CHAPTER TWELVE

The Rowan Tree

1

The convoy with the partisans’ families, complete with children and belongings, had long been following the main partisan force. After it, behind the wagons, came vast herds of cattle, mainly cows—several thousand of them.

With the arrival of the womenfolk a new figure appeared in the camp. This was Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a soldier’s wife who was a cattle healer, a veterinarian, and also, secretly, a witch. She went about in a little pancake hat cocked on her head and a pea-green Royal Scots Fusiliers overcoat, which formed part of the British equipment supplied to the Supreme Ruler, and she assured everyone that she had made them out of a prisoner’s cap and uniform. She said that the Reds had liberated her from the Kezhemsk jail where for some unknown reason Kolchak had kept her.

The partisans had now moved to a new campground. They were supposed to stay there only until the neighborhood had been reconnoitered and suitable winter quarters found. But as a result of unforeseen developments they were to spend the winter there.

This new camp was quite unlike the old one. The forest around it was a dense, impenetrable taiga. On one side, away from the camp and the highway, there was no end to it. In the early days, while the tents were being pitched and Yurii Andreievich had more leisure, he had explored the forest in several directions and found that one could easily get lost in it. Two places had struck him in the course of these excursions and remained in his memory.

One was at the edge of the taiga, just outside the camp. The forest was autumnally bare, so that you could see into it as through an open gate; here a splendid, solitary, rust-colored rowan tree had alone kept its leaves. Growing on a mound that rose above the low, squelchy, hummocky marsh, it reached into the sky holding up the flat round shields of its hard crimson berries against the leaden, late-autumn sky. Small birds with feathers as bright as frosty dawns—bullfinches and tomtits—settled on the rowan tree and picked the largest berries, stretching out their necks and throwing back their heads to swallow them.

There seemed to be a living intimacy between the birds and the tree, as if it had watched them for a long time refusing to do anything, but in the end had had pity on them and given in and fed them like a nurse unbuttoning her blouse to give breast to a baby. “Well, all right, all right,” it seemed to be saying with a smile, “eat me, have your fill.”

The other place was even more remarkable. This was on a height that fell off steeply on one side. Looking down, you felt that at the bottom of the escarpment there should be something different from what was on top—a stream or a hollow or a wild field overgrown with seedy, uncut grass. But in fact it was a repetition of the same thing, only at a giddy depth, as if the forest had simply sunk to a lower level with all its trees, so that the treetops were now underfoot. There must have been a landslide there at some time.

It was as if the grim, gigantic forest, marching at cloud level, had stumbled, lost its footing, and hurtled down, all in one piece, and would have dropped right through the earth if it had not, by a miracle, saved itself at the last moment—so that there it was now, safe and sound, rustling below.

But what made the high place in the forest remarkable was something else. All along its edge it was locked in by granite boulders standing on end, looking like the flat stones of prehistoric dolmens. When Yurii Andreievich came across this stony platform for the first time, he was ready to swear that it was not of natural origin, that it bore the mark of human hands. It might well have been the site of an ancient pagan shrine, where prayers and sacrifices had once been offered by unknown worshippers.

It was here that the death sentence against eleven ringleaders of the conspiracy and two male nurses condemned for brewing vodka was executed one cold, sullen morning.

Twenty of the most loyal partisans, including a core of the commander’s bodyguard, brought the condemned men to the spot. Then the escort closed around them in a semicircle, rifle in hand, and advancing at a quick, jostling pace drove them to the edge of the platform, where there was no way out except over the precipice.

As a result of questioning, long imprisonment, and maltreatment they had lost their human appearance. Black, hairy, and haggard, they were as terrible as ghosts.

They had been disarmed when they were arrested, and it had not even occurred to anyone to search them again before the execution. Such a search would have seemed superfluous and vile, a cruel mockery of men so close to death.

But now, suddenly, Rzhanitsky, a friend of Vdovichenko, who walked beside him and who, like him, was an old anarchist, fired three shots at the guards, aiming at Sivobluy. He was an excellent marksman but his hand shook in his excitement and he missed. Once again, tactfulness and pity for their former comrades kept the guards from falling on him or shooting him down at once for his attempt. Rzhanitsky had three unspent bullets left in his revolver, but maddened by his failure and perhaps, in his agitation, forgetting that they were there, he flung his Browning against the rocks. It went off a fourth time, wounding one of the condemned men, Pachkolia, in the foot.

