Death Is My Comrade (21 page)

In less than an hour we had reached the marshes. The trees thinned out. The rain pelted us. Pretty soon we were walking ankle-deep in muddy water, then knee-deep, sloshing, splashing. Smaller, gnarled trees grew there. They offered no protection from the rain, but their underwater roots tripped us. We could have been going in circles, but the woodcutter never faltered, never paused to get his bearings. He had a hurricane lamp, and we followed its feeble light through the marshes.

The dogs bayed and yelped behind us. A mile? Two miles?

It was almost dawn when we reached a narrow, unpaved road. It had been built on a causeway cutting across the swamp. You could see the sheets of rain bouncing off it, silver in the murky dawn light. The sky was lead.

“Four miles,” Mike Rodin said. “Four lousy miles. That's what the woodcutter figures.”

Mike Rodin told me: “We were supposed to make ten miles tonight. Beyond the marsh there's a kolkhoz, and transportation.”

“What kind of transportation?”

“Bus convoy for farm laborers. They could have taken us clear to the river below Pestovo.”

“Will they wait for us?”

Laschenko shook his head. Water flew from it. “They can't. They pass a checkpoint at Bezhetsk. Have to pass it on schedule or risk questioning, perhaps a thorough search.”

“What's the difference?” I said dryly. “If we're not aboard.”

The woodcutter said something. Laschenko nodded slowly. “Six miles,” he told us. “We must make those six miles this morning. By no later than ten. They leave at ten.”

We had climbed the causeway and stood on the muddy road. I pointed down to the swamp. “We'll never make it—through that.”

Laschenko grunted, said: “It was decided to keep off the road until we reached the kolkhoz.”

“We'll have to chance the road now.”

Mike Rodin nodded, and so did his brother. We set out again.

Ten minutes later Rodin had a bad attack.

There was no warning. He stumbled suddenly and sat down in a puddle of rain water. He made a sound in his throat, a muffled cry of pain. Eugenie ran to him, knelt at his side, rocking his head against her breast. “Daddy! It's all right, we're here. Daddy, I'm here with you.…”

I opened Mike Rodin's wet knapsack and found the morphine and the needle. Rodzianko saw it, nodded and rolled up his brother's wet sleeve. I administered the shot.

We waited. Rodin relaxed almost at once, but it was a half hour before he could talk coherently and forty minutes before he could get to his feet.

“We'll wait, Mike,” I said. “Tell us when.”

“Now,” he said promptly, his face gray and bereft of expression. “Go ahead. Now. I'm not going with you. I'd only slow you down. And the dogs.…”

As if to prove his point, we heard the dogs yelping. They seemed very far away now, and I said so.

Mike Rodin shook his head stubbornly. “All I'm asking is that you look at it sensibly. I paid you to get my brother out. We're still here.”

“We'll get him out.”

“Not with me along. I'd never make it. I was supposed to stay behind. That was the plan, wasn't it?”

“Plan's been changed, Mike. Tell us when you're ready to move.”

“Christ, will you listen to me? They're after Vasili Rodzianko, that's all. In the rain, to a bunch of soldiers, peasant-types,
I'm
Rodzianko. I'd sure as hell stop them a while, at least long enough for you to make the kolkhoz.”

I said: “You wouldn't fool the dogs ten seconds.”

“You are talking nonsense, Mikhail,” Vasili Rodzianko said in English, but using his brother's Russian name. “I will go nowhere without you—now.”

“That's why I came here!” Mike Rodin shouted. “I've got this thing inside of me, this death. I've learned to live with it. I know it's going to kill me. Bone cancer, do you hear me? It's eating away my bones, inside. It's death. I've got used to it. My comrade, death. Okay, okay, now or a little later, a few weeks or a month or three months, what the hell difference does it make? Now, do you get me? Now while I have a little life left over, will you for Christ's sake let me use it the way I want to?”

Eugenie was crying softly.

“Can you make it?” I asked her father.

