David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Around him the odour of decay was everywhere, the dank smell of leaf mould and rotting wood rising with every step he took. Underfoot the ground was saturated, wet and peaty. A thick tangle of underbrush, bramble and fallen branches snagged at his feet and, in the boggy areas, he tried to walk on the tussocks of grass — ‘cats’ the Russians called them because they looked like the humped backs of cats sitting in the marsh. Ducking under a tree that had fallen and wedged at an angle against others, his foot caught in a knot of vegetation and he tripped, hitting his head as he fell. He lay in the leaf litter for a minute or two, looking up at the canopy and incongruously thinking how sparse of leaf the trees were.

Getting to his feet again, he touched his scalp where he had felt a trickle of blood, only to find it was the grease he had smeared on his hair. Around him the forest was silent except for the chirping of a solitary bird. He stood listening to it, looking up where the sun angled narrow shafts of light through the tree tops. Not that he thought there was much chance of identifying the thing if had he seen it. He had never been as good on birds as he had been on trees — but he might have recognised a blackbird or a thrush if he saw one, and felt that some commonplace little animal like that would at least have offered him some sense of reassurance. Something known in the unknown. Something of home amid the alien corn. He shook his head in an attempt to clear his meandering thoughts, feeling gingerly at his scalp again.

He pressed on, his boots sinking a couple of inches into mud, aware that his feet felt wet. So much for the quality of Pinker’s boots. The chances were, if the man from Northampton hadn’t been stabbed by Tamara Oblenskaya, or whatever her name had been, the Germans would have shot him for selling them shoddy goods.

He had been walking for ten minutes and regretted not asking how far the abandoned house was from the river. He tried to quicken his pace but the terrain slowed his progress. As it was he was sweating, his shirt and trousers sticking to his skin and the money belt chafing. He considered throwing away the noxious jacket but took it off instead and carried it over his shoulder. He was beginning to think he had lost his bearings when ahead through the trees he saw a house. Its roof had collapsed and the walls were crumbling. He hurried towards it and had just reached the rear wall when he heard voices.

He dropped onto his haunches. A branch jabbed painfully into his leg and he shifted, acutely aware of the crack of deadwood under his feet. The voices came from the other side of the house. He bent lower and crept to one of the ruined windows. The shutter still hung from a rusty hinge but the frame was empty, its glass long gone. Through the hole he could see a tangle of spindly saplings and brushwood growing out of the floor and beyond, where part of the front wall had fallen away, three men standing. They wore rifles slung across their shoulders, forage caps and rough clothing. He could not make out any kind of insignia on their jackets but Berglund had told him that Trotsky’s new army was short of proper uniforms.

The men were talking among themselves, smoking, and as he watched, Paul suddenly remembered that he hadn’t yet got rid of the Finnish papers he was carrying.

Ever since the train he had been rehearsing a story of how he had volunteered to fight for the Finnish Reds, had been captured and managed to escape back over the border. His name was Boris Vladimirovich Alenkov, and he was a Bolshevik. Unfortunately he had no Party membership card. He had hoped Berglund might have provided one as a card might have been sufficient to deter a close inspection of his papers. They were genuine enough even if, despite the beard and a haircut one might expect to get from a sheep-shearer, the photograph didn’t look much like him. Still, the story was plausible. But not if he was caught carrying Finnish papers.

He took the crumpled identification out of his pocket and pushed it into the leaf mould at his feet. He waited until the men moved on, gave them a few minutes more to get some distance away, then stood up and rubbed the cramp out of his legs. The sweat on his skin had gone cold and the rags felt clammy against his skin. He put the fur jacked back on then uncovered the Finnish papers again, made a larger hole with the heel of Pinker’s boot and buried them deeper. Then he stepped through what had once been the back door of the house and picked his way to the front. Beyond the overgrown yard a track cut between the trees. The three men had turned left and he went right, as the man who had punted him across the river had told him. He walked quickly along the rutted track, looking for the road that would take him to the Byelo-Óstrov railway station.

Despite the coolness of the afternoon the mosquitoes and gnats still swarmed in the air like aircraft in a dogfight. When he finally reached the station Paul found a train already waiting. As if anxious to leave, the locomotive was squirting clouds of steam from its wheels and giving off smoke like suppressed anger from its stack.

The platform was crowded. He bought the cheapest available ticket from the kiosk with a muttered, ‘Petrograd’ then mingled with the other passengers, finding his rags not out of place. Most were muzhiks — peasants in rustic dress — but there were also soldiers strolling up and down. To avoid an approaching pair, Paul moved to the rear of the train where four or five open-sided cattle wagons were coupled behind the closed carriages. An old woman was struggling to load half-a-dozen bushel boxes of vegetables into one and, reaching her, he took hold of one of the boxes and hefted it into the wagon.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me help.’

She squinted up at him sideways through eyes clouded with cataracts and grunted. Paul loaded the rest of her boxes, heaved himself into the wagon and reached out his hand to help her up as the soldiers walked by. He busied himself pushing the bushel boxes to one side of the wagon until they had passed.

The old baboushka dropped down protectively on one of her bushels and cast a distrustful eye at him. Paul smiled at her and sat on the floor in the corner, out of sight of the open door. Something dug into his buttock and he shifted, pulling out of his pocket a pipe that Jalonen had bought him at Terijoki Station. The Finns had supposed a pipe more in character for an Ingrian peasant than cigarettes, but Paul hated the filthy things. He filled it now, though, with the rough tobacco Jalonen had supplied and lit it, puffing until the vile vapour caught in his throat and starting him coughing.

The baboushka watched him enviously from her perch on the bushel and after a minute or two under her rheumy gaze Paul took the pipe out of his mouth and offered it to her. She grinned at him and took it, sticking it in her mouth and sucking contentedly on the stem. Paul laughed, coughed again, and dropped the tobacco pouch in her lap. Wreathed in smoke, she nodded and offered what looked like a turnip from the box beneath her. Thinking it churlish to refuse, he exchanged it for a smaller one, thanked her and put the vegetable in his pocket.

Outside the open door of the boxcar the country hardly changed: ponds of stagnant water, stands of spindly timber, a cultivated plot or two beside a ramshackle house, cattle, pigs… He supposed it would be much the same right up to the suburbs of Petersburg — after all Peter the Great had built the city on a swamp; on a swamp and the bones of thousands of serfs who had died constructing his modern European city for him. The mosquitoes had always been a menace and if Moscow could currently boast a cholera epidemic, Petersburg would always have its malaria.