Escape to Constantinople

Pyotr went directly from the Petrosian house down to the Sevastopol quay. An evacuation was under way, and, in contrast to what he had experienced in Novorossiysk, this one appeared to be orderly. Ships hadn’t come in directly to the quay but were standing out in harbor and being fed by small boats and tugboats drawing up to the quay in various places along the waterfront to board refugees standing in queues supervised by soldiers.

When Pyotr approached what looked like the shortest of the queues, the officer on duty, after examining the letter from General Wrangel, said that there was no question of not letting him on an evacuation ship of his choosing--and even being given priority boarding, but he advised Pyotr that it would be best for him to come back the next morning because all of the passenger ships in the harbor were already nearly full to capacity, that they were all derelict tubs, and that better-appointed ships were expected to be there the next day.

“Where are the ships taking the refugees?” Pyotr asked.

“Most are going to Constantinople,” the lieutenant answered. “Some go to Samsun, directly across the Black Sea on Turkey’s east coast. Some go through to the Mediterranean either to Smyrna on Turkey’s west coast or to Athens.”

“I trust the Turks are prepared for this influx? There must be tens of thousands of people who need evacuated.”

“Over a hundred thousand if you count the general’s troops. Between you and me, the word is that his forces will be here within a couple of days, needing to be evacuated themselves. And I hope to god the Turks are prepared for this.”

“I must say that this is very organized. Not a bit like the evacuation of Novorossiysk.”

“You were there for that? This has all been planned by General Wrangel’s staff. The general thinks of everything. We’ve been putting an evacuation armada together as a contingency for some time.”

Pyotr looked out beyond the harbor, where the ships, some large warships, were thick in the water.

Following where Pyotr was looking, the lieutenant said, “Those aren’t all evacuation ships out there. Some of the Allied nations are helping to shield the evacuation. See that large ship out there beyond the imperial column. That would be the American cruiser, the St. Louis, and the smaller ship beside it is the destroyer, John D. Edwards, also American. They and other naval vessels are escorting the refugee ships to Constantinople and then coming right back to continue to help. Come back to me tomorrow morning soon after dawn, and I’ll put you right on the best ship we have out there in the morning.”

Pyotr returned to the Petrosian residence. A search of all of the rooms revealed that there were still pallets in the servants’ rooms and a bit of food still in the pantry. He bedded down on one of those for night, determined to be up and back at the quay shortly after dawn. He briefly considered waiting for Wrangel’s retreating forces to arrive so that he could join the academy cadets again, but he decided that Professor Orlov and possibly General Wrangel might take that as an insult after they had provided for his evacuation and told him to go as soon as he reached Sevastopol.

The sound of bombs and artillery shells at the edges of the city woke him before dawn, and he bolted out of the Petrosian house without eating anything and ran down to the quay.

Although still not as bad as the Novorossiysk evacuation had been, there was a great difference between the evacuation of today and what he had seen the previous day. Panic and urgency had set in. There still were refugees there--a great deal more than the previous day--but now there were bedraggled soldiers as well. Wrangel’s army of retreat was already entering the city and trying to get on evacuation boats as well.

Most of the orderliness of the previous day had evaporated and people were no longer standing in queues at small boat pickup stations, but, rather, were mobbing whatever boat was returning to the quay from having taken other boatloads of refugees out to the larger ships, and either trying to muscle or barter their passage.

Thinking of his fellow cadets, Pyotr didn’t try to board immediately but went from one end of the quay to the other, searching out evidence of the red-trimmed gray tunics of the Imperial Military Academy, now, of course, dirty and torn from months of wear and neglect. But he saw none. And he recognized none of the young men he rushed up to and turned so that he could look them in the face. None of the soldiers claimed to know anything about the cadets let alone where they were and how they had fared in the retreat.

As he searched, he saw the fleecing of the refugees that was going on by those who controlled the small boats. Boarding no longer was guaranteed save for the soldiers who could bolster their cases by brandishing whatever weapons they still possessed. The civilians were being made to surrender treasures and goods for passage.

