Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  Another day without daylight, another breath of dusty air, a few more kopeks, backaches, leg cramps, and a wretched cough. The days began to lose their character, and life slowly ground down to a black, sooty smudge.

  November and December came and went. Lenin signed an armistice with the Central Powers but for me life was nothing more than a black pit. I was losing hope that I would ever see Lotte again. She had not heard from me for a very long time. I was no longer on any of the Red Cross lists and she could only assume that I was dead. The mail service had collapsed, posting letters was pointless, and yet I still wrote my ‘letters to the snow’ as Király had called them. Those letters not only contained every detail of my life but they were my meditation, my fantasy, they were the tenuous thread that held me to life.

  I had got into a dreadful rut; I was a slave to the pit. It was too cold to walk and I was too poor to live without the mine. By February 1918, crushed by meaningless routine, my spirit was fading and I had developed a hacking cough from which I have never fully recovered. There was a constant ache in my kidneys, which worsened by the day. All I remember of March was spitting blood, increasing accidents, fainting fits and collapse. One year had passed since leaving Sretensk.

  It was then, my child, that I contracted this killing consumption which has plagued me ever since. Nevertheless I was not as ill as I had been in Sretensk. My symptoms were exacerbated by exhaustion. At my lowest point I was visited once more by those angelic children and I heard their voices driving me forwards. ‘Come on, you can’t stop now. Rise up, keep going. Walk, walk, walk. Don’t give up on us,’ they urged.

  And that is exactly what I did. I got to my feet and I walked. I put one foot in front of another and walked towards the setting sun. I remembered Oleg’s parting words to me, ‘happiness is a choice and not a function of ambition’. So I walked for the sake of walking. I put one foot in front of the other and I looked for the Lotte in everything. From April to October 1918 I walked two thousand kilometres. I walked through the endless lowlands of the Kulunda Steppe. I walked through fields of wheat. I walked through corn, I walked over beetroot and potato. I put one foot in front of the other and I walked. I walked on black earth, I walked on pebble pathways, I walked on roads, I walked on goat tracks. I walked past villages and towns. Walking became an art, a philosophy, a way of life. There was joy in it. I walked to my love as if through a painting: melting into flowers, inhaling them, living them, riding on birdsong, dancing with the wind. I was the earth I walked on, blending with the vibrant colour of land and field, enveloped in the mighty flat steppes of Russia where the earth curves into the horizon and the sun bakes the crops. I carried the universe in the palm of my hand as a gift for Lotte. This planet does not spin of its own accord; it is we who turn it with our gentle steps. A man must always move, for the earth requires it and a nomad knows that nature conspires in love.

  I met Kazakh herdsmen and black-veiled Uzbek women working the fields. I met Tadjiks and Jews, Turkmenians and Russians. I walked through a kaleidoscope of opinion, for each one I met had a different take on the historical events unfolding around us. None shared the same view but, one way or another, all were caught in the political fever that gripped the country. There were socialist revolutionaries and nationalists, there were intellectuals affiliated to the Kadets, and returning front-line soldiers known as frontoviki, there were tsarists, communists and a myriad other political groupings. There was such diversity under their banners that it would have been more accurate to say that each person was a party unto themselves. The latest developments were on everyone’s lips. The road became my teacher. I learnt from a miserable Ukrainian that Lenin had signed an onerous peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk that gave Belarus and Ukraine to the Germans. Soon after, someone told me that Lenin had been shot in the neck by a socialist. I passed a farmer’s wife who was weeping because she heard that the tsar and his children had been murdered in Ekaterinburg. Then I was staggered to learn that there was a civil war raging, but when I tried to discover who the Bolsheviks were fighting I got different responses. Some said it was a provisional Siberian government that had recently been set up in Omsk, others said the ex-tsarists, the Cossacks and the Estonians, yet more said it was a socialist organization called Komuch based in Samara, and, strangest of all, there were those who said it was the Czech Legion. This last one I dismissed as a wild rumour; nevertheless it seemed the Bolsheviks were fighting everyone on every front but that their enemy was as disparate, diverse and uncoordinated as the people I met on the road.

