The Golden Sabre

‘My father fought at Tannenburg, where he was wounded, and at Stanislau.’

Prince Gorshkov seemed to have had bad luck with his battles: Cabell wondered what other defeats he was presently headed for.

‘Bully for him.’

The reply left Frederick nonplussed: his ear was still too young for an adult’s sarcasm. But Eden looked at the American and wondered how he felt about his not having been in the Great War. He sounded as if he had some guilt about it. She herself had seen none of it, but she had seen the results of it. She had been at the station in Petrograd (she would never get used to that new name; St Petersburg had a ring to it, even if it was a German ring) when the hospital train had brought home the body of Igor. There had been other bodies covered with threadbare grey blankets; and wounded men, the sight of whom had depressed her more than the shrouded corpses. Men without limbs, a boy with half his face blown away; she had felt more pity for them than for the dead, even for Igor. For him she felt a terrible sense of loss; then realized later, with a sense of shame, that she felt sorrier for herself than for him. He had gone eagerly off to war, as he might have gone to the Swiss Alps to climb, which he had told her he did every summer; he would have died as he had wanted to, a hero in battle, died for Russia. She sometimes wondered, however, what had been his absolutely last thought just before death took him. Did men in battle really die as heroes or did they go out fighting death as fiercely as they had fought the other enemy?

But Cabell was not thinking of the past war. He had no regrets at having missed it, but he was irritated when someone suggested he should have been in it. He was more concerned with the present war:

‘We have no idea where the armies are—’

‘General Denikin’s army is in the Ukraine,’ said Frederick. ‘That’s where Father is.’

‘There’s a dozen damned armies. White ones, Red ones, private ones. At least back home our Civil War was pretty straightforward. What about you English?’ He looked at Eden.

‘We English don’t fight amongst ourselves. At least not for three hundred years.’

‘You fight the Irish. What about the Scots and Welsh?’

‘They try to fight us. But we’ll just ignore them.’

‘And they’ll all go home and be quiet?’

‘Eventually.’ But she really didn’t believe that, only wished for it. Though she had never lost her Englishness, England was becoming like a foreign country to her. Her parents, in the infrequent letters that got through since the Revolution, told her that England had changed during the War. Perhaps when she eventually reached home – how soon? Next month, next year? – she would not recognize the country she had left.

They were still on a mountain road, passing through pine forests, but now the road began to dip as it swung slightly south-east. The car was behaving beautifully, rolling smoothly along without effort, everyone in it marvellously comfortable. Cabell, a man who had never wished for riches, suddenly was seduced; he wanted to be an oil millionaire, have a car like this. He would chase horizons, follow beckoning roads in the grand manner, a vagabond with style.

Then the forest thinned out and they saw the narrow-gauge railway track running up to the mine cut into the side of the mountain slope. A wagon loaded with ore was being winched down the track to two wagons, drawn by oxen, waiting on the road.

The half-dozen men standing by the ox-wagons stiffened in surprise as the Rolls-Royce came round the bend in the road and glided to a halt beside them.

‘Good morning,’ said Eden. ‘Is there a town or village up ahead?’

The men glanced at one another, then a thickset, bald-headed man said, ‘Who wants to know?’

Cabell, half-turned in his seat, saw that Frederick was about to let the men know who he was. ‘Shut up, Freddie,’ he said in English.

The foreign language caused a stir amongst the men. They had been examining the car, their expressions a mixture of amazement and admiration. Now they stopped dead and looked at the man in the wide-brimmed hat who spoke a strange tongue.

‘Who’s he?’ said the bald-headed man.

‘He is an American engineer,’ said Eden. ‘I am an English teacher.’

‘Who owns such a motor car as this one?’

‘I do,’ said Cabell, and borrowed some of Frederick’s arrogance for the moment. ‘Good-day to you, gentlemen.’

He let in the gears and drove the car on before the men could move to stop him. Farther along the road, when they were out of sight of the mine, he said, ‘Those guys were asking too many questions.’

‘They are iron miners,’ said Nikolai. ‘Miners are different people from anyone else. It is the working underground, I think.’

‘Who do they work for – themselves?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Eden. ‘Probably for some landowner who lives in Moscow or somewhere far from here.’

