Trans-Siberian Express (29 page)

“This system we have created—this reorganization of life—this recalibration of man’s aspirations.”

“What recalibration?”

“We’ve reset the dials on man’s greed, the drive to exploit other men. Before Lenin, a few men in every country, more ruthless and talented than the others, would acquire an inordinate share of the world’s resources and with it the ability to manipulate other men for their own personal gain. We have changed all that, Kuznetsov. It had never been done in the history of the world. We did it, in my generation, in my lifetime.”

Alex remembered now that he had thought of responding, but didn’t feel it was worth arguing. You don’t trust your own people, he might have said. What kind of paradise is that?

“Nothing would have been achieved if we had let everyone pull in different directions. We had to impose discipline. Given the circumstances, one might excuse Stalin.” Dimitrov had looked back over his shoulder at Alex. “History will tell us if he was right. All opposition to the central idea had to be rooted out, destroyed.”

“And was it?”

“The struggle will only end when we are all put under one umbrella. Coexistence is a myth. That is the truth of it. Hegemony is the only objective.”

He had walked on quickly, surprisingly energetic. He is growing stronger, Alex had thought at the time, ignoring the actual words spoken.

“It took two thousand years for the weeds to grow. They cannot all be pulled out overnight.” Dimitrov had sighed. “If only there is time.”

“For what?”

“You are not listening, Kuznetsov,” Dimitrov had admonished mildly. He had opened his left hand and made a plucking motion with the fingers of his right.

“There must be time to pull out all the bad weeds. They are persistent. We pull them. They grow. We pull them again. Someday we will pull them out and they will never grow again. But only if we have the will to keep on plucking.” He made plucking motions again and again in his palm.

So Dimitrov didn’t believe a word of this détente business, as the President so blandly assumed.

“And the Chinese?” Alex asked himself the question, recalling still another conversation with Dimitrov. It was another day at the dacha. He was taking Dimitrov’s pulse, feeling the steady beat against his two fingers, counting mentally as he watched the face of his wristwatch, as always only half-listening to the words.

“The Chinks.” Dimitrov would never grant them more than coolie status. The Russian word was guttural, offensive. “They are peasants, simplistic and naive. They must be taught a hard lesson.”

Alex had felt Dimitrov’s pulse surge.

“Stop teaching such hard lessons. It is making your pulse push too fast.”

“You feel it, Kuznetsov? You feel the passion?”

“I don’t know what it is. But I feel it.”

“It is strength you feel, Kuznetsov. Soon they will feel it.”

“Who?” he had asked absently.

“The Chinks.”

“Can’t you say Chinese?”

“Someday maybe. Now they are Chinks.”

“When will they change?

“Soon.”

Clues were everywhere now, rushing to Alex’s mind.

“Do I care what they think?” Dimitrov had said one evening when he had worked for fifteen hours straight and had to be forced to go to bed. The question was meaningless to Alex, since it was the first sentence the Secretary had spoken when Alex had entered his bedroom.

“History will be the vindicator,” Dimitrov had continued, looking into space as Alex removed his slippers. “A leader must have the courage to act.”

“Without rest, you won’t have the strength for the courage.”

Dimitrov smiled, acknowledging for the first time Alex’s presence.

“Do I look like a barbarian, Kuznetsov?”

Alex had hesitated. He is tired, he remembered thinking. He must be humored.

“Of course not.”

“Believe me, Kuznetsov,” he had said. “If there was another way, another path, I would go in that direction. But all roads are closed. They will not bend of their own free will. There can be no sharing.”

Alex had tried to draw up the bed covers, but Dimitrov had resisted.

“You Americans are such children,” he had said.

“Does that mean you’re ready to acknowledge that I am an American, not simply a Russian refugee?”

Dimitrov smiled. “Naive and innocent,” he had whispered, his eyes closing. “We will not need to use our bombs on you.”

