by Leo Tolstoy
One day in November Migurski was at the Lieutenant Colonel’s house giving his sons their lesson, when the approaching sound of the post sleigh bell was heard, and the runners of a sledge came crunching over the frozen snow and stopped in front of the house entrance. The boys jumped up from their seats to find out who had arrived. Migurski stayed behind in the room, looking at the door and waiting for the boys to return, but through the doorway came the Lieutenant Colonel’s wife in person. ‘Some ladies have come asking for you, Pan,’ she said. ‘They must be from your country – they look like Polish ladies.’
If anyone had asked Migurski whether he thought it possible that Albina might come to see him, he would have said that it was unthinkable; yet in the depths of his soul he was expecting her. The blood rushed to his heart and he ran out gasping for breath, into the hall. In the hall a stout woman with a pockmarked face was untying the shawl which covered her head. A second woman was just going through the doorway which led to the Lieutenant Colonel’s quarters. Hearing steps behind her she looked round. From beneath her bonnet shone the joyful, widely-spaced radiant blue eyes of Albina, their lashes covered with hoarfrost. Migurski stood rooted to the spot, not knowing how he should greet her or what to say. ‘Juzio,’ she cried, calling him by the name his father had used, and she herself had used in the old days, and she flung her arms round his neck, pressing her face, rosy with cold, against his, bursting into laughter and tears at one and the same time.
When she had found out who Albina was and why she had come, the Lieutenant Colonel’s kind-hearted wife took her in and gave her lodging in her own house until it should be time for the wedding.
VI
The good-natured Lieutenant Colonel managed after considerable trouble to obtain an authorization from the high command. A Catholic priest was despatched from Orenburg to marry the Migurskis. The battalion commander’s wife acted as proxy for the bride’s mother, one of Migurski’s pupils carried the ikon, and Brzozowksi, the Polish exile, was best man.
Albina, however strange it may appear, loved her husband passionately but did not know him at all. Only now was she really getting acquainted with him. It stands to reason that she discovered in this living man of flesh and blood a great many commonplace and unpoetic things which had not been part of the image of him which she had nurtured and carried in her imagination; yet on the other hand, precisely because he was a man of flesh and blood, she discovered in him much that was simple and good, which had also not been part of her abstract image of him.
She had heard from friends and acquaintances about his bravery in war and she knew for herself how courageously he had faced the loss of his status and his liberty, so that she imagined him in her own mind as a hero, invariably living a life of exalted heroism; whereas in reality, for all his exceptional physical strength and bravery, he turned out to be as gentle and mild as a lamb, the simplest of men, with his talent for genial jokes and the same childlike smile on his sensitive mouth with its small blond beard and moustache, the smile which had attracted her long ago at Rozanka – but also in his mouth the never-extinguished tobacco pipe which proved particularly trying for her during her pregnancy.
Migurski too was only now getting to know Albina, and getting to know the woman within her. From the women he had known in the period before his marriage he had never gained any understanding of woman herself. And what he discovered in Albina, as in woman in general, surprised him and might well have made him disillusioned with woman in general, had he not felt for Albina a special and grateful tenderness. For Albina and for woman in general he felt a tender, slightly ironic indulgence, but for Albina herself and for her alone he felt not only loving affection, but also an awareness of and an admiration for the unrepayable debt created by her sacrifice, which had given him such totally undeserved happiness.
The Migurskis were blessed in that, directing all the power of their love on one another, they felt amid so many alien people like two half-frozen wanderers who had lost the winter road, yet managed by their mutual contact to keep each other warm. The joyful life the Migurskis spent together was enhanced by the contribution of Albina’s nurse Ludwika, who was utterly self-sacrificing, devoted as a slave to her mistress, full of good-natured grumbles, amusing, and ready to fall in love with any man whatever. The Migurskis were blessed too with the gift of children. At the end of a year a little boy was born; a year and a half later, a girl. The boy was the image of his mother: the same eyes, the same playfulness and grace. The little girl was a fine, healthy child, like a little wild thing.
Yet the Migurskis were still far from blest by their separation from their homeland, and most of all by the harshness of their unaccustomed humble situation. Albina in particular suffered from this humiliation. He, her own Juzio, a hero and a model of humanity, was obliged to stand to attention before any and every officer, to carry out rifle maintenance, to do guard duty and to obey every order without complaint.
On top of all that, the news they received from Poland continued to be extremely miserable. Virtually all their close relatives and friends had either been exiled or, having lost everything, had taken refuge abroad. For the Migurskis themselves there was no prospect of any end to this situation. All attempts to petition for a pardon or at least some improvement in their conditions, or for promotion to officer rank, failed to reach their destination. Tsar Nicholas conducted inspections, parades and exercises, attended masquerades and flirted under the cover of his masks, and galloped unnecessarily through Russia from Chuguyev to Novorossiisk, St Petersburg and Moscow, frightening ordinary people and riding his horses to exhaustion; and when a bold spirit plucked up the courage to ask for some alleviation of the lot of the exiled Decembrists or of the Poles who were now suffering precisely because of that patriotism which he himself extolled, he would stick out his chest, fix his pewter-coloured eyes on whatever happened to be in front of him, and say: ‘Let them go on serving. It is too soon.’ As if he knew when it would no longer be too soon, when it would be time to do something. And all the members of his entourage – the generals, the chamberlains and their wives, who were busy around him looking after their own interests, would feel moved at the extraordinary perspicacity and the wisdom of this great man.
