Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 6
Peters shook his head. “You can’t have a reign of terror without a death penalty, and we’ve abolished ours.”
“You could bring it back.”
“We could, but I don’t think we will—it would send out the wrong message. Admitted, there are some people whom we’ll never win over, no matter what we say or do. But we need the vast majority to support us if we’re going to achieve real change. Instilling fear is fine if all you need is obedience, but history shows that it won’t get you anything more. We prefer giving wrongdoers a chance to see the error of their ways, to atone for their crimes and live a more useful life. Look, why don’t you attend one of our tribunals and see how the system is actually working? I can arrange it, and if you stumble across a reign of terror, then please report it to me.”
“I will,” Caitlin said. “And I’d like something ordinary. We all know that Countess Panina got off lightly after walking off with the Welfare Ministry’s funds, but she’s a celebrity and one whom many people still admire. I’d like to see how you deal with the less sympathetic.”
Peters reached for a ledger, licked a finger, and thumbed through several pages. “You’re in luck,” he said eventually. “There are several such cases coming up tomorrow morning. At the grand duke’s Palace, starting at nine. You won’t need a pass.” He gave her a wicked grin. “You can even take part if you wish. Anyone present can speak, either for or against the accused.”
“I doubt I’ll do that, but thank you anyway.”
“Thank the revolution.”
Next morning, after the usual inadequate breakfast, Caitlin took the short walk through the snow to the Grand Duke Nikolay’s palace. This lay on the other side of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, not much more than a stone’s throw from the frozen Neva. The grand duke himself had been dead for decades, and the palace, long a college for the daughters of the aristocracy, had been sequestered for government use.
The wood-paneled music auditorium, with its beautiful stained-glass ceiling and elegant red hangings, seemed a strange setting for a revolutionary tribunal, but a cynic might have noted the lack of a working electric light. The seven-man tribunal—one man in a suit, two in uniform, two in workers’ overalls, and two in peasant blouses—was seated behind a large semicircular mahogany table, across which a sheet of gold-embossed red leather was draped. The accused were lined up on a long bench to one side, with the people—and presumably the lawyers—massed in rows of chairs facing the panel of judges.
Case followed case at a fairly rapid pace, the accused taking turns on a separate bench as those in the seats got up to support or denounce them. If any of the latter were lawyers, they spoke a lot straighter than those Caitlin remembered from court reporting in Brooklyn. And people seemed interested in more than the facts of who did what to whom—they wanted to understand motives and to judge how best the accused might find redemption.
At the end of each trial, the seven judges would move next door to reach their verdict and then return to deliver sentence. A man caught with a machine gun in his room, along with a pile of counterrevolutionary pamphlets—two years in prison. A man who had passed himself off as a commissar to collect “new taxes” from hotels—three years. A Red Guard who’d abandoned his post for a tryst with his girlfriend, a youth who had stolen a coat from an old man sleeping on a park bench—both sentenced to “the reprehension of society.” And, in the youth’s case, the return of the coat.
It all seemed quite astonishing at first, but by the end of the proceedings she was really glad she’d come.
That evening she found Jack Reed and Albert Rhys Williams in one of the cafés off Nevsky that they all patronized, and she recounted the experience.
“They’re mad,” was Reed’s opinion. “It’s not the small fry—I’m all for letting them off lightly and giving them another chance. It’s the big guys—people like Kornilov, who led an army against them, for Christ’s sake! And Krasnov. Both of them arrested, both of them released!”
“They’re forgiving to a fault,” Caitlin murmured.
“And in their case it probably is one,” Reed said. “These people will come back to bite them, take my word for it. They’ll go straight to the English and the French and beg them for help getting back into power. And once the big war’s over—maybe even before—the English and the French will say yes. It’s all very well being kind and understanding, but it’s a recipe for civil war.”
He might be right, Caitlin thought as she trudged home through the snow. But harshness also had its consequences, and on balance she liked those even less.
