Murder and Revolution

by Evelyn Weiss

  “Take off his jacket; use it to tie him. And, Professor, do you have that handkerchief? I’ll gag him so he can’t make a sound.”

  We look out into the darkened corridor. To our right are the steps leading down to the lobby; we can see light down there, and hear the noise of talking: it sounds as if more of Kılıç’s troops have come into the courthouse. I dread to think of what they have been doing today… or of what they might do to us.

  But Yuri points silently along the passage to our left, and whispers. “I’m not using the flashlight yet. We must be like cats in the night.”

  He leads us along the corridor. I’m just behind him, holding Mariam’s hand. We go a few paces, then Yuri pushes open a door on our left, and I feel air on my face. I can’t see it, but we’re looking out on the courtyard.

  There’s no moon, but a few scattered stars mark the shape of the sky above the surround of blank walls. Yuri puts his hand on my shoulder, to signal to me to wait. He steps out alone into the courtyard without a sound. We can’t see what he’s doing, but then I feel his hand again on my elbow; a gentle tug forward. It’s a signal for us all to step into the courtyard. I go forward ten paces, then I hear the faintest whisper from Yuri.

  “We’re at the hatch, and I’ve opened it. Now, I will drop down into it, holding the edges of the hole with my hands so I can pull myself out again if it’s full of oil. But if I’m able to get right down inside the pipe, I’ll put on the flashlight.”

  I hear the tiniest sound, his feet grazing on the brickwork, as he lowers himself. Then I see dim, blood-red light below me. Yuri has cupped his hand over the end of the flashlight, so no light shows up here in the courtyard. He signals to me to lower Mariam to him. Moments later, I dangle my own feet over the edge: Yuri grips my calves, and I slide down; then he holds my waist. “Take great care to keep standing, Agnes. Now, can you hold the flashlight while I help the others down? Keep your hand over the end of it.”

  Within a minute we’re all inside the pipe, and Yuri pulls the hatch down on us. I take my hand off the lamp of the flashlight, and we look around.

  It’s horribly claustrophobic. The pipe is four feet or so in diameter; I’m bent over, but Yuri and Rufus have to crouch. The smell of oil is overwhelming, and the whole interior of the tunnel is coated in sticky, shiny black, like tar. The oil is pooled on the floor of the tunnel; my shoes are covered.

  I see the professor’s face in the flashlight, looking intently at us all. “Listen carefully. There are dangers down here. Perhaps not as bad as Kılıç and his murdering mob – but we could still die down here.

  Firstly, after a few minutes, the oil will begin to irritate your skin where it touches: your feet will start to feel they are burning. Secondly, crude oil gives off noxious gases such as toluene: we will all have bad headaches, and start to feel dizzy. Those feelings will get worse as we go along. And of course, take great care not to slip over and get covered with oil.”

  Yuri leads us forward, shining the flashlight down the pipeline. The glistening circles of the oil-coated walls recede endlessly before us, dimming into faraway blackness. We inch our way forward, time goes by, but nothing changes; my view is always the same. I feel the tunnel is hypnotizing me. Step, step. Under my feet, it’s like walking in maple syrup: the suction of the oil pulling at my shoes, as I move my feet forwards.

  The fumes are affecting me, earlier than I expected. My head feels stuffed with cotton wool, and, like a dream, I see the tunnel ahead as the barrel of a gun, the rifling spiralling us along into a dark distance. I have an illusion I’m sliding forward, powerlessly pushed along by an invisible current: my head swims. My eyes are stinging, like vinegar on my eyeballs. I keep blinking, and try to focus on stepping carefully. “Follow Yuri, hold on to Mariam” I say to myself, over and over, like a mantra. But even my inner voice seems caught up into the current, moving me towards the blackness like a twig carried by a stream.

  Behind Mariam, Axelson speaks again.

  “The gases are affecting me, and probably all of us. We’re at risk of hallucinations, or even unconsciousness. Captain Sirko, is there an inspection hatch soon where we could get some air?”

