“After we catch the eagle I’ll put it back,” Taijan explained. “He won’t notice anything.”
When they reached the mountains, Taijan did not inspect the crests of the cliffs, but galloped on, to where the intermontane trough became wide and a creek gurgled merrily in the middle. On either side of the creek grew centennial cork elms and gnarled oak trees. But none of them seemed to be fit for his purpose, because he passed them and galloped on and on. Then he suddenly reined in his horse and stretched out his arm, pointing to a huge dry cork elm standing in the middle of the plain. When the horses rode up to it, they saw it was dirty with bird dropping — a sure sign that an eagle was passing its nights up the tree. It was midday by then. Without being afraid of the eagle appearing, the hunters measured the poles against the highest branches. There was only one dry branch that was unreachable, so Taijan climbed up the tree without wavering and cut off the branch. Now he was sure that they’d catch the eagle. The hunters rode away from the elm and settled in the shade of a full-branched nut tree where they had a generous sunset meal and lay down to rest until the evening The hunters watched the eagle as long as twilight permitted and glanced in fright at its hooked beak and talons which could pierce a human skull with a single blow. Apart from Rahim, Taijan had taken along two jigits who had warned Rahim urgently not to approach the eagle closer than three full kulash.
At long last the eagle fell asleep. Jaisak carefully lifted the lid off a pot filled with glowing coals, lit the tar-saturated wool on the tip of one of the poles which he bound with leather thongs to the second pole topped by the reflector. The men quickly approached the tree, raised the poles to the level of the eagle’s head, (the reflector at first turned away from the eagle) and instantly turned the poles round, throwing a dazzling light, multiplied threefold by the reflector, into the eagle’s eyes. The glare roused the eagle from sleep; he closed his eyes the next moment, and hissed threateningly. Blinded, he stared then at the fire and saw neither the hunters nor the thin noose that was lowered over his head. Taijan did not miss his mark: the noose embraced the eagle’s neck, clutched his throat, and sealed his doom when he was pulled down the tree with a jerk.
The struggle that followed was long and arduous. The ruler of the skies was not prepared to give up. His talons ripped the sturdy canvas, his ravening beak tore the sheepskin coats and mittens to pieces, but in the end metal rings fettered his feet, his wings were twisted behind his back, and a huge sack became the dreary night abode of the tough opponent.
For three days and nights, relieving one another in turns, Jaisak, Taijan and the other two jigits tamed the bird to their will. But every resistance has its limits. By the end of the third day Taijan threw the semi-conscious bird to the ground.
“Enough!” Taijan said, throwing the eagle up onto his mitten for the last time. “A dead eagle won’t earn us even a bowl of kumiss, let alone a chunk of mutton from Djantemir. We have tamed both the nestling and this big one,” he concluded, setting the eagle on the tugir.
“And what about the bai’s wife?” Jaisak asked with a derisive squint in his eye. “She’s been tamed too. Ever since our boys gave her a good pecking she hasn’t been pestering Kuljan and the other women.”
The next day Djantemir returned to the aul at last. He was still limping slightly, but could already walk without crutches or cane. Shauken put on a show of happy reunion by throwing herself on his neck “for joy” before the entire aul and ordered a number of her sheep to be slaughtered and for everyone to be treated to noodles with mutton and badger meat. Djantemir could not help wagging his head in surprise on seeing his wife’s unprecedented generosity, but as a husband, he was very much pleased by the attention accorded him.
When everyone had had his fill of the treat and settled round the bai, sipping the foamy kumiss out of their bowls, Djantemir told about his travel. Ibrai was already going on eighteen, but two years earlier he had been taken gravely ill. When still a teenager, he climbed a tree to pick some nuts and fell to the ground from a partly broken branch. At first nobody noticed any changes in him and he did not complain of anything, but one or two years later his back started to ache ever more terribly. He had difficulty in walking and could hardly bend down. He was rubbed with goat fat, the mullahs treated him with prayers and incantations, but his health deteriorated ever more until, last year, Zulkarnai took him to Orsk to a Russian physician who ordered the boy put in a plaster-cast bed, kept warm, fed well, and brought back for examination two years later.
