by Harold Lamb
Mac handed over the suitcase and gestured with his thumb. “Out!” he directed. “Over and out, Russky.”
The Russian shook his head. Obviously, Mac reasoned, he could not take a stowaway in the high-priority freight car. He intimated as much by starting to shove the stocky man in gray, who reacted promptly. An elbow like iron dug under Mac’s ribs and sent a sharp stab of pain up under his skull.
The battle that followed in the confined space between the door and the crates was rapid, silent and painful. Mac was handicapped at first by his desire to oust the intruder. When he tried to kick the Russian loose, he found himself on his back. He could not grip his adversary, who wriggled loose and swung the tin valise viciously.
The Russian took all Mac’s jabs to his head, and used his clipped head like a battering ram. He avoided in-fighting, and grinned enthusiastically as he swung and kicked. Mac edged to the crates and swung his right, only to be crashed down, with his enemy’s elbow grinding into his throat. He felt blood in his mouth, and his sight blacked out.
“Viedma!" yelled his victorious foe. And Mac began to be conscious of something strange. A woman’s hair pressed against his face, and instead of sweat, he smelled perfume. Unmistakably he heard a woman’s voice.
The pressure on his windpipe went away. By degrees his sight cleared sufficiently for him to make out a lightweight girl prone upon him, talking back to the Russian, who crouched above him, eager to resume operations. Not a word of her lingo could the sergeant understand.
Mac moved to hoist her off.
“Lie still, you mindless idiot!” The girl turned her attention to him. “Otherwise, you will be dead.”
MAC spat out blood, feeling weak. Cautiously he reached out and gripped the carbine by the side of the car. By fingering the clip he found it to be loaded, and he brought the muzzle up toward his enemy. The Russian did not seem impressed, but the girl looked scared. Swiftly she got up between the two men, and was silent.
Gingerly the sergeant seated himself on a crate, and rubbed his windpipe back into place. The train was moving too fast now to throw the Russian out, and Mac doubted if it could be dons, anyhow. “Ouagh,” he said. “Tell that—bozo—take a break. I’ll take him—apart someplace else.”
“Take him apart?”
“Fight him.”
“Oh.” Her wide gray eyes looked full into his. “You want a truce, Sergeant?” She let off some more explosive talk to the Russian. That enthusiast grinned again, nodded, and sat down unconcerned in the open door. Opening the midget suitcase, he drew out a slender bottle filled apparently with water and drank from it thirstily. Mac’s throat ached for the water, but he did not ask for it. Putting down his weapon, he eyed the girl.
She was young, her arms and throat too thin, with a wealth of hair like spun straw tinged by the sun. She was costumed in an American combat jacket and a short skirt.
“Where’d you drop in from, sister?” Silently she pointed up to the darkness above the top layer of crates. There, apparently, she had hidden out. It bothered Mac that she seemed to be more afraid of him than of the Russian.
Her name, he learned, was Anna, and she spoke English because her mother had been English. “And so your dad was Russian?” Mac asked.
“No, Lithuanian.”
“What’s Lithuanian?”
A smile touched her lips. “If you don’t know, does it matter?” And she sat down by the Russian, cross-legged, as if Mac and the train did not matter. She just looked out at the mud villages and the hot brown fields sweeping by. When she did that, she looked older. Mac decided she wasn’t pretty, but something about her bothered him.
It was as if she sat waiting and listening for something to happen, without caring what it would be. The soldier offered Anna the bottle, and when she refused, he drank some more. After a moment he began to sing to himself. Putting his arm around her, he felt for her breast, and she jerked loose, hitting him hard over the eyes. Shaking his head, he laughed; but he did not reach for her again. Then she turned up her head to Mac without moving.
“Now you have found me, you will put me off?”
Before he could answer, the train began to jolt to a stop.
When it came to rest beside a stone castle that looked like a motion-picture set, the girl glanced quickly at Mac and climbed up to the top layer of crates, out of sight.
