Captain of the Steppe

by Oleg Pavlov

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  First published in the UK in 2013 by

  And Other Stories

  91 Tadros Court, High Wycombe, Bucks, HP13 7GF, United Kingdom

  www.andotherstories.org

  Copyright © Oleg Pavlov 1994

  Published by arrangement with ELKOST Intl. Literary Agency

  English language translation copyright © Ian Appleby 2013

  Introduction copyright © Marcel Theroux 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

  The right of Oleg Pavlov to be identified as Author of Captain of the Steppe (original title Kazennaya skazka) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 9781908276186

  eBook ISBN 9781908276193

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

  This publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT programme supporting translations of Russian literature.

  Contents

  Introduction, by Marcel Theroux

  1 · Once Upon a Time

  2 · Potatoes

  3 · Comrade Skripitsyn

  4 · A Matter of State

  5 · Released

  6 · A Passion for Orders

  7 · The Whole Truth

  8 · A New Era

  9 · A Feat in Winter

  10 · For Glory, and for the Peace of His Soul

  Epilogue

  List of Characters

  Glossary and Note on Military Ranks

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  Dedicated to Russian captains, those strongest of servicemen, on whose hard graft, aye, on whose hard graves our Empire-state reposed through the centuries. May they never be forgotten.

  Introduction

  The steppe where this story unfolds is the vast grassy plain which sweeps across the heartland of the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. In Kazakh, it is known as Saryarka, the yellow steppe. It is a place vividly recreated in Oleg Pavlov’s novel – its endless grass, its changing light, its mud, its snow, and the fierce Buran wind that blows over it in winter.

  The Kazakh steppe forms part of the vast Eurasian steppe which rolls between Russia and its former empire in Central Asia. It is a place of bewildering size. I have crossed parts of it by train and by air. Its hugeness is disorienting. In such a landscape, individual human beings and their struggles seem diminished in dignity and significance.

  During Soviet times, the Kazakh steppe was a place of exile and punishment. Prisoners served out their sentences doing forced labour in the notorious Karlag system of camps, which centred on Karaganda – a city proverbial in Russian for being in the middle of nowhere.

  In Captain of the Steppe, Pavlov’s subject is the lives of the most transient and isolated of the steppe’s inhabitants: a company of soldiers at a remote penal colony during the last decade of Soviet power. The men are guarding prisoners – in camp slang, zeks – at an outpost in Karabas, forty or so kilometres from Karaganda. The zeks are almost certainly mining coal for Soviet factories. In fact, the prisoners themselves are dealt with only glancingly. Pavlov’s main interest is in the lives of a handful of the soldiers, in particular Captain Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov, who is the book’s hero.

  A decent and conscientious officer, Khabarov is coming up to his retirement. A more pragmatic man would see out his final days at the camp and leave. Not so Khabarov.

  The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut laid it down as a principle of good storytelling that ‘every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water’.The desire that moves Khabarov is just as primal and only slightly more grandiose. Frustrated by the rotten rations sent out to his troops along with year-old copies of Pravda, he is inspired to find a solution. The plan he comes up with is very simple: he decides to grow a crop of potatoes in order to feed his men.

  Despite his ignorance of agriculture and the reluctance of the hungry troops, who can’t see the sense in burying something you can eat, Khabarov perseveres with his scheme. And as he is repeatedly thwarted, his sensible and humane plan begins to take on the dimensions of a tragicomic obsession.

  Khabarov’s single-minded pursuit of his mission triggers a series of unexpected episodes, misunderstandings and unforeseen outcomes that could be called farcical if the novel’s overall key wasn’t so resolutely minor. Most significantly, he finds himself pitted against the shady special investigator Skripitsyn, a man whose opponents have an unfortunate tendency to perish in fires.

