THE CURSED AND THE SLAIN

(excerpt, from Glas 7)

Chapter One

The train crunched icily, contracting, squealing, and as though exhausted by a long run with no let up, scraping and spitting, began to relax its great iron bulk. Frozen clinker snapped beneath wheels, a white dust settled on rails; its metal parts and its carriages were spangled right up to the windows with grey beads of ice. The train, come from some unimaginably remote place, shrank in on itself, exhausted and cold.

To either side, in front and behind, all was bleakness. The place where it had stopped was wreathed in motionless fog, the sky barely distinguishable from the earth, both of them merged and fused by the freezing murk. There was something desperately alien about what was or might be there, something unearthly and desolate, and some nameless creature on the point of death could be heard scratching a failing paw with blunted claws, and piercing the frosty mist with a snapping and a decrepit wheezing like a last tuberculous cough modulating into the barely audible rustle of a soul taking flight.

It was the sound of a forest in winter, frost-bound, shallow breathing, terrified of any rash move or deep breath which might rend the trees which were its flesh to their very heartwood. Pine branches and needles, evergreen boughs, sharp from the cold, brittle, dying of their own accord, drifted down ceaselessly, cluttering the forest snow, catching on their downward flight at their fellow branches and turning into so much useless debris, a wooden detritus fit only for the building of anthills and nests for black, heavy birds.

The forest, however, was nowhere to be seen, not even its silhouette visible. It could only be imagined where the curtain of frost seemed especially dense and impenetrable. Yet a barely detectable wave was rolling in from over there, a calm insistent breath of life at odds with the deadness of the calm fettering God's earth. From the direction where the forest had to be imagined and where something could be heard breathing, from grey wilderness came what sounded like the last howl of some creature in its agony. It spread and grew louder until it filled the distant land and the invisible sky, turning ever more unmistakably into a melody to pierce the heart. That howling, coming from so far away in the fog-bound world, from the very heavens, barely penetrated the stifling, muggy carriages, but the bellowing, chortling, snorting, singing recruits gradually fell silent and strained to hear it, ever more audible, unceasing, and coming closer.

Leshka Shestakov, warm and comfortable up on the luggage shelf, uncertainly moved his cap from his ear. In this cosmic howling he began to make out the sound of marching feet, the thundering of some vast military formation, and the sound of the iron train, still rasping in the cracking frost, ceased to set his teeth on edge. He felt a chill of fear and unease run down his back, and a tremulous ecstasy. It began to dawn on the recruits that the foggy, frozen world outside the windows was not howling but singing.

All the time they were being herded out of the carriages by impartially ill-natured men in worn military uniforms, lined up alongside the white spattered train, divided into groups of ten, and ordered to fall in behind, they were turning their heads this way and that, trying to find out who was singing, and where, and why.

Only when they got close to the pine forest, its warm tree tops besieging the winter's fog, looming first black then green through the grey, motionless world, only then did the recruits see waves of human beings advancing from all directions out of the impenetrable mist, rolling in towards them beneath the trees, swaying wearily as they moved along, row upon row in close formation. Like automatons the ragged columns as they marched were exhaling puffs of white breath, which were immediately followed by the eery howling which now resolved itself into slow, drawn out sounds and words which had to be guessed at rather than heard: "Across the steppe march regiments renowned", "Once I've seen it through, Marusya, I'll come back to you, Marusya", "A fearless seagull soaring flew above the mighty ocean blue", "Never, Cossacks of Kuban, forget September twenty-one", "Ho, bold Poltava gun, four wheels made to run and run...".

The simple words of songs familiar from their schooldays and now bawled out by raw, congested throats, dealt a further blow to their already sinking morale. They felt totally cut off, filled with foreboding, and now there came this hoarse singing to the tramp of frozen soldiers' boots. The intimidating sound of marching was muted, however, beneath the forest canopy by the sand underfoot and the tops of the pine trees enclosing them overhead. The voices merged into one and seemed less harsh. The soldiers' singing sounded lustier too, perhaps because after exhausting exercises the companies were returning to barracks, rest and warmth.

