Night Soldiers

them across the metal shelf by the helm so that they made a great ringing clatter.

She moved her lips as she counted them, then gave him a good, long look, taking in his worker’s clothing- wool jacket and pants, heavy boots, peaked cap stuffed in side pocket-and staring him full in the face before she went back to watching the river.

“Who are you, then?” she said. “And spare me the horseshit, if you don’t mind.” Her tone was courteous, but bore the suggestion that she could throw him back overboard anytime she felt like it. He looked at her arms. She could do it easily, he realized.

“I am from the river, like you.” He said it in Bulgarian.

She nodded and thought it over. “That is a fortune,” she said, switching into Russian, knowing he would understand it. “A lot of gold for a river boy.” She paused for a time, ruminating on things, as the tug slid past the snag. She’d given it just enough room for safety, not so much as to waste fuel.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“My official name you don’t need to know,” she said. “On the river I am called Annika.”

“If you turn your boat around, Annika, they will think that you are going back downstream for the barge, and they will not send a patrol boat out from Bratislava.”

“Smart, too,” she said, “for a river boy.”

He did not press her further. She picked up one of the coins and studied it front and back, then tossed it onto the shelf. She mumbled to herself in Hungarian for a time-curses, he suspected, from the choppy rhythm of it, aimed at Germans, Russians, gold, rivers, boats, him, and likely herself and her fate as well-then spun the wheel toward the far bank. The rudder responded and the tug swung slowly in the direction of the shore, the course change preparatory to coming about and heading east.

“My Hlinka watchdog,” she said, “he still lives?”

Khristo looked at the man. “Yes,” he said.

“He crawled in here for company while he died,” she said. “That much we give him.”

He nodded his agreement.

“When he’s gone,” she continued, “pitch him overboard. On my boat, you must work.”

She was a small tug, so wide-beamed in the middle and high in the bow she seemed half submerged. Her current name, K-24, was just barely visible amid the rust stains and moss green patches on her hull. She had been designated K-24 in 1940, when Hungary had joined the Axis powers. Aside from a few gunboats and a small fleet of tugs and barges, Hungary had no navy. It had no coastline and no access to the sea, though it was governed by an admiral, Miklos Horthy, throughout the war.

The tug had been launched in 1908 at a dockyard near Szeged and christened the Tisza, after the river on which the city was located. She was forty feet long, built low to the water in order to slide beneath the old Danube bridges. Her steam engine was Austrian, a simple boiler that put forth 200 horsepower on a good day and would burn coal or wood but in its time had run on straw, hay, cotton waste or anything else that could be set on fire. When the Americans were bombing up and down the river-hitting the Romanian oil transfer points at Giorgiu and Constanta, finally taking out the oilfields at Ploesti-she had been regularly strafed, something about the slow progress of a tug inciting turret gunners to a frenzy as they passed above her. One fighter pilot-“a splendid idiot” was the way Annika put it-had spent the better part of a half hour machine-gunning a bargeload of gravel, to no particular point, having first nearly melted his barrels in fruitless attacks on the Tisza’s pilothouse, which was covered by a two-inch sheet of iron plating painted to look like a wooden roof. The Tisza had, in four years of war, taken its share of hits at the waterline, in the engine boiler and the smokestack, but these were easily enough patched.

She was, Annika admitted, an old lady and a noisy one. Her pistons hammered relentlessly as she ran, and you could hear her coming a good way off, ticking like a clock gone mad. “A dirty old lady,” Annika’s husband had called her, in the days before the war. Her stack-chopped off a few feet above the roof level of the pilothouse because of this or that bridge-trailed sooty clouds of smoke into the sky, black, gray, or white, depending on what they had to burn that day.

Leaving Bratislava, the smoke was black as they used up the last of the Czechoslovakian coal. “From here on, it’s brushwood,” Annika told him, casting a meaningful eye toward the double-bitted ax that stood in one corner of the pilothouse. “She’ll run on trash, if she must.” The Danube grew its own fuel, abundant softwoods-alder, willow, big-leaf maple-that lined its banks and drank its water. It was light, fibrous stuff that grew up in a year and burned up in a minute but it was abundant, and the Tisza had never minded it. “Thank the Lord for the current,” Annika said, “and for a load of one river boy rather than a barge of sand.”

