“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: