Suddenly, the deafening sound of a gunshot broke the silence, and a fountain of small stones erupted right beside Nina. Flinching, she looked around, and her blood ran cold—down below at the foot of the hill stood a familiar, dust-covered Buick.
The German flight instructor, Friedrich, lowering the barrel of his gun, beckoned to Nina. “Come here!”
There was nowhere to hide. Nina sank to the ground and hid her face in her hands. Let them carry her back to the car if they had to.
Borisov came running up, grabbed her by the shoulder, and forced her to her feet.
“Idiot!” he shouted, dealing her a great slap in the face. “Do you know how much petrol we’ve wasted because of you?”
Nina tried to get away, but Borisov twisted her arm and pulled her toward the car.
“You’re for it now!” he hissed. “You backstabber! What if they’d caught you? You’d have handed us all over to the Chinese, wouldn’t you?”
He was about to hit Nina again, but Friedrich stopped him. “We should go,” Friedrich said. “We still have to catch up with the others.”
Nina, sobbing, was bundled into the Buick between boxes of tinned food and a shining gramophone speaker.
“Oh, don’t worry,” said Borisov. “I’ll set you free in a week—without food and water. But first, I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you.”
Friedrich glanced at Nina in the rearview mirror. “Get into the truck with Magda,” he said suddenly in English. “And don’t leave her for a minute, or this scoundrel will beat you to death.”
Nina was bewildered. She had had no idea that any of the Bolsheviks sympathized with her.
Borisov frowned. “What did you just say to her?” He knew no English, despite having spent three years in the Peking Legation Quarter.
“I was just telling her to get into the baggage truck,” said Friedrich. “I don’t want her in my car.”
Englishwoman Magda Thomson felt like a pariah among the Bolsheviks. She had an inherent and irreparable defect in their eyes—she was the heiress of a large soap factory near Liverpool. Tall and heavily built, she looked more like a butcher’s daughter than a “soap princess,” but that did not help—the Bolsheviks looked askance at her. Sometimes they would even mock her openly.
Magda had traveled the world at her leisure before settling in Peking. She took a room in a hotel not far from the Legation Quarter, and one night as she sat reading in her room, she had heard a suspicious scuffle outside the door. Looking out into the corridor, she saw a man clutching a bloody wound on his arm.
“The Chinese police are after me,” he panted. “Could I hide out here with you for a while? My name is Friedrich. And yours?”
At the sight of this Teutonic knight with his haughty stare and close-cropped head of graying hair, Magda had been unable to resist. She let Friedrich stay and began helping him in any way she could: driving him to the apartments of fellow conspirators and organizing the evacuation of Chinese communists and their Russian advisers. At night, they would make love.
Magda asked Friedrich about his plans for the future.
“I’m going to Moscow,” he said.
“But why? You’re a German. What is there for you in Moscow?”
“A new life is dawning there. As for your beloved West, it has nothing to offer but vulgarity, tedium, and moneymaking.”
Friedrich told Magda of how he had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the Great War and how he had become friendly with Bolsheviks and realized that it was his fate to try to bring about world revolution. In China, he had instructed National Revolutionary Army pilots in aerial warfare.
Magda gave Friedrich a nickname in private: Friedrich der Große (Frederick the Great). He knew no fear and was less concerned for his own welfare than he was for that of his comrades and for the general good—as he understood it. He was the first man that Magda had ever met who cared nothing for her fortune. In fact, he thought of it as a burden that she should get rid of as soon as possible.
“I can’t,” Magda explained apologetically. “It’s not my money, you see. It’s my father’s. He just pays all my bills.”
Friedrich never spoke to Magda of love. He assumed that she wanted to help not him personally but his cause, and he was grateful to her for it.
One day, he clasped her tightly by the hand and told her that he was leaving for the Soviet Union.
“The Party will never forget your kindness, Miss Thomson!”
“I’m coming with you,” declared Magda without a second thought.
Friedrich was dumbstruck. He told Magda she had lost her senses and hinted that, as a British capitalist, she might run into some serious problems in the USSR. In reply, Magda said that she was not really scared of anything. She had been traveling around South America and met an Indian medicine man who had given her a special herb to smoke and put a charm over her that was supposed to protect her from a violent death.
Next day, Magda went to see new friends she had made in the Soviet Embassy and managed to get herself a visa.
“Have they lost their minds?” Friedrich yelled, furious, when he found out. “How did you talk them into it?”
Magda smiled enigmatically. She had offered Friedrich’s comrades in arms a large medical truck that they could use to take personal possessions out of China. The Soviet government was only providing enough money to evacuate people, the party archive, and weapons. Everything else was to be left behind.
Friedrich was furious with Magda and warned her not to come near him. The other Bolsheviks kept their distance from her too as if she might infect them with “British Imperialism.”
The journey from China was a long one, and Magda, worn out from fear and loneliness, was overjoyed when Nina Kupina was put into the truck with her, especially as this new fellow passenger spoke excellent English. It was a good thing that Nina was thin too as it meant she could squeeze into the space behind the passenger seat. There was no room in the back; the van was crammed full with bundles, baskets, and boxes.
Day after day, the medical truck trundled across the desert like a solid, stony sea. Watermelons rolled about underfoot while feathers from a number of ladies’ hats nodded overhead, pinned to the ceiling of the driver’s cabin. The Embassy women were hoping to sell them for a profit in Moscow, opting to forget about their anti-capitalist convictions for a while.
Their Chinese driver sang songs, interrupting his singing now and again to curse their guides, who kept getting confused and more than once led the column of vehicles in the wrong direction completely.
“What are we going to do if we run out of gas?” the driver muttered now and again. “Or if there’s a sandstorm?”
Magda was listening with only one ear. Up ahead of them was the Buick driven by Friedrich der Große. She would have given anything on earth to be next to him right now. If there were some disaster, she thought how good it would be to die with him at his side in a single moment! The sands would cover them, and three-hundred years later, they would be discovered by some archeologist, sitting side by side and holding hands. Even death would be powerless to separate them.
But Friedrich had taken Borisov in his car with him, together with an extra water cask—there was nothing there to delight the archeologists of the future.
Magda could not understand why Friedrich was rejecting her. It was true that she was no beauty; it was true that she was English, but these things had never bothered him in the past. And what if he had no desire to make it up to her when they got to Moscow? What if he just disappeared, leaving her to do whatever she wanted?