4
Disposing of the Dead
It was considerably warmer in Brindisi than it had been in London, but the rain seemed just as persistent, hardly abating from the morning McColl arrived until the evening he left, sixty hours later. His twenty-year-old steamship was one of five bound for Egypt under the protective eye of the Japanese destroyer Hinoki, which had strayed halfway around the world in the cause of Allied solidarity. The steamship’s crew was French and North African, the passengers mostly Indian and English troops bound for Mesopotamia and the subcontinent, with a smattering of sappers bound for Aden, returning Indian Civil Service wallahs, and a few like McColl himself whose status and purpose were best left undefined. The only women on board were a group of nurses bound for East Africa, who were wisely keeping themselves to themselves.
There was a large contingent of horses and mules belowdecks, but their number went down with each passing day. The rough seas made them “troublesome,” whatever that meant, and every morning several new cadavers were laboriously manhandled over the side. McColl had never been mad about horses, but he found their dumb sacrifice unexpectedly distressing, perhaps because it seemed so typical of the way the war was being run.
After five days of poor weather, the sun emerged from hiding, and everyone kept a close watch for the flocks of seagulls that were said to follow submarines. But none appeared, and only the appalling food spoiled the rest of the voyage. On the eleventh day out of Brindisi, McColl’s ship parted company with the Suez-bound others and headed into port at Alexandria. The night train from there reached Cairo soon after dawn, and another week of waiting followed. When he finally received new marching orders, they came with the news that Audley Cheselden’s ship had been delayed and that the man himself would now meet McColl in Aden.
The train to Suez took forever but finally shuddered to a hissing halt beside the Malabar Khan, a patchwork of peeling paint and rust that wasn’t even upright at its mooring. The interior was worse. It was impossible to open a door without hearing the rustle of cockroaches scurrying for cover, and on more than one occasion a door came off its hinges. The vessel was also overcrowded with humans, not to mention the usual complement of troublesome horses, and Suez was barely out of sight when the first of these received a Red Sea burial. McColl asked several of the Indian army officers why they couldn’t use French horses in France and Indian horses in India, but none came up with an answer.
The days that followed were cool enough for sitting out, and he ventured below only when hunger became acute enough to outweigh the taste of the food. Most mornings he read, swapping each finished book with one of his fellow travelers. In the afternoons he studied Farsi from a primer he’d picked up on Charing Cross Road, thinking it might prove useful in Persia and beyond. The hours went by, the distant yellow line of the African coast hardly changing at all, the sighting of other ships the only cause for excitement. When one hove into view, everyone rushed to the rail and waved at the pack of waving strangers a few hundred yards away.
It took the Malabar Khan seven days to reach Aden. This British outpost at Arabia’s southwestern tip had been besieged since 1914, but the Turkish besiegers had long since given up hope of mounting a telling attack, and the British defenders were more than happy to leave the enemy where he was, out in the unfriendly desert. With Cheselden’s ship still four hours away and his own busy taking on coal, McColl took a trip out to see the eleven-mile-long perimeter. He found a few sandbagged strongpoints connected by mile upon mile of thickly strung wire, plus a bunch of sun-bronzed soldiers almost mutinous with boredom. McColl found himself wondering what would happen to the barbed-wire industry if peace were ever declared.
By the time he got back to port, Cheselden’s ship was inching in, and fifteen minutes later the man himself came bouncing down the gangway. The first impression was tall and gangly, but the cliché didn’t do him justice—his movement seemed barely coordinated, as if each limb were out for a separate stroll. The face was pleasant enough, if spoiled by an overlarge nose. This latter was currently running, a condition that McColl put down to a cold but which turned out to be more or less permanent. Audley Cheselden’s right hand was almost proof of perpetual motion—when it wasn’t pushing back the hair that flopped across his forehead, it was usually wiping his streaming proboscis.
