The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko

by Zinaida Tulub

  The hunters did not dare venture into the dense reeds after the bloody tracks. Everybody knew that a wounded tiger was the first to attack. Only after twenty well armed men had been brought together did they dare follow the wounded animal in pursuit. Some half a verst from the trap they came upon the dead tiger lying in a pool of blood: all the six bullets had pierced him, and it was a sheer wonder how the will to live had made the deadly wounded, blood-dripping animal slink away so far.

  Everybody congratulated Shevchenko on his wonderful idea, but he was in a hurry to put the savage strength and beauty of the huge tiger on paper in pencil and water colors.

  “Taras Aga! Is that you really, my friend?” the excited voice of Jaisak suddenly rang out. “Oi boi, how glad I am to see you again!”

  “Jaisak!” Shevchenko cried out joyously, and getting to his feet, he almost got his water colors smeared.

  “We are wintering not far away from here,” Jaisak said, jumped off his horse, and strongly embraced the poet. “And how did you get here, Taras Aga?”

  “Unlike you I sailed across the Taniz Aral. And these are my chiefs or mayirs, as you call them,” Shevchenko explained, gesturing at Butakov and Bogomolov with a broad sweep of his hand.

  “I know! I saw it! A large boat, a very large boat with wings and canvas. Good morning, Russian chiefs,” he sud­denly checked his emotions and respectfully shook Butakov and Bogomolov’s hands with both of his. “Do come and visit us. We are finely settled now in a big aul. Djantemir became a very rich bai, with white yurts and a lot of sheep. He built himself a house just like the one in Orsk. We will treat you to bishbarmak, Russian vodka, cured and fried fish. We catch a lot of fish here and cure them, too. Djan­temir is even glad that Meshka Mayir chased him away from Jaman-Kala. Here it’s better and warmer. It’s only the tiger we were afraid of, but now he is dead. Who killed him?” he asked, his eyes shifting from Butakov and Shev­chenko to the others.

  “It was Taras Grigorievich’s idea to put up shotguns against the tiger,” Butakov replied, laughing.

  Jaisak did not understand to the end what he was told, but he did not dare ask questions and only said to Shev­chenko:

  “Show me where you live, Taras Aga. I will visit you another time; there is much I want to talk about with you. Right now I have no time.”

  Shevchenko showed him his earth house from-afar. Jaisak jumped into the saddle, lashed at his horse, and galloped off, while Shevchenko took up his brushes again.

  The tiger was unusually huge, with terrible, seemingly polished fangs and a rich yellow coat with black velvety stripes. While he was finishing the watercolor, the Ural Cos­sacks skinned the animal. Eventually the skin was ac­quired by Butakov for three pailfuls of vodka and three cans of tinned meal.

  Before snow and blizzards set in, Shevchenko made quite a few pictures in water colors, sepia, and red and colored pencils. He did a number of landscapes with Fort Kosaral viewed from land and sea, the sea inlet at the mouth of the Syr Darya, and a wonderful oil painting, Moonlit Night. When snow started to fall, he painted por­traits of his expedition friends and the interior of their quarters. Pospelov had a wonderful figure and Shevchenko eagerly drew him naked to the waist and involuntarily admired the handsomness of his sitter.

  Maksheiev frequently engaged Shevchenko in arguments about art. Theoretically, both of them stood for truth in art, but Maksheiev believed that Shevcheuko’s words and deeds were at variance. He criticized Shevchenko for his early paintings, in which human features were rendered inac­curately by prettying the sitter, lengthening his face, and lending him artificial postures.

  “I never did that,” Shevchenko countered angrily.

  “Oh no, my dear fellow: you have sinned against the truth of life on many occasions. It’s a pity I don’t have your pictures here. I’d prove that I have a reason to judge so. Every year I visited the exhibitions at the Academy of Arts, and didn’t miss a single one. I saw and remember pretty well your Katerina. That’s no grief-stricken serf girl for you, but a manorial lady dressed in peasant garb. She has tender, well-groomed hands unaccustomed to me­nial work; neither is her face touched by the winds and the scorching rays of your blazing Ukrainian sun. She never saw the plight of serfdom, your Lady Katerina. And believe me, her image would have been the more touching, if you had not beautified her. I am also acquainted with the Keikuatova, and saw your oil portait of Mademoiselle Keikuatova at their home. No doubt she is like a well cared for hothouse flower, but at the same time she is a healthy person, while in your portrait you have made her an al­most incorporeal and anemic creature that seems to be mor­tally ill with consumption. No denying it, the portrait is a wonderful work of art, but it is what you imagined Made­moiselle Keikuatova to be and not what she really is.”

