John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

Evgenia comforted her, stroking the old lady’s hair, whispering into her ear.

At length, Granma continued, “Pyotr is stubborn, like his father before him. He won’t crack under the knout. But if they give him a bottle, if they talk to him like they’re all pals, then in his cups he’ll tell them everything. So you should leave. You should get off the barge before he cracks.”

“When?” asked Jones.

“At nightfall. In an hour, maybe less.”

“Will he crack?” asked Evgenia. “Are you certain?”

“No. But the risk…”

They left her, the cat once again purring in her lap.

For a moment, the two of them stood on the steps of the cargo hold, looking out upon the world beyond the riverbanks, the sky to the east turning pink. Their quandary was impossible.

Perhaps Yagoda’s letter was still their best way out of trouble. Perhaps it could be used to create a story of a secret mission for the head of the GPU. But, for that to work, they would have to be who their other documents said they were: a professional translator and a foreign journalist. Dressed up like barge workers, in stinking working men’s clothes, her hair cut short, the magic letter would not be believed.

But Pyotr could deliver them up at any moment. All the GPU had to do was telegram the local militia to hold the barge at the next lock on the Dnieper and they were done for.

“The Cheka,” Evgenia said at length, “they grind you down. You have courage, you have determination, you have something precious the world must see. But, in the end, they break you. If we leave this barge, they will sniff us out. If we stay on the barge, they will have us. But for these poor people who have risked their lives to help us, we are nothing but a curse. The same with the Wobblies. It would have been better if we had not even tried.”

Overhead, a solitary crow beat its wings against the darkening sky.

“Let’s go before we lose the light,” said Jones, his hand touching the bag holding the Kinamo and the reel of film.

They told Yuri of their decision who relayed it to Granma. As the barge rumbled to a stop, they shook hands with Yuri and waved farewell to Arkady, who grinned hugely at them, oblivious. Of Granma, there was no sign.

The barge bumped against the ice. Here, the Dnieper had widened, the western bank a dark strip, two miles off. Ice floes close to the hull creaked and see-sawed, settling into a broken crazy-paving as the wash from the engine died down. Jones picked a solid rectangle twenty yards long towards the stern and, when he lowered himself onto it, it barely tilted with his weight. Evgenia passed him their bag and she too jumped down.

Soon, two black dots were making their way across the vast icefield towards the dying sun.

The sky turned blood red, then scarlet. By the time they made the riverbank, it was an inky blue. By the light of the stars, they found a rough track running parallel to the river – but it was potholed and full of sumps of snow and ice which they sank into, sometimes beyond their knees. It was madness to try and go further in the dark. Madness, too, to stay out here on the edge of the steppe with nothing to protect them from the wind from the east, growing stronger with every minute.

After some time, stumbling, exhausted, they came across a black shape looming out of the dark. Crowley’s lighter did its job, illuminating a building of the simplest possible design: wooden slats laid diagonally, their ends embedded into a bank of earth, the floor frozen mud, on top of which a filthy sheepskin lay.

“All my darkness sums it up,” said Jones. “Do you think that Duranty would ever end up in a fisherman’s hut like this?”

Evgenia shuddered. “Never.”

“Yes, not his thing. Poor chap, he needs to widen his horizons.” Jones was oddly happy. Better the hut than the hole underneath the marble. They scouted around for some firewood but their hoard was pretty pitiful, only a snow-sodden log and a dead bush that burned fiercely for ten minutes before it was done. When the log took hold, its smoke filled the hut, sour and acrid in their throats. It was a mercy when the fire died out. They lay down together, shivering in the iron cold, and waited for dawn listening to the howl of the wind.

“The film reel, Mr Jones? The film reel?” Lyushkov’s soft rumble was calm, gentle, almost girlish. For the life of him, Jones couldn’t remember where he’d left it. He was always losing things: his hat, his marbles, the film reel. “I am most terribly sorry, Mr Jones,” said Lyushkov, “but you give me no choice.” They crushed all the bones of his left hand first, then all the bones of his right – and he sat in front of his typewriter in a wet slimy darkness, while Cardiff demanded copy, and he couldn’t write a word because he had flippers instead of hands.

“For God’s sake, shush, you’ll wake up the dead!” cried Evgenia.

Jones surfaced from the nightmare, his chest constricted, drenched in sweat despite the intense cold.

“You were mumbling to yourself, louder and louder. Then you started to scream…”

“I am most terribly sorry, Evgenia.” There was something so utterly formal about Jones’ apology that she burst out laughing and hugged him. “Ffwl!” she said.

To the east, the darkness was softening, turning from obsidian to darkest blue. Across the frozen river, three miles away, they made out a goods train rattling along the far bank, its wagons defined only by their noise, the guard’s van shining a solitary red light at the rear.

Jones studied the train for a time, then said, “If Pyotr talks, they’ll find out we’re heading for Odessa. All they have to do so is search the westerly bank and, hey presto, they’ve got us. If we move inland, it’s still easy for them. In the snow, underfed and exhausted as we are, we can only move at a snail’s pace.”

“So?”

“Evgenia, we’re on the wrong side of the river. We cross the river, we hitch a ride on a goods train, hide in a wagon, then we have a chance.”

“The bridges,” breathed Evgenia. “They’ll be guarded. Passports checked, everything. It’s impossible.”

“Who said anything about crossing by bridge?”

“We can walk across the frozen part. But for the channel, we’d have to have a boat…”

“We can punt a floe.”

“What is punt?”

“You stick a pole into the water, wiggle it along and you move. It’s the only thing that they taught me at Cambridge.”

She did that trick she had, of drawing back, her head turned away, as if she was repelled by his presence. “You’re not serious?”

He was, very.

After a time they found a long, thin log, a fallen silver birch. Snapping off the branches as best he could, he looked at her like a caveman. “Pole,” he grunted.

“Idiot,” she said.

“The word does not rhyme with yacht,” he said, matter-of-factly.

Foolish as it seemed, she accepted his invitation to go punting on the frozen river. So, long before sunrise, they started back out across the river, Evgenia carrying both their bags, Jones shouldering the pole. By the time they had got to the channel, sunrise was already approaching. Their dilemma was simple. Too small an ice-floe and they could be upended in the river; too big a floe and the pole would not be effective, and, when the sun came up, they would be drifting in the middle of the channel for all the world to see.

Chance made the decision for them. They were tip-toeing at the edge of the channel, studying the floes, when with a jolt the ice they were standing on was suddenly torn clean away. Startled, Evgenia almost fell in, recovered and jumped back onto the solid river ice. Jones, using his pole as a trapeze artist on a high wire, recovered too. The floe, a lozenge about ten feet long, stabilised. Jones walked to the rear and put the pole in, gave it a wiggle and, to Evgenia’s astonishment, it began to move back under Jones’s direction. It took him a little time to find his rhythm, but soon he was poling with grace and efficiency – and Evgenia had to jog along to keep pace.