Captain of the Steppe

by Oleg Pavlov

  Once he’d said what had come feverishly to mind, Skripitsyn sighed to himself, as he saw how blindly Sanka believed him, how he whined with all their accumulated anguish: ‘I knew it, I knew … I’m behind you every step of the way, no matter where … I’d even kill for you …’

  ‘Hey, now, stop that, what are you thinking?’ Skripitsyn turned numb. ‘Listen, you stay in the department, in the morning clean my coat, and don’t take a single step outside.’

  ‘But where will you go, if I stay?’ protested Sanka, loyally.

  ‘I’ll go to the infirmary, they’ll give me a space there. Now you get a good night’s sleep.’

  Appearing in the sickbay, Skripitsyn woke up the duty orderly and, not bothering with long explanations, demanded a bed for the night in the officers’ ward. At the same moment, he wrote off Sanka Kolodin: first, from the roster of the Special Department, sensing that this soldier mustn’t be around him much longer. But later, as he took a long time to fall asleep in the empty ward, feeling hungry, and thinking over the best way to get rid of this witness that he no longer required, Skripitsyn caught himself thinking it would be better if this soldier went missing by himself, even if this meant he died. He would have fallen asleep with this thought rippling through his soggy, deadly exhausted brain, had he not suddenly remembered his own boss … Smershevich.

  Skripitsyn smirked and projected his words clearly into the emptiness: ‘Well, just where are you now? You what? You got burned?’

  ‘A fire … ’ he suddenly thought, with alarm, and recoiling from the idea even in his somnolent state, he came to in an unusually compassionate mood. ‘No … No.’ But all the same, this thought about a fire filled him with a sense of peace. And he remembered the business now, in every detail …

  It had happened without Skripitsyn’s involvement, although it had changed a lot in his life, too. Usually, in the autumn, the city sanitary department would send a lorry to pump out the regimental cesspit, full to the brim by this time of year. The logistics service was responsible for summoning the lorry, but they were having a change of command just then, and they forgot to call for it. In the winter, the cesspit overflowed, which meant areas of the regiment’s more intimate places began to be fouled up. It was impossible to scoop out the shit: winter is winter. The only thing that remained was to hack it out, or wait for the spring so it could melt. Of course, if they did hack it out, they would be removing their protection from the cold. Around that time, Fyodor Fyodorovich personally ordered that another, temporary, latrine trench be dug around the back. This was dug out of the frozen ground by seven soldiers who were in the sickbay for treatment. They were brought in so as not to tear healthy people away from their duties, although the healthy ones would never have agreed to build a shithouse. The poorly ones, though, were happy at the prospect of not seeing the inside of the barracks for another week or so. They had already dug a hole as deep as a person when they came upon a lumpy, frozen-over cable; but, not pausing to figure out what was what, they hacked away at it with crowbars as if it was made of rock. The electric shock from the hewn-open cable killed all seven on the spot. When the deaths were investigated, they discovered that HQ had a map of its underground infrastructure, on which the cable was clearly marked by a dotted line. Pobedov hadn’t even bothered asking for this map. He’d chosen the place for the shithouse by eye, the old-fashioned way. The investigation, and the fatal incident itself, put a great strain on the colonel. He felt so sorry for the lads who had been killed that it hurt, and he reproached himself, but at the same time he refused to accept he was at fault; it had just been one of those unfortunate events. It was Smershevich who saved the colonel: he made the investigation so convoluted that the seven corpses simply vanished into thin air. Having performed such an important service, Smershevich had expected some particular regard, but the colonel shrank away from him, and secretly began to hate him. Once he even said openly that Smershevich should leave the regiment, to which Smershevich replied that in fact he would remove Pobedov.

