Death Is My Comrade

by Stephen Marlowe

  Earlier, we’d all eaten heartily at the farmhouse. I’d told Mike Rodin about the soldier. Over dinner Laschenko and Lucienne had talked in low tones, he earnestly, she angrily and with scorn. Soft, silent Mikhail never said a word.

  After dinner Mike Rodin had a mild attack. His face turned gray and he began to sweat. We had packed our knapsacks already. He had a needle and morphine in his, but when I started to open it he shook his head. Rodzianko was gravely concerned. There was no electricity in the farmhouse. By the ruddy, flickering light of the oil lamps, they could have passed for twins.

  Eugenie, as unpredictable as ever, stood behind Mike Rodin, stroking his shoulder while he endured the pain. Her face mirrored his. When his face twisted with the pain, hers did too. A little later she brought him tea. She kept saying, “Daddy, daddy, are you all right? Please be all right. Please.”

  We all changed into rough peasant clothes, dark skirts and heavy blouses for the women, shirts and bell-bottomed trousers and soft caps for the men. By the time he changed, Mike Rodin was feeling better. Eugenie hovered near him.

  Father Alexi gave us a benediction. His parting words were: “Bog lyubov.” That is Russian for God is love.

  Then in small groups the peasants who had gathered around the farmhouse drifted back through the birch woods. Three of them remained to guide us the first night. It had been decided previously that we couldn’t chance the road for a while. By now soldiers might be on the lookout for Vasili Rodzianko. They could watch the roads, they could set up blocks, they could even send patrols through the woods, but they couldn’t cover all the vast birch forest and the marshes along the Moscow and Mologa Rivers between Zagorsk and Pestovo to the north.

  We made less than eight miles that first night. At dawn we reached a woodcutter’s crude hut and spent the day there. Food was waiting, smoked fish and coarse dark bread. The three peasants left us. Our new guide was a red-faced man in a leather jacket.

  I kept the first watch outside the woodcutter’s hut. Mikhail would have the second, and Mike Rodin the third, if he felt up to it. Then Vasili Rodzianko would watch till dusk, when we’d be off again. I sat on a rail fence with the rifle over my knees. It was quiet in the woods. A bird called, far off. The morning was gray and oppressively muggy.

  Eight miles, I thought. Almost five hundred to go. If things had gone according to plan, I’d be out over the Atlantic now with Vasili Rodzianko. Look at the bright side of things, I told myself. Rodin’s coming out with you.

  Halfway through my watch, I heard a noise behind the hut.

  I headed back there with my rifle. Lucienne Duhamel was outside in a crouch under one of the paper-paned windows.

  “Not sleepy?” I said.

  Mike Rodin’s face appeared in the window. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Get back to sleep.”

  “I was restless,” Lucienne said. She made a face. “These clothes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had lice in them.”

  She had managed to keep her Gallic poise, though. The Italian-cut hair was neatly in place, the broad brow was so clean it looked scrubbed, the dark eyes in the pale beautiful face looked at me mockingly.

  “I’m going to get away sooner or later, you know.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “You can’t stay awake all the time.”

  “Where would you go? Could you find your way out of the woods?”

  “We won’t be in the woods forever.” Lucienne looked at the white boles of the birches, at the cordwood neatly stacked. “We have come a long way from Chevy Chase, haven’t we?”

  “Too long for me. Apparently not long enough for you.”

  “Semyon told you?”

  “He told me.”

  “He is a fool. He was lucky enough to be born a part of the wave of the future. He’s throwing all that over for a—a whim. He has everything to lose, nothing to gain. He is a fool.”

  “It took him twenty years to make his decision. That’s no whim. And Rodzianko doesn’t see it as the wave of the future.”

  “Then he too is a fool.” Lucienne gave me a strange look that could have been Gallic peasant cunning. “Chet,” she asked suddenly, “are you quite incorruptible?”

  “Better hit the sack, Lucienne.”

  “Are you a fool too? You’ll never get out alive, none of you. I have money. I could—”

  “Put it in a bank.”

  I started to walk away from her, the rifle trailing. She came after me. I felt her hand on my shoulder. I turned around.

