Russian Treasures

29. THE BRITISH LIEUTENANT

The sun beat down on Klim’s eyelids, unbearably bright. He felt as dry and scorched as a dead leaf, his body no more than an outline and a handful of dried-out veins.

He was aware of a terrible weakness and a tugging pain in his chest every time he took a breath. And what was that buzzing sound? Was it the sound of cicadas, or was it inside his head?

Suddenly, there was a roar like thunder, and a hot wind fanned his cheeks.

Klim opened his eyes and saw an armored train racing along the embankment in a cloud of dust, black smoke, and sparks. The rattling cars flashed by, and then all was quiet again, although the earth kept trembling as though beaten.

Klim tried to sit up but felt such excruciating pain that he fell back. Catching his breath, he tried again, this time more carefully. His tunic was covered with half-clotted blood. It was terrifying even to take a look at the gaping wound in his chest. Has Osip wounded me fatally? Will I recover, or am I done for? It took some time for Klim to realize that his lung had been spared, and the bullet to his chest had only damaged the flesh.

He had a vague, delirious recollection of the events of the previous night. He remembered jumping out through the open car door, his body angled to the side perhaps a split second before Osip had fired the gun. After that, Klim had hit the ground, and, it seemed, he had concussed himself. That was why he felt so sick.

Nina? Klim choked and clutched his forehead. Oh, God! He had left her behind; she was still on the train.

Klim bandaged his wound clumsily with a strip torn from his tunic and dragged himself along the railroad tracks barefoot and leaning on a stick that he had found lying on the ground. There wasn’t a soul around, just hunchbacked slopes, dry grass, and trees. He had no food and no water to drink or to bathe his wound. Without medicine, it wouldn’t be long before his wound became infected.

Several times, Klim stumbled and fell and lay there motionless feeling nothing but his own pulse. If only someone would come! Whites or Reds, he didn’t care. Just give me some water, and you can finish me off.

A sense of inexorable horror was bearing down on Klim: What has happened to my wife? Those beasts might rape or mutilate her. Osip, please don’t touch her… please… please!

Klim prayed silently and pointlessly as he stumbled along. He knew he had seen Nina for the last time, and no one would be able to tell him where to look for her.

At first, Klim felt he was losing his hearing—he could no longer hear the birds or the snap of twigs under his feet. Then came visions: gray huts floating above the horizon and a large bed on the path with its bedposts adorned with round metal knobs that gleamed in the sunset. Two boys dressed in rags were sitting on top of it.

Klim wanted to talk to them, but they disappeared in the thick shimmering air. He staggered to the bed—what a convenient mirage!—and lay down on it.

That’s it, he thought. I’ll just lie here. I’m not going anywhere.

Klim was woken by two thin menacing boys—one with a kitchen knife and other with a scythe and dressed in an adult’s shirt with a hood that made him look like a miniature Grim Reaper.

“Get off!” they yelled. “This is our bed.”

Two girls approached, timid and wary. They circled Klim at a safe distance for some time, unsure what to do. In the end, they brought him water.

“Are there any adults in the village?” Klim asked, catching his breath as he spoke.

“No,” said the younger of the two girls, whose head was shaven. “The Reds mobilized all the men and took all food away, so the women have gone too. There’s nothing to eat. We live in the mansion over there on top of the hill.”

“Shut up, Leech!” ordered the older girl.

Klim agreed to get off the bed in exchange for a potato.

As soon as he got down, the boys lifted the bed up by its legs.

“Where are you taking it?” asked Klim.

“To the mansion,” one of the boys said. “There’s a wounded pilot there. A foreigner. It’s for him. We hope he’ll take us up in his plane when he gets better.”

Klim spent the night in an empty hut and the next morning trudged up the hill to the mansion.

Clearly, the house had been used as a military base. It had been looted and badly damaged. The ceiling in the hall was peppered with gunshot, the parquet floor was broken, all of the larger pieces of furniture had been cut up, and torn books and photographs littered the floor. Only the antique tapestries remained intact. No one had bothered with them because the cloth they were made of was so worn that it was no use for making clothes.

