The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  “There hasn’t been a single word about you. Better get yourself scarce before Globa sees you. You know the cap­tain doesn’t like the men hanging around the headquar­ters.”

  In the evening the poet was racked with despair. He must have been fooled! So it would be drill again — for weeks, months, years. He lay on his bunk drained of strength, unable either to stir or utter a word.

  A deep sleep abruptly cut short his sad flow of thoughts, and the next day, before breakfast, he was summoned by Meshkov and officially informed that he was appointed to the Aral expedition and was to report immediately to his new commander Lieutenant Butakov.

  For the first few moments Shevchenko was at a loss. A sharp pain stabbed his sick heart like a hot needle, and his hands trembled helplessly. He stood there and did not understand what Meshkov was telling him. He saluted auto­matically to his tormentor, and only outside on the porch did he realize that he had not asked where he could find Butakov.

  “Shevchenko! Hey, Shevchenko!” Lavrentiev came run­ning after him. “The lieutenant is here in the office of the company CO. He’s calling for you.”

  Shevchenko stood for a while as if he had not understood the clerk, and then he hurried inside. On entering the office, he bellowed with an unexpectedly joyous boldness:

  “Good morning, your Excellency! Private Shevchenko reporting on your orders!”

  “Good morning, Taras Grigorievich,” Butakov said, walked up to him and shook his right hand which was still pressed to his side “at attention.” “I am very glad to meet you, and the more glad to have had the fortune to snatch you from Orsk. Be seated please. I want to have a talk with you.”

  Butakov understood what Shevchenko was going through at this minute, and to give him a chance to regain his self-control, he kept on talking as he sat down.

  “They would not let you go as an artist, nor as a sol­dier. You have been detached to my expedition force as a sailor. But whatever your status may be, the main thing is that you have been released. You will share the same cabin as we, the officers. You will be our artist, and if you like” — he gave his lively black eyes a cunning squint — “our comrade and companion.”

  “I … I don’t know how to thank you. I…” Shevchenko managed to say something at last, and then fell silent, with a lump in his throat. “Thank you!”

  “Still, I think it’s me who should thank fortune for having acquired such an assistant and comrade,” Butakov responded warmly. “This expedition is the main purpose of my life. I have been obsessed with its idea for years. Throughout many sleepless nights I have been thinking about it, dreaming about it, and then started pushing it through. If you only knew how difficult it is to overcome our indifference to everything new, our bureaucracy. Man’s soul yearns for the new and unknown…” the excited Bu­takov lapsed into silence. “Well, we’ll have enough time yet to talk about all that.” A minute later he spoke up again: “After all, we’ll be seeing each other for a year and a half or even two years and will probably get tired of each other within that time. But right now I ask your magnanimous apology — I have work up to my neck: a number of our wagons have broken down and have to be repaired immediately. We are setting off tomorrow morn­ing, Taras Grigorievich. Pack your things in crates or suitcases and take them to my tent. I shall order Tikhon, my batman, to put them together with my person­al belongings and navigation instruments which are the most valuable cargo we have. You can now change into civvies.”

  The men were getting ready to break camp: tents were taken down, the horses were hitched to the wagons, the camels loaded, the men took up march formation, and at ten o’clock after the parting prayer, the caravan marched out.

  The first to gallop off were the guides, accompanied by half a dozen Cossacks, to reconnoiter the trek. Half a verst behind them followed a company of infantry troops with two cannons, and after them came the rattling bulk of the main caravan. It moved in three files at a distance of more than a verst from one another. The wagons were fol­lowed by baggage camels, behind which plodded the flock of sheep intended partially for the needs of the Raïm Fort and partially to feed the huge mass of people who pushed through the steppe like a horde from the times of the Great Migration. A hundred Cossacks and an infantry company with two more guns brought up the rear, and yet another hundred Cossacks armed with lances, swords and rifles moved on the left and right of the caravan to protect its flanks.

  Shevchenko went of foot in the forward company de­tailed from the Orsk garrison. He wore the canvas suit Levitsky had given him and his old summer coat; all of his things, carefully tied and tightly covered with cloth, were riding in a wagon in the caravan. He was in a wonderful mood, the company moved on easily, and he exchanged banter with the right flankmen now and then.