  Such arguments would make Shevchenko angry and ex­cited: he would fall silent, offended, and go out of the earth house.

  “An argument must be honest, without imputing to the opponent what he did not do, what he does not have and never will,” he repeated again and again.

  But still, doubts gradually started to stir somewhere deep in his mind. What if there was a grain of truth in Maksheiev’s words? Without noticing it, his new drawings showed, like never before, how carefully and thoroughly he conveyed the truth of life, profound and unfathomable in its beauty and horror.

  Frequently Shevchenko recalled his great teacher Brüllow. At the Academy Brüllow was considered a progressive man who determinedly went against the pseudo-classicist trend in art, and instead of making his students copy only the great masters of Italian, Spanish and Dutch painting he demanded that they draw people and landscapes from nature.

  But Brüllow’s demands for lifelikeness and truth in art did not go beyond a certain limit: he studiously evaded everything that seemed mundane, dull and commonplace to him. In the latter category he included a lot of things, considering worthy of art only the beauty of the human fig­ure, inspired or classic faces, and even in his best painting, The Last Day of Pompeii, which won him acclaim through­out Europe, there was not a single ugly or even slightly insignificant face nor a single feature devoid of grace in the entire crowd of horror-stricken people fleeing from Vesuvius spewing forth its lava and ashes. It represented not the tragedy of an entire city doomed to death, but an affectedly pompous theatrical scenery to a tragedy. That was how the life he could not grasp was taking revenge on the artist.

  A year before his arrest, Shevchenko heard rumors that Brüllow was living through an inner crisis, a sort of reevaluation of his former esthehic standards. It was said that he had started on a new painting based on Russian life, in which there was neither the glaring Italian sun nor the effects of a volcano’s glow and fiery streams of lava, or lightning. But what Brüllow produced in the end Shevchenko was not destined to find out on the shores of the distant Aral Sea. He was independently seeking his own way in art.

  The days were growing shorter. Shevchenko devoted ever more time to reading the books from the library which the Constantine had brought to Kosaral. What he liked most was to compare the occasionally fantastic and at times re­markably accurate statements of the geographers of the past with the explorations of the latest expeditions through­out the jungles and deserts of Asia, Africa, South America, and on the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

  Maksheiev brought along a suitcase of books. A part of them were devoted to topography and the military sciences, and the rest mostly dealt with philosophy of the most con­trastingly opposite schools of thinking.

  Shevchenko lived in miserable penury that winter. Fre­quently he did not have a copper to buy himself tobacco, an envelope or postage stamp, a cake of soap or sugar for his tea. So he had to look for some earnings. He wrote letters for the illiterate soldiers and Cossacks, but they, too, had nothing to pay for his services. At times he proposed that the officers have their portraits made in pen­cil or water colors, for which he was paid ten rubles. But in Raïm there were no more than ten and
in Kosaral three officers, and they were not that well off to afford such a luxury as a portrait. As to the local civilian population, there was none as yet, except for a priest, two clerks and two physicians with their families. Shevchenko frequently had to go about with the bitter thought of where to get himself some shag for a cigarette. Even such a trifle proved to be a difficult problem, because almost all of the Cossacks were Old Believers and did not smoke, while the soldiers were always short or their shag ration and he just could not make himself beg from them.

  Occasionally the sutler helped him out, but for a pack of shag Shevchenko had to write out an application for him or make a fair copy of an account, and when there was nothing to write, the sutler did not give him anything on credit.

  The days passed by, but no mail arrived.

  That year cholera raged throughout Russira, and the bubonic plague, brought from India, swept across the land. Quarantine was enforced everywhere; any parcel coming from the infected areas remained unhandled and the let­ters were fumed with sulphur smoke. The newly arrived officers told about entire villages dying out,

  What if his friends, too, had died of the horrible disease in Ukraine, and he was wailing for a message from them in vain?

