Читать книгу The Golden Sabre - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 6

Chapter Two

‘Tiflis is over a thousand miles from here, you know that?’ They had left the estate wheat-fields and were on a narrow country road, bowling along under the immense blue glare of the late-afternoon sky, a long trail of dust whirling out behind the Rolls-Royce and its bouncing trailer. ‘Where does this road lead?’

‘It goes round south of Verkburg, then up towards the mountains. No one will be looking for us south of Verkburg. That’s why I suggested we should head for Tiflis.’

‘Why not Cairo or Capetown? Goddam women! You put ’em in an automobile and they lose all sense of distance, they think they’re on some goddam magic carpet!’

‘Watch it!’

‘Put down your handbag! I’m not going to apologize – you’re enough to make Jesus Christ Himself swear!’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing the Holy Family into your conversation. The children are good Orthodox Christians. So am I. Well, not Orthodox – Church of England.’

‘I’m an orthodox lapsed Catholic. I’m not driving this thing all the way to Tiflis – tomorrow I’ll take the Holy Family and myself and head north and take my chances. We’ll talk about it when we stop to have a meal – where’s the food basket and the water?’

‘Oh my goodness!’ Eden slapped a hand to the top of her head, as if her hat were about to blow off. ‘I left the basket and the water-skin on the table in the kitchen!’

Cabell looked at her with wry disgust. ‘What do you want me to say now? Oh my goodness?’

They had gone fifty miles, were south of Verkburg and heading up into the hills when a rear tyre blew out with a blast like that of a small cannon. The car skidded, but Cabell kept it under control and ran it gently off the road and in amongst a stand of fir trees.

‘There’ll be twenty or thirty more of those before you get to Tiflis,’ Cabell said as he got out to fit the spare.

‘We could fit the tyres with the rubber balls in them,’ said Frederick, who had now got over his pique at being relegated to the rear seat.

‘You can save those for the really rough roads.’

‘You talk as if you’ve already made up your mind you’re not coming with us.’ Eden was careful not to sound aggressive. She had had time to think about what lay ahead of them and her early confidence had drained out of her as if a plug had been pulled.

‘Let’s say I’m looking for an alternative.’ Cabell stripped off his shirt and hung it on the tonneau of the car. He saw Eden frowning at him as he pulled his overalls straps back over his shoulders. ‘Okay, don’t start lecturing me about my dress, Miss Penfold. I’m not going to get my shirt all sweaty and dirty just to shield your maidenly susceptibilities.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of mine. I was afraid for Olga’s.’

‘Does my bare chest worry you, honey ?’

‘Princess,’ corrected Olga. ‘Not at all, Mr Cabell. Naked men are beautiful.’

Eden gasped. ‘You haven’t seen any!’

‘In books. With fig-leaves on.’

‘There,’ said Cabell to Eden. ‘I could even get by in front of the Princess with just a fig-leaf … Relax, Miss Penfold. Take your corset off.’

‘Not in your company, Mr Cabell.’ Eden, aware that she now had to court Cabell into staying with them, tried to smile. But it was like a strip of lemon pith.

‘Oh, you and I are going to be like an old married couple by the time we say goodbye.’

‘How romantic,’ sighed Olga. ‘Love at first sight.’

Cabell grinned, patted her shoulder. ‘That’s one of the dangers of myopia, honey. Get Miss Penfold to explain that to you in one of her lessons.’

He was taking the spare tyre out of the trailer when he stopped and gazed down through the trees. Almost a mile away, perched on the side of a steep hill above a narrow pass, was a village, a collection of log huts strung along a single street and behind them the log stockades surrounding their gardens.

‘Nick—’ He took some roubles from the purse in his overalls pocket. ‘Get along to that village and buy what food you can. Meat, bread, potatoes, whatever you can get. And see if they’ll sell you a couple of water-bags.’

‘What do I say if they ask who I am? Everyone is so suspicious these days.’ Nikolai would much rather have remained to help fit the tyre.

Cabell looked at Eden. ‘You know this area. Who could he be?’

‘I don’t really know it at all – we’ve hardly moved off the estate.’ She was feeling more helpless by the minute and that annoyed her; she had always prided herself on being resourceful. But she tried: ‘Nikolai, tell them you are up in the mountains with a prospecting team. There are one or two small iron mines up there, I think.’

‘I’ll go with you, Nikolai, and help you,’ said Frederick, and Nikolai looked at him gratefully.

‘You’ll stay where you are,’ said Eden.

Nikolai went off reluctantly, moving slowly down through the trees as if hoping the village would have disappeared by the time he reached it.

‘Okay, Freddie,’ said Cabell. ‘Hop out and give me a hand with this jack. You ladies get out, too.’

‘Mr Cabell,’ said Frederick, ‘if you wish me to do something for you, ask me, don’t order me. I am a prince—’

‘Freddie, you are a small stuffed shirt. Princes are a dime a dozen in Russia and don’t let anyone tell you different. Down in Armenia and Georgia there are more princes than sheep. Now get out and get to work on that jack or I’ll boot your aristocratic ass up through your aristocratic gut!’

Frederick stared at him, then looked at Eden for support. But she, while not agreeing with Cabell’s choice of language, agreed with him in principle. There might be more than enough lords and ladies back in England, but at least they did not call themselves princes. It was a subject she had never raised with her employer, but princes for her were proper royalty. She could never bring herself to see Frederick on the same level as the Prince of Wales. Six years in Russia hadn’t worn away even a thin layer of her Englishness.

‘You had better do what Mr Cabell says.’

‘Damned proletariat!’ said Frederick and skipped aside as Eden swung her handbag. ‘Wait till Father hears of this!’

‘Is there anything I can do, Mr Cabell?’ Eden said stiffly.

Cabell looked around. The sun had passed beyond the mountains above them and it was cool and pleasant here in the thick stand of firs. Some wild flowers, anemones and gagea, bright scattered trinkets, grew out of soft patches in the rocky earth. Nature’s music, a soft wind in the tree-tops and the whispering trickle of water over rocks, suggested a peace that he welcomed after the events of the day. It would be dark in another two hours and it might be an hour or more before Nikolai returned with the food and water.

‘You and Olga clear a spot for us to camp. We’ll stay here tonight and move on first thing in the morning. If you don’t mind soiling your hands, Princess–?’

‘One had better become accustomed to working,’ said Olga and picked up a twig between thumb and forefinger and threw it away with a fastidious grace that didn’t bode well for her future among the workers.

Cabell and Frederick, the latter in sullen silence, changed the tyres. Then Cabell went looking for a place to wash and found a narrow stream dropping down over steps of rocks through the forest. He was out of sight of the others and he stripped off completely and washed himself down with the clear cold water. He wiped the water from himself with the palms of his hands and stood for a moment breathing the cooling air, smelling the forest and watching the green dusk ever so slowly start to creep up between the trees. A blue-grey waxwing bounced from branch to branch looking for supper and a red squirrel slipped like shifting bark up and down the trunk of a tree. This, as much as making a living from the search for oil, was what brought him to these remote spots. He had not left Prairie Avenue just for money alone.

