Horsemen of the Sands Read online

  For now, actually, they were getting ready to move not south but north, to the Trans-Baikal region. Ungern was rushing through the camp holding a tashuur, giving final orders, and Bezrodny was packing the boxes with blank cartridges. The order was to head out come morning, and everything around was seething. Only Naidan-Dorji, who possessed the mysteries of the three worlds, including the art of training temple horses, was sitting all alone, off to the side from the camp commotion, fingering beads made of one hundred eight black Indian nuts, and looking at the sky. Clear that afternoon, by evening it was covered in clouds, and when he cast aside another nut, he attempted to find the corresponding star, something that most often he didn’t manage to do.

  Naidan-Dorji whispered a prayer and blew upward, but the clouds did not disperse. The heavenly writings were hidden from him, and in his own soul, clouded by fear and temptation, he could not read the future as before. However, he did have the idea that when authority rests on deception, it will be overthrown not by the wisdom of those who have learned of it but by the simplicity of those who have been misled. If authority forces men to believe in what it itself does not, it will be crushed by the weight of this belief. It seemed as though Ungern himself could sense his own doom. Before the campaign the baron had given Naidan-Dorji a precious Chinese tea, mu-shan, which protected from imbecility in old age, saying with a grin, “I don’t need this. I won’t live to old age.”

  In his dream, Naidan-Dorji saw a huge host. Countless terrifying horsemen in gleaming armor galloped across a vast, wild, and gloomy plain, but a wind blew from the lips of a righteous man, and the horsemen scattered to dust, for they were all made of sand.

  11

  THE NEXT DAY at midday, Chigantsev beckoned to me.

  “Well, shall we go?”

  He was holding a submachine gun.

  “Where?” I didn’t understand.

  “To see your friend.” He nodded in the direction of the river where Boliji that morning had driven the calves from the farm.

  I noticed screwed to the barrel of his submachine gun an attachment for shooting blanks – a special adaptation that returns some of the powder gases back to the gas chamber. Otherwise you can’t fire volleys. When you shoot blanks, the reset mechanism doesn’t work.

  Chigantsev strode across the field toward the river, and I followed him. My bubble of fear, located not far from my head, began to inflate quietly but wasn’t keeping me from thinking yet.

  “Maybe it’s not worth it?” I said uncertainly.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know. Let him think what he wants.”

  “Quit it.” Chigantsev dismissed that. “I’m going to explain to him right now how it’s done.”

  Stopping him was beyond my powers. He was walking with the springy gait of a front-line soldier, filled with determination to speak to Boliji immediately and open his eyes to a deception half a century old. Evidently, Chigantsev sincerely believed that he would thereby earn at least his gratitude.

  Boliji’s signature canvas cape and black hat loomed up in its usual place. We were already quite close, but he sat perfectly still, not looking in our direction and assiduously pretending not to notice us, in order to preserve his dignity should we suddenly walk past.

  Chigantsev stopped, saluted, and then held out his hand. I greeted him in Buryat as he had taught me: “Mende!”

  In response, Boliji turned back the hem of his cape in a stately gesture.

  “Tea?”

  He was sitting with his arms around his thermos, like a child with a favorite doll.

  “Yes, yes,” I said hastily, hoping to delay the beginning of the conversation.

  Boliji screwed off the nickel-plated cap, blew into it, getting ready to pour the first portion, and pulled out the stopper.

  I watched steam rise over the opening, feverishly trying to figure out how to distract Chigantsev from his plan, when suddenly a brief round thundered behind my back.

  Chigantsev was standing with his submachine gun at his hip, and before him a patch of scorched grass was smoking. He had shot down and to the side. I noticed the shots had had much less of an effect on the calves than on me. Only the most impressionable slowly turned their heads, and working their jaws without stopping, they stared at Chigantsev with curiosity but without fear.

  Unperturbed, as if nothing had happened, Boliji filled the thermos cap with tea and gave it to me.

  “Drink this! Good tea.”

