Captain of the Steppe

by Oleg Pavlov

  Kolodin said without hesitation, ‘It’s true.’

  The foreman chewed this over a little in silence, then expressed surprise. ‘Why’s he got up? There’s loads of grub, still, and he’s standing up.’ Kolodin sat down on a crate with the entire team. They passed him a link of smoked sausage, curled round like a mongrel’s tail and with the same sort of red, crimped arsehole; they passed some bread in his direction, too. Starving, he set about devouring it all, which cheered the railwaymen. Then, as the team began to disperse, without saying farewell to the escapee – it was as though he did not exist – the foreman explained to Kolodin with drunken forcefulness that he was in Shakhtinsk, where there was nowhere to hide, just mines and the rail depot. ‘You need to get yourself to Karaganda and once you’re there you’ll figure out where to head for.’ He took it upon himself to guide Sanka to the mine, and set him on the bus that, as it happened, took the shift-workers from the mine to Karaganda itself. ‘You sit quiet and you’ll make it there.’

  The folk from the mine, as opposed to the railwaymen, were soberer and stronger. They briskly took the deserting soldier in hand. Not bothering to ask, they stripped all the obvious government-issue gear from him, apart from his underpants. One gave up some trousers, another a pair of worn-out boots, or a spare, faded shirt; they did what they could. These men, covered head-to-toe in coal dust, all looked the same – like Africans, he thought, or perhaps just devils. They passed Sanka along a human chain, instantly forgetting him once he had passed from their hands. At its end they put him in the miners’ bus which would take him right to Karaganda.

  The bus set Sanka down in a quiet spot, well away from any police patrols, where Karaganda was full of well-built miners’ huts with yards containing old orchards which stood dark and silent at this time of year.

  In the not quite two full days that had passed since Skripitsyn had sent Kolodin away from the regiment, the investigator had completely forgotten about his acolyte. He was spending his nights in the Special Department. Late in the evening, he heard footsteps outside his door. In fright, he tore himself away from the documents that he’d been up so late reading and headed off in the direction of the footsteps, but he could not see anyone. The dark and the cold that poured in as soon as he opened the door pressed unpleasantly on the investigator standing on the threshold. He slammed the door shut, and went as far as locking it. But he hadn’t even managed to get back to his desk in the office before he heard steps again, yet more clearly, and louder. Unhesitatingly, the Special-Department agent hurried to catch up with whoever it was.

  Plunging headlong a few metres into the darkness, he ran into a man who he dragged into a dead end, at which point he recognised his acolyte, although he had no wish to believe that this dead man walking was back in his life. ‘Hello, comrade Senior Warrant Officer … ’

  Skripitsyn fixed his eyes, sharp as shards of glass, onto him. ‘Where have you come from?’ Have you been seen on the base? Speak!’ Unable to bear it any more, Kolodin clasped the hissing throat of his boss tightly in his hands, which looked as red as if they had been boiled. The acolyte was throttling the Special-Department agent, staring at him madly, seemingly trying with all his might to understand something. Either crying or howling softly, he would let go slightly of his croaking boss, then begin choking him again, until he suddenly turned and ran.

  Skripitsyn’s first impulse was to rouse the whole regiment there and then and place them on alert, but by the time he had got to the phone the Special-Department agent had thought better of ringing the guardhouse, so he ran off in search of the deserter himself. The sleepy sentries he bumped into in the darkness made out the head of the Special Department through bleary eyes, seeing nothing suspicious in his nocturnal zeal. At one point, he sensed something hidden in the dark: alive, and dangerous. This was at the lorry park. Skripitsyn remembered that from time to time Sanka had passed the night there, in his vehicle. However, even here, everything was calm at the sentry posts. The sentry was silent, pacing up and down by the gate. The notion that Kolodin had managed to escape from the environs of the base into the town heartened Skripitsyn, and he returned to the Special Department, ultimately deciding to keep everything that had happened that night a secret. As he saw it, the deserter had only two options left: to run into a patrol in the town, or to vanish in some unknown direction, but again, only as far as the first policeman or military patrol. After that, the usual court hearing, which would tie up all the loose ends.