“Zulkarnai gave the doctor two horses, and the doctor promised to restore the boy’s health,” Djantemir said. “Now he’s laid up in his father’s aul: the boy looks healthy, but he cannot get up, because if he does, he’ll break his spine that has been smitten by a horrible disease, and then he won’t be healthy to the end of his days.”
“He asked about you, too,” the bai turned to Kuljan who listened to her father with deep alarm. “I told Ibrai that you were waiting for him anxiously. Also, that you are capable of doing everything and are so pretty that even akyn Abdrahman composed a song about your beauty,” Djantemir added, cunningly winking at his wife. Instead of shrugging her shoulder indifferently as was her habit and dropping a disparaging remark, Shauken suddenly gave a smile and said in a sugary voice:
“You should have also told him how industrious she is, how good she is at embroidering and weaving beautiful carpets.”
“Oh yes, I forgot about the carpets,” Djantemir said with a sigh of regret/ “But Zulkarnai is so rich she’ll live at his home without working, if only Ibrai gets well. And this is what he asked me to give you as a present.” Djantemir stuck his hand into a pocket and produced a necklace bound in a tiny cloth. “Ibrai asked you to wear it and pray to Allah to make him well. Then we will celebrate your wedding in a year.”
The girls darted over to Kuljan to have a look at the present, while Djantemir inquired about the flocks and commented on the bride money he was expecting from Zulkarnai, complaining bitterly that the prize would be his only in a year’s time.
In the meantime, nobody had noticed that Kuljan had disappeared with her girl friends and a number of the jigits. This did not escape Shauken’s eyes, but she had all too important reasons to keep silent, and Taijan, to divert the bai’s attention from the young people, brought him a huge eagle which he ceremoniously settled in the bai’s yurt on a tugir prepared the day before.
The bai was transported with joy. He feasted his eyes on the eagle like a child on a new toy or a warrior on a rare weapon, gave the eagle pieces of fresh mutton, lumps of sugar, and ordered Shauken to bring him from his trunk the most lavish tomaga he had, one that had belonged to an eagle he had hunted with when he was young and achieved fame throughout the entire steppe.
When Shauken informed him that she had presented Jaisak with a new yurt, Djantemir did not so much as utter an angry word, so timely was he overjoyed by the present from the young jigit.
“Oh, if only he were rich as the late Shakir had once been!” he said with a sigh, when he was alone with his wife. “I would have given him my Kuljan in marriage instead of that sickly Ibrai! I agreed to wait another year, but if he doesn’t get well, I’ll have to turn him down.”
Djantemir did not know that Kuljan and Rahim were sitting behind the wall of the yurt at that moment. Blushing and trembling from excitement, she had heard her father’s confession.
13
Days and Thoughts
The mail arrived in Orsk with a supply transport in the latter half of the month. Everyone who was expecting a precious message from anywhere waited impatiently for it and, well in advance, prepared letters, parcels and money orders to be sent to all coiners of the vast Russian Empire.
Shevchenko was also anxiously waiting for the transport: he had to send Lazarevsky the address of Alexandriysky, a physician he had recently been introduced to at the Isaevs. Alexandriysky had immediately agreed to Shevchenko’s mail being sent to his home. Besides, She
vchenko asked Lazarevsky to tell Gern not to send any more messages to the Orsk commandant — so frightened was he by the unexpected consequences of Gern’s letter to Meshkov. And lest his letters from Orsk fall into the hands of the officers, Lidia Andreievna herself went to the post office and mailed Shevchenko’s letters in her own name.
He could have written a lot and to many people, but at the thought that his letters would first pass through the hands of his superiors and the gendarmes, perhaps, the pen slipped from his fingers and he tore to pieces unfinished letters in which every line cried out in anguish.
In the middle of August he started counting the days and hours when he would get a reply from Orenburg and Ukraine. But his expectations were in vain: there was no mail for him that month. Neither Levitsky nor Lazarevsky, let alone Gern, had had the courage to send their letters openly by mail.