  Seeing that the calves had no intention of running and would not have to be caught, Chigantsev aimed at a reddish-brown calf standing off to the side and again squeezed the trigger, this time releasing a long round, five or six shots. The submachine gun shook in his hands, and a puff of yellow flame burst from the barrel. The calf gave a disgruntled moo.

  Chigantsev squatted next to Boliji.

  “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to him,” he said, referring to the calf he’d aimed at. “The safety measure makes farther than seven meters all right. The gases won’t reach him.”

  “You shot blanks?” Boliji asked.

  “Exactly, granddad, blanks.”

  “But why?”

  “See here” – Chigantsev slapped me on the shoulder. “Yesterday he was telling me how Ungern couldn’t be killed. Now do you understand why?”

  “No.”

  “What’s there not to understand? I fired at the calf, right? At the reddish-brown one. Is the calf alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was the same with Ungern.”

  Boliji’s eyes turned cold.

  “You think I’m an old fool, right? Who doesn’t know anything, who doesn’t know a blank?”

  “Don’t be offended, granddad, I’m telling you for sure. And before that they flattened the bullets in the smithy. No big deal! Tap tap and it’s done.”

  “Go away, commander.”

  “Wait a minute, granddad. Why are you mad?”

  “Go away! Go! You have your affairs and I have mine. Give it here!”

  Boliji roughly took the thermos cap away from me and splashed the unfinished tea on the grass.

  “Give me the gau, too!”

  He wrinkled his nose as if he wanted to sneeze and just couldn’t. The skin on his forehead was moving strangely and unpleasantly, and his hat was moving with it. A foolish little stranger was sitting in front of me. Everything foreign emerged in sharper relief. His eyes lengthened and narrowed, his eyelids grew heavier, his cheekbones jutted out, and even his accent became more noticeable.

  “Give me the gau!” he repeated angrily. “You shouldn’t have it.”

  “People don’t take back gifts,” I replied, knowing that deep down he wanted to hear just this from me.

  I could not return the gau under any circumstance. If I returned it, that would mean I hadn’t understood anything, or had forgotten everything. After all, no one had forced me to become a participant in the game he had proposed. The two of us had established its rules without consulting, but trusting each other.

  Boliji carefully screwed on the cap, rose, and headed for the calves, shouting something angrily at them in Buryat, partly intended, most likely, for Chigantsev and me. He walked with his arms around his thermos, which was as big as a fire extinguisher, and next to it he looked especially small. From behind you might have taken him for a boy if it weren’t for his gray hair and wrinkled neck. He was walking away from me forever. I watched him go, and my throat tightened with admiration and sympathy for this old man whose faith was nothing but pride, his pride memory, and his memory love.

  “Hey, granddad!” Chigantsev called after him.

  Boliji didn’t look around.

  Swearing, Chigantsev picked up the submachine gun, and aiming the thundering barrel, like a paratrooper who’d landed in the very thick of the enemy, fired the remaining cartridges in the magazine in one long, continuous round. An ejected casing burned my hand.

  Boliji stopped.

  “Why are you s
hooting?” he asked. “I already told you in words.”

  “But what if it was all as I say? Then what?” Chigantsev squinted slyly.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “But if it was?”

  “Then you would think that Jorgal was an ignorant fool. He was wrong to tear off the gau. He was wrong in everything.”

  “No,” Chigantsev replied gravely. “I wouldn’t think that. In my opinion, granddad, you had a daring brother. That’s for sure. I would have personally given him a medal.”

  Chigantsev said what I should have, then winked at Boliji, shouldered his submachine gun, and started for the road. He’d also done his deed; doubts did not torment him. Now Chigantsev was walking away, and Boliji and I watched him go. He was walking across the field with his loose, springy gait, his entire body swaying, like an athlete limbering up, and his boots made a ringing sound as they hit the desiccated grass, which now sounded very different under my feet. A cloud of dust flew toward him from the road. I smiled at Boliji. The horsemen of the sands had passed between us and scattered.

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