Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  “Well, there's enough of it,” she said, referring to a stack of zinc-colored cans of tomato sauce piled up on a shelf. “There used to be fish,” she said, “but the bomb concussions have done for them. Big ones, catfish with whiskers. Strong—but cooked in milk they were sweet. Ach”—she shut her eyes and grimaced in sorrow—“this stupid war is a curse. It took my husband, both sons, most of the men on the river. The winter of '43 got them, retreating from Moscow in the snow, so cold that when they took their pants down by the side of the road, they froze up back there and died.” Her mouth tightened at the thought and she crossed herself. “One or two came back. Husks. Good for nothing after that—they'd seen too much.”

  She cleaned her bowl with a thumb and licked off the last of the tomato sauce. “They are fighting east of us, just as I warned you. Near the prison at Vác, downriver from the bend at Esztergom. The Hungarian Third Army, they say, what's left of it, and the Sixth Panzer, facing the Third Ukrainian. Mongolian troops, river boy, they fight on vodka and if you're a woman, God help you die quick. They haven't been here for a thousand years, yet we've never forgotten them. They surrounded forty-five thousand German troops up by Lake Balaton, and pffft, that was that.”

  “What are people saying?” Khristo asked.

  “Well, the Russians have got Budapest, so that's the end of the government. No great loss. Some say the thing to do is cross over the lines, surrender to the Red Army—others want to wait here. The Russians will need us. They'll pay something, at least, to have their supplies move on the river.”

  “And so?”

  “Some of us are going to try to sneak through tonight. Maybe they stop fighting and have a snooze.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “So do I. How far east are you going?”

  “I'll tell you when we get there,” he said.

  “So I guessed.”

  “Have you got anything black? Like paint?”

  “Paint! You are crazed. Some tar, maybe.”

  “It will do,” he said.

  They chugged slowly out of Szöny harbor just after midnight, eight tugboats moving in single file along the dark river. Since they could expect to be under observation by Hungarian and Wehrmacht rearguard units, each flew the flag of the collapsed Hungarian regime on the short pole astern. The best navigator of the group, a stooped old man called Janos, took the lead in his boat, followed by Tisza and the others. The moon was fully risen, but the spring westerly had increased its force and a low scud of cloud obscured the light, leaving the river in drifting shadows. Difficulty of navigation was increased by a drop in temperature that brought a heavy mist off the water, swirling in the wind as it blew downstream. This made Janos's job harder, but turned the boats into ghostly, uncertain outlines from the perspective of the shore.

  Of Janos, Annika said, “He is half blind, so the darkness will not bother him. He navigates with his feet, he says. By the run of the water under the keel he knows his way.”

  “Is that possible?” Khristo asked.

  “He is on the river since childhood. Thus he is a good navigator, also a good liar. Take your pick.”

  Standing in the pilothouse, Khristo could feel only the rapid pulse of Tisza's engines. Yet the boat ahead of them moved slowly back and forth from the center to the starboard bank of the river, as though it were avoiding hazards, and the rush of water passing over a sandbar shoal could be heard to one side of the boat as they moved around it.

  “A sandbar,” Khristo said. “He has taken us away from it.”

  “Ja, ja,” Annika said, unimpressed. “A famous sandbar, one that everybody knows. What you and I must worry about are the new ones. Danúbio—the god of this river—stirs his mud up every winter and leaves it in different places, so that we may find it with our propellers.” She made a small correction with the wheel, apparently following some motion of the lead boat's stern that was invisible to him. “A way down from here, there are granite blocks under the water, quarried by the Romans as piers for a bridge. The emperor Trajan desired to build a military road, from Spain to the Euphrates River, but he died. He left us his granite to remember him by and, when the water is low and there is sand on both sides of the river, it will peel the bottom of a boat clean off. I have seen it.”

  They were silent for a time, staring ahead of them through the drifting fog. “Do you want me down below?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Stay up here with me and keep the pepecha handy. We are going full slow as it is, and if something happens you don't want to be belowdecks.”