  And then, out of the blue, a rumour started up that Smershevich was Jewish. It started and spread, trickling in from who knew where. Soon everyone was chanting, ‘Yid, Yid … ’ Surrounded by these whispers, Smershevich started drinking terribly, mortally. It seemed to him that the rumour had been started by Fyodor Fyodorovich himself; that is, by Pobedov. True, the colonel was generous with his use of the word ‘Yid’. Threatening everything on God’s earth, Smershevich staggered drunk from person to person, crying bitterly, ‘Well, who is it who’s lying? Do I look anything like a Yid to you?’ And if they couldn’t convince him otherwise, he would start fighting. The rumour started that same winter. That winter, the colonel began trying to win Skripitsyn over, and many people heard Smershevich threatening his investigator: ‘Is this you crawling out of the muck and into the good life? Look, you push ahead, you jump the gun, and I’ll have your fat in the fire. You’ll remember what you used to be, and the dump I dragged you from.’

  Perhaps drunk, perhaps angry at being called ‘Yid’, Smershevich shortly after burned to death, burning down the department with him. Many of the cabinets, it transpired, were unlocked, which led them to conclude that before his death Smershevich had been rifling through the papers, about half of which had burned up. Anatolii Skripitsyn calculated the losses and led an inquiry into the fire. He was not implicated in the matter because he happened to have been away searching for a deserter at the time; no one even thought of suspecting him.

  These were the circumstances through which a person so comical and pitiful to look at was given command of the Special Department by Pobedov. The old man himself had long since served out his time, so they thought he would go peacefully into retirement – but the colonel would not go. 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, while recently a cook had fished a rat out of the cauldron of borscht and sworn mightily, as though the rat were responsible for eating up all the meat in it. ‘The rats are stealing it right out of the pan!’ he had cried, with righteous anger.

  5

  Released

  The simpleton to whom, in his haste, Skripitsyn had left command of the mutinous company turned out to be none other than Ilya Peregud. The Special-Department agent had driven off from Karabas, leaving this man in the middle of the square. On that ill-starred afternoon, both the square and the camp environs seemed to Peregud to have been turned upside-down. The roof of the barracks hung over the skies as though flourishing leaden wings, while Peregud himself felt badly sick. His nausea was not from what he had been drinking, but because he would have killed for a drink.

  In life, Ilya Peregud was sustained by two things, which remained at all times sacred to him, since even in his direst need they couldn’t be sold for drink: his Cossack topknot and his Cossack moustache. ‘I’m a Cossack from the Don – have you heard of that river?’ It was impossible to tear your eyes away when he was saying this! It seemed you might put him in a furnace, but even there his topknot and moustache would not burn away, while Peregud himself would stare out from the blazing coals and the fire would howl and sing ‘the riverrrr!’ His spirit was neither free nor wild but had sprouted like some perennial weed that would eventually even push its way through bare rock. He hadn’t settled down to family life, or a nice little home; he had only the most dissolute pastimes; he had no desire, nor ability, to exert himself, to make any effort at all; he didn’t want, as he put it, to turn into a worker ant. And anyway, vodka brought him happiness without exertion, without that hateful ant-like toil. When Ilya Peregud drank to his heart’s content, the days were like holidays. Turni
ng to drink from one of the resonant bottles, he felt such delight as perhaps only infants know. Peregud knew a hundred different ways of making vodka – how to distil it from rice, wheat, rotten apples, wood chips, old women’s headscarves or sour cabbage soup. He even maintained that, if none of the former was to hand, you could brew it from a mix of soil and water. Just spit in it once, to get the fermentation started! And how marvellously the first shot went down after he woke up. It penetrated right through him, as though he was an unfledged, gaping nestling. In that minute, Peregud became blissfully alive, throwing back his top-knotted head and feeling a warm flutter in his chest. Shot after shot, the nestling grew, unfurling its wings in his chest, which as a result became wide and clear, like the heavens. And then Ilya would take wing! He took wing like a strong, free bird with bright, singing plumage and little bells in his tail. Rising to heights that took your breath away, from which the very earth seemed no more than a wrinkled walnut, his Cossack spirit sailed or swam in the flowing currents of winds that smelt of tobacco, vodka, the Don river and the smoke of Cossack villages.