  After two hours’ march toward the south-east, the cara­van passed not far from the camping site of Djantemir’s aul. Through the dense cloud of dust it was difficult to see the gray-yellow adobe walls of the bai’s house, but Shev­chenko noticed right away that the campsite had been aban­doned, all of its traces obliterated by the winds, rains, snow, and sandstorms.

  “Our bat’s left for good,” the soldiers remarked.

  “That’s certain! The major’s chased him from his old haunt,” Kuzmich said with a sigh.

  The dust scratched the men’s throats, grated between their teeth, and made their nostrils dry.

  Shevchenko turned round: a dense impenetrable curtain shut off the steppe behind the caravan, while ahead it was clear. He quickened his pace and outdistanced the wagons by about a hundred paces.

  They were now passing the cliff rising over the valley where the battue was staged the previous winter. Shevchen­ko stopped, dumbfounded: instead of the dry barren branch­es of the saxaul he saw a pleasantly rosy haze someone seemed to have thrown like a transparent veil on the dry scrub, through which glittered the sunlit River Or swollen with the thawed snow and the recent April rains.

  Shevchenko hurried toward the cliff, not believing his own eyes.

  The dry and dead scrub of the saxaul had come to life. The branches were clustered with green succulent off­shoots, each bearing a blooming tassel of tiny rosy flow­ers.

  “A beautiful sight, isn’t it?” a horseman remarked, lean­ing down from his saddle.

  Shevchenko started at the unexpected voice, but on seeing the gilded buttons of a uniform showing from under a cape, he snapped to attention.

  “Yes, sir! A very beautiful and interesting sight. It’s a pity my oil paints are packed away; I would have put all that on canvas at once.”

  “Oh, so that’s what you are!” the horseman said with a drawl and jumped from the horse. “Let me introduce myself: Junior Captain Maksheiev, Alexei Ivanovich. You must be the artist Shevchenko? So we’ll be sailing the Aral Sea together.”

  “Yes, sir,” Shevchenko repeated, not knowing how to conduct himself in the presence of this smart looking officer.

  “Would you please drop those formalities, dear Taras…” the officer faltered, shaking the poet’s hand.

  “… Grigorievich,” the poet prompted.

  “What are these strange trees or shrubs called?” Maksheiev asked, looking back at the cliff.

  “That is saxaul. They say the trees do not bear any leaves. I thought it was a dry stand — and here…” Shevchenko made a sweeping movement of his hand.

  “Remarkable! I’d like to break off a twig and have a closer look, but here’s such a steep…”

  “There ought to be a little gully with a brook somewhere here. You can walk down it, but I’ve forgotten where it is.” Shevchenko said, looking around. “I think it’s farther ahead.”

  “Get on my horse with me,” Maksheiev said, jumping into the saddle. “Otherwise we won’t catch up with our troop.”

  “No, thank you kindly. I’ll make it on foot.”

  Maksheiev galloped ahead, but Shevchenko walked on along the cliff, now and then shooting sidelong glances at the caravan which was pa
ssing him at quite a distance now. When he had reached the gulch where a cold, lim­pid brook gurgled over rounded pebbles, Maksheiev was already returning with a bouquet in his hand.

  “They don’t smell. What a pity! I thought they would smell like lilac.”

  “I believed they smelled like almonds. How tiny these flowers are! They’re not as pretty as I thought they were; from above their beauty quite struck me.”

  Farther on Maksheiev walked, leading the horse by the halter.

  “You know, we have a lot of common acquaintances,” he said. “I am a friend of Mombelli. He often told me about you, and even showed me your book. Unfortunately, I do not understand Ukrainian, and so could not read your poetry. In Orenburg I learned of your fate, and decided to get acquainted with you by all means. Butakov was fortu­nate to get you out of Orsk. It’s an abominable town! Even the Kirghiz call it Jaman Kala, which means ‘bad place.’“

  “You know their tongue?”

  “Only separate words. But I am very interested in it.”

