The revolutionist, p.29
The Revolutionist, page 29
Zander managed, "Thank you for taking the risk."
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The officer shrugged. "Your revolution is a disaster for Russia. Millions will die. I hope to God you lose." He stood up, brushed the dust from his knee with a gloved hand, and disappeared over the embankment.
Lili slowly turned to Zander. Her face was streaked with tears and dirt. She spat out dirt from her mouth and stared at him, stunned. Then a strained, crooked, ugly smile distorted her face. "What a gift life is," she said, and she started to sob quietly.
Zander could see that Lili was dying mentally. The cells in her brain must be decaying under the strain, he told himself. Her mind tended to wander; it was often, judging from the expression on her face, blank. She was capable of concentrating for short bursts when he pushed her, but the only thing she seemed to expect was the worst. She could collapse in tears at the sight of blood from a mosquito bite she had scratched raw. And once she started sobbing, she would stumble along behind Zander for hours, blinded by tears, her body jerking spasmodically.
She had cracked like an old saucer. And he had become the caretaker of the pieces.
Now Lili lay curled up behind the hedges at the lip of a ravine that the peasants used as a garbage dump, twitching in her sleep. Zander crouched next to her, watching a fat, bearded priest drive a mule through rows of unharvested rye teeming with field mice, toward the village and the gutted church at its edge. In the distance a swarm of flies hovered over the priest's head, scattering when he swatted at them with the back of his hand, then regrouping instantly into something resembling a halo over a saint. The mule reared, frightened by the mice scurrying underfoot, and refused to advance. The priest cursed him to burn forever in a hell so hot it taxed an educated man's vocabulary to describe it. When the mule still didn't budge, the priest raised his robe and reared back and kicked him in the testicles. The mule bellowed in pain and crashed forward again through the rye toward the gutted church.
Moving across high pastures by the light of the moon, hiding by
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day, living on mushrooms and the roots of plants and what they found in the ruins of barns and houses, Zander and Lili made their way across the Ural Mountains toward Perm, a city some two hundred miles from Ekaterinburg. Armed bands of Whites, Reds, and even Greens—anarchist peasants who fought against both sides—roamed the countryside, killing the humans or the animals they came across. Hardly a night went by without their stumbling across bloated and decaying corpses. They had gone to ground one morning before first light, only to find, at sunup, that they were under a cliff against which several small bamboo cages had been suspended, each containing a prisoner who had been left to die of thirst and exposure. Hiding in a bog near a lake another time, they saw a band of Greens herd eight prisoners—it was impossible to say whether they were Whites or Reds—onto a long dock at the water's edge, tie boulders to their necks, and prod them off the deep end with the points of bayonets. "If we are in danger of being caught," Lili would say again and again, "you must cut my wrist with that rusty knife you found," and Zander, sharpening it on a flat stone, had to promise her he would do it. At first he would agree only to quiet her. But after he saw the corpse of a woman who had been gagged and raped and garrotted, he meant every word.
"We will never make it to Perm," Lili sighed one day as they scavenged for food through burned outbuildings of a once-flourishing farm. Around them everything had been demolished—poultry sheds, pigpens, milking stalls, horse stables. Several wild dogs, their rib cages visible in the moonlight, howled from the shadows of a stand of timber.
Except for one wing, the manor house of the farm, planted on a rise behind the outbuildings at the end of an alley of acacias, had been burned to the ground. Poking around that wing. Zander discovered a length of drapery and folded it into a mattress for Lili, who promptly curled up on it and fell into a fitful sleep. In the charred ruins of the main house Zander found a tin of halvah, a broken jar with some pickles still in it, and a metal box full of iodine crystals. Settling down in a corner near Lili, he added what he had found to his makeshift backpack, placed his rusty knife where he could get at it quickly and started to doze. The heat was oppressive. Two flies buzzing around his good ear woke him, but he brushed them away and, leaning against the wall, drifted off into a deep sleep.
