by Sam Eastland
‘Never mind the odds,’ said Pekkala. ‘Can you help me?’
‘I can try,’ replied Kovalevsky. ‘Let’s talk about it over dinner this evening at the Café Tilsit. That is your favourite place, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Pekkala replied in confusion, ‘but how . . . ?’
He was interrupted by a loud and jarring bell which clanged in the hallway, indicating that the next lesson had begun.
‘Six o’clock!’ Kovalevsky stepped back inside his classroom. ‘Make sure you are punctual,’ he said with a smile as he began to close the door. ‘Teachers don’t like to be kept waiting.’
By the time their request
By the time their request to withdraw from the grounds of the Catherine Palace had been granted, the remnants of the 5th Anti-Aircraft Battery 35th Rifle Division had already been retreating for two days. Their new orders were to proceed to Leningrad, where the three remaining trucks would attempt to enter the city before the German encirclement was complete. If successful, they were to be deployed against the bombing raids which were now going on around the clock.
Barkat was driving at the rear of the column when, as they passed through a village so small it wasn’t even marked upon their maps, an old woman wearing an ankle-length blue dress and white shawl beckoned to them from the front gate of her garden.
‘What does that woman want?’ barked Commissar Sirko, sitting beside Barkat and smoking two cigarettes at the same time.
‘It looks like she’s holding a bottle,’ replied Barkat.
‘A bottle? Stop the truck!’
Obediently Barkat pulled to the side of the road and Sirko jumped down on to the road. He strode across to the woman. ‘What is it, granny? What have you got for me?’
She handed him an ornate glass container of the kind used to hold home-made vodka.
Sirko leaned over the garden’s white picket fence, which was twined with purple chicory flowers and kissed the woman on her sunburned, wrinkled cheek.
The old woman nodded and smiled and patted the air in farewell as Sirko walked back to the waiting truck, the bottle raised triumphantly above his head. ‘They love me!’ he announced to Stefanov and Ragozin, who had stuck their heads out from under the canvas flap at the back of the truck in order to see why they had stopped. ‘Even though we’re leaving them to an uncertain fate among the Fascists, they don’t hold it against us. You see, Stefanov . . .’
‘Are you going to share that?’ asked Ragozin.
‘Go find your own vodka-making granny,’ replied Sirko. He drank half the bottle before the woman’s house was even out of sight.
When they stopped an hour later to change a flat tyre, Sirko threw up on the side of the road. ‘I drank it too fast,’ he remarked, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
After struggling to catch up with the other two trucks, which had driven on ahead, Barkat eventually found them pulled off the road in a forest, where they were settling in for the night. Thick stands of white birch, with loose bark curled like scrolls against the bone-white trunks, spread away dizzyingly into the depths of the forest.
Rather than unpack the truck, they lay underneath it, wrapped in their brown rain capes, with rucksacks for pillows.
Sirko threw up again.
Stefanov, lying beside him, could smell from the vomit that what Sirko had drunk was not vodka but wood alcohol.
‘That witch has killed me,’ whispered Sirko, touching his fingertips against his face. ‘I think I’m blind.’
He died before dawn.
They wrapped Sirko in his rain cape and buried him in a clearing in a pine forest, his helmet on a stick to mark the grave.
From then on, Sergeant Ragozin was in charge.
Later that morning, the three trucks of the convoy set out across a marsh, travelling on corduroy roads made from thousands of tree trunks laid out side by side over the swampy ground.
Halfway across, with Barkat still driving in the rear, the ZiS-5 slid off the corduroy road and their vehicle became stranded in the mud. The rest of the convoy pushed on, with a promise to send help as soon as they had reached Leningrad.
‘But you can’t leave us here!’ Ragozin pleaded. ‘Not in this miserable place!’
His only reply was a wave from the driver of the second truck, as it teetered away across the swamp.
‘If that selfish bastard hadn’t drunk poisoned alcohol, I would never be in this predicament!’ wailed Ragozin.
‘And if he hadn’t been so selfish with it, neither would the rest of us,’ replied Barkat.
