Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

But deep down, everyone was tormented by the same question: “What are we doing here? What’s it all for?”

The British had plenty of food from condensed milk to canned beef, and soon, Klim felt far better and stronger than he had before. However, all this time, he felt not as if he were living but merely enduring life.

His duty was to translate the news releases, manage the newly hired orderlies, and assist the British in their short-lived love affairs. The instructors were extremely jealous of the tank boys for having Klim to help them, and now and then, Captain Pride would “rent out” their interpreter, overcharging the instructors shamelessly for Klim’s services.

“I suppose a crate of whiskey will just about do it, but you can bring me a new samovar as well.”

While on his Russian mission, Captain Pride had assembled a magnificent collection of samovars and kept it in the ammunition car under the strict surveillance by the guards.

The instructors laughed at him. “The Bolsheviks will blow up our train sooner or later, and your samovars will be scattered all over. Just imagine, the Russians will write in their chronicles, ‘In the year of 1919, extraordinary weather conditions were observed: it rained samovars.’”

At night, the tank boys gathered by their fireplace. Klim drank with them, laughed at their dirty jokes, and gazed at the map on the wall. The railroad line was like a black funeral ribbon stretching down to the south through Rostov and Ekaterinodar to Novorossiysk.

What if Nina has managed to escape from the Reds and reach Novorossiysk? Klim thought, and every time, he pulled himself up. Who are you kidding? You’ll never find her. Even if Osip by some miracle did spare her life, and even if she wasn’t killed or injured on the journey, she’ll have left Russia long ago. And God only knows where she is now. Maybe in France, maybe not. But in any case, she thinks I’m dead. She won’t be expecting to see me again.

His mind ran this way and that like a caged animal throwing itself against the bars of its enclosure, unable to see a way out.

“Got the blues again?” Pride asked, looking into Klim’s eyes. “I’ve seen a lot of that at the front. Give us your cup—I’ll give you a shot of rum.”

4

Klim went to see Eddie in the hospital car.

“How are you, old boy?” he asked.

Eddie put his newspaper aside. “That’s it,” he said. “We’re going home.” He began to whistle “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

“What d’you mean?” Klim asked, surprised.

Eddie handed him the newspaper. At a banquet in London’s City Hall, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George had given a speech in which he had announced that the United Kingdom couldn’t afford to continue its costly intervention in the endless Russian civil war. To maintain an effective fighting force, the Britain government needed to send four hundred thousand soldiers to Russia, and this was quite unthinkable. Lloyd George was sure that sooner or later the Bolshevik regime would fall, and he didn’t consider General Denikin capable of spearheading the anti-Bolshevik campaign. If the people of Russia had really supported him, the Bolsheviks would never have been able to defeat the White Army.

“What nonsense!” Eddie said with a sad smile. “As though victory in war is down to a popular vote or something. Anyway, from now on, we’re only here as observers.”

5

The news that Britain would no longer be supplying military aid terrified the Whites. There were calls for Denikin to be replaced by the brilliant cavalry general Wrangel. Political passions were running high in the Caucasus, and the Cossacks were refusing to lend their support to the volunteers unless the White command promised them an independent state. The Whites’ retreat began to look more like a stampede.

The locomotive pulling the British train had broken down, and the passengers were forced to celebrate Christmas of 1919 in the middle of the frozen steppe. Outside, the unbroken snow of the plains stretched away like white silk under a velvety-black starry sky as far the eye could see. The tank crew fed their fire with the butts of broken rifles and took turns to crank away at a handheld dynamo flashlight. Christmas dinner was special less for its food than for the elaborate reminiscences of food that it evoked.

“My mother used to cook veal chitterlings,” Captain Pride said as he opened a can of the hateful beef stew. “We would stuff ourselves until we hardly could move.”

Eddie poured cups of whiskey. “We used to have a Christmas goose dinner.”

They talked of stuffing, roast potatoes, bread sauce, and plum duff.

“Gentlemen, please, must you?” someone pleaded from time to time.

But the conversation went on: “Mince pies—ham omelets—”

Eddie raised his cup. “Do you remember how we drank to Christmas in Moscow?”

The door clanged, and a guard walked into the sleeping car to report in Russian.

“They’ve mended the engine, but they still haven’t got any steam,” Klim interpreted. “The train manager is asking everyone to help fill the tank with snow.”

“We’ll be there just as soon as we’ve had our drink,” Captain Pride said. “Merry Christmas, gentlemen, and here’s to a happy 1920!”

All night long, all of those who could still stand hauled snow to the engine in buckets, bags, and even capes. A bucket of snow when melted would yield a few cups of water.

6

Finally, they got the train going and managed to go as far as Rostov. The branch lines were flooded with hoards of refugees who tried to storm the railroad cars heading south.

Captain Pride posted men with machine guns on the roofs of the boxcars and ordered them to shoot if anyone tried to get onto the British train.

Then he went into town, taking Klim with him. The mood on the streets was frantic, close to hysteria. Nobody knew where the headquarters were or who was in charge. The telegraph was down because Red partisans had cut the wires.

“How far away are the Bolsheviks?” Klim asked a distraught-looking colonel overseeing the loading of horses into a freight car.

