The Dangerous Years (13 page)

‘And I am wearing at least three of everything except shoes,’ she said. ‘God help anyone who feels gallant enough to try to carry me aboard.’

The rumble of guns to the north was more pronounced now, with faint screams and the noise of bloody little affrays as the Bolsheviks pressed deeper into the city. As they moved down the stairway to the kitchen, they could hear the smashing of glass and occasional shouts, and a baying sound like a pack of hounds. The hearse turned out of the drive, the nervous driver clutching the reins in mittened fingers. Rumbelo sat alongside him, wearing an old top hat of Driand’s and a ragged jacket from the corpse in the garden which concealed the revolver that was jammed into the driver’s side. Behind the hearse marched the two other sailors, unshaven and looking like anything but naval personnel. In his enthusiasm, one of them wore a voluminous black coat of Madame Driand’s which he’d had to split across the shoulders to get on his broad frame, but it was vast enough to allow him to carry a rifle underneath. The other weapons were within easy reach inside the hearse.

They looked a shabby procession as they stumbled down the street. The girls were acting the part well, sniffing into handkerchiefs and pretending to weep, with Vera Brasov the most enthusiastic of all, howling from time to time and helped along by Kelly who walked with one hand supporting her round the waist, the other hand jammed in his pocket with his revolver.

A sleety snow was drifting down, wet and freezing so that the crowd at the end of the street was thin. It opened to let them through without question. The hearse had passed that way every morning and only a few incurious eyes watched them. Vera Brasov set up a new wail of anguish and Kelly’s hand tightened on her waist.

‘For God’s sake,’ he breathed, ‘don’t make a meal of it!’

Fires were raging everywhere in the city now and Red infantry was pouring into the suburbs. Down the Kiev road Red cavalry was clattering towards the Nikolaevsky Boulevard, searching the hospitals for helpless White officers. A wind of arctic bitterness was blowing and in almost every street they saw bodies, some of them coatless and bootless, stiff and blue with the cold.

Then they heard the rattle of small arms fire and Driand held up his hand.

‘The mob is moving down the Shevchenko Boulevard,’ he said. ‘And we have passed the cemetery long since. It is imperative that we get rid of the hearse.’

At a signal to Rumbelo, the vehicle swung into the drive of a deserted house under the trees. The two old men, stiff and half-frozen, were helped out of the improvised coffin, and Madame Driand slung a length of carpeting over Prince Busukov’s shoulders. He shrugged it off immediately.

‘I prefer to die like a Russian prince,’ he said.

Growing sick of the whole performance, Kelly drew his revolver and stuck it under the old man’s nose.

‘Take off your jacket and cap,’ he ordered. ‘You’ve made a token escape in full uniform and decorations. Let it be enough.’

The old man was too startled to argue. As he stripped off his tunic, Kelly helped him into his own stinking leather overcoat and slammed a fur cap on his head. The medals were thrust into the Princess’ handbag and the tunic turned inside out and placed round one of the older children. At the sight, Vera Brasov’s funeral wails changed into a gust of laughter and the Driand girls began to collapse into helpless giggling.

‘Dry up!’ Kelly snapped and they stopped with an abruptness that indicated there had been more than a little hysteria in it, and one of them began to sob.

The driver was touching Kelly’s arm. ‘Gospodin–’

‘Pay him, Driand!’ Kelly said. ‘Then lock him in the hearse, Rumbelo, and take the horses out of the shafts and tie ’em up somewhere. That ought to stop him raising the alarm before we’re clear.’

Pushing the women and children before them, the sailors huddled them together in the ruined garden. As the mob drew nearer rifle bolts clicked. But the crowd swept past, filling the street and ignoring the shadows. One or two of the smaller children began to wail with hunger and their mothers and older sisters clutched them to them, whispering urgently to them to be quiet, trying to instil their own fears into minds too young to be aware of the danger. For an hour the mob swirled up and down beyond the garden wall and they could hear the crashing of glass and yells and occasional shots, and once they heard the most appalling screams as though some wretched girl had been discovered hiding in an attic or a cellar and been dragged out to be raped by her tormentors. As the racking screams rang out again and again, Vera Brasov clapped her hands over her ears, her face agonised, and buried her face in Kelly’s coat.