  During his military service in the 1980s, Oleg Pavlov himself worked as a camp guard in northern Kazakhstan, and the book is packed with the kind of detail that assures us of the author’s experience in this world. Pavlov confidently recreates the soldiers’ slangy and abrasive speech; he is a connoisseur of the malodorous atmosphere of the camp, the operations of the latrines, and the bathhouse which smells ‘as though they were drying out damp cats’. There is a note of personal bitterness when he compares a character to one of ‘those medical orderlies, posted to obscure military hospitals … who, if they treat you, will surely cripple you’.

  Captain of the Steppe was first published in Russia in 1994, when its author was twenty-four, and became the first in a loose trilogy about the lives of men working in the prison system of Soviet Kazakhstan. It is an almost purely male world. Female characters in Captain of the Steppe include only a telephone receptionist, a train driver, a faithless wife and some Kazakh women encountered during wanderings on the steppe. The book has a young man’s relish for ribaldry and knockabout humour, but there is pathos too.

  Pavlov does not aim for a naturalistic depiction of the life of the camp – the sort that is so hauntingly achieved in the stories of Varlam Shalamov. Instead, Pavlov imbues his world with a very particular flavour: the mixture of tragedy, absurdity and black comedy that runs in the veins of Russian literature as far back as the work of Nikolai Gogol.

  The spine of the story is Khabarov’s mock-heroic quest for his potatoes, but Pavlov has a Gogolian fondness for excursions into the lives of his minor characters: the morose Cossack Ilya Peregud, who knows how to make vodka out of ‘rice, wheat, rotten apples, wood chips, old women’s headscarves or sour cabbage soup’; the villainous Skripitsyn and his hapless sidekick Sanka Kolodin; or the incompetent Colonel Pobedov, who presides over an organisation which enacts in miniature the failings of the entire Soviet system:

  By then he already considered himself an eminent military commander, not knowing – because they weren’t reporting it to him – that the soldiers were escaping from the companies and the zeks from the camps, where the guards standing sentry were drunk and asleep; that the officers were fighting over the most insignificant appointments and promotions, while in the more distant locations there were unholy levels of drunkenness; that everywhere the very plaster was coming away.

  Hanging over the book is the knowledge that, within a very few years, the Soviet Union will cease to exist, and the province in which the prison camp stands will become part of the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan.

  Captain of the Steppe can be read as a satire on the absurdity and chaos of the decaying Soviet empire
, but in the end it is Captain Khabarov’s struggle that stays in the reader’s mind. He is an obsessed but decent individual trying to do his best in a world which finds his altruism both unfathomable and threatening. And in telling the story of Khabarov’s obsession and its impact on those around him, Pavlov fashions a disquieting and comic elegy for the foot soldiers of a vanished nation.

  Marcel Theroux

  London, 2013

  Captain of the Steppe

  1

  Once Upon a Time

  They used to deliver newspapers like potatoes to the company stationed out in the steppe: a month’s worth at a time, or two, or even enough to see them through to spring, so as not to waste fuel and not to pamper the unit. They were last year’s papers, sent from the chaotic regimental reading room where they took whatever was left in the binders of back issues. But even though the papers were tattered, when they reported something big that had taken place long ago, unknown to the soldiers, they found tears could be squeezed from their eyes. To find out so late and yet so suddenly about all the world’s events drove the soldiers to squander what remained of their lives; lives that were in any case wasting away. Even amidst this dereliction of duty, you could hear them drearily going over and over what they had read, reluctant to forget. Word by word, the discussions among the servicemen grew more heated, each man developing his particular opinion and, if suddenly some bigger and more significant event came to light, yet without any clear political line, it would end in fisticuffs.

  Captain Khabarov expected nothing from life. If he ever planted himself in a group of these textual analysts, he would furtively mix his long-standing personal anguish into the general unease arising – or so they maintained – from the international situation.

  Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov had wound up in government service neither through calculation nor through coercion; mind you, his own free will hadn’t played much part either. So they had shaved his head and taken him as a soldier, as they did everyone. He served out his time. But when his term as a conscript was up, they persuaded him to stay on as a sergeant major. ‘Stay put, Ivan, carry on serving. This is the right place for you. You’re not one of them civvy bastards, are you?’