‘They might work for my Uncle Vanya,’ said Frederick. ‘Father once said that Uncle Vanya owned everything for a hundred miles south of Verkburg.’

‘Freddie will inherit it all when Uncle Vanya dies,’ said Olga. ‘He is Uncle Vanya’s favourite nephew. I’m his favourite niece.’

‘Well, you’re not my favourite passengers,’ said Cabell. ‘I have an idea your Uncle Vanya wouldn’t be those miners’ favourite boss, either. Just keep your mouths shut about your relatives, okay? Stop playing Prince and Princess and be just plain Fred and Olga.’

‘Mother won’t like it when she hears of it,’ said Olga.

‘Your mother’s safe in Tiflis.’

The children said nothing, just looked at each other and sat back stiffly in their seats. But Eden said quietly, ‘You didn’t have to say that, Mr Cabell.’

‘I know,’ he said just as quietly; he increased the speed of the car, hoping the wind would make the children deaf to what he said. ‘But I haven’t had much experience with kids.’

‘That’s very evident, Mr Cabell.’ But she smiled when she said it and he grinned back at her.

Goddam, he thought, she’s a good-looker and she looks as if, with the right feller, she’d enjoy … But with two kids and a namby-pamby Cossack in the car, what could a feller do?

Ten minutes along the road they came into a large village. There was a main street and side streets running off it; a white stone church sat on the slope above the wooden houses, its golden dome dull and patchy. Children and dogs appeared from nowhere; then doors opened and men and women stood there. Excitement made the warm lazy air come alive; no one had ever seen such a magnificent car. Cabell and the others floated down the main street as Cleopatra’s barge might have floated down the Nile.

The main street ran into a square halfway through the village. On one side of the square a row of walnut trees fronted the entrance to a small railway station. Old men sat on benches beneath the trees, sometimes poking with their walking sticks at the hens that scratched about in the dust; they sat in silence, gossip and comment exhausted. Half a dozen women stood waiting their turn at the well-pump in the centre of the square, chatter spouting with the water. Several dogs rose up out of their torpor and began to bark as the Rolls-Royce and its procession came into the square and pulled up.

‘You do the shopping, Miss Penfold.’ Cabell got down from the car, smiling broadly at the gathering crowd like a politician gathering votes. ‘Take the kids and Nikolai with you, get a good supply. Don’t waste time. I’ll have a talk with these old guys, find out what lies south of here.’

The old men sat up straight on their benches as he approached them. They looked remarkably similar in their loose blouses and baggy trousers, as if they had all shrunk to a uniform size inside their clothes. Their only difference was in their headgear: some wore caps, one or two had straw hats. They peered at him with their rheumy eyes, recognizing him as a foreigner but knowing no maps on which to place him. Their eyes retreated into the gullies of their faces and he felt he was walking into an ambush. He was aware that the crowd, those that hadn’t followed Eden and the others, had fallen silent. He had a sudden premonition that he should turn back, get into the car, pick up the others and drive on. But it was too late now.

‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ Their gaze sharpened even more with suspicion; you could combine all their ages and no man in that time in this village had been called a gentleman. That was for the absentee land owners, the men who had come every year like the summer ’flu and been just as welcome. ‘What is the name of this village?’

The old men looked at the man who sat in their middle. They all had beards or moustaches, but he had the most magnificent beard of all, a white explosion of hair that hid everything below his nose. He had once been tall but the years had shrunk him; but as he stood up there was no bend in his back. He wore a roughly woven straw hat, baggy blue trousers and a grey blouse from the breast of which hung a brightly polished medal on a faded ribbon. He didn’t lean on his stick but held it as a gentleman might hold a staff of rank.

‘Drazlenka is the name of our village.’ He had a surprisingly young voice, as if time had not been able to get at his throat. ‘Who are you, sir?’

‘My name is Cabell. I’m an American, driving down to Tiflis and then to Batumi to catch the ship for home.’

‘I know Tiflis, I was there once. On my way to my second war, the one in the Crimea against the English.’

‘Your second, war?’

The old man chuckled, like birds chirruping in the nest of his beard. ‘I fought for our Tsar Alexander against Napoleon Bonaparte, I was a drummer boy.’

