Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

A naval gun boomed offshore.

Fomin kissed Nina’s hand. “Why are you shaking? That’s only the British trying to scare off the Greens.” His eyes were tired and bloodshot, the pupils dilated.

Nina felt pierced by a sudden, sharp pity for him. He had lost everything, and he was unloved and doomed. But still, she pulled her fingers out of his rough palms.

“Good night.”

6

An hour later, she crept carefully up to his bedroom door and looked inside. The light was still burning. An empty bottle of cognac stood on the table, and Fomin snored on the couch still in his clothes and shoes.

Quietly, Nina climbed the ladder to the attic. The stairs creaked treacherously under her feet, and she winced at every step. What if somebody overheard her?

Slowly, Nina opened the hatch. She was greeted by the musty smell of an unlived-in room and a cold breath of air. It was pitch black, and she had nothing to light her way.

“Klim!” she whispered.

“I’m here.”

A hot wave of relief swept over her body. Thank God, he was all right.

Groping across the attic, Nina found her way to where Klim was lying and put her head on his shoulder. He covered her with his blanket, pressed her to his chest, and groaned softly.

“Oh, they gave me a thrashing all right,” Klim said.

“I don’t want anybody else,” Nina sobbed quietly. “I just want to love you—and to be with you—”

Klim quietly ran his fingers through her hair. “I still can’t believe I’ve found you. Up here, I can hear everything everyone says downstairs. That counterintelligence agent was lying to Fomin. He told him that his boys had killed me and thrown my body into the sea. He got fifty francs for it—so now I know my true worth. And all the time, I was lying here as though I’d already died and gone to heaven.”

“Don’t talk about it!” Nina pleaded.

She kissed him in the pitch darkness like a phantom, a spirit she had called up. She tried to be cautious but kept forgetting and surrendering to warm delight.

Somewhere outside came the sound of shooting, and Nina got to her feet. “I have to go, or someone will wake up and find out I’m not in my room.”

“Go on then,” Klim said, still holding her hand. “Nina—is it true that I’ve really found you again? Maybe this is just some sort of delirium? If it is delirium, I don’t want to wake up.”

1

Sablin had spent six months in the White Army. He had seen marching columns deployed from horizon to horizon. He had seen brutal cavalry attacks in which avalanches of horsemen would crash into each other at full gallop in an orgy of slaughter.

So much had passed before his eyes: cannons hopelessly stuck in the snow, half-deaf gunners who could talk only in shouts, and Kalmyk troops going into battle accompanied by the crash of tambourines and singing of their shamans. They came back with their enemies’ heads on spears.

Don Cossacks in faded tunics and trousers with red stripes, Kuban and Terek Cossacks in astrakhan hats and long, flared chokha coats, and volunteers dressed in the Russian Imperial and British uniforms had only one thing in common: their battered boots, a symbol of the great retreat.

Now, if they came across a dead body lying on the road, the first thing they did was remove the boots, which were far too precious to be allowed to go to waste.

Everyone had long since stopped expecting anything from the commissary. They had only been issued new footwear once in the last two months when they had been sent a consignment of odd army boots, left feet only.

“Don’t anger the gods,” Kirill Savich, the paramedic, had said to Sablin. “Be thankful for small mercies. Imagine if the Reds shot your right leg off. A left boot would come in handy.”

“If only I could be sure they’d shoot off the right leg,” Sablin had muttered.

The army fled but slowly. The icy steppe had thawed and was now deep with mud that clogged the wheels so that they could only move the ambulance carts forward by dragging them. Sablin remembered something similar in Manchuria during the Russian-Japanese war of 1904–1905.

The horses collapsed with exhaustion and didn’t even try to get back up again. Spattered with mud to his shoulders, Sablin approached a group of medics crowded around a horse, its sides heaving with effort and its ears twitching.

“You need to unharness it,” Sablin commanded. “Grab its mane and pull it over onto its side.”

Then they freed its bent front legs and pulled at its mane and tail. Finally, the horse was back on its feet, and the medics harnessed it again.

“I just can’t bear to watch it,” said one of the nurses named Fay, a grotesque-looking girl with a face like an imp. “The poor thing needs rest.”