  The thought about the plague visited the poet again and again, inspiring him to write a semi-fantastic ballad, “The Plague”: Black Death stalks the towns and villages, mow­ing down the horror-stricken people and hurtling them into graves it digs for them; they lock themselves up in their homes, but there is no lock or key that can save them from inevitable Fate; hungry cattle roam from yard to yard; gardens and streets are overrun by weeds and nettles, the ponds get muddy and overgrown with reeds, and the last to die are the grave diggers who drag the deceased with chains into the communal graves; a year later new people arrive at the village and set fire to the horrible hot­bed of death, obliterating thus every trace and memory of the old village.

  To chase away boredom, Butakov suggested a visit to Djantemir’s aul one gloomy day: “Taras Grigorievich here says that Djantemir is incredibly rich. I think we ought to visit him, get acquainted, have a look how he lives, and then invite him to our place.”

  Butakov’s idea was to everybody’s liking, but only five people went on the visit: Butakov, Maksheiev, Shevchenko, Bogomolov — who as the commandant of Kosaral had to get officially acquainted with his new neighbors — and En­sign Nudatov, who was exiled to Raïm for two years, be­cause several Polish exiles had escaped with a Bukharan caravan when he was on duty.

  “Don’t forget the water colors and pencils,” Butakov advised Shevchenko. “Every one of us will surely want to have a memento of this visit.”

  The horses were already snorting near the earth houses. Knowing that Shevchenko was a bad rider, Bogomolov ordered that the poet be given a tractable mare.

  Shevchenko’s spirits buoyed at the thought of a good treat and, most importantly, of the fragrant Persian tobacco, and he jogged along on his Rosinante (as he had immediately nicknamed the mare) if not in a dashing so at least in a lively manner. They forced two sea inlets, rounded several estuaries, and galloped along the Syr Darya upstream; an hour later they saw white and black yurts in the distance.

  The group was met by a wild barking of dogs.

  “Stop here, Alexei Ivanovich,” Shevchenko said as he rode up to Butakov. “Let us wait until the hosts show up and chase the dogs away, because those wolfhounds have such fangs we’ll hardly escape once we make a move.”

  On learning about the appearance of some chiefs, Djantemir, heavier and much fatter than he had been the year before, hurried to meet the guests halfway.

  “Glory be to Allah for having sent me such good and respected guests,” he said solemnly, a sugary, sleepily insinuating smile freezing on his puffed-up round face.

  By custom, he led the guests to his yurt, while Iskhak and Rahim took care of the horses.

  Inside the yurt, the guests were immediately served tea, while a sheep was being skinned by the threshold. Butakov and Maksheiev regarded the interior of the yurt with cu-osity and involuntarily were lost in admiration of the proud giant of a golden eagle dozing on its perch. When a bowl with the steaming mutton was brought in, Iskhak id Rahim offered the guests water to wash their hands and some towels.

  “Don’t shake the water off your hands onto the floor. Wipe them on the towels or with your handkerchiefs, because otherwise you’ll offend the hosts,” Shevchenko said to the officers in a whisper.

  In the meantime, Djantemir had taken a bottle of vodka out of a trunk and poured the drinks into bowls up to the rim, saying:

  “Oh, how wonderful the mayirs did to have killed the tiger. He destroyed many of our sheep and did us great harm. The women were afraid to let their children outdoors, because he gobbled up one child. They say he liked children’s meat.”

  “It was Taras Grigorievich’s idea to kill him the way we did,” Butakov said.

  “Taras Aga is a good man,” Djantemir confirmed with a nod. “Back in Jaman Kala he arranged the wolf chase. The mayirs killed a lot of wolves then. A good man he is indeed!”

  Shauken was busy setting the fare. Dressed in her holi­day sleeveless jacket of velvet, she waddled back and forth among the guests like a duck. Soon she was to bear a child, her pregnancy making her look like a huge ball with a smaller one attached in front of her. Her face beamed with such solemn self-satisfaction that Butakov barely held back his laughter.

