Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

I

IN the spring of 1830 Pan Jaczewski, who was living on his ancestral estate of Rozanka, received a visit from his late friend’s only son, the young Josif Migurski. Jaczewski was an old man of sixty-five with a wide forehead, broad shoulders and a broad chest and long white whiskers on his brickred face, and he was a patriot from the time of the Second Partition of Poland. As a young man he had served alongside Migurski the elder under the banner of Kosciuszko and he detested with all the strength of his patriotic soul the ‘whore of the Apocalypse’, as he called her, the Empress Catherine II, and her loathsome, traitorous lover Poniatowski, and he likewise believed in the restoration of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania,¹ just as he believed at night that the sun would rise again by the next morning. In 1812 he had commanded a regiment in the army of Napoleon, whom he worshipped. Napoleon’s downfall grieved him but he did not abandon the hope of a restoration of the Polish kingdom, were it only a mutilated one. The opening of the Sejm² in Warsaw by Alexander I revived his hopes, but the Holy Alliance and the triumph of the general reaction across the whole of Europe, and the petty tyranny of the Grand Duke Constantine put off indefinitely any realization of his cherished longings … After 1825 Jaczewski made his home in the country, spending his time without interruption at Rozanka and occupying himself with farming, hunting, and the reading of newspapers and letters, by which means he continued ardently to follow political events in his homeland. He had taken as his second wife a beautiful but impoverished woman from the szlachta,³ and the marriage was not a happy one. He neither loved nor respected this second wife of his: he felt her to be an encumbrance and treated her harshly and rudely, as if her were punishing her for his own mistake in remarrying. He had no children by his second wife. From the first marriage there were two daughters: the elder, Wanda, a stately beauty who was aware of the value of her attractions and was bored by country life; and the younger, Albina, her father’s darling, a lively, bony little girl with curly blonde hair and, like her father, large widely-spaced sparkling blue eyes.

Albina was fifteen years old at the time of Josif Migurski’s visit. Migurski had in fact stayed with the Jaczewskis before as a student, in Wilno where they spent the winters, and had paid court to Wanda, but now he was coming to visit them in the country for the first time as a grown up and independent young man. The arrival of young Migurski was agreeable to all the inhabitants of Rozanka. The old man liked Josif Migurski because he reminded him of his friend, Josif’s father, of the time when they were both young, and of how they had talked together with great passion and the rosiest hopes about the current revolutionary ferment – and not only in Poland but also abroad, whence he had just returned. Pani Jaczewska liked him because when there were guests present old Jaczewski restrained himself and did not scold her for everything in his usual manner. Wanda liked him because she was sure that Migurski had come for her sake and that he intended to propose to her: she was preparing to accept, but she intended, as she expressed it to herself, to ‘lui tenir la dragée haute’.⁴ Albina was glad because everyone else was glad. Wanda was not the only one convinced that Migurski had come with the intention of asking for her hand. The entire household, from old Jaczewski down to nanny Ludwika, thought so, although nobody said anything.

And they were correct. Migurski had arrived with that intention, but at the end of a week he left again, somehow confused and downcast, without having made any proposal. They were all surprised by this unexpected departure and no one, with the exception of Albina, understood the reason for it. Albina knew that the cause of his strange departure was she herself.

The whole time he had been at Rozanka she had noticed that Migurski seemed particularly animated and cheerful only when he was with her. He treated her like a child, joking with her and teasing her, but with her feminine intuition she sensed that underneath this treatment of her there lay not the attitude of an adult towards a child, but that of a man towards a woman. She could see this in the admiring expression and affectionate smile with which he greeted her whenever she came into the room and took his leave of her when she left. She had no clear awareness of what was happening, but his attitude towards her made her feel happy, and she unconsciously did her best to please him. In fact anything she could possibly have done would have pleased him. And so when he was present she did everything with a special kind of excitement. He was pleased when she ran races with her beautiful greyhound and it jumped up and licked her flushed, radiant face; he was pleased when at the slightest pretext she broke into loud and infectious laughter; he was pleased when, continuing her merry laughter in the expression of her eyes, she put on a serious face to listen to the Catholic priest’s boring homily; he was pleased when, with exceptional accuracy and humour, she mimicked first her old nanny, then a drunken neighbour, and then Migurski himself, switching in an instant from the depiction of one to the depiction of the next. Most of all he was pleased by her enthusiastic joie de vivre. It was just as though she had only just realized the full charm of life and was hastening to enjoy it to the utmost. He liked this special joie de vivre of hers, and this joie de vivre was aroused and heightened especially when she was aware that it was delightful to him. And so it was that Albina alone was aware why Migurski, who had come to propose to Wanda, had gone away without doing so. Although she could not have brought herself to tell anybody and did not confess it directly even to herself, in the depths of her soul she knew that he had wanted to fall in love with her sister, but had actually fallen in love with her, Albina. Albina was greatly astonished at this, counting herself totally insignificant in comparison with the clever, well-educated and beautiful Wanda, but she could not help knowing that it was so and she could not help rejoicing in the fact, because she herself had come to love Migurski with all the strength of her soul, to love him as people only love for the first, the only time in their lives.

II

At the end of the summer the newspapers brought the news of the July Revolution in Paris. After that news began to arrive of impending disorders in Warsaw. With a mixture of fear and hope Jaczewski awaited with every post news of the assassination of Constantine and the beginning of a revolution. At last in November the news arrived at Rozanka – first of the attack on the Belvedere Palace and the flight of the Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich; then that the Sejm had pronounced that the Romanov dynasty had been deprived of the Polish throne and that Chlopicki had been proclaimed dictator and the Polish people were once more free.

