John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“It’s cold as iron,” whispered Evgenia.

“The Cheka have never checked the barges before,” replied Yuri, softly. “But Granma, she’s worried. She says there’s something especially dangerous about helping you two. Everyone on the river is talking about the two foreign spies with the camera.” He hesitated. “This is the safest place on the boat. They’ll never find you down here. Once we start moving, once we’ve made some headway, I’ll come and get you out of here. I’m going the whole way, down this river, then joining the Dnieper, then hugging the coast of the Black Sea, then to Odessa. Once we’ve left this place, you’ll be able to come up for air, to sit in the sun. For the moment, I’ll try and find you some blankets, maybe a sheepskin. Suffer the cold for a night and then we’ll see.”

He came back with a huge fur. “Must be a bear,” said Jones.

“It belongs to Granma,” said Yuri, threading it through the gap.

“Did she kill it with her own fair hands?” asked Jones, trying to make light of the grimness of their hidey-hole. Yuri made no reply. They heard him hammer the wooden chock into place, sealing them in, and then his boots climbing the ladder out to the fresh night air and the stars without.

Water hissed and bubbled as the river’s current played upon the ancient and very thin steel plate beneath them. Whenever the barge bumped against its moorings, the oily slop in the bilges licked against the underside of the planks. For Jones, his fear of enclosed places was far worse here than in the truck: if the barge hit a rock or a jagged ice-floe, then they would be trapped in a watery grave under ten tonnes of marble. Jones started to pant, his breathing irregular, jerky. It was only when he heard Evgenia hum a few bars from “Let My People Go” that he started to gain control again.

At length the engine came to life and, with bewildering slowness, the barge pushed through the river’s newly-formed skin of ice. Soon, the noxious slop beneath Jones and Evgenia spouted between the gaps in the planks, soaking the bearskin and them in turn. Filled with oil as it was, the slop didn’t freeze, just clung to their clothes, coating everything it touched.

For hours on end, the tension gnawed away at their nerves – until, finally, the scrape of boot steps on metal signalled an end to their torture. Yuri cursed as he hammered the wooden chock free and, suddenly, a dim light filtered through. Limbs cramped and half-frozen, it took Evgenia and Jones an age to scramble out through the hole, their hands and faces blackened by the slop. Yuri led them to the cargo ladder and allowed them to climb up so that their heads could peek out through an open hatch. Up above, sunrise. Pink fingers of light searched out the near-frozen river and the white steppe beyond, a steam engine pulling an endless succession of coal wagons running parallel with the river.

Soon, Yuri disappeared, only to reappear with two cups of “coffee”, foul-smelling but hot, and with that chunks of freshly-caught carp, cooked in a metal tin. No more delicious a meal Jones had eaten his whole life.

“Bugger the Cheka,” said Jones, “I’m not going down that hole ever again.”

Evgenia studied him, unconvinced.

The barge had been built long before the revolution and was held together by rust and rivets, black smoke belching from its dwarfish smoke-stack. It moved arthritically, never faster than the current, lest its venerable hull be punctured by a big floe or its engine give out. But at least the tortoise pace had a soothing effect on both Jones and Evgenia. They were still being hunted and had to hide in the cargo hold disappear whenever the barge had to enter a lock or when they encountered river traffic coming upstream. But the hold was paradise compared to the darkness underneath the marble.

Later that morning, they met the two hands. Arkady was young, a bit simple, did everything Granma asked of him with a literalness that was both silly and touching. Arkady sensed that something was not quite right about the squinting man and the strange-looking boy but didn’t know how to articulate his doubts and was afraid to cross Granma, so he ended up smiling at them slightly creepily, as he if he was a creature in a not very good horror movie. A little while later, the older hand, Pyotr, emerged from the engine room covered in coal dust. Looking Evgenia up and down, he half-smiled, half-grimaced and muttered something.

“What was that?” asked Evgenia.

“Trouble, more trouble than it’s worth.” He said this to himself, raising a flask to his lips and draining it, then wiping the back of his mouth. “The bilge pump. Built by the former people. It’s knackered, keeps on getting blocked. When that happens, the bilges can rise a foot in an hour. Hate to think what might happen if it gets blocked when you two are hiding underneath the marble. Not a good way to go, eh?” Then he disappeared back to the engine room without saying another word. He had the same piercing blue eyes as Granma and had been handsome, once, before the drink had addled his looks.

Three days after they joined the barge, Granma allowed them up to the wheelhouse for the first time, Jones squinting at the fuzzy shapes in the near-distance, Evgenia – looking more like a boy than a woman in her boiler-suit and black cap – explaining what he was missing: the immensity of the Dnieper, at times so wide as to be an inland sea, snow on snow, ice-floes cracking and tumbling ahead. Granma said nothing but smoked her pipe. Small talk was not for her.

The one thing everybody on board did was fish, trailing lines in the barge’s wake when it was moving, casting rods when the barge had to lay up to wait for oncoming traffic, or when a knot of ice blocked the channel until a ship with a specially hardened bow could pass through. During these enforced stops, Pyotr would walk off into the solid ice and drill a hole with an auger, then sit above the hole and wait. Jones would go to a porthole and, making sure that no-one would was looking, slip on his spectacles and spend hours watching nothing happen with sinful pleasure.

He made himself a promise, then: that, if they ever got out of the Soviet Union and he was done with journalism, he would take up fishing. Granma was the best of them: she simply had to cast a line over the stern to land a carp or pike or dace. The catch was always washed down by her moonshine, made from fermented potatoes – and old boots, Jones guessed – which she manufactured in a still in her cabin. Granma did her best to ignore them, day in, day out, but their very presence on her barge was an act, in those times, of extraordinary courage.

Or a kind of madness.

The wind saved them. Had it been in the wrong direction, they would never have heard the barking of dogs from a mile downstream, long before the lock came into view.

Granma hissed, “Get down under the stone and stay there until we come and get you!” Then she made the sign of the cross, index finger straight, middle finger slightly crooked. Jones couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an ordinary person make a show of religious belief. These days, they were for the doomed or the damned.

Yuri led the way, hurrying Jones and Evgenia down into the cargo hold and watching them wriggle into the hollow beneath the bottom slab of marble. It was grimmer down here than before, but there was no choice. Evgenia was the last one in, Jones clutching his bag with the Kinamo and reel of film to his side as she followed him through. In here, the bottom of the marble an inch from Jones’ face, they held each other’s hands and listened to the wooden chock being hammered home, then Yuri’s steps on the ladder.

Nuzzling each other as tenderly they could, they did their best to close their minds to reality, the monolith above, the oily slop beneath. After a time Jones asked, “Evgenia, am I wrong or did Granma make the same sign of the cross as the priest?”