The Margin of Evil!

by Simon Boxall

  Georgii looked into her eyes and said. 'Sometimes I just wish things could last a little bit longer. Yes I know we have to go, but life and good times are like a 'Good' bottle of wine. You want to savour it for as long as possible.'

  'Are you saying Georgii Radetzky… that as far as we are concerned,' patting her stomach, and then drawing Pyotr and Anna close to her. 'We are nothing more to you, than a good old bottle of wine!'

  'No, no, no! I didn't mean it to sound like that.' Georgii was facing Yulia full on and Yulia was doing her damndest trying to keep her face straight. In the end she couldn't hold out any longer. Again they fell into each other's arms laughing. They walked back to the tug.

  Chapter Forty One

  Joseph Stalin had not been idle. Whilst Georgii was laughing on the river bank, 'The Commissar for Nationalities' had managed to get himself posted back to Moscow.

  It had annoyed him greatly, all the touring. It had been an unrelenting round of meetings with local soviets and he had felt that he had, unnecessarily, been sidelined to the Caucasus. As far as he was concerned, and he was an ambitious man, he needed to be at the political centre. The Caucasus, as far as Comrade Djugasvilli, nee Joseph Stalin, was concerned, might as well be Ulan Bator. Could be worse he thought, he could be in the Ukraine. He had to get back, and, with war brewing with Poland, war would be his ticket back. This time he was determined to worm his way back into favour. Even if it did mean toning down - a tad - his attitude and kissing Trotsky's arse. Fortunately for him he did not have to wait long for the summons.

  Arriving back in Moscow, he was relieved to find a different, more conciliatory, Lenin. War with Poland now preoccupied 'The Central Committee'. Into this, Stalin resolved to play the game, whilst at the same time, seeking out an opportunity to further his own political ambitions. The goal was to centralise, by any means possible, all power into his hands.

  At a meeting of 'The Committee' he was told that he going to be sent to the Western Ukraine. The place he was going to be sent to was Lvov. There he was going to organise the cities defence, in the face of Ukrainian Nationalists, helped out by the rapidly advancing Polish Army.

  But, whilst in the Ukraine, a telephone call from Tver changed everything. 'The Bitch' Trofimov had some news which she thought he would like to hear. Suddenly the ball was in his court. An opportunity to disrupt had presented itself. Also the trail on Radetzky had suddenly gone from cold to hot. After he had replaced the receiver; he pondered on the fact, amazing what a difference a phone call makes. This time he felt the advantage was all his. 'Fuck' their war, he thought socialism can only be achieved in one country, and that is here in, 'backward', Russia. Yes if need be, he would go along with those zealots of the 'Central Committee', who desperately wanted to spread the revolution Westward.

  But now he saw a chance to weaken Trotsky and, at the same time, catch Radetzky. And he was going to do it by using Radetzky's old 'Comrade in Arms' Brusilov as the bait. It was as the English liked to say, 'He was going to kill two birds with one stone.' This time, 'The Granite Faced Old Slag', had come up trumps. She could live a little bit longer, he thought.

  Comrade Trofimov had always felt that Moscow was too stifling. She had always loved the country, especially as she was descended from, so she said, minor, country nobility. But that was in the past, the future now lay in Tver. The very place her parents often used to stop off at on their way to St Petersburg. That was in the old days. She stared out of the window. She looked at the endless lines of refugees that now seemed to line every road. Trofimov studied their dirty faces.

  'How long, till we get to Tver,' she said.

  'Soon, the cities coming into view now,' the driver said.

  She thought about her brief. That was to deal with all dissenters harshly and to 'Sovietise' the city's inhabitants by using any means at her disposal. Comrade Trofimov pulled out her predecessors file out of her brief case and read through it. These bastards would pay and pay, they dearly would, for his death. She looked out of the window, it had now begun to drizzle. The car was crawling down the road. Trofimov's eyes fixed on a group of people sitting by the side of the road. It was a man wearing a thick set beard, and a tall, not unattractive woman. The man and the woman were accompanied by two children. She looked back at the man, somehow the face seemed familiar, but from where? But, try as she could, she could not place the face and yet, as the drizzle turned to rain, she could not get the man's face out of her mind.

