The Long Walk (19 page)

I marvelled at the way the girl stood it all. I fear we all still had misgivings about her frailty and I am sure she was aware of them. In these early days she never once held us up. She was
even gay and happy when we were soured and foot-weary after a particularly trying march. She treated us like a crowd of big brothers – all except Mister Smith. Between those two there grew
almost a father-and-daughter relationship. Often in the night shelter she would get him to tell her about America and on more than one occasion I heard him tell her that when this was all over she
should come to the States with him. He would gently tease her about her big Russian boots and then say, ‘Never mind, Kristina, in America I will buy you some beautiful dresses and elegant
high-heeled shoes.’ And Kristina would laugh with the wonder and promise of it.

She grew on us until there was not one of the bunch who would not cheerfully have died to protect her. She would wake in the morning, look at the unhandsome collection around her and say
‘It is wonderful to see you all. You make me feel so safe.’ On the march she loved to get Zaro up to his funny business. Even Zaro sometimes was glum, but Kristina never failed to chaff
him back to his normal sparkling humour. Zaro, spurred on by her interest, would effervesce with fun. Sometimes as I watched them together, I found it hard to realize we were on a desperate
mission, half-starved and with the worst of the journey yet to come. Most reserved of the party was the Lithuanian, Marchinkovas. He talked little and generally only gave his advice when he was
asked for it. Kristina would walk alongside him for miles, talking softly and seriously, and then there would be the phenomenon of Marchinkovas smiling, even laughing out loud.

Now, too, the party had a nurse. Kolemenos began limping with sore toes. Kristina bathed his feet for him, tore strips off her petticoat and bound up the raw places between his toes. When my leg
wound opened up, she dressed that. A cut or an abrasion was her immediate concern. When the bandages were finished with she washed them through in stream water, dried them and put them away for
further use.

Approaching what was probably the Bargusin River, about halfway down the lake, Kristina was herself a casualty. She began to drop behind and I saw she was hobbling. I stopped the others and went
back to her. ‘My boots are hurting me a little,’ she said. I took them off. The soles and backs of the heels were raw where blisters had formed and burst. She must have had hours of
agony. The boots had been too heavy and big for her. All seven men fussed about her while she insisted that she was quite well enough to continue. I bandaged her feet with some of her own linen and
then persuaded her to let us cut off the long felt tops of the boots to see if she could get on more easily with the reduced weight. Off came the felt and was stowed away to be used later inside
moccasins. But an hour later she was hobbling as badly as ever and we decided to throw the boots away and make her some moccasins.

So I made Kristina a pair of moccasins. I lavished on them all the care and artistry of which I was capable with the materials at hand. The others sat round and watched every cut of the knife
and every stitch of the leather thonging. I doubled the soles so that they would be stiff and long-wearing and I lined them with sable. Everybody congratulated me on my handiwork and Kristina
planted an impulsive kiss right in the centre of my forehead.

We began to feel the girl was good luck to us. We suffered no real slow-down until we reached, at night, only five days after turning south at the lake tip, the Bargusin River. The trouble with
all the bigger waterways was that we had to spend extra time reconnoitring for the best position to attempt a crossing. We discovered the next day there were three fair-sized rivers in our path.
Having crossed the first we encountered the second after only an hour’s march. The third, and biggest, held us up three hours later and we wasted hours surveying it and eventually negotiating
it. We guessed that all three rivers must join to the westward to enter the Baikal Lake as the main Bargusin River. We climbed a hill on the far bank of the third river and lit a fire to dry
ourselves out. We were all dog tired and very hungry.

About this hunger business, I found that the real pangs did not hit me for about eight days. All the others would in the meantime have been suffering badly. But when I was attacked by the pains
of starvation I was worse affected than any. We made a little
kasha
with the barley that night, but the quantity was so small that it was almost worse than nothing at all. We could think of
little else but food. There were suggestions that we should creep up on a farm or smallholding and steal something, but even in our extremity we had the great fear of jeopardizing the whole escape
by bringing ourselves to the notice of the people who lived in the country. If we were determinedly hunted some of us at least must be recaptured.