  The closer I got to the Urals the wilder the rumours became and the more endangered I felt. People said that Lenin and Trotsky were German spies sent to bring the country to its knees, they said that the Germans had already taken Odessa. They claimed that Bolshevism was part of a Jewish conspiracy. I even heard that Poland had been given independence, and if that was true then where was Ulanow? In Poland, Austria or even Germany?

  The countryside swelled with drunken deserters heading east. One day I was on a quiet pathway north-west of Orsk heading towards Orenburg. The chill of late autumn hung in the air like a threat and a thin mist blew down in gusts from the Southern Urals. I heard a moaning coming from the bushes. I put down my heavy pack and went over to see. There was a middle-aged man lying prostrate in the mud in a pool of blood. I asked him if I could help and he groaned incomprehensibly, so I pulled him up and sat him on his haunches. He was wearing a soldier’s greatcoat but carried no weapons; he was no doubt a deserter. His forehead was lacerated, the wound fresh for it leaked blood, but the sheer quantity of it made the injury look worse than it was. I mopped his head with my handkerchief; he was disorientated and confused and it took him a few minutes to recover his senses.

  ‘Who did this to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Cossacks,’ he gasped. ‘They robbed me. Why rob me? What do I have? I’m no kike.’ I held my tongue. ‘The bastards terrorize everyone in these hills. Be careful, friend, they must still be close by.’

  I peered through the mist; there was no sign of anybody. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Away – away from the Germans, away from the Poles, away from the Yids.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Yids, Poles, Bolsheviks – call them what you like, they are one and the same. Didn’t you know – Trotsky’s real name is Bronstein? He’s not even a Russian, and Lenin too.’

  ‘Lenin’s a Jew?’

  ‘Well, he must be, they stick together don’t they, like maggots in a nest.’ He laughed and a trickle of blood rolled down his face and dropped on my trousers. I smiled and nodded. How easy it was to deny my faith. It was a game I played many times in my youth but refuse to play now I’m older.

  ‘I didn’t care much for the tsar,’ he said, ‘I was happy to see him go, but things have got so bad that I miss him now. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed as ruefully as I could, ‘he wasn’t so bad after all.’

  ‘There’s less food now than there was before. West of the Volga the peasants are eating each other, they’re so hungry. Can you imagine? People have been arrested for cannibalism. Those Bolshevik rats surrendered the best farmland to the Germans and now they’re stealing the rest for themselves. Lining their pockets, as if the Jews aren’t rich enough. And they say they are doing all this for the people. What a joke.’

  ‘So why did you desert? Shouldn’t we be fighting them?’ I asked.

  ‘I was forced into the army in the first place. They call it a volunteer force but the generals and their lackey Cossacks are rounding up men of all ages and enlisting them at gunpoint. Look at me: I’m forty-five years old, I’ve had no training. What use am I against the Red Army? If you go beyond Orenburg you’ll get drafted whether you like it or not, and if you refuse to fight they’ll assume you are a Bolshevik and throw you in the Volga or worse. I passed through one village where the body of a young girl hung from a telegraph post. Her head was shaved and
her breasts had been ripped off. Her skin was burnt black. A piece of paper was nailed to her with the warning: “Anyone else who has any business with the Bolsheviks can expect similar treatment.” I saw it with my own eyes.’

  I was horrified. Just as I was congratulating myself for surviving the harshness of Siberia my hopes were dashed again. The only thing separating me from Lotte was the entire Red Army and a civil war of terrifying ferocity. I was entering the heart of madness.

  ‘Where are you heading?’ he asked.

  ‘To the front.’ It was a half-truth.

  ‘Good man,’ he said, slapping his bloody hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you a frontovik?’

  ‘Yes, I fought in the war, in Ruthenia.’ That much was true.

  ‘Ah, I thought you were Ukrainian from your accent, so you were with Brusilov, we need men like you. Who will you join now?’

  I was confused by his question. ‘The Whites,’ I replied hesitantly.

