The last sunlight was being drained from the sky. It clung hopelessly to the branches of the trees, thinning, loosening, breaking apart. Soon it would be dark. It would have been better if it had been dark.
In a ring that stretched all round the clearing, stood about twenty men in dirty white uniforms. On their head they wore scarlet forage caps bearing a death’s-head symbol above crossed shin-bones: the uniform of Annenkov’s now-defunct Siberian units.
In their hands, they held 8mm Mannlicher rifles pointed inwards to the centre of the clearing. They had come a long way from home, and the road back was closed. They were living their apocalypse here in the Mongolian wilderness. Some of them had been fighting since 1914. Seven years, and it still had not ended.
In the centre of the clearing, along a low depression from which undergrowth had been meticulously cleared, about forty bodies lay tumbled in a ragged heap. They were dressed in grey uniforms with red triangles on their sleeves; most had astrakhan caps bearing red stars; a few wore helmet-shaped felt caps with a hammer and sickle device. Near the bodies stood another dozen men, dressed in the same basic uniform and lined up for the same fate.
But Christopher’s eyes were focused on one man alone. By the side of the heap of victims stood a small White officer. He was dressed in a tattered grey Mongol overcoat and an old green Cossack cap with a visor. His right hand was held in a black sling that looked as though it had been there since the man’s childhood if he had ever had a childhood. But on his shoulder he sported a general’s epaulet. And in his left hand he held a heavy service revolver. As Christopher watched, he turned and faced the next prisoner in line.
“Kak vas ha familia? What’s your family name?” he asked. His voice carried in the stillness, hoarse and menacing.
The condemned man shivered in the departing sunlight. In his eyes Christopher saw only an utter hopelessness of the spirit, as though life had drained away long before the bullet entered him.
He was young, a mere boy.
“Arakcheyev,” the boy replied. How old was he? Fifteen? Sixteen?
His voice was toneless; for him, identity meant nothing any longer.
“Itnya otchestvo? Christian name and patronymic?”
“Yuri Nikolayevitch.”
The general turned his head a fraction and barked a command at a second officer standing nearby. This third man was dressed in a soiled white uniform, a lieutenant fresh out of military academy.
In his hand, he held a large book in which he was writing.
“Write them down!” ordered the general.
The lieutenant wrote the names in the book, in their proper order, all according to form. No court, no tribunal, no sentence but death, but a record must be kept of the dead. When the new Tzar sat on his throne and thrilled his people with the glamour of his return, he would find all in order. A million dead. Two million.
Twenty million. But all in order: a graveyard with numbered plots and arrows pointing to the exit.
“From?”
“Gorki.”
“Rank?”
“Corporal.”
“Unit?”
“Second Squadron of the Communist Interior Defence.”
“Age?”
The boy hesitated.
“Eighteen,” he said. But it was a lie. They both knew that.
“You admit to being a Bolshevik?”
The boy paused again. For a moment, he saw something like hope. Would a denial not be enough? Then he looked into the general’s eyes and all hope faded.
“Yes.”
“And a traitor to the Tzar and Holy Russia?”
“Not a traitor,” protested the boy.
“I have been loyal to Russia. I have served the Russian people.”
“Write “Traitor”.” The general paused and looked at the boy.
“Have you anything further to say?”
The boy remained silent. He was shaking, trying to control himself. The light was going out of the world. In just another moment he would see the day ending. Suddenly he wanted very much to see the last of the light. It was unbearable to have it snatched away from him by an executioner’s bullet. But he could not bring himself to say anything, not even to ask for another minute of light.
“Very well,” the general said. Some made last speeches, others remained silent. It made no difference. He and his men were impervious to both.
“In the name of the princess Anastasia, Tzarina of all the Russias; in the name of the blessed Tikhon, Patriarch of our Holy Mother Church; in the name of Baron Roman von Ungern Sternberg, Protector of Khalka and Supreme Commander of Russian forces in the East: I sentence you, Yuri Nikolayevitch Arakcheyev, to death. May your soul find mercy with God.”
He raised the pistol to the boy’s trembling head. His victim’s eyes were open, staring, lusting after the dying light. He fired and the boy jerked and toppled backwards on to the heap of corpses.
The general bent down, saw he was still moving, and fired again.
The boy became still. It was growing dark.
“Light torches!” shouted the general.
In a matter of moments, lights flared in the circle round the clearing. Every other man held a torch high in the air. The red flames flickered against white uniforms and long bayonets, and in the centre of the clearing, arms and legs and heads would be singled out momentarily before slipping back into a merciful darkness.
Christopher watched transfixed. Who was his enemy? That was what he wanted to know.
The killings went on. One by one, the prisoners would be led up, questioned, and inevitably shot, usually twice in quick succession. It was a nightmare that repeated and repeated itself.
The last prisoner to be questioned was a thin, stooping man with iron-rimmed glasses, a commissar of the Cheka who had been caught with the military unit whose surviving members had just been executed. The others had been soldiers, but here, thought Christopher, was a real revolutionary. His face was white and drawn, plainly visible in the light of a nearby torch.
