Quartet for the End of Time (16 page)

When the first soldier came in sight he paused, his weapon raised. He spoke—a single phrase—once more in that gloriously unidentifiable tongue. Then four or five men appeared behind him, their weapons also raised. They stood facing me like that for some time, saying nothing now—not even among themselves—just regarding me in bleak surprise. What a sight I must have been! Only half clothed, my chest bared and still dark with bruises where I had been beaten not long before, my hair grown matted and long. Then there was the pure desperation of my posture: my hands raised above my head, and the wild note with which I had announced my presence—a sound which still must have lingered in the air.

I tried to steady my voice as best I could before I spoke again. American, I said, lowering one of my arms and pointing to my chest. American, I said again. Slowly, the Czechs lowered their guns. The word having achieved, in this way, a welcome result, I repeated it again and again. It was as if it were the only word I knew. American. American, I said. As if
that
were the prayer I had tried to utter beside the old man only minutes before. A prayer that had sounded so empty then, as if it had not existed at all.

A
ND INDEED, WHEN
I directed the soldiers to the old man's hut not long after, having managed, with the help of one among them who could understand and even speak a little English, to indicate that I was not alone—when I pressed my face again into the darkness under the sagging bed and called out to the old man—I received no reply. My words echoed against a profound stillness. And when we hauled the old man out from beneath the bed, it appeared as though he had already been dead a long time. The Czechs looked at me and then at the old man—confused. Just a moment ago—I said. I left him, but just for a moment. The English-speaking soldier now appeared even more confused than the rest. This man, he said, finally, has been dead for a week. I could not deny that this appeared to be so. But I also knew that when it came to the interior matters at the heart of all questions of life and death, things never were, or would remain for long, exactly how they appeared. It was, however, useless to press the issue. There was nothing to be done about it now. The space and time by which I was separated from the old man was now so profound, and so unbreachable, that it did not matter in human terms if it was measured in decades or hours. Also, the confusion with which the soldiers had initially regarded me had turned quickly to concern. It is difficult to trust a man who does not understand the difference between the living and the dead. I closed the old man's eyes, which had until then continued to peer glassily into the distance—as if still hoping to recover something from that void—and turned my attention as best I could to the living. I asked for only one thing—that we bury the old man, with our own hands. Still puzzled, the Czechs agreed to my request. Two of them departed, returning several minutes later with a broken shovel and a hoe. It was funny to think that those implements, as well as who knew what else, had been lying exposed in the dust all that time: ready to hand. We carried the old man a little distance from the town, to its western-facing edge. I could have carried him myself, and indeed it would have been easier, less awkward to do so, even with how weak I had become. Despite my battered chest and painful,
stiffened leg, it would have been nothing to lift the old man on my shoulder and carry him out to the western limit of the demolished town. His weight on my shoulder would have had no more meaning than a perched bird. But even with how eager the Czechs were to depart, we all somehow seemed to agree that it would have been indecorous to carry the old man simply slung over a shoulder, and so we proceeded through the village, stepping over the awkwardly thrust beams and bones that interrupted our course, with the old man's body stretched between us.

A shallow hole was dug. It did not look sufficient in depth to cover anything at all, let alone a man, but when the old man's body was laid within it we found that it was deep enough. We covered his body with the extracted dirt, and the Czechs bowed their heads and one of them spoke a few words that—appropriately, I thought, for the occasion— I did not understand. But when the soldiers began to move off in a group, back toward the village from where we would shortly depart, I turned back and traced a single word in the dirt over the old man's grave: P
AIX
. A word that we both, to greater and lesser extents, now understood. That, indeed, for a brief time we had shared. Then I turned and followed the Czechs and we made our way back to the railway line, which I would find was not at all far from the little village. There, the Czechs had been established for many months. They had known the village well—though not, until very recently, of its devastation. They had come to investigate only after their young spy—a hired boy of twelve or thirteen—had failed to arrive at the appointed hour.