Pachkolia cried out, clutched his foot, and fell, screaming with pain. The two men nearest him, Pafnutkin and Gorazdykh, raised him and dragged him by the arms, so that he should not be trampled to death by his comrades, who no longer knew what they were doing. Unable to put down his wounded foot, Pachkolia hopped and limped toward the rocky ledge where the doomed men were being driven, and he screamed without stopping. His inhuman shrieks were infectious. As though at a given signal, everyone lost his self-control. An indescribable scene followed. The men swore loudly, begged for mercy, prayed and cursed.

The young Galuzin, who still wore his yellow-braided school cap, removed it, fell on his knees, and, still kneeling, edged backward following the rest of the crowd toward the terrible stones. Bowing repeatedly to the ground before the guards and crying loudly, he chanted, quite beside himself:

“Forgive me, comrades, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, please let me off. Don’t kill me. I haven’t lived yet. I want to live a little longer, I want to see my mother just once more. Please let me off, comrades, please forgive me. I’ll do anything for you. I’ll kiss the ground under your feet. Oh, help, help, Mother, I’m done for!”

Someone else, hidden in the crowd, chanted:

“Good comrades, kind comrades! Is this possible? In two wars we fought together! We stood up and fought for the same things! Let us off, comrades, have pity on us. We’ll repay your kindness, we’ll be grateful to you all our lives, we will prove it to you. Are you deaf, or what? Why don’t you answer? Aren’t you Christians?”

Others screamed at Sivobluy:

“Judas! Christ-killer! If we are traitors, you are a traitor three times over, you dog, may you be strangled. You killed your lawful Tsar, to whom you took your oath, you swore loyalty to us and you betrayed us. Go ahead, kiss your Forester, that devil, before you betray him! You’ll betray him too!”

Even at the edge of the grave Vdovichenko remained true to himself. His head high, his gray hair streaming in the wind, he spoke to Rzhanitsky as one fellow anarchist to another, in a voice loud enough to be heard by all:

“Don’t humble yourself! Your protest will not reach them. These new oprichniki[17] these master executioners of the new torture chambers, will never understand you! But don’t lose heart. History will tell the truth. Posterity will pillory the Bourbons of the commissarocracy together with their dirty deeds. We die as martyrs for our ideals at the dawn of the world revolution. Long live the revolution of the spirit! Long live world anarchy!”

A volley of twenty shots, discharged at some inaudible command caught only by the riflemen, mowed down half the condemned men, killing most of them outright. The rest were shot down by another salvo. The boy, Terioshka Galuzin, twitched longest, but finally he too lay still.

2

The idea of moving to another place, farther east, for the winter was not given up easily. Patrols were sent out to survey the country beyond the highway, along the Vytsk-Kezhemsk watershed. Liberius was often absent, leaving the doctor to himself.

But it was too late for the partisans to move and they had nowhere to go to. This was the time of their worst setbacks. Shortly before they were finally crushed, the Whites, resolving to destroy the irregular forest units once and for all, had encircled them and were pressing them from every side. The position would have been catastrophic for the partisans had the radius of the encirclement been smaller. They were saved by its size, for the approaching winter made the taiga impenetrable and prevented the enemy from pulling his ring tighter.

To move, however, had become impossible. They could, indeed, have broken through to new positions had any plan offered specific military advantages. But no such definite plan had been worked out. The men were at the end of their tether. The junior officers lost heart and with it their influence over their subordinates. Senior commanders met nightly in council and proposed conflicting solutions. The idea of shifting camp had finally to be abandoned in favor of fortifying the present positions in the heart of the taiga. Their advantage was that the deep snow made them inaccessible, particularly because the Whites were ill supplied with skis. The immediate task was to dig in and lay in large supplies.

Bisiurin, the camp quartermaster, reported an acute shortage of flour and potatoes. Cattle, however, were plentiful and he foresaw that the staple food in winter would be milk and meat.

There was a shortage of winter clothing; many of the partisans went about half dressed. All the dogs in the camp were strangled, and people with experience as furriers were set to making dog-skin jackets, to be worn fur side out.

The doctor was denied the use of transportation. The carts were kept for more important needs. The last time the partisans had moved camp the wounded were carried thirty miles on stretchers.

The only medicines he had left were quinine, Glauber’s salts, and iodine. The iodine was in the form of crystals and had to be dissolved in alcohol before it could be used for dressings or operations. The destruction of the vodka still was now regretted, and those of the brewers who had been acquitted at the trial as less guilty than the rest were told to mend it or construct a new one. The manufacture of alcohol was resumed for medical purposes. When this became known in the camp, people exchanged meaningful glances and shook their heads. Drunkenness broke out again, and contributed to the general demoralization.

The alcohol produced was almost 100 proof. At this strength it was suitable for dissolving crystals and also for preparing tincture of quinine, which was used in the treatment of typhus when it reappeared at the onset of the cold weather.