Shevchenko was assailed with grief, and on the pages of his bootleg notebook appeared verse deploring the sun not warming his soul in the faraway steppe beyond the Ural, where he wished the free wind would at least bring the dust from his homeland and scatter it on his grave if he were fated to die here.
The days became shorter, the nights colder. Every morning, on holidays and Sundays, he hurried to his new friends and returned with gratitude the books he borrowed from them, chose another one to read, and then settled down to hear the latest news which now and then reached them from Orenburg and sometimes even from the banks of the Vistula. They read to each other their letters in which every word was deliberately ambiguous — the state of the weather stood for public sentiments, convalescence for hope of imminent change, and surgical operations for arrest and trial.
These conversations invigorated Shevchenko and inspired hope for the reversal of the reactionary violence. It was not without reason that Europe was living through great changes.
“Mark my words, gentlemen: after dethroning Louis XVIII, the French will soon depose Louis-Philippe,” Stanislaw Królikiewicz kept repeating with conviction. “There is a great sense in the proverb: ‘Between two evils ‘tis not worth choosing.’ Previously the people suffered directly from the aristocrats, and now financial magnates and manufacturers have snatched the reins of power. At a factory the working day is between sixteen and eighteen hours long. The peasantry is disintegrating, swelling the ranks of the workers more and more. And when all the laborers come out into the streets of Paris at one and the same time, Louis-Philippe is going to be in difficulty. France is now setting the pace for Western Europe. And the reverberation of its revolutions is shaking both Prussian and Austrian absolutism. Soon there will be neither serfdom nor autocrats throughout all of Europe — take my word for it.”
Such thoughts encouraged Shevchenko, and he returned from his hospitable friends, carrying under his arm a new book and, in his heart, a ray of hope that he would live to see better times and regain his freedom.
He almost never brought books into Lavrentiev’s home so as not to bring a new disaster on his friends. Instead, he went into the steppe where he either read for a long lime, wrote his verse, or else sat silently by the river, engrossed in his thoughts.
Sometimes he was accompanied by Fischer, because General Isaiev had been taken seriously ill, and after tutoring Lidia Andreievna’s boy, Fischer left discreetly, realizing that neither she nor Natalia were disposed to entertaining guests.
“Write! Write again! Remind them of your existence,” Fischer advised the poet insistently. “But don’t mention that you live in private quarters.”
Shevchenko gave a sigh.
“I have written already — to Sazhin, Lizohub, Pletniov, Dahl, Grigorovich and Hrebinka, I was going to write to Zhukovsky, but Gern learned that he was abroad. I even wrote to Karl the Great, as we used to call Professor Brüllow. And nobody has written a word in reply. Just to think of it — nobody at all!”
“Damn them! And they are supposed to be friends!” Fischer cried angrily. “They’re not friends but filthy people of the basest sort! Lackeys who don’t know what honor is! Every decent person must — do you hear me? — he simply must extend you a hand of assistance, and in case such help is impossible for the time being, support you morally at least. What a time has come, when everyone trembles for his own hide like a wet dog!”
“From the Moldavian to the Finn all silent are in all their tongues, because such great contentment reigns!” Shevchenko quoted from his The Caucasus as he chewed on a dry grass stalk.
“All right, so don’t wait for the letters! Don’t expect any help! Help yourself then! Write to Dubelt! Write to Orlov! Fool them! Renounce your convictions in word, so as to preserve yourself for the struggle, for the future! Appeal for pardon! Repent!”
“Never!” Shevchenko snapped back. “I’d hate myself for doing that. I spent days writing a letter to Governor Funduklei in connection with my belongings having taken away from me during the search, and you cannot imagine how repulsive and difficult it was for me.”
“I see!” Fischer said after a pause. “You are a terrible judge on history’s behalf. You are an exposer, a witness of their black deeds! I shouldn’t have advised you as I did. Please, do forgive me!”
Fischer fell silent, shamefaced.
