Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

Komarov smiled and introduced them. Ivan Arbatov, as McColl knew from his London briefing, was one of the last Menshevik leaders still at liberty in Lenin’s Russia. Or had been. McColl remembered the Chekist escort at Kazan Station.

“Where are we sending you, Ivan Ivanovich?” Komarov asked as he reset the pieces, confirming McColl’s suspicion.

“Verny. Or whatever it’s called this month—your party’s penchant for name changing is becoming almost obsessive.”

“It’s called Alma-Ata now,” Komarov told him.

“Whatever. Nothing but apples to eat, they tell me. I loathe apples.” Arbatov stirred his tea morosely, then smiled. “But don’t let me interrupt your game. We can talk at some other time. At this rate,” he added, staring out into the darkness, “we shall be spending several years in each other’s company.”

Komarov had finished resetting the pieces.

“It’s a great relief, you know,” Arbatov went on conversationally, “being ejected from the political arena. Suddenly I can say exactly what I think again, without worrying about whether that will be the phrase or the sentence that finally gets me into trouble. A relief,” he repeated. “I hold no grudge against you, Yuri Vladimirovich. I want you to know that. Now I really will leave you to your game.” He gave them each a farewell nod and left the carriage.

“Old fool,” muttered Maslov, who’d been standing in the vestibule doorway for the last few minutes.

“Perhaps,” Komarov said, “but that old fool was a comrade of Lenin’s when you were still a mother’s dream.”

“Why is he being exiled?” McColl asked. He had found the Russians’ conversation both bizarre and touching in its old-world civility.

“The usual,” Komarov said, holding out his hands for McColl to choose a color.

Two hours later he had lost three games in a row and was about to plead exhaustion when the train clattered over a succession of points and began to slow down alongside another line of lighted carriages.

“Samara?” Maslov asked hopefully, looking up from his book.

Komarov was trying to see out, his hands cupped around his eyes. “No. The old fool was right—we’ll be on this train for years.”

It squealed to a halt, and the three of them climbed down to find themselves in a multitrack yard. Looking under their train and the one alongside it, McColl could see at least half a dozen others. He remembered Ruzhkov’s remark about trains disappearing into thin air.

Komarov and Maslov were already walking past their train’s locomotives, and McColl strode after them. A couple of hundred yards beyond the lines of stabled trains, the lights of a small station were burning; to left and right, on the slopes of the shallow cutting, hundreds of shadowy figures moved among myriad campfires, the sum of their murmuring voices sounding almost sepulchral. The whole scene, in fact, felt strangely biblical.

They walked on to the station, Ruzayevka Junction, as a large nameboard proudly proclaimed. An old woman was sitting on the platform, deftly spitting chewed sunflower seeds out onto the tracks.

Behind the station more fires illuminated a palisaded area no larger than a tennis court, into which were crammed several hundred prisoners. They appeared to be mostly peasants and mostly men, though there were a few young boys to be seen. Red Army soldiers surrounded the staked fencing, talking among themselves, the ends of their cigarettes occasionally flaring in the gloom.

At the door of the station building, a soldier barred their way, then examined Komarov’s credentials with a thoroughness which exasperated Maslov. Eventually they were allowed inside, where the Cheka officer in charge provided suitable recompense with a display of unmitigated awe. His news was less inspiring. A bridge up ahead was down—maybe blown up, maybe simply collapsed—and for the moment no trains could continue on to Samara. There was no other route worth considering. But the engineers were working on repairing it. It would take them twelve hours, perhaps twenty-four.

Komarov asked who the prisoners were.

“Antonovists.”

Komarov nodded. “Keep me informed,” he said, and turned to leave. As they walked back alongside the tracks to their train, McColl found himself imagining that medieval armies occupied the slopes on either side and that dawn would see them launch their attacks across the shining rails.

The first time Caitlin heardthe sound it eluded recognition, but the second time, half-awake, she could not be deceived. It was gunfire.

She dressed quickly, exited the carriage, and walked briskly down the corridor between two trains in the direction the sound had come from. It was still early morning, the sun not yet visible over the hills ahead, and for a moment, as she stepped out into open space and saw the slopes covered with bodies, she thought she’d walked into a massacre. But then she saw heads raised among the smoldering fires, and realized that they, too, had been woken by the noise.

Another fusillade shattered the morning.

She walked on up a track, toward the source of the noise. After passing a goods warehouse that had lost its roof, she suddenly came upon it: a line of people backed onto the edge of a loading platform, facing a group of soldiers around a machine gun. Behind and below the former, a pile of bodies covered the rails.

She heard a shout, then the loud, incredibly loud, clatter of the gun, saw most of the line topple backward onto the corpses below. One man had fallen into a squat and swayed there on the brink before finally toppling over.

She couldn’t move. She realized her mouth was open and managed, with great effort, to pull it shut. She felt like running back to the train and asking Komarov to intervene. But she knew what he would say; she could even see the look on his face as he said it: This is a war, and there are always casualties; rebellions must be stamped out. This is the real revolution, the one you read about in Pravda , sitting at your Zhenotdel desk. Real people, real atrocities; they burn party cadres alive, then slice them up and feed them to hogs. And this is how we avenge them—this is what “suppressing banditry” looks like when it’s happening in front of your eyes.

This was Sergei’s world. This was the war he had found himself in, the one that had let loose his demons and shut down the young man she’d known. In that moment she felt her heart go out to him, wherever he was, whatever mad scheme he might be pursuing.

Another group was being led forward. She wanted to walk away, to lower her eyes, but if standing and watching was the only way she could share in the responsibility, then stand and watch she would.

Sensing other eyes, she turned to find Komarov’s. He was leaning against the wall of the roofless warehouse gazing straight at her. He quickly looked away, and neither spoke, but she instinctively felt that his heart’s response to these killings was no different from hers, and that all their obvious differences paled into insignificance as long as this burden of barely supportable sorrow bound them together.

The machine gun opened up again, dispensing death and bouncing echoes down the valley.

It turned into a long,hot day. Caitlin spent it shut away in her compartment, mostly lying down, listening to the sounds of the outside world drifting in through the open window. There were no more volleys of gunfire, only the distant murmur of the camps on the slopes, the occasional couple walking by outside, children playing hide-and-seek under the stabled trains. A bee searched her compartment for pollen and left disappointed. She tried to do some work, but the article she was trying to edit now seemed depressingly theoretical.