The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  “The lords as one with the rabble?” Shevchenko said with a laugh. “That would be a curious sight!”

  “For the first battle the lords’ sword will come in very handy, and eventually we will sort things out. As a matter of fact, there is bitter unrest everywhere: the Russian mu­zhiks are rebelling too. Hungary also seems to have come to a stir. The trouble is that the people are scattered over large territories in small groups, without an independent postal system or such a wonderful new means of communi­cation as the telegraph. So it is difficult for the peasants to unite. For the workers it is much easier: they work all together and have better opportunities to organize…”

  “What else did you hear?” Shevchenko hurried him impatiently.

  “Isn’t this enough for you, my colleague? Well, if you like, there is also bad news. Such as the epidemic of chol­era in Russia. There are even rumors that a plague has bro­ken out. If that is so, quarantine will be set up everywhere. Don’t expect any letters from home then. So far it is a ru­mor and, more likely, a lie.”

  Though really out of the ordinary, the news was all too brief and fragmentary. The sun had sunk considerably in the east by then, and because of the scanty light it was impos­sible to paint any more. Shevchenko gathered his painting tools, and both men, hungry and excited, walked back to the camp.

  That night Shevchenko could not sleep. He tried to draw in his imagination the atmosphere of an imminent uprising: passionate speeches and arguments, clandestine circles, ar­dent proclamations, and the maneuvering of the lordlings in their attempts to exploit these sentiments for their own ends.

  Once, while looking through Shevchenko’s album which had quite a few sketches in it, Maksheiev remarked:

  “It’s a pity you gave Schreiber your first watercolor of the fire in the steppe. You did it quite well.”

  “I gave it away because it did not come out as I wanted it to be,” Shevchenko said with a laugh. “I had not held a pencil in my hands for a year and a half and could not master the coloring of the scene right away. But I remem­bered well all the shades of the fire, the smoke and the glow, and the beautiful way in which they reflected in the water. One of these days I will renew all that in my mem­ory, and you will see: it will be much better, livelier than the first attempt at painting from nature.”

  The caravan had covered almost a half of the trek, but the steppe was as monotonous as before. Then the terrain became rocky, with splinters of quartz, over which it was impossible to walk barefoot. The drivers wound pieces of sheepskin and rags round their feet or else climbed onto the wagons which the exhausted horses pulled laboriously along with the excessive loads.

  The caravan forded the half-dry Irghiz River and moved along its left bank, leaving behind to the right a hill with the graves of batyrs. A halt was about to be called at the grave af Batyr Dustan when the scouts suddenly came gal­loping back and reported something to the general in great excitement.

  The report must have been very alarming, because Gene­ral Schreiber immediately called an officers’ council, and then everyone was stunned by the news that there had been a skirmish about three versts away the day before: the little caravan which had left Orenburg two days earlier was attacked by a troop of Khivans, and although the es­cort beat off the attack, quite a few wagons were plun­dered. A score of drivers were taken prisoners, many of the men were killed or wounded, and the beheaded corpses were still lying in the steppe unburied.

  An augmented reconnaissance force was sent out in all directions. The wounded were given first aid, and the corps­es were brought together. Off to one side the men were already digging a communal grave. Shevchenko looked with horror at the beheaded corpses of soldiers whose fate he could have shared just as easily.

  “But where are their heads? Why were they taken away?” he asked.

  “The heads are with the attackers, who will bring them to the chieftains. Each head is rewarded with money or something valuable, and the chieftain will order the heads to be stacked in a pyramid by his tent or take them to his camp as a military trophy,” Maksheiev explained. After a minute he added: “Do you understand now why we can­not do without an armed escort? Here you can be attacked by men from Khiva, Kokand, and the insurgent Kirghiz from Kenessary’s band.”

  The rest of the daytime halt was filled with sadness.

  Whoever needs this blood and sacrifice? Shevchenko re­flected as he sketched the grave of Dustan Batyr.

