Night Soldiers

He was so cold. He had lived a cold, wasted life, he thought. Blown about in storms from Vidin to Moscow to Spain and then Paris. Sante prison had put an end to that, a white blank in his life. And what was the point? To end up dead in some little Bessarabian village? Was that why he had been put on this earth?

The end of the war was coming; it would be like a dawn, the living would sigh with relief and set about to change the world. He wanted to see it. He wanted to live. It would be the best of times to start a new life. Trieste. A part of Aleksandra’s fantasy. Something about the place had always intrigued her. Perhaps she had been right. In Trieste, he knew, there were Slavs and Italians living side by side-he would not have to be an emigre, an alien, he could just be a man.

Looking into the fire, he could see it. Little streets with radios playing behind shuttered windows, bakeries, dogs napping in the sun. He could walk beside the Adriatic with a newspaper folded beneath his arm. He could stop at a cafe and read the news. About the mayor and his deputies and the scandal over the contract for the repair of the local streets. Out at sea, a freighter would move slowly across the horizon.

The girl sleeping beside him mumbled some words and, for a moment, her face was touched by sorrow.

In the morning it was raining and wisps of fog hung in the tops of the pine trees. Someone gave him a cup of hot water flavored with tea and he felt much better after he’d drunk it. Then Kulic took him some way up the mountain-they had to walk very slowly, and Khristo helped him in the difficult places-to an open meadow, a sloping field with mist lying above the long grass and a row of wooden boards set in the ground. One of them was marked Aleksandra-1943

Khristo stood with his hands in his pockets, his face wet in the rain. “She came down here in ‘37,” Kulic said. “When Ilya got her released, he bought her a ticket and put her on a train. He sent along a letter. ‘Keep her out of sight,’ he said. ‘Encourage her to live quietly.’ She did just that. Stayed in a village and worked in a shop, kept to herself. She was someone whose fire had gone out, though you could see, every now and then, how she’d been. But she seemed to have promised herself to be that way no more, to make the world pay for what it had done to her by withholding her light from it. Then we were invaded and went to war. In the strange way of things, it brought her back to life. She fought with us, first as a courier, then with a rifle. We took a German supply column in October of 1943-mules with mortar rounds strapped to them. And when the thing was finished we found her curled up behind a tree and she was gone. The magazine of her rifle was empty, Khristo, she bore her share of it and more.

“While she was with us, she used the cover identity that Goldman had provided for her. But then, as the war went on, she began to call herself Aleksandra. So, when we brought her up here, we marked her grave with that name only, as we believed she would have wished. From Ilya, I knew her story, but she never spoke of you, or of Paris, but neither did she take a lover.”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Khristo said.

“I spoke to you from the heart last night, about Trieste, but I could not let you go away without seeing this. It is another side of things, something between you and me, only that.”

“It’s better for me that I found out,” he said.

“There are meadow flowers this time of year,” Kulic said. “I’ll wait for you if you like.”

Three days later, he went east on the river.

Kulic found him a berth on a tug called the Brovno, bound for Belgrade to pick up a bargeload of iron pipe destined for the rebuilding of the transfer station at Galati, in Romania, the final staging point for oil going to Soviet Black Sea ports. Obtaining export stamps for the pipe had been, according to the pilot of the Brovno, “like a fire in a whorehouse-everybody running around in circles and screaming at everybody else.” The city of Belgrade had been virtually leveled by the Wehrmacht, and whatever pipe they did manage to fabricate was, they felt, better used to supply water for Yugoslavian toilets rather than fuel for Soviet tanks. And as for the Romanian state trading company, which had to be pounded on the back until it coughed up the import papers, well, that was even worse. A fire in a whorehouse on a Friday night. “All spies up there,” the pilot said. “Romanians.”

For Khristo, there was little to do aboard the Brovno. Ivo, the pilot, stayed in the wheelhouse while his brother-in-law, Josip, ran the engine down below and his son, called Marek, served as second engineer. The Brovno was a big, powerful river tug, built just before the war. They’d run her up an inlet in 1940, built a shack around her, dismantled the diesel engine and hidden the parts in three separate attics, then gone off to the hills to fight the Germans.