During the golden evenings of early autumn Shevchenko frequently thought of his Ukraine, his heart was there on the banks of the old Dnieper River as he wandered by the ruins of the monastery at Trakhtemiriv, the refuge of the old, feeble Cossacks. He recalled the fearless swordsmen, crowned with the glory of the battles of long ago, who in their declining years retired to the monastery to atone for their sins by prayer. A Cossack retired from the secular world with noisy and pompous celebrations, but under the monk’s cowl he now and then yearned for the past, recalling his merry, heady youth and the temptations of the sinful world in which he had known both glory and happiness as well as a lot of overwhelming, unforgettable grief.
In his mind’s eye he also saw the steep bluffs of the Dnieper at Kaniv, Kiev and Tripillia. And he conceived an unborn dream of returning to his homeland and building himself a comfortable cottage on one of those bluffs.
But every time the sorrow of his recollections and contented dreams was ruthlessly invaded by something horrible and hateful: all too much had Shevchenko seen hideous scenes of serfdom, and the bitter fate of his serf brothers and sisters became an inseparable part of his soul. His eternal enemies, the lords and landowners — they stood before him, ready for the sake of their drunken orgies to take away from the poor peasant his last cow which fed his children.
Verse after verse, poem after poem was written down in his bootleg notebook, reviving the horrible truth of the epoch of serfdom. In the distant steppes beyond the river Ural he thus settled his lengthy account with all the serf owners and even with the czar himself.
But there were also moments when despair gripped him, and then his verse turned into laments and tears.
Summoning his will, he always got the better of himself: he had to preserve his life. Perhaps he’d live to see the day when he could fight for the freedom of his people in word and deed. That was his duty, his calling, the aim and purpose of his life. He had to fight, even when wounded, to the last drop of blood, to the last spark of life in his tortured body.
In early September, rains set in. It became instantly cold, and during this first spell of bad weather maneuvers were suddenly announced.
The company was moved from place to place. Though this was no parade ground, the men marched in goosestep, covering from twenty to forty versts in a day’s march. The nights were spent in tents which were broken at dawn, and then the men moved on in their cumbrously heavy greatcoats drenched with rain to the last stitch and they slugged on through the slimy, sucking mud that stuck to their boots, turning them into veritable dumbbells. But the most difficult part of it all was to drop on the ground and shoot or crawl around in the mud. Previously, Shevchenko’s legs were racked with rheumatism every autumn, and now the dise
ase was rampant. In vain did he try not to lag behind the others to the torrent of foul cursing by the sergeant-major and noncoms. Once he dropped to the ground, he could not get up. At last the battalion medical attendant reported to the superiors that Private Shevchenko had to be hospitalized. Shevchenko was relieved of the marches, but for another two weeks he had to remain in the battalion train until the maneuvers were over and the battalion returned to Orsk.
On learning of Shevchenko’s illness, Doctor Alexandriysky immediately visited him, found the patient to be ill with rheumatism and scurvy in its initial stage, prescribed him an ointment and alcohol compresses. The notion of vitamins did not exist in Shevchenko’s time, but from experience it was known that a patient affected with scurvy got better when he ate fruit and vegetables. In Orsk, though, they were difficult to find. The physician turned to Isaiev for help.
First thing next morning Lidia Andreievna and Natalia sent Shevchenko a whole basketful of turnips, onions, and heads of cabbage, with the strict order that he eat the vegetables raw. The latter helped Shevchenko much more than the ointment, and the alcohol prescribed for the compresses Shevchenko drank up together with Lavrentiev to the health of Lidia Andreievna and Natalia.
Alexandriysky frequently called on Shevchenko. He always brought along a book and eagerly told him interesting events from the medical profession or from his personal experiences, to which Shevchenko liked to listen.
His Polish friends also made their calls, lavishing him with the best of tobaccos and once bringing him a new anthology of young Polish poets to read.
In two weeks Shevchenko had recuperated and had a good rest. When he got on his feet, the first thing he did was to go for an unsteady walk into the steppe. The autumnal skyline was perfectly straight like the horizon at sea. The wind swept the reddened balls of tumbleweed into the distance. Storks winged their way to the south in extended wedges, and their honking voices reverberated in the poet’s heart with deadly sadness.
The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko Page 15