  Nudatov found himself in such an exotic environment for the first time and admired everything with rapture. The yurt, the golden eagle, the patterned pieces of felt along the kerege, the drinking bowls, and the hosts in their striped garb — everything was so new and distinctive for him.

  “It’s a pity I won’t take in and remember all of it,” he said with a sigh. “Memories always lose their freshness with the passage of time. I wish I had at least a souvenir to remind me of this visit.”

  “That’s where I can help you out,” Shevchenko respond­ed cheerfully. “I will draw you in this setting. It’s a good thing Alexei Ivanovich advised me to take the water colors along.”

  “Everything would be fine, my dear Taras Grigorievich, if the ten rubles I gave you for your work last lime were expended for something useful. You’ll just squander them on drink, and tomorrow you’ll be going around cadging for a pinch of tobacco from good people.”

  Shevchenko hung his head. Nudatov’s words had stabbed him painfully.

  Nudatov felt ashamed at what he had said. The officers shrugged their shoulders, indignant, and turned away from him.

  “Oh well,” Nudatov stammered on, “I understand how it is. At times you just blurt things out. But please do me a favor — make a drawing.”

  Shevchenko reluctantly picked up his brush. In the draw­ing he did, Nudatov was half reclining on a carpet with a drinking bowl in his hand. Opposite him sat the grave and corpulent Djantemir, his legs crossed like a Buddha’s. In the depth of the yurt dozed the golden eagle, and a saddle and huge empty saba hung on a wall. Shauken disappeared from the yurt, frightened that the Russian akyn would make a drawing of her.

  Everybody liked the drawing, but Shcvchenko flatly re­fused to take any money for it however much Nudatov and the others insisted. When a new round of fare was being served, Shevchenko slipped out of the yurt unno­ticed.

  Jaisak had just returned to the aul and was eating millet porridge with airan when the poet entered his yurt.

  “Be seated, Taras Aga,” the young herder said joyfully, spreading under the guest the only piece of white felt he had. “How is life?”

  “Not much to be happy about,” Shevchenko replied with a sigh. “Although it is far easier than last year, bondage remains bondage. Better tell me what’s new with you and how are your affairs with Kuljan?”

  “Nothing has changed. I bagged a lot of fox. The eagle I have is a good hunter. As to Kuljan… Zulkarnai came to the jailiaou and said that his son was still laid up in that … how do you call it?”


  “Plaster cast, you mean?”

  “Yes, plaster cast.”

  “So what did they decide?”

  Jaisak waved his hand in a gesture of hopelessness.

  “The poor girl’s tears don’t dry. Before that her only grief was that she would have to marry Ibrai, but now there is new, much worse trouble in store for her. Zulkarnai did not come alone, but with his relatives to strengthen the friendship with Djantemir. Among the relatives was Zulkarnai’s uncle Moldabai. He’s over seventy years old, toothless, hunchbacked, and can barely sit on a horse. As soon as he saw Kuljan he seemed to have gone out of his mind: he said that if Ibrai were to die, he would marry her. There is nothing you can do about it: amenger is a law.”

  “What a loathsome thing to do!” Shevchenko could not hold his tongue. “Well, and how did Djantemir take it? Will he really agree to that?”

  “Djantemir realizes that Moldabai is very rich and an imam besides.”

  Both lapsed into a long silence.

  “I got a lot of fox furs,” Jaisak said, breaking the si­lence. “But I have nowhere to sell them. It takes three days to get from Jaman Kala to Orenburg, and from here it’s five times that much. How can I get there all by my­self?”

  “If anything unexpected happens to you, let me know.

  Come and see me anyway. I like talking with you,” Shev­chenko said, getting to his feet.

  Jaisak saw him to Djantemir’s yurt where the officers’ horses were already snorting and jangling their bridles as the guests were taking leave of the bai.

  “Where is my Rosinante?” Shevchenko asked with comic surprise.

  “She limps in one leg,” Iskhak explained. “Get on our horse. Rahim will go with you and bring it back.”

  “But it’s evening already. What if wolves attack him on his way back?” Shevchenko said, worried.

  “They won’t. It is not full winter now. The wolves are not hungry yet,” Iskhak said with a smile. “But if you fear for his life, let him stay the night with you and return to the aul in the morning. You agree, ata?”