  The conversation flowed back to their St. Petersburg acquaintances. Then Maksheiev told him what was new in the literature of the past winter season, how he had made the acquaintance of Petrashevsky and the talented writ­er Dostoyevsky and the poet Pleshcheyev and the lat­est news from the theater world. Shevchenko listened with rapt attention. His soul was starved from lack of intellec­tual sustenance, and he greedily took in the scanty news. With the conversation neither of them noticed how two hours had passed. It became cold. The cloud of dust stirred up by the caravan was spreading more and more over the steppe. Thirst started to plague the men.

  “Look how our infantry kicks up the dust,” Maksheiev remarked, wiping his sweaty dirt-grimed forehead.

  “I just cannot understand why we have such a large guard troop in the desert: two companies of infantry, guns, three hundred Cossacks,” Shevchenko said with a shrug. “Looks like we are out for a fight.”

  “It’s something like it,” Maksheiev said with a smile. “Legally, our border runs along the River Ural. Orsk For­tress stands right on the border, while the steppe beyond the Ural is not ours.”

  “Does that mean that Meshkov chased Djantemir’s aul out of its own land?”

  “If only they could call it their own land. The British are stealing up to Central Asia from the south. In diploma­tic language, this is called expanding the sphere of influ­ence. So our expedition is a sort of reconnaissance mission. We’ll try to lay our hands on the sea which the Kirghiz call Taniz Aral.”

  The caravan stopped only once to graze the horses and cattle.

  Next morning when the caravan set off, the whole steppe glistened with profuse dew, as if it were spangled with diamonds. To evade the dust, Shevchenko left the camp half an hour before the departure of the guides and scouts, and throughout the whole morning he breathed fresh, clean air, delighting in the quiet of the boundless steppe. The day was bright, but at midday Shevchenko saw way ahead, on the very horizon, white cloudlets which now and then appeared and moments later seemed to melt, without rising any higher.

  “The steppe is burning! The Kirghiz have set it on fire!” one of the guides cried out. “What for?”

  “So that last year’s feather grass doesn’t get in the way of the young grass. The old grass burns away, leaving ahes, and ashes are the best fertilizer. For the Kirghiz grass is the first thing that counts, because they live off cattle breeding,” Maksheiev explained as he rode up to the poet.

  “I wonder what will happen to us?” Shevchenko rea­soned out loud. “We are heading in that direction, after all.”

  “We won’t perish, don’t you worry,” a Cossack guide laughed, flashing his dazzlingly white teeth. “Right now the river makes a turn. The fire is beyond it.”

  He had spoken the truth. An hour before sunset separate fiery dots appeared ahead. They grew in number, and when twilight was falling, the dots gradually merged into one glittering band which glowed in a twisting stream of fire, growing brighter and broader with every minute. But now the glittering ribbon of the River Or stretched between the fire and the caravan. A light breeze rippled the river, and the burning steppe was reflected on the water in golden scales. Just at that moment a Bukharan caravan appeared by the water’s edge. The camels walked one after the other in a long file and seemed to be carved out of black wood against the backdrop of the burning steppe. The sight of this beauty held Shevchenko spellbound, and he rushed to the wagons. He simply had to paint the river, the golden scales of the rippling water, and the camels. He ran around between the wagons, looking in vain for the only convey­ance with the inscription “Personal Baggage of the Expedi­tion Chief, Wagon No. 301” until he came across Butakov’s batman. Together they quickly located the wagon. Shevchenko took out his oil paints and album, but by the time he returned to Maksheiev, the Bukharan caravan had already disappeared in the thickening dusk.

  The steppe fire raged the whole night through. Maksheiev sat at Shevchenko’s side and admired the elemental force of the flames, but then fatigue overcame him and he went to sleep. Shevchenko, oblivious of sleep, remained sitting outdoors till morning. It was too dark to paint, but when dawn colored the fleecy clouds purple and the last fountains of fire still spurted beyond the river, Shevchenko feverishly dashed off a watercolor — his first work of art after a year of military bondage.

  Walking around the camp that morning, General Schreiber came across Shevchenko. He stopped by the artist, took the watercolor in his hands, and after regarding it for a long time, gave it back to Shevchenko with an expression of pity on his face. Shevchenko caught the hint. What could he do?

  “Your Excellency,” he said, embarrassed, “I see you like my work. May I present the watercolor to you in mem­ory of this fire?”