The remembered conversations were coming to him like sunlight filtered through a prism in his mind. They had not been conversations at all, he saw now, hardly dialogues. They had been monologues, continuous and consistent, and although he had been a bystander then, he was a participant now. If only he could go back and relive the lost moments, probe the mystery of Dimitrov’s mind with the same zeal that he had probed his blood. It would have been simple then to send Dimitrov to his reward. And now Anna Petrovna stood to be martyred by his passivity. Himself as well.

Perhaps, after all, he deserved to suffer for his lack of action, condemning half a continent to death. How could he possibly live with the knowledge that he might have prevented it? He shivered, bunching himself into the fetal position for warmth. There was no blanket on the bunk. He pushed his cold hands under his body, feeling the pain where the door handle had bruised the skin. He must get off the train, communicate with the outside world. Tell anyone who would listen. And yet, he could not, still, bring himself to forgive Anna Petrovna, not in his mind, although he yearned for her and continued to feel the power of his longing. It annoyed him that he could not shake the feeling. The urge to run to her, to throw himself in her arms seemed overpowering, although he lay still, forcing himself to remain where he was, as if imaginary chains were wrapped around his body.

He might have dozed. He could not tell, except that a change in the rhythm of the train suddenly triggered his alertness. The compartment was dark, but he could sense bodies moving around in it, heard heavy breathing, the sound of energy.

“Irkutsk,” someone said. He sat up quickly, bumping his head against the ceiling. Climbing down from the bunk, he stood for a moment recovering his sense of space. A young man stood beside him buttoning a uniform tunic.

“Nearly home,” he said. “I hope my mother and father will meet me at the station.”

Edging himself out of the compartment, Alex moved into the passageway, crowded with people preparing to depart. Outside, men and women trudged through the snow. He saw horse-drawn sleighs, their drivers bundled snugly. Plumes of smoke moved upward through the chimneys of log cabins. Then, as the train moved slowly forward toward the bright lights of the city, the landscape changed. Huge blocks of apartment houses could be seen, and tan brick smoke stacks belching yellow smoke and showers of red sparks.

He remembered how Anna Petrovna had talked lovingly of Irkutsk. To him, Irkutsk was merely an idea, a sentimental heritage handed down by his grandfather. To Anna Petrovna it was home; her roots were embedded in it. Was it possible that Irkutsk was on the edge of extinction?

The train chugged to a halt. “It is Irkutsk I,” someone said. “Only a five-minute stop on the outskirts.”

Passengers had started to debark when Alex saw through the windows an unusual sight. Running soldiers, their heavy boots crunching in the snow, their machine guns at the ready position, were deploying along the length of the station. As passengers left the train, the soldiers stopped and interrogated them as they stood shivering in the snow. When they had answered satisfactorily, they were allowed to pass through the checkpoints the officers had set up at the edge of the platform.

“KGB troops,” someone whispered behind Alex. A pall of fear had fallen on the crowded hard-class carriage. “Who are they looking for?”

Alex would not let himself dwell on the idea of it.

“How long before the main station of Irkutsk?” he asked someone next to him.

“Twenty minutes,” an old man said with authority, his eyes still leveled at the soldiers. “They must be preventing someone from leaving the train,” he said, loud enough to be heard through the passageway. The fear in the crowd became tangible. Alex felt a brief weakness in his knees. He had decided to dash off the train at the main Irkutsk station and run for a telephone. He wondered if the KGB would repeat their blockade there, and if he was really the target of their vigilance.

The train moved again. Back in the compartment where he had bunked, Alex looked about him in the semidarkness. The only other occupant was a big man, snoring in one of the lower bunks. Moving quietly, listening for any break in the rhythm of the snoring, Alex struggled to open the window. The upper portion was designed to move up and down, but it seemed to be jammed. His fingers shook with strain as he stood on his tiptoes and pushed downward with all his strength. Taking deep breaths, he tried to control his panic. Then he pushed downward again, still listening to be sure the other man was still asleep.

The train picked up speed, moving through what appeared to be a huge railroad yard. Electric lines crisscrossed overhead, layers of white snow weighing them down. The city was just awakening. Truck traffic flowed, and horse-drawn carts moved freely among the motorized vehicles. A slice of icy air cut through Alex as the window moved at last, making a sharp noise. The snoring man gurgled, then resumed his rhythm. Curling his fingers over the top of the window, Alex pulled downward, hanging on with his entire weight, feeling the window give finally and move slowly downward.