The point of a saber tickling his throat jerked him back to consciousness. His eyes batted open. His body froze. Several dozen half-naked children of all sizes and ages had crowded silently into the wing of the manor house. Their bodies were covered with dirt and sores. The older ones—they couldn't have been more than twelve—
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had surrounded Lili and Zander, pinning them to the floor with outstretched cavalry sabers which were so heavy the children had to manipulate them with both hands.
Eezprezomi,'" murmured Zander. "Don't move."
Before they left Moscow, they had heard about the bezprezomi, or homeless ones. There had been an article in Pravda describing the thousands of half-starved orphans roaming the countryside, hunting in packs, terrorizing villages, stealing or killing to survive, Hving by their own laws with the older children protecting the younger ones. There had even been a suggestion that some of the children, wild with hunger, had turned to cannibalism.
There was a shuffling of bare feet now as the children made way for their leader. He was dressed in a loincloth and wore a woman's fur cape flung over one shoulder. A hunting hawk, with a short leash attached to one claw and a hood over its head, clung to his raised wrist. The leader, who couldn't have been more than fourteen, surveyed the two prisoners with unblinking dove's eyes as he absently pulled a louse from his scalp and squashed it between his fingernails. Somewhere behind him a baby burst into tears. Another child began to sing to it in an undertone. The leader nodded at Zander's rusty knife. A young girl with burn scars over her chest promptly scooped it up and stuck it into her waistband. Two of the children dug into a canvas sack and produced a long chain, which they passed several times around Zander's arms and wrists before padlocking the ends together.
The leader looked down at Lili. "If you do not do as we say, we will cut up your friend and cook him." He glanced over the heads of the children nearest him and called, "Bring the babies."
Six young girls, naked except for tattered cotton underpants, their skin covered with layers of scabs, pushed through the crowd. Each carried an infant in her arms. "We found them yesterday," the leader mumbled, "in a village put to the sword by Whites. They will go to heaven if they do not get milk. Our girls have no breasts, but you do. Breastfeed our babies and we will spare you and your friend."
Controlling an urge to tremble, Lili glanced at Zander. She started to say, "I have no—" when she caught his almost imperceptible shake of the head. The bezprezomi obviously thought any woman with breasts had milk. Lili shivered. "Pass them to me one at a time," she said. She unbuttoned her shirt and took the first infant to her breast.
The baby fitted its tiny mouth over her nipple, but was too weak to suckle. Several of the bezprezomi squatted down around Lili to watch. One child who couldn't have been more than four years old began to cry. An older boy pulled a large gold pocket watch from a sack and pressed it against the child's ear.
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"Tick-tick," the child giggled. "Tick-tick,"
Lili passed the first baby back to its caretaker, and forced herself to accept a second. This one was covered with head sores oozing pus. It began to suck at her breast, and howled when the nipple failed to provide milk, but the infant continued sucking, and Lili's nipple became raw. Cringing, Lili thrust the baby off her chest. The children squatting around her sprang to their feet. Two of the older children leveled their cavalry sabers at Zander's throat.
Shuddering, Lili carefully drew the baby back to her chest and offered it the other breast.
By midafternoon each of the babies had had a turn at Lili's breasts. The leader dipped into a canvas sack and passed out sticks of smoked meat. Afterward, twenty of the bezprezom't formed a ring in the middle of the room and began to play koshka-mishka, cat and mouse. The object was for the "cat" inside the ring to break through and catch the "mouse," an emaciated eight-year-old girl who circulated outside the ring.
The game began playfully enough with the cat, a heavy twelve-year-old boy, rebounding off the locked arms of the children in the ring. Each attempt to break out evoked wild laughter from the bezprezomi watching from the sidelines. The laughter incensed the cat, who began hurling himself against the linked arms with more force. The harder he tried to break out, the more the others laughed, until finally the cat lowered its head, and grunting viciously, butted straight into the chest of one of the younger children in the ring. With a cry of pain the child fell back. The cat sprang through the gap onto the back of the mouse, grabbed her hair in both hands, and began pounding her head into the stone floor.