‘We cannot stay here,’ Driand told Kelly. ‘They have never forgotten that the French came to the assistance of the Whites last year. They would kill the consul. I’ll go ahead and find a safe route.’

Shuddering with fear, he slipped out of the garden into the darkness. It was cold under the trees and the children were whimpering with the icy wind, and Kelly was just wondering how in God’s name they were going to move Busukov’s wife when Driand returned. He was pushing a wheelbarrow.

‘I doubt if she’ll argue about the transport,’ he said. ‘And I have found a route.’

Leading them from the garden in the shadow of the trees, he dived down a narrow alley so suddenly they almost lost him. The whole city seemed to be awake now and, with two of the seamen carrying the money and Rumbelo wheeling the barrow containing the old woman, they began to move past the backs of shabby houses that grew smaller with every step. The barrow wheel shrieked like a pig in torment and, underfoot, the paving stones gave way to cobbles, then to slush that crept up to their ankles and splashed skirts and trousers. Finally they found themselves creeping past middens and back alleys until they reached the waterfront at last, and headed for the area of the Fleet Landing Place.

Occasionally, soldiers waved them past, giving them snippets of news as they went. To the north typhus was raging everywhere and the White medical services had broken down completely. Desolation and anguish gripped the countryside and thousands of wounded died untended as hospitals were evacuated. Horses, wagons and guns were being abandoned, and the Greens under Mahkno were looting what the Bolsheviks hadn’t already taken, while the Reds were capturing whole strings of stranded trains full of sick and starving women and children. Any white officer who was found was murdered on the spot in front of his family, and the frozen bodies lay in piles on every station, neatly stacked like the wood they used in the engine furnaces, grey-white and stiff, and naked because their clothes had been stripped off for the living.

Boyle was tense and nervous as a kitten but he had the little hotel well guarded, with men in the upstairs windows. Food had been found and there was even a large pot full of hot soup with black bread. With the children sleeping in their arms, the women sat around the shabby lounge on chairs and settees from which the stuffing had been removed by rats and mice to make nests.

They spent the whole of the next day in the deserted hotel. No one came near them except a small group of people who discovered the broken back window, and climbed inside to find the place already occupied. By some strange alchemy of physical attraction, Boyle and the eldest of the Baptiste daughters, Anne-Marie, decided in their moment of strain that they were soul-mates and spent their time whispering in a corner when Boyle wasn’t dodging out to find out how the land lay.

They could see several huge fires close by, one of them filling the sky with flying sparks.

‘The Hotel Besserabia,’ Driand reported, returning from one of his forays into the darkness. ‘It was packed with refugees.’

There was no water in the Tsar Alexander I and no sanitary arrangements, and they were beginning to grow hungry by the next evening when the darkened rooms were suddenly flooded with light. Peering through a crack in the boarded-up windows, they saw a dazzling blue-white beam from the sea moving slowly across the town to the snow-clad hills beyond.

‘Searchlights, sir!’ Rumbelo breathed. ‘That can only mean one thing.’

When Boyle reappeared from one of his prowls along the waterfront, his face was alight with relief.

‘The Navy’s here!’ he announced. ‘I didn’t see
Mordant
, but I saw what looks like
Queen Elizabeth
and a cruiser. There are also one or two transports and passenger vessels and a few small coasters flying Greek and Turkish flags.’

In the relief that flooded over him, it suddenly occurred to Kelly that neither he nor Rumbelo had been to sleep for three nights.

As they woke the others the next morning, they could hear shots and cries of anguish as the town fell into a final reign of terror, with robbery, murder and rape as hourly occurrences. With daylight they made their way past the deserted inner basins of the harbour to the moles.
Queen Elizabeth
had started lobbing ten-inch shells over the city on to the approach roads being used by the Reds, her big guns booming with the monotony of a tolling bell. But by now an avalanche of refugees was filling the city so that it had become a vast camp of starving people desperate after their long trek from the north. Many of them were too weak and too disheartened to help themselves, however, and those who were still capable were surrounded by a sea of sick.