His father had been an adventurer whose courage ran out when he was only 500 miles from home. Jack Cabell had come down from Quebec heading for the Amazon and then the Andes; he had wanted to see jungles and really great mountains. He had got as far as Chicago and his nerve ran out. From then on he had travelled in books, safe in hardcovers against storm, disease, cannibals. He had kept the books for his son and Matthew Martin, always called that by his mother who had an Irish taste for long-windedness and no liking at all for long distances, had followed his father’s vicarious journeyings. But Matthew Martin had had more courage than Jack Cabell; and horizons called to him like houris. But, unlike most horizon-chasers, he always appreciated what he passed along the way. He smelled invisible flowers, heard silences, saw more than his eye told him. He knew that his job, if he was successful in locating oil, would bring men and equipment to spoil the very things he had enjoyed. But by then he had headed for another horizon and never looked back. That would only bring a sense of guilt and he was not perfect. The world, he hoped, would always be big enough to stay ahead of its despoilers. But sometimes he felt he was whistling into a wind that had not yet begun to blow, that was still beyond time’s horizon.

He pulled on his clothes, donning his shirt again, and went back to where Eden, Olga and Frederick had cleared a space around the car. The air was cooling by the minute and he knew it would be cold here tonight. The climate could do that here on the eastern slopes of the Urals; the difference between midday and midnight temperatures could sometimes be fifty degrees Fahrenheit. He looked at Eden, wondering how warm she would keep a man.

‘There’s a stream over there,’ he said. ‘You can all go and have a wash.’

‘Is that an order or a suggestion, Mr Cabell?’ Eden had taken off the jacket of her travelling suit; her once-white blouse was grey with dust and there were dark stains of perspiration under her armpits. She was tired and testy and still upset by the day’s events and she forgot about wooing Cabell to remain with them. Her voice once again was full of governess’ starch.

‘You can take it any way you want,’ said Cabell, a little surprised: he had thought they had declared an unspoken truce. ‘But while I’m stuck with a female nanny, two uppity kids and a limp-wristed Cossack, there’s sure as hell not going to be any other boss but me around here.’

‘You have a knack for putting people in their place,’ said Eden, still not retreating. ‘Are there any American Tsars?’

He grinned after her as she stalked off with the two children in tow. Goddam, he thought, how did General Bronevich keep his erection in the face of such scorn? She’d freeze the blood of a cantharides-crazy gorilla. How could he have wondered about her keeping a man warm?

Half an hour later Nikolai came back with two legs of mutton, two loaves of coarse bread, a small bag of potatoes, two full water-skins and three blackened and dented iron pots. And a load of high indignation.

‘Those villagers are capitalist robbers! They saw I was a stranger and everything doubled in price!’

‘You two kids peel the spuds,’ said Cabell; then raised his hand threateningly. ‘Get a move on! There’s going to be no loafers in this commune. Everybody works!’

‘Bloody Bolshevik tyrant,’ said Frederick and ducked just in time as Eden’s handbag came round in a swift whirl at his head.

The meal, when it was finally ready to be eaten, did no more than fill their bellies. ‘We eat much better than this at home,’ said Frederick.

‘Kid, stop complaining. You’re eating now what the workers in this country have been eating for centuries. Sometimes they didn’t get as much as this. If you don’t like it, just tie a knot in your digestive tract and live on air and your memories of what you had back home. But for crissakes shut up and don’t complain!’

The boy sat very still for a moment, then suddenly he sprang up and walked off into the trees. Then Nikolai said quietly, ‘Excuse me,’ and got up and went after Frederick. There was silence for a long moment and Cabell put down the plate of mutton stew. He had three tin plates in his own cooking gear and he had doled out the stew on them, keeping a plate for himself and letting the other four share the other two plates between them. He chewed on the last piece of meat in his mouth and it tasted like soft alum.

‘I’m sorry.’ He looked across at Olga, who sat as stiff and white as a china doll. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt Freddie like that.’

The child said nothing; then she, too, got up and ran off to join her brother and Nikolai. Eden put down her plate. ‘You say a lot of things that are right, Mr Cabell. You should learn to say them so that they don’t hurt people so much. Especially children. Freddie and Olga aren’t old enough yet to be blamed for what’s wrong with Russia.’

‘I know. I’ll go and apologize—’

‘No, leave them while they’re with Nikolai – he’ll comfort them. Talk to Freddie in the morning.’ She stood up, began to gather up the plates. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we went on alone to Tiflis. I don’t think we’re very compatible.’

He looked up at her. She was flushed by the firelight, strands of her hair had fallen down about her face: goddam, he thought, she’s beautiful at times. ‘I’ll sleep on it.’

Later the children came back, said nothing to Cabell but quietly went about helping Eden with the washing-up. Nikolai, also silent, brought in more wood for the fires. Cabell sat with his back against a tree, feeling as much an outsider as he had ever felt in his life before. Once, as Frederick passed by him, he said, ‘Freddie—’; but the boy ignored him and walked on. Cabell felt a flash of anger at being ignored by a child, but he swallowed it. He had learned diplomacy the hard way, but amongst men. Children were a whole new race to him and it was a wonder to him that he had ever belonged to them. He sat quietly against the tree till everyone had settled down for the night, then he got out his sleeping-bag and prepared to crawl into it.

‘Good night, Mr Cabell,’ said Eden from the rear seat of the car. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done today.’

She and the children were sleeping in the car, she and Olga in the rear seat, Frederick in the front. Nikolai, covered with the trailer’s dusty tarpaulin, slept on one side of the car; Cabell in his sleeping-bag was on the opposite side. None of them was comfortable or really warm; the children grumbled sleepily and Eden shifted restlessly. Only Cabell and Nikolai, the one grown accustomed to discomfort, the other born to it, went off to sleep at once.

Eden lay staring at the patches of stars showing through the tops of the firs. She could hear grunting and movement in the forest, but Cabell and Nikolai had lit four small fires around the car and she hoped they would prevent any wild beasts from coming too close to the car. On reflection she was surprised how calmly she was taking the possibility of a bear or wolf coming into their camp. But then the hazards of living had been building slowly ever since August 1914.

She had come a long way from Croydon. Her father and mother, school teachers both, had not objected when she had applied for the advertised job in the Daily Telegraph; after all, they had encouraged her to read about faraway places and other people’s customs. Of course, being Tories, they had been thinking of the Empire and good solid English-speaking stock such as Australians and New Zealanders and had seen her as the governess to some rich sheep farmer’s family; they had visions of her rounding the Australians’ sat-upon vowels and weaning them away from their aboriginal habits. Her mother had had a fit of the vapours and her father an attack of xenophobia when she told them, after the letter had gone off, that the job was with a Russian family in St Petersburg. Foreigners were best left to themselves to find their own way out of their ignorance; Russians were not only foreigners but barbarians as well. Better that she should become a missionary and go out and teach the Zulus or the Australian blackfellows; at least the Empire would gain something from that. But she was a stubborn romantic, the best sort; and in the end she had prevailed. The job was for two years and she had promised to return home at the end of it.

She had applied for a passport, something she had never heard of up till then; Russia and Turkey were the only two countries in the world that required travellers to have them. She had bought a steamer trunk and a suitcase and in September 1913 sailed on a German ship for St Petersburg. The adventure had begun.

She wrote home to tell her parents that the Russians, or anyway the Gorshkovs, were not barbarians. She told them that they would be surprised at how civilized the Russian middle and upper classes were. French (or sometimes English) was often the first language in a household; one spoke Russian only to the servants. The gentlemen bought all their clothes from English shops in St Petersburg; the women went to Paris to buy their dresses, their underwear and their cloaks; only fur coats, for men and women, were made by Russians for the Russian gentry. Why, Prince Frederick, the boy she was teaching, even wore Norfolk jackets, knickerbockers and Eton collars. She had been acclaimed as a gourmet chef when she had given the cook her mother’s recipe for English trifle; the French governess, from the house next door, invited to tea, had thought the trifle was some sort of culinary joke; but she did not tell her mother that. She had written them not to worry: she was in circumstances every bit as civilized as those in Croydon. She did not mention that she was living in a good deal more luxury. She did not think it fair to compare the 20-room house in St Petersburg with the semi-detached house in Croydon. Nor the Corot, Watteau and Fragonard paintings in the big salon with the Landseer and Holman Hunt prints on the parlour walls. Nor did she think it fair to tell them that she could not see herself ever coming home to Croydon to live there forever.

