The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  Abdrahman, Azat and another two akyns from the outlying auls arrived at the toi on the afternoon of its very first day. Afraid lest Abdrahman recall old offenses and take revenge through scathing satire, Djantemir himself went to meet the famed akyn, helped him down from his horse, deferentially held the bridle, and seated him in his house opposite the door together with the mayirs and the most respected guests.

  On seeing Abdrahman, Shevchenko greeted him with joy. Since the day Shevchenko met him outside Orsk, he had developed a great liking for the old akyn, and this lik­ing grew the more after Jaisak’s story of the famous akyn having quarreled with Djantemir and composed a satirical song about the fat bai. Shevchenko wanted Abdrahman to sing him the famous songs of Utemisov which fired and called on all the tribes of the boundless Kazakh steppe to struggle for freedom. These songs, as Shevchenko had heard from former participants in the crushing of Isatai Taimanov’s movement, were fiery appeals of wrath and hymns of struggle for freedom.

  Leading the akyn into such a conversation in the pre­sence of the Raïm officers was impossible. They had a chance to talk a little in the farthest room of the bai’s house where they were left eye to eye, but for Iskhak it proved difficult to find the proper Russian words when the con­versation drifted beyond the notions of everyday life. Be­cause of this handicap Shevchenko and Abdrahman almost did not understand each other. Besides, Iskhak could not be completely trusted.

  The conversation took on a turn for the better when Jaisak arrived. Distressed for some reason and nervous, he invited both men to his yurt, and there, far away from any treacherous ears, started to complain bitterly:

  “Djantemir’s gone mad. He pounced on me, stamped his feet, and bawled me out for letting Rahim ride my horse. I kept my mouth shut: I could not possibly tell him that his son was saving Kuljan from Moldabai.”

  “Help us understand each other,” Shevchenko asked and, after Jaisak had regained his calm, explained what songs he would like to hear from Abdrahman.

  “Yes, such songs once resounded in our land,” the old akyn said with a sigh. “But our freedom was crushed, and with the songs of Utemisov’s great soul. And now it is only here” — he brought a palm against his chest — “that those half-forgotten songs still live. I will sing them to you and tell you about the secret dreams of our steppe.”

  The three of them stayed in Jaisak’s yurt for a long Lime, forgetting about the heady merriment outside, the sumptuous midday meal that had been consumed without their presence, and the wine and cognac Djantemir had not begrudged to enhance his friendship with the Russian authorities.

  At Abdrahman’s request, Shevchenko recited some of his poems in a melodious recitative imitating his favorite Ukrainian folk tunes.

  None of them knew that both Butakov and Maksheiev were looking everywhere for Shevchenko to tell him of their imminent departure.

  An hour earlier a messenger from Raïm had galloped in to inform the officers that an urgent order had been received to despatch the supply train back to Orenburg immediately, because armed units of Khivans had appeared in the steppe. Both Maksheiev and Akishev had to leave for Orenburg with the train. The officers asked the Kazakhs to find their horses which were grazing by the herders’ camp.

  “Ai, but you cannot leave like that, mayirs! You must stay for the toi to the end,” Djantemir said, shaking his lead offended. “Tomorrow the akyns will be singing, the dombras playing, and the kyui will be recited. It will be also a baiga of akyns, and the best song will be awarded with a gown, saddle or carpet — all sorts of presents. Ai, you cannot go to Kosaral! Don’t go to Raïm either!”

  The mayirs jingled with their spurs, thanked for the treat and hospitable reception, but orders wee orders — they had to be complied with immediately.

  “You may stay here, if you want, Taras Grigorievich,” Butakov proposed politely, seeing how the poet met the news of the sudden departure with bitter chagrin. “I know how interesting it would be for you to attend a competition if akyns. A kobzar is a friend and brother to an akyn, isn’t that so? You may return tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow if that will be convenient for you.”

  The permission to stay was irresistibly tempting, but his conscience could not go against his moral obligation to see off Maksheiev. He sadly took leave of Abdrahman and walked after the sleigh, in which Butakov and Pospelov had arrived.

