The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  “I’ll have you caned! I’ll have you run the gauntlet if you have your head in the clouds!” he raved a key lower and rushed over to another platoon on seeing something wrong there.

  On holidays and during red-letter days, of which, apart from Sundays, there were no less than two or three a month, Shevchenko went to the Or River which flowed into the Ural some two to three versts from the fortress. There, convinced that none of the barrack drunkards, let alone the officers, had followed him, he settled in some dense shrubs, took the little notebook out of his bootleg, and wrote poetry in his native Ukrainian language which nobody spoke or even understood here.

  Shevchenko’s thoughts always took him back to his homeland. It was enough for him to close his eyes or simply fall to thinking and his mind revived the village of his childhood Kirilivka, or his boundlessly loved Kiev sprawl­ing along the green banks of the Dnieper, or else the hospit­able home of a friend where he had lived for a long time, painting portraits of the hosts and writing his poems. At all times his heart was with his dear nation, his brothers and sisters were suffering, and like Antaeus touching his native land in his thoughts at least, his spirit buoyed and he wrote. He invited these thoughts, sweet and bitter as they were at one and the same time, pleading with them not to leave him in a foreign land; in his poetry, he drew pictures of the Ukrainian village immersed in the lush verdure of orchards, with snow-white cottages between slender poplars, with the clean mirrors of ponds, with meadows and the cheerful frothing of water on the water-mill wheel.

  Yes, it was an Eden on earth, but nearby, on a hill, loomed the landowner’s palace where money was always needed to hold the unending banquets — and so the peas­ant was robbed of his last cattle, of his last jaded nag, without which he could not plow his miserly strip of land, and his harvest was sold to the merchant, which doomed the village to hunger.

  In this way he wrote the poem The Princess. His heart boiled with wrath and hatred, the poem’s words becoming as cutting as the lashes of a whip. These verses were fated to reach the reader only many years later when serfdom was abolished. After having had his fill of the sweet tor­ments of creativity, Shevchenko returned to the barracks, conscious of the fact that even here, in exile, he served his native land, preparing a weapon to struggle on for the freedom of his people.

  Once on a Sunday in late July he decided against walk­ing far into the steppe to the Or, because storm clouds had overcast the sky, here and there a gray net of rain screened the horizon, and a barely audible rumble of thunder reached his ears. Sitting in between the shrubs on the high bank of the Ural, he looked through the pages of his note­book and his “children,” as he called his verse with a sense of pain; then, wearied by the stifling heat of the approaching rainstorm, he undressed and jumped into the cold waves of the Ural. The bathing refreshened him. He dived a number of times, swam some more, and was already dressing when a pleasant baritone with a discernible Polish accent asked suddenly:

  “If I am not mistaken, the gentleman is the poet Taras Shevchenko?”

  Shevchenko started and impulsively reached for his boots: the cherished notebook was in place.

  “Excuse me, but who do I have the honor of speaking to?” he asked, calmer now.

  “Let me introduce myself. Your comrade in misfortune: Otto Fischer, an exiled Pole.”

  The introduction relieved Shevchenko’s tension.

  “I am very pleased to meet you! I, too, wanted to get acquainted with you, that is, with all the exiles,” Shevchen­ko said, shaking Fischer’s hand genially. “But how did you learn about me?”

  “My colleague Ludwik Turno wrote to me about you from Orenburg.”

  “Turno? Oh yes, I remember meeting him at the Gerns’. He is an extremely likeable person. But as far as I know, you’re not the only exile here?”

  “There are three of us at the Orsk Fortress now. One died of consumption this spring. The rest were transferred to other battalions. How was your swim? Is the water good?”

  “Just wonderful. Cool and healthfully refreshing.”

  “With your permission, I will take a dip then.”

  It was only now that Shevchenko noticed how smartly Fischer’s uniform fitted his figure, and he suddenly felt uneasy about his own untidy appearance. While Fischer was swimming, Shevchenko combed his hair and mustache, shook out his uniform, and wiped the dust off his boots with grass, and when Fischer settled at his side, he ex­tended both hands to him for joy: “Oh, how I’ve missed a friendly conversation here!”

