The fresh snow was pitted with the marks of women’s high heeled shoes. Elkin stared at them lovingly. How many years had it been since he had seen such a thing in Moscow?
All around, people were shouting Russian, Belarusian, and Polish. The houses here were wooden like the houses in Russia, but their roofs were covered in red and black slates in the Polish style. Soviet banners, prepared for the latest anniversary of the revolution, fluttered in the breeze. On a nearby bench, Red Army soldiers sat beside fine-looking Jewish men with side locks.
After wandering for a while, Elkin found his way to Nemiga, a narrow street lined with low buildings with cluttered stores on the ground floor and living quarters up above.
Elkin found the house he was looking for and knocked at the padded door. A young man with closely cropped hair, dark eyes, and a crooked chin came out.
“What do you want?” he asked in Belarusian.
“I’m here to see Rygor,” replied Elkin.
The young man glanced to each side and then took Elkin through into a room piled high with packing cases full of goods.
“Stay here,” he said and disappeared into the back room.
Elkin waited for more than an hour. Eventually, he could stand it no more and went out into the corridor.
A narrow metal staircase led up to the floor above, and up above, he could hear voices speaking in Polish.
“They’re running out of confiscated goods. So, what have we got right now?”
“Ribbed tricot, French marquisette, velveteen—with and without silk—wool broadcloth…”
The Poles were cashing in on all sides on the Bolshevik economic experiment. As soon as certain goods began to disappear from the USSR, there was a tremendous surge in contraband items. In the villages on the Polish border, people were hard at work concocting mascara, making brassieres from poor-quality imitation silk, and even printing false consignment documents for all sorts of institutions. Nobody was concerned by the poor quality of these goods; they were still better than what was available in the USSR.
At last, there was a clatter of boots on the staircase, and Rygor, a plump man with a curly beard, came down from the floor above.
“Well, just look who it is!” he exclaimed in Russian on seeing Elkin. “So, what brings you here?”
Elkin explained he needed to get to Poland without delay.
Rygor scratched his head thoughtfully. “Well, you could set off tonight if you like. But I have to warn you, there’s shooting on the border at the moment.”
“What? Why?” asked Elkin in alarm.
“Russkies behaving like beasts, that’s what. Now, they’re waging war on well-off peasants. Our men don’t want to give up their produce, so they’re hiding in the forest. Folk around here are desperate and still armed to the teeth after the war. So, partisans are killing Red Army soldiers like pigs and then running across to Poland to escape arrest. My friend, Piatrus Kamchatka, is setting out to the border today, and he can take you with him.”
According to Rygor, Piatrus was an experienced smuggler. “For three years now, he’s been taking gold and artworks over to Poland. He brings all sorts of things back in to the country, from microscopes to toilet paper. He’s as strong as an ox. One time, he was asked to take a crippled old woman across the border. And what do you think he did? Took her over on his own back!”
Rygor asked for a hundred rubles for putting Elkin in contact with his friend.
“For God’s sake, I can’t give you that much!” said Elkin.
Rygor shrugged. “Well, so long as you’re no bourgeois, you can stay here, can’t you?”
With a heavy heart, Elkin handed over the money. Now, he might not have enough to pay a guide from the sum allocated by Nina for his passage across the border.
“Anyone with any sense is selling their possessions and getting out of the land of the Soviets,” said Rygor, putting the money in his pocket. “Piatrus can take you as far as Rakov—it’s what you might call the smugglers’ capital. I’ll be going there myself in three weeks. It’s a good little town, Rakov. For a population of seven thousand, it has one hundred and thirty-four shops, nighty-six restaurants, and four official brothels.”
Ales, the young man with the crooked chin who had opened the door to Elkin, took him to a village on the border.
They traveled for a long time along bad roads. It was a frosty night, and the cart jolted them mercilessly as it went over the frozen ruts.
Eklin tried to ask Ales about the smugglers and about the situation at the border, but the young man merely pulled a face and spat on the ground.
“Ask Piatrus,” he said.
All the way, he sang songs about the “Russkies” who had drawn up their borders without consulting the local peasants and about the wrath of the people, which was bound, sooner or later, to overtake the interlopers. The Belorussians had lived for many years between the devil and the deep blue sea, suffering all sorts of misery from both the Poles and the Russians, who kept sending armies sweeping through their land.
Elkin sensed that Ales saw him as an enemy too, as one of the “Russkies.” He found it hard to believe how he could be considered guilty of crimes of which he had no knowledge. But as far as Ales was concerned, ignorance of the plight of Belorussia was tantamount to approval of the injustices being done to his country.
Dusk was falling by the time they reached the village.
With trepidation, Elkin gazed at the clapboard houses with their dark blue window frames. Snow lay on their thatched roofs, and columns of smoke drifted from their chimneys.
Ales led the horse into a yard surrounded by a pole fence.
“Out you get!” he commanded to Elkin.
Clenching his body against the cold, Elkin jumped down. The icy puddles crunched beneath his feet.
An old woman wearing a checked dress and a padded jacket came out to meet them. She spoke to Ales rapidly in Belorussian. All Elkin could understand of their conversation was that Ales was going on farther while Elkin was to wait for Piatrus there.
The old woman took him inside the house where it was hot and smoky. Several hens were settling down to roost before an enormous stove.
“Won’t you take off your coat?” asked the old woman as Elkin sank, exhausted, onto a bench.
“I’m cold,” he told her. “I can’t seem to get warm.”
After the conversation with Ales, he was haunted by a sense of foreboding. Where had he ended up now? Who were these people? Could he trust them?
Fortunately, the old woman turned out to be good-natured and friendly. She even offered Elkin some bread.
Unlike Ales, she was more worried about the Poles than the “Russkies.” Sighing, she told him that when the Germans had come during the Great War, they hadn’t touched a thing, but with the Poles, it had been a different story. They stole animals, and any peasant who protested would be whipped with switches.
So, this is life on the border, thought Elkin. On the one hand, there’s no shortage of opportunities for trade, but on the other hand, everyone is out to get a piece of what was yours.
He soon felt drowsy from the food and the warmth and kept rubbing his eyes to keep himself awake.
“So, where’s Piatrus?” he asked at last.
There was a sound from the shelf above the stove, and the next minute, a great strong boy dressed in a faded soldier’s tunic without a belt jumped down to the ground. He stretched, yawned, and, turning to the icon in the corner of the hut, crossed himself.
“Have you got some money for me?” he asked Elkin.
Like Rygor, Piatrus was not prepared to bargain. He would settle for no less than three hundred rubles, and Elkin was forced to get the shortfall from the sum Nina had asked him to take across the border. He cut open the lining of his coat and took out a hundred-dollar note.