Colditz certainly looked impenetrable.
But how did Tania do it? How did she make it to Finland, with Dimitri dead and Sayers fatally wounded? He wished he knew, but he knew one thing—somehow she ended up in Finland. So there must be a way out of this place, too. He just couldn’t see it.
Pasha and Ouspensky were a lot less optimistic. They had no interest in watching the guards. Alexander wanted to talk to the British POWs in the courtyard, but he had no interest in explaining his flawless English to Pasha or Ouspensky. There were no Americans in sight, only British and French officers, one Polish officer and the five Soviets with whom they shared their cell.
The one Polish officer was General Bor-Komarovsky. Alexander and he got talking in the canteen. Komarovsky had taken over the Polish Underground Resistance to Hitler and to the Soviets in 1942. When he was caught he went straight to Colditz, to ensure his permanent incarceration. And though he was very willing to tell Alexander stories of previous escape attempts out of the castle, and even gave Alexander his old relief maps of the area, in Russian, Komarovsky told Alexander that he could forget about escaping from here. Even those who had gotten outside the fortress walls were all caught within days. “Which goes to show you,” Komarovsky said, “that what I’ve always believed is especially true of a place like Colditz. Despite the most meticulous planning and organization, there is no successful way out of any difficult situation without the hand of God.”
Tania got out of the Soviet Union, Alexander wanted to say. I rest my case.
At night on his top bunk, he thought of her arms. He thought of trying to find her…Where would she be? If she were still waiting for him, where would she be so he could find her? Helsinki? Stockholm? London? America? Where in America, Boston, New York? Somewhere warm, perhaps? San Francisco? The City of Angels? When she left Russia with Dr. Matthew Sayers, he was going to take her to New York. Though the doctor had died, perhaps Tatiana headed there as planned. He would start there.
He hated these blind alleys of his imagination, but he liked to picture what her face might look like when she saw him, what her body might look like as it trembled, what her tears might taste like, how she would walk to him, maybe run to him.
What about their child, how old was it now? One and a half. A boy, a girl? If a girl, maybe she was blonde like her mother. If a boy, maybe he was dark-haired like his once dark, now hairless father. My child, what is it like to hold a small child, to lift it up in the air?
He would get himself into a self-defeating frenzy thinking of her hands on him, and of his own on her.
When she had first left him, the aching for her in his body was unabated, through windy March and wet April, and dry May and warm June. June was the worst. The aching was so intense that sometimes he thought that he would not be able to continue another day, another minute of such want, of such need.
Then a year passed and another. And little by little the aching was numbed, but the want, the need—there was no escape from that.
Sometimes he thought of the girl in Poland, blowzy Faith, who offered him everything and to whom he gave a chocolate. Would he be as strong now if a Faith walked through these parts? He didn’t think so.
In Colditz, there was no escape, not from the thoughts, not from the fear, not from the throbbing. Not from the realization that it had now been many months, many years, and how long could one faithful wife wait for her dead husband? Even his Tatiana, the brightest star in the sky. How long could she wait before she moved on?
Please, no more. No more thoughts. No more desire. No more love.
Please. No more anything.
How long could she wait before she put her blonde hair down, and walked out of work, and saw another face that made her smile?
He turned his own face to the window. He had to get out of Colditz, at whatever the cost.
“Comrades, look here,” he said to Pasha and Ouspensky, when they were out on the terrace one freezing February afternoon. “I want you to see something.” Without motioning he pointed to the two sentries one on each side of the rectangular terrace, seven meters wide by twenty meters long.
Then he walked them casually across the terrace to the stone parapet and casually looked over the ledge while lighting a cigarette. Pasha and Ouspensky also looked over the ledge. “What are we looking at?” said Pasha.
In the walking garden far below, same shape as the terrace but twice as wide, two sentries with machine guns stood at opposite sides, one in an elevated pagoda, one on a raised catwalk.
“Yes?” said Ouspensky. “Four guards. Day and night. And the garden is over a vertical drop. Let’s go.” He turned.
Alexander grabbed his arm. “Wait, and listen.”
“Oh no,” said Ouspensky.