E
VEN IN THE SHORT
time the Czech soldiers had been away, their camp had shifted slightly—a little farther south of the line, and for a moment, before spotting the relocated camp in the distance, we turned in circles in the spot where it had once stood. I sensed in the soldiers only the vaguest surprise that of what they had expected to find there was now only the most impermanent trace. Later, we were informed that the move, which had indeed been slight, had occurred the evening
prior after a particularly unwelcome “delivery” from General Kalmykoff. It was the habit of this general to throw the corpses of horses or Yakut ponies into Czech or American camps from his trains as he sped through. When one particularly fetid corpse had interrupted the Czechs' evening meal, they had disbanded their little camp and relocated to a safer distance.

Kalmykoff was another legend in Siberia at that time. Unlike Semenoff or even Kolchak, who had positioned themselves outside of the law, Kalmykoff had brazenly positioned himself above it. He had already tried and hanged two members of the Swedish Red Cross, for one example. But despite this, American money and troops poured in to support him. Like it or not, we were on the same side. We sat in camps on the railway lines Kalmykoff blazed through, and were sent in columns to the villages to rout out and kill whatever he had not already destroyed. And we did this. We even began to enjoy it. Death got under our fingernails. It tingled, clinging to the ends of the hairs on our forearms and the insides of our noses. Anything to break up that dull expanse of time, which otherwise threatened to destroy us. Yes, there existed among us a boredom so great that it was a heavy exertion just to bear it. Some of us were lost on account of it—beyond any mere swapping of allegiances. One man going mad, another torn to threads in front of our eyes. Still another's life leaking out of his mouth in such a slow vermilion red that it was impossible to imagine it had existed inside him all of that time. Inside a man you either liked or disliked, it didn't matter. I remember one particular case, a man named Rabinovitch, who had cried into his soup for no apparent reason on several occasions, but who, when approached—when offered the slightest brotherly commiseration—would rear up, his eyes flanked suddenly on either side of his head and his hard fists prancing in front of him like the hooves of a horse. There was not, in the gesture, any seeming object—just a desperate disavowal and distrust of human contact of any kind. You might think, from his name, that he was a Jew, but he said he wasn't. He hated Jews, he said. As well as Negroes and Italians. It was his fear, see. I noticed it, and he noticed
I noticed, so he hated me, too. I would stand near him sometimes just to feel the air change between us. Just to feel the way his breath would suddenly stiffen in his throat. Outwardly, nothing or nobody otherwise scared him. He would go hurling himself headlong into a fight as if he were as hell-bent on destroying himself as he was on destroying the enemy. He bragged a lot, too. About how many Bolsheviks he'd killed, and how many had been the result of hand-to-hand. And no one told him, as many of us no doubt thought quietly to ourselves: Anyone could kill one Bolshevik or a hundred on the ground. They were kids, nearly all of them. Less properly outfitted for combat than even we ourselves had been our first winter when we arrived and our munitions, along with our winter gear, did not. It was only because it took so much energy not to freeze or starve to death that winter that we didn't die of boredom. But that was the way it was for the Bolsheviks all the time. It's a miracle they survived at all, let alone drove out everyone else. But that's just it. They knew how to survive. They had something over on every single one of us in that respect. Jap, American, and even Kolchak soldier. It was not only death that had gotten under their fingernails and into the hairs inside their noses, and lungs. The country itself had infected them. The sand and the grit and the cold had got under their skin. It made them part desert, part air— which was, after all, all that country was. That was why they were so supreme when it came to fighting out there. It was where they—very literally—came from, and would return. You would be reminded of this fact often—of how ultimately foreign and dispensable you were to them—and to that landscape. Especially when a shell whistled nearby and then exploded in a way that made you pause as if out of respect for the shape of your own death, which had just a moment before been brilliantly illuminated beside you.

