Lenins roller coaster, p.16
Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 16
“I used to charge my lead soldiers between two lines of books,” Pryce-Manley said, gazing out.
“‘Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die,’” McColl quoted softly.
“‘Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred,’” Pryce-Manley responded.
“Idioty,” the Russian driver muttered under his breath.
A week later. The sun had just cleared the horizon, bathing the steppe in a golden glow. Most of the station’s transient population were still asleep, the platform thick with bodies wrapped in shawls or newspapers, a couple of men smoking their first cigarette of the day. There was no sign of activity in the small German billet that lay beside the single copse of trees, the soldiers still in their motor lorries, the officer in his tent.
This was Chaplino Junction, and McColl didn’t think it owed the name to Charlie Chaplin. Behind him two lines diverged, the one heading east toward the Donbas, the other south toward Crimea. Up ahead, beyond the nondescript station, the tracks forked west and north, the former to Kiev, the latter to Kharkov and Moscow. It was a place for changing trains, if there were any to change to. Without them it was merely a village lacking any obvious means of support.
There were signs of traffic past—a line of rotting wooden wagons in one of the overgrown sidings, in another the rusting remains of a locomotive whose boiler had exploded. The train McColl had arrived on was now stabled in the shunting loop, lacking the engine it needed to proceed.
Beyond the station the steppe stretched away in all directions, its flat immensity disturbed to the north by a line of hills so low they barely deserved the name and to the east by the distant silhouette of the nearest settlement. Perpendicular columns of smoke were already rising from a few of the village chimneys, one no doubt the bakery’s; in a couple of hours, the daily cartload of loaves would struggle down the earthen track toward the station.
The air was rapidly warming, the makeshift camp beginning to stir. People were sitting up and stretching on the platform, tumbling out of the abandoned coaches and joining the queue at the station well. Several babies were crying, and the overall buzz of conversation was steadily rising. The fields around were slowly filling with people in need of their morning crap.
And there was no sign of a train.
The day after the visit to Balaklava, McColl had taken a local train to Simferopol and hidden away in a crummy hotel. As he’d hoped and expected, the bulk of the German occupation force had moved straight on to Sevastopol, dropping off units as they went to guard the lines of supply. Those soldiers assigned to Simferopol station were mostly older men, content just to go through the motions, and once the trains were running again, passenger checks were cursory. After four boring days in the city, McColl had presented his papers for their inspection and been airily waved through. As his train had chugged northward, he’d thanked his lucky stars that his fears had proved unfounded.
But they hadn’t. At some point in the night, the train had been diverted and on arrival at Chaplino Junction had endured the ultimate slight—its engine had been stolen by a passing German transport.
It was time to see if there was any fresh news. The station’s only employee couldn’t conjure trains out of thin air, but that didn’t stop the several hundred stranded passengers from behaving as if he could. His office was usually under siege, his parentage often in question; as far as McColl could see, only the presence of German troops had saved the hapless soul from being lynched. They needed him to man the telegraph.
At this hour of the morning, there were only a few angry people leaning over his shoulder as he sought the latest news from up the line. There was none to appease them. Several German troop and freight trains were expected on the east-west line, and Russian trains would have to wait their turn.
Was there any alternative? That morning, in the scrum around the bread cart, McColl overheard a couple talking. Like him, they were heading for Kiev and in lieu of a train were considering walking to Ekaterinoslav on the Dnieper, where one could still catch a boat upriver. Seventy miles, the man thought. More like a hundred was his wife’s best guess.
A hell of a trek either way. Doable, but McColl didn’t think he’d leave just yet. He remembered waiting for omnibuses in London—after a while impatience would start you walking, and the damn thing would always turn up the moment you’d gone too far to get back.
Early that afternoon two of the promised German trains steamed through, neither even stopping for water. A third clattered through the points near his bed on the loading bank soon after dark, and he was still wide awake an hour or so later when lightning flashed on the eastern horizon. A brief rumble of thunder followed, but neither was repeated, and as far McColl could see, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Another train arrived soon after first light. Once it had stopped a hundred meters short of the station, soldiers poured out of the four boxcars and hurried off in different directions, like people escaping a building on fire. When it became obvious that a perimeter was being drawn around the station area, the sense of disappointment that had accompanied the train’s arrival swiftly turned to alarm.
There were about eighty of them, McColl guessed. While half formed the cordon, the rest marched down the track toward the station, where they split into small units, some herding those on the crowded platform, others beginning to empty the buildings and vehicles. As he obeyed a German soldier’s order to get down off the loading bank, McColl noticed that two groups were being formed—one of men and older boys, the other of women and children.
The latter group was herded toward the overgrown sidings on the other side of the water tower, where the derelict engine and wagons stood. The men, McColl included, were harried and hustled into a single line, until all were standing between the two rails with their backs to the platform. About a hundred of them.
“This happened to my brother,” someone was whispering. “When they need laborers, they just take people away.”