Even before the general had a chance to pronounce his death sentence, the man stretched out a hand. With his eyes, he held his executioner fixed, willing him to pass over the gun. A minute passed, two minutes, during which neither man spoke. It was clear what the prisoner wanted. And at last the general gave way.
Using his single hand, he emptied the chamber of his revolver of all but a single bullet, reclosed it, and handed it to the commissar.
Even at such an ideological distance, they understood one another.
All round the clearing, rifles were raised and pointed directly at the prisoner.
But he had no intention of attempting a clumsy escape. He raised the pistol to his head, slowly and deliberately, while all the time his eyes held those of the little general. There was a look of terrible disdain on his face, disdain less for what the general and his men were doing than for what they were, or what they had become.
Watching from the trees, Christopher felt it like an icy blast, the power of this man’s contempt. In a moral sense, he had already escaped his captors. He made no speech, he called down no retribution. It was enough, watching him, to know that the whites were defeated. It was only a matter of time. He held the gun firm against his temple, so that it would not slip. A single motion and all would be well again. He pulled the trigger, and the gun fell to the ground.
The silence that followed was terrible. Whatever pleasure these men had had in their day’s work, whatever triumph they had felt meting out death in such measured handfuls all had been wiped out in a moment by one man’s gesture. The general bent down and picked up his pistol from the ground. His hand shook as he retrieved it and replaced it in its holster.
Christopher stood up slowly, eyes still fixed on the clearing, on the white uniforms of the living, the blood-stained forms of the dead. He turned to go, worried that he might not be able to find his way back through the trees in the dark.
A voice came out of the night, a soft voi
ce speaking in Russian.
“Just drop your gun, tovarisch. We have you covered from all sides.”
He did as he was told. His gun made almost no sound as it fell to the floor of the dark forest.
Behind them, the sky was reddening, as though dawn were breaking in the south. From edge to edge of the horizon, hell was creeping on silent feet across a black sky. It was midnight. The little general Rezukhin was his name had ordered his men to set fire to the forest with their torches. The previous day, he and his unit of forty men had been ambushed passing through the forest on their way back to Urga from a six-day reconnaissance.
Half of them had been killed before they succeeded in luring their attackers out into the open and gaining the upper hand.
Now, Rezukhin had decided that the forest represented a danger to any White troops passing its edge: his solution was to burn it to the ground. But it seemed to Christopher that the general’s reasons for setting mile after mile of trees alight were not military at all.
The general and his men were no longer soldiers fighting a war.
They had lost their war long ago. Now they were actors in an apocalyptic drama, half out of their minds with drugs and alcohol and disease, half-crazed by bloodshed and destruction.
Here in Mongolia, they dragged out a phantom existence, banished forever from wives and family and sweethearts. They thought of themselves as the damned and lived accordingly. They had no fear and no morality, no expectations, no hopes, no reason to do anything but kill and loot and wreak a sort of vengeance on a world that had turned its back on them. They were the men of the brave new age now dawning. And they would spawn a brood vaster and more mysterious in its savagery than any that had ridden these same steppes with Genghis or Hulagu Khan.
Christopher rode with Chindamani. Winterpole was just behind.
They were at the head of Rezukhin’s column, near the general himself. Their car had been commandeered and driven off at speed to Urga by a Russian mechanic.
At first, Winterpole had argued with Rezukhin that he and Christopher were British agents sent to assist von Ungern Stern berg. But the general had only laughed and, when Winterpole persisted, told him sharply to shut up or be shot. Even Winterpole had known when to pipe down. But now he fumed and brooded, believing desperately that Ungern needed him and that he would discipline Rezukhin for discourtesy towards a representative of a friendly power.
Winterpole was a man of the world, but his worldliness, though vast, was of the wrong sort. The sins and vices of polite society, however interesting, are not those of the barracks or the open steppe. Where Winterpole came from, there were rules and conventions, even for the darkest of crimes; how otherwise could men of consequence be distinguished from common criminals? But here no code existed at all: here, desperation swept aside all the niceties and made brutish insanity of everything it touched. It was a fire raging in a doomed forest, out of control and consuming all it touched.
They camped late that night, well away from the blazing forest. A wall of fire shimmered on the horizon still, creeping with the prevailing wind across an unassuming backdrop of night sky. The three prisoners were kept together in a single tent under heavy guard. They slept fitfully or lay awake listening to the sounds of the darkness: birds calling, remote and tuneless; men calling out in their sleep; the crackling of camp fires lit to stave off the penetrating cold. The guards discouraged them from talking together when they woke, though they refrained from using any real violence against them. All that night, Christopher held Chindamani without speaking. She was silent in his arms, preoccupied with some private sadness, sleepless and dreamless.
Throughout the next day they rode on in gloomy silence, strung out across the empty plain like a broken necklace of cheap glass.
One man died of wounds sustained in the skirmish at the forest.
They left him on the grass, naked and pitifully pale. His horse came with them now, bearing an empty saddle.
By the second night, the men had started to grow restless.
Suffused with killing and the infant joy of setting alight a forest merely to lay black ashes on the scene of their crimes, they had ridden until then in a state of morbid contentment, their flagging spirits buoyed up by an infusion of vanity.