How, Pyotr thought, was he to gain a place in one of the small boats? He still wore his red-trimmed gray tunic and he held the letter General Wrangel had written on his behalf, but he had no weapon, and he doubted a piece of paper would mean anything to the small boat captains.

As he was pondering this, he fortuitously came upon the lieutenant he’d met the previous day, who, with a small unit of soldiers at his direction, was still valiantly trying to keep the boarding of at least a couple of the tugboats as organized as his general had planned. The lieutenant was as good as the word he had given Pyotr the previous day. Proffering his apologies for the change in the atmosphere on the docks and the evaporation of the previous day’s orderliness, the lieutenant put the young Romanov directly into a departing tugboat. He also apologized about what he had said about the quality of the ships; the evacuation vessels in service today weren’t in better condition and accommodations as the ones of the previous day. If anything, they were even more derelict.

When the tug Pyotr was riding in cleared the inner harbor, he looked back on the city of Sevastopol, which still looked majestic and inviting in the spring sunny morning air. The double-headed eagle of his family remained proudly standing on the column on the rocks to the harbor entrance. Pyotr wondered, with regret, what the city would look like in a week’s time--and what would be on top of the column to replace the imperial eagle.

When he turned his gaze out to sea, his dismay increased ten-fold. The boat he was in seemed to be headed out to an old, rusty freighter that was listing in the water and that, even from here, Pyotr could see was packed with evacuees on the decks as thickly as had been the ship he’d come to Sevastopol from Novorossiysk in. He searched for the name of the freighter on its side and saw that it was the Rion. He didn’t have the vaguest notion what the meaning behind that name was, but he said a little prayer that it stood for “redemption” rather than “ruin.”

* * * *

Having made one crossing of the Black Sea on a packed refugee ship, Pyotr didn’t make the mistake of going beneath decks at all when he boarded the Rion. He hadn’t identified himself as a Romanov, let alone a count, from the time the lieutenant got him on board a tugboat in the Sevastopol harbor. He was merely Pyotr Apraksin now, a merit cadet at the Imperial Military Academy from a village outside St. Petersburg, where his parents were both teachers.

He stood at the rails, watching the lights twinkle on in the harbor city, as twilight fell. Artillery shells lit up the horizon beyond the old city on its three hills in an atmosphere both eerie and hollow in its suggestion of celebration. Pyotr knew that neither the sounds of keening on the crowded quay or shells bursting in the air over the outskirts of the city were cause for celebration--at least for him. He wondered if he was observing, rather, the dying of a city. And tears came to his eyes, as he realized that, for the first time in his life, he was no longer in mother Russia; that he no longer was a Romanov count either, as if that had had any real meaning for a couple of years; and that he may never see his homeland again.

Despite the cold, which was accentuated out here on the water, as darkness fell over the groaning freighter, the closeness of the bodies on the deck and the fires burning in the three oil barrels set on the center of the deck made it seem warm. Relieved by their successful flight from Sevastopol and emotionally protecting themselves from thinking of the unknown future, the refugees were in a party mood.

Remarkably, space was cleared by the center fire barrel to provide a small stage, where, in succession, singers and instrumentalists, followed by folk dancers, entered the small circle of light and entertained, permitting the refugees to concentrate on something other than their own plight. At least most of them Pyotr saw were giving into the false festive mood. He began moving around the deck, as he could, and observed that not all were engaged in tension-releasing celebration. In this journey, he passed more than one birthing of the young and dying of the old and infirm, the refugees seemingly able to concentrate on entering and leaving the earth now that the trial of getting on an evacuation ship had been accomplished. He also saw and heard people suddenly remembering who wasn’t there--who had been left behind--and what possessions they had lost. He also spied the pickpockets moving among the family groups, whose attentions had been concentrated on the entertainment or the births, deaths, and lamentings for lost relatives and goods, and deftly rearranging what wealth the others had managed to hold onto to that point in the evacuation.

