Four Soldiers

by Hubert Mingarelli

  Also by Hubert Mingarelli

  A Meal in Winter

  © 2003 by Hubert Mingarelli

  English translation © 2018 by Sam Taylor

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  Originally published in France as Quatre Soldats by Éditions de Seuil in 2003

  First published in Great Britain by Portobello Books, London, 2018

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2018

  Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

  ISBN 978-1-62097-441-4 (ebook)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Mingarelli, Hubert, 1956– author. | Taylor, Sam, 1970– translator.

  Title: Four soldiers: a novel / Hubert Mingarelli; translated from the French by Sam Taylor.

  Other titles: Quatre soldats. English

  Description: New York: The New Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018021521

  Classification: LCC PQ2673.I467 Q3713 2018 | DDC 843/.91—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021521

  The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

  www.thenewpress.com

  24681097531

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  1

  I AM FROM Dorovitsa in the province of Vyatka. When my parents died I left Dorovitsa and moved to Kalyazin, by the river, where I worked for a man named Ovanes.

  I harnessed felled tree trunks to a horse to transport them from the riverbank to the sawmill. Then I tied them to a winch and lowered them one by one to Ovanes’ band saw. In the evening I fed the horse with oats and spread out straw for him.

  I rented a room from Ovanes at 16 Svevo Street. My window overlooked the river. I had a bed and a rug. I built myself a cabinet where I kept my belongings.

  I was alone in the world and in the evening I watched the river as I ate. There were flat-bottomed boats moving upstream. Their hulls gleamed in the setting sun. On the bridge the shadows were like ghosts.

  When I left Kalyazin, Ovanes bought the bed, the rug and the cabinet from me. I took the train to join the Red Army and I fought on the Romanian front. We marched a long way. We ate cold kasha and dried fish and we slept in ditches.

  I was in Dudorov’s regiment, and in the summer we fled from the Romanians. It was very hot. The cavalry kicked up clouds of red dust. The ambulance and food-truck drivers yelled at us to get out of the way. The officers stopped to look behind them, hands shielding their eyes from the sun, as if they’d forgotten something.

  Then I met Pavel. He was heating up some water behind a wall, hidden from the road. He’d stabbed a hole in a tin can with his knife and he was holding it above the flames. Our regiment continued to march along the road, kicking up dust.

  When he took some tea out of his pocket, my thirst and the sight of the tea emboldened me. I called out to him: ‘Hey, comrade!’

  He beckoned me over. I sat across from him and we drank the tea together in silence. We were in the same regiment. When the noise from the road had died down completely, I said to him: ‘The Romanians will be here soon.’

  We set off, and caught up with the tail end of the column. An officer on horseback was circling around the tired soldiers, trying to hurry them up. He’d put a handkerchief under his cap to protect the back of his neck from the sun. He was red from the dust and he held his revolver against his stomach. He kept saying, over and over: ‘I know you’re tired, but don’t make me do it. I swear by Saint Sophia, don’t make me. Keep going! Don’t slow down!’

  And as he said this he moved the revolver from his stomach and held it in his fingertips as if it were burning hot. He was a young sub-lieutenant and he looked on the verge of tears. Finally, a soldier who was pulling a mule by its bridle said to him: ‘What do you want from us? We’re marching, we’re marching. Put your revolver away. No one’s making you do anything.’

  The officer yelled: ‘What did you say to me?’

  The soldier lowered his head. The officer went up to him, brandishing his revolver. He put the barrel of the gun to the mule’s neck and pulled the trigger. It fell forwards. The soldier had wrapped the bridle around his wrist and he fell onto the road too, dragged down by the mule and its load.

  The officer stood above them, his revolver pointed at the sky. In a rage, he screamed: ‘No one’s making me do anything, eh? You feel better now?’

  The soldier was lying on his back, covered in the mule’s blood. He stared darkly at the officer and said in a cold voice: ‘Bastard.’

  The soldier tried to grab his rifle but it was trapped under his back. He pushed the mule away to free himself and picked up his knife. So Pavel and I both ran towards the ditch, hurtling down into it and coming out the other side, and then into a field to get away from the road.

  It was a sloping field, the grass cut short.

  When we reached the high part of the field, we could see the column stretched out all the way to the horizon. This was exactly what we wanted: not to lose sight of the others, to keep marching eastward with them to escape the Romanians, but without having to deal with all the troubles on the road.

  We paused to get our breath back.

  It felt suddenly hot and I took out my tobacco.

  We heard a bird singing from behind a hedge.

  We spat out the remains of the dust from our throats. In the distance they were turning on the headlights of the ambulances and trucks.

  We looked all around us.

