The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  “What does the word aral mean?” Istomin asked.

  “In Kirghiz aral means island, but they call the sea Aral Teniz, and what the word teniz means I do not know.”

  On the fourth day the wind changed course, and the Constantine sailed into the mouth of the river.

  The sails billowed. There was a heavy swell as the Con­stantine bore through the deep blue of the Aral Sea. Behind the stern the propeller of the log dragged by a thin chain rotated quickly, measuring the schooner’s speed. Everything here was unknown and unexplored, so Butakov gave the order to go at half speed.

  On the bow stood a sailor who took the soundings and kept calling over his shoulder:

  “Twenty-eight! Forty-two! Thirty! Twenty-five! Thirty-nine!”

  Akishev wrote down the soundings. The helmsman froze with every call, while Butakov did not take the binocu­lars away from his eyes and frequently looked at his watch. The fishermen had told him that sailing before the wind he could reach the nearest island Kugaral in two hours, but the wind kept changing direction. Butakov had to tack. The craft went into a roll. The sailors did not notice it, since they had been used to the roll “since the cradle,” as they put it. But Maksheiev turned pallid, then his face became a ghastly green and he retired to his cabin, feeling the on­set of sea sickness.

  From the moment he appeared on board the Constantine, Shevchenko had a feeling he was absolutely out of place and of no use here.

  At first he could not understand the underlying source of this feeling. Everyone treated him in a friendly way. He was respected and appreciated as an artist, poet and a person, but everybody was in the mad grip of one desire, one scientific purpose, carried away as they were by a com­mon cause and dream. Even during off-duty hours their conversation revolved around astronomical, geological, geodetic and topographical topics as well as soundings and hydrography. Only these subjects excited them and provoked heated arguments. Shevchenko, however, had to keep silent, because he did not understand such things.

  His heart was filled with a desire to share the thoughts and work of these heroes and martyrs of knowledge.

  In his mind, Shevchenko compared his fellow travelers with his former acquaintances of the recent past — the mer­rily garrulous and carefree hussars and uhlans who were lusty carousers, the big landowners and masters of crofts from the so-called “lovers of native antiquity” who in word did nothing but think about the common people, hinting over a drink about the need for reforms and abolition of serfdom, while in deed…

  These comparisons gave birth to caustically worded, wrathful verse about those “friends of the people” who dressed in peasant coats and embroidered shirts, while in reality they were wolves in sheep’s clothing.

  All these thoughts deprived him of sleep and mental equilibrium.

  Butakov and the other officers noticed that the poet was behaving strangely — either because he missed his home­land or was ill.

  Shevchenko moved around taciturn, his bushy brows bristled into a frown, or else fled to the crew deck to the sailors. With them he regained his animation, joked, sang, listened to their stories about distant seas and lands, and reluctantly returned to the wardroom when it was time for meals and sleep.

  It was only with Tomasz Werner that he felt at ease, probably because he was also an exile and a private, whose acquaintance he had made at the Gems’.

  One day the Constantine rode at anchor off a little island. Butakov, Maksheiev and Akishev went ashore to make a survey, the navigator Pospelov and Istomin took their hunt­ing rifles and left to add some game to the crew’s usual fare, and Shevchenko and Werner remained alone. Werner was sorting out samples of rocks and fossils he had collect­ed on Kuraral and other islands for a geological collection, while Shevchenko was biting at a pencil as he thought over a verse. Suddenly he crossed out what he had written, tore the page into little bits and pieces, and threw the shreds into the sea through an open porthole.

  “Nothing coming out?” Werner asked with sympathy, raising his eyes from a fossilized shell-fish.

  “The hell with it!” Shevchenko cursed.

  “I, too, cannot identify this dratted shell,” Werner sighed with disappointment, and looking round at the door, added: “I have been keeping at it so long I suppose I have to air my brains somehow. For a long time it’s been on my mind to ask you, Taras, to tell me a bit about painting. I’m already in my thirties but I don’t know anything about it — it’s simply a shame to confess it. At times Maksheiev and you get into a conversation, mentioning all sorts of artists, while I sit there and only blink my eyes like a savage, without understanding anything you are talking about.”