3

At this time the doctor went to see Pamphil and his family. His wife and children had spent the whole of the past summer as fugitives on dusty roads under the open sky. They were thoroughly frightened by the horrors they had gone through, and they anticipated new ones. Their endless wanderings had marked them indelibly. Pamphil’s wife, two daughters, and little son had light hair, faded to a flaxen color by the sun, and bristling eyebrows, white against their tanned and weather-beaten faces. But while the children were too young to bear the marks of their experiences, the mother’s face had become lifeless. Strain and fear had narrowed her lips to a thread and frozen her dry, regular features in a rigid expression of suffering and defensiveness.

Pamphil was devoted to all of them and loved his children to distraction. He surprised the doctor by his skill in carving toy rabbits, cocks, and bears for them, using a corner of his finely sharpened ax blade.

With the arrival of his family he had cheered up and begun to recover. But now the news had got about that the presence of the families was considered bad for discipline, and they were going to be sent, under proper escort, to winter quarters at some distance from the camp, which would thus be relieved of its burden of civilian refugees. There was more talk about this plan than actual preparation, and the doctor thought it would never be carried out, but Pamphil’s spirits fell and his hallucinations came back.

4

Before winter finally set in, the camp went through a period of disturbances—anxieties, uncertainties, confused, threatening situations, and a number of weird incidents.

The Whites had completed the encirclement according to plan. They were headed by Generals Vitsyn, Quadri, and Bassalygo, who were known far and wide for their harshness and unyielding resolution, and whose names alone terrified the refugees inside the camp as well as the peaceful population remaining in its native villages at the rear of the encircling troops.

As we have said, the enemy had no means of tightening his grip, so the partisans had no reason to worry on this account; on the other hand, it was impossible for them to remain inactive. They realized that passive acceptance of their plight would strengthen enemy morale. However safe they were inside their trap, they had to attempt a sortie, even if only as a military demonstration.

A strong force was set aside for this purpose and concentrated against the western arc of the circle. After several days’ hard fighting, the partisans defeated the Whites and broke through to their rear.

This breach opened a way to the camp in the taiga, and through it poured a stream of new refugees. Not all of these were related to the partisans. Terrified by the punitive measures of the Whites, all the peasants of the surrounding countryside had fled from their homes and now sought to join the partisans, whom they regarded as their natural protectors.

But the camp, anxious to get rid of its own dependents, had no place for newcomers and strangers. Men were sent to meet the fugitives and to divert them to a village on the river Chilimka. The village was called Dvory (“farms”) because of the farmsteads that had grown up around its mill. There it was proposed to settle the refugees for the winter and to send the supplies that were allotted to them.

While these steps were being taken, however, events followed their own course and the camp command could not always cope with them.

The enemy had closed the breach in his positions and the partisan unit that had broken through was now unable to get back into the taiga.

Also, the women refugees were getting out of hand. It was easy to lose one’s way in the taiga. The men sent out to turn back the refugees often missed them, and the women flooded into the forest, chopping down trees, building roads and bridges, and achieving prodigies of resourcefulness.

All this was counter to the intentions of the partisan command, working havoc with the plan made by Liberius.

5

That was why he was in such a temper as he stood talking to the trapper, Svirid, near the highway, which came close to the edge of the taiga at this point. Several of his officers stood on the highway, arguing about whether to cut the telegraph line that ran along the road. Liberius would have the final word, but he was deep in conversation with the trapper and kept signalling to the others to wait for him.

Svirid had been deeply shocked by the shooting of Vdovichenko, whose only crime had been that his influence rivalled that of Liberius and brought dissension into the camp. Svirid wished he could leave the partisans and go back to his old, private, independent life. But this was out of the question. He had made his choice, and were he to leave his Forest Brothers now he would be executed as a deserter.

The weather was the worst imaginable. A sharp, scudding wind swept torn, low clouds as black as flying soot before it. Snow would suddenly fall from them with a convulsive, insane haste. In a moment the broad expanse of the earth was covered with a white blanket. The next minute, the white blanket was consumed, melted completely, and the earth emerged as black as coal under the black sky splashed with slanting streaks of distant showers. The earth could not absorb any more water. Then the clouds would part like windows, as though to air the sky, which shimmered with a cold, glassy white brilliance. The stagnant, unabsorbed water on the ground responded by opening the windows of its pools and puddles, shimmering with the same brilliance. The vapors skidded like smoke over the pine woods; their resinous needles were as waterproof as oilcloth. Raindrops were strung on the telegraph wires like beads one next to the other without ever falling.

