Shevchenko would not have accepted such sacrifice, of course. He wished no more than just two lines of affectionate greetings from the one he called his starlet and whom he recalled every time when the sun set and the mountains turned black.
For her sake he had alienated himself from Princess Varvara Repnina, who loved him. He did not accept her loyal heart, for he cared for another woman. And that other woman did not even answer his despairing letter from Orenburg. Had she forgotten him? No, she had not. She simply did not take all that as love; to her it had been no more than a caprice, an accidental, passing whim of a high-society lady.
He snatched the sealed letter addressed to Zakrewska from the table and tore it to pieces. It was only that he realized his blindness in regard to Repnina, and only now did he appreciate all the wisdom contained in the proverb: “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Nonetheless, there stood before his mind’s eye the charming image of Zakrewska he had drawn last summer, trying to spiritualize her features as much as possible.
“It was not her I was drawing. I was just drawing my dream. I crowned her with the halo of a Madonna and did not see that she was a shop-window dummy,” he told himself, pacing from corner to corner. “Enough! She is not worth my tears. And if I ever scramble out of this grave, I will never come to her. I shall reverently bow to Repnina for all the care she bestowed upon me, for her selfless pure affection, for every teardrop she shed because of my blindness and egotism.”
He sat down at the table, took a fresh piece of paper, and wrote in his fine but clear handwriting:
“Dear Varvara Nikolaevna …”
He stopped abruptly and threw the pen aside.
And what if she, too, wouldn’t answer? What if she saw in him only an artist and poet who could exalt her image in verse and on canvas?
He abandoned this thought instantly. For didn’t she find him the job of a drawing instructor at Kiev University? Didn’t she herself knit him a warm woolen muffler on seeing that he had no fur collar on his winter coat? Didn’t she subscribe to all the journals and bought all the books which could be of interest to him? Whoever else might ignore him, but Varvara Nikolaevna would undoubtedly respond to his letter. She was incapable of forgetting.
Shevchenko clutched his temples and sat still and frozen for a long time. Then he took up the pen and wrote in a simple, warm and serious manner like he would have written to an elder sister who understood everything, who felt that he had to be snatched out of here one way or another while his soul was alive, while his talent had not decayed, while the desire to live blazed in him.
How difficult, how contrary it was to his nature to ask and complain. He quickly changed to describing the local nature and the Kazakhs.
“… the Kirghiz are so colorful, so distinctive that you cannot help but take a pencil and draw them. Sometimes I visit the caravanserai and look at the Bukharans. What a slender built people they are! What wonderful heads they have. There is an inherent dignity about them without any haughtiness whatsoever. If I were permitted to draw, how many new and original drawings would I have sent you! But there is nothing I can do about it! To look and not to draw — what a torment it is for me.
“… It is over half a year now that I have been cut off from literature. Send me, if you please, Gogol’s latest book Selected Excerpts from Correspondence with Friends and the Studies of the Moscow Archeographic Society published by Bodiansky.”
He read what he had written with a lump in his throat. Again he had to beg, beg, beg…
That is my last attempt, he thought, sealing the letter. If there is no reply this time as well, then I’ll…
A week later Shevchenko prepared to visit Jaisak again and took along the portrait of Kuljan he had finished drawing in the settlement.
“If you love her so much, let her always stay with you,” he said to the young herder, and gave him the drawing. “It may help her become your wife one day.”
Jaisak beamed with joy. The drawing did indeed seem to him to be a miraculous charm which would help him marry Kuljan in spite of all obstacles. He did not know how to thank, where to seat, and with what to treat the guest. That day, like almost every other day, he had nothing to offer but fresh airan. Trying to demonstrate his affection and gratitude to the poet, he saw him off right to the fortress.
It was a wonderful day, with a cloudless sky overhead. The sun was warm like in summer, and there was not a single ripple of wind in the air. Even the light balls of tumbleweed lay still in the places where the merry wind had left them when it had spent itself the day before. After parting with Jaisak, Shevchenko walked along the river for some time and then went to the settlement.
