In my racing days I had kept my glasses anchored by a double head strap of elastic, a handy gadget now gathering dust with my five-pound saddle. It had never crossed my mind that it might mean the difference between life or death in Moscow.
They pushed and shoved, and more and more of my weight was transferred over the wall. It all seemed both agonisingly fast and painfully endless: a few seconds of physical flurry that stretched in my mind like eternity.
I was hanging on to the parapet and life with one hand, the rest of me dangling over the water.
They swung, as I had time to realise, one of the riot sticks. There was an excruciating slam on my fingers. I stopped being able to use them, and dropped off the wall like a leech detached.
12
Winter had already penetrated the Moscow River. I went down under the surface, and the sudden incredible cold was the sort of numbing punching shock which Arctic Ocean bathers don’t survive.
I kicked my way up into the air, but I knew in my heart that the battle was lost. I felt weak and half-blind, and it was dark, and thickly snowing. The temperature made me breathless, and my right hand had no feeling. My clothes got heavier as they saturated. Soon they would drag me under. The current carried me down river, under the bridge and out the other side, away from the Embassy; and even while I tried to shout for help I thought that the only people who would hear me would be the two who wouldn’t give it.
The yell, in any case, turned into a mouthful of icy water; and that seemed the final reality.
Lethargy began slowing my attempts to swim and dulling my brain. Resolution ebbed away. Coherent thought was ending. I was anaesthetised by cold: a lump of already mindless matter with all other bodily systems freezing fast to a halt, sinking without will or means to struggle.
I began, in fact, to die.
I dimly heard a voice calling.
‘Randall... Randall...’
A bright light shone on my face.
‘Randall, this way. Hold on...’
I couldn’t hold on. My legs had given their last feeble kick. The only direction left was downwards into a deep numbing death.
Something fluffy fell on my face. Fluffier and of more substance than snow. I was past using a hand to grab it, past even thinking that I should. But somewhere in the last vestiges of consciousness an instinct must still have been working, because I opened my mouth to whatever had fallen across it, and bit it.
I held a lot of soft stuff between my teeth. There was a tug on it, as if something was pulling. I gripped it tighter.
Another tug. My head, which had been almost under water, came up again a few inches.
A sluggish thought crept back along the old mental pathways. If I held on to the line I might be pulled out on to the bank, like a fish.
I should hold on, I vaguely thought, with more than my teeth.
Hands.
There was a problem about hands.
Couldn’t feel them.
‘Randall, hold on. There’s a ladder along here.’
I heard the words, and they sounded silly. How could I climb a ladder when I couldn’t feel my hands?
All the same, I was awake enough to know that I had been given one last tiny chance, and I clenched my jaws over the soft lifeline with a grip that only total blackout might loosen.
The line pulled me against the wall.
‘Hold on,’ yelled the voice. ‘It’s along here. Not far. Just hold on.’
I was bumping along the wall. Not far might be too far. Not far was as far as the sun.
‘Here it is,’ shouted the voice. ‘Can you see it? Just beside you. I’ll shine the torch on it. There. Grab hold, can’t you?’
Grab hold. Of what?
I lay there like a log.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said the voice. The light came on my face again, and then went off. I heard sounds coming nearer, coming down the river side of the wall.
‘Give me your hands.’
I couldn’t.
I felt someone lift up my right arm, pulling it by the sleeve out of the water.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said again; and dropped it back.
He pulled my left arm out.
‘Hold on with that,’ he commanded, and I felt him trying to curl my fingers round some sort of horizontal bar.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to climb out of the bloody river. You’re bloody nearly dead, do you know that? You’ve been in there too bloody long. And if you don’t get out within a minute, bloody nothing will save you. Do you hear that? For Christ’s sake... climb.’
I couldn’t see what I was supposed to climb, even if I had the strength. I felt him put my right arm up again out of the water, and I thought he was trying to thread my right hand behind the horizontal bar until I had the bar against my wrist.
‘Put your feet on one of the steps under the water,’ he said. ‘Feel for them. The ladder goes down a long way.’
I began vaguely to understand. Tried to lodge a foot on an underwater horizontal bar, and by some miracle found one. He felt the faint support to my weight.
‘Right. The bars are only a foot apart. I’ll pull your left hand up to the next one. And whatever you do, don’t let your right hand slip out.’
I dredged up the last remnants of refrigerated strength and pushed, and rose twelve inches up the wall.
‘That’s right,’ said the voice above me, sounding heartily relieved. ‘Now keep bloody going, and don’t fall off.’
I kept bloody going and I didn’t fall off, though it seemed like Mount Everest and the Matterhorn rolled into one. At some point when half of me was out of the water I opened my mouth and let the fluffy but now sodden thing fall out: and there was an exclamation from above and presently the line was tied round my left wrist instead.
He went up the ladder above me, still cursing, still instructing, still yelling at me to hurry up.
Step by slow step, we ascended. When I reached the top he was standing on the far side, grabbing hold of me to roll me over on to the flat solid land. My legs buckled helplessly as they touched down, and I ended in a dripping heap on the snow-covered ground.
‘Take your coat and jacket off,’ he commanded. ‘Don’t you realise cold kills as fast as bloody bullets?’
I could crookedly see him in the streetlights, but it was his voice I at last conclusively recognised, though I supposed that at some point up the wall I had sub-consciously known.
‘Frank,’ I said.
‘Yes? Get on with it. Look, let me unbutton this.’ His fingers were strong and quick. ‘Take them off.’ He tugged fiercely and stripped off the clinging wet sleeves. ‘Shirt too.’ He ripped it off, so that the snow fell on to my bare skin. ‘Now put this on.’ He guided my arms into something dry and warm, and he buttoned up the front.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now you’ll bloody well have to walk back to the bridge. It’s only about a hundred yards. Get up, Randall, and come on.’
There was a sharp edge to his voice, and it struck me that it was because he too was feeling cold, because whatever it was that was sheltering me had come off him. I stumbled along with him on rubbery knees and kept wanting to laugh weakly at the irony of things in general. Didn’t have enough breath, however, for such frivolities.
When I nearly walked into a lamp post he said irritably, ‘Can’t you see?’
‘Lost my g-glasses,’ I said.
‘Do you mean,’ he said incredulously, ‘that you can’t even see a bloody big lamp standard without them?’
‘Not... reliably.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
Inside his coat my whole body was shuddering, chilled deep into the realms of hypothermia. Although they were apparently functioning, my legs didn’t feel as if they belonged to me, and there was still a pervading wuzziness in the thinking department.