The Lieutenant’s Lover. Harry Bingham

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       THREE

      1

      The train nosed in, then stopped. Men began to uncouple the long chain of carriages. A short but massive man in a waist-length coat and a flat cap began to bellow instructions in a continual torrent. Half the time, the orders made no sense. The man shouted things like, ‘Lift it up – up – no up, you wet dishcloth – well, down then if it doesn’t go. Down!’ He didn’t make it clear who he was addressing or what he was talking about. His face was bright with anger, and he had a tic in his upper lip. The man giving the orders was comrade Tupolev and he was Misha’s new boss. It was spring.

      Tupolev dealt with some other workers, then approached Misha.

      ‘Malevich. Those carriages. They’re late. They’re required immediately in the port railway. Immediately! Those carriage bodies… Well! They’re in a rotten state! But, you understand, we have to fix them up. You do. Not that you’d understand. An aristocrat. Anyhow. That’s the way it goes. Yes!’

      ‘You would like me to take charge of repairing those carriages for immediate return to the port railway,’ said Misha, calmly translating his boss’s nonsense into logical order. ‘Yes, comrade.’

      Misha knew what he was about. In the four months he’d been working in the Rail Repairs Yard, he’d made himself indispensable. He’d learned metalwork from the older craftsmen. He could work a lathe and a welding torch. He could forge, cast, bore and weld. Each night he read the engineering books that Tonya had bought for him, and his understanding grew. The men turned to him sooner than Tupolev. He had become the yard’s inventor, organiser and inspiration.

      He reviewed the string of carriages.

      They were mostly boxcars, wooden boxes on wheels, which would be easy enough to sort out. But along with the boxcars, there were half a dozen grain hoppers too, open steel bins on wheels that looked as though they had been dipped in the sea and left to rust. Their upper halves were in a terrible state. Their wheelbases were so dilapidated, that only about half the wheels still functioned.

      ‘Those hoppers,’ said Tupolev. ‘Well, really!’

      Misha examined them briefly, about to recommend them for the scrapheap. Then something caught his eye. A flash of white paint, so badly peeled that it was hard to make out. But the script was Latin not Cyrillic. Misha cleared away some grime from the surface and made it out: LAHTI-HELSINKI. These grain hoppers travelled to Finland, a distant world now, all but inaccessible, and one that was out of reach of comrade Lenin’s murderous hand. Misha felt a sudden lurch of excitement, a cold wash of adrenalin. His hand shook very slightly as he wiped it clean on his trousers.

      ‘What do you think, comrade?’ asked Tupolev, examining him narrowly. ‘I can see – well, really, the state of them!’

      Misha got a grip over his feelings, and replied normally. ‘These hoppers. They’re for the port railway, you said?’

      ‘The port? No. For Vyborg. The Vyborg line. Don’t tell me what I said, you exploiter! You want to scrap them, I expect, but—’

      ‘I’ll mend them.’

      Tupolev was taken aback. He might be a fool, but he knew the basic technical side of his job well enough. These hoppers were all but useless and he knew it. ‘Mend them! Mend…’

      ‘After all, they’ll be needed for the harvest. Just think how angry the comrades in the Export Bureau will be if they can’t—’

      Misha never finished his sentence.

      From the far end of the rail shed, there was a thundering crash and a loud scream, abruptly terminated. A few moments of total silence followed, succeeded by the shouts of men as they ran to the scene. Misha sprinted over, aware that Tupolev was lumbering on after.

      It soon became clear what had happened. A carriage had been raised on the yard’s only usable winch. The winch hadn’t been properly secured, and the carriage had come plummeting down. A man lay on the tracks underneath. The man wasn’t from the repairs yard. He wore an ordinary railwayman’s uniform and a bottle of vodka lay smashed to smithereens beside him. The man must have been dead drunk inside one of the carriages. He must have woken up and climbed or fallen from his compartment. Then, when the winch broke, he’d ended up trapped.

      Misha СКАЧАТЬ