Napoleon and Alexander? That had been over a hundred years ago. The old man’s mind was wandering; but he was obviously the one who had to be spoken to. He was the village patriarch, the other old men looked to him for their words. In the background the crowd was still silent, their faces no longer laughing and excited but blank.

‘Does the road run right through to Tiflis from here?’ said Cabell, humouring the ancient.

‘One can always find a road,’ said the old man. ‘Perhaps not for the horseless carriage, but for one’s feet. I walked the journey.’

‘A thousand miles? Each way?’

‘It took time. When one was young one had plenty of time.’ Somewhere in the white jungle of beard Cabell guessed the old man might be smiling. ‘Where do you come from now?’

Cabell hesitated, then decided that General Bronevich had probably not come this far south. ‘From Verkburg.’

‘The woman and the children are your family?’

Again he hesitated: would it be safer to lie to the old man? But there was no time for an answer. There was a hubbub across the square behind him. He turned round and saw Eden, Nikolai and the two children being hustled towards him by a group of men. Leading the group, now and again giving Eden and the others a rough shove, was the bald-headed miner.

‘Ah,’ said the old man and Cabell thought he heard the chuckle again. ‘Here comes Comrade Keria. He will ask the questions now.’

He sat down again on his bench and the other old men nodded to him, pleased that he had displayed their authority and dignity. They sat there like honoured guests at some formal function waiting for the festivities to begin. Cabell, watching the group approach, aware of something in the atmosphere that he couldn’t quite grasp, suddenly wondered if the festivities would include a lynching.

The whole village seemed to be gathered in the square now. People flowed out of doorways and streets and lanes, coming quickly but with scarcely a sound other than the clatter of their wooden-soled boots on the cobbles of the square. They crowded in behind the group escorting Eden and the others and for a moment Cabell thought he and the old men were going to be swamped. Then, only two or three yards from him, the miners and the crowd came to an abrupt halt. Eden grabbed the two children and with Nikolai moved to stand beside Cabell.

‘What’s going on?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. The miners came rushing down the street in a lorry. They saw us going into a shop and they pulled up and grabbed us.’

Cabell saw the scared faces of the children and he put an arm round Frederick’s shoulders. He said in English, ‘Now remember, Freddie – keep your mouth shut.’ Then he looked at the bald-headed miner and said in Russian, ‘I am told your name is Keria.’

Keria twisted both little fingers in his ears, a disconcerting habit. ‘Yes, I am Maxim Keria. Chairman of the Drazlenka Soviet of Bolshevik Workers.’

Cabell noticed that only the miners nodded approval of what Keria had just said; the rest of the crowd remained silent and expressionless. But he opened his arms, stepped forward and embraced the bald-headed Bolshevik. ‘Greetings, citizen! Why didn’t you say who you were back up there at the mine?’

Keria’s surprise and puzzlement was no less than that of Eden. She stared at the traitor, wondering how she could have begun to trust him, even to like him. But Cabell, his back to her and the others, had guessed at the consternation that had gripped them. He stepped back from embracing Keria and without turning round said in English, ‘Play along with me. Don’t bugger this up or we’re going to have our asses kicked in.’

‘Watch it,’ she said automatically. ‘And you have the wrong revolution. They were citizens in the French Revolution. They’re comrades here.’

‘Nerves,’ said Cabell, and he was full of apprehension. ‘I lost my cue for the moment.’

Keria, suspicion replacing surprise, making his ugly face even uglier, said, ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Comrade Cabell and I bring you greetings from Big Bill Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World. Big Bill said to me, Comrade Cabell, he said, go out there to Siberia and tell the workers there that the IWW is right behind them. And, by God we are! Aren’t we, Comrade Penfold?’ He reached behind him, pulled the stunned comrade forward. ‘This is Comrade Penfold, who’s come all the way from England to bring greetings from George Bernard Shaw!’

As he looked at Eden, out of the corner of his eye he saw the white beard twitch in the region of the patriarch’s mouth. Was the old son-of-a-bitch smiling?

‘Greetings from George Bernard Shaw and Keir Hardie and Sidney Webb!’ Eden shouted in a wobbly voice. If her mother and father, the Tory true-blues, could only hear her now …

But Keria was unimpressed. ‘Who are these Industrial Workers of the World? Who is this George Bernard Shaw?’

Eden looked sideways to Cabell. ‘I’d hate to be in England now. I think an earthquake might have just happened.’