Klim didn’t hear the girl they called Leech approach him.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll take you to the pilot. He’s in the main bedroom with the pink wallpaper and stained-glass windows.”

Klim’s head was spinning from hunger and fatigue.

“How do you find food?” he asked the girl.

Leech shrugged her bony shoulders. “We look for cigarette butts along the railroad. Passengers throw them out the windows, and we pick them up, take out what’s left of the tobacco, and exchange it for potatoes.”

“And is that it?”

The girl stood on one leg to scratch her calf with her foot. “We go into the big village and beg too. Sometimes we get a slap, but sometimes we get bread.”

Lieutenant Eddie Moss had been assigned to deliver a package to British military observers with the Kornilov Shock Regiment. On his way back, his plane had been shot down by machine-gun fire from a Red armored train. The pilot had been shot dead, and Eddie had survived only because the plane fell into trees. He had fallen out of the cockpit and so escaped being burned alive. Only his legs and his right arm had been covered with deep burns.

The gang of homeless children had found Eddie and dragged him into the ransacked mansion. The oldest of them was no more than twelve years old, yet they had fed Eddie and helped change his bandages. He didn’t speak Russian and had to explain himself using gestures and drawings. But he had little talent for arts and had to use his left hand, so, often the children couldn’t understand what he wanted.

Eddie was desperate to get back to his own side. He struggled for more than an hour drawing in his notebook, trying to ask the children in pictures if they had seen another plane of the same kind as his. He was sure that his fellow soldiers must be out searching for him.

But the children had not understood and thought Eddie was telling them he was uncomfortable on the floor, asking them to find him a bed. So, they had brought one for him—albeit without a mattress—happy to be helping a wounded aviator.

They had mistaken him for a pilot and were fascinated by the fact that Eddie had so recently been up in the sky. The boys kept bringing him charred pieces of the wreckage of the plane that they had found in the forest. They would run around the ruined house with their arms outstretched, pretending to be fighter planes.

Eddie was in despair. I’m missing in action, he thought. Nobody knows where I am, and I can’t get out of here by myself. His legs and right arm were in such agony that there were times when he would have welcomed a bullet to the head. But one day, a miracle happened—a man came into Eddie’s room and, speaking with a strong Russian accent, asked him in English, “How did you get here?”

On November 11, 1918, London had learned about victory in the Great War. That afternoon, cables came into news agencies announcing that Germany had surrendered. The city was celebrating with a joyful chorus of factory sirens, ships’ whistles, and car horns. Parishioners gathered in churches to give prayers of thanks, all of the pubs were full, and people danced in the streets, drunk and happy.

Eddie Moss was in a cab riding along Pall Mall. He was ready to weep at the thought that he was young and still alive, there was the bright moon in the sky, and the blackout blinds had been taken off the windows. Not so long ago, German zeppelins had bombed London and killed more than seven hundred people.

Eddie stopped his cab at the Royal Automobile Club. On the marble steps, gentlemen with their overcoats unbuttoned were bawling out “The Mademoiselle from Armentières.”

Eddie entered the bar.

“Over here!” his friends greeted him with shouts. “Give him an extra drink for being late.”

There was a crash of broken glass outside and the sound of a police whistle, and everyone ran out to see what was going on.

Lieutenant Bolt sat down next to Eddie and put an arm around his shoulders. “What are you going to do after the war?” he asked.

“Well—” Eddie hesitated. “I don’t know. My brother has a firm in Yorkshire that produces fertilizer.”

“What? Cow shit?” Bolt laughed. “I can just imagine you selling that.”

“Not shit, chemicals!”

Eddie felt embarrassed, but he had nothing better to do now that he had been demobilized.

“We’re going to Russia,” Bolt said. “We’re organizing a military campaign in the south, and we need about three hundred volunteers. Want to join us?”

Eddie tried to bring to mind what he knew about Russia. All he could think of was snow and a picture of the bearded Tsar in epaulets, which he had once seen on the cover of a magazine.

