I looked at him in amazement.
“I’m not mad, Zoyenka,” he said quietly. “Or not more mad than I have every right to be, or any of us has. But by God what it’s done to us, that city!” His voice rose again. “If ever there was a Babylon, Moscow it must be. Not a city of harmless lust and drink and idleness, but a true Babylonian seat of power, greed and cruelty, from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin the Cruel, from Leonid Brezhnev to Semyon Trofimovich Kuba. Moscow must be destroyed!”
Moscovia delenda est ran like a scarlet ribbon through my mind. Bubo was from Bratsk, I myself from Leningrad, others among Bubo’s penal followers were from the far corners of Moscow’s old empire. In those few moments I believed like Bubo that if Babylon was destroyed its empire of misery must crumble with it.
“No,” said Anton, his hand coming down flat on the table. “Our duty is to save ourselves. To take advantage of the anarchy and go south to a Black Sea port. We’re a few thousand men, perhaps tens of thousands, but what can we do against tanks and aircraft?”
“If we get into the city they’ll have to destroy Moscow to destroy us,” Bubo said.
“Then they’ll destroy Moscow, you know that,” Anton said.
“So be it,” Bubo grunted. “So be it.”
I of course knew where I stood, although much of what Bubo said appealed to my vengeful imagination. But for Laryssa it was different. Bubo put no weight on her. Far from it. “You have to decide, little one,” he said. “But I think you would be mad to come with me. Go south with Anton and Zoya. Find some fishing village with a boat to hire.”
He pulled out of his pocket a canvas bag and spilled coins on the table. They were English sovereigns, gold francs, silver dollars and a few heavy gold rubles. He reached down and took the gold rubles from the scatter of coins. “Take them, Anton,” he said. “Let them remind you of your mother’s gold ruble.”
The rest of the money he pushed back in the bag and handed it to Laryssa. She took it silently.
I ran round the desk to hug Bubo. Like Anton I had no wish to be there when Laryssa said good-bye.
She came stumbling out into the cold five minutes later. As we crunched across the frozen snow down to the station she was shaken by bouts of sobbing.
“We’ll take the last coach,” Anton said, as we picked our way through the burned-out station. “He’ll let us off in the outskirts of the city.”
That evening the train stopped in some Moscow suburb and Anton, Laryssa and myself climbed down onto the track.
As the train lumbered slowly away, the old-fashioned whistle blew twice, then twice again. Anton and I put our arms round Laryssa as we watched the last red light fade. I never saw Bubo again. And neither, of course, did Laryssa…
In the huge courtyard of the new American Embassy the green bus rolled forward and stopped under the eyes of the Marine guards.
As the American, British and German embassy staffs crossed toward it, David Butler ticked them off on his pad. Jack Bennerman, the American evacuation officer, waved to the driver as the door closed and the bus moved slowly away. The journey to Sheremetyevo Airport on the northwest of the city would take about forty minutes. There a Finnair 747 was waiting within the heavily guarded perimeter.
From beyond the embassy walls the Englishman and American could see the dawn light rising above the city. As the last bus drove into the courtyard the senior embassy staff from half a dozen Western embassies, including two ambassadors, straggled across the courtyard while Jack Bennerman checked off names.
Near the end of the line Tom Yates was walking with Harriet, both hauling heavy leather suitcases.
“Where’s Carole?” David Butler asked, looking quickly down the line.
Tom Yates’ face was set. “She’s not coming.”
“What the hell do you mean, she’s not coming?” Bennerman said.
“She’s not coming, that’s what he means. She’s staying in Russia with her Russian,” Harriet snapped nervously. “Now for God’s sake, let’s get aboard.” She hurried forward.
Yates watched the other two men hesitate. “What is it?” he said bitterly. “Are you both in love with her too?”
Past the Pavelets Station Carole took the Varshovskoye Shosse, then drove south on Highway 5 toward Podolsk.
She was still shaking from what she had heard at Letsukov’s apartment. While she was hammering on the door a stranger had wrenched it open angrily. He had stood barefoot in an unbuttoned lumberjack shirt and baggy gray trousers staring at the obviously distraught Westerner opposite him.
When she asked for Letsukov the man had snorted angrily, “It’s we who live here now,” and he gestured to an unseen family behind him. “The old occupant’s gone.”
“Where, do you know where?”
Behind the man’s head she saw a militia uniform hanging on the cupboard door.
“Where he ought to have been a long time ago is my guess,” the man said and closed the door in her face.
There was no traffic on the southern road but the snow was thick and uncleared and she felt she was making agonizingly slow progress. Yet during the afternoon she had reached Podolsk and followed the railway track to the station where Letsukov had met her. For an hour after that in the almost deserted town she had driven through the suburbs looking for the old nineteenth-century Singer Sewing Machine Company building and only as the factory’s English sign stood out against the last pink streaks of daylight did she know she was on the right road.
Yet there were still another two hours of false turnings before she found the crossroads where she had last seen Letsukov, and another three or four miles along the lane she had finally abandoned the car.
Without snowshoes, sinking in the deep drifts almost to her waist, Carole had been in a state of collapse when Kitty and Volodya pulled her into the hut.
While Volodya took off her coat, Kitty wrapped her in a blanket and dragged her chair closer to the stove.
“He was arrested last week,” Kitty said. “Just after you were here.” She brought a glass of tea and placed it carefully between Carole’s hands.
“As far as we can understand,” Volodya said, “he was arrested for something to do with a fire at his office.”
“Do they know about the newspaper?”
“It won’t take them long to make the connection. We’re moving the presses tonight,” Kitty said.
The hot tea burned her fingers. “Do you know where he’s being held?” Carole asked.
“At the Lubyanka,” Volodya said shortly.
“He’s being questioned?”
They both nodded.
“Tortured you mean?” Carole said. She was shivering too much to hold the tea and Kitty stepped forward and took it from her.
Kitty placed the glass of tea on the stove-top and looked up at her husband. “You can tell her,” she said. “There can be no harm now. Not now that we’re just leaving ourselves.”
Volodya hesitated. “Do you remember us talking of a man named Joseph Densky?”
“Yes. He’s in prison in Leningrad.”
“No longer. Joseph Densky is now in Moscow. He has called on every Moscow worker to demonstrate tomorrow night. ‘Have courage,’ he said. ‘No one can guess what Moscow or even Russia will be the next morning.’”
Chapter Forty-Four
The morning wore on and the Gulag Regiments marched and sang through the thickening eastern suburbs of Moscow. Women hung from their tower-block windows and men on the street watched silently. But all through that long morning there were no incidents as nearly 150,000 men passed through the first suburban villages of the capital.