  Hours later at a meeting of local soviet dignitaries, and long after Giorgii's party had disappeared into the forest, did she recognise the face, Comrade Trofimov then excused herself from the soiree and spent the next three hours trying to get a call placed to Moscow. There was someone who would like to know what she knew.

  'Yes,' the accented voice on the other end of the phone said.

  Chapter Forty Two

  As good as his word captain Constantinou turned up the next morning. He had quite a busy day in front of him. First he had to get his tugboat back into the water. Secondly he had to take Georgii's party to rendezvous with their 'Green' guides.

  The Greek, even though he had initially been wary of him, had grown to really like Georgii Radetzky, Yulia and young Pyotr and Anna, O'Reilly was a 'Dick', but then, he reasoned, you couldn't have it all, could you.

  Once the tug had been refloated and the boiler primed, Captain Constantinou took the party, now rejoined by Royston O'Reilly to meet their guides from the forest. Tearful farewells were said by the main road as the party waited for them to show up. No one noticed the face in the car staring at them, but then, the members of Georgii's party, by now, had only one thing on their mind and that was to 'Escape'.

  There was a whistle and it came from inside of the forest. The whistler whistled again. Constantinou replied with a similar whistle and signalled for the party to move towards the forest wall. Once inside, and he'd handed them over to their guides Constantinou beat a hasty retreat back to the tug. Steam was up and it was time to go. The skipper would never see Georgii, Yulia, O'Reilly and the kids again.

  The guide, whom Pyotr later described as a cross between Rasputin and Jesus Christ, led them down a path flanked by tall trees surrounded by thickets. At intervals down the track the party was joined by others keen to get out of 'The Socialist Utopia'. By nightfall, and now deep inside the forest, the guides led them to a makeshift 'Shanty' encampment. Talking to them, Georgii discovered that, over the previous eighteen months, people had just abandoned everything and had moved into the forest. The guide explained that people felt safe here. 'The Reds' seldom made forays into the forest, especially after what had happened in Tver and Tambov[31]. Here they stayed the night.

  Next morning they moved deeper into the forest. Georgii enquired whether anyone was afraid of the wolves. The guides reply was, they would rather take their chances with the 'Wolves' than 'The Reds'. Yulia complained of back ache but, apart from that they made good progress. When Georgii enquired how they would cross the frontline, he was told not to worry; they would find a way across. As the guide kept on reminding him, 'Providence was always a good friend.'

  Deeper and deeper they penetrated into the forest. Georgii, and everybody else, was stunned by its beauty. Tall trees sprung up out of the ground, they rose up towards the heavens. In places the trees were so close together, that even in the middle of the day, they almost blotted out the light. Georgii marvelled at this twilight world. With every passing day they moved further and further into the forest. Walking by day, camping by night, they moved in an ever westerly direction.

  Occasionally they would pass other groups, smugglers and people traffickers he surmised; the guides exchanged information and then moved on. Sometimes they would make detours, off of the track, and into the forest itself. One time they went to an old estate and picked up some people, then they carried on with their journey. The guide explained that, even though they were relatively safe in the forest, there were still agents of the 'Reds' and 'W
hites ‘at large, even out here. These people, the guide stressed, would not hesitate to sell you, or their grandparents, to them. You had to be careful all of the time; and careful meant, 'do not smoke and leave no refuse', he pointed out that carelessness on anyone's part ultimately would lead to discovery. They had to be vigilant.

  Sometimes they neared a town, and the guides would disappear to get hold of information and to see how the 'Lie of The Land' was. Other times they would come back and the party would either have to double back or make a long detour, especially if the 'Red Army' was active in the area.

