Her last image of Sorochinsk was of a young boy, thin enough to squeeze through iron railings, standing by the track. After watching him wave the train good-bye, she lowered her head and closed her eyes.
Later that evening, the whole party ended up in the curtained-off saloon. Mostly, McColl suspected, because guilt was more bearable shared.
Arbatov wanted to twist the knife. “You were warned,” he said, addressing Komarov directly but allowing an accusing gaze to sweep across them all. “There was no rain last summer and precious little snow in winter, and you kept on taking whatever you could.”
“The cities needed food,” Komarov protested, but McColl could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.
“The cities weren’t starving,” Arbatov went on, “but you decided that the workers had more right to the food that the peasants had grown than the peasants did themselves. You even took most of their seed corn! And when your own agricultural scientists produced a report outlining the mistakes you had made, you refused to publish it. Your government just sat on its hands and hoped for a miracle, which needless to say never came.”
McColl expected an argument from Komarov—if not fresh facts, an insistence that everyone makes mistakes. None was forthcoming.
Red Cossacks
Sergei Piatakov turned on his heel to better take in the vastness of earth and heaven. To north and west, the desert of the last few days faded into the distance, where a low line of sand hills merged into the blue-grey sky. Away to the south, above their receding train, a line of mountains loomed out of the heat haze. A half mile or so to the east, across an arid riverbed, the small town of Saryagash seemed sunk in torpor.
“Come on,” Brady said, picking up his battered suitcase. “Time to start our new career.”
The accompanying grin belonged on an explorer’s face, Piatakov thought. Or maybe a conqueror’s. Brady was more Cortés than Columbus—he wouldn’t be satisfied with looking around and reporting back.
The two of them walked across the tracks and started down the dirt road, making the most of the shade provided by the acacias that lined the route. It was incredibly hot—a hundred degrees at least, Piatakov guessed—but the air was so dry that he didn’t feel that uncomfortable.
He remembered thinking that seeing the world would make him a better teacher, but backward Turkestan hadn’t been high on his list of places to visit. He had always wanted to see America, and he and Caitlin had vowed to go there together once the revolution was safely entrenched. He would meet her family in New York and then perhaps travel west to see the Grand Canyon and the great meteorite crater and the geyser in Yellowstone Park—all those wonders of the world that had gripped his imagination as a child.
Well, he doubted he’d ever see them now.
Brady already had, of course, and been characteristically unimpressed. “A deep trench, a big hole, and a tall fountain,” had been his verdict, when Piatakov had mentioned his ambition to see them.
“What day is it?” the American asked, interrupting Piatakov’s reverie.
“Saturday.”
“That’s what I thought. Twelve days to travel two thousand miles.” He took out his fob and checked the time. “It looks like a ghost town,” he said, gazing ahead at the empty-looking Saryagash. “Maybe they’re all having siestas. With heat like this, they’d need to.”
Piatakov didn’t bother to reply. He understood the American’s slightly hysterical mood: twelve days on a crowded train, and this much light and space was enough to make anyone feel light-headed. And after only a few hundred yards, they were probably both beginning to feel the heat. The sun seemed to press down on Piatakov’s cap like a steam iron.
“Uzbeks,” Brady said as they saw their first people—a series of men laid out on mattresses in the shade of trees and buildings. “The Russian colonists down here call all the urban Muslims Sarts, but there are lots of different groups. You can tell them by their hats. See that guy over there?” He pointed out an old man sitting in an open doorway, wearing what looked like a long white nightshirt and a peakless embroidered cap. “That sort of hat means an Uzbek.”
Piatakov grunted. He sometimes felt that Brady should have been a librarian, albeit one who took no prisoners.
They came to a crossroads where the road from the station met a wide, tree-lined avenue that boasted a number of imposing buildings. Two Uzbeks were walking toward them, toting battered kerosene cans from which they sprinkled water across the sandy street. Their bare feet were blanched by the dust.
The Russian Imperial Bank seemed permanently closed, its double-eagle plaque hanging loose on the wall by the boarded doors. Three small boys were sitting on its veranda, watching the strangers with interest.
“There,” Piatakov said, pointing out another building fifty yards farther on, where a large red flag hung above an open door, low enough to serve as an entrance curtain.
Inside they found a large office, shutters closed against the sun. Two desks bore typewriters; several shelves sagged under piles of papers. The large map of Turkestan that hung on one wall looked as though someone had thrown a bottle of ink at it.
A chain of troika bells hung beside the door. Brady shook it, conjuring a mental picture of falling snow.
A bleary-eyed man emerged from the back of the building. He was a Russian, somewhere between youth and middle age, with a complexion that suggested more than a few years in Turkestan. He greeted them cordially, said his name was Ulionshin and that he was the local party secretary.
Brady passed over two of the identity papers that Aram Shahumian had forged in Moscow. Ulionshin took a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from a drawer and examined the papers carefully. “So, Comrade Travkin,” he said, addressing Brady, “you and Comrade Semionov here have come to report on the state of our roads in Turkestan.” He offered a wry smile. “It will be a short report, I’m afraid. One word would suffice for most of them and not a word you use when ladies are present. But accurate. The camels have been dropping it for several thousand years. Still, what can I do to help you?”