  A fire broke out at dawn – a vehicle was burning: the head of the Special Department’s personal transport. It would have been in the power of the men at the sentry posts to stop the fire consuming the other vehicles, had they not seen, as they ran up with fire extinguishers, that there was a huge figure in the fire, from whom, it seemed, the very heat was streaming. He was the image of flame made flesh. He was shouting something through the roar of the fire and holding onto the blazing steering wheel with his burning hands. This sight scared them so much that they recoiled, pitiful and overwhelmed; they could only watch the fire’s glow helplessly. Time was lost. By the time the alarm was raised on the base, the rank of vehicles was engulfed in a huge blaze. Fuel tanks exploded. It was impossible to approach the machinery. By morning, though, the lorry park at the Karaganda regimental base had burned itself out. The fire brigade had been pouring on water from a distance, but they still managed to shield the barracks and to win back several garages.

  At the crack of dawn they dragged Fyodor Fyodorovich Pobedov from his warm bed and took him to the base in a prison van, like a common thief, because they were no longer able to send his personal car to fetch him. Who knows what was going through his mind as he jolted around in the back of the van, refusing to believe in any fire – was he to be purged? Shaken, red-eyed and tearful, the colonel set about deciding who to find guilty and who to hold accountable. They hurriedly formed the soldiers up on the square and spent a long time over the roll-call, checking against the lists. It turned out, though, that there was no one missing from the ranks of warrant officers and soldiers. So it was deduced that the man who died in the fire hadn’t been serving in the regiment, but had broken in from outside. The sentries testified that they had encountered the unknown person while he was still alive, and that this mystery man had not called for help nor made any attempt to escape the fire, but rather had determinedly sat within it. So it transpired that this unknown man had perhaps even broken into the base with the aim of burning it down. Pobedov wanted to hide in his office, as was his wont, to sit a while and catch his breath. But yet again an emergency was reported: a desertion in the regiment. A soldier had, without authorisation, left his detachment on the way to a new place of service. It was a former private in the Special Department: one Kolodin, Aleksandr.

  Furious, the colonel pictured how all this might have happened. He realised suddenly that the fire in the lorry park had also started with the Special Department; that is, with Skripitsyn’s vehicle. And then he remembered that Skripitsyn had for some reason been among the first on the scene of the fire; that is, he had been on the base at dawn, as though he had been waiting for it to catch fire. Mind you, the vehicle could have caught fire by accident, and it would have been stupid to set fire to it and then parade about in full view. So if he had been awake until dawn, that was in fact a good thing; it meant he was putting the hours in. Added to which, as regards the soldier from the Special Department, the personnel officer reported that Skripitsyn had good reason to rid the regiment of him on the quiet: this soldier had been raped in one of the steppe companies by his fellow soldiers, non-Russians to a man, but so as to avoid scandal, the case had not been allowed to proceed. Finding it difficult to understand what was unfolding around him, Pobedov nonetheless realised that for various reasons the surname of the Special-Department head was flashing in his mind. ‘Another fire? You know what, that’s no accident. Proof, now, of course you won’t prove anything. Both that time and this he wrote everything off, all th
e t’s were crossed and the i’s dotted. But it’s time to act!’

  And so, step by step, Fyodor Fyodorovich edged towards the idea that it was time to get rid of Skripitsyn, one way or another. And the colonel was already raising his voice and demanding Skripitsyn’s presence, the saboteur. When the latter did present himself, stooping and downcast, the colonel waxed even more wroth, as if he did not want Skripitsyn to begin offering excuses. Yet Skripitsyn made no attempt to reply, remaining obediently silent. He stayed silent and imperturbable all the while, and even when the colonel finished by shouting, ‘Gather your odds and sods together because, you little piece of shit, tomorrow you’ll be marching off to serve somewhere out in the steppe!’, he still said nothing in response.

  The next day, Skripitsyn turned up for duty earlier than usual. The colonel put a call in to Skripitsyn equally early. ‘Haven’t you cleared off, yet?’

  ‘Are you afraid, Fyodor Fyodorovich? Do you think I will run away?’