  The military man in Khabarov could be detected in his mean, crude features. The sergeant major was a thickset, stocky man who resembled a great sack of potatoes. This made him unremarkable, comparable to maybe another million servicemen just like him. However, this million formed a mass of people within which each individual disappeared without trace. He was fated – here’s the truth – to be suspended in it like some sort of clot. Anyway, he stayed in the service for the rations and the pay packet, which wouldn’t buy much in the way of treats. No matter what happened, Khabarov would think, ‘There’s no way around it; just have to put up with it.’ And he also thought, no matter what happened, ‘This isn’t over yet.’

  Now in dusty captain’s epaulettes, Khabarov was serving out the rest of his natural life in one of the camp companies in the Karaganda region. He’d been shunted around the prison camps from Pechora to Zeravshan for longer than any hardened criminal, yet he hadn’t been promoted any higher.

  The place in the steppe where Captain Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov was now serving was called Karabas. This is what the Kazakhs had dubbed it. In their language, the name meant something like ‘The Black Head’. However, there were by now no Kazakhs to be seen anywhere near Karabas. They had settled on far-off collective farms, raising sheep. From time to time the steppe-dwellers would come into the settlement for a quick look at the camp, and in the hope of maybe getting their hands on a bit of ironmongery. And when they were asked how the place had come to inherit such a dour name, the Kazakhs looked round shiftily and confessed that they didn’t know where their forefathers had got this notion of blackness or how they had contrived to see a head in the midst of this desolate expanse of steppe. The hills that surrounded the place like grey smoke did not look remotely like heads, while their stony ridges darkened in the dank weather to look more like tree stumps. Mind you, there was space and to spare. No plant life, nor agriculture, nor rivers troubled the good steppe earth. There was no crowding. It wasn’t because of the space, though, that people had settled there. They were to build a prison camp; the site was chosen as if someone had spat there, purely out of malice, and there they had set about living.

  Karabas was divided into two parts, of which the more unassuming was the sentry company quarters, while the other, all too visible – like some great barge on the steppe – was the camp itself. Both the company quarters and the camp had been built at the same time, but they had suffered many batterings over the years, while temporary structures had been put up and pulled down with equal abandon. In all its time, the settlement had never seen shops, public amenities, houses or churches. There were only cheerless barracks, exactly like kennels, right down to the idiot howl of the guard dogs that echoed around them. Boots had trodden out pathways stretching towards the barracks. The paths were so narrow, it was as though people had been walking along a rim, afraid to fall. These paths led away to dead ends, breaking off where the sealed zones and other strictures began. Access to Karabas was by a narrow-gauge railway that parted company from the main line far beyond the hills. Another route away from the camp led to a barely visible graveyard, where the sickbay buried unclaimed zeks. At this site, from time to time, freshly dug soil would appear. These were all the connections, as it were, all the ways in and out. If truth be told, in Karabas only the barrack lice circulated freely, two-timing the soldiers with the zeks at will, and vice-versa. The lice paid each other visits, eating and drinking, and multiplying a hundredfold. Meanwhile the men suffered from itchiness and squashed the little monsters in the midst of their festivities, which created a bond between them stronger than a mother’s love.

  Not counting the livestock, Karabas was inhabited by soldiers, zeks, volunteer workmen and prison warders. The zeks and the soldiers lived here for years, seeing out their terms, which meant military service for some and imprisonment for others. A small factory had been built in the camp where they knocked together boots, always to the same pattern, boots that weighed a ton, for just such camps as this. The working days exhaled sour cabbage soup; long and oppressive, they welled up as though from ancient depths.