Then August 1914 had come and Igor, Lieutenant Dulenko, went off to war. Her parents had not known of him; she had still been feeling her way, if that was not too indelicate a way of putting it, with a particular man. Then he had gone away …

But now memory failed her, was not strong enough to keep her awake: she fell asleep, worn out by the day. She slept fitfully, memories nibbling at her like mice, and when she woke she was stiff and cold and for a moment completely lost.

Then she sat up and saw Nikolai warming up one of the legs of mutton on a rough wooden spit and Cabell going off to fill the water-skins from the stream. She woke the children and told them to follow Mr Cabell and wash the sleep from their faces.

Cabell had filled one of the water-skins and was dipping the second into the stream when Frederick and Olga came through the trees. He said good-morning to them, but they just nodded stiffly. They knelt down to wash their faces. And the wild boar, grunting and whistling with terrifying loudness, came barrelling down the slope straight at them.

Olga screamed and fell into the water. Frederick jumped across the stream, leaving the way open for the boar to come straight at Cabell. He swung the half-filled water-skin; it hit the boar on the snout and burst open on its tusks. The beast skidded to a stop, blinded by the water; it let out a horrible sound of rage, shaking its head to clear its sight. Cabell grabbed up Olga, flung her over his shoulder and raced for a tree that had fallen down across a gap between two big boulders. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Frederick haring off through the trees towards the camp and he hoped the boar would not follow the boy.

But the boar had already marked its target. It grunted and whistled again, then came straight after Cabell. He knew how fast the beast could move, had gone hunting them north of Baku; but he had never been as close as this to one before. He staggered up on to the nearest boulder, clutching hard at Olga as she slipped off his shoulder. He lost his footing and fell back as the boar came in beneath him. He landed on its back, heard Olga scream right beside his ear; somehow he managed to keep his footing and didn’t fall over. He leaned back against the boulder as the boar, thrown off balance by his landing on its back, went down on its nose and rolled over and over like a circus dog. Cabell scrambled back up on to the rock, hands scrabbling at its rough surface, his knees scraping against it, and fell on to the fallen tree, only just managing to hang on to Olga as she tumbled forward off his shoulder. She was screaming, seemingly without stopping for breath, and her hands were clawing at him like birds’ talons. Somehow he turned round on the tree-trunk, straddled it, feeling the rough bark against the insides of his thighs, and faced the boar as it came up on to the boulder. It paused, grunting and whistling at him, its tiny eyes red with hate, the tusks bobbing up and down as if already tearing into his guts.

It was no more than ten feet from him as he inched carefully back away from it; he could smell it, felt the heat of it. He was frantically trying to keep his balance on the narrow trunk as Olga still screamed and struggled in terror across his shoulder. He could feel his legs and arms beginning to tremble and he wondered if he was going to have the strength to get off the log if the boar hurled itself at him.

It kept putting tentative hooves on to the log, then drawing back. It wanted to be at him, to tear him to pieces with its tusks; but instinct told it it could not keep its footing on the thin round trunk of the tree. Frustration made it rage even more and Cabell, slowly easing his way back, the bark wearing away at the insides of his legs, never taking his eyes off the animal, waited for the boar to hurl itself across the intervening space. Which it all at once did.

He saw it coming at him like a giant blunt-nosed shell; then there was a shot. The boar’s head seemed to blow apart; the hurtling beast slipped sideways in the air. It hit the tree-trunk only two feet in front of Cabell, bounced off and thudded down between the two boulders. It twitched, then lay still.

Cabell, clinging to the still screaming, struggling Olga, saw Eden come out of the trees, one hand holding her shoulder, the other the double-barrelled shotgun. With her was Frederick and, some paces behind, easing his way cautiously out from behind a tree, was Nikolai.

Cabell brought Olga forward from his shoulder, sat her facing him on the log and gently slapped her face. She gasped, drew in her breath; then her screaming quietened to a soft whimpering. Cabell patted her arm, then nodded down at the dead boar beneath them.

‘He won’t worry us any more, Olga. Relax, honey – it’s all over.’

Olga whimpered, gulped, still trembled. Then Nikolai, overcoming his fear, certain now that the boar was dead, came in beneath the tree-trunk and Cabell lowered Olga down to him. Then, very conscious of his chafed thighs, Cabell lifted himself up and walked off the log and slid down the boulder to stand beside Eden and Frederick as they came up to him.

‘Thanks, Eden. We’re even.’ He looked at the dead boar. ‘He even looks a bit like General Bronevich.’

She was massaging her shoulder; trembling a little, too. She would never make such a lucky shot again; she hated to think what would have happened if she had missed. Or if her shot had been wide of the boar but not of Cabell and Olga. ‘I’ve never a fired a gun like this before, only a light one.’

She gave the gun to Frederick, went to Olga and comforted her, leading her away through the trees and back to the camp. Cabell looked at Frederick. ‘That was quick thinking, Freddie, getting Miss Eden here with the gun.’

The boy wanted to be a hero but he was too honest. ‘She was already coming this way with the gun. As soon as she heard Olga scream—’

Cabell put his arm round the boy’s shoulders; only then did he realize how much Frederick had suffered at seeing his sister in danger. The wiry young body was trembling as much as Olga’s had been; all the juvenile arrogance was gone. He wanted the comfort of an adult.

‘Freddie … About last night. I’m sorry. Sometimes my tongue gets away from me. It won’t happen again, if I can help it.’

‘Will you be coming with us then?’

Cabell sighed. ‘I’m afraid I may have to.’

They walked back to the camp, he with his arm still round the boy’s shoulders, while Nikolai, a coward but not insensitive, quietly followed them.

[2]

Pemenov rubbed the insides of his short thighs, feeling the chafing there. It was months since he had ridden a horse for such a distance; he had always travelled with General Bronevich in the car. But he would have to suffer the soreness till he became accustomed to the saddle again: there was a lot of riding ahead of him.

He had picked up the trail of the car he was chasing on the road that skirted south of Verkburg. He had pulled his horse into a farmhouse and, producing the General’s pistol and instantly wiping the derisive laughter off the farmer’s face, had demanded food, a water-bag and the farmer’s own straw hat. The farmer, aware now that this strange little man was quite capable of killing him and his family, had hurriedly obliged. Then, under questioning from Pemenov, he said yes, he had seen a motor car heading down this road. Yes, this was the only road till it joined the main road ten miles farther on. No, he did not know much about the main road except that his brother, who worked in Verkburg, said that it was the only road that went south and these days not many people travelled it.

So Pemenov headed south and now in the cooling evening he was making camp amongst some trees just beyond where the secondary road joined the main route. When he had eaten he wrapped himself in the stinking blanket that had held the soldier’s saddle roll and settled down to sleep between the two fires he had lit. The horse was tethered to a nearby tree on a lead-rope long enough to give it room to move if it was attacked by a bear or wolves.

Pemenov put the loaded rifle beside him, closed his eyes and went off to sleep at once. He would need an early start tomorrow and it would be a long ride. He knew that motor cars, though they travelled faster, broke down more than horses. He fell asleep absolutely certain that he would catch up eventually with the American.

[3]

‘We’ll have to get more food. Some fruit and jam and honey, things like that. And some tea or coffee. Mr Cabell, are you listening to me? You haven’t spoken since breakfast.’

