Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 12
“If you side with us and they side with our enemies, then yes.” And this, McColl thought, was the rub. Supporting one Russian revolutionary faction against another, even if only to further an anti-German agenda, was meddling in Russian politics. And he would have to live with that, or he might as well go home.
Caitlin would see things differently.
His eyes were beginning to close, and Karelin was a kind enough host to notice. “I imagine the train was too cold for sleeping,” he said. “Come, I’ll show you your bed.”
McColl awoke to find his host gone, the familiar meal of bread and Narzan water waiting on the table. A note alongside informed him that Karelin would return around six.
After visiting the outhouse, McColl noticed a mirror hanging on the wall and took some time to examine himself. He’d lost weight over the last few weeks, and his cheekbones seemed sharper than he remembered, even under two days of stubble. “Jack of Gaunt,” he murmured to himself. “A desperate character.”
Strakhov and company had only seen him in a relatively clean-shaven state, so he decided to leave the beard alone, at least for the moment.
With a sky free of clouds and the edge already off the morning chill, it seemed criminal to spend the day indoors. Karelin hadn’t said he should, and a real Georgiy Kuskov would surely have gone for a stroll. Somewhere in the town, there might be something other than bread to eat.
He first explored the docks, walking out onto the long wooden jetty beneath the towering stacks of cotton bales. They wouldn’t be hard to set ablaze—a few splashes of kerosene and a single match would suffice—but Karelin had been right: the jetty would go up, too, and the cranes would drop into the water, leaving no means of unloading the food the town would need to survive.
Should he do it anyway? McColl thought he knew what the generals back home would have said, but until he was sure that there was no alternative—and probably even then—he didn’t think he could. There had to be another way.
A hanging haze of smoke led him on to the railway station and yards. There was more cotton in the latter, two long lines of cars packed with the stuff.
Perhaps he could torch these trains. A drop in the ocean certainly, but the gesture would be noticed and might encourage the locals to do more. He would suggest it to Karelin.
The town looked as boring in daylight as it had darkness. There was no hotel that McColl could see and only a scattering of shops, none of which had much to sell. The bazaar was open but had already run out of food. It was going to be a long day.
Rather than go home, he walked on beyond the last few houses and found himself on a beautiful beach. There was no one else about, so he stripped off his clothes and waded out through the gentle surf. The water was cold, but no colder than Loch Linnhe on a bright spring morning. And for the first time in weeks, he felt thoroughly clean.
Karelin came home later than predicted, and the look on his face was grim. “Bad news,” were the first words out of his mouth. “The Ashkhabad soviet has put a team of police on tonight’s train. An executive committee member named Semashko is in charge . . .”
“I’ve met him.”
“I thought you might have. Once his men have searched every house in Krasnovodsk and weeded out everyone who doesn’t actually live here, he’ll be the one to identify you.”
“Fuck,” McColl said in English.
Karelin recognized the tone. “It is not as bad as it sounds. The train is due at eight in the morning, but friends will ensure that it doesn’t arrive before ten. Too late to catch the morning boat to Baku, which you must be on.”
“And the cotton?”
“You must leave that to us. This is a small town, and if you’re still here when they arrive, they will certainly find you. And one way or another, that will be the end of your war.”
The Russian was right, and McColl knew it. There was no escape across the desert, and a train would simply take him back to Ashkhabad. A ship was his only hope.
Next morning Karelin walked him down to the quay. According to the Russian, the two men by the gangplank were Bolsheviks and probably there to check those departing. “But don’t worry, I’ve known them since school. Let’s go and introduce ourselves.”
Praying that the Russian knew what he was doing, McColl followed him across the quay. “My friend’s uncle,” Karelin said in reply to their questioning looks. “Georgiy Kuskov,” McColl introduced himself, shaking both their hands.
“What are you doing here?” Karelin asked them.
“Looking for an Englishman,” one of the men said, his eyes scanning the dock.
“Well, good luck.”
McColl could hardly believe his own, but managed a comradely smile. As the two guards carried on scanning the quay for the wanted spy, Karelin saw him onto the ship, which hardly seemed big enough for a sea crossing, and helped him buy the necessary tickets for his passage and meals. “And for once there will be something to eat,” the Russian told him; “I just saw the cook come aboard with a big bag of cabbages. But don’t leave it too long,” he added, “or they’ll all be gone.”
“Thank you,” McColl told him. “For everything.” Listening to Caitlin’s tales of Russian generosity, he had half suspected she’d simply been lucky. Apparently not.
“I will tell you something to make your journey easier,” Karelin said quietly after checking that no was in eavesdropping range. “Something you must not repeat to anyone. Do I have your word?”
“Of course,” McColl said, hoping he’d be able to keep it.
“The Bolsheviks in Ashkhabad will not be in power much longer. It is probably a matter of weeks, a few months at most. And once we control the soviet, there will be no deals with the Germans. We will burn the cotton rather than sell it to them.”
“That is good to hear.”
