Russian Treasures

36. TRAGEDY IN NOVOROSSIYSK

For several days, all of the employees of the British mission had given themselves up to vandalism on an unprecedented scale.

Five hundred gallons of rum had been poured into the sea. All of the artillery breechblocks had been thrown into the water. The tank crews had crushed forty new airplanes straight from the factory and then sent the tanks into the sea with their engines running.

Everyone was trying to stay calm but making a poor job of it. Mountains of rifles, backpacks, saddles, and harnesses had appeared down by the waterfront. The Royal Scots Fusiliers had doused them with kerosene and set them alight. The sea around the pier was full of floating debris with a dead body drifting facedown in the waves here and there.

The British had abandoned all of their warehouses in the city to looters but weren’t allowing Russians onto the territory of their mission under any circumstances.

Two days previously, Eddie Moss had received an order to deliver a package to General Kutepov’s headquarters. As soon as he had gotten out of the car, he had been surrounded by women carrying small children. They had held up their crying babies and screamed, “Pozhaluista! Please!” as though he could do something for them. One of the women had fallen on her knees and grasped Eddie’s hand, trying to kiss it. He had pushed her away, feeling like a murderer.

An interpreter at Kutepov’s headquarters had told Eddie that the general had issued a new order: now only those servicemen able to continue fighting the Bolsheviks had the right to leave for Crimea. Kutepov had requested that the British command help the Russians with the evacuation.

The British were hastily boarding the SMS Hannover, a former German battleship that had been transformed into a troop transport. With a great clatter of boots and squeaking of wheels, they made their way up the gangplank, their sweaty faces coated with cement dust. A terrible wailing could be heard over the port as the crowd surged and cried out behind the barbed wire that fenced off the pier. Every now and then, the soldiers on the machine-gun towers fired volleys into the air to hold back the crowd, but even that was useless. The British soldiers had to use their rifle butts to knock down those who climbed the fence.

Eddie tried not to look at the Russians. It’s not our fault that we can’t save them, he thought. They’ll trample us to death if we let them through the fence.

The Whites felt that the British behavior toward the Russians showed an icy indifference. What Eddie was feeling now wasn’t indifference but unspeakable shock and shame.

We’re leaving you behind. We promised to help you, and now, we have to leave you to die.

Eddie thought time and time again of Klim Rogov and particularly of the day when they had left him behind in Rostov. But how the hell could he have done anything differently? Should Eddie have stayed with Klim out of solidarity, sick as he was, only to become a burden to him and die somewhere on the frozen steppe?

The Russians are to blame for all this, Eddie kept saying to himself. It made it a little easier to take.

He heard a locomotive whistle from behind the fence.

“Moss, to the gate!” cried Captain Pride.

A small train that had come to fetch the workers from the British mission and take them to the pier came forcing its way through the crowd. There were clouds of steam, a deafening squeal of metal, and dreadful shrieks. Eddie wondered if somebody had fallen under the locomotive.

The Scots Fusiliers closed in on the refugees to stop them forcing their way through the opened gates.

“Get back!” yelled Eddie, waving his gun. “Get back, or I’ll shoot!”

The locomotive came slowly in, pulling four cars behind it. Eddie was about to give the order to close the gate when he noticed a man on a horse making his way through the crowd. Judging by his collar insignia and crimson band on his cap, the man was a British officer with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

“What’s up?” Eddie shouted.

“I have a hospital here!” the officer cried in a muffled voice. It sounded as though he had caught a cold. “I need help bringing in my patients!”

“Where the hell have you been all this time?” Eddie shouted, aghast. “Why aren’t you on the ship yet?”

The officer only waved his hand.

The Fusiliers lined up to make way for eight carts full of wounded soldiers, pale-faced and freshly bandaged.

“Do you belong to our military mission?” Eddie asked them, but no one answered.

The officer dismounted and ordered the medics and nurses to load the wounded onto new stretchers that they had brought with them.

“Faster! Faster! Take them onto the ship!” he shouted in a strange accent.

Russian staff officers were getting out of the railroad cars. According to an agreement with the British command, they had been assigned places on the Hannover. A tall man with a shaven head dragged a young woman out by her arm. She tried to pull away from him, shouting something in Russian. The man slapped her across the face, and the woman cried out and pressed her hand to her cheek.

All of the anger that had been boiling up in Eddie came to a head. Running up to the scoundrel, he put a gun to his chin. “Don’t you dare!” he shouted.

“You not understand! This my wife,” the man protested in broken English.

Eddie grasped the man by the shoulder and pushed him toward the Fusiliers. “Take him out of here!”

Then he approached the weeping woman. “Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked.

She said nothing—it seemed that she didn’t speak English. Eddie could see that she was shaking all over.

“Go to the ship, ma’am. We’re leaving soon.”

