Horsemen of the Sands Page 5

  A dirt road to a farm passed right there, and if the entire picture was to come to mind without falling to pieces, it needed a name, if only an invented name.

  AND SO IT WAS HARA-SHULUN.

  In Buryat, this means “black stone,” or, as applied to a point of settlement, Blackstone. The area hills had outcrop-pings of black basalt, so that an ulus might very well have the name I invented for it.

  Not far away, our motor-rifle company with its attached T-54 platoon was working out the tactics for a tank landing force. Two years before, during the fighting on Damansky Island, the Chinese had fired hand-held grenade launchers and skillfully lit up the tanks moving toward them, and now, by way of an experiment, district headquarters had rolled out a new tactic on us that wasn’t reflected in the field manual. We were supposed to go on the attack not behind the tanks, not behind their armor, but ahead of them, defenseless, to clear the way for them, using submachine guns to take out the Chinese grenade launchers. In those days I was a lieutenant, a platoon commander, and it wasn’t my job to judge the wisdom of the idea itself. Fortunately, neither we nor anyone else ever had to test its effectiveness in practice. A Chinese theater of military operations would never open, but we didn’t know that at the time.

  Everyone feared the Chinese soldiers’ fanaticism; there were rumors that on Damansky and outside Semipalatinsk they’d preferred death to captivity. Men spoke of this with a combination of respect and a sense of their own superiority, as if it were something we, too, once possessed but had abandoned in the name of new, higher values. Boliji argued very similarly about the shaman from the next ulus, who was said to possess definite abilities beyond the reach of the lamas of the Ivolginsky monastery, while at the same time these abilities did nothing to elevate this man; on the contrary, they seemed to move him even further down the social ladder.

  People said the Chinese fired machine guns with the accuracy of a sniper’s rifle and that they were uncommonly hardy. A PLA soldier carried a month’s rations, whereas our soldier carried three days’, and a Chinese infantryman could get along almost without sleep and travel nearly a hundred kilometers in twenty-four hours on a daily ration of a handful of rice. We were only reassured by the stories about our secret weapon for fighting the fanatic crowds of millions, about borderland hills turned into unassailable fortresses where wild rosemary growth concealed concrete bunkers with lethal installations that had names as affectionate as typhoons’. Actually, no one knew a damn thing. Mao Tse-tung figured in the newspapers as a character in a series of jokes; meanwhile more and more new divisions from the abolished Odessa District were being transferred to the Trans-Baikal. In the irrational atmosphere of this confrontation, we were taken to Hara-Shulun for training.

  Day after day, truck wheels and caterpillar tracks churned the dry sandy soil. Steppe stood in for desert, but the tank tracks wiped away the layer of grass, and the land again became sand, uncertain and shifting. The tanks trailed tall columns of yellow dust. Our PB-62s joined the line of vehicles, we jumped out of the hatches, ran across the field in a line, and then in the headphones of my R-13 I heard my company commander’s unintelligible wheezings. The sense of his order was clear without words. The platoon commanders replicated it with voices and flags; the tanks slowed down, and we boosted each other up to our places near the turret, only to jump down again in a couple of minutes. In two or three places, a black cloud gathered over the field from smoke bombs marking armored personnel carriers hit by the enemy. Major Chigantsev, the training officer, did not spare the pyrotechnics.

  The road followed one edge of the field that had a power line alongside it; down the other, about half a kilometer away, ran a small, peaceful brook with flat banks whose name I’ve forgotten. It was there that Boliji would drive his calves from the fattening lots in the mornings. They would wander down the road with the downcast discipline of raw recruits and turn off toward the river just opposite our boundary for dismounting. Off to the side, Boliji himself rode a horse. Lean and short, like his little Mongolian horse. From a distance he looked like a child riding a pony. Later I calculated he was shy of sixty, but at the time he seemed to me a very old man. Under his black, narrow-brimmed hat I could see an Asiatically stiff crop of perfectly gray hair, which seemed blindingly white against his brown, wrinkled neck. Boliji kept his hat and duster on even in the afternoon. Riding past us, he touched his tiny hand to his temple in a stately gesture, and Chigantsev invariably saluted back: a greeting between two commanders before their troops.

