“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
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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,
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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.”
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“Oh, Pasha, what areyour options? Even if you for a moment thought I might have some, which believe me I don’t, where does staying in Colditz leaveyou ?”
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?”
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“I don’t know.” Alexander pau
sed. “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.”
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“You’re not risking your life to justgo , 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, speaking 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.
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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?”
“No, and now is not the fucking time.”
“I was thinking now is a very good time.”
“It’s pitch black. There is no height. Just come on! Move a little faster.”
Alexander was soaked to the skin. German trench coats were made of thick canvas, but weren’t waterproof. What good were they?
They all released the rope and jumped to the ground a minute later. Alexander cut through the barbed wire fence surrounding Colditz at the bottom of the hill and they were out.
Now he wished the weather would quieten. Who wanted to run at night in this weather?
“Everybody good?” Alexander said. “We did great.”
“I’m good,” said Ouspensky, panting.
“I’m good, too,” said Pasha. “I scraped myself on something when I landed. Scraped my leg.”
Alexander got out a flashlight. Pasha’s trousers were slightly ripped at the thigh, but he was barely bleeding. “Must have been the barbed wire. Just a scratch. Let’s go.”
They were running, running all day and night, or maybe they slept in barns at night, but they dreamed of running, and when they opened their eyes, they were exhausted. Alexander ran slowly, Pasha ran slower,
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and Ouspensky barely moved. In the fields, in the rivers, in the woods. A day went by, then another, how far had they gotten from Colditz? Maybe thirty kilometers. Three grown men, five healthy lungs between them, and thirty kilometers. They weren’t even past Chemnitz, just south-west. There were no trains, and they did their best to avoid paved roads. How were they going to get to Lake Constance on the border of Switzerland at this rate?
Pasha slowed down even more on the third day. He stopped chatting in between breaths, and stopped eating on the third night. Alexander noticed because when he said, Pasha, eat some fish, Pasha replied that he wasn’t hungry. Ouspensky made a joke, something like, I’ll eat everything, don’t have to ask me twice, and Alexander gave him the fish without a s
econd glance, but he stared at Pasha. He took a look at Pasha’s thigh. It was raw and red and oozing yellow liquid. Alexander poured diluted iodine on it, sprinkled some sulfa powder on it and bandaged it. Pasha said he was feeling cold. Alexander touched him. He felt warm.
They made a lean-to with their sheets for all three of them, and they crawled in and kept barely warm, and in the middle of the night, Alexander woke up because he was sweating. He thought there was a fire in the lean-to, he jumped up with a start. But it wasn’t a fire. It was just a burning Pasha.
What’s wrong with you, Alexander whispered.
Don’t feel so good, Pasha mouthed inaudibly.
Everything was silent and mute. Alexander used the last of their water, placing rags on Pasha’s head. It helped a little. The water was gone, and the rags were hot from Pasha’s forehead, and Pasha was burning. Alexander went out in the cold rain and got more water.
Don’t feel so good, Pasha’s mouth moved. By morning his mouth was cracked and bleeding. Alexander unbandaged his leg. It looked the same as yesterday. More green than yellow. He disinfected it, and poured sulfa powder on it, and then he diluted the sulfa in some rain-water and made Pasha drink it, and Pasha did, and then threw up and Alexander cursed and yelled, and Pasha mouthed, I been wet too long, Alexander. I think I was cold and wet too long.
It was just above freezing. The rain was turning to sleet. Alexander wrapped Pasha in his trench coat.
Pasha was burning. Alexander took his trench coat off Pasha.
When it stopped raining, he built another fire and dried all of Pasha’s clothes and gave him a smoke and a small drink of whisky out of their flask. Shaking, Pasha drank the whisky.
“What are we going to do?” asked Ouspensky.
“Why do you have to talk so much?” snapped Alexander.
They decided to walk on.
Pasha tried, he tried to put one foot in front of the other, he tried to move his arms across his body to help propel him forward, but his shaking knees kept buckling. I’m going to rest a bit, mouthed Pasha, and then he said, I’ll be all right. He sat down on the ground. Alexander held him up, stood him up, raised him up, then lifted him and threw him on his back.
“Captain—”