They had had their meagre breakfast, none of them having any real appetite after the encounter with the boar; then they had re-packed the trailer and got on the road again. As they had driven out on to the road Cabell had seen the crows already coming in above the trees to the spot where the dead boar lay.

They had driven through the village where Nikolai had bought the mutton and bread. The villagers, alerted by the shouts of their children and the barking of their dogs, had come out of their wooden houses to stand and stare at the car as it rolled grandly down the single street. They saw only the occasional truck and never a car here; the outside world did not intrude, even the civil war was a war between strangers. The children and some of the women waved and one or two of the older men saluted: they had no idea who was in the car or whom it belonged to, but it was a symbol. Hands had been touching forelocks for centuries: it was a habit, good for one’s health.

‘I’m thinking about how far we have to go,’ said Cabell. ‘I wish to hell there was some quicker, safer way. An airplane, maybe.’

‘That’s wishing for the moon, Mr Cabell. I don’t think we should pray for miracles. I didn’t think lapsed Catholics ever did any praying.’

‘It’s a reflex action. You got any suggestions about what we should do?’

‘Just keeping heading south and hoping for the best.’

‘That’s constructive. How about this war that’s going on? It’s all over the place. We’ve got no way of knowing whether, we’re going to run into a battle. I don’t want to be caught in the goddam middle.’

‘Watch it!’

‘You have a knack for making anyone swear, Miss Penfold.’

‘Were you in the Great War, Mr Cabell?’ Frederick had recovered from his fright at seeing the danger his sister had been in. He was also recovered from his hurt at what Cabell had said to him last night. But he was still the little aristocrat, sitting upright in the back of the car while Cabell, the chauffeur, took him out for his morning spin. Despite what the American had said last night, he was not going to descend from prince to commoner overnight. His mother had coached him too well in his rank. ‘The war against the Germans?’

‘No. I was searching for oil.’

‘That wasn’t dangerous, was it? Not like fighting in a battle.’

‘No, it was a joy-ride. Just like the last couple of days.’

‘My father fought at Tannenburg, where he was wounded, and at Stanislau.’

Prince Gorshkov seemed to have had bad luck with his battles: Cabell wondered what other defeats he was presently headed for.

‘Bully for him.’

The reply left Frederick nonplussed: his ear was still too young for an adult’s sarcasm. But Eden looked at the American and wondered how he felt about his not having been in the Great War. He sounded as if he had some guilt about it. She herself had seen none of it, but she had seen the results of it. She had been at the station in Petrograd (she would never get used to that new name; St Petersburg had a ring to it, even if it was a German ring) when the hospital train had brought home the body of Igor. There had been other bodies covered with threadbare grey blankets; and wounded men, the sight of whom had depressed her more than the shrouded corpses. Men without limbs, a boy with half his face blown away; she had felt more pity for them than for the dead, even for Igor. For him she felt a terrible sense of loss; then realized later, with a sense of shame, that she felt sorrier for herself than for him. He had gone eagerly off to war, as he might have gone to the Swiss Alps to climb, which he had told her he did every summer; he would have died as he had wanted to, a hero in battle, died for Russia. She sometimes wondered, however, what had been his absolutely last thought just before death took him. Did men in battle really die as heroes or did they go out fighting death as fiercely as they had fought the other enemy?

But Cabell was not thinking of the past war. He had no regrets at having missed it, but he was irritated when someone suggested he should have been in it. He was more concerned with the present war:

‘We have no idea where the armies are—’

‘General Denikin’s army is in the Ukraine,’ said Frederick. ‘That’s where Father is.’

‘There’s a dozen damned armies. White ones, Red ones, private ones. At least back home our Civil War was pretty straightforward. What about you English?’ He looked at Eden.

‘We English don’t fight amongst ourselves. At least not for three hundred years.’

‘You fight the Irish. What about the Scots and Welsh?’

‘They try to fight us. But we’ll just ignore them.’

‘And they’ll all go home and be quiet?’

‘Eventually.’ But she really didn’t believe that, only wished for it. Though she had never lost her Englishness, England was becoming like a foreign country to her. Her parents, in the infrequent letters that got through since the Revolution, told her that England had changed during the War. Perhaps when she eventually reached home – how soon? Next month, next year? – she would not recognize the country she had left.

They were still on a mountain road, passing through pine forests, but now the road began to dip as it swung slightly south-east. The car was behaving beautifully, rolling smoothly along without effort, everyone in it marvellously comfortable. Cabell, a man who had never wished for riches, suddenly was seduced; he wanted to be an oil millionaire, have a car like this. He would chase horizons, follow beckoning roads in the grand manner, a vagabond with style.

Then the forest thinned out and they saw the narrow-gauge railway track running up to the mine cut into the side of the mountain slope. A wagon loaded with ore was being winched down the track to two wagons, drawn by oxen, waiting on the road.

The half-dozen men standing by the ox-wagons stiffened in surprise as the Rolls-Royce came round the bend in the road and glided to a halt beside them.

‘Good morning,’ said Eden. ‘Is there a town or village up ahead?’

The men glanced at one another, then a thickset, bald-headed man said, ‘Who wants to know?’

Cabell, half-turned in his seat, saw that Frederick was about to let the men know who he was. ‘Shut up, Freddie,’ he said in English.

The foreign language caused a stir amongst the men. They had been examining the car, their expressions a mixture of amazement and admiration. Now they stopped dead and looked at the man in the wide-brimmed hat who spoke a strange tongue.

‘Who’s he?’ said the bald-headed man.

‘He is an American engineer,’ said Eden. ‘I am an English teacher.’

‘Who owns such a motor car as this one?’

‘I do,’ said Cabell, and borrowed some of Frederick’s arrogance for the moment. ‘Good-day to you, gentlemen.’

He let in the gears and drove the car on before the men could move to stop him. Farther along the road, when they were out of sight of the mine, he said, ‘Those guys were asking too many questions.’

‘They are iron miners,’ said Nikolai. ‘Miners are different people from anyone else. It is the working underground, I think.’

‘Who do they work for – themselves?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Eden. ‘Probably for some landowner who lives in Moscow or somewhere far from here.’

‘They might work for my Uncle Vanya,’ said Frederick. ‘Father once said that Uncle Vanya owned everything for a hundred miles south of Verkburg.’

‘Freddie will inherit it all when Uncle Vanya dies,’ said Olga. ‘He is Uncle Vanya’s favourite nephew. I’m his favourite niece.’

‘Well, you’re not my favourite passengers,’ said Cabell. ‘I have an idea your Uncle Vanya wouldn’t be those miners’ favourite boss, either. Just keep your mouths shut about your relatives, okay? Stop playing Prince and Princess and be just plain Fred and Olga.’

‘Mother won’t like it when she hears of it,’ said Olga.

‘Your mother’s safe in Tiflis.’

The children said nothing, just looked at each other and sat back stiffly in their seats. But Eden said quietly, ‘You didn’t have to say that, Mr Cabell.’

‘I know,’ he said just as quietly; he increased the speed of the car, hoping the wind would make the children deaf to what he said. ‘But I haven’t had much experience with kids.’

‘That’s very evident, Mr Cabell.’ But she smiled when she said it and he grinned back at her.

Goddam, he thought, she’s a good-looker and she looks as if, with the right feller, she’d enjoy … But with two kids and a namby-pamby Cossack in the car, what could a feller do?

