Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“That is the danger,” he agreed.

“Well, how do we avert it? When I’m working at the Zhenotdel, I feel positive. There are plenty of days when it feels like one step forward, two steps back, but generally speaking, I feel that we’re still breaking ground, that month by month we’re still opening doors.” She paused to stub out her cigarette. “But lately I’ve begun to feel that all this is happening in some sort of cocoon. And that when the day comes for us to break out, we’ll find that the rest of the party has been moving in the opposite direction. And the rest of the party, being much stronger than us, will first set aside our work and then forbid us from spinning any more cocoons.”

His grunt sounded appreciative.

“But giving up won’t get us anywhere,” she went on. “So we put our fears aside and go back to work. What else can we do?”

“ You could walk away,” Komarov suggested.

“Because this isn’t my real home?”

“Because you seem to believe—wrongly I hope, but maybe not—that the struggle for women’s rights in Russia over the next few years won’t get the priority you think it deserves. Maybe somewhere else it will.”

“Maybe.” Was he giving her some sort of warning? Or just being honest? “But leaving would feel like failure,” she said. “This is where we made the breakthrough, where the future seemed so full of hope.”

“Seemed?” he said. There was more sadness than accusation in his tone.

“Sometimes I fear so,” she conceded. “Sometimes I don’t.”

He gave her a wry smile. “I know what you mean.”

Piatakov opened his eyes tosee Chatterji squatting by his side. “It is time to go,” the Indian told him.

He half-walked, half-slid down to where Brady was gazing through his telescope. The moon was high now, the lights of Charjui on the western bank mostly extinguished. The width of this river still astonished Piatakov; the Moskva, the Neva, were streams by comparison. Above their heads the iron bridge blocked out half of the star-filled sky.

“Stealth or force?” he asked the American.

“Stealth, I hope. There have been four or five Chekists sitting around on the quay all day. There’s at least one there now; someone lights a cigarette every so often. But the way I see it, with the moon over there, this bank will mask us for most of the crossing. Once we get nearer, we’ll have to play it by ear.” He stood. “Ready, Durga?”

They slid the boat into the water and clambered in. The hull creaked, but the bottom was bone-dry; Chatterji had stolen well.

The Indian sat in the bow, Brady in front of him at the oars. Piatakov lolled in the stern, wondering how Czar Alexander had felt on his way to meet Napoleon in the middle of the Neman River.

A slight breeze seemed to be following the water downstream. “The mighty Oxus,” Brady drawled softly.

The current was stronger than it looked, but the American’s shoulders were equal to it. He kept the boat close to the bridge on the downstream side, counting off the piers as he passed them in a satisfied murmur. The moon was hanging directly above the upper reaches of the river, loosing a cascade of silver toward them. Like a magic carpet, Piatakov thought.

Soon they were roughly halfway across, both shores looking distant. Piatakov aimed the telescope at the bank they were moving toward. There were several boats at the quay, but they were still too far away for him to pick out theirs.

“Fourteen,” Brady muttered. “Eleven to go.” He was breathing heavily now, and stopped rowing for a minute or so to flex his shoulders and massage his forearms. “Your turn, Sergei,” he said, just as they heard the fast-swelling drumbeat.

A train was coming. The American cursed and took up the oars again. They had drifted more than fifty yards from the shelter of the bridge, and Piatakov could hear the rumble deepen as the approaching locomotive abandoned solid ground and ventured out onto the iron lattice. Soon he could make out the orange glow from the firebox and the pulse of smoke gathering moonlight.

They were still some way downstream from the bridge when the train passed overhead, a line of unlit cars behind the locomotive. As far as Piatakov could see, the driver was staring straight ahead and hadn’t noticed the small craft below. “I don’t think so,” he said in answer to Brady’s inquiring look.

The drumbeat faded; the American rowed on, his weariness apparently gone.

Piatakov raised the telescope again. There were several barges lined up at the quay, some piled high with cotton, others awaiting their share of the towering mounds on the quayside. And there, a couple of hundred yards downstream, was their passport to Afghanistan. The riverboat was more than a hundred feet long, with a deck barely five feet clear of the water, and what looked like a long two-story house squarely plonked amidships. The line of portholes on the upper floor suggested passenger cabins; the lack of windows below suggested space for freight. At the bow end, a small square bridge was set atop and forward of the main structure; in the stern, a large cylindrical casing covered a giant paddle wheel. Red lights glinted at either end, but there was no sign of life between them.

Ten minutes later Brady maneuvered their boat alongside the riverboat, only a few feet away from where someone had neatly stenciled “Red Turkestan.” Chatterji grabbed hold of the deck edge and squeezed himself up through the railings. He stood there and listened for a second, then disappeared into the darkness, gun in hand.

Brady and Piatakov followed, leaving their skiff to drift away downstream. Like a balloon released into the sky, Piatakov thought—a sad sort of freedom. One of Aram Shahumian’s favorite epigrams came to mind: a revolution was like a wild horse; it wasn’t a matter of whether you’d be thrown from its back, simply of when.

“Act naturally,” Brady said as they reached the door that led out onto the deck. The three of them had spent the night in a storeroom, and the Red Turkestan had been underway for over an hour, having departed Charjui soon after daybreak.

The American opened the door and stepped through. Behind him, Piatakov shielded his eyes against the sudden glare. The world outside looked like a child’s painting: a shiny white boat on a bloodred river under a bright blue sky. At the river’s edge, green reeds gave way to yellow-brown desert, making the most of nature’s palette.

Ten yards away two men were leaning over the port rail, shouting to make themselves heard over the din of the paddle wheel. One glanced at them as they emerged, but without apparent interest. Brady led the way aft, hesitating only fractionally at the sight of three uniformed soldiers sitting around the foredeck-mounted machine gun. “A lovely morning,” he shouted in Russian, and one soldier raised an arm in reply. The American turned up the stairs to the upper deck, a smile on his face.

A man and a woman were standing side by side at the bow rail, smoking cigarettes, gazing straight ahead. Leaving Chatterji to stand guard, Brady and Piatakov ascended the short flight of steps that led to the bridge. As the American stepped through the open doorway, he pulled the gun from his waistband.

There were two men inside: one, burly and fair-haired under his peaked cap, was sitting with his back to them, booted feet resting on the ledge beneath the open window; the other, short, wiry, and dark, was standing at the wheel, resting his weight on one leg.

“Crew only,” the man with the cap said without bothering to turn his head.

“Have I the honor of addressing the captain?” Brady asked.

“You…” The intended sentence died as the eyes took in the revolver. “What the hell…? What do you want?” The man seemed more surprised than frightened.