Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious in and of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer.
He woke on the morning of the third day to find that he was soaked to the skin and the back of his throat was on fire. In panic, he forced himself to a sitting position, then swallowed obsessively until the burning subsided. He was thirsty, dry as dust. The only water available collected in shellholes or farmers’ ponds or, in extremity, there was the river. But each time he had to drink he was in fear of cholera, so permitted himself only a few sips, imagining that his body would fight the bacteria better if it was limited to small doses.
Out on the road, a small group of old people in black clothing was already on the move, though it was barely light. What did they eat? he wondered. He’d had a tin of jam the previous day. Had slid down an embankment onto the shore of the river, where he could hide in order to eat it. Like an animal with its kill, he thought. Plum jam. The most delicious thing there could possibly be. He’d sawn the tin open with his knife and spooned the jam up with his fingers.
Of the fourth day he remembered little. The villages of Ercsi and Adony and Dunafoldvar seemed deserted. He would wait at the outskirts for a group of refugees and walk through with them, so as to pass unnoticed. But he was not challenged. Russian military police sat in American Jeeps and smoked cigarettes, watching him limp past. At Fajsz, a woman came out of a house and gave him a cup of water. Her face beneath the black shawl was seamed and windburned, yet she was young and seemed very beautiful because there was pity for him in her eyes. He drank the water and handed the cup back.
Some miles before the town of Mohacs, he left the Great Plain and entered the swampland of southern Hungary. Now it was not so far to Yugoslavia. Soviet troops had been there longer, river traffic would be closer to normal. It was a guess-information abstracted from Czech newspapers by Hlava and reported to him twice a week-but a reasonable guess. The German censors did not want the population to know where the lines were, but they could not resist reporting Russian atrocities against civilians-an attempt to stiffen public resistance as the time of invasion approached.
Good guess or not, he would have to find a way to get back on the river, he could not walk much farther. The hunger had stopped gnawing at him, but his mind was running in odd channels, wandering through images of the past. There was no sense to them; they were simply moments of other days, things heard or seen with no reason to be remembered. He would, from time to time, snap awake, recall who he was and what he was doing, but then he would drift away once more. A woman in Fajsz had given him a cup of water. Or had she? Had that happened? At one point, somewhere south of Mohacs, he came to his senses to discover that he was on his knees by the river, water cupped in his hands. There were black specks floating on the surface. He bent his head and sipped at it, but it was foul with dead fish and the taste of metal and he spit it out.
“Serves you right.”
Startled, he scrambled to his feet. The voice came from a small skiff not twenty feet away, its bow partly grounded on the sand. A man in the uniform of a Russian enlisted soldier was watching him intently. Then he realized, through a mist, that the man had spoken in Serbian, a Yugoslav language close enough to Bulgarian that he understood it easily. Had he left Hungary? Contrived to walk blindly through a frontier post?
“Here,” the man said, “try this.” He held out a canteen, the flat kind used by the Red Army, its canvas cover dripping from being hung over the stern of the boat in order to keep the water cool.
He waded over to the boat, accepted the canteen and took a brief drink. The water was cold and sweet. Handing it back, he saw that the man was wearing several ranks of medals on his jacket. He was young, nineteen or twenty, with service cap pushed back on his head to reveal hair chopped short in military fashion. The bottoms of his trousers were tied in knots just below the knees and a pair of homemade crutches was resting on the bow seat, their tops cushioned with folded rags.
The man waved off the canteen. “Go ahead,” he said.
Khristo drank more water, rubbed his lips with his fingers, and returned the canteen. “Thank you,” he said, using the Bulgarian expression.
“Bulgarian?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” Khristo said. “Downriver from here. Near Silistra.”
“Can you row a boat?”
He nodded that he could.
“Come on then,” the man said.
Khristo climbed carefully over the side, balancing his weight so he would not rock the boat. The soldier changed seats, moving to the bow by using his hands to shift himself along the gunwales. Khristo took the oars- facing the “wrong” way, downstream, a river tradition that allowed the oarsman to keep an eye out for obstacles- and rowed out to midriver, his hands rolling over each other, oar blades chopping up and down in the water.
“Good,” the soldier said appreciatively. “I see you’ve done this before.”
“Oh yes,” Khristo said.
“Just as well. It’s a bastard out here-you’ll break your back trying to keep this bugger pointed downstream.”
“We have the current,” Khristo said, thankful he didn’t have to put his back into it.
“More like it has us. You’ll see.” He twisted around and watched the river for a few moments, then turned back to Khristo. “I’m Andrej,” he said.
They shook hands. “I’m called Nikko.”
He rowed for several hours as the rain sprinkled on and off. Andrej spoke casually of his time in the army. His father had been a great admirer of the Bolsheviks and had sent him off to enlist with the Russians in 1940. He had fought at Stalingrad as a machine-gunner, then come west with the Second Ukrainian Front, seeing action at the forcing of the river Prut and fighting through the Oituz Pass in the Carpathians. Wounded in the back by mortar shrapnel, he had served with a second-rank unit as far as the town of Szarvas, in eastern Hungary, where he’d stepped on a German land mine and lost the lower parts of both legs. He was philosophical about it. “At least they didn’t get anything important,” he said with a wink. After a time in a field hospital, he’d taken off on “night leave” and caught a ride to Budapest. Nobody there wanted to hear about his problems-a harassed clerk took a moment to stamp his mustering-out papers-so he “borrowed” a skiff from a drunken guard and headed toward home, a little town to the east of Belgrade.
They crossed into Yugoslavia late in the afternoon and a Yugoslav patrol boat came alongside to take a look at them. Andrej tossed a salute, then waved his crutches. A sailor returned the salute from the foredeck while Khristo waved and smiled.
“Home,” Andrej said.
“Your Russian uniform,” Khristo said. “They don’t seem to mind.”
“Why should they? We are allies. Tito will be running things down here and we’ll be much better off. You’ll see when you get home to Bulgaria. The Russians bring us peace.”
Khristo nodded polite agreement. “No more politics and feuding.”
“That’s it,” Andrej said vigorously. “Everything nice and quiet, a man will be able to get on with his life.”
The tempo of the river was steady and constant and, after a time, Andrej’s head lowered to his chest, his
