Only toward the evening was their fury spent and then, in small groups of six or seven mounted men, they were themselves hunted down by militia units in armored patrol cars. Bubo, the tailor from Bratsk, died trapped in an alleyway, his horse bucking wildly and squealing in pain as the militia bullets ricocheted off the narrow walls. A Tatar death.
From the back of the wood truck Zoya, Anton and Laryssa could see the burning city receding in the distance.
Since dawn they had fought and punched their way through panicked crowds of refugees.
When I had time to draw breath, when I had time to look around me at the burning buildings and the fleeing people, at the frightened, white-faced militiamen and the shells exploding in the streets behind us, I found myself crying with strange exultation. At one moment I recognized Razina Street where I had stood, clasping my pathetic percussion grenade on the morning of Romanovsky’s funeral. When I looked up now and saw that the twenty stories of the Rossiya Hotel were on fire above my head I wanted to go into Red Square and stand in the middle of a blazing Kremlin and gloat. I had not, you will see, after the months in Panaka, escaped my own share of madness.
Before midmorning Anton had found an abandoned car with a few centimeters of gasoline still in the tank. It had not taken us far, but driving straight down the Ordynka Boulevard we seemed to bypass the worst of the fighting. By afternoon we were out of the city. There was a lot of luck involved.
After the gasoline ran out we walked. Or rather stumbled in the thick snow on the uncleared highway south of Pavelets Station trying to wave down a passing truck. We never discovered what our crazy woodcutter was doing in his lone ancient truck plowing through the snow toward Podolsk, but then we didn’t ask. All that was important was that he stopped and let us climb on the back.
South of Tula things seemed more normal. The snowplows had been out and there was more traffic on the road. Without too much difficulty we got another lift taking us almost 120 miles south to Orel. There, on the Moscow Road, just outside the city, the driver dropped us off at a gasoline point.
It was a fairly new concrete structure built, we heard later, for the 1980 Olympic Games. It had a shabby new hotel attached to it and Anton left with one of Laryssa’s silver pieces to see if he could buy us food.
I suppose it was a few minutes later that Laryssa and I heard the raised voices in the filling-station office. We could see the outline of two men and another sitting behind a desk. But what amused us most I suppose was the extraordinary inflections of the two men’s voices. They weren’t so much rising in anger as high-pitched in sheer fury.
I think Laryssa laughed for the first time that day. “Golden boys,” she said.
The problem, as we had no difficulty in overhearing, was their Zhiguli-Fiat, which we now saw was standing in a repair bay beside the pumps. From their exaggerated protests they might have been waiting years for the repair (whatever it was) to be completed.
Then suddenly within the office voices dropped. Perhaps you have to have grown up as a Soviet citizen to know by instinct that money was changing hands.
The two men came out of the office a few minutes later. They were both in their fifties, both exquisitely dressed with graying wings of hair brushed back from their temples. Laryssa immediately put on a remarkable performance. She glanced, apparently casually at the two men, then recoiled in affected surprise.
The two men looked at her in bewilderment.
“Leningrad,” she said. “The Saint-Tropez Club.”
They looked at each other in alarm. How were they to know that Laryssa knew every illicit drinking club, straight or homosexual, in Leningrad. And there was nothing straight, as she told me afterward, about the Saint-Tropez Club.
“You must have been there, gentlemen,” Laryssa said amiably. “It couldn’t have been anywhere else.”
Naturally they admitted nothing, although when Laryssa said she had worked in the kitchens of the club (quite untrue) for over two years, they relaxed a little. But perhaps it was only when my blond Anton came back that they really became friendly.
And so that was how we got a lift, the three of us crammed in the back of their repaired Zhiguli-Fiat, all the way to Batumi on the coast a few miles along from Turkey. And how the two golden boys, Peter Rinsky and his friend, in that turbulent Georgian port where Russian troops were still fighting a rearguard action against the independence forces, shared with us the precious name of a boatman.
Chapter Forty-Seven
In Red Square the GUM department store, looted of its tawdry stock, was blazing. On the corner of 50th Anniversary of the Revolution Square, fire had gutted both the Intourist and the National Hotels. Along the northeast wall of the Kremlin, across the Alexandrovsky Gardens, the whole of the Prospekt Marksa seemed to be alight. Flames pouring from the huge Rossiya Hotel cast a leaden orange glow over the waters of the Moskva River.
The random shelling had taken a terrible toll of the refugees. Along every sidewalk in the center of the city dark crumpled figures lay in the snow. Some still moved. At the great Botkin Hospital, where Lenin himself had been treated for a gunshot wound, at the ancient Burdenko and the Filatov Children’s Hospital, surgeons operated throughout the day and long into the night.
Deep in the Lubyanka Letsukov had heard the shelling. Throughout the day no guard had visited his box cell. No one had slopped soup into the wooden bowl chained to the back of the door. No one had brought a chair and a table and a man to stand behind you when the questions were asked. His neck was swollen out below the skull. His ribs were punched and kicked to a dropsical blue-blackness. If he moved it was to feel the pain in every bone and muscle in his legs and body.
Yet he had told them nothing. From that fact alone he derived a sense of pride that no beating could erase. He knew with certainty that he could hold out against them.
They had used all their resources of terror. In the night men in hoods had flayed him with chains. At dawn he had been menaced with unspeakable suggestions. He held before him the example of Joseph Densky even while he recognized that he would never possess that man’s capacity to influence evil. Sometimes he sang through cracked lips. Sometimes he shouted cheerful abuse at the guards. He had learned that above all he must not fear provoking them. Above all he must not be respectful.
Where it began nobody could say. Perhaps before the smoking wreck of the GUM department store, perhaps on the Marx Prospekt or in the gardens of the shell-shattered Polytechnical Museum. Or perhaps in all these places at once. But while the Gulag Regiments slept or rested, while the men from the camps wrapped themselves in the cotton blankets of the shops along Kuybysheva Street, in some unspoken alliance of the dispossessed, the Iskra march on the Lubyanka began.
They carried flaring torches even though the buildings still burned around them. They assembled in small groups and joined with other groups. They came together in hundreds and joined with other hundreds. While the Gulag conquerors of the city looked on in bleary approbation they marched toward the Lubyanka.
In Dzerzhinsky Square they gathered in their thousands, the handheld torches umbring the faces of Joseph Densky’s Russia.
They faced the gray stone building which had once been the home of the All-Russia Insurance Company and through whose dark Victorian basements, since the Revolution, the prisoners of Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, Beria, Andropov and Kuba had passed to the hutted camps of Soviet correction.