Horsemen of the Sands

by Leonid Yuzefovich

  Kozlovsky went out with the signed decree and Ungern was left alone once more. He unfastened his deel, lifted the amulet, and squinting, saw on his white, hairless chest a strange reddish spot with five rays of different lengths shooting out from it. It looked like someone’s tiny palm had left a mark on his skin.

  He turned the amulet over and sniffed its back side. It smelled like a damp poultice. The skin in that place still itched a little, but by evening the itch had passed entirely.

  Undressing for the night, Ungern noticed that the spot was no longer red but faded. By morning it had vanished completely.

  THE ASIATIC DIVISION was moving toward the border in several columns. In June, the mountain streams flood and rage from the melting snows, and on the sagging and rotting bridges of planking, abandoned over the last few years, the waters rise to a man’s waist and halfway up a horse’s side. But in late May one can still pass.

  Spring had transformed the stern mountain ranges of Northern Mongolia. White anemones carpeted the mountains’ southern slopes, and a violet flame of wild rosemary girded the foothills. Pasqueflowers bloomed on the gloomy stone barrens. The nights were cold, but ducks were already beginning to weave nests in riverbank depressions, and at dawn, advance parties of geese flying from the south would appear.

  In the last few days of May 1921, the division crossed the border of the buffer Far East Republic in two columns. Their goal was Mysovaya, a Cossack village – to blow up the tunnels around Baikal and cut off the Trans-Siberian railroad so that the Reds couldn’t use it to transfer reinforcements from the west – but they couldn’t get farther than Khyagt-Troitskosavsk. Ungern, broken and nearly surrounded, still managed to break out of the trap and return to Mongolia. His trail was lost, and there was a faint rumor that his division had scattered and he himself had fled to Harbin but en route had either been killed by the Chinese or thrown into the dungeon of the medieval Qiqihar prison. According to another version, the baron had led his horsemen southward, to Tibet, and perished in the vast, tractless Gobi; according to a third, he went to the west of Halha and offered his services to General Bakich, whose detachments were then descending from the spurs of the Altai. Ungern began to be forgotten, but six weeks later, once the Fifth Army’s Expeditionary Force had occupied Urga, he again crossed the border unexpectedly and by forced march moved north, toward Verkhneudinsk.

  The Cossack, Bashkir, Buryat, and Tibetan companies trotted off again, the Halhans, Chahars, Harachis, and Derbets galloped, and the captive Chinese unaccustomed to riding horseback rattled in their saddles, having been thrown together into a separate division. Intertwined in a fantastic embrace on their silver epaulets were the dragon and the two-headed eagle, symbolizing the unity of the fates of the two empires, great and collapsed but with the promise of rebirth.

  Machine guns sailed along on camel humps, and oxen dragged cannons. Across the steppe rivers, where there is no forest on the banks for building rafts, they sent their artillery across on several ox carcasses that had bloated in the sun, which they tied together. Under the hooves of horses, sheep, and camels, under the wheels of the wagons, the steppe smoked with the flying dust of July, and a sultry haze blanketed the horizon. Asia breathed hotly down their necks.

  At one time, a full-grown, sugar-white filly, quite unlike the short-legged, shaggy, and ill-tempered Mongolian horses, had shown up at Ungern’s headquarters. During their moves and at their night’s rests, Naidan-Dorji personally looked after her. On the journey they put a precious, silver-adorned saddle with coral pendants on her, but no one ever sat on it, and the white filly invariably traveled light. Right before the Mongols’ eyes, Ungern ordered a Cossack beaten to death with sticks for clambering up on her back when drunk. The great Sagan-Ubugun rode her, as he had seven hundred years before, invisible, having quit his seclusion by a mountain lake in order to lead the baron’s host to victory.

  “Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days….”

  3

  THE TABLE, NIGHTSTAND, and kitchen shelves in Boliji’s house were lined with faded oilcloth all with the same design: dark blues squares with two pineapples, one whole and one cut into pieces, on a platter. It was dazzling.