A man of about thirty-five, with a beard and a felt hat got to his feet to meet Shevchenko in his room.
“Let me introduce myself: Mikhailo Lazarevsky, the elder brother of your Orenburg friend. I have brought greetings from your friends and some letters.”
At last! Beside himself for joy, Shevchenko embraced the welcome guest. All his anger and the wrongs his friends were supposed to have done him melted away.
The guest undid the leather straps of his grip and took out the letters, books and packages.
“Here is a letter from my brother Fedir and from Serhiy Levitsky,” he said. “And this letter is from your homeland and one is from Karl Gern. I’ve brought you two issues of the Sovremennik, a new novel, Notre Dame de Paris, by Hugo, and some newspapers. There’s also Ukrainian spiced horilka and home-made sausage. All this they received from their parents and asked me to pass it on to you.”
Shevchenko’s hands trembled from excitement when he tore the envelopes open. Lazarevsky, pretending not to see the poet’s excitement, continued as he put his empty grip on the floor:
“I live not far away from here, at Troitsk, and work as a trustee of the borderland Kirghiz. I’ll be visiting this town on business about once every two or three months. My work also takes me to Orenburg, so I can pass to and from you whatever you wish and would be glad to help you.”
“Thank you. Thank you ever so much,” Shevchenko said, alternately reading the letters and rushing back and forth to ask the lady of the house to put on the samovar and fry the fresh fish Kuzmich had brought him.
Mikhailo Lazarevsky stayed up with Shevchenko late into the night, and when he left in the morning, parting with the poet as the best of friends, he gave him fifty rubles which his brother Fedir had supposedly asked him to pass on to Shevchenko.
Shevchenko read and reread the amiable letter from Lizohub — the first greeting from his homeland. This letter crossed the one he had sent only a week ago through Alexandriysky. He was no less gladdened by the ardent letter from his young friends in Orenburg.
It was Sunday. After seeing off his guest, Shevchenko stood for a long time at the last hut in Orsk and followed the black dot of the tarantass disappearing in the reddish distance. The gray feather grass shrouded the skyline, the sun blazed as it did before, but separate clouds shielded it now and then, casting gray shadows on the steppe like sorrowful recollections of the poet’s past.
After sunset a cold spell suddenly set in. A sharp wind came blowing from the north, black clouds overcast the sky, a biting rain stalled to fall during the night, followed by’ heavy snow. It snowed all night, at first wet and then large frost-bound quick-descending flakes. When Lavrentiev roused his lodger from sleep in the morning, the window panes were plastered with snow outside and covered with a frost film inside, while outdoors the wind swirled the snow and wailed wildly.
Winter whipped across the garrison unexpectedly. Although a transport had brought warm outfit, all the covering documents were drawn up incorrectly, so everything that had been brought was locked up in the storehouses; the soldiers were issued only last year’s bashlik hoods, foot clouts of cloth, and ragged mittens.
It was fifteen degrees Centigrade below zero. The company was routinely ordered to march to the parade ground and lined
up. The wind tore at the skirts of the greatcoats and bashlik ends sharply lashed across the men’s faces, blew up into their sleeves, and chased the snow in whirls. The men stamped their cold numbed feet, but the command “Attention!” made them stand rigid. Captain Globa noticed right away that the alignment was disturbed: the foot of one soldier had slipped off a frozen earth clod and stuck slightly out of line, another man had his feet planted further apart than was provided for by regulations. Globa grew mad, and instead of issuing the command “At ease!” he went spitting out such volleys of curses that even the snow seemed to blush.
The men stood stock-still and scowled sullenly. Their numb hands barely held the rifles. Their legs had lost their litheness, and when at last Globa commanded, “Forward march!” in a voice that had become gratingly hoarse from the cussing, many of the men could not swing their legs properly enough and bring them down with a uniform thump on the frozen ground.
And again there was vile cursing, face slapping, and fisticuffs.