  They were oblivious to the flow of time as if this was not their first meeting and they had been good friends and seeing each other after a long separation. A furious whirl­wind jolted them back to reality.

  “A rainstorm!” Shevchenko jumped to his feet.

  When they had reached the first houses, a warm, blessed downpour spattered around them, the wind chased the pallid waves of rain which made them look like some form­less apparitions with loose gray hair.

  After they shook the water out of their clothes on a porch, Fischer took Shevchenko into a log cabin built in Oriental fashion, with the windows facing the yard and a blank wall giving onto the street.

  A tall dark-mustachioed man of about thirty rose to his feet to meet Shevchenko.

  “Let me introduce you to my friend Stanislaw Królikiewicz,” Fischer said.

  “We were looking for you last week,” Królikiewicz said genially in a mellow bass. “We dropped in to the barracks and looked for you in the steppe. I am sincerely glad to see a dear poet and a likeminded adherent.”

  “Thanks for your kindness!” Shevchenko said with a bow. “But I have no right to claim any personal merits in fighting for your martyr — Poland.”

  “You are wrong to think so! We have a common enemy — czarism. Hence a common purpose as well: to gain freedom for all nations who groan under the heel of czarism,” Królikiewicz said.

  “You know, Taras Grigorievich,” Fischer intervened, “Monsieur Królikiewicz and Monsieur Zawadzki, our third comrade, were laid up in hospital for three months after running through the ‘green street.’  ”

  “What? After running the gauntlet?” Shevchenko clenched his teeth.

  “Yes. We were chased between a double file of five hundred men twice,” Królikiewicz confirmed. “For instigat­ing rebellion. That’s how the verdict ran.”

  At that moment a drenched Zawadzki, a thick-set man with gray hair, entered the room. He carried a big roll of tobacco leaves in gray wrapping paper.

  Fischer hastened to introduce him to Shevchenko. After shaking hands, Zawadzki threw off his wet uniform, and sitting down at the table, asked the guest:

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Yes. Not cigarettes, though, but a pipe.”

  “I’ve just got some fine kafan from a Bukharan. It’s one of the best Turkish tobaccos around. What about trying it? It’s really wonderful.”

  “I have an extra pipe,” Fischer went into a bustle. “Here you are: as a token of our future friendship, let us smoke a ‘pipe of peace.’”

  “Well, if you put it that way…” Shevchenko gave a smile as well, as he accepted the pipe.

  After the shag and the cheap cigarettes, the poet inhaled the fragrant kafan smoke with pleasure when he suddenly saw a big shelf lined with books on the wall. His eyes flared up like those of a hungry man seeing bread. Królikiewicz intercepted his look and his stern eyes softened.

  “Are you fond of books? They are really difficult to get here. Our compatriots got us these to save us the trouble occasionally; our parents send us some with the travelers who come here. Our library is at your service.”

  Shevchenko went up to the bookshelves: there was Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Schiller in Polish, Jan Kochanowski, Ignacy Krasicki, Walter Scott, and German, Polish and French novels. Only three books were in Russian: Pushkin, Rileyev and Odoievsky’s Heterogeneous Tales.

  “Do you have Herzen by any chance?” he asked.

  “We do, but it�
�s in Rover’s kennel,” Zawadzki responded as he cut the tobacco leaves on the table.

  “Everything that is prohibited we keep outdoors in the dog’s kennel,” Fischer explained with a laugh. “Rileyev is normally there too, but today we failed to hide it, be­cause the masters of the house were at home. We visit Rover when they are away, or at night when they’re asleep. Rover is guarding the books honestly. He loves us … that is, the bread and the bones from our borshch he gets.”

  “You should see his fangs — they’re like a wolf’s,” Za­wadzki added. “No stranger dares go near his kennel.”

  “And what about the masters of the house?”

  “They don’t know anything about our cache. We built it when we were repairing the kennel. No search in this house will reveal anything.”

  Shevchenko picked out the Heterogeneous Tales and a pocket-size volume of Mickiewicz. In the meantime, a sa­movar and cold collation had appeared on the table, and a lively conversation began during tea.

  “What happened in Cracow, after all?” Shevchenko asked. “The Russian papers wrote next to nothing about it.”