  ‘Yes, of course, but that could be anyone. Are you going to join Denikin in the Caucasus or Kappel in Samara?’

  ‘Kappel,’ I said off the top of my head. ‘And what about the Czechs?’ I ventured. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘The bloody Czechs, they’ve taken control of the whole trans-Siberian railway from Ufa to Vladivostok. They are a bunch of arrogant shits; nothing gets through without their permission. God knows what they’re doing here. They’re still fighting for their own independence. I’ve heard there’s sixty thousand of them; all of them deserters from the Austrian Army. They switched sides because they wanted the Austrians to lose the war. Now they’re stuck here and they hate the Reds for signing the peace treaty. They say they want to go home, but how can they unless Austria falls? So they’re fighting with Kappel because they want the Great War to start again. I hate the bastards but thank God they’re on our side because we’d be lost without them. They’re organized and highly motivated, which is more than you can say for our rabble. You’ll see our lot for yourself when you get to Samara. You’d better hurry up though, because I just heard the Reds have taken Syzran, it won’t be long before they cross the Volga. It’s going to be all hands on deck in Samara pretty soon. It’s not for the likes of me but you . . . Oh Christ . . .’ he tailed off as the thunder of galloping horses reached our ears. My heart skipped, a rush of blood surged into my head; quick as a fox the deserter scuttled into the bushes. I grabbed my pack and pelted into the scrub after him. The horses were nearing but I still couldn’t see them through the mist. A thought struck me: they knew he was there, maybe they were coming back for him, he was spilling blood over the bushes, an easy target. I turned away and charged down the slope, trying to put as much distance between us as I could in the few seconds I had before the thudding gallop of horses sent me diving to the ground into a stand of nettles behind a bramble bush. I yelped but dared not move, for now I could see them: bearded, filthy and fearsome, astride their horses. I counted thirteen of them. They varied in age, two were grey-haired and perhaps in their late fifties – it was difficult to tell – but the youngest was no more than fifteen. They halted at the pool of blood on the track and looked around for their victim.

  ‘The weasel’s still alive,’ one of them said. ‘He’s crawled away.’

  ‘Won’t be far. Let’s have some sport, friends,’ called another, and the men cheered.

  A third called out to the bushes, ‘I smell the blood of a coward, where can he be?’ I held my breath. I could see the deserter’s legs sticking out from a bush fifteen metres away. He was trembling like a lamb torn from its mother.

  ‘Are we playing hide and seek, Yid?’

  They could have been talking to me. My mind raced. I still had my Austrian papers; they would flay me alive if they knew who I was. I carefully reached inside my jacket pocket, stinging my hand on the nettles, and felt for my papers.

  ‘Do we have to smoke you out, weasel? Or are you going to be clever and give yourself up?’

  The deserter didn’t budge. I pressed my papers into the soil and covered them over. One of the Cossacks steered his horse off the track. There was a sneering arrogance about him and a savage glare in his eye. I guessed he was their Ataman, or leader. ‘Oh, what a careless little Bolshevik,’ he gloated, ‘you left your blood all over the place. Oh, look, here’s a bit more. It’s Red through and through.’ The others roared with laughter. A couple of them jumped down from their horses and waded into the bushes straight towards their catch. I lost sight of them behind the bramble but I heard them taunting as they got closer.

  ‘Why did you quit the battlefield, deserter?’

  ‘There is no home for cowards in Russia!’

  ‘Show yourself, chicken.’

  Suddenly the deserter broke cover like a partridge at a shoot and hurtled off as fast as he could run. The Cossacks charged him down and dragged him back to the track, passing within feet of me but miraculously not seeing me. I began to shake with fear and prayed the deserter would not give me away. He was pleading with them now. ‘I told you I’m not a Bolshevik and I’m not a Jew.’

  ‘Why won’t you fight them, then? You’re with us or you’re against us,’ the Ataman said fiercely. ‘We left you for dead; we’ll not make another mistake.’

  ‘No, no, don’t kill me. I hate the Bolsheviks, with all my heart I hate them,’ the deserter bleated. ‘Please, I just want to see my wife and my three girls. You have families, don’t you? You must understand. How will they live without me?’

