The Golden Sabre

‘Are you a Bolshevik?’ Cabell said.

‘No more than you are, Cabell.’ Delyanov’s beard twitched. ‘I am a realist. The past is past, so I am a Bolshevik if they say I am.’

‘But surely the people won’t let Keria kill us?’ said Eden.

‘Who knows? They are a strange people here. I wasn’t born here – I came here sixty years ago. I am here more years than most of them have lived, but they still say I came from outside. They want to build a wall round Drazlenka now, shut out everyone. This was always a village that hated outsiders. Now that the Prince won’t be back …’

‘Can you help us escape?’

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ said Olga. ‘I can’t hold it any longer.’

‘I can’t help you escape,’ said Delyanov, ‘but I can escort the young lady to the lavatory.’

He opened the door, stood back to let Eden and Olga go out. He looked back at Cabell and the beard twitched again. ‘You and the boy and the scrawny one will have to attend to your own bladders. Everyone pisses on the railway tracks.’

He went out, closing the door behind him. They heard him snap something at the two young guards, then the door opened and the two youths looked in and jerked their heads at Cabell.

He, Frederick and Nikolai went out on to the small station platform and stood there in a row relieving themselves. Cabell looked south down the railway line, wondering how far it went. Was there another town further on, one where outsiders were hated as much as in this one? He began to appreciate for the first time that they were heading into a part of the Russian Empire that had never really been fully conquered, where the people did not, and possibly never would, see themselves as Russians.

‘I wish they would stop calling me the scrawny one. They all sound like my father.’ Nikolai shook himself, pulled up his trousers and turned back towards the waiting room. Melancholy and insulted, he eyed the two guards who stood watching them. ‘Shot by Bolsheviks. He’ll never forgive me for that.’

‘I doubt if he’ll get to hear of it.’ Cabell tried to sound comforting, a little difficult in the circumstances. ‘How are you, Freddie? You’ve kept your mouth shut pretty well.’

‘I’m going to let them know who I am.’ Frederick waved a strong stream in the air, a golden rapier stroke. ‘So’s they’ll know whom they’re murdering.’

‘Whom? That’s good grammar, Freddie, but poor politics. We’ve got to start thinking of getting out of here.’

Crossing the square with Eden and Olga, Delyanov fluffed up his beard and said, ‘You’re a remarkably pretty girl.’

‘Thank you,’ said Eden, and refrained from saying he had already told her that. She had met lecherous old men before, but never one as ancient as this. She changed the subject away from herself: ‘You sound as if you might have been educated, Mr Delyanov.’

He nodded proudly. ‘I educated myself, taught myself to read when I was forty years old. I met Pushkin – you know, the poet?’

‘I know him.’ She had discovered him when she had come to Russia, almost swooned over Tatiana’s love letter to Onegin.

‘I didn’t agree with everything he wrote. Too much about freedom – that was what I thought then. Now – well, maybe he was right. I met Tolstoy too. On my hundredth birthday I made the journey all the way to Yasnaya Polyana to pay my respects. He talked to me, called me Uncle – he thought he was getting old till he talked to me. He talked to me about what he believed in. I began to see that things had been wrong—’ He shook his head and the beard quivered. ‘You are a hundred years old and one day you discover you’ve been blind all your life.’

‘It’s not too late.’ But Eden felt ridiculous telling him so.

‘No.’ He fluffed up his beard again. ‘I can save you from being shot. Marry me.’

Eden stopped by the well in the middle of the square, leaned against its stone wall while she splashed water on her face from the dribbling pump. There were still people in the square: the half-dozen old men still sitting under the walnut trees, several conferences of crones, children slipping like drops of mercury from one group to another. The heat pressed down on her like a soft invisible weight; it came up from the cobblestones and the dust its sharp white lights that made her eyes ache. Everyone in the square, even the old man immediately in front of her, seemed to hang suspended in shimmering sunlight. She was going to faint; or fall into the mirage with them. Yesterday a Mongolian general had tried to rape her; today a centenarian was proposing marriage. Perhaps she was already in the mirage.

‘Don’t you already have a wife?’

‘I’ve had four. They’re all gone. You’re a pretty girl, you’d be good to look at in my old age. Keep me company. All my children are dead, too. All twelve of them. Took after their mothers, all died young. None of them lasted past seventy.’

Eden wanted to laugh. She could feel hysteria taking hold of her like a fever. She looked wildly around for some grasp on reality, heard Olga say, ‘I want to go to the lavatory.’

‘Here it is.’ Delyanov led them up a lane past log houses, opened the gate in a rough wooden fence and pointed to an out-house in the middle of a vegetable garden. Olga, walking carefully but quickly, went along the garden path to the lavatory and disappeared into it. Eden leaned against the fence, recovered slowly.

‘If you marry me,’ said Delyanov, ‘Keria won’t shoot you.’

‘But you don’t know me – we have only just this moment met—’

‘I like your looks. At my age one cannot afford to waste even a day.’