Sablin sniffed. “If we let it rest, it wouldn’t move and would be dead before we knew it. A horse needs to be led. Do you remember how my mare Swallow got her hoof stuck in the crack between the planks on that bridge? If I’d left her alone, she would have broken her leg. When a horse panics, it goes crazy.”

“It’s the same with people,” sighed Fay.

Soon, the hospital was left alone, as all of the rest of the army units had overtaken it. Only occasionally a rearguard unit made its way past the ambulance carts. At first, Sablin kept looking behind to see if the Red Army was approaching, but soon, he just forgot about it.

They spent nights camped out on the floor of huts, often abandoned. Sablin always was the last to go to bed. First, he had to make sure that all of the horses were unharnessed and had enough hay. Then two hours later, he got up to check that the horses had been given their water. He couldn’t trust anyone else to do it because everyone was dazed by fatigue. They would reply automatically, “Yes, sir,” and do nothing. Only Fay helped him, fetching water when necessary or haggling with Cossack women for fodder.

“I need food and hay for the field hospital,” she insisted.

“We have nothing,” they said.

“Listen, I’ll pay you in cash. If you refuse, I’ll find what I need and pay you nothing. The Reds will take the hay anyway.”

Every now and then, Fay scolded Sablin, “You’re always taking care of the horses, but what about taking care of yourself? If one of the horses collapses, I can find another even if I have to steal it. But where would I find another doctor? Go to sleep now!”

Even in the morning when everyone had already gotten up, she sent the medics away to stop them bothering Sablin. “See to it yourselves,” Sablin heard through his sleep. “Let the doctor have a few minutes’ rest.”

2

After the Whites had surrendered Ekaterinodar, it seemed for a time that they would have a respite. The Bolsheviks were stuck some way behind. The Kuban River had overflowed its banks, and all of the bridges had been blown up by the Whites. It was much easier to walk now. The Kalmyks’ herds had passed the hospital unit, and the sheep trampled the mud until it was a solid, springy mass less sticky and easier to walk on than before. The hospital unit was reduced to eight carts: all of the walking wounded had gone on ahead, and half the seriously injured patients had died on the way.

The air was pure and soft, and in the distance, the blue-gray mountains rose up still with patches of snow here and there. Sablin rode along, falling asleep every now and again—or rather, drifting in and out of consciousness. His horse, Swallow, carried him along behind the carts, and he dreamed of Nizhny Novgorod, his house, and his wife. It seemed to him as though none of it had ever actually belonged to him, that he was watching a film of somebody else’s life, an unheard-of color film with sound.

“Doctor, look!” called Fay.

The road ahead ran through a crevice in the mountains, and countless convoys and military units were streaming down into it as though into the mouth of a funnel. The sight was majestic and eerie: the White Army disappearing into another world.

They traveled on through rocky mountains, gorges, and tunnels flooded with people, horses, camels, and carts. Partisans could be hiding behind any rock. Sablin struck up a conversation with a lieutenant who had been several times to Novorossiysk. The lieutenant told him that the entire Caucasus region was riddled with Greens like a Cossack hat crawling with lice. They called themselves “The Sochi Raiders,” “The Detachment of Thunder and Lightning,” the “Team of Avengers,” and so on.

“Who’d they want to avenge?” the doctor asked wearily.

“Everyone and everything.”

The partisans were impossible to resist: they killed whomever they wanted and snatched whatever they could carry away.

“Sometimes I think, was it really worth fighting?” Kirill Savich, the paramedic, sighed, scanning the endless columns of the retreating people. “If we’d known in advance what would happen, I don’t think we’d have formed the White Army and started the war. Russia is done for anyway, and we’ve done nothing but suffer in vain and get people killed for nothing.”

Sablin gave a wry smile. Maybe it hadn’t been worth it, but if he had to choose again, he would still have joined the volunteers and made his way from Oryol to the Caucasus Mountains.

Once, Klim Rogov had told Sablin that he didn’t want to get involved in the war; he didn’t want to waste his time on such a bad business. But war gave you no choice. It sucked in everybody, willing or unwilling.

To fight the Bolsheviks meant to shoot ordinary Russians who had been forcibly conscripted. Not to fight them meant to stand and watch your home being destroyed without even trying to defend it. It was a trap, and once you were in it, there was no good solution. You could either bite your leg off and escape crippled or wait for the hunters to come along, shoot you, stuff you, and mount you in a glass case.