Ten minutes along the road they came into a large village. There was a main street and side streets running off it; a white stone church sat on the slope above the wooden houses, its golden dome dull and patchy. Children and dogs appeared from nowhere; then doors opened and men and women stood there. Excitement made the warm lazy air come alive; no one had ever seen such a magnificent car. Cabell and the others floated down the main street as Cleopatra’s barge might have floated down the Nile.

The main street ran into a square halfway through the village. On one side of the square a row of walnut trees fronted the entrance to a small railway station. Old men sat on benches beneath the trees, sometimes poking with their walking sticks at the hens that scratched about in the dust; they sat in silence, gossip and comment exhausted. Half a dozen women stood waiting their turn at the well-pump in the centre of the square, chatter spouting with the water. Several dogs rose up out of their torpor and began to bark as the Rolls-Royce and its procession came into the square and pulled up.

‘You do the shopping, Miss Penfold.’ Cabell got down from the car, smiling broadly at the gathering crowd like a politician gathering votes. ‘Take the kids and Nikolai with you, get a good supply. Don’t waste time. I’ll have a talk with these old guys, find out what lies south of here.’

The old men sat up straight on their benches as he approached them. They looked remarkably similar in their loose blouses and baggy trousers, as if they had all shrunk to a uniform size inside their clothes. Their only difference was in their headgear: some wore caps, one or two had straw hats. They peered at him with their rheumy eyes, recognizing him as a foreigner but knowing no maps on which to place him. Their eyes retreated into the gullies of their faces and he felt he was walking into an ambush. He was aware that the crowd, those that hadn’t followed Eden and the others, had fallen silent. He had a sudden premonition that he should turn back, get into the car, pick up the others and drive on. But it was too late now.

‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ Their gaze sharpened even more with suspicion; you could combine all their ages and no man in that time in this village had been called a gentleman. That was for the absentee land owners, the men who had come every year like the summer ’flu and been just as welcome. ‘What is the name of this village?’

The old men looked at the man who sat in their middle. They all had beards or moustaches, but he had the most magnificent beard of all, a white explosion of hair that hid everything below his nose. He had once been tall but the years had shrunk him; but as he stood up there was no bend in his back. He wore a roughly woven straw hat, baggy blue trousers and a grey blouse from the breast of which hung a brightly polished medal on a faded ribbon. He didn’t lean on his stick but held it as a gentleman might hold a staff of rank.

‘Drazlenka is the name of our village.’ He had a surprisingly young voice, as if time had not been able to get at his throat. ‘Who are you, sir?’

‘My name is Cabell. I’m an American, driving down to Tiflis and then to Batumi to catch the ship for home.’

‘I know Tiflis, I was there once. On my way to my second war, the one in the Crimea against the English.’

‘Your second, war?’

The old man chuckled, like birds chirruping in the nest of his beard. ‘I fought for our Tsar Alexander against Napoleon Bonaparte, I was a drummer boy.’

Napoleon and Alexander? That had been over a hundred years ago. The old man’s mind was wandering; but he was obviously the one who had to be spoken to. He was the village patriarch, the other old men looked to him for their words. In the background the crowd was still silent, their faces no longer laughing and excited but blank.

‘Does the road run right through to Tiflis from here?’ said Cabell, humouring the ancient.

‘One can always find a road,’ said the old man. ‘Perhaps not for the horseless carriage, but for one’s feet. I walked the journey.’

‘A thousand miles? Each way?’

‘It took time. When one was young one had plenty of time.’ Somewhere in the white jungle of beard Cabell guessed the old man might be smiling. ‘Where do you come from now?’

Cabell hesitated, then decided that General Bronevich had probably not come this far south. ‘From Verkburg.’

‘The woman and the children are your family?’

Again he hesitated: would it be safer to lie to the old man? But there was no time for an answer. There was a hubbub across the square behind him. He turned round and saw Eden, Nikolai and the two children being hustled towards him by a group of men. Leading the group, now and again giving Eden and the others a rough shove, was the bald-headed miner.

‘Ah,’ said the old man and Cabell thought he heard the chuckle again. ‘Here comes Comrade Keria. He will ask the questions now.’

He sat down again on his bench and the other old men nodded to him, pleased that he had displayed their authority and dignity. They sat there like honoured guests at some formal function waiting for the festivities to begin. Cabell, watching the group approach, aware of something in the atmosphere that he couldn’t quite grasp, suddenly wondered if the festivities would include a lynching.

The whole village seemed to be gathered in the square now. People flowed out of doorways and streets and lanes, coming quickly but with scarcely a sound other than the clatter of their wooden-soled boots on the cobbles of the square. They crowded in behind the group escorting Eden and the others and for a moment Cabell thought he and the old men were going to be swamped. Then, only two or three yards from him, the miners and the crowd came to an abrupt halt. Eden grabbed the two children and with Nikolai moved to stand beside Cabell.

‘What’s going on?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. The miners came rushing down the street in a lorry. They saw us going into a shop and they pulled up and grabbed us.’

Cabell saw the scared faces of the children and he put an arm round Frederick’s shoulders. He said in English, ‘Now remember, Freddie – keep your mouth shut.’ Then he looked at the bald-headed miner and said in Russian, ‘I am told your name is Keria.’

Keria twisted both little fingers in his ears, a disconcerting habit. ‘Yes, I am Maxim Keria. Chairman of the Drazlenka Soviet of Bolshevik Workers.’

Cabell noticed that only the miners nodded approval of what Keria had just said; the rest of the crowd remained silent and expressionless. But he opened his arms, stepped forward and embraced the bald-headed Bolshevik. ‘Greetings, citizen! Why didn’t you say who you were back up there at the mine?’

Keria’s surprise and puzzlement was no less than that of Eden. She stared at the traitor, wondering how she could have begun to trust him, even to like him. But Cabell, his back to her and the others, had guessed at the consternation that had gripped them. He stepped back from embracing Keria and without turning round said in English, ‘Play along with me. Don’t bugger this up or we’re going to have our asses kicked in.’

‘Watch it,’ she said automatically. ‘And you have the wrong revolution. They were citizens in the French Revolution. They’re comrades here.’

‘Nerves,’ said Cabell, and he was full of apprehension. ‘I lost my cue for the moment.’

Keria, suspicion replacing surprise, making his ugly face even uglier, said, ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Comrade Cabell and I bring you greetings from Big Bill Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World. Big Bill said to me, Comrade Cabell, he said, go out there to Siberia and tell the workers there that the IWW is right behind them. And, by God we are! Aren’t we, Comrade Penfold?’ He reached behind him, pulled the stunned comrade forward. ‘This is Comrade Penfold, who’s come all the way from England to bring greetings from George Bernard Shaw!’

As he looked at Eden, out of the corner of his eye he saw the white beard twitch in the region of the patriarch’s mouth. Was the old son-of-a-bitch smiling?

‘Greetings from George Bernard Shaw and Keir Hardie and Sidney Webb!’ Eden shouted in a wobbly voice. If her mother and father, the Tory true-blues, could only hear her now …

But Keria was unimpressed. ‘Who are these Industrial Workers of the World? Who is this George Bernard Shaw?’

Eden looked sideways to Cabell. ‘I’d hate to be in England now. I think an earthquake might have just happened.’

‘An earthquake named Shaw? I wish he were here now. We could do with some of his arguments.’

‘What are you talking of in your foreign language?’ Keria demanded. ‘Why do you have a magnificent car like this? Workers don’t ride around in such cars.’

‘They do in England and America,’ said Cabell, trusting to the ignorance of isolation; but out of the corner of his eye he saw the huge white beard twitching again. ‘Soon everyone here in Russia will do the same.’

