by James Meek
I first saw him from a distance, when I was leading Hijaz for an early morning walk with the rest of the squadron around a paddock next to his forge. The forge and anvil were in a covered yard out front and we could hear and see him banging away at a shoe there. It was a frosty morning and it was hard to make him out through the mist of men and horses’ breath but I was watching him and the red glow of the forge. The hammering stopped and I saw him stand up and look directly at me, following me with his eyes as I walked on. I felt as if some concealment had been taken off me by the silencing of the hammer, as if the sound of Hijaz’s hooves on the hard turf and his breathing and the clink of his harness had drawn Chanov’s attention, even though all of us were making the same sounds. When a crow cawed, and other men and horses passed between me and the blacksmith’s line of sight, I felt grateful for the concealment. A few seconds later, however, I came into view from the smithy again and he was still watching me. He didn’t take up his hammer again until I led Hijaz out of the paddock. Do you remember, Anna, when we first met, I talked about seeing good souls from far away, like lights in the darkness? I know now that this is what Chanov was looking for. At the time, I was afraid of him. I avoided any dealings with him until one day when all my troopers were busy and Hijaz shed a shoe and I had to go to him myself.
He put the horse into the care of his underlings, took off his apron and asked whether I would do him the honour of taking tea. He spoke formally to me, as a sergeant to an officer, and sincerely, but there was an expression on his face, and a tone in his voice, which was not subordinate. He was leading me, and I was following on tamely, as me leading Hijaz out of his stall in the morning.
We went to a workroom with a work bench running down the middle, a single slab of oak notched and scored, and a tangle of black iron hanging from the walls, with some shine of steel and brass. There was a stove at the back and plank benches on ammunition crates and a nicely-wrought iron table. It had been made by one of the apprentices, Chanov said. He poured tea into glasses fitted inside cupholders fashioned from thin sheets of brass cut and filed into patterns, then rolled into shape to fit the glasses. More detail was engraved onto the brass and the etched lines had tarnished, making them stand out against the gleam of the polished metal. I asked Chanov if they were made by the apprentices too, and he said no, he had made them. I held them up to look more closely. There were human figures. They had a lumpy, pagan look to them, with big heads and small bodies. There was a tree, with fruit. I understood what it was. It was the Garden of Eden, and God was there under the Tree, talking to Adam and Eve! I was so stricken with the passions that I started to turn the cup round quickly, as if I was reading a book, and spilled the tea on the floor, with the glass after it, which smashed.
Chanov cleaned it up, shushed away my apologies, and gave me a fresh glass. He told me not to worry, and not to be afraid. He had heard that I was pious, and loyal to the Gospels, and had wanted to meet me. He came from a town called Yazyk, in Siberia, between Omsk and Irkutsk. He had never been a convict, and he had no family; he was an orphan, had been adopted by the Yazyk blacksmith, and had inherited his trade on his death. He was not a flagellant, but like all the inhabitants of Yazyk, he did belong to a sect. He would not tell me about it, except that he, and the other members of the congregation, were already living in Heaven, in Paradise, here on Earth.
Anna, my dearest, I am a plain writer, I do not have the power of a St John or a St Paul to tell you how true and convincing the farrier seemed to me about such fantastic happenings. I have always listened patiently to holy fools and the kind of ranting preacher you meet in crowded cities, but I would not stop to hear a man declare that Heaven had already been made on Earth. Yet Chanov made me stop. He spoke with such certainty, looking into my eyes and smiling in such a sweet, warm, joyful way, beating out the rhythm of his speech with graceful movements of his hands so unlike the flailing of his limbs at the anvil. His voice was calm, yet with a rhythm to it, as if he was singing.
Of course I asked him how we could enter Paradise in this way, without dying, and he grew more serious, and said everyone had to make the journey alone. The only way was to burn the Keys of Hell, he said. He picked up a piece of coal, opened the stove, and threw the coal into the red embers, where it instantly began to burn. He ran hot water from the samovar over his fingers to clean the coal dust off.
