The Last Train to Kazan

5

Everything is ready. Everything is more than ready. He has paid out monies, arranged for transportation. Not wanting to go any further than that. The city is an uproar. A panic. A good time for anyone to be leaving.

The date has been decided. He has sent his confirmation, but the wireless receives nothing. Accordingly he has made the walk up the long hill to the station, dressed as well as he can, waited in the queue for what seems like hours, grown frustrated and then realized that it would be far better to pay for a boy.

And this is what he does, finding one of the wretches that wait just outside the station so that they will not be run off by the one of the Red Guards assigned to patrol the entrance.

‘I need a courier. Who’s the best?’ Making it like a challenge, the kind of thing boys of a certain age prefer over all others. Putting on a smile to dazzle them. One tough on top of a luggage cart doesn’t flinch. ‘It might be difficult,’ he says to them, still smiling, ‘but I’m in a hurry and don’t have a lot of time.’

‘Two kopeks,’ they are all shouting. The little ones cluster around his knees.

‘I am having dinner with a special person. She needs consoling.’

‘If you want the receipt, it’s extra,’ says the tough.

‘No, I don’t know where I’m going to be. You keep the receipt and I’ll come back for it.’

‘It’s still extra,’ says the boy, and the little ones look around, willing to do whatever he tells them for less.

He looks at the boy’s eyes. Not unattractive. Good enough. Big enough to know what getting hurt means. Now all the little ones have shut up.

‘Fine, then,’ he says. ‘You.’

They move into the corridor and he finds a counter and the forms. He writes the message, changes his mind in midsentence and tears up the form and starts again.

The boy reaches into his pocket and takes out a tin box, something once used for pills. He has a cigarette stub in there, and begins to dig for a match.

‘Here,’ he says, and gives the boy his cigarette case. Turns back to the writing.

‘Sometimes the best-laid plans go all wrong, you understand?’ he says to the boy.

‘All the time,’ the boy says, carefully closing the case, turning it over in his hands, feeling the warmth of the silver. Expensive, the boy will be thinking. Nice, but something that’s been around, a dent here, a place where the silver has rubbed off at one corner, as if it had been dragged along the ground. He holds out his hand and the boy gives the case back. The touch of a smile.

They are equals now.

‘The important thing is not to panic. Not to lose your head, eh?’ Looks over at the boy and smiles. He straightens up from the counter top and gazes down through the doors out to the open square.

Tonight, he thinks. Certainly, it will be tonight, he is thinking. The Bolsheviks are packing up and leaving town, the better to make their stand on the Volga. Everyone is trying to get out of the city on the last train. Those who’ve kept back a little are even trying to bribe their way out of town.

If you are going to run away, he is thinking, you should resemble as much as possible someone who is running away. Someone with something to save, something to protect. It’s victims who run away.

He tears up the form again. Starts over.

SPECIAL SALES #R4-0B3

READY TO PURCHASE SEVEN. ADVISE REGARDS DELVERY

SOONEST.

TODMANN

He signs, and folds the form in half. ‘I’m going to give you a rouble extra, eh?’

The boy frowns, looking at him, surprised that this supposed sophisticate has revealed himself to be a far bigger fool than he has suspected.

‘But it’s not for you, it’s for one of the operators in there, eh? Go in through the door and give him the note. For that much it goes to the top of the queue, yes?’

‘Yes, of course.’ The boy actually smiles.

‘Thank you, and here, soldier. Take another.’ He opens the silver case and gives the boy another cigarette, wondering if he’s the kind to rush through things or make them last. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he says.

‘Fine,’ says the boy after a moment. A good boy. Good eyes. Strong and hungry.

‘I’ll be back for the receipt. I need it for business, so make sure you keep it. Keep it safe in your little box, eh? If they reply, I might hire you a second time, eh? So, go on, then,’ he says, and watches him walk down the corridor, jump the line, take his cap off as he pushes into the telegraphers’ cage and, good boy that he is, do exactly as he’s been told.

