The Town By The Sea

ON THE TRAIL OF PECHERITSA

After we had inspected the reapers I suggested taking a boat out to the harbour bar. We had been intending to go out there ourselves for some time, and now there was a good excuse. It was a fine evening with a light breeze blowing from the steppe.

During the past three days of anxiety, while the various shops turned and assembled the parts we had cast, the sea had been stormy. But at dawn today the gale had dropped and we had no difficulty in getting a light white-painted rowing boat from the Life-Saving Society's landing stage.

Petka and Nikita took the oars and I took the rudder. Only Sasha had nothing to do, so he kicked off his shoes and sat with his legs dangling over the bows.

We took turns at the long, springy oars and after about an hour the nose of our boat drove into the long spit of sand that ran out from one end of the town to the lighthouse.

Here there was nothing but sea and sky. The rippling expanse of water stretched away on both sides divided only by a narrow strip of clean, silvery sand.

The town was scarcely visible. Like seaside cottages in the distance, its tiny buildings ran along the shore from the Liski to Matrosskaya Settlement. To the right, at the end of the bar, stood the white cone of the lighthouse. It must have taken a lot of work to build it out there, on the treacherous sand, if even here the bar was so narrow that any big wave could easily swamp it.

Sinking into the soft sand, as if we were wading in a corn bin, we dragged the boat out of the water and Petka slipped his clothes off.

Like a goose flapping its wings in winter, Nikita swung his arms a few times, glanced with half-closed eyes lat the reddening sun, and dashed boyishly into the water. We, too, raced after Nikita into the gleaming sea.

There was something fascinating about bathing out here in this great open expanse of water. The sea was warm as a steppeland pool. Pounded by the heavy waves of the day before, the bottom was covered with sandy wrinkles. The pleasant salty breeze smelt of fish and rotting seaweed. And if you floated on your back, you could stare up at the sky where a merlin was hovering over the steppe. He was looking for prey, the rascal, but he just couldn't make up his mind what to swoop upon from his lofty height.

We had a grand bathe, and when we scrambled gasping out of the water, Nikita started doing physical jerks. He swung his arms about until the bones cracked. And although we had the open sea all round us and the tang of salt in our nostrils, it seemed as if we were back again with Nikita in Podolia. I thought of our walks round the town at night, and suddenly I remembered something.

"Enough of this mystery-making, Nikita!" I said. "Tell us what happened to Pecheritsa!"

"All right, I'll tell you, don't get excited!" Nikita replied soothingly, and sitting down in the boat, with his face to the setting sun, he began his story.

.. . Ever since Dzhendzhuristy had found the ginger moustache of the fleeing Pecheritsa by the entrance to the District Education Department, Vukovich's mind had been working overtime.

To discover where Pecheritsa might be hiding, one had to study his whole past, his present, and even to glance into his future, one had to find out about every friend or acquaintance he had ever had or was likely to have. One had to discover where he had travelled, what places he knew best, and then it would be easier to guess where he might find accomplices and protectors.

Zhitomir and Proskurov could be counted out. It was unlikely that Pecheritsa would think of stopping in those little towns situated so near the frontier. The frontier was always well guarded, and after Pecheritsa's flight from our town it would have been doubly dangerous for him to venture near it.

Judging from the ticket that Pecheritsa had left with me, it might be assumed that he had intended to travel as far as Millerovo. Surely he hadn't made for the Don or the Kuban?

From the fugitive's records and from information supplied by his former colleagues, Vukovich ascertained that Pecheritsa had never been in the region of the Don. What was more, soon after his arrival in our town, when he was still quite above suspicion, Pecheritsa had said proudly to a typist at the District Education Department: "I have never been to Moscovia and, God willing, I never shall. Why should I leave the Ukraine?"

It was hard to imagine that he had made such a statement deliberately, so that in a moment of danger it would make hated "Moscovia" a safer hiding-place for him.

In case that happened, however, all suspicious persons in Millerovskaya, Olkhovy Rog, Nikolsko-Pokrovskaya stations, and even in the villages of Krivorozhye and Olkhovchik were investigated. No trace of Pecheritsa was discovered there. In all probability Pecheritsa had taken the ticket to Millerovo as a blind. Who could tell whether he hadn't written himself out several more free travel warrants to various parts of the Ukraine, and perhaps under different names?

Vukovich set about solving the riddle.

The first thing he did, so Nikita told us, was to study the period when Pecheritsa donned Austrian uniform and marched into a Ukraine seething with revolution.

At that time the Austrian generals were using Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia for their own ends. A whole legion of "Galician Riflemen" was sent as part of the Austrian army to plunder the Ukraine.

Popular uprisings broke out in the Kiev, Kherson, Yekaterinoslav provinces. Villages and even whole districts mustered partisan detachments and fought the invaders. In the neighbourhood of Zvenigorodka alone the partisans destroyed several regular units of the German-Austrian army.

The Austrian Eastern Army was led into the Ukraine by Field-Marshal Bohm-Ermolli. The command was then handed over to General Kraus. At the end of March 1918, by agreement with the Germans, General Kraus plundered the Podol, Kherson, and Yekaterinoslav provinces—a huge area of the Ukraine stretching from the Zbruch to the Azov Sea.

As soon as General Kraus took command of the Eastern Army, the Austrians' adviser on Ukrainian affairs, Zenon Pecheritsa, received a staff appointment at the headquarters of the 12th Austrian Army Corps located in Yekaterinoslav. In this capacity Pecheritsa often accompanied punitive expeditions into rebellious districts, and on these occasions he used all his cunning to make himself useful to the Austrians.