‘An earthquake named Shaw? I wish he were here now. We could do with some of his arguments.’

‘What are you talking of in your foreign language?’ Keria demanded. ‘Why do you have a magnificent car like this? Workers don’t ride around in such cars.’

‘They do in England and America,’ said Cabell, trusting to the ignorance of isolation; but out of the corner of his eye he saw the huge white beard twitching again. ‘Soon everyone here in Russia will do the same.’

He sounded ridiculous in his own ears; but he had no other weapon. He tried desperately to remember some of the rhetoric he had heard from the Wobbly organizers on the Texas oil fields, but all that came to mind was the apathy of the workers they had been adressing and the brutal antagonism of the oil-field bosses. Phrases came back to him – ‘Workers of the world unite!’, ‘Sell your labour, not your life!’ – but the iron miners of Drazlenka remained as unmoved as the oil workers of Texas. He might have been Big Bill Haywood addressing a Republican convention.

At last he threw up his hands and looked at Eden. ‘I don’t think I’m getting through. You got any messages from Karl Marx?’

But Eden had messages from no one. She had no ear for political oratory; all she could remember of Trotsky and Kerensky was that they were boring. She gestured helplessly.

‘Well, that’s it, Comrade,’ Cabell said to Keria. ‘Greetings from the Great Outside World.’

‘You are not comrades,’ said Keria and behind him the miners nodded their heads. But the crowd said nothing, did not move. ‘You will be executed after you have been tried.’

‘You have the verdict before the trial?’

But Keria was deadly serious: he had no sense of humour. ‘Just as it was under the Tsar.’

Behind him Cabell felt Frederick stir and he stepped back and put his heel on the boy’s toe. ‘Sorry, kid.’

‘Who are these children?’ Keria demanded, scrutinizing them for the first time. ‘They don’t look like the children of workers. And who is the scrawny one?’ He jerked his head at Nikolai.

‘The children are mine,’ said Cabell. ‘Their mother was Russian but unfortunately she came back for the October Revolution and fell prey to the charms of a workers’ chairman from Georgia. That’s why we are on our way to Tiflis, to ask her to return to our family circle. You want your mother back, don’t you, children?’

The children were a little slow to respond to their substitute father and Eden answered for them. ‘Of course they do.’

‘Why are you travelling with this man?’ Keria glared at her. ‘Are you his mistress?’

‘Watch it,’ said Eden. ‘Not in front of the children.’

For the first time the crowd showed expression. It looked disapproving: adultery was a bourgeois habit. ‘What about him?’ said Keria, jerking his head again at Nikolai.

‘A fellow worker,’ said Cabell. ‘Trotsky himself lent him to me. His very own godson.’

He’s gone too far, thought Eden. But some of the miners looked at Nikolai with new interest and some murmured approval. But Keria was all suspicion. He was trained for the future: trust no one. ‘He can prove that at the trial. Take them away!’

But the Drazlenka soviet had never had any prisoners to try: it did not know where to take them. There was no village jail or police station, no army barracks: they had authority but none of authority’s conveniences. They looked at Keria in bewilderment and he stared back at them, bewildered by his own command. Cabell suddenly wanted to laugh, but he knew the situation was far too serious for any merriment.

Then the white-bearded old man stood up. ‘Put them in the railway waiting room. There is no train for another two days.’

So the enemies of the proletariat were carted off to the railway station. The crowd surged along behind them. Any stranger coming on the scene would have thought that he was witnessing the departure by train of the village’s favourite family. There was no booing or jeering, just laughter and shouting; it was as if now that Keria had made the decision for them, the crowd had come alive again. But if the crowd was now merry, none of its merriment communicated itself to Cabell. With one eye never leaving Keria, seeing the sense of power all at once beginning to swell the man, he knew that the bald-headed miner intended to have an execution if it killed him. He would only be following in the tradition of Russian history: drastic solutions for minor problems. The Tsars had been better teachers than they knew.