6

Everything changed in Perm. Ryzhkov watched the soldiers as they suddenly emptied out, and there was the first delay; a full half-hour while they watered and fitted an extra tender. The wires were down and no one knew if they could re-coal at Yekaterinburg yard.

He walked around the city, stood there watching the Kama running low between its embankments, used his Cheka credentials whenever he needed, and poked his nose into everything. Dropped in on the commissar and let him know that he might have important communications from time to time, looked the man straight in the eye. Watched the wheels go around even as he agreed. Special handling, then. Absolutely.

They got going again at dusk. He managed to requisition a loaf of bread at Cheka mess, which was a long room in the basement of a therapeutic school with kitchens at the end and steaming soup pots. Then in the night the train had slowed, and stopped intermittently – the entire journey elongating from a normal eight hours to two days and counting.

The weather had changed, becoming wetter. It began to rain in the night, and it was in some grey late July hour when they finally arrived, passing through a hurried line of barricades the Bolsheviks were throwing up at the village of Kungur, where the road to Moscow intersected with the railroad – an important little place, for if the Czechs overran it they’d be one step closer to controlling the railroad all the way to Viatka, and that much closer to joining with British and American forces advancing south from the port of Archangel.

And if that happened the people’s revolution would be surrounded.

They were losing, Ryzhkov saw. The train was completely empty in the last stretches, not a good sign. It appeared that there were no reinforcements rushing to help the Ural Soviet and the people of Yekaterinburg. And, even with the fresh troops he had been travelling with, it was obvious that there would be no strong Red defence of Perm. It was just the mathematics – there weren’t enough trained Red fighters to stop the Czechs. No horses to speak of, no artillery.

No hope.

‘Where’s this?’

‘Yekaterinburg – but there’s two stations. They are trying to decide. They might not be able to get into the city,’ one of the conductors told him.

The train, which had been creeping along, slowed to a halt some distance outside the first stop, a rural station on the way into the city. Manning the watchtowers beside the road were factory workers, with red rags tied round their sleeves, while below them a mass of wounded Bolshevik infantrymen waited for evacuation. The only station was hardly more than a tiny loading dock, and a telegraph shed at the crossing of the Moscow road.

The conductor came back and said they wouldn’t be going into the city to the central station. Too dangerous. In the distance there was a sudden crash of an artillery explosion, and Ryzhkov shouldered his bag, stepped down out from his carriage and started walking down the tracks to the crossing.

There was another ripple of artillery rising up through the hills, a long distance away, but still his shoulders hunched and his stomach went light. The little station had been blacked out except for a single shielded light. The artillery had given him the shakes, and all he’d wanted to do from the moment he’d got out of the train was run away as fast and as far as he could.

Find the Romanovs and then get out, he told himself.

Places are either good, or they are bad. Yekaterinburg was bad, a city in chaos, stupefied, not knowing to whom it should pay allegiance. Ryzhkov’s first view of the city was from the back of a automobile-tyre-shod cart that was being used as an ambulance back and forth to the crossroads. There was plenty of room going back. The driver was careful to explain that he’d been recruited by the local soviet when Ryzhkov flashed his Cheka book at him. ‘It’s fine. I don’t care which side you’re on,’ Ryzhkov told him.

‘The city is clearing out, you see? Everyone is scared.’

‘Sure.’

‘There’s only a couple of your boys left.’

‘I’m not staying long either.’

‘For the best, I think.’

They wound their way down the Moscow road, passing the little farms that had been carved out of the birches, slowing to cross the bogs that lined the low parts of the road. Beneath the trees it was wet and the driver pulled the awning over them, so that all they could see were the hocks of the two ponies that were pulling them into the town.

The road widened out as they came down through the populated heights of the city sloping down to the river Iset. Looming over the huts and outbuildings were the first of the larger wooden houses with the usual traditional accoutrements, ornate filigree under the gables and around the doors, painted shutters, saw-cut banisters and sharp picket fences surrounding yards which once had been carefully tended. Then came the first of the really substantial buildings, built with brick and a lot of stone, since the Urals was an ancient mining region.