  Djantemir’s sons accompanied the mayirs, but halfway they turned back to the aul, and it was only Jaisak who rode with the Russians to Kosaral. Maksheiev invited him to his earth house and gave him all his money, out of which Jaisak had spent but fifty rubles.

  “Today you earned two hundred sheep at the baiga,” Maksheiev said. “Buy yourself another hundred, and Kuljan will be yours. How much does one sheep cost now?”

  “Without the Bukharan caravan around, two sheep cost one ruble. When the caravan arrives and the Bukharans ask for food, the price will be one ruble for one sheep.”

  “So do the buying while there are no caravans,” Maksheiev advised. “It’ll he enough for you and your wife to live, without misery. So help you God. But mind you hide your money well. You’ve got so much money it can buy five times as many sheep as you earned today.”

  “Oi, mayir! Oi, Taras Aga!” Jaisak exclaimed, realizing at last that his fate was taking a good turn. “How happy I shall be now!”

  He shook their hands with sincere ardor. Maksheiev laughed, slapping him on his shoulder, while Shevchenko embraced the young man and kissed him on parting.

  28

  Thoughts, Conversations and Arguments

  On the last evening before his departure Maksheiev had a lengthy talk with Shevchenko. Werner had gone to bed early and fallen fast asleep at once. They, too, were about to go to bed when Maksheiev suddenly changed his mind: “Taras Grigorievich, I’ve almost forgotten the main thing. Many a time I wanted to ask you to recite your poetry to me. You know, somehow it’s even strange: we’ve been liv­ing together for over a year now, but I still don’t know what you have written. Why haven’t you ever recited any­thing to me?”

  “I was sure you were not interested in my poetry,” Shev­chenko replied simply. “You never mentioned you were.” Maksheiev felt embarrassed.

  “On the contrary, it interests me very much, but I was under the impression you had certain reasons to keep silent about it.

  Well, if things have happened as they did, let’s remove our mutual misunderstanding. Recite something from your poetry, please.”

  Shevchenko was silent for a while, choosing in his mind what poem would be the best to recite in this case, and then he recited “The mighty Dnieper roars and groans…”

  “Fantastically written. It’s a bold, strikingly measured poem,” Maksheiev praised him, sincerely surprised at the force and expressiveness of the poem’s images. “What about reciting another poem?”

  Shevchenko recited him the dialogue of the guards from the cycle In Prison, an excerpt from Haidamaks, the recent­ly written The Churchwarden’s Daughter and some smaller poems. Maksheiev listened with keen attention.

  “Some more!” he asked every time Shevchenko stopped. ‘‘Wonderful,” he said at last with conviction. “You have a broad range of themes, a distinctive way of treating them, and a lot of dramatic elements in the plots. There is one thing, though, which annoys me: why do you, a person who respects Pushkin and Lermontov so markedly, depart from the classical trochee and iambus and slip into folk song or syllabic verse?”

  Shevchenko screwed up his eyes wearily: This man does not understand me, he thought. Why, the akyn understands me, and so does Kuzmich.

  “I write the way my people sing and create. Above all, I am a poet of the people and must — do you hear me? — I must speak with them in a language and verse they under­stand and with which they can be stirred most,” Shevchen­ko answered reluctantly.

  “All right, you are really a poet of the people, and this cannot be denied you. But each nation has people of dif­ferent
… er… levels, and for each of such levels there exist other forms of language and versification.”

  Shevchenko did not say anything in reply and started undressing. When both of them lay down on their cots, Maksheiev suddenly said:

  “I’m very glad to have heard your poems on departure at least. I deem it my duty to tell you that you are a poet by the grace of God, and well… by the will of the people.”

