I looked up terrified into the Asiatic face that smiled toothlessly down at me. “It’s the doctor,” he said. He swung off his horse and came over and clasped me in his arm. “It’s the doctor from Panaka Five,” he repeated, stepping back. “What are you doing with this trainload of rubbish, Comrade Doctor?”
Laryssa giggled near hysterically. The man turned. “I remember you, too,” he said, shaking her hand.
“I was the doctor’s assistant,” Laryssa said hurriedly. “Look, we just fell in with this lot for the ride back to Moscow. Tell us what’s happening, friend.”
One or two of the officials and their wives gathered round us, but the Asiatic gave them such a menacing hiss of hate that they quickly fell back.
“We’re taking the train,” he said. He gestured to the officials. “The ordure here will be lucky to get away with their lives.”
“You’re going to Moscow?”
“Moscow first, then home.”
“Take us to Moscow,” Laryssa said. “Can you do that?”
He shrugged. “That depends on the cripple,” he said doubtfully.
“The cripple?” I could see something light up in Laryssa’s face.
“The cripple’s our leader now. He gives the orders.”
We were taken before Bubo in the headquarters he had set up in Lenin Square.
I had never seen Laryssa so happy. After the tears and kisses she kept circling him, prodding at his chest or arm with her finger as if in need of further confirmation that it was really her man.
And Anton was with him. Not in the office when we arrived. In fact he was down at the station supervising the loading of their horses into the cattle cars. Bubo sent a messenger down straight away but simply to tell Anton that he was wanted in Lenin Square immediately. No mention was to be made of me.
Then he poured vodka.
I can remember the nervous excitement of that short wait, even to this day. I think Bubo must have been telling Laryssa what had happened since we were separated at Panaka. Then I hardly absorbed a single sentence. Only later the pieces came together.
When I heard his step outside and his voice shouting to Bubo I ran toward the door and literally exploded into his arms as the brute walked in.
He was no more coherent than I was. “Holy Jesus,” he kept saying. “Holy Mother of God” and all sorts of other strange incantations from his village past. And then I was just like Laryssa. I could not stop touching his hand or edging close to him as we four drank our way through a bottle.
The first toast, I’m glad to say we remembered, was to Anna.
Walking hand in hand through the town we selected a house. The door was open, the rooms richly furnished. What did we care that afternoon about the fate of the vlasti who had lived here? We wandered from floor to floor. In the kitchen we collected glasses and a bottle of vodka, in the vaulted bedroom we lit a huge fire and threw ourselves upon the wide oak bed.
I undressed him. Undressing myself I nestled between his legs.
He reached down touching my hair as my tongue ran over him. “If we’d met somewhere else, other than in Panaka,” he said, “would we still feel like this about each other?”
I looked up. “We did,” I reminded him. “We met in Leningrad.”
“Ah, but you were a child then. Sixteen.”
“Seventeen. And desperately in love with you from our first meeting.”
He pulled me up toward him. “How can a man without words say what he feels about you, Zoyushka?”
We lay silent together.
“In the West,” he said, “lovers swear some sort of oath. ‘For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…’” he rolled on top of me, parting my legs… “with my body I thee worship.”
When Bubo and Anton had recovered consciousness that last night in Panaka, not all of the penals had marched away with Barkut Khan.
Many who hated and feared the Khans had hidden in the forest. Others simply slept through the departure. On the appel-square that day they had gathered under the only leader they knew, Bubo, whom some of them had worked with in the woods.
Since that day they had battled their way out of the far north. In Krasibirsk they had found an old locomotive in a siding and succeeded in hitching a string of cattle trucks to it. After a journey of nearly 250 miles they had been attacked by a militia unit and scattered in the snow forests. When the survivors re-formed they had marched on the next town and fought a pitched battle with staves and flying rocks against other penals. Somewhere outside the town they had found buses and trucks and in them completed another vast section of the journey. Then they had found the horses. In an abandoned cavalry stable outside Vologda where they were intending to sleep the night they had found stall upon stall, in five great stable blocks, of shaggy cossack ponies. Their former riders, a Kirghiz National Division, had deserted with an earlier trainload of penals, one of the many units on the penals’ route home which simply joined them in those wild times.
The old Russian grooms had handed the horses over without complaint and Bubo’s ragbag army had become a mounted unit.
Our gentle friend Bubo kept discipline with a ferocity which shocked Laryssa and me. He would have a man flogged or even shot for failure to carry out an order. And yet, at any time, a man could announce that he no longer intended to ride with Bubo and would then be free to leave unmolested. As a system it seemed to work. These strange men, changed in God knows what fashion by their experiences, worshiped their limping leader.
In the station the cattle trucks had been loaded with horses, the boiler filled with water and the tender piled high with coal. A messenger came up to find Anton and myself to say that food and ammunition were being loaded now. The train would be ready to leave at any time Bubo ordered.
Until this point I had not even thought about what happened next. I was with Anton again; Laryssa was with Bubo. After the nights at Krasibirsk and the nights of horror with the wolves, it was enough to be here.
But more serious decisions were afoot. Sadder ones, too.
Bubo, I think must have read my thoughts when we returned to Lenin Square.
“Some things have changed, Zoyenka,” he said gently. “We should talk now.”
His tone was enough. I nodded although not understanding. Anton’s face was suddenly set and troubled. Laryssa became silent.
“Great things are about to happen in Moscow,” Bubo began. “Or at least we believe and hope so. There are tens of thousands of penals there already. Thousands more are coming in from the north every day. According to the telex upstairs, in the eastern suburbs there’s already fighting. Over a hundred thousand men, some with weapons, have organized themselves into Gulag Regiments. It could be that just one more push is needed.”
I told him I didn’t understand. I looked at Anton but he was biting his lip, looking down at the carpet.
“This whole area north of Moscow is already out of control,” Bubo said urgently. “Not only the penals but some of the regular Army divisions have broken loose. Asiatic units here in Vologda have refused to attack us and have turned over their arms instead…”
“You want to overthrow the government?” Laryssa said in an awed voice. “Overthrow the Party?”
“I want to string up every corrupt judge and every camp guard. I want to burn every Security Board record, I want to catch the vlasti in their big apartments and turn them out into the snow to work. I want to tear down this whole stinking pigsty that they’ve built on Lenin’s Revolution. And if I can’t,” he said, “I want to tear down Moscow with my bare hands.”