Captain of the Steppe

by Oleg Pavlov

  He was not worried for himself; he was retiring soon, after all. However, Khabarov would have been easier in his mind if he could have been sure he was at least of some value to people. Meanwhile, the rotten portion of what the regiment had sent them – very nearly half the delivery – they buried a good distance off, so as not to smell it. There’s no telling how much was buried, perhaps an entire collective farm’s worth; but in that obscure year, at the edge of one of these dumping grounds out in the steppe, thickly overgrown with wormwood, the tops of a potato plant broke through. One hungry soldier noticed them, and dug them up in search of the tubers at the roots, still green. This came to light by chance. The soldier ate the tiny potatoes there and then, raw. A bit later, he had stomach cramps. They tried to figure out what was wrong with him. He told the captain about the potatoes, but Khabarov did not believe him, deciding that the soldier must have secretly stuffed himself with soil, and was now feigning food poisoning. The poor lad writhed in pain, and threw up some gluey, porridge-like substance. They laughed at him, but then, after all, the potato tops were found. They reconsidered their opinion of the soldier’s honesty, and the captain was like a new man.

  Khabarov decided to visit this site in the steppe. He sat down on a little rise, breathed in the wormwood and looked off into the hollow, deserted distance. And the following thought came to him: what if, come the spring, we make a vegetable plot in the steppe? We could plant potatoes, too. From one potato, so they say, you can get a whole bucketful. We’ll barter potatoes for meat from the Kazakhs, and then, when the company has got rich on potatoes, we’ll get our own livestock. Perhaps they won’t drive me into retirement. Perhaps they’ll let me stay around the smallholding, if it turns out to be useful. He would supply the regiment with potatoes and meat. And so Ivan Yakovlevich decided that he would wait for the next delivery. He would plant all the potatoes they were allotted. Meanwhile, they would live on grains and boiled-down beef suet until the plants grew. They’d get by.

  2

  Potatoes

  The flies, snakes and birds that had disappeared, some in the autumn, some in the winter, had not yet reappeared. So life was sad in the early spring, as the only remaining living things were in fact men and lice. These latter creatures, which you cannot catch, or even spot, began to reveal their true nature: as soon as a man was starving, without hope, they would begin multiplying on him in their myriads, making themselves just as unfed and unhopeful. Dejection was omnipresent in the community. Even the air inside had irrevocably spoiled and was swarming with lice. That is, it too was, in a way, quick on the uptake and liable to move by itself.

  On that first day, after the potatoes had been trucked in to Karabas, the captain held the men back. He baffled the poor lads with some nonsense about the need to sort through the potatoes to decide which were good and how many to allot to each man’s ration. As they sorted through, the servicemen ate on the sly, even though the potatoes were raw – having got frozen in transit, they were crumbly and sweet. The captain did not make a fuss. He calculated that they would not take many away, counting on the rations to come, and that they wouldn’t even start hiding them.

  That night, Khabarov was scared to fall asleep. Hungry mice scoured the office, gnawing at – or, at any rate, trying their teeth on – all the crude fixtures it contained. Time melted slowly away, and the captain’s resolve faltered as he felt the early morning cold. For the rest of the night, he wavered on the point of changing his mind: the soldiers would refuse to dig the vegetable plot, and if they did not get their appointed rations, they would burn down the barracks. And so the captain got up while it was still half-dark and sat at the small window. The heavens brightened before his eyes, opening their vaults while the endless shoals of the steppe emerged from the gloom.