  The Ataman reflected a moment, then his face softened. ‘Yes, I understand, little man, where are you from?’

  ‘Kuvandyk.’

  ‘I know it, a fine village, you’re nearly home,’ the Ataman smiled. ‘And what do you do there?’

  ‘I make hats. If you ever pass through ask for Lev Borisovich, everyone knows me. I will furnish each and every one of you with a fine hat,’ the man simpered.

  ‘You must be missing your daughters, Lev Borisovich, I have two myself. How old are they?’ the Ataman asked politely.

  ‘Yes, I haven’t seen them for three months. The eldest is twenty-one, and the others are nineteen and fifteen. Each prettier than the last,’ Lev said proudly.

  ‘I’m so glad to hear that, Lev Borisovich, because we will be visiting them when you’re dead.’ The Cossacks sniggered with excitement.

  Lev stared at the Ataman incredulously, then he let out a high-pitched whine, his shoulders dropped and he began to sob: ‘Not my girls, please don’t touch my girls.’

  His pleas were met with nods and smiles. He fell to his knees and beat the ground, cursing his stupidity. Then he raised his head and looked straight at the bush where I was hiding. My heart froze. It was a look of sheer desperation; he did not say a word but I knew that he was pleading with me to help him. What could I do? I kept still and waited to see what he would do. After a moment he looked away and I thanked God for blessing this man, anti-Semite though he was, with strength of spirit.

  ‘What shall we do with him, boys?’ the Ataman asked his henchmen.

  ‘Cossack-charge him,’ the youth replied.

  The others hurrahed and turned their horses up the slope. The two men on the ground pushed Lev to the middle of the track and forced him to face the horses, which had retreated some way up the hill. They drew their swords and stood one on either side of the track a metre away from the kneeling deserter.

  ‘If you move you’ll lose your head,’ one said.

  The youth went first. Calling on his horse to run like the wind, he charged down the hill at full gallop straight towards Lev Borisovich. The others were cheering the boy on. His eyes were savage with excitement and as he got to Lev he readied himself for a jump. The horse sailed over Lev’s head but a trailing hoof caught him full in the face, sending him reeling over backwards. The Cossacks laughed. Lev scraped himself off the ground and stared at me again. His nose was smashed and his face splattered in blood. I held my breath. His mouth opened as if to speak, but he swallowed and held his
peace. The dismounted Cossacks grabbed him under the arms and turned his battered body to face the next rider, who had begun his charge.

  ‘I’m looking forward to fucking your babies,’ the rider jeered as he bore down on his victim. Lev was quaking as the horse bundled into him, trampling him with its hooves and knocking him down the hill. His body lay motionless for a moment, a twisted wreck in the mud. The two Cossacks pulled him up to see if he was dead. Lev coughed and spluttered, he was winded but trying to speak.

  ‘I’m not . . . a . . . Bolshevik,’ he gasped.

  ‘You are to us. Come on, we’ve only just begun,’ the older one said, yanking him back into position.

  ‘I’m not . . . a Bolshevik,’ he moaned. Then he turned his head towards my bush and said, ‘Ask . . . him.’ The words were like a bullet in my head.

  ‘What?’ they spoke together.

  ‘Over there, ask him,’ Lev said, a little more forcefully.

  They both looked towards me. I could feel my face burning.

  ‘Who?’ the younger one asked.

  ‘Me,’ I said, getting to my feet. My appearance brought the other horsemen racing back down the hill. I made my way towards the track.

  ‘So there’s two of you?’ the Ataman asked. ‘Why didn’t you say so earlier, Lev?’

  ‘This man knows I’m not a Bolshevik or a Jew,’ Lev wheezed.

  ‘But you’re both deserters,’ the Ataman sneered.

  ‘No,’ Lev said, answering on my behalf, ‘he’s a frontovik.’

  ‘I’m on my way to join General Kappel,’ I added, trying to sound confident.

  ‘This is true,’ Lev assured him.

  ‘How do you know each other?’

  ‘He’s from my village, he knows me well.’