As he watched, Pyotr realized something else. He realized that, although the supper hour was already passed, very few of the refugees were eating or drinking anything. While it was dawning on him that most might have been shortsighted enough not to take care of this need in choosing what to take with them, he realized that, in his haste, he hadn’t done this either other than a small loaf of moldy bread he had found in Petrosian’s larder the night before and had taken away with him.

Reasoning that the bread wouldn’t get any more edible if he tried to horde any of it, he moved to a position in the dark at the side of the back of the wheelhouse, well away from the musical focus of the refugees on deck, hunkered down at the rails, closed his eyes, and slowly ate the entire loaf. It tasted good to him, mold and all, in the realization that it would probably be the last food he’d see during this journey--unless provisions had been made to feed this mob en route from Sevastopol to Constantinople.

He wondered how long the travel time was. Surely a couple of days at least as slowly as the freighter was moving.

He’d been concentrating on savoring his meal for so long that he’d finished before he realized that he was listening to the sound of sex. Curious, he rose from his squat at the rails and moved to an open door at the back of the wheelhouse. He was looking into some sort of storage room for ropes and tackles and such that were needed on deck but that the crew wanted to keep out of the elements. His eyes became accustomed to the darker interior, and he realized that he was looking at one of the junior officers of the Greek crew of the freighter taking one of the young refugee men. The refugee was belly down on a huge coil of rope, his head pointed at the door but his face looking down at the floor. He was hanging on to other objects on the floor with his fists, trying to stay steady in place, while the burly Greek stood behind and punched hard between the butt cheeks with his cock, in a brutally rough, rhythmic pounding.

“You’re a handsome one. And you seem to like what you see. I’ll give you a good fucking after I’ve done with this lad, if you like.”

Pyotr realized, in shock, that the Greek sailor was talking to him. He had lingered in the doorway, adjusting his eyes to the scene, rather than drawing away in horror as soon as he realized what was transpiring. Apparently the junior ship’s officer had thought this meant Pyotr was interested in what the other young man was getting as well. And, to be honest, Pyotr could not have claimed that the man had gauged his interest incorrectly.

In embarrassment, he withdrew from the doorway, but as he moved up the rails, back toward where the refugees were entertaining themselves to forget the gravity of their plight, Pyotr heard the sailor laugh a deep-chested laugh and call out. “Later then. You look a right nice piece. When you’ve a notion, I’ll treat you right.”

Pyotr stumbled back to where the crowd on deck was thicker, to the protection of the proximity of others and from the demons that plagued him as well. He had remained watching the taking at the back of the wheelhouse, because the Greek sailor had looked arousing to him. Memories of being taken roughly both by Vasily and Nikolai streamed into Pyotr’s consciousness. The sailor’s tunic had been open to reveal a hairy, heavily muscled chest. His face wasn’t handsome, but it was a strong-featured one, commanding in the intensity of his purpose and the cruelty of his smile as he punished the channel of the young refugee. Pyotr wondered why the refugee was allowing himself to be treated like that. And then he remembered the ship officer’s mention of “treating you right.” Perhaps the refugee had realized he was hungry before the ones dancing about the deck had and was doing something about that.

Beyond that Pyotr couldn’t deny that he was a prisoner to be taken like that too. He shook his head as if to jettison these thoughts and walked toward the flickering light on deck, seeking the proximity of other, normal refugees, whose only worries were for their own survival and that of their loved ones--and of how they were ever going to be able to start their lives over again, if they were able to survive to reach land again.

The latter thought was not an empty one. When Pyotr woke up the next morning, it was to the sensation that the freighter wasn’t moving. As he stood and fisted the sleep out his eyes, he realized that it hadn’t been a sensation; it was reality. The freighter’s engines had foundered in the night, and there was no wind to fill its sails, which, in any event, were too scant to pull along a vessel as overloaded as this one was.

