Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  Király duly got his reward and insisted that we stay another day. I must admit that I was happy to suffer their grunting and wailing a second night for the luxury of being in a room of my own in a proper bed. There was fresh linen and a fire in the room. I bathed in hot water from the stove and slept better than I had for three years. Heaven comes in simple pleasures.

  Király would have stayed a third night if I had let him. As it was he finally agreed that we had to leave. The kulak woman, like most of the peasants, had been stockpiling her harvest, hoping for the prices to pick up. She had sheds full of food, and we loaded up a sledge with grain, potatoes, carrots, apples and many loaves of fresh bread which she had specially baked for us over the two days. She gave Király her husband’s coat, a few bottles of vodka and an axe.

  We trudged fifteen kilometres a day following the route of the trans-Siberian railway towards Lake Baikal. We never got too close for fear of being seen but made sure that we could hear the trains when they passed. The terrain was never-ending taiga: hilly, thickly forested with coniferous trees and nothing else. Wherever we looked it was the same to the horizon. The only interruption to the monotony was the occasional village that looked like an oasis in the desert. What we would have given to walk through those villages! Our eyes throbbed in the dazzling whiteness of snow and sky. It would have been restful merely to gaze on faces and buildings, to hear children’s voices and to walk on cobbles. But we had to steer well clear of all that. I had learnt from the travelling merchants in my family how to build a lean-to from the branches and leaves of coniferous trees. Uncle Josef had taught me how to build a fire that would last the night and where to place it to keep the lean-to warm, and he had shown me how to navigate by the Pole Star after dark and in daylight by looking for where the moss grew thickest on trees.

  For forty days we ploughed through this whitewashed wilderness and I swear we bickered every step of the way. We quarrelled about every conceivable detail of our tawdry existence: whose turn it was to pull the sledge in the morning, where to stop, when to stop, how much wood to gather for the fire, whose mess tin to use for cooking, how much snow to melt in the soup, when to eat one of our precious apples. Sometimes we would argue about the futility of the last argument we had just had, and on one occasion we were so mad at each other that we did not speak for three days. But no matter how much we professed to hate each other we always went to sleep in each other’s arms because our survival depended on it.

  The full ferocity of the Siberian winter had passed but there was a sting in its tail. When the northerlies blew they still blasted through our clothes and chilled our bones; they could still knock us off our feet and blind us in a blizzard. We never felt warm, and the cold began to nibble at my kidneys, which had never fully recovered from the typhus. Király began to moan about his feet; he had been ranting about the cold since we left, which was irritating enough given how futile it was to complain about the weather, but now his whinging took on dramatic new proportions even by his standards.

  ‘Damn these useless, threadbare socks and the whore that knitted them, damn these pox-ridden bits of cow’s arse and every flea-bitten labourer that laid his filthy fingers on them and dared to call them boots. Damn that drunken rotten mutton of a woman that called herself my mother and that fat-fisted mastiff of a man that stuck his dog-eared cock inside her. Damn them both for ejaculating me on to this windy septic bog of a planet full of loathing and death. Damn everything because my feet are frozen, do you hear me Daniecki? My feet are falling off, my feet have no feeling, why don’t you care, you foreskin-hating fool? My feet are on fire. Oh Mary, mother of Christ, heal your humble God-fearing friend Király – that’s Frantz Király, born in Sarospatak, Hungary 1897 – yes, me, heal me, don’t make a mistake, don’t go healing some dim-witted Romanian, do you hear me? Me. Just me. And you can forget Daniecki, too, he doesn’t even believe in you.’

  And he would repeat and refine this tirade for hours on end as if it were some kind of mantra. I never took him seriously – not for a minute. On the contrary the more florid his insults the more they made me laugh, which enraged him, and led to more outrageous damnation. It was only when I noticed him limping and heard him sobbing in his sleep that I promised to carry out a proper inspection. It was a still night, the fire was roaring, the soup was cooking, Király was sitting on the sledge with his left leg stretched out in front of him, his foot resting on a rock. The sole of his boots had worn right down and there was a hole where the stitch-work on his uppers had come away. I untied the bindings and carefully loosened the boot; he winced and again cursed the Austrian cow for giving its hide to such a lousy piece of footwear. I tried to pull it off but it seemed to be stuck to his foot and he howled in agony. Snow had got into his boot. Foot and boot were frozen together. Together we rolled the rock nearer to the fire and he propped his foot up again as near to the heat as he could bear. Soon there was steam rising up from the toe and water dripping down the heel. I pulled again and this time the boot came off in my hands. His toes were sticking up rigid inside his socks as if he were stretching them. When I touched them they were cold and solid. I peeled off the first of his three socks; it was damp. With the second one the smell of rotting skin hit my nostrils. The third sock was impossible to remove: it had partly disintegrated and partly encrusted to his foot. Bits of sodden wool hung off his scaly, blistered heel. Király was whimpering at the sight of it. He feared the worst. I took out my knife and cut carefully down the length of the sock to his big toe where the material was still frozen and clung tenaciously to his skin. Then I tugged at it until it came away in my hands. I winced at the sight that greeted me. The lower part of his foot was black. A white furry fungus covered all his toenails bar the big one, such that it was impossible to distinguish one toe from another. We had both seen this before in the Carpathians. It was a severe frostbite that had gone septic, and gangrene was setting in.