“Wake up!” the colonel barked. “They’ll be here any moment now.”

“We need to get another locomotive,” Captain Pride said, turning pale as he learned the news. “Our own wreck won’t last ten miles.”

They found a graveyard of abandoned locomotives next to the railroad depot, but there were no working engines to be had either for money or the promise of canned beef. Captain Pride brought in his soldiers and lined all of the railroad employees up against the wall.

“Tell them to find us a damn engine, or we’ll shoot the lot of them,” the captain told Klim.

“How am I supposed to do that?” howled the depot manager.

The soldiers already had their rifles at the ready.

“Captain Pride! Captain Pride!” called a voice.

They turned to see one of the instructors running toward them.

“We’ve found an engine. We met the men from the British mission in Rostov. They’re evacuating, and they agreed to take us on board. But there are only two cars in their train. Their engine can’t pull any more than that.”

Captain Pride gave the order to leave everything behind, including all of the tanks, arsenal, and his beloved samovars.

“People are our priority,” he said firmly, but nevertheless, he decided to abandon the Russian staff.

“Our officers from Rostov have an interpreter of their own,” he told Klim. “If I take you, I’ll have to take the rest of the Russians.”

Klim told him that he understood perfectly.

Eddie leaned out of the car door and thrust a wad of crumpled banknotes into Klim’s hand.

“Here, take this. The lads did a whip-round.” His lips were trembling. “I feel like such a pig! I’m sorry it turned out this way.”

7

A black and dreadful-looking crowd of White soldiers and refugees was crossing the ice of the frozen Don River.

“Look at the bourgeois army scampering!” commented a homeless boy perched on a boat frozen into the ground.

The “bourgeois” hadn’t a penny to their names. Those who had once waltzed in splendid dance halls were no better off than those who had loaded bales in the docks. Nobody knew where they were going, where they could stay the night, or how they would find their next meal.

A huge Kalmyk encampment stretched along the railroad for miles—emaciated horses, huge mud-spattered camels with matted fur, shivering children with blue lips, and stiff old men and women with blank faces.

Nobody knew why the Whites were unable to defend themselves. Why in general did nobody show any faith in their ability to act together? The refugees were all like desperate beggars prepared to kill just for the chance of a frozen carrot, a place in a sleigh, or a night in a warm hut.

Klim submitted to the law of the refugee pack. He tried to keep neutral and inconspicuous—he had no choice if he wanted to get to Novorossiysk, the allied ships, and salvation. However, at the moment, he couldn’t for the life of him see any point in being saved.

Fortune had smiled on him again, and now, he was warmly dressed and had money. Nevertheless, at night after the long journey on foot, he—along with many others—began to hallucinate, imagining that he saw thousands of roses in the trampled snow. Many people fell under the same mass illusion and walked as though over a carpet of white and pink flowers, breathing in the delicate, sweet scent.

Klim experienced an even more sublime hallucination of his own. His wife came to him dressed in a blue gown with the shimmering embroidery on the bodice and an ornamental comb in her dark curls. He called out to her, losing himself so completely in his dream that he saw nothing else and bumped into the people around him.

If only he could have administered that vision straight into his veins like a drug in fantastic doses! To the outside world, Klim knew that he must seem like a madman with a twisted sense of humor and a warped view of reality. But inside, he was still living in the world of the tango and the Columbus Theater, the finest in Argentina, ablaze with light from the chandeliers and decorated with flags for opening night.

I don’t care if Buenos Aires has gone to the dogs just like everywhere else, Klim thought. I’m not going back there anyway, and I won’t have to witness its disgrace.

His hallucinations were, in fact, a blessing to him. When people no longer understand what is real and what is not, they are no longer terrified to see the naked bodies of dead children thrown out of train windows or shocked to find velvet furniture and a stuffed tiger in a sleeping car left behind by the White commanders while desperate people trudge through the snow on foot.

The heavy frosts prevented the Red cavalry from catching up with the refugees and hacking them to pieces with their swords, but the same frost spelled doom for the Whites as well. It was rumored that six thousand Cossacks under General Pavlov had frozen to death on the steppe. The Reds emerged from their warm huts one morning to see the entire regiment lying dead and covered with ice.

Klim passed through countless towns, villages, and hamlets on foot, and it was only once he got to Ekaterinodar that he managed to squeeze himself onto a dilapidated train. The more fortunate passengers were snoring triumphantly on their berths while others were sleeping standing up with their heads nodding in time with the wheels.

For a long time, the train made its tortuous way between the mountains, every now and then plunging into a tunnel and crawling slowly on. The sun was rising, and the snow-painted peaks changed from purple to gold.

1

Spring had already come to Novorossiysk. The snow had melted, and the weather was warm and windy.

Klim got off the train at a small dirty station. To judge by the blankets, oil stoves, and swaddling clothes drying on ropes, there had been refugees camped out here for weeks, and people were dying here too. In the waiting room, medical orderlies were picking up the dead and laying them on stretchers. There was an epidemic of typhus in the town.

Klim came onto the crowded square beside the railroad station. A strong gust of wind lifted his cap from his head and dropped it at the feet of a guard sitting on a broken hitching post.

“This is nothing to what we get in winter,” he said amiably, “when the Nor’easter starts up.”