“Not like Charlin Chaplin,” said Evgenia. “Who told you about the film?”
“Word travels in these parts. You asked one of the villagers whether you could film here.”
Yuri stood behind them, silent.
Evgenia glanced at Jones. He nodded, then Evgenia tried her best. “We are making a film. But it’s about the hunger, the children starving, the dead villages. We need to get the film out, to tell the world what’s happening. We have the proof on film. That’s why, Granma. That’s why we need to hide on your barge, to get out.”
“The train would be faster.”
“They’re hunting for us. If we take the train…”
A sound came from the woods outside – something, perhaps an animal, bustling through the undergrowth. The cat stopped purring, its ears pricking up. The old woman listened intently. Then the cat stretched itself, licked a paw and started purring again. Granma sucked on her pipe and came to her decision.
“The hat? That’s a giveaway, right there. His glasses? They have to go. His clothes, too. I can give him some good working men’s clothes. And, you, my lady, you’ve got to look like a man. So the hair? It’s got to be cut. Your fine clothes, you’ve got to throw them away. I’ve got a boiler suit that will fit you. When a barge comes along, or we’re close to the bank or going through a town, you’ve got to hide, right down in the bilges, in the muck. Aye, both of your faces are bloody white, too. You need to look brown, common, like me.”
“Thank you Granma,” said Evgenia, “thank you with all our hearts.” She translated the deal to Jones.
When he learnt that he could not wear his spectacles, he said: “Without them, I am blind.”
“Tough,” said Evgenia.
The old woman found some scissors and went to work on Evgenia’s hair, great long tresses falling to the ground. Throughout it all, Evgenia wore a steely smile. Yuri disappeared for a time and came back with two sets of clothes, two pairs of boots. None of it was clean. From a jar, the old woman gave them each a dollop of molasses to make their faces less lily-white. When the transformation was finished, they looked into a mirror and saw two rough necks.
While the old woman headed off to the barge, to warn her crew, Evgenia, Yuri and Jones waited in the shack. Ten minutes later, they hurried through the dark, the eastern sky beginning to redden, heading towards a black hulk that lay in the ice-edged river. At the barge’s stern, they could see a red dot, someone smoking a pipe. They waited in silence until the red dot was extinguished, then they hurried across a narrow, spindly gangplank and down a wooden ladder into the bowels of the ship. Down here, slabs of marble lay flat on a lattice of wooden railways sleepers. Yuri took out a hammer from a toolbox and headed for the largest slab and crawled underneath the overhang. In the gloom, all of the sleepers looked solid and immobile but with the hammer he knocked a wooden chock to one side to gain entry, opening up an access hole not much bigger than eighteen inches square. Jones had to wriggle sideways to get in. Rough wooden planks had been laid on a metal trellis above the bilges, the filthy oily water sucking and weeping beneath them. The gap between the planks and the bottom of the marble was but twelve inches.
“It’s cold as iron,” whispered Evgenia.
“The Cheka have never checked the barges before,” replied Yuri, softly. “But Granma, she’s worried. She says there’s something especially dangerous about helping you two. Everyone on the river is talking about the two foreign spies with the camera.” He hesitated. “This is the safest place on the boat. They’ll never find you down here. Once we start moving, once we’ve made some headway, I’ll come and get you out of here. I’m going the whole way, down this river, then joining the Dnieper, then hugging the coast of the Black Sea, then to Odessa. Once we’ve left this place, you’ll be able to come up for air, to sit in the sun. For the moment, I’ll try and find you some blankets, maybe a sheepskin. Suffer the cold for a night and then we’ll see.”
He came back with a huge fur. “Must be a bear,” said Jones.
“It belongs to Granma,” said Yuri, threading it through the gap.
“Did she kill it with her own fair hands?” asked Jones, trying to make light of the grimness of their hidey-hole. Yuri made no reply. They heard him hammer the wooden chock into place, sealing them in, and then his boots climbing the ladder out to the fresh night air and the stars without.
Water hissed and bubbled as the river’s current played upon the ancient and very thin steel plate beneath them. Whenever the barge bumped against its moorings, the oily slop in the bilges licked against the underside of the planks. For Jones, his fear of enclosed places was far worse here than in the truck: if the barge hit a rock or a jagged ice-floe, then they would be trapped in a watery grave under ten tonnes of marble. Jones started to pant, his breathing irregular, jerky. It was only when he heard Evgenia hum a few bars from “Let My People Go” that he started to gain control again.
At length the engine came to life and, with bewildering slowness, the barge pushed through the river’s newly-formed skin of ice. Soon, the noxious slop beneath Jones and Evgenia spouted between the gaps in the planks, soaking the bearskin and them in turn. Filled with oil as it was, the slop didn’t freeze, just clung to their clothes, coating everything it touched.
For hours on end, the tension gnawed away at their nerves – until, finally, the scrape of boot steps on metal signalled an end to their torture. Yuri cursed as he hammered the wooden chock free and, suddenly, a dim light filtered through. Limbs cramped and half-frozen, it took Evgenia and Jones an age to scramble out through the hole, their hands and faces blackened by the slop. Yuri led them to the cargo ladder and allowed them to climb up so that their heads could peek out through an open hatch. Up above, sunrise. Pink fingers of light searched out the near-frozen river and the white steppe beyond, a steam engine pulling an endless succession of coal wagons running parallel with the river.
Soon, Yuri disappeared, only to reappear with two cups of “coffee”, foul-smelling but hot, and with that chunks of freshly-caught carp, cooked in a metal tin. No more delicious a meal Jones had eaten his whole life.
“Bugger the Cheka,” said Jones, “I’m not going down that hole ever again.”
Evgenia studied him, unconvinced.
The barge had been built long before the revolution and was held together by rust and rivets, black smoke belching from its dwarfish smoke-stack. It moved arthritically, never faster than the current, lest its venerable hull be punctured by a big floe or its engine give out. But at least the tortoise pace had a soothing effect on both Jones and Evgenia. They were still being hunted and had to hide in the cargo hold disappear whenever the barge had to enter a lock or when they encountered river traffic coming upstream. But the hold was paradise compared to the darkness underneath the marble.
Later that morning, they met the two hands. Arkady was young, a bit simple, did everything Granma asked of him with a literalness that was both silly and touching. Arkady sensed that something was not quite right about the squinting man and the strange-looking boy but didn’t know how to articulate his doubts and was afraid to cross Granma, so he ended up smiling at them slightly creepily, as he if he was a creature in a not very good horror movie. A little while later, the older hand, Pyotr, emerged from the engine room covered in coal dust. Looking Evgenia up and down, he half-smiled, half-grimaced and muttered something.
“What was that?” asked Evgenia.
“Trouble, more trouble than it’s worth.” He said this to himself, raising a flask to his lips and draining it, then wiping the back of his mouth. “The bilge pump. Built by the former people. It’s knackered, keeps on getting blocked. When that happens, the bilges can rise a foot in an hour. Hate to think what might happen if it gets blocked when you two are hiding underneath the marble. Not a good way to go, eh?” Then he disappeared back to the engine room without saying another word. He had the same piercing blue eyes as Granma and had been handsome, once, before the drink had addled his looks.