Heart of Iron (27 page)

Despite his faltering words and circuitous manner of speaking, his explanation made sense to me. Moreover, I recognized myself, Eugenia, Jack: we all were too fearful to expect anything but disappointment. I thought maybe this was why all of us were constantly rewarded with it. I nodded, wordless, and sat back in my chair, no longer tense and reaching. “Maybe we are not demons,” I said.

“Maybe so.” Kuan Yu put a folded envelope in front of me. I opened it to find a sheet of paper covered in Jack’s careful hand. My heart fluttered, and I forgot to even feel disappointed once I realized it wasn’t my letter.

“My dearest Sasha,” the letter opened, rather dramatically, “I hope this finds you well. I must beg your forgiveness for not telling you earlier, but I fear that our pursuers (and I am ashamed to recognize them as my countrymen) may have too easy a time following us. Yet, I worry that if one of us were to be captured, the fate of the other would be as good as sealed. So I have made a decision to travel separately — and I hope you will forgive me for not betraying my means, for to tell you would be to put you in a greater danger.” I stopped there and thought peevishly that he knew the way I was traveling and therefore was in a position to betray me while not extending me the same courtesy. Or was he so certain that he liked me more than I liked him? I continued reading.

“I will wait for you in Krasnoyarsk, and only hope you will do the same for me if you get there first. If we do not meet in one week’s time, proceed without me. If it is at all in my powers, I will make sure the documents you need to achieve your purpose will be available to you.”

Strange — how could he make sure of something like that, unless he had a trusted courier? Moreover, there was no place of meeting indicated anywhere. I turned the page over, and found a faint, spidery scrawl that I would have missed if I had not searched so intently any sign at all.

“Follow your heart,” it read. “Believe your heroes.”

This advice seemed both too general and too hackneyed for Jack, so I decided it was a secret way of telling me where to meet him. The trouble was, I had no idea what was in Krasnoyarsk, and who I could possibly follow there, let alone which ones of my heroes he was talking about.

I folded the letter and stuffed it carefully into the inner pocket of my uniform, as Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi watched. I wondered if they had read the letter.

“Are you going to Krasnoyarsk?” I asked them.

“Eventually,” Liu Zhi answered and twisted his mustache thoughtfully. “Who knows when the next train comes? In winter, there’s snow, there’s cold and breakage. Trains unreliable. Unless the hussars let us join them.”

“This could be arranged, I’m sure,” I said, and rose. “Come along, it is high time the two of you met some of my colleagues.”

Liu Zhi and Kuan Yu nodded to Woo Pei and followed me; their docility and easy manner kept surprising me. After all, I had barely made their acquaintance before witnessing them kick in several English heads. I puzzled whether traveling with me would be of some benefit to them — if it were, it would be easier for me to accept their willingness to come along.

We found the party in the tavern had grown subdued, as most of the participants had either left for the train and its warmth and benches, or fell asleep where they sat. The rotmistr and still sober Volzhenko were the only two who seemed in possession of their faculties. A few hussars were leaving, and Volzhenko barked orders at them, telling them to all stay together, to take a head count when they left and when they arrived, and to report the irregularities to Cornet Petrovsky who was already on the train. When Volzhenko saw me, he grinned. “Has to be done,” he shouted by the way of explanation. “These sorry bastards get drunk, wander through the snow, fall over and pass out, and then we find them dead, like logs frozen solid. We make sure that if anyone falls behind, there’s someone there to go back and dig him out of a snowdrift. Necessary, that.”

“I see,” I said, and smiled.

The rotmistr winked and laughed, and gave an exaggerated head tilt in the direction of Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi. Woo Pei remained invisible in the kitchen, but his presence was still palpable in the sweaty, musty din of the room. “Your friends?”

“Fur traders from China,” I said. And added in a burst of inspiration, “I am paying them to escort me around Beijing. May they travel with me?”

The rotmistr scratched the back of his head, and then opened in his arms in a gesture of wide wonderment. “Oh, young Poruchik Menshov. How I envy your gift of making friends, of finding what you need to find. Of course they may travel with you — we have space.”