After they embraced, McColl watched Karelin bound down the gangplank, share a few words with the bored-looking Bolsheviks, and stride off down the jetty. He was an impressive young man, McColl thought. As Kuskov had been. Russia’s future might be brighter than people thought.
It was almost half past nine, but there was no sign of anyone lifting the gangplank. As he waited, McColl kept his eyes on the far side of the bay, where the line from Ashkhabad skirted the shoreline. And there, to his distress, a plume of smoke appeared above the rocky outcrop, heralding the coming of a train.
It was distant enough to look toylike, but seemed to be barreling on as if eager to make up lost time. Ten more minutes and it would reach Krasnovodsk.
When was the damned ship leaving?
Looking down from the rail, he could see that the gangplank was at last being hoisted aboard. The two Bolsheviks were walking away.
The gangplank was soon stowed, but there was still no sign of movement, and the smoke from the locomotive was now rising above the warehouses that lined the tracks on their way into town.
The ship just sat there by the jetty.
“Please,” McColl murmured, and some god or other decided to listen. No ship’s horn had ever sounded so sweet, no revving engines quite so melodious. The ship edged out from the quay and slowly turned its bow toward the mouth of the bay.
He had gotten away, and Semashko could gnash his teeth in vain. In the joy of the moment, McColl almost forgot the fullness of his failure.
Almost.
7
A Different Drum
Twenty days after leaving the Finland Station, Caitlin saw the upper floors of Manhattan’s skyscrapers poking out through the fog that lay across New York Bay. Her journey had been quicker than expected, and quicker by far than that of poor Jack Reed, who had left Petrograd a fortnight before her, only to be marooned in Norway by their government’s refusal to allow him home. “It’s flattering to be considered so dangerous,” he had told Caitlin over dinner on the eve of her sailing, “but I think I’d kill someone for a night out on Broadway.”
She knew what he meant. After so long away, the sight brought tears to her eyes. The world might call, but this was home.
The Brooklyn quays seemed full of ships, most of them no doubt Europe-bound, carrying men or munitions. Hers moved on past a blurry Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson before edging into a berth just beyond the Hoboken Ferry terminal. Having telegraphed ahead with the ship’s anticipated time of arrival, Caitlin was hoping there’d be someone to meet her.
There was, but not the someone she wanted. After looking at her passport, the young immigration officer checked a list on his desk, told her to wait, and asked, with minimal courtesy, if she’d accompany him into his office. Ordered to sit, she watched as he methodically emptied her suitcases onto a large, flat table.
He was about her own age, Caitlin thought. Short black hair, wiry build, probably of Italian parentage. His New York accent inclined her to like him; the look in his eyes and the twist of his mouth did not.
Her clothes and toiletries were put to one side, her notes and newspaper clippings to another. After unrolling a revolutionary poster in which Woodrow Wilson, dressed as Uncle Sam, was looking down on Europe with dollar signs for eyes, the man gave Caitlin a nasty look.
“Wait here,” he said, leaving the office and closing the door behind him.
A uniformed woman came in and ordered Caitlin to strip off her clothes.
“Completely?”
“That’s what “strip” means.”
“It’s freezing in here.”
The woman nodded her agreement. There was anger in her eyes, too.
Refusal, Caitlin knew, would merely prolong matters. Swallowing her indignation, she took off all of her clothing. The woman went through each item twice before handing the whole lot back. As Caitlin re-dressed herself, she caught a flicker of movement behind the door.
The man returned and took the seat across from hers. “I have some questions,” he began.
Which was something of an understatement—he had hundreds. Questions about Russia: What she had done there, whom she had met, who had paid her expenses? Questions about the Bolsheviks: How well did she know Madam Kollontai—this with a leer—and what had they asked her to do in America? There were questions concerning the war and how she felt about her own country’s involvement. Did she consider herself a patriot, or did she agree with traitors like Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood, who claimed that the war was a trick on the American people?
None of it was subtle. Quite the contrary, in fact—it was all so glaringly obvious that she even wondered for a while if she might be missing something. But she knew she wasn’t. The man reminded her of the stupider Bolsheviks she’d met in Petrograd, young men who’d swallowed a creed whole and felt compelled to resent those who hadn’t.
There seemed no point in lying, and giving him honest answers felt almost as good as slapping his face would have done. She was a socialist and a feminist, she told him, with socialist and feminist opinions. And the last she’d heard, freedom of thought and speech were guaranteed by the Constitution. So long as that was the case, she would continue to promote those causes. The Russian Revolution was an inspiration, not a paymaster.
The questions moved back in time. What had she been doing in Paterson in 1913? In China in 1914? Who had paid for that trip and why? What about her family’s links to the Irish republican movement, and what about her younger brother, whom the British had executed as a German agent?
After spending several hours with this idiot of a man, Caitlin found herself wondering how the authorities managed to keep themselves in power. The answer, of course, was simple—they made use of the power they had. All her notes, journals, and souvenirs would, he told her, be taken away for “examination,” to determine whether or not they “contained anything contrary to the interests of the American government.” The fact that he was unable to offer any date for their return clearly gave him a great deal of pleasure.