I asked what the Keys of Hell were, and he said we would talk on another day, and returned to his anvil. I stayed by the stove for a time, turning the empty cupholder round in my hands. I had hoped he would give it to me, as a solid token of a promise that there was more than I knew.
As it happened, I did not see the farrier for many months after that. There were manoeuvres, I had leave – we went to visit your mother, you remember – and, when I went to speak to him, the apprentices told me he was busy in the workshop. I began to wonder if the apprentices were not also dwelling in Paradise. They had something of another world about them; smooth skin and soft voices and ageless faces. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time wondering how men could live in Paradise and at the same time appear to be dwelling among us, among the lies and the dirt and the cruelty, the disappointments and the ugliness. I was tormented by questions, and I said nothing to you. I do not know why. Perhaps I had been given foreknowledge of what was to happen, that it would separate us. Perhaps it was the word ‘alone’ which made me afraid to even mention the farrier to you. But I was very eager. You may have sensed it. I felt I was about to be entrusted with a secret power.
One night in midsummer, when the regiment was on field exercises near Poltava, I was dozing in my tent. One of my troopers came in and said there was someone to see me. I put on my boots and went out. One of the apprentices was there. Instead of saluting he put his hand on my shoulder and started to whisper something in my ear about Hijaz, who I had sent to be shoed earlier. Before he could finish the trooper grabbed him and knocked him unconscious with a blow to the face, saying that he would teach him respect for his betters. I asked the trooper if he knew what he had done, and the trooper looked at me as if I was mad. I realised that while to me it seemed the trooper had sent himself directly to Hell by striking an angel, or an inhabitant of Paradise at least, in the life of the army the trooper’s action was normal, and I could not go against them now. I told the trooper to take the apprentice to the doctor. I think he knocked a tooth out. I went off towards the encampment of the farriers.
Their tents and carts were some distance away, on the edge of a wood. The field forge and anvil were set out under an awning to protect the farriers from the sun and one of the other apprentices was working there. I asked about Hijaz. He pointed to a stockade where a number of horses were penned and said Hijaz was ready and I could collect him after I had seen Chanov, if that suited me. I nodded, not able to speak with my heart beating so fast, and the apprentice put down his tools and led me through to the back of his workplace.
The awning was pitched right up against the first of the trees. They were beeches, slim and grey and tall. I followed the apprentice a little way into the forest. It was about ten o’clock. The sun had just gone down but it was still light. The apprentice led me towards a tent which had been pitched over a stream; the canvas was held firm on either bank, but the water flowed straight down the centre line of the tent, and the poles were set in the gravel bed of the brook. The apprentice asked if I would like to take off my boots and I took them off and unwrapped the footcloths and stepped into the cold water, which ran round my ankles. The apprentice left and I walked upstream into the tent.
Chanov sat in front of me on a canvas stool. The legs of the stool, and his own bare feet, were in the water, which spurted round him with a pleasant rushing sound. I had thought so much about this meeting, and prepared so many questions and answers, yet his first remark to me was quite unexpected. He asked why Hijaz was an entire. You know what an entire is, do you not, Anna? A stallion which has not been castrated. I hesitated and stam
mered that he was a good horse, obedient, strong, willing, fast when I asked for it. He had been wilful sometimes as a youngster, but I had coaxed him out of it with discipline, fairness and love, as a master of horsemanship does. Besides, the Hussars disapproved of geldings. They thought they lacked fire in the charge.
I hoped the blacksmith would start to say something I could understand, but instead he nodded and asked something even more strange, about whether I thought a horse could sin. I said I had never thought about it before, but no, I supposed a horse could not, no animal could.
Chanov smiled and nodded again. He said I was right, no beast could sin. Only man could. The man was master to the horse, he said, but no-one was master to the man except man himself, as God willed it. God was waiting for man to master himself, to understand the way to bring himself back to obedience and innocence and love, to be an angel in Paradise. What could be tolerated in a stallion could not be tolerated in man, because man’s wilfulness was fearsome and cruel, and his desires and ambitions wicked.