Kristina was fast asleep even while we were talking.

The Sergeant looked down on her. ‘Let us sleep. I think she will bring us luck tomorrow.’

‘Let us hope so,’ said his friend Makowski.

T
HE BARGUSIN
crossing took place at the end of May and was the last of the major water hazards. On the south bank the
Siberian summer seemed to be waiting for us. From the northern tip of Baikal we had been favoured by exceptionally mild spring weather, dry and quite rainless. Now the sun beat down on us, all was
green, there were flowers and the birds were back from their distant migrations. In six weeks we had walked out of the bitter tail-end of Central Siberian winter into the warm embrace of the
Southern summer, where village orchards in the distance were gay and beautiful with blossoming cherry and apricot trees. Sleeping out became less of an ordeal even when it was considered prudent
not to risk lighting a fire. During the day we were forced to discard our fur waistcoats but we put them on again after sunset to protect us against the night’s chill.

For a full two days after the Bargusin we ate nothing and the thought of food obsessed all minds. Then it was that we saw the horse through the trees betraying its presence with restless
movement in the shafts of a crude sledge. It had scented our approach and obviously did not like what it smelt. Zaro and I went forward for a close look. The horse turned the whites of its eyes
over its shoulder towards us. It had every reason to suspect our intentions. We were quite ready to eat horsemeat.

Zaro and I saw it at the same time – an old single-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, stock and barrel held together by windings of copper wire. It lay across the sledge alongside a little
leather pouch which we guessed to be for the ammunition. The thought struck me hard. We must get that gun before the owner can reach it. I ran forward with Zaro and whipped it quickly under my arm,
barrel pointing down. I waved the others forward. Kristina, with Mister Smith’s arm protectively about her shoulder, stood well back as the rest of the party came up to Zaro and I. Kolemenos
went towards the horse to talk to it and to try to quieten its restiveness, but the animal shied from him.

The man must have been quite near, near enough to hear the nervous movements of his horse. We faced him in a tense bunch. He was about sixty, a solid, broad-shouldered woodcutter, his big axe
held on his right shoulder. He was heavily bearded but both his beard and long hair were neatly trimmed. His approach impressed me. He saw us but his slow, deliberate walk did not falter. His eyes
looked steadily ahead and took in the fact that I held his gun under my arm. He gave no sign of fear or alarm. He went to the horse’s head, ran his hand through the mane, turned aside and
swung the blade of his axe into the bole of a tree, where he left it.

He looked at me and beyond me to where the girl stood with the American. ‘Who are you?’

Smith answered, moving forward as he did so. ‘We are prisoners escaping. We shall not harm you. We only want food.’

‘Times have changed,’ said the man. ‘At one time you would have found food waiting for you, and no questions asked.’

There was a simple dignity about the man. He looked us all over with easy frankness. He turned his head towards Kristina again and I thought he was going to ask us about her. But he said
nothing. Instead he walked around the horse’s head and reached down to the sledge for a long, slim sack which he picked up. His fingers busied themselves with the leather thong around the
neck. ‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ he said. ‘I live alone and I am the only man for miles around here.’

From the sack came treasure. A loaf of dark brown bread. Four smallish dried fish. A thick, mouth-watering hunk of salted fat pork. From his belt he took a long hunter’s knife. These were
the provisions of a man who was intending to be away from his home for a whole day and it was evident he had not yet eaten. We watched his performance with concentrated attention. Carefully he cut
off one slice of bread and one slice of salt pork which he replaced in the sack. He motioned to Kolemenos, positioned nearest to him. Kolemenos took a couple of paces forward and the woodcutter put
into his big hands the loaf of bread, the lump of pork and the dried fish.

Kolemenos stood for so long looking down at the food in his hands that eventually I said to him, ‘Put it in your bag, Anastazi, and we’ll share it out later.’