But during the second day’s riding, and certainly after the death of the wounded man, a terrible ennui had begun to fix its grip on them. They shifted in their saddles mile after mile, itching to be back in Urga or off on another hunt for Bolshevik infiltrators.
Someone rode out from the road to a nomad encampment and returned with a plentiful supply of han chi a local drink.
That evening, han chi Was passed round after supper and the men’s mood changed. They sang old songs, Russian songs about girls with flaxen hair and birches waving in the mists of autumn, and as they sang they grew sentimental and even maudlin.
The older men regaled their juniors with pathetic tales of valour that had grown tarnished from overmuch recounting. As the night progressed, stories of bravery gave way to accounts of bawdy excess. New songs replaced those of the early evening. In a spot set apart from the rest of the camp, Rezukhin sat by a solitary fire, his black sling invisible against the night, smoking hashish from a private supply kept in his saddlebag.
It was just after midnight when they decided to come for Chindamani. The fires had died down and clouds had come up from the south to cover the moon. Perhaps the han chi rendered them incautious, perhaps the darkness gave them a sense of security in what they planned. Rezukhin had ordered the woman off limits in spite of everything, he knew enough to cover himself against the possibility that the Englishmen might indeed prove of value to Ungern Sternberg. But he had gone to sleep in his tent and would be oblivious to anything that went on.
Some of the men had been watching her furtively all that day, but no-one had approached her or tried to speak to her. It had been years since any of them had had anything to do with a woman who was not a prostitute or the near equivalent. But, coarsened as they had become, in some part of them they retained memories, however dim, of the social conventions that had formed their upbringing. Some of them still had wives or sweethearts at home.
And Chindamani, unconsciously perhaps, but with unmistakable clarity, set up a barrier between herself and the men around her which, however imperceptible, served to restrict their activities to sidelong glances.
That had all changed with the onset of night and the powerful effects of the han chi From sentimentality they passed to self-pity and from self-pity to regret. It was not long before regret had wakened in them feelings of resentment against Germans, Bolsheviks, and anyone else responsible for the loss of Russia and its privileges. And out of resentment was born a curious and unreasonable lust, not merely physical but shaped out of the greed and bitterness that lay in the depths of wounded psyches.
Chindamani was to be their victim, not merely because she was the only woman there, but because she represented too many conflicting opposites for them to cope with. She reminded them at once of the women they had left behind in their homes in Moscow or St. Petersburg and of the eastern women they had known since then. She was physically attractive in a way that only their lost sweethearts had been, yet untouchable, a Madonna-like figure who inflamed them while making them feel like children or priests, castrated, pure, yet seething with impurities. They could not bear the contradictions.
Four of them came to the tent where she and the others had at last fallen into an uneasy sleep. Only a single guard was left, half asleep himself and a little drunk on han chi that some friends had brought for him.
They kicked Chindamani awake, and before she had time to protest, hauled her roughly to her feet. She could tell at once that they were in no mood to be reasoned with, and at once gave up the attempt to struggle. Christopher woke at once, but one of the men grabbed him, holding a gun at his head.
“One word out of you, tovarisch, and I’ll send your brains to Urga before the rest of you. Pommae
te?”
Christopher nodded and sank back. He had not understood much, but he got the general idea. Behind the man with the gun, the guard was watching him, his rifle poised. Winterpole came awake, unable at first to comprehend what was happening.
Chindamani turned as they dragged her to the entrance and spoke rapidly to Christopher in Tibetan.
“Ka-ris To-feh! Find him! Tell him I love him! If you can, hide him!
It’s not time yet! Tell him it isn’t time!”
One of the men clamped a heavy hand over her mouth. They wanted her out of the tent, away from the light of the oil-lamp.
They did not want light for what they were going to do. The fourth man let go of Christopher, holstered the gun, and followed the others. The guard remained, intently watching his charges.
A terrible silence formed round them. They knew what was happening, what would happen when the men had finished with her. They heard coarse shouts, then a laugh, raucous and prolonged. Then the laugh was cut short and a group of men cheered.
Someone began to sing a song, not a melancholy dirge about maidens or birches, but a coarse drinking song of German origin which Hebe something-or-other, but transposed into Russian, witless, brash, more sordid than usual out here in the wilderness. It was a song that needed a tavern and the smell of sour beer.
Christopher threw his bedclothes back and made as if to stand.
The guard levelled his rifle at him nervously. A hand grabbed his arm and pulled him back down to the ground.
“For God’s sake, Christopher, don’t be such a bloody fool!” It was Winterpole’s voice, hissing in the semi-darkness like a snake.
“They’re raping her!” Christopher shouted back.
“Don’t you understand? Those bastards are raping her!”
“It doesn’t matter, Christopher, really it doesn’t. She’s just a darkie. Don’t get things out of proportion. She isn’t important, you know that. Don’t get yourself killed for her sake.”
Christopher sat up again, but Winterpole got in front of him and fastened his hand on his arm even more tightly.
The Ninth Buddha Page 36