Horsemen of the Sands Read online

  Here everything Jorgal had seen through the hole in his yurt at home was repeated: shots rang out – the crowd gasped, shaken – and bullets crushed by Sagan-Ubugun dropped on the felt mat. Ungern explained whose hand had flattened the lead like wax, and three young fellows, unmarried as yet, without untying their reins from their father’s gold hitching posts, asked to go to war with him for the yellow faith. Satisfied, he ordered nothing be taken without payment, that bread and mutton be purchased for money.

  They stayed a day in Halgai. Waking up from a heavy, predawn dream, Kozlovsky lay by the wall of a summer hut and listened to a conversation between two Trans-Baikal Cossacks lying nearby.

  “So what if I don’t believe so much in God myself?” one said. “He’s ours, God, Jesus Christ, I believe in Him if I want and don’t if I don’t. For a while, maybe, or all the time. He knows better. But why our baron has gone crawling to a stranger’s god, my mind can’t take that in. Your own, he’s like a wife, see. You come home drunk, she forgives you; you smack her, she cries and forgives you back. Where’s she going to go? But a stranger’s woman! She doesn’t have to answer to you.”

  “God’s the same for all nations,” the other reasoned. “Only the faiths are different.”

  “What about Satan?”

  “The same, too. The demons, now – those depend on the nation.”

  “The ones who’ve taken over the baron, are they ours or theirs?”

  “What, have you seen them? How do you know?”

  “I’ve been with him since back in Dauria,” the first Cossack said. “He got up to tricks there no one would believe if I told ’em. Once one night he goes out to the hills alone and starts banging away with his gun until he runs out of bullets. Shoots and shoots and shoots. And you can’t figure out who he’s shooting at. He comes back in a black mood. Not a good time to get in his way. The officers, the braver ones, somehow ask him, ‘Who were you shooting at, Your Excellency? Who were you trying to kill?’ He just shrugs them off. ‘Who’s there to kill!’ he says. ‘Whether you shoot or not, you won’t kill them anyway!’ ”

  “It’s our demons, the Russian ones,” Kozlovsky chimed in. “You can tell by their ways.”

  The Cossacks cautiously quieted down. Then one objected:

  “I think it’s theirs. I bet ours are happy he’s thrown in with a stranger’s faith. What do they need to be scarin’ him for?”

  “Ours,” Kozlovsky repeated stubbornly, and he went to find Ungern.

  Ungern was all alone, without any officers, as he tended to be more and more often lately, sitting by a fire where Bezrodny was cooking shashlyk. Buddhist beads consisting of one hundred eight grains of ivory hung from Ungern’s wrist.

  “Are you saying we’re going to put on this show in every village?” Kozlovsky asked as he sat down beside him. “Forgive me, Roman Fyodorovich, but my men are asking why you aren’t wearing a cross anymore. What am I supposed to tell them?”

  “I have a cross,” Ungern said with surprising calm. “The Buddha’s teaching doesn’t contradict the Gospels.”

  Bezrodny started turning the sticks threaded with the pieces of lamb. The dripping grease spattered iridescently on the coals.

  Kozlovsky shook his head to drive out a hallucination.

  “D-damn!” He had an urge to look around to see whether it was titmice chirping. Somewhere in the lilac.

  “I understand.” Ungern nodded. “When I go into the forest, I start scouting for mushrooms right away. Even though I know there aren’t any here that are any good, I still look.”

  No one had heard any confession of this sort from him for a long time. Kozlovsky decided to take advantage of his mood and go back to the conversation that was interrupted that night.

  “Lots of officers still have families in the east. Everyone’s hoping you’ll lead the division to Manchuria.”

  “No,” Ungern replied. “We’re going back to Halha.”

  “What for? The Reds are going to take Urga soon anyway. We don’t have the forces to interfere.”

  “I didn’t say I was planning to go to Urga. We’ll move westward, toward the Kobdo area.”

  “And where after that?”

  “Tibet.”

  “Across the Gobi?” Kozlovsky said in horror.