Suddenly, the woman caught sight of the R.A.M.C. officer. “Dr. Sablin!” she cried.

The woman rushed to him and started to explain something. Looking at her in confusion, the officer nodded, and Eddie realized that not only the officer but also all of the wounded men with him were Russian. The doctor had changed into British uniform to give himself and his patients a chance to get on the ship.

Should I report them? Eddie thought for a second. His next thought was, Of course, not. Let the captain find out after we set sail.

He went up to the doctor. “Keep your people quiet,” he said in a whisper. “Try not to talk until we’ve boarded the ship. I’ll help you get settled.”

The words of a solemn song kept going around in Eddie’s head:

The old countess told Klim that she wanted to go straight to the French quay. “Sorry, but I’m too old for all these adventures. I just want to get onto the ship.”

For an extra twenty francs, Shushunov had promised to take the old countess to the checkpoint.

“You should come with me,” Sofia Karlovna told Klim. “You have documents now, and Fomin will get Nina out.”

Klim looked away from the old countess. “The British will take her to Egypt or somewhere, and I’ll never find her again.”

“You won’t find her again anyway,” said the old countess with the sigh. “Still, I wish you luck.”

They shook hands, and Sofia Karlovna got out of the car. “If by some miracle,” she said, “you manage to get out of here, do write to me care of the Paris central post office. Mr. Shushunov, let’s go.”

Klim had to leave the car behind in the port. It was impossible to get through the endless columns of Don Cossacks. A forest of lances and a sea of horses’ heads stretched as far as the eye could see. The ground was littered with cloth, leather, canned food, and rifles.

Klim made his way, ducking under the bellies of the horses.

The cavalry officer ordered the Cossacks to dismount. “Leave your horses behind!”

The Cossacks unfastened their saddles and bridles. Many of them wept silently, tears coursing down their dusty faces. It was unthinkable to leave behind a horse that meant more than a friend. These horses had saved their riders in battle and shared everything that had come their way.

The Cossacks put their arms around their horses’ necks and stroked their cheeks. One man put a gun in his horse’s ear, but his friends wouldn’t let him pull the trigger.

“Do you want me to give up my girl to the Reds?” he yelled as he struggled in the arms of his friends.

The horses whinnied in fear while the men cursed. In a frenzy, the Cossacks began to throw their saddles into the water. “To hell with it all!”

Hundreds and then thousands of feet stomped up the gangplanks as the regiments boarded the steamers, which began to list under the weight.

“Get back! We’re setting sail! No more space here!” the captain shouted through his megaphone, but nobody paid any attention.

“We still have three rearguard regiments here!”

An artillery shell wailed and exploded on a nearby slope.

“The Reds are already at Hajduk Station!” someone cried. “They might even have gotten as far as Kirillovka.”

“You’ll sink the ship!” yelled the captain. “There’ll be another transport soon to take you on board.”

One by one, the overloaded ships sailed away with clusters of people hanging onto their rigging. Whenever a new vessel sailed toward the quay, the crowd would dash along the side of the water shouting, not knowing where it would berth. Lost children wailed, and women became hysterical.

Klim noticed a Kalmyk with two boys, numb with fear. They were dashing hither and thither among the soldiers, completely lost.

“Where should we go?” the Kalmyk asked Klim. “Where’s our boat?”

Several horses jumped into the sea and swam after the steamers as they left the quay.

Klim reached the British pier by evening. A huge crowd was standing in front of the closed gate; however, people were now no longer shouting or panicking but staring silently through the rows of barbed wire, watching a warship sail into the distance.

The fog drifting from the mountains mingled with the smoke of the fires on the streets. Some people decided to go to Gelendzhik, and some went back into town. Klim overheard an officer from the Markov Regiment proposing to take by force the next ship that came in. “It’s every man for himself now,” he said.

“There won’t be another ship,” a familiar voice said.

Turning, Klim saw Fomin, bareheaded in an overcoat with its buttons torn off, standing a few steps away.

Klim rushed up to him. “Where’s Nina?” he asked.

A vague smile appeared on Fomin’s face. “If it isn’t Mr. Argentinean himself! Nina’s gone. Neither you nor I will ever see her again.”

Sablin ordered Nina to help him carry the wounded onto the ship. When all of the men were aboard, she rushed onto the upper deck.

Sablin tried to hold her back. “Where’re you going?”

“Klim’s still there,” Nina said, panting. “I need to go back to town.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Dr. Sablin!” cried the nurse running up to him. “The captain found out that a we’d made our way onto his ship unlawfully.”

Sablin closed his eyes for a moment.

“I’ll go to the captain now,” he said. “Fay, I want you to keep an eye on Miss Nina. She’s beside herself with grief. She could throw herself overboard.”