“Somewhere to sleep tonight and a ride into Tashkent tomorrow morning, if that’s possible,” Brady said.
“Transport by road, you mean?”
“It’s the only way to see what improvements are necessary.”
“Of course, of course. But we have no motor transport, I’m sorry to say. There was an automobile,” he explained almost wistfully, “but the Tashkent Cheka decided they needed it more than we did. And of course they were correct, but . . .” He shrugged. “I can have you taken by taranta.”
“Taranta?”
“I’m sorry. Living here for so long, one forgets. A taranta is a four-wheel carriage, quite comfortable, and Tashkent is only thirty versts away. Three hours at the most.”
“That sounds very acceptable,” Brady said.
“Good. As for a place to sleep, I shall be honored to share my roof; you will find nowhere cooler in Saryagash. And of course you must eat with us.”
It was a pleasant evening. Ulionshin’s wife was a lovely, almond-eyed Uzbek, and his equally beautiful daughters had a plethora of questions about the wider world, which Brady was happy to answer. The food was the best they’d eaten for several months: thick unleavened bread, which Ulionshin called lepioshka, and chunks of lamb on skewers grilled over a slow-burning fire, all washed down with raisin-sweetened, bloodred apple tea. Afterward, stretched out on his back in their allotted corner of the roof, Piatakov stared up at the starriest sky he had ever seen.
He lay awake for a long time, feeling the past gnawing at the edges of his contentment. This was his new life, freely chosen. Why was it so hard to cast the old one aside?
They left Saryagash soon after first light, sitting side by side on the taranta’s rear seat. The driver, a young Uzbek named Mirumar, spoke not a word of Russian but refused to be inhibited by this handi
cap. Whenever he had a moment free from shouting at the horses, he would explain passing scenes of interest with extravagant gestures, streams of incomprehensible words, and what he no doubt thought was a winning smile.
The journey was slow but mentally relaxing, despite Mirumar’s exuberance and the endless jolting of the ironclad wheels on the badly rutted road. They sat mostly in silence, aware of the heat’s slowly tightening grip, listening to the heavy breathing of the two ponies, watching the mountains rise in the distance. Only once did they encounter other travelers: a convoy of camels escorted by nomad horsemen, who treated them to an array of lordly stares.
“Kyrgyz,” Brady suggested, a word that unleashed a long stream of obvious invective from their driver.
As they neared the foothills of the mountains, the transition from desert to greenery was abrupt. Silence gave way to birdsong, the harsh yellow glare to a patchwork of colors less fierce on the eye. They joined the road from Chimkent, which proved just as rutted as the one from Saryagash, but which wound prettily through thinly wooded slopes and across the occasional dried-up stream. It passed through several villages, each a single street of clay dwellings surrounded by fields full of working women, each boasting a chaikhana or two full of lolling men, glasses of green tea and ornate hookahs only an arm’s reach away.
Piatakov didn’t have to wonder what Caitlin would have thought.
The sun was approaching its zenith when they drove across a wide riverbed and stopped beside a guard post on the northeastern edge of Tashkent. Two Uzbeks in Red Army uniform noted the red stars in their caps and examined the proffered papers only with reluctance, before returning to their seats in the shade. Mirumar urged the ponies forward once more, down a narrow, unpaved street hemmed in by a wall of clay houses.
Ulionshin had explained the city’s layout to them: a Sart town of around a hundred and sixty thousand Uzbek natives and a Russian town of a hundred and twenty thousand colonists, side by side on either bank of the Sarla River. Coming from Saryagash they would arrive in the Sart town first, but Mirumar knew the route through to the Russian quarter.
Brady had other ideas. He leaned forward and tapped the boy on the shoulder. “Chaikhana,” Brady said, adding a drinking mime for good measure.
A few moments later they pulled up outside a large and prosperous looking teahouse and, after disentangling their cramped limbs and luggage from the taranta, sent Mirumar on his way with a precious ruble. Brady surveyed the coins still left in his hand somewhat ruefully. “Rogdayev had better cough up,” he said.
They found an empty mattress and sat with legs stretched out, their backs to the side of the building. The adjoining square contained at least twenty empty market stalls, and the wall of dun-colored single-story buildings that enclosed it was broken only by the streets running in and out. Above the roofs the dome of a mosque gleamed fitfully in the sun. Most of the mosaic tiling had fallen away, and red poppies were climbing up the dome from roots in the supporting stonework.
“You’ve never been out of Russia before, have you, Sergei?” Brady observed.
“No.”
“I think we should stay in the Russian town,” Brady decided, surveying the other, mostly sleeping, customers.
“We’d certainly be conspicuous here,” Piatakov agreed.
Brady sighed. “Yes. But isn’t it fascinating?”
“It is.”
“I wonder how religious these people really are,” Brady mused. “That mosque doesn’t look very well cared for. You remember Dzagin, on the train? He told me about a notice he’d seen in a small town near here; it said something like: the service today is being given by a communist priest, so members of the party are allowed to attend!”