“If we’re lucky,” the man on McColl’s left muttered under his breath. He was probably in his thirties, with dark hair and beard. On the previous day, McColl had noticed him penciling notes in the margins of a dog-eared copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.
Would his papers pass muster? McColl wondered. But only for a moment—the Germans were showing no sign of running a check. Which might be good news but probably wasn’t.
A German major was walking down the line, mostly looking straight ahead but occasionally glancing to his left at the red and barely risen sun. McColl and the Russians might have been invisible for all the interest he showed in them.
At the end of the line, the major halted for a moment, staring out across the steppe. And then he turned abruptly, causing the sunlight to glint on his shiny boots, and started retracing his path.
A finger was pointed at the first man, who was swiftly shoved forward across the rail by the major’s subordinates. The finger carried on wagging and was raised again a few seconds later.
“Every tenth man,” McColl’s neighbor muttered. “Fuck.”
McColl’s stomach contracted like a balloon expelling air. In Belgian villages the Germans had sometimes taken one of every ten men hostage and then shot them in reprisal for resistance attacks.
He suddenly remembered the singular thunder and lightning of the night before. Had someone blown up a bridge or a train? Were they the reprisal?
The officer was about halfway down the line. Behind him four men stood forward of the others.
Looking to his right, McColl counted out ten men. If the young man with the shock of blond hair was chosen, then he would be, too. And there’d be absolutely nothing he could do about it. The nearest cover—the station house—was more than twenty yards away, and in the unlikely event he reached that, there was still the circle of soldiers beyond and a world as flat as a pancake.
Was this it? Had his luck finally run out? Would Caitlin ever know what had happened to him?
A fifth man was pushed forward. A sixth.
The finger went up and down, counting off lives.
Counting off the blond young man’s.
Dread seemed to drop like a curtain, and he had the strange sensation that his feet were clinging to the earth.
The finger reprieved another two men, then suddenly stopped in midair. A young woman had broken away from those guarding the women and children and was running toward the line of men. Two soldiers rushed to intercept her and each managed to grab an arm, sweeping her feet off the ground. She began to scream, just the one word—“Pyotr!”—over and over.
The blond young man managed only a single step in her direction before soldiers hauled him back.
As she was dragged away, still screaming her husband’s name, the German resumed his counting.
And a sliver of hope pierced McColl’s heart. Was he imagining it, or had the distracted major taken an extra step? Had he missed a man? As the German drew nearer, McColl could hear him softly counting: “sieben”—the next but one man along, “acht”—his neighbor, “neun”—himself, “zehn”—and the finger raised at the old man on his left.
The wave of relief was so intense that McColl felt his bowels on the verge of loosening. The old man, who obviously hadn’t been counting, shuffled forward with grim resignation.
McColl’s other neighbor had. The bearded man’s look—half smile, half disbelief—suggested McColl was the luckiest man in the world.
The major reached the end of the line. Turning, he nodded to the sergeant beside him, who shouted an order down the track. The pairs of soldiers guarding the men who’d been selected now hustled them off toward the dock. Most went quietly, but a couple had to be forced. Soon they were all in line, their backs to the low brick wall. Several looked in shock, one was openly weeping.
Looking at the old man who’d been chosen in his place, McColl was seized with a sudden urge to put things right.
He couldn’t do it.
A German soldier stepped forward, carrying a weapon that McColl had never seen before. At first sight it seemed like a cross between a shotgun and a rifle, but the small, drum-shaped magazine suggested a handheld machine gun, and that was what it was. At a nod from the sergeant, the trooper tightened and held the trigger, hosing the line from end to end with a deafening hail of bullets. The bodies jerked this way and that like puppets on strings, then collapsed in a heap when the firing stopped.
The ensuing silence was eerily complete. And then the wails of grief rose up from the corralled women and children, punctuating the steady plod of the sergeant’s boots on ballast as he checked each man for signs of life.
I should be dead, McColl thought. He was still thinking it when a German soldier appeared in front of him, holding out a spade.
Twenty of them were chosen, two for each grave. McColl found himself with his bearded neighbor, digging a hole on the edge of the fallow field that lay behind the loading bank.
“You saw him fuck up his count,” the Russian said after a while.
“Yes,” McColl admitted. For a moment he expected a lecture on doing the right thing, but the Russian just laughed.
“History must have work for you,” he said. “I am Semyon Nikolayevich Kerzhentsev,” he added, holding out a hand.
“Georgiy Romanovich Kuskov,” McColl said, shaking it.
They worked on. The Ukrainian soil was dry without being hard, and the Germans were impatient enough to accept a mere meter in depth. When all the graves were dug, the bodies were laid alongside, the relatives allowed to say their good-byes.
No one came to see the old man, most of whose face had been ripped away. McColl stood over the Russian for a few seconds, thinking he should say something but having no idea what that might be.