  Królikiewicz lit up his pipe and drew on it deeply.

  “We wanted to rise as one nation, so that the enemy would not have known a moment’s peace in every village, city and town; so that he would be fired at or watched furtively from every wood and orchard, from behind every cliff in the mountains and from every home and thus be drawn into an ambush or trap. It was to be a fight just like the Spaniards’ with Napoleon who overcame powerful states but could not subdue the Spanish patriots. We set the date of the uprising for the twenty second of February, but our cause was betrayed by traitors from among the gentry who warned the enemy. The Austrians dispatched a unit to help the government that was well-disposed to them, and several days before the uprising most of our leaders were arrested. That is why only Cracow rose up in arms. Its main force was the town’s poor citizens. They captured the town, and the Austrian troops had to flee. We established a provisional government which immediate­ly issued a manifesto calling on everyone to struggle for the independence of Poland, at the same time eliminating all taxes and proclaiming democratic freedoms. Unfortu­nately, arguments flared up within the government: some wanted to limit themselves only to the national question, while others pointed to the peasantry’s demands for the abolition of serfdom, the workers’ demands for more pay and cheap bread, and the townspeople’s demands for civil rights. All these demands frightened the gentry and bour­geoisie, and the Austrians started to advance with substan­tial forces. Battles ensued. A unit of workers from the Wieliczka salt mines under the leadership of Dembowski came to the town’s assistance. He reorganized the town’s defense, under his influence democratic reforms were ef­fected more broadly, which drew masses of the peasantry to the uprising. We were expecting insurrections in Silesia, Poznan, on the Vistula and in Galicia. Peasant riots had actually broken out there, but the forces were unequal. Dembowski was shot by the Austrians who then captured Cracow in early March. And we landed up in Orsk…”

  Królikiewicz fell silent, but a nervous twitch lingered on his thin lips, and grief spread across his stern face. After regaining self-control, he told about his arrest, the inquest and the trial.

  Then Shevchenko told them about the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and about his copy of the manuscript Three Years the gendarmes had taken away from him. He read his poems To the Dead, the Living and the Unborn… and My Testament, as well as one or two others.

  The Poles looked reverently at him, feeling happy for the first time since they had landed in this horrible prison without walls.

  Back at the barracks, Shevchenko lay down on his bunk and opened a book, pretending he was reading it, but in­stead of the Heterogeneous Tales and Mickiewicz he saw before his eyes the events of his distant youth.

  In the days when he lived in Vilnius an uprising was about to break out. Even the tender and bashful Dziunia Gusikowska — his short-lived love — burned with the sacred fire of struggle for her people. At that time he was already reading Mickiewicz in the Polish language and was just as raring to take part in the uprising. He had studied the Polish language which stood him in good stead today. He sincerely envied the Poles who had learned to unite so strongly and were capable of real struggle.

  If only the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish peasants, the Caucasian highlanders and these naked and hungry Kirghiz were capable of uniting and attacking czarism!

  How had it happen, after all, that two fraternal Slavic nations had become enemies? They should have lived in lasting peace as good neighbors, stood shoulder to shoulder against the enemies as they had once done against the Turks at the walls of Khotin and confronted the Teutonic knights on the shores of the Baltic Sea and Lake Chud.

  Twilight was falling. Evening prayers and roll call were over. The barracks gradually quieted down. But Shev­chenko was deep in thought about the past, and sleep evad­ed him. In his heart he felt compassionately for a Poland that had been torn into three parts, a nation that had produced such courageous and staunch people.

  The men in the barracks were asleep. Discordant snor­ing, sighs, and mumbling came from all sides. Shevchenko hid the book in his locker, settled by a wick lamp, unfolded a piece of paper he had found between the pages of the book, and became thoughtful.

  Yes, they were set at variance with one another by the rapacious magnates, and the predatory, cunning Jesuits.

  Shevchenko reread what was written there, carefully folded up the paper, and hid it in his pocket.

  He impatiently waited for the end of that week during which he read the Heterogeneous Tales twice and learned many of Mickiewicz’s poems by heart. But when he was getting ready to leave for his new friends and opened the locker, he saw that the Heterogeneous Tales had disap­peared.