  Then we set off again, smoking our cigarettes in the evening light, and I imagined we were returning from a hunting expedition. Pavel looked peaceful as he walked. He could sense which way to go even in the darkness. Sometimes he would sniff the air. After a while he said to me: ‘We’ll join them on the road tomorrow. No one will notice
we were ever gone.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘no one will notice.’

  It was a clear night except for one dark strip of cloud on the horizon and we spread out our blankets under some mulberry trees.

  At dawn we rejoined the regiment, and as we were approaching the road Pavel said: ‘Let’s stay together.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We continued our retreat from the Romanians and in September we travelled to Galicia in trucks.

  One night in Galicia, Pavel took a table and two chairs out of a house and we played dice in the middle of the street. A big Uzbek from our company stood at a distance and watched us play. He had broad shoulders. He was built like a lumberjack and sometimes he seemed a bit slow.

  Pavel told him to come over. He asked him if he had any tobacco. The Uzbek did, and he wanted to gamble it at dice. He went to fetch another chair from the house and we played a dozen games. Pavel won all his tobacco and the Uzbek stayed sitting at the table, looking miserable. Pavel watched him with a smile, and in the end he gave him back half of his tobacco. The Uzbek was very grateful. He looked so happy now that you’d have thought he was the one who’d won every game.

  When we went back into the house to sleep, the Uzbek went off to find his belongings and his rifle. He moved in with us and we didn’t object. The next day he lit a fire and we made a soup with his rations. While Pavel and I ate, still wrapped up in our blankets, and the daylight came in through the window, the big Uzbek stared at us with his blank idiot’s expression and we realised that he wanted more than anything to stay with us. When Pavel asked him his name, he blushed and suddenly he didn’t look like an idiot any more. ‘Kyabine!’ he boomed.

  That day, the Poles took the village back from us. They ambushed us near Jarosław and things started going badly for us again.

  In October it snowed and we waited in a factory for our orders. When they arrived, our commander brought us together and told us that we had to leave the front and retreat into the forest. There, we would build huts and wait for the spring. So Pavel, Kyabine and I wandered all over the factory, looking for anything that might be useful in the forest, and we found a rolled-up tarpaulin.

  We left the next day. Kyabine carried the heavy tarp roll over his shoulder. On the way we saw the Poles again. More than once we had to run to avoid being caught by gunfire, and Kyabine never once let go of the tarpaulin.

  We reached the forest in early November and marched deep inside it. It was very cold and the wind blew relentlessly. We wrapped ourselves up in our blankets, covering everything but our eyes. The whole company advanced in a vast silence. Our mules and our horses breathed out clouds of steam.

  Pavel walked at the back of the column and said nothing because in his head he was drawing up the plans for our hut.

  It started to snow again. Kyabine walked heavily next to me. He breathed with his mouth open. Sometimes he shook himself to knock the snow from his shoulders.

  Pavel caught up with us and he told us that he had the hut clear in his mind now. And the best thing, he thought, would be to have four of us to build it. We told him he was right. We had a discussion to decide who we would ask to join us. We gave our opinions on lots of men in the company. Finally we went to ask Sifra Nedatchin. He was very young and a good shot, and he owned cavalry boots. We’d never heard of him having any trouble with anyone about anything.

  He was walking on his own behind a mule and when he saw us approaching he was frightened. It was Pavel who asked him if he’d like to help us build a hut and live in it with us. He said yes in a shy voice. I handed out cigarettes to everyone.

  The company marched for three days in the falling snow, the bitter cold and the fierce wind. Then we cut down some trees to form a clearing.

  We all began building huts. About thirty of them went up in the snow, forming a circle around the edge of the clearing.

  We built ours following Pavel’s plans. Kyabine showed how strong he was. He got through more work than Pavel, Sifra and me combined. While the three of us paused to catch our breath, Kyabine valiantly kept going.

  When we’d finished building our hut, we proudly contemplated it in the light of the fire that burned at the centre of the clearing. We walked all around it, congratulating one another, and then all four of us went inside and I thought to myself: That’s it, I’m not alone in the world any more. And I was right.

  2

  WE WERE OUT of the forest now. Winter was over and it is difficult to imagine how long and cold it had been. We had eaten our mules and our horses, and many of our men had died in the forest. Some of them died when their huts caught fire. Or they got lost when they were out hunting. Soldiers who went hunting later found their bodies. Of course some of the ones we didn’t find must have deserted. But I think in most cases they just got lost and froze to death.

