Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

Fifteen minutes later they were at the hostel. Piatakov sat down heavily, mopping the sweat from his face.

“Where’s Aram?” Brady wanted to know.

“They got him. He’s probably dead by now.” Piatakov explained what had happened, dragging out each word with what felt an immense effort.

“You left him,” Brady summed up coldly.

Chatterji also looked at Piatakov, as if expecting a new and better explanation. What blame there was was his, Piatakov thought angrily. If the Indian hadn’t started shooting… Piatakov looked up at the American. “He told us to. And he was right. We couldn’t have moved him, and the Chekists would have had us all.”

Brady took this in, standing with one hand clenched inside the other. The Indian still looked resentful.

Piatakov felt sick. First Ivan, now Aram. But what else could he have done?

“You think he was dying,” Brady muttered. “What if he doesn’t?”

Piatakov gave him a cold stare. “You know Aram as well as I do. You know he would never give us up.”

“I know, I know. And he doesn’t know where we are in any case.” Brady was pacing the room like a caged animal. “And the moment it gets dark we’ll be on our way.” He paused at the window and stared at the sprawling Uzbek compound across the street.

“What if they find us before then?” Chatterji asked. He was still breathing heavily, his cheeks twitching. Brady glanced at the Indian, saw something he didn’t like, and walked across to throw an arm around Chatterji’s shoulder. He began talking in a quiet, hypnotic undertone.

On the other side of the room, Piatakov watched the Indian’s body relax, the dangerous glitter fade from his eyes. Piatakov walked across to the other window and the line of blue domes. A blue, blue world. Another comrade gone.

McColl had never seen Caitlinso upset.

“They sent the last girl back in a sack,” she said, in a voice that made him think of broken glass. “They’d cut off her head and her arms and legs, and they pinned a message to the sack: This is your women’s freedom .”

A late-afternoon sunbeam lay across the white tablecloth, revealing a mosaic of ancient stains. McColl put down his glass of beer, adding another ring to the pattern.

“She was only seventeen,” Caitlin continued. “Her name was Ulugai, and she wanted to teach her friends to read.”

“Not a lot to ask,” McColl said quietly.

“They read, they learn, they question. And then they say no,” Caitlin told him.

They were sitting in the huge communal room that took up most of the party hostel’s ground floor. At the time of McColl’s only previous visit to Tashkent, this had been the dining room of the Hotel Tzakho, invariably packed with people eating and talking to the strains of a full orchestra. Composed mostly of Austrian prisoners of war, the orchestra had included a bewildering variety of national melodies in its repertoire. Now the room was nearly empty and almost silent, just them and three Russian men, who were chatting in desultory fashion at a table ten yards away.

“Another woman was lynched for suggesting a husband shouldn’t beat his wife,” Caitlin said with a sigh, as if she couldn’t quite believe it.

“Komarov thinks that the Zhenotdel workers may have been too confrontational,” McColl said, remembering his conversation with the Russian earlier that afternoon. “For their own safety, that is,” McColl quickly added when he saw the look on Caitlin’s face.

“Does he indeed?” she said sarcastically. “And what does he suggest?”

“That the killing of Zhenotdel workers should be classed as a crime against the revolution, rather than as simple murder. I know,” McColl said, raising both palms, “but it does make sense, at least in the short term. Men like these put no value on their own women’s lives, but if they know that the government holds your delegates in the highest regard, they might think twice about killing them. Which won’t help ordinary women much in the meantime, but at least you’ll be able to operate.”

“Perhaps,” she said, looking slightly mollified. She was wearing a long Uzbek dress that she’d bought in the market that afternoon, dark blue with a pattern of large pink and white flowers. It suited her and went well with the bright red Zhenotdel headscarf that was loosely draped around her neck.

Suddenly her face lit up. McColl turned to see two women threading their way through the tables toward them, one dark and probably Uzbek, the other blonde and probably Russian.

Caitlin was on her feet, hugging the former. “This is Rahima,” she told McColl eventually. “We met in Moscow.”

The Russian’s name was Shurateva. “I’ve got two soldiers outside,” she said after the introductions had been completed. “Just in case.”

Caitlin turned to McColl. “It seems you’re not required.”

McColl didn’t hesitate. “I’ll come anyway,” he told her. He needed to establish wireless contact with India but still hadn’t decided what to tell his putative listener. Attending a Zhenotdel meeting in such a hostile environment would be interesting for him and might prove dangerous for her. The empire could wait another day.

There was a taranta waiting outside. On the floor between the seats, there was a film projector and a boxed reel of film. Two Red Army men, small and rather frail-looking Russians, were leaning up against the vehicle, rifles cradled in their arms.

The taranta creaked alarmingly as they all clambered aboard, and the axles squealed as the driver set the ponies in motion. McColl was pleasantly conscious of Caitlin’s thigh against his own, but she was in animated conversation with the other two women. Soon they were crossing a dry riverbed and entering the old town, drawing stares from the local population. Shurateva shouted directions at the driver, who gave no sign of hearing her but went where she directed.

“What’s the film?” McColl asked Caitlin.

“Makul-Oi,” Shurateva answered him. “It’s the story of a Muslim girl who refuses to marry the old man her parents have promised her to.”

And who wins out despite many setbacks, McColl thought but had the sense not to say. Why did propaganda always sound faintly ridiculous, even when it made such perfect sense?

The taranta rattled down a narrow street and crossed a square that housed a large mosque. The sky was rapidly darkening, and a large flock of birds was drawing wide circles in the air above, cawing fit to burst. McColl felt a chill run up his back, leaving a sense of unease that he couldn’t begin to explain. He closed his eyes for several seconds, then opened them just in time to see a scrawny tortoiseshell cat slither under a gate.

They arrived at the meeting place. McColl and one of the soldiers carried the projector through an arched wooden doorway and into a large courtyard. Rugs covered the ground, and about thirty Uzbek women were sitting cross-legged, their veils lowered, chatting with one another. When McColl and the soldier appeared, they turned their faces away, raising the veils as they did so.

“You’ll have to stay outside,” Caitlin told him.

McColl nodded and withdrew, joining the two soldiers outside the main doorway. This was set back from the street, on the rim of a semicircular space. A row of small trees on either side provided daytime shade for the wooden benches that lined the compound walls. Seating himself on one, McColl examined the scene. It was a wide street for the old town and seemed unusually quiet for the time of day.

As if to confirm his suspicion, two young Uzbek men squatted down across the way, taking occasional glances in his direction.

Through the door he could hear Caitlin talking in Russian, then pausing while Shurateva translated her words into Uzbek. The two women were setting the scene for the film they were about to show.