‘Darling Benya,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve decided. You were right: I must go back. Don’t try to dissuade me now. It is decided.’
He did not reply for a long time; then he sighed, knowing now how sometimes men perished because they were too weary to go on.
‘It’s too dark now to do anything. I think we bandits in love must stay together. Somehow forever. And for us forever means now. No one will find us here. Let’s decide what to do in the morning.’
XII
The Kalmyks saw the clump of poplars and within it the roof of a peasant cottage. They stilled their horses and their own bodies and listened. They thought they heard the whinny of a horse but couldn’t be sure. Altan signalled at Gushi and they slipped their Schmeissers off their shoulders and dismounted deftly with barely a sound, peering through the granular lilac of the falling night.
This place was set perfectly on the route the Russian and the nurse would take if, as they suspected, they had chosen the indirect way back to the Don and the Russian lines. When the scouts had left Malamore, they had ridden hard back over the steppe around the other side of the village in a giant half-circle, starting again at the Italian headquarters, Radzillovo. When they saw the stream they let their mounts drink and then rode them into the water and along it, searching the banks for the tracks of two horses. And, sure enough, they had found the marks of hooves entering the water and they knew what the prisoner had done.
‘Not bad for a greenhorn,’ said Altan to Gushi as they tracked the place where the two horses came out of the stream and loped up to the cottage.
They listened; then they tied up their ponies, slipped off their soft boots and, clamping a djindal between their teeth, they crept on all fours closer to the cottage until they could just make out its gate, wattle fence, white windows. They were looking for horses but nothing moved. No smoke was rising from the house.
They looked at one another and Altan shrugged, gestured backwards and they rose to their feet and returned to the ponies. By now it was pitch dark. Even with the moonlight they would be unable to see properly and there were only two of them. So much could go wrong.
‘Why are we stopping?’ asked Gushi. ‘I sense they are here.’
‘Based on what, boy?’ asked Altan.
‘On the tracks on the ground – and the pulse in my throat,’ said the younger one. ‘We can cut his throat and take his ears back to the Italians and win promotion.’
‘And what if by mistake, shooting in the darkness, we harm her? The colonel’s mare! What promotion will we get then, puppy? We will be promoted to the noose, that’s what.’ Altan drew some dried camel meat from under his saddle and offered Gushi some distilled mare’s milk from his canteen. ‘Here’s the plan,’ he said. ‘We sleep here, and before it’s dawn we will catch them like rats in a trap.’
Day Eight
I
Lying against Fabiana, Benya was dreaming with the near-drugged abandon of one who has ridden all day, made love for hours and, finally feeling safe and inflamed and slaked, has fallen asleep in the copious, floating heat. He was back in Kolyma and it was a month after the start of war, in the summer of 1941.
At dawn, the guards burst into Benya’s barracks. ‘Get your belongings, Prisoner Golden. Davay! Davay! Work brigades leaving now! Back to the gold mines with you, fucking dog’s prick!’
Panic jittered through him. He remembered Jaba’s warning. He had lost his protection – that meant losing his cushy job in the clinic, and this was his punishment: back to the mines! This was his deepest fear. In nightmares, in daydreams, he saw himself marched back to the mines on the dark side of the moon. He would die out there, he knew it. Every day he expected it and now it had come.
The truck was waiting, engine gunning, and with terrible foreboding he climbed into the back.
‘Surprise!’ cried Smiley. ‘Haha! Look at that face, Boss!’
Deathless sneered, ‘You fell for it, didn’t you?’
‘All right, boys,’ said Jaba. ‘Join us, Benya. Good news. We’re being transferred to the hospital at Magadan – and you’re with us.’
‘Oh my God, I thought—’
‘I know what you thought. But you see, life is a plate of lobio beans,’ said Jaba and, banging the top of the truck, he called to the guards: ‘All right, let’s go!’
On the way, they talked about the war with the guards, hungry for the slightest titbit. Comrade Molotov had announced the war to the Soviet people with the words: ‘Our war is just. Victory will be ours.’ Then Stalin gave a speech addressing his people as ‘brothers and sisters’ and even ‘my friends’ – he must be worried, thought Benya, to call any of us ‘friends’! The radio reported triumphant counter-attacks but the guard whispered stories of defeat and collapse…
Jaba’s new headquarters was the Magadan Hospital, where all his boys now got jobs: Benya was still a feldsher, a medical assistant, and one of his jobs was to keep the key for the medical supplies room, a key with a leather label reading: ‘Only special personnel. Magadan Hospital. KOLYMA.’
When he left Kolyma, it was the only thing he took with him, to remember the luck that had saved his life. But the job had its worries too: sometimes Smiley or Fats Strizkaz demanded morphine and Benya had to give them some – but not too much. If he was discovered handing out drugs, he would be transferred back to the gold mines; if he refused the Criminals, Jaba would destroy him, and as long as Jaba was happy, he felt he would be safe.
The news from the war was dire. Minsk and Smolensk fell. By September, Belorussia lost, the Baltics, Crimea gone! Leningrad – besieged! The Zeks, patients and doctors talked of nothing else… Several dying men even regained a hollow-eyed life-fire to discuss Russia’s fate. Ukraine and Kiev had fallen, a million Russian soldiers taken prisoner. Odessa fell to the Romanians – and Benya prayed for his parents. Then suddenly the Nazis were approaching Moscow! The reverberations of panic reached even distant Kolyma.
The moment he had finished that day on the ward for the dying, Benya, still wearing his white medical coat, rushed to see Jaba in his ‘clubroom’ where he held court. A card game was in progress with the Camp Trusty, Fats Strizkaz; and Prishchepa was singing the brigand song, and the others were joining in like a crew of crooning pirates: ‘They’ve buried the gold, the gold, the gold…’
‘What is it?’ asked Smiley.
‘I want to ask the Boss something.’
‘All right. It’s the professor, Boss, wants to talk.’
Jaba waved him in. ‘What is it?’
Benya gathered himself: ‘Boss, you own me and I would do nothing without your blessing but Moscow is in danger and the time has come for me to ask permission to join the Shtraf battalions,’ he said.
‘I told you never to ask me this again. On pain of death! Yet still you want to fight for the Bastard?’ The Bastard was always Stalin.
Benya looked around him. Prishchepa had stopped singing; Fats put down his cards; Deathless was playing with a switchblade.
‘You know what my answer could be?’ Jaba said softly.
Benya nodded.
‘Boss, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ It was Prishchepa, still young somehow, glossy as the dawn.
‘And this is also to do with the war?’ Jaba did not glance at him. ‘Speak, boy.’