Svirid was one of those who had been sent to meet the women refugees. He wanted to tell his chief about the things he had seen, about the confusion resulting from conflicting orders, none of which could be carried out, and about the atrocities committed by the weakest elements of the female hordes, the first to succumb to despair. Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.

Other women, the strongest, were models of courage and self-control, unsurpassed by men. Svirid had many other things to tell his chief. He wanted to warn him of an impending new rebellion, more dangerous than the one that had been put down, but Liberius, by hurrying him, deprived him of the power of speech. Liberius kept interrupting Svirid not only because his friends were calling and waving to him from the highway, but because during the past two weeks he had been given similar warnings time and again, and by now he knew them by heart.

“Give me time, Comrade Chief. I am no good at finding words. They stick in my throat, they choke me. What I say is this, go to the refugee camp and tell those women to stop their nonsense. Otherwise, I ask you, what is this supposed to be—‘All against Kolchak!’ or a civil war among the women?”

“Get on with it, Svirid. You see I’m wanted. Don’t spin it out.”

“And now there’s that she-devil, Zlydarikha, God only knows what she is. She says: ‘Put me down as a woman ventilator to look after the cattle. ...’ ”

“Veterinary, you mean.”

“That’s what I say—a woman ventilator to cure cattle of wind. But she’s not looking after cattle now, such a heretic, devil’s reverend mother she has turned out to be, she says cows’ masses, and turns young refugee wives from their duty. ‘You’ve only yourselves to blame for your miseries,’ she says to them. ‘That’s what comes of hitching up your skirts and running after the Red flag. Don’t do it again.’ ”

“What refugees are you talking about—ours, from the camp, or some other kind?”

“The others, of course. The new ones, the strangers.”

“But they had orders to go to Dvory. How have they got here?”

“Dvory! That’s a good one. Your Dvory’s burned out, mill and all, nothing left of it but cinders. That’s what they saw when they came by—not a living thing. Half of them went crazy, yelled and howled and turned straight back to the Whites, and the other half turned this way.”

“But how do they get through the taiga, through the swamps?”

“What are saws and axes for? Some of our men, who were sent to guard them, helped them a bit. Twenty miles of road they’ve cut, they say. Bridges and all, the brutes! Talk about women! They’ve done things that would take us a month of Sundays!”

“That’s a fine thing, twenty miles of road! And what are you looking so pleased about, you jackass? That’s just what the Whites want, a highway into the taiga! Now all they have to do is to roll in their artillery!”

“Send a force to guard the road.”

“I can do my own thinking, thank you.”

6

The days were getting shorter; it was dark by five. Toward dusk Yurii Andreievich crossed the highway at the very place where Liberius had stood talking to Svirid a few days earlier. He was on his way back to the camp. Near the clearing where the mound and the rowan tree marked the camp boundary, he heard the bold, challenging voice of Kubarikha, his “rival” as he jokingly called the cattle healer. She was singing a gay jingle and her voice had a raucous, boisterous screech in it. Judging by the peals of approving laughter that kept interrupting her, there was a crowd of men and women listening. Then came silence. The people must have dispersed.

Thinking herself alone, Kubarikha sang a different song, softly, as if to herself. Yurii Andreievich, who was cautiously making his way in the dusk along the footpath that skirted the swamp in front of the rowan tree, stopped in his tracks. Kubarikha was singing an old Russian song, but he did not know it. Or she was improvising it?

An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song’s sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words.

Kubarikha half sang and half recited:

“As a hare was running about the wide world,

About the wide world, “over the white snow,

He ran, the lop-eared hare, past a rowan tree,

Past a rowan tree, and complained to it:

Have I not, he said, a timorous heart,

A timorous heart, so faint and weak?

I am frightened, he said, of the wild beast’s tracks,

Wild beast’s tracks, the wolf’s hungry belly.

Pity me, O rowan bush! O fair rowan tree!

Do not give thy beauty to the wicked enemy,

The wicked enemy, the wicked raven.

Scatter thy red berries to the wind,

To the wind, over the wide world, over the white snow.

Fling them, roll them to my native town,

To the far end of the street, the last house,

The last house in the street, the last window, the room

Where she has shut herself in,

My beloved, my longed-for love.

Whisper to my grieving love, my bride,

A warm, an ardent word.

I, a soldier, languish in captivity,

Homesick, I am, poor soldier, kept in foreign parts.

I’ll break from durance bitter,

I’ll go to my red berry, to my lovely bride.”

7

Agafia Fotievna, Pamphil’s wife, had brought her sick cow to Kubarikha. The cow had been separated from the herd and tethered to a tree by a rope tied to her horns. Her mistress sat on a tree stump by the cow’s forelegs and Kubarikha, on a milking stool, by her hind legs.