  “And put this too in a bank?”

  She placed her arms around my neck. She kissed me, with zeal and considerable skill. From thigh to breast her body pressed against mine. She drew her head back an inch and breathed against my lips. “Take me back. To Zagorsk. To Moscow. Take me back with you, Chet.”

  I pushed her away from me, less gently than I had intended. She stumbled and almost fell.

  “And you on your honeymoon,” I said lightly, chidingly.

  My tone enraged her. She was no second Galina. Rage grooved lines in her face. She looked then like what she was: a confused and angry woman shoving her fortieth birthday hard enough to knock it over.

  She tried to slap my face. I caught and held her wrist. “Hit the sack,” I said. “Maybe you’ll feel younger when you get up.”

  She cussed me out in French. Then she strode angrily toward the hut, her shapely buttocks swinging. I heard Mike Rodin’s laughter from inside. He’d been her husband. He’d probably known what to expect from Lucienne. I hadn’t. I knew now.

  And someone else knew too; I saw Galina’s face disappearing from the window as Lucienne slammed the door.

  I finished the rest of my watch without anyone else trying to seduce me.

  Soon after we started out that second night the rain broke.

  It dripped soddenly through the firs and pines and birches. It quickly turned the grassless, clay-rich soil of the forest into a quagmire. Our footsteps made sucking sounds in it. We were soaking wet after a half hour. The water streamed down our faces and drenched our clothing. I weather-slung the Russian rifle, bore down, and wondered if it would be all right. Lucienne fell once. She got up dripping mud. She cursed the elements as she had cursed me. In the darkness and the wet we stumbled against one another. The forest smelled moist and earthy.

  Two hours like that—and we heard the dogs.

  They were still far away, but their baying and yelping came frighteningly over the hissing roar of the rain. The soldier, I thought. The soldier got free. Or one of the peasants returning to the kolkhoz was caught and questioned.

  We called a halt. Rodzianko thought the dogs were closer. The dacha, he said. They could get the scent at his dacha, and follow. A mile to the east, the woodcutter told us, was marshland. It would be more difficult for the dogs to follow our trail there.

  In less than an hour we had reached the marshes. The trees thinned out. The rain pelted us. Pretty soon we were walking ankle-deep in muddy water, then knee-deep, sloshing, splashing. Smaller, gnarled trees grew there. They offered no protection from the rain, but their underwater roots tripped us. We could have been going in circles, but the woodcutter never faltered, never paused to get his bearings. He had a hurricane lamp, and we followed its feeble light through the marshes.

  The dogs bayed and yelped behind us. A mile? Two miles?

  It was almost dawn when we reached a narrow, unpaved road. It had been built on a causeway cutting across the swamp. You could see the sheets of rain bouncing off it, silver in the murky dawn light. The sky was lead.

  “Four miles,” Mike Rodin said. “Four lousy miles. That’s what the woodcutter figures.”

  Mike Rodin told me: “We were supposed to make ten miles tonight. Beyond the marsh there’s a kolkhoz, and transportation.”

  “What kind of transportation?”

  “Bus convoy for farm laborers. They could have taken us clear to the river below Pestovo.”

  “Will they wait for
us?”

  Laschenko shook his head. Water flew from it. “They can’t. They pass a checkpoint at Bezhetsk. Have to pass it on schedule or risk questioning, perhaps a thorough search.”

  “What’s the difference?” I said dryly. “If we’re not aboard.”

  The woodcutter said something. Laschenko nodded slowly. “Six miles,” he told us. “We must make those six miles this morning. By no later than ten. They leave at ten.”

  We had climbed the causeway and stood on the muddy road. I pointed down to the swamp. “We’ll never make it—through that.”

  Laschenko grunted, said: “It was decided to keep off the road until we reached the kolkhoz.”

  “We’ll have to chance the road now.”

  Mike Rodin nodded, and so did his brother. We set out again.

  Ten minutes later Rodin had a bad attack.