“I don't know. I don't give a damn. Why do you think I wanted to see Galina and Mikhail in Moscow? All along I've wanted to do it something like this, but I didn't tell them, didn't know if Galina would buy it. Not then. I was going to tell them I'd die, take a lethal dose of morphine, as their father. Don't you see, that would have given them time to get out on their own hook before the police got wise, before Vasili Rodzianko showed up in the Western world. But Galina … I didn't know if she … never had the chance.” He stood there in the rain, glaring at me defiantly. “Now I have the chance.”

“Okay,” I said. “Have it your way. You can stay.”

Rodin smiled.

“I'm staying with you,” I said.

Vasili Rodzianko nodded his head once, said gently: “And I too.”

Mike Rodin called me a name, and then a grin bisected his tired gray face and he said: “Christ, I always pick them, don't I?” He shook his head. “I wish I'd had you with me ten years ago, Drum. You're stubbbrner than I am, aren't you? Those proxy fights,” he said musingly. “That railroad out West. Christ, I could have used you. A private dick! What a waste.”

“Write me a testimonial when we get home. Now let's get moving.”

We set off along the muddy road again. For a while I supported most of Mike Rodin's weight on my shoulder, but before long he said he could walk under his own power—and did. Eugenie walked at his side. I heard her say: “I'd do anything for you, Daddy. Anything. I'd die for you.” He patted her hand.

She said it. They were just words at the time. But I'd remember them later.

Chapter Twenty-five

T
hree ancient buses waited on the bare wet square in front of the barracks-like main building of the collective farm. It had stopped raining. The woodcutter spoke to a man in an oilskin raincape. He looked us over with bright, narrowed eyes. Then very solemnly he went into the building and came out a few minutes later with a book. I saw Vasili Rodzianko's picture on the rear of the dust jacket. It couldn't have been the book that had earned Rodzianko his Nobel Prize: that had been banned in Russia. The bright-eyed man wanted and got Rodzianko's autograph.

We went into the building. In a big kitchen they had vodka and then tea and black bread waiting for us. The room had an enormous cast-iron stove. Its firelids glowed cherry red. Before long our wet clothing began to steam.

When we went outside again, the buses were loading. I heard the shuffle of heavy shoes on muddy ground as peasants filed slowly aboard.

There was space for us in the rear of one bus. Just before it started, the bright-eyed man boarded. As solemnly as he had brought the book for Vasili Rodzianko to autograph, he now brought three bottles of vodka. Then the bus started. The ones ahead of us were moving already.

Since arriving at the kolkhoz we hadn't heard the dogs. We'd left that danger behind us. I thought Mike Rodin was smiling a little, sitting on the hard wooden bench at the rear of the bus, and I knew why. I could feel it myself. We were motorized. Now we could begin to roll up the mileage.

I was asleep before we lost sight of the collective farm. Later the bright-eyed man told us we had passed through three checkpoints without incident.

That afternoon at a little Mologa River town we boarded a barge loaded with farm produce bound for the cities to the north. It was one of a string of five flat, ugly barges towed by a tugboat. The barges were strung on cables for a half mile behind the chugging, laboring tug. We moved downstream slowly past birch woods. The sun came out, and most of us lounged around the deck in its warmth, watching the scenery drift by. That was safe enough; we could see people on the other barges. I never knew who they were or where they were going.

The sun seemed to draw Galina Rodzianko out of herself. She combed her long blond hair, which was still damp. She sat on a crate and swung her legs and even sang a little.

“That's nice,” I said. “I like it.”

“A folk song from the Ukraine. I was for some time with the ballet in Kiev. Russian folk music is nothing, but the Ukrainian is the most beautiful in the world.”

“You think we're going to make it?” I said. “No more tricks, Galina?”

“You are a strange man.” She broke abruptly into Russian:
“Vynoslivost.”

“What's that?”

“Oh, a word we have. It means lasting a thing out. My father is like that. And you too are like that.
Vynoslivost.”

“Vynoslivost,”
I said. Galina crinkled her eyes, smiling at my pronunciation. Then she began to laugh. She jumped down lightly from her perch on the crate and did a quick pirouette, her thighs flashing as the skirt swirled. Maybe it was the sun and the warmth or the feeling of security on the barge after our night in the marsh. She executed a classic ballet leap and drifted down to the deck as light as a feather.

Just then Laschenko came on deck. “Practicing?” he said.