Suddenly, like the shackle of a huge padlock, a wall of sound snapped shut around their hearts: "Arise, our mighty Motherland, Arise to fight the foe...". The defiant sound of advancing boots filled the world near and far, prevailing over the whole frozen, prostrate world. It nullified and obliterated all weaker sounds, all other songs, the cracking of the trees, the squealing of the sledge runners, and the whistling of far off steam engines. From all sides the thunderous crescendo of stolidly marching feet advanced, seeming even to resound from the sky welded to the earth by the stinging cold. Without realizing it, the recruits, who had been straggling along out of step, reformed and began to stamp their boots on the churned up road of sand and snow in time to that great, defiant song and they seemed to see glistening in the pits left by the heels of their boots not crushed red cranberries but the blood of trampled enemies.

The soldiers grimly lugging on their shoulders and backs rifles, machine gun mounts and barrels, trench mortar bases, anti-tank guns with bumps at the ends like the rotted skulls of weird birds which snagged overhead branches and knocked down snow on them, seemed not to be returning from exercises. They were going into battle, into bloody battle. This was not a formation trudging through pine trees and wearily planting the much repaired heels of worn-out boots in the yielding sand, but men full of strength and righteous anger, with faces scorched not by frost but by the flame of battles fought. They radiated a great potency which there was no understanding or explaining, which could only be felt, and made you draw yourself up, aware of being part of this defiant world and subordinate to it. Nothing else mattered any more, everything seemed infinitely remote, even your life itself.

When the recruits were marched down into the gloom of an underground barracks where crushed pine branches thrown on the sand formed the floor, and when they were ordered to find themselves a place on plank beds made from unstripped tree trunks barely squared on the side for sleeping on, Leshka could still hear within himself the fading echoes of that defiant "Arise to fight the foe..." He was overwhelmed by a sense of fatalism. He as an individual was no longer of significance, no longer in charge of his future. There were more important matters and causes which took priority over his little self. What mattered was the tempest, the torrent he was now caught up in. His was now to march, and sing, and fight, perhaps to die at the front together with these weary masses which carried all in their path before them, roaring out that incantation, that mighty roar of a country calling all to join to fight the foe, a country over which there hung a chilling, darksome, murky threat. How was a man to free himself of it on his own? Only in unison, only as part of a river, only as part of the melt waters of spring could he break through to the regions of light, to a different life full of the very meaning and purpose which at present were so beside the point but for which, since time began, people throughout the world have given their lives.

There came down on Leshka's soul just the spirit which is supposed to be present in barracks and prisons: a dull acceptance of everything occurring. When he was appointed to the first spell of duty as barracks orderly, to keep the barrackroom stove stoked with the raw pine firewood, he accepted the assignment without protest. Having listened to the order not to fall asleep, not to let the quarantine barracks catch fire, to make sure the recruits went well out into the forest before relieving themselves, to beat with a stick any who took it into their heads to urinate in the barracks, rifle other people's knapsacks, or, needless to say, hit the bottle, he obediently repeated the order and loudly repeated after Sergeant-Major Yashkin that anyone who stepped out of line would be for the high jump.

The Sergeant had an armband on his greatcoat sleeve like those worn by soldiers in a guard of honour. He informed them he was the NCO in charge of the quarantine barracks guard. Yashkin had already served at the front. He had a medal and was in a reserve regiment after being in hospital. He would very shortly be returning to the front line with a draft company, glad to leave this hell hole, might the devil take it, might it go to hell, and burn to a cinder all at once, as he told them.

Yashkin was stunted, skinny, and cantankerous. He had no beard to speak of, only here and there something bristling from the sagging sledge-like hollows of his cheek bones where he had not shaved properly, and a sparse, straggly growth under his nose. His eyes were yellow and joyless, the skin beneath them minutely wrinkled, and the skin on his forehead was yellow also. He kept warm by sitting pressed up against the stove which was heaped with hot sand. His back was hunched, he whimpered like a puppy as he breathed, and he cadged tobacco, bread, and lard off them. Leshka had good tobacco, still a little bread, but no lard. He nodded towards the bulging sacks which morose-looking recruits from the Old Believer regions of the Siberian taiga sat hugging like a god-given woman, as if to say, those devils wouldn't exactly starve if they shared out some of their supplies.

