Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  But meanwhile there was the Women’s Battalion — the Women’s Battalion of Death. Watching Mrs Pankhurst take the salute, Carlie felt the whole idea a transgression of the idea of female emancipation. Did some of these women have children, and if so, what would happen to them if their mothers died in battle? She loathed the whole notion of women masquerading as men, and especially in man’s last defensible role, that of soldier and killer.

  Following the review of the women, Carlie was invited to a reception for journalists and other visitors. She went back to her hotel room to get ready, feeling the excitement rise at this first chance to circulate and put out cautious feelers about foreign residents in the city.

  Her hotel room was scarcely salubrious. In the days of rioting and insurrection, raiders had taken most of the furniture, and she had to get by now with a jute bag filled with straw as a bed. She suspected the straw was infested with bugs. But with the state Petrograd was in, she supposed she was lucky to have a roof over her head.

  She performed a sketchy toilet, grimacing at her skinniness, and entered the reception with her heart knocking loudly against her uncushioned ribs. The soirée was in a miniature ballroom which must once have been beautiful. Now chandeliers had been wrenched from the ceilings, the walls desecrated with slogans and worse.

  She was beginning to think her task was hopeless: all the faces were strange, filled with suspicion and sometimes even hostility. She remembered what a member of the Suffragette party had said to her: ‘This is a city of spies and secret agents.’

  But then a Russian woman who had been talking to someone near her suddenly turned and said, ‘You are from Glasgow, no? I have been there. I am singer.’

  Carlie allowed her to explain how she had travelled most of the world, singing arias from the famous operas, and then when she had engineered her into a quiet corner, said almost conversationally, ‘Do you know of any other Glasgow people living here in Petrograd?’

  ‘I do not know —’ the woman began, then stopped. She turned her back quickly on the rest of the room and said urgently, ‘I will come to your hotel tonight. Talk now of other things.’

  ‘It’s the Hotel Tatiana, room six,’ said Carlie quietly. The woman’s eyes dilated with panic-stricken warning, so she said no more.

  She didn’t know when her visitor might come so she retired to her room early on the pretext of having a headache, and sat there on her straw bed, heart beating unevenly at the possibility of at last having news of Donald.

  She had almost dropped off to sleep, despite her vigilance, when there was a timid knock at her door, barely more than a rustle. She opened it and the woman, whose name was Anya, stepped in. She wore a black shawl over her hair and half-concealing her face.

  ‘I know concierge,’ she said. ‘He will not say I come here.’

  ‘Thank you for coming.’ Carlie laid her hand on the woman’s arm. ‘I am looking for my husband. His name is Donald Balfour. He is a dark, thin man, about medium height —’ She stopped. Anya’s eyes were on her watch and ring. Carlie removed them without demur, handing them over. ‘You can have them. Gladly.’

  ‘For food,’ said Anya. ‘For my child. Now listen, I take you now to house where foreigners are. I do not know if your husband may be there. If he is, you must go with him on train to Bjelo-Ostrow. It is your only chance. Past there, you will be safe. Understand?’

  Carlie nodded. She was already pushing everything she had into her carpet-bag, thinking how wise she had been to travel light. Anya asked her to give her some money to pay to the concierge on the way out.

  Once in the street, they flew through the dark protective night, hugging the buildings. Anya’s grasp never slackened on Carlie’s wrist. All the while in a curious, hoarse accent she related what it had been like in the city since the revolution.

  ‘The Tsar tried to come here. But the people stopped his train. He thought the Petrograd Garrison, the Cossacks, would save him, but they would not turn against the people. It was very bad here. The people had to queue all night for food and they were angry because it went to strangers with money, while old people died with the blood turning to ice in their veins. If you were stranger, you must hide, or you would be killed.’ Her voice softened in pity. ‘It is possible your husband die. I do not like to say it, but it might be so.’

  Two soldiers came down the centre of the roadway, smoking and swaying slightly, possibly drunk. Anya pulled Carlie into a doorway till they passed. Then they were running again, two fluttering shadows, till at last Anya turned down a small shabby sidestreet and stopped at a large decrepit building. Carlie saw a dull red chink coming from a blind in the basement.