  We were sitting at the table drinking tea, and Boliji was telling the story of how the Reds set fire to the steppe in order to stop Ungern, but he passed through the fire and came out toward Goose Lake. He had eighty versts to go to Verkhneudinsk. Meanwhile the Buryat company of Cossack Captain Ergonov had entered Hara-Shulun. Here Ergonov mobilized seven adult males, issuing each a rifle and ten yanchans against his future salary. Among them were Boliji’s father and older brother Jorgal.

  Nine-year-old Boliji, his mother, and his baby sister went to see them off. They stood by a suburgan and watched the horsemen go. His father kept looking back for a long time, shouted something, and waved his hand and his cap, but Jorgal got in the saddle and rode off, not once turning around. He was young, hot-tempered, and foolish and wasn’t thinking about his mother.

  At their parting, his mother sprinkled a cup of mare’s milk on the ground behind them, spreading a lucky white road over which her men would avoid disaster and return home unharmed, the way the migratory birds return in spring because in the fall the women in the uluses sprinkle milk after the avian caravans stretching southward.

  I listened and thought about the promised amulet. To me it looked like either a bronze, long-eared Buddha, or a porous fragment of black meteorite metal with a loop soldered on for a string, and when Boliji finally laid out on the table a threadbare silk packet with frayed edges, I experienced a momentary disappointment so acute that it could not help but be reflected on my face, but Boliji pretended not to notice.

  “Sagan-Ubugun!” he said, running his pinky over the depiction of a bald old man with a crook.

  I attempted to clarify how he thought the amulet worked. What happens if I hang it on my neck or put it in my tunic chest pocket? Say I did that, what then? Would the bullet fly past or not harm me, or did the amulet affect not the bullet itself but whoever sent it – clouding his gaze, or instilling fear to make his hands shake? There was another possibility as well: something happens not with the bullet or shooter but with the rifle, for instance, a warping of the bullet in the chamber. I expected complex explanations, but Boliji replied without guile that the gau stopped bullets in the air, and they fell to earth before reaching their target. The mechanism of this miracle, which broke the laws of ballistics, remained unexplained.

  “That’s how it used to be,” he added. “I’ll tell you the truth, I haven’t tried it in a long time.”

  I understood that the miraculous power contained in the amulet could also age and burst, just as the bubble of fear had burst in him.

  “Here’s Jorgal” – Boliji pointed to a photograph together with a dozen others stuck in a frame hanging on the wall, the way it’s done in Russian peasant families. “He looks like me in the face. You thought it was me, right? No, Jorgal. He was cheerful and knew lots of good jokes. He’d blow up a sheep’s bladder and put it under the felt mat. Young girls would come and sit down. Blat! Everyone would laugh, and the girls would blush.”

  The wind was gusting outside, whipping up pillars of sand and dust on the road. As soon as they were swept onto the grass, they collapsed.

  “You and I are drinking tea,” Boliji said. “Right?”

  I didn’t say anything since the answer was obvious.

  He shook his head.

  “No, tell me, what is this? Tea?”

  “Tea.”

  “And you drink it like tea. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But why do you drink it that way?”

  “What way?”

  “Like tea.”

  “Because it is tea,” I said.

  “No” – Boliji smiled – “you drink it like tea because you’re a human being. But give a cup of tea to a lucky man from heaven, and he’ll say, ‘This
is disgusting.’ Give it to an unlucky man from hell, and he’ll say, ‘This is the drink of the gods.’ ”

  He took a sip and finished his story.

  “When Jorgal came home, he drank tea as if he’d just emerged from hell. Our father was already dead, and Jorgal had brought his body home on his saddle.”

  THE NIGHT JORGAL returned to Hara-Shulun, there was a storm and a hard rain. The heavenly camel opened its big mouth and its saliva poured down on the land, making lots of noise, drowning out the clatter of the horse and washing away its tracks. No one in the ulus saw Jorgal arrive, and Boliji’s mother told him not to tell anyone.

  The night before, Boliji and his sister had gone into the steppe to dig up little mouse stores, where they often managed to find tiny daylily roots the size of garlic cloves, gently sweet to the taste. The mice put them by for themselves for the winter. Together Boliji and his sister gathered a whole handful, feasted on them, and on the way back saw that one of the mice they’d robbed had hanged himself from grief. The mouse had discovered the loss and leapt on a fork in a wormwood stalk, strangling herself, and then dangled there, a brown lifeless lump, until it died. His mother said this was a bad omen, and indeed, early the next morning Jorgal galloped up with his father’s body across his saddle.