  That morning, the calves were strung out along the road, as usual, and the soldiers had already started jumping to the ground. With a serious face, Chigantsev was tossing smoke-puff charges in front of us; they were supposed to simulate a battle atmosphere. That week we were expecting inspectors from district headquarters. My APC was moving at the far end of the line, by the shoulder, and one smoke-puff charge ricocheted off our side and onto the road. While the fuse was still burning, the calves kept going. The ones in the lead calmly passed the barely smoking cardboard tube, but then the charge exploded under the hoofs of the next row. Bluish smoke seeped between the reddish and spotted calf backs.

  The entire herd ran helter-skelter.

  In and of itself, this firecracker wouldn’t do the slightest harm, but the calves were walking close together, head to head, and the danger seemed greater somehow coming directly from the middle of the herd rather than from far off. Panicked, they dashed off, their tails pulled up, across the field where we were turning around for the attack. Our company commander sounded the retreat over the radio and the tanks stopped. Rejoicing at the unexpected diversion, the soldiers started whistling their heads off, which made the poor calves light out even faster. They ran scattering for the fir-covered hills.

  “Let’s take the trucks,” Chigantsev ordered me. “Cut them off from the forest, or else there’ll be even more lost. We’ll pay for any losses.”

  Ten minutes later we had cut off the way to the hills with our three trucks. The calves started clustering, and the most composed were already cropping the grass when Boliji came galloping up. Without getting down from his horse, he took a hunk of homemade blood sausage out of his saddlebag and silently held it out to me.

  “Thanks, you don’t have to,” I refused his offering.

  And so without a word Boliji took aim, flung his gift into the PRC’s open hatch, and drove the calves back across the field.

  My driver poked his head out, showing me the sausage that had fallen from the sky.

  “Look, comrade lieutenant! Can we have a bite? There’s bread.”

  My mouth was watering, but I proudly declined, telling him to drive toward the road. We caught up with Boliji halfway. He was telling the calves off angrily and loudly, and then suddenly he fell silent and rode past Chigantsev with an impenetrable face.

  “He’s going to complain,” Chigantsev said resignedly.

  The night before, a tank crew had knocked off the arm of a roadside pole, the farm had lost power right during the evening milking, and they had these calves coming down on their heads, too. Chigantsev was worried the collective farm would send a complaint to division headquarters.

  Usually, Boliji would leave his calves to graze by the river and would walk toward the road to admire our maneuvers. During breaks, I’d talk with him sometimes, ask him how to say “hello” and “goodbye” in Buryat so that I could show off the words in my letters to my mama, but that day he didn’t show up.

  At the midday meal Chigantsev told me, “Go over and see him and have a nice talk. Take that hot soup over there and go.”

  I grabbed two full pots, for Boliji and myself, and started toward the herd. I suspected that if I didn’t share the meal with him, he would refuse the soup the way I refused his sausage. In both pots, over the pearl barley gruel, reddish from the army fat, and the pieces of potato, rose big chunks of pork. This product of the regimental piggery had been fished out of the pot for me by Chigantsev himself.
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br />   I found Boliji sitting on the bank – not facing the river, the way any European would, but with his back to it. In his eyes I noted the same expression we have when we watch flowing water, or tongues of flame in a campfire, as if the steppe and the streams of hot air rising above it seemed to him filled with the same mysterious and eternal movement, at once arousing and soothing.

  I put the pots on the ground and set out spoons and bread from my gas mask pouch.

  “Dinner?”

  Boliji picked up the pot and sniffed. He liked the smell.

  “Sure.” He nodded, picking up a spoon.

  I managed to empty the pot, saving the pork for last, when I noticed Boliji had stopped chewing and was looking at me closely.