  ‘Are you still poking fun at me? At the regimental commander? Gah! I’ve put up with you for a long time. A very long time … Do you know where I’m sending you? To Balkhash. You’ll be chewing on copper.’

  ‘And what if, for the sake of honesty, I reveal all the truth about you that Smershevich had locked away in his cabinets?’

  ‘Ah. You piece of shit! You’d do that after all the kindness I’ve shown you? You’re out of your depth, now. Mind you don’t shit yourself. I’ll have you up in court. In court!’

  ‘Now, now. There won’t be any court without you, Fyodor Fyodorovich. After all, you’re the biggest criminal in the regiment!’

  The colonel hung up. Skripitsyn meanwhile thought to himself, not without a certain pleasure, that the old git would have strung himself up by his own tie if he ever found out or could understand the whole truth. And it even occurred to Skripitsyn to tell them all about Sanka, just to see the looks on their faces when they found out that there hadn’t been any sabotage. They simply wouldn’t believe it! They wouldn’t want to believe it. Taking a sheet of paper, he set about writing a dispatch: his resignation from the service. He took so long writing it that he lost track and started thinking about other things. Just then, a crowd of excited people burst into the Special Department, dragging what was either a person or a mannequin. ‘Take this one in, he was about to shoot the regimental commander!’

  As Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov was coming to his senses, having been handed over to the Special Department, Skripitsyn tidied up a little in his office, which had become rather neglected. And although it had been his first meeting with the captain that had set all his future prospects crumbling to ashes, the crooked warrant officer looked at Khabarov with vacant indifference. If anything could have perplexed Skripitsyn after all this, it was the news that the captain had made an attempt on the regimental commander’s life. Was Fyodor Fyodorovich so scared that he imagined the captain had intended to kill him? Or was this sorry excuse for a captain so enraged that he really had made the attempt? Yet his pistol was still under lock and key in Skripitsyn’s safe; there was no pistol, so where had all this excitement come from?

  Sensing the possibility of some kind of way out, although it still wasn’t clear even to him exactly what, the Special-Department agent began their conversation. ‘Well, then, did you decide to greet your dear father, Pobedov that is, with bread and salt? Did you offer him any? You just hang on in there … ’

  ‘You’re dogs, the lot of you … One big gang, it seems.’ Khabarov groaned, not wanting to understand anything.

  ‘You swear about it, go on. That means you’re still alive! It’s just that you and I have nothing to share. I still wanted to help you, back in Karabas. Come on, what are you pulling faces for? After all, I’ve also got one foot in the grave that Pobedov has dug for me.’

  ‘I’d kill him … ’ affirmed the captain, and Skripitsyn shuddered. He waved away the soldier who had brought Khabarov in, and set about the captain himself. ‘It’s too soon to give in. Two honest people, that’s a force to be reckoned with. It’s good that you’ve understood who your friends are, and your enemies. I was gradually getting closer to this Pobedov, gathering evidence and facts; I was working as hard as I could. But you wouldn’t give me any testimony. There was no other option left … ’

  Shaken by this news, Khabarov raised his head, done over by the other officers’ boots, and the lopsided warrant officer was amazed to see bright shining tears were rolling down from Khabarov’s swollen eyes. ‘Oh, why didn’t you say so right away? I’d have spoken up!’

  ‘Bit late for that now … ’ said Skripitsyn. Looking away, he pushed the pistol towards the captain. ‘Take this. It’s yours … Leave, while you still can. Get away.’

  ‘Please forgive me, dear comrade,’ muttered Khabarov, taking the pistol and not knowing where to put it, once lost and now found.

  The captain rose in silence and moved off, limping somehow crabwise, shoving the pistol into his greatcoat pocket while not removing his hands, as though keeping them warm. ‘You look after the potatoes as best you can. Look after them!’ And that was how they parted.

  Khabarov had intended to stick to their arrangement and he would have made himself scarce, just as he had promised Skripitsyn, if only he hadn’t bumped right into one of his oldest acquaintances, a completely insignificant sergeant major whom he had been friends with when they served alongside each other years back. Seeing his sorry appearance – and disapproving – the sergeant major did not want to let Khabarov leave. He was one of the storesmen, and Khabarov could not say no to him, on top of which he was experiencing an incomprehensible sense of gloom.