They dropped gorgeous shells. Shells which hung suspended in the air for whole minutes sometimes, lighting up everything below and making you want to stop and look up and just wonder at it all for a while. Just as stars will sometimes take you unawares so that you begin to ask yourself—not with your head or with your tongue, both of
which have long ago given up such impossible questions, but with some part of your heart that never will—what is a star? What is this rock, suspended for some minutes, beneath them? And what am I— suspended, most briefly, there? Those are the questions, anyway, that would spring into my own heart some nights when we stood outside and saw the Bolsheviks, in their true element, alive and raining down on us from the air.

But then, I have not finished telling you about Rabinovitch, and how, for all his talk, he got blown apart just like anyone else might have by a Bolshevik shell. About how when I ran to him I found the upper half of his body at a distance of several yards from his lower half, and his eyes wild in that way, like the way they'd looked when he got fighting mad—as if he had eyes, yes, like a fish or a horse, on either side of his head. I can't say why, but as I knelt beside him, I remember I felt more remorse for his passing than I ever had before, for any man. When I saw his life, in vermilion red—I never saw a life so bright as his—bleed out from between his teeth, I felt a terrific and unassailable sense of sorrow and loss. Maybe it was those eyes—the way they bulged, like gills, on the side of his head—or the way that I detested him. His commonness, and petty cruelty—the sort that did not take on the guise of war, but was always somehow, instead, personal and small, utterly his own. Whatever it was, it opened within me, as I knelt beside his diminishing body, his life escaping in vermilion red between his teeth, a profound pity, which I will never forget. It made me weep—real tears streaming down my face—as all around me the beautiful Bolshevik shells streamed like the supreme mysteries of heaven and hell to the earth.

I told myself then that it was not Rabinovitch I mourned. I could not make sense of that. It was the old man, I thought—for whom I had never properly grieved. It had been all that I could do, after all, to follow the Czechs back to the railway line, and not long after that I was returned to my own camp—another surprisingly short distance, among all those distances—where my company, battered but intact, had remained. Almost immediately things settled back into the old pattern, as if I had never been away. As if I had never been buried alive, or had light scoured
into my eyes, or fed an old man like a bird from a spoon, or uttered clumsy prayers into the darkness that had separated me from him—a space that was at once infinitely vast, and yet at the same time, somehow, too small—beneath his sagging bed.

As I have said—the company had lost only two soldiers in the capture of the
Destroyer
, and my unexpected arrival brought that number down to just a single one. As I recounted what bits and pieces of my story I could (they surfaced tentatively, at first, were hardly narratable—I struggled especially with sorting my impressions into some semblance of chronological time), my return was proclaimed a miracle, and it revived in all of us the belief or hope, or whatever it was, that the men we had lost to that great, empty, unconquerable terrain—to that unwinnable, indeed, unfightable war—were not really lost, but had only been absorbed into other as yet unrecounted, or unrecountable, stories. That they would someday return to us, just as I had done, and make sense of their absence in some—however unbelievable—way. Or, if they did not, it was only because the story had become, finally, too complex—too ultimately removed from our own realities. It was impossible to know how deeply this belief, if that is what it was, penetrated—or if it was only something (an object, like a doorstop) that we wedged into the small opening that revealed itself sometimes as the absence of any sort of belief at all.

Whatever the case, there persisted in the atmosphere of the camp a rare sense of triumph in the capture of the
Destroyer
. A sense that had been only partially dampened by the train having been promptly returned to its owner. Kolchak's Washington supporters had, without too much trouble, succeeded in persuading the government that there was nothing for it but to give Semenoff back his train. You see, the idea was that whatever Kolchak's men—including General Semenoff—were doing, the Bolsheviks were doing (or would be doing, given the chance) much worse. The official report was that they were the greasiest type of Russian Jew we were all too familiar with in America. That many of them, having spent time in the Red-hot zones of either New York or Chicago, had returned to their native country,
having absorbed every one of the worst phases of American civilization, and without the least knowledge or racial understanding of what was meant by the word so dear to, and so inseparable from, what it meant to be an American:
liberty
. It was my experience, to the contrary, that the Bolsheviks—being the only ones who seemed to have any idea at all of what it was they were fighting for—were the most honest of all of us over there.