Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

“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.”

“Do you know where I can find a room to rent here?” Klim asked.

The guard beamed and put his hand to his mouth. “That’s fifty-four!” he called out to a porter nearby.

The porter gave him the thumbs-up.

“We had a bet on how many people would ask for a room to rent,” the guard explained to Klim. “I told him there’d be a hundred before lunch.”

Klim looked around. Officers, Cossacks, Kalmyks, and aristocratic ladies with children—everyone was hurrying off somewhere, their feet churning up mud.

“There ought to be something available,” Klim said.

The guard shrugged. “Go to the market and ask around. Maybe some widow will let you into her bed.”

The tin shop signs rattled in the wind, and great clouds were massed in the sky. The sidewalks were so full that people inched forward like passengers on a crowded tram. There were hundreds of beggars—mostly adults and youths—but almost no elderly people or small children to be seen. The streets were lined with rows of covered wagons and broken-down cars used as shelter by soldiers, who were building bonfires and butchering horse carcasses right in front of their makeshift dwellings. The living paid no attention to the corpses lying in the road; they might have been dead dogs for all anyone cared. Some of the dead had gunshot wounds, and some looked as though they had died a “natural” death.

As usual, no one knew where anything was, but after walking for some time around the streets that ran down toward the sea, Klim found the marketplace.

Carts harnessed with long-horned oxen stood close to the stone wall. The smell of damp earth and rotten potatoes mingled with smoke from the braziers.

“Get your barbecued meat here!” the street sellers called. “Kebabs for sale!”

“Pickled watermelon!”

“Dried apricots! Sweeter than a Cossack’s kiss.”

Buyers could find everything here from cutlasses to oranges, from silver mackerel to watery soup doled out by traders into cups and pots.

Blue-eyed Cossack girls haggled contemptuously with refugee women. They held up the White government banknotes to the sun, grumbled under their breath, and tucked the money into the tops of their men’s boots.

The sprawling flea market was full of people buying and selling, gambling and fighting, and everywhere the air was thick with cement dust.

Klim walked up to a cart loaded with newspapers: Russian Time, Free Speech, Great Russia, and the like. All of the editorials looked the same: “Let’s hear it for our boys and victory!” no matter what.

Klim began to read an appeal to “Our brothers, the peasants”:

All the land seized during the revolution must be returned to its rightful owners. But as winter crops have been already planted, one-third of the future harvest will be transferred to the state, another third transferred to the owners, and one-third kept by the peasants in payment for their work.

Are they idiots? Klim thought. What sort of time is this talk about how crops will be shared out in the future with the White Army on the brink of destruction?

A little old hunched Jew with an oversized cap pulled down over his big hairy ears was selling copies of Great Russia.