Night Soldiers (56 page)

He must have dozed, for he snapped into consciousness as a drone rose higher and higher until it became a full-throttle roar. The hour was barely dawn, the river ran silver in the grayish light, and just east of his vantage point a tug was pulling a barge upstream. It was a heavy barge, and the tug was only just making headway against the current. The two planes flew side by side up the river—the gun-ports on their wings twinkling briefly as they passed over the barge—then broke off the attack, climbed steeply as their engines screamed, banked into tight, ascending turns, and headed back for another pass. He knew the silhouette: they were P-39 Airacobras, fighter planes of American manufacture with the red stars of the Soviet air force on their wings.

To see what they were shooting at, he narrowed his eyes and stared into the faint light: gray bundles, tight ranks of them pressed together on every available foot of barge space. As the Russian pilots made their second strafing run, one of the bundles rolled over the side and vanished in the river. They were German wounded, he realized, probably casualties of the fighting in Nitra, barged down the river Nitra into the Danube, now headed west to Austrian field hospitals. The fighter planes' guns mowed from the stern of the barge to the foredeck of the tug as he watched. Just as they broke off the second attack, a fountain of ack-ack tracer flowed upward from the dock area, falling far short of the climbing planes, and a figure in black ran from the pilothouse of the tug and began swinging something at the towing bitt on the aft deck. His motions were frantic, and Khristo realized he was chopping at the towline with an ax. As the Airacobras came around the third time, the barge broke free and began floating backward, downstream in the current, and the tug headed toward the bank, attempting to crawl in under the protection of the anti-aircraft fire.

He broke from the shed in a dead run as the planes harried the tugboat, headed for the river. The cold of it exploded in his head as he dove in, and the shock caused him to take a sickening mouthful of oily water—the iridescent sheen was all around him. Keeping his face out of the river, he struggled toward the tugboat, the weight of clothing and shoes dragging him down. The roar of the incoming planes rang in his ears, then they were gone.

He had tried to calculate a safe angle of intersection—heading well upstream of the tugboat when he entered the water—but the river was taking him. He dug his arms in as hard as he could, told himself he was getting it done, slicing through the current. A look at the boat showed him he was wrong. He was losing ground with every stroke. He ducked his head below the surface and kicked like a maniac to keep his body straight, driving the hard water beneath him as he brought his arms through. When his air was gone he came up gasping and tasted oil in his throat. The tug was near, he'd gained a few feet, but he was sliding past it and the hammering pulse of the propeller shaft felt as though it was on top of him. He lunged through the water, flailing his arms, then kicked his weight upward and got one hand through the rope lashing that looped along the hull. Dragged against the swell, his body created a wave that almost drowned him. He fought above it, snatching the rope with his other hand and holding on for his life. The motion of the boat drove him against the hull and he tried to thrust himself farther up the rope by shoving his feet against the wood, but it was slippery as wet ice and he couldn't do it.
Oh well
, he thought, amused by his predicament, a grand euphoria rising within him. Then he realized that the cold had invaded his mind, that he could die snagged on the hull, the strange dreamy death that came from immersion in cold water. In terror, he hauled frantically at the rope and his body sprang loose from the river, and then he had the rope under his arms and was inching his way up the loop, struggling toward its height and getting one hand hooked like a claw on top of the deck bulwark. He looked up, noted casually that blood was welling from beneath his fingernails, running pink as it mixed with water, then hung all his weight on the hand in order to swing one foot up on the bulwark. He pleaded for strength, then rolled himself over, falling three feet and landing deadweight on the planking of the deck. He lost himself for a time, then discovered the fading drone of airplane engines and the throbbing of the tug's pistons and returned to the world. The night before, he had studied the river from a distance, finding consolation in its slow, dark motion. A man of the world, who had walked the streets of Paris. Now he remembered himself as a little boy, guided by the lore of older kids, throwing a few crumbs of bread in the river before he would even dare to put a foot in the water.

Gun in hand, he crawled along the curve of the bulwark until he reached the pilot's cabin, which was set just forward of the small deckhouse that served as the tug's living quarters. Inside, a woman was at the helm, adjusting the large spoked wheel, watching the water ahead of her with unmoving eyes.

A bearded man in a black uniform sat against the far wall of the cabin, eyes closed, knees pulled up, hands clasped across his stomach, chest moving slightly as he breathed. An old-fashioned machine gun—a
pepecha
, with rough wooden stock and pan magazine—lay at his feet, and a trickle of blood ran across the deck from somewhere beneath him.

The pilot glanced at Khristo, then returned her attention to the river. She was immense, a solid block of a woman in carpet slippers and black socks and a flowered print dress that hung down like a tent. Above the socks, her white ankles were webbed with blue veins—the result, he realized, of a lifetime spent standing at the helm. Her face, in profile, featured an enormous bulb of a nose, a massive, square jaw, and salt and pepper hair scissored in a line across the nape of her neck. She was, he guessed, well into her fifties.

She spoke to him briefly in a language he did not at first understand, then realized was Hungarian. Next, she tried him in rapid German. He shook his head dumbly and started to shiver in the cool dawn air. “Who is he?” he said in Czech, nodding at the man on the floor.

“Hlinka,” she said. The Hlinka, he knew, was a Slovakian fascist militia that fought alongside the Germans.

“Your guard?” he asked, purposely vague. A guard could protect you or hold you prisoner.

She declined the trap. “What do you want?” she said in Czech. “Here it is forbidden to refugees,” she added. With authority, just in case he was something the Germans had thought up to test her loyalty.

He did not answer immediately. She shrugged, went back to work, changing course a point or two to avoid a whitewater snag some way upriver.

“I want to go east, mother,” he said, using a term of respect.

“I am not your mother,” she said. “And they are fighting east of here. And if you try to shoot that thing it will piss on your foot.”

He looked down to see water dripping from the barrel of the Czech automatic. He stuck it back in his belt, then reached into his pocket and brought out the gold coins—there were sixteen, each a solid ounce—and sprayed 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, Miklós 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 Stúrovo. In mid-afternoon, 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 Szöny 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.