Moskva

49 An Ordinary Train

Tom watched the KGB officer’s gaze slide over him, barely taking in his turned-up collar and pulled-down cap. Half the passengers were dressed in similar fashion. The choice was suffer the cold in this carriage or swelter in the one behind, which had heating enough for the entire train. The young man who’d followed Tom from the Hotel National opened his mouth to object, shut it again and let the officer lead him from the Moscow–Volgograd express at the first station outside the city.

‘Black market,’ someone muttered.

‘Roubles for dollars.’

They looked out at Tom’s shadow protesting loudly on the platform that he needed to be let back on to the train and watched him grow flustered when the doors were slammed and the diesel growled back into life.

As the train pulled away, Tom looked around, wondering who was watching him now. Someone would be. Unless General Dennisov was simply relying on Tom to deliver himself. That was always possible. As before, he was travelling without proper papers. Once again, he was headed for a city about which he knew almost nothing. There the similarity ended.

This train couldn’t be more different. Yelena’s had been luxurious, a gilded relic of an imperial mindset. This one couldn’t have been more utilitarian. It rattled and stank, and the windows let in the cold and squeaked so badly that Tom wanted to find a screwdriver and tighten the screws himself because he wasn’t sure he could stand another twenty hours of this.

After a while, he pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and kept it angled to the window in case the fat woman next to him woke and wondered why her neighbour was reading something foreign.

No mention was made of the Tsaritsyn Monastery in any of the guidebooks for sale in the foyer of Caro’s hotel. But Tom had a photocopy of an entry from the old Guide to the Russian Empire that Mary Batten had lifted for him from the embassy library.

Published three months before the Great War began, it said little about the monastery except that it was remote, rarely visited by tourists, and while a boat trip on the Volga was well worth the effort, Tsaritsyn Monastery itself had little architectural merit, certainly not enough to balance the inconvenience of two days’ travel along rough cart tracks through unkempt forest.

A note in the margin, handwritten by someone taught letters in the old fashion, by endless repetition between ruled lines, agreed and disagreed.

The monastery itself was nothing, crude even by provincial standards.

But its medieval rood screen, originally from Kiev and presented by the local governor fifty years before, was a work of art, if not by Andrei Rublev, at the very least by a direct disciple.

When Tom next looked at his watch, four hours had gone by and most of the others had joined the woman next to him in dozing. Only an old woman and a whining child seemed resolutely awake. Tom noticed that though she gave the boy regular cups of tea from a tatty Komsomol thermos, and slices of bread and sausage, she drank and ate almost nothing herself and looked anxious when she saw Tom notice. He nodded, and after a moment, as if afraid of being rude, she nodded back.

Stations came and went.

A few people got off. A few got on.

At one station, the young woman Tom had decided was shadowing him clambered stiff-legged from her seat, dragged a cheap cardboard case from the rack overhead and left without looking back. No one replaced her. At least, if they did, they didn’t sit in that carriage. He was left to memories and thoughts and found neither welcome.

Caro had cried when he said goodbye.

That was unexpected. He’d have said she’d grown to dislike him too much to be anything but grateful to have him out of her life. But he’d never been good with that stuff. And he was, he imagined, out of her life now, one way or another.

‘Take care,’ she’d said.

She’d gripped his shoulders in the foyer hard enough to make the desk staff stare and kissed him fiercely. ‘Russia suits you.’

He’d looked at her, wondering.

‘Here,’ the boy opposite suddenly said.

Several people glanced round to see him offer to share his vodka. A handful of those looked hopeful, perhaps believing the Stolichnaya might come their way. It didn’t. Tom took a hefty swig and let most run back, returning the bottle with a nod.

‘Going or returning?’ Tom asked.

The conscript’s grin was an answer in itself.

Five minutes later, the boy was deep in a long and one-way conversation about a bar brawl in Minsk. A minute after that, he was showing Tom a scar, which was still raw and curved, a hand’s breadth above his hip from his belly to his back. As night drew in, the passengers settled, the main lights went down and half-lights came on, and the carriage might have been brighter, if most of those hadn’t been broken, stolen or simply never replaced. Like birds roosting, people dropped off to sleep until only Tom, the kid with the scar and a girl who’d moved next to him after he told the story about the knife fight were awake.