Chanov stood up, unbuttoned his braces and began taking off his shirt. ‘I am going to bathe,’ he said, and told me to wait and listen. It occurred to me much later that if anyone had heard him talking to an officer in this way he would have been flogged and stripped of his rank, but at the time, it never crossed my mind to question his authority. He asked me, in a way that didn’t call for me to answer, what it was that made men so cruel and greedy. What drove them on to steal from and exploit each other, to make war, to rape and abuse women and children, to lie and cheat and strut like peacocks, to torture animals, to maim Nature? What burden did they carry with them, placed on them by God after tasting the Forbidden Fruit, which made them despise themselves, live in guilt and shame and terror of old age and death?
He turned his back to me then and let his breeches fall into the water. He was naked in the stream except for the gold chain around his neck.
He said: ‘I do not have this burden any more.’ He turned round to face me. He said: ‘I have been made an angel.’
It was dim inside the tent, but I could see that between his legs there was nothing, a gap. He had been castrated. The genitals had been completely severed.
Chanov squatted down and began to splash water over himself. He told me that he had burned the Keys to Hell, that he had Mounted the White Horse. He said that when war came, he would be there for my salvation. He said many other things I have forgotten. I could not listen any more. I left the tent, took my boots, and began to run. I think I may have fallen in the stream, I do not remember. I found Hijaz and rode for hours, until I could see the glow of Poltava.
For weeks, I was in anguish. It is hard for me to admit now, harder than you can imagine, but I truly thought Chanov was insane, sick-souled. I was so disappointed! That it should come down to the stroke of a knife. I felt I had been cheated. I had imagined, in my faith, that he would reveal to me some secret radiance, some long, profound prayer, even some course of fasting and self-denial. This, castration, was ridiculous. Yet if I look back honestly, even then, in my doubt, part of me wondered at his courage, that he should believe so strongly in the Word that he would sacrifice that. It is strange how many people we can divide ourselves into when we are uncertain about something. Inside our minds it is as if there is a group of men sitting around arguing, and another part of us is standing to one side with his hands over his ears, not wanting to listen to any of it.
I thought of you, of course, and of Alyosha, how Alyosha would never have been if I had been one of the farrier’s castrates, how you would hardly have found enough in me worth loving, let alone marrying, if I’d been some docile gelding. And the strange thing was that last summer, before the war, the world did seem more like Paradise than Hell. Perhaps it was chance. Perhaps, after seeing Chanov, it was what I wanted to see. On the ride back to the camp from Poltava everyone I passed seemed to greet me gladly. I saw a peasant watering his old carthorse in the river and stroking its neck and whispering in its ear. I saw children running in and out of the rows of a sunflower field. They were chasing each other in pure play. They were laughing.
You were surprised, I think, when I came home a few days later, and dragged you upstairs. You were not very willing. You were hot and tired and you wanted to wash, but I would not let you, and you came round. Would God have made these Keys to Hell so cruelly, to give us so much pleasure, I thought then? I thought you liked the way I used them. I wondered if Chanov was not an agent of the Prince of Darkness, the Enemy. I was in a fever that day. Do you remember? I spent so long with my lips and my tongue between your legs, and I burst my seed inside you, and spilled it a second time, on your tongue and your lips. I wanted you to feel me penetrate every opening in your body. I wanted to press it into your ears, your eyes, your belly, your backside. And how I loved the taste of you, the salty juice at the top of your legs.
And then the war came, and Chanov disappeared. Not just him, but the apprentices. There was a terrible scandal. It got back to the staff that the Colonel had turned a blind eye to Chanov’s lack of respect for regulations, and had it not been for the urgency of the situation, he would have been punished. As it was they found some Ukrainian smith to do the job, and we were put on trains west towards the Austrian border.
Everything was unfamiliar in those first days of the war, but I did not feel a sense of dread, as I had expected. Sitting in the compartment of the train – it was a regular coupé, the kind you take to Crimea or Petersburg, the troopers and horses were in wagons – it felt as if we were going on holiday. We were in khaki, of course, but everyone told all the jokes they could remember. We had no idea what was going to happen, or how far we would go, or how quickly. We thought we might end up riding into Vienna. Or even Berlin. ‘Paris!’ somebody said, and then everyone pitched in with their ideas, till our heads were filled with visions of a column of Russian Hussars trotting through the streets of New York, Rio de Janeiro or Baghdad. And yet we had swords and pistols weighing down our belts, and they had trained us to use them.