Bringing the chair close to the window, he stood on it and stuck his head out, measuring the possibility of moving his body through the opening. The space was wide enough, but as he stood poised, waiting for the train to slow down for Irkutsk, the futility of escape from the train struck him. He was, after all, in the dead center of Siberia, with three thousand miles between him and the Sea of Japan. The irony of it did not escape him. Like his grandfather, he would have to traverse half the great Siberian land mass. It was formidable, impossible. But, like his grandfather, he had to try. Poking his head out again, he could see the lights of what he assumed to be the main Irkutsk railroad station. Lifting himself to the edge of the window, he slid his body halfway out, gripping the window edge with one hand and reaching downward toward the lower ledge, waiting for the train to stop. Until it did, he would be dangerously conspicuous.

The moment the train stopped, he pushed himself out, falling like a rock onto a soft layer of snow. Then he moved, crouching, keeping close to the train, moving past the hard-class carriages, crouching lower as he passed the restaurant car. As he reached the soft-class carriages, he began to feel the physical strain, and he paused to catch his breath. Peering under the train, he could see feet moving, the lower torsos of the soldiers, the butts of their machine guns glistening in the harsh light of the platform.

He felt absurd. Mild-mannered Dr. Alex Cousins, crouching in the snows of Siberia, freezing, moving toward an inexorable fate. It was ludicrous. Then he felt his rage rise, and with it his determination. He was going to get word to the President, no matter what it took to do so.

He moved forward again, reached the windowless baggage car, then moved around the engine, straightening as he looked upward into the single electric eye of the engine’s beam. He walked through a crowd of babushkas who were patiently waiting for the train to pass.

He calculated quickly. It was perhaps twenty yards to the ornate railway station building. Farther down, troops were intercepting the departing passengers as they stepped off the metal stairs. Their drawn guns were ominous. He tried to calculate his route and the timing. Then he started to move casually. He would stay close to the train and make his break for the station when he was parallel to the baggage car. The soldiers were standing with their backs to him, a human corral funneling the debarking passengers to the checkpoint.

Suddenly soldiers were running, calling loudly to each other. Alex froze, then saw that the soldiers had crowded around a man and an old woman who seemed to be carrying a heavy object between them. Alex stepped back into the shadows and listened.

“You must let me through,” the man said. Alex recognized his voice instantly—it was the Jew whose wife had died. It was the body of his wife, then, that they were holding between them, bundled in the train’s blankets and tied with string like an Egyptian mummy.

“You must let me through,” Ginzburg pleaded.

“What’s in there?” one of the soldiers asked, jabbing the bundle with the butt of his machine gun.

The arrogant brutality of the act seemed to Alex perverse and unnecessary. The Jew exploded in a burst of rage, kicking the butt of the gun and lashing out with one free hand while the other still held his end of the bundle. In a moment the soldiers had kicked him to the ground. The attendant dropped her end of the burden and stood dumbly looking about as if she were just a disinterested observer.

“Jew haters,” the man screamed, squirming and kicking as two soldiers lifted him to his feet and pinioned his arms. The soldier whose gun Ginzburg had kicked away from the bundle drove the butt into the Jew’s midsection.

Alex watched, hypnotized by the sheer brutality of it. He stood rooted to the spot, torn between the necessity of reaching the station and the temptation to intervene on Ginzburg’s side.

As Ginzburg retched and gasped, his body limp, his eyes bugging out, the soldier who had hit him knelt down next to the bundle and took out a long knife. He slit the rope and sliced carelessly through the blanket, then parted the edges with his blade.

“A woman,” he said. The knife had sliced into her flesh, leaving a long black line down one side of her face.

Somehow Ginzburg recovered his breath. “Bastards,” he screamed at the top of his lungs.

The soldiers laughed as he screamed and struggled in their viselike grip. The commotion attracted the attention of the major who had been supervising procedures at the checkpoint. He walked directly over to Ginzburg, who was still struggling.