Through the freed space formed by the breach, access to the insurgents was opened in the taiga. New crowds of refugees came pouring in to join them. This influx of peaceful country people was not limited to direct relations of the partisans. Frightened by the punitive measures of the Whites, all the neighboring peasantry moved from their places, abandoning their hearths and naturally drawing towards the peasant forest army, in which they saw their defense.
But in the camp they were trying to get rid of their own hangers-on. The partisans could not be bothered with the newcomers and strangers. They went out to meet the fugitives, stopped them on the road, and turned them aside, towards the mill in the Chilim clearing, on the Chilimka River. This cleared space, formed from the farmsteads that had grown up around the mill, was called the Steadings. The plan was to set up a winter camp for the refugees in these Steadings and store the provisions allotted to them.
While these decisions were being made, things were taking their own course, and the camp command could not keep up with them.
The victory over the enemy had complications. Having let the partisan group that had beaten them pass into their territory, the Whites closed in and restored their breached line. For the unit that got to the rear of them and was separated from their own forces, the return to the taiga after their foray was cut off.
Something was also going wrong with the refugee women. It was easy to miss them in the dense, impassable thicket. Those sent to meet them lost track of the fleeing women and came back without them, while the women in a spontaneous flow moved deep into the taiga, performing miracles of resourcefulness on their way, felling trees on both sides, building bridges and log paths, making roads.
All this went contrary to the intentions of the forest headquarters and turned Liberius’s plans and projects upside down.
5
That was what he was raging about as he stood with Svirid not far from the high road, a small stretch of which passed through the taiga in that place. His officers were standing on the road, arguing about whether or not to cut the telegraph lines that ran along it. The last decisive word belonged to Liberius, and he was chattering away with a wandering trapper. Liberius waved his hand to let them know that he would come to them presently, that they should wait and not go away.
For a long time, Svirid had been unable to stomach the condemnation and shooting of Vdovichenko, guilty of nothing except that his influence rivaled Liberius’s authority and introduced a split in the camp. Svirid wanted to leave the partisans, to live freely by himself as before. But not a chance. He had got himself hired, had sold himself—he would meet the same fate as the executed men if he left the Forest Brotherhood now.
The weather was the most terrible that could be imagined. A sharp, gusty wind carried torn shreds of clouds, dark as flakes of flying soot, low over the earth. Suddenly snow began to pour from them with the convulsive haste of some white madness.
In a moment the distance was covered by a white shroud, the earth was spread with a white sheet. The next moment the sheet burnt up, melted away. The soil appeared, black as coal, as did the black sky drenched from above with the slanting streaks of distant downpours. The earth could not take any more water into itself. In moments of brightening, the clouds parted, as if to air out the sky, windows were opened on high, shot through with a cold, glassy whiteness. The standing water, unabsorbed by the soil, responded from the ground with the same thrust-open casements of puddles and lakes, filled with the same brilliance.
The drizzle slid like smoke over the turpentine-resinous needles of the evergreen forest without penetrating them, as water does not go through oilcloth. The telegraph wires were strung with beadlike raindrops. They hung crowded, one against another, and did not fall.
Svirid was among those who had been sent into the depths of the forest to meet the refugee women. He wanted to tell his chief about what he had witnessed. About the muddle that resulted from the clash of different, equally impracticable orders. About the atrocities committed by the weakest, most despairing part of the horde of women. Young mothers, trudging on foot, carrying bundles, sacks, and nursing babies, losing their milk, run off their feet and crazed, abandoned their children on the road, shook the flour out of the sacks, and turned back. Better a quick death than a long death from starvation. Better the enemy’s hands than the teeth of some beast in the forest.
Others, the stronger ones, gave examples of endurance and courage unknown to men. Svirid had many more things to report. He wanted to warn the chief about the danger of a new insurrection hanging over the camp, more threatening than the one that had been crushed, but found no words, because the impatience of Liberius, who hurried him irritably, completely deprived him of the gift of speech. And Liberius interrupted Svirid every moment, not only because people were waiting for him on the road and nodding and shouting to him, but because in the last two weeks he had been constantly addressed with such considerations and knew all about it.
“Don’t hurry me, comrade chief. I’m no talker as it is. The words stick in my teeth, I choke on them. What am I saying to you? Go to the refugee train, talk some sense into these runaway women. It’s all gone haywire with them there. I ask you, what is it with us, ‘All against Kolchak!’ or female slaughter?”
“Make it short, Svirid. See, they’re calling me. Don’t lay it on thick.”
“Now there’s this demon woman, Zlydarikha, deuce knows who the wench is. Sign me up to look after the cattle, she says, I’m a vitalinarian …”
“Veterinarian, Svirid.”
“Like I said—a vitalinarian, to treat animals in their vitals. But now you can forget your cattle, she’s turned out to be a heretic witch from the Old Believers,2 serves cow liturgies, leads the refugee women astray. It’s your own fault, she says, see where you get when you go running after the red flag with your skirts pulled up. Next time don’t do it.”
“I don’t understand what refugees you’re talking about. Our partisan wives, or some others?”
“Others, sure enough. The new ones, from different parts.”
“But there was an order for them to go to the Steadings, to the Chilim mill. How did they wind up here?”
“The Steadings, sure. There’s nothing but ashes left of your Steadings, it’s all burned down. The mill and the whole place is in cinders. They got to Chilimka and saw a barren waste. Half of them lost their minds, howled away, and went back to the Whites. The others swung around and are coming here, a whole train of them.”
“Through the thicket, through the bog?”
“Ever heard of axes and saws? Our men were sent to protect them—they helped out. Some twenty miles of road have been cut. With bridges, the hellcats. Talk about wenches after that! They do such things, the shrews, it takes you three days to figure it out.”
“A fine goose you are! Twenty miles of road, you jackass, what’s there to be glad about? It plays right into Vitsyn and Quadri’s hands. The way into the taiga is open. They can roll in their artillery.”
“Cover them. Cover them. Send a covering detachment, and that’s the end of it.”
“By God, I could have thought of that without you.”
6
The days grew shorter. By five o’clock it was getting dark. Towards dusk Yuri Andreevich crossed the road in the place where Liberius had wrangled with Svirid the other day. The doctor was heading for the camp. Near the clearing and the mound on which the rowan tree grew, considered the camp’s boundary marker, he heard the mischievous, perky voice of Kubarikha, his rival, as he jokingly called the quack wisewoman. His competitor, with loud shrieks, was pouring out something merry, rollicking, probably some folk verses. There were listeners. She was interrupted by bursts of sympathetic laughter, men’s and women’s. Afterwards everything became quiet. They all probably left.