Precious metals had been quarried out of the mountains for centuries; iron for cannons, gold for money, platinum for jewellery and coal for steam engines. The city had been created by Peter the Great to honour his bride Catherine, and to serve as the gateway to Siberia, a region vast beyond belief, containing too many time zones and nationalities with customs that were utterly foreign to most Russians. In addition to the administrators and bureaucrats based there, Yekaterinburg had become a city of miners, lumberjacks, railwaymen and metalworkers. There were smelting plants, foundries and metals factories ringing the city and spread across the long slope down to the lake. The lake itself had been dammed in the distant past and now it was rimmed with vacated mansions and idle fishing boats.

The city was quiet. Supposedly the revolution had been particularly vigorous in the Urals. An industrial region with a tradition of exploitation had given rise to a hotbed of workers’ agitation, and the mines and factories had been quickly shut down by the expedient of sabotage. The most committed of the workers had already been subsumed into the Red Army and the city was in the process of being inherited by those too poor to run away, those who longed for a Bolshevik defeat, or those who had merely waited too late.

Ahead of them were the first signs of life: two men smoking beside an open door, a woman with a chicken under her arm moving protectively down the sidewalk, two ancient men harnessing a dray.

‘What is that?’

‘Oh,’ said the driver. ‘That’s the Church of the Ascension.’

‘No…that, beside it.’ There was a high barricade made of cut logs like a fort in an American wild west film.

‘Oh, that’s the Special House. It’s where they killed the Tsar,’ he said, turning at Ryzhkov’s sudden reaction.

‘Killed them?’

‘So they say.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Three days ago in the night. Killed the Tsar and his son. The women have been taken away.’

‘You know this? You saw them go with your own eyes?’

‘They are killing the entire family, so some say.’ The driver shrugged.

‘Do you mean Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich?’

‘Him, too, the Tsar’s brother. They killed him in Perm last month, everyone said. That came to the telegraph. But then we heard at the hospital that he and his driver got away.’

‘There are too many rumours. I’m trying to find out what really happened.’

The driver arced his head in the direction of the house. ‘The Tsar is dead, I think that is the best guess, but –’ nodding towards Ryzhkov’s breast pocket, ‘– you should be able to find out, eh?’

Ahead of them was the confluence of two monstrously wide streets. The driver drew up outside the American Hotel. It was still draped in red flags, and there was a knot of Red Guards there making a show.

He walked up the stairs off the street, showed his card and went inside. In the wide saloon that opened off the lobby three men were hammering and nailing tables together. Otherwise the building seemed vacant and littered with the obvious markers of defeat. Two clerks were crossing down the corridor with boxes of files, en route to the furnace in the ballroom. A third clerk knelt beside the furnace blowing and cursing at a smouldering mound of paper. He stopped one of the young men with his magic red book and asked for direction to the Cheka office.

‘You’re too late, sir. The building is being abandoned. I’m burning the last of the pay records right now, and then I’m on my way.’

‘But Cheka headquarters is here in the hotel?’

‘Oh yes, right down that hallway. Room number 3, sir.’

He walked down to the room. The door was open. Number 3 was a large rectangle, a small cloakroom at one end. A sofa. A pair of desks. Several broken lamps. Fragments of paper and carbon flimsies spread across the floor. Another boy walked past him with a broom and began sweeping them up into a pile. An inkwell had turned over and black footprints had been tracked into the Turkish carpet.

‘Where have they gone, do you know?’

The clerk shrugged and did not meet his eye. ‘Back to Moscow, comrade…’

Ryzhkov crossed the office to one of the desks, looked in its drawers and found a Yekaterinburg city directory there. It listed all addresses, and those with telephones were printed in bold. There was only one Eikhe in the book – No. 2 Kushok Lane.

‘Do you know where Kushok Lane is?’ he asked the clerk.

‘Right on the other side of the city, in the direction of the Trouchenko foundry.’

‘Too far to walk?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Ryzhkov watched him crabbing the papers into a ball, stuffing them into a mail sack.

‘Where is the local soviet?’

‘Besides right here, you mean?’

