The Russians Collection

by Michael Phillips

  Why should he wait till spring? He could be dead by then. The young one was right—why not die trying to make good the attempt? He had been listening to his comrades for years, listening to their plans, taking ideas from one, now another, carefully formulating a strategy of his own. The young Pokoinik could probably help him make it work. He had already begun bribing one of the guards, who, when he escaped, would continue to receive an allowance by keeping him on the books as under his charge. It was a common practice, and Kaplan had been slyly keeping watch on how the process worked for some time. It was a daring plan; if they could get far enough through the mountain passes before the onslaught of winter, they could survive. His scheme did not call for a northern or western route through the wild wastes of Siberia, but rather southward . . . toward lands of the far east and peoples unknown.

  As Kaplan pondered his future, on the bunk next to him Sergei, too, was considering what to make of the old man’s words.

  His few months of imprisonment were nothing in comparison to Kaplan’s, but it might as well have been years for what it had made of him. He had long forgotten the genteel ways of his youth, the essence of polite conversation, how to hold silver, how even to relieve himself with propriety. Kindness and mercy and faith had become as foreign to him as . . . the loving touch of a woman.

  Yes, he desperately wanted away from this vile place. If he died, it was no more than he had sought at Tiumen. Why not do as Kaplan had suggested? Perhaps he was right; perhaps they did need each other. And if either of them chanced to make it, would not it have been worth the risk?

  52

  The route followed by Paul Yevnovich Burenin took a more northerly direction than those whose destination was the mines of Kara. With others of a revolutionary bent, Paul found himself bound for Kolyma, in the distant regions where snow and ice prevailed.

  The longer the journey and the smaller dwindled their band, the more somber they all became. Even one-time comrade Stepniak had grown distant. More and more Paul found his thoughts skipping backward through time and painful circumstances to happier and more pleasant memories. Faces and images, sights and smells, from Katyk and his father’s izba crowded into his mind. For so long he had banished them from his thoughts, as if he could will that former part of his being into nonexistence. Now, however, with his own exile and banishment for crimes against the tsar, he no longer had the mental strength to keep them at bay. With every passing day they intruded closer and closer toward that innermost region of his heart, the heart he had kept hidden and walled up since the day he left Katyk. He now found himself regretting that he had not spoken to the young Prince Fedorcenko and identified himself as Anna’s brother. Such a connection, however slight, would have meant a touch, even if distant, with a sister he had always loved.

  Now the prince was gone, Anna was gone . . . they were all gone. He would never see them again.

  All the things he had believed in now seemed hollow. It had once seemed so important to oppose the aristocratic league of the tsar and his government. Their goal had been to overthrow the oppressors, thinking it would rid society of all its evils. They had killed the tsar, but what had really changed? Were the rebels really any different from the nobles, down deep where the foundations of life pulsed within them? As they left Tiumen, what could be said to have distinguised him from the young Prince Fedorcenko?

  Fragmentary conversations and memories flooded him as he made his way toward a future of empty meaninglessness at Kolyma: happy childhood play in Katyk, walking silently with his father away from the jail in Akulin, his father’s enthusiasm over Paul’s education. He supposed they would always represent the former carefree days of his youth. Even when he thought back to his first introduction to political ideas at the feet of his martyred friend, Kazan, he could not do so without a sense of pleasant nostalgia.

  His papa’s hearty laugh . . . Mama’s bustling energy . . . his little brother constantly tagging after him . . . Kazan’s passionate idealism . . .

  Anna had always spoken of God in a way that, try as he might, Paul could not understand. She had trusted Him as an all-loving, all-sovereign Father who only wanted good for His children. His ways, she said, were truly beyond understanding, but when we did trust Him, the understanding of His nature grew with it. Paul had not been able to grasp the reality of Anna’s personal God. He had always considered such faith something only for people like Anna and their father, people he thought of as weak and ineffectual.

  So many times as he was growing up he had come upon Anna somewhere alone—in a corner of the izba when the weather was cold, out under the willow tree during the warm season, sometimes just walking along through the solitary fields. She always had a smile for him, and was usually either reading or carrying the small Bible of their papa’s. She had read to him occasionally from some favorite passage. She had spoken to him of wisdom.

  He could not deny that he yearned for those sweet days now as he trudged along in filth and despair to an uncertain future, exiled to permanent sorrow and loneliness—his life cut short and essentially ended in its very prime. All his ideas, all his passions—where had they left him in the end? Broken and empty, drained of direction and purpose. Even his final act of rebellion, the assassination attempts of the tsar, had been for nothing. The people had responded by spitting in the faces of the heroic assassins, and a new tsar was cheered on to his throne. And the hand of tyranny and repression fell harder upon them, though none seemed to care.

  Why should he care anymore?

  He had given his life to bring freedom to a people who didn’t want freedom. He had suffered and fought and even murdered for them, but all he had to show for his efforts was . . . nothing. He had watched his friends die for an illusion. How could they have been so foolish? He used to call Anna naive, but she was far less so than he and his comrades who actually believed they could change the world and make a difference. They were all gone, dead, exiled, or simply deserted, and yet the world on as if they had never existed. Nothing changed.