  ‘I have sent word you come,’ said Anya. ‘Go down and tap on the window. They will let you in.’

  ‘How can I thank you?’ Carlie whispered. Anya’s mouth brushed her cheek. ‘One day I come back to Glasgow and see you. I will sing there. It is friendly city.’

  ‘Yes, please come,’ said Carlie. In a moment, there was a void in the dark where Anya had been.

  It was the loneliest moment Carlie had ever experienced. But fear lent her an unthinking courage. She tapped on the window and almost fell down the last of the basement steps as the door opened and a shaggy head peered out.

  The next thing she knew she was in a large kitchen, with warm, yeasty smells. An elderly woman was sitting by a wood fire, watching her unsmilingly. There was the thickset man who had let her in and two men in ragged clothes, sitting at a table and looking at her with mixed wariness and curiosity.

  One of the men rose and came towards her.

  ‘You are the woman from Glasgow, then?’ His accent was purest Geordie. His hand went out. ‘My name is Harry Macready. From Newcastle.’

  The other man rose slowly also and held out his hand. ‘Peter Macbride, from Musselburgh,’ he pronounced.

  ‘I’m looking for Donald Balfour, a Glasgow engineer, who is my husband,’ said Carlie, almost formally. ‘If you have been working here, you must have some news of him. A dark man, slender build, medium height —’

  Harry Macready took her arm and led her to a chair. She saw that he was filthy and emaciated, but his eyes, warm and sane, reassured her.

  ‘Yes, we know Donald,’ he said. ‘He’s been in this with us. He’s been sick, Mrs Balfour. We’ve all been starving. These good people here —’ he indicated the man and old woman — ‘have given us shelter, out of Christian charity. They even share their food, but there’s hardly anything of it.’

  ‘Donald,’ she said. The words had dried up in her throat. She began to sob, not knowing she was doing it. ‘Where is he? Tell me.’

  Harry took her over to a corner of the room and drew aside some curtains. ‘There,’ he said, without preamble. The dark head was turned to the wall, the figure covered with mangy fur skins and ragged knitted blankets. ‘He sleeps a lot,’ said Harry.

  She dropped to her knees and said his name. The figure stirred sluggishly, slowly, as though from a dream. He was thinner and dirtier than even Harry or Peter. His eyes opened and he looked at her without recognition at first. Then his pink tongue began to work around cracked lips. ‘Carlie,’ he said.

  She put her arms around the bundle of filthy rags.

  ‘I’ve come to take you home. It’s all right. I’m here.’

  ‘Carlie?’ he said again.

  She wiped the tears away carelessly from her face. ‘Can you stand, darling? Can you walk?’

  He got up, like a stiff old dog. She saw that all the flesh had fallen away from his bones, so that he looked like the Christ-figure in some medieval icon. She cried out in protest and horror. She felt as though reason was about to desert her, as though she saw humanity being crucified everywhere, sickening and dying and rotting into bones and rags.

  ‘Steady,’ said Harry Macready. ‘Would you have a tot of anything on you?’

  She brought Donald forward to the table and rummaged through her bag to bring out a flask of brandy. She held it
tenderly to Donald’s lips, then everyone else in the room had a few sips.

  ‘Carlie,’ he said at last, in a more normal voice. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘On a number ten tram,’ she responded.

  Through the night they went over the plans for getting away to the Finnish frontier. Bjelo-Ostrow. Carlie tried to persuade Harry and Peter to come with them, but they obviously had some plan of their own almost ready to put into action. She insisted on giving them her gold bar brooch which they could exchange for money or food.

  ‘If you’re prepared to pay over the odds for tickets, you’ll get on the train,’ Harry explained. ‘The difficult part is when you get to the frontier. Sometimes you get passed through without any trouble. At other times, they question every single person on the train.’

  Carlie looked at Donald. ‘It’s a risk we have to take,’ she said.

