Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

Leech stared at Klim with adoring eyes. “How do you do that? What are you, a magician?”

At night, she fell asleep next to Klim. “I’ll stay with you. If I have a bad dream and start screaming, wake me up.”

“What do you dream about?”

“Well—different things.”

Later, Fyodor told Klim that Leech’s entire family had been shot.

“Who killed them?”

“Hell knows.”

At first, Klim couldn’t understand why the children, who were always hungry, shared all of their meals with two wounded men.

It wasn’t because of the card tricks or because they wanted a ride in a plane. It was simply that as children, they needed adults who would take an interest in them. As a little boy, Klim had always thought his father hated him, and it had made his life miserable. But these young criminals were hated by the whole world. To them, it was a miracle to find people who wouldn’t chase them away and who expected food from them rather than a dirty trick.

“You need to get well quick,” Janka kept saying. “We’re going to the city soon to spend winter there. We have a good place in a factory boiler room. It’s like heaven there. You can stay with us, and if the police come, you can tell them we’re your kids. The main thing is that we don’t want to get taken to the orphanage. They don’t feed children there, and we’ll die of hunger.”

It was easy enough to say “get well quick.” It was cold now, and Klim and Eddie—both bearded, thin, and shaggy—wrapped themselves up in antique tapestries to keep warm.

Klim scoured the house and park for anything edible, but the only things he could find were berries at the very top of a spindly rowan tree. It was impossible to reach them because they were too high and the branches of the tree were too thin. Even Leech wouldn’t have been able to climb up there, and Klim was far too weak to think of breaking the tree down.

They burned what was left of the furniture in the cast-iron stove in the pink room. The varnish and paint smelled terrible, and the burning wood gave off a thick brown smoke, but the fire kept them warm at night. Now, when the children went out to look for food, they went farther afield and came back with less. Fyodor had become broody and irritable and lost his interest in planes.

9

“They’ll leave us soon,” Eddie said.

Yuri, looking sullen, had just brought in a moldy crust of bread for the two men to share and disappeared again out the door.

Klim thought he knew what was going to happen. The day before, Leech had been crying and refused to explain what the matter was. Clearly, the children had discussed things together and decided to go off to the city because they could no longer provide for the two adults.

Klim reckoned that it must be about fifteen miles to the city. If he could get ahold of some kind of footwear, he could probably reach it, but Eddie was quite unable to walk. His legs were covered with scabs, and the slightest movement caused him pain.

If I stay, we’ll starve together, Klim pondered. But if I leave, Eddie hasn’t a chance of surviving.

One morning, the children went off and didn’t come back. Klim had to make a decision. One minute, Eddie told him that all he needed was one or two more days to get back on his feet, but the next minute, he begged Klim to shoot him.

“Shut up, for God’s sake!” Klim said, frowning.

He concocted all sorts of fantastical schemes in his mind. He would have to go to the city and persuade somebody to come back and rescue Eddie. But why would anyone take a horse back along the frontline for the sake of an Englishman of no use to anyone?

Klim could hear trains racing past behind the trees a stone’s throw from the mansion. They’ll never stop to pick up two wounded men, he thought. Even if I got up on the railroad tracks and waved my arms to attract their attention, they’d probably just run me down and keep going.

In fact, this was what Klim wanted most of all. He had had enough, and in any case, he had nothing left to fight for.

1

Klim and Eddie’s rescuers arrived one day in a tank. It tore off the gate at its hinges and rolled up to the porch, leaving behind it the smell of fumes and black, ribbed tracks in the freshly fallen snow.

A man wearing a British uniform pushed up the hatch and jumped out. “C’mon, lads!” he shouted above the sound of the engine. “There’s got to be a stove hereю”

He ran up the steps followed by five other men from the tank.

Eddie couldn’t believe his luck when he realized that the soldiers were his fellow countrymen for whom he had helped organize the tank demonstration in Novorossiysk.

“How did you get here?” he asked as the soldiers picked him up to carry him to the tank.

