Blood Red, Snow White (21 page)

As we got off the train, my escort, whose name I had learned was Dragonovich, seemed unsure of what to do.

“You must go and see Lenin?” he asked, as if I was in charge.

“That’s right,” I said. “You should take me to see him. We’ll find him at the Kremlin. Here, I’ll call a drozhka.”

I trotted out of the station, and Dragonovich tagged along, clutching his rifle and pack and staring all about him at the wonders of the Moscow architecture.

As we approached the Kremlin wall, his mouth fell open. The onion domes and spires of Red Square rose beyond.

“My God,” he said, “it’s so beautiful. And so terrible.”

I nodded. He was right; he had put his finger on exactly what I always felt in Moscow. I took the chance to suggest something to him.

“It would be as well for me to see Comrade Litvinov first. At the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.”

Dragonovich, still wide-eyed like a child, nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “very well.”

I breathed easier. It would be sensible to see Litvinov, that was true, but I had another reason for the detour.

We had some trouble with the Red Guards at the gates, but soon we were up into the vast maze of the Kremlin itself. I knew Evgenia might be hidden somewhere in its vast belly; I was possibly very close to finding her now, but had to keep my nerve. I led the way and in a short while was knocking on Litvinov’s door.

As I walked in, the old man rose from behind his desk and glared at me. My soldier hovered behind me, completely out of his depth and aware of it.

“Mr. Ransome!” Litvinov declared. “You are a most persistent individual!”

He snatched a piece of paper from his desk.

“Do you know what this is?” he shouted. “I have just received this, this telegram. From Reval, where the Minister for Foreign Affairs writes to tell me that you are already on your way to Moscow. This despite the fact that I had specifically forbidden your journey.”

I spread my hands.

“There must have been some confusion,” I said.

“So I see. And who is this?”

He turned his wrath on Dragonovich.

“What do you want? Did you bring him here, or did he bring you? Never mind. You have a unit to return to, I assume? Yes? So get out of my office!”

The soldier slunk away, his tail between his legs. I felt sorry for him; I wondered whether he would even manage to find his way back to the station, never mind the Estonian front.

Litvinov sat down. His anger seemed to have left.

“What are we to make of this, Mr. Ransome?”

So I told him. I told him about the peace proposals from Estonia, and I think he believed me.

“I will call Lenin and you can tell him this yourself.”

He picked up the receiver of the phone on his desk.

“Of course,” I said, quickly, reaching out a hand to stop him using the phone. “But would you mind first, to tell me … to let me, I mean, see someone else?”

Litvinov smiled.

“So that’s it. Love? You would have made a good Russian, Mr. Ransome. A very good Russian. Very well. I will phone Comrade Lenin shortly and tell him you are on your way. Of course, the Kremlin is a big place. You might, I suppose, lose your way…”

There was a sly look in his eyes and a grin on his face.

“Thank you. Thank you so much,” I said.

“I presume you know which way to lose yourself?”

“The floor beneath this one, on the northern side?”

“Exactly. You have half an hour.”

*   *   *

Even as I left his office I could hear Litvinov asking to speak to Lenin, and I hurried through the high dark corridors to find the Education Department.

I was outside the door, and lifted my hand to knock, then let it fall.

It had been not weeks, but months. We had heard nothing from each other. My heart grew perfectly still, as if waiting to know it could beat again.

I didn’t knock, and just walked into the office.

One or two faces I didn’t recognize glanced up at me, and I looked blankly past them. Then, there she was. She left her desk and came to me, and in that short space, there was time for tears to roll down her face, and a smile to spread on her lips.

I put my arms around her gently, as if she might break, and she put her head on my shoulder and wept silently.

She stood back, and we were aware of being stared at by the other people in the room.

“Arthur!” she said. She laughed and then tugged both my hands. “Come here. Come with me. I have something you want.”

Still laughing, she pulled my hands and led me back into the corridor and down the hall.

“Do you remember?” she said. “Can you guess?”

