Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Sir,’ said the Governor coldly, ‘I must ask you not in future to interfere with my officers when they are carrying out their duties.’

  ‘Their duties include beating up the prisoners?’

  The thin lips tightened.

  ‘This is not St Petersburg.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  The Governor looked at him coldly.

  ‘You refuse my request?’

  Dmitri thought quickly. If he refused, the Governor would almost certainly require him to leave.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not refuse your request.’

  The Governor allowed himself a little satisfied smile.

  ‘Very well, then. In the short time that remains of your stay – ’

  ‘Short time?’ said Dmitri.

  The Governor looked at him in astonishment.

  ‘You have surely satisfied yourself that the girl is not here?’

  ‘She is signed in as having arrived.’

  The Governor frowned.

  ‘A clerical error, obviously. Which I shall have to take up.’

  ‘You are saying that she never arrived?’

  ‘That is quite certainly the case.’

  ‘That, since her name appears on the convoy lists, she was somehow lost en route? Escaped, perhaps?’

  ‘I think it far more likely that she was never dispatched.’

  ‘More clerical error? At the other end, this time? There do’, said Dmitri, ‘seem a lot of them around.’

  The Governor glared at him.

  ‘If there are clerical errors,’ he said harshly, ‘I think it more likely that you will find them at Kursk. To which I suggest you return. Speedily.’

  Dmitri considered.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  6

  That was all very well but where had it got him? The Governor had acceded but with an ill grace. Dmitri had been allowed to stay on in the prison guest room while he prosecuted his inquiries. He soon learned, however, that in future he could expect little co-operation from the prison authorities. Officials who had previously been helpful now averted their faces embarrassedly. The guards, after what had happened at the gate, kept their distance. An invisible wall had gone up between him and everyone else.

  Dmitri affected not to mind. The company was not so brilliant that he could not do without it, he told himself truculently; and would have told everyone else had the opportunity presented itself.

  In the privacy of his room, however, he was forced to admit that his inquiries were now severely handicapped. Visits to barracks – and therefore conversation with their inmates – were now allowed only after a specific request and required the Governor’s written permission. The prison records could be consulted, but only in the prison office and in the suddenly unhelpful presence of clerks. It was all very well antagonizing the Prison Administration but, without its help, how was he going to be able to do anything?

  The big man seemed to have taken the little Milk-Drinker under his wing; and this morning it rather looked as if he needed to. Timofei’s lip was cut and his cheek bruised.

  ‘I told you!’ Methodosius was expostulating. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I pleaded with you!’

  ‘If it’s the guards again – ’ began Dmitri angrily.

  ‘Not this time. It was just two blokes having a go at each other, and he has to step in. All right, they weren’t very good and it wasn’t worth watching, but if you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave them alone?’

  ‘No blows!’ said Timofei.

  ‘Yes, all right, I know what you mean. It’s the principle of the thing, yes, I know. But, look, if you stick your nose in, you’re the one who’s going to get the blows, and that doesn’t help anyone, does it? I mean, it’s sort of provoking them, isn’t it? All that happens when you stick your nose in is that there are more blows. Now that’s not right, is it? Adding to the blows that there are in the world? Why don’t you just keep out of it!’

  Timofei had to think this over.

  ‘And another thing,’ said Methodosius, ‘cut down on the praying!’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Timofei. ‘I couldn’t do that!’

  ‘Well, cut down during the night, at least. Couldn’t you shift some of it into the daytime? I mean, they’re the same prayers, aren’t they? What difference does it make if they come up during the daytime?’

  ‘It’s quieter at night. I can give my mind to it.’

  ‘Now that’s the very thing it isn’t. It’s not quieter at night. Not if you’re praying. And why can’t you pray just once or twice? Not all through the night. Out loud.’

  ‘By praying out loud, I give witness.’

  ‘Yes, but you see, it creates bad feeling. And you wouldn’t want that, would you? Not if it leads to blows?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Timofei, startled. ‘Do you think it could do that?’