All the same, there was on the whole more of happiness than of unhappiness in the lives of the Migurskis.
So they lived for a period of five years. But suddenly there came upon them an unexpected and terrible sorrow. First the little girl fell ill, then two days later the little boy: he had a high fever for three days, and in the absence of medical help (there was no doctor to be found) on the fourth day he died. Two days after him the little girl also died.
The only thing which stopped Albina from drowning herself in the River Ural was that she could not imagine without horror the state her husband would be in on receiving the news of her suicide. But it was hard for her to go on living. Hitherto always active and solicitous, she now handed over all her concerns to Ludwika and would sit for hours doing nothing, gazing mutely at whatever met her eyes, then suddenly jump up and run off to her tiny room and there, ignoring the consolations offered by her husband and Ludwika, she would weep silently, merely shaking her head and begging them to go away and leave her alone.
In the summer she would go to her children’s grave and sit there, lacerating her heart with memories of what had been and of what might have been. She was particularly tormented by the thought that her children would still have been alive, had they all been living in a town where medical aid was to be had. ‘Why? What for?’ she thought. ‘And Juzio and I, we want nothing from anybody, except for him to be able to live in the way he was born to live, as his grandparents and his forefathers lived, and all I want is to live with him and to love him, and to love my little ones and to bring them up.
‘Yet suddenly they start tormenting him, and send him into exile, and they take away from me what is dearer to me than the whole world. Why? What for?’ – she hurled this question at men
and at God. And she could not conceive of the possibility of any kind of answer. Yet without an answer there was no life for her. And so her life came to a standstill. This wretched life of banishment, which she had previously managed to beautify by her feminine good taste and elegance, now became intolerable not only to her, but to Migurski, who suffered both on her account and because he did not know how to help her.
VII
At this most terrible time for the Migurskis there appeared in Uralsk a Pole by the name of Rosolowski who had been involved in a grandiose plan for a rebellion and escape, drawn up at that time in Siberia by the exiled Catholic priest Sirocynsky.
Rosolowksi, like Migurski and thousands of others condemned to Siberian exile for having desired to live in the manner to which they were born, that is as Poles, had got involved in this cause and had been flogged with birch rods and assigned to serve as a soldier in the same battalion as Migurski. Rosolowksi, a former mathematics teacher, was a long, thin stooping man with sunken cheeks and a furrowed brow.
So it was that on the very first evening of his time in Uralsk Rosolowski, as he sat drinking tea in the Migurskis’ quarters, inevitably began in his slow, calm bass voice to recount the circumstances which had led to his suffering so cruelly. It appeared that Sirocynsky had been organizing a secret society with members all over Siberia whose aim was to incite a mutiny among the soldiers and convicts with the help of the Poles enlisted in the Cossack and line regiments, to rouse the deported settlers to revolt, seize the artillery at Omsk and set everyone free.
‘But would that really have been possible?’ enquired Migurski.
‘Quite possible, everything had been prepared,’ said Rosolowski frowning gloomily, and slowly and calmly he proceeded to tell them all about the plan of liberation and the measures which had been taken to assure the success of the enterprise and, in case it should fail, to ensure the safety of the conspirators. Their success would have been certain, but for the treachery of two villains. According to Rosolowski, Sirocynsky had been a man of genius and of great spiritual power, and his death too had been that of a hero and a martyr. And Rosolowski began in his calm, deep, measured voice to recount the details of the execution at which, by the order of the authorities, he and all the others found guilty in the case were compelled to be present.
‘Two battalions of soldiers stood in two ranks forming a long corridor, each man holding a pliant rod of such a thickness, defined by the Emperor himself, that no more than three of them could be inserted into a rifle muzzle. The first man to be brought out was Dr Szakalski. Two soldiers led him along and the men with the rods lashed him on his exposed back as he came level with them. I was only able to see what was happening when he came near to the spot where I was standing. At first I could hear only the beating of the drum, but then, when the swish of the rods and sound of the blows falling on his body began to be audible, I knew he was approaching. And I could see that the soldiers were pulling him along on their rifles, and so he came, shuddering and turning his head first to one side, then to the other. And once, as he was being led past us, I heard the Russian doctor telling the soldiers, “Don’t hit him too hard, have pity on him.” But they went on beating him just the same: when they led him past us for the second time he was no longer able to walk unaided, they had to drag him. His back was dreadful to behold. I screwed up my eyes. He collapsed, and they carried him away. Then a second man was brought out. Then a third, and a fourth. All of them eventually fell down and were carried away – some looked as if they were dead, others just about alive, and we all had to stand there and watch. It went on for six hours – from morning until two in the afternoon. Last of all they brought out Sirocynsky himself. It was a long time since I had seen him and I would not have recognized him, so much older did he look. His clean-shaven face was full of wrinkles, and a pale greenish colour. His body where it was uncovered was thin and yellow and his ribs stuck out above his contracted stomach. He moved along as all the others had done, shuddering at each stroke and jerking his head, but he did not groan and kept repeating a prayer in a loud voice: ‘Miserere mei Deus secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.’7
‘I myself could hear it,’ said Rosolowski rapidly in a strangled voice, and he shut his mouth and breathed heavily through his nose.