  The troops slept through the night without undressing, their arms at the ready. The guards were relieved every hour, but the night passed without an unpleasant event, and the next day the caravan reached Uralsk toward the evening. Uralsk, a wretched settlement of adobe houses and mud-and-straw huts surrounded by a low wall, looked more like a cattle pen and produced an oppressive impres­sion on Shevchenko and the sailors.

  Beyond Uralsk, the caravan twice pitched camp on the banks of a steppe lake; by the third night they reached the fetid river Djalolli, behind which started the Karakum Des­ert. Old soldiers told such horrors about the desert it made the men’s skin creep and they prepared themselves for the worst.

  Two hours before sunup the wagons were additionally greased, the tents taken down, and the loaded camels set forth so as to cover the first stretch of the way in the morn­ing cool. Fortunately, a northern wind rose and it became so cold that the men had to put on their greatcoats.

  The sharp north wind persisted for three days. The men started to make fun of the oldtimers when the wind sud­denly stopped blowing, and within an hour, instead of the cold, there came such a heat that Butakov’s thermometer registered forty degrees Reaumur. An egg buried in the sand would be fried within five minutes. The men were drenched with sweat and overcome by a savage thirst. The scouts could not locate the usual wells which must have been buried by the last sandstorm. Another ten versts had to be covered to the nearest wells, and this stretch proved to be much more difficult than the previous three-day trek. The water in the wells they reached was bitterly salty.

  The thirst-plagued men drank it with abhorencc. Shev­chenko took it like medicine, flavoring it with some lemons Maksheyov had given him.

  The caravan moved on again before dawn the next day. The trek ran across the bottom of a dried-up lake covered with a layer of snow-white salt. In the morning sunlight it seemed to be of a pleasantly rosy hue, but when the sun climbed higher, it turned so dazzling white it hurt the eyes.

  “Don’t look at it,” Butakov warned Shevchenko. “You will be blinded and miss a lot of interesting things on the way.”

  Shevchenko looked distrustfully at Butakov.

  “Be so kind, my friend, as to take your orders,” Buta­kov reprimanded him in a friendly way. “I’ve been sailing in the southern seas for a long time. People there suffer from snow blindness, and this salt sparkles just like real snow.”

  Indeed, everything started to get mixed up and tremble before Shevchenko’s eyes shortly after. So he walked on, his eyes fixed on the haunches of Maksheiev’s horse.

  At long last the salt-strewn plain was left behind, and the caravan again moved across gray-yellow dunes which were getting lower with every verst. Clusters of saxaul appeared here and there; they had already shed their blos­soms, and on the sharp tips of the young shoots there were tiny seed capsules. One day later a narrow strip of blue showed far off to the south.

  “Hello, you welcome Blue Sea. We’ve reached you, after all!” Butakov said, strongly excited, and taking off his cap, he crossed himself.

  The men were instantly buoyed up with animation. Even the horses quickened their pace without having to be whipped on. At noon the next day the caravan approached one of the northern bays of the Aral Sea. The soldiers, drivers, cameleers and Cossacks — all as one rushed to the warm curling waves which rolled onto the sandy beach with a rustle. The soldiers unbuckled their belts, threw off their uniforms and shirts on the run, and jumped into the waves with boyish laughter, but once they were out of the water, they
spat with disgust, complaining: “Oh God, there’s water up to the horizon, but nothing to drink!”

  There remained another two days’ march to Raïm, but the men, after having a good rest, covered the distance much faster. The arduous fifty-day trek had come to an end. Walking almost all of the distance on foot, Shevchenko had become haggard and suntanned; though physically exhausted, he remained in high spirits.

  For the first three days he, like all the other men, slept or lounged on the soft sandy bank of the Syr Darya, chat­ting with the soldiers from the Orsk garrison.

