Hubert Mingarelli
FOUR SOLDIERS
1
I AM FROM Dorovitsa in the province of Vyatka. When my parents died I left Dorovitsa and moved to Kalyazin, by the river, where I worked for a man named Ovanes.
I harnessed felled tree trunks to a horse to transport them from the riverbank to the sawmill. Then I tied them to a winch and lowered them one by one to Ovanes’ band saw. In the evening I fed the horse with oats and spread out straw for him.
I rented a room from Ovanes at 16 Svevo Street. My window overlooked the river. I had a bed and a rug. I built myself a cabinet where I kept my belongings.
I was alone in the world and in the evening I watched the river as I ate. There were flat-bottomed boats moving upstream. Their hulls gleamed in the setting sun. On the bridge the shadows were like ghosts.
When I left Kalyazin, Ovanes bought the bed, the rug and the cabinet from me. I took the train to join the Red Army and I fought on the Romanian front. We marched a long way. We ate cold kasha and dried fish and we slept in ditches.
I was in Dudorov’s regiment, and in the summer we fled from the Romanians. It was very hot. The cavalry kicked up clouds of red dust. The ambulance and food-truck drivers yelled at us to get out of the way. The officers stopped to look behind them, hands shielding their eyes from the sun, as if they’d forgotten something.
Then I met Pavel. He was heating up some water behind a wall, hidden from the road. He’d stabbed a hole in a tin can with his knife and he was holding it above the flames. Our regiment continued to march along the road, kicking up dust.
When he took some tea out of his pocket, my thirst and the sight of the tea emboldened me. I called out to him: ‘Hey, comrade!’
He beckoned me over. I sat across from him and we drank the tea together in silence. We were in the same regiment. When the noise from the road had died down completely, I said to him: ‘The Romanians will be here soon.’
We set off, and caught up with the tail end of the column. An officer on horseback was circling around the tired soldiers, trying to hurry them up. He’d put a handkerchief under his cap to protect the back of his neck from the sun. He was red from the dust and he held his revolver against his stomach. He kept saying, over and over: ‘I know you’re tired, but don’t make me do it. I swear by Saint Sophia, don’t make me. Keep going! Don’t slow down!’
And as he said this he moved the revolver from his stomach and held it in his fingertips as if it were burning hot. He was a young sub-lieutenant and he looked on the verge of tears. Finally, a soldier who was pulling a mule by its bridle said to him: ‘What do you want from us? We’re marching, we’re marching. Put your revolver away. No one’s making you do anything.’
The officer yelled: ‘What did you say to me?’
The soldier lowered his head. The officer went up to him, brandishing his revolver. He put the barrel of the gun to the mule’s neck and pulled the trigger. It fell forwards. The soldier had wrapped the bridle around his wrist and he fell onto the road too, dragged down by the mule and its load.
The officer stood above them, his revolver pointed at the sky. In a rage, he screamed: ‘No one’s making me do anything, eh? You feel better now?’
The soldier was lying on his back, covered in the mule’s blood. He stared darkly at the officer and said in a cold voice: ‘Bastard.’
The soldier tried to grab his rifle but it was trapped under his back. He pushed the mule away to free himself and picked up his knife. So Pavel and I both ran towards the ditch, hurtling down into it and coming out the other side, and then into a field to get away from the road.
It was a sloping field, the grass cut short.
When we reached the high part of the field, we could see the column stretched out all the way to the horizon. This was exactly what we wanted: not to lose sight of the others, to keep marching eastward with them to escape the Romanians, but without having to deal with all the troubles on the road.
We paused to get our breath back.
It felt suddenly hot and I took out my tobacco.
We heard a bird singing from behind a hedge.
We spat out the remains of the dust from our throats. In the distance they were turning on the headlights of the ambulances and trucks.
We looked all around us.
Then we set off again, smoking our cigarettes in the evening light, and I imagined we were returning from a hunting expedition. Pavel looked peaceful as he walked. He could sense which way to go even in the darkness. Sometimes he would sniff the air. After a while he said to me: ‘We’ll join them on the road tomorrow. No one will notice we were ever gone.’
‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘no one will notice.’
It was a clear night except for one dark strip of cloud on the horizon and we spread out our blankets under some mulberry trees.
At dawn we rejoined the regiment, and as we were approaching the road Pavel said: ‘Let’s stay together.’
‘Yeah.’
We continued our retreat from the Romanians and in September we travelled to Galicia in trucks.
One night in Galicia, Pavel took a table and two chairs out of a house and we played dice in the middle of the street. A big Uzbek from our company stood at a distance and watched us play. He had broad shoulders. He was built like a lumberjack and sometimes he seemed a bit slow.
Pavel told him to come over. He asked him if he had any tobacco. The Uzbek did, and he wanted to gamble it at dice. He went to fetch another chair from the house and we played a dozen games. Pavel won all his tobacco and the Uzbek stayed sitting at the table, looking miserable. Pavel watched him with a smile, and in the end he gave him back half of his tobacco. The Uzbek was very grateful. He looked so happy now that you’d have thought he was the one who’d won every game.
When we went back into the house to sleep, the Uzbek went off to find his belongings and his rifle. He moved in with us and we didn’t object. The next day he lit a fire and we made a soup with his rations. While Pavel and I ate, still wrapped up in our blankets, and the daylight came in through the window, the big Uzbek stared at us with his blank idiot’s expression and we realised that he wanted more than anything to stay with us. When Pavel asked him his name, he blushed and suddenly he didn’t look like an idiot any more. ‘Kyabine!’ he boomed.
That day, the Poles took the village back from us. They ambushed us near Jarosław and things started going badly for us again.
In October it snowed and we waited in a factory for our orders. When they arrived, our commander brought us together and told us that we had to leave the front and retreat into the forest. There, we would build huts and wait for the spring. So Pavel, Kyabine and I wandered all over the factory, looking for anything that might be useful in the forest, and we found a rolled-up tarpaulin.
We left the next day. Kyabine carried the heavy tarp roll over his shoulder. On the way we saw the Poles again. More than once we had to run to avoid being caught by gunfire, and Kyabine never once let go of the tarpaulin.
We reached the forest in early November and marched deep inside it. It was very cold and the wind blew relentlessly. We wrapped ourselves up in our blankets, covering everything but our eyes. The whole company advanced in a vast silence. Our mules and our horses breathed out clouds of steam.
Pavel walked at the back of the column and said nothing because in his head he was drawing up the plans for our hut.
It started to snow again. Kyabine walked heavily next to me. He breathed with his mouth open. Sometimes he shook himself to knock the snow from his shoulders.
Pavel caught up with us and he told us that he had the hut clear in his mind now. And the best thing, he thought, would be to have four of us to build it. We told him he was right. We had a discussion to decide who we would ask to join us. We gave our opinions on lots of men in the company. Finally we went to ask Sifra Nedatchin. He was very young and a good shot, and he owned cavalry boots. We’d never heard of him having any trouble with anyone about anything.