“The rabble has mutinied there,” said Bolt, “and now, the noble Russian ladies are waiting for their knights in shining armor to save them. The War Office wants to help General Denikin restore law and order in the country. Just think—soon we’ll be celebrating in Moscow!”

The boys came back into the bar, pleased to have saved from the police patrol a US Marine, who had caused the disturbance outside.

“So, you’re all going to Russia, are you?” Eddie asked his friends.

“All except you, seeing as you prefer to work as a shit peddler,” Bolt said.

He proposed that they have a gentlemen’s agreement: the first one of them to be awarded a medal would get the pick of the Russian duchesses.

“Are you sure they have duchesses in Russia?” Eddie asked.

“I think so. Russia has everything you can imagine. Then the rest of us will get second or third choice of all the duchesses and countesses and what have you. You just wait and see—they’ll welcome us with open arms and tears of gratitude. After all, we’re saving their bloody motherland.”

They drank to their new US Marine friend, to Mother Russia, to Moscow, and to the Tsar and Tsarina, if they were still alive. They laughed and roared out at the top of their voices:

They had taken a long journey by sea to the dirty port of Novorossiysk and then on by train to Ekaterinodar where the British mission was based. They didn’t, of course, meet any duchesses, but still, the White Russians doted on the British. The representative for the United Kingdom, Major General Poole, vowed to do everything possible to get his government to send troops to help Denikin. It was rumored that in return for petitioning the British government, Poole had been given a large share in an oil company exploiting reserves on the north-eastern coast of the Caspian Sea.

“He got one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in shares from the Russians,” Bolt told Eddie in confidence, “just for writing a fifty-five-page report.”

But the British government was skeptical about Poole’s proposal and soon replaced him with Lieutenant General Briggs. Briggs was put in charge of military supplies for the White Army.

Every now and then, Eddie was sent to Novo—as they called Novorossiysk. He delivered packages or watched British tanks, rusty-gray monsters that thrilled everyone who saw them being unloaded at the port. According to the newspapers, these “self-propelled armored vehicles” had arrived at the front in wooden containers labeled “tank” to conceal their actual purpose, and the name had stuck.

The British staged a demonstration battle on the outskirts of Novo. The tanks drove down into a steep ravine one after another, clattering and thundering, and then moving heavily on their tracks crawled up the opposite slope. The spectators watched in awe.

“We need to explain to the Russians that the Mark V tanks come in two types: ‘males’ and ‘females,’” said Captain Pride, chief commander of the armored unit. “Males are armed with six-pounder guns and machine guns, and females have machine guns only.”

However, there was no one to translate his words. Some Russian officers knew basic English, but when it came to “transmissions” or “air-intake systems,” they were struck dumb. There were no dictionaries, and the allies had to learn from each other by pointing at things and naming them.

There was food in Southern Russia but no industry. The White commissaries made endless lists of what was needed at the front, but there was no one to translate them. The British looked at the dense Cyrillic letters, shrugged, and sent whatever military supplies happened to be left after the Great War.

They sent bayonets that didn’t fit the Russian rifles, cartridge belts incompatible with Russian machine guns, and shells the wrong size for Russian cannons. Studebaker field ambulances were too heavy for the Russian roads, and the British horseshoes were too big for Cossack horses—while the White cavalry was given a hundred and sixteen thousand of them. A hundred thousand steel helmets gathered dust in warehouses because the Russian soldiers never used them. Huge shipments of goods flowed in from the Mediterranean military bases without the slightest understanding of for whom or for what they were intended.

The Russians were driven to protesting angrily, shouting and waving their arms.

“They say that the British are mocking them deliberately,” the interpreter explained dispassionately. “They think the objective of the United Kingdom is not to get Russia back on its feet but to destroy it.”

Needless to say, sentences such as this were easy enough to translate.

While General Denikin blamed the Allies for the chaos at the rear, the Allies blamed thieving supplies officers. Everything that was brought into the military warehouses appeared immediately on sale at local markets—at exorbitant prices, of course.

Six months later, Briggs was called home.