Pasha leaned forward. “Let him go, Captain,” he said. “We don’t need him. Go to hell, Ouspensky, and good riddance.”
Ouspensky stayed.
Alexander, without pointing, said, “There are two guards down in the garden during the day, and two up here on the terrace. But at night the two guards here are relieved until morning because there is not much point in looking right at the floodlights. The guards here are replaced by one additional sentry in the garden below for a total of three. The third sentry watches the barbed wire fence over the fifty-foot—” Alexander coughed—“sixteen-meter precipice that leads to the bottom of the hill and to freedom.” He paused. “At midnight, two things happen. One is the changing of the guard. The other is the turning of the floodlights to light this terrace and the castle. I’ve been watching it all out of our window at night. The guards walk off their posts, and new ones come to take their place.”
“We’re familiar with what changing of the guard means, Captain,” said Ouspensky. “What are you proposing?”
Alexander turned away from the precipice and toward the castle. He continued to smoke leisurely. “I propose,” he said, “that when the guard is changing and the floodlights aren’t on, we jump out of our window carrying a long rope, run across this terrace, jump down right here into the garden below, run to the barbed wire, cut it, and then descend on ropes the sixteen meters down to the ground to make our escape.”
Pasha and Ouspensky were quiet. Ouspensky said, “How much rope would we need?”
“Ninety meters in all.”
“Oh, can we just pick that up at the canteen? Or should we ask housekeeping?”
“We will make it out of bed linen.”
“That’s a lot of bed linen.”
“Pasha has been making friends with Anna from housekeeping.” Alexander smiled. “You can get us extra sheets, can’t you?”
“Wait, wait,” said Pasha. “We have to jump out of our window, nine meters above concrete…”
“Yes.”
Pasha tapped his foot twice on the ground. “Concrete, Alexander!”
“Hold on to the rope and run down the wall.”
“And then hold on to the rope to scale another thirteen meters down into the garden, run fourteen meters across, cut the barbed wire, and descend on another rope sixteen meters to the ground?”
“Yes, but the second rope we can attach in the dark. Won’t be any floodlights on the wall down there.”
“Yes, but the sentries will have taken their places.”
“We will have to be on the other side of the barbed wire and in the trees when they do.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Pasha. “What about the long white rope that’s hanging out of our window? You don’t think the guards will notice that, with the floodlights illuminating it so discreetly?”
“One of our bunkmates will have to brace us and then pull up the rope. Constantine will do it.”
“And he will do this why?”
“Because he has nothing better to do. Because you will give him all your cigarettes. Because you will introduce him to Anna in housekeeping.” Alexander smiled. “And because if it works, he can escape himself the following night. The barbed wire will already be cut.”
Ouspensky said, “Comrade Metanov, as usual, there is something you have overlooked to ask the captain. What about time? How long do we have before the new guard takes his place and the floodlights come on?”
“Sixty seconds.”
Ouspensky opened his mouth and laughed. Pasha joined him. “Captain, you are always so amusing, wry, witty.”
Alexander smoked and said nothing. Pasha did a double-take, his mouth still open, still wanting to smile. “You’re not serious about this?”
“Absolutely am.”
“Comrade, he will have us on,” said Ouspensky to Pasha, “until Friday if necessary. He is a terrible prankster.”
Alexander smoked. “What would you two rather do? Spend two years digging a tunnel? We don’t have two years. I don’t know if we have six months. The British here are convinced the war will be over by the summer.”
“How do you know?” said Ouspensky.
“I can understand rudimentary English, Lieutenant,” Alexander snapped. “Unlike you, I went to school.”
“Captain, I enjoy your sense of humor, I really do. But why do we have to dig a tunnel? Why do we have to fling ourselves out of windows on sheets? Why don’t we just wait the six months for the war to be over?”
“And then, Ouspensky?”
“Then, then,” he stammered. “I don’t know what then, but let me ask you, what now? You’re throwing yourselves off a cliff, why? Where are you hoping to go?”
Pasha and Alexander both stared at Ouspensky and didn’t reply.
“As I thought,” said Ouspensky. “I’m not going.”