  He thought of steam under pressure and what it could do and was thankful for the dispensation. “What use will the pepecha be against field guns?”

  She shrugged. “Not much.”

  The river meandered north and south at Esztergom, then swung around in a sharp bend by the Vác prison and headed due south, toward Budapest and eventually into Serbian Yugoslavia. They could hear the fighting well enough, like an approaching thunderstorm, and the sky flickered a dull orange with artillery and tank barrages, but most of the action seemed to be centered north of the river.

  Moving along the northward curve toward Esztergom, a searchlight cut through the fog and raced forward from the last boat to the first, then pinned Janos's tug in its beam. A loudhailer, sounding eerily close over the water, called out a command in Hungarian. As Janos, shouting in a cracked voice, answered the unseen officer, Annika translated into Russian:

  “Convoy leader, identify yourself.”

  “iC-38 and seven K-class tugs—out of Bratislava.”

  “Where bound?”

  “Vác prison.”

  “Say again, iC-38.”

  “Vác prison.”

  “Have you gone mad?”

  “Long ago.”

  “The Russians are up there. Are you under orders?”

  “Yes, sir. To remove special prisoners to the rear.”

  “Written orders?”

  “Verbal orders. From the SS. A German colonel accompanies us, would you like to hear it from him? I can wake him up for you.”

  “Proceed, K-38.”

  “Thank you.”

  “God help you.”

  “One hopes.”

  The searchlight blinked out, and the running lights of the patrol boat faded away as it returned to station in midstream.

  The convoy steamed on into the darkness, its slow progress taking them toward the steady beat of artillery exchanges in the hills above Vác. They could now see yellow muzzle flashes on the ridge-lines, and a piece of burning debris arced gracefully above them and hissed into the water. At first, the bass thudding of the gunnery was a massive rumble, low and continuous, that rolled and echoed above the river. But as they drew closer, the sound resolved into separate parts: the low thump of field mortars, the whistle of Wehrmacht 88 s and the sigh of Russian field-gun rounds, the rhythmic crackle of machine-gun fire and the muffled impacts of exploding shells.

  As they steamed around a bend in the river, the horizon glowed brighter and brighter and the sound swelled in volume. Then they were in the middle of it.

  It was like a nightmare, he thought, because he wanted to run but could not move. His eyes streamed with tears from the billowing smoke—suddenly every object was blurred and misshapen. The prison on the far bank was burning, towers of flame from the roof and cell windows rolling into the sky as though sucked upward by an immense wind. The air around him buzzed and sang, and he thought he could hear voices from the near bank, calling out in a strange language, and a huge shower of sparks rained down on the boat. Then the water exploded, a white wall, and the river rocked backward. The window glass trembled and water sprayed across it, a prism refracting clouds of tracer, the fiery prison, the shore ahead stuttering from white light to blind darkness and back again. He went deaf. Braced himself against the pilothouse wall and felt the Tisza taking fire, like an animal kicking the hull.

  The stern of iC-38 began to move away from them and Khristo tore
himself from the wall and ran crouched along the deck, throwing the hatch back and jumping six feet into the hold. He opened the boiler door with a bare hand—saw the red stripe across his palm but felt nothing. He piled armloads of brushwood through the opening, kicking it into the roaring furnace as it snagged on the rim, bowed and resisted as though it did not want to burn. The Tisza rocked again. He slammed the door with his boot and leaped up the ladder onto the deck. An enormous yellow flare went off above him and a wind knocked him flat on his face. He scrambled to his knees, ready to swim, then saw that it was the boat behind them. Its pilothouse was gone, stack bent over to the deck with white steam spraying from one side. As he watched, the boat yawed out toward midriver, a line of little flames licking along the bow. He scurried toward the pilothouse, like a rat in a burning barn, he thought, and saw human shapes onshore, running with the boat, their arms raised in supplication. One of them tried to swim out, then vanished.