  Shevchenko’s face paled.

  “The book! Where is the book I’ve been reading?” he said, turning to Kuzmich who was sewing a button on to his uniform. “The book isn’t mine. I have borrowed it.”

  “I’m no crook,” the old soldier said, giving him a stern, but open look. “Ask them.” He gestured contemptuously toward the far corner where Kozlovsky was boisterously playing cards with the demoted Ensign Belobrovov and the drunkard Schulz.

  Shevchenko went up to them, and looking straight into Kozlovsky’s eyes, asked:

  “Where is my book?”

  Kozlovsky did not bat an eyelid.

  “Whoever wants a book that’s already been read?” he answered the question with a question.

  “Must have been used for rolling cigarettes,” Belobrovov retorted carelessly.

  “I demand the book be returned at once!” Shevchenko said sharply.

  “Oh, pardon.” Kozlovsky clicked his heel pieces together. “I forgot to inform you that it’s now in the possession of the merchant Ghalhushian in the settlement. He eagerly buys up books for twenty kopecks. Go and get it. He prob­ably hasn’t torn it up for grocery bags yet.”

  Shevchenko left for the settlement almost at a run. Chalhushian’s store had a profuse display of goods: barrels of herring, kerosene and plant oil, sacks of flour, millet, sugar and groats, crates of soap, shag, nails, macaroni, candles, jars of fruitdrops and cheap candy, boxes of cinnamon, raisin and laurel leaf, and under the counter stood huge carboys with vodka and cheap Caucasian wine.

  “Has anyone offered to sell you a book recently?” Shev­chenko asked.

  “One soldier brought a book yesterday,” the fat, short-legged shopkeeper answered impassively. “Look! Yours — not yours?” he threw the Heterogeneous Tales on the counter.

  “It is! It is! The book was stolen from me,” the poet said and noted with horror that the book’s list of contents and last page had been torn out. “There was a page here. Do you still have it?”

  “Soldier brought book,” the Armenian repeated indiffer­ently. “Me doing you service: we need paper for herring, need for sugar, need for raisins. Soldier bring
— we take, we give vodka, shag. Pay thirty kopecks and take it.”

  Shevchenko paid the money and hurried to his friends. Zawadzki and Królikiewicz were not at home: they were on guard duty that day; only Fischer was awaiting the poet. Shevchenko told him what had happened and apologized for the missing page in the book.

  “Don’t take it so much to heart,” Fischer said with a smile, seeing how overwrought Shevchenko was. “It would have been much worse if the entire barracks were to use up the book for rolling cigarettes. Sit down and tell me what’s new. Then we’ll take a swim in the Ural and do some fishing. Today is a cool day, and fish bite well in such weather. As for dinner, we’ll go to General Isaiev.

  “What?” Shevchenko asked, bewildered.

  “Very simply. The general is a widower living with his daughter Natalia who recently graduated from the Smolny Finishing School in St. Petersburg. His elder daughter, the widow of an officer killed in the Caucasus last year, has come to visit him. She has a boy I am tutoring for the entrance examinations to a Gymnasium. Frequently I stay the evenings with them. The general wants to meet you, and his elder daughter is fascinated by your poetry. They asked me to bring you along at all costs.”

  Refreshened by the swim and walk in the steppe, they went to the general’s home.

  The principal adornment in the modestly furnished but large parlor of the general’s home was an Eberhardt grand piano and a number of magnificent date palms and rubber plants. A red-breasted gray parrot was squawking merrily in a tall round cage.

  Lidia Andreievna, the general’s elder daughter, came out to meet them.

  “How do you do,” she said simply, extending her hand to Shevchenko after he had been ceremoniously introduced to her by Fischer. “I am glad to meet you. But why are we standing? Do sit down, please. Papa is in a bad mood as always. He will join us in no time. I have read your Kobzar. It was back in the Caucasus when my husband was still alive. You certainly have a distinctive talent. At times your poetry is so delicate, so lyrical, and at others tempestuous, sharp and courageous. Like a storm on a sea. You must take care of yourself and go through whatever suffering you have to so as to write another book as good as this one.”