The insurrection had not yet reached Rozanka, but all the inhabitants followed its progress, awaiting its arrival in their home region and making ready for it. Old Jaczewski corresponded with an acquaintance of long ago who was one of the leaders of the insurrection, received a number of secretive Jewish commercial agents not on economic but on revolutionary business, and prepared to join the insurrection when the time should be right. Pani Jaczewska concerned herself as always, but now more than ever, with her husband’s material comforts, and by that very fact managed to irritate him more and more. Wanda sent off her diamonds to a girlfriend in Warsaw so that the money obtained for them could be given to the revolutionary committee. Albina was interested only in what Migurski was doing. She learned via her father that he had enlisted in Dwernicki’s detachment and she tried to find out all she could about that particular detachment. Migurski wrote twice: the first time to inform them that he had joined the army; and the second time, in mid-February, an enthusiastic letter about the Polish victory at the battle of Stoczek, where they had captured six Russian guns and some prisoners.

‘Zwyciestwo polakòw i kleska moskali! Wiwat!’⁵ – he wrote at the conclusion of his letter. Albina was in raptures. She scrutinized the map, trying to work out when and where the decisively defeated Muscovites must be, and she went pale and trembled as her father slowly unsealed the packets brought from the post office. On one occasion her stepmother chanced to go into Albina’s room and came upon her standing before the mirror wearing trousers and a konfederatka.⁶ Albina was getting ready to run away from home in male attire to join the Polish army. Her stepmother went and told her father. Her father summoned Albina to him, and concealing the sympathy, even admiration, he felt for her, delivered a stern rebuke, demanding that she should banish from her head any stupid ideas about taking part in the war. ‘A woman has a different duty to fulfil: to love and comfort those who are sacrificing themselves for the motherland’ – he told her. Now he needed her, she was a joy and a comfort to him; but the time would come when she would be needed in the same way by her husband. He knew how to persuade her. He reminded her that he was lonely and unhappy, and kissed her. She pressed her face against him, hiding the tears, which nevertheless moistened the sleeve of his dressing-gown, and promised him not to undertake anything without his agreement.

III

Only those who have experienced what the Poles experienced after the Partition of Poland and the subjection of one part of the country to the power of the hated Germans and another part to the power of the still more hated Muscovites, can understand the rapture which the Poles felt in the years 1830 and 1831 when, after their earlier unsuccessful attempts to liberate themselves, their new hope of liberation seemed about to be fulfilled. But this hope did not last long. The forces involved were too disproportionate and the attempted revolution was once again crushed. Once again tens of thousands of dumbly obedient Russians were herded into Poland, and at the command first of Diebitsch, then of Paskevich, quite without knowing why they were doing it, proceeded to soak the earth with their own blood and that of their Polish brothers, to crush them, and once more to set in power weak and worthless men who desired neither the freedom of the Poles nor their suppression, but simply and solely the satisfaction of their own greed and their childish vanity.

Warsaw was taken and the independent Polish detachments utterly defeated. Hundreds, thousands of people were shot, beaten with rods, or sent into exile. Among those exiled was young Migurski. His estate was confiscated, and he himself assigned as a common soldier to a line battalion at Uralsk.

The Jaczewskis spent the winter of 1832 at Wilno for the sake of the old man’s health: since 1831 he had been suffering from a heart ailment. Here a letter reached him from Migurski, written in the fortress where he was serving. He wrote that however hard were the experiences he had already gone through and which still awaited him, he rejoiced that it had been his destiny to suffer for his native land, that he did not despair of the sacred cause to which he had devoted part of his life and was ready to devote that which remained, and that if a new opportunity were to present itself tomorrow, then he would act again in precisely the same way. Reading the letter aloud, the old man burst into sobs when he reached this passage and for some time could not go on. In the final section of the letter, which Wanda read out, Migurski wrote that whatever his hopes and longings might have been at the time of his last visit to them, which would ever remain the brightest point of his whole life, now he could not and would not speak further about them.

Wanda and Albina each understood these words in her own way, but neither confided to anyone else exactly how she understood them. Migurski concluded his letter with greetings to all of them: among these he addressed Albina in the same playful tone he had adopted with her at the time of his visit, asking her whether she was still rushing about as she used to, running races with the greyhounds, and mimicking everyone so beautifully. To old Jaczewski he wished good health, to the mother success in household affairs, to Wanda that she should find a husband worthy of her, and to Albina that she should keep her joie de vivre.

IV

Old Jaczewski’s health grew ever worse and in 1833 the whole family went abroad. In Baden Wanda met a wealthy Polish emigré and married him. The old man’s condition rapidly declined, and at the beginning of 1833, while they were still abroad, he died. His wife he had not permitted to follow him, and to the very last he was unable to forgive her for the mistake he had made in marrying her. Pani Jaczewska returned to the country with Albina. The chief interest in Albina’s life was Migurski. In her eyes he was the greatest of heroes and a martyr, to whose service she had resolved to dedicate her own life. Before going abroad she had already struck up a correspondence with him, at first on her father’s behalf, then on her own. After her father’s death she returned to Russia and went on writing to him; and once her eighteenth birthday was past she declared to her stepmother that she had decided to travel to Uralsk to join Migurski and there become his wife. Her stepmother at once began accusing Migurski of selfishly wanting to relieve his own difficult situation by captivating a rich young woman and compelling her to share his misfortune. Albina grew angry and informed her stepmother that no one but she could think of imputing such base thoughts to a man who had sacrificed everything for his own nation, that Migurski had on the contrary refused the help she had offered him, and that she had decided irrevocably to join him and become his wife, if only he was prepared to grant her that happiness. Albina was now of age and had some money – the thirty thousand zlotys which her late uncle had left to each of his two nieces. So that there was nothing to hold her back.

In November 1833 Albina, as if for the last time, said farewell to the family who were tearfully seeing her off on her journey to this distant, unknown realm of barbarous Muscovy, took her seat alongside her devoted old nurse Ludwika whom she was taking with her, in her father’s old covered sleigh, newly repaired for this long journey, and set off on the highroad.