  Maksheiev left in the morning. The members of the expedition saw him off to Raïm and returned to Kosaral. Now the earth house was shared only by Werner and Shevchenko. They had missed having a long and sincere conversation, because throughout the past month Maksheiev had worked persistently and never left the drawing pen out of his fin­gers, or else was engrossed in his topographical calcula­tions, which made his fellow lodgers read silently so as not to interfere with his work. Throughout that winter Werner and Shevchenko had, apart from making good friends with each other, developed what they both called an “exile’s feel­ing,” which did not allow them to speak openly of their hopes and mental wounds in the presence of a free person.

  The first thing they did was jump at the chance of read­ing Maksheiev’s newspapers, which they had read previous­ly many a time but in snatches. As before, they sought answers to hundreds of questions and, in particular, to the further development of the French Revolution and the events in Poland. But in the pages of the St. Petersburg press it was difficult to find a sensible article, let alone a bare listing of facts: everything was slashed by the ever wakeful and unrelenting censors. Moreover, the newspapers were of very old date: the supply train that reached them in January had left Orenburg in November; now it was March, and so they discussed the events of last year and autumn.

  Lizohub’s letter contained hints of some extraordinary events, but the hints were so unintelligible that Shevchen­ko understood their meaning only after his conversation with Królikiewicz. “There is a lot of news,” Lizohub wrote, “but since it concerns distant foreign lands, I will not write about them in detail. The only thing I can say is that every­body hopes for something better, although it all does not occur silently but to the accompaniment of twenty-four-pound cannon balls.”

  The last phrase suggested that skirmishes had started in Paris, because the cannons were silent during the Feb­ruary coup. One of the issues of the monarchist newspaper Se­vernaya pchela buzzed away with malicious glee that it was time to commend the wisdom of statesman, in par­ticular Cavaignac, who had finally bridled “the insolent rabble.”

  “That means defeat for the people,” Shevchenko said. “But who is this Cavaignac? Have you heard that name be­fore?”

  Werner shrugged his shoulders.

  “I wonder what is going on there?” he reasoned aloud. “They have established a republic, introduced universal suffrage, done away with censorship. What else do they want then?”

  “I heard last year that they had a horrible crop failure and famine. It could be that the storekeepers and landown­ers are withholding the grain, waiting for the prices to jump up, while the hungry people smash their storehouses. If only I could see Królikiewicz,” Shevchenko said with a sigh. “He always knows all the news and could explain a lot of things.”

  But to meet Królikiewicz was not as simple as it had been in winter, because now that the thaw had set in, the ice on the Syr Darya became unsafe to walk on, and Raïm could be reached only before dawn, when the ice froze up during the night. At nights, however, no one dared travel because of the wolves.

  They met only in April when the inlet was free of ice and Królikiewicz arrived at Bogomolov’s office with a mes­sage from the Raïm commandant. He came by boat, and while the lieutenant wrote the reply, Królikiewicz went to see his friends.

  Shevchenko and Werner were glad to see the unexpected guest and bombarded him with questions almost the very moment he appeared.

  “We’re waiting for the new supply train, and before it arrives there is nothing I can tell you, because homing pi­geons do not fly to us and the telegraph has not been installed yet,” Królikiewicz said. “We’ve got hard drinking bouts — that’s the only news I can relay to you from Raïm. Although the new commandant locked up all of the vodka in the powder magazine and sealed up all the sutlers’ bar­rels, the officers can barely keep themselves on their feet from booze as before.”

  “Where do they get the vodka then?” Werner won­dered.

  “From the soldiers. The ones who’re not incorrigible drunkards do not swallow their share of vodka they get as rations, but carry it in their mouths and then spit in out into a small keg, from which the vodka is then sold to the officers,” Królikiewicz said with a laugh.

  “Taras Grigorievich received a letter from Ukraine in January,” Werner said. “It mentions some twenty-four-pound cannon balls. We think it’s a hint about the events in Paris, but we are not sure.”

  “Let me have a look,” Królikiewicz asked, and after read­ing through the letter, he confirmed their supposition: “It’s clear enough that Lizohub had the street battles in Paris of last June in mind. It was bloody and heroic fight­ing.

