Horsemen of the Sands Read online

  Copyright © Leonid Yuzefovich, 2002

  English translation copyright © Marian Schwartz, 2018

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Yuzefovich, Leonid, 1947- author.

  Schwartz, Marian, 1951- translator.

  Title: Horsemen of the sands / Leonid Yuzefovich ; translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz.

  Other titles: Peschanye vsadniki. English

  Description: Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LOON 2018008419 | ISBN 9781939810090 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH : Ungern-Sternberg, Roman, 1885-1921 – Fiction.

  Siberia (Russia) – History – Revolution, 1917-1921 – Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG3482.U87 P4713 2018 | DDC 891.73/44–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018008419

  Ebook ISBN 9781939810106

  Archipelago Books | 232 3rd Street #A111 | Brooklyn, NY 11215 | www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House | www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Cover photo from a private collection, 1925.

  This work was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation

  TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.

  Translation of this publication and the creation of its layout were carried out with the financial support of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication under the federal target program “Culture of Russia (2012-2018).”

  Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the

  Lannan Foundation, the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia), the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  v5.3.2

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  THE STORM

  HORSEMEN OF THE SANDS

  THE STORM

  1

  THEY NEVER RAN OR SHOUTED or fought in class. Things never reached that point, thank God. They just would chatter, squirm, drop things, throw stuff back and forth, rip up pieces of paper, and roll their pens and pencils across their desks. The noise these forty-five fifth graders produced could not be broken down into its component parts; the undifferentiated rumbling struck the ear with a combination of a savage harmony characteristic of a rain’s rumbling, or a waterfall’s, and its irritatingly importunate, almost mechanical timbre.

  “Quiet, children!” Nadezhda Stepanovna shouted. “Today we have a visitor, Dmitry Petrovich Rodygin. He will talk to us about traffic safety rules.”

  She rapped her pencil on her desk – not in front of herself but in front of Rodygin, so as to draw their attention to him.

  “Quiet! I’m ashamed of you!”

  Rodygin thought she should be ashamed of herself. Not all that young, she ought to have mastered discipline by now.

  “You go ahead. I’ll do this myself,” he told her as gently as possible.

  Nadezhda Stepanovna moved reluctantly toward the door. The noise did not abate.

  “Wouldn’t you like to learn something new?” she began in the very voice she hated in herself. “I don’t believe that. Vekshina here, for example, I’m sure she does.”

  Top student Vekshina, a little girl with a big nose and short hair sitting at the first desk, drew her head into her shoulders, frightened. Without too much of a stretch you could interpret that as her nodding in agreement.

  “Then why don’t you say something? You have to have the daring to defend your convictions even if the majority doesn’t share them. Stand up and say, I’m interested! Don’t keep me from listening!”

  Vekshina stood up, convulsively squeezing her apartment key, which hung around her neck on a cord, like a cross, and turned silently toward the window. Rodygin couldn’t help but look in the same direction. Outside it was September, damp and warm, and green leaves were brushing across the glass. For a leaf to turn yellow and fall, as it’s supposed to in the Urals in late September, the weather has to be dry and clear, with morning ice on the ponds and a ringing underfoot. Lately something in nature had been out of kilter, as it had been in manufacturing.

  When Nadezhda Stepanovna finally left, he smiled another half-minute, lulling their vigilance, and then suddenly barked, “All right, stand up!”

  They were surprised, but they stood up.

  “You stand up sloppily. Sit down.”

  They sat down, clattering their chairs and shoving.

  “You sit down badly. Stand up!”

  This time they stood up a little better, but someone in back giggled, an insidious criminal sound came from off to the side, and a wad of chewed up paper flew at the blackboard.

  Rodygin didn’t look for the perpetrators.

  “Mark time,” he commanded. “March!”

  Those in front marked time languidly between the rows. They were choking with laughter, their cheeks were puffing out, their eyes popping, but they did march. The ones in back, aware of their position’s advantages, barely shifted from foot to foot. This went on for a little while, but Rodygin marked time implacably, like a metronome, tapping his index finger on the ridge in the desktop. Eventually they got in the groove.

  “Well done!” he praised them. “You may sit down.”

  They sat down as quietly as elves so they wouldn’t have to stand up again. He praised them again.

  “Well done. You sit down well.”

  Rodygin began all his talks on a quiet, lyrical note intended to create an atmosphere of mutual trust, then he moved on to business, and in conclusion he would tell a few engaging but thematically related stories from the back pages of Behind the Wheel magazine. For starters he told them about how when he was a child, he and some other boys had chased the first automobile to ever drive through their village, for three kilometers. “At the time, automobiles were special, and you saw them as rarely then as you do horses now. Now everyone rides in cars, but have many of you ridden horses? Raise your hand if you have.”

  Everyone but Vekshina had. Some had ridden at the racetrack, others at their grandmother’s in the country or at a Russian Winter festival, as the recently rehabilitated Shrovetide was now officially called. Vekshina said she’d ridden a pony at the zoo, but that probably didn’t count.