V

Migurski was living not in the barracks, but in separate quarters of his own. Tsar Nicholas I required that Polish officers who had been reduced to the ranks should not only have to put up with the hardships of an austere military life, but also suffer all the humiliations to which private soldiers were subjected at that time. But the majority of the ordinary men whose duty it was to carry out his orders were fully aware of the harshness of treatment meted out to these demoted officers, and without regard to the danger involved in any failure to carry out the Tsar’s will, deliberately failed to carry it out whenever they could. The semi-literate commander of the battalion to which Migurski had been assigned, a man who had been promoted from the ranks, understood the situation of this once wealthy, well-educated young man who had now lost everything: he felt sorry for him, respected him, and made all kinds of concessions in his favour. And Migurski could not help appreciating the generous spirit of the lieutenant colonel with the white side-whiskers on his puffy military face, and to recompense him Migurski agreed to give lessons in mathematics and French to his sons, who were preparing for entry to the military academy.

Migurski’s life at Uralsk, which had now been dragging on for some six months, was not only monotonous, dreary and dull, but very hard into the bargain. Apart from the battalion commander, from whom he attempted as far as possible to distance himself, his sole acquaintance was an exiled Pole, an uneducated and disagreeable man of a thrusting disposition who worked in the fishing trade. The principal hardship for Migurski lay in the difficulty he experienced in getting used to a life of poverty. Following the confiscation of his estate he had been left quite without financial means, and he was making ends meet by selling off whatever gold objects still remained to him.

The single great joy of his life in exile was his correspondence with Albina, and the charming, poetic image he had formed of her during his visit to Rozanka remained in his soul and now in his banishment grew ever more beautiful to him. In one of her first letters to him she asked him, among other things, about the meaning of his words in the earlier letter: ‘whatever my dreams and longings might have been’. He replied that now he was able to confess to her that his dreams were connected with his desire to call her his wife. She wrote back that she loved him too. He responded that it would have been better if she had not written that, for it was dreadful for him to think about something which was now most likely an impossibility. She said in her reply that it was not only possible, but would most certainly come about. He wrote back that he could not accept her sacrifice, and that in his present circumstances it simply could not be. Shortly after writing this letter he received a package of money to the value of two thousand zlotys. By the postmark on the envelope and the handwriting he could see that it had been sent by Albina, and recalled having jokingly described in one of his earliest letters the satisfaction he felt now at being able by the lessons he gave to earn enough to pay for all the things he needed – tea, tobacco, even books. He transferred the money to another envelope and returned it to her with a letter begging her not to destroy the sacred nature of their relationship by bringing money into it. He had enough of everything he needed, he wrote, and he was completely happy in the knowledge that he possessed such a friend as she was. With that their correspondence came to a stop.

One day in November Migurski was at the Lieutenant Colonel’s house giving his sons their lesson, when the approaching sound of the post sleigh bell was heard, and the runners of a sledge came crunching over the frozen snow and stopped in front of the house entrance. The boys jumped up from their seats to find out who had arrived. Migurski stayed behind in the room, looking at the door and waiting for the boys to return, but through the doorway came the Lieutenant Colonel’s wife in person. ‘Some ladies have come asking for you, Pan,’ she said. ‘They must be from your country – they look like Polish ladies.’

If anyone had asked Migurski whether he thought it possible that Albina might come to see him, he would have said that it was unthinkable; yet in the depths of his soul he was expecting her. The blood rushed to his heart and he ran out gasping for breath, into the hall. In the hall a stout woman with a pockmarked face was untying the shawl which covered her head. A second woman was just going through the doorway which led to the Lieutenant Colonel’s quarters. Hearing steps behind her she looked round. From beneath her bonnet shone the joyful, widely-spaced radiant blue eyes of Albina, their lashes covered with hoarfrost. Migurski stood rooted to the spot, not knowing how he should greet her or what to say. ‘Juzio,’ she cried, calling him by the name his father had used, and she herself had used in the old days, and she flung her arms round his neck, pressing her face, rosy with cold, against his, bursting into laughter and tears at one and the same time.

When she had found out who Albina was and why she had come, the Lieutenant Colonel’s kind-hearted wife took her in and gave her lodging in her own house until it should be time for the wedding.

VI

The good-natured Lieutenant Colonel managed after considerable trouble to obtain an authorization from the high command. A Catholic priest was despatched from Orenburg to marry the Migurskis. The battalion commander’s wife acted as proxy for the bride’s mother, one of Migurski’s pupils carried the ikon, and Brzozowksi, the Polish exile, was best man.

Albina, however strange it may appear, loved her husband passionately but did not know him at all. Only now was she really getting acquainted with him. It stands to reason that she discovered in this living man of flesh and blood a great many commonplace and unpoetic things which had not been part of the image of him which she had nurtured and carried in her imagination; yet on the other hand, precisely because he was a man of flesh and blood, she discovered in him much that was simple and good, which had also not been part of her abstract image of him.

She had heard from friends and acquaintances about his bravery in war and she knew for herself how courageously he had faced the loss of his status and his liberty, so that she imagined him in her own mind as a hero, invariably living a life of exalted heroism; whereas in reality, for all his exceptional physical strength and bravery, he turned out to be as gentle and mild as a lamb, the simplest of men, with his talent for genial jokes and the same childlike smile on his sensitive mouth with its small blond beard and moustache, the smile which had attracted her long ago at Rozanka – but also in his mouth the never-extinguished tobacco pipe which proved particularly trying for her during her pregnancy.

Migurski too was only now getting to know Albina, and getting to know the woman within her. From the women he had known in the period before his marriage he had never gained any understanding of woman herself. And what he discovered in Albina, as in woman in general, surprised him and might well have made him disillusioned with woman in general, had he not felt for Albina a special and grateful tenderness. For Albina and for woman in general he felt a tender, slightly ironic indulgence, but for Albina herself and for her alone he felt not only loving affection, but also an awareness of and an admiration for the unrepayable debt created by her sacrifice, which had given him such totally undeserved happiness.