  “There’s one right here.” Yuri pushes at a dark space in the ceiling, I hear a hatch grinding as it rises, and suddenly there’s air in my nostrils. I feel like my head is being cleaned of dirty fuzz. We take it in turns to stand directly underneath the hatch. After a few minutes of recovery, we carry on along the pipe. Then after another ten minutes, Yuri lifts another hatch, and then we carry on; repeating and repeating. Soon, I feel like I’m walking on smoking coals, and my eyes burn in my head, but all any of us can do is keep walking to the next hatch: breathe deeply, then walk on again.

  After an eternity, I hear the professor’s voice. “How long have we been going, Captain Sirko?”

  “About two hours. At this pace, that’s maybe a mile.”

  “How far to go?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  I try not to think about what is ahead. The oilfields will be guarded, I feel sure, by Ottoman soldiers. It’s possible there may be fighting there, and fires: indeed, the place might well be an inferno.

  If we can get through that, our hope is to find a way out beyond the oil wells and down to a quieter part of the coast. In studying the local area, Yuri found out about several fishing hamlets within a few miles of the oilfields. If we can get to the shore before dawn, we may be able to find a fisherman’s boat and steal it. Then, it’s about a hundred miles along the coast to the border with Iran. But if escaping the oilfields takes longer, then we’ll have to lie low all day tomorrow. And all of us are half-covered in oil. I realise that, for us to survive, several things have to all go exactly right for us. Then I try to stop that thought, and just concentrate on stepping –

  “Look!”

  Yuri is holding up another hatch. But this time, instead of blackness through the gap, we see a red sky. Fire.

  Yuri pulls himself up through the hatch, and hisses down at us. “We’re next to an oil derrick; the top of it is burning. We’d better get out of the pipe.”

  I lift Mariam; Yuri takes her from my grasp, then lifts me too; the professor and Rufus follow me. We look around us. In the glow of the fire, I see Yuri smile grimly.

  “When they draw pictures of Hell, it looks like this.”

  He’s right. The livid light around us is blood-red. Here and there in the night sky, flames blaze at the top of derricks, crackling and leaping like demons. The air is roasting hot, and clouds of black soot billow past us. Yuri points his finger into the gloom.

  “I think that is the way out of here.” A rough track leads forward among the forest of derricks.

  “What’s that?” Despite the stinging soot, Mariam’s eyes are alert and watchful. She is pointing to something far ahead of us, something big. It’s standing on flat ground a hundred yards beyond the last of the derricks. And then, I hear the most welcome sound I can imagine.

  Rufus is swearing.

  In the lurid glow, we see a familiar shape. I suppose no-one, not the defenders or the attackers of Baku, knew how to fly it. Miraculously, it appears intact, exactly as we left it, sitting there on the runway.

  “This is the damnedest luck ever! And the burning derricks – they light the airfield, like bloody broad daylight! Taking off will be easy. They’ve even left the rope ladder in place. But – I’ll still need to refuel, before I can fly her.”

  We head over to the shed that we saw, all those weeks ago, when we landed. Sitting behind it are two large drums.

  “Sirko, Prof – can you give me a hand to lift these and pour the fuel in?”

  I look at Rufus. “We’ll all help. The more people lift the drums, the quicker we can refuel the aircraft. We need to move fast: there are probably Ottoman soldiers in the oilfields.”

  Panting and puffing, we roll the fuel drums over the baked clay of the airfield to the plane. Even for five of us, the drums are heavy to lift, but we m
anage to hoist them up next to the airplane’s fuel intake. We hear the comforting glugging sound of pouring fuel. It’s a messy job: fuel spills over my arms, splashes my face and chest, but I don’t care. Now the second drum… and now, it’s nearly empty. The final gallons splash into our airplane’s fuel tank.

  Like a punch, the drum is knocked from our hands. The clang in my ears is a bullet hitting metal.

  “Leave it! Get in the plane!” Yuri’s shouting at us, and I hear the sliding bolt of the rifle that he took from the guard in the courthouse. He lifts the gun to his shoulder, and fires.

  Rufus has climbed the rope ladder already; he’s clambering into the cockpit. I lift Mariam to him, and he bundles her into the space behind his pilot’s seat. I look up at the two of them. Their faces are oddly alike; pale in the night, edged with red light from the fires. I look into Mariam’s wondering eyes, her open mouth. I can’t tear my eyes away from her, and something snaps in my mind.