I began to laugh, too, because I had smelled a familiar smell.

“Here,” she said, throwing open a door onto a small kitchen area. A pot bubbled over a portable stove.

“Potatoes,” she said.

“That’s what we want,” I said.

I had never eaten anything better, I swear, than that dish of boiled potatoes. My hunger from not eating for two days, and my hunger to be with Evgenia made that dish the sweetest food I had ever had. I gazed at her and she grinned back at me, unable to stop smiling. Her eyes sang.

This is what you want. This is what you want.

Then she stood.

“Oh!” she cried. “Wait here.”

She hurried from the makeshift kitchen where I sat perched on a stool, but was back moments later clutching something in her hands preciously, as if it were gold, or maybe an egg.

“Here,” she said. “Dessert!”

She produced the end of a bar of chocolate, about three squares, which we shared, and savored, ever so slowly.

“Wherever did you get that?” I asked.

“I’ve been saving it. For months,” she said. “I’ve been trying not to eat it. I told myself you were going to come back and that when you did we would share it. But sometimes there were days when I gave up hope. I’m sorry. But I didn’t know. On those days, I let myself eat one square. But I told myself that if I ate all the chocolate, you would never be coming back.”

She held up the empty wrapper and screwed it into a ball.

“You came back just in time, Arthur.”

She tried to smile, but she failed and the tears came again.

“I’m so sorry, Genia,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Never mind, you’re here now.”

“Yes. But now what? You know that the Whites are advancing on Moscow?”

She nodded, closing her eyes.

“Yes, we have heard. But Trotsky says they will be defeated.”

“He would,” I said. “He would and maybe he’s right. But what if he isn’t? You have to leave, Evgenia. I want you to come with me when I go.”

“Where? Where will you go? Where is there that’s safe for us? You can’t stay here, even if I could. And I can’t go to England. And neither of us can go to Stockholm.”

“Estonia,” I said, “Reval.”

“But we’re at war with Estonia.”

“Not for long,” I told her. “That’s how I got here, I’ve brought a peace proposal from Reval. Estonia wants peace with Russia, and I know Lenin wants peace with Estonia; it’d be one less part of the White Army for him to fight. Soon, Estonia will be a neutral country, and we can live there. Safely. Only…”

“Only what?”

“Well,” I said, hesitating. “Your mother. Your sister…”

“I know,” she said. “I know. But they know, too. We’ve talked about it. If my Englishman were to come for me … They’ll be safe, even if the Whites take Moscow; they are not Bolshevik, they are not known as I am.”

“So you would leave? Leave them?”

“I will never leave them,” she said. “I may leave Russia, but they will always be with me. And Arthur, more than anything, I want to be with you.”

I held her hands but said nothing, because there was nothing to say. We understood each other, and that was enough.

“I don’t have long,” I said at last. “I have to go and see Lenin. Tomorrow we will leave. You should go home. See your family, and pack whatever you need to bring.”

“All right.”

“But don’t bring anything more than you can carry. Easily.”

“But Arthur, how are we going to get out?”

“The way I came in. Across no man’s land.”

22

MOSCOW TO REVAL.

Almost six hundred miles.

A journey that nearly cost us our lives. Three times.

*   *   *

Of the first part there’s not much to say. We finished our business in Moscow, I with Lenin, Evgenia with her family, and I saw little of her as she made preparations to leave.

Lenin was delighted with me.

All he was concerned about was peace with Estonia, but he, like Minister Piip, was not willing to trust anything to the wire, or paper, and gave me a full account of what I was to propose to Piip, which was in short, a peace conference. Of course, for the time being, that left Russia and Estonia at war, and it was that front line which Evgenia and I would have to cross.

“I have read your book,” Lenin said to me. “
Six Weeks in Russia
.”

I didn’t answer. Whenever anyone says that to me about something I’ve written it seems foolish to say anything until they’ve said what they thought of it.

