Night Soldiers (59 page)

He woke on the morning of the third day to find that he was soaked to the skin and the back of his throat was on fire. In panic, he forced himself to a sitting position, then swallowed obsessively until the burning subsided. He was thirsty, dry as dust. The only water available collected in shellholes or farmers' ponds or, in extremity, there was the river. But each time he had to drink he was in fear of cholera, so permitted himself only a few sips, imagining that his body would fight the bacteria better if it was limited to small doses.
An old wives' tale
, he told himself. Yet something primitive within him insisted that it be done that way even if he knew better. The body runs on liquid, he thought, I must have it.
No
, said another voice,
only a little
.

Out on the road, a small group of old people in black clothing was already on the move, though it was barely light. What did they eat? he wondered. He'd had a tin of jam the previous day. Had slid down an embankment onto the shore of the river, where he could hide in order to eat it. Like an animal with its kill, he thought. Plum jam. The most delicious thing there could possibly be. He'd sawn the tin open with his knife and spooned the jam up with his fingers.
Walk
, he told himself to stop the reverie.
Walk and you will feel better
. And there would be more jam tomorrow. Maybe the sun would come out and dry him off. Maybe the Americans would swoop down in one of their special planes—they seemed to have no end of them—and whisk him off to Switzerland, to Basel, to the Gasthaus Kogelmann. Where they served a thick pancake of fried potatoes and onions and, for those who took full board, Frau Kogelmann would make sure there was a second pancake for you if you were still hungry. When you drank some water, in the little dining area set off from the parlor, a boy came with a yellow pitcher and refilled your glass. You didn't have to ask.

Of the fourth day he remembered little. The villages of Ercsi and Adony and Dunaföldvár seemed deserted. He would wait at the outskirts for a group of refugees and walk through with them, so as to pass unnoticed. But he was not challenged. Russian military police sat in American Jeeps and smoked cigarettes, watching him limp past. At Fajsz, a woman came out of a house and gave him a cup of water. Her face beneath the black shawl was seamed and windburned, yet she was young and seemed very beautiful because there was pity for him in her eyes. He drank the water and handed the cup back.
“Köszönöm,”
he said, his voice a dry whisper. She nodded in acknowledgment, then a voice called from a house and she went away.

Some miles before the town of Mohács, he left the Great Plain and entered the swampland of southern Hungary. Now it was not so far to Yugoslavia. Soviet troops had been there longer, river traffic would be closer to normal. It was a guess—information abstracted from Czech newspapers by Hlava and reported to him twice a week—but a reasonable guess. The German censors did not want the population to know where the lines were, but they could not resist reporting Russian atrocities against civilians—an attempt to stiffen public resistance as the time of invasion approached.

Good guess or not, he would have to find a way to get back on the river, he could not walk much farther. The hunger had stopped gnawing at him, but his mind was running in odd channels, wandering through images of the past. There was no sense to them; they were simply moments of other days, things heard or seen with no reason to be remembered. He would, from time to time, snap awake, recall who he was and what he was doing, but then he would drift away once more. A woman in Fajsz had given him a cup of water. Or had she? Had that happened? At one point, somewhere south of Mohács, he came to his senses to discover that he was on his knees by the river, water cupped in his hands. There were black specks floating on the surface. He bent his head and sipped at it, but it was foul with dead fish and the taste of metal and he spit it out.

“Serves you right.”

Startled, he scrambled to his feet. The voice came from a small skiff not twenty feet away, its bow partly grounded on the sand. A man in the uniform of a Russian enlisted soldier was watching him intently. Then he realized, through a mist, that the man had spoken in Serbian, a Yugoslav language close enough to Bulgarian that he understood it easily. Had he left Hungary? Contrived to walk blindly through a frontier post?

“Here,” the man said, “try this.” He held out a canteen, the flat kind used by the Red Army, its canvas cover dripping from being hung over the stern of the boat in order to keep the water cool.

He waded over to the boat, accepted the canteen and took a brief drink. The water was cold and sweet. Handing it back, he saw that the man was wearing several ranks of medals on his jacket. He was young, nineteen or twenty, with service cap pushed back on his head to reveal hair chopped short in military fashion. The bottoms of his trousers were tied in knots just below the knees and a pair of homemade crutches was resting on the bow seat, their tops cushioned with folded rags.