  Throughout the next day the caravan trekked along the right bank of the river, but on the fourteenth of May Schreiber gave the order to cross it. The water was still at its spring high, so a bridge had to be built. Maksheiev was charged with the construction of the bridge, for which the ship building timber and thick rope were used. It was forbidden to hew or saw the timber, which complicated the work immensely. For all that, the bridge was built in a couple of hours; at first the guns and then the wagons rolled across the bridge. The camels forded the river.

  Further on the caravan moved through a fire-ravaged steppe. The smell of burning and ashes made the dust denser and the more stifling, while the sight of the black ground cast a somber gloom on the troops. Man and beast quickly succumbed to exhaustion, but Shevchenko walked on in good spirits.

  The journey continued for another week. Though tired from the trek by now, Shevchenko remained cheerful and even-tempered, and if anyone were to have asked him what he had experienced and thought over these days, he could have said sincerely: “It was easy to breathe and I was almost happy.”

  Daylong halts were sounded ever more frequently to give the exhausted men and beasts a rest. Shevchenko used ev­ery halt to draw. He had drawn the rivers Kara Butak and Irghiz with the forts of the same names, and felt that he was gradually regaining precision of draughtsmanship and a feeling for color.

  During one such halt, when he had walked far into the steppe to sketch a half-dry nameless stream, Królikiewicz came to see him.

  “Hello!” Shevchenko greeted him joyfully. “Sit down, and let’s have a chat while we have the time.”

  “That’s just why I was looking for you,” Kloiikiewicz said. “I have to tell you some fantastic news I recently heard from a compatriot from the Orenburg unit. Ho, too, is an exile, but came from my country only two mouths ago. Just imagine: there’s a revolution on in Paris! All the people have revolted. Louis Philippe ordered the national guard to crush the insurgents, but it sided with the people. So he abdicated and fled, and the people seized the Tuileries, took his throne to a square, and burned it in front of a huge crowd. Well, a provisional government was formed, with two representatives from the workers and not a single aristocrat. The
bankers and financiers fell into panic. I’d love to know what our autocrat thinks on that point. He’s probably…”

  “For God’s sake, tell me what is happening in France in greater detail!” Shevchenko exclaimed impatiently.

  “All right then. A republic was proclaimed. Everything is buzzing and seething in Paris. It almost came to a fist fight when they tried to decide what color the republic’s state flag should be: red, or tricolor like it had been during the first revolution. The poet Lamartine and a certain Dupont de l’Eureare are at the head of the provisional govern­ment. My compatriot does not know anything more, be­cause he had been arrested by then, and even what I am telling you now was learned from his wife during their last meeting before he was taken to Warsaw.”

  “And what’s going on in Ukraine? What’s happening in Poland? In Russia? In Galicia? Does everyone keep silent there as well?”

  “Oh no! Although the Cracow Republic does not exist anymore, there is no peace there either, just as throughout all of Poland. That unfortunate man was not arrested for nothing.”

  Królikiewicz looked around, although the place was so barren that even a little gopher would have hardly found himself a hideout. Then he continued nervously, tugging at Shevchenko’s sleeve:

  “Throughout the past year the peasants in Warsaw, Radom, Lublin and Augustów provinces refused en masse to pay taxes to the landowners. Quite a few manors were set on fire. Many village elders and even more stewards were killed. The authorities got scared of the peasant move­ment, and Grand Duke Constantine issued an order pro­hibiting the landowners to levy any taxes, except for the usual ones, on the serfs. Clandestine societies and circles are springing up everywhere, fiery appeals are being writ­ten, and small-scale peasant rebellions flared up in Galicia last summer. They had been preparing to rise in one body, but the treachery of a number of landowners thwarted the general uprising, because the Austrians arrested the peasant leaders. In Poznań something of the sort is being prepared now. You must know that our suffering is the worst under the Prussian heel. The Prussian rulers not only plunder and ruin our country, but have started Germanizing us: Pol­ish schools have been closed down, Polish newspapers and journals prohibited, Polish officials are not permitted to speak in their native tongue at the offices where they work, and they are forced to study German. Is it really possible to tolerate such horrible humiliation? The very ground there is ready to burst into flames: you just give them a slogan, and everybody will rise as one man — from magnate to the most piteous beggar!”