  If he could, he’d forget it all and go back to Katyk and till his papa’s meager patch of earth, milk the scrawny cow, and try to prod some life out of that ancient horse Lukiv. He’d marry and have children and break his back every day to try to keep them all from starvation. If the peasants liked that life so much, perhaps there was something to it that he had missed seeing.

  Well, he couldn’t go back now even if he did want to, which in all truth he did not. Not, however, because he was afraid of labor or poverty—God only knew he had worked harder and starved more in the city than he ever had at his papa’s—but because he could never look with respect upon those simple peasants again who had refused a chance for a better life.

  All he had ever wanted to do was help. What was so terrible in that? What more could a feeling man do when he saw need and injustice?

  But it was all over now. Exiled for life. Completely isolated. Even after his hard-labor sentence was over, he would be remanded to some tiny village where he would live out his days as an “enforced resident.” Perhaps since he could read and figure, he could earn a little money as a clerk and find a way to survive. But what good would it do? What good could he do? His life was over.

  But even in the midst of his despair, from out of the distant past came Kazan’s words back to him. What was it he had once called Siberia . . . the University of Revolution.

  Perhaps . . . just perhaps . . . there might be something more than nothingness and ignominy ahead of him. Kazan himself had escaped exile.

  Was it possible that his life might not be over? Regardless, he was not alone. There were still others who believed as he did. Perhaps together, even here in the isolated wastes of Siberia, they might yet have an impact upon the government and the ambivalent masses.

  It was something to think about anyway. Something to warm his bones and soothe the hungry ache in his stomach as he marched onward toward whatever destiny lay before him in this empty, desolate land.

&
nbsp; 53

  For three days Kaplan had enjoyed the fetterless freedom and solitary nights of free-command as a Kara convict.

  One of the best-kept secrets of the Russian Siberian prison system was the fact that escape was not nearly so impossible as the St. Petersburg government would have its people believe. It all depended upon what one meant by escape. If getting outside the walls of one of the prisons sufficed in itself, then so-called “escape” was not altogether uncommon. If escape meant a successful and healthy return to Russian life and society in the cities and temperate climes west of the Urals, then it was indeed impossible. The distances were so huge, and the terrain and weather so fierce and inhospitable that the land simply could not be traversed by one traveling alone. Scattered throughout the sparsely populated regions of far eastern Russia, however, lived any number of former convicts who had managed to escape from the various prisons and labor camps and had been content to carve out some life of poverty in the nearby environs, free of their chains. Whether it was a “freedom” worth risking one’s life for, each man had to resolve for himself. Hundreds made the attempt every year. Most continued the futile effort to cross the Siberian plains before winter, the vast majority dying before catching a distant glimpse of the Urals. The wise ones did not try, but set their sights nearer at hand. Without help, without transportation, without food, escape usually meant a hasty death. So most of the convicts remained where they were, weighing the risks of escape against the possibility of pardon or release at some distant future time.

  But for those intent on getting free from their shackles, ways could be found, and usually the guards did not stand in the way. Half the guards and wardens were paroled onetime prisoners themselves and were cut out of the same breed of humanity as their charges. If they could discover a means whereby to profit themselves from a prisoner’s escape, they would allow it and line their own pockets in the process. Scruples, integrity, and morals were not common in Siberia, on either side of the fence.

  Of course it wouldn’t do to have the prisons emptying. The guards had to keep some semblance of order. But they all had their favorites, even those they might be inclined to help or encourage—the old and the infirm particularly, whose loss would scarcely be felt in the daily tally of gold, and whose chances of survival in the wilderness was slim. If they looked the other way, and a few escaped and died, so much the better for everyone. It was an effective means of weeding out the aged, the troublemakers, the malcontents. And if they remained on the roll, the governmental allowances continued to come in for total head count, and their reputation did not suffer from having to report escapees.

  Kaplan was one such who would not be missed; he had not one chance in a thousand of making it fifty versts beyond the mines. At least that was the opinion of the guard whose friendship the old convict had been cultivating for five years—especially once Kaplan divulged his plan to follow the treacherous Shilka River to Nerchinsk, thence to embark southward over the Khingah mountains into Mongolia. It was suicide, the guard thought as he chuckled to himself over the prospect. But if the old fellow wanted to try it, who was he to stand in his way? Maybe he would even make it. He would never see Moscow or St. Petersburg again, and what harm if some Mongolian or Tartar tribesman ran him through with a scimitar.

  It was late afternoon. A relentless, tiring sun beat down upon the mines of Kara. During the last of the five-minute water breaks, Kaplan sauntered over to the guard to engage him in conversation, while Sergei, by prearrangement, eased his way inconspicuously to the crude privy at the back of a short line of his fellows. The area was halfway enclosed, though hardly private.

