Horsemen of the Sands Page 10

  “Nothing more. I’ll be waiting for you outside.”

  A fine drizzle fogged the shop window, where old books were opened to the title page. I went through the arch, took a peek at the courtyard, confirmed there was no back door, and stood by the front door. There were forty minutes to go until the store closed, and it was nice to imagine Chizhov languishing in anticipation that whole time. I could just have given him a thrashing. I was taller, stronger, and, most of all, younger. Not in the sense of being more agile and having better reactions but just more irresponsible.

  I had a long wait ahead. The store closed at seven, but Chizhov didn’t appear until about seven thirty, and not before I had the idea of moving away from the shop window. When he was closing and locking the door, I came out from my hiding place. Chizhov noticed me and started off quickly in the direction of Nevsky. I went after him but didn’t try to catch up, to prolong his torment.

  It was Saturday, May, and the street crowd on Nevsky had thickened up like porridge steaming off its water. Suddenly, Chizhov tripped on the curb and waved his hand. A green light pulled up, and he got in the taxi and slammed the door. The driver started the meter and the light went out. I’d barely managed to jump into the back seat when the car pulled out.

  The driver braked.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The same place,” I said. “I’m with him.”

  Chizhov didn’t even turn his head.

  We rode in silence, and when we got there he paid in full. I didn’t add a kopek. I had enough money left for a return ticket and to eat a couple of times at the dietetic cafeteria. We got out simultaneously. The taxi drove away, and the rain got louder. Or maybe it was the sea. I had no idea where I’d been taken.

  We stood facing each other and next to us a big grocery store shone light through its Gothic-arched windows. It was still open, and people were coming out with bags and fine brown paper cones. In my town, the paper was rough and thick and peppered with splinters.

  “I told you I don’t have your amulet!” Chizhov hollered, snapping. “I promise you, I don’t!”

  “Where is it?”

  “I gave it to a woman I know.”

  “Excellent. Let’s go see her.”

  “She lives in Moscow.”

  “And you’re in Leningrad?”

  “This is an idiotic conversation. Leningrad, as you see. What about you?”

  “Perm,” I answered honestly, although I could have not answered.

  “Just think how life has scattered us all! Do you want me to give you ten rubles? We’ll be quits.”

  A car ducked around the corner, threatening to splash us with dirty water. I grabbed Chizhov by the elbow to pull him away from the puddle.

  “Twenty-five,” he said, pulling his arm away in fright.

  I managed to jump back, but he got splashed.

  “Fine,” I took pity on him. “Give me the ten and we’ll go to the store.”

  “I don’t drink,” Chizhov informed me.

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  I told him to get in line for the cashier and ran to the grocery department myself. Times were such that high-quality Indian tea was still sold freely. With his ten at the ready, Chizhov awaited my instructions. I told him to use it to buy the tea. It came out to around eighteen packets, but he did the noble thing and, going beyond the stipulated sum, paid for twenty. We tossed them into my briefcase.

  “I understand,” Chizhov said. “What entertainments are there in the provinces? Unless you find tea entertaining.”

  “Now to the post office,” I ordered.

  “What post office? Everything’s closed.”

  “Then we’ll meet tomorrow.”

  Chizhov’s face fell.

  “What’s the point now?”

  I made a vague gesture that transitioned into a wave of goodbye and started off down the street as if I had to be somewhere, although I had absolutely nowhere to go. I’d told my relatives, who were sheltering me, that I was going home tonight and I didn’t feel like going back to their place. They’d probably already tossed my sheets into the hamper.

  The rain let up, and I spent the entire night lounging around the city, slept briefly at the train station toward dawn, and in the afternoon, at two o’clock, when the used bookstore closed for lunch, I showed up once again and took Chizhov to the nearby post office. We sent a package of tea to Hara-Shulun, to Boliji Budaevich Budaev, and then stopped into a cafeteria and shared the price of a cup of coffee and pastries. I still didn’t have enough money for a reserved seat anyway, so I decided to travel fourth class and bought two more pastries – one with dried apricots and one with chicken. They didn’t make them like that in Ulan-Ude or Perm. Chizhov tried to justify himself. He said he’d received a telegram saying his wife was ill and had had to leave immediately for Leningrad. It was clear that he was lying, but my anger had dissipated long ago. I told him about Jorgal and Boliji, and he got very emotional and suggested buying more tea and sending it to Hara-Shulun in his own name, but I said enough was enough. He immediately agreed with me.

