Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

One of the soldiers offered McColl a cigarette. He took it, feeling his hands needed something to do. Was he imagining the tension in the air? The two young Uzbeks across the street were staring straight at him.

The whir of the projector was suddenly audible through the door, and flickers of light danced on the higher walls.

McColl got up and placed his eye against one of the star-shaped holes in the wooden door. The film was flickering on the earthen courtyard wall, which had the strange effect of dragging it into the past, offering only sepia when black and white was required. But the women, once more unveiled, were drinking it in, wonder in their eyes and upturned faces. On the other side of the courtyard, Caitlin was seated on the edge of a veranda, elbows on knees, her attention switching back and forth between the film and its audience, a smile of serene contentment lighting her face.

McColl felt a surge of sadness. For what? For whom?

Back in the street, the two young men had turned into five. They stared at him, and he stared back, then ostentatiously slid his pistol out of his belt and laid it on the bench beside him. One man began whispering excitedly to the others; then all turned their heads in the same direction, looking down the street at something he couldn’t yet see.

He was not in suspense for long. Another dozen men of varying ages walked into view, and the whole assemblage squatted down in a circle, like a bunch of soldiers receiving their last instructions before setting off on a mission. Which wasn’t an encouraging thought.

After a few minutes, the meeting seemed to break up. They all rose to their feet, and two of the older men started across the street, walking slowly but with obvious purpose. McColl picked up his pistol as his Red Army companions reached for the rifles they’d leaned against the compound wall. When the Uzbeks were about twenty feet away, he raised his hand to halt them. “Good evening,” he said cheerfully in their language. “How may I help you?”

The use of their mother tongue seemed an unexpected development. The shorter, more intelligent-looking of the two offered a respectful bow. Like his partner he was dressed in a white linen shirt, matching trousers, and embroidered cap. “We wish to speak with our wives and daughters,” he said.

“The meeting will soon be over,” McColl told him.

“We wish to speak most urgently.”

Too bad, McColl thought. “I regret that that is not possible,” he said. “This is a party meeting, a government meeting,” he added, remembering Komarov’s advice. “It cannot be interrupted. But it will be over in a very short time,” he promised, hoping it was true. A fresh contingent was approaching up the street opposite, and some of the newcomers were carrying flaming torches, which seemed to wrench the scene back several centuries.

“It is not right,” the other Uzbek was saying, revealing several gold teeth in the process. “These are our women.”

McColl just looked at him. The torches, the whining husband, the ludicrous religious trimmings. He thought of Ulugai, sliced into pieces by men like these.

“It is not right,” the man repeated patiently, as if McColl hadn’t heard him the first time.

“There is nothing more to be said,” McColl snapped, and dismissively turned his back. When he looked again, the two men had recrossed the street, but an imam had also arrived, and was intoning passages from the Koran, jabbing away with his fingers to emphasize each point. McColl stood and watched, thinking it must have been scenes like this that had greeted suspect witches in medieval England.

He considered advising Caitlin to end the meeting before matters got out of hand, but loud applause and a quick look through the star told him the film had just finished. Two women were lighting kerosene lamps and hanging them from veranda beams; Caitlin and Shurateva were taking up position where the “screen” had been. When questions were asked for, several hands shot up.

Across the street the imam’s voice grew louder and shriller. McColl had no idea where the nearest telephone might be, and any kind of search would mean leaving his post. The two soldiers were looking increasingly nervous and casting frequent glances in his direction, as if willing him to conjure up the magic carpet that would whisk them back to the safety of their barracks.

McColl made up his mind. “Tell Comrade Piatakova what is happening,” he was telling the nearer soldier, when a stone bounced off the man’s shoulder, knocking him back a pace. Two more thudded into the wall close by. The crowd was advancing slowly across the street, all except for the imam, who was urging them on from behind, wearing the sort of facial expression that Haig might have worn at the Somme. McColl wondered if shooting the man would help. The rest might be shocked into flight. Or tear him limb from limb.

He fired into the ground ahead of the advancing feet. The effect was dramatic: the voices both inside and out broke off abruptly, leaving only the city’s murmur.

Then the men started forward again.

“Inside,” McColl snapped, somewhat unnecessarily: the two soldiers were already halfway through the doorway. McColl ducked in behind them, and began searching for something heavy to reinforce the door.

Caitlin was at his side. “What’s going on?” she asked. The smile was still there in her eyes—it had been too bright to fade so swiftly. Behind her the seated women were all turned toward them, their faces hard to read in the dark.

“A deputation of concerned menfolk,” he told her, finally noticing a useful stretch of laddering. It might do. “Is there another way in or out?”

Caitlin asked Shurateva, who asked an indomitable-looking middle-aged Uzbek woman. The sitting women all scrambled to their feet on hearing the question. “No,” the Uzbek replied in Russian. She walked past McColl to the door. “Who dares to violate my house?” she shouted through it.

Angry cries responded. “Wife stealer! Daughter of Satan!”

There was a thunderous crash, the sound of splintering wood. Before McColl could move, one of the soldiers fired through the wood, eliciting a yell of pain from the other side.

Then the door fell inward, spilling men into the courtyard. The Uzbek women retreated into the farthest corner, some yelling defiance, others streaming tears.

“Stop!” Caitlin cried out in the loudest voice he had ever heard her use. She stood fifteen feet from the invaders, palms held up to ward them off, her eyes brimming with anger. And for a moment she held them, but only that. She knew no words of Uzbek, and Shurateva, joining in, lacked Caitlin’s natural authority. With a thrill of horror, McColl noticed that one man was carrying a sword.

He grabbed Caitlin’s arm and tried to pull her away.

“What are you doing?” she shouted.

He kept pulling, but she squirmed out of his grasp. “Don’t you want to fight another day?” he yelled back.

“I can’t just abandon them!”

McColl instinctively dropped his head as something swished past his ear, then turned to see something flash on the end of an upraised arm. He pulled the trigger, and the man just dropped, his sword falling behind him.

Caitlin was trying to reason with another man, who seemed far more interested in splitting her skull. McColl put a bullet in the back of one of his thighs, and the single shot turned into a volley. A machine gun was firing in the street outside.

A man fell backward through the broken door like a bloodied sack of potatoes. His Uzbek friends were spinning this way and that, uncertain what to do. McColl walked slowly backward, pulling Caitlin with him, until he could feel the wall at his back.

No one came after them. Some men pulled themselves up and over the wall, silhouetting themselves against the night sky before they disappeared. Others just threw down their makeshift weapons and stood there waiting, suddenly submissive. They edged away from the sword on the rug, as if afraid it might explode.