Everyone had to make the choice that suited them best. Sablin had chosen to keep going to the bitter end as long as he was able. That was how Sablin saw himself—a man who never surrendered. As for what it all meant, he had no idea. In general, he often struggled to find meaning in life.

3

Sablin had naively believed that when they got to Novorossiysk, the worst would be over. He had thought the evacuation would be carried out in an orderly manner with the wounded transferred to ships and sent off by the commanders to wherever they saw fit. But as soon as the ambulance carts crossed the mountain pass, his hopes were dashed.

It was a quiet spring evening with the hill slopes lost in a lilac haze, and in the distance, the Black Sea was as calm as a millpond. Below as far as they could see were sprawling camps of army units. Huge pillars of swirling dark gray smoke rose from the foot of the mountains.

“Where are the Allied ships?” Fay asked anxiously.

Kirill Savich handed her his binoculars. “Over there on the horizon. I suppose none of the transports are in the port. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen—all that remains for us to do now is throw ourselves into the sea.”

Sablin ordered them to pitch camp. Then after questioning several people about who was responsible for what, he rode Swallow down the hill to the headquarters of General Kutepov, who was in charge of the evacuation.

The general had his headquarters in a boxcar that stood uncoupled not far from the marina. Beside it were several freight cars in flames.

Sablin had to argue with the guards for some time before they let him squeeze into the hot boxcar filled with cigarette smoke. Cossacks and volunteer army officers shouted at each other, clutching their guns. General Kutepov called them to order, but quarrels kept flaring up again.

“Did you know that General Kirey is evacuating artillery shells and military equipment while people are left stranded?” roared an elderly colonel with a saber scar on his forehead. “The scoundrel announced that anyone who loaded at least two thousand pounds of the stuff onboard would get a place on his steamer.”

“Why are they taking equipment and leaving the sick and wounded behind?” Sablin asked a captain from the Drozdov Regiment.

The captain folded his arms on his chest. “Everyone is already thinking about how they’ll survive after the war. The sick and wounded can’t be sold abroad, but military equipment can.”

The meeting lasted four hours. Each division had a steamer assigned to it, and the commanders were to send guards to the ships to keep unauthorized passengers from boarding.

“Gentlemen,” Kutepov repeated for the tenth time. “I assure you, you will get your transports. We’ve already had radio messages from the Allies to that effect.”

Try as he might, Sablin couldn’t manage to find a place on the ships for his hospital unit. The officers he approached either averted their gaze, told him to go to hell, or advised him to appeal to the Allies.

“The French have said they’ll give us forty-five places and no more,” the captain of the Drozdov Regiment told Sablin. “The British haven’t given us a clear answer yet. They are busy with the second battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, which has just arrived from Constantinople. They’re supposed to ensure the evacuation of the foreign missions and, if possible, some of the Whites.”

As Sablin left the boxcar, he noticed a faded propaganda poster on its wall. It was Gulliver in a British helmet pulling a fleet of battleships along on strings. “I am an Englishman,” read the slogan, “who has given you everything you need for victory.”

There was a Bolshevik leaflet on the ground directly under the staff boxcar.

Down with idle landlords, capitalists, and officers with golden epaulets!

All the soldiers of the White Army are now eligible to return home except for monarchists, landlords, kulaks, factory owners, traders, profiteers, and other parasites, all of whom are expelled from Soviet Russia.

Present this leaflet at any political department of the Red Army.

Stick your bayonet into the ground! Join the Red Army! Join history! Forward toward a new dawn of humanity!

Sablin returned to his camp dazed and numb. For a long time, he sat quietly, staring into the campfire.

“I’ve just been to the port,” Fay said, approaching him. “It’s so terrible there that it’s indescribable. An Italian ship docked, and everyone rushed to try to get on board. A woman was trampled to death.”

Sablin listened with only half an ear. What am I supposed to do? he thought. We have only three or four days of food left and only a couple of thousand rubles in worthless White Army money.

He looked at the slopes dotted with campfires. There were tens of thousands of people. It was impossible to evacuate them, and they couldn’t put up any fight against the Reds. What would happen to them when the Bolsheviks captured the town?