“I was disinclined to like it,” he went on, “but then I had a letter from Radek. You know he is still in prison in Berlin, and he said it was the first thing he had read of the Revolution that brought us Bolsheviks to life, as real people. And so I changed my mind about it. You have done us a great service. If there is anything I can grant you in return, you have only to name it.”

All sorts of outrageous requests flashed through my head, but I let them go.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Just help us as far as you can to leave Russia.”

“Indeed. I have bad news. There has been another outbreak of fighting on the Estonian front. The fighting is spreading south. Your journey out may be harder than the journey you made to get here. But we will do what we can.”

*   *   *

Then we left, by train, and at first all was well.

We made a slow but comfortable journey of four hundred miles through the day and overnight to Rejitsa, and then on the following day to Korsovka, though this time we sat on the floor of a freezing cattle truck, huddled around a small fire.

At Korsovka we were handed over to the Commissar, where we had a basic but welcome lunch of soup and bread. The Commissar was grave-faced.

“The fighting is everywhere,” he said. “To and fro, we capture a village, then the Whites take it back. There is no telling where you will be best to go. All I can say is that if you do run into any trouble, sit tight in the first cottage you see and wait to be captured by the Whites.”

And hope they don’t find out who Evgenia is, I thought.

He gave us two carts, one driven by a small boy in which we put all our luggage, and one driven by a gloomy old militiaman, who seemed convinced we were heading into certain death.

We trundled out of Korsovka, into the unknown. The boy and I walked at the side of the horse, while Evgenia sat on our luggage. No one spoke.

I’d found Evgenia, true, but we were not safe yet. With every step we moved a little way forward, but I didn’t know whether it was one more step toward safety, or danger.

We made our way along forest tracks, deeply rutted and frozen solid. The trees reached silently toward us on all sides, opening out into a clearing here and there, and our carts rumbled on.

Then we heard firing. It was impossible to tell where the shots were coming from, but they sounded distant. There was nothing to do but go on.

We saw no one, but then, long after the shots we’d heard, we saw men running low through the trees. They emerged onto the track ahead of us, and then ran back the way we had come, taking no notice of us at all.

We went on, and another mile or so later we saw a farmhouse up ahead. Outside was a group of people, not soldiers, but peasants. As we came up, I called to them.

“Do you know where the front is?”

They stared at us, and then one of them pointed. Back the way we had come.

At this, the old militiaman turned his cart around, and sped away hell for leather, for home. I looked at the young boy leading our cart. He was chewing on a piece of straw, which he spun from one side of his mouth to the other. I feared for him; he had no business risking his life for ours.

“And you,” I said, “do you want to run for home, too?”

He shook his head.

“I have brothers on both sides,” he said, “I’m happy in either place.”

“Thank you,” I said. I was relieved by that, but the peasants looked at us less happily. They were in no man’s land, in a civil war. If they were caught sheltering Reds …

“We are on our way to Marienhausen,” I said. “Do you know the way? Is it far? Perhaps we could ask you for some tea before we go on.”

There were five men, and an old woman. They regarded us suspiciously, but the old woman spoke.

“Yes, we can make some tea.”

She led the way into the farmhouse, and we found it was a single large room, dark inside, but beautifully warm; a fat stove roared away. Two small children saw us come in, and ran to hide behind a hefty chair next to the fire. From there they gazed at us as we took out our own samovar to make tea.

Without removing her headscarf, the old woman bustled around the kitchen. Our boy grew brave, and sat himself next to the stove. The children peered around the chair at him, and for a moment I was transported to a different Russia, one that I had made myself, in a book of fairy tales.

Now in no man’s land, we could expect that the next soldiers we saw would be White, and I decided to get rid of anything that might endanger us. I opened the door to the stove and fed into it all the passes, letters of safe conduct and every scrap of paper from Moscow, while our samovar came to a boil on top. The old woman watched me, and then looked at our samovar, the fine silver piece with my initials on the side. She caught me looking at her, smiled, and looked away.

I heard a voice outside, and saw one of the men looking through the window at me. I thought nothing of it, but then heard raised voices. They grew louder.