PART III: QUIET FLOWS THE DON
The transfer had been carried out, and Andreas and the cubes were now safely on board the Paris Commune. That left Hero and Leander to play escort to the battleship… while discussing their new ally.
"I don't like her." Hero grumbled.
"What we like doesn't affect the mission, Hero."
"You're not going to go into one of your duty lectures, are you? Bleh."
"Are you going to stay dutiful?"
"Yeah, yeah," she grumbled. "You never went at Andreas like this."
"He didn't need reminding."
"Well, maybe he does now." Hero looked towards the Paris Commune and smirked. "How long did he spend staring at her?"
Leander cringed. She had hoped their expert spy would have been a bit more subtle… but there wasn't much that could be done about it now.
As they sailed on, Parizhanka read through the book. It wasn't fast, because she had to make translation choices on the fly, but she was nice to listen to. He grew to really regret her brief breaks from reading as she stopped to communicate with Leander and Hero.
Quiet Flows the Don spent a lot of time in the build-up to the action. A lot. He asked when the World War started and Sevastopol pointed out a part that looked about a third of the way through the book… it was an intimidating tome, certainly, but he didn't mind the idea of listening to Sevastopol read through all of it…
A family of Cossacks, doing the same work and mowing the same fields their forefathers did, with a low-lying sense the future would come and overthrow their ways of life. Meanwhile, a passionate affair between a Grigory and an Aksinya, both of them risking their futures for love. Despite the brutality of the culture depicted, it was quite easy to get swept up.
("This story, it's got a lot of…"
"What?"
"I mean, the women aren't treated-"
"I think that's the point, Comrade. Do you think I'm a supporter of pre-revolution society?")
Honestly, it was pretty easy to just sit back and let her be the boss. She was, after all, the naval expert. Most of the time, at least. When she was three sheets to the wind, his was the most level head on board, but she was wise enough to avoid getting too wasted when in a genuinely dangerous situation.
Again, he thought of the gulf between the Sevastopol who drank herself into a stupor and the confident, intelligent young woman who offered to teach him Russian for when he reached Sevastopol.
She leaned over his shoulder, long curtain of white hair passing by his face as she looked at his paper. "That's close, but you forgot the ya."
"Backwards R?" He groaned.
"Good," she smiled, "But you didn't write it here." She tapped at the paper and he sighed.
"Our poor little spy, can't even speak a lick of Russian." His blood chilled, and she saw his worried expression. "Oh come on. The maps? The currency? The icon and mat? Hell, the fact that you escorted those two through Turkey? I would have used a spy."
"You're not going to…"
"We're allies, Comrade. For now." Her grin reminded him that yes, she was a battleship.
More sailing brought them close to Sevastopol, where they were met with a Russian destroyer: she was Ташкент or in Latin lettering, Tashkent. He was a little proud of himself, being able to read the ship's name, although his pride quickly disappeared when Parizhanka started shouting to the destroyer's captain. And yes, it was a completely normal destroyer.
After some rapid fire back and forth, she turned to Andreas. "Comrade, a cube, if you would be so kind?"
"Alright." Not really his area of expertise. He ran down and fetched a single cube from the bag, and he was surprised to feel it warm in his hands. Little motes of blue light danced around inside, like dust caught in a sunbeam. It almost seemed… excited? Energized, maybe?
He returned to Parizhanka and gave it to her. "Spasibo bolshoye, comrade!" The sailors on the Tashkent had set up a rope, so the cube was swiftly sent across. The Captain took it, seeming about as curious as Andreas was, but it reacted more strongly, the light growing brighter, the edges of the cube seeming to grow fuzzy…
The light grew and grew, so brilliant that Andreas was forced to look away. He hoped there weren't any Axis planes nearby to catch a glimpse of it, as a pillar of brilliant light rose from the deck of that destroyer. Shadows stretched out across the deck, and then the light began to fade, Hesitantly, Andreas looked up, and he saw someone new standing on the destroyer's deck. Well, she was one of only two people standing, the rest had fallen away, shaking and trembling.
