Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

Cunningham arrived at the northentrance soon after twelve-thirty and spent the next half hour as instructed, walking from one end of Platform 6 to the other.

It was more like an obstacle course than a path. Indians provided the obstacles, they and all the mercantile and domestic activities they’d managed to cram onto a platform thirty feet wide. It seemed to Cunningham that an Indian was incapable of traveling anywhere without taking his entire family, all its belongings, and enough hardware to cook six-course meals. Many had also brought livestock—goats, chickens, pye-dogs—and at least two sacred cows were trundling up and down Platform 6 in search of something to chew.

There were also coconut sellers, soda-water sellers, toy sellers, and sticky-sweet sellers. Toys and sweets, Cunningham thought—that was what Indians loved. Toys and sweets in the brightest imaginable colors. Children, every last one of them. The real children made faces and giggled each time he went past; the adults only wanted to.

One Indian was tugging at his sleeve. As he turned, a note was pressed into his hand by a young adolescent. Come with this boy. Alone. McColl .

“Lead on,” Cunningham invited his guide. They crossed to the farthest platform, entered one of the railway offices, and climbed two flights of stairs to the roof. A white man was waiting for him, but it wasn’t McColl. In fact the features were distinctly Slavic.

“Who are you?” Cunningham asked.

The man was looking over his shoulder. Cunningham caught the glint of reflected glass from the signal box across the tracks, the shutters closing around it like a snuffer on a candle. Someone had taken a picture of him and the Russian, which could only be bad news.

As Cunningham hurtled back down the stairs hoping to catch whoever it was, he realized his young guide had disappeared.

After reaching and crossing the platform, Cunningham jumped down between the nearest rails, and was almost run over by an idling shunter. By the time he reached the foot of the signal box steps and took a few seconds to look around, there was nothing to see. No one running. No McColl. Even the Russian had vanished.

He went up anyway, but the Indians on duty responded to his shouts with the usual infuriating smiles. The little office at the end was empty; the head signalman, he was told, had gone to lunch.

“Christ, what a mess,” he murmured as he took in the view from the cameraman’s window. Fitzwilliam was going to love this one.

Caitlin spent the morning alonein their room at Sinha’s house, and her mood had not been improved by the reading matter. McColl had come across the Indian communist newspaper on his way back from the station the day before and thought it might contain the recent Russian news she craved. Reading through it, she told herself to be more careful in what she wished for. There was indeed a feast of news—the latest trade deals and production targets, more peasant rebellions ended, a united party still set on delivering its brave new world. The NEP was undoubtedly working, the famines apparently loosing their grip. It was all good, all true, as far it went. And yes, the revolution had been about increasing production, giving people a better material life. But that wasn’t the end of the story. It had also been about building a real democracy, one unfettered by money and privilege. And, in those joyful early days, it had been about creating a new man and woman.

And there, in one small paragraph, was the news that meant something to Caitlin.

The “woman’s advocate” Alexandra Kollontai, the Indian writer noted, was leaving Moscow for “six months of agitational work in Odessa.” With the women’s issue now “resolved,” Kollontai’s “separate organization” had “surely fulfilled its purpose.”

Caitlin read it several times, and could find no silver lining. They were moving her friend away from the heart of power, and it felt like a small step from there to moving women away from the heart of the party’s concerns.

All of which made Caitlin consider her own position. If Russian men—Bolshevik or otherwise—had absorbed all the change they were ready for, then surely it made more sense for someone like her to continue the struggle elsewhere. On the other hand, if the Zhenotdel was under serious threat, it would need the help of people like her. So wouldn’t she just be running away?

Was she just looking for reasons to stay with Jack?

That thought brought her back to the present and her constant companions of worry and guilt. Each time Jack went out, she wondered if she’d see him again, and the knowledge that she’d written those notes to Sergei seemed to hang in the back of her mind like a small dark cloud.

The knock on the door broke into her thoughts, and Maneka’s abrupt appearance threw them aside.

“English downstairs!” she said excitedly. “English with guns! You must get what you need and come with me.”

Repressing the urge to seek clarification, Caitlin took a brief inventory of the room and decided there was nothing she couldn’t live without. But as Maneka was already bundling some of Jack’s clothes into their suitcase, she threw in some of her own.

As they left the room, footsteps were audible on the nearest stairs. Maneka grabbed Caitlin’s wrist and set off in the other direction, down a narrower flight, through an arch, and along a corridor lined with boxes of vegetables. Two servants stepped sharply out of Maneka’s path, and offered Caitlin namaskars as she hurried by. She and Maneka were almost at the end of the passage when a shout rang out behind them.

Not pausing to see whose it was, Caitlin followed the girl through another door and found herself back in the women’s courtyard. The children all stared at her and the suitcase as Maneka tried to explain her presence to the older women. The debate was hardly started when someone rapped on the gate that guarded the second entrance, and an angry dispute erupted beyond it. The men of the household were telling the white invaders that they weren’t allowed in the women’s preserve. The white invaders were demanding the key to the door.

They’ll break it down, Caitlin thought. If she’d been wearing the Indian clothes, they might not have noticed her. As it was…

“Please,” Maneka was saying, tugging again at her wrist. There was a third door half-hidden by foliage, which at first refused to open but then did so with an angry squeak. Another corridor, another gate, and they were out in an alley.

“That way,” Maneka said, pointing her toward the busy-looking road at the end.

Caitlin took the girl’s hand and squeezed it. “Thank you,” she said as the sound of screams came over the wall to her left. The “English” had invaded the women’s sanctum.

“Go,” Maneka told her.

She went, hurrying down the alley with the suitcase in hand, wondering where she should go and how she and Jack would find each other again. Their old room at the serai, she decided, if she could find it.

She needn’t have worried. As she inched her way out of the alley, a brown hand in a uniformed sleeve closed around her neck. When she struggled, the policeman quickly released her, but not, she soon realized, from any intention of letting her go. He was shocked at having laid hands on white skin.

While his partner recovered the suitcase she’d dropped, he harried her down the street like a sheepdog, urging her this way and that without coming too close. Several hundred interested eyes watched them pass, and some at least had the sense to look amused. An open car had been backed into Sinha’s street and now stood waiting by his gate, upper body gleaming and lower half caked in dust.