The Migurskis were blessed in that, directing all the power of their love on one another, they felt amid so many alien people like two half-frozen wanderers who had lost the winter road, yet managed by their mutual contact to keep each other warm. The joyful life the Migurskis spent together was enhanced by the contribution of Albina’s nurse Ludwika, who was utterly self-sacrificing, devoted as a slave to her mistress, full of good-natured grumbles, amusing, and ready to fall in love with any man whatever. The Migurskis were blessed too with the gift of children. At the end of a year a little boy was born; a year and a half later, a girl. The boy was the image of his mother: the same eyes, the same playfulness and grace. The little girl was a fine, healthy child, like a little wild thing.

Yet the Migurskis were still far from blest by their separation from their homeland, and most of all by the harshness of their unaccustomed humble situation. Albina in particular suffered from this humiliation. He, her own Juzio, a hero and a model of humanity, was obliged to stand to attention before any and every officer, to carry out rifle maintenance, to do guard duty and to obey every order without complaint.

On top of all that, the news they received from Poland continued to be extremely miserable. Virtually all their close relatives and friends had either been exiled or, having lost everything, had taken refuge abroad. For the Migurskis themselves there was no prospect of any end to this situation. All attempts to petition for a pardon or at least some improvement in their conditions, or for promotion to officer rank, failed to reach their destination. Tsar Nicholas conducted inspections, parades and exercises, attended masquerades and flirted under the cover of his masks, and galloped unnecessarily through Russia from Chuguyev to Novorossiisk, St Petersburg and Moscow, frightening ordinary people and riding his horses to exhaustion; and when a bold spirit plucked up the courage to ask for some alleviation of the lot of the exiled Decembrists or of the Poles who were now suffering precisely because of that patriotism which he himself extolled, he would stick out his chest, fix his pewter-coloured eyes on whatever happened to be in front of him, and say: ‘Let them go on serving. It is too soon.’ As if he knew when it would no longer be too soon, when it would be time to do something. And all the members of his entourage – the generals, the chamberlains and their wives, who were busy around him looking after their own interests, would feel moved at the extraordinary perspicacity and the wisdom of this great man.

All the same, there was on the whole more of happiness than of unhappiness in the lives of the Migurskis.

So they lived for a period of five years. But suddenly there came upon them an unexpected and terrible sorrow. First the little girl fell ill, then two days later the little boy: he had a high fever for three days, and in the absence of medical help (there was no doctor to be found) on the fourth day he died. Two days after him the little girl also died.

The only thing which stopped Albina from drowning herself in the River Ural was that she could not imagine without horror the state her husband would be in on receiving the news of her suicide. But it was hard for her to go on living. Hitherto always active and solicitous, she now handed over all her concerns to Ludwika and would sit for hours doing nothing, gazing mutely at whatever met her eyes, then suddenly jump up and run off to her tiny room and there, ignoring the consolations offered by her husband and Ludwika, she would weep silently, merely shaking her head and begging them to go away and leave her alone.

In the summer she would go to her children’s grave and sit there, lacerating her heart with memories of what had been and of what might have been. She was particularly tormented by the thought that her children would still have been alive, had they all been living in a town where medical aid was to be had. ‘Why? What for?’ she thought. ‘And Juzio and I, we want nothing from anybody, except for him to be able to live in the way he was born to live, as his grandparents and his forefathers lived, and all I want is to live with him and to love him, and to love my little ones and to bring them up.

‘Yet suddenly they start tormenting him, and send him into exile, and they take away from me what is dearer to me than the whole world. Why? What for?’ – she hurled this question at men and at God. And she could not conceive of the possibility of any kind of answer. Yet without an answer there was no life for her. And so her life came to a standstill. This wretched life of banishment, which she had previously managed to beautify by her feminine good taste and elegance, now became intolerable not only to her, but to Migurski, who suffered both on her account and because he did not know how to help her.

VII

At this most terrible time for the Migurskis there appeared in Uralsk a Pole by the name of Rosolowski who had been involved in a grandiose plan for a rebellion and escape, drawn up at that time in Siberia by the exiled Catholic priest Sirocynsky.

Rosolowksi, like Migurski and thousands of others condemned to Siberian exile for having desired to live in the manner to which they were born, that is as Poles, had got involved in this cause and had been flogged with birch rods and assigned to serve as a soldier in the same battalion as Migurski. Rosolowksi, a former mathematics teacher, was a long, thin stooping man with sunken cheeks and a furrowed brow.

So it was that on the very first evening of his time in Uralsk Rosolowski, as he sat drinking tea in the Migurskis’ quarters, inevitably began in his slow, calm bass voice to recount the circumstances which had led to his suffering so cruelly. It appeared that Sirocynsky had been organizing a secret society with members all over Siberia whose aim was to incite a mutiny among the soldiers and convicts with the help of the Poles enlisted in the Cossack and line regiments, to rouse the deported settlers to revolt, seize the artillery at Omsk and set everyone free.

‘But would that really have been possible?’ enquired Migurski.

‘Quite possible, everything had been prepared,’ said Rosolowski frowning gloomily, and slowly and calmly he proceeded to tell them all about the plan of liberation and the measures which had been taken to assure the success of the enterprise and, in case it should fail, to ensure the safety of the conspirators. Their success would have been certain, but for the treachery of two villains. According to Rosolowski, Sirocynsky had been a man of genius and of great spiritual power, and his death too had been that of a hero and a martyr. And Rosolowski began in his calm, deep, measured voice to recount the details of the execution at which, by the order of the authorities, he and all the others found guilty in the case were compelled to be present.