"For God's sake, stop him," Lili screamed from the corner of the room.
"But it is only a game," the bezprezomi^ leader, caressing the feathers of his falcon, called back.
The children squatting along the walls began clapping rhythmically. At each clap the cat pounded the mouse's head into the floor. Lili turned away and shut her eyes, but the tears flooded out anyway.
At sunset, the bezprezomi gathered up their belongings and babies and, filing out the door, disappeared into the night. True to their promise to Lili, they left behind the key to the padlock that bound Zander. They also left behind two babies that had gone to heaven during the day, and the body of the mouse sprawled in a pool of drying blood in the middle of the room.
Their faces blackened with mud, the raiding party set off two hours after sunset. All fourteen of them crowded into two fishing barks and
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poled their way across the river at a point several miles upstream from the White battery dug in on the headland commanding the Volga.
The guide, a young peasant who had been raised on the Asian bank of the river near Kazan, led the raiding party inland, away from the Volga, and skirting the edge of a field planted in cabbages, turned toward the promontory barely visible in the distance. Moving along a ditch used to circulate runoff from the river when it was high, the raiding party approached the campfire at the base of the promontory. Tuohy eased his head over the edge of the ditch and counted the silhouettes. He tapped the man next to him and held up two fingers. Then he motioned two of the Chekists forward. They drew knives from their belts and, crawling on their bellies, disappeared over the top of the ditch. Tuohy cocked his ear toward the campfire and strained to catch the sound. A faint breeze whistled through the underbrush. A frog croaked. There was a soft thud of feet running on the damp earth. Silhouettes darted in front of the campfire. Then everything was quiet.
"Let's go," Tuohy whispered, and he and the eleven men with him headed up the rise toward the White cannon dug in above them. As they drew closer Tuohy could hear someone washing tin plates in a bucket. Tuohy pointed a finger, dispatching a Chekist in the direction of the sound. The man who was doing the washing hummed to himself. Suddenly the humming ceased. Tuohy nodded toward the first of the two artillery pieces, its barrel elevated and visible against the night sky. He crawled forward with some of the Chekists until he reached the sandbag barrier, and slowly raised himself until he could peer over the top into the dugout.
There were seven men inside, four of them sound asleep, the other three propped up with their backs against ammunition crates playing cards by the light of an oil lamp. Tuohy sank back into the shadow of the sandbags and waited to give the other Chekists time to position themselves around the second dugout. He drew his knife from his belt. The men around him followed suit.
"Now!" he whispered, and he flung himself over the top and came down on the other side on one of the card players, burying his knife in the man's chest. Around him there were muted cries as men died before they had a chance to know what was killing them.
Tuohy stood up and peered in the direction of the second dugout. A Chekist trotted over and knelt on the rim of the sandbags. "It is ours," he whispered.
Two of the Chekists who knew something about artillery pieces set about spiking the guns so that they would blow up in the face of anybody who tried to fire them. Tuohy grabbed the lantern and walked over to the lip of the headland. He stared down at the Volga
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curving under his feet, then waved his gaslamp in a great arc. Below, on one of the four Bolshevil^ gunboats, someone signaled back.
The four boats, with Trotsky in command aboard the lead vessel, made their way around the curve under the promontory into the lagoonlike bay before the low, sprawling town of Kazan. The White flotilla—an oil barge, two river steamers fitted out with machine guns and cannon, a half-dozen gunboats—lay at anchor about two hundred yards dead ahead of Trotsky's makeshift armada.