The two other men watched Ragozin as he marched dementedly up and down the rotted tree-trunk road, stamping at the ground as if the earth itself required punishment. ‘I am a civilised man! I used to have the most popular radio programme in the entire Soviet Union!’ He shook a knotty fist up at the sky. ‘People from all over the world wrote to me. Once I got a letter from Vanuatu and I don’t even know where that is!’
‘I knew he’d crack eventually,’ said Barkat, scratching at his week-old growth of beard.
Ragozin glowered at the men with bloodshot eyes. ‘What are you looking at? Haven’t you ever seen a man in torment before?’
‘Not one as civilised as you,’ Stefanov replied.
When they woke up the next day, they discovered that the 25-mm gun had sunk so deeply into the mud that it threatened to drag the truck down with it. In desperation, they unhitched the gun from the truck and in less than a minute the 25-mm had vanished completely into the reeking black ooze.
It took them three hours before they had finally extricated their truck and eased it back on to the corduroy road, by which time they were dangerously low on fuel.
They managed to reach the village of Vinusk on the other side of the swamp before running completely out of petrol. They found the place deserted but intact. As of that moment, the three men had no idea which side of the line they were on.
The autumn sky glowed powdery blue and the air flickered with late-hatching insects in a light turned strange and gold. The breeze smelled sweetly of poplar leaves, which fell in cascades of yellow upon the wreckage of the battlefield.
For their command post, Ragozin selected a house in which a deep bunker had previously been dug beneath the floor. The bunker was reached by a staircase cut into the clay and reinforced with slabs of iron tank track. The tank which had supplied the tracks, a massive Soviet KV-2‚ lay with its turret blown off in a shallow pond across the road.
Judging from the equipment they found, including rifles, a box of ration food and a Golub radio precariously balanced on a collapsible army desk, the bunker had been built by Russian soldiers. The previous tenants had even left behind a map, pinned with bayonets to the earth walls of the bunker. Red and blue grease pencil lines, which marked the positions of opposing forces‚ had been drawn, erased, then drawn again so many times that in places the map was illegible.
Perched on a crate that had once contained land mines, Stefanov turned on the radio and listened through veils of radio static to a Russian artillery commander giving target coordinates for a barrage that was about to begin.
Beside him, on a bed made out of wooden planks with a chicken-wire mattress, Barkat was taking a nap.
‘Grid seven,’ said the voice on the radio, ‘point H-12.’
Satisfied to hear that somebody in the Red Army was doing more than just retreating from the Germans, Stefanov pulled a slightly rotten pear from one pocket and a stag-handled switchblade from the other. He pressed a button on the side of the knife and the blade flashed out with a noise like someone sucking their teeth.
Barkat sat up suddenly. ‘Do I smell food?’
Stefanov sighed. It was not a very big pear and he had been hoping to eat it by himself. But now he cut off a slice, speared it on the end of the knife and offered it to Barkat.
Barkat reached across, took the slice off the switchblade and crammed it into his mouth. Then, from around his neck, he pulled a small white linen bag c
ontaining his ration of machorka tobacco. Next, Barkat produced a neatly folded page from the Izvestia. He did not read the news, but no rolling papers were issued with army tobacco rations and the wafer-thin teture of Izvestia was best for cigarettes. Barkat tore off a finger-length strip of paper and wiped it on his matted greasy hair before folding it into a cigarette with some flakes of machorka from the sweat-stained bag. ‘What are you looking so thoughtful about?’ asked Barkat.
‘To tell you the truth,’ admitted Stefanov, ‘I am having some trouble understanding the difference between Fascism and Communism.’
‘You think too much. They are the Fascists. We are the Communists. What more is there to know?’
Stefanov gave a dissatisfied grunt.
‘What’s on the radio?’ asked Barkat. ‘Any music?’
‘Only if you count the Stalin organ.’
‘Why don’t you come upstairs and get some fresh air?’
‘Maybe later,’ he said.
‘Where’s Ragozin?’
