Captain of the Steppe Read online

  It scarcely needs saying that Peregud didn’t do a bloody thing about any of his duties. There was nothing he was able to do, in fact, apart from inspire respect. The dogs were not fed, the sheets not counted. But the disorder that reigned on his account throughout the company made life the merrier for everyone; they used to love taking the piss out of him. He was, in fact, an unrivalled source of entertainment. Peregud had never once in his life hit anyone, for fear of killing them. If they wound him up too much, he would just bellow in warning, ‘You dare take the piss out of me? Out of a Cossack?’ Or he would glower and get angry. He might punch a hole in something – one of the walls, maybe – in front of them and instantly regain their respect. From time to time, though, he would be seized by fear, as other people sometimes get aches in their bones before it rains. Once it happened that during one of these episodes someone whispered to Peregud that a patrol wagon was after him. So Ilya went and climbed under the cots in the barracks, and the soldiers deliberately kept him scared: ‘You lay there, maybe they won’t find you.’ And there he lay, not moving, thinking it was all true. Then he was dragged out from under the bunks by the deputy political officer, Vasil Velichko, a man who always spoke the truth and stood up for the unfortunate.

  As regards Vasil Velichko, the men themselves would tell you he was the sort of man who held nothing back and kept no secrets. This is the man we should have started with, in fact, if only Peregud hadn’t turned up. Peregud could have waited, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere, and he’d put up with anything so long as you poured vodka into his heart. But just you try and move past him!

  If they had said to Captain Khabarov that Peregud had hidden himself under the cots, a stunt the soldiers had scared him into trying, he wouldn’t even have stood up, let alone drop the matters that he was busy with. But Velichko, now, Velichko rushed off, all aflutter. That was the kind of man he was; he wanted to save everyone and change everything on earth!

  It was easy to fall into Karabas, as easy as falling down a hole; but it was hard, to put it bluntly, to get out again. Never mind the zeks, even the soldiers were exiled, hidden deeper in the steppe, when they didn’t pass muster at the regimental base. This Khabarov knew to be true, and when they had suddenly sent him a deputy political officer from the regiment, he had been scared that the newcomer would turn out to be completely beyond hope, one of those who had nothing to lose. On his very first day, Velichko organised a political-awareness class, sticking up some pretty good posters around the barracks, and daubing slogans there, too, although not many of the men understood what the slogans were exhorting them to do. The captain was even surprised by the meanness of the regimental commanders: why did they have to send a blessed fool like that away? They could have let him flutter about with his slogans at headquarters. Noting, later, that the company now had political classes and briefings, plus a cell of the Young Communist League, Khabarov grew depressed and muttered, ‘This is all going to end badly.’

  Every single story deputy political officer Velichko had about himself included the exclamation ‘I became convinced’, which was soon succeeded by ‘I have overcome’, but they all presented one and the same picture: he would start doing something, but then drop it as he got caught up in something else, and he would never see anything through to the end. According to his tales, he used to believe in God, but then lost his faith, and began practising body-temperature conditioning. ‘I became convinced that a man can have control over himself, that he should be healthy and find joy in life!’ Velichko exclaimed. And then, with the same feverishness, he took to recounting how he had lost faith in temperature conditioning when he understood that first you need to make everyone’s life happy and joyful. ‘I became convinced of this, it’s the most important thing, do you understand? First we need to build communism! It’s bad for a person when it’s bad all around, but all together we can change the world!’ The entire trajectory of Vasil Velichko’s path through life was this: he had been getting by quietly in the service, but then he asked to transfer to the political department and be a propagandist, after which he was sent to serve in Karabas, probably so that nobody on earth would have to hear any more about him.

  The soldiers loved their deputy political officer. Khabarov, he was alien. They feared him, or respected him. You could have a drink with Peregud, though it was like being with an old bloke. But Velichko brought posters and slogans with him, and from the very first days he hung out with the soldiers, even using the polite form of ‘you’ to them to start with, because the soldiers were the very people with whom he planned to change the world. Yet since he had to bring everyone round to his way of thinking, something special and sincere came about that would never have happened if he had set out to change everything by himself. If your stomach aches, go see Velichko, complain about it! If you want to pour your heart out, go see him, he’ll listen all night, if need be! And while Khabarov still took the deputy political officer for a windbag, he began to treat him more gently, understanding that Velichko was genuinely trying his best on the men’s behalf, never mind if his efforts brought little result. Anyway, could one man change everything?

  A passionate dispute soon arose between Khabarov and Velichko, which bound them closer than any blood transfusion. The captain was forever putting things to one side for future use, and then eking out his stores for a long time. Even if there was enough of everything, he would still put something aside, expecting a plague, almost as though inviting disaster. The soldiers understandably grew downcast at these economies and lost all faith in the future. The deputy political officer was deeply troubled by this, and he would round on the captain whenever he tried to make a saving. Their silent battle, although it was certainly cantankerous at times, lasted for months, and it would have cost the captain nothing to overpower the fragile, dreamy political officer, but seeing his despair and pain, Khabarov surrendered. Peregud had popped up and made him laugh: ‘Here, Ivan, give over with the starvation diet. The deputy political officer is right. Turn it around, you prick. Make all the cuts you want for yourself, but don’t touch the men!’ The system was shattered. Ivan Yakovlevich could hardly bear to look on as Velichko scattered his years of ant-like efforts to the wind for the sake of a single day’s slackening of the reins. But seeing all this, he stayed submissively quiet. You would have thought that Vasil – and Peregud, for that matter – was a burden to him, and didn’t provide the slightest assistance, but here’s a funny thing: this burden made the captain’s life cosier and his service easier.