‘Two battalions of soldiers stood in two ranks forming a long corridor, each man holding a pliant rod of such a thickness, defined by the Emperor himself, that no more than three of them could be inserted into a rifle muzzle. The first man to be brought out was Dr Szakalski. Two soldiers led him along and the men with the rods lashed him on his exposed back as he came level with them. I was only able to see what was happening when he came near to the spot where I was standing. At first I could hear only the beating of the drum, but then, when the swish of the rods and sound of the blows falling on his body began to be audible, I knew he was approaching. And I could see that the soldiers were pulling him along on their rifles, and so he came, shuddering and turning his head first to one side, then to the other. And once, as he was being led past us, I heard the Russian doctor telling the soldiers, “Don’t hit him too hard, have pity on him.” But they went on beating him just the same: when they led him past us for the second time he was no longer able to walk unaided, they had to drag him. His back was dreadful to behold. I screwed up my eyes. He collapsed, and they carried him away. Then a second man was brought out. Then a third, and a fourth. All of them eventually fell down and were carried away – some looked as if they were dead, others just about alive, and we all had to stand there and watch. It went on for six hours – from morning until two in the afternoon. Last of all they brought out Sirocynsky himself. It was a long time since I had seen him and I would not have recognized him, so much older did he look. His clean-shaven face was full of wrinkles, and a pale greenish colour. His body where it was uncovered was thin and yellow and his ribs stuck out above his contracted stomach. He moved along as all the others had done, shuddering at each stroke and jerking his head, but he did not groan and kept repeating a prayer in a loud voice: ‘Miserere mei Deus secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.’⁷

‘I myself could hear it,’ said Rosolowski rapidly in a strangled voice, and he shut his mouth and breathed heavily through his nose.

Ludwika, sitting by the window, was sobbing and had covered her face with her shawl.

‘And you had to describe it to us! They are beasts, nothing but savage beasts!’ cried Migurski, and throwing down his pipe he jumped up from his chair and hurried out into the unlit bedroom. Albina sat there as if turned to stone, gazing into the dark corner of the room.

VIII

The following day Migurski, on his way home from a lesson, was surprised to see his wife hurrying to meet him with light steps and a radiant face. When they got home she took him into their bedroom.

‘Juzio, listen to me.’

‘Listen? What do you mean?’

‘I have been thinking all night about what Rosolowksi was telling us. And I have decided: I cannot go on living like this, in this place. I cannot. I may die, but I am not going to stay here.’

‘But what can we possibly do?’

‘Escape.’

‘Escape? How?’

‘I’ve thought it all through. Listen,’ – and she told him the plan she had worked out during the night. Her plan was this: he, Migurski, would leave the house in the evening and leave his greatcoat on the bank of the Ural, and beside it a letter saying that he was going to take his own life. They would think he had drowned. They would hunt for his body and send in a report of what had occurred. Meanwhile he would be hiding – she would hide him so that he could not be found. They could go on like that for a month at least. And when all the fuss had died down, they would run away.

Migurski’s first reaction was that her scheme was impracticable, but by the end of the day her passionate confidence in it had convinced him, and he began to be of the same mind. Apart from that, he was inclined to agree with her, for the very reason that the punishment for an attempted escape, the same punishment Rosolowski had described to them, would fall on him, Migurski, but if they succeeded she would be set free, and he saw that since the death of the two children life here had been bitterly hard for her.

Rosolowski and Ludwika were let into the scheme, and after lengthy discussions, modifications and adjustments the plan was complete. To begin with they arranged that Migurski, once he had been presumed drowned, should run away alone on foot. Albina would then take the carriage and meet him at a prearranged place. This was the first plan. But later, when Rosolowski had told them of all the unsuccessful escape attempts which had been made in Siberia over the past five years (during which only one fortunate man had escaped to safety), Albina put forward a different plan – namely, that Juzio should be hidden in the carriage and travel with her and Ludwika to Saratov. At Saratov he would change his clothes and walk downstream along the bank of the Volga to an agreed spot where he would board a boat which she would have hired in Saratov and which would take the three of them down the Volga as far as Astrakhan and then across the Caspian Sea to Persia. This plan was approved by them all, as well as by its principal architect Rosolowski, but they were faced with the difficulty of fitting the carriage with a hiding-place big enough to take a man without attracting the attention of the authorities. And when Albina, having paid a visit to the children’s grave, told Rosolowski that she felt bad about leaving her children’s remains in an alien land, he thought for a moment, then said:

‘Ask the authorities for permission to take the children’s coffins away with you – they will grant it.’

‘No, I can’t do that, I don’t want to!’ said Albina.

‘You must ask them. Everything depends on it. We shall not take the coffins, but we shall make a large box for them and into that box we shall put Josif.’

For a moment Albina wanted to reject this suggestion, so painful was it for her to associate any such deception with the memory of her children, but when Migurski cheerfully approved the project, she agreed.

The final version of the plan was thus as follows: Migurski would do everything to convince the authorities that he had been drowned. As soon as his death had been officially recognized she would apply for permission, following the death of her husband, to return to her native land, taking with her the mortal remains of her children. Once the permission had been granted everything would be done to give the impression that the graves had been opened and the coffins taken out, but the coffins would remain where they were and instead of the coffins it would be Migurski who would take their place in the specially constructed box. The box would be loaded on to the tarantass and so they would reach Saratov. At Saratov they would transfer to the boat. In the boat Juzio would emerge and they would sail down to the Caspian Sea. And there Persia or Turkey awaited them – and freedom.

IX

First of all the Migurskis purchased a tarantass on the pretext that Ludwika would soon be leaving to return to her homeland. Then began the construction of the box to allow Migurski to lie in it, if only in a contorted position, without suffocating, to emerge quickly and unobtrusively, and to crawl back into it when necessary. The designing and fitting out of the box was the work of all three of them together – Albina, Rosolowski, and Migurski himself. Rosolowski’s help was particularly vital, since he was an accomplished carpenter. They made the box to be fixed against the front-to-back struts at the rear of the coach body and flush with it, and the wall of the box which lay against the bodywork could be slid out, allowing a person to lie partly in the box and partly in the bottom of the tarantass. In addition airholes were bored in the box, and the top and sides were to be covered with bast matting and tied up with cords. It was possible to get in and out of the box by way of the tarantass, which was fitted with a seat.