Just south of the Bratislava docks, the river became the north-south boundary between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, passing entirely into Hungarian territory at the town of Sturovo. In midafternoon, Khristo hid belowdecks, behind a coal bin next to the boiler, where he at last dried out while the Hungarian border guards came aboard to joke with Annika and consume several bottles of beer and a tin of jam. When they’d gone, Annika came down the hatchway and showed him how to stoke the boiler and manage the primitive gearing system that changed propeller pitch. “Three speeds,” she said, “all slow. And if we have to go backward, I come and show you. You must be a little bit the mechanic.”

But for most of the day, not much was demanded of him. He stood by Annika’s side and watched the shore as they moved through the vast Hungarian plain. It was a March afternoon on the river as he remembered it, cold and gray, with racing clouds above and occasional moments of sunlight passing into sudden rain squalls that roughed up the surface of the water, then disappeared. They went past odd little towns full of bulbous shapes and steeply pitched roofs with storks’ nests woven into the eaves. Deserted towns, they seemed; only a few skinny dogs came down to the water to bark at them. Perhaps the people had fled as the fighting moved toward them- west to the German lines or east to the Russian. He did see the barge of wounded Germans, what was left of them, being towed upriver by another tug with whom Annika exchanged a greeting of whistle blasts. Sometimes the sky cleared, revealing the low Carpathians in the northern distance, sun shafts piercing the cloud and lighting the ridges a pale green.

In the late afternoon they pulled into the harbor at Szony and tied up next to a line of tugs, some of them joined to empty barges. Annika went off visiting, hopping nimbly in her carpet slippers from deck to deck, stopping at each pilothouse to gossip and exchange news. It was dark by the time she returned. They sat together by a miniature parlor stove in the kitchen area of the crew quarters-two hammocks and a battered old wardrobe chest- while Annika added water to flour and rolled up csipetke, tiny dumplings, boiled them in a pot of water, and added some dense tomato sauce from a tin can, then a single clove of garlic-“to make it taste like something”-squeezed flat between thumb and forefinger before ceremonial addition to the stew.

“Oh, for an egg,” she said sadly, “or a pinch of rose pepper. You would love me forever.”

In Prague, Khristo had lived on bread that was part sawdust, and horsemeat stewed with onions to hide the spoiled taste, and he wolfed down his portion of dumplings in sauce. “I’m in love with you already,” he said.

“Well, there’s enough of it,” she said, referring to a stack of zinc-colored cans of tomato sauce piled up on a shelf. “There used to be fish,” she said, “but the bomb concussions have done for them. Big ones, catfish with whiskers. Strong-but cooked in milk they were sweet. Ach”-she shut her eyes and grimaced in sorrow-“this stupid war is a curse. It took my husband, both sons, most of the men on the river. The winter of ‘43 got them, retreating from Moscow in the snow, so cold that when they took their pants down by the side of the road, they froze up back there and died.” Her mouth tightened at the thought and she crossed herself. “One or two came back. Husks. Good for nothing after that-they’d seen too much.”

She cleaned her bowl with a thumb and licked off the last of the tomato sauce. “They are fighting east of us, just as I warned you. Near the prison at Vac, downriver from the bend at Esztergom. The Hungarian Third Army, they say, what’s left of it, and the Sixth Panzer, facing the Third Ukrainian. Mongolian troops, river boy, they fight on vodka and if you’re a woman, God help you die quick. They haven’t been here for a thousand years, yet we’ve never forgotten them. They surrounded forty-five thousand German troops up by Lake Balaton, and pffft, that was that.”

“What are people saying?” Khristo asked.

“Well, the Russians have got Budapest, so that’s the end of the government. No great loss. Some say the thing to do is cross over the lines, surrender to the Red Army-others want to wait here. The Russians will need us. They’ll pay something, at least, to have their supplies move on the river.”