The Fan Tan Players, page 15
‘‘Who?’’
‘‘The kulaks are the wealthier peasant class. Last year’s grain harvest was three million tonnes less than the year before. The kulaks were accused of hoarding. They’ve refused all along to sell grain at state-fixed prices. Chances are Stalin may invoke a state of emergency and confiscate kulak land and cattle and turn it all over to the collectives. There’s going to be widespread resistance. I’m told there’s rural discontent, a lot of suspicion and widespread resentment.’’
‘‘So I should watch my step.’’
‘‘The countryside’s swarming with urban-party cadres and Red Guards. It’s a rotten time to enter Russia uninvited. Things are getting ugly there.’’
They crossed the street. By the bus terminus, they witnessed a procession of shorn-headed Chinese men wearing wooden blocks round their necks being paraded through the streets of the city. Their legs were in shackles. The message on their block-collars read: ‘Condemned to death for opposing The Japanese Imperial Army.’
A little further on, they looked on as three White Russians were systematically beaten up in front of a Caspian tea house. The Japanese soldiers were demanding to see their papers but all they had were outdated Tsarist identity-documents. With no jurisdiction or consulate to protect them, their statelessness rendered them easy targets.
‘‘Things are getting ugly here too,’’ Iain said.
‘‘It’s a cakewalk compared to what’s happening in Russia.’’ Cooke scratched the back of his head. He let his hand fall to his side. ‘‘These people you want to go in and get,’’ he said, looking puzzled, ‘‘who are they? Why are you doing this?’’
Iain didn’t reply for a while. The questions hung in the air. He felt a pang. Should he confide in Cooke? Would he understand? Should he admit to wasting SIS resources? To being a fool? A romantic? Searching his heart, he only found more unanswered questions. His conscience flooded his throat like sour milk. He had to say something. He decided to tell Cooke the truth.
‘‘I’m trying to reunite a father and daughter. I’m hoping to help a woman, a woman who means a lot to me.’’ Then, to his surprise, he added, ‘‘I’m also trying to ease my own guilt having destroyed my own family.’’
They found an empty compartment, sagged into their fitted seats which folded down into beds, and opened several bottles of beer. Their passage north to Mukden took 8ø hours by train; it was followed by another long rail journey to Changchun, the northern terminus of the South Manchuria railroad. During that time, to calm Iain’s nerves, he and Cooke played a variety of pen and paper games such as squares, battleships and hangman, and occasionally, when very bored, they played fan tan using a cupful of melon seeds acquired from the dining car.
Relaxed by the beer, Iain allowed his mind to conjure up images of Nadia. He knew that she wasn’t speaking to him at the moment, yet he tried to picture her standing by the sea wall with the sun on her shoulders. He tried to imagine the joy in her heart when he returned with her father. But he could not. Instead, the burning sense of anticipation in his stomach grew and grew. And the closer they got to Changchun, the more uneasy Iain began to feel, so that soon it started to show on his face. As he peered into the darkness he thought of all that Nadia had lost – the life that she never had. Her home, her childhood, her father had been snatched away by fate. She’d been robbed of something. It made him remember the day he had stood on the railway platform as a boy, leaving Helmsdale in disgrace, Iain believed it echoed his own life in some respects. But in his case, fate wasn’t to blame, the blame was all his, harsh and bleak and brutal.
‘‘Another couple of hours to go,’’ said Cooke, eyeing Iain narrowly before gazing out the window. A shred of red light came through the narrow mountains. The sky was raw now. Dawn was approaching fast. ‘‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’’
‘‘I think so.’’ In the subdued light Iain held his head in his hands. He let out a long breath. ‘‘What do you think my chances are?’’
Cooke fluttered his eyes and sucked in a breath. ‘‘Let’s look at the facts: you’re entering a hostile environment; you’re searching for a family called Riedle in a village called Elychoko near Blagoveshchensk, but you’re unsure where they live; if you were to find them, there’s no way of telling how they’ll react to your advances – chances are they’ll think you’re dangerous and inform the authorities; but let’s assume they’re friendly and take you to Shaskov – you’ve never met Ilya Shaskov before, so there’s a risk he won’t believe a word you say. Now, you claim Shashkov is ill, do we know how ill? Can he walk? We don’t know. Will he survive the trip? Again, we don’t know. On top of that there are armed Red Guards swarming about, you don’t speak a word of Russian and yesterday’s wind chill temperature in Heihe was estimated at –22 C. All in all, I’d say your chances were pretty slim.’’