Yashkin walked through the quarters, his cat-like eyes probing the recruits perched on their bunks. Many were already asleep. Wild men who had worked the gold mines of Baikit, Upper Yeniseisk, or who came from Tyr-Pont, as they called other, secret regions, sat cross-legged in a circle deep in a game of cards. One gambler was already reduced to his underpants, having staked and lost everything else. Forced out of the circle, he now stood craning his neck and giving advice and instructions from a distance to the others as to which card they should take with, which trump they should play. In a dark, far corner of the quarantine barracks, which was lit at each end by two primal tallow lampions and by the lazily burning stove with no doors, the recruits who arrived a week ago sat perched close together on the edge of their bunks, like swallows on a telegraph wire, patiently biding their time. Yashkin knew what they were waiting for. He walked through their ranks giving warning glances, but in the gloom they all seemed not to notice him.

In the darkened depths on a lower bunk somebody was praying, "God of mercy, God of justice, deliver me not into temptation but deliver me from evil..."

"Cut it out!" Yashkin ordered for form's sake, and continued on his rounds, issuing a reprimand to anybody doing anything not in accord with regulations. Since, however, nobody in the barracks was doing anything at all, he rapidly ran out of things to reprimand.

Yashkin returned to his command post by the stove, detailing on the way back two teams to saw and chop logs outside respectively. He again settled himself on a block of wood directly opposite the hot, square opening, again spread his arms and moved his chest close to the stove, taking in the warmth, but unable to get warm.

In the barracks at large it was not exactly warm but not exactly cold either, as is usual deep under ground. The stove did little more than bring a little cheer to the dim life crammed in this airless dungeon, and even then brightened up only its immediate surroundings. The woodwork of the bunks to either side of the stove was covered in soot, but oozing sulphur made the ends of the beams stubbornly white, like bones which had already mouldered in the grave. A barely detectable whiff of sulphur and the scent from the crushed pine branches on the bunks, where the hard boughs also served in place of bedding, mitigated the smell of rot, dust, and pungent youthful urine.

The Old Believers were wagging their rumpled beards together in some kind of a meeting. One of them, a burly fellow in a ridiculous three-tiered peaked cap without a peak, hobbled over to the stove and placed in Yashkin's lap a round loaf with a nut brown crust, a piece of boiled meat, two onions and a birchbark salt box in the form of a pen case. Yashkin took out a pocket knife, cut off a hunk of bread for himself, thought for a moment, cut off another slice, and uttering the name "Zelentsov", shoved the bread and a lump of meat into hands which appeared instantly. He started peeling the onion.

"Elk meat!" Zelentsov's voice came from his bunk, followed shortly afterwards by the man himself. He sniffed with nostrils so broad they looked torn, peered round with beady but observant eyes, and demanded something to smoke from the visitor.

"We do not smoke," the Old Believer said, lowering his eyes.

"And do we not drink either?"

"On holy days we sometimes do. Beer..."

Leshka held out his tobacco pouch to Zelentsov, who lit up, weighed the pouch in his hand and, without asking, poured more tobacco out into his hand. Yashkin chewed away unhurriedly, indifferently, chomping the runners of his sledges up and down, deftly throwing rings of sliced onion from some distance into his narrow mouth ringed with cold sores. When he had eaten he looked around for someone, tugged two snoring recruits from upper bunks by their legs, and ordered them to fetch water. Two bodies lumbered to the ground. "Why us all the time?" the boys grumbled and went off clattering the billy can. The barracks door was forced open, the rasping of a saw was heard, and an eddy of chill, sweet air gusted into the barracks. All the time until they brought the water back in the iron can suspended from a bending pole a fresh draught blew from the door, and above the opening, unattainably far away, a narrow strip of grey light showed it was night.

