Russian Treasures

30. THE ARMY INTERPRETER

Klim and Eddie’s rescuers arrived one day in a tank. It tore off the gate at its hinges and rolled up to the porch, leaving behind it the smell of fumes and black, ribbed tracks in the freshly fallen snow.

A man wearing a British uniform pushed up the hatch and jumped out. “C’mon, lads!” he shouted above the sound of the engine. “There’s got to be a stove hereю”

He ran up the steps followed by five other men from the tank.

Eddie couldn’t believe his luck when he realized that the soldiers were his fellow countrymen for whom he had helped organize the tank demonstration in Novorossiysk.

“How did you get here?” he asked as the soldiers picked him up to carry him to the tank.

Captain Pride explained to Eddie and Klim that the British troop train had been traveling with the White Army. Along the way, the crews brought their tanks down from the open trucks where necessary to put the Reds to flight. The tanks never failed to strike terror into the hearts of the recently mobilized villagers, and they had only once encountered serious resistance when the Reds had fought so fiercely that the British had been astonished. Why were the Russians attacking a combat vehicle armed with no more than rifles? The episode had ended in a bloody massacre. Later, the British had learned from Russian captives that these zealous soldiers were military cadets from the city of Tver. Their commanders had convinced them that the British tanks were fakes made of painted plywood that would shatter at the blow of a bayonet.

The tanks were unable to cover long distances, so they never went far from the railroad. The crews tried not to use them too much because the machines were expensive, and if something happened to them, they couldn’t be taken away from the battlefield to be mended.

The tank crews lived in freight cars converted into sleeping compartments, which were terribly cold at night. Captain Pride had decided that they needed a stove. He had seen thick brown smoke rising above the trees and, training his binoculars on it, noticed a European-style roof. He had decided that he should go to the mansion to look for a small stove unlike the enormous brick monsters they had found in Russian villages so far.

Pride had told the driver to stop the engine and set off on a treasure hunt.

“We didn’t have any firewood,” Eddie explained to his rescuers, “so Klim burned broken furniture in the stove. This man saved my life. He made an Argentinean hunting weapon, a bolas, out of stones and rope and used it to hit the hares that came into the garden.”

The captain shook Klim firmly by the hand. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” said Klim. “We lost track of time long ago.”

The soldiers knocked the cast-iron stove out of its place, took it to the railroad by tank, and put it into their car.

“Now, we’ll be warm as toast in here,” Pride said. “And those machine-gun instructors will be freezing their arses off outside. After all, they wouldn’t help us get the stove, would they? Now, we won’t let them in our sleeping carriage to warm up.”

Then Captain Pride summoned Klim. “Where did you learn English?” he asked.

“I had an English tutor when I was a child. Later, I worked at the British mission in Tehran and then in Shanghai.”

“How would you like to interpret for us?”

Pride told Klim that at the previous stop, he had had to court-martial the unit’s orderlies and interpreters after he had discovered that they were stealing anything from the train that wasn’t nailed down—from officers’ boots to the new Ricardo engine—in order to sell it.

“It’s a nightmare trying to find interpreters,” Pride told Klim. “We’ve tried to hire Russians, but they’re either thieves or their English isn’t good enough. Then we had some Jewish immigrants from the East End of London sent out, but that only made things worse. The Russians hated them so much that they refused to talk to them. They even shot one interpreter in front of our eyes. Some of our men know French from learning it at school, and they can make themselves understood when they speak to the Russian aristocrats, lucky beggars. But I’m not one of them. The only French phrase I’ve learned since the war started is ‘Ça coûte combien?’—‘How much?’ If I want to find a girl for the night—”

“I don’t know much military vocabulary,” Klim admitted.

“That doesn’t matter,” Pride said. “It’s the machine-gun instructors who need to talk to Russians about their equipment. All we need is to find washerwomen to do our laundry now that we’ve lost our orderlies.”

Klim agreed to sign a contract and was taken on to the payroll with the unit.

Klim translated cable after cable for Captain Pride—reports of General Yudenich’s defeat in the north and Admiral Kolchak’s retreat from Omsk. In mid-November, the Red Army seized an important railroad station, Kastornoye, and after that, it became clear that the Whites would never make it to Moscow.

They never stayed long anywhere, so they soon received the nickname “tourists.” They had stormed a locality, killed the Red garrison, and gathered the citizens in the central square.