A probably foolish sense of disbelief helped her keep a lid on the upset and anger, but it was still a close-run thing. His final flourish was to hand her a copy of the 1917 Espionage Act. “If you haven’t been home for a year, you need to read this,” he said. “Your country is at war now.”
Four hours after reaching Immigration, Caitlin was finally allowed through to the arrival hall. This vast space was empty, save for two people sitting on a bench, almost fifty yards away.
“Caitlin!” her Aunt Orla cried as she clambered to her feet, her Irish-American brogue bouncing off the high brick walls.
•••
On the subway to Brooklyn, there were several occasions when Caitlin caught her aunt and brother-in-law giving her worried looks. Back in her old room in the East Fourth Street brownstone, which felt a bit like a museum exhibit after such a long time away, she examined herself in the mirror. It had to be admitted that the last four months had taken a toll: her face was thinner, cheeks paler, hair less lustrous. When she changed out of her traveling clothes and into ones she’d left behind, the looseness of the latter was almost startling.
Her older brother, Fergus, was now living in Washington, but her sister, Finola, and brother-in-law, Patrick, were waiting at the house with their two children—the four year-old son Caitlin knew and the baby daughter she’d never met, who’d been christened Bridget after her late grandmother and who was altogether delightful. Finola and Patrick seemed utterly self-absorbed and almost absurdly happy, with each other, their children, their new house just two blocks away. Caitlin envied them and didn’t.
Her father was his usual gruff self. He made a few welcoming noises—more, Caitlin thought, for Orla’s sake than her own—but expressed no interest in where she’d been and no joy in her return. Over lunch he offered a few opinions on the state of the world, catching her eye in the process, as if defying her to argue. He gave no sign of mellowing as he aged; if anything, he seemed to grow a little sourer with each year that passed.
He soon went off to his “study,” leaving the others to greet and take care of the stream of relations and neighbors who dropped by to welcome Caitlin home. Most suggested she needed “feeding up” and took for granted how relieved she must be to be back. Several asked about Russia, but few listened hard to her answers. Imagining herself in their place, it did seem far away. As far as the moon, she thought, remembering Zamyatin’s story.
But with Russia now such a huge part of her life, she couldn’t just keep quiet about it. And she knew that her aunt was curious, particularly when it came to feminist issues. When Kollontai had visited the house in Brooklyn two years earlier, she and Orla had gotten on well, so Caitlin’s tale of her friend’s ministerial travails, recounted on a wintry walk around Prospect Park, was listened to with interest. But when she tried to explain the split in the Bolsheviks over peace with Germany, she saw her aunt’s eyes glaze over. “I’m sorry,” Caitlin said. “I’ve been so wrapped up in it all.”
“I can’t deny it sounds exciting,” Orla said. “I’ve been following the news there as best I can, but most of the stories are just sensational, about the dead not being buried and all the churches being burned down. What has happened to the priests?”
“They’re having to earn a living like everyone else. No, really,” she said, noticing her aunt’s expression, “the priests in Russia weren’t like the priests here. They were part of the establishment. One day, about two months ago, I was on a tram in Petrograd, and the priest refused to buy a ticket, because he and the other “men of God” always used to travel free. When the driver said no, the passengers all backed him up and threatened to take the priest before a revolutionary tribunal. These days all men are equal, they told him, including “men of God.”
Orla shook her head in wonderment. “It will be strange for you, being back here,” she said, looking out across the tranquil park.
Caitlin gave her aunt’s arm an affectionate squeeze.
“And how’s Jack?” Orla asked.
“I’ve no idea. We’re fine,” she added. “We just don’t see each other very often—November was the last time.”
“At his father’s funeral.”
“Yes. Four months ago,” Caitlin murmured, as if she’d only just realized how long it was.
Orla was silent for a few moments. “I can’t help wondering if you two will ever be able to settle down together,” she said eventually. “You’ll find it difficult, dealing with each other all the hours God sends.”
Caitlin often wondered the same. She wrote to him that evening, sure for the first time in months that a letter would reach his London flat. Whether he’d be there to read it was another matter.
•••
Monday morning, on the subway into Manhattan, Caitlin familiarized herself with the Espionage Act. It had come up in several discussions with the other American correspondents in Petrograd, so she already knew the gist, which Jack Reed had defined as “Don’t mess with the US war effort!” Reed had also been fond of quoting the act’s provisions, most notably the one that targeted any opponent of the war who might “willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States.” Reading through the act on the wildly lurching train, she decided that everything would come down to how loosely or not the law was interpreted. Or, to put it another way, how far up the government’s backside the judiciary was meaning to climb.
Turning to her newspaper, she discovered that a new and harsher version of the act was already under discussion. “And you almost had me liking you,” she muttered to herself, thinking of Woodrow Wilson.
Buried on an inside page there was confirmation of what she’d heard on the wireless the previous evening, that the Bolsheviks had finally signed a peace treaty with Germany. What she wanted to know was what damage signing it would do to the coalition with the LSRs, but nothing was said about that. The Germans, meanwhile, were advancing on Petrograd, and the government had shifted the capital to Moscow.