  They spent the rest of the night preparing for the journey. With a pair of nail-scissors, Carlie cut Donald’s hair. The house had no water but there was a cupful in a small wooden bowl with which they cleaned his hands and face. The old Russian brought a jacket from a cupboard to replace the rags on Donald’s back and the woman gave Carlie a shawl so that she would look more like the other women passengers next day.

  They had schooled her how to ask for two tickets for Bjelo-Ostrow in Russian. When she passed the money across the counter the next morning, the clerk said officiously there were no seats. Calmly she pushed more money towards him. The tickets were hers.

  Fear. It was a kind of infection you caught in the streets. But it was outweighed by her concern for Donald. He looked so deathly ill she was afraid he would drop in his tracks. Yet once they were on the train, and it had started, he caught her eye with a glint of triumph that made her feel as if the sun were being poured over her.

  They were stopped at Bjelo-Ostrow. Everyone was made to get out on the frozen platform. Horrified, she saw that the people ahead were subjected to the most rigorous searching. A woman screamed as an official ripped the hem of her skirt and gold coins fell out on to the snow.

  She took Donald’s arm as they shuffled forward, trying to weigh up the temper of the officials and glad when they got the youngest and, it seemed to her, the one who spent least time on the formalities.

  Covertly and swiftly she pushed the tiny packet into his right hand. It contained her seed pearls and gold locket set with turquoise. Without flinching, she looked straight at him in total, naked supplication. If he arrested her, there was nothing more she could do. But, expertly, he palmed the small package into his own inside pocket. She felt his eyes rake over her figure with a certain amount of lustful interest. He muttered something in Russian that made a woman ahead turn and gaze at Carlie in open contempt. But he let them pass through. She was sure, as they stepped forward, that he would change his mind and call them back. Second by second she waited. But it was growing dark. He let the night swallow them up.

  As the train began its journey through Finland, she seemed to catch images and distortions of her own unholy terror in the darkling windows. Yet gradually the realization of what they had accomplished took over. She felt Donald relax into sleep next to her. She snuggled against him. The train wheels sang an insistent song of freedom and joy.

  *

  At the Casualty Station, that July, there were times when Alisdair Kilgour could hear the nightingales. He listened for them at the edge of the woods, when the quiet came after the bombardment. Their sound emptied and purified his tired mind.

  You had to keep going on the small things of immense value. A clean pair of socks. A cloud shape. Flowers the cook had grown. A sycamore leaf lying in the palm of your hand. Its shape. Its veins. Only the small things made any sense.

  When it came to the third battle of Ypres, he began to feel mortally weary. On the Messines ridge, where Haig was ‘straightening out’ the Ypres salient, he had to cope with the casualties of gas warfare as well as those who were wounded.

  Passing down rows of stretchers, with barely room to stand or kneel between, he saw men gasping for air like landed fish, green stuff oozing from their lips. Some he could treat, especially if the type of gas could be identified; some he had to send back to Blighty, and some, too far gone, he could not help.

  It was worse for him when the casualty was some pit lad from Lanarkshire or ’prentice from the Bridgeton slums. The sense of superiority he had once felt because of his background and university education had forsaken him once and for all and he could feel only rage that these stubborn, invincible men, some of whom had been fighting now for three years, had been hungry, lousy, wet and cold for most of that time.

  Life had given them little enough before they came here, and nearly ten thousand from the Glasgow battalions had left their bones on the battlefield. The survivors should have had half a loaf a day. Often it was no more than one slice, with hard biscuits for tea. The nearer you got to battle, the more food was lost, stolen or sold.

  Yet when they lay gasping through gassed lungs, or groaning from amputated limbs, they often managed to reassure him that they were ‘all right’. He had brought the padre to one Govan boy dying of wounds, who had rounded on him, saying, ‘I’m no’ as bad as all that, Doctor. I’m going back to my wife,’ and then turned his face to the wall and died.

  As the main attack at Ypres gave way to the swamps of Passchendaele, he heard the nightingales no more. He felt as though all his life-energy was being sucked down into the damned, impenetrable mud. It was then he found he was thinking with a curious, hallucinatory persistence about Tina. He could see her so very clearly in his mind’s eye, as he had first met her. A little quiet dark girl, whose smile always changed her utterly.

