Captain of the Steppe

by Oleg Pavlov

  ‘We should go, it’s about to kick off … ’ Sanka whispered, but his boss shrugged him off angrily.

  ‘You animals! Animals!’ yelled Skripitsyn, lurching forward, and the soldiers rushed to get out of his way.

  ‘Khabarov is our commander. If he gives the order, then we’ll start loading!’ shouted the soldiers to the Special-Department agent as they scattered throughout the yard, leaving Khabarov and Skripitsyn alone in the middle of a cold, slushy ring.

  They stood facing each other, so dissimilar, so alien, that they would never see eye to eye. ‘Kolodin,’ snapped the investigator, ‘is the order clear to you? Carry on, don’t be afraid.’ Kolodin stepped firmly off towards the shack. The soldiers waited in perplexity, not approaching. When he dragged the first sack out from the shack, Khabarov sagged to the ground and yelled violently, ‘Lads, those are ours!’ However, the men were silent and kept their distance, waiting for something, already a little afraid of the Special-Department agent.

  The captain stumbled and collapsed; he’d run out of energy. He got to his knees and stared mindlessly at Skripitsyn, moaning: ‘I’ll place you under arrest myself, I’ll … I’ll shoot you!’ With unsteady hands he unholstered his pistol and brandished it at the men, shaking and rocking. But Skripitsyn stood his ground – he didn’t believe for a second that Khabarov had enough courage to shoot. And then Sanka leapt awkwardly at the captain, pulling the trigger with all the strength he could muster. A snap shot rang out, the heavens rang, and their dirty blue hue was shaken. Safe and sound, but limp from delayed shock, Sanka yelled, ‘I’ve got him, he’s for it now!’ Following Skripitsyn’s orders, the captain was tied up and locked in the armoury, which had an iron roof, no windows and a grille instead of a door. He was still hurling himself about and yelling, ‘Seize him, lads! Get him, my boys!’ Once they had dragged Khabarov into the armoury, the Special-Department agent turned his gaze upon the captain’s pistol, now lying unclaimed on the ground. He picked it up and stashed it in his briefcase.

  The cleverer soldiers stole away from the square so as not to be set to work. But the ones whose curiosity kept them rooted there were grabbed by Skripitsyn and put under Sanka’s command to drag the potatoes into the lorry. Dejected, they flung the sacks into the lorry with something approaching fury, which meant the loading proceeded without hindrance; quite swiftly, in fact.

  As it turned out, the zeks had been watching what was unfolding in the barracks square for some time, sitting in crowded ranks on the roofs of their own barracks. They suddenly took it on themselves to begin an incessant whistling in solidarity with the heavily laden soldiers.

  There, on the prison-camp barrack roofs, disturbances had started that were quickly turning dangerous. They set one of the roofs alight and flames soon took hold. Shots began rattling out from the sentry towers. The zeks reluctantly withdrew back into the zone. Only the camp juveniles remained on the barrack roofs, like parched saplings. They knew no fear because they hated everything around them, as though born to it. Knowing that the machine-gunners wouldn’t dare shoot at them, the young lads started showing off, flinging down slates at the soldiers heading away from the barracks. Only when Kolodin was already fastening down the cover on the lorry did the prison warders clamber up onto the roofs. They laid into the teenagers with long steel rods – reinforcing bars – chasing and grabbing them. They swung the last few by their hands and feet and tossed them off the roof.

  The square emptied of people. The sole warrant officer in the company ran in from guard duty. Skripitsyn had sent for him. The enforcement agent handed over command of the company to him, ordering that Captain Khabarov be neither untied nor released. He also promised an escort for the arrested party to arrive the very next day. The warrant officer – who had the aspect of a legendary warrior – had only one response to all the arrangements being made by the investigator: silence – although his expression suggested disagreement. He nodded and shook his head, but never once opened his mouth for fear of himself being arrested, should the investigator smell the fumes on his breath. His mournful, drink-ravaged face eventually sickened Skripitsyn so much that he stopped mid-word and waved his hand, then made his solitary way to the lorry.

  As soon as the lorry started up and moved off, its engine rumbling, a great howl went up, as if all the guard dogs in Karabas had woken up; as if even the steppe itself had found a voice and suddenly taken up an indistinct, rumbling howl.