The man waved off the canteen. “Go ahead,” he said.

Khristo drank more water, rubbed his lips with his fingers, and returned the canteen. “Thank you,” he said, using the Bulgarian expression.

“Bulgarian?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Home,” Khristo said. “Downriver from here. Near Silistra.”

“Can you row a boat?”

He nodded that he could.

“Come on then,” the man said.

Khristo climbed carefully over the side, balancing his weight so he would not rock the boat. The soldier changed seats, moving to the bow by using his hands to shift himself along the gunwales. Khristo took the oars—facing the “wrong” way, downstream, a river tradition that allowed the oarsman to keep an eye out for obstacles—and rowed out to midriver, his hands rolling over each other, oar blades chopping up and down in the water.

“Good,” the soldier said appreciatively. “I see you've done this before.”

“Oh yes,” Khristo said.

“Just as well. It's a bastard out here—you'll break your back trying to keep this bugger pointed downstream.”

“We have the current,” Khristo said, thankful he didn't have to put his back into it.

“More like it has us. You'll see.” He twisted around and watched the river for a few moments, then turned back to Khristo. “I'm Andrej,” he said.

They shook hands. “I'm called Nikko.”

He rowed for several hours as the rain sprinkled on and off. Andrej spoke casually of his time in the army. His father had been a great admirer of the Bolsheviks and had sent him off to enlist with the Russians in 1940. He had fought at Stalingrad as a machine-gunner, then come west with the Second Ukrainian Front, seeing action at the forcing of the river Prut and fighting through the Oituz Pass in the Carpathians. Wounded in the back by mortar shrapnel, he had served with a second-rank unit as far as the town of Szarvas, in eastern Hungary, where he'd stepped on a German land mine and lost the lower parts of both legs. He was philosophical about it. “At least they didn't get anything important,” he said with a wink. After a time in a field hospital, he'd taken off on “night leave” and caught a ride to Budapest. Nobody there wanted to hear about his problems—a harassed clerk took a moment to stamp his mustering-out papers—so he “borrowed” a skiff from a drunken guard and headed toward home, a little town to the east of Belgrade.

They crossed into Yugoslavia late in the afternoon and a Yugoslav patrol boat came alongside to take a look at them. Andrej tossed a salute, then waved his crutches. A sailor returned the salute from the foredeck while Khristo waved and smiled.

“Home,” Andrej said.

“Your Russian uniform,” Khristo said. “They don't seem to mind.”

“Why should they? We are allies. Tito will be running things down here and we'll be much better off. You'll see when you get home to Bulgaria. The Russians bring us peace.”

Khristo nodded polite agreement. “No more politics and feuding.”

“That's it,” Andrej said vigorously. “Everything nice and quiet, a man will be able to get on with his life.”

The tempo of the river was steady and constant and, after a time, Andrej's head lowered to his chest, his body rocking gently with the motion of the skiff as he dozed. Khristo rowed on, riding the current, working the oars as rudders to keep the prow pointed east. It required all his attention, and the repetition of effort soon crept into the muscles between his shoulders and resolved into a sharp, persistent ache. It was hard labor—Andrej had been right about that—the spring flood toyed with the skiff, tried to spin it in eddies or knock it sideways with a quartering swell, but Khristo used the force of the water to his advantage. He knew the techniques in his bones, having learnt the job as a child. And he had gained strength when Andrej had shared white cheese and bread with him. He was astonished at what a little food could do for a man.

In the skiff, he was much closer to the water than he had been on the
Tisza
, and he could see the war coming down the river—a gray sludge that floated on the surface, smashed tree trunks, dead birds, the tangled remnants of a feather mattress, a strip of German camouflage cloth wound around the end of a stick. What could that have been, he wondered.