Captain Pride explained to Eddie and Klim that the British troop train had been traveling with the White Army. Along the way, the crews brought their tanks down from the open trucks where necessary to put the Reds to flight. The tanks never failed to strike terror into the hearts of the recently mobilized villagers, and they had only once encountered serious resistance when the Reds had fought so fiercely that the British had been astonished. Why were the Russians attacking a combat vehicle armed with no more than rifles? The episode had ended in a bloody massacre. Later, the British had learned from Russian captives that these zealous soldiers were military cadets from the city of Tver. Their commanders had convinced them that the British tanks were fakes made of painted plywood that would shatter at the blow of a bayonet.

The tanks were unable to cover long distances, so they never went far from the railroad. The crews tried not to use them too much because the machines were expensive, and if something happened to them, they couldn’t be taken away from the battlefield to be mended.

The tank crews lived in freight cars converted into sleeping compartments, which were terribly cold at night. Captain Pride had decided that they needed a stove. He had seen thick brown smoke rising above the trees and, training his binoculars on it, noticed a European-style roof. He had decided that he should go to the mansion to look for a small stove unlike the enormous brick monsters they had found in Russian villages so far.

Pride had told the driver to stop the engine and set off on a treasure hunt.

“We didn’t have any firewood,” Eddie explained to his rescuers, “so Klim burned broken furniture in the stove. This man saved my life. He made an Argentinean hunting weapon, a bolas, out of stones and rope and used it to hit the hares that came into the garden.”

The captain shook Klim firmly by the hand. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” said Klim. “We lost track of time long ago.”

The soldiers knocked the cast-iron stove out of its place, took it to the railroad by tank, and put it into their car.

“Now, we’ll be warm as toast in here,” Pride said. “And those machine-gun instructors will be freezing their arses off outside. After all, they wouldn’t help us get the stove, would they? Now, we won’t let them in our sleeping carriage to warm up.”

Then Captain Pride summoned Klim. “Where did you learn English?” he asked.

“I had an English tutor when I was a child. Later, I worked at the British mission in Tehran and then in Shanghai.”

“How would you like to interpret for us?”

Pride told Klim that at the previous stop, he had had to court-martial the unit’s orderlies and interpreters after he had discovered that they were stealing anything from the train that wasn’t nailed down—from officers’ boots to the new Ricardo engine—in order to sell it.

“It’s a nightmare trying to find interpreters,” Pride told Klim. “We’ve tried to hire Russians, but they’re either thieves or their English isn’t good enough. Then we had some Jewish immigrants from the East End of London sent out, but that only made things worse. The Russians hated them so much that they refused to talk to them. They even shot one interpreter in front of our eyes. Some of our men know French from learning it at school, and they can make themselves understood when they speak to the Russian aristocrats, lucky beggars. But I’m not one of them. The only French phrase I’ve learned since the war started is ‘Ça coûte combien?’—‘How much?’ If I want to find a girl for the night—”

“I don’t know much military vocabulary,” Klim admitted.

“That doesn’t matter,” Pride said. “It’s the machine-gun instructors who need to talk to Russians about their equipment. All we need is to find washerwomen to do our laundry now that we’ve lost our orderlies.”

Klim agreed to sign a contract and was taken on to the payroll with the unit.

2

Klim translated cable after cable for Captain Pride—reports of General Yudenich’s defeat in the north and Admiral Kolchak’s retreat from Omsk. In mid-November, the Red Army seized an important railroad station, Kastornoye, and after that, it became clear that the Whites would never make it to Moscow.

They never stayed long anywhere, so they soon received the nickname “tourists.” They had stormed a locality, killed the Red garrison, and gathered the citizens in the central square.

“Now, you and Russia are saved,” they had proclaimed. Then they had left, taking with them whatever they had managed to get from the “grateful people.”

Many times, Klim had witnessed epic scenes of looting. Soldiers had run from boxcar to boxcar smashing locks with their rifle butts and tearing off seals.