  “How come, if you studied at a Gymnasium?! You are a nobleman, aren’t you?”

  “If you only knew how I grew up and studied!” Werner winced at the very recollection. “My Polish comrades don’t know anything about my past. Though they consider them­selves revolutionaries, most of them are really… Oh well, to hell with them! My father was so poor he had to serve as a coachman with a count, and he could barely sign his name. I was the eldest of eight children. At the age of ten I was taken to work at the lord’s stables. My father dreamed of making me an educated man, but he had no means for that. Unexpectedly, luck singled me out. One day my father was digging holes for pillars in the park where a new arbor had to be built. As he dug away, his spade hit against something hard. He dug some more and threw a pot out of the hole. The pot had money in it: copper, silver, and several coins of gold. My father thought a lot whether to surrender the money to the count or leave it for himself. Mother burst into tears: ‘It was the Lord God who sent it to us so that Thomas would amount to something. Don’t give it away!’ After some thinking, my father offered up a pray­er to God and kept the money for himself. My parents bought me a pair of boots — the first in my life, dressed me in new clothes, got textbooks for me, and sent me to school. But nothing much came out of it. The money lasted only two years, and I had to go back to work in the stables again, although I did not stop studying. Up at the crack of dawn, I had to take out the dung of twenty horses, bed the stalls with fresh straw, curry the horses, plait their manes and tails, give them oats and hay, and water them. I was in a real hurry not to be late for school. But after school I had so much work on my hands I did not know what to do first: run to the stables or get down to do my homework. At first I passed the examinations for three grades, then for five. I barely got through modern school and enrolled in a technical college. And here I was in trouble again: while studying, I had to help my younger brothers and sisters. Father had passed away by then.

  “Friends taught me to love my country. I have not done much for her — almost next to nothing, but even that was enough to have me convicted. I am only afraid of one thing: I’ll never ever become an engineer,” Werner gritt­ed his teeth and turned away to hide the tears of despair growing in his eyes. “I have read too little, and have been to a theater only once in Warsaw,” he added and started nervously shifting the rocks he had laid out on the table, without noticing that he had again mixed up what he had already sorted out.

  Shevchenko came up to him and put a hand round his shoulder.

  “Forgive me, brother, for any bad word you might have heard from me. Of course, I will tell you about art and about everything else I know. Oh, how I understand you! When all of you sit there at the table and talk about mag­netic deviations, a certain Mesozoic Era, and isobars, I listen to all that like an outright fool. Teach me your geology a little bit at least. Maybe I might be helpful to you with something and won’t feel myself out of place here.”

  “I will teach you, of course!” Werner said. “We can start right away! All right?”

  After the talk with Werner, Shevchenko cheered up. Thom­as gave him a book on geology to read, and Shevchenko almost learned it by heart. In Orsk his brain had been fam­ished for lack of spiritual nourishment and he greedily absorbed every drop of knowledge like the parched soil re­ceives an unexpec
ted rain. But however much he delved into the subject, some of the questions remained unclear to him and he frequently asked Werner things for which the latter could not always provide the answers.

  Whenever Werner went ashore, Shevchenko always ac­companied him, and if there was no interesting landscape to paint, eo took a most lively part in collecting rocks for the mineralogical collection.

  Thus in good cheer he returned to the schooner, and in the evening he and Werner inspected the finds at length.

  “We have three chests with books on board,” Butakov told the poet one day. “There is not much poetry, though: apart from Lermontov and Pushkin, there is nothing else. But if you’re interested in, say, sea, voyages, botany or ge­ography, the books are at your disposal.”

