Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Don’t, Porfiri Porfirovich,’ he muttered.

  ‘I don’t see how you can hope to escape from this with impunity, Peter Ivanovich,’ continued Porfiri Porfirovich pitilessly. ‘Heaven knows what will have happened to her by the time we find her. Even if she comes back, she’ll be a changed woman.’

  ‘Even if?’

  ‘A sensitive girl. Who knows what torments – ’

  ‘You think she really could …?’

  Peter Ivanovich caught his breath.

  ‘I think she’d better be found as soon as possible.’

  ‘Well, yes. You’re doing what you can, of course …’

  His voice tailed away.

  ‘It’s a real pig’s ear,’ said Porfiri Porfirovich. ‘I’ve sent messages. But you know our bureaucracy, Peter Ivanovich. Will they get through? If they do, will anybody do anything? It’s an awkward business, you see, and people will want to steer clear of it. It’s the kind of thing they’ll pass from one desk to another. And meanwhile …’

  ‘We must do something,’ said Peter Ivanovich. ‘You said yourself, we must do something!’

  ‘I’d send someone,’ said Porfiri. ‘That’s the best way. When you’re actually there, they can’t fob you off. At least, not if you’ve got authority.’

  ‘You don’t think – you don’t think,’ said Peter Ivanovich timidly, ‘that you could go yourself, Porfiri Porfirovich?’

  ‘No,’ said Porfiri, ‘I don’t. I’ve got a job to do here. Made even more difficult by the incompetence of the local administration.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘It ought to be someone who could identify the girl. Properly, I mean. We’ve had enough of that sort of mistake.’

  His eyes turned to Dmitri.

  4

  ‘So you agreed?’ said Sonya, eyes shining.

  ‘I said I would think about it.’

  They were in Igor Stepanovich’s sitting room. There was a row of glasses on the table and the vodka had already been started. Igor had intended the get-together as a gesture of solidarity – he had felt that Dmitri would need support after talking to Porfiri Porfirovich – but it had somehow turned into a celebration. They were all there, the usual circle, plus Sonya and Vera Samsonova.

  ‘But you will, won’t you?’ said Sonya.

  ‘At the time, I thought I would. Now I am not so sure.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Vera.

  ‘Because it would be so unpleasant.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t mind, would you?’ said Sonya.

  ‘I think I certainly would.’

  ‘Yes, but you would bear it for the sake of Anna Semeonova!’ declared Sonya.

  Dmitri’s attachment to Anna Semeonova, however, had dwindled.

  ‘But why should I bear it? I hardly know the girl.’

  ‘Dmitri!’

  ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘She called to you for help!’ said Sonya reproachfully.

  ‘It was only help in finding the back yard!’

  ‘Oh, no, Dmitri, it was a cry from the heart!’ said Sonya confidently.

  The girl had clearly been reading too many novels. Dmitri had always known it would be a mistake if they admitted women to their circle.

  But it wasn’t just the women.

  ‘You can’t abandon her now!’ said Sonya’s brother, Pavel.

  ‘I am not abandoning her. She has never been mine to abandon. I met her once, casually, in the Court House. That is all!’

  ‘It is your duty!’ said Igor Stepanovich sternly.

  ‘Duty! How can it be?’

  ‘Your duty as a lawyer to your client.’

  ‘She’s not my client. I just met her casually in the corridor.’

  ‘She asked you for advice and you gave it. I would say that constitutes acceptance of her as a client. De facto, if not de jure.’

  Igor Stepanovich had once studied law. Briefly.

  ‘De facto?’ said Dmitri, outraged. ‘What sort of nonsense is that?’

  ‘What do these legal quibbles matter, anyway,’ said Sonya passionately, ‘when there is a prior claim of the heart?’

  ‘Heart? Whose heart?’

  ‘Not yours,’ shot Vera Samsonova. ‘Not yours, because you haven’t one!’

  ‘Oh, not got one, haven’t I?’ cried Dmitri furiously. ‘Well, let me tell you, no one would have even thought of going to Siberia if it hadn’t been for me!’