Cabell, Eden, Nikolai and the two children were herded into the dusty waiting room. Keria gave instructions to two of the younger miners, then he left, closing the door behind him. Outside the crowd drifted away, but some children remained, their faces pressed against the grimy windows of the waiting room. The two young guards, uncomfortable in their unaccustomed role, sat down on a bench beside the door. The prisoners, equally uncomfortable but for a different reason, stood awkwardly for a moment, then they, too, sat down on the benches around the grimy walls. Above Eden’s head was a fly-spotted time-table; but someone had painted a rough red hammer-and-sickle on it. Behind the red paint of revolution were the schedules of trains that might never run again. Cabell wondered where the train due in two days would be heading, wondered what its passengers would think if they saw five corpses hanging by the neck from the walnut trees outside. But maybe train passengers all over Russia were familiar with such sights now. He just didn’t know. He began to feel more and more remote, as if the real world were sliding away from him.

‘I want to go to the lavatory.’ Olga was pale under her perspiration, afraid and trembling again.

Eden put the request to the two guards. They looked perplexed, not knowing what privileges a prisoner was entitled to. Then the door opened and the white-bearded old man came in. The two youths stood up, but he ignored them. He looked at the prisoners in turn, then he smiled at Eden.

‘A pretty girl. You make an old man feel young again. Or wish he were young.’

‘Thank you, Grandfather—’ Eden wondered if thanks for compliments were in order in such circumstances.

‘My name is Delyanov. Alexander Dmitri Delyanov. I was named after Tsar Alexander. The first Alexander.’

‘Comrade Delyanov—’ One of the guards felt he had better start acting like a guard. ‘Comrade Keria said no one was to come in here—’

‘Stuff Comrade Keria,’ said Comrade Delyanov. ‘I am one hundred and twenty-five years old and I am not going to be ordered about by infants like you. I am wearing trousers older than you—’ He gestured at his baggy patched pants. ‘Get outside! Go on – out!’

Cabell hardly saw the young men exit. He was gazing at Delyanov, trying to make his eyes believe what his ears had heard. He knew of tales of men who lived to a great age in southern Russia; but they had been men from the hills and mountains of Georgia. Perhaps no one had come here to the southern Urals looking for ancients; but he still could not believe that Delyanov was as old as he claimed. A man who had seen Napoleon …

‘Did you – I mean are you really as old as all that?’

Delyanov smiled. ‘You think I am a liar, don’t you, Cabell? You are one yourself, a liar with lots of imagination. It was a pity you were wasting it on clods with no imagination. Yes, I am one hundred and twenty-five years old.’

Frederick gasped and Olga opened her eyes wide. Cabell said, ‘Did you actually see Napoleon Bonaparte?’

‘Of course.’ Delyanov was not offended; he had been asked the question a thousand times. ‘I was at Tilsit in 1807 when the Tsar and the Corsican met on the raft in the middle of the Niemen River. I led the Tsar down to the boat that took him out to the raft, playing my drum. He pinned that medal to my tunic himself.’ He patted the medal on his breast. ‘He was a strange one. He could have been the greatest of them. But—’

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ said Olga with a full bladder and no sense of history.

‘How many wars have you fought in?’ said Frederick.

‘Three. The war against Napoleon, the one against the Turks and the one against the English. I missed the last two, against the Japanese and against the Germans. I volunteered, but they laughed at me. They laugh at old men sometimes for the wrong reasons.’

‘How have you lived so long?’ Cabell still could not bring himself to believe that Delyanov was as old as he claimed. He looked like a well-preserved seventy at the most.

‘The right food, the right thoughts and baggy trousers.’ He pulled out his trousers to show their bagginess. ‘Tight trousers cut off the blood to your crotch. That’s where a man’s youth is, in his crotch.’

‘Watch it,’ said Eden, nodding at Olga.

‘My dear—’ Delyanov bowed to Olga. ‘I apologize.’

‘Will that awful man Keria really execute us?’ said Frederick.

The old man nodded. ‘He wants to make a name for himself. A name for himself in this village!’ He laughed and for the first time there was the sound of age in his throat: it was an old man’s cackle. ‘When you have seen emperors, as I have … Keria is a little man with little ambitions.’

‘Killing us is a big ambition in my eyes,’ said Cabell. ‘Who owns this village? Don’t people have any say?’

The old man shrugged. ‘This village used to belong to a prince, Prince Vanya Gorshkov.’ Frederick and Olga raised their heads, but Delyanov didn’t notice. ‘He won’t come again. None of those princes will.’