Brady laughed out loud, drawing stares and one or two disapproving murmurs. “He had another story about a Chinese dentist, a traveling dentist, who used to work here in the old town. He told all his patients that toothache was caused by maggots in their teeth, and he’d poke around with a pair of chopsticks in their mouths, bring out the offending maggot, and stomp on it. Then he’d give them a pill and pocket his fee. Of course, the maggot was in a hollow chopstick, and the pill was opium, so the tooth would never get better. But no one seemed to mind. He came back year after year and did a roaring trade. He just had the knack of getting people to believe in him.”
Like you, Piatakov thought but didn’t say.
Brady gulped down the last of his tea. “Come on. Let’s go and find some lodgings.”
They walked on in the direction that seemed most likely, threading narrow streets and small squares until they suddenly emerged beside a wide boulevard, just as an overcrowded electric tram squealed past. The shock of this sudden encounter with modernity was exacerbated by the tram’s occupants, nearly all Uzbeks, the men in white robes and turbans or caps, the women veiled from head to foot.
A hundred yards farther on they found a tram stop leaning drunkenly into the road, bearing information in Russian.
Another tram duly arrived, every bit as full as its predecessor. They found themselves each gripping the rear veranda rail with one hand, their bags with the other, as the tram rolled down the boulevard and crossed a large square boasting two large mosques and the statue of a Russian on horseback. A long bridge over a wide, dry riverbed led into the Russian town, where the buildings were much more substantial. Most were painted in traditional pastel colors, and many had red flags hanging from poles or flying from the roof. The faces on the pavement were mostly European.
They clambered off the tram, and Brady examined the map Ulionshin had drawn for them.
Ten minutes later they were knocking on the door of a mansion in Gogol Street. An attractive middle-aged Russian woman let them in, examined their papers, and copied out the details. “For the Cheka,” she explained, as if they’d just arrived from Mars. Then she showed them up to a first-floor room, the contents of which were half a dozen rolled carpets, a table with one leg missing, and a precarious tower of books.
“The bourgeois family who lived here smashed all their furniture before they fled,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “And they tore out all the wiring, so there’s only cotton oil for light.” She indicated the twists of cotton wool on the table, lying beside a saucer of oil. “Unless you have some candles?” she asked hopefully.
“I’m afraid not,” Piatakov told her. “Thank you.”
“We do have water again,” the woman said. “At the end of the hall. Supper is at nine.”
Piatakov shut the door behind her and joined Brady at the window. A young Russian girl was cycling past on the road below, pieces of blue ribbon streaming out from her bonnet. The sound of running water drifted up from the irrigation stream which ran between the road and the parched grass beyond. In the distance, half-hidden by a line of palms, a string of camels was sauntering along.
Moscow seemed far away. In more ways than one.
McColl stared out through his compartment window, something he had been doing for much of the previous twenty-four hours. The train was stabled a few hundred yards south of Orenburg station, close to where a dirt road from the east crossed the tracks and entered the town.
The view from the window rarely stopped shifting. A steady stream of carts trundled into the town, emerging from behind a derelict warehouse like one of those endless strips of bunting magicians drew out of their sleeves. Each was driven by a peasant with an anxious expression; each carried a high pile of decrepit-looking furniture, upon which a varying number of children precariously perched. And there was often a scrawny mongrel chasing its tail down among the trundling wheels, as if survival itself wasn’t hard enough.
And then there were the soldiers. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. Columns marched into town and columns marched out, none of them showing much in the way of enthusiasm. There were solitary soldiers, groups small and large, all milling wherever space allowed, pickin
g up rifles and putting them down, passing around cigarettes, pissing against anything that rose out of the ground.
It reminded McColl of the Boer War. Take away the distant onion domes, and Orenburg could be any small town in the western Cape, dry and dusty, full of purposeless motion, and reeking of troop disaffection. Each time a new column appeared on the track he half expected a dolorous chorus of “Goodbye, Dolly Gray.”
He had wanted to explore the town, but the passengers had all been warned—effectively ordered—not to leave the safety of the train. The only exceptions were Komarov, Maslov, and Caitlin, who’d ridden off in a droshky flanked by a mounted military escort, the Chekists intent on collecting and sending messages from their local office, Caitlin the same from hers. McColl had no idea how she’d persuaded Komarov to take her along, but perhaps the Cheka boss was offering some small compensation for dragging her all this way from Moscow. Perhaps.
There’d been no audible gunfire since their departure several hours earlier, but McColl was relieved to see their droshky appear in the distance. Soon the three of them were picking their way across the weed-infested tracks, Caitlin looking none too pleased, Komarov and Maslov chatting behind her. The two Chekists were getting on better, McColl thought; they seemed to have settled into an uncle-nephew relationship during the journey, and there was less of the abrasiveness that McColl remembered from Moscow.
Once they’d all climbed aboard, and Caitlin had disappeared in the direction of her compartment, McColl asked Komarov if he had any news. McColl meant about the train, and was more than a little surprised when the Russian delved in his pocket for a crumpled telegraph form and told him to see for himself.
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 19