The sound of my voice caused the Russian to turn towards me – and to the gun I was holding. There was an unspoken question in his eyes. I walked over to Smith and we talked about the gun.
We agreed the thing would be useless to us. We could not hunt with it because the noise of it would attract attention to us, especially in the well-populated southern areas we were now approaching.
Nevertheless, security demanded we should not leave it with the woodcutter. Paluchowicz and Makowski added their opinions and the final decision was that we could not afford to take the slightest
risk of the gun being used against us or as a signal to summon assistance.

I faced the Russian. ‘We are sorry, old man, but we have to take your gun with us.’

For the first time he appeared perturbed. He lifted his hands as though to appeal to us, dropped them again. ‘It will not be safe for you to use it,’ he said. ‘I understand the
way you feel. Hang the gun on a tree somewhere and perhaps one day I shall find it.’

We turned to go. Once more he looked at Kristina. ‘Good luck to you all,’ he called after us. ‘May you find what you seek.’

We moved on for about an hour without much talk, all of us feeling a nagging sense of guilt at having taken that shotgun, a thing of inestimable value to a man like the woodcutter.

‘Well,’ said Zaro eventually, ‘the old man still has his horse.’ We laughed at that, but felt no better for it.

About five miles from the scene of the encounter I hung the gun on the low branch of a tree overhanging a faint track, having first bound a piece of deerskin round the breech. It was the best I
could do.

The food remained untouched until the day’s march ended at nightfall. Kolemenos divided it into eight portions. So small was each lot that I could have bolted mine in a couple of minutes
and still remained hungry. But the well-developed instinct of hoarding food against the possibility of even worse trouble prevailed with all of us. We decided to use what we had as an iron ration
spread over three days – a little for this night and the two following nights. Kristina listened to our talk and ate as we did, one-third of her small store. She looked very white and tired
that night, I remember.

In spite of the natural preoccupation with food, progress remained good as we pressed south over a succession of low ranges. The farther we went the more the signs of human settlement increased.
Our method was to approach the top of each hill warily and scout from there the country ahead. Frequently we saw people moving about in the distance. We swung off course to avoid roads along which
went telephone poles – always the mark of an important route – and which carried a fair amount of lorry traffic. On other occasions we heard men calling to one another and the clatter
of tractors. There was often the sound of a not-far-distant factory hooter.

Daylight travelling was getting hazardous. One day after the last of the woodcutter’s food had gone, we sat down to review our situation. This was a day, I recall, when Kristina had been
unable to keep up with us. Several times she had slipped away and held us up. There had been good-natured grousing. She was away from us now as we discussed plans for covering the dangerous terrain
between us and the border.

‘What is the matter with the little girl?’ asked the Sergeant suddenly.

I turned rather sharply on him. ‘There is nothing the matter with her that a day’s rest won’t cure. Don’t forget she is a woman. All women become unwell. Have you
forgotten?’

Paluchowicz’s face was a study of consternation. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said slowly. Nor had the others, apparently. ‘The poor child,’ murmured
Makowski.

Mister Smith spoke up. ‘Obviously we shall have to revert to night marches very soon. We might as well start the new scheme now, and Kristina can have her rest. Slav, you are the youngest
of us. You have a quiet word with her and tell her we won’t start until she feels quite fit to go.’

I moved away from them and met her as she came out from among the trees. ‘Kristina, we are all going to rest for a day and then start travelling at night.’

‘Is it because of me?’ There was a bright pink spot in each cheek.

‘No, no. It will be safer at night.’

‘I have been holding you back today. I am very sorry. But I could not help it, Slav. I am very tired today.’

‘I understand. Please don’t worry.’

She turned away. ‘You are very kind, Slav. You are all very kind. Thank you.’ And I led her back to the others. And everybody was immediately talkative in an elaborately casual way.
Then she sat down beside Mister Smith and said, ‘Tell me some more about what the women wear in America.’ He smiled and talked. She listened without saying a word, her chin on her
knees.