  ‘My God, Frantz, why didn’t you say something?’ I asked.

  ‘Very funny,’ he said bitterly.

  There was not much we could do until we got to Irkutsk. Király insisted that there was no point trying to thaw out his foot because it was known that a man with frostbite could still walk some distance, whereas once the foot was reheated it was much more painful and impossible to walk on for a while. Besides it would only freeze again over the next few days. I gave Király my spare socks and carved him a pair of crutches. From then on our progress was very slow, as he hobbled from hill to hill requiring frequent rests.

  One day we trekked up a hill that looked like every other snow-covered hill but when we got to the top the land gave way before us and there was the vast and magnificent Lake Baikal. It was the end of April 1917 and the snow was melting but the lake was still frozen. I bounded down the hill in excitement with the sledge in tow. At the edge of the lake there were huge craggy edifices of ice that jutted upwards and outwards at strange angles pointing accusingly at the sky. These icy fingers must have been formed as the winter freeze sank deeper and deeper in the lake and the new ice pushed against the old ice, making it splinter and crack at the banks. But the centre of the lake was as smooth as a Viennese rink. I flicked one of the icicles with my finger and it responded by playing a beautiful clear note. Each icicle had a different song to sing. As I waited for Király to join me I amused myself by playing out a little tune. A surge of confidence swept through me. We had escaped and survived the winter, spring was a breath away and the most desolate and hostile terrain was behind us. It would not be my last winter in Siberia but the worst was past. At that moment under the blue skies of Baikal, I was happy merely to be alive and to know where I was going.

  Király, on the other hand, was now so miserable he had even stopped cursing. His silence was tragic. He toiled down the hill like a great tortoise, his back arched like a shell over his crutches and his head rolling back and forth. There was a pained grimace etched on his face. He was so exhausted now that his breath was heaving and hi
s bad leg dragged limply in the snow behind him.

  I shouted up to him, ‘We’ve made it, Frantz.’

  When Király eventually joined me he slumped down on the sledge and waited until he had stopped wheezing. ‘Made what exactly? We’ve made it to a frozen lake in the middle of nowhere. We’ve walked forty days and we’re still six thousand kilometres from home.’

  ‘Yes, but we’re alive.’

  ‘Barely.’

  And then he looked hard at me and spoke from his heart: ‘Moritz, I don’t know where you get your energy from. Look at you, you’re playing like a kid while I’m freezing to death. You move too fast for me. I’m holding you back. I can’t go much further. I have to stop. There is a child in you that refuses to die. When I first met you I thought your naivety bordered on stupidity, you were a boy in a man’s world. I hated you and yet I was drawn to you. I think it is because you have what I never had. So listen to me, Moritz, I want you to go and find your Lotte. Leave me in Irkutsk.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Frantz, we’ll wait in Irkutsk until your leg has healed and then we’ll set off again. I can’t do this alone. I need someone to shout at.’

  ‘My foot will never heal,’ he said, ‘it’s gone. Besides I don’t want to go back to Hungary. I have no love there. I’ll only end up in the army again, at least here I can start afresh, be a new person. But will you promise to do one thing for me?’ I nodded my head. At that moment I would have done anything for my best friend Frantz Király. ‘Take an axe to my toes. Chop them off. If you don’t do it now I’ll lose my leg.’ He picked up the axe that the kulak woman had given us and handed it to me.

  ‘But we’re only three days from Irkutsk. We’ll find a doctor there,’ I protested.

  ‘It can’t wait. Believe me, you have to do it now.’

  I reluctantly built a fire while Király polished off the remaining vodka. It was the only anaesthetic we had. When the fire was roaring I carefully placed the axe blade in the flame. Then I pulled off his boot and socks. His foot was barely recognizable; the gangrene had spread to his toes. The rest was a black icy stump and it reeked of putrid flesh. I placed it carefully on a boulder.

  ‘You can save me the big one, it’s not so bad,’ he said in a tiny voice.

  I looked down at his foot and doubted whether I could be that accurate with an axe. I picked up a pebble and forced it in the gap between his big toe and second toe. It bought me a couple of centimetres. I tore a strip of material from one of my shirts in readiness, then I took the axe from the fire and lined it up with the top end of the blade to the edge of the pebble. I hesitated a moment as I fought back a wave of revulsion.

  ‘Do it, Moritz,’ Király urged.