“Lieutenant Ouspensky,” said Pasha, “have you ever in your entire fucking miserable life said yes to anything? You know what’s going to be on your grave? ‘Nikolai Ouspensky. He said no.’”
“Both of you are such comedians,” said Ouspensky, walking away. “You are just the height of hilarity. My stomach is hurting. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Alexander and Pasha turned back to the garden below them.
Pasha asked how they were going to get through the barbed wire.
“I’ve got the wire cutters with me from the Catowice Oflag,” said Alexander, smiling. “Komarovsky gave me his military maps of Germany. We just need to get to the border with Switzerland.”
“How many kilometers?”
“Many,” Alexander admitted. “A couple of hundred.” But fewer than from Leningrad to Helsinki, he wanted to add. Fewer than from Helsinki to Stockholm. And certainly fewer than from Stockholm to the United States of America, which is what he and Tania had planned.
Pasha didn’t say anything. “Failure cost is high.”
“Oh, Pasha, what are your options? Even if you for a moment thought I might have some, which believe me I don’t, where does staying in Colditz leave you?”
Shrugging, Pasha said, “I didn’t say I wasn’t with you, I didn’t say I wasn’t going. I just said…”
Alexander patted him on the back. “Yes, the risk is high. But the reward is also high.”
Pasha looked up to the third-floor window of his cell, to the terrace they were standing on, down to the garden below. “How in the world do you expect us to do all this in sixty seconds?”
“We’ll have to hurry.”
They planned for another two weeks until the middle of February. They got medical supplies and canned goods and a compass. They stole sheets out of the laundry room and at night cut them in the dark and braided them together and then hid them in their ripped-apart mattresses. While helping to make rope Ouspensky kept saying he wasn’t going, but everybody in the cell knew he was. The hardest thing was to get some civilian clothes. Pasha finally managed to sweet-talk Anna into stealing them from the laundry at the German senior officers’ quarters. Their weapons had long been taken away from them, but Alexander still had his rucksack, which had a titanium trench tool, wire cutters, his empty pen, and some money. Anna even stole them some German IDs the night before their escape.
“We don’t speak German,” said Ouspensky. “It won’t do us much good.”
“I speak a little,” said Pasha, “and since we’ll be wearing German clothes, it’s only right we should have German IDs.”
“And what did you promise this young naïve girl for risking her job and livelihood for you?” Ouspensky asked with a sneer.
“My heart.” Pasha smiled. “My undying devotion. Isn’t it what we always promise them? Right, Alexander?”
“Right, Pasha.”
Finally the planned night in February came and the time was near. Everything was ready.
It was eleven in the evening and Ouspensky was snoring. He asked to be woken up ten minutes before departure. Alexander thought it was smart to rest, but he himself could not sleep since yesterday.
He and Pasha were sitting on the floor by the closed window, tugging on the rope that was securely—they hoped—attached to one of the bunkbeds cemented into the floor.
“Do you think Constantine is strong enough to hold the rope steady? He doesn’t look that strong,” Pasha whispered.
“He’ll be fine.” Alexander lit a cigarette.
So did Pasha. “Will we succeed, Alexander? Will we make it?”
“I don’t know.” Alexander paused. “I don’t know what God has planned for us.”
“There you go with your God again. Are you prepared for anything?”
Alexander paused before answering. “Anything,” he said, “except failure.”
“Alexander?”
“Yes?”
“Do you ever think about your child?”
“What do you think?”
Pasha was quiet.
“What do you want to know? If I think she still remembers me? Do I think she has forgotten me—found a new life? Assumed that I was dead, accepted that I was dead.” Alexander shrugged. “I think about it all the time. I live inside my heart. But what can I do? I have to move toward her.”
Pasha was quiet.
Alexander listened to his palpitating breathing.
“What if she is happy now?”
“I hope she is.”
“I mean—” Pasha went on, but Alexander interrupted him.
“Stop.”
“Tania is at her core a happy soul, a resilient person. She is loyal and she is true, she is unyielding and relentless, but she also feels a child’s delight for the smallest things. You know how some people gravitate toward misery?”
