by Alan Furst
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 Mohács, 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 not 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.”
&
nbsp; 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.
“Any luck?” Khristo asked.
“No,” the old man said, “not much.”
“Too bad.”
“Yes. There used to be pike here.”
“The markings on this barge—I used to have a friend whose boat had the same numerals. Quite a coincidence, no?”
The old man nodded that it was.
“I’d like to see him again, this friend,” Khristo said.
“Then I’ll take you there,” the old man said. He stood slowly, taking the line from the river and wiping the muck from it with thumb and forefinger, then kicked an old piece of canvas aside and, with his other hand, retrieved a Browning Automatic Rifle, the American BAR, much battered and obviously well used. “Your friend is my son,” he said, shouldering the heavy weapon, gripping it so that his finger was within the trigger guard. “You carry the lantern,” he said, “and go on ahead of me, so that he may have the pleasure of seeing his old friend arrive.”
They walked for a long time, climbing into an evergreen forest where the sharp smell of pine pitch hung in the evening air. This was the land called Syrmia, lying between the rivers Danube and Sava, the edge of the Slavonian mountain range that ran north into the Carpathians. The trail reminded Khristo of Cambras—a steep, winding approach with potential for ambush at every blind turn. His lantern sometimes showed him a gleam of reflected light at the edges of the path. Weapons, he thought. But these sentries did not challenge him or show themselves, simply passed him on silently, one to the next.
After an hour of hard climbing, the old man melted away and Khristo was alone in a clearing. He stood there patiently while, somewhere, a decision was made. Above him, an ancient fortress of weathered stone was built directly into the face of the mountain. There were hill forts scattered all across northern Yugoslavia, he knew, some of the sites already in use at the time of the Greeks and Romans and, the story went, never vacant for one day in all those centuries. From the top of the hill, the river would be visible for miles in both directions once daylight came.
At last, a silhouette moved toward him from the darkness, a man who walked with great difficulty, his weight shifting violently with every step. Khristo raised his lantern so that his face could be seen and the man advanced into the circle of its light. Perhaps it was Drazen Kulic, he thought, or perhaps not. This man wore the blue jacket of a Yugoslavian army officer over a torn black sweater. He walked with the aid of a stick in his right hand, his left arm dangling useless by his side, the hand cupped and dead. A black patch covered his left eye, and the skin on that side of his face was ridged and puckered all the way to the jawline, pulling the corner of his mouth into an ironic half smile. The man stared at him for a time, searching his face, then said, “Welcome to my house.”
“Drazen Kulic,” he answered formally, “I am honored to be your guest.”
They walked together through a pair of massive doors made of logs cross-braced with iron forgings, into a cavelike room with a fire that vented through a blackened hole in the ceiling. There were some thirty people in the room, half of them sprawled asleep in the shadows, the other half occupied with a variety of chores: loading belts and magazines, cleaning weapons, repairing kit and uniform. They spoke in low voices, merely glanced at him, and ignored him after that. The women had bound their hair in scarves and wore sweaters and heavy skirts, while the men were dressed in remnants of army uniforms. The room smelled of unwashed bodies and charred wood and the fragrant odor of gun oil. The sound of working bolts, metal on metal, formed a rhythmic undertone as the guns were reassembled after cleaning.
Kulic took him to a trestle table set against one wall, and an old woman appeared with two tin cans made over into cups and filled with home-brewed beer, a bowl of salt cabbage and a slab of corn-meal bread. Khristo used his knife to put pieces of cabbage on the bread.
Kulic raised his beer. “Long life,” he said.
Khristo drank. The taste was bitter and very good. “Long life,” he repeated. “And thanks to God for letting me see the signal on the barge. I could have missed it.”
The right side of Kulic’s mouth twisted up in a brief smile. “You have not changed, I see,” he said, “forever fretting over details.” He paused to drink. “At that bend in the river there is a cross-current, and if you do not see the barge you will hit it—though I take nothing away from God, as you can see.”
“How did it happen?”
“A mortar shell, in a graveyard in the Guadarrama, the mountains west of Madrid. I’d been a bad boy, and the NKVD ‘arranged’ for it to happen. They meant for me to die, but I was only—well, you can see for yourself.”
“I’d heard that you were captured. Also that the Russians got you out.”
“Who told you that?” Kulic asked.
“Ilya Goldman.”
“Ilya!”
“Yes. Years ago, you understand. In Paris, before the war.”
Kulic took two cigarettes from the pocket of his uniform jacket, gave one to Khristo, struck a wooden match on the table, and lit them both. “In Paris, before the war,” he repeated, a sigh in his voice. He did not speak for a time, then said, “It’s true. They did get me out. If I’d died they wouldn’t have cared, but I was alive and I knew too much, so they couldn’t leave me where I was. Then, after they’d sprung me, they tried to send me back to Moscow, but I vanished.”
“Have you made it right with them?”
Kulic shook his head no, exhaling smoke from his nostrils. “Bastards,” he said briefly. “Do you know what went on here, in Yugoslavia?”
“Some,” Khristo said.
“Communists fighting Chetnik fascists, centrists, monarchists, the Mihailovich units, and all of us, excepting the Chetniks, fighting the Germans. Some groups with OSS support, some with the British MI6, some with the Russians. Believe me, it is beyond imagining. We shot our wounded, Khristo, to keep them from the Gestapo. I did that, with my own hand, sometimes to friends I’d played with as a child.”
“This war …” Khristo said.
“This war was worth what was done only if we come out of it a nation. Forgive the speech, but it’s true. When the Russians got here in force we’d already taken control—they could not do to us what they did to the Poles. But for that we paid a price.”
“I know,” Khristo said. “I saw it in France.”
“This was worse,” Kulic said simply.
They were silent for a time. The sounds of the great room—the hiss of damp wood on fire, the cleaning of weapons, subdued conversation—flowed around them.
“And now,” Kulic said finally, “it begins again. Only this time we are alone, or so
on will be, and the NKVD begins to nibble. Assassinations, kidnappings, false rumors, the press manipulated, officials bribed, the destruction of reputations—you know their methods, I’ll spare you the bedtime stories—but there is no misreading their intentions. They want Tito for a puppet. If they can’t have him, they’ll throw him out a window and try someone else. Meanwhile, our American friends are still here, and they help if they can, but they are about to fold up their tents and steal away into the night.”
“I doubt that,” Khristo said.
“You’ll see.”
“Drazen,” Khristo said after a moment, “the numbers on the barge.”
“Still a mystery?” Kulic smiled with the right side of his mouth.
Khristo waited.
“I believe you sent a radio message to the Bari station. Some strange ravings about an NKVD colonel who is supposed to materialize in Sfintu Gheorghe on the twelfth of April. Well, you wanted a contact, now you have it.”
“You are to help?” Khristo leaned forward, a little amazed.
“Help.” Kulic repeated the word to himself and laughed. “How is your English?”
“Good enough.”
“I believe it went: ‘Find out what that crazy son-of-bitch does.’ You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Well.”
Khristo took a moment to assemble his thoughts. “What he does is bring Sascha Vonets out of Romania, with information, probably very good information. Ilya got Sascha’s message out—from the camps. Voluta delivered it to me. It cost him his life. In Spain, Sascha told me what was coming—in the Yezhovschina purge of the security services—and Ilya warned me when I had to get out. Then, in Paris, I was trapped by the British, in an émigré operation against the Soviets, and sent to prison. For life. Voluta’s organization set me free, just before the Germans took Paris. So, because of these people, because they endangered themselves on my behalf, I sit here drinking beer with you. One could simply walk away from such responsibilities. Is that your suggestion?”