Bukov frowned. “Wait here a moment.” Then he left me; I saw him circle past Pudovkin and then his heavy shoes thudded the stairs going up. I bit my lip; what if someone should enter just now, or pop out of a doorway along the hall?
Bukov came trotting down with a high pair of rubber overshoes. “You don’t want to ruin your shoes, do you.”
“Are these your own?”
“I’ll get another pair. Put them on.”
“Thank you.”
I balanced myself against the window jamb and tugged them on over my shoes. Bukov slid the window open. “All right?”
“I’ve been privileged to know you,” I told him. “Isn’t there anything I can-”
“Just don’t lead them back to me if you can help it. They know what I am but they think if they leave me free to operate I’ll lead them to others. I won’t, but they don’t know that.”
“They won’t leave you alone forever.”
“I know that. But in the meantime we’re getting a great many people out. I’ll have no regrets when they come-I just don’t want to hurry them.”
“I understand.”
I thought he smiled; in the dimness it was hard to be sure. He offered his hand. His grip was firm and quick. “Give Nikki my love.”
“I-”
But he urged me out the window. I hung by my fingers and let myself drop. The snow cushioned the fall but I lost my balance nonetheless and had to brush myself off; when I looked up the window was sliding shut.
The truck swayed when Pudovkin put his weight on the running board and swung himself into the cab. The door chunked shut and he reached across my knee into the glove box for the keys. “I’m sorry it took so long. I had to throw him off the scent, that fellow in the cafe.”
“Did he try to follow you?”
“No, but he knows who I am. I couldn’t let him see me come this way. I had to come the long way round.”
The dusk had turned to night. He ground the starter and the engine caught; I heard the ratchet of the handbrake.
The truck had been driven to pieces. We rattled around the village and went bucking and pitching down the country lanes, snarling through the gears. He said, “We’re a little heavy. It really is a cargo of coats. I’m afraid it won’t be a fast journey-we’ll be lucky to make the coast by dawn. I’ve got to stay on the back roads.”
“Then we’ll be crossing the straits by daylight.”
“No, it’s better to lay over and cross by night. There’s a house we’ll use.”
It began to snow again. Through the batting windshield wipers I saw the forests slide past. We snored and growled up the low hills, the truck shuddering with the strain. There are thick woods inland on the peninsula; at the crests the wind has made the trees hunchbacked. The wind of our approach stirred the trees and pillows of snow fell with plopping crunches, now and then on our hood; several times we had to stop and get out to clean it off. Pudovkin said, “I have tire chains but I hope we won’t need them.” His voice was thin against the racket.
There was nothing for me to do. He had to concentrate on his driving; the roads were narrow and steeply treacherous. I tried to doze. Into my inert grey weariness fell the occasional pebble of apprehension and retrospection: I was a fool, there was no way out of this, I’d been unforgivably callous in involving Bukov and his people in this because it meant I was no longer risking merely my own life but theirs as well.
We ran on into the snowy night along the narrow hill tracks. We crossed above a lake, faintly shining in the night-the ice on it gleamed where the wind had cleared the snow from it. The truck was not insulated and had a poor heater and its window seals were all gone; the wind bit my ears.
During the past three and a half days I had numbed myself with introspective rationalizing and fantasizing. At times I’d had to fight an overwhelming yearning for Nikki, whom I had tried to put out of my thoughts until then; I could see her clearly, her movements and poses and faces-I remembered the way her hair had looked against the pillow; I could hear the cadences of her voice. She was personal and specific in my vision. The nerve ends of my hands and lips remembered with exquisite agony the sweet warm textures of her body. Now Bukov’s parting comment brought it all back again and I drowsed fitfully in the lurching truck with Nikki on my mind, wanting her and blaming her, loving and hating, and now wondering: would I seek her out, once I was out of the Soviets’ reach? Would we meet-and how would it go? Did I have anything to say to her beyond accusations?
My anguish was the torture of questions without answers. The faces moved across the screen of my eyelids: MacIver. Haim Tippelskirch. Zandor. Timoshenko. Karl Ritter. Vassily Bukov. And Nikki. The faces I had never seen-Kolchak, Maxim Tippelskirch, Heinz Krausser-and the dream of gold.
The snow stopped falling before dawn but it had dropped heavily on the hills and we had to use the chains; it took a long time to wrestle them onto the tires and we were still west of our destination when the light came.
The dawn sky had a bruised coloration and it promised to be another oppressive grey day; the trees were limp and heavy, the crumpled folds of the hills were blue with dull shadows. The truck’s window crank, designed by some sinister idiot, hammered the side bone of my knee.
A small stone farmhouse on the left: Pudovkin swung the wheel and we angled across into its yard. I stiffened.
“We’ll lay over here.”
He drove it right into the barn and a man came down from the house, a big man with his face glowing in the chill wind. We dismounted from the truck and Pudovkin smiled but the farmer did not. Pudovkin had begun to utter a greeting but now suddenly his voice stopped, as if someone had shot it.
I said, “What is it?”
The farmer only shook his head and closed the barn behind us and took us to the house. He was reaching for a wide rake when I went inside with Pudovkin.
The woman was stout and I heard the cry of an infant somewhere in the house. Pudovkin and I stood in the kitchen stamping and blowing through our cheeks. Pudovkin pulled off his gloves and blew on his hands. “Hello, Raiza.”
“You’re still too thin,” she said.
“Boris has a long face.”
“He heard something. I don’t know.”
Through a steamy window I saw the farmer raking the yard, obliterating the tracks our truck had made.
Pudovkin said, “We haven’t eaten all night.” He took me through the house and showed me the bathroom. I heard his footsteps recede; the farmer banged into the house and they talked in the kitchen. I could hear the voices, not the words.
I let the water run until the rust cleared out of it. The trickle spiraled down an icicle that hung from the spout. When I turned it off the waterpipes banged. I found a towel and scrubbed my face warm.
I found Pudovkin at the kitchen table, his jaws ruminating bread. “We’ve had a little trouble. The man I was to turn you over to-he was to take you across to the mainland and drive you down the Caucasus. He’s been arrested.”
I sat down very slowly as if the chair might break under me. “Then they know.”
“No. The man’s a Jew, they arrest them for sport. It doesn’t mean this has anything to do with you.”
The farmer stood at the stove, brooding, his nose tucked inside the upturned collar of his coat: “Perhaps you’d better change your plans, Mikhail.”
Pudovkin said, “The car is ready on the other side?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll have to go as planned. Our papers go with that car, not with any other.”
“Suppose Leonid gives them the plate number?”
“Will he?”
The farmer turned. “He won’t volunteer it. But if they put pressure on him.… You can’t hold that against a man. Anyone would break.”
Pudovkin said, “But they’d have to know what to ask him.”
“They may know that he arranged for a boat. I don’t altogether trust the man he got the boat from. The man’s a gentile.”
“So am I,” Pudovkin said.