  “You’re eating the soup wrong,” he said. “A soldier eats like this: first the meat, then the water. What if there’s a battle? Bang bang! Forward! And you haven’t eaten the main thing.”

  Agreeing, I started to steer the conversation along the lines Chigantsev had marked out for me.

  “Did your superior send you?” Boliji interrupted. “The mustache?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Tell him, everyone has his fear. A man, a calf. It expands like a bubble and when it reaches the head it gets in the way of his thinking. But it doesn’t get in the way of his legs. For some, it’s a long way to the head, for some not so long. Here!”

  Boliji slapped himself on the back of his head and smiled.

  “Should we have tea?”

  I jumped up. “I’ll bring it right away.”

  “Sit.”

  He brought over a huge Chinese thermos decorated with flowers and birds, poured milky tea straight into the pot, where there was still some swollen barley on the bottom, took a sip, splashed in some more, and handed it to me.

  “Here! Good tea.”

  I swallowed it, trying not to hold it in my mouth.

  “Fear is close in you,” Boliji assessed. “But the bubble isn’t too big. It won’t fill your whole head, if it inflates, it will leave a little room for thinking. But your officer’s bubble is big, although it’s a long way from his head.”

  “Which is better?” I asked jealously.

  “Both are okay. It’s bad when it’s big and close.”

  “What about you?”

  He laughed.

  “I don’t have one. It got old and burst.”

  The silence and heat were making my ears ring. Far off, at the edge of the field, I saw the tanks’ head-on silhouettes with their cannons turned to the side. That meant mealtime wasn’t over yet.

  “You didn’t take the sausage,” Boliji spoke with sudden decisiveness. “I’m going to give you my gau!”

  “Your gau?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that?”

  Boliji struggled to translate the word into Russian.

  “My gau….It has Sagan-Ubugun drawn on it. The White Elder, as we call him.”

  “A tanka?” I suggested, drawing what I knew Buddhist icons on silk were called.

  “No. You go into battle and hang it around your neck. No bullet will touch you and your bubble won’t inflate.”

  I realized he was talking about some kind of amulet.

  “Baron Unger, you know him?” Boliji squinted.

  “Yes,” I confirmed, guessing he meant Baron Ungern.

  “Unger wore it on his chest.”

  “Just like the one you have?”

  “What do you mean just like? It’s the one.”

  “Your gau?” I didn’t believe him. “That you want to give me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think they couldn’t kill him? He was shot.”

  “Oh!” Boliji smiled condescendingly. “That was later.”

  “Won’t you regret giving away such a thing?”

  Boliji stuck out the tip of his tongue and touched it with his finger.

  “That word is here, but not here” – and he placed his hand on the left side of his chest. “I’m old, I’m not going to war. I don’t need it. You’re young, you do. You know what it used to be like for us here? A lama heals a boy, doesn’t take any money, doesn’t take any sheep. He heals a married man and takes one price. But an old man comes to be healed, and there are two prices – one for yourself now and one for yourself as a young man.”

  They could hear the lead tank’s engine start up. The others roared to life after it, and the turrets started turning slowly into marching position.

  “You’ll bring it tomorrow?” I asked, trying to hide the agitation that had gripped me at the thought that I would become the owner of this relic. “We’re going to be moved from here soon.”

  “Why tomorrow?” Boliji was surprised. “Come tonight. You saw the farm? Past that is my house.”

  2

  AT THAT TIME ALL my information about Ungern had been gleaned from two sources: the Soviet-Mongolian film They Called Him Sukhe-Bator, with the actor Lev Sverdlin made up to look like a Mongol in the leading role, and B. Tsybikov’s book, The End of Ungern Madness, published in Ulan-Ude in 1947. I’d dug it up in the Republic Library’s catalog. The catalog card had a complicated code, which meant, as eventually became clear, that not everyone was permitted to read it, but the woman in charge of the reading room sympathized with me, and my lieutenant epaulets proved my reliability. I got the book, and except for the ritual anathemas, it proved quite informative. The author was describing not only the end of the Ungern madness, as one might expect from the title, but also its beginning, and the summit of the mad baron’s might.