  “The physician Kiłkicwicz received a letter from abroad through reliable people who wrote that after the May dem­onstrations I told you about last time, the Provisional Gov­ernment and Constituent Assembly adopted an openly re­actionary policy and started attacking the workers. At first, entry into the workshops was made difficult, and then its newly arrived out-of-town members were expelled. The workers bad no choice: either die of hunger or fight the bourgeoisie sitting on the Provisional Government. On the twenty-second of June the workers of the national work­shops and all those who had been expelled from them staged a demonstration. They were joined by the workers of other industrial enterprises, and marched through the Paris streets, chanting slogans: ‘Down with the Government of Lamartine!’, ‘Work and Bread!’ In the evening they started erecting barricades, of which there were over six hundred by next morning.

  “So the Constituent Assembly entrusted the war minister General Cavaignac with extraordinary powers.

  “And the carnage broke loose. Guns, cavalry, infantry were thrown against the unarmed people. The workers had no commanders, no plan of defense, no weapons, gun powder or bullets — only cobblestones. But they fought with un­matched heroism and staunchness. Among them was a for­mer hussar officer, who was an ardent advocate of the repub­lic. He developed a plan of defense and directed its course. The hopeless struggle on the barricades lasted four days, and the workers, who were hungry and without so much as a weapon to resist, lay down their lives. In the meantime, the well-fed petty-bourgeois shopkeepers watched the blood­shed with blind fury and glee.

  “What happened next was no more than a whole-scale massacre. The workers were hunted down, executed, drowned in the Seine or thrown into prison where they were shot at through the cell bars and left to lie dead for sev­eral days. The rest of the prisoners died of hunger, because they were not fed at all.”

  Królikiewicz fell silent. Always calm and stiffly reserved, he could not restrain his emotions now as if something was suffocating him.

  Werner moved his lips wordlessly like in a prayer. Shevchenko clenched his fists.

  “Beasts!” he uttered at last. “I thought that only our landowners are capable of such things.”

  “Just imagine what they had reduced the worker to! If he does not pay the rent for his dark and damp basement — out he goes into the street with his children. If he loses his job — he must die of hunger. He slaves up to sixteen hours a day. Now he’s lost everything he gained in the winter. All progressive newspapers have been banned and their publishers imprisoned. People are thrown into prison for debts again, while the taxes have not been eliminated — on the contrary, new and additional taxes have been authorized. There is no harvest to speak of neither is there any work. Hunger, epidemics, death,” Królikiewicz concluded sadly.

  “But all of this took place in the summer. What about now? What is happ
ening now in Paris?” Werner asked. “There are so many of our émigrés living there. What has happened to them?”

  Królikiewicz did not say anything in reply to this sorrowful question, picked up his military cap and rose to his feet.

  “Well, and what about Poland?” Werner rushed after Królikiewicz. “Are things there just as bad? And — ”

  Without concluding his thought, Werner tore at his shirt, Królikiewicz silently put one arm around him like he would do to a son to comfort him, and with the other he stroked his shoulder.

  “Brace yourself, old chap!” he said with an unexpected tenderness. “We must steel ourselves. Tragic and sad as these events might have been, the blood did not flow in vain. By this example people will learn to fight the capitalists just they learned to fight the landowners. The workers won’t go out on a demonstration empty-handed next time. And they’ll find arms and will explain to the soldiers that the workers and peasants are their brothers. It is rumored not without reason that in our ‘czardom of silence’ as well the authorities have started tightening the screws. Our Czar Nicholas must be sleeping uneasily in his gorgeous palace when he recalls Louis Philippe and the barricades in Paris. Nothing new seems to be happening in Russia, but there is probably unrest in many countries now. People have been roused from their sleep, because the echo from the guns in Paris has resounded everywhere.”

  When Krółikiewicz left, Shevchenko and Werner diligent­ly resumed reading the yellowed newspapers. Quite a few of the hints in the progressive press and even in the buzz­ing of the Severnaya pchela now gained a new meaning for them.