  The lorry drove off. Far from the camp settlement, its faint headlights formed the sole illumination in the whole darkening steppe.

  Towards December, the heavens simply collapse; from them fall great torrents of numbingly cold rain, often mixed with snow. The winds drive cold air about, honing it so its gusts cut through everything living, even the steppe grasses. The earth chills. The steppe track is squelched into a filthy quagmire, which gets smeared across junctions and sharp turns.

  Huddled into his greatcoat, Skripitsyn kept opening and closing his eyes; Sanka could not make out if his boss was dozing or fretting. They were rolling along a level strip of land that was swathed in mud. Suddenly a rut narrowed. The lorry shook jarringly. Skripitsyn gave a moan. Sanka instantly slowed down. ‘Put your foot on it!’ ordered his boss at once.

  ‘I can’t just here. The wheels will spin in the mud and we’ll get bogged down.’

  ‘Faster, drive faster!’ said Skripitsyn with a grimace, not understanding what had been said.

  ‘Punish me if you like, but I have to answer for you.’

  ‘Oh, shut your mouth!’ exclaimed Skripitsyn. ‘Listen here. Turn off the road, head straight onto the steppe. Drive!’ Skripitsyn was gasping for breath; his dry eyes were shining like a dog’s. He floundered about in the cramped noisy cab as though he meant to stand upright in it. The lorry had driven off onto the steppe and was forging along, God knows where to. It rattled over the bumps and shook from side to side. And then, with a grinding noise, they were flung from their seats, while the lorry, which had nearly turned over, dug deep into the earth and stalled. Sanka came to with the sour taste of blood in his mouth and a nagging pain around his ribs. He bellowed and spat something onto the floor. Skripitsyn was gazing worriedly at his bloodied acolyte.

  ‘My chest hurts,’ the other man complained, and the agent turned away from him. ‘Are you all right?’ mumbled Kolodin, but heard nothing in reply. He quietly spat out the rest of the blood, wiped himself up and tried to start the engine with a shaking hand. The lorry spluttered and slipped a little.

  ‘Are we stuck fast, then?’ asked Skripitsyn, all of a sudden.

  ‘We’ll get ourselves out, we’ll get going again …’

  ‘We won’t drive anywhere, get out,’ Skripitsyn said, with determination. ‘You throw the potatoes out of the back, we’ll sink them in this puddle.’

  ‘How come? You said yourself, orders came from Pobedov to take them to the regiment.’

  ‘I’m my own Pobedov … What do you know about my life, you idiot? It’s me, I command everyone.’

  ‘First you say take the potatoes, that was the order. Then you say there is no order, chuck them away. But maybe I’m also a person. What do we need to do that for?’ And then Skripitsyn lost his patience and blurted out: ‘The reason you’re a person is that I saved you. Or have you forgotten? I saved you; I didn’t shrink away from you in disgust. When I say jump, you jump, just as I said!’ Sanka dumbly submitted to this command and climbed out, and into the back of the lorry.

  Skripitsyn climbed out after him and walked off a little, then stood motionless on the empty expanse of steppe. He stood there bare-headed, his wits seemingly addled by the steppe winds. He was looking askance at the mud into which the potatoes were being poured, and to his eyes they came alive: they snored gently in the sacks as the tireless Sanka lifted them; as he threw them overboard, they shrieked, raining down; and they droned on in the mud.

  Eventually, they formed a mountain. ‘There, that’s it, now they’ve spoiled … �
� mumbled Skripitsyn under his breath.

  When it was all over, the lorry started up and moved off, but rather than plunging still more angrily ahead, it crawled heavily backwards onto the potato pile, flattening it down and then grinding it with its wheels, until nothing was left there but a raw paste.

  4

  A Matter of State

  His eyes bleary with fatigue, Kolodin missed the moment when, having been dragged along the steppe through the ruins of mining villages and through little towns that stood empty along its edges, the highway seeped finally into twilit Karaganda like a sluggish, laden-down river. He’d confused the fires blinding him with the fainter fires in Karaganda. The lorry sped along dingy, flat, leaden squares and swerved its way between blocks of flats, lifeless in the night-time that squeezed down on them; it scared the sleeping side streets and sneaked through deserted junctions.