‘He went to the crossroads at the end of the village.’
‘Why?’
‘He said he spotted some wild strawberries growing by the side of the road when we drove in here.’
‘Idiot! Strawberries don’t grow this time of year. They were probably poisonous mushrooms.’ As Barkat climbed the stairs, he mumbled a song called ‘Katyusha’. ‘Apple trees and pears in blossom . . .’
Under his breath, Stefanov sang along: ‘. . . on the river morning mist . . .’
When Barkat had gone, Stefanov rose to his feet and walked across the muddy floor to look at the map. Placing a finger at each end of the map, where the grid references began, he traced the coordinates he had heard on the radio. ‘Grid 7, H-12,’ he muttered to himself. His fingertips came together over a cluster of black freckles on the rubberised canvas, each one representing a house. The name of the village was barely legible, its letters all but hidden by the wrinkles on the canvas. He stared at the spot until at last he could decipher the word. Vinusk. The breath caught in his throat. His fingers dropped from the map.
‘Barkat,’ he whispered, and then his voice rose to a shout. ‘Barkat!’
His voice was drowned out by the shriek of incoming Soviet rockets, as if a train were hurtling past at full speed just above the house. In two long strides, Stefanov crossed the room and dived under the desk on which the radio had been set up. As he crawled up against the wall, he heard the clattering roar as a shell hit the road and then a long hiss as another landed in the pond. A third landed somewhere behind the house.
Stefanov closed his eyes, jammed his fingers into his ears and gritted his teeth as explosions began to follow each other so quickly that he could not distinguish one from another.
He felt a sudden pressure in his ears, like diving too deep under water. The floor bucked. Then the roof caved in. The air was filled with metallic-smelling smoke. He cried out and his mouth filled with smoke. The radio slid off the table and its metal corner smashed him in the head. Stunned by the blow, Stefanov heard a far-off ringing like a single struck piano key whose tone refused to fade away. And suddenly everything stopped except that single note which seemed to rise in pitch until he felt his skull must shatter like a crystal glass. In that moment, Stefanov felt neither pain, nor fear, so separated from the spark of his own life that it was as if he had never existed. For how long this lasted, he had no idea. It might have been a few seconds before the sound vanished abruptly and, in its place, he heard the crackling of flames.
Stefanov opened his eyes. At first he saw nothing. He wondered if the concussion had blinded him. Bringing his hand to his face, he could vaguely make out the wall of his approaching palm. He crawled out from under the broken table, through rays of sunlight that punched through the smoke, leaning like crooked pillars among the fallen timbers of the roof. Shakily, he climbed to his feet, shedding a garland of tangled radio wires from around his shoulders. The smoke was already beginning to clear. The maps on the wall had been shredded as if by the claws of giant cats. Where the roof had fallen in, clumps of thatch littered the floor. Lying on a heap of mouldy straw in front of him was a cluster of baby mice, eyes not yet open, their tiny pink bodies twined together as they nosed about in the grey air. Above him, visible through holes torn in the roof, fat cumulus clouds wandered by in the blue.
Stefanov climbed the staircase and stepped out into a world that he no longer recognised. Blast craters crackled and smouldered in the road. Licks of flame stabbed out of the ground. Trees which had lined the street were splintered at chest height. Where houses had once stood, he now saw only fragmented walls and chimneys, from which rose coils of thick black smoke.
Their truck, which had been hidden behind the building, was slumped forward on punctured tyres, its engine torn away.
Barkat lay beside the ruined vehicle. A bird could have flown through the hole in his chest.
At the sight of his friend’s blood, mingled with the blue-green puddles of spilled radiator fluid, Stefanov dropped to his knees. With tears blurring his vision, Stefanov gathered Barkat in his arms. Lifting the body over his shoulder, he set off towards the crossroads where Ragozin had gone to find the strawberries. As he stumbled under the weight, fresh perspiration doused the white salt blooms of old sweat on his clothes. Barkat’s face thumped against Stefanov’s back and the dead man’s boots trembled in a rhythm with his stride.
