The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  The decision was extraordinarily bold, because to the south off Barsakelmes Island the fishermen sailed only along the shores, never daring to venture into the central and widest part of the sea.

  The schooner raced through the night like a huge black bird over the desolate and choppy sea, and at dawn the crew saw on port a hilly island which everyone took for Barsakelmes at first, but on checking the reading of the towed log against the time of day, Butakov realized that this was yet another unidentified island.

  He wanted to drop anchor, because the schooner had run out of fresh water, but since there could not be any water on the island, he decided to return to Barsakelmes, replenish the supply of water and firewood, and then re­turn to the island.

  During the night a storm broke out again. The schooner had to change course and hide behind Cape Uzinkair. During the forced two-day anchorage, the supplies of firewood and fresh water were replenished. The crew bathed, washed their clothes, because while at sea they had to save on fuel and wash only in cold water.

  On the third day, with the waves still high, the Constan­tine sailed to the newly discovered island. Butakov named it in honor of Czar Nicholas.

  In the morning a boat took Akishev and three sailors ashore to make a topographical survey, Butakov and Pospelov went to plot the position of the island, and Shevchenko joined them in order to draw the landscapes.

  Here they made an unexpected discovery. The island, which no human being seemed to have set his foot on, was inhabited by saigas, steppe antelopes. With naïve curiosity they came very close to the sailors. Pospelov aimed his rifle and brought down three saigas with a number of well aimed shots. For a minute or so the herd looked with hor­ror and incomprehension at the men, and then fled head­long in panic.

  The crew was extraordinarily happy at the discovery. Not counting the several birds Pospelov had bagged, the men had not tasted fresh meat for two months.

  Toward the evening a storm gathered unexpectedly. The Constantine rode at two anchors in a wide deep bay shel­tered from the wind, but the storm made it impossible to sound the depth around the island and explore its coast. Shevchenko, for his part, was satisfied to have made a number of wonderful watercolors on sea and land.

  The storm thundered for a whole week, during which time the crew had their fill of fresh meat and stocked up firewood and fresh water which was much better than the water from Barsakelmes. It was only on the seventeenth of September that the Constantine ventured into the open sea; to the north off Nicholas Island she came upon a low island which Butakov named the Island of the Heir; a little to the south there was yet another island which he named after the schooner.

  Autumn set in. Butakov had learned from a salesman marketing the catch of a fishermen’s gang that the mouth of the Syr Darya was shallow in the autumn. The schooner changed course, going from Constantine Island to the south of the Syr Darya, but in order to negotiate the shallows in its delta, she had to be unloaded and towed to the river. After making fast in a little inlet off Kosaral Island opposite Fort Kosaral where the current of the Syr Darya was subtle, Butakov hauled down the St. Andrew’s flag and broad pennant, and on the thirtieth of September the schooner prepared for winter.

  23

  On Kosaral

  Within the sixty days at sea Shevchenko got used to the life of the mariners. They had fired him with their enthu­siasm and spirit of storm-tossed travelers dreaming of un­known islands and countries, and introduced him to their circle of interests. The dangers and cruel storms, which made them gamble with death every minute, had hardened their nature. He realized that he’d always have a warm feeling for these men.

  But when they were on shore, this continuity of interests and the friendship began to crumble. At first they still slept on the ship, but from morning till sunset each was occupied with his own work. The meals were taken on shore near the field kitchen, the men never appearing for their meals in one body.

  Loneliness and homesickness overcame the poet again. The year before the burning hatred of army drill had aggra­vated his loss of homeland. Now this pain merged with the quiet sadness of his recollections. Forced idleness made him feel useless.

  Butakov, Pospelov and Akishev quartered in their felt tent, Maksheiev, Shevchenko and Werner shared another such tent, while medical attendant Istomin occu­pied the partly built headquarters and office of Fort Kosa­ral together with its commandant, Lieutenant Bogomolov, who had been transferred there from Orsk.

  Throughout the whole day Butakov, Pospelov and Akishev occupied themselves on a high promontory jutting far out into the sea.