  ‘Pretty sure of it,’ said Methodosius. ‘You want to have regard to the number of blows there are in the world and cut the praying down! At least at night.’

  Over at the gate something was happening. Guards were running about.

  ‘Is another convoy coming in?’ asked Dmitri.

  ‘No, it’ll just be the stores wagon.’

  The guards opened the gates and then, after a large cart had driven in, closed them again. The cart carried on to the kitchens. Prisoners came out to unload it.

  ‘That’s a soft number!’ said Methodosius. ‘Now why couldn’t I get that instead of the buckets?’

  ‘Buckets?’ said Dmitri.

  There were six men, two to each bucket. Methodosius saw that Dmitri was paired with him. They lined up in front of the guardroom with the empty buckets and then filed out through the gate, an armed guard behind them.

  Dmitri had thought there might be problems, especially over the chains.

  ‘Chains?’ Methodosius had said. ‘No shortage of chains in Tiumen!’

  The bights had been stretched so that Dmitri was able to slip them on over his hands and his feet. The weight made him stagger. The convicts, much amused, made him practise. Experience, they had assured him, was the thing.

  The party crossed the road. At the gate of the women’s prison they stopped and the guard called through a spyhole. The gate swung open and they went into the yard. They stood there for a moment and then split up, two men going into each of the barracks. The guard meanwhile stood against the wall in a position from which he could see all three barracks.

  ‘You’ve got two minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Two minutes? It’ll take us more than that to unchip the ice!’

  ‘I know what will take you more than two minutes, and it’s not chipping the ice! Two minutes.’

  ‘Oh, come on! Do us a favour!’

  Methodosius produced a cigarette.

  ‘All right,’ said the guard, relenting. ‘But that only earns you five minutes.’

  Methodosius brought out another two.

  ‘What have you got in mind?’ said the guard. ‘An orgy?’

  Methodosius and Dmitri carried the pail inside.

  ‘Hello, girls!’ said Methodosius.

  ‘Hello!’ said one of the women. ‘You’re a new one, aren’t you? We haven’t seen you before!’

  ‘You haven’t seen my friend, either,’ said Methodosius. ‘He wants to talk to you. You go ahead,’ he said to Dmitri. ‘I’ve got my mind on other things.’

  He strolled across to the other side of the barracks.

  ‘I’m looking for a woman called Shumin,’ said Dmitri.

  ‘Someone else was looking for her.’

  ‘It was me. Some of you said you knew her.’

  ‘You?’ The women, intrigued, gathered round.

  ‘I haven’t got long.’

  ‘You’re all right. Olga, go and talk to the guard!’

  ‘Is it the nice one?’

  ‘No. That’ll make it easier.’

  ‘I’m not going to talk to him for too long,’ grumbled the woman, but went off obe
diently.

  ‘Now, what is it you’re after?’

  ‘Shumin. Some of you said you’d seen her.’

  ‘Yes. She was with us on the convoy.’

  ‘Do you remember what she looked like?’

  ‘Of course I remember!’

  ‘Fair or dark?’

  ‘Is this some sort of game? I can think of better ones. Fair.’

  ‘Really fair?’ What was the phrase? ‘A real Russian beauty?’

  ‘Polish, I would have said. And I didn’t go much on her nose.’

  ‘Don’t be such a bitch, Irina. She was very pretty.’

  ‘Is she your girlfriend?’

  ‘No,’ said Dmitri. ‘I’m just trying to find – ’

  ‘I’ll bet she is!’

  ‘No, she’s not. Look, just tell me, I haven’t got long: where the hell is she?’

  ‘Why are you trying to find her, then? If she’s not your girlfriend?’

  ‘I’m a lawyer – ’

  ‘Oh, yes? And they put lawyers on the shit-buckets these days, do they? Well, it’s reasonable, I suppose.’

