David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul’s teplushka shuddered and the train picked up a little speed. The argument petered out and men returned to their bunks. Within ten minutes the movement proved enough to lull several to sleep and the sound of snoring became an accompaniment to the leitmotif of the wheels rattling over the track. The man who had been given Romanek’s newspaper had begun to doze, allowing the paper to slip onto the floor. Paul glanced down at the indecipherable headline on its front page and shifted his position on the bunk.

The boxcar was warm. He felt he was finally thawing after the two-day patrol, his bunk a feather bed compared to sleeping on frozen ground. The movement of the train was comforting.

If the gold was in Omsk, he thought, then that presumably was where Mikhail and Sofya were. Valentine, too, no doubt. It meant Sofya was safe and he didn’t have to worry about her anymore. She was on the other side of the Urals… So far away, although he supposed now he had a reason to go to Omsk there was a chance he might see her. She might be safe and he no longer had to worry about her, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about her. Now she was no longer with him, he found that he thought about her all the more.

Out of the blue, her face would suddenly pop up in his head; something she had said would skitter through his mind and, when he was least expecting it, the timbre of her voice would ring in his ears. He found the whole business disturbing. Yet not disagreeable. In fact, in a masochistic sort of way, it was all rather pleasant.

On the edge of sleep, his mind weighing all the ramifications and expanding and contracting as perception did in a state of semi-consciousness, his train of thought took a branch line and he began to wonder, with Gajda also in Omsk as well as some British general, if, like the gods looking down on the soldiery at Troy, his fate too was being manipulated on some elevated level; arbitrarily decided on a whim. If that were the case, was there any point in attempting to steer the path of one’s own destiny?

The grinding of metal woke him. The train was braking, an operation on this particular locomotive always accompanied by a screaming battalion of banshees. He raised himself on one elbow and rubbed the sleeve of his tunic over the small window cut into the top of boxcar. A film of ice on the outside of the glass hazed a view of buildings and a water tower.

‘It’s a depot,’ he said to Romanek who had begun stirring.

The train came to a noisy halt and sat amid a hissing of steam and creaking metal, contracting in the cold. Men were jumping down onto the platform and Paul could see them milling around the station office.

‘Picking up the rearguard,’ Romanek said, climbing out of his bunk. He began pulling on his heavy winter coat, preparing for his turn of duty on the freezing flatcar with the machineguns. He had just put on his boots and was reaching for the sliding boxcar door when someone began hammering on the outside.

‘Just wait will you?’ Romanek called in Czech, a phrase Paul could just about understand as it was what others were always telling him.

Romanek opened the interior door, packed with insulation, and was about to squeeze through a gap in the exterior door when it was slid wide open. Paul gritted his teeth as the warmth of the teplushka was sucked out of the boxcar.

The legionnaire on the platform was shouting at Romanek. Around Paul, men sat upright on their bunks. Romanek said something back and Paul could tell from his tone of disbelief that something had happened.

‘What is it?’ he asked in Russian.

The others ignored him, gathering at the open door oblivious to the cold.

‘What’s happened’ Paul asked again in faltering Czech.

Someone said something over his shoulder that Paul didn’t understand. Except for the name Švec. The legionnaire on the platform moved on to the next car, hammering at the door. Romanek pulled theirs shut.

‘What, Karel?’ Paul tried a third time. ‘Something about Švec?’

‘He’s dead. He shot himself.’

‘What?’

‘Two weeks ago, at someplace called Aksakovo. After his men refused to fight. It came through on the telegraph.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

Romanek glared at him. ‘Why? Why do you think? His men refused his orders. His men wouldn’t fight.’

‘But to shoot himself…?’

‘He was an honourable man. He took their refusal to fight as a personal failure.’

The train began moving again. Romanek returned to his bunk, the machineguns forgotten. The other men sat around, looking down at the planked floor. No one said anything. After a while Paul asked:

‘What’ll happen now?’

Karel looked up.

‘Now? We do what Švec’s men should have done. We fight.’

Once back with the rest of the échelon, Paul found himself summoned to the wagon of Kapitan Lubas who, after a brief interview, told him to report to the divisional commander. This turned out to be Colonel Voitzekhovsky, Čeček having been ordered to Vladivostok. The colonel was in his staff carriage on another train several miles to the east and, assuming he was being passed along the line once more, Paul dithered over whether to encumber himself with his gear or return for it later. Deciding he might be carrying it to no purpose, he decided to leave it and managed to get a lift part way to Voitzekhovsky’s train from a wagon hauling wood. He rode a horse bareback for a further twenty minutes until both Paul and the agitated animal tired of the novelty. After that he mostly walked.

Back in the early autumn when Paul had first joined the échelon, the road that paralleled the line was always busy; invariably men could be found stretching their legs or just taking the air and exchanging gossip; teams of horses would canter up and down being exercised; supplies were constantly being transferred from one train to another. Now, in a cold November with snow thick on the ground, the men kept inside the teplushkas , conserving their warmth and energy; horses were content for the most part to remain in their boxcars.

Just yards from the rail line, the trees hung white with snow, their laden boughs drooping with an air of depressed gloom under its weight. At night while they all lay in their bunks, wolves could be heard howling, one pack to another, and the men exchanged tales of people who had wandered into the trees after dark and had not returned. Boredom encouraged the stories. Sitting in the teplushkas with only candlelight for illumination, there was little to do but talk or sleep. If the stories were true, Paul suspected it was the boredom that prompted men to take nocturnal excursions into the trees. No more than a few feet away, pristine and forbidding, the forest exuded the aura of having lain untouched for millennia. Nonsense, of course. In summer the whole aspect of the country was different. But summer was brief and winter seemed to be the forest’s natural state. Why anyone would want to fight over it, Paul didn’t know. He could understand men coveting the good earth to the south, but this deep and unending forest? It sometimes seemed to him to be the antithesis of what any human being could want.

But that too was nonsense. The area teemed with people. It was the land of the Kirgis; further north lived Voguls and Ostiaks. There were Tartars and, far to the east, beyond the Urals and Omsk and Tomsk, lived the Buryaits. He had learned about them in the schoolroom of the Rostov house in Petersburg, the facts pushed into a unresponsive brain only with the liberal use of the cane across the knuckles or the flat of the hand applied to the back of the head. He could relive the pain of it if he ever thought too long about the schoolroom although it was only now, in adulthood, that he had begun to suspect the punishments may not have been inflicted out of any educational zeal but rather through resentment and class envy. The house might have been seen as a microcosm of Russia: the peasant class at the bottom, skivvying and slaving in the kitchens and the stables, little advanced socially from the serfs they had once been; through gradations of servants above them of varying station, up through the house to the governess and tutors or, in the country, the stewards and bailiffs and land agents… What, he wondered, had given those at the top the right to lord it over the rest? Hadn’t they all begun on an equal footing? Back when everyone had run naked through the trees like the wolves…