  Later he told them that Ergonov’s company had caught up to Ungern’s host near the Goose Lake monastery, where the Reds were entrenched. His father had been left to watch the sheep, and Jorgal and the rest had galloped toward the shooting, and he’d been lucky: around the captives, killed and undressed by the Chahars, he’d picked up a metal pencil in the grass. In it were two colored sticks, blue and red, and a clever spring pushed out first one, then the other, and although the yanchans Ergonov had given him had been taken away by the Cossacks, he had high hopes for his new loot.

  It all began well, but in the evening his father said, “The Red Russians have great strength. We’ll be lost, we must flee.”

  That spring, Jorgal turned seventeen. He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to fight. Then his father threatened that he wouldn’t give him the dowry for his bride. He had no choice but to obey. In the dark they rode out of the camp and ran into a picket from their own company. His father started saying that the grass here was bad, that they had to find better grass because the sheep were hungry, but the Cossacks didn’t believe him. They surrounded them and brought them to Ergonov, who was sitting by the campfire next to Ungern, eating meat.

  “Why don’t you want to fight for our faith, father?” Ungern asked, frowning.

  My father asked in turn, “And what is your faith?”

  “The same as yours. The yellow faith.”

  “Our faith,” his father answered, “is this: the sheep faith, the horse faith. Pray to the earth, pray to the water. Pray a little to the Buddha. If you brew tarasun, sprinkle some on the Buddha. Weapons are not our faith. Let us go home, General sir!”

  “Fine, father,” Ungern agreed. “Go, but your son stays.” He looked at Jorgal and asked him, “Do you want to stay with me?”

  “I do,” Jorgal admitted.

  His father spat silently at his son’s feet and started toward the Cossack holding their horses. He mounted his own and took the other by the reins.

  “Leave one horse,” Ungern ordered him.

  His father moved over to Jorgal’s horse.

  “Chiang-chun, this is my horse,” Jorgal said, addressing Ungern. “Tell him to ride his own.”

  “Ride your own,” Ungern ordered.

  “Both are mine,” his father replied.

  “Father, don’t take my horse,” Jorgal asked once again.

  His father didn’t listen.

  “This isn’t a human being,” he shouted in Buryat. “He has the eyes of a mangys! You want to serve a mangys?”

  He thought Ungern wouldn’t understand him, what he said, but he was mistaken. Shaking his head, Ungern took Ergonov’s carbine and shot the father in the chest.

  Jorgal sat over him until everyone fell asleep, then lay his body across his saddle and galloped off to Hara-Shulun. No one pursued him.

  All day his father lay in their yurt, under a felt mat. His mother stuck a silk scrap with an incantation on his wound, so his soul wouldn’t fly out of the body through the bullet hole prematurely, before hearing the final prayer. Only a lama could recite that kind of prayer, but his mother was afraid of summoning him. What if he told someone that Jorgal had run away from Ungern? She sat and wept and couldn’t bring herself to do anything. By making her husband’s future life easier, she would destroy her son in this life.

  It was hot, and the yurt stank from the dead body. In the evening, Boliji’s mother gave him a piece of felt and sent him and his baby sister to sleep in the open air. No sooner had they lain down when their uncle, their mother’s brother, approached and asked why they were sleeping there. Boliji didn’t know what to say and said, “Mama told us to.”

  Hearing voices, Jorgal hid in time under the goatskin covers he used on winter nights. Their uncle peeked into the yurt but didn’t notice anything.

  “Why are the children sleeping under the moon?” he began shouting. “It’s not good, they’ll dry out!”

  The moon was big and round. Boliji’s sister got scared so his mother took her into the yurt. Boliji fell asleep alone, and in the morning his mother told him that during the night she and Jorgal had taken his father to the hills and left him there, without throwing earth on him, for the wolves and foxes to eat. Without a lama, the only way to ensure him a favorable rebirth was by giving his flesh up for the good of other living creatures.