  ‘It was the only way.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned! Isn’t that the Governor I see over there? On the end of a bucket? Well, it was the only way he could come and see us, I expect!’

  In the end, Dmitri had to tell them everything. He didn’t mind that, but they needed some convincing and it ate heavily into his few precious moments. They listened, however, with growing involvement.

  ‘Poor Anya! I always knew there was something different about her!’

  ‘She didn’t say anything to you about any of this?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘She kept herself to herself.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ someone objected. ‘She was always rather nice.’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. Nice, yes, but I always thought she came across as a bit of a lady.’

  ‘Well, she was a lady!’

  ‘Yes, but – ’

  ‘You got to know her on the convoy?’

  ‘Oh, yes. And I don’t think she was at all stand-offish, Lena, it was only when that man came along – ’

  ‘What man was this?’

  ‘Oh, it was just someone pestering her. One of the politicals. She didn’t know what to do about him – ’

  ‘That’s what I meant, Raissa, when I said she was a bit of a lady. I mean, she didn’t know how to handle him, did she? You or I would just have told him to bugger off, but she couldn’t quite manage to do that, could she? He went on and on at her, and in the end all she could do was run away when he wasn’t looking and move to some other part of the convoy – ’

  He could see Methodosius returning.

  ‘She went to some other part of the convoy? And you didn’t see her again after that? So you don’t really know that she ever got to Tiumen.’

  ‘She got to Tiumen, all right,’ said one of the women. ‘When we got in, I saw her.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Yes. She was standing by the gate. There was a little party to one side. I don’t know what they were doing but she was one of them. I don’t know where they went.’

  ‘Could you find out?’ he said urgently, as Methodosius came up.

  ‘We’ll try.’

  ‘All right, girls?’ said Methodosius. ‘He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?’

  ‘Quite nice,’ said one of the women critically. ‘You can bring him here again.’

  They lifted the pail. Or, rather, tried to.

  ‘Jesus, it’s stuck.’

  Methodosius knelt down and tried to shake the bucket free.

  The guard put his head in at the door.

  ‘Come on, come on! You’ve had time to work your way through the whole barracks!’

  ‘It’s iced on!’

  ‘I’ll bet what you’ve been busy with isn’t iced on!’

  The guard came across and hammered at the bottom of the pail with the butt of his rifle. As the pail jolted free, some of its contents spilled over the side. A sickening stench rose into the air.

  ‘Come on, get that bloody thing outside!’

  Dmitri bent and lifted. He felt the other side of the bucket go up easily as Methodosius took hold. The bucket tilted towards him and something spilled on to his hands.

  The mail had come in and with it some letters for Dmitri.

  ‘You may stay as long as you wish,’ wrote Peter Ivanovich generously; adding, however, less satisfactorily: ‘In fact, the longer, the better.’

  ‘My dear Dmitri,’ wrote Igor Stepanovich, ‘we think of you all the time’, which was gratifying. Less gratifying, and not just because of the typically inflated – and exhausted – metaphor, was the rest of the sentence: ‘and if you do not return, your memory will forever burn like a bright coal in our hearts.’

  Hardly more pleasing was the next paragraph:

  ‘Things here have returned to normal. I ran into Novikov the other day and he told me that everyone was doing their best to put the unfortunate incident behind them. He said that it was all due to a minor clerical error which he, Novikov, had fortunately been able to detect, and that now the whole thing was being fast forgotten. He half hinted that it probably wouldn’t have occurred anyway but for the presence of young, inexperienced lawyers. Do you think, Dmitri, he could have meant you? Oh, and Peter Ivanovich seems to have made it up with old Semeonov, which is, Peter Ivanovich says, what really matters …’

  Dmitri threw the letter down in disgust. As he did so, he caught sight of a postscript scribbled on the back of the envelope: ‘Sonya sends her love.’