  No one admitted aloud that they needed anyone else, but the admission, albeit tacit, was there in the communal living arrangements made by this trio in the company’s administrative office. Khabarov had moved in there ages ago. In Ugolpunkt – a little place not too far away, reached via the narrow-gauge line from Karabas – there was a separate brick-built hostel for the camp-workers in which it was possible to obtain a place to sleep. But the poky rooms there were shared between five, even for the family men. So the captain reckoned it would be more peaceful to live in his office. After Velichko had tried life with the camp warders and their unrefined families, he asked if the captain would let him have a billet. And then Ilya, when he had registered that the company commander and the deputy political officer were living right alongside him, followed a rule of staying at theirs as a guest every night. They billeted him on the floor, which suited him fine. After this, Khabarov was ashamed ever to think of driving him out again, which would be to deprive him of his pleasure, even if Ilya had decidedly impinged on their space and, what’s more, afflicted them with conversations, the kind without beginning or end.

  The air in the office became potent: as they breathed it, so they lived. Sometimes it would be Khabarov who hit the bottle, although you’d never believe he might go on a bender because, even when he drank, he did so stiffly, as though seeing someone off on a long journey. If he ever got drunk suddenly, all out of nowhere – and when he did, he would drink non-stop – it was only
ever when a bit of gloomy time off, a veritable new dawn, turned up in his usual pointless routine. It was precisely during these peaceful times that, totting it all up, the captain would fancy there was no value to his life. When he was drunk, though, he didn’t stagger around the company. He slept the sleep of the dead, which is to say he lay on his cot without even taking his boots off. Ilya would sleep on the floor by the captain’s side like a dog, scaring away anyone who came in with his growl. Once a day, though, he would prod Ivan Yakovlevich to make sure that the captain was still alive.

  Khabarov would need maybe a week to sleep it off, and then he would realise that the running of the place had been abandoned and would quit his drinking with ease.

  Velichko was the only one who would have stayed teetotal. However, he too would sometimes start drinking, while attempting to re-educate Peregud, to turn him away from drunkenness. Peregud would promise, ‘Enough. I swear. Not a drop, as my life depends on it. So come on, for the last time, let’s share a glass together. Here, Vasiliok, listen, don’t offend me. Drink to my new life!’

  The deputy political officer would ask, ‘Are you honestly going to stop drinking?’

  ‘Cossack’s honour, or don’t you believe me?’ Velichko would feel ashamed, and he hurriedly acquiesced, even though the vodka hit him like a truncheon, weakened as he was by the healthy lifestyle he’d been leading for so long.

  Occasionally Velichko and Peregud would stage a mutiny, shouting, ‘There’s nothing for people to eat, there’s no discipline left in the country, it’s thief against thief!’ Khabarov feared such conversations. He would suddenly interrupt: ‘Quit going over the same old nonsense. We’d do better to have a drink. Let’s have another little drink.’ And he’d drink too. When he poured vodka on these troubled conversations, Khabarov more often than not exceeded his limits, and would again get extremely drunk all of a sudden. He would start to excoriate the authorities and the regulations so fiercely that Velichko and Ilya would turn pale, then red, and run out of the office like men possessed. In the end, Peregud would deliberately lay himself down to sleep on the floor and start snoring loudly: either he wanted to drown out the captain’s tirades so that no one overheard him, or he was genuinely falling asleep, and this snoring was something that happened to him when he got scared in his sleep.

  Khabarov could only set stuff aside from what was brought in. He could not siphon off a little something for himself, bypassing his superior officers – there was nothing to be had. Velichko complained more and more, and grew downcast. He used to dream about making everyone on earth happier, but he was driven to tears of torment by the fact that that he had caught lice in Karabas. He tried various scientific methods to rid himself of the parasites, but the lice would crawl back onto him straight away from the others.

  One day, Velichko cancelled his political education class, saying, ‘Forgive me, everyone, for lying to you all, because I raised questions then gave incorrect answers.’ With something approaching joy, Khabarov replaced the political classes with domestic chores for the soldiers, who, mind you, got out of them easily, as ever. Seeing that no one appeared to be sorry about what had happened, Velichko felt his loneliness in Karabas even more acutely. Only the captain knew about the dispatch the deputy political officer had written in which he had requested to be discharged. However, a spiteful response came from somewhere, which was only to be expected. Five years was what he had left to serve, and he couldn’t strip himself of his epaulettes, as according to the regulations this would make him a deserter.

