Little Apple (12 page)

"Got any cigarettes with you?" Kohout whispered. "Here, stick a few of mine in your pocket. Twenty's the limit, and I don't want any trouble."

They had to wait half an hour before their turn came. The immigration officer was sitting in a kind of booth just inside the door. Kohout handed him his passport and stood there hunched up against the cold.

The official took the passport and studied the particulars. He glanced at Kohout's face for a moment and exchanged a few words with a uniformed figure beside him, then pointed to a bench in the background.

"Go over there and wait," he said.

Kohout turned as white as the wall.

"But my suitcase," he stammered. "I have to get it checked by customs. What's the matter?"

"You'll find out in due course," the official said calmly. "Go over there and wait for me."

"What's wrong?" Vit¬torin demanded anxiously. "Aren't our passports in order? We're together."

The man looked up.

"Together, eh? In that case, wait over there too. I won't be long."

He nodded to his colleague, who shut the outside door. Then he examined the other passengers' passports.

Vit¬torin deposited his knapsack on the bench beside Kohout's wooden suitcase.

"What have you been up to?" he hissed. "Is there something wrong with my passport? If so, I'd sooner you told me right away."

Kohout leaned his head against the wall and said nothing.

Meanwhile, the official had finished checking the other passports. He stood up and beckoned to them.

"You two, come with me."

"Where to?" asked Vit¬torin.

"You'll see. Don't make a fuss, just come along."

Vit¬torin was told to wait outside an office while Kohout and the official went in. The sign on the door read: "Inspector, Frontier Security Service."

Their passports were forgeries - that was the only explanation. Vit¬torin gritted his teeth and longed for it to be over: the waiting, the interminable waiting, the questioning, the return journey. The return journey? No! He was determined not to go back. If they confiscated his passport he would have to sneak across the frontier on foot.

The door opened and Kohout emerged. Behind him came a man carrying his wooden suitcase.

"It's all a misunderstanding," Kohout said in a hoarse voice. He blinked nervously. "It'll be sorted out in no time. You go on ahead, I'll catch you up."

"Go in," the man with the suitcase told Vit¬torin, "the inspector's waiting. You can talk afterwards."

The inspector, a fair-haired, middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed moustache, gestured to Vit¬torin to sit down. The immigration officer was standing beside his superior's desk in an attitude of attention.

"Georg  Vit¬torin,   commercial employee,"   the inspector began.  He handed Vit¬torin's passport to his subordinate. "Read me out the particulars."

He then proceeded to ask Vit¬torin a number of questions concerning his destination, his connection with Kohout, the amount of money in his possession and how he had come by it. His answers were taken down in writing.

"Isn't my passport in order?" Vit¬torin asked.

"Your passport is quite in order," the inspector told him. "There's nothing to prevent you from continuing your journey. As soon as you've signed this, you may go."

Vit¬torin breathed a sigh of relief.

"I'd like to wait for my friend," he said. "We're travelling together."

The inspector stroked his blond moustache.

"Your friend is under arrest and will be brought before the relevant district court," he announced. "He admits to having embezzled the following sums from his employer, Dr Sigis-mund Eichkatz of No. n Grosse Mohrengasse, Vienna II: 270 lire, 118 reichsmarks, 420 lei, and i860 kronen. The money was found in his possession."

"I had nothing to do with it," Vit¬torin exclaimed in horror, "-absolutely nothing, I swear. I give you my word of honour!"

The inspector raised his hand.

"Had you been in any way compromised by circumstantial evidence or your friend's statements," he said, "I should have ordered your arrest. Please sign this declaration. If you hurry, you can still catch the train."

Kohout wasn't on the platform. It was only when the train pulled out that Vit¬torin caught a final glimpse of his friend.

He was standing near the boiler-house, flanked by two policemen and staring at the ground. Vit¬torin waved goodbye as he passed, but Kohout didn't notice. He was engaged in an animated soliloquy, from the look of him, because he was shifting from foot to foot and wringing his hands.

NO-MAN'S-LAND

Novokhlovinsk, a town some twelve miles south of Berdichev, consisted of three or four mean little streets and a marketplace. The handful of fishermen's huts near the river were grandly referred to by the local inhabitants as "the suburbs". When the Austrians withdrew, the inn in the marketplace, the "Hotel Moskva", had been requisitioned by the staff of the 3rd Ukrainian Volunteers as officers' quarters and orderly rooms. The staff telegraph office was installed in the schoolhouse, which had served as a quartermaster's store during the war. The station lay outside town, and anyone trying to reach it on foot in winter had to wade there through knee-deep snow.