  Shevchenko greedily jumped at the chance to read what­ever he could get hold of. In the ship’s chests he found the works of Humboldt and the famous French travelers Arago and Dumont d’Urville, the reminiscences of Krusenstern and others. They presented in an engaging way the nature of distant continents and islands, the life of their people, customs and cultures. Had the people there cast off their shackles or did they still share the bitter fate of the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish peasants? Shevchenko asked himself every time he opened a new book. The hor­rible lot of the Africans who were sold into slavery in the United States of America shocked him the most. He could not forgive the geographer and traveler Humboldt who was so passionately vocal in sympathizing with the Africans and other slaves beyond the Atlantic, while at the same time speaking out his mind indecisively and half-heartedly when it came to serfdom in his native Germany, in Austria, and in the Russian Empire, too, which he had had a good op­portunity to study during his travels throughout the Urals, Altai, along the Caspian coast, and in many other re­gions.

  Under the influence of Humboldt’s works, Shevchenko became interested in botany, and now helped Werner in col­lecting plants for the expedition’s herbarium. But, however fascinating his new occupation was, the horror of the bar­racks could not escape his memory. At such moments he was oblivious of both an interesting plant and an unknown piece of rock.

  Once he and medical attendant Istomin asked Butakov to give them a lecture on astronomy.

  Butakov gave the lecture on the evening of a dead calm. At first he told them in detail about the solar system. Shev­chenko listened spellbound. It was the first time he was being given a glimpse into the universe, and when Buta­kov, his voice grown hoarse after speaking for an hour and a half, fell silent, the oppressed Shevchenko went on deck, smoked silently for a long time, looked at the stars, and suddenly burst into a roar of laughter: “And the bible says that ‘the creation of the world’ occurred six thousand years ago and lasted for six days!”

  22

  Lieutenant Butakov

  The Constantine had been confidently plying the blue waters of the Aral Sea for many days now. The sea was choppy, and the schooner was mercilessly tossed from wave to wave even in a light wind. To make her a little more stable, Butakov gave the order to have her ballasted with rocks which made her sink by four feet at the stern and three and a half feet at the bow.

  Whenever she came to anchor off some island or in a bay, Butakov went ashore for astronomical observations, and Maksheiev for topographical surveys. After each such trip the pieces of white Whatman paper in the navigator’s cabin were covered with new grids, in between which were the wavy outlines of land and the dark or brighter blue of the sea. But Butakov did more than draw outlines of coasts and islands on the map; he carefully studied their geolog­ical structure, climbed up and down the gullies and gulch­es to see the sequence of rock layers, dug prospecting shafts — or holes, as he called them simply — and returned with sacks of mussels, pieces of rock, fossilized and live plants. And every time he said with chagrin, as he threw his cap on the desk:

  “There’s no trace of stone coal!”

  “Why are you so set on finding stone coal?” Shevchenko asked him once.

  “What else should I be looking for then?” he said, throw­ing up his arms from emotion. “For thousands of versts around this sea there is nothing that might be called a real forest — only shrubs. Where will you get the fuel for steam­ships when the sea is to be explored?”

  “Oh, nobody has heard about steamships in this place yet,” Maksheiev said, smiling. “People are scarce here. To the Kirghiz our Constatine and Nicholas must seem like some weird birds.”

  “We are lagging behind all of Europe and even Turkey which, thanks to the Britons, has steamships already. The era of sailboats is receding into the past.”

  “But still, why do you keep on hoping so persistently to find coal here?” Istomiv wondered.

  “Because our esteemed Artemiy Anikievich” — Butakov nodded in Akishev’s direction — “found pieces of it on the western coast this spring. Today I landed three miles from the Izendiaral Cape and ordered the sailors to dig holes one and a half sazhen deep right on the shore. At the depth of one sazhen the clay was so hard it had to be hacked with axes, and then the holes started to fill with water. The men suffered, working in ice-cold water up to their knees. The water had to be scooped out with pails all the time. They suffered, and so did I together with them. And the main thing — all our work was in vain: there is no coal.”

  Akishev was sitting there confused and embarrassed.

  “I could have made a mistake. We did not try to find out whether it burns… and anyway …I am neither a geo­logist nor an engineer… The men said it was coal, and I took them at their word,” he justified himself lamely.

  “Well, so we’ll be looking again and again,” Butakov said.