  By his reckoning they must be in Belarus. But you couldn't tell; the guide never gave anything away. Even when he dealt with queries, he always played his cards close to his chest. In many ways he was very helpful, other times he was not. But that was small fry, they always had plenty of food and every night they always seemed to bivouac in a safe and dry place.

  On and on they went, hemmed in on both sides by tree, brush, bog, bush, stream, river and briar. Days became routine, up before dawn, no talking, and walk on till dusk. On long hikes Georgii's mind drifted back to the day when he was looking out across the icy Volga. He remembered the sense of foreboding he'd felt on that day. The all embracing feeling, that he was stepping into an unknown world and with it all came that dissolving feeling in the gut; he'd experienced it on many previous occasions in the war. As in those times he did what he always did, he bottled everything up inside, but this time it was different, before he'd always known that however things turned out, he, they, would all make it out alive. This time though, and this was the first time he'd felt like this, Georgii was not so sure this time, deep inside, he began to detect the slight feeling of uncertainty.

  He didn't dare speak of it to Yulia, or anyone else for that matter, about the way he felt. They would only tell him he was overreacting. Gerhardt had said, 'You're not Nicolai Tolstoy,' when he had tried to talk about the way he felt about things. But, all the same, the feeling lay there in the pit of his stomach and it refused to go away. It was only a feeling, but it persisted to the point where it would not go away; but, on many occasions when Georgii had had this feeling, this time he'd just have to learn to live with it, but still it would not go away.

  The forest now seemed to have no beginning or end. Shafts of light cut through the 'Rusty Dusty' colours and the browns and greens of forest. The forests canopy stretched from the west, heading east right across, bar one or two large open spaces, all the way to the Pacific. No one was going to find you here, the guide reassured him; Georgii just hoped their leader was right, because the aching in his gut, and previous life experience, was telling him otherwise.

  After one such time, when the guide had disappeared for a long time, only to return, telling them that they had to head further south, apparently there had been skirmishing ahead of them and the area was not safe. They were going to head for the safety of Luck. From there they would try and cross the front line, and make for Lvov, and then on to Krakow.

  As it turned out, it was easier said than done. The guide, after another such disappearance, explained to them that the Soviet advance had accelerated, at speed, towards 'The Vistula' river. Long after the conversation with the guide had finished, Georgii sat down and thought that, if the Poles had any sense, they would make a stand there. Right here, right on the river bank. Also he remembered the offensive of nineteen sixteen when the advance into the Carpathian Mountains, slowly, turned into a rout of the Austrians, and then Ludendorff's counterattack that had given them a dose of their own medicine. 'Aah nostalgia', Georgii thought.

  But that retreat had been hard to take. The army had disintegrated there and then. Looking back on it, it was there that the officer corps had lost faith in the leadership. It was there that the necessity for change in Russia had been borne. But, like all things it had not been immediately obvious. Even now, as he sat there sitting on a tree stump, slightly away from the others, he wondered what historians in twenty or thirty years' time would make of all this. How would they all be judged? Yulia came up to him with a cup of coffee, and then she put her arm around his shoulder and then she gave him a soothing kiss on the cheek. Afterwards, he gave her one of his long penetrating, loving, appreciative stares.

  'What is going through your mind Georgii,' she said.

  'Oh ... nothing much. I was just thinking about the present and the past. Don't ask me, which order it was all in,' he said.

  'Georgii! We are going to get out of this alive? Aren't we?'

  Of course we are. Don't worry Yulia, we'll soon be safe.' He held her hand firmly, and tightened his grip, as he said those words.

  They sat there in silence, under the bough of a mighty oak. In the silence they watched the pillars of sunlight as they filtered through forest roof. The bugs and flies in an instance were brilliantly illuminated only to disappear within a second. As Georgii watched, he felt the flies and bugs were metaphors for them all. You were born, you lived, you flourished, and then you died. Not necessarily in that order. But the more he thought about it, the more Georgii came to realise that you didn't have to be dead, in the physical sense, you could still carry on living. But you were dead in the emotive sense; in so much as you felt nothing for anyone, or anything. All through his adult and child life, he'd seen evidence of this; you could be emotionally dead, but still you carried on living. Back in Moscow he'd wondered about this, but Yulia had changed all that. There was a distant whistle that cut through the silent forest. Georgii and Yulia got up. It was time for their party to move on.

