David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Well, they did. They had all betrayed the Revolution, although perhaps not in the way that either they or Stalin saw it.

Paul would have liked to know if they had come to realise exactly what they had done during those last moments of life. Had there been any feeling of remorse, of pity for their countless victims? Had it all become clear — in one last blinding flash of comprehension — that it had all been a gigantic mistake?

He didn’t think so. If there was pity in them it was self-pity; if there was remorse, it would have been remorse for not having squashed Stalin when they had the chance. As for mistakes, they had probably believed that the only one they made was in not reading their Marx closely enough.

He tried to remember the name of the corporal he had shared the shell-hole with, the one who had talked about Bolshevism while they’d sat up to their chests in filthy water. The name wouldn’t come — perhaps there had been too many others in the years between — but he did remember that the man had been Jewish. Well, at least he had been spared the knowledge of the horrors of Hitler’s holocaust. Before the war those same apologists who had defended Lenin maintained the choice was a simple one — even a moral one — between Fascism or Communism. Paul had never believed that although he supposed that Jacobs would have. Jacobs, that had been his name. He would have chosen Communism and supported the Bolshevik Revolution through thick and through thin. Not, had he been there, would it have done the man much good; Paul suspected that sooner or later Jacobs like so many others would have ended up against a wall. Caught by bigotry somewhere between the Nazi belief that Communism was a Jewish plot, and the Communists’ belief that Capitalism was a Jewish invention.

Paul stood up, easing his aching limbs back into life. It was dark now on the street although a light showed in a window across the road. Time for his last interview.

The man’s name was Milos Jelen and Paul had been given it by an old Legion colleague who thought of Jelen as someone who might be useful. The name hadn’t been familiar to Paul although there was something about it that tripped a wire in his head; sufficiently enough for him to stop by a bookshop earlier that day to satisfy his curiosity.

At the café door, he paused and nodded at the owner before crossing the road towards the apartment block. Milos Jelen was listed as the resident of flat six. Beside his name was a bell. Paul ignored it. The main door had no lock and he pushed it open. The pervading smell of stale cooking filled the stairwell, the residue of old cabbage and long-boiled meat. A dim light lit the stairs and he began to climb, running his hand along the greasy handrail as he took each step.

He had formed a vague notion before arriving that he might be able to recruit one of the heroes of the Legion for London. His first choice would have been Čeček, but Paul discovered the colonel he had first met in Kazan had died relatively young in 1930. There were others, although he suspected he would find they had all had their fill of British machinations while in Russia and be suspicious of committing themselves to yet another Allied cause.

Not all were available. Gajda, a possible candidate, was in prison. He had involved himself in fascist politics in the twenties, attempting to overthrow the government of Thomas Masaryk. It might have been that Kolchak’s Slovak general had rued missing his opportunity of a glorious destiny in Siberia and had made a belated grab for one in the newly formed Czechoslovakia. In the event his fascist sympathies hadn’t even helped him after the German invasion. Although Masaryk had already released him, the Nazis threw him back in prison. Even now, three years after the war he was still there, President Beneš viewing him as a threat to the country.

Neither had the reputation of Jan Syrový, the former commander of the Legion, escaped unscathed during the war. He was presently paying the price of collaborating with the Nazis and was in prison too, having remained in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation as prime minister. It was said he now shared a cell with Gajda.

A sad end to two once illustrious careers but at least they were alive. Paul had not been in the country long before learning that many of the former legionnaires had found themselves hunted men as soon as Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Red Army. Having escaped the Bolsheviks in Siberia, they had finally become victims of Stalin’s long memory and longer thirst for revenge. Some had been murdered, others had flown the country. Those that couldn’t had gone into hiding.

It had been one of these men who had given him the name of Milos Jelen. Jelen had had some dealings with the Legionářská banka . In an unofficial capacity, it was understood. Paul understood.

The Czech bank was rumoured to have been set up by returning legionnaires with Russian gold looted from the treasury they had escorted along with Kolchak from Omsk.

The Bolsheviks had maintained there was a discrepancy of £32 million between the amount taken from the bank in Kazan and the sum handed over to them in Irkutsk. They held the Legion responsible for it. Paul well-remembered the gold bars and currency he had seen lying in the snow after the train wreck in Tatarskaya Station. But if the Bolshevik accusation were true, the theft must have been a more organised affair than the pilfering he himself had witnessed.

The Red Army had no doubts and in May 1945 they, in turn, had looted the Legion bank, shipping its assets back to Moscow.

Or had that merely been an excuse to cover standard practise? Paul didn’t know. What he did know, after walking past the bank on his arrival in Prague, was that the Red Army had taken their revenge on a once-beautiful building. Scenes decorating the façade of the Legion’s retreat through Siberia, and the columns topped by legionnaires sculpted in relief had been defaced. The interior, ornamented in Moravian themes and art deco, had been vandalised.

What was left was like a skull from which the features had been stripped away. Memento mori: a gift to the Czechs from the Red Army.

The door to flat six lay at the end of the corridor. The light was not working and, passing beneath it, Paul saw the bulb had been removed. There was no light showing under the door either, but from its position the flat overlooked the street and the café where he had waited and he had seen a light in the window from the road.

Putting his ear to the door before knocking, he listened to the silence within, then raised his fist and rapped on the wood.

In the bookshop earlier he had asked if they had a Czech-English dictionary. Only a battered copy, for office use, but they said he was welcome to consult it.

‘Jelen’, he found, was the Czech word for deer. Perhaps he had heard the word at some point while living on the Legion trains, or had it merely been a hunch born of past experience?

A light came on and a key turned in the lock. The door opened a few inches. Milos Jelen had changed in thirty years. His face had fattened, his hair thinned and had retreated from his forehead. Lines creased the corners of his eyes and furrowed his pale brow. Like railroad tracks in snow? But that was too fanciful. The face may have been pale but it was not that white. Although, as Paul watched, it had been getting whiter by the moment.

‘Good God!’ Valentine said in Czech.

Paul replied in the same language.

‘You weren’t expecting me?’ He edged past Valentine into the hall of the flat.

Valentine glanced down the corridor and closed the door. ‘Were you followed?’

Paul raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Give me some credit after all these years… old man .’