He had a lot of luggage for a man under twenty-five. Two suitcases and a trunk seemed more than a tad excessive for the mission Cumming had in mind, but it soon transpired that these were full of African artifacts bound for England. “My father’s a collector,” Cheselden explained as the native clerk in the shipping office filled out the requisite forms. “I only hope some wretched Austrian sub doesn’t send them all to the bottom.”
Not to mention the ship and its crew, McColl thought but didn’t say.
However, the young man grew on him as their ship sailed east and north toward the gulf. Cheselden took the dreadful conditions in his stride, rarely complained about the bites soon stippling his body, and was once even heard defending the cooks. He was used to sleeping on decks, he said, having never found a cabin bunk long enough. He had a friendly word for everyone, whatever an individual’s status or color.
He was of course keen on the job. Cumming had recruited him in 1914, after only a year trotting the globe for the world’s most famous travel business. As Cheselden readily admitted, he had gotten that job on his father’s recommendation—his studies at Oxford had proved something less than a total success. His qualifications for this one seemed similarly suspect. Though he claimed a certain fluency in French and German, he spoke no Russian at all, which McColl assumed ruled out any hope of their acting independently in Turkestan. Cheselden disagreed—“I’m good at improvising”—and he had studied the history of the region in question, which was more than McColl ever had. Tamburlaine, it turned out, was more than a character in some old play.
Cheselden assumed he’d been chosen for the mission on account of his expertise in handling explosives. McColl had trouble believing this but came to accept that it might be true. The young man’s arms and legs might march to four different tunes, but his fingers were surprisingly nimble.
One night in the gulf, as they lay side by side on the slowly shifting deck, Cheselden told McColl he had a girlfriend back in London whom he hadn’t seen for over two years. Her name was Sophia, but he called her Soph. “And she calls me Aud. Soph and Aud,” he murmured to himself. “I hope she hasn’t met some dashing swine in uniform.” He turned to McColl. “Are you married?” he asked.
“Divorced,” McColl answered curtly. “A long time ago,” he added, thinking that Evelyn hadn’t crossed his mind for months. He felt reluctant to mention Caitlin. Explaining her was difficult, and not doing so always felt like a betrayal.
Eighteen days after leaving Suez, the Malabar Khan entered the Shatt al-Arab channel, lines of bright green palms edging the torpid brown waters. Arab dhows danced around the slow-moving steamship as it neared Basra, before finally weaving its way between a couple of vainly scuttled Turkish gunboats and drawing up alongside a long and crowded wooden wharf lined with towering cranes. The town itself was a mile inland, and the trip up a foul-smelling creek in the gondola-like bellum was definitely one to remember, albeit for all the wrong reasons.
Basra was the usual sea of sun-baked brick around a modern colonial core. The streets in the center were paved; the best hotel boasted electric lights and fans, which come summer would be something to die for. Over the next few days, as the two of them sorted out their ongoing travel arrangements, they came across the usual British landmarks—a racecourse, a church, and a cricket pitch. The locals had created a hybrid of soccer and rugby, which they played at all hours in flowing Arab robes.
A movie theater had been set up in one half-broken-down building. Attending it one evening, McColl and Cheselden found themselves surrounded by enthusiastic Arab males, who cheered and hissed the heroes and villains and fell strangely silent only when unveiled women appeared on the screen. The night before their departure upstream, there was a fireworks display in the adjacent square, which both of them watched from the hotel terrace. Rockets zoomed off into the night sky, creating new fields of eye-popping stars. Roman candles blazed and Catherine wheels fizzed, and as the display neared its end, several Arab men, festooned with squibs and presumably attired in fireproof suits, lit their own blue touch papers and somersaulted down the street, pursued by their sons and daughters.
As he and Cheselden were punted down the aptly nicknamed Shit Creek next morning, firmly holding their noses, McColl reminded himself that even an armpit like Basra had its happy children, and no doubt the sky above them occasionally coughed up a rainbow.