‘At my age one doesn’t marry at a moment’s notice. You will have to give me time.’ But she knew that back home her mother already thought she was on the shelf for good: twenty-six and no husband in sight. But she couldn’t see herself taking a centenarian bridegroom home to Croydon.

‘There is not much time. You may be dead by tomorrow afternoon. This man Keria is very impulsive.’

She had heard the phrase a shotgun wedding, something that Americans evidently went in for. But this was terrifyingly ludicrous: a firing-squad wedding. ‘I shall have to talk to Mr Cabell.’

‘Is he your lover?’

She hesitated, then nodded: any port in a storm. ‘He won’t like it.’

‘He will if you save his life and the children’s. What does he do besides tell lies about being a comrade?’

‘He’s an engineer, an oil engineer. A geologist.’

‘They’re practical men,’ said Delyanov, as if the engineers he had known put romance to some mathematical test. ‘Ah, here comes the little girl. That better, my dear? A little bladder relief does wonders.’

Olga gave him her princess look. ‘One does not talk about such things in polite company.’

Delyanov smiled in the depths of his beard. ‘You’ll be a great lady some day, my dear. May you live long enough,’ he said, and winked at Eden.

He escorted them back to the railway station, exhorted Eden to consider his proposal as a serious one and left them in the care of the two young guards. Eden closed the waiting-room door on the youths, leaving them sitting on a bench in the sun. They didn’t protest but sat there dumbly, now and again looking at each other as if expecting some flash of intelligence that would tell them exactly what their duties were. They had heard all the theory from Comrade Keria, but this was the first lesson in the practice of revolution and they were at a loss. The revolution, Keria had told them, was a Russian affair, a war against the Tsar and all the reactionaries who had supported him. And here they were guarding two foreigners, a couple of kids and a scrawny one who sometimes walked like a girl.

Eden sat down on a bench in the waiting room and said, ‘The old man wants me to marry him.’

‘He is far too old for you,’ said Frederick. ‘He would be impotent.’

‘Watch it!’

‘What sort of education did you give these kids?’ said Cabell; but it was only a mark-time remark while he took in what she had said. ‘The old son-of-a-bitch must be senile. It’s – it’s indecent!’

‘What is the matter?’ Nikolai said in Russian.

Cabell told him and the Cossack rolled his head in shock and despair.

Eden said, ‘If I marry him, he says he can arrange it that you four go free.’

‘No!’ said Cabell and the two children echoed him. ‘It’s all a bluff. That guy won’t have us shot.’

But later that night, trying to sleep on one of the hard wooden benches, Cabell felt no optimism at all about their fate. He had heard of the wholesale killing by both sides in this bloody civil war and he knew and understood some of the hatred that fired the revolutionaries. Keria was one of them, recognizable at a glance, a man looking for a way out of a hole in the ground to a place on top of the mountain. Cabell had seen the coal miners on strike in the hills of Pennsylvania, the men who had inherited the fierce passions of the Molly Maguires of the 1870’s. Miners had the seeds of revolution ingrained in them as deeply as the mine dust in their lungs. He could not blame Keria for the way he felt. He just did not want to die as a way of proving Keria’s revolutionary zeal. And there was also the villagers’ hatred of outsiders … Tomorrow there would be no one on his and the others’ side at the trial, no one but a randy old man offering to marry a girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter.

He turned over to go to sleep and saw Eden sitting up on her bench, her head and shoulders outlined against the moonlit window. Quietly he got up and went and sat beside her.

They spoke in whispers, not wanting to wake the children and Nikolai. ‘What am I to do?’ she said. ‘I keep thinking of the children. And you,’ she added. Then added further, lives weighing on her like sacks of potatoes: ‘And Nikolai.’

‘It’s not worth the risk,’ he said. ‘The old man can’t guarantee we’d be let go.’

‘Perhaps I could save my own life. I’m ashamed that I keep thinking of that.’

He felt for her hand, found it. It was the first time he had touched her and both felt the immediate intimacy; but their hands were stiff one within the other, arthritic with caution, wary of the circumstances that had brought them this close. ‘When he dies – it could happen tomorrow, the day after, any time … What happens to you then?’

‘They’d probably kill me then.’ Her fingers were just dead bones in his hand.

‘I’m not going to let that happen. Not to any of us.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Then she started to weep. It was something she hadn’t done in a long time, not since the first lonely weeks when she had first come to Russia and then when they had buried Igor Dulenko. She had never thought of tears as a sign of feminine weakness, but somehow she had survived without them till now. When Cabell put his arms round her she didn’t resist but leant her head against his shoulder and let the tears come. It was so long since he had held a girl like this one in his arms that he felt awkward; there had been girls in his arms but they had been paid for and none of them had asked for gentleness or sympathy. He brushed his lips against her hair, but said nothing.

On a bench opposite them Nikolai watched them and wept, too. For himself alive today as much as for himself dead tomorrow. He longed for love, but there was no man who would comfort him.