  “Genuine revenge has to be foolish, ridiculous, absurd,” Chizhov said, having in mind not so much Jorgal, who took revenge against Ungern, as me teamed up with him. “It has to be an impulse, not a calculation. When that happens, revenge leads to understanding between people.”

  His research director had died of a heart attack and he’d never been able to defend his dissertation. A wife, a child, a hundred rubles in salary, and no housing prospects, while among the collectors of book antiquities were influential men who promised to help him with an apartment. The main thing was to save up for a co-op, Chizhov said, and then he could take up his research again. Living with his mother-in-law, in a communicating room, it was impossible, nonetheless he still had some credibility in the scholarly world and recently a letter had come from Ulan-Ude asking him for a consultation. He’d written back: Send smoked Baikal whitefish. As a joke, naturally. By the way, the drawing on the amulet had been done in paints made from fish bones, and not just any fish bones. They boil them, you know….Right then the radio chimed three o’clock, and Chizhov raced back to his store.

  In parting, shaking my hand, he said, “Believe me, she is a very fine, dear, unhappy woman.”

  I didn’t get it right away, that he was talking about his Moscow friend to whom he’d given the gau he’d stolen from me.

  My train left that night. I bought a ticket and headed out once again to roam the streets.

  The Neva was wider than the Selenga but narrower than the Kama. The Bronze Horseman had trampled the snake in the year Jorgal was born.

  “Sagan-Ubugun,” I repeated, “Urga, Ungern.”

  The German surname held odd echoes of the Mongolian capital and the Buddhist hermit, as if whoever had been giving out names had foreseen a specific destiny, that one day they would be spoken together.

  The obscure Cossack Captain Ungern-Shternberg, a man of courage, a visionary, and a drunkard, had ridden out from here, from this city, past Lake Baikal, under Kerensky’s government, and three and a half years later, as a major general whose name was well known in Moscow, Peking, and Tokyo, had stood on Bogdo-Ola and looked through binoculars at the temple of Tegchin-Kalbyn-sum, where Chinese infantrymen in ash-gray uniforms swarmed next to the wheel of the teaching, which resembled a ship’s helm. To the right and left of the wheel were wooden fallow deer painted red – in memory of being the first to listen to Gautama Buddha’s Benares preaching. The Chinese were setting up a machine gun in their midst. The steppe was bare; the snow blown off by the winds. The steep cliff cleaved the clouds of sand flying from the Gobi, and if you hadn’t heard the guns cracking, you might have thought Genghis Khan’s campaigns had ended yesterday.

  In those days, my grandfather was roaming the deserted palace of the Bukharan emir, and my grandmother, pregnant with my mother, was sewing baby clothes and looking at heavy snowy humps on the little houses across the Moscow River.
Six months later, when the Asiatic Division had crossed the border of the Far Eastern Republic, it was raining in Petrograd. Whirlwinds of sand raced over the Buryat steppe, while between them, in the middle of our enormous country, in the poor town of my childhood, which neither my grandfather nor my grandmother had yet thought of as the town of their old age and death, a blizzard of poplar fluff swept the recently renamed streets – straight, unpaved, with water pumps sticking up at street corners like ancient cannons dug into the earth. East and West were two mirrors placed on either side of Russia, and Russia looked first at the right, and then at the left, each time amazed that its reflection in one mirror did not look like its reflection in the other.

  In my youth I wrote poems. I sat on the bench near the Bronze Horseman and murmured:

  On the steppe, ’neath yellow clouds,

  Where birds are driven to their death

  A horseman was fashioned out of sand,

  His horse reared up and fell to dust.

  6

  WE DRANK TEA, and Boliji told me how a certain Buddha whose name he’d forgotten created the first human being in the steppe.