  ‘Oh, you’re very good at your job, Dmitri,’ said Vera Samsonova spitefully. ‘No one doubts that. It’s just that we wonder if there is anything else in you apart from your job.’

  Dmitri banged his fist on the table and made the glasses jump.

  ‘You think it’s part of my job? To go to Siberia?’

  ‘It’s your moral duty, man!’ shouted Igor Stepanovich, crashing his fist, too, upon the table. ‘As one human being to another!’

  ‘That won’t weigh with Dmitri!’ cried Vera Samsonova. ‘All he thinks about is his precious career.’

  ‘Do you think it’s in the interest of my career not to go to Siberia? Quite the reverse, I can tell you. Quite the reverse!’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve calculated it very carefully,’ said Vera Samsonova nastily.

  ‘Oh, Dmitri, how could you?’ cried Sonya. ‘To think of your career when a woman’s life is at stake!’

  She began to cry noisily.

  ‘You brute!’ shouted Igor Stepanovich. ‘All you think about is yourself!’

  ‘You have no heart!’ cried Vera Samsonova, beginning to weep too. ‘You have no heart!’

  ‘I have a heart!’ shouted Dmitri. Why this should suddenly be so important to him was not clear.

  ‘Show it then!’ cried Sonya. ‘Take suffering upon you!’

  ‘Suffering?’ said Dmitri, far, but not quite, gone.

  ‘For the sake of mankind!’ shouted Igor Stepanovich.

  ‘And womankind,’ sobbed Vera Samsonova.

  ‘I will!’ shouted Dmitri.

  Train to Moscow, bearable: train on to Nizhni Novgorod tedious. The countryside was flat and featureless, the passengers on the train pretty featureless, too. There wasn’t a pretty woman among them, nor an interesting man. Dmitri retired to his book. It was a novel. Dmitri didn’t believe in reading official papers.

  The train stopped at Nizhni Novgorod; or, rather, the track ran out. After this it was boat. Dmitri had never been on a boat, but he could guess what it was like. Everyone crowded together and no privacy. And so slow! He decided to avoid it if he could, and went straight to the police station.

  Well, not quite, or, at least, not entirely intentionally. In fact, the police came to him.

  It happened like this. When Dmitri got off the train he was amazed. He was amazed, first, because there weren’t any people. There were the buildings, quite substantial ones, some of clay, brick, too; there were the boulevards, wide and shaded by not yet leafy birches and poplars; there were the hotels, the theatres, the enormous cathedral of Alexander Nevski, even a Bourse – a stock exchange, for God’s sake! And there were the markets.

  But there was no one in them. Grass and weeds grew in the middle of the empty streets. The shops were all shut. The doors and windows of the houses were all shut. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Vehicle? There wasn’t even a pedestrian. He had come into a ghost town.

  At last he saw someone, a peasant carrying a load of wood.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ said Dmitri. ‘Where is everyone?’

  The peasant, glad of the excuse, put his load down.

  ‘Nothing’s going on,’ he said. ‘That’s the point. It doesn’t go on till the summer.’

  Gradually, Dmitri worked it out. Nizhni Novgorod was a fair city and this side of the river was where the fair was, but it didn’t open until May. When it did, the place would be full. Five hundred thousand traders would flock into the city. Until then, though, the buildings stayed empty.

  But if there were no people, there were h
undreds of boats. They lined the banks of the Volga for six miles on both sides. That was the second thing that amazed Dmitri. It was a boat world. There mightn’t be vehicles on the streets but there were plenty of boats on the river, of all shapes and sizes and sorts, some sail, some rowing, some – the larger ones – steam.

  A thought struck Dmitri. He had been intending to go to the police station, but why go there? If they were anything like the police in Kursk, they wouldn’t know anything. The people who would know would be the boatmen. This was where the prisoners were trans-shipped from rail to boat, and the boatmen would know how frequently and from where the prison boats left. He could go straight there. If he went to the police station, the chances were that it would take him quite a long time to work his way through their bureaucracy, and by that time Anna Semeonova might have departed.

  The boatmen obliged. The convict barges, they said, left from a point some two miles down the river. There was a sort of cantonment in which the prisoners were kept. It was on this side of the river because that’s where the train terminal was and they didn’t want to go to the trouble of ferrying them to the other bank.

