‘Zulus here first. Now, everything taken away.’
‘I know,’ he said with some passion. ‘Ten years ago, more, I worked with Mohandas Gandhi. Do you know of him? Englishtrained lawyer who led campaigns for the rights of the Indians here. Passive resistance – that was his tool; we call it satyagraha in our language. You just down tools and refuse. But even as we won our small victory, a much greater injustice was being legislated into existence – I mean, the institutionalised discrimination against the native majority.’
He regretted his rather complex language, but she seemed to understand. ‘Gandhi? Where now?’
‘Went back to the Raj, to advance the rights of our countrymen on our own soil.’
‘In Bombay?’
‘I hope not.’ He closed his eyes then, and tried to imagine Bombay as it must be now. Gopal came from a well-to-do family from Delhi, but as a young man he had moved to Bombay for the commercial possibilities of a city that had grown huge under the British, and he had grown to love it: the sprawling old quarters, the giant cotton mills of the industrial zones, even the great administrative buildings of the British. And then there was the scent of it, of the spices of cooking, of the sandalwood burned at the festivals. Well, more than sandalwood would be burning in Bombay this terrible morning.
‘Can’t fight Martians,’ Nada said now. ‘Just wait until go away. What was word?’
‘What word? Oh – satyagraha.’
She repeated it with relish, syllable by syllable. ‘Satyagraha. Wait until go away. Then take land back.’
She was right, Gopal thought. But even if the Martians could be beaten, they would leave human affairs everywhere stirred up, as if with a giant spoon. Nothing would be the same, anywhere in the world, he supposed.
Nada stood. ‘Now I go home.’
He stood with her. They scrupulously shared out the water they carried between them, then shook hands rather gravely, and she walked away, deeper into the hills.
Gopal waited until the Martians’ main attack seemed to be over. Then he worked his way towards the outskirts of Durban.
As it happened the Martians themselves withdrew before Gopal reached the city. And he was intrigued to learn later, so he would one day tell me, that they had been seen heading north, a great ambulatory army of them, making steadily, it seemed, for the forested heart of Africa.
18
OUTSIDE ST PETERSBURG
‘Ulla! Ulla!…’
Heard in every continent, that day, from east to west, and south to north – from southernmost Africa to the far north of Russia…
‘Ulla! Ulla!…’
At midnight the Martians had landed at Tosno, some thirty miles south-east of St Petersburg. In retrospect Andrei Smirnov would reflect that the day Martians came to Mother Russia ought to have been strange enough. But, for him, it got stranger.
In his barracks in the city, Rifleman Andrei Smirnov had happened to be awake, and had seen for himself the cylinders pass across the sky, streaks of light like so many green shootingstars. Most of the men in the barracks, sleeping as best they could, had missed it. Even when the word got around, and those who woke were told the strange news, most of them didn’t care. Martians were England’s problem; Germans were Russia’s.
The city, Russia’s capital, sat on a fat isthmus between Lake Ladoga to the east, and the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic to the west. In this eighth year of a long war the German divisions had pushed through Finland and come on the city from the north, evidently intent on taking the capital at last, in a bold and demoralising coup. The Imperial Army had responded well. The Germans had been held north-west of the city, a line that had since solidified in miles of trenchworks and wire and artillery emplacements, backed up by rougher ditches and wooden barricades assembled by civilian squads. But they were German invaders stuck like a knife deep in the belly of Russia, and they had been there for years.
This particular night the men in Smirnov’s unit, on a rest rotation, had been holed up in what had been a school hall a few streets behind the Pushkin Theatre. They were far behind the lines, deep inside the city itself, on the southern bank of the Neva, the river that bisected St Petersburg. And when morning came the men, summoned by the bugle, formed up in a yard where no children had played for many months. Outside the barracks, a sense of urgency was apparent. Smirnov became aware of church bells ringing, rousing the population. They soon learned that Smirnov’s unit was being mustered, not to go north to meet the Germans, but south to face Martians. Smirnov could feel the fear sweep along the lines, like the passing of a ghost.
Andrei Smirnov was a conscript soldier, one of many millions – some said as many as five million – mobilised since the Germans’ declaration of war. He had seen little action, even since being posted here, to St Petersburg itself. Was he to be spared a German bullet, only to face an interplanetary death?
As it turned out, not that particular day.
A lieutenant, in a crisp staff officer’s uniform, walked along the lines, briefly inspecting the men. He stopped by Smirnov, tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned him away. ‘You’ll do. This way.’
In a moment Smirnov’s life had changed, and he was set on path that would lead me, one day, to write to him about his memories of this day. For now he was just confused, and wary, for no soldier likes novelty; novelty gets you in trouble, or dead. Smirnov looked over to his corporal, but the man shrugged. Smirnov had no choice but to follow the lieutenant.
The lieutenant looked him up and down. ‘Your name?’ Smirnov told him.
‘Can you ride a motorcycle?’
‘Yes, sir, I—’
‘I am an aide to General Brusilov.’
Automatically Smirnov stiffened to a kind of attention.
The lieutenant handed Smirnov a packet of papers, and a small white flag. ‘Here are your orders. You are to take a message to the Germans. Am I keeping you awake, soldier?’
‘No, sir. I mean – sorry, sir. The Germans, sir?’
‘You may have heard of them. Ugly sausage-eaters with pointy hats.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Naturally we’ve been trying to get through to them by other means, telegraph, wireless. We do need to communicate from time to time. Probably the wireless will work. You are something of a last resort.’
‘Very well, sir.’ He stood waiting for details.
The lieutenant, who didn’t look much older than Smirnov, waved his arms impatiently. ‘What are you waiting for, man, a push?’
‘But how should I—’
‘Ride through the city to the German lines, and wave that bloody flag before the Germans shoot your balls off, and make them read the letters. All right?…’
Of course it wasn’t as simple as that.
The first part of the assignment was easy enough. On his requisitioned motorcycle, he took a direct route north-west through the most picturesque part of the city, through Palace Square, across the Neva – from the bridge he had a fine view of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the oldest building in the city, now a prison, and scarred, like so many of the city’s landmarks, by the Germans’ shelling. But that morning the streets were filling, with confused and frightened civilians; more than once he had to gun his engine and wave to clear a path. Evidently the news was out that the Martians had landed to the south, and of course one would have an impulse to flee – but where to? The north was the obvious route, but the Germans were to the north, they had not magically gone away, and a German bullet would kill you just as effectively as the Martians’ magical Heat-Ray. The driving got easier as he reached the north-west suburbs, nearer the front line, and passed along streets that were much more badly damaged, and all but deserted.