Fay cast a jealous look in Nina’s direction.

“You can go back to Novorossiysk if you want to,” she told Nina as soon as Sablin was out of the way.

Nina set off toward the gangplank.

“I can’t leave,” she tried to explain herself to the British sailors.

They helped her to get to the jetty strewn with abandoned possessions. Thick smoke billowed from the steamer’s funnel, and the anchor chain rattled as it was pulled up.

The Hannover set out to sea.

For a long time, Nina stood at the railing looking at the fiery glow in the waves of the gulf. The last transport passed, tugging an overcrowded barge behind it.

The crowd behind the barbed wire was thinning out. At first, people left one by one and then in groups. Soon, there was nobody left at the pier.

Darkness set in rapidly as the town struggled in its death throes. From time to time, the pink glare of an explosion flashed behind the dense clouds. The last defenders of Novorossiysk were desperately trying to hold the mountain passes.

Nina picked up an abandoned chocolate bar from the ground and unwrapped it. The smell and taste were like something long-forgotten. She struggled to understand what she had done and why she had refused to be saved.

I don’t need that kind of salvation, she thought.

There was nothing in her heart but a sort of dull apathy. Where should she look for Klim? What might have happened to him? She couldn’t bear to lose him again.

One of the abandoned horses came up to Nina and laid its head on her shoulder. It was trembling and snorting, and a purple point of fire glowed deep in the pupil of its eye.

Nina picked up her skirt, put her foot in the stirrup, and mounted the horse, feeling the unfamiliar sensation of the breeze on her bare knees.

“Let’s go home,” she said, touching the reins.

The town was in the grip of a pogrom. The streets glowed golden from fires, the low clouds were brown as coffee from the smoke, and the air was filled with flying ash and charred paper.

Nina rode slowly down the middle of the road. Ragged people ran by with bundles of leather jackets, shoes, and belts. People were breaking open crates right there in the street and pouring packets of hardtack, yeast, and starch into their knapsacks. It was beyond belief that all of this food had been kept in warehouses all this time while in Novorossiysk, people had been starving.

The earth trembled with the beat of thousands of hooves. Horses abandoned by the Cossacks had herded together, and bearded Circassians were chasing after them whooping.

Vorontsovskaya Street was empty. It appeared that everyone had taken cover in anticipation of the inevitable trials to come. Nina rode into the backyard, jumped to the ground, and froze in disbelief when she heard laughter inside the house.

She ran onto the porch and pulled open the front door. In the living room by the light of two candles, Klim and Fomin were sitting at the dinner table playing cards.

“I think I’d have made a good Provisions Commissar,” Fomin said.

Klim nodded. “I agree.” He caught sight of Nina and jumped to his feet, his face transformed. “Why are you still here?”

She rushed to him. “I couldn’t go without you!”

Klim’s hands were shaking as he took her tightly in his arms and kissed her. “Everything will be fine—you’ll see. We’ll go East instead. The Bolsheviks won’t be able to block the border with China, however hard they try—it’s thousands of miles long. We’ll find a way to get over it.”

Fomin cocked the little revolver in his hand.

“Nina, my dear,” he said, “you are distracting us from very important business. After you left, Mr. Argentinean and I decided to have a card duel. We thought it would be entertaining. The winner will die a quick and painless death courtesy of the last precious bullet in this gun. The loser has to wait to be hacked to death by the Red cavalry. I must inform you that your husband beat me.”

Nina froze. “Surely, you wouldn’t—”

“Mr. Rogov, if you wish, I can let Nina have your prize. Whatever you say.”

The reflection of the candle flame flickered on Fomin’s forehead, slick with sweat. The corners of his mouth twitched.

“There’s no need to look so frightened.” He laughed. “After all, you wouldn’t be apart for very long. The Reds will be here in a couple of hours, and they’ll kill the rest of us. Then we’ll meet in heaven and laugh over our memories.”

“Hands up!” shouted a clear boyish voice as a group of scrawny teenagers armed with rifles appeared in the doorway.

Startled, Fomin dropped the revolver on the tablecloth and raised his hands. A second later, he realized that the intruders were mere boys trembling at their own effrontery.

“What do you want?” Fomin demanded angrily.

He reached for his revolver, but the older boy pressed his rifle to Fomin’s chest while the second boy grasped the gun. “We need to talk about our father—Jacob Froiman.”

Fomin grimaced. “I see. Well, young men, have a seat.”

The older boy turned to Klim. “You must leave now. We have a score to settle.”

Klim grabbed Nina’s hand, and they ran outside. The sky above the trees was bathed in an orange glow.

“Who were those boys?” Nina whispered.

“The vanguard of Soviet power,” said Klim. “Come on. We need to find a place to hide.”

A rifle shot rang out inside the house.