Yet the captain stood strong, the girl's hand clasped in hers. Long, long purple hair, down to the calves, eyes like ice, a young woman's body wrapped in a heavy white coat. Tashkent didn't exactly look a Kazakh, admittedly, but she was cute.
She talked with her captain and Parizhanka for a few brief moments, before they all got moving, for fear of the Axis. They had caught the Russians off guard, and not even the Black Sea Fleet was totally safe in their own waters.
Autumn was the season of harvest, and yet it was also the season of dying. And God above, did the Soviets die. They died to the Germans, and they died to buy time. Thousands died in floods when the Soviets bombed a Dneiper dam behind them, like a burning of Moscow in miniature. Hopefully, the Russians wouldn't have to reenact 1812 in the city itself.
The policy was "Nothing For Germany". The fruits of the people's labor in the Five-Year Plan would not fall to the thieving fascists! It sounded like the usual communist propagandizing, but it was much harder to disregard it when the suffering was so close. When they came to dock, he got to see what things were like.
He had some surplus soap and a few other necessities from their trip across Anatolia… they were offered, and were gone, in moments. Poor bastards deserved it more than him, he was certain of that. Even unluckier than them were the poor bastards serving on Tashkent- with the cube replacing them, they were… reassigned, about a month before the Crimean campaign.
The Germans came for the city, and the conditions were so dire that the ships were no longer safe to moor there; instead, they went to bases as far away as Soviet Georgia. Tashkent and Hero were troopers, he would admit it: they hauled ammo and provided fire support.
(They were more alike than he initially thought, bumming around together during their limited freetime. "Andreas, can you grab us something to drink?" He couldn't refuse, not when they worked so much harder than he did.)
They were, perhaps, comrades, but the relationship Leander formed with her own cruiser counterpart was a bit different…
"Merkuria, you have no right to complain about back pain if you slouch like that."
"You're an uppity junior, you know that?"
"I think we can all learn from each other, a little…"
"You could learn how to loosen up a bit, couldn't ya?" Merkuria never got too worked up at Leander, though… she needed someone to work out the knots in her back, and Leander was usually magnanimous enough to do it.
That left Andreas and Sevastopol. She had an especially busy schedule, providing fire support for the defenders of Sevastopol– who earned their home the title of Hero City, eventually– and he usually tagged along with her, keeping a careful eye on her cubes… and how the Russians grew into them. They had trouble getting the cubes to work on some ships, and that certainly didn't help things.
The Germans advanced, taking over much of Crimea. Further to the east, Rostov-on-Don fell, and her wide river flowed with blood. And it was barely more than a generation since the same violence ravaged these broad plains.
It was a minor thing, comparatively, but Sevastopol reached the violent part of Quiet Flows the Don, the war beginning in earnest. The low boil of violence throughout the novel suddenly exploded into violence and rape on the front. Futile deaths, the evaporation of Cossack culture under a hail of machine gun fire, war losing valor, if it ever had it in the first place.
A horrible (in the sense of provoking horror) book in horrible times. He didn't know why they kept on reading it, even. They certainly weren't escaping to a better world– not a communist utopia, not a chivalric fantasy– but he supposed they did it together.
Parizhanka worked her way through a concerningly limited supply of booze, and in his darker moods, he drank alongside her.
He had done work to help the fighting in Syria. He should have expected it. And yet…
He felt both too close and too far. To his north, there was a wave of destruction moving across Russia, people died in numbers he struggled to imagine, but he didn't know these people. He was a Cypriot, a stranger to this proud, long-suffering people, and he felt like even more of an outsider when Parizhanka went to sleep crying.
How was he supposed to respond to that? What could he do, really, other than lay a hand on her shoulder and try to empathize with her?
She started, grabbing his arm as her head snapped around to look at him. Eyes like blood, a grip like iron. A yank, and he fell down, Andreas barely managing to catch himself before he crashed into her.
"Stay."
"I can't… not now."
Parizhanka frowned, sitting up so they were practically eye to eye. She had removed that sort of scarf thing she usually wore, letting him see the graceful lines of her neck as they led down to the white shoulders, the collarbone… "I'll exploit you," she breathed, "and you exploit me. Fair."
