in knots just below the knees and a pair of homemade crutches was resting on the bow seat, their tops cushioned with folded rags.

  The man waved off the canteen. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Khristo drank more water, rubbed his lips with his fingers, and returned the canteen. “Thank you,” he said, using the Bulgarian expression.

  “Bulgarian?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” Khristo said. “Downriver from here. Near Silistra.”

  “Can you row a boat?”

  He nodded that he could.

  “Come on then,” the man said.

  Khristo climbed carefully over the side, balancing his weight so he would not rock the boat. The soldier changed seats, moving to the bow by using his hands to shift himself along the gunwales. Khristo took the oars-facing the “wrong” way, downstream, a river tradition that allowed the oarsman to keep an eye out for obstacles-and rowed out to midriver, his hands rolling over each other, oar blades chopping up and down in the water.

  “Good,” the soldier said appreciatively. “I see you’ve done this before.”

  “Oh yes,” Khristo said.

  “Just as well. It’s a bastard out here-you’ll break your back trying to keep this bugger pointed downstream.”

  “We have the current,” Khristo said, thankful he didn’t have to put his back into it.

  “More like it has us. You’ll see.” He twisted around and watched the river for a few moments, then turned back to Khristo. “I’m Andrej,” he said.

  They shook hands. “I’m called Nikko.”

  He rowed for several hours as the rain sprinkled on and off. Andrej spoke casually of his time in the army. His father had been a great admirer of the Bolsheviks and had sent him off to enlist with the Russians in 1940. He had fought at Stalingrad as a machine-gunner, then come west with the Second Ukrainian Front, seeing action at the forcing of the river Prut and fighting through the Oituz Pass in the Carpathians. Wounded in the back by mortar shrapnel, he had served with a second-rank unit as far as the town of Szarvas, in eastern Hungary, where he’d stepped on a German land mine and lost the lower parts of both legs. He was philosophical about it. “At least they didn’t get anything important,” he said with a wink. After a time in a field hospital, he’d taken off on “night leave” and caught a ride to Budapest. Nobody there wanted to hear about his problems-a harassed clerk took a moment to stamp his mustering-out papers-so he “borrowed” a skiff from a drunken guard and headed toward home, a little town to the east of Belgrade.

  They crossed into Yugoslavia late in the afternoon and a Yugoslav patrol boat came alongside to take a look at them. Andrej tossed a salute, then waved his crutches. A sailor returned the salute from the foredeck while Khristo waved and smiled.

  “Home,” Andrej said.

  “Your Russian uniform,” Khristo said. “They don’t seem to mind.”

  “Why should they? We are allies. Tito will be running things down here and we’ll be much better off. You’ll see when you get home to Bulgaria. The Russians bring us peace.”

  Khristo nodded polite agreement. “No more politics and feuding.”

  “That’s it,” Andrej said vigorously. “Everything nice and quiet, a man will be able to get on with his life.”

  The tempo of the river was steady and constant and, after a time, Andrej’s head lowered to his chest, his body rocking gently with the motion of the skiff as he dozed. Khristo rowed on, riding the current, working the oars as rudders to keep the prow pointed east. It required all his attention, and the repetition of effort soon crept into the muscles between his shoulders and resolved into a sharp, persistent ache. It was hard labor-Andrej had been right about that-the spring flood toyed with the skiff, tried to spin it in eddies or knock it sideways with a quartering swell, but Khristo used the force of the water to his advantage. He knew the techniques in his bones, having learnt the job as a child. And he had gained strength when Andrej had shared white cheese and bread with him. He was astonished at what a little food could do for a man.

  In the skiff, he was much closer to the water than he had been on the Tisza, and he could see the war coming down the river-a gray sludge that floated on the surface, smashed tree trunks, dead birds, the tangled remnants of a feather mattress, a strip of German camouflage cloth wound around the end of a stick. What could that have been, he wondered.

  The barge was close to the point where the Drava entered the Danube, near the town of Osijek, on the inside of a tight curve to the north. In the fading light he could see that it was a very old barge, half sunk in the water, half settled into the mud of the shoreline. There were white gouges in the wood at the stern-it was obviously something of a hazard to navigation, abandoned there long ago and never removed. An old man was sitting on the stern, fishing with a line on a pole and smoking a pipe. The barge’s former markings were still visible, whitewashed numerals that appeared to have faded into the rotted hull over time. A 825.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again it was still there. Someone had reached out for him. He took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Resisted the urge to leap out of the boat then and there and swim wildly toward the barge.

  In the bow, Andrej dozed on. He should be killed, Khristo thought. Because whatever cover story might be contrived at this point was going to be so thin that a light would shine through it. This close, the Czech automatic would do the job, and one more pistol shot on this river wasn’t going to make a difference to anybody. But he hadn’t the heart for it. The soldier’s life had been spared in battle, he did n
ot deserve to be shot dead in his sleep a few score miles from home. Khristo waited until the barge was out of sight, scooped some water onto his face, then shipped oars.

  Andrej woke up immediately. They were rotating slowly in the current, drifting toward the rocky profile of the near bank. “Can’t do it,” Khristo said sorrowfully, breathing hard, wiping his face. “Just can’t do it.”

  The soldier rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “What?” he said.

  “I tried,” Khristo said, and by way of explanation extended his blistered hand.

  “You can manage,” Andrej said. “I saw you.”

  Khristo shook his head apologetically.

  “Very well,” the soldier said, his expression resolute and cheerful. “I shall take over the oars for an hour, then we’ll pull in for the night. That will fix you up, you’ll see, by the morning you’ll have your strength back.”

  “No,” Khristo said. “It’s best that I go on by foot, out on the roads.”

  “Nonsense. Stand up and we’ll trade places. Keep a lookout in the bow for your share of the work.”

  “I cannot allow it,” Khristo said, putting the oars back in the water and guiding the skiff into the near bank, making a great show of hauling at the water.

  “Don’t be a proud fool,” Andrej said. “We must all work together now, remember, and take up the slack where we are able. I am able.”

  “Rowed halfway home by a legless man? Not me.” The bow skidded into the mud and Khristo hopped out, then pushed the boat back out into the water.

  The soldier worked his way down the gunwales to the rowing seat. “To hell with you, then,” he said bitterly, rowing the skiff toward the middle of the river, chopping angrily at the water with his oars.

  By the time Khristo worked his way back through the underbrush along the shore, the old man had lit a lantern. He clambered up on the barge and called out a greeting. The old man nodded in response, not bothering to turn around.