Along came the G.I. mechanic. “Hi,” said he to Mac, and peered at him curiously. “You had your face lifted?” Running his fingers over a bruise, the sergeant answered, “I slept on it. Where you come from, they like to ask questions?”
Then the unpredictable Russian offered his bottle, and the G.I. took a deep swallow and sighed heavily. He did this as if he liked the water of the country.
“Ever hear of a place called Cathay?” the sergeant asked.
The brakeman considered, when the sergeant described it. “Sounds a mite like Salt Lake City,” he offered.
“It’s here in Asia.”
The brakeman shook his head.
After they got going again, the girl climbed down. “Thank you please,” she said. “You are kind, soldier.”
Mac stared. Nobody had called him kind before. It had not entered his mind to turn in the two stowaways at the whistle stop by the castle. With the Russian, he had an unfinished argument, and with the girl—
As before, she sat between them, drinking water out of an old whisky bottle, and tearing off strips from a roll of native bread. Mac accepted some of the water and felt better.
The train was winding into a gorge, climbing into mountains where sheep grazed, as in Nevada.
Anna had traveled, she made clear in her soft voice. At the start of the war she had been taken from her home into a labor camp in the Urals where the other inmates were Poles. Later she had been taken from the Urals into Persia, where the refugees like herself formed a colony and found some work, helped by the British. She had a nice room in Tihran; and then the British had started to move the refugee colony to East Africa by train. At Ahwaz, Anna had escaped from the train, because she did not want to travel to Africa. She had no home except the room in Tihran, and she was on her way back there, if God permitted.
THE gorge had opened out to an upland valley, with horses grazing in the gullies. When the sunset glow struck through behind them, Mac beheld across the way long robed figures staring up from a campfire ringed with black tents. They looked like pictures of people in the Bible—two thousand years distant from the train.
Beside him the Russian heaved a bottle, empty, into the shadows beneath. Propped against a crate, he had been singing quietly to himself. Now he drew another bottle from the tin valise and broke the sealing wax on it.
“The guy,” Mac observed, “is sure thirsty.”
Anna looked carefully at the Russian, and said sharply, “You must stop him, now.”
“It’s his water, Anna.”
“It’s not. It’s vodka.”
“Well, I guess these Russians take vodka like water.”
“He is not a Russian. He is a Ukrainian Cossack from Perekop. The Germans took away his family to labor like me. So Sokol, which is his name, hates those Germans.” She caught Mac’s arm. “Sergeant, you must stop him drinking now, because if he is drunk in Tihran the Russian military police will take him and shoot him. They have orders to do that, if a soldier is drunk in the streets.”
It was all tangled up, this Russian business, but Mac was beginning to think the straw-haired girl knew the answers better than he did.
“Sokol drinks because of his family. He will not stop just if you tell him to.”
“Okay, Sister Anna, we’ll keep him ready for inspection.”
But when Mac pondered how to do this, it did not seem so easy. Sokol kept the bottle firmly in hand, and Mac doubted his ability to confiscate it by force. Then the solution came to him.
“Tell this Sokol I’d relish a drag myself.”
By
dividing the bottle, its effects on Sokol could be halved. The sergeant had never tried vodka, yet it looked smooth. It tasted smooth, when he tried it.
“Zdorovenki bouly ” enunciated Sokol.
“What’s that he’s saying?”
“Good health to you. And he also says he will break your head like a melon when you say.”
The sergeant laughed and took another swallow. Sokol reciprocated at once, pleased. It was going to be hard to keep ahead of him . . .
The darkness in front of them grew bright with a moon’s glow. Crests of hills stood stark against a shimmering sky. Cold air bathed their lungs, and the sergeant felt as if he were coming home to the Nevada mountains again. A good place to hop the train.
Beneath him the train did a strange thing. It crawled and wormed its way up toward a mountain summit. When he leaned forward he beheld four separate angles of track traversing up. Anna pulled at him anxiously, and he took her hand and held it, to reassure her.
