The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  In the east, dawn was breaking, heralding the birth of a new day.

  During breakfast Shevchenko’s new friends asked him about his personal belongings.

  “The manuscripts and drawings were taken away by the gendarmes, and the rest remained in prison,” be answered indifferently. “With the little money 1 have about me I’ll have to buy myself something for the summer, because it will be too hot and I’d look funny going around in a tailcoat.”

  That was enough for Lazarevsky to plunge into a flurry of activity. He called the housemaid Axinia and told her to clean and press Shevchenko’s tailcoat, and to wash and starch his shirt. Levitsky offered to lend some money and a canvas suit. Shevchenko refused to accept the money but tried the suit on, and Axinia volunteered to shorten its legs and sleeves a little bit. Then she recalled that the husband of the landlady had recently died and left quite a few of his things. The young men took him immediately to the landlady who, on learning that Shevchenko was an artist and in exile besides, brought a summer coat from her ward­robe and flatly refused to take any money for it, adding to the coat several pairs of underwear, a straw hat, and a pair of warm winter trousers.

  “This is not a present, but rather a down payment,” she said to ease his embarrassment. “Once you are freed, you will paint a portrait of my late husband from this little daguerreotype. Consider me your first customer.”

  After parting with his new friends, Shevchenko took a walk around the town.

  Dust and sweltering heat hovered over Orenburg. Its central part was a cluster of public buildings: the two-storied palace of the governor, beside it a large building occupied by the military district commander, a little far­ther away the Gymnasium, the building of the provincial revenue department, a military school, and a school for the girls of the nobility — all of them dull-looking in the heavy architectural style of Czar Nicholas’ reign, and all of them painted with bright yellow ochre. On the square was a clumsily designed cathedral with a huddle of beggars on the porch, an arcade with short smooth columns painted white, and a little to one side was a prison castle — simply a prison with guards on the watch towers behind the tall brick walls. All around there were innumerable monotonous single-storey buildings of wood, with blackened, unpainted tiny windows, tightly shut gates, and tall enclosures without a single chink.

  There were practically no civilians in sight, except for some occasional old woman carrying a couple of wicker baskets or pails of water.

  Helmets and epaulettes. Epaulettes and helmets. Soldiers and Cossacks, Shevchenko thought as he walked across the hot velvety dust. It’s not a town but a military camp.

  The streets all looked alike: on the dirt road lay heaps of ashes, at the crossing was a pile of rubbish, and on the market place the wind was whirling around wisps of hay, dirty paper, husks and. dust. Salesmen or a proprietor-mer­chant yawned from boredom in the shops scattered here and there, and gawked at the strange pedestrian; and in the lower part of the town stood a green nondrying puddle in which two ducks splashed about and a mud-covered sow lounged. It seemed that the silence was suspended in the air along with the dust and sweltering heat, occasionally interrupted by the barking of a dog or the soul-rending sounds of a waltz coming from a barrel organ.

  Without realizing how he came there, Shevchenko found himself in the steppe and suddenly saw on the horizon the outlines of the caravanserai and beside it the dome of the mosque and the tall stone needle of the minaret.

  The minaret was much farther away than he had thought at first. Its narrow door was open. Behind it, in the semi-darkness, he saw the barely distinguishable stairway rising in a spiral. Shevchenko stopped in indecision: he wanted to climb the stairs and look at the steppe, the town, and the deep churning Ural River from thirty meters up, but the heat and walk had exhausted him, and it occurred to him that the faithful might take his unwonted intrusion as an offense against their holy shrine.

  So Shevchenko only walked round the minaret, admiring its revetment of rose granite and the facing of intricate cornices of colored tiles covered with clear-cut geometrical ornaments girding the wall in several bands. Then he came up to the mosque and was about to cross its threshold when an old Kazakh wearing a white turban shook him by the shoulder and angrily gestured at his feet. Shevchenko stopped in surprise, but seeing that everyone entering the mosque took off their footwear first, he pulled off his shoes as well. The old man in the turban gave him a nod and motioned for him to enter.