  “Yes, it does,” Rodygin ruled on her case and moved on to business.

  He took out a notebook, put on his glasses, and started reading the figures on childhood traffic injuries. National figures were classified, but the ones for the district, city, and even the whole province were open. Adults were impressed by the figures themselves, but the graphic thinking of fifth graders required more concrete details, so Rodygin told them about events to which he had supposedly been witness. “This sweet curly-headed little boy ran across the street where he wasn’t supposed to, was run over by a truck, and had to have his leg amputated.”

  “How far up?” came a practical question from by the window.

  In reply, Rodygin flicked the pencil across his hip, showing that the leg as such simply was no more.

  “Don’t show it on yourself,” Vekshina warned him.

  “This has been a tremendous tragedy for the victim’s parents,” he summed up, “and for him personally. An eleven-year-old cripple, just your age. And why did it
happen?”

  “It was his own fault,” the same dauntless voice answered from the same window.

  “It happened,” Rodygin said, frowning, “because this little boy didn’t know anything about braking distance.”

  He explained in detail what braking distance was, what it might be at the speed limit of sixty kilometers an hour for various means of transportation and depending on the weather – on dry asphalt, wet asphalt, and black ice. Then he recommended writing down these facts, and he started slowly dictating as he paced between the rows.

  Some, including Vekshina, took them down assiduously. Some moved their lips, trying to remember, but most pretended to be writing them down. Two daredevils in the last row didn’t even pretend.

  Finished dictating, Rodygin talked about the ability to judge distance. If your ability to judge distance was good, you wouldn’t get run over because you could easily determine the distance to an oncoming car, correlate it to the braking distance, and then decide accurately whether to go or wait. Naturally, all this happened automatically, which meant you had to be constantly training your distance-judging ability.

  “Here, for instance,” Rodygin proposed, squinting. “Tell me how many meters it is from the blackboard to the opposite wall. But quickly.”

  The answers fell in a broad range. He heard them all out and then, without any particular hope, asked, “Has anyone in your class ever been run over by a car?”

  It turned out someone had. That spring, Filimonov had been knocked down by a motorcycle and had missed school for a week.

  “Stand up, Filimonov!” the girls started whispering. “Stand up, they’re talking about you!”

  Filimonov stood up. A little boy with big ears wearing a school uniform, it felt to him as if the usual world had been left far below, while he himself had sliced through the protective film head first, like a fish pulled out of the water, and was now gasping for air, suffocating from horror and loneliness. But he had not written down or remembered the braking distance of the IZh-Planeta motorcycle that had knocked him down near the Nature’s Gifts store. Filimonov had been drinking tomato juice, a wonderful gift of nature at ten kopeks a glass, and the salt was free. When he went flying toward the grass and saw blood on his shirt, his first thought had been that the tomato juice was spilling out of him.

  “Now we’re going to ask Filimonov how many meters it is here.”

  “Where?” a cheerful boy sitting at his desk asked.

  The same question could be read in the eyes of many, including those who had already answered him two minutes before. In that time the problem had been driven from their minds.

  “From this wall, where the blackboard is, to that wall,” Rodygin pointed patiently, and his gaze shifted back to Filimonov. “So, how many meters is that?”

  Filimonov took a deep breath and whispered, “Twelve.”

  “Louder. So everyone can hear you.”

  “Twelve meters.”

  “Well, let’s check. My pace is exactly eighty centimeters. So how many of my paces should there be?”

  The silence of the grave fell. Finally one girl, after doing the calculations on paper, raised her hand, stood up, and answered in full.

  “There should be fifteen of your paces.”

  “Smart girl,” Rodygin rewarded her. “Now, count.”

  He took up his starting position, that is, pressed the backs of his boots right up to the baseboard, and starting on his left foot, stamping out his pace, moved down the aisle.

  “One,” the off-key chorus thundered, gathering strength with each step. “Two. Three…”

  All of a sudden, at the fourth step, Rodygin realized distinctly that it would be exactly fifteen paces, no more and no less. At that point he firmly lengthened his fifth step, and his sixth even more so, and his seventh and eighth leapt to nearly a meter and a half. His height allowed him to do this imperceptibly, moreover his distracting gesticulations played their part.

  “Ten,” the chorus thundered.

  “And a half,” Rodygin added magnanimously, and silence ensued.

  Filimonov was looking at the partition with glassy eyes. He was done for. He was a bad judge of distance, and that’s why he’d been run over by the motorcycle. And he would be again.

  “There, you see?” Rodygin told him with kindly reproach. “Sit down.”

  Filimonov sat down. The girls were looking at him with compassionate curiosity, as if he were a candidate for corpse.

  Feeling light pangs of conscience, Rodygin slowed down at the wall and then started back.

  “The years will pass,” he said as he walked. “You will all grow up, you’ll labor honestly in the economy, and you yourselves will be able to acquire an automobile for your personal use. Who wants to have his own personal automobile? Raise your hands.”