  Indeed, in another letter, she did; and much more besides. She sent her heartfelt admiration, her tenderest sympathy and her passionate devotion, in which latter she was joined by Larissa Philipovna, whom by chance she had met coming out of church the other day. She lived, she said, only for the day when he returned – that bit was all right, thought Dmitri – which, unfortunately, would probably be long deferred. She bravely faced the possibility that he might be much changed, worn, grey – grey? – but, surely, after such a profound spiritual experience, much Deepened.

  Dmitri threw that letter aside, too, and turned to one from Vera Samsonova. It was very brief. In fact, she said, she would not have written at all, only she had come across something in a local newspaper that she thought might interest him. She enclosed the relevant extract.

  It was a report of a demonstration that had occurred recently outside a local tannery. The demonstrators had apparently wished to draw public attention to the effect on the health of the locality – it was this that had attracted the attention of Samsonova – of the tannery’s discharge of chemical wastes. The demonstrators had, naturally, been arrested and were awaiting trial. Inquiries had established that they came from outside the area, indeed, from another province altogether, but that their ringleader, who had, unfortunately, escaped arrest, was a local woman, one Marfa Shumin.

  ‘Thinking?’ said a voice suddenly.

  Dmitri stopped, startled. It was a man sitting with his back against the wall. His face seemed vaguely familiar.

  ‘Just brooding,’ said Dmitri.

  ‘I am thinking,’ said the man. ‘It’s better.’

  ‘Oh?’ Dmitri fired up. No one was going to give his mental processes secondary status. ‘And what’, he asked condescendingly, ‘are you thinking about?’

  ‘Justinian’s Statutes.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dmitri, taken aback.

  ‘Yes. They’re fresh in my mind, you see. I was editing them for publication. An academic edition,’ said the man, with a shy smile. Dmitri recognized him now. He was the man he had seen reading a book in the cell.

  ‘You’re a lawyer?’

  ‘I’ve never practised. I teach legal history in the Law Faculty at Kazan University.’

  ‘I’m a lawyer,’ said Dmitri.

  ‘How interesting!’ cried the man, sitting up. ‘Then we’ll have lots to talk about.
What is your field?’

  ‘Oh, general,’ said Dmitri, ‘general.’

  ‘Probably wise. It’s a mistake to specialize too early. It can become a blind alley. Look at me: I’m not yet thirty and my career’s already at a dead end.’

  ‘Surely not … When you get back – ’

  ‘With Roman law as a subject? It’s peripheral, my dear chap. In Russian universities anyway. And yet at one time, you know, it looked as if it could be central. That was after the Reforms, when it looked for a while as if Russia was going to adopt a modern European legal system. It’s not going to happen, though, is it?’

  ‘Not at once; but I’m sure it will happen. It’s only a question of time.’

  Belief in progress was an article of faith of the journals which Dmitri read back in Kursk.

  ‘I wish I could be so sure. But when I look around me … after all, we wouldn’t be here, would we, if Russia had a legal system based, like those of other European countries, on Roman law.’

  ‘Wouldn’t we?’

  It was only afterwards that he realized that the man had taken him for a prisoner too.

  ‘Well, no. Roman law made a distinction between justice and administration. In Russia we have never made that distinction. What the Tsar says is law. What his officials say on his behalf is law. There is no tradition of the law as an independent thing to which appeal can be made, not as there is in other European countries, which have all incorporated that distinction into their legal systems.’

  Dmitri remembered now thinking something along these lines on the boat. At Kazan, hadn’t it been? Perhaps he had read something published from the university and had associated the name with the idea.

  ‘And so,’ said his acquaintance, ‘they can send us to Siberia by administrative decree, without us having a chance to challenge their charges in a court of law subject to proper judicial processes!’

  ‘And all this comes about because our legal system is not based on Roman law?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Dmitri thoughtfully. Like all law students he had studied Roman law in his first year at university. As with most students, however, its significance had escaped him.

  ‘Or, at least,’ said the man, smiling, ‘that’s what I argue in my article.’

  ‘Which article was this?’