Meshed was still a thousand miles away, the next leg of their journey a slow cruise up the Tigris on an old paddle steamer. The decks were packed with soldiers, the nights a litany of yells from woken men who’d just been stepped on. The days were long and boring, the river full of twists and turns, sometimes so severe that a boat upstream seemed to be gliding across the nearby desert. On clearer days the mountains of Persia were faintly visible on the eastern horizon.
A stop at Amarah offered some relief. McColl and Cheselden went ashore and followed the ship captain’s directions to the local British officers’ club, where drinks could be had in a roof garden overlooking the river. The three-month-old newspapers seemed like historical documents. Would the battle for Passchendaele be the breakthrough Haig had promised? Were the Bolsheviks yesterday’s men?
Another three days brought the steamer to Kut, its final port of call. The soldiers were continuing north to the current front by train, McColl and Cheselden leaving from a different station for Baghdad. Kut was the town that General Townshend had surrendered to the Turks in April 1916, after his army had endured a harrowing five-month siege. It had been recaptured ten months later, and Cheselden insisted on paying Townshend’s former HQ a visit, seating himself in the general’s chair and arranging his jaw at a suitably heroic angle.
It was only a hundred miles from there to Baghdad, but the train took all night to reach the fabled city. McColl was not expecting much, having spoken to others who had, but Cheselden seemed almost insulted by the lack of flying carpets, their role usurped by Ford vans and Peerless lorries. The streets were certainly alive, the Arab cafés with their tiered seating, hubble-bubbles, and tiny cups of mocha, the eating houses full of boisterous Tommies. There were myriad signs in English, advertising everything from laundries to language lessons, but remarkably few in Turkish. The old rulers had been gone for less than a year, and they clearly weren’t expected back.
After securing hotel rooms and eating their first decent meal since Basra—a chicken-and-vegetable stew with rice, richly savory with cinnamon—the two men walked over to the British Residency. No new instructions from Cumming awaited them, only confirmation that they should continue on into Persia. A short report on the political situation was appended but was almost as dated as the papers they’d read in Amarah. The local political secretary took them out onto the terrace for drinks and expressed his doubts as to their intentions.
McColl ignored them. “What we need,” he continued, tearing his eyes from the pleasant vista of a river lined with beautiful villas, trees, and flowers, “is transport. A Peerless lorry would do, and petrol enough to reach Teheran.”
“I’ll find out if the army has one to spare.”
McColl smiled. “If you tell them they do, then they do. And since we need to leave the day after tomorrow, perhaps you could have the lorry delivered to our hotel tomorrow afternoon. And a mechanic if possible, to talk me through the dos and don’ts.” McColl had been working on automobiles since his return from South Africa, first as a hobby and then as a job, but he hadn’t spent much time with lorries, and if the damn thing conked out in the middle of nowhere, he wanted to be able to get it started.
The following morning was spent gathering supplies, and by noon a serious pile of containers was waiting in the hotel’s palm-shadowed forecourt for the expected arrival of the Peerless. It eventually turned up, driven by the mechanic McColl had asked for. As the two of them discussed the vagaries of the engine, Cheselden supervised some willing local youths in the loading of their bags and boxes. With several cans of petrol already on board, there was just enough room in the back for the two of them to sleep.
After another delicious stew—this one of ground lamb, potatoes, and eggplant—and an evening stroll through the still-busy Arab bazaar, they took to their beds, an early start in mind. By six they were out on the road, heading for the Persian frontier.
It took them all day to cover the hundred and twenty miles. The road was virtually empty of motorized traffic but not of civilians, and many of the latter seemed resistant to the notion of a British right of way. The surface also left something to be desired, making travel over fifteen miles per hour an unacceptable gamble. Even at that speed, Cheselden’s head rebounded off the roof more times than seemed healthy, and McColl was relieved to reach the unmanned border, where abandoned Turkish and Persian watchtowers faced each other across a stretch of rock-strewn wasteland. They spent the night in the Persian one and were disturbed only by the single scream of an unknown animal somewhere close by.