Stefanov reached the crossroads. Here, as well, artillery had cratered the ground.
Rain dripped on Stefanov’s head, merging with sweat as it trickled down his forehead. He wiped it from his face and glancing at his reddened fingertips realised that what had fallen on him was blood, not water. Struggling to wipe it off as quickly as he could, he looked up and saw Ragozin’s body tangled high in the branches of a tree, where he had been thrown by the blast. Ragozin’s back was folded almost double, his face strangely misshapen, like a waxwork figure melting in the sun.
There was no way to bring Ragozin down. Stefanov had to leave him. Still carrying Barkat, he stumbled on towards a town, whose rooftops he could see in the distance.
Another kilometre along the road, he met a column of Russian infantry heading west to stop the German advance. Stefanov climbed up on a grassy embankment while the soldiers filed past.
Gently, he set Barkat on the ground. The dead man collapsed in a sitting position, slumped against Stefanov’s legs like a broken marionette.
The soldiers marched in good order, faces hidden under the flared rims of their helmets. Over their left shoulders, each man carried a rolled blanket, the ends of which were stuffed into the little aluminium buckets that served as mess kits. A few of the soldiers glanced nervously at the corpse.
Once the column had gone by, Stefanov shouldered the body and continued on beneath grey clouds tasselled with rain.
Pekkala arrived
Pekkala arrived at the Café Tilsit at 5.30, half an hour before the meeting was due to take place. It was his custom to arrive early for meetings. This gave him time to study his surroundings, even those which were as familiar to him as the Tilsit. Out of habits that had been drilled into him since his first days of training with the Okhrana, he never sat with his back to a window or a door, but always positioned himself against a wall by an exit, preferably the kitchen, through which he could escape if needed. The other advantage of being near the kitchen was that anyone entering the restaurant through the service entrance would inevitably be halted by the staff. The change in tone of their voices was as good as any watchdog, even if he could not hear what they were saying. And if, as was likely, the intruder responded by pulling a gun on any waiter or dishwasher who tried to bar his way, even if he did not pull the trigger, the sudden silence from the kitchen was equally efficient in warning him that something was not right.
No matter how safe Pekkala knew his surroundings to be, whenever circumstances forced him to sit facing away from a window or a door, he felt the skin crawl on the back of h
is neck.
These rules of survival had been so engrained into Pekkala’s mind that he no longer gave them any conscious thought.
The café was bustling as usual for that time of the evening. Most of the customers sat at long tables, elbow to elbow, strangers side by side, enjoying the strange solitude that came with being alone in such a crowded place. As Pekkala made his way towards his usual table at the back, he saw that it was already occupied. As he turned to look for an alternative, the figure at his chosen place raised a hand and smiled.
It was only then that Pekkala realised the man was Kovalevsky, who had arrived even earlier, no doubt with the same instincts as Pekkala’s.
The two men sat hunched over the little table, elbows resting on the bare wood, not knowing where to begin after so many years apart.
In spite of the years since they’d last seen each other, Pekkala felt immediately at ease with Kovalevsky. Their shared past had given them a particular angle of vision on the world which could not be blunted by time.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t show?’ asked Kovalevsky.
‘You’re here now‚’ replied Pekkala. ‘That’s what matters.’
‘I see you are not wearing your weapon.’
‘I knew I wouldn’t need it.’
With a smile, Kovalevsky drew open his coat, showing that he’d also come unarmed. ‘Ever since you stepped into my classroom this afternoon, I’ve been wondering how you tracked me down.’
‘You talk in your sleep,’ replied Pekkala.
‘I what?’
Without offering any further explanation, Pekkala asked a question of his own. ‘How on earth did you know I came here to the Tilsit?’
‘I come here myself from time to time. I’ve seen you here.’
Now it was Pekkala who seemed baffled. ‘How is it that I didn’t spot you?’
‘One thing I did not forget from my days with Myednikov is how to vanish in a crowded room. Besides, when a man is dead, you do not look for him. In that way, at least, Dzerzhinsky did me a favour.’