  His heart-rending voice, sounding almost drunk, rang out through the sleeping barracks. Once he had sounded the battle alarm, the captain armed the soldiers with entrenching tools and drove them from the bright, dead square into the steppe. Gasping for breath, the soldiers whispered to each other, ‘Where is he taking us? The pisshead, what’s got into him?’ The captain meanwhile had taken to waving his arms about, as though giving commands on the battlefield. The soldiers launched an attack on the great expanse of empty land, and dug it over, following Khabarov’s directions. The captain staggered along the creeping ranks, brandishing his pistol whenever the digging stopped without permission, and offering encouragement: ‘Keep those shovels working!’ The amount of dug-over soil grew ever bigger. He measured it out with an unwavering stride until he ran out of steam, at which point he ordered them all to line up along the edge of the field. The sacks were brought out in front of the ranks, who stood rigid, and then shouts rang out: ‘Brothers, look! That’s our grub he wants to bury in the ground!’ Khabarov tried to drown out these howls with a shout that cracked with despair: ‘Silence! It’s not our rations we’re burying in the ground, it’s our future. In half a year you’ll be eating mashed potato by the bucketload!’ But the loudest mouths in the unit ran out in front and started yelling at the tops of their voices, ‘Brothers! We refuse! These are our rations!’ Khabarov tried to convince them: ‘They’ll grow by themselves, there’s no need to put any effort into them … I’m doing this for you, I want to make sure there will be something to live on in future … ’ But they shouted him down, roaring, ‘We refuse! We’ve heard enough about life! Company commander, let us eat!’

  Then the captain scattered whatever was left of the potatoes, and began planting the tubers into the earth himself. Clocking his pistol, the soldiers did not dare attack, although that awesome weapon did not save the captain from the deluge of invective and clods of earth they were hurling, beyond fear. Yet he was glad: they had dug over the earth; he could never have turned over so much soil by himself. Knowing he was guilty of a deception, he did not try to avoid the clods of earth. He quickly hid the potatoes in the plot, covering them over.

  The crowd dispersed. After spending the whole day alone in the field, Khabarov considered his return to the barracks despondently. However, the company positions turned out to be quiet. They either did not acknowledge the captain, or skirted past him sullenly. Still, there was one man who snorted, ‘You should sleep, boss, you must be tired.’

  The captain awoke late in the morning, thinking that the servicemen had forgiven him completely and performed the company reveille themselves. When he had washed, he stepped into the cookhouse, where he did find some soldiers. A significant aroma of fried potatoes struck out from the kitchen at his belly. ‘Where’s that coming from?’ he said, in surprise. A merry little cook leaned through the serving hatch, its shutters open. His frying pans were still sizzling. ‘Ta-dah! Scoff as much as you want!’

  In a daze, Khabarov ran to the field. His potatoes lay scattered along the paths in the square. That was why no riots had started! By now the captain was crawling along the ground, gathering the remaining ones. The soldiers probably hadn’t bothered to drag these off, which was why they were scattered about like pebbles.

  When he made it back to the barracks, the first soldier he met – lounging at the gateway, lazily puffing on a greasy cigarette – choked on his smoke when he recognised this crooked, filthy individual, dragging a sack that looked like it was crammed with stones along the ground, as his captain.

  The servicemen had stuffed themselves to their hearts’ content on fried food. They were exhausted. They were having a quiet afternoon nap. Forgotten, Khabarov yelled, in an alien tone, ‘Get up! Where’s the rest? Where? You can’t have eaten them all … Listen, I’ll give you no rest, you bastards, not one of you!’ The barracks barely stirred.

  ‘Put a sock in it, we’ve heard that song before.’

  ‘Brothers, really, what’s he on about now?’

  ‘Listen, Khabarov, we’re gonna write to the prosecutor, and that’s the truth!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, cap’n. Ransack the place. What you find is yours. Or piss off, and don’t ra
in on our parade.’

  ‘Yeah … And if you start waving your gat around, we’ll see you off ourselves. Just try touching it, everyone will sign a statement!’

  ‘What’s this then? It’s my death you want?’ sighed Khabarov, at this. ‘I’ll tell you this: you’ll return those potatoes. You’ll plant them back in the ground with your own hands, to the very last one. If you refuse, you bunch of pricks, come evening roll-call I’ll shoot myself right before your very eyes.’

