Three days after they joined the barge, Granma allowed them up to the wheelhouse for the first time, Jones squinting at the fuzzy shapes in the near-distance, Evgenia – looking more like a boy than a woman in her boiler-suit and black cap – explaining what he was missing: the immensity of the Dnieper, at times so wide as to be an inland sea, snow on snow, ice-floes cracking and tumbling ahead. Granma said nothing but smoked her pipe. Small talk was not for her.
The one thing everybody on board did was fish, trailing lines in the barge’s wake when it was moving, casting rods when the barge had to lay up to wait for oncoming traffic, or when a knot of ice blocked the channel until a ship with a specially hardened bow could pass through. During these enforced stops, Pyotr would walk off into the solid ice and drill a hole with an auger, then sit above the hole and wait. Jones would go to a porthole and, making sure that no-one would was looking, slip on his spectacles and spend hours watching nothing happen with sinful pleasure.
He made himself a promise, then: that, if they ever got out of the Soviet Union and he was done with journalism, he would take up fishing. Granma was the best of them: she simply had to cast a line over the stern to land a carp or pike or dace. The catch was always washed down by her moonshine, made from fermented potatoes – and old boots, Jones guessed – which she manufactured in a still in her cabin. Granma did her best to ignore them, day in, day out, but their very presence on her barge was an act, in those times, of extraordinary courage.
Or a kind of madness.
The wind saved them. Had it been in the wrong direction, they would never have heard the barking of dogs from a mile downstream, long before the lock came into view.
Granma hissed, “Get down under the stone and stay there until we come and get you!” Then she made the sign of the cross, index finger straight, middle finger slightly crooked. Jones couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an ordinary person make a show of religious belief. These days, they were for the doomed or the damned.
Yuri led the way, hurrying Jones and Evgenia down into the cargo hold and watching them wriggle into the hollow beneath the bottom slab of marble. It was grimmer down here than before, but there was no choice. Evgenia was the last one in, Jones clutching his bag with the Kinamo and reel of film to his side as she followed him through. In here, the bottom of the marble an inch from Jones’ face, they held each other’s hands and listened to the wooden chock being hammered home, then Yuri’s steps on the ladder.
Nuzzling each other as tenderly they could, they did their best to close their minds to reality, the monolith above, the oily slop beneath. After a time Jones asked, “Evgenia, am I wrong or did Granma make the same sign of the cross as the priest?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I saw that too. I think they’re Old Believers. Maybe all of them are, the priest, Ilya, Yuri, Granma, the crew.”
“Old Believers?”
“They follow the old version of Russian orthodoxy, before the Reforms in the seventeenth century. The Bolsheviks hate them, more than the ordinary church, and they hate that with a passion. People say the Old Believers, they’re a bit touched, a cult.”
“But their priest looked after the children, and they’re hiding us.”
“In this time, being in a cult may not be the worst thing.”
“Ilya said they’d used this route before. Is it possible that they’ve smuggled other Old Believers out under the marble?”
“Maybe the ffwl is becoming wise,” she said and kissed him, once, twice.
The barge bumped heavily against the side of the lock. From somewhere up above, the sound of shouts and the barking of dogs reached their hiding place. Evgenia put her finger to his lips and the two of them lay side by side, shivering and afraid.
Then, suddenly, the engine and the bilge pump were cut and they heard the metal of the hull ring as heavy boots thundered down the ladder into the hold.
Two dogs barked, then fell quiet.
Jones and Evgenia held their breath as best they could. Outside their hiding place, the animals sniffed and whined, their paws pattering on the marble.
“Nothing but stone down here,” came Granma’s voice, a little bored.
“The dogs seem excited,” a man’s voice, surly.
“Maybe a big rat is teasing them.”
“We should lift this slab.”
“Good luck with that brother. It weighs ten tonnes. You need a dockyard crane to even try – and the All Soviet Marble Works will have your balls if you break off a single speck of their precious rock. The high-ups in Moscow love this stuff. Break the marble for a rat if you dare, but that’s on your head, not mine.”
A long pause, a decision being made. “Oh, all right mother, stop your nagging. Come on boys, it’s time for lunch.”
Boots on metal retreated, diminished – and, after that, there was only a silence that went on and on.
Eventually the engine throbbed onwards, south, towards the sea. But something was not right.
“The bilge pump. It’s not working.” The anxiety in Jones’ voice was raw, his whisper too loud. Evgenia gripped his hand tightly, “Sssh.”
But he was right. The level of the slop at their feet rose, first soaking the bearskin rug they were lying on, then wetting their backs through their clothes. Taking the tin case out of the film bag, Jones jammed it between his ribs and the marble.
In the darkness, Jones pressed his mouth against her ear.
“Evgenia, what shall we do if they capture us and one of us survives and the other doesn’t?”
For a time, she said nothing. Jones listened intently for any sound other than the the throb of the engine, the hiss of the river and the sloshing of the bilge water, still climbing by the inch.
“The Cheka will play games with us. They may let you go.”
“They could kill us both, at the drop of a hat.”
“If they have me, they won’t need to kill you. Before they shoot me, they will force me to write love letters to you, twenty letters for twenty years. So even in 1953 you will think that I am alive when I am long dead. I’ve told you about this. So you must promise me that, if they take me but let you go, you will hurry to the West and, the moment you are free, tell the world what the peasant said. ‘There is no bread.’ Promise me you will do that.”
“What if you’re still alive?”
“I will be dead within a week. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“I love you, Evgenia. I have never loved anyone more my whole life.” He squeezed her hand. “I shall love you until my dying day.”
The bilge level seemed to hold steady for a time – but then the barge hit some rough water and the slop sluiced over their faces. They held their breaths, praying for the water level to go down. But it did not. The slop rose above their ears and they lay with necks angled, arching their mouths to the stone as their precious pocket of air grew smaller and smaller.
One minute…
Ten minutes…
An hour…
Time was meaningless in here. Neither knew how long they had been down here in the dark before they heard Yuri’s light steps climbing down the ladder, his curses, the slosh of his boots in the bilges, the sound of the crowbar prising the wooden chocks free – and, at last, saw a faint glow-worm of light.