Her face shone faintly white, beneath the brightness of her hair. She did not look so tired now, only young. Mac said, “It feels good here.”
“Nobody told me that before, Mac.” All three of them had a touch of it, he thought. It came out of these years. He was tired and going over the hill; she had no home to go to, only a room in Tihran; Sokol had a home, but he had lost his family.
Sokol pointed up. A peak appeared between two crests, high and lonely, white with snow. Mac looked at it and nodded.
“He must have traveled some, Anna. Ask him if he knows whereabouts Cathay is.”
“Cathay?”
Mac told her about the fountains that gave you a big kick out of life, and the lakes with white boats just floating on them. He omitted the hostess princesses. Anna spoke rapid Russian to Sokol.
“Sokol says,” she explained, “only the eagles know about Cathay, and he is a falcon, not an eagle. Drink some more, or he will be drunk.”
She sat there like a picture out of a fairy tale, not real but lovely. Sokol threw away the empty bottle while the train crept along a summit against the roof of the sky.
The moon left the sky, and Mac’s eyes closed. After a while he stretched out against his pack and slept.
Once he woke up, hearing the door sliding shut. Anna was pulling at it, and day seemed to be coming up outside. Another time when the train pulled up, he stirred and listened. Somebody was crying close to him. It was the girl, asleep with her hand over his. Sunlight streamed through the cracks of the high-priority car.
TRAMPING and voices woke the sergeant with a feeling that he had overslept. Through the open door, electric lights shone along a cement platform crowded with natives and soldiers under packs.
“What’s this?” Mac demanded, half awake.
“It’s Tihran ” Anna announced, “and I—'"
It was her stop. Mac noticed that Sokol had disappeared, although his coat, valise and guitar were lying as they had been. “What happened to him?” he asked.
“Oh, he went. Quite well he could stand, and talk, thanks to your drinking. How do you feel? Please,” she added swiftly, “can you walk with me, by the military at the gate?”
“Sure,” he said, and climbed down to help her. From somewhere she had produced a bundle done up in a shawl. Although Mac could take in all these sights, his brain felt blurred. About Anna he remembered that she was a wraith, a refugee without a pass for the train. So he talked to her, and held her arm as they pushed through the Persians and whatnots crowding to the gate.
Strange-looking soldiers in mustard-colored uniforms examined the others but paid no attention to the American sergeant and the girl. Likewise, the American M.P.s merely looked at Anna’s legs in silent appraisal. Mac remembered to ask about his train.
“How long does this transcontinental limited stop here?” he asked the nearest M.P.
“That?" The soldier looked surprised. “Two hours officially. Actually five or six. Who cares?”
Anna pulled at him, and he went on, out to a cobbled square full of dust and sunset glow. “What now?” he questioned.
“We will go in a droshky.”
And she climbed into a horse-drawn hack that looked like a museum piece tied together with cord. Hugging her bundle, she made room for Mac, smiling. “Now you come. I want you to eat your dinner with me, please.”
All at once he felt hungry. In two hours, he reasoned, he could get some chow and be back on the train, which would take him out of this Tihran place where M.P.s of all sorts abounded.
Although the droshky bounced and sideslipped, Anna seemed happy. So did the dark figures that clustered in the open shops and sidewalk fruit stands, singing and talking and calling out the stuff they had to sell. Some of them stretched out on rugs beside the small torrent of water that ran in the gutter. It struck Mac that this was one continuous block party. “What goes on tonight?” he asked curiously.
“Tonight is like any night in Tihran. Oh, these Persians have so little money and things, they enjoy themselves like this.” And, gravely, she added, “Tonight is special for me.”
AT a door in a clay courtyard wall she stopped the driver, and paid him with some coins from her purse. Taking Mac’s hand she led him in, through a shadowed walk to a garden lighted with lamps on tables where a dozen assorted people sat eating, including four American soldiers. The walls of this garden were painted with horsemen and dancing girls out of a fairy tale. As soon as Anna stepped into the light the big woman at the counter by the kitchen door screamed and ran over and embraced her.