“Now, you and Russia are saved,” they had proclaimed. Then they had left, taking with them whatever they had managed to get from the “grateful people.”

Many times, Klim had witnessed epic scenes of looting. Soldiers had run from boxcar to boxcar smashing locks with their rifle butts and tearing off seals.

“There’s underwear in here, lads. Real underpants!”

“And artillery parts.”

“Hey, quick, this one’s full of saddles!”

The army priest had beaten at the looters with his umbrella. “Take your hands off! That’s a sin! Don’t you dare!”

But the soldiers had shoved him down in the mud.

The Whites forced the peasants to carry their loot and refused to let them go, taking them farther and farther away from their native villages. The army neither paid civilians for their services nor gave them hay for their horses. Many times, a peasant willingly gave up a good horse for an injured one simply for a chance to get back home. And when he reached his village, he found a new man in charge there, a Red commissar who had been dispatched to take the place of a predecessor who had been hanged.

“Citizens,” the commissar exhorted the frightened villagers, “you have been freed from your chains. A new day is dawning.”

The White army kept losing soldiers and gaining refugees. Hordes of people trudged alongside, carried their belongings, and drove herds of animals along the roads.

“I just don’t get it,” Pride said with a shrug. “Why the hell have we stopped our offensive against Moscow?”

For Klim, it was quite clear what was happening. The White Army had simply gone bankrupt. It hadn’t enough resources—neither material nor human.

The White Army retreated because it was impossible for them to wage war without reinforcements. The soldiers had been fighting for months until they were numb and almost dead with exhaustion. All they had by way of rations was moldy hardtack; all other food had to be procured from the locals. The volunteers knew that there was nobody to come to relieve them, and gradually, they gave in to a despair close to indifference.

When your lungs are racked by chronic bronchitis, all your comrades have died, and your stomach is aching with hunger, the only thing you feel is a fierce hatred of all those who stayed away from the front and survived at your expense.

Most of the time, the British troop train stood idle on railroad sidings. The tanks were no longer being taken down from their trucks because there was no more fuel. There was an air of nervous merriment among the British soldiers very similar to the atmosphere Klim had observed in the gamblers’ den. Rather than fighting the Bolsheviks, the tank crews were more interested in waging their own brand of guerrilla warfare against the machine-gun and artillery instructors. The tank crews called the instructors “schoolmistresses” while they themselves proudly bore the name of “canned meat.”

“Look out! It’s the tinned stew!” the instructors yelled, catching sight of their adversaries.

The tank crew curtseyed facetiously. “Good afternoon, ladies! How are your lessons?”

The instructors were sitting around with nothing to do too. In the first months of the war, they had played an important role as advisors to the Russians, instructing them in the use of British weapons, but now, nobody had any need of them.

The tank crews and instructors competed against each other in every possible way from bottle-shooting competitions to friendly boxing matches. They agreed to a truce only when an express train brought them French magazines, L’Illustration and La Vie Parisienne. Then a frantic trade started up involving pictures of girls, especially glamorous pin-ups showing off cleavage or bare legs.

But deep down, everyone was tormented by the same question: “What are we doing here? What’s it all for?”

The British had plenty of food from condensed milk to canned beef, and soon, Klim felt far better and stronger than he had before. However, all this time, he felt not as if he were living but merely enduring life.

His duty was to translate the news releases, manage the newly hired orderlies, and assist the British in their short-lived love affairs. The instructors were extremely jealous of the tank boys for having Klim to help them, and now and then, Captain Pride would “rent out” their interpreter, overcharging the instructors shamelessly for Klim’s services.

“I suppose a crate of whiskey will just about do it, but you can bring me a new samovar as well.”

While on his Russian mission, Captain Pride had assembled a magnificent collection of samovars and kept it in the ammunition car under the strict surveillance by the guards.

The instructors laughed at him. “The Bolsheviks will blow up our train sooner or later, and your samovars will be scattered all over. Just imagine, the Russians will write in their chronicles, ‘In the year of 1919, extraordinary weather conditions were observed: it rained samovars.’”

At night, the tank boys gathered by their fireplace. Klim drank with them, laughed at their dirty jokes, and gazed at the map on the wall. The railroad line was like a black funeral ribbon stretching down to the south through Rostov and Ekaterinodar to Novorossiysk.