  Jorgal hid in the yurt until a week later three of the men Ergonov had driven off to war showed up. From them, the ulus learned that the Reds had defeated Ungern and he was withdrawing to the south, to Mongolia. Jorgal rejoiced and ran to see his fiancée Sagali and give her the steel pencil he’d won in battle, but halfway there he turned back when he noticed a mounted detachment riding up to Hara-Shulun. He said Ungern’s army was coming, and Boliji and his mother went out to look at the men. There were officers, Russians and Buryat Cossacks, one bespectacled lama wearing a Tibetan-cut monk’s coat with wide lapels, Halhan Mongols wearing their caps, Chahar brigands in bearskin caps, Chinese with little faces, and even some men about whom even their uncle couldn’t say who they were or where they came from. Up ahead galloped a tall, pale-eyed rider in a yellow princely deel with the epaulets of a chiang-chun, a military cap, and tall Russian boots. Under him was a long-legged dun stallion with almost no mane, moving at a steady trot. The rider didn’t jolt on him the way steppe dwellers do on their little horses, but rather loomed majestically and dropped down in his saddle, erect and terrifying.

  The Cossacks started their fires alongside the suburgan and began cooking their gruel and roasting their meat, while three horsemen made the rounds of the ulus huts and yurts, summoning people to a meeting. They lashed on those who didn’t want to go with tashuurs. His mother put on a cap so as not to show heaven her crown (for those seeking death reveal it) and a vest so as not to show the earth her back and shoulder blades, for then the earth would call to her to lie down on it. She went where everyone was going. Boliji followed close behind, while Jorgal and his baby sister stayed in the yurt and watched through a hole.

  Twilight had fallen – that time of day when the smoke from the campfire looks milky white, when you can’t make out individual trees in the hills, when each sound in the steppe carries far and lingers long so that what the eye doesn’t see the ear might hear.

  Not far from the suburgan stood carved poles, hitching posts painted red, where pilgrims tied their horses. Hitched to one of them now was a slender white filly, saddled and harnessed. The bespectacled lama stroked her muzzle, whispered something in her ear, and stood next to the Russian chiang-chun in the Mongolian deel.

  “Ungern,” the uncle whispered.

  Calling those gathered to attention, Ungern raised his right arm and dark, sunburnt hand.
The sleeve of his deel slipped down, baring his light, untanned shoulder, and when the chiang-chun’s high, piercingly fine voice – like a quarrelsome woman’s – rang out, for a few seconds everyone continued to avoid looking at his face and at that arm bared to the heavens. His first words did not seem to come out of his mouth but to fall from somewhere above, understandable but oddly altered by foreign speech.

  First, Ungern said that if Russians with stars on their caps came here, then it would not be for long. Soon a mighty host would come racing in from the south with the name of the terrible Makhakala on their lips and his word in their heads, and it would vanquish the lands all the way to Baikal itself.

  Then he warned them that the Russians would begin trying to convert everyone to a new red faith, and anyone who accepted it, betraying the yellow faith, the Chahars would rip out their living heart, and after death those people would fall to the seventh hell and suffer on the sword-mountain where the knife-tree grew. Forty-nine knives would enter the apostate’s liver and twenty-one times in each eye, and anyone who came to propagate the red faith, the demons would sow weeds and camelthorns on his tongue.

  “Look,” the bespectacled lama announced in the onset of silence, “and you will see that the great Sagan-Ubugun himself protects our chiang-chun. He will not let bullets touch his body.”

  Ungern freed the silk gau hanging from a string over his collar and slowly walked past the front rows, showing them the image of the White Elder. A few were allowed to touch it.

  “Look! Look!” the lama exclaimed, clicking his tongue. “It is a gift from the Bogd Gegen, the holiest Javzandamba Khutagt, the Supreme Holiness….Hoom!”

  Two Chahars spread a white felt mat next to the hitching posts, and Ungern sat down on it, folding his feet under and hooking his thumbs into his deel sash. The white filly was now to his right, quite close; he could easily touch her hooves. The bespectacled lama took out a flask of horza, a raw vodka, sprinkled it to the four corners of the earth, indulging and inviting as witnesses the tengri of the north, south, east, and west, the spirits of the taiga, mountains, steppes, and desert, and then poured out a few drops in front of himself and prostrated himself on the sprinkled earth as he recited a prayer.