  Peregud remembered living in such a village with his father. His mother had died early, but their smallholding was rich. He and his father had got along well. But one day his old man set off for Rostov, to trade his berries at the collective farmers’ market, and came back on his empty cart, arms wrapped round a younger woman. He settled down with this woman, but didn’t stop loving his son. He used to say in front of her, ‘I’m leaving the smallholding to Ilya, it’s up to him what happens to you after I die; maybe he’ll let you stay in the house.’ As time went on, the woman grew weary of the old man, and began hankering after his son. She began by fashioning herself into a mother: she’d hug him, kiss him on the forehead and say tender words to him. But suddenly she couldn’t hold back and would start trying to suck at his lips.

  Ilya was reluctant to complain about her to his father. The old man had grown very attached to her, even if he had brought her back unclad and unshod from the city as though hiring a farmhand. But his stepmother grew angry at Ilya’s resistance, and turned nasty. When his father was out, she’d fling off her shirt and walk naked round the house, so that Ilya had to avoid home without his father. However, when his father was home, the lascivious woman would snatch a moment when he’d left the room and lift up her skirt: ‘Now then, son, take a look at what I’m hiding for you, my darling … ’ So Ilya had a lot to bear, driven to exhaustion by hiding the truth about her from his father. One day he finally imparted it all, laying his soul bare. The old man unhesitatingly believed his son. He took a whip to the little slut. He ordered her to spend the night in the cowshed, and for there to be not a trace of her, the toad, come the morning. But he awoke to the sound of a woman’s shrieks coming from the cowshed. He ran in and saw that his son seemed to have piled on top of his stepmother, tearing off her shirt and crawling around on her, while she was thrashing about underneath him and yelling. Then the old man forgot about his wrath. He caught his son over the head with a pole. And when Ilya came to, he had neither father nor family home. From the previous evening she had been swearing to the old man as he’d been putting the whip across her that Ilya had spoken up in revenge for her staying faithful to his father, and the son had got nowhere with her.

  The old man hoisted his unconscious son onto a horse and turned him in to the police, and when Ilya was convicted of raping his father’s wife, the old man lived for another year, then died. The house, the yard, the smallholding with the two horses, pigs, orchard and vegetable patch – all went to that vile woman who had married him to herself, and practically killed him.

  The young widow sold it all as a single lot, without haggling, and lightly skipped away from the foreign village she had plundered.

  Ilya Peregud drank down misery in the camps until he started vomiting blood, yet he survived due to his natural strength. He did three years and survived, while they made the rest of his sentence easier, having turned him into a zek, albeit an unmanageable one, by putting him to unpaid, black-market work.

  He was seeing out the rest of his time in Karaganda, meaning his work days were spent on the far reaches of the Kazakh steppe, in a clean little town called Abai, where they had set him to work as a miner. But his soul was not meant for the daily grind and graft. He never even got used to getting up when told to and following orders.

  The Kazakh steppes were a kind of God-given homeland for him, like a warm bright sky for a bird. For the Kazakhs who roamed from place to place with the collective farm herds, every guest was dear – they’d feed him up and get him drunk and shed blood for him. They’d give him all the kumis he could drink. And, what’s more, there’s this araka stuff, which is even stronger than Russian vodka, oh, yes!

  It could be said that Ilya Peregud drank out of his endless fear of sobriety. Either it was mental illness, a portent of the DTs, or out of desperate ignorance or the unceasing viciousness that had built up within him, but Peregud maintained, sometimes with scary intensity, that there was in the world a terrible force seeking to exterminate all Cossacks. In his mind, this force was called ‘the hounds’; he wasn’t able to express it any more precisely than that. It meant that good order which compels a person to submit.

  Once he was released from forced labour, Ilya Peregud stuffed himself with food in the steppes from Karaganda to Zhezkazgan, from Uralsk to Balkhash. Ancient enemies of the Cossacks, the steppe-dwellers were initially somewhat afraid of Peregud, with that moustache and topknot of his, but in time they began to like him. Peregud forgot how to speak Russian, and learned to hunt for steppe game and drink kumis without revulsion, but he was a poor worker and his bosses despaired of him. Come winter, the nomads went back to the collective farms, where there was a great mass of Russians and Kazakhs already settled. And their debts had to be paid in full, in cash if you had it or in sweat if you hadn’t.