What if Nina has managed to escape from the Reds and reach Novorossiysk? Klim thought, and every time, he pulled himself up. Who are you kidding? You’ll never find her. Even if Osip by some miracle did spare her life, and even if she wasn’t killed or injured on the journey, she’ll have left Russia long ago. And God only knows where she is now. Maybe in France, maybe not. But in any case, she thinks I’m dead. She won’t be expecting to see me again.

His mind ran this way and that like a caged animal throwing itself against the bars of its enclosure, unable to see a way out.

“Got the blues again?” Pride asked, looking into Klim’s eyes. “I’ve seen a lot of that at the front. Give us your cup—I’ll give you a shot of rum.”

Klim went to see Eddie in the hospital car.

“How are you, old boy?” he asked.

Eddie put his newspaper aside. “That’s it,” he said. “We’re going home.” He began to whistle “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

“What d’you mean?” Klim asked, surprised.

Eddie handed him the newspaper. At a banquet in London’s City Hall, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George had given a speech in which he had announced that the United Kingdom couldn’t afford to continue its costly intervention in the endless Russian civil war. To maintain an effective fighting force, the Britain government needed to send four hundred thousand soldiers to Russia, and this was quite unthinkable. Lloyd George was sure that sooner or later the Bolshevik regime would fall, and he didn’t consider General Denikin capable of spearheading the anti-Bolshevik campaign. If the people of Russia had really supported him, the Bolsheviks would never have been able to defeat the White Army.

“What nonsense!” Eddie said with a sad smile. “As though victory in war is down to a popular vote or something. Anyway, from now on, we’re only here as observers.”

The news that Britain would no longer be supplying military aid terrified the Whites. There were calls for Denikin to be replaced by the brilliant cavalry general Wrangel. Political passions were running high in the Caucasus, and the Cossacks were refusing to lend their support to the volunteers unless the White command promised them an independent state. The Whites’ retreat began to look more like a stampede.

The locomotive pulling the British train had broken down, and the passengers were forced to celebrate Christmas of 1919 in the middle of the frozen steppe. Outside, the unbroken snow of the plains stretched away like white silk under a velvety-black starry sky as far the eye could see. The tank crew fed their fire with the butts of broken rifles and took turns to crank away at a handheld dynamo flashlight. Christmas dinner was special less for its food than for the elaborate reminiscences of food that it evoked.

“My mother used to cook veal chitterlings,” Captain Pride said as he opened a can of the hateful beef stew. “We would stuff ourselves until we hardly could move.”

Eddie poured cups of whiskey. “We used to have a Christmas goose dinner.”

They talked of stuffing, roast potatoes, bread sauce, and plum duff.

“Gentlemen, please, must you?” someone pleaded from time to time.

But the conversation went on: “Mince pies—ham omelets—”

Eddie raised his cup. “Do you remember how we drank to Christmas in Moscow?”

The door clanged, and a guard walked into the sleeping car to report in Russian.

“They’ve mended the engine, but they still haven’t got any steam,” Klim interpreted. “The train manager is asking everyone to help fill the tank with snow.”

“We’ll be there just as soon as we’ve had our drink,” Captain Pride said. “Merry Christmas, gentlemen, and here’s to a happy 1920!”

All night long, all of those who could still stand hauled snow to the engine in buckets, bags, and even capes. A bucket of snow when melted would yield a few cups of water.

Finally, they got the train going and managed to go as far as Rostov. The branch lines were flooded with hoards of refugees who tried to storm the railroad cars heading south.

Captain Pride posted men with machine guns on the roofs of the boxcars and ordered them to shoot if anyone tried to get onto the British train.

Then he went into town, taking Klim with him. The mood on the streets was frantic, close to hysteria. Nobody knew where the headquarters were or who was in charge. The telegraph was down because Red partisans had cut the wires.

“How far away are the Bolsheviks?” Klim asked a distraught-looking colonel overseeing the loading of horses into a freight car.

“Wake up!” the colonel barked. “They’ll be here any moment now.”

“We need to get another locomotive,” Captain Pride said, turning pale as he learned the news. “Our own wreck won’t last ten miles.”

They found a graveyard of abandoned locomotives next to the railroad depot, but there were no working engines to be had either for money or the promise of canned beef. Captain Pride brought in his soldiers and lined all of the railroad employees up against the wall.