  The next morning Butakov sailed the Constantine to Barsakelmes Island in the central part of the sea. Maksheiev, Akishev, one noncom and six sailors went ashore to make a full topographical survey. Butakov also ordered the party to clean the wells to replenish the ship’s water supply; he himself returned to Cape Izendiaral and sent ashore Wer­ner with a party of armed sailors to look for the elusive coal. Only Shevchenko remained in the ship’s boat to draw the imposing grandeur of the cape.

  The elevation of the Kulandy Peninsula was high; its shores did not rise over the surf in a single rocky wall but descended to the sea in several terraces half a verst wide each. Butakov went into the depth of the peninsula to make astronomical observations, Werner and his party climbed the first terrace and turned to the south.

  After walking for about five versts, they stopped on a plain which seemed to be colored with soot. Sparse blades of grass and little grass tufts stuck out of the ground here and there. Werner stopped, picked up a handful of the black soil, ground it in his palms, and ordered the men to dig.

  Everybody was silent. The sailors dug deep and narrow prospecting holes in two places simultaneously. Werner chewed on a dry grass blade with excitement, silently going up to one hole, then to the other, while noncom Abizarov alternately watched the surroundings both with naked eye and through a telescope, since anything unexpect­ed could happen in this strange and unknown country.

  The holes were quickly increasing in depth. The sailors were throwing clods of blue-white clay over the top when suddenly the shovel of one of them slipped across the bot­tom of the hole with a clatter and, scraping up the blue clay, left a deeply black trace behind.

  “Coal!” his neighbor cried out, shoving the clay aside.

  Werner rushed over to the hole, the sailors quickly cleaned the layer of coal of the last clay clods, and then started hacking pieces of coal with a pick and handing it up to Werner.

  The coal layer was half an arshin thick, but the coal was of good quality. It did not give off a bright silvery glimmer at the fracture points like anthracite, but neither did it crumble: it was hard like stone and of a richly black color.

  “There’s coal here, too!” a sailor called from the second hole.

  Werner compared the pieces of coal from both holes. There was no doubt: this was real coal. The sailors gath­
ered brush twigs and tumbleweed, built a fire, stacked the pieces of coal in a loose pyramid, and joyously showed Werner how the coal was turning red, glowed ruddily, then resembled heated red metal radiating real burning heat.”

  “Dig! Dig deeper!” Werner ordered.

  The sailors took to digging again. The first layer was followed by gray saline clay, then came greasy clay reek­ing of petroleum, and at last there was a layer of coal over a foot thick. This coal also burned well as did the petroleum-saturated clay, but the sailors dug on and on. They dug to a third layer from two to three fingers thick, and stopped.

  In the meantime, Butakov had established the position of the island and returned, looking for Werner. On seeing the lieutenant, Werner started waving his cap from afar. Buta­kov quickened his pace, descended from the upper terrace, and hurried to the prospecting holes.

  “Coal! It’s wonderful coal!” Werner said. “Our work has not been in vain after all.”

  Butakov examined the pieces of coal attentively, ordered another few holes to be dug in different parts of the pla­teau farther inland and, when layers of coal were found there too, he gave a bright and happy smile. The dying fire was rekindled, and when the coal in it had burned out, ev­erybody saw that it left only a small amount of ashes. This, too, was a feature of the coal’s good quality Butakov’s face beamed. So in the future, shipping on the Aral Sea and the first forts and settlements on its shores would be provided with fuel.

  The sun was setting in the west. Butakov was in a hurry to get back to the schooner.

  “Your Excellency,” a sailor stopped him. “Request per­mission to hack some coal for the galley. We’re running out of firewood, and everyone loves a cup of hot tea.”

  “Go ahead!” Butakov agreed cheerfully.

  In half an hour all the pails and sacks they had brought along were filled with coal. Groaning under the burden, the sailors made for the boats. Werner and Butakov fol­lowed behind, discussing the future of the deposit they had discovered. No one cared that their hands and faces were grimed with coal which made them look like real miners just out of a pit.