“I’m going to find Nina,” said Klim. “Nizhny Novgorod is on the way to Kazan.”
Khitruk averted his eyes. “Well, may God help you.” He patted at his pockets in search of a cigarette lighter, muttering away and pretending not to notice Klim’s outstretched hand.
“Thank you for everything,” said Klim, picking up his kit bag from the floor.
Durga met him on the stairs.
“I really don’t know what I should wish you,” she said angrily. “Go now before I say something stupid and jinx you. I don’t want you to catch a bullet in your first battle.”
The rivers were shallow in summer and full of hidden shoals and sandbanks, and the troopships made slow, tortuous progress. There were twenty-eight ascending locks and four descending ones on the Sheksna River alone. The rickety wooden holds were so small that the sailors had to load all the coal and ammunition onto barges. Even the water for the boilers had to be stored on them. The troopships were towed to the town of Rybinsk by tugboats at an agonizingly slow speed of two and a half knots.
Klim grew weary and impatient. He paced the burning hot deck, shading his eyes to look at the ancient monasteries on the riverbanks with their towers and arrow-slit windows. The air was filled with the smell of cut grass and river mud.
Pukhov kept pestering the Chinese soldiers as they lay listlessly in the heat.
“How do you say ‘hello’ in your language?”
The Chinese would say something to him and cackle gleefully. Pukhov repeated what they said and burst into shrill laughter too, not realizing that he had just called himself a donkey and that they were having a laugh at his expense.
After dinner, Klim took refuge behind a lifeboat in the stern. He wanted to spend some time alone away from the Chinese, who were constantly asking him to interpret something. But Pukhov always managed to find him and sat down beside him with his thin hands pressed between his knees.
“The Whites have a fleet of their own now,” he said. “I never thought I’d ever be taking part in a river battle. I remember reading about warships, cannons, and cutlasses as a child, but now, I’m going to experience it all for myself.”
Klim remained tight-lipped. The civil war was none of his business. He had decided long ago that as soon as they got to Nizhny Novgorod, he would go ashore and escape.
The mowers on the riverbank began to cook their lunch. The waves lapped quietly against the side of the ship. Klim tried to work out how long it would take the Nakhimovets to get to Nizhny Novgorod, given all the stops, locks, loading, and unloading.
“Klim?” came Pukhov’s voice.
“Hmm?”
“Do you ever get scared at the thought that they might kill us? Personally, I simply can’t imagine how the world could possibly exist without me in it.”
12. MOBILIZATION
Nina was overjoyed when she received Klim’s telegram, but out of fear of Fomin, she kept it a secret from everyone and celebrated the good news on her own.
In the evenings, she would dance around her bedroom barefoot, rushing up to the mirror every now and then to inspect her reflection. Was she still pretty? Had she changed very much since Klim had left? Like a child, she jumped onto the bed, fell onto the pillows, and hugged them tightly to her.
Recently, she, her brother, and Elena had become as thick as thieves. They liked to sit together on the small sofa in the library and read aloud to each other in turns. They went to the cinema where they watched the audience rather than the screen and giggled together at the most dramatic moments. They pottered around in the garden they had planted on the slope behind the house, proud of their homegrown cucumbers and radishes.
Nina bit the bullet and allowed Zhora to hold parties at the house for his fellow poets. They came to Crest Hill in the evenings to read their poetry, sing to the guitar, and share news in excited whispers. After the Czechs’ rebellion, fighting had flared up all over the country. There were countless peasant uprisings, the Cossacks and Whites had launched attacks on the Red Army in the south, and the Czechs and Slovaks were fighting the Bolsheviks in the Volga region and along the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Nina touched Klim’s key. She didn’t care about anything in this country anymore and least of all her mill and store. She just wanted Klim back.
The really good thing was that Nina wouldn’t have to come up with any schemes to keep Klim and Fomin apart. Everything had turned out perfectly. The conspirators in Nizhny Novgorod were planning to stage a coup in late August. Fomin was one of the ringleaders, and he would be too busy to give Nina much thought.
Sablin had been genuinely amazed when Zhora had announced that he wanted to become a medic, but the boy had studied hard in the dissecting room and pretended to mind neither the heavy smell of the formaldehyde nor the dissected corpses lying on the tables. He had watched Sablin perform operations several times and managed not only to take everything on board but also chat to the nurses about the price of butter and millet.
He’ll do, thought Sablin, smiling to himself. He’s a born medic.
One day, Zhora approached Sablin. “I’d like to have a word with you, Doctor, if I may?” And this had marked the beginning of a clandestine alliance between the two men.
Sablin took the most direct part in the preparations for the uprising. He had trained up medical teams and organized secret locations where the wounded would be treated.
When Sablin came in to work at the hospital, he went straight to find Zhora.
“What’s the latest news?” he asked.
“The White Army and the Czechs have occupied Simbirsk city,” Zhora answered in an excited whisper, “and they are on their way up the Volga.”
The Bolsheviks, fearing that their fragile grasp of power might be slipping, were resorting to ever more brutal measures. Sablin gaped dumbstruck as Zhora told him the news from Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks had just shot the entire Russian royal family, including the young grand duchesses and the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich.
Soon, the news had spread throughout the hospital, but few people expressed much pity or compassion. Most of the staff and patients confined themselves to obscure phrases such as, “Well, the Tsar has come to a bad end.” Others openly reveled in his death, saying that it had served him right.
The city was in a state of feverish activity. Huge posters were plastered all over the fences calling on river transport workers to join the Red Volga Flotilla. In the Kunavino district and around the fair, sailors’ hats bearing the names of ships no one on the Volga had ever heard of became a common sight. The Bolsheviks had destroyed the Russian Black Sea Fleet near the port of Novorossiysk so that their battleships would not fall into German hands. Now, their crews were traveling overland to Nizhny Novgorod to set off down the Volga on merchant boats that had been fitted out as gunships in the Sormovo factories.
On the morning of July 27, 1918, two Red Army soldiers came to visit Dr. Sablin.
“Get ready to leave, Doctor,” they said. “We have orders to take you as a member of the Red Volga Flotilla staff.”
At the headquarters, Sablin was told that he had been appointed head of a field hospital and that the next day, he was to leave for the front on a new gunboat called the Lady that had been converted out of a tugboat. Sablin tried to argue that he didn’t want to enlist and wasn’t even fit to fight on account of his bad leg, but the Flotilla commissar—a strapping, clear-eyed giant of a man—replied that this was no time for arguing and that Sablin would be shot if he didn’t report first thing the next morning.