  He had been in love with her. Not she with him. And he was someone who had always had women doting upon him. His mother. The sisters. He had thought love and submission and total dedication every man’s due.

  When the letter had come from Sandia to tell him about Tina’s baby, he had been too busy with heavy casualties to let it sink in. It had done, after a time. He had felt jealousy and betrayal and anger and yearning ache through his bones like a destroying fever. Sandia had not wanted him to hear about it second-hand.

  Well, now it did not matter. There had been the false euphoria after Byng’s Third Army took Cambrai and they had pealed victory bells out over London. There had been no reserves to back up the advance of the tanks and he had had to patch up the men who had fought so hard for such a hollow victory. ‘Green’ men, just out from Blighty, without the resistance or the experience of ‘Kitchener’s Army’.

  He was too weary for it to matter. The Germans were advancing once again. Both sides were throwing everything they had into the desperate fighting — tanks, cavalry, planes and men.

  There were never enough beds or stretchers or nurses or medicine or bandages or hours to sleep. Now it did not matter. Let her flit in and out of his mind, like a flower or a butterfly. There was a foolish, secret comfort in it. He felt a fatal ennui most of the time. He was most probably going to die. Most of the men he had set out with had died. Every day he walked in the company of the dead.

  But then, through the sensation of attenuated nightmare there threaded something they were calling victory. It had started when the twelve American battalions arrived. It grew stronger as Foch belaboured the Hindenberg Line and the Allied armies in Salonika reduced Bulgaria to collapse.

  What would they do with it, when it arrived? The broken men, who would never walk or see again. Those who hopped on one leg or tied laces with their teeth and one arm. The skinny, pimpled, valiant lads who’d survived bombardment and come out the other side as men. What would he do with it?

  Did they realize at home, he wondered, those who talked so facilely of victory, that it was still being paid for, in what they alleged were these last days of the struggle? He knew he was not alone in these angry resentments. There was a great void between those who had slogged the brutal days out on the battlefield a
nd those who had remained at home.

  On a day of torrential rain and thunderstorm the General sent for him to tell him he had been recommended for decoration.

  ‘Nearly four years’ service, Captain,’ said the white-moustached dignitary. ‘We’re very proud of you. You’ve been a lucky man to survive, what?’

  He agreed that he had been lucky. When the rain stopped he sat on an upturned bucket outside the doctors’ tents and listened in vain for the nightingales. In the distance, the bombardment began again.

  The General had refused to go inside the Moribund Ward. He had gone green at the gills and pleaded lack of time. Soon, Alisdair knew, he himself would have to go back inside the two large tents, laced together and packed with dying officers and men. The last instalment?

  They were waiting for supplies of morphia. If he could go into the tent with the means of easing agony, he did not mind so much. He went to look for the padre, knowing he could not go in there again alone.

  The padre took one side, and he walked down the other. A young nurse not long out from Blighty, her eyes cupped with purple, accompanied him.

  ‘Could you look at this one, Doctor?’ she pleaded. ‘He was brought in five minutes ago. A stomach wound.’

  There was nothing he could have done. Nothing in all the world could have saved this one. A shot of morphia could have eased him into Eternity with dignity. But the morphia had not come. He had been making noises but now they were quietening. His face held that dreadful grey porridgy pallor that heralded death.

  Alisdair looked down at Wallace Mackenzie.

  He was never to know if Wallace recognized him, if some stab of recognition penetrated his agony.

  ‘Put me away, doc,’ he pleaded. His voice rose above the groans and tore at the air like a savage beast. ‘Put — me — out — of — it.’

  Alisdair took his hand. The young nurse took the other. Together they tried to make him a little easier. They put water to his lips. At last his eyes closed, A look that was almost of ease spread across his features. They did not have to sit with him for long. Life ebbed away peacefully, and after the rain the nightingales began to sing again. Deep in the wood they sang.