Night Soldiers

understood what the Russians thought about that-especially those Russians whose job it was to think about things. It made them sentimental, for they saw their former selves in it.

Budapest was eighteen miles downriver from the Vac prison, just far enough behind the front lines to be, by then, choked with apparat of all sorts. The tugboat captains feared that as much as Khristo did, and river gossip confirmed their fears. There would be no sneaking through a web of those proportions- it had to be confronted.

Once the fighting was well behind them, Janos led them into a narrow stream which, at first, did not appear navigable, then widened suddenly and ran four or five miles into the empty countryside. What a dark alley was to a criminal, he thought, this byway to nowhere was to the boats. “When we have no customs stamp, we unload here,” was how Annika put it. “We are all smugglers, of course,” she added offhandedly, “some of the time.” The tugs tied off to trees on the bank, then everyone fell into a sleep of exhaustion.

The following morning, he joined the crews in chopping brush. Annika had applied lubricating grease to the burn and bound it up with an old engine rag, and the right hand slid up and down the ax handle anyhow, so he was able to manage it. He relished the work, laboring under a pallid sun with his jacket and shirt off, the sweat running down his back. Both blades of the double-bit ax were sharp, and he could take a two-inch trunk down with two or three wallops. Softwood was like that, of course, but he fancied himself a great woodsman nonetheless, the darkness of Prague and the terror of the previous night sweating itself out of him as he hacked at the brush.

They made a fire and burned the Hungarian flags, then patched the hulls with canvas and tar, which would have to do until they got to a boatyard. There, he was told, fabled craftsmen could saw out a damaged section of wood and then, almost unbelievably, reproduce the precise curve and size of planking to be tamped back into place with mallets. Then, using a long file called a slick, they would bring the new planking to a perfect harmony with the old hull. And it would never leak.

At sunset, they stood in a circle with caps in hand and Janos spoke a short prayer for the lost crew and tugboat. Many of them had been slightly wounded going past Vac-a steam scald, a broken wrist, two minor shrapnel injuries, Khristo’s burned hand-but they all felt themselves fortunate to see the sun go down that night. They were close to Budapest, there were those who wanted to go on right then and have it over with, but Khristo made a short speech, translated by Annika, and they eventually decided to trust his perception of Soviet bureaucracy-which by nightfall was wobbly at best and sometimes surly, from a full day’s vodka ration, and didn’t much like the darkness in the first place.

The next morning, Annika chose a young, whippy birch and Khristo felled it and trimmed the branches. About his further preparations she was less than pleased, but admitted glumly that it would be for the best if a strong effect were achieved. “It is hard to know with that sort of army,” he explained. “Maybe they hug you, maybe they squeeze off half a magazine in your belly. They themselves don’t know what they’re going to do until the mood takes them.”

“Ja, ja,” she said, not really convinced he was right. Khristo’s preparations had made a grave dent in her supplies, and she felt she might regret that in the future.

But she was proud of him later on that day, as they steamed downriver through the center of Budapest, he could see that. He was standing forward of the pilothouse with a ten-year-old boy borrowed for the occasion from another boat-Tisza was the leader of this convoy, and everybody, Annika included, knew they had to make an impression. Khristo turned at one point and looked in the pilothouse window and saw a sly and appreciative grin on her face.

The noise was overwhelming. There must have been thirty thousand of them-Mongolian troops with European Russian officers-lining the quays of the city as they moved through it. They cheered and waved, raised their pepechas and their old rifles with long bayonets. Some of the officers came to fervent attention. The child next to him, Khristo realized, was meant for the theater. He thrust his little fist into the air with revolutionary passion and scowled patriotically as though he were about to cry with all the emotion of it. Or perhaps, Khristo thought, he came suddenly to believe it. That was surely possible. It was exciting, thrilling, those tens of thousands of voices roaring in unison as the seven boats passed, their crews standing atop the cabins and saluting fiercely, their steam whistles hooting in celebration. The roar increased to thunder as they sailed past the elegant old parliament building that faced the river, the soldiers inside apparently so excited that desks and chairs and a snowstorm of papers came sailing out of the windows.

This was Khristo’s finest moment. Annika handed him the pepecha through the pilothouse door and, in perfect imitation of a thousand posters, he held it high in one hand-the bandaged one, forearm bulging-shaking the weapon with revolutionary fervor: fuck with us and this is what you’ll get! The soldiers on shore, recognizing their very own weapon, the PPSh M1941, cheered even louder. And when he climbed up the iron ladder onto the roof of the pilothouse and repeated the gesture, using the flag for background, the cheering reached a glorious climax. On both banks, voices were raised in spontaneous singing-the Red Army anthem.

A real Soviet flag would not have worked, he knew; it would have puzzled them, made them curious. Where did he get it? Who is he? But the huge square of canvas, four feet high and six feet long, roped to a birch pole nailed into the back wall of the pilothouse, then stretched forward by a rope wound around the smokestack, as though it were flying stiff in a fast breeze-that took them past curiosity. That sort of gesture took them in the heart.

It was a grand flag: red with tomato sauce, hammer and sickle crudely painted with black tar. On both sides, so that all could see it.

Russian press dispatches, for March 29, 1945, would include a mention of the incident: “In Budapest, elements of the Hungarian navy overthrew their fascist officers and joined forces with the victorious divisions of Marshal Malinovsky’s Third Ukrainian Front in a display of patriotic solidarity.”

They were arrested, of course, but it was the mildest sort of arrest. Around a bend in the river, a Russian patrol boat guided them into a dock and the military intelligence people were sent for. Papers were produced, examined, held up to the light-but they had already “confessed,” in the most public way imaginable, to the worst of their crimes: being part of a supply system that served an enemy fighting force. Thus the intelligence people found little to provoke their interest. They had the “crime,” which satisfied one of their instincts, and they had the “penalty,” which satisfied the other. The penalty was a form of conscription: these tugboats and their crews would serve the Occupation garrison, which desperately needed a way to get back and forth across the river. The retreating Germans had blown every single bridge in Budapest, whose twin cities, Buda and Pesth, were divided by the Danube. In return for faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips-whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays-the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside. Vodka rations, supplied from the east, might come later, the Russian officers said, if they worked hard and kept their noses clean.

The tugboat people found this an excellent arrangement. They had their lives and their boats, they would be fed, and they were keenly aware that captured enemies of the Soviet armies rarely fared that well. After a few hours, they were sent back to their boats and told to await further direction.

Khristo was taken to a room. For him they had two captains with the top buttons of their tunics undone. One was tall, with colorless eyes, the other short and not happy about it. So, they started in, he was a Yugoslav conscript worker who had escaped from his masters in Prague. A curious tale. How had he done it? Describe a milling machine, please. And what was the lubricating procedure for a lathe. Had he ever used a router plane in his work? Where was the factory? What did it do? Where did he live? What was his mother’s maiden name? The street on which the factory was located-what did it look like? What was he paid? Had anyone helped him in his escape? How had he gotten from Prague to Bratislava? Transferred? Who had signed the order? The German supervisor? What was his name? What did he look like? The papers had been destroyed? How convenient. We know you’re an American spy, they told him. One of the tugboat crewmen had suspected it, had told them he was carrying gold. Where was it? Where was the radio? Where were the maps? Make a clean breast, they said; all we want is for you to work for us, surely you see you would be too valuable to be shot. Come on, they said, all three of us are in the same profession, if we don’t stick together the higher-ups will shaft us all, we know it, you know it, let’s make an arrangement, let’s make each other comfortable. Some of these bastards would poke your eyes out if we weren’t protecting you. Mongolians! You’re lucky it’s us and not them. We understand your problems.