Although he heard those around him mumbling about this new danger, they seemed more vocal about being thirsty and hungry. Pyotr was thirsty and hungry too. But the multitudes around him seemed only now to be realizing that they hadn’t eaten--and worse, not had even water to drink--for half a day. Grumbling was reaching a high pitch, and, indeed, the sound of that had been what had brought Pyotr up out of his sleep.

The crowd was becoming unruly. Looking to the wheelhouse, Pyotr could see that the Greek crew members now were armed with rifles and were milling around, holding a separation between them and the swirl of the refugees. The refugees were crying out to be fed and given water to drink, but there was no response from the crew. Obviously no provisions had been made to feed the evacuees.

And the Rion was dead in the water.

This standoff lasted throughout the day, and the refugees’ attention was only diverted from begging the crew for succor by the sight of other ships, several also carrying evacuees, steaming past them. None stopped; all hovered farther off from the Rion as they realized the plight of the ship.

Pyotr hunkered down next to and in the shadow of the rails and conserved his energy as the long day crept on. It grew quieter after twilight, as the refugees collapsed more than retired to exhausted whimpering, moaning--and for many, dying, and wailing over the newly discovered dead.

All during the day, Pyotr had kept track of where the junior officer of the previous night was stationing himself. As darkness fell, he saw that the Greek sailor was standing in front and to the side of the wheelhouse, at the rails, apart from the other crew members. He was smoking a cigarette when Pyotr approached him.

When the sailor saw Pyotr, the young cadet was relieved to see that he was recognized.

“Hello there, my handsome little pigeon,” the Greek sailor said in an amused, deep bass, keeping his voice down so that few beyond Pyotr heard him. “Have you come for some of what I can give you?”

“Can I come near so that we can talk?” Pyotr whispered. He was looking apprehensively at the shotgun the sailor was holding in a position where it could be raised and fired in an instant.

The Greek sailor seemed taken slightly aback that Pyotr had spoken in fairly fluent Greek. He looked at him, reassessing, and realizing that Pyotr wasn’t just another one of the peasant or merchant-class refugees being evacuated. “You can come as near as you want,” he said. And then, as if to tease and shock Pyotr, he added, “I can come inside you if you have an interest. Is that what you want?”

“Will there be food and drink if that’s what I want?” Pyotr answered, without flinching, which caused the ship’s officer to smile.

“Well now, I have to share my food and drink with the rest of the crew. If I was willing to share it with you, I’d have to share your ass with any of the others interested.”

Pyotr hesitated for only a moment. His lips were parched and his belly was growling and they had been marooned for only a day yet. He had struggled with whether he was ready just to give up or if he wanted to live, and, although he could come up with few reasons to live, he couldn’t bring himself to want to die. Not as long as there was a hint of hope, at least.

“Can I eat and drink first?”

“You can have something to drink, but food will come after I am satisfied with you. The others can wait for you, but you can wait for food.”

The Greek junior officer fucked him first in a small cabin set up to accommodate two crew members on two cots with very little space between them. Pyotr was permitted to drink his fill from a flagon of water in the crew’s mess, as the Greek sailor broadcast what was on offer and crew members congregated to view him and, as interested, pay whatever agreed to to the Greek sailor.

Pyotr lay sideways on the cot in the small cabin, with a pillow under the small of his back, elevating his buttocks. The Greek officer, bare-chested, hunched between his legs, holding Pyotr’s legs spread, and fucked him hard. Those who were to come and had been assigned their places in line, stood around, licking their lips, pulling on their cocks, and not so patiently waiting their turns.

“You’re a luscious one,” The Greek said, with an appreciative laugh. “You aren’t new to this, are you? You are hungry for it.”

Pyotr indeed found that he was hungry for the burly Greek’s attentions. He reached up to the man’s hairy chest with his hands and ran his fingers through the hair on his barrel chest. The Greek looked surprised, then smiled, then lowered his lips to Pyotr’s. His mouth moved down to Pyotr’s nipples, where he gnawed, as his hips pistoned hard, and Pyotr groaned and moaned at the length and thickness of him.

