The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  Taijan and his friends had dug a deep grave in the rocky, frost-bound ground which had to be hacked with a crowbar, ketmen, and at times with an ax. By tradition, the grave was quadrangular. In the depth of it, Taijan had dug a lateral niche. The deceased was taken off the camel, un­wrapped out of the rug, all the three kerchiefs were untied, the pieces of cloth taken off to become, by custom, the pro­perty of the mullah, and Shakir was lowered into the grave to the accompaniment of a prayer. He was put in the niche to lie on his right side, covered with the rug, the niche was boarded, the grave filled with earth, on which stones were placed lest wolves and jackals dig it open, and then a tomb­stone was put up at the head. Later on the name of the deceased, his years of birth and death would be engraved on the stone.

  Everyone kept silent on the way back. Even the young jigits did not urge on their horses nor rush around the sleigh, trying to outrace one another as they usually did. Djantemir Bai sat silently in the sleigh beside the taciturn Jaisak, and when they approached the yurts, he muttered haltingly:

  “Since a wolf tore your sheepskin coat and robe, I’ll have everything new sent to you, and for your wound you’ll get a camel, ten sheep and a horse. You can pick the best you see in the herd.”

  Jaisak gave a nod, having nothing to say to Djantemir in response.

  2

  Arrival in Orenburg

  The sun was slowly setting over the horizon that was as flat as the surface of a calm sea. The boundless steppe was spread out under the sun. The feather grass, still silky in its vernal attire, stood motionless and showed up white in the distance just like the evening mists in the lowlands of Russia’s North. But it was parchedly dry in the steppe, without any dewdrops or other traces of humidity.

  A tarantass sped down the road with a clang and rattle, leaving a comet-like trail of whirling dust stretching out far behind it.

  “They must be needing me very much in Orenburg, if you’re in such a hot hurry,” one of the occupants of the carriage said with undisguised irony. He wore a round felt hat and was dressed in an old soldier’s greatcoat over a crumpled tailcoat and a dirty shirt with starched dicky and collar, but without any tie around his neck.

  “You’d have been better off if you swallowed your tongue and wrote less of those squibs, you khokhol   versifier,” the courier ensign sitting at his side snapped back. “It would have been better for you and me: then we wouldn’t have had to go to the other end of the world.”

  Shevchenko shrugged his shoulders.

  The dust had made his throat sore and irritated his eyes. His whole body ached from the eight-day jolting without any sleep and rest, with only half-hour halts at the post stations to have the horses changed.

  Dusk was falling. The sun declined slowly far behind them, and the blue air of the summer night, so unexpected and beautiful after the “white nights” of St. Petersburg, was approaching from the east.

  “Thank God, there is a town over there!” the coachman suddenly roused himself, pointing his whip into the distance.

  But because of the gathering night neither the passengers nor the gendarme sitting on the box beside the coach­man saw anything, except for a huge solitary building with blank stone walls, the dome of a Muslim mosque, and a tall slender minaret at its side standing far out in the steppe.

  A caravanserai, Shevchenko guessed, and even rose slight­ly from his seat as the tarantass drove nearer. He had talked about it with Brüllow the year before last: the mosque was built to the design of the painter’s brother, the architect Alexandr Brüllow, but mentioning to the gen­darme and courier the name of the teacher he loved so much would have been shrill blasphemy, so the poet only looked silently at the slender minaret which seemed to be soaring toward the first stars.

  It was well into the night when the tarantass rumbled through a vaulted gateway and the exhausted horses stopped in front of an ordnance house.

  The coachman had to knock on the oak window frames, the gate and the door with both whip and fist for a long time before a sleepy watchman reeking of raw vodka and sweat opened the door to let the arrivals enter the office.

  “Where is the officer of the day?” the courier asked sternly.

  “His Excellency has gone, and left orders not to be dis­turbed,” the watchman answered hoarsely, and fussily went about lighting a candle from an icon lamp in the corner of the anteroom.