The rest of the countless herd was crammed into a glade, hemmed in all around by the dark forest of triangular firs, as tall as hills and rising from their spreading lower branches as if they were squatting on fat bottoms on the ground.

The cows were mostly black with white spots and belonged to some Swiss breed popular in Siberia. They were exhausted, no less exhausted than their owners by privations, endless wandering, and intolerable crowding. Rubbing flank to flank and maddened by the lack of space, they forgot their sex and reared and climbed on top of one another, pulling up their heavy udders with an effort and roaring like bulls. The heifers who were covered by them broke away from underneath and rushed off into the forest, tails in the air and trampling shrubs and branches. Their herdsmen—old men and children—ran shrieking after them.

And as if they too were hemmed in by the tight circle of treetops in the winter sky above the glade, the black and white clouds reared and piled and toppled as chaotically as the cows.

The knot of curious onlookers who stood at a distance annoyed the witch, and she measured them from top to toe with a hostile look. But, vain as an artist, she felt that it was beneath her dignity to admit that they embarrassed her. She pretended not to notice them. The doctor watched her from the back of the crowd, where she could not see him.

This was the first time he took a good look at her. She wore her usual English cap and pea-green overcoat with its crumpled collar. But the haughty and passionate expression that gave a youthful fire and darkness to this aging woman’s eyes showed plainly that she did not care in the least what she was wearing or not wearing.

What astonished Yurii Andreievich was the change in Pamphil’s wife. He could scarcely recognize her. In the last few days she had aged terribly. Her goggling eyes were almost ready to pop out of their sockets and her neck was as thin and long as a cart shaft. Such was the effect upon her of her secret fears.

“She doesn’t give any milk, my dear,” she was saying. “I thought she might be in calf, but then she would have had milk by now and she still hasn’t any.”

“Why should she be in calf? You can see the scab of anthrax on her udder. I’ll give you some herb ointment to rub it with. And of course I’ll cast a spell on her.”

“My other trouble is my husband.”

“I’ll charm him back, so he won’t stray. That’s easy. He’ll stick to you so you won’t be able to get rid of him. What’s your third trouble?”

“It isn’t that he strays. That would be nothing. The misfortune is that he clings to me and the children with all his might, and that breaks his heart. I know what he thinks. He thinks they’ll separate the camps, that they will send us one way and him another. And that we’ll fall into the hands of Bassalygo’s men and he won’t be there and we won’t have anyone to stand up for us. And that they’ll torture us, they’ll rejoice in our torments. I know his thoughts. I’m afraid he’ll do away with himself.”

“I’ll think about it. I’ll find a way to end your grief. What’s your third trouble?”

“I haven’t a third one. That’s all there is—my cow and my husband.”

“Well, you are poor in sorrows, my dear. See how merciful God has been to you! Such as you are hard to find. Only two sorrows in your poor heart, and one of them a fond husband! Well, let’s begin. What will you give me for the cow?”

“What will you take?”

“I’ll have a loaf of bread and your husband.”

The onlookers burst out laughing.

“Are you joking?”

“Too much, is it? All right, I’ll do without the loaf. We’ll settle for your husband.”

The laughter grew louder.

“What’s the name? Not your husband’s, your cow’s.”

“Beauty.”

“Half the herd is called that. All right. We’ll start with God’s blessing.”

She recited the spell for the cow. At first she was indeed concerned with the cow, but after a while she got carried away and gave Agafia a whole set of instructions on witchcraft. Yurii Andreievich listened spellbound, just as, when he first arrived in Siberia from European Russia, he had listened to the florid chatter of the driver, Bacchus.

The woman was saying:

“Aunt Margesta, come and be our guest. Come on Wednesday, take away the pest, take away the spell, take away the scab. Ringworm, leave the heifer’s udder. Stand still, Beauty, do your duty, don’t upset the pail. Stand still as a hill, let milk run and rill. Terror, terror, show your mettle, take the scab, throw them in the nettle. Strong as a lord is the sorcerer’s word.

“You see, Agafia, you have to know everything—bidding and forbidding, the word for escaping and the word for safekeeping. Now you, for example, you look over there and you say to yourself: ‘There’s a forest.’ But what there is over there is the forces of evil fighting the angelic host—they’re at war like your men with Bassalygo’s.

“Or take another example, look over there where I’m pointing. You’re looking the wrong way, my dear, use your eyes, not the back of your head, look where my finger is pointing. That’s right! Now, what do you think that is? You think it’s two twigs that the wind has tangled together? Or a bird building its nest? Well, it isn’t either. That thing is a real devil’s work, a garland the water spirit started weaving for her daughter. She heard people coming by, that frightened her, so she left it half done, but she’ll finish it one of these nights, you will see.