Such doubts weren’t new to Iain – he’d been persistently troubled by them for weeks. He didn’t like thinking about this, so he gave a mirthless laugh. ‘‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’’
Cooke gave Iain a searching look. ‘‘You said earlier that you were hoping to help a woman. Forgive me Iain, but who is this girl?’’
Iain started to answer, but drew back and said nothing.
‘‘I presume she’s White Russian and that she’s Shashkov’s daughter.’’
A silence. The volume of the train’s chugging rose and fell. Then. ‘‘Her name is Nadia.’’
Bemused, Cooke said, ‘‘You obviously care for her otherwise you wouldn’t be doing this.’’ He waited a beat. ‘‘But are you sure she’s worth it?’’
‘‘Yes.’’ His voice rang full and true.
‘‘What about the Riedles? I presume you’ll take them with you? What will you do with them once you get back across to China?’’
‘‘There is a Lutheran Mission in Harbin who help Russians from over the border.’’
‘‘And if you make it back, do you intend to marry Nadia?’’
Iain’s lips grew tight as though there was grit in his teeth. His heart ratcheted in his chest. He shrugged slowly.
‘‘Do you think that’s wise?’’ Cooke asked.
‘‘You tell me.’’
‘‘Marrying a White Russian,’’ he said bluntly, ‘‘may cost you your job.’’
For a while they didn’t speak or blink or even appear to breathe.
An hour and a half later, as they approached the city’s edge, the porter knocked on the compartment door and came in with a tray bearing cups of hot tea and a plate of Chinese buns. As soon as he left, Cooke shook his head and brought a cup to his mouth. He watched Iain over the steaming brim.
‘‘They’ll execute you as a spy if you’re caught. Either that or you’ll spend the rest of your life working in a Siberian salt mine. The Soviets don’t treat espionage lightly.’’
This was a phrase he’d heard repeated before. Iain felt himself grow cold. There was something in the way Cooke said ‘they’ll execute you’ that made him quiver. It prised open a weakness in him he didn’t know existed and for a brief moment he resented Cooke for his honesty.
Cooke opened his briefcase with his good hand and removed a square of folded paper. ‘‘Look,’’ he said, ‘‘I realize this is an unofficial operation, and we usually only hand these out to our field operatives, but it might just save your life.’’ Iain unfurled the note. It was made from lightweight paper, measuring 13 by 16 inches, designed to be folded into eighths. It contained both English and Cyrillic text.
‘‘What is it?’’ he asked.
‘‘It’s what we call a Blood Chit.’’
Iain studied the pointee-talkie language chart and the English-Russian pronunciation guide at the bottom: ‘I am a British citizen. Please help me return to the Chinese border. The British Government will reward you. You will be paid handsomely in gold for my safe return.’
There were also phonetic translations for the Russian words ‘don’t shoot’, ‘far, near’, ‘food, bread, drinking water’, ‘doctor, medicine’, ‘sleep, hide’ and ‘I will pay you’.
He pursed his lips, felt himself tense up. His eyes settled on Cooke’s invisible left hand, at the shiny-pink rub of skin. It would have been a grenade, thought Iain, either that or a sniper’s bullet. Had it happened at night? Was he smoking at the time? Had the cross hairs focused on the crimson glow within his palm? The shock would have been brutal and swift.
They’ll execute you.
Iain scraped his palms together and pushed them through his hair. He sat stiffly quiet for a long time. His own hands, he noticed, were quivering faintly.
Iain squinted out the window. The road ahead looked as black as the midnight sky, but his heart knew where it was taking him. Iain’s eyes glinted in the window; there was no retreating now. He was ready.
2
Sunrise. The Amur Valley became a land of mirrored frost, of boundless swards of ice stretching to the horizon and beyond. The frozen water, covered by a thick surface skin of ice, seemed to ripple with the violence of the changing light – the sky was predatory, even the sun looked raw with cold.