London bided its time. No one could predict whether or not it was worth taking a bet on Denikin. On the one hand, Bolshevism was a threat to world order, and the United Kingdom was itself subject to debilitating strikes. On the other hand, Lenin’s government had ravaged his country to such an extent that Russia no longer posed a threat to the interests of the English king. This, of course, was a relief.

Eddie didn’t care much about politics. His job was straightforward enough, British currency was highly valued at the Ekaterinodar market, and Novo was full of restaurants and beautiful girls (although he had still to meet any duchesses).

Eddie was pleased when the next man put in charge of the British mission, General Holman, kept sending him off to deliver packages to military observers. After all, that meant he had the chance to fly.

Whereas before he had sent his brother photographs on which he had written, “Here I am with a Mark V tank,” now he sent more impressive pictures on which he wrote, “This is me with the Bomber DH.9” and a detailed description of what it was like to fly in a plane.

He sent postcards home saying, “Greetings from Rostov” and “We’re on the advance” and so on. But now it looked to Eddie Moss as though he would end his life in a ruined mansion in the middle of nowhere.

Eddie clutched Klim’s hand. “Don’t leave me! There’s no one here besides you who understands English—I’ll die without your help.”

Klim looked at Eddie’s face caked with grime and soot. The young man had a short nose thickly covered with freckles and shining blue eyes with matted eyelashes.

“I’m sorry, but I have to find my wife,” said Klim.

He asked Leech how to get to the nearest railroad station. The girl looked doubtfully at his bandage, now stiff with dried blood, and at his bare scratched feet. “You won’t get that far,” she murmured.

And she was right. Klim got no farther than the porch before he fell down unconscious. The children dragged him back to the room with the pink wallpaper, and there he and Eddie spent more than a month.

Klim floated in and out a feverish delirium. Sometimes the image of Nina swam before him, and he would think, I’ll never see her again, and feel fear and pain burn him up inside. If it weren’t for the black infected wound in his chest and this nausea that made it impossible to stand, he felt he might have been able to find her, to save her. But now it was too late anyway. The worst had probably already happened.

Lubochka had cursed Klim, and it had turned out as she had wished. We should have stayed in Nizhny Novgorod, he thought again and again. So what if we were freeloaders in somebody else’s house there? So what if we were serfs of the Bolshevik state?

Klim’s only memento of Nina was the knotted leather cord that she had given him—to remind him that no matter what, he had to survive. But would he?

Eddie was tormented more by this uncertainty than by his burns.

“Where’s the frontline?” he kept pestering Klim. “Why can’t we hear guns? What are the children saying?”

The children had no idea where the frontline was. There was nobody in charge at all in the surrounding villages—neither Reds nor Whites.

“If the Reds find us, will they kill us immediately?” Eddie asked Klim.

“Most likely.”

“What about the Whites? Could you explain to them that I’m in the service of His Majesty?”

“I could.”

When Eddie felt better, he told Klim about the British mission in Ekaterinodar.

“There is a whole crowd of us. A hundred officers and a hundred and thirty soldiers, all volunteers. One fellow came because he heard Churchill’s appeal about military aid to Russia on the radio, and he joined the British Military Mission because Churchill is his idol. Another fellow thought he heard God’s voice in his head telling him to go to Russia. Yet another spent the Great War as a prisoner of the Germans, came out without a single medal, and decided to catch up with all his friends. And our machine-gun instructor openly admits that he escaped from the police. Russia might be a god-forsaken hole, but it’s still better than Scotland Yard.”

“And what about you—why are you here?” Klim asked.

“I wanted to see the world. If I’d been demobilized, I’d have ended up in Yorkshire. I’ve seen everything there is to see already.”

The two of them talked to each other for days. Klim told his new friend about Argentina, and Eddie told him of the gas attacks at Ypres and how he had narrowly escaped being gassed. On the day that the Germans had fired their toxic shells, he had been sent to the rear to pick up the mail. When he’d returned, his whole company had been blinded, and none could even read the letters.

Eddie had been born the same year as Nina and had seen nothing in life except war. He was surprised that Klim didn’t want to join the White Army.