  “How else?”

  “That’s certain death! In the fall the Gobi’s impassable.”

  “We’ll wait for winter. There’s feed for the horses there, enough for us, if we move in small detachments, and in winter the snow makes up completely for water….I sent a letter to the Dalai Lama, so he’ll take us into service. When the time’s right we’ll come back, and then we’ll see who wins out.”

  “The officers and Cossacks won’t go to Tibet with you,” Kozlovsky said impudently. “There’ll be a mutiny.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “God forbid! It’s just no one will believe we can cross the Gobi and start all over again. The Reds now aren’t what they were in ’18.”

  “In the last three years they haven’t learned to fight,” Ungern objected. “If it had been me surrounding them at Troitskosavsk the way they did me, not one would have gotten away. And on the next campaign I’ll have a hundred thousand Tibetans and Mongols.”

  “Where will they come from?”

  “Sagan-Ubugun will help me. Did you see the brave soldier who came to see us yesterday at Hara-Shulun? He was a deserter. In a year or two, I’ll have a whole host just like him. Somewhere in the Holy Scriptures it says that at the end times the yellow race will move on the white and overpower them.”

  “The Bible talks about the yellow race?” Kozlovsky was dubious.

  “Yes, only they couldn’t find me the place. And the end times aren’t long off. Take a look around. Brother is going against brother, son against father, everyone is going hungry, and everyone has forgotten the truth. People say last winter on Bogdo-Ola they saw a black hare. You know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “Every thousand years, a single hair in a hare’s pelt turns black. When they are all black, war will break out between the Buddhists and the infidels, and the universal kingdom of the Buddha Maitreya – the Buddhist messiah, the lord of the future – will ensue. If you read my last decree to the division carefully, you’ll probably remember that at the end I inserted something from the Prophet Daniel – about troubled times, at the end of which Mikhail, the great prince, will arise. Everyone thinks this refers to Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. As if he hadn’t been killed in Perm but had escaped either to England or China and was just about to declare himself.”

  “You don’t really believe that yourself, do you?”

  “I used to, yes. Now I don’t. It’s been revealed to me that the Mikhail prophesied in the Scriptures is, in fact, Maitreya. The Bible and Buddhist books attest to one and the same thing. When it comes to the one thousand three hundred thirty-fifth day since the end of daily sacrifice, we were just counting wrong. You have to count from the shutting down of churches last year. By that time I’ll have left Lhasa, returned to Mongolia, invaded China, and ascended to the throne of Emperor P’u-’i. With his army, we’ll move into Siberia and after that Russia and Europe. The yellow race will be the victor, and there will be Buddhism everywhere, Buddhism, Buddhism, Buddhism.”

  Kozlovsky listened, aware that his life belonged to a madman. He had to do something immediately.

  “Roman Fyodorovich,” he said, dispassionately gazing into the maniac’s glassy, whitish eyes, “in the future war I will not be able to fight by your side. My honor will not permit that.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a Russian man and I am going to fight on the side of the white race.”

  Bezrodny had tossed some kind of valerian on the coals, causing it to smolder and infuse the shashlyk with its aroma. Breathing in its smell and counting his beads, Ungern nodded.

  “Fine, I’ll release you. Go to your wife.”

  Kozlovsky held his bre
ath. He couldn’t believe that he had so easily obtained what everyone had been dreaming about but had not dared even to breathe a word of, as deserters were punished with greater cruelty than captive commissars.

  “Go,” Ungern repeated. “I appreciate bold men. Only give back the map.”

  Kozlovsky’s heart sank. Reaching the Chinese border without a map was almost harder than crossing the Gobi into Tibet, but ten minutes later, with his carbine on his back and stuffed packs, he rode up to the dying fire, dismounted, and from his field pack handed to Ungern the most accurate map of Mongolia we have to this day: ten versts to the inch, drawn by Lisovsky, the irrigation engineer. Urga’s lithographer had produced a total of three copies. Ungern wanted to reduce the risk of the map falling to the Reds. He could not orient himself with it and resorted to the services of experienced staff officers. Kozlovsky was one of them, but he had not dared copy the map beforehand so they wouldn’t find a copy and accuse him of preparing to flee, and now he was afraid to waste time on this; the baron could change his mind at any moment.