Iain put his hand up to his eyes to stop the glare. Tiny scuff marks of animals marked the tableau, ruining the pristine snow. To his right he saw a strip of river, cut from stainless steel; to his left a stretch of trees, of which only the tallest of the pines showed any hint of green. A gale sent snow powder swirling off the tips of these trees onto the ground. The wind was like a whip. Iain grimaced as miniscule chips of ice spat into his eyes. He walked on, head down.
A week had passed since his train journey from Dairen. In that time he’d grown a stubbly beard, a dusty red fleece with pinpoints of gold, and although it helped to keep out some of the wind chill, his cheekbones, despite being framed by an aureole of rabbit fur, were chilblained and had turned the colour of tinned salmon.
The compressed ice squeaked as he walked. Iain paused to scrape the ice fragments from his eyes. He couldn’t quite believe he had crossed over into Soviet Russia. To his left, he saw a sika deer stretched out, frozen stiff, by the edge of the road, its head and greyish forelegs only just visible above the snowline. Iain looked behind him. Beyond the river were some scattered distant houses of a village and what might have been a skinning farm. Iain took a few seconds of cautious thought to evaluate what he was about to do. He’d made a calculated guess that he and the guide could carry Ilya Shashkov for half a mile without having to rest. It meant that they were going to have to stop between six to eight times.
The day before he had driven up from Sunwu to Heihe, passing gold mining towns along the old route that ran from Hsi-gangshi towards the Amur River. The truck belonged to the Manchurian warlord Chang Hsueh-liang. The men in the truck – a driver, three armed toadies, and a Russian-speaking guide – were all on Chang’s payroll. Now, four of the men, including the driver, waited for him on the Chinese side of the Amur, while Iain and the guide made their way through the outskirts of Blagoveshchensk. Iain had no choice but to trust the warlord and his men.
Dressed in dog hides and fleeces, with blanket rolls draped over their shoulders, Iain and the guide each carried a rifle, water skins, and long wooden poles with a strip of canvas slung between them to be used as a drag sledge.
Some time in the middle of the morning they came to a smooth hollow, verged on either side by banks of trees, and then, moments later, climbing a hill, they reached a hamlet. Iain saw men with features ridged by the Siberian wind, emerging from their homes to gather wood for their fires. Their faces resembled wrinkled sacks. Iain kept his eyes low and hooded.
‘‘Ni khuya sebye. We haff arrifed,’’ said the guide, pale ghosts of steam escaping from his mouth. ‘‘We haff come to the weelage of Elychoko. We must be most careful now. Do not speak to the weelagers. I will do all the communicating.’’ As he said this a man on horseback rode by; he carried in his arms an Amur leopard.
‘‘Who is that?’’ asked Iain, wondering whether the horseman was a Red Guard.
‘‘Ye vaw? He is a hunter. He uses the leopard to bring down wild deer.’’
Crowded together, one and two storey houses made out of thatch and earth and silt – silt streets, silt courtyards, silt-and-mud walls – Elychoko was a little village which turned dark at night because there was no electricity and grew quiet enough to hear a marmot burrowing in the snow outside. It was a place with crooked, rough-stone lanes that had never seen a motorcar, a place shrunken from the world. It was also home to a small monastic church, which had three low apses, with white stone walls and narrow, deeply splayed windows.
‘‘Follow me,’’ said the guide. ‘‘We haff to ask for information. We try in the church.’’ Making their way under the eaves, Iain was directed under an archway, through to the main door of the church via a Judas gate; out of respect, he and the guide left their guns at the vestibule. They entered, out of the cold wind, into the dark, bleak interior. It stank of animal hides and unwashed men. There was the sound of a woman coughing, a baby crying. He saw candlelight on the far side of the altar; a small group of people standing with their backs to him, a few of which had bowed down to the ground.