  In the Trans-Baikal he’d commanded the Asiatic Division, two-thirds of which consisted of Mongols and Buryats, under the command of the Cossack Ataman Semyonov. In the fall of 1920, when the Red Army and the partisan detachments that had come out of the taiga led an offensive against White Chita, Ungern and eight hundred horsemen moved on Urga, the Mongolian capital and residence of the eighth Bogd Gegen, who had been its monarch since 1911, when the Middle Kingdom had become the Republic of China and Halha (Outer Mongolia) had achieved independence. Spiritual master of the Mongols and the eighth incarnation of the Tibetan hermit Daranata, Ungern was now under arrest in his own palace. General Kuo Sung-ling had occupied Urga and restored the rebellious province to Peking’s authority.

  Unable to capture the capital, Ungern left for the upper reaches of the Kherlen, replenished his thinning hundreds with Mongol princes’ detachments, and in early February 1921, after three days of battle, took Urga by storm, driving out the 15,000-man Chinese garrison. The Chinese retreated to the north, where they attempted to make their way east, to the mother country, but very few made it all the way to the saving border. In the steppe, corpses stripped by the conquerors remained lying along the Kalgan highway. Here, wolf packs feasted, racing around like spectral balls of tumble-weed, leaping on the dead bodies.

  Immediately after the victory, Ungern purged Urga of “harmful elements,” by which he meant all Jews (including women and children), Bolsheviks (including Socialist Revolutionaries and Siberian cooperative members), and those Chinese who had cut off their queue – the symbol of loyalty to the overthrown Manchurian Qing dynasty. Finally, the dead bodies were cleared from the streets, and to the roar of trumpets and the clanking of seashells the Bogd Gegen entered an exultant Urga and once again occupied the Mongolian throne. At the coronation dinner, Ungern sat at Bogd Gegen’s right hand, higher than all the princes and lamas. Apart from the highest princely title of qing wang, he was granted the khan title available only to Chingisids by blood, and the title of “The great bator – or hero – the commander who restored the state,” as well as the right to the same symbols of rank and power as the rulers of the four districts of Halha. Henceforth this descendent of the Crusaders could wear the yellow deel and yellow boots, could have reins on his horse of the same color, and could ride in a green palanquin and put a three-eyed peacock feather in his cap.

  YELLOW IS THE SUN. Green is the earth, life. The thr
ee iridescent eyes stand for the third degree of earthly might: power, which has an extra eye to read men’s souls.

  From a tender green seed-bud, a shining golden fruit was born. In front of the Sacred Gates of Bogd Gegen’s Nogon Temple, the Green Palace, Lieutenant General Roman Fyodorovich Ungern-Shternberg, khan and qing wang, flung back the curtain of his palanquin, which he had switched to from his motorcar fifty paces from the palace. His soft yellow ichig boot stepped onto the felt mat spread over the dust, which was decorated with ertni-kheh, ornaments that warded off any and all evil.

  The Nogon Temple was located on a bank of the Tola and separated from the town by broad and flat floodlands covered with dismal gray shingle. Colonel Kozlovsky, the convoy’s Cossacks, and his orderly, First Lieutenant Bezrodny, stayed outside the gates, and from that point the baron was escorted only by the scholar lama Naidan-Dorji-gelun, an astrologer who had once been with the Buddhist temple in Saint Petersburg. Ungern considered himself a Buddhist, prayed in the capital’s halls, and donated large sums to the monasteries, which irritated his Russian confederates, who preferred, actually, that he not make these feelings public. But few knew that he dreamed of converting the Siberian peasants to the yellow faith and then to roll the wheel of teaching onward, westward. Christianity had been unable to preserve the monarchies of Europe or stand up to revolution. The ruinous culture of the white race had penetrated into Japan and even China, where the republican ko-mings, or revolutionaries, had overthrown the Manchurian dynasty. The sole people left untouched by this contagion were the Mongols.