  The following day the faint rumble of thunder could be heard in the distance. Pyotr and Anna kept on asking when it would rain. Georgii could only reply soon. As the day progressed the sounds of thunder became more consistent. Georgii didn't have the heart to tell the two children that they were walking into a war zone. But soon he knew he would have to explain everything to them.

  The guide addressed the party. He explained to them all that, based on the intelligence information he had received from locals and so forth, and when he had been out on his various reconnaissance trips, it was now getting too dangerous to travel in the direction he had originally intended. He told them that they were now entering into an area of intense military activity. The guide explained that based on what he had managed to find out there was no conventional front line, due to the fact that the Polish army had retreated, in good order, towards the safety of Poland and the Vistula River. The area they now found themselves in was crawling with combatants from both sides. Their group was too big to travel as a single party. So he told them what he was going to do. Basically, he had decided to split the group up so they could take advantage of the relative confusion, and from here he would have to make two trips to the relative safety of Poland. They would draw straws on who went with which group.

  Two things happened that were serve notice on their honeymoon. The first was, Georgii felt a further disintegration in the pit of his stomach; the moment that the guide had told them of his plans, his bowel had begun to dissolve, he started to experience that 'age old' Georgii Radetzky sinking feeling. Thinking that 'History' was beginning to repeat itself and in light of previous, personal experiences, Georgii knew there was nothing that he could do to stop events unfolding, fate was decreeing, once again, that he was going to lose out. Georgii let out a short sigh.

  The second was shortly after the guide's speech. Pyotr came up to him and had explained that, for a long time, he had suspected that they were being followed. When, along with Anna he had gone to investigate, they were both quite shocked that their worst fears had been confirmed. But the real shock was, they were not being tracked by one group, they were indeed being tracked by two and it seemed that both groups were entirely ignorant of the other.

  Even with his delicate stomach and ever increasing aching pains, Georgii scolded the two children for not telling him sooner. But the worst was yet to come. The guide, out on one of his many recce, was in touch with the smaller of the
two groups. This group, in actual fact, was a group of one, occasionally joined by another.

  'Christ Almighty', he thought, this changes everything? Gripped in panic, Georgii weighed up the options. To do anything hasty might jeopardise their chances; so it seemed that they had no alternative but to, tentatively, go along with the guides plans. But if the opportunity arose, and they were all still together, they could all 'Cut and Run-For-It' when the opportunity presented itself.

  But the guide was beckoning everyone in the group over. He had the straws laid out in a row. He explained how it was going to work. Those who drew the short straw would lie low here, and wait until he returned, and then they would make up the main body of the second group that would head off in the direction of Poland and the safety of Warsaw. He then put the straws which, in actual fact, were quite long, or not so, bracken stems into his hat. They all took one. Anna and Pyotr drew long ones, as did he, but when he looked over towards Yulia, he was shocked to see that she had drawn a short one.

  Georgii asked if he could have a private word with the guide. They walked a little way into the forest. When he was out of earshot, he asked him if it would be alright if he could swap his straw with that of Yulia's. The guide 'ummed and aahed' and then said no, and squawked on that it would not be fair to the other members of the party, if people were not going to accept the luck of the draw. There could only be one draw, and then the guide made as if to walkback to the group.

  Georgii grabbed him by the arm and then, with his other hand, jabbed his pistol into the guides back. The guide realised that he had no alternative but to acquiesce. Even though he could see that their leader was grudgingly giving in. Georgii pushed him away. The guide pulled himself together and walked back, closely followed by Georgii, to the crowd.