“Thank you, rotmistr.” I leaned over the table to shake his wide, calloused hand that reminded me of a piece of leather tack more than human flesh. “I cannot thank you enough for your kindness.”

He waved his hands in the air, as if suddenly shy of gratitude and praise. “The pleasure is all mine, poruchik,” he said.

I had to admire how quickly his speech changed from educated and businesslike to lilting and folksy, as if he was so used to playing one of his hussars, all peasants in their past lives, that it took him effort to remember how to speak as an educated man, while the reverse transition came as easy as breathing. “The pleasure’s all mine. You see, it’s winter, the nights are long, the days have all but disappeared, and the road is long and snowy and difficult. There are rumors of roaming wolves and rails busted open from the freeze, but — and call me a superstitious man if you must — but I look at you and I wonder. I wonder at how you manage to slip away from those who are looking for you and how you continue — as unstoppable as an arrow — and the world turns to spread itself under your feet so that you may get to wherever it is you’re going. With you on board, I am sure our journey will go well, little hussar, so you bring whoever you need to bring with you, and may God be with you all.”

I wasn’t sure if he was serious or joking, but I could not doubt that his sharp eyes saw Kuan Yu cross himself when God was mentioned.

I wondered occasionally whether I had fallen asleep and dreamed this entire journey, if I would wake up back in St. Petersburg — or even in Trubetskoye, and discover that the last year of my life was just a dream brought on by a too late and too filling meal. I could hope, couldn’t I?

Not that I was unhappy, but I felt so detached from everything I had ever known. I drifted among the strange people and occurrences, missed my mother and my aunt, and still moved inexorably east, along the narrow steel tracks that pierced the heart of my country like a shining needle piercing the thorax of a butterfly.

Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi made fast friends with the hussars. Here, without the compartments, we all shared the same living space, and it felt like a gypsy encampment where people moved from bench to bench, forming temporary alliances and knots of conversations and laughter and card games. We consumed ridiculous amounts of pickled herring and pot stickers and wine; the rotmistr made sure that we were well stocked with food and drink, since the military trains did not bother with a restaurant carriage — or many other amenities. Besides the engineer and the freedmen feeding coal to the insatiable maw of the locomotive, coal that powered its terrible blazing heart, it was just the hussars, two Chinese fur traders, and I.

Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi had fulfilled the requirements of their professed occupation, and bought a goodly portion of Trubkozub’s inventory, as well as bartered several bolts of white and blue silk. I had made a mental note not to leave China before acquiring several miles worth of this smooth, shimmering material in pale blue for my mother, and a few bolts of black for Eugenia. Both would surely enjoy it.

Krasnoyarsk used to be a frontier town, Cornet Volzhenko who seemed to consider himself my friend now, told me. It was built to guard the eastern reaches of the empire back in the seventeenth century, and now it had retained some of its old forts. “All wood,” Volzhenko said as he sipped wine from his tin mug, his legs stretched across the aisle between our benches, and his large boots propped comfortably next to me. “Nothing really modern there. There’s a garrison though, all Cossacks, I think.”

“That’s good,” I said. “What are they doing there?”

Volzhenko shrugged. “Guarding the border, I suppose.”

“They are not near the border.”

“Somewhat near.”

“Not near enough to guard it.”

Volzhenko smiled. I noticed he looked particularly young when he grinned like that — lopsided, showing a chipped canine tooth on the left side of his mouth, his faintly freckled nose wrinkling. I frowned, thinking that if there was to be a war, Volzhenko would certainly be sent to fight and likely to die. Eugenia’s words floated back in my memory — her lamentations for her brother who was killed in the previous war, the helpless cry of those who were left alive and had to carry the burden of remembering the dead. “I’m sure if there’s a war with China, the Krasnoyarsk garrison will be there in spades. When we get there, I’ll take you to one of the Buryat teahouses — I swear, their tea is the strangest thing I had ever seen. They make it with lard.”

“That doesn’t sound like something I would want to try.”