When tarantass and box were ready, and when her husband had yet to make his disappearance, Albina began to prepare the authorities by going to the Colonel and telling him that her husband had fallen into a state of melancholia and was threatening to kill himself, and that she feared for his life and begged that he might be released before it was too late. Her acting ability stood her in good stead. The fear and anxiety she expressed for her husband appeared so natural that the Colonel was touched and promised to do all he could. After that Migurski composed the letter which was to be discovered in the cuff of his overcoat left lying on the river bank, and on the evening they had chosen he went down to the Ural, waited until it was dark, laid the clothes and the coat containing the letter on the bank, and returned home. They had prepared him a hiding-place in the loft, secured by a padlock. That night Albina sent word to the Colonel by Ludwika to say that her husband had left the house some twenty hours earlier and had not returned. Next morning her husband’s letter was brought to her, and she, with every appearance of deep despair, went off weeping to show it to the Colonel.

A week later Albina submitted her request to be allowed to leave for her own land. The grief displayed by Madame Migurski affected everyone who saw her: all were filled with pity for this unfortunate wife and mother. When permission had been granted for her departure, she made a second request – that she might be allowed to exhume the bodies of her children and take them with her.

The military authorities were astonished at such a display of sentimentality, but agreed to this as well.

On the evening of the day after this permission had been given, Rosolowski, Albina and Ludwika drove in a hired cart, containing the box, to the cemetery where the children were buried. Albina fell to her knees before the grave, said a prayer, then quickly got up, and turning to Rosolowski said:

‘Do what must be done, but I cannot have any part in it,’ and went off by herself.

Rosolowski and Ludwika moved the gravestone aside and turned over the whole of the top surface of the plot with a shovel so that the grave looked as though it had been opened. When all this was done they called to Albina and returned home taking the box, filled with earth.

The day fixed for their departure came at last. Rosolowski was rejoicing at the success of the enterprise which seemed almost complete, Ludwika had baked biscuits and pies for the journey, and repeating her favourite turn of phrase, ‘jak mame kocham,’⁸ said that her heart was bursting with fear and joy at the same time. Migurski was filled with joy, both by his release from the loft where he had spent more than a month, and still more by the renewed vitality and joie de vivre of Albina. She seemed to have forgotten all her former grief and the dangers, and as she might have done in her girlhood, ran to see him in the loft, radiating rapture and delight.

At three in the morning their Cossack escort arrived, bringing with him the coachman and a team of three horses. Albina, Ludwika and the little dog took their seats on the cushions of the tarantass which were covered with matting. The Cossack and the driver got up on the box, and Migurski, wearing peasant clothes, was lying in the body of the tarantass.

They were soon out of the town, and the team of good horses pulled the tarantass along the beaten roadway, smooth as stone, through the endless unploughed steppe overgrown with the last season’s silvery feather-grass.

X

Albina’s heart had almost stopped beating from hope and delight. Wishing to share her feelings with someone else, she now and then, almost smiling, made a sign with her head to Ludwika, indicating now the broad back of the Cossack seated on the box, now the bottom of the tarantass. Ludwika stared motionlessly ahead with a meaningful expression, only slightly pursing her lips. The day was bright. On all sides stretched the limitless deserted steppe and the silvery feathergrass shining in the slanting rays of the morning sun. Occasionally, first on one side, then on the other side of the hard road on which the rapid, unshod hooves of the Bashkir horses rang out as if on asphalt, the little earth-covered mounds made by gophers came into view; one of the little creatures would be sitting up on sentry duty, and anticipating danger would give a piercing whistle and disappear into the burrow beneath. On rare occasions they met with passers-by: a string of Cossack carts full of wheat, or some Bashkirs on horseback with whom their Cossack exchanged animated remarks in the Tatar tongue. At all the posting stations the horses were fresh and well-fed, and the half-roubles provided by Albina for vodka ensured that the drivers drove the horses, as they put it, like Feldjägers,⁹ galloping all the way.

At the first posting station when the first driver had led away the horses and the new driver had not yet brought out the new ones and the Cossack had gone into the yard, Albina bent down and asked her husband how he was feeling and whether he needed anything.

‘Excellent, don’t worry. I don’t need anything. I wouldn’t mind lying here for two whole days.’

Towards evening they drew into a large village called Dergachi. To give her husband the chance to stretch his limbs and refresh himself Albina told the driver to stop not at the posting station but at a coaching inn, then immediately gave the Cossack some money and sent him off to buy milk and eggs. The tarantass was standing beneath a projecting roof. It was dark in the courtyard, and having stationed Ludwika to watch out for the Cossack, Albina released her husband and gave him food and drink, after which he crawled back into his hiding-place before the Cossack returned. They had a new team of horses brought round and continued on their way. Albina felt her spirits rising more and more and was unable to contain her cheerfulness and general delight. There was no one to talk to other than Ludwika, the Cossack and her little dog Trezorka, so she amused herself with them. Despite her plainness, at every contact with a man Ludwika would immediately detect him sending amorous glances in her direction, and she now suspected something of the sort in her relations with the burly and genial Ural Cossack with unusually bright and kind blue eyes who was escorting them and behaving most agreeably towards the two women, treating them with gentle and good-humoured kindness. Apart from Trezorka, whom Albina had to threaten to prevent him from sniffing about under the seat, she now found amusement in watching Ludwika’s coquettish advances to the Cossack, who was quite unaware of the intentions being ascribed to him, and smiled agreeably at her every remark. Albina, stimulated by her sense of danger, by her growing conviction that their plan was succeeding, and by the splendid weather and the fresh air of the steppe, was enjoying the return of those youthful high spirits and merriment which she had not felt for such a long time. Migurski could hear her cheerful chatter and he too, despite the physical discomfort which he concealed from them (for he was extremely hot and tormented by thirst), forgot about himself and rejoiced in Albina’s joy.

Towards evening on the second day something came into sight in distance through the mist. It was the town of Saratov and the Volga. The Cossack with his farsighted steppe-dweller’s eyes could distinguish the Volga and the masts of the ships, and he pointed them out to Ludwika. Ludwika said that she could see them too. But Albina could make out nothing, and remarked loudly, for her husband to hear:

‘Saratov, the Volga’ – and as though she was talking to Trezorka, Albina described to her husband everything as it came into view.