The can, which held the same as three buckets or so, was put on the stove. The sand hissed. Hands reached thirstily out with mugs, cans, and jars. Those in charge half jokingly demanded bread and tobacco in return for the water, and when some stumped up (others did not) they too began chomping. When somebody paid in potatoes, they rolled them over into the hot sand beside the stove pipe. An appetizing aroma began to fill the place, covering the sourness and the stench.

The smell of baking potatoes drew people from the dark depths of the barracks. They crowded round, themselves producing potatoes and rolling them in until the flat top of the iron stove looked as if it were cobbled. The old stove had neither a bottom nor a door, and had already half sunk into the sand.

"Mind your backs there!" The cry filled the barracks, and reddish blocks of pine wood were rolled in banging and walloping from the door, to be followed by several armfuls more of dry chopped firewood, pine and perhaps some other kind, filched evidently from who knows where by the wily sawyers.

Yashkin moved away from the maw of the stove and a great quantity of logs was shoved into the hole, so great, indeed, that the ends stuck out the opening. The stove thought for a time before spitting and crackling and catching light, roaring gratefully as its sides grew raspberry red. The recruits surrounded it like members of its family. They munched their potatoes, asked each other where they were from, warmed and dried themselves, took stock of their new situation, and were delighted to meet people from their own village or just from the same part of the country, not yet aware that in this they were doing as the times demanded. The ties of kinship and coming from the same area would later be valued above all the transient circumstances of life, and most of all, most tenaciously they would strengthen and rule at the far away front, as yet unknown but inescapable.

The Old Believer with the remarkable hat was called Kolya Ryndin and came from Upper Kuzhebar in Karatuz, on the bank of the River Amyl which flows into the Yenisei. Kolya was the fifth of twelve children in the Ryndin family, and his relatives were beyond number.

People began teasing him. He smiled good-naturedly, baring large teeth and doing his best to join in the ribbing. When, however, a sickly lad with a head balanced on a scrawny neck protruding from a much mended quilted jacket slipped up to the stove and tried to whisk a potato away, Kolya took it from him.

"I told you, laddie, you must yet abstain a while from taking food, potatoes too, and especially one that's not yet properly baked. You'll get such runs as will blast you seven metres against the wind." Kolya paused to guffaw. "Not counting the splashes!" He continued more seriously, like a political instructor, to give a moral lesson. "Diarrhoea gets passed around, and this is a barracks, a community, and you'll be giving it to everybody." He pulled a small yellow canvas bag from his sack, sprinkled a handful of a grey mixture into a mug, put it on the fire, and added paternally, "When that's boiled, you drink it. It'll clear you up in a jiffy."

Everybody, including Sergeant-Major Yashkin, stared at this Old Believer with new interest. "What is it? What's that medicine?" they asked, because Petya Musikov, the lad with the runs, was not the only one in need of medical assistance. Along the way the recruits had bought and eaten whatever came to hand, drinking any amount of unboiled milk and water of dubious origin, and now were suffering upset stomachs.

"The fruit and dried bark of birdcherry, snakeweed, cowweed, and other herbs from the forest. When all these medicines are dried and crushed it is lastly sanctified and whispered over by Old Sekletiniya, a healer and sorceress famed the length of the Amyl River. Our taiga is rich in clever people, but none can hold a candle to Old Sekletiniya..." Kolya Ryndin pointed meaningfully towards the ceiling. "She can cure not just diarrhoea, but ruptures, even burns, and wild-fire. Everything, right up to consumption, she can cast a spell on. And she rubs bellies too."

"Bellies? Whose? What for?" Sergeant-Major Yashkin asked Kolya Ryndin amiably, his mood already changing for the better.

"Whose do you think? Not mine, to be sure. Women's, of course, to be rid of a baby they don't want."