Galina gave him a bitter stare. “What for?”

She withdrew into herself after that, standing at the rear of the barge and looking moodily at the two others trailing behind us.

I went back there to her.
“Vynoslivost
, Galina. You're going to do all right in the West.”

She didn't turn. The wind blew her long blond hair, molded her skirt against her dancer's thighs. “Just leave me alone.”

It was very hot below decks.

It was also poorly ventilated. The barge reeked of raw cabbage. There were cabbages in crates and cabbages in sacks and overripe cabbages heaped in rotting piles.

Mike Rodin and his brother sat crosslegged on the floor, talking. Their faces were red, their sleeves rolled up. Sweat glistened on their skin. Sometimes they spoke in Russian and then suddenly they'd break into English and then back into Russian again. They had opened one of the bottles of vodka. They kept passing it back and forth, taking long swigs. Eugenie sat near them in a corner, her big eyes intent. She had another one of the vodka bottles, and she was drinking from it. They probably didn't even know she was there.

Rodzianko did most of the talking. He hadn't talked much until then. It was as if our peaceful interlude on the barge, as it had almost done for his daughter Galina, had opened him up.

Pretty soon his voice drew the rest of us below decks. We just stood there, listening. Vasili Rodzianko had us spellbound. And from what he had to say in English, I began to learn just how important his message for the free world would be.

“The Communists ask too much of a man,” he said. “My flesh and my blood, yes. I would surrender those to a cause in which I believed. But they ask more than that. They ask for a man's honor as well. And my honor they cannot have.”

He also said: “But the cause? How can one believe in such a cause? Ideological orthodoxy through discipline, that is its strategy. But its tactics? They are the tactics of compromise and deceit and are dependent upon the ignorance of the brain-washed masses and the nocturnal knock on the door by the Secret Police.”

And he said: “They tell us that the end justifies the means, but in pursuing that end they submerge it in the means. They betray comrades, they risk the fate of nations, they even aid the counter-revolution so that revolutionary zeal may flourish. They make man a mechanical cog in the march of history. They feed the individual and his dignity to the hungry maw of the masses, and they betray the masses so that a few power-grabbing individuals may survive. I'll tell you what Communism in Russia means, Mikhail: it means betrayal. It means the prostitution of an idea by cynical opportunists, it means forty years of the brute and the Neanderthal, it means an end to human dignity, it means the beginning of man the machine. The most ruthless and also, pathetically, the most pointless betrayal mankind has ever known.”

It was later. The setting sun had turned the waters of the Mologa blood red. Our string of barges was moored for the night near a little village. I stood on deck alone, and then I heard footsteps behind me.

Eugenie came out. She weaved across the deck toward me. “Ooo, that vodka. I'm a little bit drunky-wunky.” She tripped and fell into my arms and gave me an up-from-under look of drunken cunning. “Up here on deck, Chet, with the sun like that and all, don't you feel almost as if we're the last two people on earth?” She hiccupped. “Lucky me. Me and the man who carries his life in his hands wherever he goes.” She looked up at me gravely. “That's you. That's you, Chester Drum.”

Her arms went around my waist. She sagged there. Her head flopped loosely against my chest. Then she looked up at me again. “Kiss me, Chet?”

“No.”

“You're not afraid they'll catch us?” She sounded drunkenly shocked.

“Not me. I carry my life in my hands. But I'm almost old enough to be your father, Eugenie.”

“You
are
afraid. Phooey on you.”

What do you do with a seventeen-year-old who's drunk too much vodka and thinks, for the moment, you're the be-all and end-all of the male of the species? It's easy if she's a seventeen-year-old all teeth and freckles and knobby knees. But Eugenie wasn't. Eugenie had developed precociously. She was all curves and firm fullness of flesh, and she purred now like a lazily contented kitten and, still like a kitten, rubbed against me.

I didn't respond. Call it will power, not biology. I can be stirred. But I was thinking, too: first the mother, then the daughter. Not only do you carry your life in your hands, Drum, but you are irresistible.

As if reading my thoughts, Eugenie pouted: “Don't you like me as much as my mother? I saw the way you kissed
her.
Outside the woodcutter's hut. I was watching. What did you do after
that?”