“I can be as good as the food and drink I’m given for it is good,” Pyotr said, trying to sound saucy and fulfill the role the Greek wanted him to take.

The Greek roared with laughter, and called out to those gathered around, “We’ve got a genuine royal courtesan here, lads. We will have to see what fancy tricks he can do for a decent supper.”

After the fifth sailor, there was a commotion at the door to the cabin, and all of the sailors except for the one then fucking Pyotr and the Greek junior officer, evaporated.

“What do we have going here?” The vessel’s captain asked with a gruff voice.

“He was hungry and the men are on edge from the situation on deck,” the junior officer answered, as he struggled back into his tunic. Pyotr was a bit confused that the answer was so matter of fact. The Greek junior officer didn’t seem to be all that concerned. “He’s a prostitute, captain--and a damned fine one. He’s taken the cocking well. He came to me and offered himself--for food and drink--and agreed to fucking the others as well.”

The captain looked Pyotr over closely. Pyotr said nothing to contradict the Greek sailor. For one thing, he was too exhausted at this point to say much of anything; for another he had not been fed yet and wanted to do nothing to prevent that from happening.

“Bring him up to my cabin. You promised he could eat. We’ll feed him there.” After saying this, the captain turned and left the cabin.

The captain’s cabin was above the wheelhouse. The ship’s chief officer sat and watched Pyotr feed hungrily on a hearty meal and drink the beer that was offered him. And then the captain beckoned Pyotr over to his bed. By this time, warned by the looks the captain was giving him as he watched the young Russian eat, Pyotr was able correctly to discern the nature of the captain’s interest.

Both stripped by the bed, without words being exchanged, and Pyotr went down on the bed on his belly. The captain stretched on top of him, and he fed his cock inside Pyotr and showed him that ship’s captains could be hungry too. Before the captain had come, Pyotr heard the door to the captain’s cabin open, and another senior officer entered and disrobed slowly as he watched the captain fucking Pyotr. Pyotr watched the other officer removing his clothes. He was a florid redhead, tall and thin, but made of solid muscle, and had the longest cock Pyotr had ever seen, which now was standing at a rising angle up from the flaming red hair of his crotch.

“Costas said you had a lively one up here, Captain, and might want some company. After you’re done?”

“You know what I like. And he’s a prostitute. We can have him together.”

Pyotr groaned as the captain rose up into a kneeling position on the bed, bringing Pyotr up with him without dislodging his thick cock from Pyotr’s channel. Pyotr was being clutched to the captain’s chest, with one of the captain’s arms around his belly and Pyotr’s thigh on top of the captain’s. The redheaded ship’s officer knelt on the bed between Pyotr’s thighs and grabbed and raised Pyotr’s ankles to his shoulders while the captain tipped Pyotr’s body back, raising his pelvis.

While Pyotr panted hard, groaned, and gave little cries, the redhead worked his long cock in on top of the captain’s inside Pyotr’s channel. When he was deeply embedded, the captain and the redhead’s faces met over Pyotr’s shoulder in a passionate kiss, the two moaned in harmony with Pyotr’s grunts and groans, and the redhead started to stroke his cock inside Pyotr and on top of the captain’s cock.

After the captain was done, he had the other officer give Pyotr some more beer and food, told Pyotr he was the best male whore they’d had since leaving Constantinople the last time, and returned Pyotr to the crew for their enjoyment.

On the morning of the third day, the U.S. cruiser, the St. Louis, didn’t pass the Rion by. It came alongside, sent a water hose across to the becalmed ship to the parched-throated cries of approval of the refugees on deck, and then took the Rion in tow and headed for Constantinople.

Food for the refugees had already been passed across--the St. Louis apparently had been apprised of the Rion’s plight and had come to the rescue prepared. If it had come one or two days earlier, though, there would have been many more mouths to feed than there were now. Pyotr was never more proud, either before or after, in the Russian people as he was that day. As food came on board from the St. Louis, he watched, tears in his eyes, as the starving Russians calmly queued up to receive it and ensured that the very young, old, and inform received their rations first. Pyotr wasn’t proud of the circumstance under which he himself still lived, however. But he was now thinking in terms of a survivor, not a Romanov noble. Nobility was not that prized a possession at this time in Russian history, he thought with a great deal of bitterness.