  There was no warning. He stumbled suddenly and sat down in a puddle of rain water. He made a sound in his throat, a muffled cry of pain. Eugenie ran to him, knelt at his side, rocking his head against her breast. “Daddy! It’s all right, we’re here. Daddy, I’m here with you.…”

  I opened Mike Rodin’s wet knapsack and found the morphine and the needle. Rodzianko saw it, nodded and rolled up his brother’s wet sleeve. I administered the shot.

  We waited. Rodin relaxed almost at once, but it was a half hour before he could talk coherently and forty minutes before he could get to his feet.

  “We’ll wait, Mike,” I said. “Tell us when.”

  “Now,” he said promptly, his face gray and bereft of expression. “Go ahead. Now. I’m not going with you. I’d only slow you down. And the dogs.…”

  As if to prove his point, we heard the dogs yelping. They seemed very far away now, and I said so.

  Mike Rodin shook his head stubbornly. “All I’m asking is that you look at it sensibly. I paid you to get my brother out. We’re still here.”

  “We’ll get him out.”

  “Not with me along. I’d never make it. I was supposed to stay behind. That was the plan, wasn’t it?”

  “Plan’s been changed, Mike. Tell us when you’re ready to move.”

  “Christ, will you listen to me? They’re after Vasili Rodzianko, that’s all. In the rain, to a bunch of soldiers, peasant-types, I’m Rodzianko. I’d sure as hell stop them a while, at least long enough for you to make the kolkhoz.”

  I said: “You wouldn’t fool the dogs ten seconds.”

  “You are talking nonsense, Mikhail,” Vasili Rodzianko said in English, but using his brother’s Russian name. “I will go nowhere without you—now.”

  “That’s why I came here!” Mike Rodin shouted. “I’ve got this thing inside of me, this death. I’ve learned to live with it. I know it’s going to kill me. Bone cancer, do you hear me? It’s eating away my bones, inside. It’s death. I’ve got used to it. My comrade, death. Okay, okay, now or a little later, a few weeks or a month or three months, what the hell difference does it make? Now, do you get me? Now while I have a little life left over, will you for Christ’s sake let me use it the way I want to?”

  Eugenie was crying softly.

  “Can you make it?” I asked her father.

  “I don’t know. I don’t give a damn. Why do you think I wanted to see Galina and Mikhail in Moscow? All along I’ve wanted to do it something like this, but I didn’t tell them, didn’t know if Galina would buy it. Not then. I was going to tell them I’d die, take a lethal dose of morphine, as their father. Don’t you see, that would have given them time to get out on their own hook before the police got wise, before Vasili Rodzianko showed up in the Western world. But Galina … I didn’t know if she … never had the chance.” He stood there in the rain, glaring at me defiantly. “Now I have the chance.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Have it your way. You can stay.”

  Rodin smiled.

  “I’m staying with you,” I said.

  Vasili Rodzianko nodded his head once, said gently: “And I too.”

  Mike Rodin called me a name, and then a grin bisected his tired gray face and he said: “Christ, I always pick them, don’t I?” He shook his head. “I wish I’d had you with me ten years ago, Drum. You’re stubbbrner than I am, aren’t you? Those proxy fights,” he said musingly. “That railroad out West. Christ, I could have used you. A private dick! What a waste.”

  “Write me a testimonial when we get home. Now let’s get moving.”

  We set off along the muddy road again. For a while I supported most of Mike Rodin’s weight on my shoulder, but before long he said he could walk under his own power—and did. Eugenie walked at his side. I heard her say: “I’d do anything for you, Daddy. Anything. I’d die for you.” He patted her hand.

  She said it. They were just words at the time. But I’d remember them later.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Three ancient buses waited on the bare wet square in front of the barracks-like main building of the collective farm. It had stopped raining. The woodcutter spoke to a man in an oilskin raincape. He looked us over with bright, narrowed eyes. Then very solemnly he went into the building and came out a few minutes later with a book. I saw Vasili Rodzianko’s picture on the rear of the dust jacket. It couldn’t have been the book that had earned Rodzianko his Nobel Prize: that had been banned in Russia. The bright-eyed man wanted and got Rodzianko’s autograph.

  We went into the building. In a big kitchen they had vodka and then tea and black bread waiting for us. The room had an enormous cast-iron stove. Its firelids glowed cherry red. Before long our wet clothing began to steam.