  ‘Get them on board once and that’s it!’ they said.

  Dmitri thanked his stars that the idea had occurred to him before he’d gone to all the trouble of crossing to the other side and negotiating with all the Novikovs the police station probably contained. He looked around for a droshky. Of course, there wasn’t one, so he had to make his way on foot. In summer, no doubt, it would have been delightful; the Volga, blue and brimming with boats on one side, the bazaars with all their Tatar traders on the other. This early in the year it was bloody cold.

  The cantonment was easy to pick out. It consisted of a number of long wooden buildings surrounded by a high wooden palisade. Finding himself confronted by the palisade, Dmitri began to walk round it in search of a gate.

  He had nearly got to the gate when two men in uniform came up to him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ they said.

  ‘Trying to find my way in,’ said Dmitri.

  ‘Are you sure it’s not trying to help someone to find their way out?’ they said suspiciously.

  ‘It would be a public service,’ granted Dmitri, ‘which I certainly hope at some time to perform. Meanwhile, I would like to talk to someone responsible. Assuming that there is someone responsible in a place like this.’

  It was then that they arrested him. To Dmitri’s chagrin, they took him not into the cantonment but to the police station on the other side of the river, where it was some time before he found intelligent life at all and considerably longer before, even with the aid of his authorizations, he was able to persuade them of the genuineness of his mission and to transport him back to the cantonment. Where he discovered that the barges containing the Kursk consignment had just left.

  There was nothing else for it; to Perm he would have to go. It would take weeks. Perm, as far as Dmitri was concerned, was on the edge of the known world. Go further and you would fall off – into a region where there were great blank spaces on the map with ‘Here be anthropophagi’ written across them: Siberia, in fact.

  Could he be spared for so long? All too easily, he felt. They were probably glad to get rid of him. What of the cases he would miss? Well, what of them? There were too many of the ‘she put a spell on my cow’ sort. No one was going to make a name for himself by working on that sort of thing. No, he would probably do far better for himself by finding Anna Semeonova and bringing her back to the relieved arms of her parents. Old Semeonov was supposed to have influence. What was the name of that prince he was always talking about? Dolgorukov? ‘Ah, Prince, can I introduce the young man who rescued my daughter?’ ‘Kameron? An unusual name, that. Scottish? Well, it’s one that I shall certainly remember.’

  Dmitri chided himself. That sort of thing was for Peter Ivanovich. He would have nothing to do with it. He would carve his way upwards by legal brilliance alone. He would rescue Anna Semeonova purely because it was his duty.

  In the cause of duty he was prepared to suffer, even to the extent of enduring a tedious journey by boat. Setting himself sternly, he went down to the river and found a Kamenki Brothers steamer going in the right direction.

  It was about a thousand miles from Nizhni Novgorod to Perm by river, first down the Volga and then up to the Kama and fortunately the weather was mild enough for him to spend the whole time outside, up on the hurricane deck, away from the throng of muzhiks below, smoking, smelling, chattering and, yes, he had guessed it would come to that, singing. Put a Russian on the river and he would at once start singing about Mother Volga.

  There were never more than a few people on the hurricane deck since it was reserved for gentlemen, a term, however, used fairly loosely on the river. Most of them stayed on for only a short distance. Only two other men, beside Dmitri, were going the whole way. One of these was an elderly merchant, wrapped heavily in furs and apparently hibernating since he said nothing at all for the whole of the first day. The other was a young railway engineer over-eager to engage Dmitri in conversation.

  ‘Ah!’ he said ecstatically, breathing in heavily and taking in the scene with a wide sweep of his hand. ‘The real Russia!’

  ‘Is it?’ said Dmitri discouragingly.

  He distrusted people who talked about ‘the real Russia’. All too often they were people of a certain sort, people who identified the real Russia with a very unreal Old Russia, in which peculiar spiritual insight was somehow to be found in simpletons and wisdom was lodged in the startsi, or elders, of the local peasant community. Dmitri did not believe that wisdom was lodged in anybody old and thought that Holy Fools were more likely to be fools than holy. He was a staunch modernizer and believed that Russia’s problems would be better solved by turning towards the west, than looking inwards to the past. And he was surprised that this young man, an engineer and therefore, according to Vera Samsonova at least, more likely to be in tune with the modern spirit, did not think so too.