  So come winter, Ilya made his way from the steppe to the little mining settlements, but everywhere there were bosses he could not stomach, and low pay, and nowhere to live. Women fell in love with him, but each one wanted only to marry him; only then would they agree to provide food and drink, and to register him as residing in their home. But for Peregud marriage was that same, ant-like, unwanted expenditure of effort; there was no way he could inflict it on himself.

  Once Ilya Peregud got lost on the steppe, on his way from one nomad camp to the next in search of the araka that gave him life. Halfway there, tormented by his sobriety, he lay down, thinking he’d have a bit of a rest. His dried-out throat itched so much that he wanted to scratch it, if not tear it out. However, the blazing steppe sun bound his arms with tight, fiery strands, so that he slumped on the ground and chewed at what bitter, wasted grass he could get to with his mouth.

  And suddenly, from out of the ground reared a wolf. Small, with a rough reddish coat like pig bristles and a bit of beard that irritated the eye like dust. Sharp and wedge-shaped, with a peculiar insolence, this beard gave the wolf’s thick, broad-browed muzzle a wrathful appearance. The wolf looked at Peregud with tearful, human eyes, and spoke to him in a roar: ‘The time has come at last for you to fear your masters; it’s payback time for all the bread you’ve eaten. You’ve spent enough time on your spree.’ Nothing could have struck Ilya more forcefully than the fact that this wolf, speaking to him in the unpeopled steppe, stank of dried fish: a sober and salty scent, just like blood. Or the stink like you get in a camp barracks. Ilya grasped then that this was the hound himself speaking to him. They each had a pack leader above them, who was drawn from that iron-bristled pack of theirs that feeds on living people.

  With the last of his strength, Peregud sprang to his feet and raced away from the wolf. It chased after the Cossack, trotting a short distance behind him, as though dropping back to offer him some hope, which put fresh air in his lungs. But in fact the hound was waiting for this Cossack to run out of breath for good. Ilya ran for a verst or so, then crawled on his stomach, clutching at the grass,
while the wolf padded along behind him. When, exhausted, Peregud could no longer draw breath, it stood over him and spoke again: ‘The time has come at last to be harnessed by your masters. Everyone is already in harness, and we till the soil from their backs. Or have you still not understood that our truth holds sway on this earth? Or do you still believe you are your own master?’

  Peregud played dead, but his heart, constricted by fear, beat out from his chest across the whole steppe. The wolf spat out a cough, growing angry at the Cossack’s desire to trick him. He said: ‘The time has come at last to eat you. It is no good being afraid, save for your flesh and bones. From now on you can look forward to the odd visit from us, and to sacrificing the odd lump of flesh, since you’ve put some meat on your bones.’ The wolf bit off the tiniest morsel, then sprang away from poor, howling Ilya and resoundingly chomped his jaws. The wolf derived no pleasure from what he swallowed; he could not allay his appetite with just one bite. This was his job, his duty as a hound. Looking for a moment with revulsion at the Cossack’s vivid torment, he suddenly rose to his hind legs, growing huge, and paced off into the steppe somewhere, to wherever it was he had to go.

  Poor Ilya was found by some Kazakhs who had been hunting in the area. They took him to their camp and got him drunk on kumis. The steppe-dwellers did not believe his testimony. But not because the wolf had spoken with a human voice. Knowing their lands and the habits of the beasts there from birth, the Kazakhs told the Cossack that there was no way a wolf could appear in their arid steppe. Wolves did not live where there was no open water. So the steppe-dwellers decided that Peregud must have been drunk, since he thought he had seen a wolf. And the chunk of flesh had been gnawed out of him by voles while he was sprawled on the ground. The Kazakhs cared for Ilya diligently, and he spent another month in the camp enjoying their araka; he could have wished for nothing better.