  When we went outside again, the buses were loading. I heard the shuffle of heavy shoes on muddy ground as peasants filed slowly aboard.

  There was space for us in the rear of one bus. Just before it started, the bright-eyed man boarded. As solemnly as he had brought the book for Vasili Rodzianko to autograph, he now brought three bottles of vodka. Then the bus started. The ones ahead of us were moving already.

  Since arriving at the kolkhoz we hadn’t heard the dogs. We’d left that danger behind us. I thought Mike Rodin was smiling a little, sitting on the hard wooden bench at the rear of the bus, and I knew why. I could feel it myself. We were motorized. Now we could begin to roll up the mileage.

  I was asleep before we lost sight of the collective farm. Later the bright-eyed man told us we had passed through three checkpoints without incident.

  That afternoon at a little Mologa River town we boarded a barge loaded with farm produce bound for the cities to the north. It was one of a string of five flat, ugly barges towed by a tugboat. The barges were strung on cables for a half mile behind the chugging, laboring tug. We moved downstream slowly past birch woods. The sun came out, and most of us lounged around the deck in its warmth, watching the scenery drift by. That was safe enough; we could see people on the other barges. I never knew who they were or where they were going.

  The sun seemed to draw Galina Rodzianko out of herself. She combed her long blond hair, which was still damp. She sat on a crate and swung her legs and even sang a little.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “I like it.”

  “A folk song from the Ukraine. I was for some time with the ballet in Kiev. Russian folk music is nothing, but the Ukrainian is the most beautiful in the world.”

  “You think we’re going to make it?” I said. “No more tricks, Galina?”

  “You are a strange man.” She broke abruptly into Russian: “Vynoslivost.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, a word we have. It means lasting a thing out. My father is like that. And you too are like that. Vynoslivost.”

  “Vynoslivost,” I said. Galina crinkled her eyes, smiling at my pronunciation. Then she began to laugh. She jumped down lightly from her perch on the crate and did a quick pirouette, her thighs flashing as the skirt swirled. Maybe it was the sun and the warmth or the feeling of security on the barge after our night in the marsh. She executed a classic ballet leap and drifted down to
the deck as light as a feather.

  Just then Laschenko came on deck. “Practicing?” he said.

  Galina gave him a bitter stare. “What for?”

  She withdrew into herself after that, standing at the rear of the barge and looking moodily at the two others trailing behind us.

  I went back there to her. “Vynoslivost, Galina. You’re going to do all right in the West.”

  She didn’t turn. The wind blew her long blond hair, molded her skirt against her dancer’s thighs. “Just leave me alone.”

  It was very hot below decks.

  It was also poorly ventilated. The barge reeked of raw cabbage. There were cabbages in crates and cabbages in sacks and overripe cabbages heaped in rotting piles.

  Mike Rodin and his brother sat crosslegged on the floor, talking. Their faces were red, their sleeves rolled up. Sweat glistened on their skin. Sometimes they spoke in Russian and then suddenly they’d break into English and then back into Russian again. They had opened one of the bottles of vodka. They kept passing it back and forth, taking long swigs. Eugenie sat near them in a corner, her big eyes intent. She had another one of the vodka bottles, and she was drinking from it. They probably didn’t even know she was there.

  Rodzianko did most of the talking. He hadn’t talked much until then. It was as if our peaceful interlude on the barge, as it had almost done for his daughter Galina, had opened him up.

  Pretty soon his voice drew the rest of us below decks. We just stood there, listening. Vasili Rodzianko had us spellbound. And from what he had to say in English, I began to learn just how important his message for the free world would be.

  “The Communists ask too much of a man,” he said. “My flesh and my blood, yes. I would surrender those to a cause in which I believed. But they ask more than that. They ask for a man’s honor as well. And my honor they cannot have.”

  He also said: “But the cause? How can one believe in such a cause? Ideological orthodoxy through discipline, that is its strategy. But its tactics? They are the tactics of compromise and deceit and are dependent upon the ignorance of the brain-washed masses and the nocturnal knock on the door by the Secret Police.”