Winds of War (123 page)

Chapter 53

Talky Tudsbury was having five o’clock tea alone in his hotel suite that day, with some light refreshment of sprats, cheese, sturgeon, black bread, and honey cakes, when Victor Henry came in and told him that he was going to the front. The correspondent got so excited that he stopped eating. “Good God, man, you are? With the Germans swarming in all over the place? It’s impossible. It’s just talk. Dear Christ, these Russians are good at putting you off with talk. You’ll never go.” He brushed up his moustaches and reached for more food.

“Well, maybe,” Pug said sinking into a chair and laying on his lap the briefcase stuffed with codes and harbor charts, which he had just collected at the navy ministry. He had had five or six hours’ broken sleep in four days. The room was jerking back and forth in his vision as he strove to stay awake. “But my clearance has just come in from pretty high up.”

Tudsbury was putting a chunk of bread heaped with sardines to his mouth. The morsel stopped in midair. He peered at Henry through his bottle-glass spectacles, and spoke in low quiet tones. “I’ll go with you.”

“The hell you will.”

“Victor, the correspondents went to the central front two weeks ago, when the Russians were counterattacking. The day they left, I had flu, with a sizzling temperature.” Tudsbury threw down the food, seized his cane, limped rapidly across the room, and began to put on a fur-lined coat and a fur hat. “Who’s handling this, Lozovsky? Can’t I just tell him you said I could come? I know them all and they love me. It’s up to you.”

Victor Henry did not want Tudsbury along, but he was exhausted and he was sure the Russians would refuse.

“Okay.”

“God bless you, dear fellow. Stay and finish my tea. Tell Pam I’ll be back before six, and she’s to retype my broadcast.”

“Where is she?”

“A letter came for her in the Foreign Office pouch. She went to get it.”

Pug fell asleep in the armchair where he sat. Cold fingers brushing his cheek woke him. “Hello there. Wouldn’t you rather lie down?” Pam stood over him, her face rosy from the frost, her eyes shining, wisps of brown hair showing under her gray lambskin hat.

“What? Oh!” He blinked and stretched. “What am I doing here? I guess I walked in and collapsed.”

“Where’s Talky?” She was talking off her hat and gloves. “Why did he leave his tea? That’s not like him.”

Sleep cleared from his brain like fog; he remembered his conversation with Tudsbury, and told her. Her face went stiff and strained. “The front? They’ll never let him go, but
you?
Victor, are you serious? Have you heard the BBC, or the Swedish radio?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I know better than to argue, but – I can tell you this, our embassy’s getting ready to be moved to the Urals or somewhere. By the bye, Ted’s all right.” She went to the desk, still in her fur coat, and picked up typed yellow sheets. “Oh, drat, another revision. Such niggling!”

By now Pug was used to her casual bombshells, but she dropped this one so swiftly that he wasn’t sure he had heard aright. “Pamela, what’s this? What about Ted?”

“He’s fine. Or safe, anyhow.”

“But where is he?”

“Oh, back in Blighty. Hardly the worse for wear, according to him. It seems he finally managed to escape – he and four French aviators – from a prison camp outside Strasbourg. He did have quite a few adventures in France and Belgium, straight out of the films. But he made it. I rather thought he would, sooner or later.” She sat down and took the cover off the typewriter.

“Good God, girl, that’s tremendous news.”

“Yes, isn’t it? You must read his letter. Seven pages, written on both sides, and quite amusing. He’s lost three stone, and he still has a bullet in his thigh - or, more accurately, in his behind. He’s quite chastened, he’ll take the desk job now - as soon as he can sit at a desk, he adds rather ruefully! And that means I’m to come straight home and marry him, of course.”

Pamela broke her offhand manner with a long glance at Victor Henry. She put on black-rimmed glasses. “I’d better get at this. And you obviously need some sleep.”

“No use. The mission’s leaving soon. I have to see them off. Pam, that’s splendid about Ted. I’m very glad and relieved.”

Rubbing her hands and blowing on them, she said, “Lord, it would be a relief at that, wouldn’t it? I mean to get away from Talky’s handwriting and his optimistic drivel.”

Tudsbury burst in on them a little later, his face aflame, his nose empurpled by the cold, just as Henry was putting on his bridge coat.