This was the limit of Vit¬torin's progress to date, it having proved impossible to go any farther. The Ukrainian Volunteers were holding a line between Novokhlovinsk and Berdichev, and facing them was the Red Army's 2nd Lettish Rifle Regiment.

Vit¬torin had rented lodgings in a cobbler's house and seldom ventured out. His room, which was dark, shabby and ill-furnished, did duty as a bedroom, living-room and kitchen combined. The cobbler himself had taken his tools and retired to a sort of lumber-room.

On the fourth night after his arrival he was roused by someone hammering loudly on the front door. He pulled on his coat and made his way down the creaking stairs. The cobbler opened the door. The tall, gaunt, bushy-eyed man standing
outside wore neither overcoat nor fur jacket in spite of the cold.

Huddled in the snow beside him and muttering incessantly was a figure swathed in a brown leather trenchcoat.

Raising his lantern, the cobbler saw at a glance that the tall man was a Russian officer. He was about to slam the door and bolt it when Vit¬torin intervened.

"Who are you?" he asked. "What do you want?"

The stranger raised a hand to his astrakhan cap in salute.

"Captain Stackelberg of the Nizhgorod Dragoons," he said in a hoarse voice. "I'm looking for lodgings for myself and my brother officer."

"Lodgings? There are rooms for Russian officers at the Hotel Moskva."

The captain shook his head.

"Not for us - we don't belong to the volunteer army. My comrade is sick. Unless I find him a warm room and some dry clothes soon, he'll die on me here in the snow. I can't carry him any further."

"What's the matter with him?"

"I don't know - a fever of some kind. You see? He's delirious. He's just completed a very taxing journey. He needs rest, a warm room, and a bed."

There was only one bed in the house, but Vit¬torin didn't hesitate.

"He can have mine," he said. "There'll still be room for the two of us - we'll manage somehow. Come inside."

The captain saluted again.

"Thank you," he said, and turned to his friend. "Mitya, on your feet! Do you hear me, Mitya? That's wonderful - now you want to spend the night in the snow! Get up, there's a fire burning inside."

He patted the snow off his friend's leather coat and re-addressed himself to Vit¬torin.

"My comrade's name is Dimitri Alexeevich Gagarin. Those people over there" - he gestured toward the east - "they shot his father, Count Gagarin. You aren't Russian, but the name may be familiar to you."

They lodged together in the cobbler's room for three whole weeks. Stackelberg slept on the floor, Vit¬torin on a makeshift bed consisting of two chairs and a fur jacket. The nursing and housework they shared between them. In the morning Vit¬torin set off for "the suburbs" in quest of bread, flour, eggs, sheeps' cheese, or fish. Meanwhile, Stackelberg swept the room and lit the stove. The local physician, an elderly man who had once been the medical officer of a Volhynian regiment, looked in on his patient every evening. When they were alone again, Gagarin, his sunken cheeks still flushed with fever, would sit up in bed and listen in silence while Vit¬torin and Stackelberg engaged in endless conversations about Europe, Russia, and their personal experiences.

"Why should I keep anything from you, after all you've done for us?" Stackelberg said one evening. "You'd guess the truth anyway, sooner or later. This was Mitya's third trip through the lines from Moscow, carrying certain papers and documents. I take delivery of them on behalf of the legitimate government. Sometimes I act as a courier myself."

"Is it that simple?" Vit¬torin asked eagerly. "I mean, is it as easy as all that, sneaking through the front line? Your friend is little more than a boy - he can't be eighteen yet - and it must take some nerve ..." He broke off, reduced to silence by a hoarse bark of laughter.

"Nerve?" said Stackelberg. "He's so brave it's positively sinful, but the front line, as you call it, is a myth."

"Seryosha," the sick man called feebly, "when do I get my tea?"

"It won't be long, Mitya, just be patient," Stackelberg told him, and a gentle note crept into his gruff voice. "In Moscow they make tea out of turnips, but this is the real thing. You don't believe me? Ah, Mitya, you don't believe a thing unless it's staring you in the face, that's the kind of fellow you are."

He sliced some bread before turning back to Vit¬torin.