“If you hate the Bolsheviks so much, why don’t you fight them?”

“This isn’t my war,” Klim said.

“If everyone thought like you, the Bolsheviks would win.”

“It’s all the same now.”

Klim felt sorry for the children who had saved him and Eddie. What did the future hold in store for gangly Fyodor? Or for Yuri, who never parted with his weapon, the rusty scythe? Or for snotty-nosed Janka or the shaven-headed Leech? They stole from peasants and were often beaten. If they fought among themselves, Fyodor would thrash the other children brutally, particularly the girls.

“They need to learn to respect me,” he said.

Sometimes Klim told the children fairytales or showed them card tricks. It turned out that Eddie had a deck of playing cards—albeit indecent ones—in his map-case.

Leech stared at Klim with adoring eyes. “How do you do that? What are you, a magician?”

At night, she fell asleep next to Klim. “I’ll stay with you. If I have a bad dream and start screaming, wake me up.”

“What do you dream about?”

“Well—different things.”

Later, Fyodor told Klim that Leech’s entire family had been shot.

“Who killed them?”

“Hell knows.”

At first, Klim couldn’t understand why the children, who were always hungry, shared all of their meals with two wounded men.

It wasn’t because of the card tricks or because they wanted a ride in a plane. It was simply that as children, they needed adults who would take an interest in them. As a little boy, Klim had always thought his father hated him, and it had made his life miserable. But these young criminals were hated by the whole world. To them, it was a miracle to find people who wouldn’t chase them away and who expected food from them rather than a dirty trick.

“You need to get well quick,” Janka kept saying. “We’re going to the city soon to spend winter there. We have a good place in a factory boiler room. It’s like heaven there. You can stay with us, and if the police come, you can tell them we’re your kids. The main thing is that we don’t want to get taken to the orphanage. They don’t feed children there, and we’ll die of hunger.”

It was easy enough to say “get well quick.” It was cold now, and Klim and Eddie—both bearded, thin, and shaggy—wrapped themselves up in antique tapestries to keep warm.

Klim scoured the house and park for anything edible, but the only things he could find were berries at the very top of a spindly rowan tree. It was impossible to reach them because they were too high and the branches of the tree were too thin. Even Leech wouldn’t have been able to climb up there, and Klim was far too weak to think of breaking the tree down.

They burned what was left of the furniture in the cast-iron stove in the pink room. The varnish and paint smelled terrible, and the burning wood gave off a thick brown smoke, but the fire kept them warm at night. Now, when the children went out to look for food, they went farther afield and came back with less. Fyodor had become broody and irritable and lost his interest in planes.

“They’ll leave us soon,” Eddie said.

Yuri, looking sullen, had just brought in a moldy crust of bread for the two men to share and disappeared again out the door.

Klim thought he knew what was going to happen. The day before, Leech had been crying and refused to explain what the matter was. Clearly, the children had discussed things together and decided to go off to the city because they could no longer provide for the two adults.

Klim reckoned that it must be about fifteen miles to the city. If he could get ahold of some kind of footwear, he could probably reach it, but Eddie was quite unable to walk. His legs were covered with scabs, and the slightest movement caused him pain.

If I stay, we’ll starve together, Klim pondered. But if I leave, Eddie hasn’t a chance of surviving.

One morning, the children went off and didn’t come back. Klim had to make a decision. One minute, Eddie told him that all he needed was one or two more days to get back on his feet, but the next minute, he begged Klim to shoot him.

“Shut up, for God’s sake!” Klim said, frowning.

He concocted all sorts of fantastical schemes in his mind. He would have to go to the city and persuade somebody to come back and rescue Eddie. But why would anyone take a horse back along the frontline for the sake of an Englishman of no use to anyone?

Klim could hear trains racing past behind the trees a stone’s throw from the mansion. They’ll never stop to pick up two wounded men, he thought. Even if I got up on the railroad tracks and waved my arms to attract their attention, they’d probably just run me down and keep going.

In fact, this was what Klim wanted most of all. He had had enough, and in any case, he had nothing left to fight for.