“
Mojet byt
! Qualified yes, by God! They’ll confirm it tomorrow, but Victor, I believe I’m going with you! - Pam, have you finished yet? It’s getting near that time. -The Narkomindel’s in mad confusion, Victor, the news from the front must be really bad, but God Almighty that clearance you’ve got, whatever it is, certainly is the secret password! Of course they adore me, and they know I’m entitled to a trip, but the look that came over Lozovsky’s face, when I said
you
insisted that I accompany you!”

“Oh, Talky!” Pamela stopped typing, and glared at him. “Victor didn’t insist at all He couldn’t have.”

“Pam, one has to bludgeon these people.” Tudsbury’s face creased in a tricky grin. “I said you two were old friends, in fact and that Victor rather liked you and wanted to oblige me. So please back my story if occasion arises.”

“You unscrupulous old horror,” Pamela said, her face mantling pink.

“Well, that’s true enough, as far as it goes,” Victor Henry said. “I have to get on to the airport now. Pamela’s got some great news, Talky.”

The intrusion of Tudsbury snagged the trip. The Narkomindel, the Foreign Office, hemmed, hawed, and stalled. Days went by. Pug remained stuck in Moscow with nothing to do. The ambassador and the attachés acted cool and distant, for Victor Henry was that plague of the Foreign Service, an interloper from Washington. Once he dropped in on Slote’s office and found the diplomat pale, harassed and given to pointless giggling.

“Say, what’s my daughter-in-law doing on your desk?” Pug said. Natalie smiled from a silver frame, looking younger and fatter, with her hair in an unbecoming knot.

“Oh! Yes, that’s Natalie,” Slote laughed. “D’you suppose Byron would mind? She gave it to me ages ago, and I’m still fond of her. What’s happened to your trip? You won’t have far to go, at the rate the Germans are coming on, hee hee.”

“God knows,” Pug said, thinking that this man was in bad shape. “Maybe it’s all off.”

The main trouble, it turned out, was Pamela. Her father had asked to bring her along, claiming helplessness without her. He had since withdrawn the request. But the Narkomindel had fed the three names into the great obscure machine that handled the matter, and there was no starting over. Lozovsky began to lose his genial humor when Pug appeared or telephoned. “My dear Captain Henry, you will hear when you will hear. There are other equally pressing problems in the Soviet Union just now.”

So Pug wandered the streets, observing the changes in Moscow. New red-and-black posters blazed appeals for volunteers, in the crude bold socialist imagery of muscular young workmen and peasant women brandishing bayonets at spiders, snakes, or hyenas with Hitler faces. Labor battalions shouldering spades and picks marched raggedly here and there; big trucks crammed with children crisscrossed the city; long queues stood at food shops, despite the heavy rain that persisted day after day. Soldiers and horse-drawn carts vanished from the streets. Under the sodden caps and wet shawls of street crowds, the swarm of white high-cheekboned faces wore a different look. The Slavic phlegm was giving way to knotted brows, inquiring glances, and a hurrying pace; Victor Henry thought that the approach of the Germans made the Muscovites look more like New Yorkers.

Lozovsky finally telephoned him at the hotel, his voice ringing cheerily. “Well, Captain, will tomorrow at dawn suit you? Kindly come here to the Narkomindel, wear warm clothing, a raincoat, and good boots, and be prepared to be out three or four days.”

“Right. Is the girl coming too?”

“Of course.” The Russian sounded surprised and a bit offended. “That was the problem. Really it was not easy to clear, though we wanted to make the exact arrangements you desired. Our Russian girls face combat conditions as a matter of course, but we know that foreign ladies are much less hardy. Still we all know Miss Tudsbury, she is attractive, and one understands such a devoted friendship. It is arranged.”

Victor Henry decided to ignore the jollying, even ribald tone, and not to try to rewrite this record. “I’m grateful, and I’ll be there.”

* * *

They drove southward from Moscow in the rain, and all morning ground along in a thunderous parade of army trucks, stopping only for a visit to an amazingly well camouflaged airfield for interceptors, in the woods just outside the capital. The little black automobile, a Russian M-1 that looked and sounded much like a 1930 Ford, made cramped quarters, especially with unexplained packages and boxes lining the floor. When they had gone about a hundred miles, their guide, a mild-faced, bespectacled tank colonel, with the odd name of Porphyry Amphiteatrov, suggested that they stop to eat lunch and stretch, their legs. That was when they first heard the German guns.