  Sergei delayed until all the others were through and the place empty. Kaplan may have been old and insignificant in the eyes of the authorities, but not Sergei. He was young and was accompanied by a reputation. It would take ingenuity and daring for him to escape the watchful gaze of the guards.

  Kaplan had thought of this too, although when he first proposed it to his young accomplice, Sergei had laughed with disgust and revulsion. Only later as he pondered his hideous fate did he realize the genius of the plan. As Kaplan had said, it was his only chance. There was no other place to hide. Inspection would not reveal him missing until the morning. And by then the two of them would be many kilometers downriver—if his chains didn’t drag him to the bottom and permanently entomb him under thirty meters of icy water pouring down out of the Mongolian highlands.

  The thought of freedom had nearly been outweighed by t`he disgusting horror of the plan. Sergei’s stomach had been churning all day in morbid anticipation. He would sooner face an entire battalion of Turks singlehandedly!

  “That is exactly why it will work, my squeamish young friend!” said Kaplan the night before, with a grin of pleasure at Sergei’s discomfort. “Not the most suspicious, not the most wicked, not the most alert guard in all of Siberia would suspect such a thing! You will be safe until I come for you after the night is well dark and everyone in free-command well asleep.”

  Safe! thought Sergei with abhorrence. His stomach would be empty within two minutes! He would then have to lie in his own vomit besides!

  When the last of his fellows had left the walled-off area, Sergei knew the moment of his greatest earthly trial had come. To do what now was set before him would take more courage than it had for him to step in front of Rustaveli’s loaded gun. He inched forward, dragging his chains slowly across the dirt, knowing that the nauseating reek all about him was only the beginning. New latrines were dug only every several months, and this one was nearly full.

  He crept to the edge of the ditch, casting a quick glance behind him through the opening in the privy barricade. At the edge of the pit he was shielded from the view of both convicts and guards. He slid to a sitting position, dangling his legs over into the foul hole of refuse. Then, closing his eyes and grimacing as though facing a firing squad, he slid over and lowered himself into the pit.

  His feet oozed their way deep into the noxious human dung, covering the tops of his boots and going halfway to his knees before feeling the slightest resistance. His stomach retched violently from the stench—once . . . twice . . . and was empty in less time than he had predicted.

  But he had to hide himself out of sight in case another prisoner should enter to make use of the place. He had known that when he began the descent, and now, without pausing for further reflection, he slowly lay down on his back, allowing the vile muck to close over his legs and body. He might faint a half dozen separate times before nightfall from the rank stench and the mere realization of what he was doing. But for now he was out of sight—just as a heavy-footed guard walked in, glanced hurriedly around for malingerers, and then exited again, leaving the onetime prince of Russia in the most hideous of self-dug living graves.

  The seven-hour wait seemed like seven years, but at last Sergei heard the raspy whispering voice of his savior above him. He reached up a hand he had kept free of the muck. Kaplan took it and, with great effort, pulled his young accomplice from the hideous pit.

  Without pausing to comment on his condition, Kaplan motioned him to follow. Sergei did so, and, following a circuitous route so as to avoid being seen, they arrived two or three hours before dawn at the entrance to the great Shilka, a kilometer and a half beyond the free-command border of the Kara settlement.

  “The water will clean the stench from you, my young friend,” Kaplan said. “But it will also bury you if you allow your chains to drag you out into its depths. The river is rapid and treacherous. Stay near the side or you will be pokoinik, indeed!”

  Sergei nodded. Right now, death itself seemed a pleasant thought alongside how he had spent the last nine hours!

  Kaplan looked at him once more. “After this I will call you Pokoinik no longer, for we shall be free men indeed!” Then he turned toward the river and leaped into the turbulent blackness below.

  Sergei hesitated only a moment, then followed.

  He plunged in, sank down, and knew
instantly the water was well in excess of his own height in depth. His chained feet hit the bottom in a moment; and from the tumbling along of the rocks beneath him, he knew he was already being carried along quickly by the fierce, icy current.

  The only other creature out at that midnight hour was a solitary owl, circling above the taiga in search of field mice and wood rats. Its keen eyesight instantly discerned the two creatures at the river’s edge. But even as it swooped down for a closer look, two faint splashes sounded and then were quickly swallowed up by the rush and roar of the river itself.

  The great night bird glided down with outstretched wings and floated along the water’s surface, turning its head this way and that. There would be no dinner for it to pluck out of the water, however. Far in the distance, downriver, the owl could just barely make out the form of a single head bobbing up and down in the swirling flow.

  But the current was swift, and had already borne whatever it was well beyond its reach.

  54

  A light rain splattered the branches of the great elm outside Anna’s window. She sat at her little desk, her mind distracted for the hundredth time from the book she had been trying to read. She watched as the beads of water gathered on the fresh green leaves of the tree, their weight bending the slender shoots steadily downward until the moment when each fell with a tiny silent splash to the damp earth below. One after another the drops fell from the tree—dozens, hundreds, thousands—in the infinite dance of a Russian summer rain.

  Lately their own lives mirrored the simple patterns of nature.