[4]

In the morning the villagers came early to the square, like a football crowd eager to get good seats for today’s big match. They brought chairs with them and set them up in a hollow square in front of the railway station. The sun climbed through a brilliant sky and the tree-shrouded mountains flickered with flashes of green as the trees stirred in the slight morning breeze; to the east clouds lay on the horizon like the white negative of another dark range. The breeze suddenly dropped as the sun got higher, the trees in the square drew their shadows into themselves and the heat already began to sear like an invisible flame. Two ravens appeared out of nowhere, materializing like black spirits, and flapped lazily on to the roof of the railway station. They croaked miserably as the prisoners were led out of the waiting room and Cabell, looking up, thought of the line (was it from Hamlet?): The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.

But there was no look of revenge on the faces of the crowd sitting on their chairs, standing in orderly groups. They looked uncertain this morning, as if during the night they had dreamed of the enormity of what they wanted, the death of the outsiders. The old men sat in the front row, some of them with their wives.

Delyanov rose from his chair and came forward. He carried a bunch of red roses and, taking off his hat with a sweeping gesture, he handed the bouquet to Eden. ‘Everyone knows of my proposal. I announced it last night. You will be welcomed by all as my wife.’

‘Silly old bugger,’ said an old woman in the front row and chomped her gums at him.

Delyanov turned to her. ‘You are only jealous, Natasha Mihalovna, that I did not ask you to be my bride.’

‘Who would have you?’ said Natasha Mihalovna. ‘It takes you all your time to pee, let alone use it for anything else.’

‘Do you mind?’ said Eden. ‘There are children present.’

‘Holy Toledo!’ said Cabell, careful for once of the children.

‘What’s the matter, Mr Cabell?’ said Eden.

‘Nothing, nothing.’ He shook his head, wondering if the heat had got to him already. By tonight it wouldn’t matter what was discussed in front of the children, they would only be corrupted by worms. ‘Here comes Judge Keria.’

But Keria was not the only judge. The village soviet had stayed up half the night planning this trial; it would be done in the proper way, even if the verdict was already decided. Keria and two other miners sat down behind the table that had been placed outside the entrance to the railway station. The five prisoners were sat on chairs placed to one side; opposite them sat two more miners, the prosecutor and his assistant; there was no counsel for the defence. The walnut trees threw impartial shadows on all of them; the spectators sat in the open sun but seemed oblivious of it. Keria rapped the table with his gavel, a short pick-handle, and the trial began.

The prosecutor, a burly young man with close-cropped black hair and a look of intelligence that had never been allowed to flower, rose to his feet, conscious of the occasion and his position in it.

‘The charge is that these five strangers are enemies of the State.’

‘You have no evidence,’ said Cabell.

‘I second that,’ said Delyanov.

‘Shut up, you old fool,’ said Natasha Mihalovna and some murmurs in the crowd seconded her advice.

‘You were the same at the priest’s trial,’ said Delyanov. ‘You’re not interested injustice, just in satisfying your spite.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ grumbled the old woman, not sure herself what he was talking about. What was justice? No one in the village had ever known it.

Cabell looked for a priest amongst the crowd, but there was none; then he looked across the square and up past the houses to the white church on the slope above the village. Its doors were closed, planks nailed across them. Had the priest been driven out of the village or had he, too, been executed? He stared at the church, then his eye caught sight of something else on the crest of the slope. A horseman stood there gazing down on the scene in the square. The rider was small (a boy perhaps?) and he sat without moving. Was he waiting, Cabell wondered, to take a message of their execution to another village?

Cabell looked back at Delyanov. ‘What happened to the priest?’

‘They drove him away,’ said Delyanov. ‘Drove him away with stones.’

‘Good riddance!’ cackled Natasha Mihalovna.

Keria banged the pick-handle, called for order. ‘Go on,’ he said to the prosecutor.

But the prosecutor was too slow. Delyanov was back on his feet, speaking directly to the tribunal this time.

‘The young woman, if she has any sense, is to be my bride. So I say you cannot execute her friends, because they will be my friends, too. I move the trial be ended.’ He looked at the old men on either side of him. They stared back at him, neither denying him nor supporting him. He drew himself a little straighter, then turned and stared back at the crowd, challenging it. ‘Well? You have heard me speak. Let me marry the girl and let the others move on!’

There was silence for a moment, then Natasha Mihalovna chomped her gums and suddenly screamed, ‘Sit down, you old fool! The trial goes on!’

There was another moment’s silence. Cabell looked out at the crowd, realized with a sickening sudden emptiness that Delyanov was alone. Then someone clapped. The clapping spread through the crowd, hesitatingly, never loud, the hands hollow so that the sound, too, was hollow. It was an answer; but not the answer Delyanov had expected. He looked around him, bewildered; suddenly, after sixty years, he, too, was a stranger again. Abruptly he sat down, looked as if every one of his years had all at once fallen in on him. Jesus, Cabell thought, they’ve just executed him!

The prosecutor, given back the floor (or the roadway, for he stood in the middle of it), put the case against the prisoners. The foreigners had no proof that they were who they said they were; the children were half-Russian, as admitted by the American, but they did not look nor sound even half-worker. Compare them with the children of our village …

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