“Tell them to find us a damn engine, or we’ll shoot the lot of them,” the captain told Klim.

“How am I supposed to do that?” howled the depot manager.

The soldiers already had their rifles at the ready.

“Captain Pride! Captain Pride!” called a voice.

They turned to see one of the instructors running toward them.

“We’ve found an engine. We met the men from the British mission in Rostov. They’re evacuating, and they agreed to take us on board. But there are only two cars in their train. Their engine can’t pull any more than that.”

Captain Pride gave the order to leave everything behind, including all of the tanks, arsenal, and his beloved samovars.

“People are our priority,” he said firmly, but nevertheless, he decided to abandon the Russian staff.

“Our officers from Rostov have an interpreter of their own,” he told Klim. “If I take you, I’ll have to take the rest of the Russians.”

Klim told him that he understood perfectly.

Eddie leaned out of the car door and thrust a wad of crumpled banknotes into Klim’s hand.

“Here, take this. The lads did a whip-round.” His lips were trembling. “I feel like such a pig! I’m sorry it turned out this way.”

A black and dreadful-looking crowd of White soldiers and refugees was crossing the ice of the frozen Don River.

“Look at the bourgeois army scampering!” commented a homeless boy perched on a boat frozen into the ground.

The “bourgeois” hadn’t a penny to their names. Those who had once waltzed in splendid dance halls were no better off than those who had loaded bales in the docks. Nobody knew where they were going, where they could stay the night, or how they would find their next meal.

A huge Kalmyk encampment stretched along the railroad for miles—emaciated horses, huge mud-spattered camels with matted fur, shivering children with blue lips, and stiff old men and women with blank faces.

Nobody knew why the Whites were unable to defend themselves. Why in general did nobody show any faith in their ability to act together? The refugees were all like desperate beggars prepared to kill just for the chance of a frozen carrot, a place in a sleigh, or a night in a warm hut.

Klim submitted to the law of the refugee pack. He tried to keep neutral and inconspicuous—he had no choice if he wanted to get to Novorossiysk, the allied ships, and salvation. However, at the moment, he couldn’t for the life of him see any point in being saved.

Fortune had smiled on him again, and now, he was warmly dressed and had money. Nevertheless, at night after the long journey on foot, he—along with many others—began to hallucinate, imagining that he saw thousands of roses in the trampled snow. Many people fell under the same mass illusion and walked as though over a carpet of white and pink flowers, breathing in the delicate, sweet scent.

Klim experienced an even more sublime hallucination of his own. His wife came to him dressed in a blue gown with the shimmering embroidery on the bodice and an ornamental comb in her dark curls. He called out to her, losing himself so completely in his dream that he saw nothing else and bumped into the people around him.

If only he could have administered that vision straight into his veins like a drug in fantastic doses! To the outside world, Klim knew that he must seem like a madman with a twisted sense of humor and a warped view of reality. But inside, he was still living in the world of the tango and the Columbus Theater, the finest in Argentina, ablaze with light from the chandeliers and decorated with flags for opening night.

I don’t care if Buenos Aires has gone to the dogs just like everywhere else, Klim thought. I’m not going back there anyway, and I won’t have to witness its disgrace.

His hallucinations were, in fact, a blessing to him. When people no longer understand what is real and what is not, they are no longer terrified to see the naked bodies of dead children thrown out of train windows or shocked to find velvet furniture and a stuffed tiger in a sleeping car left behind by the White commanders while desperate people trudge through the snow on foot.

The heavy frosts prevented the Red cavalry from catching up with the refugees and hacking them to pieces with their swords, but the same frost spelled doom for the Whites as well. It was rumored that six thousand Cossacks under General Pavlov had frozen to death on the steppe. The Reds emerged from their warm huts one morning to see the entire regiment lying dead and covered with ice.

Klim passed through countless towns, villages, and hamlets on foot, and it was only once he got to Ekaterinodar that he managed to squeeze himself onto a dilapidated train. The more fortunate passengers were snoring triumphantly on their berths while others were sleeping standing up with their heads nodding in time with the wheels.

For a long time, the train made its tortuous way between the mountains, every now and then plunging into a tunnel and crawling slowly on. The sun was rising, and the snow-painted peaks changed from purple to gold.