  During the previous winter, the foundation of the fort had been laid there to provide winter quarters for fifty Ural Cossacks and a detachment of infantry troops from Orsk. Everybody — sailors, Cossacks, and infantry troops — took a hand in building the fort. They put up a large bar­racks for one hundred men, two storehouses, a bakery, stables, a sheepfold, a barn, a dwelling house and the head­quarters; they erected ramparts, dug earth houses, built stoves, made adobe and bricks, and kneaded dung into fuel bricks. Both the Orsk soldiers and Cossacks noticed with wonder that none of the officers ever used bad language or bawled them out, threatening to bring fists or canes into play, but were doing their job thoroughly and conscien­tiously, and this made the men work without any abusive prodding.

  Shevchenko made an attempt to join in this tense team work, but Butakov strictly forbade him to do so.

  “Don’t chill your hands, sir,” he told him sternly. “Help Werner get his collections in order, write poetry, paint whatever you want, and read. We’ve got enough hands as it is.”

  In early October the mail arrived at Raïm. This event occurred three to four times a year and was expected with particular impatience. From Raïm the mail was taken to Kosaral by fishermen who heaped the letters and parcels right on the desk in the future office of the fort. Moments later the room was packed with people and Lieutenant Bogomolov started reading aloud the names of the address­ees. Those who stood nearest to Bogomolov passed the letters to the recipient over the heads of the others, and he immediately elbowed his way back to the door to read with pleasure the warm lines addressed to him, experience joy from their message, or else heave a sigh if the news was sad.

  Shevchenko and Werner stood in a corner and watched with excitement and hope as Bogomolov picked up letter after letter. They were expecting to hear their names called any minute, but the heap was melting before their eyes, and in the end they saw that there was nothing for them. The room became empty just as fast as it had filled. Both men made silently for the door. Werner’s lips trem­bled and he barely held back his tears. Shevchenko was more composed than his friend. Dusk was falling. Silently they lay down on their cots, without looking al each other. From outdoors came the dry rustle of reeds. The sky dimmed in the tent’s smoke outlet overhead.

  “It’s difficult to be alone,” Shevchenko said on impulse. “You wait so anxiously for those letters, but people do not, they simply cannot understand how necessary any mail is in captivity! Homesickness gnaws at your heart like thirst in the Karakum Desert. If I had a mother or a wife, they would have understood and written to me…”

  “They would, my foot!” Werner said with a bitter smile. “I, for one, have a mother and a wife and a sister… and even a child I haven’t seen yet. And no letters. This is the third year they haven’t written. It would have been better if they had not existed at all! I wouldn’t have waited in vain then. I’d be at peace with myself and be hard as a rock.”

  Werner turned round to the wall abruptly.

  Shevchenko kept silent, then he got up, sat down at the table, struck fire with a flint, lit the wick lamp, and start­ed to write.

  The steppe bordering on the Aral Sea was much poorer in vegetation and more desolate than the plains around Orsk. Everything here indicated the proximity of the des­erts — the Karakum and Barsuk. Here and there the clay or rock rises were covered with thorny bushes and sparse
patches of feather grass, and the eye grew tired of the dazzling white depressions of saline land — mostly the bowls of long dried-up lakes. Except for the thick stands of reed crackling dryly in the wind, the only thing Shev­chenko saw as he wandered around Kosaral were barren skeletal shrubs of saxaul and balls of tumbleweed which the winds had swept here unbeknownst from where. And over this entire dreary scene hung a low cold sky of yellow.

  Thick, torpid waves, skies dull and sightless….

  On shores that wear a veil of haze,

  Tall reeds, though no wind with them plays,

  Sway as if drunk. O God Almighty!

  Beside this wretched sea and far,

  In this lone prison without bars,

  Am I intended long to languish

  In endless pain and endless anguish?…

  As if alive, the parched and dry

  Grass stirs, but, mute, makes no reply…

  ‘Twill not disclose the truth, alas,

  And there is no one else to ask!