“Or again, take your red banner. You think it’s a flag, isn’t that what you think? Well, it isn’t a flag. It’s the purple kerchief of the death woman, she uses it for luring. And why for luring? She waves it and she nods and winks and lures young men to come and be killed, then she send famine and plague. That’s what it is. And you went and believed her. You thought it was a flag. You thought it was: ‘Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.’

“You have to know everything these days, Agafia my girl, every single thing. What every bird is and every stone and every herb. That bird, for example, that’s a starling. And that beast is a badger.

“Now, another thing, suppose you take a fancy to someone, you just tell me. I’ll make him pine for you, whoever he is—your Forester, the one who is your chief, if you like, or Kolchak or Ivan Tsarevich—anyone. You think I’m boasting? I am not. Now look, I’ll tell you. When winter comes with blizzards and whirlwinds and snowspouts chasing each other in the fields, I will stick a knife into such a pillar of snow, right up to the hilt, and when I take it out of the snow, it will be red with blood. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, there you are! And you thought I was boasting. Now, how can it be, you tell me, that blood should come out of a snowspout that is made only of wind and snow? That’s just it, my dear, that whirlwind isn’t just wind and snow, it’s a were-wolf, a changeling that’s lost its little bewitched child and is looking for it, it goes about the fields crying and looking for it. That is what I struck with my knife, that is why there is blood on it. Now, with that knife I can cut away the footprint of any man, and I can sew it with a silk thread to your skirt, and that man—whoever he is, Kolchak, or Strelnikov, or any new Tsar they set up—will follow you step by step wherever you go. And you thought I was telling lies! You thought it was: ‘Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.’

“And many other things there are, such as stones raining from heaven, so that a man may go forth out of his house and the stones rain upon him. Or, as some have seen, horsemen riding through the sky, the horse’s hoofs hitting the tops of the houses. Or as sorcerers prophesied of old, saying: ‘In this woman there is corn, in that one honey, in a third marten fur.’ And the knight opened the shoulder of the woman, as if it were a casket, and with his sword took out of her shoulder blade a measure of corn or a squirrel or a honeycomb.”

Occasionally we experience a deep and strong feeling. Such a feeling always includes an element of pity. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. In the case of some men, compassion for a woman exceeds all measure and transports her to an unreal, entirely imaginary world. Such men are jealous of the very air she breathes, of the laws of nature, of everything that happened in the world before she was born.

Yurii Andreievich was sufficiently well read to suspect that Kubarikha’s last words repeated the opening passage of an ancient chronicle, either of Novgorod or Epatievo, but so distorted by copyists and the sorcerers and bards who had transmitted them orally for centuries that its original meaning had been lost. Why, then, had he succumbed so completely to the tyranny of the legend? Why did this gibberish, this absurd talk, impress him as if it were describing real events?

Lara’s left shoulder had been cut open. Like a key turning in the lock of a secret safe, the sword unlocked her shoulder blade and the secrets she had kept in the depths of her soul came to light. Unfamiliar towns, streets, rooms, countrysides unrolled like a film, whole reels of film, unfolding, discharging their contents.

How he loved her! How beautiful she was! In exactly the way “he had always thought and dreamed and wanted! Yet what was it that made her so lovely? Was it something that could be named and analyzed? No, a thousand times no! She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line that the Creator had, at a single stroke, drawn all around her, and in this divine form she had been handed over, like a child tightly wrapped in a sheet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul.

And what had happened to him now, where was he? In a Siberian forest with the partisans, who were encircled and whose fate he was to share. What an unbelievable, absurd predicament! Once again everything in his head and before his eyes became confused, blurred. At that moment, instead of snowing as had been expected, it began to drizzle. Like a huge banner stretching across a city street, there hung before him in the air, from one side of the forest glade to the other, a blurred, greatly magnified image of a single, astonishing, idolized head. The apparition wept, and the rain, now more intense, kissed and watered it.

“Go along now,” said the witch to Agafia. “I have charmed your cow, she will get well. Pray to the Mother of God, who is the abode of light and the book of the living word.”

8

There was fighting on the western border of the taiga. But the taiga was so immense that the battles were like border warfare on the edges of a great kingdom, and the camp hidden in its heart was so full of people that however many went away to fight, there seemed always to be more people left.

The rumble of the distant battle hardly ever reached the camp. Suddenly, several shots rang out in the forest. They followed one another at very close intervals, and all at once turned into a quick, ragged fusillade. People started up and ran quickly to their tents or wagons, and a general commotion began. Everyone got ready for battle.

It proved to be a false alarm. But then a growing crowd streamed toward the place where the shots had been fired.