“I know how some people do that, yes,” said Alexander, inhaling the nicotine.
“Tania doesn’t.”
“I know.”
“What if she is remarried and has made herself a fine life?”
“I’ll be happy to find her happy.”
“But then what?”
“Then nothing. We salute her. You stay. I go.”
“You’re not risking your life to just go, Alexander.”
“No.” I am a salmon, born in fresh water, living in salt water, swimming 3,200 kilometers upstream over rivers and seas back home to fresh water to spawn, and to die. I have no choice.
“What if she’s forgotten you?”
“No.”
“Maybe not forgotten, but what if she doesn’t feel the same way anymore? She is in love with her new husband. She’s got kids. She looks at you and is horrified.”
“Pasha, you have a twisted Russian soul. Shut the fuck up.”
“Alexander, when I was fifteen, I had a crush on this girl, we had a great time for a month, and the next year I went back to Luga thinking we would continue our romance, and you know what? She didn’t even remember who I was. How pathetic was that?”
“Pretty pathetic.” They both laughed. “You obviously were doing something wrong if she forgot you that quick.”
“Shut up yourself.”
Alexander had no doubt—whatever Tatiana’s life was, she had not forgotten him. He still felt her crying in his dreams. Every once in a while he dreamed of her not in Lazarevo but in a new place, with a new face, s
peaking to him, begging him, imploring him—but even in a new place with a new face, Alexander could smell her pure breath, breathing her life into him.
“Alexander,” Pasha barely whispered, “what if we never find her?”
“Pasha, you’re going to make a chain smoker out of me,” Alexander said, lighting up. “Look, I don’t have all the answers. She knows that if I am able, I will never stop looking for her.”
“What are we going to do with Ouspensky?” Pasha said. “Couldn’t we leave him here? Just forget to wake him.”
“I think he’ll notice when he wakes up.”
“So?”
“He’ll send them after us.”
“Ah, he would, wouldn’t he? That’s the thing about him. He’s a bit…baleful, don’t you think?”
“Don’t think twice about it,” said Alexander. “It’s a Soviet thing.”
“Even stronger in Ouspensky,” Pasha muttered, but Alexander sprung up and shook Ouspensky. It was near midnight. It was time.
Alexander opened the window. It was a rainy and stormy night, and it was hard to see. He thought that might play to their advantage. The guards wouldn’t willingly be looking up at the rain.
With the ends of the ropes tied around their waists, the slack rolled up in their hands, their belongings tied around their backs, the wire cutters in Alexander’s boot, they stood and waited for the signal from Constantine. The guards on the terrace had already left for the night. Constantine would wave as soon as the guards were gone from the garden, and then Alexander would jump first, then Pasha, then Ouspensky.
Finally, a few minutes after midnight, Constantine waved and moved out of the way. Alexander flung himself out of the small window. The rope had four meters of slack. He bounced hard—too hard—against the wet stone wall, and then quickly released the roll of rope bit by bit as he ran down the wall to the ground. Pasha and Ouspensky were right behind him, but a little slower. He ran across the terrace and jumped over the parapet, releasing the rope bit by bit in a great hurry. The rope was too short, fuck, it yanked him up two meters above the grass, but it was all right, because he let go, fell into the sloshing, icy wet grass, rolled, jumped up and ran to the barbed wire, his cutters already out of his boot. Pasha was behind him, Ouspensky, breathing heavily, was behind Pasha. By the time they got to him, seconds later, the barbed wire was already cut. They squeezed through the hole and hid in the trees over the precipice. The floodlights came on. The guards took longer tonight to come out. It was windy and raining hard. Alexander glanced at the floodlit castle to see if the rope had been pulled up by Constantine. It could have been, it was hard to see through the rain. The guards were still not out and Alexander had extra time to attach one rope fifteen meters long to the branches of the three-hundred-year-old oak. This time he let Ouspensky and Pasha go first. The three of them slowly edged down the slippery wall, suspending themselves over the precipice. It was dark, and a good thing too because Ouspensky called out, “Captain, did I ever tell you I’m afraid of heights?”