When we reached our destination, a halt about twenty miles from the front, we were given some bad news. The Colonel, who had gone on ahead to see about fodder and billets, had been in a staff car which had come off the road when an Austrian aircraft dropped bombs. The bombs had not fallen close, but the driver had panicked. Everyone in the car was killed.
We camped at the halt. The Colonel was replaced by his second in command, who was less popular. He was a higher-ranking noble than the Colonel, and he had always felt he should command the regiment, but really he was a lazy man who had never learned much except to punish juniors of lesser blood. You probably remember him, a big man with a pale face, black beard and bloodshot eyes. Rumlyan-Pechersky, that was his name. He told us that we would move forward at dawn, possibly to attack.
On the train, I thought about you. I promised to be honest, Anna, and in the camp, as it got dark, I thought more about Chanov. For the first time I heard the sound of artillery in the distance. People always say it is like thunder and it is but thunder stops. All night there was a coming and going of slow, heavy trains, full of men and shells and animals, I supposed: I could not see them, I heard their groaning and shrieking and hooting and the sound of hooves, wagon wheels and marching. And they were using aeroplanes! Remember, Anna, we went down to the flying field with Alyosha to watch the aeroplanes take off and disappear into the heavens. I thought they were marvellous things. I thought when I saw the sun reflect white off their wings so high up in the blue that man was getting somewhere, that a new kind of time was beginning. Now they were using them to drop bombs. Even though I had been an officer for so long, I had never seen anything like this effort all around me, this organisation, this busyness of thousands, directed towards something I had never witnessed, but expected would not be wholesome. I still did not understand what it had to do with Chanov’s ideas. It was absurd.
Late that night I went looking for Chernetsky. It was dark. Some officers f
rom his squadron were playing cards by the light of a lantern in Chernetsky’s tent, but he wasn’t there. I could see from the pile of paper money on the table that they were playing for high stakes. They glanced at me with that mixture of acceptance and suspicion I was used to. I had helped each of them with a horse at some time or another, but I never drank or gambled with them, or visited the public house. You know that story, anyway. You helped me with them. They liked you. So I asked where Chernetsky was and they looked at each other and one of them said he was over on the other side of the road, beyond the cooks’ wagons. They offered me Chernetsky’s electric torch, a present from his aunt, so I took it. I crossed the road and found the cooks’ wagons and asked if they had seen an officer. They pointed into the darkness to where I could just make out of group of trees. As I walked towards it I heard a woman’s voice and a hand touched my sleeve. The woman asked if I was lonely and would I like to spend time with her. I said no and pushed her away, I hope not too roughly. I got closer to the trees and I could see a figure there with a cigarette in his hands. I switched on the torch. It was Chernetsky. A little girl was kneeling on the ground in front of him. At the touch of the light she took something out of her mouth quickly and turned towards me, holding up her hand to block the glare. I saw that Chernetsky was stuffing his member into his breeches. Neither he nor the girl seemed about to move otherwise. Chernetsky put his hand on the girl’s head and with his smoking hand waved at me, swearing and telling me to put the light out. He did not know it was me until I spoke, of course. I switched the torch off and said that she was only a child. I saw the cigarette end arc up towards my friend’s mouth and glow as he inhaled. He said she was fourteen, meaning that she was old enough to be bought by a man, I suppose. He let the cigarette drop and I saw it glow again as the child sucked on it. She had not looked fourteen. I do not know how old she was. Twelve? Ten? A child, anyway, however experienced in that trade. I think I spoke again, I said something about him finding an older girl. I may even have offered to pay. I did not go any closer. I did not want to. Then I heard the girl speak in the darkness. She said: Who is that? Chernetsky told her to shut up and do her job. He called me by my first name and said: This is not for you.