The snowstorm persisted for three days; all that time Globa tortured his inadequately dressed company. What made it still worse was that the men had no felt boots on, while the temperature had dropped to twenty-five degrees below zero with a strong north-westerly wind. A half of the men got their noses, ears and cheeks frostbitten, but most of all it was their feet which suffered greatly when festering wounds appeared on them. Many had to be admitted to hospital which lacked not only enough beds but even straw and hay for the mattresses to bed the sick on the floor. The first thing the soldiers would do in the morning was hurry to the windows to see whether the snowstorm was still raging. But outside an impenetrable curtain of white was hanging in the air, waves of snow swept over the ground like apparitions, and the orderly, each time he returned from the company headquarters and was asked whether there had been an order to have warm clothing issued, waved his hand hopelessly.
“Have you gone blind, or what? Don’t you see what’s going on outside? Who’s going to drive into the steppe to his death? No order’s come from Orenburg yet.”
On the evening of the third day, Shevchenko went to Lidia Andreievna with the secret intention of telling the general what Globa was doing to the men. Lidia Andreievna met him in a sad and agitated state. Shevchenko noticed at once that she looked drawn.
“Father is feeling worse every day,” she replied quietly to his alarmed inquiries, and her chin trembled. “The whole summer through I had been telling him to take a holiday, go to the Caucasus to take in the sun and warmth and mineral water. He caught a chill on his kidneys a long time ago. But you cannot persuade him. And now he’s bad. He’s got such swellings it’s horrible to look at! His legs look like logs. The weather has made things even worse. There is no chance to get out of Orsk now. Oh my God, is he going to die here?”
Shevchenko comforted Lidia Andreievna and Natalia as best he could.
In the corner of the hall stood the dust-covered grand piano nobody had played on for so long. Natalia saw the dust on the lid, hurried off for a duster, and on returning started to clean the lid and the keyboard. The piano responded to her touch with a polyphonic hum, and the next moment the low voice of the general came from the depths of the house.
“Who is there?”
“It’s Taras Grigorievich,” Natalia replied.
“Who? I can’t hear you! Let him come here!” Isaiev ordered.
Lidia Andreievna saw Shevchenko into the room of the sick man. The windows were tightly curtained. The stove in the room radiated generous heat, and a tall candle burned on a bedside table amid the apothecary jars with long prescription slips.
“Good evening, your Excellency!” Shevchenko snapped to attention.
“Good evening, my dear chap. Please be seated,” he extended his hand to Shevchenko. “What’s new?”
“Seems to be nothing except for the snowstorm.”
“So why am I kept in the dark then?” the general said angrily. “Thank God my eyes can still see!”
“No, Daddy, the window cannot be opened,” Lidia Andreievna got excited. “I have been calling on Meshkov three days now, asking him to send a glazier. We have to put in another set of windowpanes for the winter, but we don’t have the glass for them. The cold is coming through the windows, and cold is bad for your health.”
“What scoundrels! How they toadied when I was still in good shape. They must be thinking I’m a frail man and have spent my fires. But I am still alive, damn it! Take a piece of paper and write my order: have the glass issued and a glazier sent over immediately. They’ve got one in the third company… and write in the putty, too.”
Lidia Andreievna quickly wrote the note; the general signed it, and gave it to Shevchenko.
“Do me a favor, dear chap. Go to our churl and get him to issue the glass right away.”
And suddenly, on seeing Shevchenko’s footwear, the general stopped him, surprised.
“Why aren’t you wearing felt boots? It’s cold outdoors after all.”
“We’ve not been issued any yet, your Excellency. Indeed, it is very cold today: twenty-three below zero.”
“The hell knows what’s going on! Has drill been stopped then?”
“By no means; it’s held on schedule. But…” Shevchenko fell silent for a moment, and then he plucked up enough courage to say, “… but about a half of our company’s got frostbite. Many of them have been hospitalized. The men are almost dying with the pain.”