  He shut up, and sighed again with annoyance, looking round at the men, who had grown quiet. He had spoken out recklessly in his anger. As he cooled off, Captain Khabarov understood that he had sentenced himself to death; he went limp, as though all his bones had melted, and dragged himself away to his poky little room in the office.

  The barracks resembled a cowshed, being so extended and driven so deeply into the ground that the roof practically buried the rooms beneath it. Indoors, it was cramped from the sides, while the ceiling pressed down from above. A corridor, just as oppressive as the exterior walls, ran along it, onto which opened the doors of all the barrack rooms. There was even regimentation in the barracks, but of a particular, unaccommodating kind: iron bunks, fairly screwed into the floors, and bare walls.

  It was along this corridor, in its emptiness, that Khabarov was dragging himself to his office. It occurred to him that dying would be painful. It also occurred to him that there would be a mere emptiness left in his place. People had lived before him, had shared their blood for him, but he would just spill that blood into a black quagmire. He was such a useless person that truly the best thing for him to do would be to die.

  Oblivious to the world, Khabarov lay down on his bunk. He forced himself to stay on the bunk and pretend to be asleep, intent on staying put instead of running out to his men. Outside, it was getting dark. Voices called out, increasingly faint, fading into the evening hush. The need to piss seized the captain; it was unbearable. There was a little pail in the office, a veritable slop bucket. He screwed up his eyes in shame, and relieved himself in the pitch dark. And trembled for fear they would hear him.

  When they knocked on the door, he decided to pretend to be asleep. They worked the door frame over harder, and it began to crack. ‘Comrade Captain? Boss? Are you still alive?’ And Khabarov let slip, ‘Here I am … ’ A happy noise went up the other side of the door. ‘Well, we’ve returned the potatoes for you! Just like you said, right back in the ground, there. We, well, we decided to live in peace with you, meaning we pulled in a few favours. Nuff said.’

  Khabarov opened the door to the petitioners. They were struck dumb, fixing their eyes on his feet, which were bare, and turning blue. ‘Looks like I’m still alive.’

  The soldiers shuffled their feet, hesitating. ‘Er, just so as you know, we kept just a few of the spuds back. Did we ought to replant them?’ And the captain said, ‘Eat them, but I won’t allow it again.’

  So that the plot was not ransacked again, the captain chained up two strong guard dogs at its edges. Their viciousness and their resounding barks ought to have done the trick. Come the morning, the field was empty: all trace of the dogs had vanished and the patch had once again been dug up. The feasting held by the soldiers that night spread furtively through the barracks. It was only by the appetising smells that Khabarov worked out they had fried some meat and were eating it, with a side dish of potatoes. They had killed the guard dogs and, once they were skinned, the soldiers had fried and eaten them, as if unsentimentally disposing of something that had outlived its usefulness.

  The ones who had feasted were identifiable by their swollen stomachs. Khabarov kicked a good half of the company out onto the steppe and ordered them not to come back. Once they had roamed around the district, frozen and starving, these gourmets returned all the same, demanding their lawful ration. There was nowhere for them to run. They gave their solemn word that henceforth they would not steal from the field.

  Many of them kept their word. They restrained themselves and even helped look after the field. They surrounded it with barbed wire, which lay about the place rusting uselessly in huge coils. But many others conceived a hatred of this field. Still, the potatoes managed to grow, and so there came to be more and more doubters in the company: sure, it’s a pity about the rations, but it would be a pity too to crush the shoots, now that they’re out; let whatever comes, come.

  The dry steppe summer flared up. The earth around the potato field was cool. The servicemen went there in crowds, seeking escape from the dejection and the heat. And the zeks clambered onto the barracks roofs and perched as high as they could within the confines of their zone, gazing at the luxuriant green plant tops, seeming to see in them some far-off, wondrous gardens. Occupying the roofs was forbidden by the regime, but driving the prisoners down from there would have been tantamount to forbidding birds from flying in the heavens. It angered the zeks that their guards would even set barbed wire around an unfettered patch of steppe. Now and then the natural sounds of the steppe would be drowned out by yells from the rooftops:

  ‘One zone’s not enough for you, you want to put everything in harness!’