  “Right off, naturally, he gave him a soul as white as a swan. He thought and thought….No, he thinks, that’s no good. How can a man like that slaughter sheep? He’ll die of hunger! He smashed it and made another. With a soul as black as a raven. He thought and thought, and again, that’s no good because he’ll go straight to hell. He broke it again and made a third. He gave him a soul as colorful as a magpie. All human beings come from him, but they’re all a little different. Some have lots of black feathers, some just a few.”

  Boliji winked, letting me know that he himself, of course, didn’t believe in fairy tales like that, and he added, “Jorgal had very few black ones.”

  BY MID-AUGUST, the Asiatic Division had broken away from their pursuers and crossed the Mongolian border. The division still had about two thousand sabers left. Its thinning regiments moved like water over a mountain slope, flowing around rocks, dividing into many little streams, and merging again through the gullies into a single stream. The men didn’t know where they were being led, but they didn’t dare murmur. They feared the mad baron like fire, like smallpox. In battles with the Reds, Ungern would gallop ahead, drawing hundreds into the attack, and after the fighting, they would find as many as a dozen bullet holes in his saddle, boots, deel, cap, and horse’s harness, but he himself wasn’t even wounded.

  When he rode by close, Jorgal could smell the heavy odor of evil coming from him, the spirit of death. His impotent hatred made his teeth ache, like icy water, but Ungern was kind to him, kept him close, promised to give him his German binoculars for hunting and to marry him to a prince’s daughter and make him a taizi – a prince – if he went among the nomads to tell tales of the bullets flattened by Sagan-Ubugun.

  They traveled without roads, along river courses, and stopped only to give their harried horses a rest. On their short halts, the men had no time to rest up or cook food. The horsemen sat in their saddles like drunkards. Naidan-Dorji’s head was pounding, his eyes sinking. His liver hurt from all the jarring and the nearly raw meat, and his stomach wouldn’t digest food. Sometimes it felt as though they’d already entered the realm of the invisible and now didn’t need to hurry. A Siamese prince came to him in a dream and said that even Sagan-Ubugun’s hair, grown out over seven centuries since the death of Genghis Khan, wasn’t enough to weave a bridge across this abyss.

  The mountains stood like convicts with half-shaven heads – the southeastern slopes bare, the northwestern covered in forest. Looming over the cedar forest at the summits were gloomy, stone barrens. In July, Urga had been taken by the Fifth Army’s Expeditionary Corps, and there were Reds in the north as well. In the east, Marshal Chang Tso-lin still held out hope of restoring Halha to Peking. In the west, Baikalov’s squadrons crossed the Mongolian border in pursuit of General Bakich, tossing Siberian fugitives out of their hastily woven nests. They had a red banner, and now Bakich, too, had a red one, just a small, tricolor lozenge sewn into the upper corner, under a lance. A white, nine-tailed banner made of shiny brocade and sanctified in the blood of a slaughtered Cossack sergeant-major waved over Ja Lama’s detachments. Ja Lama embodied the spirit of the great warrior Amursana, who had died two hundred years before and who had instructed him to kill off all newcomers without distinction, no matter who they were – fugitives from Siberia or Chinese with or without queues.

  Mongolia….Thousands of Russians passed through it going east, and thousands remained there for good. They were killed by Chinese soldiers, cut down by Ungern’s Cossacks, and slaughtered by Mongols desperate to find the source of their own adversities. Russian bones lay white in the rocky ravines of Dzungaria, on the bare slopes of the wild Tannu-Ola Mountains, at the foot of holy Bogdo-Ola, buried by avalanches and snow and swept by the sands of the Gobi Desert. On the staffs over the stone mounds alongside which the mountains’ invisible masters rested, on the shriveled trees where forest spirits spent the night, like the last trace of life of these long vanished people, yellowed ribbons of Vologda lace hung amid scraps of cruder and finer silk – along with scraps of Morozov chintz, vials with faded labels from Omsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk pharmacies, perfume flasks, uniform buttons, and candies in identical, dusty gray wrappers that had once been vivid and colorful but had hardened like on a New Year’s tree left up too long. One instant a scarf would flash or a piece of linen with a lovingly embroidered monogram, and the chance rider would take a good look at it, sigh, remove his cap, and cross his brow.