  Pulling out the map, he accidentally dropped a peacock feather on the ground that had been with it, which after the taking of Urga he had received from Bogd Gegen along with the title van, “truly zealous,” and the right to have brown reins on his horse. The feather had two eyes, not three like the baron’s. The invisible realm had not yielded to Kozlovsky.

  Naidan-Dorji, who was sitting beside Ungern, picked up the feather and began carefully straightening the shredded stem and smoothing the tangled fibers. It was clear that Kozlovsky did not hold the sign of his rank in the proper respect.

  “You can stick it up your ass,” Naidan-Dorji whispered to him, but so that Ungern wouldn’t hear.

  Fastening his pack, Kozlovsky saw with astonishment that Bezrodny was serving him a skewer of cooked shashlyk. This would not have occurred to him without the baron’s order.

  “Take it, take it.” Ungern smiled.

  He seemed to be taking pleasure in his own mercy, which also smacked of insanity.

  Kozlovsky accepted the gift and picked up his reins, but Ungern stopped him.

  “Wait a minute! If you reach Harbin, I would ask that you keep silent about this.”

  He fingered the lace of the amulet hanging on his chest expressively.

  “As you wish. Farewell, Roman Fyodorovich! I thank you for everything. Bear no ill will.”

  Kozlovsky slowly rode away from the fire and almost immediately regretted responding as he had, and not otherwise, that he hadn’t shown he understood everything and he could be relied upon. The request addressed to him had required an entirely different response. He already knew exactly which one. However, to go back and say it was foolish, and Ungern wouldn’t have liked that. Kozlovsky tried to forget his blunder and put his steed at a trot.

  When Kozlovsky had disappeared behind the wall of the last winter hut, Ungern made a sign to Bezrodny. A couple of minutes later, accompanied by three Chahars, his favorite orderly galloped off in the same direction. The clatter of hooves died down, and a single gunshot cracked in the distance.

  5

  IT WAS SUMMER when I met Boliji, and in September I was sent from our regiment’s permanent post on a mission to Ulan-Ude. The amulet brought from Hara-Shulun lay in the suitcase under my cot in the officers’ lodgings, and I admired it less and less often, but when I was packing my briefcase for the trip, I took it along so that I could show it to someone knowledgeable about such things.

  At the local history museum, a young woman from the Department of the Pre-Soviet Past introduced me to a bald young man with a beard, explaining that this was Comrade Chizhov, a researcher from Leningrad, who had come to Buryatia to complete work on his dissertation on Buddhist iconography.

  My gau did not pique his interest.

  “An ordinary sort of thing. Where did you get it?”

  I started telling him and he interrupted me.

  “That’s all quite clear. Will three suit you?”

  “What?” I didn’t understand.

  “Three. Three rubles.”

  Chizhov shifted his gaze to the museum girl.

  “You can draw up the purchase with the comrade lieutenant, but don’t give him more than three rubles. A handsome price.”

  I was struck by the size of the sum offered. If only Boliji had heard!

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “this amulet belonged to Baron Ungern.”

  Chizhov reacted instantly.

  “In that case, a ruble.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t value such rarities very highly.”

  The young woman didn’t join in the conversation, but from her face I could tell she was in awe of his competence.

  “We specialists,” Chizhov clarified, softening the ideological emphasis of his previous sentence.

  “You misunderstood me. I have no intention of selling it. I just wanted to know what century it comes from.”

  “The twentieth. Did you think it had survived from the days of Genghis Khan?”

  I pointed at the strange writings next to the head of Sagan-Ubugun, which looked like tree roots.

  “There’s something written here. What language is it in?”

  “It’s Old Mongolian script. You see, the Mongols didn’t always use the Cyrillic alphabet.”

  “Can you translate it?”

