The fishing boat lay at anchor without lights; we climbed over the low transom and the boatman fixed the dinghy to its davits and went forward to start his engine. Pudovkin and I went below. The crew cabin was tiny; there were four hammocks and it stank of fish. The engine came alive with a guttural growl and we heard the anchor cable scrape; a few moments later the cabin floor tipped underfoot as the stern went down with the screw’s bite.
“It’s twenty-four kilometers by the route we’ll take,” Pudovkin said. “We’ll be about four hours.”
“You’d better sleep, then.”
“I intend to.”
I left him cocooned in a hammock; I went up to the wheelhouse. I’ve never been a good sailor and I knew I couldn’t take the confinement of that stinking closed crew cabin; on deck in the air I might make it without losing my stomach.
We ran without lights and the boatman kept her throttle at something like half speed because he didn’t want excessive noise and he didn’t want to throw too much of a visible wake. We were quartering across the current that flowed through the strait from the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea; it was a rough ride and I clung to handholds.
For two hours we rode the bucking deck together and never learned each other’s names; I think we both felt it was better not to know. We exchanged meaningless small talk, neither of us giving anything away. He told me a little about fishing and a little about the waters hereabouts.
In mid-channel we hit a crosschop of conflicting currents that was too much for me and I had to hang over the stern rail at one side of the dinghy and cat up my dinner. The rest of the ride was agony.
Once he throttled down and I looked up in alarm; after a while I caught sight of lights moving past our port side in the distance. The boatman identified it as the night ferry to Kerch. We pitched derelict in the sea’s short chop until distance absorbed the ferry.
After midnight we went ashore in the dinghy and Pudovkin paid the boatman the second half of his money. Again the handshake—in contrast to the ritual bear-hug of friends—and then Pudovkin and I climbed the steep rocks in a frigid wind. I could hear the chatter of my own teeth.
“I’m afraid we have a walk ahead of us. I didn’t trust him enough to have him put us down too close to the car. Are you up to it?”
“Is there a choice?”
He laughed and went striding toward the coast road, setting an example I’d have been embarrassed not to follow since I was half his age. On the boat I’d been convinced I could survive anything so long as it was on dry land but now I found the bite of that arctic wind and the lash of driven snowflakes to be equally painful. I’ve never thought myself a hypochondriac but that night I had visions of trenchfoot and frostbite and pneumonia.
I don’t know how long we walked. I had passed the point of exhaustion and had made a fine discovery: there was no such thing as second wind. But it was still dark when Pudovkin led us down a snow-covered side road that appeared to be nothing more than dirt-track ruts with tufts of weed sprouting from the center hump. We had a limited amount of light, reflecting down from the underbellies of the clouds; it had stopped snowing at some indeterminate time in the night and Pudovkin said the lights were those of a town beyond the ridge inland of us. Whenever the wind let up we could hear the crash of surf below to our left. There was a gothic wildness to the night: snow-mists swirled around us and the wind had a dismal voice.
I bumped into Pudovkin’s shoulder before I realized he had stopped; belatedly I saw that the snow-covered mound in front of us was a car—a Volkswagen by its shape. We batted the two-inch white cake off the windshield and rear window and then Pudovkin opened the door to release the catch of the front hood.
He stood looking into the orifice. “You’d think there’d be a shovel. Well we’ll have to make do.” He handed me the jack handle and went at it with his gloved hands. It was impossible not to admire his self-control. We shoveled snow clear of the exhaust pipe and scraped purchase-tracks for the wheels and then we let the wind blow us back to the car. At least there were chains on the rear tires.
Pudovkin found the key under the seat and we had some trouble before the car would start. From the diminutive size of its oval rear window I assumed it was very old—early nineteen-fifties at best—but after a great deal of weak grinding it caught and Pudovkin revved it mightily. He made sure it was warmed enough not to stall before he tried putting it in gear.
The night’s coat of granulated-sugar snow treacherously concealed an underlayer of glazed ice; we skidded loosely all the way out to the main road but the chains kept us moving. When we reached the road I said, “Shouldn’t we sweep over our tracks?”
“The wind will do it for us.”
We jingled slowly south and in a little while daylight began to flood across the ridges, scattering the shadows.
I tried to navigate but the map of Georgia and the Caucasus was not of the finest scale and did not show all the back roads; often we reached intersections not indicated by the map and had to guess. We were trying to avoid the seaside resorts but at the same time we could not afford to take the main inland routes because they were summer roads high up in the Caucasus and if you got stuck in snowdrifts up there they would be carrying your body out in the spring. The late snowfall had been a bad break all around; it restricted our choices of routes, it slowed our travel and it left tracks.
On the stretches between resort towns we tried to get down onto the main roads because they were plowed clear; along here we removed the chains and Pudovkin drove too fast for the roads, the tires leaving black smears on the oil-smudged curves, the beetle running along with a complaining rubbery whine.
On the northern approaches to Tuapse we stopped at a government pump to fill the tank and put oil in the crankcase and Pudovkin asked the attendant about the weather to the south. There had been less snow down there, the man said; he heard Sochi was completely snow-free.
We had come only a bit better than a hundred miles since dawn and it was already late afternoon. We’d last eaten at midnight—food we’d carried ashore from the boat—and we were famished; we bought bread and tinned herring and beer and I purchased a cheap composition suitcase because my paper-wrapped bundle had been ruined by last night’s weather. When we returned to the car Pudovkin said, “If we run straight through we’ll reach the border by tomorrow night. What do you say?”
“I’ll take another turn at the wheel, then.”
He’d been reluctant to let me drive before; he was still reluctant—he loved to drive, particularly on bad roads. “I should have been a taxi driver or a racer,” he said. “Isn’t it childish?”
We ate on the move and then he spread the map across his knees and directed me to the left up a steep pitted asphalt street; we had to get around Tuapse because at this time of year the police would notice any strange car in the deserted streets.
The detour took us well back into the hills before we could turn south again and the snow was deep along the shoulders; we had to put the chains on again.
Darkness fell and there was no moon—the clouds were still with us. We crawled because it was hard to see: the line of definition was poor between what was road and what was not road. The country there is jagged and humpy and the hills are studded with low scattered trees. Down below along the coast it is semitropical with palmlike vegetation and white-roofed seaside houses but these hills, footing against the mysterious Caucasian Mountains, are as primitive as something in Nepal. It is twenty miles between habitations and there are no towns; the roads at best are farm-truck tracks and our game antique beetle had as much trouble as it could handle.