He sounded ridiculous in his own ears; but he had no other weapon. He tried desperately to remember some of the rhetoric he had heard from the Wobbly organizers on the Texas oil fields, but all that came to mind was the apathy of the workers they had been adressing and the brutal antagonism of the oil-field bosses. Phrases came back to him – ‘Workers of the world unite!’, ‘Sell your labour, not your life!’ – but the iron miners of Drazlenka remained as unmoved as the oil workers of Texas. He might have been Big Bill Haywood addressing a Republican convention.

At last he threw up his hands and looked at Eden. ‘I don’t think I’m getting through. You got any messages from Karl Marx?’

But Eden had messages from no one. She had no ear for political oratory; all she could remember of Trotsky and Kerensky was that they were boring. She gestured helplessly.

‘Well, that’s it, Comrade,’ Cabell said to Keria. ‘Greetings from the Great Outside World.’

‘You are not comrades,’ said Keria and behind him the miners nodded their heads. But the crowd said nothing, did not move. ‘You will be executed after you have been tried.’

‘You have the verdict before the trial?’

But Keria was deadly serious: he had no sense of humour. ‘Just as it was under the Tsar.’

Behind him Cabell felt Frederick stir and he stepped back and put his heel on the boy’s toe. ‘Sorry, kid.’

‘Who are these children?’ Keria demanded, scrutinizing them for the first time. ‘They don’t look like the children of workers. And who is the scrawny one?’ He jerked his head at Nikolai.

‘The children are mine,’ said Cabell. ‘Their mother was Russian but unfortunately she came back for the October Revolution and fell prey to the charms of a workers’ chairman from Georgia. That’s why we are on our way to Tiflis, to ask her to return to our family circle. You want your mother back, don’t you, children?’

The children were a little slow to respond to their substitute father and Eden answered for them. ‘Of course they do.’

‘Why are you travelling with this man?’ Keria glared at her. ‘Are you his mistress?’

‘Watch it,’ said Eden. ‘Not in front of the children.’

For the first time the crowd showed expression. It looked disapproving: adultery was a bourgeois habit. ‘What about him?’ said Keria, jerking his head again at Nikolai.

‘A fellow worker,’ said Cabell. ‘Trotsky himself lent him to me. His very own godson.’

He’s gone too far, thought Eden. But some of the miners looked at Nikolai with new interest and some murmured approval. But Keria was all suspicion. He was trained for the future: trust no one. ‘He can prove that at the trial. Take them away!’

But the Drazlenka soviet had never had any prisoners to try: it did not know where to take them. There was no village jail or police station, no army barracks: they had authority but none of authority’s conveniences. They looked at Keria in bewilderment and he stared back at them, bewildered by his own command. Cabell suddenly wanted to laugh, but he knew the situation was far too serious for any merriment.

Then the white-bearded old man stood up. ‘Put them in the railway waiting room. There is no train for another two days.’

So the enemies of the proletariat were carted off to the railway station. The crowd surged along behind them. Any stranger coming on the scene would have thought that he was witnessing the departure by train of the village’s favourite family. There was no booing or jeering, just laughter and shouting; it was as if now that Keria had made the decision for them, the crowd had come alive again. But if the crowd was now merry, none of its merriment communicated itself to Cabell. With one eye never leaving Keria, seeing the sense of power all at once beginning to swell the man, he knew that the bald-headed miner intended to have an execution if it killed him. He would only be following in the tradition of Russian history: drastic solutions for minor problems. The Tsars had been better teachers than they knew.

Cabell, Eden, Nikolai and the two children were herded into the dusty waiting room. Keria gave instructions to two of the younger miners, then he left, closing the door behind him. Outside the crowd drifted away, but some children remained, their faces pressed against the grimy windows of the waiting room. The two young guards, uncomfortable in their unaccustomed role, sat down on a bench beside the door. The prisoners, equally uncomfortable but for a different reason, stood awkwardly for a moment, then they, too, sat down on the benches around the grimy walls. Above Eden’s head was a fly-spotted time-table; but someone had painted a rough red hammer-and-sickle on it. Behind the red paint of revolution were the schedules of trains that might never run again. Cabell wondered where the train due in two days would be heading, wondered what its passengers would think if they saw five corpses hanging by the neck from the walnut trees outside. But maybe train passengers all over Russia were familiar with such sights now. He just didn’t know. He began to feel more and more remote, as if the real world were sliding away from him.

‘I want to go to the lavatory.’ Olga was pale under her perspiration, afraid and trembling again.

Eden put the request to the two guards. They looked perplexed, not knowing what privileges a prisoner was entitled to. Then the door opened and the white-bearded old man came in. The two youths stood up, but he ignored them. He looked at the prisoners in turn, then he smiled at Eden.

‘A pretty girl. You make an old man feel young again. Or wish he were young.’

‘Thank you, Grandfather—’ Eden wondered if thanks for compliments were in order in such circumstances.

‘My name is Delyanov. Alexander Dmitri Delyanov. I was named after Tsar Alexander. The first Alexander.’

‘Comrade Delyanov—’ One of the guards felt he had better start acting like a guard. ‘Comrade Keria said no one was to come in here—’

‘Stuff Comrade Keria,’ said Comrade Delyanov. ‘I am one hundred and twenty-five years old and I am not going to be ordered about by infants like you. I am wearing trousers older than you—’ He gestured at his baggy patched pants. ‘Get outside! Go on – out!’

Cabell hardly saw the young men exit. He was gazing at Delyanov, trying to make his eyes believe what his ears had heard. He knew of tales of men who lived to a great age in southern Russia; but they had been men from the hills and mountains of Georgia. Perhaps no one had come here to the southern Urals looking for ancients; but he still could not believe that Delyanov was as old as he claimed. A man who had seen Napoleon …

‘Did you – I mean are you really as old as all that?’

Delyanov smiled. ‘You think I am a liar, don’t you, Cabell? You are one yourself, a liar with lots of imagination. It was a pity you were wasting it on clods with no imagination. Yes, I am one hundred and twenty-five years old.’

Frederick gasped and Olga opened her eyes wide. Cabell said, ‘Did you actually see Napoleon Bonaparte?’

‘Of course.’ Delyanov was not offended; he had been asked the question a thousand times. ‘I was at Tilsit in 1807 when the Tsar and the Corsican met on the raft in the middle of the Niemen River. I led the Tsar down to the boat that took him out to the raft, playing my drum. He pinned that medal to my tunic himself.’ He patted the medal on his breast. ‘He was a strange one. He could have been the greatest of them. But—’

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ said Olga with a full bladder and no sense of history.

‘How many wars have you fought in?’ said Frederick.

‘Three. The war against Napoleon, the one against the Turks and the one against the English. I missed the last two, against the Japanese and against the Germans. I volunteered, but they laughed at me. They laugh at old men sometimes for the wrong reasons.’

‘How have you lived so long?’ Cabell still could not bring himself to believe that Delyanov was as old as he claimed. He looked like a well-preserved seventy at the most.

‘The right food, the right thoughts and baggy trousers.’ He pulled out his trousers to show their bagginess. ‘Tight trousers cut off the blood to your crotch. That’s where a man’s youth is, in his crotch.’

‘Watch it,’ said Eden, nodding at Olga.

‘My dear—’ Delyanov bowed to Olga. ‘I apologize.’

‘Will that awful man Keria really execute us?’ said Frederick.

The old man nodded. ‘He wants to make a name for himself. A name for himself in this village!’ He laughed and for the first time there was the sound of age in his throat: it was an old man’s cackle. ‘When you have seen emperors, as I have … Keria is a little man with little ambitions.’

‘Killing us is a big ambition in my eyes,’ said Cabell. ‘Who owns this village? Don’t people have any say?’