  I see the dead children again.

  My whole body feels awash with horror, and I feel my flesh surging with a hot, raw feeling that I’ve never known before. Rage against the murderers. I want to hurt them, kill them. I can feel my blood pumping, a brutal rhythm banging in my brain.

  I still have the gun from the lake at Tri Tsarevny. I pull it out and hold it in front of me. It’s a mere useless decoy, of course. But in the light of the burning oilfields, I stand, pointing it in the direction of our unseen attackers. It’s like I’m watching myself; this mad woman who doesn’t care if she dies, who is making herself a target to distract our attackers, so the plane and its occupants can escape.

  Holding the gun out in front of me, I start to walk across the open space of the airfield, in the direction of the gunfire.

  Yuri fires again. He must be able to see the men who are shooting at us, because I hear a scream from the darkness below the derricks. He’s hit one of them. But now, I hear Yuri’s voice, yelling at me. I can almost feel the sound.

  “Agnes, don’t be a fool! Get into the plane now! I’ll hold the soldiers off.”

  The voice cuts through my trance; I come back to my senses. I just obey Yuri; I run back to the airplane, and grab the rope ladder. As I climb, Rufus clutches my elbows and drags me up into the seat beside Mariam. As he does, he hisses at me. “If you want to help, Agnes, then look after Mariam. She’s terrified.”

  Yuri is still standing on the ground, rifle pointed out into the darkness. He holds the gun in one hand and with the other he reaches behind him, grasps one of the propellers and pushes it. I realise that the professor is standing on the other side of the plane, turning the other propeller. Then a bullet hole appears in the side of the cockpit.

  “Oh my God!” It’s Rufus: the bullet has grazed his lower leg; he curses as he pulls out the throttle. But there’s a roar from the engines: we’re starting to move.

  Another bullet whistles past my head. I see Axelson running, gripping the front edge of the wing, pulling himself up. Then I hear Yuri’s rifle barking again, and I hear him yelling abuse at our attackers. He’s doing it deliberately, I realise, to draw their fire. The airplane is huge, but it’s now a moving target; Yuri is a stationary one.

  We’re rumbling along the airfield now. I feel the wheels juddering on cracks in the dry clay surface, the pull of air on the wings. Another bullet rips through the wings: I can see the reddened sky above the oilfields through the wide tear. Then another hits the glass windscreen of the cockpit: glass flies everywhere. We bounce along the runway, gathering speed.

  A hand grabs my shoulder. It’s Yuri; with a single movement he pulls himself up into the seat behind me, next to the professor. More bullets are flying past us, but we’re moving fast now, towards a wall of smoke that billows from a blazing oil derrick. The clatter of the engines is matched by the savage juddering of the plane on the cracked runway. The jolts come faster and faster, like hammer blows. Every part of the airplane is rattling: I feel it’s going to shake into a thousand pieces.

  The smoke from the derrick envelops us like a black blanket. I choke with soot: I can’t breathe. I close my eyes, but I’m too late: soot covers my eyeballs. A stinging, fiery blackness fills my vision. I feel like the inside of my head is burning.

  Something makes me blink. And, like a miracle, I can see clearly. The smoke blows away harmlessly, and my lungs fill with fresh, clear air. I feel the wind in my hair and on my face, like a cooling balm, washing away the blackness of the oilfields.

  I can see again. Looking down from the airplane, one hundred, two hundred feet below us, I see a gloomy expanse, lit here and there by the flaming derricks. As we climb higher, they look like a hundred red candles burning on a dark table. Beyond the darkness of the oilfields is a wide sweeping expanse, gray in the night: the shores of the Caspian Sea. Above us, I see a skyful of stars. We’re leaving Baku. For the last few hours, I’ve focused every second on survival. Now, relief floods through every nerve in my body. But, like the soot that I still feel in my nostrils, I’m not free of what I saw in this place. I’ll never be free of it.

  Rufus is shouting. “South-east, to Iran? A couple of hours, and we’ll be there.”

  I can’t speak. But I hear Yuri and the professor like a chorus, loud and clear. “No. South-west. Aim for Mount Ararat.”

