Having asked for the window to be opened, the nuns faced one another apparently in telepathic communication. They spoke not a word for the whole journey, making it embarrassing when we needed to approach the window to buy something from a platform vendor if the train stopped at a station. These vendors lacked the smoothness of the Kiev hawkers, but they were just as noisy. Bare-footed peasant women offered us cakes or fresh milk, and their grandfathers brought up samovars on trolleys and described in husky bellows the refreshing properties of their tea. Children were there in plenty, rarely selling anything, merely begging us for a few kopeks. The nuns would sit with their feet just above the floor of the train, their skirts arranged to cover their toes, while we did everything in our power to avoid contact with them (all, that is, save Shura). It was Shura, half in the carriage after some panting expedition along the platform, who found his hand placed firmly in one’s lap and apologised. Later, in the corridor, he murmured some crude speculation when they did not appear to be listening, wondering at their ‘impossible capacity’. I scarcely understood him, but the naval officers, who had overheard, enjoyed the joke. I blushed. The Greek priest laughed uncomprehendingly along with the sailors, while the man in the astrakhan collar grumbled into his copy of Neeva - The Cornfield - magazine.
Shura got into conversation with the Cossack, who seemed to like him. The captain said he was a supply-officer going to Odessa to arrange for certain provisions and equipment for his unit. He could not, of course, tell us anything more. He was amused when I mentioned that my father had also been a Cossack. Shura laughed, too, telling me to be quiet. Claims of that sort, he said with a look at the captain, could get me into trouble. The navy men were all the way from Moscow, where they had been on leave, and were full of tales about the delights of Russia’s second great city. These delights were hinted at with looks and whispers to Shura. He was only a little older than me but seemed far more worldly, understanding the full meaning of the innuendoes, made obscure so as not to shock the nuns who, Shura swore, were nonetheless listening avidly.
The good-natured Cossack was soon offering vodka which was accepted by the priest, refused by the gentleman in the hat, ignored by the nuns. He pushed his woolly shapka on the back of his grey head and unbuttoned his kaftan to reveal a shirt embroidered in black and red. He had blue breeches and soft leather boots and seemed at once more free and more of a soldier than any others on the train. At our request he showed us his long sabre, his shorter dagger and his pistol, but allowed us to handle none of them. Of the sabre he said ‘it must never be drawn, save to be blooded’, though he displayed an inch or two so that we could see the engraving (in Georgian by the look of it) on the hilt. ‘These blades,’ he said, ‘are so sharp that a moth settling on them would find itself cut in half before it realised anything had happened. It would only find out when it tried to fly away again!’
I was considerably impressed. I said that my father must have had a similar sword. He asked me jovially to which sech my father had belonged. I said the Zaporizhskaya. He asked me how old my father was. I said I did not know. He asked me if I was sure Father had not been an inogorodi. I did not understand him. This was a Cossack word, he explained, for Great Russians living amongst them. The word meant, more or less, outsider. I assured him that my father had never been an outsider. He had served with a Cossack regiment in St Petersburg. He asked which one. I told him that I did not know. Again he laughed, evidently pleased that anyone should claim Cossack blood, even if they did not, as he believed, possess it.
I became agitated and insisted that I told the truth. I recall Shura saying flatly: ‘His dad’s dead, see.’ At which the Cossack softened and patted me on the knee, holding his scabbarded sabre out towards me and smiling. ‘Don’t worry, little one. I believe you. We’ll soon be riding side by side, you and me. Killing Jews and Germans willy-nilly, eh?’ The naval officers (and the echoing priest) joined in his laughter, as did my cousin, and I felt a happy warmth. The train journey remains in my mind as one of the most comradely times of my life. The Cossack’s name was Captain Bikadorov.
Shura asked the naval officers how they thought the War was going. What was the atmosphere in Moscow? They said everyone was confident, from the Tsar downwards. Our allies were predicting that ‘the Russian steamroller will crush the Germans in weeks.’ Tannenberg had been an untypical set back due to our over-confidence. We had learned our lesson over Japan and were now the strongest we had ever been. We would play the game of war more cautiously but more effectually. ‘Particularly,’ one of them pointed out, ‘now that Japan is our ally!’ This created further trumpetings from the gentleman in the homburg.
‘And the Turks?’ I said. ‘When shall they be beaten and the Tsar attend mass in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople?’
‘Just let them start something now and they’re as good as finished,’ said Captain Bikadorov. ‘Though there isn’t a better enemy than your Turk.’ It would be good to free ‘Tsargrad’ (Constantinople) but it was the French he was unsure about. They had gone soft, since Napoleon. They had already been beaten over and over again by the Germans. Moreover he was not sure that the English were reliable allies ‘since they’re almost Germans themselves.’ But the French were the real weak link. The naval officers agreed that in their experience of the French they had met in Odessa ‘the frog-eater is as effete as he is grandiose.’ It was impossible, the older one added, for a Frenchman to think of himself as mortal. The moment the conception impinged (usually when the real fighting started) he became outraged. ‘They are not cowards. They are merely possessed of a divine pomposity!’
The gentleman behind Neeva rose, bowed to the naval officer, and said that he was a native of Odessa and that he had the honour of bearing a French name. His grandfather had been French. He sat down again, raised his Neeva, then, as if upon reflection, lowered it to add: ‘Napoleon was defeated not by our soldiers, my friends, but by our snow. And for our snow we have only God to thank.’