“It was just luck,” Kerzhentsev said beside him. “Good for you, bad for him. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“I don’t expect I will,” McColl said. There were enough things he felt responsible for without adding fate to the list.
The order was given to infill the graves, the relatives pulled away. After the first few shovels of earth had been thrown in, the Germans left them to it. They were heading back toward their train, leaving only the original group to guard the junction.
“Where are you headed?” Kerzhentsev asked him.
“Kiev.”
“Me, too.” Kerzhentsev was staring at the motor lorries parked in front of the trees. “I don’t suppose you could drive one of those?”
It was a tempting idea, one they came back to several times that day, albeit with less and less confidence. After the executions and burials, local hostility was further stoked by the posting of a notice threatening additional reprisals, and the small German garrison wisely showed no inclination to relax its vigilance. The soldiers stuck close to one another and to their transport and gave McColl no chance of a closer look at the lorries. Not that he really needed one—he was pretty sure he could get one started, with or without a key, but what would be the point? There was bound to be noise, and an outcry would follow. If by some miracle they managed to outrun the rifles and the second lorry, how far would they get before a German airplane tracked them down? There was nowhere to hide on the steppe.
It was a nonstarter, and both of them knew it. Either they could wait for a train and risk falling victim to another reprisal or they could start walking.
They weren’t prisoners, but it still felt prudent to leave unobserved. Soon after dark they picked up their bags and slipped away across the field behind the station house. According to the locals they had asked, Ekaterinoslav and the Dnieper River were almost directly east of Chaplino Junction, but the railway that connected them took a big loop to the north, almost doubling the distance and increasing the probability of unwanted encounters with Germans. So they’d decided on the direct route, navigating their way across the open steppe by a sky that they hoped would remain open.
Their progress was slowed only by the uneven ground. There were few obstacles of any kind, natural or man-made, the occasional stream to ford, the even rarer fence or hedge to climb. They circled the small settlements that appeared in their path, only once attracting the attention of dogs, whose incessant barking seemed to follow them for what felt like hours. Above them the sky behaved, rarely clouding the Pole Star from view, and then for just a matter of minutes.
By 3:00 a.m. Kerzhentsev reckoned they had walked around fifty versts. “Let’s sleep now,” he suggested, “and do most of our walking by daylight. We’ll need to find food and water.”
McColl was only too happy to get off his feet and was asleep within moments of hitting the ground. The return of daylight brought him briefly back to consciousness, but the next thing he knew, it was ten in the morning and Kerzhentsev was waking him out of a nightmare in which he couldn’t find his brother, Jed, who was loudly screaming for help.
During the day’s walk, he learned some of the Russian’s personal history. Kerzhentsev was an engineer by trade. He had a wife and two daughters, aged seven and four, the second of whom he’d not yet seen. Called up in 1914, he’d managed to survive three years on the Eastern Front and in the process had become a Bolshevik. He had grown up in a small town west of Minsk, and it was there that the German occupation authorities had hanged his fifteen-year-old brother for allegedly stealing a hunk of bread and left the corpse in situ to serve as an example. His father and mother had been clubbed to death by drunken German soldiers when they tried to cut it down.
No wonder the man hated Germans.
But why had he become a Bolshevik? Hadn’t they signed a peace treaty with the Germans?
“Only because there was no army left to fight them. It was just tactics, yes? We all want our revolution to survive, and we will do what is necessary. Some will sign pieces of paper, some will continue to fight. And those who sign the paper will be as pleased as the fighters when we kick the beasts out of our country.”
They saw no Germans that day, and the villagers they met said the enemy rarely strayed far from the safety of their trains. All were women or much older men—those younger men not killed in the war were away fighting for some group or other. One old man told them that both his sons were fighting with an anarchist group led by a local woman. “Marusya,” he said. “Remember that name.”
Kerzhentsev had already heard of her. “They say she commands several hundred men,” he told McColl. “And has magnificent breasts.”
She probably had a horse as well. At each village they asked how much farther it was to the Dnieper, and the answer was always depressing. Walking what felt like ten miles usually seemed to advance them five and on one occasion left them even more distant. When they sank to the ground on the banks of a small river soon after ten that evening, the Dnieper still seemed as far away as ever.
Kerzhentsev was sitting with his back against one of the trees. “So who are you really?” he asked out of the blue.
McColl just stared at the Russian, hoping he’d misheard.
“And what are you doing so far from home?” Kerzhentsev continued.
The Russian knew. Somehow he knew. Had someone finally heard the foreigner in his accent? “Fighting Germans,” McColl said simply.
“You are English, yes?”
“Yes.” McColl considered reaching for the Mauser in his bag, but there was nothing threatening in the Russian’s voice. He sounded more amused than anything. “How did you know?”
“This morning you talked in your sleep. Shouted, in fact. I did enough in school to recognize your language when I hear it.”
“What was I shouting?”