  ‘Do you know how much trade goes down this river?’ said the engineer.

  ‘Certainly not!’ said Dmitri coldly.

  ‘Five million tons. Five million tons!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Seven hundred boats carrying grain alone!’

  He was probably not, then, an ‘Old Russia’ man; he might even be a modernizer. All the same, Dmitri did not feel inclined to forgive him. He would not forgive anyone who used statistics.

  He turned away from the engineer and addressed himself, with apparently significant concentration, to the landscape; which proved to be much like landscape. The left bank was totally uninteresting, flat and wooded. The right bank was at least varied. The land rose up abruptly from the water’s edge to a height of about 500 feet and was broken by promontories which divided the river into a series of long, still reaches, rather like lakes. Here and there on the promontories were white-walled churches with silver domes, surrounded by little villages of unpainted wooden houses, with elaborately carved and decorated gables. Occasionally, the steamer would run close in to the bank and then sometimes they would see muzhiks lying about on the grass (idle sods; they were the real Russia, all right) in red shirts and black velvet trousers. Sometimes, too, there were peasant girls who would run down to the river waving their handkerchiefs. It was all very picturesque. Dmitri, however, was opposed to the picturesque. He objected to anything that conjured out the emotionally facile in you.

  He stayed morosely peering out at the bank until it became dark. Then, suddenly, the merchant roused himself and summoned a samovar from below and the fragrance of the tea was so inviting that Dmitri was lured back to sociability. He exchanged grunts with the merchant and even asked the engineer what (on earth) he was going to do in Perm.

  ‘Oh, I’m working on the railway,’ said the young man, pleased to tell him.

  ‘Railway?’ said Dmitri. ‘Out here?’

  ‘The Ural Mountain Railway,’ said the engineer, shocked. ‘
It goes from Perm to Ekaterinburg.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Dmitri.

  ‘Well, the mines, of course …’ His voice trailed away. He was clearly wondering whether Dmitri was having him on. ‘And the prisoners,’ he added, deciding that he wasn’t. ‘At the moment we’re working on an extension to Tiumen. It’s the big forwarding place for all the convicts.’

  ‘Amazing!’ said Dmitri.

  ‘Well, it is in a way. You wait till you see it! It’s really modern, the most modern part of the whole Russian rail system.’

  He prattled on about how well-ballasted the track-bed was, how excellent the rolling stock, how well-kept the track. No expense had been spared. Even the verst-posts were set in neatly fitted mosaics of coloured Ural stones.

  Dmitri’s mind, however, had gone off on its own track. He was thinking about Anna Semeonova and the system that had brought her here, the system which, improving all the time, now brought nearly twenty thousand prisoners to Siberia every year. Ancient, he thought, or modern? The Old Russia or the New?

  At about five o’clock in the morning he was awakened by the persistent blowing of the steamer’s whistle, followed by the stoppage of the engine, the jar of falling gang-planks and the confused trampling of feet above his head. Guessing that they had arrived at Kazan, he went on deck.

  For a moment, when he looked at the bank, he felt that he had been hit by the aurora borealis. The houses, all wooden, of course, had been painted a variety of colours. Just behind the landing-stage was a chocolate-brown house with yellow window shutters and a green roof. Next to it was a lavender house with a shining tin roof; a crimson house with an emerald roof; a sky-blue house with a red roof; an orange house with an olive roof; a house painted bright green all over; and then a house which over three storeys exemplified the entire chromatic range.

  Stunned, he was about to retreat when he realized that this wasn’t Kazan at all but just the Kazan pristan, or landing-stage. The city itself was over to the right, a mass of towers, minarets and domes shimmering in the early morning sunlight. It took him by surprise. He had been expecting a European city, but this wasn’t European, it was something more Eastern. He had a slightly uncomfortable feeling of foreignness.