It was about the first of December in our calendar, in the year 1920, when we received a second smuggled letter from my sister: “Be ready whenever we send for you.” For that promised summons we waited in desperate suspense until two days after Christmas. Then to my mother’s lodging came a fisherman and his little boy with the whispered news that we were to go with them on the day following. My mother found means of sending the news to our friend the priest, and he brought it to me. “Tomorrow at four o’clock you go abroad.”
The next day at the appointed hour my mother and I, two shivering creatures facing death, but ready, met at a small railway station leading along the Baltic shores. The fisherman’s son was also at the station, but obeying instructions, we did not notice him but simply followed wherever he led. Our train journey was short, and at five o’clock, pitch dark in the Russian winter, we alighted at a poor village, following the boy who carried on his back a bag of potatoes. Alas! In the darkness and confusion we lost him, and stood in the icy cold like lost souls, not knowing where to turn. Suddenly out of the shadows a peasant woman approached us. “Are you looking for a boy with a bag of potatoes?” she said in a low voice, and to our frightened assent she murmured: “Follow me.” We followed, although, for all we knew, it was to a Chekha prison. Anybody in Russia may be Chekha, the friend who invites you to dinner, the man who buys your last jewel, the woman who offers to guide you over an unknown road. You can trust no one, consequently, when you must, you trust anyone. We followed the peasant woman into a dim hut, and there we found two fishermen who assured us that they were ready that night to take us across the frozen Baltic to a village on the Finnish side. Their horses and sledges, they told us, were safely hidden, but they would be ready to take us and three other fugitives, a lady, a child, and a maid, as soon as we could safely venture to leave the village. As luck would have it there was a festival and a dance going on that night, and we had to sit in that stifling hut in complete silence until two o’clock. Also we had to pay for our shelter and escape one hundred thousand rubles, which my mother had secured by selling her last treasure, a pearl necklace.