He turned away from them. They should not see the deep worry lines that cut his face.
His one certainty stood firm. It would be here, close to the site of the Sobibor camp, that collection would be made and delivery taken. That much he knew.
‘I give it an hour. We’ll move then. Just let the light settle a little,’ Lawson said. Anxiety squirmed in his stomach, but he summoned up the medley of confidence and authority. ‘They won’t come until it’s decently dark, I’d bet on it.’
Two kilometres back, they had worked for two hours, Molenkov doing better than Yashkin, and had shifted a tree’s lower trunk — three metres long and a half-metre in diameter — that blocked a trail into the forest. They had left an apology for a road, the only route going south from the village of Malorita. They had — together — sweated, cursed, grunted, sworn, gasped, but had moved it, and had been left with feeble strength after the log that had been embedded in winter mud was slid aside sufficiently for Yashkin to wriggle the Polonez past it. Then they had had to reverse the process. Molenkov had insisted on it. The log must be returned to its old place. It had sunk back into the mud groove it had lain in before its disturbance. They had done it, and they had fallen on each other and hugged. Neither had known who supported the other. Then they had kicked out the rigid lines of the Polonez’s tyres and used dead branches to smear the mess they had made in the mud. Yashkin had driven into the forest and Molenkov had the map on his knee. Each metre the car took them, with its petrol-gauge needle stationary at the bottom of the red section, seemed important and an unlikely bonus.
A kilometre back, the Polonez had sunk into mud on the trail. The engine had died after Yashkin had tried to accelerate out of the pit they’d gone into, then reverse out, and had failed in both. They had been there an hour. The solution, Molenkov had announced, was to make a secure base on which the tyres could find a grip. They had gathered up every branch and pine frond, every limb that the winter snow’s weight had broken off. They had brought the wood in armfuls to the trail, had slapped it down into the mud, heaved the pieces against the tyres and insinuated them under all four wheels. Then more had gone in front and been stamped down. Yashkin had started the engine, Molenkov had pushed and mud had flown. He had thought he had used the last energy he possessed, had sworn oaths at the great mound in the Polonez underneath the tarpaulin and … the wheels had gripped. The Polonez had surged forward. Molenkov had been left, a filthy, grunting, muddy wretch, on his hands and knees.
They had come off the trail and Yashkin had woven between the trees, the lower branches scraping the car’s sides.
Molenkov had his arms up as if he expected, with each lurch of the wheels, to be thrown against the dashboard or the lower part of the windscreen, and he had tried to read the map. The light was failing, and his eyes could make out only the blur of a deeper shade of green and the line of the Bug. Among the trees, off the track, the ground was firmer than it was on the trail, and they made progress — slow but steady, Molenkov thought. Almost, he had relaxed. Almost, he had forgotten.
And then there was a cough, like a fucking death rattle. It was the way his wife had gone, a cough deep in the throat that persisted for three, four seconds and then quiet. When the quiet had come, his wife was dead. The Polonez, too, was dead, engine expired.
Yashkin could be an idiot, could be precise and disciplined. He was in the middle of a forest with a car that was going nowhere and had a dry fuel tank. His response was to set the gear in neutral and apply the handbrake.
They climbed out of the car. They met at the back, and each took hold of a corner of the tarpaulin. Together, they dragged it clear. It was not done with words but from some instinctive agreement. Each reached forward and laid a hand on the covering, where the writing was stencilled and the serial number posted. It did not breathe, did not hiccup. It showed no sign of life. Again, without consultation or debate, they took the side straps and heaved, lugged, dragged the fucking thing off the tail. Yashkin locked the car.
They took their positions on either side of it.
They lifted, felt its weight.
Yashkin asked, ‘How far?’
Molenkov answered, ‘More than three kilometres. My friend …’
‘Yes?’
‘Why are we doing this?’
Yashkin stuck his chin forward. ‘To show that we can, and because we said we would.’
They went forward, towards the fall of the sun.
Carrick stared at the water, and saw only the dull flecks where the flow held debris in a swirling eddy. He waited for the moon to rise, and for a light to flash. Reuven Weissberg’s hand still rested on his coat, and they were together. The others, behind them, were apart.
Chapter 19
Carrick felt the cold around him. He scanned the bank for a light.
With the darkness, Reuven Weissberg had been decisive: the boat had been dragged from cover and was beside them with the coil of rope. The instructions had been given for Viktor, Mikhail and Josef Goldmann to spread themselves out, take the positions at hundred-metre intervals, but that evening they were ordered to be downstream of himself. Carrick was told that Reuven Weissberg and he were at the best place for a crossing, where the flow was fastest but the river narrowest. He sensed certainty in the man beside him that the delivery would be made.
Carrick would have sat in the quiet that was threatened only by the rumble of the river, owls’ cries and the motion of the high branches behind him. He did not need to talk. He was numbed by tiredness and hunger. Reuven Weissberg talked to him, and, if he had wished to, he could not have escaped the purr and persistence of the voice alongside him.
He wanted it over, done with, wanted to see the light, make the crossing and bring back what was bought.
The voice dripped in his ear.
Reuven Weissberg said, ‘I could have arranged, Johnny, for it to be carried up north to the Finnish border, or taken into the Kaliningrad oblast, into Latvia or Estonia, because there all the frontiers leak. It could have gone into Ukraine far to the south or to a Black Sea port. I have the connections to have collected it at any of those places … but it had to be here, Johnny.’
Only blackness and lines of deep charcoal grey were in front of Carrick. He couldn’t see the water, only hear it.
‘From the time I was a child, Johnny, I have known of this place. She did not, but she could have taken a knife and used its tip to carve its name on my chest or my forehead. When I was a child, in Perm, when I lived first with my grandmother, I knew this place, the paths and huts inside the fences and the tracks in the forest better than I knew the route to the block where we lived and the streets around it. I could have walked from the hut where the clothes of the dead were sorted and the hut where the cut hair of the dead was graded and the hut where the valuables were parcelled, and I could have gone to the Happy Flea or the Swallow’s Nest or walked on the Road to Heaven. If I was late for school, I ran. I was a child and was late for the bell at school, but I did not think of punishment from a teacher. I was always running from the fence through the minefield, then through the open ground and the machine-guns fired, and I was running through the trees in the forest. If I fought in the yard at school, it was not against an older child who tried to keep me from his customers over whom he had made a roof, but I was one of those who waited in hiding for the German officers to visit a place that it was routine for them to come to, and I imagined I hacked with an axe and stabbed with a knife. Everything about me was the creation of my grandmother. It was from this place.’