  While they were having a drink and a bite to eat, Skripitsyn came to the end of his tether over the captain: pacing up and down while they got drunk, he thought with irritation that every impulse these people had, even the most unstoppable, would come to nothing. They burn up, smoke rises from them, and nothing is left but charcoal.

  ‘Ah, that one wouldn’t hurt a fly … ’ he concluded gloomily, faltering at last. No longer able to hold back, he burst into the stores to kick the captain out of the room in which he seemed to have got stuck.

  An unfamiliar lorry was spluttering by the regimental gates, waiting to be sent on its way. Skripitsyn jumped up onto the running board. ‘Where are you headed?’

  ‘I’m for Dolinka,’ came the reply from inside.

  ‘Right, well, take a passenger, you can drop him off at Sixth Company.’

  ‘I’m not allowed, I’ve got cargo.’

  ‘Do you know who you’re speaking to? The head of the Special Department, that’s who!’

  ‘Well, there are plenty of bosses on the base, but I’ve got my own boss.’

  ‘You’ll take him, or I won’t let you go!’

  ‘I might be persuaded, three ought to cover it … ’ Skripitsyn amenably scraped together three roubles.

  After standing and waiting until the lorry had passed through the gates, Skripitsyn dolefully and indifferently went back to his office to finish writing his resignation. It was peaceful on the base, but he hardly had time to be surprised by this peace when some agitated officer ran determinedly out of HQ and, throwing open his arms just like they were wings, shouted out as he ran past, ‘The regimental commander’s having a cardiac! The commander’s dying!’ This harbinger flew into the sickbay and, before Skripitsyn’s very eyes, the medical officer and an orderly ran for HQ. Meanwhile, having accomplished his objective, and still uneasy, the officer began wandering across the lifeless square. From God knows where, people began thronging towards him. Hurriedly, his words tripping over each other, he informed them: ‘His heart gave out, an arrest; when he fell, he hit his head.’ At this, Skripitsyn too headed into HQ.

  The old colonel was lying flat on a strip of carpet on the floor of his office. Skripitsyn crossed over to the body, driving away the gawkers, clerks and other small fry who were just happy to have caught a glimpse. In the office there were the medical
officer, Sokolskii, and Petr Valerianovich Degtiar. There was also a fat, weeping clerk, on whose knees the colonel’s head was resting.

  Skripitsyn could not bear the silence. ‘Is he dead?’ They were all convulsed with grief. Who knows what might have happened had he put it differently: ‘Is he alive?’

  Only the medical officer responded, saying clearly, ‘Fyodor Fyodorovich has overdone it. His heart is not tireless. We’ll build him back up.’ His words liberated those present in the room; the colonel, however, did not so much as flutter his blueish eyelids, although Skripitsyn could by now clearly see that his chest was still rising and falling.

  After a while, the doctors summoned from the hospital appeared. They were greeted with relief, as though the burden of responsibility had been lifted. Sokolskii insisted that he be allowed to accompany the regimental commander to the hospital. Perhaps he assumed that he would do everything to save the colonel’s life, in contrast to the others.

  Left alone together in the now-deserted anteroom, Skripitsyn and Degtiar began an unwilling conversation. Degtiar controlled himself: ‘I know the colonel had raised the question of your discharge from the service if you were to refuse to serve in Balkhash. I did not agree with him. Personally, I respect you, Anatolii, but make your decision. I will have to carry out the order.’

  ‘The comrade Colonel’s like a drunkard: whatever’s in his head gets blurted out of his mouth,’ replied Skripitsyn, crudely. ‘What you don’t know is what he says about you.’ Degtiar turned a deep shade of red, but stayed quiet. His unthinking steadfastness annoyed Skripitsyn. ‘He used to say that your head was just like your you-know-what parts; that with a head like that you must not command the regiment, and this was about you, who’s a thousand times better than he is.’ Degtiar barked, ‘Drop it, Anatolii, everything will be all right.’