* * * *

The captain of the Rion, out of pride, had refused to have his freighter towed from the Straits of Bosporus at the Black Sea end of the water passage into the Sea of Marmara in the daylight, so it was twilight before the St. Louis, with its derelict captive in tow, entered the straits. It would be nearly eight hours before they reached the great city straddling Europe and Asia. Pyotr was standing at the rails along with the crowd of refugees, thinned out distressingly by the deaths and burials at sea over the previous few days.

He watched the lights on the shore become more densely spaced and bright as the tandem vessels steamed through the Bosporus. The first impressive sight on the approach to the city were the lights of the Rumeli Hisarı, the fortress built in the fifteenth century to guard the approach to the city from the Bosporus and, above that, Roberts College, which was founded and run by American missionaries. The redheaded ship’s officer, who had shared him with the captain, had sidled up to Pyotr and gave him a running commentary of the various palaces--the Dommabahce Palace and the Beylerbeyi Sarayi--of the minarets of large, ornate mosques floating on the skyline, the docks, and markets the ships were passing en route to where the Rion was to be birthed at anchor in Buyukdere Bay, along with myriad other Russian refugee vessels.

“Do you know where to go and what you will do in Constantinople?” the officer asked.

“I will seek out the Russian émigré community, I suppose,” Pyotr answered. “Just follow them from the ship. I have no better plans for my future than any of the others do. Just to escape the Bolsheviks.”

The officer snorted. “You won’t need to go far. There are Russian princes under every rock and in every sewer. You will be hard pressed to survive.”

Pyotr looked at the man beside him sharply, but there was no reason to believe in his demeanor that he knew of Pyotr’s parentage. As depressing--and truthful, Pyotr was sure--as what the ships’ officer was telling him was, Pyotr knew he would be better in Constantinople than in Sevastopol. He had wondered constantly over the past few days what had become of Grigory Orlov and his fellow cadets. He hoped that they were to be found in Constantinople already, having been transported on ships that had not foundered as the Rion had.

“You could stay on the Rion,” the officer said in a low voice. “The crew has enjoyed you--the captain also. The captain has said it would be good for the crew to have such as you on board when we travel on to Europe when the Rion has been overhauled. We could take you to any of several ports as long as you permitted us to make sport with you until then. You would eat well and have a ceiling over your head at night, which is better than most of these bastards will get.”

Pyotr contemplated this offer. The crew had been rough on him--but none rougher than the captain and this redheaded senior officer combined. It would be a way for him to get far, far away from the refugee encampments that already taxed the Turks to the point of groaning--or at least to get ahead of the influx of Russian émigrés into mainland Europe. But then he would be completely on his own. There was no hope he could unite again with the Imperial Military Academy cadet corps, which was the last place his family knew he could be located.

“Thank you, but no. I will take my chances in Constantinople.”

“You will know where we are being refitted,” the officer answered before he turned and disappeared into the gawking crowd along the rails. “You have until we are patched up and sail away again to decide. The captain has said that there would be money in it for you as well. He would much rather have the crew using you on the ship than whoring on the docks and getting sliced up in their sniffing for it there.”

It wasn’t much of a choice, Pyotr knew. But he had seen enough of what real life had become to know that it was more of a choice than any of the refugees huddled around him had. And he was not so full of pride any more that we would reject the choice out of hand. He had already crossed that line of prostituting himself for survival. It seemed like he’d been doing that for half of his life--just not as literally as he now was doing.

“And you, sir,” he asked. “Do you care if I go or stay?”

“I . . . I would much prefer you stay, of course. As would the captain.”

At least there was this, Pyotr thought. At least he still had goods to sell that some wanted to buy. That too was more than most of his fellow refugees had.