The crowd chuckled uncertainly, and parted to make space for Kolya beside their commander. They almost forcibly made Petya Musikov and a few other ailing lads drink the scalding decoction. Someone gave Petya rusks to eat, and he crunched them loudly like a dog. Meanwhile a fight broke out among the card players. Yashkin took Zelentsov and one other solidly built lad and went to quell the unrest.

"If you don't pack that in, I'll have you out in the frost," Yashkin piped in a falsetto, "sawing firewood."

"I'd fuck your mother, General..."

"Don't go near his mother. She's a virgin."

"Yeah, seven kids and still a virgin."

"No, she only had one, but what a winner, haw-haw."

"I said I'll have you out."

"You and whose army, you gut-worm in a swoon!"

"Silence!"

"Hands off the cards, General, or I break your jaw."

"My jaw has me to look after it."

"You little shit!"

From one of the bunks a villain, bare to the waist and covered in tattoos, lunged at Yashkin, only to land with a yelp on the twig strewn floor. Yashkin, twisting the knife off him, kicked him outside. Leshka, Zelentsov, the duty soldiers and their helpers hauled two other daisies from their bunks, dragged them as their vests worked up bare backed over the splintery, crushed pine branches, and threw them too out the door to cool down. Zelentsov returned to the stove with the knife in his hand, looked at his bleeding palm, wiped it on his jacket, sprinkled it with ash from the stove, clenched it, and, baring his remaining decayed teeth in a grin, said not loudly but very distinctly to the barracks at large,

"Try it on again and this knife of yours goes in..."

The wild men went quiet and the barracks settled down again. Kolya Ryndin looked round apprehensively, viewing Zelentsov and Yashkin with new respect. What eagles were these who had no fear of wild men with knives. What people he had met up with! You could tell at a glance that Zelentsov was a seasoned lad who had seen the world, but this one, the commander, was just a little scrap of a fellow, ill looking, but he hadn't blinked an eye when he went for the knife. There's a soldier for you. He would keep the company of these men. They would defend him should need arise. Zelentsov squatted comfortably, lit up again, yawned, spat in the sand, and climbed into his bunk. Soon the whole barracks was asleep.

Yashkin lowered his soft Budyonny helmet over his eyes, buttoned it at his chin, raised the crumpled collar of his greatcoat, pushed his hands into the sleeves, lay down by the feet of the recruits at the end of a bunk with his back to the stove, and promptly began to grunt as if grumbling to himself.

"The sergeant-major is far from well," Kolya Ryndin concluded and, sitting a moment, added, addressing himself to Leshka, "I'll help you keep watch. What should he take for jaundice now? Which herb? Old Sekletiniya did tell me, but dolt that I am, I don't remember now."

"It's the front has made him yellow, the hatred and the fear."

"Is that the case?"

The watch did not hold out to morning. Leshka, slumped against a bunk upright, struggled against sleep for a long time, his head nodding, swaying, until he finally gave in. Clutching the upright, he pressed his cheek against the rough bark as his body relaxed and he sank, breathing evenly, and drifted away to his home expanses on the River Ob. Kolya Ryndin sat on his log, but eventually he too in slow motion, as if braking in flight, fell to the warm sand littered with cigarette ends, instinctively rolled a log under his head, pulled his cap down further, and immediately shook the entire barracks with snoring so mighty that somewhere in the depths of the dug-out a recruit woke up and asked in a piteous voice,

"Oh, mum. What's going on? Where am I?"

In the morning there was great lamentation and cursing in the reception barracks, much groaning and hysteria. All the recruits' plump knapsacks had been cut open and the contents plundered, in some cases half their goodies had gone, in others not a crumb remained. The wild men were belching and scratching full bellies. Some lads quick off the mark ferreted through the barracks in search of the thieves and gave a good drubbing to any who crossed their path. In the distance Yashkin was cursing. Despite his express order and prohibition people had pissed beside the bunks and at the door. All over the sand there were small fresh pits white with salt. The dug-out smelled like a stable, despite the sergeant-major's throwing wide the pine door, through which a square of light showed it was day.

Translated by Arch Tait and Martin Dewhirst