  Once again, all hands went up, except for the smallest boy, who was dressed worse than the others and said he already had one, and Vekshina, who didn’t say anything. Failing to pry an explanation out of her, Rodygin resumed.

  “But remember one thing from your school bench. Never, under any circumstances, get behind the wheel drunk.”

  To help them visualize it, he sketched a picture in broad strokes where the heroes were plucked straight from life. “Here is Vekshina, a mama herself now, pushing a stroller down the sidewalk.” Rodygin paused for the giggles to flutter through the class, as was to be expected. Innocent giggles, mostly, but a few girls sniffed shyly, looking down, and to the left there was a cautious male cackle. “They already know,” Rodygin thought sadly. He himself had learned about this much earlier, but for city children, who had no contact with farm animals, the knowledge was fairly early, and not on the best authority, of course.

  Vekshina didn’t know yet, and Filimonov had heard a thing or two but had his doubts. Grownups certainly weren’t going to go around doing the foolish things eighth graders did. You could expect anything from them.

  In an intriguing tone, to distract their attention, Rodygin hastened to inform them that Vekshina had been at the infant feeding center. She was calmly pushing her baby in her stroller, while a few blocks away, still indistinguishable in the stream of cars, there was a speeding car behind whose wheel sat Filimonov. He was coming back from a birthday party where he’d had more to drink than tomato juice.

  Filimonov grinned, flattered.

  Now, feeling no pangs of conscience whatsoever, Rodygin reminded him that he was not a good judge of distance, and after the birthday party, he was a terrible one. In addition, a storm had just passed, the asphalt was wet, and the braking distance had increased. Filimonov pressed on the pedal. Too late! Red, the color of blood, struck him in the eyes, and the car bore down unstoppably on the crosswalk where the happy mother was pushing her stroller.

  Brakes squealed outside and Vekshina screwed her eyes up tight. Her daughter’s name was Agnya, and she was a chubby, swarthy little girl in a lace-trimmed pink satin coverlet. Not blue, under any circumstance; blue was for boys.

  Crash! At the last moment Rodygin had Filimonov run into a bread van. No one was injured, thank God, but the residents of an entire neighborhood had no bread. And in the morning they had to go to work. What would they have with their tea?

  This problem worried everyone. Several suggestions were made as to what exactly. On the list were cottage cheese pancakes with sour cream, regular and potato pancakes, biscuits, waffles, cookies, and even breadfruit. You could easily grow breadfruit trees in apartments for just such times, a flabby boy with jug ears said with Jewish aplomb.

  Vekshina took no part in the discussion; she didn’t care. She was thinking about why Nadezhda Stepanovna had decided that this lecture would be more interesting for her, Vekshina, than the other kids. She had had her suspicions before, but when Rodygin started explaining the punishments applied to drunk drivers, all her doubts fell away.

  Vekshina’s father had worked at a motor transport company as a long-distance trucker. Three months before, while moo
nlighting somewhere outside of town, he was given some home brew and vodka, and on the way home he crashed his ZIL into the road crew shed and fought with a policeman. Her father went to jail for fifteen days, his license was revoked, and he was demoted from driver to mechanic. They could survive the fifty-ruble pay difference, they’d done worse, her mother said, but as a mechanic her father started drinking. Drunk, he ran to the garage and tried to get his ZIL out of its bay. The guard had already caught him twice, and the third time they threatened to take him to court. Her mother was constantly telling everyone about this because she had to share her grief with someone. Vekshina begged her not to tell Nadezhda Stepanovna, but then she got told, too. Vekshina felt like ripping the key off her neck, throwing it out the window, and never going home again.

  Outside, an almost completely green leaf from an American maple was gliding down to the lawn. She couldn’t figure out why such a green leaf had torn off its branch. In its place Vekshina would have hung on a little longer. She remembered the leaves would soon turn color and start falling one after the other and be springy underfoot. You could jump on them from the fourth floor and not get hurt.

  “Three years…five years” – Rodygin’s prophetic voice hovered over her – “for a serious accident…ten years….”

  Stepping silently across the fallen leaves, her father was walking toward her from the prison wall. He noticed the stroller and asked, “Boy or girl?” “Agnya, your granddaughter,” Vekshina answered, and she and her papa hugged and quietly wept for joy.

  2

  TEA WAS BEING MADE in the teacher’s lounge, and Nadezhda Stepanovna was sent out to the grocery nearby for a cake. Physicist Vladimir Lvovich, with whom she had had a casual office romance, was in charge of the till. She was happy to go to him for the money.

  On the desk in his lab a battery of half-liter jars containing clusters of poison-blue crystals sparkled. Ninth graders had grown them over the holidays from a copper sulfate solution. These same crystals always showed up here in September, like a final greeting from the departing summer. With a breathtaking look he had reconciled Nadezhda Stepanovna to the idea that the ruby in her silver ring had not been hewn from mountain veins but had also been born in a glass beaker.