  Although the Karaganda regiment was based within the city boundaries, it was surrounded by open spaces and ground that had been dug into by abandoned foundations and trenches. Here, in the middle of nowhere, it was further hidden by a concrete wall that looked like a long, wide road, although the road only led along its own closed circle.

  This wall could only be traversed by way of the long road that encircled it, ending in a kind of funnel, where a gate suddenly appeared: an abyss of gaping black steel. In it, though, there was a little door, as if to a house; not for vehicles, this, but for people. Hanging above the gateposts were lamps, burning inside steel muzzles. The place was empty, and hollow. The same lamps shone melting paths down into the mire at the gates, where the mud had been churned up during the day.

  They’d stopped expecting anyone to arrive at the checkpoint a good while earlier – they were relaxing for the evening, playing cards. Skripitsyn was asleep. Sanka went to the gatehouse himself. There he waited, while their arrival at the regiment was recorded in the logbook. As happens towards nightfall, a certain cosiness had set in at the gatehouse. The duty officer who had been dragged away from the card game by this whole procedure – just by looking at him you could tell he was a kind man – stamped and signed the record, giving a cheery wink to Sanka. ‘So where’s that secret boss of yours? Worn out, is he? Taking a nap?’ As soon as Kolodin appeared on the threshold, the soldiers on sentry duty in the guardroom went silent and stared at him; they stared reproachfully at the acolyte of the Special-Department head until he left, as though he had no right even to be in the same room as them.

  The officer sat briskly back down to his cards, exclaiming, ‘Oh, what I’d give for more hearts!’

  One of the sentries grimaced unhappily. ‘Them buggers get to ride in lorries. All right for some …’

  ‘Everyone knows that Skripitsyn is a crawler,’ the officer could not restrain himself. ‘He’d kiss a toilet seat, if he thought it would get him promoted. There’s never enough butter for that one, he always wants it spread thicker!’ Meanwhile, outside the grilles on the gatehouse windows, the cast-iron gates were clattering as they slowly parted, opening for the waiting lorry.

  Nothing was stirring on the regimental parade square when it came up under a searchlight beam arcing down from an iron mast erected above the roofs.

  There were boxy constructions that could only be told apart by their smell, which hit you from some distance off – one, from the bathhouse, smelt as though they were drying out damp cats; another, rotten, was from the cookhouse – these were arrayed along the edges of the square like sentry boxes. Above the huge regimental square there hung a faint black cloud, in which the searchlight beam played like a vein of sparks of mysterious origin. The air itself had turned into a government-issue machine, fit for breathing in and out.

  At this time of night the regiment was deathly quiet. Once the soldiers had eaten, they were led in a column to the crappers, where by company and platoon the final evacuation of the day – there were supposed to be three, in all – took place. After this, the soldiers were led into the barracks, and if nobody did anything out of line, lights-out was soon called. The barracks stank of puttees, even though they used to beat up men who hadn’t washed theirs for months. It also stank everywhere of bleach, like someone else’s piss. There was a standing order in the regiment, when it came to disinfection: pails full of bleach stood everywhere. To get into the cookhouse you had to dip your hands in the pail; only then would they let you eat. After crapping you were also supposed to wet your hands in the pail. The bleach ate away at your hands so that, with time, they began to look more like dead wood, and even started to rot.

  Kolodin drove out onto the square and stopped by the headquarters, a powerful stone building surrounded by bushes. Skripitsyn came round slowly and shook himself out of the lorry. Limping a little, he dragged himself off to the HQ, almost dead on his feet, but near the entrance he bumped into one of the junior staff officers, who seized tight hold of him, and apparently did not intend to let go. ‘You what? Do you know already? You running off? Are you heading for a fall, Skripitsyn?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ spluttered the investigator, pushing the other man away in irritation.