  It was cool and quiet inside the mosque. The air in it smelled pleasantly of the steppe grasses. Shevchenko weari­ly sat down on the deep-pile carpets covering the marble floor and crossed his legs in Oriental fashion. He did not notice how long he was sitting like that, engrossed in dreamy contemplation, while his tortured soul found respite and all his anxieties faded away in his torpor.

  Loud voices from the threshold of the mosque jolted him back to reality. He got up and went outdoors.

  Opposite the mosque rose the tall blank wall of brick of the caravanserai. A motley crowd milled about on the huge square of the caravanserai. There were quite a few Kazakhs, or Kirghiz as they were called at that time, and Russian merchants. Shevchenko was dazed by the varicolored and unexpectedly thrilling scene that unfolded before his eyes. He could not make up his mind what was better to look at: the arrogantly disdainful camels looking down on this feverish bustle, or the proudly dignified Bukharans in shiny silken robes and with faces the color of dark bronze, murky black eyes and aquiline noses, or the Kazakhs with their mysteriously calm slitlike eyes looking down from light-footed steppe horses, or the Uzbeks wearing lavish turbans bobbing above their gray little donkeys.

  “Taras Grigorievich, can it really be you?” a familiar voice asked from behind him.

  Shevchenko turned round: before him stood Levitsky in the company of a tall slender officer with the epaulettes of a staff captain.

  “Let me introduce you to Karl Ivanovich Gern,” Levitsky said. “He’s a good friend of ours and a great connoisseur of literature and art.”

  “Connoisseur is a bit far-fetched,” Gern said reproach­fully, as he shook hands with Shevchenko. “It’s just that I love honest, good and beautifully written fiction, but I regret being introduced to our best poet under the circum­stances which have brought you to Orenburg.”

  Shevchenko took an instant liking to Gern.

  “How did you get here and what are you doing in this place?” Levitsky asked.

  “Just admiring and suffering. What torment it is to see such a lot of new, original and exotic things, without having the right to paint them!”

  “I know! I understand and sympathize with you,” Gcrn said after a moment’s pause. “Look, admire and store in your memory everything. One of these days it may be use­ful and, the main thing, you must take care of yourself… for the sake of the people,” he added quietly.

  Shevchenko glanced at him silently.

  “Still, what wonderful figures of people,” he said after a while. “What faces!”

  “As for us, we’re here because life is so dull back in town. The appearance of a caravan is a great event that does not occur too often. Besides, you can buy wonderful things here at times.”

  “I, for one, am looking for a good English sporting gun,” Gern joined in. “Unfortunately, I have not seen any today.”

  “An English gun?” Shevchenko asked, bewildered.

  “Of course. The British are not at war with us, as you know, but secretly they supply arms and funds to those who do fight us. They are thus arming the Circassians. The Khivans, Bukharans and Kokandians have such wonderful carbines, shotguns, and rifles which our Christ-loving sol­diers with their pathetic bullet belchers can only dream of. Generally, we – ”

  Gern fell silent abruptly on seeing the blue uniform of a gendarme.

  “I am trying to find something for my parents who are lavishing Fedir and me with their parcels,” Levitsky said. “Here’s a shawl I bought for my mother. I wanted
to buy a Bukharan robe for Father, but the price was formidable.”

  “The day after tomorrow the caravan will be moving on. Just before it leaves the prices will drop,” Gern put Levitsky’s mind at ease. “Let us go to a Turkish coffee house for a cup of the finest Turkish brew.”

  After coffee the friends strolled through the caravanserai, showing Shevchenko the performance of a Chinese acrobat, or stopping to listen to the singing of an akyn. Gern under­stood the Kazakh language and explained to Shevchenko that the akyn was singing of Koblanda Batyr, a hero of a Kazakh epos, and about Isatai Taimanov, the Kazakh leader of the uprising which had spread throughout this land some twenty or thirty years earlier.

  “They have many wonderful ancient legends,” Gern said. “The akyns, just like the rhapsodists of ancient Greece, bring them together into endless poems.”