‘I need to talk to someone with responsibility.’

The clerk made a doubtful face. ‘Either at the municipal hall or at the civic theatre, I’d guess.’

Ryzhkov walked out of the American Hotel, past the young guards who were not quite sure what they were guarding, down to the street. The ground sloped slightly towards the area around the dam, and he kept going until he came to the municipal hall, an old building that looked suddenly out of date and in the process of being abandoned, its doors thrown open and two anxious Red Guards still lingering outside. A motor car and a truck were idling there, ready for a final run to the station.

He asked directions, and across the park he caught the Number 14 tram which was still running, and which carried him some dozen blocks past the sprawling and dead quiet Selki factory and let him off at the last stop.

From there Kushok Lane was only two blocks, and he stepped out into the muddy street and began walking. On one side of the street was a row of workers’ houses that had been arranged diagonally to the street, climbing the low ridge with a fine view of the city beneath. There were children playing in the worn expanses in front of the houses, running around the fruit trees that had been girdled with octagonal planters for protection.

No. 2 was a semi-collapsed ancient wooden house, the logs darkened to blackness with soot, weeds grown up and died in a tangle around the foundations. A wide canvas tarpaulin that had been rigged up to shade half of the house, where a woman was butchering what Ryzhkov recognized to be a goat.

‘I am looking for Nikolas Eikhe,’ he said to her.

She turned and gave him a long look, taking in the suit – now truly shabby – the thick shoes, the rucksack with the leather raincoat rolled into it. ‘He’s not here.’

‘Ahh…’

‘What’s it about?’

‘I need to speak to him. It’s important.’

‘He’s not here, Excellency.’

‘When he comes back, maybe you can give him this.’ Ryzhkov set the rucksack down, groped in the pockets for some paper. All he had was an envelope with his train schedule written on it. He wrote ‘Ryzhkov, #3 Hotel American.’

‘Shall I say what it is concerning?’ the woman said. She was busily scrubbing out the great cavity that had been made by extracting the entrails of the animal.

Ryzhkov looked around the little street. The houses here were much older than the workers’ factory houses at the end of the block. ‘Eikhe is a German name, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Yes, the family were Volga Germans. Here since the 1700s, so he claimed,’ the woman said. She was older, but still strong, with her hair bound up in a series of towels that made her look like some sort of peasant queen, wearing a large apron, her sleeves rolled up to her armpits.

‘I just want to talk to him, and I want to talk to someone who can put me in touch with the soviet.’

‘They’re all gone,’ she said with finality.

‘You’re sure? There has to be someone around.’

‘They’re gone. I’m sure.’

‘What about his friends? Maybe someone knows where I can find him.’

‘He doesn’t have any friends,’ she said flatly.

‘What about the Tsar?’

She looked up at him, shook the bloody rag out and dumped it in a dish beside the table. ‘All of them are dead.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Oh, everybody knows it. It happened at the weekend. I know one of the women who mopped up the blood.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Just a woman. Someone I know. Look, they’re dead, comrade. When he comes back I’ll give him your message. What does it say?’

‘Ryzhkov. Number 3, American Hotel.’

‘Is that where you’re staying?’ Her eyebrows went up at the cost of it.

‘No. It’s just to let him know who I am. You make sure and tell him. It’s important. And I’ll come back, eh?’ he said, jabbing his finger at her.

At the bottom of the hill he waited to catch the tram, but gave up and walked past the long façade of the factory into the city. There was another distant crash and Ryzhkov realized that the artillery had stopped for some hours and only just begun firing again. A few minutes later an automobile blew past him with several Red Guard officers packed into the seats.

When he had walked another block, at the corner he could see a stream of citizens entering the Civic Theatre. The fast car that had passed him on the slope was sitting there, with steam coming out of the radiator cap. Several carriages and military wagons were drawn up in the lane and soldiers were milling about the entrance. Ryzhkov let himself be funnelled through the great doors to the theatre with everyone else. The windows had been thrown open and the curtains pulled shut against the sun. The whole room was a stew of dust motes and muttered conversations.