The streets, full of boarded shop windows, were thronged with carts, perambulators and barrows and they had to push past desperate merchants trying to get their remaining goods to the wharves in the hope of starting their businesses again elsewhere. There were even still a few lost troops, cutting off their shoulder straps and seeking scraps of red cloth with which they might hide among the advancing Bolsheviks; while officers were wrenching off their epaulettes, because the Communists had an obsession about these symbols of privilege and liked to indulge in the pleasant habit of stripping their captives naked and nailing them to their shoulders.

The only way out of Odessa now was by barge, launch, tugboat, a Mediterranean tramp or a military transport or man-o’-war. In every street lay bodies, their clothing stirred by the piercing wind that had got up. It was freezingly cold and petrified the starving scarecrows among whom the typhus was already reaping a terrible harvest. People who had once lived in great houses were now existing in squalid cellars so that the whole city seemed to be overwhelmed with despair. Though more ships were appearing all the time and the Italian Lloyd Line offices had opened, the city was in terror because organised bands of criminals looting the northern suburbs were only held back from the waterfront by the guns of British ships. The Reds were in no hurry, however, quite content to wait until the warships had gone, because only a few outposts of White volunteers still guarded the hills, and infiltrators were in the streets, bold and unafraid.

As the grey-black sea rolled against the frost-bound shores of the bay, the rigging of the ships sparkled with icicles. A group of boys dressed in rags were doggedly stoning a few seabirds trapped in an area of thin ice. As one of the birds was hit, it lay helpless, its head bloodied, one wing dangling, squawking feebly, then the boys saw Kelly’s party and swarmed round them at once, crying out ‘Mister! Mister! Bread!’

A Refugee Control Office had been opened near the new Mission Headquarters but it was drowning under a tide of frantic people. Fighting his way through desperate men and women, Kelly had his orders made clear to him.

‘No civilians. Only Mission troops, soldiers of the Volunteer Army and their families. The Control Commission will be vetting everybody who steps aboard.’

As he left, the city rocked under a tremendous explosion as the port’s petrol tanks were fired. The shooting sounded closer and the union jack over Mission Headquarters came down in jerks. Lighters, launches and small Levantine transports, their owners making fortunes from the last agony of the White armies, were already crammed to capacity, but people who could find the money were still joining them, packing on to vessels that were already criminally overcrowded and devoid of the simplest means of sanitation or feeding. But, while sobbing women and their screaming children were being put back ashore because they couldn’t pay, the possessions of the wealthy were still being dragged up the gangplanks, and a heavy Stutz motor car and a grand piano were lifted aboard near the petroleum harbour, watched by a man in a fur cap and coat, a cigar in his mouth.

The moles were black with shivering human beings. Some of them, still haughty and high-nosed, wore furs and stood optimistically among piles of trunks, but there were others petrified with cold who wore only a coat over their night attire. Every refugee in the city, knowing what awaited them when the last of the ships left, was on the quay now, and heavy guards were posted on the gangways of all the warships to prevent them swarming aboard. They were camped in thousands, clutching their belongings and warming themselves round bonfires they’d lit. Occasionally, a desperate young man jumped into the icy sea and swam to a ship, only to be plucked from the water, dried off, and returned to the shore. Fat merchants offered suitcases full of valueless paper roubles and young girls frantically offered themselves in the hope of earning enough to pay their passage to safety.

The place was sick, desperate and terrified, with people surging in huge crowds to any point they thought might give them a better chance of safety, pushing between horses and wagons to crowd the waterfront and plead with shipmasters, knowing their only alternative was death under the sabres of the Bolshevik cavalry.

The big guns of
Queen Elizabeth
boomed again as Kelly’s party made their way through lines of abandoned field pieces, ammunition, supplies and equipment, and along the treacherously iced planks of a board walk to the quayside. The ships against the wharves were so packed with desperate human beings not another soul could be squeezed aboard, and here and there panicking seamen cut loose from time to time with machine guns over the heads of the mob to keep them at bay. Then, beyond the Volnolum breakwater, they saw the slim lines of a destroyer anchored in the bay and Rumbelo touched Kelly’s arm.