Another fusillade shattered the morning.
She walked on up a track, toward the source of the noise. After passing a goods warehouse that had lost its roof, she suddenly came upon it: a line of people backed onto the edge of a loading platform, facing a group of soldiers around a machine gun. Behind and below the former, a pile of bodies covered the rails.
She heard a shout, then the loud, incredibly loud, clatter of the gun, saw most of the line topple backward onto the corpses below. One man had fallen into a squat and swayed there on the brink before finally toppling over.
She couldn’t move. She realized her mouth was open and managed, with great effort, to pull it shut. She felt like running back to the train and asking Komarov to intervene. But she knew what he would say; she could even see the look on his face as he said it: This is a war, and there are always casualties; rebellions must be stamped out. This is the real revolution, the one you read about in Pravda, sitting at your Zhenotdel desk. Real people, real atrocities; they burn party cadres alive, then slice them up and feed them to hogs. And this is how we avenge them—this is what “suppressing banditry” looks like when it’s happening in front of your eyes.
This was Sergei’s world. This was the war he had found himself in, the one that had let loose his demons and shut down the young man she’d known. In that moment she felt her heart go out to him, wherever he was, whatever mad scheme he might be pursuing.
Another group was being led forward. She wanted to walk away, to lower her eyes, but if standing and watching was the only way she could share in the responsibility, then stand and watch she would.
Sensing other eyes, she turned to find Komarov’s. He was leaning against the wall of the roofless warehouse gazing straight at her. He quickly looked away, and neither spoke, but she instinctively felt that his heart’s response to these killings was no different from hers, and that all their obvious differences paled into insignificance as long as this burden of barely supportable sorrow bound them together.
The machine gun opened up again, dispensing death and bouncing echoes down the valley.
It turned into a long, hot day. Caitlin spent it shut away in her compartment, mostly lying down, listening to the sounds of the outside world drifting in through the open window. There were no more volleys of gunfire, only the distant murmur of the camps on the slopes, the occasional couple walking by outside, children playing hide-and-seek under the stabled trains. A bee searched her compartment for pollen and left disappointed. She tried to do some work, but the article she was trying to edit now seemed depressingly theoretical.
Her state of mind frightened her. Away from Moscow, away from the office, she felt alarmingly adrift, all her usual points of reference either gone or revealed in a completely different light. What had happened? Well, Sergei had deserted her, Komarov had virtually kidnapped her, and Jack had dropped himself back in her life like an unexploded emotional bomb.
She reminded herself that nothing really had changed. Okay, she was on a train, heading out to God knew where for God knew how long. But her desk would still be there when she returned. The Sergei she’d married had been gone for months, Komarov couldn’t hold her hostage indefinitely, and unexploded bombs could damn well stay that way. She would get her life back.
But was it the life she wanted? Things looked different stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere with only your own thoughts for company. The job, the office, the missionary zeal—they started to feel like a life to be chosen rather than taken for granted. Take that thought further, and other jobs, other offices, became possible. Russia had stolen her heart, but it wasn’t where her family was, and it wasn’t the only place she could make herself useful. She didn’t think she could ever abandon Kollontai and the Zhenotdel, but the way things were going she might not get the choice. Politics and loneliness were already fraying the edges of the life she had lived these last few years; sometimes she felt like a pond pierced by a stone, rippling away from her center.
Eventually she slept, and darkness had fallen when she woke up feeling cold and very alone. She needed to talk to someone—anyone. It had been almost three days since she had shared a normal conversation.
She washed her face and brushed her hair, practiced a smile in the mirror. There, she could still do it.
There were three men in the saloon—Jack and Komarov playing chess and a young Red Army officer whom she hadn’t met. When the latter stood and offered the seat beside him, she thankfully accepted—sitting with her back to the other two felt like an ideal arrangement.
The officer introduced himself as Semyon Krasilnikov and told her he was on his way to take up a post in Orenburg. Rather than attempt to explain her own presence on the train, Caitlin simply said that she was a Zhenotdel official with business in Turkestan—mentioning she worked for the women’s department deterred most men from probing further.
Krasilnikov proved an exception. Once they’d exchanged the usual traveler pleasantries—the excessive heat and all-too-frequent delays, the dreadful food and unyielding beds—he actually asked her to tell him more about her work. “How did the Zhenotdel come into being?” he wanted to know.
“That’s a long story,” she protested.
“We don’t seem short of time,” he said reasonably.
He even looked interested as she skimmed through the history of Russian feminism and the Zhenotdel’s eventual establishment. And he asked intelligent questions. Wasn’t there a danger of prioritizing gender over class? Were there enough men in the party who really supported the Zhenotdel’s aims, and were most of them offering little more than lip service when a conflict of interests arose?
It was impossible to generalize, she told him, knowing she’d done so herself on more than one occasion. Some conflicts of interest were more acute than others; some made comrades more open to compromise.
Krasilnikov thought that the Zhenotdel would have its work cut out in Turkestan.
Yes, she told him, but the rewards had already been spectacular. As she recounted the story of Rahima’s impromptu journey to Moscow, Caitlin suddenly realized how animated she had become—days of self-doubt were making her overcompensate.
Sitting a few feet away, McColl was having trouble keeping his mind on the game. He had actually started this one quite well, forcing Komarov onto the defensive for once, but since Caitlin’s arrival McColl’s hard-won advantage had slowly slipped away. He suspected that Komarov had noticed but hoped that the Cheka boss had put his failing concentration down to nothing more suspicious than an attractive woman’s presence.
The Caitlin he’d talked to on the platform—he might have been able to shut that voice out. But this Caitlin, this woman with so much passion, was the one he’d fallen in love with, and a game of chess just couldn’t compete.
“Checkmate, I think,” Komarov murmured just as she got up to leave the car. Her face was flushed, McColl noticed, as she nodded farewell to him and Komarov. Flushed and full of life.
As she disappeared through one gangway door, the exile-bound Menshevik came in through the other, carrying an unopened bottle of vodka. Seeing that their game had ended, he invited them and the young officer to share its contents. Receiving their agreement, he asked the attendant for glasses and sat back to examine them all with an expression half-owl and half-bear.
The vodka was rough but strong, and McColl took care not to drink too fast or too much. The conversation, which from the outset was mostly between Arbatov and Komarov, soon became a dialogue pure and simple, with McColl and Krasilnikov no more than spectators.