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t know! Bless him! Pobedov has roused the whole regiment – “Where’s Skripitsyn? Bring me Skripitsyn … ” He had a right go at me, about my tie being wrinkled. But I said to him my tie had been ironed. What are you up to, then? You’ve shat all over the old man’s wellbeing, and you’re off into the bushes?’ They were pushing and shoving in the dark, scarcely able to see, finally tumbling into the brightly lit entrance with their arms wrapped round each other. ‘Good grief, Skripitsyn,’ came the staff officer’s shrill cry. ‘Have you been digging graves?’ And the man backed away in fear, then set off at a run. Unexpectedly left in peace, Skripitsyn doubled over as though hit in the stomach and groaned, ‘Damn you all, you miserable, cowardly freaks!’ Lights were on in all the HQ windows. One window probably shone bright every night – the office window of Fyodor Fyodorovich Pobedov, the regimental commander – even when the rest of HQ was fading into twilight. The old colonel made himself stay at work into the small hours, so those around him would never imagine that he was napping, or absent.

  Pinched and diminished, Skripitsyn flitted through the door to HQ like a mouse through a drain hole. Such agility was not necessary to get into HQ, but the agent had been put through the wringer by all that had happened, so was feeling rather like a mouse. He slipped up the empty staircase to the first floor, the colonel’s, and calmed down. Then he ran along the corridor, keeping close to the walls, but when he eventually pressed himself up against that massive door behind which raised voices had already been audible for a while, one of the other office doors suddenly flew open and a fat clerk with thin lines instead of lips and eyebrows stepped out. Skripitsyn instantly stood up straight and turned to her, thinking up the fibs he would need on the fly. The clerk, though, gave a great ‘Ugh!’, making her breasts swell out like clouds, as if no mere mouse but a great rat had appeared before her. She scurried back into the office in disgust. This being the second occasion that someone had shied away from him as if he were a leper, Skripitsyn lost all self-control. He forgot his fear and burst into the anteroom to learn without further ado what had happened to the colonel while he, Skripitsyn, had been away from the regiment.

  In the anteroom, which had that sour smell that usually develops in empty rooms, were two of the less insignificant men in the regiment, standing in very straightforward positions: one opposite the other, arms by their sides. These two were Senior Lieutenant Sokolskii, eternal duty officer in the HQ, and Lieutenant Colonel Petr Valerianovich Degtiar, the adjutant.

  The lieutenant colonel looked like a nail: straight, durable, somehow even ferrous. This was a man ashamed of his bald spot; he concealed it under his peaked cap, which he would only remove at Party meetings. Sometimes they would hammer him deep into some matter and could only extract him again with difficulty. Sometimes he got bent in the line of duty, but then they could alwa
ys knock him straight and try hammering him in again.

  When the figure of Skripitsyn appeared on the threshold, standing skewed and, as ever, holding tight to his pitiful, freakish briefcase, the staff officers stopped in their tracks; you might have thought they’d been having a friendly chat about him. Skripitsyn definitely imagined collusion in their silence, and he burst out, ‘I want to speak to the colonel. I know he’s expecting me!’

  At this, Degtiar said, ‘Anatolii, you’re covered in blood,’ and looked concerned.

  ‘The anteroom is full of mud,’ Sokolskii added, and barred the scurrying warrant officer’s intended route.

  ‘There is a lot of mud,’ echoed Degtiar. ‘Anatolii, you can’t go in to the colonel like that, it’s not right.’

  ‘Let me through,’ pleaded Skripitsyn, cowed.

  ‘I won’t let you through, and I won’t even report that you’re here,’ insisted the senior lieutenant.

  ‘No! You’ll let me through!’ shouted the investigator convulsively.

  They would probably have come to blows if the door had not suddenly been flung open and Fyodor Fyodorovich Pobedov himself had not appeared with words that he had prepared in advance: ‘What on earth is going on here? This is the regimental commander’s office, not some street market!’ Lost to all in his office, hiding behind its pleasant, peaceful walls like a frog in the muck of a swamp, the colonel had a trick of leaping out and catching people so suddenly that the belief spread he was omnipresent. Thin, but with a belly like someone had stuffed a pillow up his tunic, robbed of height, with bulging eyes that seemed ever surprised, and as hard as twice-baked bread, overall Fyodor Fyodorovich Pobedov was a man who had been brought into being not through love, but fear. When calm, he was all wrinkled and faded, making himself quiet and even submissive, while turning noticeably stupider. Mind you, once provoked, he instantly took on such strength that he shook with its gravity, and was remarkable for his blind rages.