Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

But for most of the day, not much was demanded of him. He stood by Annika’s side and watched the shore as they moved through the vast Hungarian plain. It was a March afternoon on the river as he remembered it, cold and gray, with racing clouds above and occasional moments of sunlight passing into sudden rain squalls that roughed up the surface of the water, then disappeared. They went past odd little towns full of bulbous shapes and steeply pitched roofs with storks’ nests woven into the eaves. Deserted towns, they seemed; only a few skinny dogs came down to the water to bark at them. Perhaps the people had fled as the fighting moved toward them-west to the German lines or east to the Russian. He did see the barge of wounded Germans, what was left of them, being towed upriver by another tug with whom Annika exchanged a greeting of whistle blasts. Sometimes the sky cleared, revealing the low Carpathians in the northern distance, sun shafts piercing the cloud and lighting the ridges a pale green.

In the late afternoon they pulled into the harbor at Szony and tied up next to a line of tugs, some of them joined to empty barges. Annika went off visiting, hopping nimbly in her carpet slippers from deck to deck, stopping at each pilothouse to gossip and exchange news. It was dark by the time she returned. They sat together by a miniature parlor stove in the kitchen area of the crew quarters-two hammocks and a battered old wardrobe chest-while Annika added water to flour and rolled up csipetke , tiny dumplings, boiled them in a pot of water, and added some dense tomato sauce from a tin can, then a single clove of garlic-“to make it taste like something” -squeezed flat between thumb and forefinger before ceremonial addition to the stew.

“Oh, for an egg,” she said sadly, “or a pinch of rose pepper. You would love me forever.”

In Prague, Khristo had lived on bread that was part sawdust, and horsemeat stewed with onions to hide the spoiled taste, and he wolfed down his portion of dumplings in sauce. “I’m in love with you already,” he said.

“Well, there’s enough of it,” she said, referring to a stack of zinc-colored cans of tomato sauce piled up on a shelf. “There used to be fish,” she said, “but the bomb concussions have done for them. Big ones, catfish with whiskers. Strong -but cooked in milk they were sweet. Ach”-she shut her eyes and grimaced in sorrow-“this stupid war is a curse. It took my husband, both sons, most of the men on the river. The winter of ‘43 got them, retreating from Moscow in the snow, so cold that when they took their pants down by the side of the road, they froze up back there and died.” Her mouth tightened at the thought and she crossed herself. “One or two came back. Husks. Good for nothing after that-they’d seen too much.”

She cleaned her bowl with a thumb and licked off the last of the tomato sauce. “They are fighting east of us, just as I warned you. Near the prison at Vac, downriver from the bend at Esztergom. The Hungarian Third Army, they say, what’s left of it, and the Sixth Panzer, facing the Third Ukrainian. Mongolian troops, river boy, they fight on vodka and if you’re a woman, God help you die quick. They haven’t been here for a thousand years, yet we’ve never forgotten them. They surrounded forty-five thousand German troops up by Lake Balaton, and pffft , that was that.”

“What are people saying?” Khristo asked.

“Well, the Russians have got Budapest, so that’s the end of the government. No great loss. Some say the thing to do is cross over the lines, surrender to the Red Army-others want to wait here. The Russians will need us. They’ll pay something, at least, to have their supplies move on the river.”

“And so?”

“Some of us are going to try to sneak through tonight. Maybe they stop fighting and have a snooze.”

“I doubt it.”

“So do I. How far east are you going?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he said.

“So I guessed.”

“Have you got anything black? Like paint?”

“Paint! You are crazed. Some tar, maybe.”

“It will do,” he said.

They chugged slowly out of Szony harbor just after midnight, eight tugboats moving in single file along the dark river. Since they could expect to be under observation by Hungarian and Wehrmacht rearguard units, each flew the flag of the collapsed Hungarian regime on the short pole astern. The best navigator of the group, a stooped old man called Janos, took the lead in his boat, followed by Tisza and the others. The moon was fully risen, but the spring westerly had increased its force and a low scud of cloud obscured the light, leaving the river in drifting shadows. Difficulty of navigation was increased by a drop in temperature that brought a heavy mist off the water, swirling in the wind as it blew downstream. This made Janos’s job harder, but turned the boats into ghostly, uncertain outlines from the perspective of the shore.

Of Janos, Annika said, “He is half blind, so the darkness will not bother him. He navigates with his feet, he says. By the run of the water under the keel he knows his way.”

“Is that possible?” Khristo asked.

“He is on the river since childhood. Thus he is a good navigator, also a good liar. Take your pick.”

Standing in the pilothouse, Khristo could feel only the rapid pulse of Tisza’s engines. Yet the boat ahead of them moved slowly back and forth from the center to the starboard bank of the river, as though it were avoiding hazards, and the rush of water passing over a sandbar shoal could be heard to one side of the boat as they moved around it.

“A sandbar,” Khristo said. “He has taken us away from it.”

“Ja, ja,” Annika said, unimpressed. “A famous sandbar, one that everybody knows. What you and I must worry about are the new ones. Danubio-the god of this river-stirs his mud up every winter and leaves it in different places, so that we may find it with our propellers.” She made a small correction with the wheel, apparently following some motion of the lead boat’s stern that was invisible to him. “A way down from here, there are granite blocks under the water, quarried by the Romans as piers for a bridge. The emperor Trajan desired to build a military road, from Spain to the Euphrates River, but he died. He left us his granite to remember him by and, when the water is low and there is sand on both sides of the river, it will peel the bottom of a boat clean off. I have seen it.”

They were silent for a time, staring ahead of them through the drifting fog. “Do you want me down below?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Stay up here with me and keep the pepecha handy. We are going full slow as it is, and if something happens you don’t want to be belowdecks.”

He thought of steam under pressure and what it could do and was thankful for the dispensation. “What use will the pepecha be against field guns?”

She shrugged. “Not much.”

The river meandered north and south at Esztergom, then swung around in a sharp bend by the Vac prison and headed due south, toward Budapest and eventually into Serbian Yugoslavia. They could hear the fighting well enough, like an approaching thunderstorm, and the sky flickered a dull orange with artillery and tank barrages, but most of the action seemed to be centered north of the river.

Moving along the northward curve toward Esztergom, a searchlight cut through the fog and raced forward from the last boat to the first, then pinned Janos’s tug in its beam. A loudhailer, sounding eerily close over the water, called out a command in Hungarian. As Janos, shouting in a cracked voice, answered the unseen officer, Annika translated into Russian:

“Convoy leader, identify yourself.”