“Well, well,” the general drawled. “It’s commendable, quite commendable on your part. You show us an example of Christian love for one’s fellow man. Get me Meshkov and Globa, Sorokin!” he called to his batman. “On the double. And have the quartermaster-sergeant come, too. And you, dear chap, better go home. They should not be seeing you here! Otherwise they’ll plague the life out of you, once I’m gone. And you, Sorokin, don’t breathe a word about Shevchenko having seen me. Lidia dear, give Taras Grigorievich my felt boots. No, no, Taras Grigorievich, do not refuse them! I will be issued new boots, while you may show off in these for the time being.”
The general was indeed getting worse every day. His daughters sat at his bedside round the clock, and Shevchenko came every evening to relieve the overtired Lidia Andreievna or Natalia. The physician Alexandriysky called every day as well, but his prescriptions could not help the sick man any more.
Once, after retiring from the general’s bedrooms together with the physician, Shevchenko asked him:
“Is the situation really that hopeless?”
Alexandriysky shrugged his shoulders.
“He has chronic nephritis. Medicine is helpless in this case. In its initial stage, when the patient lives in a warm climate and eats a lot of vegetables, the disease is manageable, but now it is too late.”
“How long will he live?”
“A couple of weeks — no more. He’s been gravely ill for three years.”
During the last days of his life Isaiev did not recognize anyone and was unconscious almost all the time, but late in the evening on the twenty-fifth of November his eyes suddenly opened as if he had come out of a deep sleep; they strayed around the room and then stopped on Lidia Andreievna.
“Where is your husband?” he asked. “He was here just now… visiting me,” he added, a strange dull ring in his voice.
“Daddy… dear Daddy, that’s Taras Grigorievich,” Lidia Andreievna mumbled, frightened; Natalia bit into her handkerchief lest she cry out in horror.
Shevchenko put new ice on the sick man’s head and carefully wiped off the sweat which had suddenly covered his face profusely. Isaiev fixed him with a long vacant look, and then dropped his eyelids. His breath came in gurgling and broken gasps as if his lungs were filled with water. His hands gradually started to turn cold.
Shevchenko realized what was coming. He took Natalia by the shoulder and quietly but insistently led her into the dining room where he sat her at his side on a sofa and gently pressed her fingers. Both of them wer
e silent. What could they say anyway, when the great mystery of death was claiming the life of a human being in the adjoining room.
The death of General Isaiev stirred the whole of Orsk. Meshkov, on Lidia Andreievna’s request, gave Shevchenko leave to help with the funeral arrangements.
Isaiev was buried with all the military honors befitting his rank. During the service in the church the soldiers sang with religious solemnity as the occasion required. The guns of the fortress rumbled when the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave on long slips of linen.
The Kazakhs huddled off to one side of the mourners. The entire aul had turned out for the funeral of Isai Pasha. They looked with interest at the church banners gleaming in the sun and the priest’s funeral vestments of brocade, as they listened to the mournful chorus. On their way back to the aul the Kazakhs exchanged their impressions in whispers:
“Oi boi, the askars are in for a bad time if their new pasha will be as furious as the Meshka Mayir or the red-mugged Globa. Then akyn Taras will never visit our aul to play on the kobyz and sing his songs to us.”
‘‘This calls for a tip, madame and mademoiselle,” Kozlovsky rushed up to the Isaiev sisters. “For the repose of your daddy’s soul in the abodes of paradise, so to speak.”
“Oh yes, yes. Certainly,” Natalia said, confused. “Here you are. That’s for the men who dug the grave. Give it to them, please,” she said, pushing some silver coins into Kozlovsky’s hand.
“Grand merci,” he said, clicking his heels, and made himself scarce on seeing Meshkov approach.
Shevchenko came up to the sisters, and since tears had exhausted Natalia and she stood infirmly on her feet, he carefully took her by the arm. Meshkov gave him an oblique glance, noticed the white non-regulation kid gloves on his hands but did not say anything and took Lidia Andreievna by the arm.
The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko Page 18