"Yes, the front line is a myth. There aren't any trenches. The Reds occupy the occasional farmhouse, post a lookout on the roof and a machine-gun in a window embrasure, and there's their front line for you. As for the Ukrainian Volunteers, they make speeches, wrangle over whether their officers should wear epaulettes, hold meeting after meeting, elect a regimental commander one day and dismiss him the next. They put up posters: 'The Volunteer Army is fighting for democracy. Join our ranks, help defend Russia!' Fine words, my friend, but they don't wash with me. That's not the Russia I'm ready to die for."

A vigorous shake of the head betokened that the subject was closed. He took the patient some tea and a boiled egg.

"There, look," he said, indicating the egg with a tobacco-stained fingertip, "I've brought you a little barrel with two kinds of beer in it. Now eat and drink up, Mitya, and be thankful you've kept body and soul together."

Whenever Vit¬torin headed for "the suburbs" in the morning, his route took him past a snowed-up timber yard. The plank fence enclosing it was covered with posters printed by the counter-revolutionary government. Sheets of blue, green and white paper bearing proclamations addressed to the Ukrainian people rubbed shoulders with caricatures of Lenin, Yoffe, Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka boss, and Sverdlov, the Tsar's murderer. Also to be seen were gory, garishly coloured illustrations of Bolshevik atrocities. One of these, which depicted a raid on a village, showed Red Guards with repulsively brutish faces mowing down peasants as they fled from their blazing cottages, seizing their womenfolk and driving off their livestock. Standing in the foreground in red-braided breeches and glossy riding boots, the sleeves of his leather jacket adorned with the Soviet star, was a Red Army officer whom the artist had endowed with a resemblance to General Voroshilov. He was leaning on his sabre and looking down, with an air of diabolical triumph, at the bloodstained corpse of the village priest. Beneath, in flamboyant red letters, was the caption: "This is how they liberate our Russian brothers." Vit¬torin lingered in front of this poster whenever he passed the fence. The Red officer's arrogant smile held him in thrall, filled him with impotent rage.
The way he stands there in his patent leather boots and riding breeches - well-groomed to his finger
tips, the perfumed murderer. At home he washes his hands in eau de cologne and reads French novels, and the women are for ever chasing
him. And I – I'm still stuck here in this godforsaken hole, getting nowhere fast . . .

It was an immense effort to tear himself away from the poster. When he got home, he raised the subject of Selyukov with Captain Stackelberg.

"Mikhail Mikhailovich Selyukov?" said Stackelberg. "No, the name means nothing to me. You'll have to consult the War Commissariat's personnel records, though God knows what kind of a mess they're in. Mikhail Mikhailovich Selyukov . . . So he's gone over to the revolutionaries - betrayed the Tsar and sworn allegiance to the Soviets? In that case he'll be serving on a front like this one here. He won't be a staff captain any longer - a battalion commander, more like. He was in the Semyonov Regiment, you say? Perhaps, but everything's gone haywire - you don't know where you are any more. Our Nizhgorod Dragoons have been renamed 'Lassalle's Own Red Cavalry Regiment' - that's the kind of thing that's happening these days. If he's as much of a low-down, bloodthirsty sadist as you say, you'd better look for him in the Lubyanka. That's where the worst of the scum are based."

"The Lubyanka?" said Vit¬torin. "What's that?"

"You've never heard of the Lubyanka? Why, God preserve you, the Lubyanka is the great revolutionary slaughterhouse, the headquarters of death. It's the nerve centre of the Moscow Cheka."

Count Gagarin, who was sitting beside the stove wrapped in blankets, looked up.

"You don't know the Lubyanka? Well, I do, God knows. I went there and was issued with a pass stamped 'CR', meaning 'Counter-Revolutionary'. Why CR, I wondered - my father had never dabbled in politics. Anyway, I was admitted to the office by a fellow posted outside the door, a sailor with a red arm-band. The commissar sitting at the desk wore glasses and had a shawl tied round his head - maybe he had toothache. He's a Christian soul, I told myself, so why shouldn't he take pity on me? I handed him my pass. 'What can I do for you, citizen?' he asked. 'Comrade,' I said, 'I only arrived from Petersburg this morning. My father was brought here on Tuesday. I've come to inquire the reason for his arrest.' The commissar consulted his list. 'No, he's not here.' - 'Please, comrade,' I said, 'have another look.' That annoyed him. 'He's not on my list, I tell you. Try again tomorrow, you can see I'm busy. Next!' - 'But I was sent here,' I said. 'You
must
have his file.' He banged the desk with his fist. 'Get out, you're wasting my time! Next!' He ignored me and started writing."