  “I have brought a convict, a state criminal. Let him stay here, while I’m away at the commandant’s office,” the courier continued, pointing at Taras Shevchenko. “You shall be responsible for him. And you, sir, don’t contrive any tricks during my absence. It’ll only make matters worse for you,” he added as he was leaving the room. “Let’s go, Tishchenko!”

  The heavy front door shut with a bang, and the courier and gendarme’s footfalls resounded with a crunch under the windows outside.

  Shevchenko was silent. The journey had exhausted him utterly. On his way he had seen the marshy lowlands of Ingermanlandia, the dense forests of the Kostroma and Vladimir provinces, towns and their suburbs, villages and fields, the imposing might of the Volga at flood time in spring, the black lands beyond the Volga, and the drearily desolate expanses of the steppe — all of this had merged into a motley jumble of impressions. “Sleep. Sleep only!” his weary body pleaded.

  “Do you want anything to eat?” the watchman asked with a yawn. “I’ll find a slice of bread and some water to drink. As for cooked food… if you’d come a bit earlier…”

  “Give me some water; I don’t want anything to eat,” Shev­chenko said and sat down on a bench.

  The watchman brought a big bottle with water and, while Shevchenko drank long and greedily and could not drink his fill, the watchman said, scratching his hairy chest:

  “Well, you’ll have to sleep in the entrance hall. Just lie down on the floor there, brother, and don’t worry, because it’s clean: it was scrubbed with a knife today. Don’t you worry; we don’t have anything like fleas around this place. How come you didn’t take any suitcase along?”

  “Sleep. The only thing I want is sleep,” Shevchenko repeated mechanically, handing back the bottle at long last. “I’ll do without a suitcase somehow.”

  The watchman barred the front door with a heavy iron bolt on which hung a huge padlock, pocketed the key, let Shevchenko into the entrance hall, locked him up in the office, and added didactically through the door:

  “Mind you don’t smoke in there… or else you’ll get chased down ‘the green street’ to the roll of drums.”

  Shevchenko took a look at his new surroundings. The only entrance hall window, grated with ordinary prison bars just like the window in the office, barely let in the wan light of a full moon rising leisurely from behind the distant horizon. There was no bench in the room. He chose him­self a place by a wall and stretched himself out on the unpainted resinous floor planks, lay there for a while, without thinking about anything, unconsciously delighting in the silence, and then sunk into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  It was unbearably hot in the office of the provincial border commission. The bright June sun pouring in through the windows had made the room so stuffy that the luxuriant fair hair of Fedir Lazarevsky had stuck to his forehead, and rivulets of sweat rolled down his face and dripped on an opened Personal File lying in front of him on the desk. It was horribly difficult to sit in the uniform of a civil servant with a tight, starched collar, but since this was a workday and office hours, he had to be dressed in uniform while performing his official duties. Lazarevsky sincerely envied the junior clerk who wore a printed cotton shirt and sat in a draft near the door where he heaved sighs now and then. The other tables on either side of Lazarevsky were empty. His friend, countryman and colleague Serhiy Levitsky had left for the post office to collect a parcel from his mother and old aunt, and Lazarevsky relished in ad­vance the delightful moments in the evenings, when they would be looking through the new journals and books and regaling themselves on the tasty sausages, fruit
liqueurs and other goodies which, along with the food for the mind, was sent to them by loving parents and relatives in Chernihiv Province. His other colleague Galevinsky, a secretary, or rather senior clerk, had left to get some blank forms they had ordered a long time ago.

  Summoning his will, Lazarevsky forced himself to buckle down to work: he had to write an account on the results of an investigation into an intricate complaint, the disen­tanglement of which would have made even the devil go up in smoke in cool weather, let alone in a torrid blaze of forty degrees centigrade. Three times he started to write, and every time he had to throw it into the paper basket.