Khristo spent most of his time leaning on a railing and watching the land go by. Kulic had taken him off to the Osijek town hall and obtained, using forged identification papers, a Yugoslav work permit as a deckhand. So he was officially part of the Brovno’s crew, but the captain wanted no part of him as a worker. “What do you want me to do?” he asked as they got under way at dawn.

Ivo thought for a time. “Coil a rope,” he said.

“And then?”

Ivo shrugged. “Put it in the rope locker, if you like.”

He did neither. The river was taking him home, and he wanted to stand at the railing and gaze at the countryside. The hundred and twenty miles from Osijek down to Belgrade passed quickly, and by nightfall they’d pulled into the river Sava and tied up while Ivo went off to the dockside office of the harbormaster. He was gone for a long time. When he returned, he rang for three-quarter power and nosed the Brovno through a forest of tugs and barges with such speed that their wake drew curses all across the harbor. “What did they say?” Khristo asked.

“He said he’d throw me in the river. I said I’d throw him in the river. Then he signed over the barge.”

“That took three hours?”

“We said it many different ways.”

They located the pipe-laden barge and tied up to it, positioning themselves at a point just forward of the stern on the starboard quarter, then, at Ivo’s direction, resecured the load, tightening the cables down with a Stillson wrench. It was after midnight by the time they pushed the barge out of the Sava and back onto the Danube, turning east by north into the foothills of the Carpathians. How you came across the Hungarian plain, and then into the Serbian mountains, on a river that ran downhill, Khristo had never really understood, but the mountain shapes rose bulky and dark on either side of the river and the air grew sharp as they moved through the night. Ivo navigated by the beam of a powerful searchlight that swept the river ahead of him, revealing shoals and sandbars where the water foamed white. Somewhere past the giant fort at Smederevo, the light fell upon a pair of bodies, a man and a woman, joined together at the wrist by rope or wire, shifting slowly downriver on the current. “Collaborators,” Ivo said, his cigarette glowing red in the darkened pilothouse.

Khristo slept for a time, after Marek relieved Ivo at the helm, swaying in a hammock in the crew cabin, waking at dawn to a moment of panic as he tried to remember where he was. On deck, he saw that the Brovno had tied up to a small dock, for customs and passport stamps and to take on a Romanian pilot, a small man in a suit and tie. “For the Iron Gate,” Marek explained.

“Who is this?” the Romanian said, staring at Khristo.

“Deckhand,” Marek answered, winking at Khristo above the man’s head.

Taking the hint, he went off and coiled a rope in the stern. Ivo, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, appeared and took the helm, and they were off at slow speed through the Kazan pass into Romania.

It was the strangest piece of river he’d ever seen, sculptured columns of rock thrust up in midstream and the mountains closed in like high walls. There were sudden dips and falls in the river, and the Brovno and its barge plunged and bucked past rocky outcrops that looked close enough to touch and echoed back the throb of the pistons above the water. As morning came, the passage filled with strange light. He kneeled in the stern, a piece of tarry rope forgotten in his hands, and watched a line of sunlight crawl up the slope of a mountain, turning the mass of dark shapes into a forest of evergreen trees, their branches hanging with the weight of morning rain, droplets glittering as the sun caught them.

The Bulgarian border station was a sagging dock at the mouth of the river Timok. Two army captains came on board and sat at a table in the crew cabin. Glasses and brandy were produced. One of the captains was dark- skinned and wore a thick mustache, the other was fair-skinned, with black hair and blue eyes. When they had finished their brandy, Khristo and Marek were brought in together to have their papers stamped. The pale captain looked at him curiously. “He’s new,” he said.

“Yes,” Ivo said, “a hard worker. My sister’s boy.”

The man glanced down at the Yugoslav papers, then back up at Khristo. “He looks like a Bulgarian,” he said.