  32 East of Ararat

  We’re deep into the night. Far below our aircraft, I see a shadowed plain. Rufus points downwards “Look – there’s dim lights down there in the valley. That must be Yeravan. Capital of the new, free Republic of Armenia.”

  But none of us look. Our eyes are drawn, as if by magnetism, straight in front of us. The dawning sun must be coming up behind the aircraft: crimson rays slice past us, and far ahead, they strike the biggest thing any of us have ever seen.

  The mountain appears not part of this earth. It looms in the western sky, a detached, perfect pyramid of fuchsia-pink snow. It looks as if the light of daybreak has conjured it down from Heaven. Beyond it are serried banks of grey-blue clouds, like waves. The mountain’s shadow in the sunrise stretches out away from us, across the clouds: a tapering, purple finger pointing away from the peak, far into the distant West.

  Almost comically, a second, smaller cone stands by the mountain’s side, aping its bigger neighbour. Rufus turns to us. “That small one is on my map too, it’s called Little Ararat. Prof, you were right, you know – both peaks are extinct volcanoes. And down there – that tall tower directly below us is marked as an ancient Christian monastery, Khor Virap.”

  We’re flying above a river; a glittering ribbon of gold in the growing daylight. Axelson shouts.

  “That’s the Aras River below; it’s the border of the Republic of Armenia. Now we are crossing into the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Beyond the river, the land rises straight up towards Ararat.”

  The mountain is looming closer, looking bigger every moment. Rufus jokes. “We must all keep a sharp look-out now. Watch out for a boat.”

  “For what?” The professor doesn’t quite understand Rufus’s remark.

  “Noah’s Ark, of course! It must still be up there somewhere… oh God.”

  He’s staring, and pointing to our right. His voice has an odd, dead sound.

  “Engine on fire.”

  We all look. But there’s nothing dramatic to see. Between the ventilation grills of the right-hand engine casing, there are a few fluttering sparks. A fine thread of black smoke trails behind in the air.

  Yuri shouts out. “Was it hit by the shots at Baku?”

  “Probably not, Sirko. More likely is that sitting for two months on a runway next to a load of oil rigs has choked the engine with soot. I think it’s that soot that we can see, burning in there, rather than the engine itself. I’ve got my fingers crossed that the fire will burn itself out without damaging the engine.”

  Rufus is aiming left of the mountain, between Ararat and its little brother. The mountain’s colossal sides, plastered with snow, slope dizzyingly downwards. Peering
straight down, I see the lowest point of the saddle between the two peaks. I also see, ahead and far below, the shadow of our airplane.

  There’s a spluttering sound from the right engine… a strange, feathery whirring. Rufus turns his head and stares at the engine. The propeller slows, flapping to a standstill.

  He grins grimly. “Not to worry. We can still make a safe landing – I hope. But the air’s thin up here: it gives less lift. And this side wind doesn’t help.”

  We seem to be drifting to the right, getting closer to the slopes of the bigger Ararat peak. Its snowy flanks look close now: they are horribly steep, plunging thousands of feet down to the icy snouts of glaciers. Below the glaciers, I see naked rocky walls, ribs and ridges, sliced by scores of deep-cut gullies.

  “All of you! I’m looking for a landing place. Can any of you see anywhere suitable?”

  I look, but all I can see is the steep chaos of ice and rock. Time is oddly suspended; I have a sense of the tiny speck of our airplane in the vastness of the air and the mountain. I feel we’re gliding, not flying; like a feather in the breeze. No-one says anything: our lives are in Rufus’ hands. He shouts again.

  “It’s hardly good, but the best place is over there. Lava flow: it looks quite flat.” He points to a blackened patch, like spilt dried ink, far below the snow line. It looks an awful long way to it. Rufus adds “We might not get there, of course. Brace yourselves: we may be doing some tobogganing.”

  The snowfields are now whizzing past us, close alongside and below us. Gusts of wind, whirling around the mountain, buffet the plane like a boxer’s punches; we start to bounce and sway in the tumbling air. A swirl of rising snow, caught in the wind, blows into our faces and we’re blind. Everything is a world of solid white. Then just as quickly, I see again.

  A bone-white glacier is just below us, cracked and fractured by crevasses. Ahead and far below us, the smooth black lava flow looks no nearer than it did before.