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn’s army corps.

Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn’s investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air.

He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying: “Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through.”

“Patrols have gone out in strength. There’s a big battle going on. We’ll hold him.”

“There’s a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know. ... I can’t go on, men. I am spitting blood. I’ll die in a moment.”

“Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can’t you see it’s bad for him, you heartless beasts!”

The man started again: “He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you.”

“You keep saying ‘he.’ Who was it that got to work on you?”

“Let me just get my breath. ... I’ll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn’s men. You don’t know out here what it’s like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don’t know where you are, it’s pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!”

The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves.

That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp.

Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board.

His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite.

The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward. What could he be thinking of? What could he look forward to? What intentions could he have, what plans? It was a clear case of insanity, and nothing could save him now.

While Liberius, the doctor, and the members of the army soviet debated what to do with him, he roamed freely about the camp, his head hung low over his chest, his dirty-yellow eyes glowering unseeingly. An obtuse vague grimace of inhuman, unconquerable suffering never left his face.

No one was sorry for him. Everyone avoided him. Some people said he should be lynched, but they were not heeded.

There was nothing in the world left for him to do. At dawn he vanished from the camp, fleeing from himself like a dog with rabies.

9

High winter came with its severe frosts. Torn, seemingly disconnected sounds and shapes rose out of the icy mist, stood still, moved, and vanished. The sun was not the sun to which the earth was used, it was a changeling. Its crimson ball hung in the forest and from it, stiffly and slowly as in a dream or in a fairy tale, amber-yellow rays of light as thick as honey spread and, catching in the trees, froze to them in midair.

Invisible feet in felt boots, touching the ground softly with padded soles, yet making the snow screech angrily at each step, moved in all directions, while the hooded and fur-jacketed torsos belonging to them sailed separately through the upper air, like heavenly bodies.

Friends stopped and talked, their faces close together, flushed as at the steam baths, with beards bristling like iced loofahs. Clouds of dense, clammy steam puffed out of their mouths, too large for the clipped, frost-bitten words they accompanied.

Walking along the footpath, the doctor ran into Liberius.

“Hello, stranger! Come to my dugout this evening. Spend the night. We’ll have a good talk. There is news.”

“Is the courier back? Any news from Varykino?”

“Not a word about your people or mine. This, however, leads me to the comforting conclusion that they must have got away in time, otherwise we would be sure to have heard something. We’ll talk about it tonight. I’ll expect you.”

Going into the dugout that evening, the doctor repeated his question: “What have you heard about our families? Just tell me that.”

“You never want to see further than your nose. So far as I know, they are safe and sound. But the point is that the news is first-rate. Have some cold veal.”

“No, thanks. Come on now, don’t change the subject.”

“Are you sure you won’t? Well, I’ll have a bite. Though bread and vegetables are what we really need. There’s a lot of scurvy about. We should have got in more nuts and berries last autumn when the women were there to pick them. Well, as I was saying, our affairs are in excellent shape. What I’ve always prophesied is coming true. The worst is over. Kolchak’s forces are retreating all along the line. It’s a complete rout. Now do you see? What did I always tell you? Do you remember how you used to moan?”

“When did I moan?”

“All the time. Especially when we were being pressed by Vitsyn.”

The doctor recalled the autumn, the shooting of the rebels, Pamphil’s killing of his wife and children, the whole senseless murderous mess to which there seemed to be no end. White and Red atrocities rivalled each other in savagery, outrage breeding outrage. The smell of blood was in his nose and throat, it choked him, it nauseated him, it mounted to his head, it made his eyes swim. That wasn’t moaning, that was something entirely different, but how could he explain it to Liberius?

The dugout was lit by torches made of sticks stuck into a metal holder. They gave off an aromatic smell of charcoal. As a stick burned down, the cinder dropped into a bowl of water standing underneath, and Liberius lit a fresh one.

“See what I have to burn”? There’s no more oil. And the wood is too dry, it burns too quickly. Sure you won’t have some veal? About the scurvy. What are you waiting for to call a staff meeting and give us a lecture on scurvy and the means of dealing with it?”

“Stop tormenting me, for God’s sake. What exactly do you know about our people?”

“I’ve told you. There is nothing certain in the report. But I didn’t finish telling you what I’ve learned from the latest communiqués. The civil war is over. Kolchak’s forces are smashed. The main part of the Red Army is in pursuit, it is driving him eastward, along the railway, into the sea. Another part of it is hurrying over this way, and we are joining forces to mop up the considerable scattered numbers of Whites in the rear. The whole of southern Russia is clear of the enemy. Well, why aren’t you glad? Isn’t that enough for you?”