  What they did in Budapest, two days later, seemed entirely ingenuous. That was necessary. Had the tracks of planning and calculation showed through, it would have raised questions. But what he contrived was just simple enough, naive, to have about it a taste of the peasant's innocence, and Khristo well understood what the Russians thought about that—especially those Russians whose job it was to think about things. It made them sentimental, for they saw their former selves in it.

  Budapest was eighteen miles downriver from the Vác prison, just far enough behind the front lines to be, by then, choked with apparat of all sorts. The tugboat captains feared that as much as Khristo did, and river gossip confirmed their fears. There would be no sneaking through a web of those proportions—it had to be confronted.

  Once the fighting was well behind them, Janos led them into a narrow stream which, at first, did not appear navigable, then widened suddenly and ran four or five miles into the empty countryside. What a dark alley was to a criminal, he thought, this byway to nowhere was to the boats. “When we have no customs stamp, we unload here,” was how Annika put it. “We are all smugglers, of course,” she added offhandedly, “some of the time.” The tugs tied off to trees on the bank, then everyone fell into a sleep of exhaustion.

  The following morning, he joined the crews in chopping brush. Annika had applied lubricating grease to the burn and bound it up with an old engine rag, and the right hand slid up and down the ax handle anyhow, so he was able to manage it. He relished the work, laboring under a pallid sun with his jacket and shirt off, the sweat running down his back. Both blades of the double-bit ax were sharp, and he could take a two-inch trunk down with two or three wallops. Softwood was like that, of course, but he fancied himself a great woodsman nonetheless, the darkness of Prague and the terror of the previous night sweating itself out of him as he hacked at the brush.

  They made a fire and burned the Hungarian flags, then patched the hulls with canvas and tar, which would have to do until they got to a boatyard. There, he was told, fabled craftsmen could saw out a damaged section of wood and then, almost unbelievably, reproduce the precise curve and size of planking to be tamped back into place with mallets. Then, using a long file called a slick, they would bring the new planking to a perfect harmony with the old hull. And it would never leak.

  At sunset, they stood in a circle with caps in hand and Janos spoke a short prayer for the lost crew and tugboat. Many of them had been slightly wounded going past Vác—a steam scald, a broken wrist, two minor shrapnel injuries, Khristo's burned hand—but they all felt themselves fortunate to see the sun go down that night. They were close to Budapest, there were those who wanted to go on right then and have it over with, but Khristo made a short speech, translated by Annika, and they eventually decided to trust his perception of Soviet bureaucracy—which by nightfall was wobbly at best and sometimes surly, from a full day's vodka ration, and didn't much like the darkness in the first place.

  The next morning, Annika chose a young, whippy birch and Khristo felled it and trimmed the branches. About his further preparations she was less than pleased, but admitted glumly that it would be for the best if a strong effect were achieved. “It is hard to know with that sort of army,” he explained. “Maybe they hug you, maybe they squeeze off half a magazine in your belly. They themselves don't know what they're going to do until the mood takes them.”

  “Ja, ja,” she said, not really convinced he was right. Khristo's preparations had made a grave dent in her supplies, and she felt she might regret that in the future.

  But she was proud of him later on that day, as they steamed downriver through the center of Budapest, he could see that. He was standing forward of the pilothouse with a ten-year-old boy borrowed for the occasion from another boat—Tisza was the leader of this convoy, and everybody, Annika included, knew they had to make an impression. Khristo turned at one point and looked in the pilothouse window and saw a sly and appreciative grin on her face.

  The noise was overwhelming. There must have been thirty thousand of them—Mongolian troops with European Russian officers—lining the quays of the city as they moved through it. They cheered and waved, raised their pepechas and their old rifles with long bayonets. Some of the officers came to fervent attention. The child next to him, Khristo realized, was meant for the theater. He thrust his little fist into the air with revolutionary passion and scowled patriotically as though he were about to cry with all the emotion of it. Or perhaps, Khristo thought, he came suddenly to believe it. That was surely possible. It was exciting, thrilling, those tens of thousands of voices roaring in unison as the seven boats passed, their crews standing atop the cabins and saluting fiercely, their steam whistles hooting in celebration. The roar increased to thunder as they sailed past the elegant old parliament building that faced the river, the soldiers inside apparently so excited that desks and chairs and a snowstorm of papers came sailing out of the windows.