Volzhenko laughed, slapped his knee for emphasis. “You have to. For the experience, see? It’s not as awful as it sounds.”

“Right.”

“Well, it is pretty awful,” Volzhenko admitted. “But you have to have experiences like this, you know.” He removed his feet from my bench and leaned forward, elbows in his knees. “This is one thing I believe. You know how Father in church, how he always tells you about your soul, and how he’s always yapping about soul this and soul that?”

I nodded. “I know, although I haven’t been to church in a while.”

“No matter, you remember. And how they always make it sound like your soul is something you always have, how you get it when you’re still in your mother’s belly and have it till you die, and how it is always the same and unchanged?”

“That’s the long and the short of it, yes.”

“But I think they are wrong, and I don’t care if they say it’s heretical and such. I think that we are born only with a capacity for the soul, and the things we experience and learn and think about, this is what makes the soul up — the layers of everything. I heard there was that Father, a priest in Moscow who wanted to take a picture of God, so he bought this contraption for taking daguerreotypes, and took pictures of everything — his room, trees, streets, birds, just everything around him. And he took them all on the same plate, because he hoped that all these images one on top of each other, all of them translucent, would make a portrait of God.”

“Did it work?”

He laughed and ruffled his hair, his hand traveling a familiar path from the back of his neck to his forehead. “I don’t know; I doubt it. But I think it works with us — we, people, we are just cameras, and every image, everything we see and experience becomes us, becomes our soul, all of them layered and translucent… ” His voice trailed off as his gaze grew remote, directed at something far away, beyond the walls of the train carriage.

“That’s beautiful,” I whispered, entranced by the delicate elegance of his heresy. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher.”

“I took a course at the seminary in Moscow,” he said. “The rotmistr, bless him, persuaded me when I was still young enough to listen that one didn’t have to serve God by repeating the most trivial babblings of his most unimaginative servants.” Like the rotmistr, Volzhenko possessed the valuable gift of changing his diction to suit circumstance. I was starting to feel I was in a den of shape-shifters of a most peculiar kind — those who changed from simple and uneducated bumpkins to sophisticated gentlemen in a wink of an eye.

“It’s hard to imagine you a priest,” I said.

He nodded. “I was going to join the black clergy too — to become a monk. White, the parish priests, are too well fed and too content with their wives and children and being pillars of the community. The monks at least have a greater purpose than keeping their belly full. Monks… one could become an archimandrite. But yes, higher purpose is what I wanted.”

“None higher that the cavalry,” I said.

“You said a mouthful there, Menshov. Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look.”

“Look who’s talking.”

He laughed. “Fair enough. What I learned in the seminary — that was all nothing. I really started to develop true understanding when I started listening to the rotmistr.”

“I know. He is your teacher, prophet, and God.”

Volzhenko did not laugh but grew serious instead. “You need to talk to him more, maybe you’ll understand what a great man he is.”

The rotmistr towered two benches over, so we took our wine and migrated to sit next to him, disrupting his whispered and, by all appearances, emotional discussion with Petrovsky. If the rotmistr was indeed a messiah, he couldn’t have wished for more dedicated disciples than his cornets.

“Sit with us, you two,” he addressed us when we approached. “I was just telling the dolt here why I joined the military.”

“The Napoleonic war?” I guessed. “Lost your father in it?”

“This, my young poruchik, is all coincidental although not wrong,” he replied. “But the real reason is that unless you die with a weapon in your hand — and what is a better way to ensure such manner of death than joining the military? — you cannot reach Valhalla.”

“Valhalla,” I repeated. The rotmistr appeared to be one of those rare individuals who managed to combine a perfectly traditional upbringing with unexpected paganism of the school that greatly exaggerated the nobility and acumen of our Scandinavian neighbors, but I was at least willing to give the rotmistr a chance to talk about his unorthodoxies, since we had a few hours until arrival to Krasnoyarsk.

“Valhalla,” the rotmistr said and sobered up visibly. “Not because of what you think, Menshov — not just weapons or the flying wenches… whatever they are called.”