XI

Albina did not let the carriage drive into Saratov but made the driver stop on the left bank of the river at the settlement of Pokrovskaya directly opposite the town itself. Here she hoped that in the course of the night she would be able to talk to her husband and even get him out of the box. But throughout the short spring night the Cossack did not go away from the tarantass but sat next to it in an empty cart which was standing beneath a projecting roof. Ludwika, on Albina’s instructions, stayed in the tarantass and, convinced that it was on her account that the Cossack would not leave the tarantass, laughed and winked and hid her face in her shawl. But Albina could see nothing amusing in this and grew more and more worried, unable to understand why the Cossack was so doggedly attached to the vicinity of the tarantass.

Several times that short night in which dusk almost merged into morning twilight, Albina left her room in the coaching inn and walked along the stuffy verandah to the porch at the back of the building. The Cossack was still not asleep but was sitting on the empty cart, his legs dangling. Only just before dawn when the cocks were already awaking and calling from one farmyard to the next did Albina, going down to the yard, find an opportunity to exchange a few words with her husband. The Cossack was now snoring, sprawled in the cart. She cautiously approached the tarantass and knocked on the box.

‘Juzio!’ – No answer. ‘Juzio, Juzio,’ she repeated more loudly, now becoming alarmed.

‘What is it my dear, what is the matter?’ came Migurski’s sleepy voice from inside the box.

‘Why didn’t you answer me?’

‘I was asleep,’ he replied, and from the sound of his voice she knew that he was smiling. ‘Well, and can I come out?’ he asked.

‘No, you can’t, the Cossack is here.’ And as she spoke she glanced at the Cossack asleep in the cart.

And strange to say, although the Cossack was snoring, his eyes, his kindly blue eyes, were open. He looked at her, and only when his glance had lighted on her, closed his eyes.

‘Did I just imagine it, or was he really not asleep?’ Albina wondered. ‘I expect I imagined it,’ she thought, and turned back to her husband.

‘Try to put up with it a little longer,’ she said. ‘Do you want anything to eat?’

‘No. But I should like to smoke.’

Albina again turned to look at the Cossack. He was sleeping.

‘Yes, I imagined it,’ she thought.

‘I am going to see the governor now.’

‘Well, it is as good a time as any …’

And Albina took a dress out of her trunk and went back to her room to change.

When she had changed into her best widow’s dress Albina took a boat across the Volga. On the embankment she hired a cab-driver and drove to the governor’s residence. The governor agreed to see her. This pretty little Polish widow with her sweet smile, speaking beautiful French, made a tremendous impression on the governor, an elderly man who liked to appear younger than his age. He granted all her requests and asked her to come to see him again the next day to receive a written order to the town governor of Tsaritsyn. Rejoicing in the success of her petition and the effect of her own attractiveness which she could see from the governor’s manner, Albina, happy and full of hope, drove back in a carriage down the unmetalled street towards the jetty. The sun had already risen above the woods and its slanting beams were already playing on the rippling water of the mighty river. To right and left on the hillside she could see apple trees like white clouds, covered in fragrant blossom. A forest of masts came into view by the river bank and the sails of the boats showed white on the water lit up by the sun and rippling in a light breeze. At the landing-stage, having consulted the driver, Albina asked whether it was possible to engage a boat to take her to Astrakhan, and at once dozens of noisy, cheerful boatmen offered her their boats and their services. She came to an arrangement with one of the boatmen she particularly liked the look of and went to inspect his open-hulled barge which was lying amid a crowd of others at the wharf. The boat had a mast which could be stepped at will and a sail to allow it to use the power of the wind. In case there should be no wind there were oars provided, and two healthy, cheerful-looking barge-haulers-cum-oarsmen, who were sitting on the boat enjoying the sun. The jovial pilot advised her not to leave the tarantass behind but to remove the wheels and instal it in the boat. ‘It’ll go in just right, and you’ll be more comfortable sitting in there. If God grants us a bit of good weather we shall make the run down to Astrakhan in five days clear.’

Albina bargained with the boatman and instructed him to come to the Logins’ inn at the Pokrovskaya settlement so that he could have a look at the tarantass and collect a deposit. The whole thing worked out more easily than she had expected. In a state of rapturous happiness Albina crossed the Volga once more, and bidding farewell to the driver, made for the coaching inn.

XII

The Cossack Danilo Lifanov came from Strelyetski Outpost¹⁰ in the highlands between the Volga and Ural rivers. He was thirty-four years old and he was just completing the final month of his term of Cossack service. His family consisted of an old grandfather of ninety who still remembered the time of Pugachov, two brothers, the daughter-in-law of the elder brother (sentenced to exile with hard labour in Siberia for being an Old Believer), Danilo’s wife and his two daughters. His father had been killed in the war against the French. Danilo was the head of the household. On the farm they had sixteen horses, two ploughing teams of oxen, and fifteen hundred sazhens of private land, all ploughed and sown with their own wheat. He, Danilo, had done his military service in Orenburg and Kazan and was now getting to the end of his period of duty. He kept firmly to the Old Faith: he did not smoke or drink, did not use dishes in common with worldly people, and also kept strictly to his word. In all his undertakings he was slow, steady and reliable and he carried out everything his commander instructed him to do with his complete attention, not forgetting his purpose for a single moment until the job was properly finished. Now he was under orders to escort these two Polish women with the coffins to Saratov, to see that nothing bad befell them on the journey, to ensure that they travelled quietly and did not get up to any mischief, and on reaching Saratov to hand them over decently and in order to the authorities. So he had delivered them to Saratov with their little dog and their coffins and all. These women were charming and well-behaved despite being Polish and they had done nothing bad. But here at the Pokrovskaya settlement last evening he had seen how the little dog had jumped up into the tarantass and begun yelping and wagging his tail, and from under the seat in the tarantass he had heard somebody’s voice. One of the Polish women – the older one – seeing the little dog in the tarantass had looked very scared for some reason, and grabbed hold of the dog and carried it away.