The guide, two paces ahead, stamped his felt boots to shake off the snow. Iain did the same, rubbing his hands to ward off the cold. The people turned their heads towards the noise, blinking their eyes at the strangers. Iain searched the row of bewildered expressions. Some exchanged secret looks. He continued forward, everyone’s eyes upon him. Was he interrupting a service, he wondered? And where was the clergy? But then he saw a propaganda poster on the wall depicting a peasant with a rifle. The peasant was sitting on a giant egg protecting his harvest; he was surrounded by a greedy-looking kulak, a priest and a boot-legger with a knife. The church was no longer sacred; it was now a recreation centre.
A man with huge whiskers walked out of the shadows wearing an unsavoury smile and a pelt made from bearskin. He wore an arm-band emblazoned with a bright red star. He looked conspiratorial and slithery. ‘‘Zaluba. Party cadre,’’ the guide whispered in Iain’s ear.
Iain noticed he had a round face and a long, bony nose like a buzzard’s bill. He had the wide, wet eyes of a spaniel and a brown fringe was plastered to his forehead like bacon to a greasy pan.
‘‘Nyeznakormets, comrades,’’ the cadre said to the congregation.
People gathered round: babushkas with covered hair stared with trembling eyes; peasant youths, their mouths dark and brooding; elderly men wearing ushanka hats and horse skins, baring their teeth.
Iain stood quite still. The noise of breathing was all around him, mixing with the smell of oppression and tyranny. The party cadre continued speaking; his tone remained harsh, mildly argumentative. Another man with a rifle appeared from out of the blackest part of the church and stood beside the first man. They had moustaches like a thick hairbrushes, as untamable as hedgehog bristles. They appeared well-fed. In contrast, the ordinary people in the crowd looked as if they were starving.
Iain saw the cadres’ eyes flash at the crowd of people, their lips curling – was that scorn he recognized in their faces? Iain watched with narrow attention. He kept his eyes on the first man, who was now gesturing with his hands. He spoke slowly and deliberately. There were grunts of derision from the assembly.
The cadre began to harangue the congregation, thumping their fists into their hands. Iain recognized the Russian words for ‘Communist Party’ and the word khlyeb, meaning grain.
After several moments one of the party officials appeared to ask the crowd a question. He gazed expectantly into the sea of faces. Someone raised his arm and said something, but the Red Guard standing beside the cadre pointed his gun into the gathering and the man lowered his arm. The party official put the same question to the people. This time there was a hush of silence. People bowed their heads, dropped their gaze. The babushkas cowered. Nobody raised a hand.
The Tsar’s overthrow was eleven years behind them, thought Iain, yet the countryside still shook with fear like a vulnerable flower.
The official continued to glare at the crowd and allowed some moments to pass before speaking. As Iain listened, he thought he heard something about the kulaks and handing over of khyleb, but he couldn’t be sure. A minute later the cadre dismissed the congregation.
Gradually, the people disbanded, moving about in the velvety darkness, lighting candles that had already burned halfway down and rearranging chairs. Iain noticed a few babushkas handing each other jars of preserved fruit, exchanging loaves of black bread, radishes, strings of dried herring. In one corner, he noticed two men flipping through the soft covers of a book, as if discussing the lines of a poem. In another corner a small group of children were playing with a hoop of wood. With the cadres gone, the church, Iain soon realized, had been transformed into a type of activity centre.
Iain watched the babushkas stuff their food into their coats, saw their relieved smiles. Others made their way outdoors, their faces crumbling with glum dismay.
‘‘The goffernment haff urged the peasants to deliver increased amounts of grain and get paid less for it,’’ whispered the guide.
‘‘I thought as much,’’ Iain replied.
Out in the cold, the guide went up to an old man to ask about the Riedles. The man shook his head and walked off. Seconds after, Iain saw a donkey cart trundle up and watched several peasant boys being led away under escort. A woman ran up to one of the boys and covered his shoulders with a quilt. A Red Guard pushed her to the ground and bundled the youths into the back of the cart.
Two of the young men were taken aside and the guards searched their coats for weapons, throwing a small hunting blade into the snow. One of the boys was whistling through his teeth, trying to remain calm, but Iain could see the fear in his eyes. A moment later the whistler stood up in the back of the cart and shouted, ‘‘Khuy sinim!’’ only to feel the butt-end of a rifle crash against his shins.
