‘Yes, sir!’ they replied. ‘This isn’t the first time, Comrade Commissar.’
The journalists were led away followed by the commissar. I remained alone in the wagon. It wasn’t long before the soldiers returned and took the journalists’ things. I waited. An hour passed. From a nearby agitprop wagon, a sleepy-looking man, barefoot and shirtless and sporting a huge, tousled mane of hair and beard, climbed down. He dragged out after him a sheet of plywood, some brushes and cans of paint, propped the wood up against the wagon, spat on his hands, grabbed a brush and with a single stroke drew a fat man in a black top hat. Money poured from the man’s belly, which had been slit open by a bayonet. The bushy man scratched the back of his head and then wrote in red down one side of the plywood: ‘The bourgeois belly, fat with gold, Never expected a strike so bold.’
The sailors in the neighbouring wagon howled with laughter. He paid them no attention, sat down on the wagon’s steps and began rolling a thick makhorka cigarette. Just then a soldier appeared and told me to follow him to the commissar’s office. This would be my end. I grabbed my suitcase and off we went. His office was in a coach that stood in a siding overgrown with dandelions. A shiny new machine-gun stood in the door. The commissar was sitting and smoking at a table made from a few rough boards. He looked at me thoughtfully for a long time.
‘Let me hear it, every last bit,’ he finally said. ‘Where are you heading and for what reason? And let me see your documents as well.’
I realised I had to come clean. I told him about the troubles I had had trying to get a visa. ‘And as for documents, the most important one I have is this letter,’ I said, placing Galya’s letter on the table in front of him. ‘I am afraid I don’t have any others.’
The commissar frowned and began to slowly read the letter. As he read, he glanced up at me from time to time. Then he folded the letter, placed it back in the envelope, and handed it to me.
‘The document is clearly authentic,’ he said. ‘Do you have identification on you?’
I handed him my only identity card.
‘Have a seat,’ he said, and then pulled out a form with an official stamp and carefully filled it in, looking now and then at my card.
‘Here you are!’ he said at last, handing me the form. ‘Here’s your exit visa!’
‘Thank you,’ I said, overcome with emotion. My voice cracked. I couldn’t believe my luck.
‘There, there!’ the commissar said, embarrassed. He stood up and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Best not to get upset. My compliments to your dear mother. From Commissar Anokhin, Pavel Zakharovich, tell her. She must be a remarkable woman. To think of walking all the way to Moscow.’
He stretched out his hand. I shook it firmly but couldn’t get a word out. He straightened his belt and his holstered Mauser and said: ‘We’ll have to liquidate that little runt with the diamonds in the teapot. But we’ve let the others go. I’ve ordered you to be moved to a different wagon. You can’t be riding with those types. Well, farewell. And don’t forget to give your mother my compliments.’
I walked out in a daze. I could barely hold back my tears. The soldier leading me noticed. ‘I’d die twice for a commissar like him,’ he said. ‘He’s a worker from Petrograd, from the Obukhov Factory. Remember his name – Anokhin, Pavel Zakharovich. You might just meet him again.’
They took me to a wagon with only two people in it – an elderly singer and a skinny, talkative boy named Vadik. He was clumsy and simple-hearted, but kind. Both of them were travelling from Petrograd – the singer to his only daughter, a doctor in Vinnitsa, and Vadik to his mother in Odessa. Vadik had left Odessa to spend the winter holidays with his grandfather in 1917 and got stuck there for a year and a half. He found the whole thing a marvellous adventure. We travelled without any further incidents to the station at Zërnovo (Seredyna-Buda), which at the time marked the frontier between Russia and Ukraine.
We stopped at a halfway halt on the edge of a forest the night before reaching Zërnovo. The Bryansk forests stretched off to the north from here, and nearby were all the wonderful places I had often visited as a child. I couldn’t sleep. The singer and I hopped down out of our wagon and went for a walk down a dirt road that took us along the edge of the woods and out into some dark fields. Summer lightning flashed low over the swaying grain. We sat on an old elm blown down by a storm at the side of the road. These massive dead elms, lying alone among the fields and meadows, always reminded me for some reason of tough old men in homespun tunics, their grey beards blowing in the wind. The singer said after a silence: ‘Everyone believes in Russia in their own way, and for their own reasons.’
‘What are yours?’
‘I’m a singer. So you can imagine what mine are.’ He was quiet for a while and then began to sing, sorrowfully and slowly:
I walk out alone onto the road,
Through the fog the stony path shines.
The night is quiet, the wilderness hearkens to God,
And overhead star speaks to star.
I have long believed this poem of Lermontov’s to be the greatest work in all Russian poetry.fn2 And despite his saying that he had neither hope for the future nor regret for the past, it was obvious that Lermontov said all this precisely because he did regret the past and he did expect life to grant him a few fleeting, even if illusory, moments of happiness.
The wind stirred the fields. The agitated corn waved with a scattering whisper. The lightning flashed brighter, and the thunder groaned drowsily in the distance. We walked back to the station. I picked a handful of grass as we made our way through the darkness, and only in the morning did I notice that it was scented clover, what is for me the most precious of all Russian flowers.
79
The Neutral Zone
Our train arrived at Zërnovo in the morning. The frontier patrol went through the train, checking our exit visas. Our wagon and several others were uncoupled from the train and an old shunting engine dragged us towards the border, an area called the ‘Neutral Zone’. The doors to our wagon were kept closed and a few Red Army soldiers with rifles stood guard.
At last the train came to a stop, and we got out. The wagons stood in the middle of a dry field near a track watchman’s hut. The wind had kicked up the dust. A few peasant carts stood by the barrier. Their drivers – old men with whips – cried out to us: ‘Who’s heading to the other side, to Ukraine? Come on over!’
‘Is it far?’ I asked an old man with a thin beard.
‘Not at all! Three versts from here and you can already see the Germans. Let’s go!’
We piled our luggage on the cart and walked along beside it. The rest of the carts followed us. At the rear I saw the journalists from the Riga–Orël line. They were walking behind their cart and talking in loud, happy voices. Dodya wasn’t with them. Grey Spats looked wildly out of place amid the fields, the swirling dust on the road and the wind-blown nut trees in the gullies. Once we had gone about a kilometre, he stopped, turned to the north to face Russia, shook an angry fist at her and then cursed to high heaven. The driver gave him a frightened look and then shook his head.
I think I mentioned somewhere that my mother believed in the law of retribution. No base, inhuman or cruel act, she liked to say, went unpunished. Sooner or later, retribution would come. I always laughed at my mother’s superstitions, but that day I myself almost came to share her belief in the law of retribution.
The road dropped into a hollow overgrown with brush. Our driver became nervous and urged on his old nag. We had reached the bottom of the hollow and started up the other side when out of the scrub stepped a man in a tall astrakhan hat and dusty violet riding breeches. He held a Mauser in one hand. Two bandoliers with cartridges formed a cross over his chest. Several young men in greatcoats, pea-jackets and embroidered Ukrainian shirts followed close behind. They were armed with sawn-off shotguns and swords, and some of them had ‘little lemons’ – hand-grenades – dangling from their belts. The man in the violet breeches raised his Mauser and fired in the air. The carts stopped immediately.