“I am glad. But where are our families?”

“Not in Varykino, and that’s a very lucky thing. Not that there is any confirmation of that crazy business Kamennodvorsky told you about—you remember that rumor last summer about mysterious strangers raiding Varykino? I always thought it was nonsense. But the village is deserted. So it looks as if something did happen after all, and it’s a very good thing they got out in time, as they evidently did. That is what the few remaining inhabitants think, according to my source.”

“And Yuriatin? What happened there? Who is holding it?”

“That’s another absurdity. It can’t possibly be true.”

“What’s that?”

“They say the Whites are still there, but that’s a sheer impossibility. I’ll prove it to you, you’ll see for yourself.”

He put another stick in the holder and, getting out a tattered map and folding it so that the district he was talking about was on top, explained the position, pencil in hand.

“Look. All these are sectors where the Whites have been thrown back—here, and here, and here, all over this region. Do you follow?”

“Yes.”

“So they can’t possibly be anywhere near Yuriatin, because if they were, with their communications cut, they couldn’t avoid being captured. Even their commanders must realize this, however incompetent they may be. Why are you putting on your coat? Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back in a moment. There’s a lot of smoke here, and I’ve got a headache. I’ll just go out for a breath of air.”

When he was outside, the doctor swept the snow off the wooden block that served as a seat at the entrance to the dugout and sat down, his elbows on his knees and his head propped on his fists.

The taiga, the camp, his eighteen months among the partisans, went right out of his head. He forgot all about them. Memories of his dear ones filled his mind and crowded out all else. He tried to guess their fate, and images rose before him, each more frightening than the last.

Here is Tonia walking through a field in a blizzard with Sasha in her arms. She keeps wrapping him up in a blanket, her feet sinking into the deep snow. She can barely drag along, using all her strength, but the blizzard knocks her down, she stumbles and falls and gets up, too weak to stand on her feet, the wind buffeting her and the snow covering her up. Oh, but he is forgetting. She has two children with her, and she nurses the little one. Both her hands are busy, like the fugitives at Chilimka who broke down and went mad with grief and strain.

She has both her hands full and there is no one near to help her. Sasha’s father has vanished, no one knows where he is. He is away, he has always been away, all his life he has remained apart from them. What kind of father is he? Is it possible for a real father always to be away? And what about her own father? Where is Alexander Alexandrovich? And Niusha? And the others? Better not ask, better not think about it.

The doctor got up and turned to go back into the dugout. Suddenly his thoughts took a different direction and he changed his mind about returning to Liberius.

Long ago he had cached a pair of skis, a bag of biscuits, and other things he would need if a chance to make his escape should ever come. He had buried them in the snow just outside the camp, at the foot of a tall pine. To make doubly sure of finding it he had marked the tree with a notch. Now he turned and walked along the footpath trodden between the snowdrifts in the direction of his buried treasure. It was a clear night with a full moon. He knew where the sentries were posted and at first avoided them successfully. But when he came to the clearing with the mound and rowan tree a sentry hailed him from a distance, took a run on his skis, and standing straight up on them glided swiftly toward him.

“Halt or I shoot! Who are you? Password.”

“What’s come over you, man? Don’t you know me? I’m the camp doctor, Zhivago.”

“Sorry, Comrade Zhelvak. I didn’t recognize you, no offense meant. All the same, Zhelvak or not, I’m not letting you go any farther. Orders are orders.”

“As you wish. The password is ‘Red Siberia,’ and the reply, ‘Down with the Interventionists.’ ”

“That’s better. Go ahead. What are you chasing after at this time of night? Anyone sick?”

“I was thirsty and I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d go out for a breath of air and eat some snow. Then I saw the rowan tree with iced berries on it. I want to go and pick a few.”

“If that isn’t just like a gentleman’s notion! Who’s ever heard of picking berries in winter! Three years we’ve been beating the nonsense out of you others but you’re still the same. All right, go and pick your berries, you lunatic. What do I care.”

And as swiftly as he had come, the sentry took a run, stood straight up on his long skis, and whistled over the untrodden snow into the distance beyond the bare winter shrubs as thin as thinning hair.

The footpath brought the doctor to the foot of the rowan tree, whose name he had just spoken. It was half in snow, half in frozen leaves and berries, and it held out two white branches toward him. He remembered Lara’s strong white arms and seized the branches and pulled them to him. As if in answer, the tree shook snow all over him. He muttered without realizing what he was saying, and completely beside himself: “I’ll find you, my beauty, my love, my rowan tree, my own flesh and blood.”

It was a clear night with a full moon. He made his way farther into the taiga, to the marked tree, unearthed his things, and left the camp.