194

p In which Maryutka holds her first conversation with
the lieutenant, and the commissar fits out a naval
expedition

p On the second day they came to a Kirghiz settlement on the shores of the sea. The first sign they had of it was the acrid smell of a dung-fire that came over the sand-hills and made their empty bellies contract spasmodically. Then they caught sight of the low domes of yurta dwellings. Finally some shaggy little dogs came dashing up to meet them.

p The natives clustered at the entrances to their yurtas, gazing in pity and astonishment at these sad remnants of human beings.

p An old man with a caved in nose stroked the sparse hairs of his beard and rubbed his chest.

p “Salaam," he said. “Where you go, turá?"

195

p Yevsukov weakly pressed the rough palm that was offered him.

p “We’re Reds. Headed for Kazalinsk. Take us in, friend, and feed us. The local Soviet will reward you.”

p The Kirghiz shook his scanty beard and smacked his lips.

p “Ui, bai. Red Army men. Bolshie. Come Moscow?”

p “No, turd. Not from Moscow. From Guryev.”

p “Guryev? Ui, bail Ui, bail Come Kara-Kum?”

p The slit-like eyes showed a glint of horror and respect for this faded crimson soldier who, braving the wild winds of February, had crossed the dread Kara-Kum Desert from Guryev to the Aral Sea.

p The old man clapped his hands and gave orders in a guttural tongue to the women who came running.

p He took the commissar by the hand.

p “Come, turd, kibitka. Sleep liftle-little. Then eat.”

p The men dropped down like inanimate bundles and slept without stirring in the warm yurtas until nightfall. When they woke up the Kirghiz fed them pilau, and stroked their protruding shoulder-blades sympathetically.

p “Eat, turá, eat,” they said. "You weak. Eat, you strong.”

p They ate quickly, greedily. Their bellies grew bloated from the fat food and some of them were sick. They ran out into the sand, relieved themselves, then came back and set to again. At last they went back to sleep, warm and sated.

p But Maryutka and the lieutenant did not sleep.

p Maryutka sat by the smouldering embers in the brazier, all her past sufferings forgotten. She took a stub of pencil out of her pack and traced some letters on a leaf torn out of the supplement to an illustrated monthly one of the women had given her. This particular leaf carried a portrait of Count 196 Kokovtsev, Minister of Finance, and across the count’s broad forehead and fair beard Maryutka inscribed her scrawling letters.

p Around her waist the camel cord was still tied, and the other end was twisted round the hands crossed behind the lieutenant’s back. Only for an hour had she released his hands, so that he could eat his fill of pilau. This done, she had secured them again.

p The Red Army men tittered.

p “Like a dog on a chain,” they said.

p “Gone soft on him, have you, Maryutka? Then tie him to you, tie him tight. If you don’t, a fairy princess’ll come on her magic carpet and whisk him away.”

p Maryutka did not deign to answer.

p The lieutenant sat with his back against a post of the yurta, his ultramarine eyes focused on the jerky efforts of the pencil.

p “What are you writing?" he said, leaning forward.

p Maryutka glanced up at him through a dangling lock of auburn hair.

p “None of your business.”

p “Perhaps you’d like to write a letter? Dictate it and I’ll write it for you.”

p Maryutka gave a low laugh.

p “Smart, ain’t you? Just to get your hands loose to give me a clout and take to your heels. What d’ye take me for, handsome?... And I don’t need your help. It’s not a letter I’m writing, it’s poetry.”

p The lieutenant’s eyelashes flickered in surprise. He strained to get his back away from the post.

p “Poetry? Do you write poetry?”

p Maryutka flushed and interrupted the pencil’s convulsions.

p “Why the stare? You think you’re the only one can dance the mazurka and I’m an idiot-girl?”

197

p The lieutenant worked his elbows, but the bonds held.

p “I don’t think anything of the kind. I was just surprised. Do you think the time’s suitable for the writing of poetry?”

p Maryutka put down her pencil. She tossed back her head and the rusty bronze came spilling over her shoulders.

p “Ain’t you a funny one, just!" she said. “Does a person have to sleep in a feather-bed to write poetry? What if it’s all boiling over inside me? What if I dream night and day of putting it all down— how we crossed that desert, cold and hungry? If only I could make it come tight in people’s chests! It’s blood I write with. But nobody wants to print it. They say I’ve got to study first. Study! How’s a person to find time to study these days? It comes from my heart, from my simpleness.”

p The lieutenant gave a slow smile.

p “You might read it to me,” he said. “I’m interested. I understand something about poetry.”

p “You wouldn’t understand this. Yours is rich man’s blood. Sleazy. All you want to write about is flowers and love. I write about poor folk. About revolution,” she ended up sadly.

p “Why shouldn’t I understand?" replied the lieutenant. “Perhaps I myself would never write about such things, but one person can always understand another.”

p Maryutka hesitantly turned Kokovtsev upside down.

p “Oh, the hell! All right, then, listen, but don’t dare laugh. I s’pose your papa had a gov’ness for you till you was twenty, but I went all the way myself.”

p “I wouldn’t think of laughing, really.”

p “All right. I’ve put it all down—how we fought the Cossacks, and how we escaped into the desert.”