In the end, Tom took pity on them and shut his eyes too.

The kids were discreet. You had to give them that.

Of all the things Tom might have felt, sadness was the most unexpected. Not at what they did but at the youth and innocence that let them do it. You needed both to be them. Tom knew, even before the diesel made an unscheduled stop just outside Volgograd, and the old woman and small boy went to the door to wave to militsiya officers who came aboard to usher Tom off, that if he could buy Alex the chance to be young and behave as badly, he would.

A Tartar in a tatty flying jacket, with its collar up, was waiting by the entrance. The man was grinning and Tom understood he was the joke. The man’s eyes were black and unblinking, so flat it felt like looking into a void.

When he nodded to the militsiya, they let go of Tom’s upper arms and stepped back, turning for the exit without saying a word. The man watched them go for a moment, his expression unreadable, then he gestured for Tom to step closer.

Without losing the grin, he said, ‘You do what I say or we kill the girl. Understand?’

‘Of course. I understand.’

‘Now. You have the photographs?’

‘I have the photographs.’

‘Show me.’

‘When I’ve seen Alex.’

‘One photograph. To prove you have them.’

‘You really think I’d come all this way without them?’

‘You’d be unwise to.’ The Tartar turned away and an old woman brushing snow off the opposite platform with a twig broom glanced over, hunched her shoulders and hurriedly went back to work. Some things it was safer not to see.

‘You liked my present?’

Tom stared back impassively.

‘That cat. I particularly enjoyed my share of the skin. Fiddly, removing all that hair, of course. But worth the effort.’ His grin widened as they headed out of the station.

‘Your transport awaits.’

Tom stared in disbelief at the open-top Jeep the Tartar indicated. It had snow tyres and metal front seats, no seats at all at the back, and its side windows at the front were wound down. There was nothing to protect him from the cold.

A short drive brought them to an apartment block at the river’s edge.

‘Alex is here?’

‘You think we’re fools?’

Broken bricks had been built into a wall that hugged the building’s edge like ivy. Cut into them were the words Not One Step Back.

‘You know where we are?’

Tom shook his head.

‘You should. You know why the French surrendered? Because they were weak. You know why the Germans surrendered? Because they were weak. Sergeant Pavlov wasn’t weak. He became what he had to become. We all did. Pavlov held this building against Nazi tanks, bombers and infantry for a month.

‘All his food,’ said the Tartar, ‘all his drinking water, ammunition…’ He turned to look at the frozen river. ‘All of it came across that under attack from enemy planes. The Nazis lost more men trying to take this building than taking Paris… Volgograd.’ He spat, phlegm sliding on ice at his feet. ‘What sort of fools rename Stalingrad?’

‘You were there?’

‘In this house?’ The Tartar shook his head.

‘But you were at Stalingrad?’

There was something hard, entirely inhuman in the man’s stare. He looked again over the frozen waters of the Volga and Tom knew that what he saw himself wasn’t what this man saw. ‘We learned to kill. We learned to like killing. After the war, they wanted us to go back to being who we’d been before.’

‘You couldn’t?’

‘No one could. You really didn’t recognize me?’

‘Not until you mentioned the cat.’

‘You’re sure you have the photographs?’

He was the one grinning at the camera when Golubtsov was tied to a chair. The one holding the board in front of an oak tree from which four German teenagers hung, a board that read The Tsaritsyn Boys. In an earlier, more innocent picture he’d been peering at the engine of a captured Panzer, his hands streaked with oil, while the others simply posed.

‘Kyukov,’ Tom said. ‘You were their engineer.’

‘Mechanic. I was their mechanic.’

‘General Dennisov’s friend.’

Again that half-look into the distance as if sifting memories or consulting with ghosts. ‘His oldest,’ Kyukov said. ‘His best.’

Tom shivered.