  Gern must have taken an interest in Shevchenko. For a long time he asked him about Ukraine, the Academy of Arts and Brüllow, Venetsianov, Tropinin and Shchedrin, and recalled how he had made the acquaintance of Alexandr Brűllow the previous year when he came to build the mina­ret. Soon they learned that they had common friends in St. Petersburg where Gern graduated from the Military Academy several years past. At long last they made to leave the square when Shevchenko stopped to look how water was being drawn from a well in the center of the square.

  On either side of the well pit two inclined poles rose out of the ground. Their top ends were held together by a thick iron bolt with a pulley over which passed a strong rope. One end of the rope was tied to a large leather bucket holding about eight pails of water, and the other end was attached to the neck of a horse. To lower the bucket into the pit, the horse was slowly backed toward the well, and when the bucket filled with water, the animal was made to move toward the gate and stopped only when the bucket appeared over the well curb. After that an old overseer ladled out the water to the people with a huge scoop or emptied it into a stone-lined pool for the cattle, for which he was given several coppers.

  “An interesting invention,” Shevchenko said. “It must have survived from the hoary past.”

  “In this way, over three thousand heads of cattle can be watered within a day,” Gern remarked. “Such a well is called a shingrau. It is dug wherever the ground water table is very deep and there are no rivers or lakes nearby. Where the ground water is high, the Kazakhs dig them­selves a well in a day at every new camping site, and then, when they move to another place, they leave it behind to be used free by anyone. A shingrau, however, is not that easy to dig. It can be afforded only by a rich bai or khan. To dig and line the pit with stone costs no less than one hundred sheep. You must know perhaps that the Kirghiz do not pay with money but with sheep like our ancestors once did with marten furs. The owner of such a shingrau makes a good profit. The shingrau, though, was built by the Russians to revive caravan trade with Persia and Bukhara, and in the next few years with India perhaps.”

  “What a lot of things yon know about this place,” Shevchenko said with a sigh. “I’d like to have a better know­ledge of all this. But they’ll be sending me off to Orsk in a few days. Back at the barracks I was told that an escort of guards is getting ready.”

  Gern fell to thinking.

  “You know what, Taras Grigorievich, come to me to­morrow in the evening, and in the morning I will try to find out what will happen to you. Come by all means. My wife will be very glad to see you. She’s a Pole; we have many Polish acquaintances in exile here, among them stu­dents, musicians, and even an artist. They have been forced into military service just like you, but most of them lodge out of barracks.”

  5

  Kuljan

  Kuljan was an orphan. Her mother, Djevger, a Turkmenian by origin, bore no resemblance to the Kazakh women inhabiting the foothills of the Urals. Slim, with large black eyes and unusually long eyebrows, and braids reaching below her knees, Djevger looked like a graceful statuette of ebony brought from India by some accident. At the age of seven she was engaged to an oldish Bukharan merchant who traveled with his caravans to the banks of the Volga and to the Urals. He often took her on these distant and difficult treks; when she was barely seventeen, he died of cholera not far away from the camp of Djantemir. Nobody knew where and how the libertine bai had cast his eye on her but, with the merchant buried, his brothers and com­mercial partners bartered the young widow for sheep the very next day — and the tender beauty Djevger shed her paranja and became the wife of Djantemir Bai.

  The next spring she bore him a daughter, Kuljan, and two years later, a son, Rahim.

  Kuljan was not fated to enjoy her mother’s tenderness for long. Djevger was gradually fading away in the bound­less steppes of the cold northern Kazakhstan, as she recounted to the girl the stories about the luxuriant orchards and vineyards of her homeland. At the age of six Kuljan became an orphan.

  Without her mother near her, life became sad and dreary for Kuljan. Zeineb, Djantemir’s eldest wife, did her no wrong; but beset with the cares for her own children as she always was, she paid the orphan as much attention as she did the watchdogs, while Djantemir did not like little children at all. Kuljan grew up a sensitive and dreamy girl who remembered her mother’s fairy tales for years to come. Djevger was a remarkable storyteller: she changed her fairy tales every time, which made them always interesting to listen to. As she grew up, Kuljan started retelling the fairy tales to her little brother. She would find a secluded nook, sit down, gently put her arm round little Rahim’s shoulder as if giving him a part of the motherly affection he had lost, and relate the fairy tales.