  The four of us were still alive and kicking, thanks to Pavel. He was the cleverest of us all. His plans for the hut were perfect, and he was even able to build a real stove using a metal barrel filled with engine oil. A real stove that worked well and didn’t smoke us out. But most importantly he’d found a way to pass the pipe through the roof without setting fire to it. Because that was how most of the other huts caught fire. Pavel had made tin tiles by cutting up our mess tins and then he’d nailed them to the roof around the pipe. So we’d had to sacrifice half of our mess tins and steal a few from the company in order to make those tiles. But we were still alive. And not once did we wake in the night, terrified and covered in sweat, dreaming that our hut was going up in smoke.

  As for the tarpaulin that Kyabine had carried from Galicia to the forest, we used it to keep out draughts.

  There was no peat in the forest. We had to shift large quantities of snow every day to uncover dead trees for fuel. The men who’d chosen to cut down the trees that grew nearby ended up with green wood, and they were a lot less warm than we were.

  All winter long, we shifted snow and collected wood for our stove, and in the evenings we were able to play dice because we had a lamp and oil. Thanks to that lamp, we suffered far less from boredom than others in the company.

  When the spring arrived, the company set fire to all the huts. Pavel, Kyabine, Sifra and I were sad as we watched ours burn. Not because we were leaving, but because that hut had kept us warm and alive through all those months.

  As we walked away from the fire, I spoke in my head to my parents: Look at me, you don’t have to be afraid for me any more because I survived the winter and I have comrades now.

  And we left the forest.

  3

  WE WERE OUT in the plain, sitting on a pile of old railway sleepers. The tracks were just in front of us. An armoured train had just passed. Some of the soldiers, standing on the running board, waved to us, their shirts flapping under their arms.

  The camp was not far away. We’d built it at the edge of a pine wood. Our company’s commander was a shy man who left us to our own devices. We didn’t know what he used to do, before the war. I’m sure he always wished that the soldiers who’d got lost in the forest, and who we imagined frozen to death, had in reality deserted.

  We were on that pile of sleepers, doing nothing. We were just happy that the winter was over and that we’d found this place to sit, and we were peacefully smoking our cigarettes. From time to time a flock of birds flew across the sky. We looked up and watched them disappear northwards. Soon they would be flying over the forest where we’d spent the winter. We probably all thought this, but none of us said anything.

  As usual, Kyabine asked us for tobacco because he almost always lost his at dice, and had done ever since the first games in Galicia. It was Sifra who gave him the most. Pavel and I gave him some too, but not so often, and we liked to wait until he begged us for it. Kyabine was like a child when he asked us for tobacco. He was like a child in lots of other ways too, but when it came to tobacco he really was one.

  ‘Pavel!’ said Kyabine.

  ‘What do you want?’
Pavel asked him.

  ‘Roll me a cigarette.’

  Pavel continued to stare straight ahead.

  Kyabine insisted: ‘Pavel? Oh, Pavel!’

  ‘What, Kyabine?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? Please give me some tobacco.’

  As I said, Pavel and I liked it when Kyabine started begging.

  4

  WE CLIMBED DOWN from the sleepers, picked up our rifles and set off across the fields. Kyabine was walking in front of me. He’d finally got a bit of tobacco from Pavel, and even from behind I could tell he was very happy that he could smoke.

  We went to the pond.

  Soon after that we heard Yassov, calling from behind. He too found it hard to make his way through the tall grass. He caught up and walked alongside us. We didn’t pay any attention to him because we already knew what he wanted. He reached into his pocket and took out a hand sculpted in wood, then showed it to us. We laughed because it was very big.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ Yassov asked.

  Pavel said: ‘It’s not your big fat hand we want, Yassov, it’s a fiancée’s hand.’

  ‘I can make it a bit smaller if you want.’

  ‘Bugger off, Yassov!’ said Pavel. ‘And take your hand with you.’

  ‘Yeah, bugger off,’ echoed Kyabine.

  Yassov continued to walk alongside us. He wasn’t giving up. He stared seriously at the sculpted hand, turning it over, then said: ‘Listen, I think I can make it quite a bit smaller. You’re right.’

  Kyabine started grunting in Yassov’s face, making strange sounds like a steam engine. Pavel, Sifra and I imitated him, and suddenly it was as if we were in a steam-engine factory.

  So Yassov gave up trying to sell us the hand for tobacco. He stopped walking, and behind us we heard him shout: ‘Bloody idiots!’

  His voice echoed in the air above the field and we continued advancing through the tall grass. Again, but more quietly, we heard him shout: ‘Bloody idiots!’

  Yassov had started sculpting these women’s hands when we were in the forest. He’d sold several in return for food rations. With those hands, the men who didn’t have a fiancée were perhaps able to imagine that they did. As for the men who did have fiancées, well, perhaps it helped them to remember them.