  “On the grounds of Instruction No. 179 from the manager of the office of your Excellency, the Military Governor, of May eleventh of the current year, and on the grounds of my personal investigation of File No. 842, I have the honor to…”

  Lazarevsky fell to thinking whether it would be better to write “to report” or “to inform”? What should his mis­sive be called anyway: account or report? Of all the papers to write! Besides, the quills were soft that day as if they were not a goose’s but a duck’s or a hen’s. And the inkwell was full of flies. Every time the quill picked up a drowned fly there appeared a black blot on the paper. The words came out so clumsy, the work was so boring. Why did it have to be him doing it?

  “Stepan, old chap!” he cried out in despair. “Bring me a bottle of kvass.”

  No sooner had Stepan’s blue shirt flashed behind the door than the clerk Galevinsky rushed into the office, threw the bundles of freshly printed blank forms on the desk and exclaimed excitedly:

  “They’ve brought in the Kobzar tonight!”

  “Why make so much noise about it? 1 have a Kobzar,” Lazarevsky restrained the clerk’s outburst.

  “But it’s not the book I have in mind. The author, Shevchenko, has been brought here! The one who wrote the Kobzar,” Galevinsky said. “I met the officer of the day who took him over from a St. Petersburg courier in the morning. He’s at the fortress now, in the transit barracks.”

  Impossible! In the barracks! Lazarevsky thought. So he was made a soldier? Or was he banished into exile? Just like the Decembrists, like Pushkin, Lermontov and Odoievsky for having dared to speak the truth out loud!

  Galevinsky was carrying on about the blank forms and the print shop, but Lazarevsky was not listening. He had to find Shevchenko at once and tell him everything that had accumulated in his heart throughout the lonely winter evenings and nights when his mind had dwelled upon the dear verses of the Kobzar! He had to help him. Immediately, then and there!

  He swept the papers off the desk into a drawer, snatched his cap from a hook, rushed out of the office, and made for the fortress almost at a run.

  He kept asking around for a long time until an officer told him where to look for the poet. With quivering heart he went past the guard, shoved a crumpled pass into his hand, and crossed the threshold of the partly empty barracks.

  By the farthest window four half-dressed men were playing cards, accompanying the game with vile curses. Another pair was squatting before an oven, roasting something skew-red on a rusty bayonet. Yet another two were just loafing around, their eyes probing everyone alertly like some market crooks seeking an easy gain. On a bunk by the nearest window lay a portly man of about thirty-five years, reading a thick, tattered book.

  It’s him, Lazarevsky thought and went to the bunk with quaking heart.

  In the morning, the courier Widler had indeed handed the poet over to the officer of the day, who in turn had the convict sent to General Liefland, the commandant of the fortress.

  The general looked quickly through the file of the arrival and raised his eyes to him with curiosity.

  The poet returned the look in a calm and intelligent manner. He gave brief and proper answers to the questions and did it with such a degree of dignity that the general found it difficult not to talk to him as an equal, contrary to regulations.

  But the verdict was explicit enough in stating that this blue-eyed artist and poet was incredibly dangerous to the state. That was something the general’s mind could not grasp, so he thought better of going into the details of the case, and he explained to the poet — just as laconically and formally as he would have done to an officer reduced in rank after a duel — that he would he assigned to the Fifth Line Battalion and sent to his place of service in a couple of days. Then the general ordered that Shevchenko be shown to the bathhouse, issued a new set of underwear, and put on the allowance list.

  In the bathhouse Shevchenko was delighted to get rid of the dust and dirt of the road, after which he went to the barber. The latter made the poet sit on a stool, and then a pair of sharp scissors snapped and chirred long over his ears, snipping the thick hair off his nape and head and off his two-month-old beard.

  Then the barber took an open razor.

  “Give it to me! I’ll shave myself,” Shevchenko said, reaching for the razor.

  “That’s against the rules!” the barber said sternly. “We’ve got such rakes around this place that if you give one of them a razor — slash! — he’ll cut somebody’s throat, yours or his own. A penal battalion is a penal battalion.”