  That is how Shevchenko reflected his mood in verse five days after the arrival of the mail, when he roamed across the dunes, between which the muddy waters of the Syr Darya laboriously negotiated a barely water-covered shallow reaching into the sea in a long tongue. On one such day he spied Królikiewicz who waved his cap from afar. The encounter was so unexpected that Shevchenko stopped in his tracks and spread his arms in wonder.

  “By what miracle have you appeared here, colleague? I was sure you had returned to Orsk with the party under General Schreiber,” Shevchenko said, shaking hands with Królikiewicz.

  “That’s how it should have been. But during a halt for the night I was stung by a snake. They put me on a wagon, brought me to the nearest fort, and dumped me into the lap of the medical assistant. It was not him who got me back on my feet, but an Ural Cossack and his herbs. Now the sup­ply train has brought me to Kosaral. I’ll be probably stay­ing here for the winter, if the train won’t take me back to Orenburg,” Królikiewicz said, looking close at the poet. “Though you’ve grown leaner, you seem to be looking pret­ty chipper. And you’ve got a wonderful suntan, a real gypsy, I’d say. I see right away that you’ve been fanned by all the sea winds. Well, how was the seafaring? What did you see and discover?”

  “We’ve seen storms, even met death several times, but it did not notice us,” Shevchenko said with a smile. “As for the news, it’s you who have always been my reliable source. Tell me, what is going on now in the wide world?”

  “Any spring of water dries up in the desert from heat. I, too, dried up throughout the summer. If it were not for a scrap of a Polish newspaper my friends passed on to me from Orenburg, I would not be able to tell you anything. The local blockheads tore that paper into four parts for rolling cigarettes. There were only two paragraphs about France, where there is a famine now, with the peasants going hungry and the city dwellers dying from lack of food and work. In May a constituent assembly was con­vened. The people demanded a law ensuring the right to work, and insisted on having work and bread. To pen up the sentiments of the jobless, state workshops have been set up, but they are but a drop in the ocean for the needy! A demonstration burst into the session hall of the assembly with a petition. The frightened deputies took to their heels.

  So the people proclaimed the assembly dismissed and the deputies’ mandates void, but the soldiers dispersed the dem­onstration, arrested its leaders, and the assembly contin­ued its work. What happened then — I do not know, be­cause the paper was torn off.”

  “And what did the men escorting the supply train say?”

  “Nothing. I did not even dare ask, because there were none of our exiles on that escort, and asking a stranger was too risky. Some of us landed in Siberia just for that. But in Raïm there is a physician, Kilkiewicz, who comes from Lithuania. He occasionally receives mail from his homeland, and his good friends tell him a thing or two. I advise you make his acquaintance because he, too, was once brought to book when he talked too much to a patient who de­nounced him to the police. The poor chap barely got him­self out of the fix. Now once bitten, he’s twice shy.”

  They chatted some more, and Krolikiewicz left. He hur­ried to get to Raïm, which was about six versts away from Kosaral; besides, he had to cross a shallow tributary of the Syr Darya on his way.

  Shevchenko had a prolific spell of writing at that time. Again and again he drew sad pictures in verse of the peas­ants’ plight, when the beauty of a serf woman was a bane, not happiness. Ever more often his poetry dealt with a serf whom the landlord forced into the army in order to gain possession of his wife or bride-to-be. He also wrote of the tragic fate of a widow, a feeble mother whose son, her only breadwinner, was conscripted into the army, or of an unmar­ried mother who, after begging alms in church, immediately surrendered the few coppers to buy a candle to light in front of God’s image for the health of her child.

  Throughout that autumn he also wrote quite a few lyrics to songs, merry and sad, most of them written in the third person feminine: of a poor servant girl going barefoot and dreaming of a pair of morocco leather boots to dance in once at least in the company of rich women; of a rich man’s daughter whose parents forbade her to go outdoors lest she meet with her sweetheart, a poor orphan, and she remained lonely to the end of her life, her fading youth and beauty needed by no one.