  After Djevger’s death Djantemir remarried and took a corpulent and lazy woman, Nuripa, for a wife. All day long she lounged around in her yurt, chattering with the servants, while the orphans, Kuljan and Rahim, grew up like the steppe feather grass, knowing no care, tenderness or kind­ness, .except for the moments when they visited the black yurt of old Shakir, who would make them a reed pipe or else give them something for a present, while his wife, auntie Kumish, treated them to a bowl of airan, stroked their heads, gave them a piece of still hot flat cake of corn, and then hurried back to milking the bai’s sheep or mares to make kumiss, and sometimes Jaisak would give them a ride on his back, kicking his legs and shaking his head in imitation of a mettlesome horse.

  During the first few years of their orphanhood they never parted. But gradually Kuljan was being schooled to do a woman’s work, while little Rahim, like all the boys, took a fancy for weapons, hunting and horses, and little by little brother and sister became estranged.

  When her mother was still alive, Kuljan, just past the age of five then, was engaged to the son of a rich bai who camped far away from her aul. Djantemir received from the bai a substantial down payment in lieu of bride money, and, for his part, he paid the parents of the intended hus­band what was called a kyit which was always a little bit less than the bride money, because the kin of the bride-to-be was losing, while the kin of the future husband was gaining a worker instead. It was also agreed that the wedding would take place once the engaged children reached the age of fifteen.

  Kuljan was past sixteen already, but her betrothed did not show up. Djantemir decided to wander that spring not to the Syr Darya River as he usually did, but much farther to see the bai and finally clear the arrangements for Kuljan’s wedding.

  The thought of leaving her aul forever frightened the girl. What was her intended husband, the strange bai’s son Ibrai, like? What if she would never be able to love him? She felt sad to leave even this desolate and monotonous steppe, so dreadful to every new arrival, yet so beautiful to her. Neither did she want to leave baibishe Zeineb, Djan­temir’s eldest wife. Zeineb never did anything wrong to Kuljan, and now after her daughters had been married off to other auls, she even invited Kuljan kindly to her yurt to tell her something interesting or to teach the girl the native customs. Kuljan was also loath to leave old Kumish and her son Jaisak who was maimed so horribly by the wolves.

  Whene
ver she recalled the young herder, she blushed against her will and a peculiar tremor rippled through her body. But for nothing in the world would she tell anything about it either to Rahim, Zeineb, her girl friends, or even to her favorite dog Jolgusta, which followed on her heels everywhere and crept into her yurt during the nights to guard her against snakes and scorpions.

  Yes, it would make her awfully sad to leave her aul forever. But on the other hand, she would get rid of her stepmother Shauken, Djantemir’s fourth wife, who appeared in the aul in the spring of the previous year.

  Djantemir did not tell anyone about his intention to have a fourth wife. Shauken was a rich widow from a clan liv­ing on the banks of the Irghiz River. Her husband had died some years earlier, leaving her with no children or rela­tives. Shauken managed her household alone and even set up her own aul which kept away from the others. Djantemir paid occasional visits to her, and only the old bonesetter Abdullah and Monbasar vaguely suspected the true purpose of his visits. Then suddenly the news flashed through the aul: the bai was preparing a kade, that is, a wedding pres­ent for his intended wife, and was about to visit her again with a large retinue of nukers, tyulenguts and rela­tives.

  Several days later the bai returned, exhausted but pleased and merry, and for a long time thereafter the jigits were telling stories how they had been lavishly treated to food and drink, what a pompous and gorgeous baiga there had been, and how Djantemir’s son Iskhak had beaten everyone on his stallion, the offspring of the famous Karligach.

  Three weeks later Djantemir was again preparing to leave with his retinue — this time to celebrate his wedding. He said that he would return with his new wife in a week.

  The whole aul was getting ready to meet the bai’s wife. Most of the men had left with Djantemir, while the jigits who stayed behind started to choose the best racers for the baiga and chased them wildly around the steppe, getting them accustomed to runs over long distances.