‘There’s something in there,’ thought the Cossack, and he started to keep his eyes open. When the younger Polish woman had come out to the tarantass in the night he had pretended to be asleep, and he had distinctly heard a man’s voice coming from the box. Early in the morning he had gone to the police station and reported that the Polish women such as were entrusted to him and not travelling of their own free will, instead of dead bodies were carrying some live man or other in their box.

When Albina, in her mood of jubilant happiness, convinced that now it was all over and that in a few days they would be free, approached the coaching inn she was surprised to see in the gateway a fashionable-looking carriage and pair with a third trace horse and two Cossacks. A crowd of people thronged round the gateway, staring into the yard.

She was so full of hope and vitality that it never entered her head that this carriage and pair and the people clustering round might have anything to do with her. She walked into the inn yard and at once, looking under the canopy where the tarantass was standing, saw that a crowd of people were gathered round it, and at the same moment heard the anguished barking of Trezorka. The most dreadful thing that could have happened had happened. In front of the tarantass, his spotless uniform with its bright buttons, shoulder-straps and lacquered boots shining in the sun, stood a portly man with black side-whiskers, saying something in a loud imperious voice. Before him, between two soldiers, in peasant clothes and with wisps of hay in his tousled hair, stood her Juzio, raising and lowering his powerful shoulders, as if perplexed by what was going on around him. Trezorka, unaware that he was the cause of the whole disaster, stood with bristling coat, barking with carefree dislike at the chief of police. On seeing Albina Migurski winced and made to go towards her, but the soldiers held him back.

‘Never mind, Albina, never mind,’ said Migurski, smiling at her with his gentle smile.

‘And here is the little lady in person!’ said the chief of police. ‘Welcome to you, madam. And are these the coffins of your babies? Eh?’ he said, pointing to Migurski.

Albina made no reply, but simply crossed her arms on her breast and gazed in open-mouthed horror at her husband.

As often happens in the very last moments of life and at other crucial points in human experience, she felt and foresaw in an instant a multitude of thoughts and feelings, while not yet grasping her misfortune or believing in it. Her first feeling was one long familiar to her – the feeling of wounded pride at the sight of her hero-husband, humiliated before these coarse, bestial men who now had him in their power. ‘How dare they hold him, the very best of men, in their power!’ Her second feeling, which swept over her almost at the same time as the first, was an awareness of the disaster which was now complete. And this consciousness of disaster revived in her the memory of the chief disaster of her life, the death of her children. And now once again the question came to her: what for? why had her children been taken away? The question ‘Why have my children been taken away?’ called forth a further question: Why was her beloved, the best of men, her husband, now in torment, now being destroyed? What for? And then she remembered that a shameful punishment awaited him, and that she, she alone, was to blame.

‘What is your relation to this man? Is this man your husband?’ repeated the chief of police.

‘What for, what for?!’ she screamed out, and bursting into hysterical laughter she collapsed on to the box, which had been removed from the tarantass and was standing on the ground nearby. Her whole body shaking with sobs and with tears streaming down her face, Ludwika went up to her.

‘Panienka,¹¹ my dearest Panienka! Jak Boga kokham,¹² nothing will happen to you, nothing will happen!’ she said, distractedly running her hands over her mistress.

Migurski was handcuffed and led out of the inn yard. Seeing what was happening, Albina ran after him.

‘Forgive me, forgive me!’ she cried. ‘It is all my fault, I alone am to blame!’

‘They’ll sort out who is to blame in court. And I’ve no doubt the case will involve you,’ said the chief of police, pushing her out of the way.

They led Migurski down to the river crossing and Albina, not knowing herself why she was doing so, followed him and refused to listen to Ludwika’s advice.

All this time the Cossack Danilo Lifanov was standing leaning against a wheel of the tarantass and glaring angrily now at the chief of police, now at Albina, and now at his own feet.

When Migurski had been led away Trezorka, now left alone, wagged his tail and began to fawn on him. The Cossack had grown used to the dog during the journey. Suddenly he pulled himself upright, tore his cap from his head and hurled it with all his strength on to the ground, pushed Trezorka away from him with his foot, and went into the eating-house. Once inside he ordered vodka and drank solidly for a day and a night, drinking away all the money he had on him and everything he had with him, and only on the next night, when he woke up in a ditch, was he able to stop thinking about the question which had been tormenting him: why had he done it, informing the authorities about the little Polish woman’s husband in the box?

Migurski was tried and sentenced to run the gauntlet of a thousand rods. His relatives and Wanda, who had connections in St Petersburg, managed after much trouble to obtain a mitigation of the punishment, and instead he was sent into permanent exile in Siberia. Albina travelled after him.

And Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich rejoiced that he had crushed the hydra of revolution not only in Poland, but throughout Europe, and took pride in the fact that he had not betrayed the ordinances of the Russian autocracy, but for the good of the Russian people had kept Poland in Russia’s power. And men wearing decorations and gilt uniforms lauded him for this to such an extent, that when he came to die he sincerely believed that he was a great man and that his life had been a great blessing for humanity in general and for Russians in particular, those Russians to whose corruption and stupefaction he had unwittingly directed all his powers.

¹ The Rzecz Pospolita, instituted in 1569 by King Sigismund II Augustus, last of the Jagellon dynasty.

² Representative assembly, Diet.

³ Polish aristocracy.

⁴ Literally: ‘to hold the sweetmeat high’ – i.e. to put him through his paces first.

⁵ Victory to the Poles, destruction to the Muscovites! Hurrah!

⁶ A Polish man’s hat with a square base and a tassel on top.

⁷ Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy great mercy.

⁸ As I love my mother.

⁹ Couriers or special messengers.

¹⁰ A settlement inhabited by descendants of the Streltsy (archers), a state security force established by Ivan the Terrible and disbanded by Peter the Great (1708).

¹¹ Diminutive of ‘pani’ (mistress).

¹² As I love God.