  A chill crept involuntarily down the poet’s spine. That’s where he was ordered to be sent away by the obtuse and cruel Holsteinian, the “powerful Orthodox Czar of the State,” as the recently approved national anthem, “God Save the Czar,” went. Throughout the entire Christ-loving Rus­sian army, German rods, drill, fist law, and stupid disci­pline held sway, but here, in these line battalions, it was carried to the point of being absurd.

  “Don’t be afraid; I won’t cut you,” the barber said, hon­ing the razor rhythmically against a strop. “Every day I shave not only soldiers but the officers and the general himself,” he continued, interpreting in his own way the shade of alarm that had passed across the lively face of the new arrival.

  “Leave my side whiskers at least,” Shevchenko asked.

  “That’s against the rules,” the barber retorted categori­cally and snipped away at the remainder of the beard and the whiskers which Shevchenko had grown when he re­ceived the letter of enfranchisement and enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts.

  “But soldiers are permitted to have a mustache, and in the cavalry it is even a must. This gives them a dashing look,” the barber said, lathering Shevchenko’s cheek. “Want me to leave you a mustache? You khokhol chaps always wear mustaches.”

  “All right, leave it then,” Shevchenko said with a sudden smile. “I’ll have a mustache like a Zaporozhian Cossack.”

  The barber loved his trade and fussed around the poet for a long time, trimming and clipping his hair here and there. At last, satisfied with his work, he clicked his tongue with satisfaction:

  “Everything’s ship-shape! You are a picture of a lady’s man!”

  The barber produced a cheap little mirror from behind the cuff of his uniform and handed it to Shevchenko.

  The last time he looked at himself in a mirror was on the fifth of May at a coaching inn at Brovary near Kiev, when he wore a tailcoat and had a nosegay of orange blossoms pinned to a lapel as the best man at Professor Kostomarov’s wedding. Just over two months had passed since then — only sixty-five days, but looking out of the mirror now was a strange old man in whose eyes was such deep sorrow that it made Shevchenko shrink back involun­tarily.

  He had grown ten years older within these two months: deep wrinkles of sorrow creased his face from the nose to the corners of his lips. Without the groomed whiskers he was accustomed to, his immature mustache stuck clumsily over the drooping corners of his mouth like the bristling brush of a walrus. The curly dark-copper tuft on his crown was gone as well, and the close-cropped hair lay flat, mak­ing his bulging forehead look all the more disproportion­ately large.

  “Just like a fine lady’s man,” the barber repeated, waiting to be complimented on his work.

  I’m more of a horror, Shevchenko wanted to say, but remained s
ilent and gave the barber a ruble.

  Overjoyed to have been given an unexpected tip, the bar­ber shot a surprised look at what he took for a peculiar customer, snapped smartly to attention, and shot out like he would have done in front of an appreciative general:

  “Thank you very much indeed! I’ll have a nip to your health.”

  In the barracks, Shevchenko lay down on his bunk, op­pressed and shocked by the striking change in his appear­ance. But it was not the lack of his luxuriant hair and smart side whiskers that distressed him: in the cheap mirror he had seen the reflection of his inner torment, and realized that he could not hide it behind a sham front of contempt or indifference.

  He bit into his lip and turned away to the wall, but several minutes later he sat up and brought his fist down on the bunk.

  “Enough! I’ll have to learn to keep in check not only my nerves. I’ll have to learn to control my facial expres­sion and fashion myself a mask lest my eyes, lips or the line of the eyebrows betray my inner pain. And I’ll make it a purpose. Yes, I will, whatever it may take me!”

  That moment a man of about thirty with shining pitch-black eyes and a mop of curly disheveled hair of the same color came up with a peculiarly swaggering gait.

  “May I introduce myself?” he said. “Kozlovsky, Andrei Kozlovsky! A nobleman.”

  “Shevchenko,” the poet replied dryly with a slight bow, but did not extend his hand.

  Kozlovsky did not bat an eyelid at such a greeting, and sat down at Shevchenko’s side without any invitation.

  “Mon cher, we’ve landed at the end of the world, as it were. Why did they pack you off here, if it’s no secret?”