  Then General Schreiber ordered the troop of infantry and Cossacks to get ready for the march back home, leaving in Raïm two platoons from the Fifth Battalion under Lieu­tenant Bogomolov and fifty Cossacks to winter on Kosaral Island together with the sailors.

  Shevchenko parted sadly with Kuzmich and many other soldiers. One of them, embracing the poet, wiped a tear from his cheek with his fist. Even the heart of the thievish Kozlovsky gave a start when he shook the poet’s hand for the last time:

  “Au revoir,” he said with unexpected sadness. “I regret very much parting with you, mon cher ami. At times I had a feeling I was turning into a decent man again in your company. But now…”

  He waved his hand in a gesture of hopelessness and quick­ly went away.

  21

  The Schooner Constantine

  Fort Raïm stood on the crest of a hill dominating a green valley. Luxurious meadows down below passed gradually into stands of reed through which the sunlit ripples of the full-fed Syr Darya glittered now and then. In the middle of a square inside the fort stood a tall monument of stone at the grave of Raïm Batyr who died a hundred years ear­lier and after whom the fort was named.

  At the end of a three-day rest, the Orenburg carpenters and Baltic sailors started assembling the schooner with a will on a level bank of the Syr Darya where no shrubs or reeds grew.

  Shevchenko sat on the sand under a shed where sail cloth and rings of rope were stacked, and delighted in drawing the light fleecy cloudlets on the horizon.

  But his thoughts were far away from the place where he was now.

  He recalled his last week at Orsk, shortly before the ar­rival of Butakov’s caravan. As he usually did every holiday, he had walked beyond the ramparts — remnants of fortifications from the times of Czarine Catherine — where the building of the town of Orenburg was started on the site of Orsk, sat down on the steep bank of the Ural and drifted into gloomy reverie. He had not noticed then how an old man had come up to him. The man served his long sentence in exile and was now living out his days near his prison. He could not work any­more and the wardens, whom he helped by distributing the food to the prisoners or tending the stoves when blizzards raged outdoors, fed him with the offal from the prison kitchen, and even the supervisor of the prison turned a blind eye to his existence, since the almost hundred-year-old man had nowhere else to go.

  It was not the first time Shevchenko talked with him, listening to his sad life story and telling him about his own. They had a lot of things in common.

  The old man had once been a serf, an orphan and beg­gar among beggars. The lord he belonged to had two boys growing up. The orphan was taken into the lord’s household as a playmate for the boys. Like wolflings they often hit him painfully and beat him while playing. The lordlings grew up, tutors were invited to teach them, and the orphan whiled away his time during the lessons. He, too, memorized the letters, forming them into words and reading and writing no worse than the lordlings by and by. After two years of private tutoring, the lordlings were taken to school in town, while the boy was made to work in the fields. He walked behind the plowmen, harrowing and tilling fields, but did not forget what he had learned. When he grew up and became a young man, he fell in love and became en­gaged to his sweetheart. The day of the wedding had been set, preparations for it were already underway, when sud­denly the lordlings came home, took away his bride to be, disgraced her and she bore a child out of wedlock. The young man was outraged by the monstrous insult and start­ed seeking likeminded men to avenge the wrong done to him. The lordlings finished school, returned to the manor, and found themselves brides. On the day of their wedding when the newlyweds were returning from the local Roman Catholic church, the avengers attacked them and killed the entire train to the last man, after which they took refuge in a forest and brought ruin and destruction on the lords for many years. But in time their chieftain got weary of the bloodshed in his futile struggle against serfdom. He got, weary because man is not created to kill only. So he gave himself up.

  Shevchenko recalled with particular vividness the sorrow­ful and harrowing story of the old man. He put away his brushes, took the notebook out of his bootleg, and started writing. In a day he wrote an entire poem, in which he gave vent to the feelings bursting from his agitated soul; in the morning next day he came to the same place to finish painting the landscape.