The old man shrugged. ‘This village used to belong to a prince, Prince Vanya Gorshkov.’ Frederick and Olga raised their heads, but Delyanov didn’t notice. ‘He won’t come again. None of those princes will.’

‘Are you a Bolshevik?’ Cabell said.

‘No more than you are, Cabell.’ Delyanov’s beard twitched. ‘I am a realist. The past is past, so I am a Bolshevik if they say I am.’

‘But surely the people won’t let Keria kill us?’ said Eden.

‘Who knows? They are a strange people here. I wasn’t born here – I came here sixty years ago. I am here more years than most of them have lived, but they still say I came from outside. They want to build a wall round Drazlenka now, shut out everyone. This was always a village that hated outsiders. Now that the Prince won’t be back …’

‘Can you help us escape?’

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ said Olga. ‘I can’t hold it any longer.’

‘I can’t help you escape,’ said Delyanov, ‘but I can escort the young lady to the lavatory.’

He opened the door, stood back to let Eden and Olga go out. He looked back at Cabell and the beard twitched again. ‘You and the boy and the scrawny one will have to attend to your own bladders. Everyone pisses on the railway tracks.’

He went out, closing the door behind him. They heard him snap something at the two young guards, then the door opened and the two youths looked in and jerked their heads at Cabell.

He, Frederick and Nikolai went out on to the small station platform and stood there in a row relieving themselves. Cabell looked south down the railway line, wondering how far it went. Was there another town further on, one where outsiders were hated as much as in this one? He began to appreciate for the first time that they were heading into a part of the Russian Empire that had never really been fully conquered, where the people did not, and possibly never would, see themselves as Russians.

‘I wish they would stop calling me the scrawny one. They all sound like my father.’ Nikolai shook himself, pulled up his trousers and turned back towards the waiting room. Melancholy and insulted, he eyed the two guards who stood watching them. ‘Shot by Bolsheviks. He’ll never forgive me for that.’

‘I doubt if he’ll get to hear of it.’ Cabell tried to sound comforting, a little difficult in the circumstances. ‘How are you, Freddie? You’ve kept your mouth shut pretty well.’

‘I’m going to let them know who I am.’ Frederick waved a strong stream in the air, a golden rapier stroke. ‘So’s they’ll know whom they’re murdering.’

‘Whom? That’s good grammar, Freddie, but poor politics. We’ve got to start thinking of getting out of here.’

Crossing the square with Eden and Olga, Delyanov fluffed up his beard and said, ‘You’re a remarkably pretty girl.’

‘Thank you,’ said Eden, and refrained from saying he had already told her that. She had met lecherous old men before, but never one as ancient as this. She changed the subject away from herself: ‘You sound as if you might have been educated, Mr Delyanov.’

He nodded proudly. ‘I educated myself, taught myself to read when I was forty years old. I met Pushkin – you know, the poet?’

‘I know him.’ She had discovered him when she had come to Russia, almost swooned over Tatiana’s love letter to Onegin.

‘I didn’t agree with everything he wrote. Too much about freedom – that was what I thought then. Now – well, maybe he was right. I met Tolstoy too. On my hundredth birthday I made the journey all the way to Yasnaya Polyana to pay my respects. He talked to me, called me Uncle – he thought he was getting old till he talked to me. He talked to me about what he believed in. I began to see that things had been wrong—’ He shook his head and the beard quivered. ‘You are a hundred years old and one day you discover you’ve been blind all your life.’

‘It’s not too late.’ But Eden felt ridiculous telling him so.

‘No.’ He fluffed up his beard again. ‘I can save you from being shot. Marry me.’

Eden stopped by the well in the middle of the square, leaned against its stone wall while she splashed water on her face from the dribbling pump. There were still people in the square: the half-dozen old men still sitting under the walnut trees, several conferences of crones, children slipping like drops of mercury from one group to another. The heat pressed down on her like a soft invisible weight; it came up from the cobblestones and the dust its sharp white lights that made her eyes ache. Everyone in the square, even the old man immediately in front of her, seemed to hang suspended in shimmering sunlight. She was going to faint; or fall into the mirage with them. Yesterday a Mongolian general had tried to rape her; today a centenarian was proposing marriage. Perhaps she was already in the mirage.

‘Don’t you already have a wife?’

‘I’ve had four. They’re all gone. You’re a pretty girl, you’d be good to look at in my old age. Keep me company. All my children are dead, too. All twelve of them. Took after their mothers, all died young. None of them lasted past seventy.’

Eden wanted to laugh. She could feel hysteria taking hold of her like a fever. She looked wildly around for some grasp on reality, heard Olga say, ‘I want to go to the lavatory.’

‘Here it is.’ Delyanov led them up a lane past log houses, opened the gate in a rough wooden fence and pointed to an out-house in the middle of a vegetable garden. Olga, walking carefully but quickly, went along the garden path to the lavatory and disappeared into it. Eden leaned against the fence, recovered slowly.

‘If you marry me,’ said Delyanov, ‘Keria won’t shoot you.’

‘But you don’t know me – we have only just this moment met—’

‘I like your looks. At my age one cannot afford to waste even a day.’

‘At my age one doesn’t marry at a moment’s notice. You will have to give me time.’ But she knew that back home her mother already thought she was on the shelf for good: twenty-six and no husband in sight. But she couldn’t see herself taking a centenarian bridegroom home to Croydon.

‘There is not much time. You may be dead by tomorrow afternoon. This man Keria is very impulsive.’

She had heard the phrase a shotgun wedding, something that Americans evidently went in for. But this was terrifyingly ludicrous: a firing-squad wedding. ‘I shall have to talk to Mr Cabell.’

‘Is he your lover?’

She hesitated, then nodded: any port in a storm. ‘He won’t like it.’

‘He will if you save his life and the children’s. What does he do besides tell lies about being a comrade?’

‘He’s an engineer, an oil engineer. A geologist.’

‘They’re practical men,’ said Delyanov, as if the engineers he had known put romance to some mathematical test. ‘Ah, here comes the little girl. That better, my dear? A little bladder relief does wonders.’

Olga gave him her princess look. ‘One does not talk about such things in polite company.’

Delyanov smiled in the depths of his beard. ‘You’ll be a great lady some day, my dear. May you live long enough,’ he said, and winked at Eden.

He escorted them back to the railway station, exhorted Eden to consider his proposal as a serious one and left them in the care of the two young guards. Eden closed the waiting-room door on the youths, leaving them sitting on a bench in the sun. They didn’t protest but sat there dumbly, now and again looking at each other as if expecting some flash of intelligence that would tell them exactly what their duties were. They had heard all the theory from Comrade Keria, but this was the first lesson in the practice of revolution and they were at a loss. The revolution, Keria had told them, was a Russian affair, a war against the Tsar and all the reactionaries who had supported him. And here they were guarding two foreigners, a couple of kids and a scrawny one who sometimes walked like a girl.

Eden sat down on a bench in the waiting room and said, ‘The old man wants me to marry him.’

‘He is far too old for you,’ said Frederick. ‘He would be impotent.’

‘Watch it!’

‘What sort of education did you give these kids?’ said Cabell; but it was only a mark-time remark while he took in what she had said. ‘The old son-of-a-bitch must be senile. It’s – it’s indecent!’

‘What is the matter?’ Nikolai said in Russian.

Cabell told him and the Cossack rolled his head in shock and despair.

Eden said, ‘If I marry him, he says he can arrange it that you four go free.’

‘No!’ said Cabell and the two children echoed him. ‘It’s all a bluff. That guy won’t have us shot.’