  ONCE, IN THE HILLS, they came across a recent cavalry encampment. Ungern saw the wide fires, the trampled grass eaten up by the horses, the butts, the tin cans, and from many signs, including the oat husks in the manure, determined that it was a regular unit that had been here, not partisans. Evidently, they’d been going crosswise to him but had missed him. This good fortune could be a happy omen, and he ordered the horses unsaddled. This place seemed safe, like a shell-hole where another wouldn’t land.

  They ate without starting fires and went to sleep before dark. Jorgal sat under pine trees and gazed at the steppe flooded with evening sun, hoping to make out strange horsemen in the distance and at the same time afraid he would.

  Above him, pointing to their campsite, a magpie, the forest’s newsmonger, chattered heartrendingly.

  Bezrodny ran up and was about to go for his rifle but thought better of it.

  “You’ll never shoot it, the shrew! Sound travels far hereabouts….And there, it’s gone!”

  He threw a rock at the magpie. It didn’t startle, just fluttered from branch to branch and kept chirping away.

  “You can’t shoot it,” Jorgal said. “It’s someone’s soul.”

  “Whose?”

  “Someone sleeping. Kill her and he won’t wake up.”

  “Pfah!” Bezrodny spat. “Savages!”

  He walked away, and Jorgal thought this meant he wasn’t alone in needing Ungern’s death, since someone’s soul had flown away and was screaming on a tree, summoning the Reds.

  Then he fell asleep and woke up from an unprecedented, unbearable melancholy such as he’d never experienced in his life. Overhead the magpie’s chatter rang out. Oblivion had him in its grip. He couldn’t move a hand or a foot, couldn’t even wiggle his fingers or raise his eyelids. His body would not obey him, and a penetrating, deadly void chilled his chest and belly from the inside.

  The magpie started chattering again, and Jorgal guessed that it was his soul that was out of place. His thoughts flowed freely, one latching onto the next, until one arose that he understood had not been born in his head or his heart but had been picked up in the magpie’s fading cry. His own soul was telling him how he should act, and only after this encouragement did it reenter his body along with his ability to move.

  Jorgal raised up on an elbow. Everyone around him was asleep. The horses had been led away to graze by the stream, and only Sagan-Ubugun’s white mar
e was roaming all alone at the edge of the glade. Before going to sleep, Naidan-Dorji had tied her with a long rope belt to the tree next to him. Her other master, the real one, had also probably gone to lie down and rest somewhere in the forest. The air above the mare’s back was clean and transparent. Naidan-Dorji always rubbed her back down with some kind of ointment so that the gadflies wouldn’t pester her. Her belly was full; there were still oats for her in the saddlebags.

  The Mongols and Cossacks, officers and wagoneers, were sleeping. Ungern himself lay under a pine, in the shadows, but as the sun inclined toward sunset, it slipped between the branches toward his face. His yellow princely deel, torn and singed, grass-stained, stood out on the glade, which was touched with autumn yellowness, though not as vividly as before.

  Usually, Bezrodny would not lie down while Ungern was sleeping, but today he, too, was worn out. He was whistling through his nose, leaning up against a tree trunk, holding his rifle in his lap.

  Jorgal squatted briefly and finally stood tall and looked up. The magpie had disappeared, although he hadn’t heard its wings flapping. The branch where it had just perched was still, but something in his chest was fidgeting, making it hard to breathe. It was the soul-bird making itself comfortable in its nest. When it was all calmed down, Jorgal took a deep breath and started in Ungern’s direction.

  Ungern was lying on his back, his neck turned aside. His head was on his saddle and his saddle rested between pine roots. Drops of sweat dotted his brow, and under his slightly open eyelids you could see strips of the whites: wide in one eye, narrower in the other. His father had told the truth. These were the eyes of a mangys.

  Jorgal took a few more steps. It was so hot, the collar of Ungern’s princely deel was open, and a cord lay on his bare, hairless chest – a silk cord, with one red thread woven into the yellow ones. Jorgal took his long, narrow Buryat knife, which he had sharpened on a black stone and shaved his chin with recently for the first time, out of its sheath. He easily cut the cord – holding it with two fingers so the pull wouldn’t be felt – grabbed the gau, and stuck it into his ichig boot top.