Every now and then, his and Caitlin’s eyes would meet across the fire, and they’d been lovers long enough for him to recognize her look. He knew they shouldn’t, that sleeping with him again might even prove fatal for her, so he tore himself away from the eyes and the fire, and announced that he was having an early night.
She had other ideas, catching up with him as he reached his door and putting her arms around his neck.
“This is too public,” she said after a long, intention-sapping kiss.
“It’s too dangerous,” he told her, resisting her gentle tug on his arm.
“I know,” she said. “But if making love with you makes me an enemy of the revolution, then it’s not the revolution I chose to serve. Now come.”
He went.
Later, as they lay in each other’s arms, she ran a finger across his chest. “Sometimes I think that we’re the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to understand.”
“I know. And yet sometimes—like now—it seems so… self-explanatory.”
She propped up her head on an arm and looked into his face. “So are you still in love with me?”
“I’m afraid I am,” he answered with a lightness he didn’t feel.
“I’m not,” she said, laying her head back onto his shoulder.
An hour later, he left her asleep and padded silently back to his own room, hoping to maximize any thin chance of concealing their liaison. Still feeling wide awake, he went out onto the creaking balcony and watched a pair of scrawny dogs prowling the empty street.
Had he left it too late to escape? He probably had. If he took off now in one of the cars parked below, he’d either die in the desert or find the Cheka waiting in the first town he reached. And if the party ever reached Kerki, he doubted that Komarov would leave him untended again. The die seemed cast.
Perhaps it always had been. He’d left it too late to leave because this was where he wanted to be.
Two hundred miles to the west, the anchored Red Turkestan rolled gently in the smooth current of the Amu Dar’ya. Red lights shone at either end of the superstructure, though what purpose they served was beyond Piatakov; no boat would be moving on such a treacherous river at night.
They had run aground about half a dozen times that day, and both passengers and crew had been forced to take to the shallow water and bodily heave the boat off the sandbanks. The civilian passengers had taken less kindly to this unwelcome exercise than they had to the news that their boat had been hijacked. That minor detail had been accepted with a stoicism that bordered on masochism. The boat was still headed in the right direction, so why worry about who was in control? Better to shrug and enjoy what shade you could find. It was Russia writ small.
Brady was lying close by on the deck, covered with a greatcoat he had found in one of the cabins. Piatakov had watched the American’s face age as he drifted into sleep and had thought that with most people it was the other way around: he remembered Caitlin’s hair spread around her pale child’s face. Most people, he guessed, reverted to childhood in sleep, dragged back by dreams to a simpler world.
Did Brady revert to childhood when he was awake? Now, that was a disturbing thought—people who found life simple were always dangerous.
The American seemed to be growing more savage with each passing day. Had the civil war made him that way or merely set free what had been in there already?
Several years earlier, as they’d waited to set out on a night infiltration, Brady had told Piatakov that he’d been born in the year Krakatoa exploded and that, according to his mother, he’d rarely seen sunlight in the first three years of his life. This, he had said, at least half seriously, was probably why he loved darkness so much.
Piatakov thought about his own mother, and the picture that came to mind was her sitting in the overgrown arbor at the bottom of their jungle-like garden. She had loved its wildness, hated formal gardens—the newly fashionable topiary had been one of her few pet aversions. Nature was everything.
What would she think of what he was doing? She’d never condemned, always encouraged. “You’re such a good boy.”
What was good? Fighting for what you believed in? Well, people got hurt when you did that, and could hurting people be good?
He let out a sigh. Lately so many memories seemed to be claiming his attention. Why was that?
It didn’t matter. There was nothing threatening about them. On the contrary, the way they tied his life together was strangely comforting.
They left soon after dawn, jolting their way through sparsely inhabited hills, skirting the occasional village that clung to their slopes. As the bright white sky slowly turned to blue, the land began to flatten out, and the cars could sometimes run side by side, sparing each the other’s dust.
The forty-five miles to Guzar took most of the morning. It proved a very small town, perched on the rim of the desert where dried-up rivers converged in a cluster of black elms and mulberry trees. Their arrival was unheralded and provoked a range of astonished glances and gaping stares from the watching inhabitants, few if any of whom could ever have seen an automobile. The local party official was eventually hunted down in the town mosque, where he claimed he’d been doing educational work.
He arranged refreshments with alacrity and eagerly asked for news of the wider world from each man in turn. He didn’t speak to Caitlin, but couldn’t stop staring at this strangest of creatures, the so-called “comrade woman.” Every other woman in town was draped head to toe in the usual shroud.
The road onward to Karshi followed the rapidly evaporating river out across the desert, passing through a few small villages, all with fortified towers in various stages of decay. The track had been worn smooth by several thousand years of caravan traffic, and they covered this thirty-mile stretch without mishap in a little under three hours, entering what looked like a war-damaged town late that afternoon.
The local Soviet boss was waiting outside his red-flagged residence, ready to explain. The Basmachi had attacked the town twice before the recent deployment of a garrison, blowing up several buildings and riding off with all the food and drink they could carry. As a consequence, the hospitality he could offer his eminent guests from Moscow was somewhat limited.
Komarov waved all this away impatiently and asked if everything had been arranged for their desert crossing. It had. The garrison commander would supply the details, but of course they would travel by night. Komarov asked to see the man in question immediately and advised the others to get some rest while they could.
Piatakov mopped his brow with the front of his blouse for about the hundredth time that day. The sun seemed hotter than ever, beating down out of an ivory-colored sky, drawing agonized flashes of light from the rippling water.
They were approaching Burdalik, according to the captain, and the passengers had all been locked in their cabins. The desert had drawn back from the river over the last few miles, giving ground to reedy flats alive with wild birds and increasing stretches of cultivated land dotted with grey-brown houses and copses of mulberry trees. Every so often a small group of women appeared in the riverside fields, and when one spied the boat, they would all look up, then stretch their backs in unison, as if doing physical drills.