Smoke from the bonfires filled the sky. Sablin could hear rifle shots from the mountain slopes. Had the Reds already reached the passes? Or perhaps that was the Greens attacking and robbing a traveler. It was impossible to tell.

The night drew in quickly, but the camp was still humming and bustling with activity as people settled down for the night. A bird chirruped in the bushes.

Sablin got up—it was time to do the rounds of his patients still lying in carts. The nurses changed their bandages, and their tanned, thin faces were lit up by the gas lights like the faces of icons.

In the last cart lay a twenty-two-year-old patient, Nikita Yeremin. Three days earlier, Sablin had amputated his foot rotten with gangrene.

“How are you doing, young man?” Sablin asked.

Yeremin was lying with his hands behind his head. “I’m fine, doctor,” he said. “Look at the moon—how beautiful it is. It looks like a great, big, round cheese full of holes. My mother had a grocery shop in Kiev, and she sold that kind of cheese there.”

“Do we have any soap left?” Fay shouted. “We’re out of clean bandages too. I’ll have to wash dirty ones.”

“You should go to the British warehouses and get yourself new bandages there,” a male voice said from the darkness.

Sablin turned his head and was startled to see a Cossack right behind him with a dozen medical kits strung over his shoulders.

“Where did you get all this?” Sablin asked.

The Cossack pointed to the city below. “The British are destroying their military warehouses, so they’re giving away supplies for free.”

Sablin glanced at Fay. “Call Kirill Savich,” he said. “We need to go to the British now.”

“Doctor, please don’t leave us!” Yeremin cried out, grabbing Sablin’s sleeve.

“Don’t be silly.” Sablin pulled away his hand. “I’m not going to leave you behind.”

But Yeremin wouldn’t listen. “Doctor, promise you won’t abandon us! We’ll die here without you.”

Even when Sablin, Fay, and Kirill Savich had driven far away from the camp, they could still hear him shouting.

35. THE IMPOSTER

1

Colonel Guyomard received his bribe and promised Sofia Karlovna to settle the visa issue, but apart from this, Nina’s plan didn’t work out as expected. Fomin stopped going into the office. In fact, now he never left her alone at all but constantly demanded her presence.

When Fomin and Nina were sitting on the second floor, Klim could hear almost every word they said. It drove him mad to even think that he must hide from this scoundrel and remain silent while Fomin was tormenting Nina.

She could come up to the attic only late at night when everybody else in the house had finally sunk into a heavy sleep that brought no relief. Klim could only feel the touch of Nina’s hands in the darkness and hear her agitated whispers: “Be patient. It won’t be long now.”

Sometimes a searchlight shone straight in at the dormer window, and then Nina’s pale, dark-eyed face appeared to Klim for a second. There was an otherworldly, terrifying beauty about her features.

Nina kissed Klim and made him promise to keep quiet so as not to expose himself to any danger.

“Fomin has ordered the guards not to leave the house,” she told him. “There’s looting going on all over town. He’s afraid we’ll have unwelcome visitors.”

Klim hated himself for his enforced idleness, but there was nothing he could do. There was only one bullet in Nina’s revolver, and with no more ammunition than this, he could never hope to challenge Fomin’s bodyguards.

2

During the daytime, the sun came streaming in the dormer windows, and the roof heated up like a furnace. From down below, Klim could hear the roar of engines, the clatter of hooves, and the shouts of the frenzied crowds. It wasn’t even possible to stretch his muscles in case he gave himself away with a single careless movement. All he could do was sleep, read, and think.

Klim was surprised at how much Nina had changed in two and a half years. While the war had not broken her entirely, it had warped her character ruthlessly. He admired Nina for her efficiency and resilience but was alarmed to witness her sudden fits of cruelty. Klim heard her arguing with Fomin and wouldn’t have wished such harsh words even on his worst enemy. Fomin loved Nina, yet she kept telling him that she didn’t even regard him as a man and that the White cause had been lost because of people like him. Once, she told him that he could expect nothing good in exile and had better shoot himself now.