  But he put the greatest passion of his heart into the poetry in which he appealed for protest against the injus­tices of life.

  With the first autumn frosts, the winterers moved into the earth house and took to processing the astronomical data and systematizing their collections. Reading the newly received books and journals was a favorite pastime.

  Once in the morning several Kazakh horsemen came gal­loping into Kosaral.

  “Where do your mayirs live here?” one of the oldest and most dignified of them asked.

  “We haven’t got any,” an Ural Cossack answered with a contemptuous grin.

  “Well, if you haven’t any mayirs around, take us to a general,” the axakal insisted. “We’ve come on important business.”

  “How do you like that! He wants a general,” the Cossack jeered back. “Go to the mariners,” he pointed to Butakov’s earth house.

  “We’ve come on important business to you,” the axakal repeated, on entering the lieutenant’s quarters. “Good morn­ing, Russian chief! Help us, please!”

  “Good morning. Be seated,” Butakov replied affably, mo­tioning the guest to a bench as he settled back in his favored armchair. “What trouble has brought you to me?”

  “Oi boi, there is big trouble!” the old man said, shaking his head. There is a tiger living in the reeds here. A big tiger. Our jigits wanted to kill him, they looked for him everywhere, but he is hiding. In the night he kills our sheep, horses” — the axakal was bending his fingers, counting — “and even a child he did kill.”

  “Where is his den?”

  “We don’t know. Our men are afraid to go into the reeds which we need very much. We just don’t know where his den is.”

  Butakov fell to thinking. Hunting a tiger on foot would end in nothing. He had to have a talk with Cavalry Captain Chortorogov.

  “Would you please see me again the day after tomorrow,” the lieutenant said. “By that time we’ll think of some­thing.”

  When the Kazakhs left, Butakov immediately had a talk with the Cossack officers, because the presence of a tiger near the camp did not promise anything pleasant.

  Butakov could not have come at a better time. The day before a number of soldiers and Cossacks hunted wild boar, and a fortunate hunt it was: apart from three small pigs, they brought down a huge boar. The men barely managed to drag the dead boar out of the sucking marsh onto hard ground, and left him there to pick him up with a wagon the next morning. When they arrived at the place, they saw that a half of the carcass had been devoured and there were tiger tracks on the ground all around. Any minute the tiger could come hack to continue his interrupted
meal. Being of two minds what to do, the men returned to their commander for advice and met Butakov there.

  The opinions on the further course of action differed. Some suggested hitching the horses into a wagon and leaving immediately for the remainder of the boar, others proposed laying an ambush and waiting for the tiger near the car­cass, and still others simply laughed the idea off:

  “A tiger has a much more sensitive scent than we. It will be a useless ambush and we’ll just freeze for nothing throughout the night, while the tiger, once he sniffs hu­mans in the air, will stay away and go gobble up sheep or calves instead, or he might even get to our horses.”

  Shevchenko stood silently behind Butakov, smiling into his mustache, and after everybody had talked himself hoarse and fell silent, he said:

  “What if we put up charged shotguns aimed at the car­cass, tie a string or wire to the triggers, and fix the ends to the carcass. As soon as the tiger pulls at the carcass, the shotguns will go off and he’ll be either shot dead or gravely wounded.”

  Shevchenko’s suggestion brought peace to the arguing party, and the conversation centered now only on how and in what place it would be best to install the shotguns.

  Two fast-working carpenters got down to the job, and about three hours later the charged shotguns were pointing in the dense stand of reed at the unfinished boar carcass, while Shevchenko, Butakov and Lieutenant Bogomolov were carefully tying fast to the boar’s ribs and tusks the ends if the strings running from the cocked triggers. In order to efface the human scent, they dragged the carcass of a dead pig behind their retreating tracks and left for Kosaral.

  The next morning the hunters hurried to the trap. The remainder of the boar carcass had not been touched but only turned on another side. Around it were two pools of blood and a large number of tiger tracks.