Thinking about it that way seemed… very sad.
But it wasn't quite enough to make him leave.
"That was…"
"A bit of a mess," Andreas said.
"I was thinking… remarkable," Parizhanka breathed, turning towards him. "Have you done this before?"
"I have."
"Oh… then, what do we do next?"
"Now… we speculate unrealistically about a life together."
She giggled. "A little dacha somewhere, a nice big cellar…"
He restrained himself from making a comment on her drinking problem- stopping that seemed a touch more unrealistic of a fantasy. He didn't want to spoil the pillow talk.
"I'm feeling thirsty…" she mused, "Shall I grab us a drink?" He wasn't really feeling it, but before he could complain she threw back their threadbare sheets and stood up.
The silver moonlight shone down on Parizhanka, and he suddenly understood why the ancient Greeks would have warred for Helen's hand, how Grigory felt about Aksinya. Pygmalion's statue, beauty in ivory…
She didn't seem real.
Tomorrow morning, he would return to a surly, blood-soaked world. But for a while, it seemed as if he was in a myth, straddling some… magnificent creature, a divinity whose cheeks flushed with ichor, not blood.
The next morning came, and with it, Leander's judgemental stare. She had probably noticed his mood. "You had sex with her." It wasn't an accusation, more a simple statement of fact.
"Why do you think that?"
"Hero and I aren't blind, Andreas. You're not a child- there's no reason to hide like one."
"Right," he said, "I did. Are you…" What did he expect her to do? He felt embarrassment, certainly, but he wasn't quite sure what he feared from Leander. Scorn?
"I just want to know one thing: is this a scheme?"
"What?"
"Some spy's plot to get information or favors out of a Soviet battleship. Did you deliberately seduce her?"
"No!" He spat, the disgust in his voice certainly not faked. "Never. You… you don't think I…? I like her, Leander."
"As a British ship, I must frown on this sort of pandering to your emotions… but as a woman, I'm glad. She doesn't deserve that."
"Thanks?"
"Hero will be cross." Leander sighed.
"Hero?" He asked.
"She… tolerates you more than most. I'm not certain if it's…" she looked at the ground, struggling to find words. "Regardless of how strong her feelings are, she'll take offense. She'll feel like something has been stolen away from her."
"Am I a thing now?"
"You are a British asset, yes?"
He gulped.
(Earlier that morning, Parizhanka leaped into his arms and kissed him on the lips. "Don't make a Natalya of me…" Don't leave her for someone else, for a previous love.)
(What had he loved, before this mission? He loved an island, a little south of Anatolia.)
EPILOGUE: MAZEPPA
A slender Girl, long-haired and tall,
Sate watching by the cottage wall;
The Sparkle of her eye I caught
Even with my first return of thought,
For ever and anon she threw
A pitying, prying glance on me
With her black eyes so wild and free;
I gazed and gazed– until I knew
No vision it could be.
Really, they were luckier than most. The Black Sea was safer than the land, especially when Soviet forces captured Romania. They passed through the same straits that Andreas, Leander, and Hero had taken such pains to circumnavigate.
Andreas would repay Parizhanka for her reading to him, painstakingly reading books and poetry to her in Russian. He had a fondness for Byron, that Brit who had traveled all the way to Greece to fight for their independence, and the man certainly wasn't lacking for poetry.
Parizhanka– who he stilled called Parizhanka, despite her being renamed back to Sevastopol– had needed a bit of convincing before she listened to his reading of Mazeppa. She was not a particular fan of the historical figure.
"Mazepintsy," she spat the word out like it was poison. (Mazepist. Ukrainians with hopes of independence. Dissidents.) Hell, at the battle of Poltava, a battle which had named one of her sisters, the Hetman of the Cossacks fought against Peter the Great.
Still, he thought it an interesting poem. It told the tale of the Cossack prince in his youth, when he had an affair with a noble's wife, and was punished by being tied, naked, to a horse which was sent racing into the wilds. He survived and was nursed back to health by a Cossack maiden: a woman who brought him into life again.
– while she was gone,
Methought I felt too much alone.