198

p Maryutka cleared her throat. Lowering her voice, she hammered out the words, rolling her eyes ferociously:

p So the Cossacks fell upon us,
Bloody hangmen of the tsar.
We gave them bullets plenty,
But that didn’t get us very far.
Because there were so many of them
We were forced to retreat.
Our Yevsukov, like a hero,
Said the Cossacks must be beat.
We turned machine-guns on them,
We fought like hell that day,
But they wiped out our detachment—
Only twenty got away.

p “But I can’t for the life of me finish it, a fish-pox on it! I don’t know how to get in the camels,” said Maryutka in a troubled voice.

p The blue of the lieutenant’s eyes was in shadow, but the whites gave off violet reflections of the gay little fire in the brazier.

p “Good for you!" he said after a pause. “There’s a lot of expression and feeling in the lines. Anyone can see they come from the heart.” At this point his body jerked and he made a sound like a hiccup, which he covered up by saying hastily: “Please don’t take offence, but it’s very bad poetry. No skill, no polish.”

p Maryutka dropped the paper listlessly on her knee and gazed without speaking at the ceiling of the yurta for a while. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

p “I told you there was feeling in them. Everything inside of me sobs when I tell what happened. As for not being polished—that’s what everybody tells me, just like you. ’No polish, so we can’t print it.’ But how am I to polish it? What’s the secret? Look, you’re a man with book-learning—can’t you tell 199 me?" In her agitation, Maryutka addressed him almost with respect.

p The lieutenant did not answer immediately.

p “It’s hard to say. You see, the writing of poetry is an art and every art must be studied. It has its own laws and rules. For instance, if an engineer doesn’t know the rules for building a bridge, he either won’t be able to build one at all, or he will build a bad one, one that cannot be used.”

p “But that’s a bridge. He’s got to know numbers and all sorts of clever things for that. But poetry’s been inside me ever since I was born. Maybe it’s a talent?”

p “Perhaps. But even talent must be developed. An engineer is an engineer rather than a doctor because from birth he’s had an inclination to build things. But if he doesn’t study, nothing will come of his inclination.”

p “Won’t it now? Think of that! Oh, well, a fishpox on it! Soon’s we finish fighting I’ll go to a school where they learn you h<3w to write poetry. There are schools like that, aren’t there?”

p “There must be,” said the lieutenant pensively.

p “Well, that’s where I’ll go. I’m just about worn out by this poetry. There’s nothing I want so bad as to get it put in a book, and there under every poem’d be my name Maria Basova.”

p The fire in the brazier died out. In the darkness the wind could be heard rustling the felt covering of the yurta.

p “Say,” said Maryutka suddenly, “them cords must be hurting your hands.”

p “Not much. Just a little numb.”

p “If you’ll swear on your honour not to run away, I’ll untie them for you.”

“Where am I to run to? The jackals would get me. I’m not that much of a fool.”

200 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1974/OSA354/20070209/299.tx"

p “Well, you swear anyway. Repeat it after me: ’1 swear by the proletariat who’s fighting for their rights and to the Red Army man Maria Basova not to try to run away.’ "

p The lieutenant repeated the oath.

p The loop of the cord was loosened and the swollen wrists released. Blissfully the lieutenant moved his fingers.

p “Now, go to sleep,” yawned Maryutka. “If you run away now you’re the worst louse that ever was. Here’s the carpet, pull it up.”

p “Thanks. I’ll cover myself with my coat. Good night, Maria.”

p “Maria Filatovna,” corrected Maryutka with dignity as she pulled the cover over her head.

p Yevsukov was anxious to let his whereabouts be known at headquarters. But he had to give his men a chance to sleep and eat and thaw out here in the aul. When a week was up he decided to follow the coast until he came to the town of Aralsk, from which he would go direct to Kazalinsk.

p At the beginning of the second week some passing Kirghiz told him that an autumn storm had driven a fishing smack up on the shore of a cove about four versts away. They said the boat was undamaged and was lying unclaimed on the beach. The fishermen must have drowned.

p The commissar went to inspect it.

p The smack turned out to be of sturdy oak, almost new. The only damage the storm had done was to tear the sail and break the rudder.

p After consulting his men, Yevsukov decided to send a group by boat to the mouth of the Syr Darya. The smack could easily accommodate four people and a normal load of supplies.

p “That’ll be better,” said the commissar. “In the first place, we’ll hand over our prisoner. After all, 201 who knows what might happen on the march? And we’ve got to get him there at all costs. And second, they’ll know where we are and send out some cavalrymen to bring us clothes and things. If there’s a good wind you can cross the Aral in three or four days and be in Kazalinsk on the fifth.”

p Yevsukov wrote a report and sewed it into a canvas packet along with the lieutenant’s documents, which he had been carrying all this time in the inner pocket of his jacket.

p The Kirghiz women mended the sail and the commissar himself made a new rudder of broken boards.

p On a cold February morning when the lowhanging sun was a polished brass plate above a flat expanse of turquoise, a string of camels drew the smack out to the edge of the ring of ice.

p They launched it in the open sea and the passengers went aboard.

p Yevsukov said to Maryutka:

“You’re in charge. You answer for everything. Keep your eyes on that officer. You’ll be sorry you ever got born if you let him get away. See he gets there alive or dead. It you run foul of the Whites, don’t give him up alive. Well, be off.”