The driver, a burly silent soldier with a close-trimmed red beard, turned off to a side road lined with old trees. They wound among cleared fields and copses of birch, glimpsing two large white country houses in the distance, and entered a gloomy lane that came to a dead end in wild woods. Here they got out, and the colonel led them along a footpath to a small grassy mound under the trees where garlands of fresh flowers lay.

“Well, this was Tolstoy’s country estate, you know,” said Amphiteatrov. “It is called Yasnaya Polyana, and there is his grave. Since it was on the way, I thought you might be interested.”

Tudsbury stared at the low mound and spoke in a in a hushed way not usual for him. “The grave of Tolstoy? No tomb? No stone?”

“He ordered it so. ‘Put me in the earth,’ he said, ‘in the woods where I played Green Stick with my brother Nicholas when we were boys . . .’” Amphiteatrov’s bass voice sounded coarse and loud over the dripping of water through the yellow leaves.

Victor Henry cocked his head and glanced at the colonel, for he heard a new noise: soft irregular thumps, faint as the plop of the rain on the grass. The colonel nodded. “Well, when the wind is right, the sound carries quite far.”

“Ah, guns?” said Tudsbury, with a show of great calm.

“Yes, guns. Well, shall we have a bite? The house where he worked is interesting, but it is not open nowadays.”

The bearded driver brought the lunch to benches out of sight of the burial spot. They ate black bread, very garlicky sausages, and raw cucumbers, washed down with warm beer. Nobody spoke. The rain dripped, the army trucks murmured on the highway, and the distant guns thumped faintly. Pamela broke the silence. “Who put the flowers there?”

“The caretakers, I suppose,” said the colonel.

“The Germans must never get this far,” she said.

“Well, that’s a spiritual thought,” the colonel said. “I don’t think they will, but Yasnaya Polyana is not a strong point, and so the great Tolstoy must now take his chances with the rest of the Russians.” He smiled, suddenly showing red gums, and not looking mild at all. “Anyway, the Germans can’t kill him.”

Tudsbury said, “They should have read him a little more carefully.”

“We still have to prove that. But we will.”

The sun momentarily broke through and birds began to sing. Victor Henry and Pamela Tudsbury sat together on a bench, and light shafted theatrically through the yellow leaves, full on the girl. She wore gray slacks tucked into white fur snowboots, and a gray lamb coat and hat.

“Why are you staring at me, Victor?”

“Pam, I’ve never visited Tolstoy’s grave before, certainly not with you, but I swear I remember all this, and most of all the nice way you’ve got that hat tilted.” As her hand went up to her hat he added, “And I could have told you you’d lift that hand, and the sun would make your ring sparkle.”

She held out her fingers stiffly, looking at the diamond. “Ted and I had a bit of a spat about
that
. When he produced it. I wasn’t quite ready to wear it.”

The colonel called, “Well, Captain, I think we go on?”

Edging into the thickening traffic stream on the main road, the little black automobile rolled in the direction of the gunfire. Trucks filled the highway, one line moving toward the front, one returning. Whiskered men and stout sunburned women, working in fields between stretches of birch forest, paid no attention to the traffic. Children playing near the highway ignored the war vehicles too. In tiny villages, washing hung outside the log cabins and the wooden houses with gaily painted window frames. One odd observation forced itself on Victor Henry: the further one got from Moscow, the nearer to the front, the more normal and peaceful Russia appeared. The capital behind them was one vast apprehensive scurry. Directly outside it, battalions of women, boys, and scrawny men with glasses - clerks, journalists, and schoolteachers - had been frantically digging antitank ditches and planting concrete and steel obstacles in myriads. Beyond that belt of defense began tranquil forests and fields, with fall colors splashing the stretches of green conifer. Mainly the air raid shelters for trucks along the highway - cleared spaces in the woods, masked with cut evergreen boughs - showed there was an invasion on.

Toward evening the car rolled into a small town and stopped at a yellow frame house on a muddy square. Here red-cheeked children lined up at a pump with pails; smoke was rising from chimneys; other children were driving in goats and cows from broad fields, stretching far and flat under a purpling cloudy sky; and three burly old men were hammering and sawing at the raw frame of a new unfinished house. This was the strangest thing Pug saw all that day - these Russian ancients, building a house in the twilight, within earshot of German artillery much louder here than at the Tolstoy estate, with yellow flashes thick like summer lightning on the western horizon.