The waiter, who wore a black jacket, put down his tray to kiss her hand. An old guy playing a fiddle out of tune waved his bow at her. This sort of thing went on all through the meal, which took a long time. Anna ordered veal and rice with sauce, broiled chicken, long white melons and bottles of beer that must have come from some American PX. Mac ate and drank most of it, because she did not seem to be so hungry.
Finally four assorted girls under teen age came out and hugged Anna. They wore what looked like kimonos and head scarfs, and one of them interrupted her native chatter to say, “How do you do?” to Mac before they all giggled and ran off.
By then Mac could not help asking, “Does the cat know you, too?”
“They are my pupils. Like everyone, they are glad to see me, Mac. I told the children, if God permitted, I would come back.”
When a pair of older girls with the bright-tired look of prostitutes came in to a side table, Anna went over and hugged them. They did not so much as glance at Mac.
Time was passing, and he tried to call the waiter for the check, but Anna stopped him. “Please, you cannot pay here. You are our guest.”
“Whose guest?” demanded Mac, his head still wrapped in layers of fog.
Anna looked at him. “Ours. This residence and garden belong to Madame Suhaily, who has lost all her other things. So Madame Guthor who is a Hungarian refugee”—she nodded toward the large dame at the counter—“manages this restaurant, and pays something to Madame Suhaily. These Polish girls sleep here and also pay, and we all eat here while I have some money from teaching English to the children. So, we manage.”
And this, Mac remembered, she had called her home. It was a hell of a home, he thought. “Then you have your room here?”
“Yes.” Anna seemed pleased. “I will show it to you.”
WHEN he followed her, it struck him how gracefully she walked, as if her sandals were high-heeled shoes. At the top of a dim stair that smelled of dust and onions, she took his hand and led him through a hanging into a small space with embroidery hung on the bare walls, and a rug underfoot. This place smelled of flowers, perhaps because there was a box of them in the open window. Moonlight streaming in showed a few books ranged on top of a crate.
“This?” Mac asked. “Where do you sleep?”
In the moonlight she stood close to him, looking straight at him, her eyes questioning him. Had he ever thought she was not pretty? In Mac’s experienc
e, if a girl stayed so quiet in her room, like this, it meant one thing only.
Anna’s dim eyes seemed to look into his mind. She smiled, but not at him. Then she said “Here,” and led him out of the window.
They stood full in the moonlight, on part of a roof, with a roll of quilts near. The sergeant’s arm eased around her body, which felt too slight to be real. After a second she drew away and pointed.
In the shadow a few yards away the form of a large woman showed, covered by blackout robes, and under mosquito nets the slight figures of the four girls lay outstretched on their sleeping quilts. Then Mac noticed other piles of bedding stacked around the roof which was walled in from observation, except by the moon.
“Madame Suhaily and the children,” Anna whispered. “You wanted to see where I slept.”
It was like a women’s dormitory, and Mac eased back through the long window. Suddenly he remembered to look at his watch. Three hours had passed since he left the train! “Listen,” he said, “I got to go—that express will be pulling out.”
Startled, she turned to him. “But you can not go on it, because of the Russians.”
“Never mind the Russians. I’m moving.” He didn’t understand his own urgency, but he had to go on. This wasn’t far enough—he had to go on to Cathay.
“Come on down with me to the train,” he urged abruptly.
She answered his voice rather than the words: “I cannot go on the train—now.”
The heck she couldn’t! She had managed it once, easily enough.
“You stay,” she said quickly.
Looking at him, she became frightened, more so than when he had picked up the carbine. Something wild and fearful in her looked out at him. Then her eyes closed and she turned her back to him so he could no longer see her face. Her English did not sound so good as before. “All right, Sergeant,” she said to the window, “I understand how you want to go.”