  “Terrific. What inquisitive officers we have!”

  With the intimate gesture of a senior colleague, Chizhov took the museum girl by the arm.

  “You run along and go about your business. I keep distracting you all the time. The comrade lieutenant and I will be discussing narrowly specialized topics.”

  It occurred to me that I ought to leave, too, but I didn’t because I still hadn’t come up with the stinging retort I was going to throw at him in parting.

  “Let’s take the following approach,” he suggested when we were left alone. “Entrust this treasure with me for the evening, and I’ll try to translate the inscription. For some reason, I find your insistence appealing. We can meet right here tomorrow at five o’clock. Does that work?”

  Flattered, I handed him the gau.

  “If you’re interested in history,” Chizhov said as he escorted me to the front door, “I can give you one piece of advice: Don’t waste your energy on popular literature. Go straight for the serious literature, the sources.”

  The next day I didn’t find him at the museum, and the young woman from the day before informed me that he’d left for Leningrad on the morning train. While I was sitting in front of the Hodegetria Cathedral munching on turnovers, killing time until my appointment, Chizhov was already in the vicinity of Irkutsk pressing his biblical black-brown beard to the window.

  My gau had left me for good, but Chizhov and I would meet again eighteen months later. At the ripe old age of twenty-four, I’d never been to Leningrad, and after demobilization I finally made my pilgrimage to this mecca for provincial Soviet intellectuals. That’s where I saw him, in one of the cozy secondhand bookstores on Liteiny, where a single clerk, also an expert, stood watch. These fellows saw themselves as lordly despots because the stores were tiny, the clientele respectable, the demand greatly exceeded supply, and the filing cabinet only partially reflected the actual state of affairs.

  The early 1970s were a golden age for the secondhand book trade, involving considerable sums of money for those days, but at the time I didn’t understand that, and Chizhov seemed to me like Adam driven out of the paradise of scholarship. I hadn’t expected to see him here, or rather in this capacity, nonetheless I recognized him immediately. With a beard as before, wearing a jacket and tie, but also sateen sleeve protectors, which made him look like a Jewish watchmaker, he was speaking with polite inflexibility to a gray-haired woman who had tried to slip behind the counter to look at the books on the shelves herself.

  “No, I’ll show you what interests you.”

  “Let me look at that little book over there,” I asked, poi
nting to the top shelf and reading aloud the gold-embossed title on the leather spine.

  With my vision, I could read it at five meters.

  Chizhov moved the stepladder over, climbed up, and got it. After waiting for him to descend to the floor, I asked for the book right next to the first. He climbed back up. My face stirred no memories in him whatsoever. In Ulan-Ude, I’d worn my ordinary tunic with shoulder straps, and now I was wearing a sweater and raincoat.

  “And that one over there as well, please.”

  I was interested exclusively in books on the very top rows, near the ceiling.

  Chizhov gave me a hostile glance and silently dragged the ladder in the indicated direction. He would gladly have let me go behind the counter, probably, but the woman who had been refused that prevented him.

  “There, you see!” she gloated. “It would make your work easier.”

  Chizhov ignored her comment.

  “Young man,” he asked, setting the latest volume in front of me. “Are you purposely playing out a show for the lady? She’s the wrong age for you.”

  “You boor!” the woman said indignantly and left, slamming the door.

  “Is your name Chizhov?” I inquired, feeling like the Count of Monte Cristo showing up out of nowhere to take his revenge on offenders who had long forgotten about him.

  “What’s this about?”

  “You don’t recognize me?”

  “Ah, are you from Boris Iosifovich perhaps?”

  I smiled sarcastically.

  “Ulan Ude, the local history museum. Remember the lieutenant whose Sagan-Ubugun amulet you stole?”

  “You’re mistaken….Are you going to take any of these books?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Chizhov calmly stowed the whole stack under the counter. “What else interests you?”

  There was, of course, the temptation to plunge on through the shelves until he remembered, but I stopped myself in time. That woman had left, and now he was clearly ready to give me the opportunity to climb the shaky ladder myself.