But later that night, trying to sleep on one of the hard wooden benches, Cabell felt no optimism at all about their fate. He had heard of the wholesale killing by both sides in this bloody civil war and he knew and understood some of the hatred that fired the revolutionaries. Keria was one of them, recognizable at a glance, a man looking for a way out of a hole in the ground to a place on top of the mountain. Cabell had seen the coal miners on strike in the hills of Pennsylvania, the men who had inherited the fierce passions of the Molly Maguires of the 1870’s. Miners had the seeds of revolution ingrained in them as deeply as the mine dust in their lungs. He could not blame Keria for the way he felt. He just did not want to die as a way of proving Keria’s revolutionary zeal. And there was also the villagers’ hatred of outsiders … Tomorrow there would be no one on his and the others’ side at the trial, no one but a randy old man offering to marry a girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter.

He turned over to go to sleep and saw Eden sitting up on her bench, her head and shoulders outlined against the moonlit window. Quietly he got up and went and sat beside her.

They spoke in whispers, not wanting to wake the children and Nikolai. ‘What am I to do?’ she said. ‘I keep thinking of the children. And you,’ she added. Then added further, lives weighing on her like sacks of potatoes: ‘And Nikolai.’

‘It’s not worth the risk,’ he said. ‘The old man can’t guarantee we’d be let go.’

‘Perhaps I could save my own life. I’m ashamed that I keep thinking of that.’

He felt for her hand, found it. It was the first time he had touched her and both felt the immediate intimacy; but their hands were stiff one within the other, arthritic with caution, wary of the circumstances that had brought them this close. ‘When he dies – it could happen tomorrow, the day after, any time … What happens to you then?’

‘They’d probably kill me then.’ Her fingers were just dead bones in his hand.

‘I’m not going to let that happen. Not to any of us.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Then she started to weep. It was something she hadn’t done in a long time, not since the first lonely weeks when she had first come to Russia and then when they had buried Igor Dulenko. She had never thought of tears as a sign of feminine weakness, but somehow she had survived without them till now. When Cabell put his arms round her she didn’t resist but leant her head against his shoulder and let the tears come. It was so long since he had held a girl like this one in his arms that he felt awkward; there had been girls in his arms but they had been paid for and none of them had asked for gentleness or sympathy. He brushed his lips against her hair, but said nothing.

On a bench opposite them Nikolai watched them and wept, too. For himself alive today as much as for himself dead tomorrow. He longed for love, but there was no man who would comfort him.

[4]

In the morning the villagers came early to the square, like a football crowd eager to get good seats for today’s big match. They brought chairs with them and set them up in a hollow square in front of the railway station. The sun climbed through a brilliant sky and the tree-shrouded mountains flickered with flashes of green as the trees stirred in the slight morning breeze; to the east clouds lay on the horizon like the white negative of another dark range. The breeze suddenly dropped as the sun got higher, the trees in the square drew their shadows into themselves and the heat already began to sear like an invisible flame. Two ravens appeared out of nowhere, materializing like black spirits, and flapped lazily on to the roof of the railway station. They croaked miserably as the prisoners were led out of the waiting room and Cabell, looking up, thought of the line (was it from Hamlet?): The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.

But there was no look of revenge on the faces of the crowd sitting on their chairs, standing in orderly groups. They looked uncertain this morning, as if during the night they had dreamed of the enormity of what they wanted, the death of the outsiders. The old men sat in the front row, some of them with their wives.

Delyanov rose from his chair and came forward. He carried a bunch of red roses and, taking off his hat with a sweeping gesture, he handed the bouquet to Eden. ‘Everyone knows of my proposal. I announced it last night. You will be welcomed by all as my wife.’

‘Silly old bugger,’ said an old woman in the front row and chomped her gums at him.

Delyanov turned to her. ‘You are only jealous, Natasha Mihalovna, that I did not ask you to be my bride.’

‘Who would have you?’ said Natasha Mihalovna. ‘It takes you all your time to pee, let alone use it for anything else.’

‘Do you mind?’ said Eden. ‘There are children present.’

‘Holy Toledo!’ said Cabell, careful for once of the children.

‘What’s the matter, Mr Cabell?’ said Eden.

‘Nothing, nothing.’ He shook his head, wondering if the heat had got to him already. By tonight it wouldn’t matter what was discussed in front of the children, they would only be corrupted by worms. ‘Here comes Judge Keria.’

But Keria was not the only judge. The village soviet had stayed up half the night planning this trial; it would be done in the proper way, even if the verdict was already decided. Keria and two other miners sat down behind the table that had been placed outside the entrance to the railway station. The five prisoners were sat on chairs placed to one side; opposite them sat two more miners, the prosecutor and his assistant; there was no counsel for the defence. The walnut trees threw impartial shadows on all of them; the spectators sat in the open sun but seemed oblivious of it. Keria rapped the table with his gavel, a short pick-handle, and the trial began.

The prosecutor, a burly young man with close-cropped black hair and a look of intelligence that had never been allowed to flower, rose to his feet, conscious of the occasion and his position in it.

‘The charge is that these five strangers are enemies of the State.’

‘You have no evidence,’ said Cabell.

‘I second that,’ said Delyanov.

‘Shut up, you old fool,’ said Natasha Mihalovna and some murmurs in the crowd seconded her advice.

‘You were the same at the priest’s trial,’ said Delyanov. ‘You’re not interested injustice, just in satisfying your spite.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ grumbled the old woman, not sure herself what he was talking about. What was justice? No one in the village had ever known it.

Cabell looked for a priest amongst the crowd, but there was none; then he looked across the square and up past the houses to the white church on the slope above the village. Its doors were closed, planks nailed across them. Had the priest been driven out of the village or had he, too, been executed? He stared at the church, then his eye caught sight of something else on the crest of the slope. A horseman stood there gazing down on the scene in the square. The rider was small (a boy perhaps?) and he sat without moving. Was he waiting, Cabell wondered, to take a message of their execution to another village?

Cabell looked back at Delyanov. ‘What happened to the priest?’

‘They drove him away,’ said Delyanov. ‘Drove him away with stones.’

‘Good riddance!’ cackled Natasha Mihalovna.

Keria banged the pick-handle, called for order. ‘Go on,’ he said to the prosecutor.

But the prosecutor was too slow. Delyanov was back on his feet, speaking directly to the tribunal this time.

‘The young woman, if she has any sense, is to be my bride. So I say you cannot execute her friends, because they will be my friends, too. I move the trial be ended.’ He looked at the old men on either side of him. They stared back at him, neither denying him nor supporting him. He drew himself a little straighter, then turned and stared back at the crowd, challenging it. ‘Well? You have heard me speak. Let me marry the girl and let the others move on!’

There was silence for a moment, then Natasha Mihalovna chomped her gums and suddenly screamed, ‘Sit down, you old fool! The trial goes on!’

There was another moment’s silence. Cabell looked out at the crowd, realized with a sickening sudden emptiness that Delyanov was alone. Then someone clapped. The clapping spread through the crowd, hesitatingly, never loud, the hands hollow so that the sound, too, was hollow. It was an answer; but not the answer Delyanov had expected. He looked around him, bewildered; suddenly, after sixty years, he, too, was a stranger again. Abruptly he sat down, looked as if every one of his years had all at once fallen in on him. Jesus, Cabell thought, they’ve just executed him!

The prosecutor, given back the floor (or the roadway, for he stood in the middle of it), put the case against the prisoners. The foreigners had no proof that they were who they said they were; the children were half-Russian, as admitted by the American, but they did not look nor sound even half-worker. Compare them with the children of our village …