  ‘Come out of there, you, take the harness off, if you dare!’

  ‘If ever we meet outside, you won’t have time to know about it, you dog!’

  ‘You should plant your own potatoes, there’s plenty of land!’

  ‘You don’t get fat if the soup’s like dishwater!’

  ‘So drink your dishwater, then!’

  ‘And you choke down your bastard rations!’

  ‘That’s you lot: not thieves, but bastards!’ And then the wound-up, nervous bosses would come running out from each side at the double, while the soldiers and the zeks vanished in a flash.

  The camp commandant, Vilor Sinebriukhov, and the company captain usually avoided each other. Sinebriukhov had been in charge at the camp for many years, so that by comparison Khabarov’s residency in Karabas appeared merely transient. However, through all the time that they had been fated to serve in the same place, these two commanders had not grown neighbourly. If they came together by some chance, they would look at each other with such surprise that in other contexts it would have been offensive, and of their own accord would go their separate ways. ‘What an idiot, and still at liberty,’ the camp commandant would say, with Khabarov in mind. The captain in turn would express surprise: ‘I can’t believe the ground can still bear to hold him up!’

  ‘Good spuds, them, right enough!’ Sinebriukhov smacked his lips as he looked at the potato field. ‘They’d go nicely with a little lightly salted herring, ah, a drop of vodka and a bit of black bread … Some people set up a vegetable plot and other people have to sort it all out; the workload increases for the other people in the camp.’

  ‘Oh, no, you’d choke on them. You’re not going to steal this away, this isn’t your little factory in the camp we’re talking about, you thieving bastard,’ in his head, Khabarov swore at him. ‘People like you should be locked up.’

  The potato field gave rise to genuine horror in the breast of Ilya Peregud. He was a man who feared anything that appeared to change, anything that was being constructed or even anything that grew. He became scared and complained tiresomely to Khabarov. ‘That’s it. We’ll all die here, I can tell. What have you gone and done? They’ll eat us alive, the wolves … I know it for sure …’

  The potatoes bloomed. With the potatoes in flower, Khabarov went picking this simple beauty. He arranged the flowers in tin mugs throughout the barracks, as though they were long-awaited messages from the earth. The men took them on the sly, and tried them, putting them in their mouths and then spitting them out, sharing their conclusions: ‘Do they smell of anything?’

  ‘No, like water. You chew them, they’re ever so tart.’

  They began to undermine the potatoes. Khabarov guarded the field at night. He felt sorry for his potatoes. And he was scared: what was going to happen in the future? To keep up his morale, he affirmed
to himself: ‘I am a captain. That’s the single most combat-effective unit.’

  Khabarov soon got the knack of hunting for people in the potato field. Every night he would wait among the potato tops, not for a person ready to flee, but for an enemy. One time he captured a Kalmyk on the field, one of his own soldiers. The captain walloped him, pressing his forehead down into the earth so that he did not squirm, and went through his clothes, shaking out the tiny, pea-sized potatoes. He started dragging the Kalmyk by the hair, like so much dead meat, to eject him from the field. Suddenly, Khabarov grew perplexed, realising that you cannot cultivate ruined potatoes, you cannot plant them back. At this, his anger lost its strength. Weakening, the captain wondered, ‘So why am I killing people? A man has nothing apart from his life and here I am taking that away from him!’ He raised the Kalmyk and carried him, not knowing where he should drag him to, but wanting only for the other man’s situation to improve.

  Afterwards, if he pounced on people, it was only with the potato patches in mind, so that they would not get trampled. Any people he found were now silently chased away. Sometimes he would yell into the night, ‘Let them draw strength, let them grow! Wait! Have some pity!’ And it would happen that these unexpected calls in the night shook even the most cold-blooded soldiers by their very unexpectedness, so that they lost their heads and would reply, ‘We’re not up to anything, we’re just taking a stroll by the field!’