Kolchak's Gold

Walking slowly it would take me at least fifteen seconds to reach the fence. That was why I had to use the depression.

Behind me the sky pinked up with heavy clouds: dusk, then dawn. Fear began to pump the sweat out of me now.

I had to wait for that moment when the searchlights were almost equaled by the growing daylight: when everything merged into a common murk.

The trees made a mosaic against the clouds. I left my coat on the ground; it would only impede me on the barbed wire. I picked up the suitcase.

Sky merged with earth along the uncertain eastern horizon. I turned away from it and faced the fence. The beams were no longer visible but you could still see the yellow disc of light sliding along the ground, growing parabolically longer as it approached the end of its swing. It was no longer distinct at the verges and I knew it was time to go; never mind the synchronization of the farther light.

Up on one knee. I’d studied the line all night; I’d memorized it. The only place I might hit a mine was the hollow. Reckless: the hell with it, go.

The light swept past the hollow, faded, came back faintly. When it crossed the hollow again on its return sweep I walked out of the trees.

I moved low to the ground and slowly, very slowly, bent double with my breathing tight and shallow, my sphincter contracted, my palms damp, sweat ru

The cliché is that time slows to a crawl in such circumstances: that one’s feet seem to drag leadenly, every lurching step is an agony of needle-pierced nerves, all the muscles are drawn so tight they twang with vibration and the impulse to break and run wildly is almost overpowering. The cliché is true. There is no way to remember it all clearly but it lasted subjective hours. I had the suitcase clutched to my chest as if it would shield me against bullets; I moved like a man about to retch—and I was ready to. Somewhere in my head a clock was at work and at hourly intervals I knew another second had passed—yet at the same time the instants raced by in such a blur that I knew I wouldn’t nearly have time to reach the hollow before the lights came swinging back and the guns opened up.…

When the pale searchlight pi

I felt it return across my back: felt it because I’m sure I didn’t see it. The daylight seemed to be strengthening with incredible haste. They would spot me now without the lights.…

Wait now until they’ve begun to turn and look another way—wait for the light to circle away. Now. Up. Three strides to the fence. I went against it prone—laid my knee across the bottom strand to bend it down; lifted the upper strand.

The sudden noise of a man’s shout tore a gash through the fabric of the dawn. I could not look up: I could not. It was like burying my face in the pillow, that inability to look—as if by not looking I would prevent them from shooting.… I rolled through the narrow gap in the wire. My suitcase caught and jerked me around and I knew there was no way to free it and I left it there and ran—ran, diving and zigzagging with my soles slipping on the damp weeds, legs pumping, arms driving, my eyes only on the Turkish wood that meant life.

The stutter of the machine gun was curiously far off but then above the roar of my ears I heard the bullets whack past me and I learned that all the writings are wrong: bullets don’t whiz or whistle or fan the air, they crack like explosives when they go by—a sonic boom. I listened with compulsive curiosity to this phenomenon and then I was tumbling, sliding in among the trees and the guns were chipping bark and twigs above my head: I scrambled and pawed into the wood and at some indeterminate moment the guns stopped and I was alive.

I crawled deep into the forest. A crescendo of pounding blood pulsed in my head. I stood up and kicked out, flexing legs and arms recklessly to find out if I’d been hit. Then I stood with the sweat drying on me and pressure drained out of my head and I had to sit down quickly and tense the muscles of my stomach to keep from passing out.

I fought it desperately. After a very long time I was able to get up. With a deep drained ache in all my fibers I began to limp toward the river.

Trabzon. I caught a raw whiff of the sea. A bright light at the far side of the bay stroked the water with a pale rippling stripe. I was riding on the half-exposed springs of the seat of a ruined Dodge pickup truck beside a Kurdish woodman. The pickup bed was piled so high with cordwood that logs rolled off now and then and lay obstructions in the road behind. I was not trained to divide his language into words, nor he mine; we shared the word “Trabzon” and occasional sidewise smiles that strangers use to indicate to each other that they are not threatening.

A waterfront town: whitewashed stucco, bleached sidewalks constructed of cement and seashell. At the single loading dock a freighter stood with its hull broken amidships into a hinged loading ramp. Wiry workmen in greasy fezzes and white peon clothes made ant streams in and out of the hold, unloading her into a corrugated metal warehouse under high incandescent lights.

The woodman let me off in the center of town. Veiled moslem women peered from shuttered windows. A boy pedaled by on a bike. The cars parked at the curbs were mostly American-made and always very old: 1953 Plymouths, 1957 Chevrolets. One of them was pale green with TAXI painted freehand in yellow on the door. I approached the man who leaned against its fender. “Taverna? Pinar?”

He smiled at me as if I were a buffoon; shook his head and said something very rapid. But he was pointing at a doorway less than half a block distant. I nodded and smiled and said thank-you and went there. It all reminded me of Mexico—some fishing town on the Gulf of California coast. All except the profusion of straw-laden donkeys and the occasional camel. But the architecture and the smells were the same. Children plucked at my clothes.

And the smell in the taverna. Alcohol and tobacco: the spilled-beer aura of a bar anywhere. The room was crowded with dirty little checkerboard tables; it was near eight o’clock and midweek, the place wasn’t teeming, but it was the kind of low-roofed room that felt crowded even with half a dozen people in it: the air was thick with heavy body heat.

There was a bar, topped with linoleum and bordered by dull chrome. The lights were weak. A full-bosomed woman came to wait on me. She had long wiry hairs on her legs. I said, “Is Pinar here?” and when she looked puzzled I tried it in German and in French. In any case she understood “Pinar” when it appeared in each language and finally she tapped my arm—Wait here—and went away through a rear door.

A tired gnome served me food and beer at one of the tables. Globules of fat swam in the soup but I ate ravenously. I wished I had my pipe to smoke afterward. I sat back to wait for the woman, for Pinar. I was fighting to keep awake: I was wound up too tightly, to the point where I was convinced everyone who spoke within earshot was shouting—at me. I’d gone too long without sleep and I felt drunk, in that stage of inebriation where nothing I saw quite made sense anymore: perspectives were off, shapes were out of kilter, lights were blurred and too bright.

I knew I had to keep a deliberate grip on sanity because I was close to losing it.