  Shevchenko had a strange sensation during those days, as if someone had opened a locked door in his heart and let in a whiff of free air which was just as fresh and vital as the subtle sea breeze gently tousling his hair and softly caressing his suntanned cheeks.

  While painting, he recalled the fire in the steppe, the vast expanse of scorched ground it left behind, and the Karakum Desert — strange and fantastic images resurfaced in his mind. Life must have once teemed in this boundless steppe, with blooming orchards and noisy towns and ham­lets. But then a thoughtless man stole an ax from God and started hacking down the orchards and destroying the shad­owy groves. The forest giants toppled to the ground, send­ing splinters and twigs flying. A rainstorm broke out, and lightning started a fire. Man, bird and beast perished in the flames, and the once blooming land turned into a black barren desert with only one tree miraculously surviving in it; to this day the tree grows and flowers to the wonder and joy of the rare passersby.

  His brush was softly putting dab on dab. The painting seemed to have come alive with the vivid colors, while in his head there rang the first line of the poem “Behind God’s Door There Lay an Ax…”

  Two weeks had passed. Shevchenko’s album had in it five landscapes with the Raïm Fort, a landscape with the improvised dockyard on the Syr Darya, and a scene of the “assembly of the schooner.”

  The Constantine was ready to be launched. The slipway of planks was extended into the river and sunk to the depth of some two meters. The wedges were knocked out from under the hull, about a dozen men gave her a mighty push from the stern, the schooner started slipping slowly down the oily planks, and several minutes later she was rocking on the waves.

  On the twenty-fifth of July the commanding personnel of the expedition and two privates, Werner and Shevchenko, went on board and took up quarters in the only well fur­nished cabin, which they formally called wardroom. The rest of the crew occupied the bunk room.

  After a litany of gratitude, the broad pennant of the expedition chief, Lieutenant Butakov, fluttered atop the main mast. On the stern a St. Andrew’s flag was run up. Then the smoke of a salute fired from seven guns enveloped the sides of the Constantine. In response, seven guns boomed from Fort Raïm, and the Constantine started slowly sailing down the Syr Darya.

  The schooner was going adrift all the time, as the wind pushed her to low waters and the left bank. For a long time she could not head out for the open sea. An anchor had to be thrown out for the night. This went on for sever­al days. During one such evening of forced anchorage, the navigator Pospelov and the medical attendant Istomin asked Butakov to tell them what was known about the Blue Sea at that time.

  “I looked through old geographical treatises and other sources for a long time, but I found very little. Almost nothing,” Butakov eagerly started the story. “The authors of antiquity did not even suspect its existence. On the map of Ptolemy, from the second century A. D., which was pub­lished only in 1590, both the Syr Darya and Amu Darya flow into the Caspian Sea. We see the same thing on all the European maps to th
e end of the seventeenth century. The Russians learned of the sea when our merchants start­ed to penetrate into the Caspian and trade with Persia. In 1552, Ivan the Terrible ordered his officials ‘to measure the land anew and make a draught’ of the Russian state. This ‘draught’ was supplemented during the reign of Czar Bon’s Godunov, and in 1632 there was added to it The Book Called the Big Draught, in which there was the Blue Sea.

  “Then Peter I sent to the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea an expedition under Bikovich-Cherkassky who was the first to reveal that the Syr Darya and Amu Darya emptied not into the Caspian but into the Aral Sea. The first top­ographical data on the northern shores of the Aral Sea were furnished in 1733 when Russia embraced the Kir­ghiz in its empire. Then the surveyor Muravin drafted the map of the route from Orenburg to Khiva through the steppe and along the eastern shore of the Aral Sea, and, at last, separate sections of its northern coast were surveyed during the past few years with the participation of our esteemed Artemiy Anikievich” — Butakov made a bow to Ensign Akishev — “and that is why I was so interested in him joining us. But all the previous explorations were con­ducted in an uncoordinated way, while the sea itself, the center of its water surface, has remained unexplored to this day.”