Ludwika, sitting by the window, was sobbing and had covered her face with her shawl.
‘And you had to describe it to us! They are beasts, nothing but savage beasts!’ cried Migurski, and throwing down his pipe he jumped up from his chair and hurried out into the unlit bedroom. Albina sat there as if turned to stone, gazing into the dark corner of the room.
VIII
The following day Migurski, on his way home from a lesson, was surprised to see his wife hurrying to meet him with light steps and a radiant face. When they got home she took him into their bedroom.
‘Juzio, listen to me.’
‘Listen? What do you mean?’
‘I have been thinking all night about what Rosolowksi was telling us. And I have decided: I cannot go on living like this, in this place. I cannot. I may die, but I am not going to stay here.’
‘But what can we possibly do?’
‘Escape.’
‘Escape? How?’
‘I’ve thought it all through. Listen,’ – and she told him the plan she had worked out during the night. Her plan was this: he, Migurski, would leave the house in the evening and leave his greatcoat on the bank of the Ural, and beside it a letter saying that he was going to take his own life. They would think he had drowned. They would hunt for his body and send in a report of what had occurred. Meanwhile he would be hiding – she would hide him so that he could not be found. They could go on like that for a month at least. And when all the fuss had died down, they would run away.
Migurski’s first reaction was that her scheme was impracticable, but by the end of the day her passionate confidence in it had convinced him, and he began to be of the same mind. Apart from that, he was inclined to agree with her, for the very reason that the punishment for an attempted escape, the same punishment Rosolowski had described to them, would fall on him, Migurski, but if they succeeded she would be set free, and he saw that since the death of the two children life here had been bitterly hard for her.
Rosolowski and Ludwika were let into the scheme, and after lengthy discussions, modifications and adjustments the plan was complete. To begin with they arranged that Migurski, once he had been presumed drowned, should run away alone on foot. Albina would then take the carriage and meet him at a prearranged place. This was the first plan. But later, when Rosolowski had told them of all the unsuccessful escape attempts which had been made in Siberia over the past five years (during which only one fortunate man had escaped to safety), Albina put forward a different plan – namely, that Juzio should be hidden in the carriage and travel with her and Ludwika to Saratov. At Saratov he would change his clothes and walk downstream along the bank of the Volga to an agreed spot where he would board a boat which she would have hired in Saratov and which would take the three of them down the Volga as far as Astrakhan and then across the Caspian Sea to Persia. This plan was approved by them all, as well as by its principal architect Rosolowski, but they were faced with the difficulty of fitting the carriage with a hiding-place big enough to take a man without attracting the attention of the authorities. And when Albina, having paid a visit to the children’s grave, told Rosolowski that she felt bad about leaving her children’s remains in an alien land, he thought for a moment, then said:
‘Ask the authorities for permission to take the children’s coffins away with you – they will grant it.’
‘No, I can’t do that, I don’t want to!’ said Albina.
‘You must ask them. Everything depends on it. We shall not take the coffins, but we shall make a large box for them and into that box we shall put Josif.’
For a moment Albina wanted to reject this suggestion, so painful was it for her to associate any such deception with the
memory of her children, but when Migurski cheerfully approved the project, she agreed.
The final version of the plan was thus as follows: Migurski would do everything to convince the authorities that he had been drowned. As soon as his death had been officially recognized she would apply for permission, following the death of her husband, to return to her native land, taking with her the mortal remains of her children. Once the permission had been granted everything would be done to give the impression that the graves had been opened and the coffins taken out, but the coffins would remain where they were and instead of the coffins it would be Migurski who would take their place in the specially constructed box. The box would be loaded on to the tarantass and so they would reach Saratov. At Saratov they would transfer to the boat. In the boat Juzio would emerge and they would sail down to the Caspian Sea. And there Persia or Turkey awaited them – and freedom.
IX
First of all the Migurskis purchased a tarantass on the pretext that Ludwika would soon be leaving to return to her homeland. Then began the construction of the box to allow Migurski to lie in it, if only in a contorted position, without suffocating, to emerge quickly and unobtrusively, and to crawl back into it when necessary. The designing and fitting out of the box was the work of all three of them together – Albina, Rosolowski, and Migurski himself. Rosolowski’s help was particularly vital, since he was an accomplished carpenter. They made the box to be fixed against the front-to-back struts at the rear of the coach body and flush with it, and the wall of the box which lay against the bodywork could be slid out, allowing a person to lie partly in the box and partly in the bottom of the tarantass. In addition airholes were bored in the box, and the top and sides were to be covered with bast matting and tied up with cords. It was possible to get in and out of the box by way of the tarantass, which was fitted with a seat.