  This was Khristo's finest moment. Annika handed him the pepecha through the pilothouse door and, in perfect imitation of a thousand posters, he held it high in one hand—the bandaged one, forearm bulging—shaking the weapon with revolutionary fervor: fuck with us and this is what you'll get! The soldiers on shore, recognizing their very own weapon, the PPSh M1941, cheered even louder. And when he climbed up the iron ladder onto the roof of the pilothouse and repeated the gesture, using the flag for background, the cheering reached a glorious climax. On both banks, voices were raised in spontaneous singing—the Red Army anthem.

  A real Soviet flag would not have worked, he knew; it would have puzzled them, made them curious. Where did he get it? Who is he? But the huge square of canvas, four feet high and six feet long, roped to a birch pole nailed into the back wall of the pilothouse, then stretched forward by a rope wound around the smokestack, as though it were flying stiff in a fast breeze—that took them past curiosity. That sort of gesture took them in the heart.

  It was a grand flag: red with tomato sauce, hammer and sickle crudely painted with black tar. On both sides, so that all could see it.

  Russian press dispatches, for March 29, 1945, would include a mention of the incident: “In Budapest, elements of the Hungarian navy overthrew their fascist officers and joined forces with the victorious divisions of Marshal Malinovsky's Third Ukrainian Front in a display of patriotic solidarity.”

  They were arrested, of course, but it was the mildest sort of arrest. Around a bend in the river, a Russian patrol boat guided them into a dock and the military intelligence people were sent for. Papers were produced, examined, held up to the light—but they had already “confessed,” in the most public way imaginable, to the worst of their crimes: being part of a supply system that served an enemy fighting force. Thus the intelligence people found little to provoke their interest. They had the “crime,” which satisfied one of their instincts, and they had the “penalty,” which satisfied the other. The penalty was a form of conscription: these tugboats and their crews would serve the Occupation garrison, which desperately needed a way to get back and fort
h across the river. The retreating Germans had blown every single bridge in Budapest, whose twin cities, Buda and Pesth, were divided by the Danube. In return for faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips—whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays—the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside. Vodka rations, supplied from the east, might come later, the Russian officers said, if they worked hard and kept their noses clean.

  The tugboat people found this an excellent arrangement. They had their lives and their boats, they would be fed, and they were keenly aware that captured enemies of the Soviet armies rarely fared that well. After a few hours, they were sent back to their boats and told to await further direction.

  Khristo was taken to a room. For him they had two captains with the top buttons of their tunics undone. One was tall, with colorless eyes, the other short and not happy about it. So, they started in, he was a Yugoslav conscript worker who had escaped from his masters in Prague. A curious tale. How had he done it? Describe a milling machine, please. And what was the lubricating procedure for a lathe. Had he ever used a router plane in his work? Where was the factory? What did it do? Where did he live? What was his mother's maiden name? The street on which the factory was located—what did it look like? What was he paid? Had anyone helped him in his escape? How had he gotten from Prague to Bratislava? Transferred? Who had signed the order? The German supervisor? What was his name? What did he look like? The papers had been destroyed? How convenient. We know you're an American spy, they told him. One of the tugboat crewmen had suspected it, had told them he was carrying gold. Where was it? Where was the radio? Where were the maps? Make a clean breast, they said; all we want is for you to work for us, surely you see you would be too valuable to be shot. Come on, they said, all three of us are in the same profession, if we don't stick together the higher-ups will shaft us all, we know it, you know it, let's make an arrangement, let's make each other comfortable. Some of these bastards would poke your eyes out if we weren't protecting you. Mongolians! You're lucky it's us and not them. We understand your problems.