The Reds fired star shells into the air behind the White vessels to outline them, then opened up with every gun they had. The oil barge exploded, spewing greenish flames into the sky. One of the riverboats caught fire and began to sink, stern first. From the headland Tuohy could see tiny figures leaping from the deck into the burning water. Behind a jetty on the shore. White machine guns and mortars fired back. One of the Red gunboats took a hit in the stern and turned in circles for a quarter of an hour until the crew managed to jury-rig a rudder. When Trotsky's flotilla steamed out of the lagoon half an hour later, all but one of the White vessels was sinking or sunk.
The victory left control of the river in Red hands, and opened the way for a frontal assault on the Whites entrenched in Kazan.
Perm, a city of sixty thousand on the European slope of the Urals, boasted a concert hall with a Venetian chandelier so massive nobody in his right mind would sit under it. There was a public park with a ten-horse manege imported from Paris. The local undertaker owned four motorized hearses of English manufacture, though three had been requisitioned by the local Chekists to transport prisoners. The church had a layer of gold leaf on its dome. Several of the taller buildings were equipped with elevators. And some of the principal streets had been paved, though only the ones paved in cobblestones were still intact; any wooden blocks had long since been pried up by people scavenging for firewood.
By late August 1918, the streets of Perm were teeming with refugees. There were so many that the soldiers manning the roadblocks at the city's perimeter had given up asking for identification papers, and simply waved everybody past who wasn't armed. Making their way through the outskirts. Zander and Lili felt as if they were being carried on a current. As the street narrowed, the crowd seemed to flow faster. "Hurry," a woman cried to her friends as she pushed past Zander, "or we will miss the fun." Ahead, a military parade ground with a low wooden fence around it blocked the street. Before the revolution, recruits for the tsar's war against Germany had worn away most of the grass practicing close-order drill. Now, drawn by the
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excitement, Zander pulled Lili up to a place against the fence. Across the parade ground, near a brick wall, six black-robed priests had been tied to stakes. A firing squad of twenty young soldiers was marching into position facing the priests. The officer commanding the firing squad pulled his sword from its scabbard. One of the priests raised his voice. "God's curse on the head of anyone who shoots a priest—you will rot in hell!"
"Get ready," the officer ordered.
A murmur rose from the hundreds of people watching from the low wooden fence. The woman next to Zander said, "Yesterday they refused to shoot, but the boys were all local boys. So they went and brought in Uzbeks today."
Lili sagged against Zander. "I cannot take any more killing," she said dully.
Zander threw an arm over her shoulder and drew her back into the crowd. Several people quickly squeezed into their places along the fence. Pulling Lili through the mob straining for a better view—one man had lifted his young son onto his shoulders—Zander could hear the bolts being thrown on the rifles.
"Take aim," the officer cried.
Lili jerked her hand out of Zander's and pressed both palms over her ears. Tears welled in her eyes. Zander held her head to his chest. She was trembling violently.
"Fire!" bellowed the officer.
The volley crackled over their heads. Lili cried out. Heads swiv-eled. "Is she against the extermination of the exploiters, then.'"' a worker asked suspiciously.
She is against killing, Zander wanted to say. She has seen too much of it. Russia has seen too much of it. But he knew it was not prudent to get into an argument; they had no papers, no identification of any kind on them. Pulling Lili along behind him, he turned his back on the worker and set out to find the Cheka office in Perm.
Lined up five abreast between police barriers, hundreds of refugees had gathered in front of the Cheka headquarters in the Excise Office Building on the corner of Pokrovskaya and Obvinskaya. A leather-jacketed Chekist with a holster on his hip stood on the top step holding a bullhorn to his lips and reading the latest edict. "By order of the Perm Soviet," he intoned, "anyone hoarding food will be shot on sight. By order of the Perm Soviet, anyone carrying firearms without a permit will be shot on sight. By order of—"
"What about the food coupons you promised for today.'"' a man shouted up at the Chekist.
"Food coupons," the Chekist shouted back, "are issued between nine and eleven in the morning."
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"I have been here since dawn," a woman called. "There were so many ahead of me I couldn't get past the door."
