175

p Which was written only because
it had to be written

p For a brief moment the glittering encirclement of Cossack sabres was cut through on the north by a jet of machine-gun fire, and in a last wild effort the crimson Yevsukov plunged through the breach.

p Those who escaped from the death-ring in the sands of the hollow were: the crimson Yevsukov, twenty-three of his men, and Maryutka.

p A hundred and nineteen others and almost all the camels lay motionless on the frozen sands, among the snake-like roots of saksaul and the red twigs of tamarisk.

p When Cossack officer Buryga was informed that the remnants of the enemy had escaped, he twisted his bushy moustache with a bear-like, paw, stretched his mouth in a yawn like the opening of a cave, and drawled lazily:

p “To hell with them! Don’t bother chasing them; it’ll only wear out the horses. The desert’ll get them.”

p Meanwhile, the crimson Yevsukov, with Maryutka and the twenty-three, were plunging erratically, like wounded jackals, deeper and deeper into an illimitable waste of sand.

p No doubt the reader is impatient to know why Yevsukov was crimson.

p I shall explain.

p When Kolchak corked up the Orenburg railway line with a mass of bristling bayonets and human 176 pulp, setting the dumbfounded locomotives on their rear ends to rust on out-of-the-way sidings, the Turkestan Republic was left without black dye for its leather.

p And those were roaring, raging, leather days.

p The human body, thrown out of the domestic comfort of four walls into rain and shine, heat and cold, had need of a strong protective covering.

p And so it donned leather.

p Ordinarily the jackets were dyed black with a steel-blue tinge, a colour as stern and hard as the men who wore them.

p But Turkestan was left without this black dye.

p And so Revolutionary Staff Headquarters had to issue an order requisitioning private stocks of the German aniline dyes with which Uzbek women from the Ferghana Valley gave the tints of the fire-bird to their gauzy silks, and thin-lipped Turkmenian women wove brilliance into the complicated patterns of their Tekke carpets.

p The Red Army began dyeing skins with these aniline dyes, and in no time its ranks were scintillating with all the shades of the rainbow: emerald, sapphire, crimson, cobalt, purple, saffron.

p Fate, in the person of a pock-marked supply man, meted out to Commissar Yevsukov a crimson jacket and breeches.

p From early youth Yevsukov’s face had had a crimson cast (sprinkled over with brown freckles) and the top of his head was covered with a light fuzi, instead of hair. If to this we add that he was short in stature and voluminous in circumference and that his figure made a perfect oval, it can instantly be seen that in his crimson jacket and breeches he looked for all the world like an-animated Easter egg. The straps of his trappings crossed on his back to form the letter X, and one would 177 expect that on turning round he ought to exhibit the letter B on his front to complete the saying.  [177•* 

p Nothing of the sort. Yevsukov did not believe in Christ or in Easter. He believed in the Soviets, the International, the Cheka, and the heavy revolver he clutched in strong, gnarled fingers.

p The twenty-three who escaped with him out of the death-ring’ of sabres were the usual run of Red Army men. Just ordinary men.

p With them, and one of them, was the girl Maryutka.

p Maryutka was an orphan from a fishing village hidden among the reeds of the vast Volga delta near Astrakhan. For twelve years, beginning at the age of seven, she had sat astride a bench stained with fish entrails, ripping open the slippery grey bellies of herring.

p When to all towns and villages came news of the enlistment of volunteers into what was then called the Red Guards, Maryutka stuck her knife into the bench, got up, and marched off in her stiff canvas trousers to sign up.

p At first they drove her away, and then, seeing the obstinacy that brought her back day after day, they guffawed and accepted her in the ranks on the same terms as the men.

p Maryutka was slender as a reed growing on the river bank, with auburn plaits that she wound round her head under her brown Turkmenian cap, and with a yellowish, cat-like glint in her almond-shaped eyes.

p The main thing in Maryutka’s life was her dreams. She was given to day-dreaming, and she was also given to writing “poetry”, tracing 178 tottering letters with a stub of pencil on any scrap of paper that came to hand.

p The entire detachment knew this. The minute they entered a town that had its own newspaper, Maryutka would ask for writing paper. On receiving it, she would lick her lips, which had suddenly gone dry with excitement, and painstakingly copy out her “poetry”, giving each poem a title, and writing at the bottom: “By Maria Basova.”

p There were poems of revolution, of struggle, poems about the leaders. There was even one about Lenin.

p And she would take them to the editorial office. The editors, astounded by the sight of this slip of a girl in a leather jacket and with a rifle over her shoulder, would take the verses and promise to read them. And Maryutka, after casting a serene look at each of them in turn, would go out.

p The secretary of the editorial board would snatch them up eagerly and begin to read. Soon his shoulders would hump up and begin to shake, his mouth distort with irrepressible laughter. His colleagues would gather round, and between shrieks of laughter he would read the verses out loud while his listeners writhed on their windowsills (there was no furniture in the offices of those days).

p The next morning Maryutka would come back, gaze with steady eyes at the secretary’s twitching face, then pick up her poems and say in a singsong voice:

p “No good, eh? No finish? I knew it. I chop them out of my heart like with an axe, but—they’re no good. I s’pose I’ve got to work harder. Can’t be helped. What the hell makes it so hard, d’ye think? A fish-pox on them!”

p And out she would go with a shrug of her 179 shoulders, pulling her Turkmenian cap down over her eyes.

p Maryutka was not much of a poet, but she was an expert sharp-shooter. She was the best shot in the detachment, and in battle she was always to be found at Yevsukov’s side.

p He would point a finger.

p “Look, Maryutka! An officer!”

p She would screw up her eyes,’ lick her lips, and leisurely level her gun. Bang!—and she had her man. Never a miss.

p After each shot she would say as she lowered her gun:

p “The thirty-ninth, a fish-pox on him!. ..” “The fortieth, a fish-pox on him!”

p “Fish-pox” was her favourite oath. She hated any really obscene words, and whenever the men used them in her presence she would frown and blush, but she never said anything.

p Maryutka had given a promise at headquarters and she kept it and no one in the detachment could boast of having one of her affections.

p One night a Magyar named Gucsa, who had recently joined their detachment and had been casting longing glances at her for some days, stole up to where she was lying. It ended badly. The Magyar crawled away minus three teeth and plus a big lump on his forehead. Maryutka had created him to the butt-end of her revolver.

p The men enjoyed making harmless jokes at her expense, but in battle they took more care of her than of themselves. This was dictated by some unacknowledged tenderness hidden deep down within them, under the hard surface of their manycoloured leather jackets.

p Such, then, were the crimson Yevsukov, Maryutka and the twenty-three, who escaped to the north, into the frozen sands of the endless desert.

180

p It was the time of the year when February whines its stormy tunes. Fluffy snow carpeted the hollows between the mounds of sand, and the sky shrieked above the heads of those who were pushing their way into the storm and the gloom—shrieked with wind. Or perhaps with enemy bullets tearing through the air.

p It was hard going. Their ill-shod feet sank deep into the sands and the snow. The hungry mangy camels snorted, howled and spat. The sands, blown into billows by the wind, had the glitter of salt crystals, and for hundreds of miles all around the earth was severed from the sky by a horizon line as clean and definite as if cut with a knife.

p This chapter, to tell the truth, has a minor share in my tale. It would have been simpler to have plunged straight into the heart of it. But, among other things, the reader had to know where the remnants of the special Guryev Detachment, which found itself thirty-seven versts north-west of the Kara-Kuduk well, came from, and why there was a girl among them, and why Commissar Yevsukov was crimson.

In a word, it was written only because it had to be written.