The barge was close to the point where the Drava entered the Danube, near the town of Osijek, on the inside of a tight curve to the north. In the fading light he could see that it was a very old barge, half sunk in the water, half settled into the mud of the shoreline. There were white gouges in the wood at the stern—it was obviously something of a hazard to navigation, abandoned there long ago and never removed. An old man was sitting on the stern, fishing with a line on a pole and smoking a pipe. The barge's former markings were still visible, whitewashed numerals that appeared to have faded into the rotted hull over time. A 825.

He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again it was still there. Someone had reached out for him. He took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Resisted the urge to leap out of the boat then and there and swim wildly toward the barge.

In the bow, Andrej dozed on. He should be killed, Khristo thought. Because whatever cover story might be contrived at this point was going to be so thin that a light would shine through it. This close, the Czech automatic would do the job, and one more pistol shot on this river wasn't going to make a difference to anybody. But he hadn't the heart for it. The soldier's life had been spared in battle, he did not deserve to be shot dead in his sleep a few score miles from home. Khristo waited until the barge was out of sight, scooped some water onto his face, then shipped oars.

Andrej woke up immediately. They were rotating slowly in the current, drifting toward the rocky profile of the near bank. “Can't do it,” Khristo said sorrowfully, breathing hard, wiping his face. “Just can't do it.”

The soldier rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “What?” he said.

“I tried,” Khristo said, and by way of explanation extended his blistered hand.

“You can manage,” Andrej said. “I saw you.”

Khristo shook his head apologetically.

“Very well,” the soldier said, his expression resolute and cheerful. “I shall take over the oars for an hour, then we'll pull in for the night. That will fix you up, you'll see, by the morning you'll have your strength back.”

“No,” Khristo said. “It's best that I go on by foot, out on the roads.”

“Nonsense. Stand up and we'll trade places. Keep a lookout in the bow for your share of the work.”

“I cannot allow it,” Khristo said, putting the oars back in the water and guiding the skiff into the near bank, making a great show of hauling at the water.

“Don't be a proud fool,” Andrej said. “We must all work together now, remember, and take up the slack where we are able. I am able.”

“Rowed halfway home by a legless man? Not me.” The bow skidded into the mud and Khristo hopped out, then pushed the boat back out into the water.

The soldier worked his way down the gunwales to the rowing seat. “To hell with you, then,” he said bitterly, rowing the skiff toward the middle of the river, chopping angrily at the water with his oars.

By the time Khristo worked his way back through the underbrush along the shore, the old man had lit a lantern. He clambered up on the barge and called out a greeting. The old man nodded in response, not bothering to turn around.

“Any luck?” Khristo asked.

“No,” the old man said, “not much.”

“Too bad.”

“Yes. There used to be pike here.”

“The markings on this barge—I used to have a friend whose boat had the same numerals. Quite a coincidence, no?”

The old man nodded that it was.

“I'd like to see him again, this friend,” Khristo said.

“Then I'll take you there,” the old man said. He stood slowly, taking the line from the river and wiping the muck from it with thumb and forefinger, then kicked an old piece of canvas aside and, with his other hand, retrieved a Browning Automatic Rifle, the American BAR, much battered and obviously well used. “Your friend is my son,” he said, shouldering the heavy weapon, gripping it so that his finger was within the trigger guard. “You carry the lantern,” he said, “and go on ahead of me, so that he may have the pleasure of seeing his old friend arrive.”

They walked for a long time, climbing into an evergreen forest where the sharp smell of pine pitch hung in the evening air. This was the land called Syrmia, lying between the rivers Danube and Sava, the edge of the Slavonian mountain range that ran north into the Carpathians. The trail reminded Khristo of Cambras—a steep, winding approach with potential for ambush at every blind turn. His lantern sometimes showed him a gleam of reflected light at the edges of the path. Weapons, he thought. But these sentries did not challenge him or show themselves, simply passed him on silently, one to the next.

After an hour of hard climbing, the old man melted away and Khristo was alone in a clearing. He stood there patiently while, somewhere, a decision was made. Above him, an ancient fortress of weathered stone was built directly into the face of the mountain. There were hill forts scattered all across northern Yugoslavia, he knew, some of the sites already in use at the time of the Greeks and Romans and, the story went, never vacant for one day in all those centuries. From the top of the hill, the river would be visible for miles in both directions once daylight came.