Now, tracing Pecheritsa's route from the remote little village of Kolomiya to the shore of the Azov Sea, Vukovich discovered that usually when the Austrian punitive expeditions went out from Yekaterinoslav they based themselves on the colonies of German settlers, particularly in Tavria.

Vukovich had been familiar with Tavria since childhood. His grandfather, fleeing from Serbia after taking part in the uprising against the ruthless Prince Milosh Obrenovich, had settled there in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Tavria Vukovich's grandfather had married a Ukrainian woman and made his home there. Vukovich's father went to work at the iron mills in Mariupol, where he became a blast-furnace foreman. In Mariupol his son joined the Komsomol and during the Civil War was sent to work in the security forces.

As he studied Pecheritsa's route through the country of his childhood, Vukovich discovered that one of the Austrian detachments which Pecheritsa had accompanied had got as far as the German colony of Neuhoffnung, on the bank of the river Berda. Vukovich at once began to take an interest in the history of this colony and learnt that it had been founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Germans who had emigrated to Tavria from Wurttemberg.

Vukovich picked up his magnifying glass and scanned the map to study Zenon Pecheritsa's route to the Azov Sea in the spring of 1918. The security man found the map dotted with German

place-names—Forstenau, Goldstadt, Muntau... These were rich German colonies that abounded in the fertile Tavrian steppes. In the time of the tsars the German colonies had lived a life of plenty. But as soon as the call "All power to the Soviets" was raised at revolutionary headquarters in St. Petersburg, the wealthy German colonists were often awakened at night by their fear of the people's power.

They welcomed the Austrian army with open arms. When army curates in grey uniforms held thanksgiving services in the colony churches and prayed for the Hapsburg dynasty, the elders of the colony wept with joy.

There could be no doubt that the colonists treated Pecheritsa—an Austrian hireling with an excellent knowledge of German—as one of themselves and gladly assisted him in his raids on the Ukrainian villages.

Vukovich decided that a cunning enemy like Pecheritsa would be sure to have contacts in the colonies where he used to stay. It was no secret that the Austrians had planted agents in the colonies when they left. These agents, too, would make useful contacts for Zenon Pecheritsa to fall back on if the danger of exposure forced him to abandon his comfortable position and go underground.

Soon afterwards Vukovich learnt that a certain Shevchuk, an agricultural student from Podolia, had arrived at the state cattle-breeding farm in the colony of Friedensdorf for a course of practical training. Shevchuk had taken full board with Gustav Kunke, an elderly colonist who in the absence of the pastor was running the Lutheran chapel at the colony.

Vukovich had scarcely read this piece of information before another message was brought to him. From the town on the Azov Sea which had now become a second home to us Vukovich was informed that the suspected spy Zenon Pecheritsa had been seen in the town, but had evaded capture.

Though he had tried to foresee every possible action that Pecheritsa might make, Vukovich could not understand why Pecheritsa had shown himself in broad daylight in a crowded holiday resort. It would have been far simpler and less dangerous for him to have spent his time with the colonist he knew, Gustav Kunke. After long consideration, Vukovich arrived at the conclusion that Pecheritsa, on reaching Zhmerinka, had changed on to a train going to Odessa, and from Odessa made his way to the Azov coast by sea.

This assumption, however, turned out to be wrong. Pecheritsa did not go to Odessa and did not reach Tavria by sea.

First of all he took a train to Kharkov, expecting to find help and support there. But Kharkov was no place for him; at that time the Ukrainian nationalists there were being exposed and tried on a big scale. Pecheritsa, who had to stay the night illegally, now with one nationalist friend, now with another, might do his hosts great harm, and they advised him to hide himself somewhere farther away.

Pecheritsa took a train to Mariupol and from there drove over the dusty coastal roads to our town in a hired cab. Perhaps he was the "profitable passenger" about whom Volodya had told us so unsuspectingly.

Looking at it from his point of view, Pecheritsa was right in going to Mariupol. He was afraid of pursuit and wanted to cover up his tracks.

At a distance it is always difficult to get to the bottom of things. By agreement with his chief, Vukovich, who knew Pecheritsa by sight, took a trip to the district where Pecheritsa had appeared. That was how I had happened to see Vukovich on the day of his arrival, when dressed in his light summer suit and Panama hat he was walking from the station into town. He had not acknowledged me because he had wanted to keep his presence in the town a secret for the time being.

In our town Vukovich received a great surprise. When he arrived at the local security department, he was shown an urgent message from the stationmaster at Verkhny Tokmak. The message said that the

body of a murdered man had been discovered near the station, in a gully where pottery clay was usually quarried. The papers found on the body bore the name of Shevchuk which Pecheritsa had assumed when he fled from our town. . .

"A body?" Sasha exclaimed in awe. "But that's impossible! Who could have killed him?"

"Do you think I know who it was?" Nikita replied.

Petka was also deceived by the calm tone in which Nikita spoke.

"Vukovich told you everything, Nikita," he said disappointedly. "In such amazing detail. Surely he could have finished his story and told you who killed Pecheritsa?"

"Yes, just fancy, not telling me that.." Nikita murmured, scarcely able to conceal a smile. "By the way, chaps, are. you sure those reapers will be loaded before dark?"

"You can rely on Golovatsky," I said. "They'll be up at the station in time for the night train."

"Then I'll tell you the rest," said Nikita.