Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

All day the train chuggedup the valley; all day the hungry and starving trailed past, the number of those in motion steadily dropping in favor of those who were not. Small stations were gatherings of despair, their villages eerily empty save for the carrion birds expectantly strutting the streets.

Late that afternoon the train rattled into a station high in the hills—Sorochinsk was the name on the board. With her cabin door open, Caitlin could see that hundreds of people were camped on both sides of the tracks. Most were sitting or lying and probably lacked the energy needed to stand. In the eyes now surveying the train, she saw a range of emotions that stretched from pure indifference to manic hope.

Even before the train juddered to a final halt, soldiers from the troop car were jumping down to line up beside it, their rifles pointing outward, their faces locked in nervous immobility. As if in response, some members of the crowd rose slowly to their feet, some swaying with the effort of staying upright. A few began shuffling toward the train, and then stopped as they realized that most of their fellows were not.

“Where have they all come from?” Caitlin heard herself ask out loud. Neither Jack nor Krasilnikov, standing at the windows on either side of hers, offered a reply. And why should they? she thought. What was there to say?

They’d spent a whole day traveling through these people’s graveyard, and she couldn’t remember ever feeling more helpless. At first it had brought back the weeks of waiting for her brother’s execution in the Tower of London, but as the hours had passed, the sheer scale of what they were witnessing had defied comparison.

The train had not stopped to offer help, only to take on the water needed to carry it free of this nightmare. Caitlin’s coach was standing halfway between the station house and the water tower, where bodies had been stacked inside the girder supports. She could smell the putrefaction from her window and was not surprised to see the fireman holding his nose with one hand as he unclipped the hose with the other.

A small child, perhaps six or seven years old, was sitting, staring dully into space, not twenty feet away against a low wall. As Caitlin stared at her, the girl looked up, caught her eye, and smiled shyly, as if she had just been asked for a dance.

The incongruity tied a knot in Caitlin’s stomach.

The crowd had begun inching forward, as if barely perceptible advances would deny the soldiers an excuse to open fire. But the gap was obviously closing, and the fireman was still disconnecting his hose when someone fired the first shot.

The crowd let out its anger in one enormous roar and launched a hail of stones at the troops and the train they were guarding. Yells of pain mingled with the sound of shattering glass, but the clod of earth that struck Caitlin’s window merely bounced off, leaving only a starburst of yellow fragments.

The locomotive whistle screeched, as if to sound a retreat. The crowd was advancing in earnest now, the soldiers leaping back aboard, expecting the train to move. It didn’t. Caitlin could hear someone on the roof shouting at the crowd, promising a relief train. The crowd believed it no more than she did, and the man was cut off in midsentence, presumably by a well-directed stone. As people began hammering on the side of the train, a machine gun opened up farther down the platform.

The whistle screeched again, but still the train refused to move. Looking to the right, Caitlin could see people swarming around the engines, and guessed that others were blocking the tracks. If that was the case, then the driver had had enough. For several seconds the train gave a good impression of straining at the bit, before suddenly bursting into motion, viciously spurting steam, and leaving agonized screams in its wake. Their carriage seemed almost to stumble as the wheels encountered something solid, which Caitlin could only hope was a brick or a stone.

Her last image of Sorochinsk was of a young boy, thin enough to squeeze through iron railings, standing by the track. After watching him wave the train good-bye, she lowered her head and closed her eyes.

Later that evening, the wholeparty ended up in the curtained-off saloon. Mostly, McColl suspected, because guilt was more bearable shared.

Arbatov wanted to twist the knife. “You were warned,” he said, addressing Komarov directly but allowing an accusing gaze to sweep across them all. “There was no rain last summer and precious little snow in winter, and you kept on taking whatever you could.”

“The cities needed food,” Komarov protested, but McColl could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.

“The cities weren’t starving ,” Arbatov went on, “but you decided that the workers had more right to the food that the peasants had grown than the peasants did themselves. You even took most of their seed corn! And when your own agricultural scientists produced a report outlining the mistakes you had made, you refused to publish it. Your government just sat on its hands and hoped for a miracle, which needless to say never came.”

McColl expected an argument from Komarov—if not fresh facts, an insistence that everyone makes mistakes. None was forthcoming.

Sergei Piatakov turned on his heel to better take in the vastness of earth and heaven. To north and west, the desert of the last few days faded into the distance, where a low line of sand hills merged into the blue-grey sky. Away to the south, above their receding train, a line of mountains loomed out of the heat haze. A half mile or so to the east, across an arid riverbed, the small town of Saryagash seemed sunk in torpor.

“Come on,” Brady said, picking up his battered suitcase. “Time to start our new career.”

The accompanying grin belonged on an explorer’s face, Piatakov thought. Or maybe a conqueror’s. Brady was more Cortés than Columbus—he wouldn’t be satisfied with looking around and reporting back.

The two of them walked across the tracks and started down the dirt road, making the most of the shade provided by the acacias that lined the route. It was incredibly hot—a hundred degrees at least, Piatakov guessed—but the air was so dry that he didn’t feel that uncomfortable.

He remembered thinking that seeing the world would make him a better teacher, but backward Turkestan hadn’t been high on his list of places to visit. He had always wanted to see America, and he and Caitlin had vowed to go there together once the revolution was safely entrenched. He would meet her family in New York and then perhaps travel west to see the Grand Canyon and the great meteorite crater and the geyser in Yellowstone Park—all those wonders of the world that had gripped his imagination as a child.

Well, he doubted he’d ever see them now.

Brady already had, of course, and been characteristically unimpressed. “A deep trench, a big hole, and a tall fountain,” had been his verdict, when Piatakov had mentioned his ambition to see them.

“What day is it?” the American asked, interrupting Piatakov’s reverie.

“Saturday.”

“That’s what I thought. Twelve days to travel two thousand miles.” He took out his fob and checked the time. “It looks like a ghost town,” he said, gazing ahead at the empty-looking Saryagash. “Maybe they’re all having siestas. With heat like this, they’d need to.”

Piatakov didn’t bother to reply. He understood the American’s slightly hysterical mood: twelve days on a crowded train, and this much light and space was enough to make anyone feel light-headed. And after only a few hundred yards, they were probably both beginning to feel the heat. The sun seemed to press down on Piatakov’s cap like a steam iron.