  The soldiers stayed alive on their pay and rations. There hadn’t been a pay rise in decades, but there hadn’t been a pay cut either. On the quiet, it’s true, there were mutterings that they were long overdue a raise for this sort of service. On the basis that a substantial portion of their wages was being embezzled, they would serve still more slackly, so as not to lose out. Meanwhile their commanders were glad to take every opportunity to declare that they were carrying out their duties poorly and being paid for nothing. And that’s where things were left. In the summer, rations would be cut to try and save at least a little something for the winter, while in the autumn, similarly, they wouldn’t get quite enough, as rations were kept aside, in reserve. But when January stole up unannounced, these reserves would barely feed a sparrow, and no one knew why they had gone hungry for so long. Your zek, now, he’ll demand what’s his even if he has to slit his own throat. Your warder, he’ll steal it on the sly, so where’s a serviceman to find his cut? You can’t exactly weigh what comes in from the regiment. They say that the supplies meet regulations, but which regulations? Who knows? They ration by gross weight, as though they don’t understand that grain settles out, or shrinks when cooked, or generally just vanishes away. Instead of proper nourishment, just that dreadful army margarine. And the fat is like water: you’ll never feel full, and your very soul is repulsed by it. Instead of apples: dried fruit. They substitute this hot, tarry, tea-like concoction for actual tea. No matter where you look, they’re scrimping and saving. Put plainly, the men weren’t serving so much as surviving the best they could; and if you did manage to stuff yourself full, then for some reason you’d lose all your will to live.

  The captain neve
r let slip a word of complaint about his fate. Complaining meant picking someone to blame or evading responsibility, and these were things he did not know how to do. When he’d ended up in the sentry company, Khabarov had soon understood that there was no real military service here. There was just the same misery for everyone, the same toil: hauling this barge of a camp and all who sailed upon her, all struggling to keep down a rising seasickness. This was why he didn’t like the camp commanders and had no respect for the peripatetic courts, when gawpers would crowd into the club building and sentences would be passed, even when for once the guilty copped it. This was a misfortune, and as at funerals, only those nearest and dearest should be present. A solitary individual shouldn’t be held up for display and abuse. Khabarov plodded along under the camp’s yoke, making life easier neither for himself, nor for the zeks, nor for the soldiers. Each man served out his time in the camp, but there, where they would only have died alone, they lived en masse, kept on their feet by being crammed together so tightly that not even a dead man could fall.

  Only in winter did a sleepy silence hang heavy over the settlement, and a grimy off-white calm seep through, sending Karabas into hibernation. Throughout this long period, you could remember how life had abated, and the remembered warmth would heat you like a stove. The captain liked to drift away in this heat, which also soothed the sting of his many snubs and setbacks.

  If it were possible, now that we have painted this picture of the camp settlement’s expanse, to turn from the height we have already attained to its depths, then we’d have to fall like a stone into the barracks square, striking the eternally drunk Ilya Peregud, a man so huge that even without taking aim you would always hit.

  Ilya Peregud served in the company in all the unfilled posts – those insignificant, transient jobs that won’t make a man a commanding officer, but burden him with the mundane chores: counting the sheets in the stores, making sure the dogs have been fed. Karabas suffered from a permanent shortage of personnel, so all these duties fell to Peregud. He had first caught the captain’s eye as a prison warder, being quite lost in that position. The captain had led him by the hand, like a little orphan child, across into his company. Ilya’s heart and soul ran on vodka. Mind you, he wasn’t keen on moving; he was usually to be found, like a bear in his den, at one of his posts, more often than not in the stores. Peregud would be located in a dark box room, which space he filled completely: a veritable coffin. Going in, a person would take Ilya for a dead man: he’d be sat there, his huge head with the topknot apparently ready at any moment to tumble off his great mound of a torso. One arm of this mighty warrior would rise into the air like a mountainside, and in the gloom a glugging noise would be heard, and then Ilya, sighing with relief after quenching his thirst. ‘Just who are you? Are you a Cossack?’ Peregud would ask pointedly, failing to recognise who had walked in. And then he’d answer himself, ‘Well, I am a Cossack!’