  I quickly lifted the blade high above my head and smashed it down on to his foot. I felt the blade strike the pebble but not the boulder beneath. Király let out an animal-like scream the likes of which I had never heard from a human. It pierced my eardrums and echoed around the lakeside, making the crystalline icicles reverberate in sympathy. When I checked to see what I had done I saw that I had spared his big toe but that the pebble had prevented the blade from passing cleanly through the rest. His toes were half severed and still hanging by threads of bone and flesh. I grabbed a rock and, using the axe as a carpenter would a chisel, carefully lined it up once more and brought the rock down on top of it. The axe went clean through and his frozen toes rolled on to the ground all stuck together. I grabbed the strip of material I had torn from my shirt and bound it as best I could around his foot to stem the bleeding. Király was howling all the while. I felt sick but soon recovered my senses when a band of Buryat horsemen suddenly appeared over the brow of the hill and came thundering down towards us. Király was delirious with pain and hardly noticed them, but a chill went down my spine. Had we come this far for nothing? I told Király to shut his mouth and not say a word in German but I’m not sure he heard me. There were a dozen or so Buryats, mostly wearing dirty long brown robes held by orange sashes at the waist, but one of them wore a distinctive purple gown. Their black boots climbed high to their knees and they carried long scimitars. With their inscrutable Mongol features and large thickset shoulders they were as terrible a sight as anything I had ever seen. I had nowhere to run and nothing with which to defend myself other than an axe. They were shouting to each other in a language I did not recognize. It had no traces of Russian, nor did it sound Chinese. These strange guttural sounds added to my general feeling of apprehension, because I could not tell if their intentions were friendly or hostile. They came charging down and skilfully brought their horses to a standstill a couple of metres from us. I smiled at them weakly and offered a greeting in Russian. One of them responded courteously and asked what we were doing. I explained that my friend had frostbite and indicated his foot. They chatted in their language for a moment and then the one in the purple gown dismounted and walked up to Király to examine his foot. He pulled a yak-skin container from his neck, took out the stopper and poured some liquid on to a cloth. He then loosened my clumsy bindings, placed the cloth over Király’s wound and rebound it with far greater expertise than I had done. When this was done he began to chant some kind of prayer in a deep resonant voice, the words of which he repeated over and over. His eyes were closed and he was locked in concentration; the man’s belief in his own powers was total, Király was transfixed. The Buryat seemed to be weaving a blanket of sound over Király, lulling him and calming him. The other horsemen told me the purple-robed man was a Buddhist lama and that Király would heal quickly now. When the ritual was done they asked us which direction we were headed. They said they too were going to Irkutsk to trade and offered to take us there.

  It is a mystery to me why they did not kill us. Perhaps it was because we had nothing worth stealing, or because on seeing Király they had taken pity on us. More likely, though, the Russian guards had exaggerated the threat posed by the Buryats to prevent us from escaping. These men seemed honest and simple. They knew little of the war and did not care to know. All of that was far away. They were not hostile to the Central Powers – they had never even heard of them.

  They hoisted us up on the back of two horses and we galloped off towards Irkutsk. After plodding through the snow for so long it was delightful to move so fast. The sense of speed was tremendous. If only I could have laid my hands on a horse.

  Oh . . . I’m sorry . . . pass the spittoon . . . urgh . . . I’m suddenly very tired, Fischel. Isaac has the right idea. Maybe I’ll join him – take a little nap . . . perhaps the doctor was wiser than I thought. Really, I should be resting . . . Go on . . . off you go . . . Fischel, please . . . don’t just shake your head at me . . . Oh ho, I know what you want . . . your silence is demanding . . . well I can’t refuse you. But only five more minutes.

  20

  IT WAS JULY, AND THE ANT-MATING SEASON WAS ABOUT TO begin. Most of the observational research took place in the hot months because of the short lifespan of male ants. Leo was now camped at the laboratory next to London Zoo hoping to break the back of his PhD. The pupae were about to hatch. The males had already developed their wings and he carefully separated them from the female workers. He transferred them out of Queen Bess’s tank and into an isolated tight mesh cage where he planned to mate them with a new queen. At twenty-five Bess was the oldest ant they had. She was the same age as Leo. The researchers were very proud of Bess, they were hoping she might break the longevity record for a queen in captivity, which stood at twenty-seven years old. The thrust of Leo’s research was to investigate how mating frequency was related to sociality. Queen Bess was a red ant, the Latin name Formica rufa made her sound like a type of kitchen worktop from Ikea. Red ant queens tend to mate only once whereas the giant leafcutter queens mate more often. This has a huge impact on their colonies. All the female workers in Queen Bess’s colony were sisters and had a very high genetic relationship. A worker ant carries 100 per cent of the male genes and 50 per cent of the female, which means that the sisters have a 75
per cent similarity in their genetic structure, the highest in ant society. Higher than between mother and daughter ant and much higher than the 25 per cent of genes that human beings share with their siblings. The sisterhood are organized, structured and highly social, whereas the males just fly about looking for sex. The challenge for Leo was to recreate natural conditions in the laboratory so he could observe the mating. Humidity and light were key but no matter how perfectly regulated the laboratory the researchers were not always successful. The ants were very sensitive to captivity; some years they would not mate at all and come September an atmosphere of gloom would hang over the researchers. Red ants could mate on the ground or in the air, but they nearly always mated on the ground when they were kept in mesh cages. Indeed none of the young researchers had ever seen Formica rufa mate by air.

  Leo took a new queen and placed her with the males. He had to give the queen a name so he called her Eleni. She would have been delighted to have an ant named after her; she had often come to see Leo at his laboratory and had spent hours watching them build nests.