  A gunshot rang out in the office, followed by a long scuffling noise. The deputy political officer was found still alive. His eyes bulged. He was flapping his heavy-lipped mouth noiselessly. It was as if the bullet had nailed him to the floor. He had shot himself in the chest, much higher than the heart, as though he either did not really want to die or he did not know for sure where his heart actually was. As it was, his wound – just a little hole in his tunic – did not scare the men who had run in. The captain was late to appear in the office, when Velichko was already motionless, out cold on the floor. He was lying full length, and deathly quiet.

  Ivan Yakovlevich ran for the camp, to demand assistance from the infirmary. He was gone for a long time: the zeks sector lived its own life, under its own officers and regulations. The military doctor who the captain tracked down, once he’d hurled twisted obscenities at everyone and everything to the extent that it was a wonder anyone could still understand him, got to work in an instant. The servicemen dispersed back to their sties, finding out over the course of that day that Vasil’s life had been saved in the infirmary after all. The next morning, a vehicle arrived from the regiment, and only those who were loitering round the gatehouse, including Captain Khabarov, who happened to be passing by, got to see Velichko for the last time, as they were carrying him off.

  There came rumours that Velichko had been recovering in the hospital, but they’d been curing him, it turned out, in order to pass sentence upon him. The head of the regiment’s internal discipline enforcers – the ‘Special Department’ – arrived in Karabas, a man by the name of Smershevich. He was horrid in appearance: plump, fond of good food, and of drink. As well as this, though, he was hard, slab-like, with dark glinting eyes sunken in beneath his forehead. Eyes that, with his sour, forever dissatisfied expression, he would use unapologetically to transfix every man he met, as though seeing right through them. Everything about him made plain that people were worth nothing to him. He also had a crippled arm: a lonely false hand, covered in leather, did not quite conceal the stump of his right wrist. He wielded this false hand like a cudgel: he’d wave it in the air or, far from attempting to shake your hand, he would thrust it right in your face. Actually, Smershevich did not know how to interrogate; no matter how much he huffed and puffed, he just brought all his backwardness to bear, pressing down with threats, hurling invective from all sides and tossing around tired old imprecations. ‘Who are you covering for? That liar? That anti-Soviet element? I used to trip over him back at the regiment. That’s when he should have been crushed!’

  Khabarov remained silent, and Smershevich could not do anything with the captain. However, he fixed Khabarov in his mind and parted thus: ‘You maggot, you’ll see, you’ll make quite a stink when they crush you.’

  Afterwards, there was a hearing at the regiment where Vasil Velichko, already demoted and maimed for life, was expelled from the Party and sentenced to imprisonment by his peers. They also demanded the steppe captain’s presence at the court, so that they’d know in Karabas, too, what punishment could be meted out for refusing to serve the motherland. Khabarov did not go. For the first time in his life, he did not follow an order. However, nothing came of it. Maybe they had only demanded it of him to tick a box. Maybe they’d decided that he too should suffocate in that dead end of his.

  The regiment begrudged sending out a fresh person to replace Velichko. They raised Khabarov’s own pay by a kopeck so he could take on Velichko’s duties. So the captain, as though by some cruel joke, stepped up a rank, appointed to be his own personal deputy political officer. This duty depressed him: scarcely a day went by when Velichko didn’t come into his mind. And then, too, Peregud began to be tormented by panic attacks: he shut himself up in his storeroom and rarely went outside. So Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov was left completely alone.

  The captain had several years to go before retirement. At one time, he had been cheered by the thought that he had such a short time left to serve. Moving through the years towards his pension, it was as if Ivan Yakovlevich knew what he had to live for. However, it had been a long time since he had had anywhere to go back to after the army. The captain was lodged in the administrative office and he also boarded in the barracks, eating from the same pot as the soldiers. He had grown used to this. Knowing that, one day very soon, they would cross him off the list of those entitled to allowances and boot him out onto the steppe, Khabarov was still waiting for his pension, albeit with the
fanciful belief that he would have at least a month of the rest he deserved; they would let him occupy the office for a month or so more, he would catch up on his sleep, he would lie in, take a deep breath, and then he would die painlessly in his sleep.

  Thinking over his personal demise, Khabarov began making assumptions about a lot of things in advance. ‘We’ll live the way we always have,’ he said repeatedly, in a tired voice, when the regimental supply truck turned up, complaining only that once again they’d been a bit stingy over how many potatoes they had sent. ‘Well, there’s enough here for us not to die, but tell me, lads, what are we going to live on?’ Nobody knew any longer why this sickening, harsh life was happening, as though it were being meted out by a troubled conscience. The events that were transforming everything in the world did not make it as far as the steppe – they got lost on the way. This was why, to the servicemen, the very journey from this forsaken settlement to Karaganda seemed longer than a lifetime. And although it was an ordinary truck that made this journey to the settlement, the soldiers crowded round its driver – rendered inert by the jolting – as though he were a guest from overseas. But the fiend would not stick around in the community: as soon as he had unloaded, he was off. They only saw him fleetingly, in fact. He had brought rotten potatoes, which made the captain ponder. ‘That means the regiment is only getting sent rotten supplies, too.’